“Fuck, I can’t believe this.” I dropped to the floor and took a deep breath, hoping . . . there! Just the faintest scent of abnormal. “Ruby, here.” I pointed and she snuffled, and then she was off and following the scent to the back wall. I followed her, shoving boxes out of the way. There was no door. Her nose jammed against the connection between wall and floor.
I pulled a knife as Cowboy let out a low gurgle. “Fuck, hang on!”
I had to keep him alive.
He was too young to die like this.
I jammed my knife into the boards and pried until one board came loose. Underneath, there was a face peering back up at me. One I knew.
“Goddammit, don’t be a cunt. I’ve got a dying man here!” I snapped.
“NIX?” The spluttering man spewed spit into my face. I stepped back as the floor beneath me dissolved and showed a set of steps. A tiny man wrapped in a long traditional Chinese kimono all but floated up the stairs and hovered over Cowboy, narrowing in on his hand. “Oh yes, very bad, very bad indeed. Let him die.”
“No.” I glared at him. “Fred, you help him!”
“He’s part demon, let him die.”
Sirens wailed, police sirens. I grabbed Cowboy and pulled him up and onto my shoulders in a deadlift that even impressed me.
“Still so strong,” Fred said.
I was already moving, passing the strange little man on my way to the stairs. He wasn’t Chinese any more than I was, but he liked the style of clothing.
Ruby followed me and then Fred followed behind her. He sealed up the entryway as feet pounded above us. We were safe.
For now.
I stood in the semi-darkness, waiting for Fred to turn on a light. When it came, it was in the form of a candle. Not the safest considering the building timbers were still the original wood beams.
“This way,” Fred waved for me to follow and I did. The space around us was too narrow and made me think of a mine shaft. “Here, here.” He stopped in front of a too-small door and I had to put Cowboy down in order to get us both through. On the other side was a far larger room with two beds and a wall full of medicinal ingredients.
I laid Cowboy down and Fred went to work on him, slathering his hand with a thick red paste and lighting it on fire. The sparkles in the paste shot into the air and then ghosted down onto Cowboy’s face, sinking into his skin.
“He’s close to death,” Fred said. “I don’t know if he’ll pull through.” He moved around Cowboy, touching various points on his body, shaking his head and clucking his tongue. His white hair was pulled back in a thin braid that ran all the way to the floor, and his almond-shaped eyes narrowed as he worked. Almond-shaped, but the deepest amber color I’d seen in a soul outside of the wolves in Montana.
“He’ll either pull through by midnight or be dead. Nothing else I can do,” Fred said.
I slumped and shook my head. “It was my fault.”
“You make him a demon?”
I briefly told Fred about what we’d seen at the apartment building, how I’d touched the stones and asked him to do the same.
“You didn’t know it would eat him from the inside out. Not many abnormals have true demon blood running through them, not even you, despite what you might think.” Fred motioned for me to follow him, though that would imply we went to another room. No, he sat me down at a small table barely big enough for two and proceeded to make a pot of tea using a bare kettle and sprinkling some sweet-smelling herbs directly into the water. “How are you here? Last I heard, all the dangerous ones were taken.”
I grimaced. “I could ask you how you were not taken.”
“They don’t look underground. Not yet. There are some still hiding deep in the subways, under buildings like me, and I have a few things up my sleeves yet.” He sprinkled a few more packages into the teapot, then handed the empty papers to me to smell.
“I don’t think you’d try to drug me,” I said. “You liked Killian too much.”
Fred smiled, but it was sad. “For a bad man, he was very good. Like you.”
I shook my head. “I feel like I’ve woken up into a nightmare, Fred.” I couldn’t explain to him how good it felt to talk to someone who would understand. Cowboy was young; he hadn’t seen enough of the world to realize how ugly it could be, and maybe now he never would.
“Yes, it is bad. But you are here now. Maybe there is hope.” He poured me a cup of tea into a mug that read “I love NY.” I couldn’t help but notice how many of his mugs, tea towels, and general paraphernalia had that slogan emblazoned on them. I smiled as I took a sip. The warm tea was good, not overly sweet and just what I needed. No, I needed Fred and his amber eyes.
“Tell me what you know,” I said.
“The purge”—he paused and took a sip before going on—“was just a cover. It wasn’t even political, though it looked that way in the beginning. Most of the population didn’t even care that we existed with them. They looked away, and we pretended we were human, and we paid our taxes and . . . that system worked.”
I didn’t nod, just watched him as he told his tale.
“There are multiple facilities, and some sort of abnormal seems to be running them. That is all I know, and even that is based on rumor and speculation as much as what I’ve seen with my own eyes. As soon as it got ugly, I burrowed in.” He made a waving motion with one hand to encompass the space we were in.
“I think . . . it’s
