Chapter 48
Font Size:
A
A+
A++
Luke epted a white paper bag from Gretel, and with
a nod, bounded back to the pickup. Folding hisnky
body behind the wheel, he handed her the bag. “You’re
in charge of this.”
ry peered at it suspiciously. “What is it? Weapons?”
Luke’s shoulders shook with soundlessughter.
“Steamed bao buns, actually,” he said, pulling the truck
out into the street. “And coffee.”
ry ripped the bag open as they headed uptown, her
stomach growling furiously. She tore a bun apart,
savoring the rich savory-salt taste of the pork, the
chewiness of the white dough. She washed it down with
a swig of ck supersweet coffee, and offered a bun to
Luke. “Want one?”
“Sure.” It was almost like old times, she thought, as they
swung onto Canal Street, when they had picked up
bags of hot dumplings from the Golden Carriage Bakery
and eaten half of them on the drive home over the
Manhattan Bridge.
“So tell me about this Jace,” said Luke.
ry nearly choked on a bun. She reached for the
coffee, drowning her coughs with hot liquid. “What about
him?”
“Do you have any idea what Valentine might want with
him?”
“No.”
Luke frowned into the setting sun. “I thought Jace was
one of the Lightwood kids?”
“No.” ry bit into a third bun. “Hisst name is
Wand. His father was—”
“Michael Wand?”
She nodded. “And when Jace was ten years old,
Valentine killed him. Michael, I mean.”
“That sounds like something he would do,” said Luke.
His tone was neutral, but there was something in his
voice that made ry look at him sideways. Did he not
believe her?
“Jace saw him die,” she added, as if to bolster her im.
“That’s awful,” said Luke. “Poor messed-up kid.”
They were driving over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.
ry nced down and saw the river turned all to gold
and blood by the setting sun. She could glimpse the
south end of Roosevelt Ind from here, though it was
just a smudge to the north. “He’s not so bad,” she said.
“The Lightwoods have taken good care of him.”
“I can imagine. They were always close with Michael,”
observed Luke, swerving into the leftne. In the side
mirror ry could see the caravan of following vehicles
alter its course to mimic his. “They would want to look
after his son.”
“So what happens when the moones up?” she
asked. “Are you all going to suddenly wolf out, or what?”
Luke’s mouth twitched. “Not exactly. Only the young
ones, the ones who’ve just Changed, can’t control their
transformations. Most of the rest of us have learned how
to, over the years. Only the moon at its fullest can force
a Change on me now.”
“So when the moon’s only partly full, you only feel a little
wolfy?” ry asked.
“You could say that.”
“Well, you can go ahead and hang your head out the car
window if you feel like it.”
Lukeughed. “I’m a werewolf, not a golden retriever.”
“How long have you been the n leader?” she asked
abruptly.
Luke hesitated. “About a week.”
ry swung around to stare at him. “A week?”
He sighed. “I knew Valentine had taken your mother,” he
said without much inflection. “I knew I had little chance
against him by myself and that I could expect no
assistance from the ve. It took me a day to track
down the location of the nearest lycanthrope pack.”
“You killed the n leader so you could take his ce?”
“It was the fastest way I could think of to acquire a
sizeable number of allies in a short period of time,” said
Luke, without any regret in his tone, though without any
pride either. She remembered spying on him in his
house, how she’d noticed the deep scratches on his
hands and face and the way he’d winced when he
moved his arm. “I had done it before. I was fairly sure I
could do it again.” He shrugged. “Your mother was
gone. I knew I’d made you hate me. I had nothing to
lose.”
ry braced her green sneakers against the
dashboard. Through the cracked windshield, above the
tips of her toes, the moon was rising over the bridge.
“Well,” she said. “You do now.”
The hospital at the southern end of Roosevelt Ind
was floodlit at night, its ghostly outlines curiously visible
against the darkness of the river and the greater
illumination of Manhattan. Luke and ry fell silent as
the pickup skirted the tiny ind, as the paved road they
were on turned to gravel and finally to packed dirt. The
road followed the curve of a high chain-link fence, the
top of which was strung with curlicues of razor wire like
festive loops of ribbon.
When the road grew too bumpy for them to drive any
farther, Luke pulled the truck to a stop and killed the
lights. He looked at ry. “Any chance if I asked you to
wait here for me, you would?”
She shook her head. “It wouldn’t necessarily be any
safer in the car. Who knows what Valentine’s got
patrolling his perimeter?”
Lukeughed softly. “Perimeter. Listen to you.” He
swung himself out of the truck and came around to her
side to help her down. She could have jumped down
from the truck herself, but it was nice to have him help,
the way he’d done when she was too small to climb
down on her own.
Her feet hit the dry-packed dirt, sending up puffs of dust.
The cars that had been following them were pulling up,
one by one, forming a sort of circle around Luke’s truck.
Their headlights swept across her view, lighting the
chain-link fence to white-silver. Beyond the fence, the
hospital itself was a ruin bathed in harsh light that
pointed out its dpidated state: the roofless walls jutting
up from the uneven ground like broken teeth, the
cred stone parapets overgrown with a green
carpet of ivy. “It’s a wreck,” she heard herself say softly,
a flicker of apprehension in her voice. “I don’t see how
Valentine could possibly be hiding here.”
N?velDrama.Org owns all ? content.
Luke nced past her at the hospital. “It’s a strong
mour,” he said. “Try to look past the lights.” ric
was walking over to them along the road, the light
breeze making his denim jacket flutter open, showing
the scarred chest underneath. The werewolves walking
behind him looked likepletely ordinary people,
ry thought. If she’d seen them all together in a group
somewhere, she might have thought they knew each
other somehow—there was a certain nonphysical
resemnce, a bluntness to their gazes, a forcefulness
to their expressions. She might have thought they were
farmers, since they looked more sunburned, lean, and
rawboned than your average city-dweller, or maybe she
would have taken them for a biker gang. But they looked
nothing like monsters.
They came together in a quick conference by Luke’s
truck, like a football huddle. ry, feeling very much on
the outside, turned to look at the hospital again. This
time she tried to stare around the lights, or through
them, the way you could sometimes look past a thin
topcoat of paint to see what was underneath. As it
usually did, thinking of how she would draw it helped.
The lights seemed to fade, and now she was looking
across an oak-dustedwn to an ornate Gothic Revival
structure that seemed to loom up above the trees like
the bulwark of a great ship. The windows of the lower
floors were dark and shuttered, but light poured through
the mitered arches of the third-story windows, like a line
of me burning along the ridge of a distant mountain
range. A heavy stone porch faced outward, hiding the
front door.
“You see it?” It was Luke, who hade up behind her
with the padding grace of—well, a wolf.
She was still staring. “It looks more like a castle than a
hospital.”
Taking her by the shoulders, Luke turned her to face
him. “ry, listen to me.” His grip was painfully tight. “I
want you to stay next to me. Move when I move. Hold
on to my sleeve if you have to. The others are going to
stay around us, protecting us, but if you get outside the
circle, they won’t be able to guard you. They’re going to
move us toward the door.” He dropped his hands from
her shoulders, and when he moved, she saw the glint of
something metal just inside his jacket. She hadn’t
realized he was carrying a weapon, but then she
remembered what Simon had said about what was in
Luke’s old green duffel bag and supposed it made
sense. “Do you promise you’ll do what I say?”
“I promise.”
The fence was real, not part of the mour. ric, still
in front, rattled it experimentally, then raised azy hand.
Long ws sprouted from beneath his fingernails, and
he shed at the chain-link with them, slicing the metal
to ribbons. They fell in a ttering pile, like Tinkertoys.
“Go.” He gestured the others through. They surged
forward like one person, a coordinated sea of
movement. Gripping ry’s arm, Luke pushed her
ahead of him, ducking to follow. They straightened up
inside the fence, looking up toward the smallpox
hospital, where gathered dark shapes, massed on the
porch, were beginning to move down the steps.
ric had his head up, sniffing the wind. “The stench of
death lies heavy on the air.”
Luke’s breath left his lungs in a hissing rush. “Forsaken.”
He shoved ry behind him; she went, stumbling
slightly on the uneven ground. The pack began to move
toward her and Luke; as they neared, they dropped to
all fours, lips snarling back from their lengthening fangs,
limbs extending into long, furred extremities, clothes
overgrown by fur. Some tiny instinctual voice in the back
of ry’s brain was screaming at her: Wolves! Run
away! But she fought it and stayed where she was,
though she could feel the jump and tremble of nerves in
her hands.
The pack encircled them, facing outward. More wolves
nked the circle on either side. It was as if she and
Luke were the center of a star. Like that, they began to
move toward the front porch of the hospital. Still behind
Luke, ry didn’t even see the first of the Forsaken as
they struck. She heard a wolf howl as if in pain. The
howl went up and up, turning quickly into a snarl. There
was a thudding sound, then a gurgling cry and a sound
like ripping paper—
ry found herself wondering if the Forsaken were
edible.
She nced up at Luke. His face was set. She could
see them now, beyond the ring of wolves, the scene lit
to brilliance by floodlights and the shimmering glow of
Manhattan: dozens of Forsaken, their skin corpse-pale
in the moonlight, seared by lesionlike runes. Their eyes
were vacant as they hurled themselves at the wolves,
and the wolves met them head-on, ws tearing, teeth
gouging and rending. She saw one of the Forsaken
warriors—a woman—fall back, throat torn out, arms still
twitching. Another hacked at a wolf with one arm while
the other army on the ground a meter away, blood
pulsing from the stump. ck blood, brackish as swamp
water, ran in streams, slicking the grass so that ry’s
feet slipped out from under her. Luke caught her before
she could fall. “Stay with me.”
I’m here, she wanted to say, but no words woulde
out of her mouth. The group was still moving up the
lawn toward the hospital, agonizingly slowly. Luke’s grip
was rigid as iron. ry couldn’t tell who was winning, if
anyone. The wolves had size and speed on their side,
but the Forsaken moved with a grim inevitability and
were surprisingly hard to kill. She saw the big brindled
wolf who was ric take one down by tearing its legs
out from under it, then leaping for its throat. It kept
moving even as he ripped it apart, its shing ax
opening up a long red cut along ric’s glinting coat.
Distracted, ry hardly noticed the Forsaken that broke
through the protective circle, until it loomed up in front of
her, as if it had sprung up from the grass at her feet.
White-eyed, with matted hair, it raised a dripping knife.
She screamed. Luke whirled, dragging her sideways,
and caught the thing’s wrist, and twisted. She heard the
snap of bone, and the knife fell to the grass. The
Forsaken’s hand dangled limply, but it kepting on
toward them, evincing no sign of pain. Luke was
shouting hoarsely for ric. ry tried to reach the
dagger in her belt, but Luke’s grip on her arm was too
strong. Before she could shout at him to let go of her, a
lick of slim silver fire hurtled between them. It was
Gretel. Shended with her front paws against the
Forsaken’s chest, knocking it to the ground. A fierce
whine of rage rose from Gretel’s throat, but the
Forsaken was stronger; it flung her aside like a rag doll
and rolled to its feet.
Something lifted ry off her feet. She shouted, but it
was ric, half in and half out of wolf-form, his hands
taloned with sharp ws. Still, they held her gently as
he swung her up into his arms.
Luke was motioning at them. “Get her out of here! Get
her to the doors!” he was shouting.
“Luke!” ry twisted in ric’s grasp.
“Don’t look,” ric said in a growl.
But she did look. Long enough to see Luke start toward
Gretel, a de in his hand, but he was toote. The
Forsaken seized up its knife, which had fallen into the
blood-wet grass, and sank it into Gretel’s back, again
and again as she wed and struggled and finally
copsed, the light in her silvery eyes fading into
darkness. With a shout Luke swung his de at the
Forsaken’s throat—
“I told you not to look,” ric growled, turning so that
her line of sight was blocked by his looming bulk. They
were racing up the steps now, the sound of his wed
feet scraping the granite like nails on a ckboard.
“ric,” ry said.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry I threw a knife at you.”
“Don’t be. It was a well-ced blow.”
She tried to look past him. “Where’s Luke?”
“I’m here,” Luke said. ric turned. Luke wasing up
the steps, sliding his sword back into its sheath, which
was strapped to his side, beneath his jacket. The de
was ck and sticky.
ric let ry slide to the porch. Shended, turning.
She couldn’t see Gretel or the Forsaken who had killed
her, only a mass of heaving bodies and shing metal.
Her face was wet. She reached up with a free hand to
see if she was bleeding but realized that she was crying
instead. Luke looked at her curiously. “She was only a
Downworlder,” he said.
Source:
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
Articles you may like
?
?
?
?
? Ads by