Stackpole, Michael A - Shadowrun (34 page)

I took a deep breath—as deep as my broken ribs would allow anyway—then pursed my lips. "Without contact of any sort, Raven would get suspicious after twenty-four hours, but he probably wouldn't return until after forty-eight or even seventy-two hours." I sighed wearily. "I could hold out that long—hell, with a quick trip to my doss I could even carry the war back to the Weenies."

She looked down at the torpid river swirling around our legs. "Do the odds change when you have me in tow?"

"Somewhat, yeah." Slinging the gun over my shoulder, I cupped her jaw in my hands and kissed her. "I'd take you back to the tower ..."

"But they're probably anticipating that, and it would only put my parents in jeopardy."

"My thoughts exactly." I didn't add that we had no way of knowing how long they'd been watching us or how much they knew about where I was likely to go. "I'm sorry I've put you in this danger. If there was any other way ..."

Lynn pressed a finger to my lips. "If you were anyone or anything else, Wolfgang Kies, I'd never have gotten to know you. Never regret or deny what you are. It's what I love about you."

I kissed her again. "Well, then, let's find a telecom box and get to work."

Finding a phone junction box was actually easier than I'd imagined, and I immediately ripped it open.

The wires inside looked like so much rainbow spaghetti to me, but Lynn recognized things right away.

She smiled and snugged the datacord into a slot. In a hushed whisper I gave Lynn the link number I'd been assigned and the access codes, including the one that disabled the pattern checker. I had to do that to verify that I wasn't using the codes or the computer would see an input pattern totally out of sync with my previous access and would sever the connection.

Lynn winked at me. "Don't worry, lover. No one will get those codes out of me. I promise."

"I know," I said, but she was already gone. The smile remained on her face, but her eyes got a glassy look as she jacked in. Her eyes REMed and then I watched her grin broaden, which had to mean she'd gotten into Raven's system. For the next minute she looked utterly enraptured, then her eyes blinked and she returned to the land of flesh and blood.

She stared at me with incredible joy flashing in her eyes. "When I used your codes and gave the system
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the override, I heard Raven's voice say, 'That's not necessary, Ms. Ingold.' He had a pattern check already built into the system for me! The man's unbelievable!"

I suppressed a smirk. "Yeah, that's putting it mildly."

"I left a message telling him that the Halloweeners were after you and me. I also said you thought you could hold out for seventy-two hours, but any help would be appreciated."

I nodded. "Good. That will get him back, or he'll cut someone loose to help us."

Obviously pleased with herself, and the fact that Raven had gone to the trouble of building a pattern file on her—from data undoubtedly stolen by Valerie from the Fuchi system—she unplugged the datacord and tucked it away in a pocket. "What do we do now?"

I pointed further on down the tunnel. "We'll head toward my apartment, but we'll wait until dark before we go up to street level. At my place I can get weapons and some more suitable clothing for both of us.

We'll let your folks know we're going to ground, then we lose ourselves."

Lynn frowned. "Isn't it possible they know where you live and might be waiting for us?"

I nodded. "That's why we wait until dark. We'll scan the situation and walk away if anything is weird."

"Sounds like a plan."

"That it is." I smiled and started splashing my way deeper into the tunnel.

Lynn took my hand. "I think we make a good team— one too good to split up."

"I agree, kid." I gave her hand a squeeze. "The only way we'll part company is over my dead body."

II

By the time we made our way through the tunnels to my part of town, the cold had soaked into my bones and I was shivering. I knew, without a doubt, that the cuts in my side were infected. I needed antibiotics and bandages, as well as dry clothes, dry shoes, and the better part of the arsenal I owned.

Fortunately all those things were available in my apartment.

The full moon had risen far enough above the horizon that the ball no longer looked huge. Lynn and I returned to the surface through a grate in a storm culvert one street over from my apartment house. With it still being early evening and the neighborhood being on the peaceful side of residential, not many folks were out and about. I took that as a good sign—in these parts "neighborhood watch" meant folks kept score in gun-fights. If no one was out looking around I could allow myself to assume there was no trouble brewing.

Once we made it into the lobby of my apartment house I felt a lot better. I checked the security door down the back hallway and saw it was closed tight. With me in the lead, we ascended the stairs as they angled their way up and around three floors. Each flight had twelve steps, forty-eight steps between floors, and we took each one as if it was our last. I kept looking up and down the stairwell core and saw nothing.

Giddy is the only way to describe how I felt when I reached my door. I was tired and achey and stank like raw sewage, but that was all secondary to the happiness I felt in reaching sanctuary. Lynn clearly felt
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the same way and even the Old One yipped inside my head to signal his pleasure at returning to our lair.

I keyed the lock, opened the door, and reached inside to turn on the light. I tapped the switch and nothing happened. That struck me as unusual, but not dire.
Blown bulb
I told myself, and stepped into the darkness.

Looking up I saw two red eyes burning balefully about two meters above my eye level. A hand closed about my forearm, covering it from elbow to wrist. Suddenly I found myself yanked off my feet and flying through the darkness into the middle of my apartment. As I whirled through the air I saw the silhouette of a troll eclipse my vision of Lynn.

She screamed, the Old One snarled, and I hit a knot of bodies in the dark. The Old One filled me with strength and dulled my pain. I lashed out left and right, connecting solidly. I heard grunts and groans, then I slipped off balance and began to back-pedal in the darkness. Something shoved me and I exploded out into the night through the apartment window.

Longtooth, we are falling!

If you were a raven or a hawk, we could be flying!

Landing precluded further discussion. I faintly recalled something about martial arts and breakfalls. I used one, but broke my left arm instead of my fall. The rest of my body slammed into the ground a second later, the breakfall not withstanding. The impact knocked the wind from me and reduced my left side to one huge bruise.

Pain blazing through my body, stale air burning in my Kings, I lay on my back staring up at the jagged black hole in my apartment window. Lynn screamed again and I could do nothing. I fought to clear my head and tried to roll up to my feet, but I only slumped back. My left arm hit the ground again, sapping all the strength I had.

You must get up, Longtooth. They are coming for you.

I can't.

Youmust.
You must fight them.

I'm in no shape to fight anyone.

ThenI
must fight them.

No!

It was too late. With the full moon in the sky, the Old One was at his most powerful. At these times of the month the control I can exert over him is stretched thinner than a politician's sense of self-restraint.

The Old One no more wanted my consent to what he was going to do than he thought he needed it, but we both knew my concession would make things easier.

Just not the woman, Old One, not the woman.

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I will not harm your bitch, Longtooth, just those who would harm her.

The transformation, when I fight it, is a horrible experience. Now, having given my body over to the Old One, I heard my bones breaking as he recreated me in his image of what we should be. I felt the pain, but it seemed distant—like music heard in the background of a telecom call. I could feel it, and I knew it was pain, but there was not enough of it there to hurt me.

My facial bones broke and jutted out into a muzzle. My arm bones telescoped inward, shortening them so my muscles could exert greater leverage in strikes. My hands became blunt-fingered paws that ended in claws. My feet stretched out and my ankles shifted so my legs took on a characteristic lupine shape.

Fangs, elongated ears, and a thick gray pelt completed the transformation.

I had become
his
creature. With the Old One at the helm, concepts like discretion, sanctuary, and ambush were all tossed into a bin marked
cowardice.
The Old One could be as murderous as Kid Stealth, and with two bullets blowing the lock out of the security door that led into the apartment complex's backyard, I felt no inclination to restrain him.

One of the Weenies kicked the door open and light from the hallway splashed out in a narrow stripe down the center of the barren yard. "Hey, Wolf's not here!"

Had I been in control, the Halloweenies would have had a smart remark's worth of warning. The Old One has no taste for humor. He stepped us into the light so they could behold the monster they had helped create, then he set about building an even stronger correlation between learning my secret and premature death.

The Old One doesn't view killing as performance art, but he did leave a number of abstract sculptures in the apartment's hallway and yard. Most were still identifiable as human and, no, not
everything
tastes like chicken. In fact, a couple of the chromed guys tasted like Harley-Davidsons in sore need of an oil change. Regardless, the Old One boiled through them before most had drawn their weapons—which he took as great evidence of his skill, but I put down to misguided orders to take me alive.

The Old One's transformation had not healed the wounds I had taken earlier. While the transformation did fracture bones and knit them back together, the process could only heal the damage it caused. My pelt remained ragged where the gillette had cut me, and I still nursed a broken arm and ribs. His rage and power still pushed the pain away, but even he kept my broken arm hugged to my chest.

We bounded up the stairs to my apartment so quickly we didn't even pause to snarl at some of the neighbors sticking their heads out of the doors to see what was going on. Someone said something about calling Animal Control, but that just made the Old One howl with glee. I saw images of him summoning a grand canine army to storm through the concrete forest of the metro-plex, and part of me liked the idea of being Napoleon Roverparte.

Half-man, half-wolf in form, but fully lupine in spirit, we recognized and sorted out the various scents still lingering in my home instantly. The musty smell I knew as the odor of a troll—the tall thing that had originally tossed me about. At once I felt fear and anger: fear because they are purported to be hideously powerful creatures of a particularly malignant bent. The anger came because the troll's scent mixed with and masked Lynn's scent. The co-mingled scent trail led to the broken-out window, showing me how the troll had gotten out of the building while I raced up the stairs.

Beneath the troll's scent I discovered that of another foe, and hackles rose on my back. Charles the Red had been in my domain. He had undoubtedly orchestrated the earlier ambush and this battle under orders
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from Mr. Sampson. My bestial mind did not concern itself with why Charles had been here, or what he had hoped to accomplish. It only cared that he and the troll had taken Lynn. The Old One demanded that both of them die quickly and I was ready to taste their blood.

Under the Old One's tutelage, my decisions were easy. Like a gargoyle, I perched for a moment in the moon-washed hole in my apartment's exterior wall, then leaped into the night and stalked my enemies.

Their scent trails died at the street where a vehicle picked them up, leaving me no clear way to follow them. Whereas a man might have been frustrated by this, the Old One was a consummate hunter. He started us loping in a big circle around the apartment house, and halfway through it we cut across a fresh trail containing the acrid edge of extreme nervousness. We followed it like a shark trailing a bleeding fish.

I wanted to hurry to catch and destroy the person, but the Old One held us back.

He knew we were following a Halloweener, and as we trailed him I managed to intellectualize what the Old One picked up by instinct alone. The lack of spectators in my neighborhood meant that either nothing was going on,
or
people had been frightened back into their homes. The Halloweeners had obviously stationed lookouts in various places who then tipped Charles and the troll to my arrival. The lookouts took off, their role in the events finished, and I had managed to cut across the trail left by one of them.

We lowered our muzzle to the ground at the entrance to an alley that led to a warehouse. This fact I knew from previous encounters with all sorts of low-life scum.
Yes, Charles is here. Lynn is here.
My heart started beating faster yet than it had before I crept forward.

Through a rent in the warehouse's corrugated tin wall I saw Charles addressing two dozen Halloweeners— including two ogres4. Their presence—and the addition of a troll—meant that Mr.

Sampson had brought some serious power to the Halloweeners. We had no idea what his game was, or why he was using the Halloweeners as a power base, but I got the distinct feeling he wasn't some exec slumming for cheap thrills and a flea bite or two.

The Old One snarled, fending off my attempt to insert reason into his thought process.
He
had come to kill those who had stolen my bitch. He considered thoughts about
why
the Weenies were present to be a matter for forensics experts to piece together later. He wanted to create a crime scene and rescue Lynn, and he didn't see the need for rational thought in accomplishing that end.