City Under the Moon (38 page)

Lon followed the light, leading him to her baby blues.
Blue eyes. Pretty girl. Pretty Wonder Woman girl. No, blond hair. Supergirl… girl. Lon smiled at the pretty girl. Pretty girl smile back? Yes.

She began kneading his thigh. “Just relax,” she whispered, wriggling out of her vest to reveal a tight black jacket. “I can’t have you cramp up.”

Well there was no way he was going to relax with her hands
there!
She climbed over his lap into cowgirl position—

Is this real, or is this like Miley the Murloc?

—and pushed her thumbs into his hips. That felt
good.

This is fucking real. I have no idea why this is happening, but it’s real.

She moved in and he braced for impact. He’d never been so close to a girl.

Well, except the
one
.

When Lon was 15, his cousin Seth (“Meth Head Seth”) brought him to a strip club where they—
wink wink
—forget to check IDs. He bought a lapdance or four from the hottest girl he’d ever met in his life: a green-eyed brunette with pigtails and draped bangs. She was wearing the hell out of a super-tight
Charlie’s Angels
three-quarter-sleeve shirt—Farrah Fawcett vintage of course—and the shortest short shorts in the history of short-ass short shorts. Lon gave her all of his $76—winnings from a
Magic: the Gathering
tournament that were meant to buy a new laser mouse—so she’d gyrate over his lap for the magnificent duration of four songs: “Tempted” by Squeeze, Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City,” Lil’ Kim’s remake of “Heartbreaker,” and “Mr. Brightside” by those other guys.

Her name was Mercy. Oh, Mercy.

Boy, she is rubbing
hard.

So—anyway—he thought it was really strange that Mercy just kind of went at him while other—

Oboy. Oooooboy. Really hard.

—other people, um, were watching, as if nothing was going on. Meth Head Seth had his own girl, and there was some girl on girl action at the next—

Think about baseball. Right? That’s what you’re supposed to do? Baseball. How do they play baseball again?

He thought his heart was going to bust out of his chest like in
Alien
. Then it would screech and attack her, and stop this glorious rubbing.

Oh that Charlie’s Angels shirt…

When Mercy kissed him goodbye, his head recoiled into a “Miller Genuine Draft” neon sign. Meth Head Seth’s vodka and Red Bull came out of his nose and he spent the rest of the night whining about how bad it hurt and why did Lon have to be so stupid.

Tildascow switched to his other thigh, smiling diabolically.
WHY?

Fuck how did this happen could the werewolves just come back please—

“It’s okay to be scared, Lon,” she whispered, leaning in further. “We’re all scared.” He could feel the movement of her lips. “I’ll bet when you get out of this, you’re gonna be able to do anything. Nothing will scare you anymore. Am I right?” At least, that
might
have been what she said.

Her hands kept coming closer and closer to his goodie parts. His brain pounded with fear and desperation. And… other things pounded too.

“Promise me that when we’re done with this, you’re going to go see your girl face-to-face and give her a crazy
Gone with the Wind
kiss. You know what I mean?”

He forced his head to move a millimeter up and then a millimeter down.

“The kind of kiss that shows her she’s safe with you.” Her voice dampened the folds of his ear. “Sweep her up, so the world just drifts away.”

OhhhhBonerBonerBonerBoner…

“This is what I want you to do, Lon.” She lifted his chin, but fear-induced rigor mortis made him unable to comply. Instead, she tilted to meet him. Her hair tickled his cheek, her breath warmed his neck and he felt—

Holyfuckingdouble-bladedlightsabershit!

—wet, rubbery lips gently graze against his—

He snapped backward, but she caught the back of his head with her left hand, cutting off his escape. She held him firm, but she approached slowly, closing in on his lower lip. Her fingers dug into his hair and she shifted forward, her inner thighs creeping toward his waist.

Maybe she thought he was someone else?

She eased away, luring him from his crash position. Then she surged forward again, pushing with her tongue, daring his stiff lips to part.

Why am I thinking? Shouldn’t I just be enjoying it? What’s wrong with me? Does everybody think this much when they kiss?

Oh my God, I’m kissing somebody!

She squeezed the small of his back, forcing them even closer, and she slid upward, pushing her breasts into his collar. Glorious friction.

Then she attacked from above, mischievously stabbing with her tongue, willing his to come out and play. When they finally met, an electric tickle shot into him, a wild shudder between their locked bodies.

Then she released her grip, letting cold air between their bodies. Her lips pulled away, teasing him, taunting him, escaping—

He gripped her shoulders and took her back in, thinking only in body language, breathing free, tasting her and feeling her and pushing back.

And her hands shifted to his temples. Their tongues said their goodbyes. Their lips softened and unclasped. She pushed one last wet kiss onto his cheek and pulled away.

When he opened his eyes, the beautiful girl with the curly blond hair smiled at him. “That’s how you’re going to do it. And she’ll love it.”

Lon squinted, trying to remember what she was talking about.

Oh, right. He had a girlfriend out there. Elizabeth.

Oh, wait! Elizabeth would do
that
with him?

Tildascow sat back on her shins and wiped a streak of skin into the sweaty soot on her forehead. “Ladies and gentleladies,
that
is how you kiss a woman.”

Lon smiled, reintroducing his tongue to his own mouth. Mantle was stunned to silence. Jaguar shook his head and chuckled.

Ilecko had no reaction at all. His eyes were locked on the ground.

Tildascow beamed at Lon. For a second he thought she might kiss him again. Then she smacked him on the cheek, hard enough to leave a sting.

“Who’s ready for the last twenty floors?”

“I am!” he yelled.

Eighteen

Chrysler Building Stairwell

66th Floor

5:33 p.m.

Hunger.

Explosive ignition in her chest, unstoppable propulsion in her legs.

She couldn’t even feel the stairs beneath her feet now. It was like she was climbing the sky, ascending on her prey.

Brianna Tildascow felt more alive than she could ever remember. And
ravenous
. She could almost smell Valenkov now. And not just him, but all of her enemies. Anyone who would threaten her home.

She had gained two flights on the others until they finally stopped at the 64
th
floor. They called for her to wait, but she couldn’t. The ache swelled, torturous starvation.

“I’m going to scout around,” she called down the stairs, performing for their concern. “I’ll come back for you.”

She ignored their protests and left the stairwell at the 66
th
floor, crossing into a dark room scarcely larger than an average Manhattan apartment. It was empty, dilapidated. Crumbling drywall left wiring and ducts exposed. The exterior windows showed only blackout. Gunfire popped from the upper floors. Her flashlight glowed thick as a sword in the unsettled plaster dust, chasing the taste on her tongue.

At the door to the southwest stairwell, a lone soldier lay facedown in a paste of crimson drywall powder. His blood was sprayed across the wall.

She flipped the body over, no time or need to be delicate. He was Army, a PFC Wissihickon, probably 25. Someone had torn off the right side of his handsome face.

She leaned in for a close look at the wound. Severe bone damage from heavy impact. Fractures of the zygomatic arch, the orbital floor, and the maxilla. The mandible wrenched free of the cranium. Tooth shrapnel had drilled through his intact cheek.

He’d died quickly, not much blood on the floor. And he was still warm. She unzipped his jacket and pulled back his collar, exposing the olive flesh above the thick meat of his pecs. His sweet musk soaked her tongue.

Blood seeped from the innards of his throat. She pulled off her glove to feel its heat. It ran into her palm, lingering in the grooves of her fingerprints.

She couldn’t help but bring it to her tongue—
just once
—sticky and thick and tingling of metal.

If only she could—

“You know him or something?”

A light pierced the darkness of the forest and the others scattered.

“No,” Tildascow said, confused about everything. It was Mantle, and he wasn’t alone behind his light. “He’s dead.”

Mantle’s light swept down to the soldier’s ruined face. “Yeah, I reckon he’s clear on that fact. You alright?”

“Yeah.”

This room—was this where she’d been a moment ago?

She knew this place, or knew
of
it. It was once a posh lounge, the bottom floor of a three-story speakeasy called the Cloud Club.

Yes. Yes—she’d recorded details of the Chrysler Building in her memory, because it was a notable New York landmark, and majority-owned by a United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund.

“Nobody owns this space?” Mantle asked. “It’s like a ghost town.”

“Fuckin’ spooky,” Jaguar responded, running his light along the walls. “I thought this shit would be posh.”

The Chrysler Building had been a symbol of hollow American pride from day one. During its construction, Walter Chrysler was locked in a race to claim the title of the world’s tallest building. He secretly erected a larger spire to climb above the Eiffel Tower, and have it become the first building to break one thousand feet. But only days after those rivets were placed, the stock market collapsed and plunged the country into the Great Depression. The elite suits persevered in their Cloud Club, coasting above Prohibition, but eventually even the mightiest fell from the sky. This place, along with most of the Chrysler Building’s office space, had gone unoccupied for more than 40 years.

Tildascow clung to those details. There were the elevator banks, opening adjacent to a bronze and marble staircase. There were Mantle and Jaguar and Ilecko and Lon, talking about something. The body. The blood. Her watch: It was 5:42, only 90 minutes till moonrise.

But were there also trees? A swampy forest of green and black. Eyes, glowing through the darkness, watching over them all. Howling.

“You okay?” Lon asked.

She nodded.

There was no forest and there were no goddamned eyes. There was the metal of the rifle in her hand, the burn of the wound on her neck, and the sounds of gunfire above.

She came to her feet and nodded Jaguar toward the stairwell door.

When he took the lead, she realized Ilecko had been standing behind him with his sword at the ready. Her chest caught fire, the same as it had with Lon. She wanted to throw herself at him, to fight and fuck and rip each other—

Goddammit! She shook her head, fighting her way back.

“Your technology cannot save you from this,” Ilecko whispered.

“We’ll see about that.”

He waited for her to go first up the stairs and she did, ceding him the tactical advantage of her back. Lon followed, still gloriously oblivious thanks to the pep hump.

A soldier greeted Jaguar at the next landing. “This floor and the next one are secure,” he said. “We still ain’t sure about what’s at the top.”

Bright lanterns revealed the 67
th
and 68
th
floors, a two-story gallery that had been converted into a bivouac with heavy military activity. No introductions were necessary; you were human, or you were the enemy.

They were escorted upstairs, to another bi-level space, some kind of office with auburn walls, marble floors, and a high ceiling. They’d reached the triangular windows of the crown, which stretched beyond the ceiling and floor, creating the disconcerting illusion that the walls weren’t solid. Outside, they could see a Chinook helicopter descending over a landing zone on the roof of the MetLife Building.

Here was another staircase, spiral with irregular platforms that could have been cut from the sunburst windows. Up they went: Jaguar, Tildascow, Ilecko, Lon, and then Mantle.

At the 71
st
floor, the building tapered to less than five thousand square feet. This whole level was just one big office, an architectural firm with glass walls.

Beyond the lobby, shapes folded and twisted between the strobing light of gunfire. Howling and screams were punctuated with bangs. Frantic soldiers scurried about, taking cover behind furniture, peering through night-vision goggles.

Tildascow squeezed past Jaguar and the thicket of milling soldiers. They called for her, but there was no time to waste. She entered the forest, creeping between the desks and the chairs and the trees. Through the mist, she saw the wolves.

Her eyes fell on the carpet—or was it soil?

She was crouched, but now she noticed an urge to fall forward onto her hands, to let loose the tension in her legs and run on all fours.

Join us,
they howled.
Hunt with us.

She renewed her grip on her 9mm rifle.
Pop pop
—her shots found the wolves through metal underbrush.

They came in response, rampaging across shattered furniture, some on twos and some on fours, each one reaching with its wicked claws. Their snouts were extended, their limbs now covered in fur.
Tick tock. Tick tock.

The front line fell under the beasts, but her shots would not miss. Others fell in beside her, including Jaguar and Mantle.

The wolves filtered down from the access stairs to the tower’s spire. Dozens came and fell under their torrent of silver bullets, until all that remained were the death rattles of their reverse transformations.