TWENTY-SIX
WE MADE IT TO the end of the block and stopped short, listening. Nearby, rapid-fire footsteps pelted through the darkness, followed by another shriek.
“I’m looping around,” Malachi said, and then he took off, hurdling the low fence blocking an alley between two warehouses.
I sprinted toward the sounds of scuffling feet and muffled shrieks. Up ahead, in the half shadow of a dim streetlight, two figures were struggling, one on top of the other. “Hey!” I shouted.
The figure on top whipped around and bared his teeth. His victim used the opportunity I’d given her, and she scrambled to her feet and took off again, her dark hair streaming behind her. The attacker growled at me as I ran toward him, but then he dove onto all fours to chase after the girl. Damn.
I ran across a street, ignoring the squeal of tires and the honks of a horn pounded by the driver who’d almost hit me. We were in the Jewelry District now, desolate streets and abandoned buildings interspersed with funky little shops and restaurants now closed for the evening. Scraggly patches of weeds reached out to trip me as I chased the Mazikin across an empty lot. The girl he was after was almost too far ahead to see, but I caught the flash of something reflective as she disappeared into one of the buildings at the end of the block, a rambling low structure with a realtor’s sign out front, planted in the weedy gravel next to a chain-link fence.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Malachi coming up the block, cell phone in one hand and baton in the other. Determined to do my part, I put on the speed and closed the distance between me and the Mazikin as it reached the building where the girl had fled. Behind me, Malachi called my name, but I had too much momentum—I caught the door the Mazikin had ripped open and followed him in.
I was slammed against the door in the next second and assaulted by the stench of incense and rot. Blinded by the inky darkness. Deafened by the roar of the Mazikin as he barreled into me. With a rending crash, I was thrown to the floor as Malachi thrust himself against the door from the other side. I turned on the writhing, growling Mazikin knife-first. A warm gush flowed over my fist as my blade sank into the Mazikin’s side and it wheezed wetly.
“Lela,” Malachi whispered. His hand closed over my ankle. “Get up.”
I wrenched my foot away from him. “Doing my best.”
From deep within the darkness came a soft, hooting laugh. I froze, still on my hands and knees, as the door Malachi had just come through was slammed shut. “Malachi?”
His fingers wrapped around my ankle again, and he squeezed, silently letting me know where he was. Next to me, the Mazikin I’d stabbed groaned. Several feet ahead of me, something growled, and then hissed. I scooted backward quickly, right into Malachi’s arms. He pulled me to my feet.
“Can they see in the dark?” I whispered.
“Better than we can,” he breathed.
Another cooing laugh, this one higher-pitched. Coming from the other side of the room. I tensed at the soft shuffle of feet and palms on concrete. They were everywhere, all around us. Right next to me, a swishing sound told me that Malachi was sliding his hand over the door, and then tugging on the handle.
“They’ve barred it from the outside,” he muttered at the same time a Mazikin growled from a few feet away. But instead of attacking, it retreated, its footsteps growing fainter. It coughed and grunted in what I now recognized as the Mazikin language.
“He’s calling to his friends,” Malachi said against my ear. “He said he smells your fear.”
“You can understand them?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he drew a knife from beneath his shirt and whipped it into the darkness. There was a high yip followed by the sound of a body hitting the floor. And then … snarling and growling all around us. It sounded like there were at least two dozen of them. My heart lodged in my throat, choking me.
A light flickered on in a hallway at the far side of the space, revealing a few people standing in a corridor, huddled in the archway leading to the long warehouse room where we stood. One of them was the girl I’d been trying to protect, the one who’d been running from the Mazikin. She grinned at me as she twirled her hair around her fingers.
I had led us into a trap. “Malachi, I’m sor—”
“Shhhh.” His hand found mine. I absorbed the warm pressure of his fingers through my skin and drew my strength from it. “Focus.”
We were going to have to fight our way out of here, and I was his only backup.
I held my breath and tuned in to the tiniest of sounds around me, the barest wheeze, the lightest footfall. Malachi extended his baton, and I drew a knife. If we walked into the center of the room in an effort to get to that hallway, we would be surrounded. It was probably what they were waiting for. A chance to come at us from all sides. A memory echoed in my head, from my time in the dark city. Ana, talking to me about how the Mazikin were afraid of Malachi. How they’d never attack him unless they had him greatly outnumbered. I grabbed his sleeve and pulled us back against the door.
Malachi didn’t resist. With our backs against the wall, I slid to the side, out of the intermittent light coming from the far hall. I closed my eyes, picturing this building as I had seen it from the outside. It was a two-story, not huge. Probably not the nest, since it was right in the middle of a neighborhood that was pretty busy during the day. That hallway light provided the only illumination, but I remembered seeing windows as I approached the building. They were probably painted from the inside, but they hadn’t been boarded. There were three of them, located to our right along the wall.
Skin slapped concrete, the sound of a Mazikin charging—from three sides at once. In the thick, oppressive darkness, we only had our ears and the stirrings in the air around us to tell us from where they were coming. I squatted low as Malachi pivoted and stepped backward, and then we were back to back, with the wall of the building blocking their access to my right flank and his left.
“We’ll have to get to the hallway,” he said over his shoulder.
“No. There are windows in front of me.” Then I had no time for words, because the scrape and slap of hands and feet was way too close. I slashed my knife through the air and the thing yelped and rolled away, only to be replaced by another, who used its friend as a springboard to jump on me. I plunged my knife up, hitting something hard, and then soft. Bone and gut. The Mazikin landed at my feet, shrieking.
I kicked it out of the way and tugged at Malachi’s belt to let him know he could take a step back, closer to the windows that were our best chance of escape. All the Mazikin started to hoot and shriek, and against my shoulder blades I felt Malachi’s muscles flex as he wielded his staff with deadly efficiency. The emergency lights in the warehouse all flicked on at once, controlled by the female Mazikin in the hallway. She snarled something in the Mazikin language and pointed at us. “Take them!” she screamed.
I crouched as Malachi’s staff whirled over my head and then pulled my second blade. Slashing out with a knife in each hand, I inched forward as the Mazikin descended. With vicious stabs and slices, I protected Malachi’s back as he sent one Mazikin after another flying with fierce blows from his staff. Two young men with a maniacal glint in their eyes ran at us from the side, and I threw myself out of the way to give Malachi room. His boot smashed into the face of one while he jabbed his staff into the other’s throat, and they both fell to the floor, where I finished them without hesitation, with the brutal descent of my blades through vital organs, unwilling to let them rise again and attack.
Something slammed on my back right as I ripped my blade out of a Mazikin’s neck, sending me down on top of him. From above me, I heard Malachi shout, and then his legs were on either side of mine, shielding me. Another Mazikin dropped, and another stumbled out of my reach. The pipe I’d been clocked with rolled away with a clatter. Malachi called my name, and even though my ears were ringing, I still picked up the note of desperation in his voice.
“I’m fine!” I yelled, though my back and ribs were radiating hot waves of pain. My arms were buzzing. I had dropped one of the knives. Instead of reaching for another, I lunged and grabbed the pipe, and then bashed an oncoming white-haired Mazikin across the knees with it. Malachi nailed her hard in the head with his staff, knocking her out cold. And when she fell just a few feet away, I recognized her. Harriet. I guess her bat hadn’t protected her after all, and neither had I.
I slammed the pipe down on her head and got to my feet. I kept low, swinging hard, cracking knees and shins, breaking ankles and a few hands that reached down to try to stop me. My bones vibrated from fingertip to spine every time I made solid contact, and I clenched my teeth and hoped for the soft crunch that told me I had disabled another one. Above me, defending my left side and my back, Malachi jabbed and deflected, kicked and punched, crushed and dropped anything that came at him. He was an unstoppable force, smooth and invulnerable. Above the ruckus, I could hear the rapid but steady rush of his breath as he did his thing. Never once did it falter. We inched toward the windows, now only a few feet away, leaving a trail of broken and bleeding Mazikin behind us.
“The hall,” barked Malachi. “More coming.”
I didn’t turn to look. I smacked a skinny girl Mazikin away from me and lunged for the nearest window. Behind us, I could hear the thunder of footsteps as the second wave of Mazikin pushed out of the hallway. With my heart pounding against my aching ribs, I raised the pipe and smashed the window glass, which exploded outward, sending a rain of shards tinkling to the sidewalk below. I leaped up on the windowsill and grabbed Malachi’s shoulder as a siren sounded in the distance. His dark eyes met mine, and he nodded. I jumped onto the walkway, only a four-foot drop, ready to take on the Mazikin who had barred the door. But there was no one outside, only the wail of a siren coming closer. From across the street, tires screeched as a car peeled out. Someone had called the police.
Malachi grunted and stumbled against the window as the mob of Mazikin attacked. He swung his staff in an arcing blur, giving himself a pocket of space in which he could move. Then he squatted down and threw himself shoulders-first out the window, still slicing his staff through the air. He hit the ground and pushed himself to his feet as a few Mazikin came scrambling out of the window after us.
“We have to get out of here,” I huffed, my fingers scrabbling along Malachi’s waist as he stabbed the end of his staff into the neck of a skeletal middle-aged guy with inch-long fingernails. Dread rolled over me as I realized how bad this was. “I think we just killed at least eight of them. And they have plenty of witnesses.”
“That won’t be an issue, Captain,” came a voice from behind me. I whirled to see Henry, a crossbow in his hands, wearing the same clothes he’d left the Guard house in. He shot the skeletal dude in the heart, and then leaned over and yanked the bolt from the guy’s chest as soon as he collapsed. He nodded at Malachi. “Glad you texted. Run along now. I’ll clean up.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but Malachi grabbed my arm and pushed me into the lot while Henry leaped onto the windowsill and took aim.
“Grab any blades we left behind,” Malachi called out as he started to run, collapsing his staff without breaking stride.
A flash of red light told me the cops had found our block. My feet slid in the gravel as I sprinted for the nearest alley, trying to get off the street. I barreled into it without even slowing down; then I tripped and went sprawling, hitting the cement hard. Stars appeared in my vision, but I scrambled forward, desperate to hide myself. If they caught us here, that would be it for me. They would probably charge me as an adult, would never let me go, would put me in a—
Warm hands skimmed across my ribs, and I let out a gasping breath. Malachi moved in close behind me and hooked his fingers beneath me, tugging me up. Like me, he was breathing hard, but unlike me, he seemed calm and determined as he guided me into a shallow alcove, a side entrance to the building next to us, concealing us as three police cruisers roared into the empty lot across the street.
My back was to the splintery wood of a door, and my face was pressed to Malachi’s chest, my ear to his heart. I wrapped my arms around his waist and held on, taking unfair advantage of the chance to steal his warmth and strength, to pretend for a moment that he was still mine and wanted me to touch him. His earthy scent filled me up and left me starving. The drum of his heart both soothed me and called to me, until I was sure mine was beating in the same rhythm. The weight of his body against mine as he hid us from view both settled me and drove me crazy.
As we listened to the police using their bullhorn to demand that anyone left in the building come out with their hands up, Malachi’s arms slid around me, steadying us as we tried to remain flat against the wall, buried in darkness. “Are you hurt?” he whispered.
“Not really. My ribs ache from where I got hit with that pipe.”
“Broken?”
“I don’t think so. You?”
“My hands are bleeding.” I tried to twist to see them, but he only held me tighter to keep us both from falling backward into the alley again. “I’m fine. It was just the glass. Nothing Raphael can’t handle. You were right about the window. It was the smartest point of exit.” His voice was gentle and soft. Reassuring. Like it used to be.
I never wanted to leave that alleyway.
“Did you notice how the Mazikin didn’t try to bite or claw you?” he asked. “They were trying to subdue you. Not kill you.”
“The one who hit me with the pipe must have missed that memo.”
He shook his head. “They wanted us alive. They wanted you.” His arms coiled around me, like he was still trying to keep them from getting me, and it was the best thing I’d felt all night. All week. All month.
“It’s possible they wanted the police to catch us,” I said. “This whole thing was a setup. They were waiting for us. They might have even paid that kid to feed us information.”
“I realized that a little too late. They’ve never been this organized before. They’ve never come after us like this before.”
“In the dark city, you had hordes of those enormous Guards watching your back. And even then, by the end they’d started picking off the Guards, one by one, right? We only have each other here. There are different rules, too. And they’ve realized that.” My fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt. It should have been all professional, two Guards trying to survive, but it was hard to concentrate with him so close to me.
He only made it harder when he rested his chin on the top of my head. “Then I’m glad I have you. You are an excellent Guard, Lela. And a good partner.”
“I’m not—”
“You fought well. Ana could not have done better. I had no fear for my back in there. I knew you would protect me.”
“Well, you’re the one who trained me.”
“I never trained you to wield a pipe like that.”
“Okay. I might have some moves of my own.” I turned so that my forehead rested in the curve of his neck. This was not allowed. It was a shade too close, skin to skin, and I waited for him to pull away, but he didn’t. He stayed very still while I inhaled, drawing the scent of him into my lungs.
The sound of footsteps across the street froze me in place. Malachi’s heart picked up a fast, heavy rhythm, and he braced himself in the doorframe, pressing harder against me, making sure no part of us was visible from the mouth of the alley. From over his shoulder, I watched the beam of a flashlight skitter back and forth across the bricks, and I held my breath until it finally disappeared. Crunching gravel told me the cop was headed back to the cruisers.
I looked up to see Malachi, his face in shadow, gazing down at me. “I think they’re gone,” I whispered stupidly.
He nodded. I could barely see his face, had no idea what his expression would tell me if I could. But I knew it so well, had long since memorized every plane, every angle. If I could have, I would have run my fingers across his skin and read him with my fingertips. I knew that was off-limits, though, so I settled for staring, hoping he couldn’t see my face either.
I drew in a shaky breath. “Do you think Henry got away?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his even tone giving way, turning ragged.
“Should we go?”
He didn’t answer for a long time, just kept staring down at me, unreadable and unmovable. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “For being harsh to you earlier. You didn’t deserve that.”
“It’s all right,” I breathed.
“No, it’s not.”
As if it had a will of its own, my hand rose between us and rested against his cheek. When I realized what I was doing, I pulled it away, but Malachi caught it and held it to his face. Every part of my body came alive as the stubble on his cheek abraded my palm, and I stroked my thumb over his mouth. The hitch in his breath almost made my knees buckle. It nearly made me forget everything. But then … he cleared his throat and stepped back into the alley.
“There’s a passage back here between the buildings,” he said, all business again, leaving me wondering if that moment between us had been a figment of my fevered imagination. “Now that they’ve checked back here, we can probably make it out unnoticed.”
We crept through the narrow alley, and then along a gap between two rusty chain-link fences, emerging about a block from the lot. I poked out my head to make sure we weren’t emerging at the exact wrong time and peered back at the abandoned lot, now full of official vehicles and lit by spotlights. Detective DiNapoli was standing outside the building, watching over the swarm of activity with an impassive expression. The sight of him made my stomach hurt. I hoped Henry was okay—and that he’d gotten the knives we’d lost in the fight.
Knowing that if I had been caught there, I’d have some serious explaining to do, we stuck to the alleys until we were several blocks away and then turned toward downtown. We had survived, and we had eliminated several Mazikin, without being arrested or taken. It sent a message to the Mazikin—we could take a lot of them out, even if there were only a few of us. It should have felt like victory, but to me, it felt like the opposite. If the Mazikin numbers kept growing, if they kept coming at us like this, it was only a matter of time before our lucky streak snapped. We were running out of time to root them out. They were winning.
I glanced over at Malachi, who was walking with a slight limp. His hands were in the pocket of his hoodie. And his faraway, sorrowful expression told me he was probably thinking along similar lines, especially because he felt responsible for some of it. Defeat did not sit well with him.
My phone buzzed. I pulled it out and looked at the screen. A text. From Henry.
Pick up at Eddy and Bay. Prisoner to deliver.
I held up my phone so that Malachi could see. “Looks like Henry got out in time. And our evening is far from over.”
It was the first time I’d seen Malachi smile in a long time.