a good chance this was a trap, that he was waiting for me to come back and walk right into his clutches. Losing myself in the mass of umbrellas and rain parkas on the sidewalk might keep me hidden from the cops, but it wouldn’t hide me from him. It was dangerous to be here, stupid even. But I had to see it with my own eyes. I had to know for sure that Underwood and his crew were gone.
I turned to the person next to me, a thin, West Indian man wearing a plastic poncho, and I put on my best innocent act. “What’s with the ambulances? I thought that old gas station was closed a long time ago.”
He crossed himself and answered in a thick Jamaican accent, “They found four bodies inside, God rest their souls.”
Four bodies. So it was true, then. Tomo, Big Joe, and Underwood were dead. The dark-haired woman, too. The one who used to stare at me all the time, silent and watchful, like a cat focusing on its prey. It occurred to me then that I’d never even learned her name.
“They found an old fallout shelter from the sixties under the station, with a bed and some furniture,” the man continued. “There must have been some homeless people in there.”
“And you can bet they’re the ones who started the fire,” an old woman in a rain hat interjected,
Bullshit, I thought. I’d gassed up that generator myself dozens of times. Underwood always kept it in meticulous condition. He was too smart, too careful, to let an accident take him out. No, if the firefighters had traced the explosion to the generator, the Black Knight must have done something to it. Isaac was right, sneaking around and sabotaging machinery didn’t seem like the Black Knight’s style, but I’d seen the crows on the video feed myself. I knew what it meant.
“I hear they found other things down there too, bad things,” a second man said. He was tall with dark, craggy skin and a curly beard.
“What’re you talking about, Winston?” the first man scoffed, rolling his eyes. It was clear Winston was the local gossip, the busybody nobody quite liked. Every neighborhood had one. “What
“Drugs,” the woman said with unshakable certainty.
“Guns,” Winston corrected her. “Enough for an army. Makes you think about what was going on down there. Who they were. Why they needed so many guns. Too many suspicious people in this neighborhood, you ask me.”
That was my cue to leave. I slipped away, leaving Winston and the others sharing their theories about everything from street gangs to terrorist sleeper cells, but I didn’t get far before the back of my neck started tingling. Someone was watching me. I scanned the crowd and picked him out immediately.
There are a lot of dead things in New York City, things you usually don’t see. Dead rats in the sewers. Dead roaches under floorboards. Dead squirrels in the park bushes. The dead are everywhere, and in New York you probably aren’t more than a few feet from a dead thing at any given moment. I just never expected that rule to hold true on a crowded sidewalk. Still, when you’re dealing with an entity with the power to raise and control the dead, you have to stay flexible.
The revenant stood half a block away. It wore a maroon, zippered hoodie, its gaunt, male face mostly hidden in the shadows of the hood. But even if I hadn’t been able to make out the dark patch of rot on its cheek, the red glow from its pupils, muted as it was behind tinted horn-rimmed glasses, told me everything I needed to know.
Reve Azrael was keeping tabs on me. How long had the revenant been following me? All the way from Central Park?
I waited until a group of onlookers passed between us, then made a break for it. I hurried toward the subway station, flipping open the cell phone Isaac had given me. His number was the only one in the contacts. He picked up after one ring.
“Reve Azrael is tailing me again,” I told him. “I just saw one of her revenants in a crowd here in Brooklyn.”
“Damn. Can you lose it?” he asked.
I glanced back at the crowd. I didn’t see the revenant anywhere, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still following me.
“You don’t get it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if I shake this one. It doesn’t matter where I am or how many wards I’m behind, it won’t stop her.”
“Come back, Trent, we can protect you—”
“I can’t, Isaac. I’m the fly on the battlefield, remember? The only way your plan is going to work is if you’ve got the element of surprise. If I’m with you, she’ll know what you’re doing. She’ll see you coming. You won’t stand a chance.”
“Trent,” Isaac started.
I reached the subway steps. “Look, it’s me she’s got a bead on, not you. I can draw her away and buy you some time. Use it. Get to Stryge’s body before she does.”
“No, Trent, I don’t want you doing this alone—”
I snapped the phone shut, ending the call, and hurried down the steps to the subway platform. A plan was already forming in my head. If Reve Azrael insisted on shadowing me, I would lead her as far away as I could. I’d lead her out of the city entirely, and give Isaac and the others enough time to figure out where Stryge’s body was. But if I was going to do that I would need a car. The Explorer was already ancient history, probably sitting in some impound lot or Staten Island junkyard. What I needed was another car.
Luckily, I knew just where to find one.
I took the subway north, back into Manhattan, then transferred at Times Square to the R train to Queens. It was already standing-room only when I got on, but the closer we got to Queens the more it filled up with twentysomething hipsters returning to their trendy neighborhoods. They were boisterous and remarkably carefree, all unkempt hair, neck beards, and moth-eaten flannel over ironic 1980’s T-shirts. I watched them and wondered if they had any idea what kind of danger they were in, how close they were to death. I wondered if it mattered to them.
To get away from the crowd, I moved all the way to the end of the subway car. I could see into the next car through the rear window, and caught a glimpse of the revenant in the maroon hoodie again. It must have followed me from Empire Boulevard, keeping out of sight even when I changed trains. Good. As long as Reve Azrael’s attention was on me, it wasn’t on the others.
At my stop, I got off the train amid a teeming throng of passengers. As the rest of them swarmed up the steps, I slowed down on the platform to give the revenant a chance to catch up. If I was going to lead Reve Azrael on a wild-goose chase, I had to make sure her revenant didn’t get left behind. But I didn’t see it anywhere, not on the platform, and not through the train windows as it pulled out of the station. That made me nervous. I didn’t like not knowing where it went. I climbed the steps quickly and exited the station.
I turned off the main streets and soon found myself on a desolate stretch of old, vacant apartment buildings. In the middle of the block, the buildings gave way to a small, abandoned playground. Maddock’s body had been taken away, I saw, and the front gate taped off with yellow police tape. I lingered a moment, watching the dragon spring rider wobble gently back and forth on the wind, gazing back at me with its big, painted eyes that were nothing like Gregor’s. The world had grown so much larger since I’d last been here.
Bennett’s black Porsche was still parked where he’d left it around the corner. A sopping wet parking ticket lay beneath one of the windshield wipers, and a neon-yellow sticker on the passenger’s side window proclaimed that the vehicle had violated parking regulations and the street couldn’t be cleaned properly. I was lucky it hadn’t been towed away yet. I walked to the Dumpster near the car, got down on my hands and knees, and looked under it. Bennett’s key chain was still there. I fished it out and hit the unlock button. The Porsche’s doors unlatched with a satisfying
There was no GPS system in the car, so I drove around looking for signs for the 695, which would take me north to Westchester. As the rain began to taper off, I found myself alone on a barren stretch of road far from the residential neighborhoods. It was a part of Queens I wasn’t familiar with. There wasn’t much to see but trees, overgrown fields, and the occasional streetlamp lit up against the dark.
