City Under the Moon (41 page)

A wolf flew in from the darkness, appearing suddenly in the Apache’s light. It fell inches short—its claws
just
scraped the wing—and then it plummeted, limbs flailing. Lon was still so clenched that he hadn’t even noticed.

They cleared the city cluster and broke left to diagonally cross First Avenue, the quasi-highway between Manhattan and the United Nations.

She sighed with relief when she saw that the Plaza was under a massive siege. Someone had heard her over the radio.

The front lawn was lit up like a baseball stadium as helicopters swarmed overhead, raining rappelling soldiers onto the sloping roof of the General Assembly Building. Rocket-propelled grenades shot from the rooftops, lighting up the ground amid plumes of smoke. The massive rectangular Secretariat Building glowed at its fringes, backlit by a legion of boats in the East River.

The domed turret poking from the top of the GA Building seemed to look back at her, as if it were Valenkov’s eyes.

He was close now.

As they closed in, they could see that the amalgam military forces had staged an airhead on the plaza’s lawn, a square city block at the northern end of the international territory. Chinooks were jumping from Roosevelt Island, dropping Humvees with roof-mounted M2 (“Ma Deuce”) .50 Caliber machine guns that were firing before they hit the ground.

Ma Deuces were earth scorchers, the meanest penises Tildascow ever had the pleasure of stroking in her army days. The trees trembled under their punishment, dropping leaves and branches amid pulverized werewolf bits. The M2’s six-inch bullets had no silver, so the enemies kept surging with whatever limbs they had, shambling in the flickering red light cast by flares.

The werewolves had a rally point of their own. They were massing at the fountain dominating the southern end of the campus, hiding in the shadow of the Secretariat Building as they stormed the narrow back entrances to the General Assembly Building.

Man and wolf were going to meet in the middle.

The
Silver Bullet
flew low over the promenade, only a dozen feet above the knotted gun sculpture,
Non-Violence
(damn thing pissed Tildascow off more now than ever). As they spun for clearance and set down on the lawn, Green Berets unlocked the hitchhikers from the helicopter’s fuselage. Jaguar’s body spilled into their arms.

Tildascow caught Lon with an arm under his chest and brought him to a safe zone on the concrete. Mantle led Ilecko their way and looked back solemnly as they covered Jaguar’s body.

She turned toward the marble and glass columns at the main entrance to the United Nations General Assembly Building. The temporary security tent had been razed and the bulletproof doors had met their match. The interior lit up with strobing pops of gunfire. Ringing, buzzing, and whooping alarms made it clear that—
by the way
—something was happening.

The
Silver Bullet’s
gunner lifted off to make room for more traffic, but Beethoven had stripped his flight gear to join them. He broke open smelling salts to clear their heads and followed that up with fresh, silver-loaded Colt 9mm SMGs and mag pouches.

“They found the entrance to the shelter, but they don’t have the passcode!” Beethoven yelled over the warfare. “They say it’s missing from the government servers! They’re on the horn with the UN now!”

Tildascow gritted her teeth. Valenkov must’ve found some way to erase the code from the VPN, even the redundancies. It wouldn’t have been easy, but he could’ve wolfed out a UN security tech or a really talented hacker.

Ilecko passed on the rifle, preferring his sword. His skin was frostbitten and his hair was thick with frozen sweat and dirt. He was sluggish, but steady. And he nodded his readiness, as if he knew he was being assessed.

Lon was another story. He was curled up on the cement, covered in frozen clumps of muck. His eyes were clamped shut and he puckered like a thirsty fish.

Beethoven had a rifle for him, but Tildascow took it and gave him a canteen instead.

“He stays here,” she said. “Everyone ready?”

Nods all around.

“Let’s go.”

Three

White House Situation Room

6:21 p.m.

As everyone kept vigil on the flat-panel screens displaying aerial real-time footage from the UN Plaza, Billy Itz, William Weston’s top speechwriter, was furiously scribbling on a legal pad. A White House photographer had his back to the far wall, quietly snapping. Teddy wanted to put people in the room, so it wouldn’t be so easy to condemn their choices post-mortem.

Weston’s mind kept creeping toward his shirt’s breast pocket, where he’d put the laminated card that contained today’s Gold Codes, the sequence needed to authorize the launch of a WMD. The codes were provided to him every morning by the National Security Agency, placed in that pocket and forgotten. No president since Reagan had had serious cause to contemplate the Gold Codes; today’s political landscape was far more complicated in its simplicity.

Even the president couldn’t give authorization to launch WMDs on his own; a second set of Gold Codes was issued each day to his Defense Secretary, Ronald Greenberg. Only together could they issue the command, once both of their code sequences had been authorized.

Greenberg was an older man with thin white hair and a vulture’s scowl. A businessman and engineer who had come up bouncing between private weapons R&D firms and federal defense appointments, he hadn’t served in the military in almost 40 years. But he had unlimited stamina and resolve, and if the laminated card in his pocket was wearing on his mind, it wasn’t showing.

From the far end of the table, General Ryan Jermaine, the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, monitored communication with the
Lunar Eclipse.

Colonel Murdock’s voice filtered through the room. “
Lunar Eclipse
post-takeoff routine complete, we are flying high.”

“
Eclipse
, this is Home Room, do you copy?” Jermaine responded.

“Roger, Home Room, you are loud and clear. Weapons systems are online, we are proceeding to target zone.”

Weston kept his eyes locked on the UN Plaza, praying the men down there would bring him a miracle.

Four

United Nations Plaza

6:26 p.m.

Lon’s team was leaving him behind.

“Nnnmeee,” he heard himself mumble as he struggled to get up. Of course they couldn’t hear him over the war machines. He was too exhausted to shape his thoughts into reason, but he knew he had to keep going. He couldn’t let his team down.

He forced himself to his feet. Moving spotlights in the sky cast veering shadows, doing nothing to help his balance.

As his eyes came to focus, he saw a medic hunched over someone in the Shadow Stalkers’ uniform. He came closer, looking over the medic’s shoulder, to see that it was Jaguar.

His chest was crushed, as if he’d been hit by a wrecking ball. Lon remembered now that a werewolf had hit their helicopter, and Jaguar had taken the impact. The medic startled Lon when he grabbed his kit and raced elsewhere, switching channels and leaving poor, broken Jaguar alone in the grass.

“Come back!” Lon screamed, but the medic paid him no mind. Injured men were being carried in from the other side of the plaza.

Lon knelt down to… well, he didn’t know what to do. Jaguar’s brown skin had gone blue. Probably there was nothing anyone could do.

He remembered that he had to catch up with the others, but to leave would seem so disrespectful. God, he couldn’t even remember Jaguar’s real name.

But the others had left. And he couldn’t let them down. He started toward the building, turning back once to see if Jaguar had moved. And then he ordered himself not to look back again.

He trundled up the steps (
more fucking steps
) and pushed toward the entrance to the General Assembly Building. Soldiers rushed past with their weapons ready. A couple of them yelled something mean, like “get out of the way,” but he couldn’t make it out. Fuck them anyways.

A tent of scorched grey canvas was deflated in front of the building, draped over security equipment. Its seal had been dragged away from the front doors, where those soldiers stormed into the lobby.

A moment later, Lon stepped through the twisted doorframe. Glass crunched beneath his feet and the familiar reek of gun smoke enveloped him. Cloudy blue light seeped through the opaque window columns above, combining with the smoke to cast a watery ripple over the dead bodies that lay crumpled in every direction. They were of any age or race, wearing tatters of clothing or nothing at all. One girl—she couldn’t have been 30—was sprawled naked in the middle of the floor, her face frozen in a question.
Haven’t you heard, lady? The wolves came to town.

He’d never even seen a naked girl before. What a way to start.

He stepped between the corpses and some ruined artworks and statues. Everything in sight was scorched, bloodstained, or broken. Toppled metal detectors had cut divots into the checkered marble floor. Blood puddles spawned decaying footsteps in all directions. Every wall was riddled with bullet holes.

The latest soldiers were huddled to Lon’s left, firing into the darkness of a corridor that extended beneath the main balcony. Howls came in return, bouncing loony echoes. An information kiosk caught in the line of fire sizzled smoke and dust as errant shots hacked it apart. Lon tiptoed toward those men, but Tildascow and the others weren’t among them.

A wide, shallow stairwell started to the right before turning around and sweeping over the lobby to the lowest of three white balconies. He found Ilecko in a dark corner beside the stairs, looming a head above everyone else. Beethoven was crouched before him, yelling into his radio.

“Geronimo squad, this is November Zero Zero One. Do you read?” he radioed. “Any element this net, please respond. Over.”

“This is UNACOM—”, the radio buzzed, but the rest of the message was lost in the din of gunfire.

Ilecko pulled Lon close to him, where Mantle was covering them with one of those big black rifles. They were by an elevator next to a smaller, private flight of stairs descending underneath the big one.

“UNACOM, we need directions to the underground bunker,” Beethoven radioed. “Please advise.”

“Stand by, November, we are—“ Again, the rattle of machinegun fire made it impossible to hear.

“Say again, UNACOM,” said Beethoven. “All after ‘we are.’” The garbled response would have been unintelligible under the best of circumstances.

Tildascow was behind Ilecko, searching her backpack for a pair of night-vision goggles. As she put them on, Lon could have sworn—

She caught his curious glare, realizing just now that he’d arrived. With the goggles over her face, he couldn’t read her expression.

Did she see him notice her yellow eyes?

For a long moment, Lon had no idea what she was going to do. Finally, she went back into her pack and came out with another pistol like the ones Lon had already failed to use. She racked the slide and offered it to him.

When he reached for it, she recoiled sharply. Her mouth hung agape as she stared at his hands.

Startled, Lon looked them over. They were chapped and swollen, each with a thousand little cuts, but he didn’t see anything out of the—

Lon’s heart dropped as he realized what she must have seen.

A pentagram
.

Invisible to him, but to her it would an irrepressible craving. He watched her track every movement of his hands, her head tiling on her neck like a hungry predator.

The others were too focused on the radio to notice. Which was for the best, because they might kill her if they saw it. But Lon knew in his scaredy-cat heart that she could keep herself under control.

“I’ll take it,” he said, and reached for the gun with a big motion to retrieve her attention. When she snapped to, she put the handle firmly in his palm, right on top of the pentagram.

“You’ll use this if you have to,” she said over the racket.

“I won’t have to.”

She gazed at him for a moment, probably deep into his eyes, but he couldn’t see through the night-vision goggles. Maybe she was developing romantic feelings? That’d be pretty cool, even though it’d leave him in a bit of a triangle with Elizabeth. And it’d be understandable, because, let’s face it, he’d been pulling off some major hero stuff here.

She came toward him, and he thought they might be about to kiss. But then she passed him and went around Ilecko and the Shadows and stepped onto the stairwell leading to the balcony.

“Shelter is accessible from a tunnel behind the GA Hall,” called Beethoven, relaying information he’d gotten over the radio. “Straighest route is through the theater.”

“Let’s move,” Tildascow yelled, climbing the stairs.

As they followed, Ilecko gave Lon a stern glare.

“She’s okay!” Lon promised.

“
It will not be her,
” he whispered in Romanian. But his eyes said it all: He’d killed the love of his life under the curse. Tildascow wouldn’t be able to stop herself.

Ilecko led him up the stairs and stayed between him and Tildascow.

At the top, a squad of soldiers was poised at the doors to the General Assembly Hall. They communicated directions with hand signals, and moved all at once on the squad leader’s silent mark. The doors belched smoke and gunfire cracks as they stormed the hall.

“We go straight down the aisle,” Tildascow hollered as she took position next to the doors. Her voice was deep and scratchy. Maybe trembling. “There’s an exit behind the podium, leading to a hallway. The shelter entrance is straight down on the right-hand side. A team is already in place trying to get it open. Through this door, a few steps to a landing where we wait for clear. Once we move, we do not stop, no matter what you see, no matter if we lose anyone, even me.”

After a moment of steeling, Beethoven opened the door and led the way, followed by Tildascow and then Ilecko, who kept a firm grasp on Lon’s arm. Mantle came last and moved up to cover Lon’s right side. They landed on the steps above one of the rows leading all the way down to the dais of the General Assembly Hall.