Seti's Heart (20 page)

“Truly, Mr. Ashton, you didn’t think me so much a fool that I’d allow you to waltz into my office and kill me, did you? You must be more of an idiot than Perry had taken you for being,” Wilder said, shaking his head. “I knew the moment you arrived that my detectives had failed to procure Seti and that you were here for some sort of misguided, poorly planned revenge. Where is he?”

“Fuck you!” Logan snarled. If they were going to kill him, then so be it. He wouldn’t give Wilder any information. He would take that small victory with him to the grave.

“I am through playing games! WHERE IS SETI?” Wilder roared, standing up behind his desk. The barrel of the gun pressed painfully into the side of Logan’s head. “I’ll find him anyway, Logan. My finances will allow me to comb this city, even if I need to do it door by door. I will find him. You might as well simply tell me, and I promise that your death will be swift and painless. Withhold the information, insist on one more minute of this false bravado, and I’ll see to it that you suffer for as long as humanly possible before you die.” The icy black look in Wilder’s eyes told Logan that he meant every word he said.

It didn’t matter. Logan’s lips whitened, clamping shut into a tight, thin line, even as his heart hammered in his chest.

“Shoot off something non-vital,” Wilder instructed his henchman with no more emotion than if he was ordering lunch. “Perhaps a finger or a toe. Let’s see if pain will loosen his tongue.”

Suddenly, the air conditioning went haywire, or so it seemed to Logan. The room’s temperature dropped swiftly, the sweat that covered Logan’s skin chilling him. His breath ghosted in small puffs of fog in the rapidly cooling air. Wilder had noticed the change, too. His wild eyebrows knitted together in a frown as he glanced at the vents in the ceiling.

Near the window wisps of smoke curled, thickening, taking on a shape. For the briefest moment, Logan dared hope that it was Seti, exhibiting yet another unbelievable, incredible power. But the shape that took form was much too large to be him. Its head brushed the fifteen-foot ceiling of the room as it solidified.

A giant with a crocodilian head, long jaws lined with wickedly sharp teeth, its eyes burning red, surveyed the office, locking on Logan.

A huge, clawed hand lifted, and the man who’d held Logan at gunpoint was suddenly flung across the room. His gun discharged into the air, the bullet whizzing by Logan’s head so closely that he could feel the breeze part his hair. With a crash, the man hit the wall hard, crumpling to the floor.

“SETI IS MINE!” the creature, man, beast, whatever it was, thundered. It disappeared before the echo of its voice rumbled away.

Taking Logan with it.

 
Chapter Seventeen

The police, a squad of uniformed and suited men with many whirring and clattering machines – Seti had no idea as to their use, nor did he care – descended on Jason’s apartment like ants, crawling over everything, barking orders. Standing in the bedroom, cloaked in a spell that kept him unseen by the prying eyes that searched Jason’s apartment for evidence, Seti’s patience began to fray.

He’d gone too long without Logan in his sight. How could he protect Logan if he could not see the man? Right now, at this very moment one of the hard-eyed police-warriors might be questioning Logan, frightening him, touching him.

The thought of anyone but Seti touching Logan for whatever reason sent a bolt of white-hot jealousy whistling down Seti’s spine, stiffening it. No one touched Logan. No one. Logan was his.

Seti gritted his teeth and did what he was best at. He endured.

The moments ticked by with maddening slowness. Not even the ages Seti had spent locked in his sarcophagus had passed with such excruciating deliberateness. Surely a sorcerer was at work here. It was the only explanation Seti could come up with to explain why time had stopped.

Finally, a face he recognized slipped into the room with him.

“Seti?” Chris whispered, peering into the darkened corners of the bedroom. “Are you in here?”

“I am here,” Seti answered, remaining unseen. He watched Chris jump at the sound of his voice with no visible body attached to it. It would have been quite comical, if Seti’s nerves hadn’t been strung tight with worry over Logan. “Are the warriors gone? Where is Logan?”

“The who?” Chris asked. “Oh, the police! No, they’re still here. Listen, Seti, I managed to duck in here, but they’ll miss me in a minute. Logan is gone.”

“WHAT?” Seti roared, becoming visible in the blink of an eye. He towered over Chris, every muscle in his body tensing. “What do you mean, gone?”

“He…he took off just before the police got here. I didn’t get a chance to tell you before now. I don’t know where he went, Seti. But he took a gun with him,” Chris said hurriedly. He cast a glance at the bedroom door. “You need to get out of here, now. The cops will be back here any second – they probably heard you. Hell, the entire east coast probably heard you!”

Seti tipped his head back and howled, shimmering again into near invisibility. All that could be discerned of him was a subtle shadow, obvious only if one was looking for it.

A heartbeat later two police officers burst into the bedroom, guns drawn. Spotting Chris, a plainclothes detective demanded, “Who were you talking to?”

“A mummy,” Chris answered, a little too sarcastically. His reply didn’t sit well with the detective. He grabbed Chris’ arm and roughly manhandled him out of the room, while the other officers searched under the bed and in the closet for whatever had made that inhuman bellow. Not finding anything, they left, closing the door behind them.

A new emotion, one Seti had never felt before, took hold of his heart in an icy vice, squeezing the breath from Seti’s chest.

Fear.

Logan was gone, out in the world, unprotected. Seti had failed at his vow – again. The knowledge put his entire body on edge, each nerve screaming in protest. His sleek, dark brows knitted together as his face turned to granite, his resolve firming anew. He had lost Ashai. He would not lose Logan.

Stalking to the window, he drove his bare fist through the tempered glass, shattering it, and stepped through onto the narrow ledge outside. Ignoring the blood that dripped from his split knuckles, he raised his arms to the sky, lips moving soundlessly.

The wind responded to his call at once, a gentle zephyr that caressed Seti’s skin like the soft lips of a lover.

Seti concentrated, drawing upon the magick that flowed in his blood. His body filled with a power he hadn’t felt since the ill-fated night five millennia ago when he’d unleashed the fierce power of the desert winds upon his enemies. He would turn this city inside out, tear it apart brick by brick if necessary, to find Logan. He would not fail again.

The hair on his arms and legs stood on end as the air around him crackled, and his eyes glowed eerily with the potency of the power he summoned as he spoke two words into the whispering wind.

“Find him.”

At once, the wind whipped into a gale. From the open ocean waters across the harbor that surrounded the city, the wind drove huge waves crashing against the shore, rocking even the mightiest of freighters moored at the docks as it screamed in across the water in response to Seti’s order. With the speed of a nuclear windstorm it pushed through the city, sweeping across every inch of it.

It whistled underneath doors, howling through apartments and offices, shooting through ventilation and elevator shafts. Nothing could stand firm against the onslaught. The wind lifted park benches and garbage cans into the air as it blew through the streets, turning them into projectiles, hurling them blocks away. Hot dog and pretzel vendors’ umbrellas were pulled free from their carts and sent soaring into the sky. People were knocked to the ground, sent skidding across the pavement by its force. Trees were stripped of their leaves; many uprooted altogether when they failed to bow to the tempest.

And the wind searched.

It slipped into the tiniest crevices, slammed against solid walls until it found – or made – cracks with which to enter.
 
Every room within each building, every rooftop and basement was touched by the powerful gusts. Every vehicle, every office, every restaurant was scrutinized by the gale.

At Jason’s apartment, police radios crackled to life, spurring the officers to temporarily abandon their investigation, racing to the street in response to the unexpected hurricane-force winds.

In the Guggenheim, precious canvases flapped against the walls, or were ripped free, sent flying; sculptures fell clattering to the ground. Alarms sounded but went unheard under the monstrous roar of the wind.

On Broadway, a million lightbulbs burst in a rain of glittering glass as the wind tore them free from the marquees. Posters were ripped from the walls, shredded, and sent flying through the streets. Heavy velvet stage curtains blew and twisted as if they weighed no more than gauze.

On Wall Street, the pits in the Stock Exchange were covered in a snowstorm of paper and ticker tape. In the banks, the snow was green as the wind whipped money from the tellers’ drawers, sending it sailing through the lobbies.

In Fulton’s Fish Market, the fresh tuna and cod that lay on beds of ice swam through the air as the wind overturned the carts and booths.

In the penthouse of the Wilder Executive Tower, the wind paused. It swirled and eddied over the thick carpeting, caressing the mahogany desk and the old man who sat slack-jawed behind it. Picking up a trace scent of the one its master had bade it find, the wind withdrew.
 

Across the city, the wind suddenly died. Garbage and airborne debris crashed to the ground, suddenly bereft of the strong unseen arms that had held it aloft. All across Manhattan, people dodged a rain of wreckage that fell to splatter across the pavement. In the absence of the wind’s thunderous voice, the silence in the streets was deafening.

A single, whistling breeze blew back to the apartment house where Seti waited on the ledge like a flesh and blood gargoyle. Caressing his cheek, it imparted the knowledge it had gleaned from its visit to the Wilder Executive Tower.

His face hardened with determination as Seti again called to the wind. This time it bore Seti up from the ledge and into the air. As if he rode an invisible chariot, his wind horses charged forward, bearing him west, high over the streets of the city.

Arriving at the black tower where Logan’s scent had been caught, Seti faced the windows that looked into the penthouse, hovering in the air seventy-two stories above the ground. Within, he could see two men, one old, with the look of shock etched onto his face. The other was lying in a heap on the floor, unmoving.

Logan was nowhere to be seen.

Raising his hands palms-up, Seti concentrated. Above the city, black clouds gathered, belly-heavy with rain. Thunder boomed, reverberating in Seti’s bones.

Then the atmosphere crackled, sending tendrils of electricity rippling over his skin as a bolt of lightning answered Seti’s command. It speared down from the clouds to hit the window of the penthouse. The bolt didn’t smash the glass – it melted it, 50,000ºF of concentrated heat reducing the tempered glass into its original liquid form. The glass fell in a sheet, dripping down the side of the skyscraper, quickly cooling into a layer of pseudo-ice.

The wind carried Seti forward, depositing him neatly inside the penthouse. Three steps brought him to the desk, where the old man blinked up, looking at him, an expression of awe replacing the shock on his face.

“Seti? You have come to me at last!” the old man said. His face broke into a satisfied grin.

“I’ve come for Logan. Where is he? Speak quickly, old man, or your next breath with be your last,” Seti growled. His fingers curled into tight fists, the warrior in him wanting to smash the answer out of the old man. He restrained himself by the barest of margins. Likely as not, one blow would kill the old man and Seti would never learn of Logan’s location.

“Tell me first,” Wilder said, either too arrogant or too stupid to realize that Seti hung on to his control by the slimmest of threads, and in no mood to barter. “Tell me what I need to know to become immortal. Give me a sample of your blood, and I’ll tell you what I know.”