Brighid's Flame (4 page)

She grabbed his flailing arm and used it to leverage him onto his stomach, released her chokehold.

“What the
hell
—

She slammed his face into unyielding wood of his desk. “Shut up. Or by all that is still holy in this world, I will carve the greed out of your grasping heart.” She clicked on her earpiece. Her voice shook with the adrenaline pounding through her system. “I've got him.”

Chapter Four

Being back in her regular clothes settled Tara's hackles. So did being armed—armed was good. Leave it to Stephen to be ready for anything. The blue and black camouflage cargos sat snugly on her hips, tucked into combat boots. Her black tactical jacket shielded her from the cold, as did her fleece-lined gloves. Soft snow drifted peacefully around her, frost crunching under her boots as she returned to the warehouse. The tips of her ears tingled.

She remembered how snow used to be white, when she was very little. She'd delighted in the purity of a fresh snowfall. She'd found hope in it.

Now, even falling, the fluffy tendrils were tinged with gray, as though mixed with ash.

The guards at either side of the door snapped to attention. She'd proven herself today, so they were a bit more official than usual. She appreciated the small distinction. One of the guards heaved the door open for her. Their prisoner jumped when it slammed shut behind her.

The agent in charge whipped her a salute that would have done his drill sergeant proud. “He hasn't said much of anything, ma'am.”

“It's all right, agent. We don't need him to.” She strode through the ring of gun muzzles and stood at ease, hands behind her back. “Hello, Nick. May I sit?”

Nick lifted his head, a strand of graying hair dangling over his face. His chair was lodged against the front of his desk, another chair a few feet away. “Who the hell are you?”

She took the vacant seat as though he'd invited her to tea and crumpets. She crossed one leg over the other, channeling Gwen. “I really should thank you, you know. If it hadn't been for you, Vincent would never have found me.”

Nick narrowed his eyes at her. Then he threw his head back and laughed. “I wondered what happened to you. I had to rebuild my whole business after your boys pulled it apart and threw me out in the cold. If you think I'm saying anything—”

Tara cocked her head with a friendly smile. “I'm sorry, did you think we required information? We have information, Nick.”

His face went plum with rage. “If you're threatening me, little girl…”

She turned her smile down to her hands, unable to hide her amusement. There was nothing more satisfying than proof of good training. He hadn't so much fallen for her opening salvo as tripped over it and fallen into a manhole. All she needed to hear now was the splash.

“I know my hands aren't very big,” she said in conversational tones. “But I've been trained to smash them through the occasional cinder block—just as a mental exercise, you understand. The trick to it is pressure points.” She leaned forward. “The thing about the human face, Nick, is that it is chock full of pressure points. Here.” She tapped his chin. “Here.” Now she lay two fingers either side of his nose. “My personal favorites, here.” His head jerked back when she tickled the inner curves of his eyes with her fingernails. “And, of course,
here.
” She pressed the middle of his forehead with her index finger.

Plum drained to the ash white of the snow outside. He gurgled.

Tara's smile didn't waver. “Shall I tell these incredibly loyal and highly-trained agents what you did, Nick? Shall I tell them about Julien?” She could have sworn she heard twelve identical grips on twelve identical guns tighten. She suspected Nick heard it, by his expression. Or lack thereof.

He gaped open-mouthed for several moments, but he finally got it out. “I was paid.”

There was the splash. Tara leaned back, forcing herself to remain calm. “Do you honestly expect me to believe someone paid little ol' you to leave the Park and your little ol' play mansion on the Reservoir? Did you actually mean to hit Julien, or were you aiming for Vincent?”

“I don't know who paid me, not directly,” he growled. “It was someone from the Underground. And taking out Vincent is bad for business. The Foundation stops coming, my customers lose goods to trade.”

So she'd been wrong. “Why Julien, Nick?”

“
Because I was paid
. How do you think I got my play mansion?”

“By your own brand of low cunning, I'm sure.” She folded her hands again and gave him one of Gwen's patented compelling silences that just begged to be filled.

Nick didn't disappoint. “Look, one of my guys brought someone to me. That someone put me in contact with another guy. The money was so good I had to see what it was about. They paid me half up front, the other half at completion.”

“Poor Nick. You missed.”

“No,” he said, an unfortunate Cheshire grin lighting his face. “I didn't.”

She handled it well. A pause to cover the sudden violent jump of her heart, and that was all. “Here's what's going to happen, Nick. You're going to give me the location of your meeting, which is going to be verified.” She tapped her earpiece in a meaningful way.

“Subway station. Times Square.” He sagged. “Forty-second and Broadway.”

“Got that, Stephen?”

“Yeah.” He didn't sound pleased. In fact, he sounded decidedly
not
pleased. “Wait…here it is. We've got video confirmation. And a facial match.”

“Nicely done, Nicky. We thank you for your cooperation.” She vacated her rickety seat. “We're done here,” she told Vincent's men.

She made it all the way to the door, the guard opening it for her, before Nick's betrayed howl filled the small stone building to the rafters. “I cooperated! You said I cooperated!”

Tara turned. Nick had been lifted to his feet by two agents, was struggling manfully as a result. “And?”

“Where are they taking me?” His grappling was almost laughable, his whining more appropriate to a five-year-old with a tummy hurt.

“You exploited a desperate fourteen-year-old because you were too much of a coward to do your own dirty work. You nearly killed my Stephen. You nearly killed Julien, and quite possibly put Vincent Dante in danger in the process. These are the people I love most in the world, that I owe my very survival to.” She cocked an eyebrow. “I stopped wondering where you're going thirty seconds after I discovered you were the gunman.”

She left.

“Tara, you can't go to Times Square.” Stephen's voice sank to a whispered growl she could barely make out. “Private security won't even go there. There's not enough hazard pay in the world.”

She huffed—half with cold, half with impatience—as she opened the back hatch of one of the security vans. “Tell me something I don't know.”

“But you're going anyway.”

“We got through the war, hiking and hiding our way through half the city. Climbing over rubble. Sleeping in abandoned buildings. Going hungry and dodging more close calls than I care to remember. And then we lived in a shanty for three years.”

He sighed. “We should have been done with all that.”

“You are. I keep my promises.” She switched her headset off before he could try to talk her out of it.

“Where to, ma'am?” the driver asked. “Back to the Tower?”

Stephen had been mostly right when he'd said that not even private security would risk a foray into Times Square. Vincent's security would, but only for Vincent or Gwen. Tara was years, perhaps decades, away from earning that kind of loyalty.

She wouldn't ask it of them.

Tara reached in and grabbed a survival pack from the pile. “I could use a lift out of the gate.”

The agent blinked at her with impossibly blue eyes. Then his straight, dark eyebrows rushed together in frown. “You're not intending to continue on foot?”

“As a matter of fact I am.” She smiled at the unmitigated horror scrawled across his face. She opened a case and chose a pair of military blades. “Don't worry, I'm not asking you to come along.”

“You misunderstand, ma'am. We
can't
let you go in alone. It's the Bloody Square!”

She didn't want to think about why it was called that. The first attacks had been there, and she'd been put in a home because of it. So many children, flooding an already overwrought system, so the paperwork never quite caught up. She'd been so full of rage for so many years. That day had been the first, and she'd been trapped in a cage of anger until Gwen found her.

Stephen had been put in the same home, a grimy walkup in a questionable—well, more than questionable—Brooklyn neighborhood. Overcrowding and underfeeding had been the name of the game. That first day, an already undersized Stephen had been bullied for his meager portion of lunch. She was still surprised she hadn't killed the trio of boys threatening him.

“I know what it is, agent,” she said softly. She slammed the knives home into each boot. “It will be more dangerous if I stand out due to being surrounded by a small, private army. We'd be mobbed. As in pitchforks and flaming torches.” She hooked a gas mask to her belt. “Gwen trained me well, and Stephen will keep an eye on me. Besides, I'm not planning on actually going
through
Times Square.”

“No, ma'am?”

“No. I plan to go under it.”

Tara landed hard enough to jolt the air from her lungs—she hadn't expected quite so far a drop from the surface. The Columbus Circle metro entrance consisted of mostly rubble she'd had to climb through. The first few steps were largely intact, after which she'd had to jump for it. She felt naked without a stylish hat and bullwhip.

She clicked on her ear piece. “Stephen?”

“Agent Carson here, Miss Fitzpatrick.”

She nearly fell over her own feet in the tepid dark. “Carson?” He'd been the agent who'd pulled her out of the way before Julien was shot. “Not that I'm not glad to hear from you, agent, but where's Steph—Mr. Saint-John?”

“I can handle anything Mr. Saint-John would handle for you, ma'am.”

Frustration and worry combined in her gut to bubble uncomfortably. “What about Gwen?”

“She's otherwise occupied, ma'am.”

Meaning Gwen was with Vincent. “It's not like Mr. Saint-John to leave his post, agent.” If Carson didn't cough up Stephen's whereabouts in the next three seconds…

Carson cleared his throat. “He hasn't, exactly.”

“Carson.”

“He's sort of…chasing it down, ma'am. If you catch my meaning.”

Her response was an extremely foul expression, albeit strangled. “Listen to me very carefully. Stephen cannot, by any means, come to—here. I don't care if it takes a dozen tactical squads. You find him, and you stop him.”

“I'm sorry, ma'am. It's too late.”

“Then intercept him.”
She clicked her headset off and gave the open hole above her a considering glare. She stuck two fingers in her mouth and elicited a bone-jarring whistle that echoed wetly across the cement walls of the station.

A head popped into view before the reverberations died. “Ma'am?”

She really wished they would stop calling her that. “Mr. Saint-John is on his way here. Under no account is he to follow me, understand? Consider it an order.”

“Miss Fitzpatrick, we can't actually stop—”

“Then do everything you can to put him off. Have your superiors call Gwen or Mr. Dante directly if necessary. Hog-tie him and throw him in the back of the van. Whatever it takes.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He saluted and disappeared.

Tara sighed, hands on her hips, head bowed. Then she told herself to get a move on—she hadn't much time.

She fitted the gas mask over her head and adjusted the straps. She hated the things. They made her feel claustrophobic, but the alternative was so much worse. The idea of Stephen down here turned her stomach.

She switched on her flashlight, the chill of the dense metal seeping through her gloves. She told herself to focus, and began her journey into the abyss.

There was a vast difference between tunnels that radiated empty, aching loneliness and those on the perimeter of occupied territory. She'd honed that instinct the weeks she and Stephen had led thirty-six fellow students from their decaying, over-crowded school in Brooklyn down a war-torn Seventh Avenue to Central Park. There had been areas of violence, stretches of stunning, literal dead silence.

Then there were those unmarked, yet clearly delineated pockets of disquiet. They vibrated with the feel of unseen, hungry eyes. The first time Tara's group crossed such a boundary, they'd been ambushed for their supplies. Young adults, barely more than teenagers and wild with blind desperation, hunting children through the broken streets of New York. It had been absolutely the last shock Tara could take.

They'd tried to take Stephen out first, to distract and panic the others. They hadn't counted on the bigger kids running interference like pack of rabid linemen on Super Bowl Sunday. They hadn't counted on Tara.

She still carried the scars. But Stephen and the other children had been safe.

It hadn't been the last ambush, either—and not all of them had been by what she would term as human aggressors. By the second ambush, she could sense the preliminary tremor. By the third she knew what it meant.

She sensed it now, felt it crawl over her skin in slow, heavy waves. Felt it reach out and brush against her. She slowed her progress until she stopped altogether, her back against the wall and eyes closed. She switched off her flashlight.

She was still a good quarter mile away from her destination. This couldn't be good.

The dark quiet surrounded her, creeping in like a stalking cat until it caressed her. As Tara waited for her eyes to adjust, she concentrated on steadying her breathing, slowing her heart rate to that Zen-like state she had never quite fully mastered, despite Gwen's excellent tutelage. The instinct of fight-or-flight was still too ingrained.

The tiniest sound, a miniscule
chink
of a pebble losing purchase from its wall, made pond-ripple echoes in the dark. It was followed by a further, definite feeling of
not there.
Tara stepped carefully, boot heel rolling inch by inch up the sole until her toes pressed into the ground. Her other foot followed without so much a whisper of existence. She had the feeling whomever was in here with her was doing the same—a slow-motion game of chicken.