“Why don’t you try to show him you’re more than that?”
“Try to convince him I’m a good guy? That would scare him more than if I showed up like Kali with ten arms and wearing a belt of severed heads.”
Sola is quiet for a minute. Then she says, “I’m trying to see you as a serious person.”
“What do you care? Are you spying for him?”
“No. I told you before. Maybe we can work together when this is over. I can restart my PI service. But I need to know you’re someone I can depend on.”
“When this is over.” I never took Sola for that kind of optimist. But I guess anyone who goes out on her own and hangs out her detective shingle has to believe there’ll be something down the road.
“How’s this? I’ve saved this world more than once already. I have friends here and I’ll kill anything that walks, crawls, flies, or oozes out of the ground if it hurts one of them. I know God and the Devil and their worst secrets. I know how to pull the plug on this whole rotten world and I don’t do it. You know why?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know either some days. But I don’t do it and the only reason I think I’d ever do it would be to take down the Angra.”
“You think.”
“Yeah. I think.”
I look at her.
“Serious enough for you?”
She nods.
“Enough,” she says. Then, “Are you really getting a million dollars for working on the mission?”
“I wish. I got talked down to five-five.”
“Fifty-five thousand?”
“Five hundred and fifty.”
“Holy shit.”
“I’m a special case. And I had the big weapon, the 8 Ball, so I told them I wanted to be paid like a defense contractor.”
“Wow,” says Sola. “No wonder Wells hates you.”
“Imagine how much more he’ll hate me when he has to hand me the check.”
“Don’t forget to get me those psych forms.”
“Sure. I’ll do them tonight.”
“If you girls have finished gossiping it would be awfully nice if you joined the rest of us on the mission,” says Wells.
Sola snaps to attention.
“Yes, sir. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” he says. “Just do your job. Go back with the others, Sola. It’s obvious I can’t leave you children alone together.”
Sola goes back and disappears into the middle of the Vigil crew. Lots of grins and quiet chuckles back there. Law enforcement. It’s like high school with better guns.
“You don’t have to do that to her,” I say.
“Don’t tell me how to run my people,” Wells says.
“Aren’t I one of your people now?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure you are a person. Lots of things can walk on two legs. Monkeys. Dogs. Bears.”
“You should have said parrots. Those others can’t talk.”
“I know. Just wishful thinking on my part.”
We’re well down the spur line now, heading to a dead end. There’s nothing and no one down here.
Wells turns to his team.
“Anything, anyone? Life readings? Heat signatures? Any signs of Angra ritual marks or bodies?”
A few “No sirs” come from the back. Then a high-pitched whoop from somewhere. Like a howler monkey, but quiet. Then comes chattering, like a hundred people caught in the snow, their teeth tapping together. A scrabbling at the edges of the room. People look at their feet, checking for rats. I can hear breathing all around us.
“Take off your goggles,” I say to Wells. “And tell them to do the same.”
“Something’s coming. I’m going to light this place up.”
“Don’t you dare,” he says.
That’s when the first person screams.
I say, “Wells!”
“Goggles off,” he yells.
I don’t wait to see who obeys the order. My hoodoo isn’t subtle, but I figure that the tunnel is big enough to try it. I bark some Hellion and fire explodes across the ceiling. A lucky shot, as it turns out, since it knocks twenty or thirty of Saint Nick’s chop-shop people off the roof of the tunnel down onto the tracks like sizzling lunch meat. After that, it’s the O.K. Corral. The Vigil crew opens up with their weird angel tech guns, blowing bolts of purple light into Saint Nick’s creations. But it barely slows them.
A couple of chop shops rush me. One is clacking his broken teeth together like he’s gnawing his way through drywall. The other comes at me like a fucking velociraptor, his hands held out like claws, his legs pumping like pistons.
It’s like a night back in the arena, where I fought for most of my time in Hell. By instinct, I pull out the na’at and snap it open like a spear with a curved sword on the end. Broken Teeth is closest, all fangs and milky red eyes. I slice the na’at through the air and off pops his head, rolling away in the subway tide pool. I start to do the same to the velociraptor when I get a stab of paranoia. If Wells really thinks I’m Saint Nick, what’s tossing heads everywhere going to tell him?
I peg the velociraptor in the chest and angle the grip of the na’at up, forcing him to the ground. Then I pull the Colt and shoot him in the head. It’s a relief when he stays down.
I glance at Wells’s people. They’re holding off the crazies and even have a few of them down on their backs, but each one takes a dozen or more shots.
I plug a couple more crazies between the eyes. It seems to put them down nicely. Too bad I don’t have a hundred bullets.
More chop shops pour from the back of the tunnel. The Colt runs out of shots fast, but there’s no time to reload. I put it in my waistband. There’s no point pulling the black blade. I’d just start taking heads like with the na’at. That leaves one thing.
The flames at the top of the tunnel are burning down and the place is growing dark again. I manifest my Gladius, my flaming angelic sword. Its bright white fire lights up the tunnel like a movie premiere downtown. Nothing on Earth can stand up to an angelic sword. I slice the nearest chop-shop killer nearly in half with one slash and wade into a crowd that’s surrounded Sola and Wells. There’s not a lot of strategy in this. No big battle plan. Just hunt and slash and keep the monsters off the nonmonsters for as long as I can.
Good thing these chop-shop types aren’t big on brains. They’re all either teeth or claws, which makes them pretty easy to take down. I put down a dozen fast and open a hole for Sola and Wells to run through. It doesn’t smell good, all burned meat and fried hair.
One of the Broken Teeth lands on my back and sinks his choppers into my neck. It’s not even like he’s biting me. It’s like he’s trying to chew right through my spine. It reminds me of something, but that’s not important right now because I can’t reach the asshole with my sword and I can feel blood—my blood this time, not some Heavenly angel’s from the sky—running down my back.
The biter twitches. Once. Twice and falls off. Wells and Sola keep firing into its body as it tries to get up. I wade into another crowd of them and slash away. It doesn’t take long for whatever part of their brains still works to cop to the idea that fire is bad and running is good. The ones still alive and on their feet take off away from the spur track, down one of the other rail lines, and disappear, making those howler-monkey whoops, claws still out and teeth still grinding.
I keep the Gladius burning until I’m good and certain they’re gone. Then let it go out. The night-vision gear is scattered all over the tunnel, so Wells’s people pull out their flashlights. None of them say a word and most of the lights are on me. I guess they’ve never seen a Gladius before. Probably most of them never saw anything close to a real angel before. Must be a hell of time to see your first, even if he’s only half an angel.
I say, “Mind getting those goddamn lights out of my eyes?”
A few of the flashlights move off me and flash around the tunnel, looking for stray crazies. There are a lot of them on the ground, and some of them still look alive.
I go over to Wells.