“Of the grand Clans of the Shifters, some are well-known: the Wolf Clan, Cat Clan, Fox, Rat, and Bear. These are the Shifters that can transform into those animals – but the miracle of this disease is that there are many more out there, lost in their own private wildernesses: Weasel, Mouse, Stoat, Badger, and even Crow.”
The Helsing Talks (BANNED)
“There! That’s the opening!” Tay said, pointing towards where the street dipped on one side of the grand theater that had been the sanctuary for the Archon Bethania. The soldiers looked at her slightly quizzically – the whole area looked as though it had been hit by a tornado.
The Archon Koshimada’s team had made its way through Central Park, and only twice had they call to use their weapons once more – against one lone Shifter-Lych mutant that was feasting on a mortal it had hunted, and another small pack of three. Both times, the group of Koshimada’s men had acted swiftly and decisively – and Tay was impressed with their skill.
They are very well practiced, the Elder noticed, finding it a little odd – usually Elders didn’t practice for war – they had servitors for that kind of thing. But these acted and sounded like battle-hardened soldiers.
It was becoming more and more clear to Tay that they were on no simple scouting mission from one friendly Archon to another. This was a tactical strike.
Before Tay could share her concerns with Kaiden, however, she noticed that on both occasions that they encountered resistance, he had not transformed into his more monstrous form. He had remained as a man, using the small rifle that he had been given by the soldiers to help in both encounters. She approved of the way that he handled a gun, but found herself wondering just how injured he really was.
Neither of us have eaten for over a day – maybe that’s it?
She hoped it was.
“Here,” Tay said, stopping to help Kaiden over the fence. Unlike any other time that she had been with him, this time he accepted her help without a word. He looked paler than usual as well, almost haggard.
The group had found their way to the end of Central Park, to find that the center of Manhattan on the other side was almost a complete ruin. The buildings here were all mostly business or entertainment, soaring skyscrapers that sprouted atmospheric turbines, still pumping out the heavy smoke as a part of the Elder’s campaign.
Kaiden growled when he saw them, and then coughed fitfully. His chest was making a disconcerting rattling noise, and Tay was starting to get worried.
“Over there, you say?” The Archon Koshimada pointed to what appeared to be a ruin of a building.
Like many of the others around, this part of Manhattan appeared to have been hit the hardest in the fires and the fighting, almost as if it had been targeted in the attack. There were no windows left in any of the buildings, and half of the doors were broken down or broken into. Black smoke still poured from a few of the buildings, while many of the others now sported ugly black scorch marks out of their windows. The street below was a playground of ruin: burned and broken cars, smashed furniture, even a few bodies.
“Yes, that’s where I was taken when I first came here.” Tay nodded at the grand theater opposite, remembering the crowds of mortals and Blood Dolls that had seemed to be in an almost permanent encampment outside of the building. Back then, the neon lights above the door had declared the up and coming acts, just as well-heeled servitors and Elders had managed the crowds, letting only the choicest of the Blood Dolls and the rest of the mortals in. The Archon Bethania had turned her vampire court into a cause for celebrity, and everyone – whether Elder or mortal – wanted a piece of the action.
But now, all was quiet. The ‘Theater of Tragedy’, as the lights had glittered, was dark. Across the wide double doors there was piled a barricade of sorts: Two burned out cars, and a whole restaurant’s-worth of chairs and tables.
“It looks like they barricaded themselves in, at least for a while,” the Archon said, sniffing the air. He nodded at his men, who started to slip across the road towards the theater. “There’s another entrance, you say?” He turned to Tay, his hands flexing over the hilt of his sword.
Tay opened and closed her mouth, stuck with confusion over what she should do. Should she tell him, and endanger the Archon Bethania’s life?
But what did Bethania ever do for me, apart from use me in her own aims to clear out the Collective? Tay found herself thinking. Still, the idea of sending another to her death felt wrong.
“Yeah,” she said uneasily, pointing down the street beside the theater. “I was in a car at the time, and taken down there – but I didn’t see where it was, it just went dark, and we were in some kind of underground parking lot.”
“No door codes? Guards?” the Archon of the Bronx asked quickly.
Tay shook her head. “I couldn’t say; I don’t know,” she said uneasily. She was lying, and she was sure that Koshimada knew it. There had been guards at the door, and their driver had to be checked and waved through by them.
But the whole place looks deserted anyway... Anything I tell him won’t make a difference... Tay tried to assure herself.
“Hmm.” Koshimada nodded, before signalling to his men. “Two teams: one over the barricade, another with this side entrance. Tay – you’ll go with the side entrance team, seeing as you have used it before. Our friend Kaiden and I will go over the barricades.”
“No!” Tay found herself saying immediately, looking with alarm at the larger man she had come to think of as a friend. More than a friend? her mind thought stubbornly, revelling in the frisson of fear and excitement that she felt every time she thought of the Shifter-Lych.
“No?” the Archon Koshimada said with a wry smile. “Are you telling me that you have more loyalty to this mutant than you do your own kind?”
Behind him, Kaiden was scowling but hunched over, one arm to his chest as if pained. He looked in no state to be leading a frontal assault anywhere.
“We’re a team, Kaiden and I,” Tay said, trying to fathom what was going on behind the Archon’s dark eyes. Ever since they had found their goal, it appeared as though the Archon who had saved her life was now changing with every second. Had he been lying before about his motives? Tay wondered, feeling as though their position with the Bronx team was getting more and more precarious with every moment that passed.
“Well, all the more reason that you help me then,” Koshimada smiled coldly. “I need the abilities of both of you, and you will both be amply rewarded.”
“We’re not looking for any reward...” Kaiden hissed, his eyes full of suspicion and anger.
“But you will get it anyway,” Koshimada said firmly, brooking no argument. “This city is almost in tatters. There is nowhere for you to go. Staying with us is the safest option.” That being said, he turned to the rest of his team, announcing their objectives.
“Once we have gained access, we illuminate any threats, and make our way to rendezvous together in the center. Your team,” Koshimada nodded to the ones taking Tay’s route, “you will make your way up through the building and back to the front entrance. Hopefully, you will meet with us making our way further in – if not, then you will proceed to locate our team, and eliminate any barriers for our arrival. Understood?”
“Aye, Master Archon, sir!”
“As you wish, Sire,”
“Your will is our wish, Archon,”
Tay realized that the soldiers’ unswerving loyalty now had the ring of fanaticism to it, and she felt her heart sinking. Her eyes sought Kaiden, who was looking weak and annoyed.
I told you so, he mouthed, and Tay shook her head helplessly. He was right – they should have taken the opportunity when they had it to leave the Archon Koshimada’s forces and make their own way to Brooklyn. Now they would be stuck in a firefight at the very least between rival Archons.
But it was getting too late now – the night was already more than half over after their long walk through the city, and they did not have the time to make the journey to Brooklyn and find a place for Tay to rest during the day. Their vengeance would have to wait.
**
Tay found herself with a team of four other soldiers, each of whom shared their disillusionment – or perhaps their distrust by sidelong glances towards Tay, and moments of awkward silences as she approached.
“This way, is it?” one of them asked, pointing around the side of the building. Tay nodded, remembering the route that the limousine had taken. They hopped over the broken bits of masonry (and other much more unseemly objects) before Tay saw the grilled metal door that they had used. It was shut, with a metal pull-down garage door on the other side of the grill, at the head of a small sloping ramp.
“There,” Tay pointed, wondering what was happening around the front of the building, where Koshimada was probably forcing Kaiden to go first over the barricade.
But there’s no sound of gunfire. Yet, anyway, Tay thought.
The soldier who had spoken stepped forward, putting an ear to the grill for a moment. He shook his head at the others, nodding for a second soldier to come forward and unzip his backpack. He drew out small wedges of material, looking like take-away cartons: off-white plastic, with multi-coloured wires coming out of them.
“Is that...?” Tay said with alarm.
“High intensity phosphorous burn,” the soldier said, peeling off the back of the wedges, and carefully sticking them by some adhesive to the hinges of the grate, and then the metal garage door on the other side. He connected their wires to each other, and unrolled a longer wire out across the side street. All of the other soldiers chose a side on either side of the doorway, readying their weapons. Tay noticed that they were all as far apart as they could be.
“Tay, if you want to not get burned, I suggest you take cover,” the soldier said, giving her a fraction of a second before he sparked the wires against each other.
Tay had managed to get behind a rolled-over motorbike, and had her head down, but the flash was still bright enough to imprint a ruddy after-image across her eyelids. She felt the bike and the ground wobble – but the sound of the explosion was like a dull whump.
A smell of caustic toxicity filled the side street, and clouds of billowing white smoke obscured all vision. Tay crouched, her hands over her ears, too stunned by the explosion to think or do anything. She heard a whining and the scrabble of boots as the soldiers started to secure their position.
And then the smoke cleared.
**
At the front of the theater, Koshimada gestured for Kaiden and two of his four soldiers to go first, and Kaiden growled disagreeably.
“I’m sure that you can handle whatever is thrown your way,” Koshimada said. “You do seem to have, rather unique talents.”
Kaiden shook his head. The Archon didn’t understand. No one did. For a while, he thought that maybe he had found a fellow spirit in Tay – but even she was wary of him. She thought that he was a monster, and maybe he was. He had given up trying to fathom just who or what he was anymore.
He clambered over the burnt-out car, standing for a moment at the top, on a sea of chairs and tables that were wedged into a marble-edged double-door.
“It’s pretty solid,” he murmured, but Koshimada wasn’t stopping. He ordered his men to move it, while he looked around, scanning the sky and the ground around him.
Where is everyone? Kaiden was thinking as he lifted and threw tables and chairs and bits of ruined masonry out of the way. Within just a few minutes, they began to uncover the doorway to inside. It was dark, and the air smelled of burning and death.
“Clear a path! Clear a path!” one of the soldiers was saying, kicking at the barricades to make a wide enough hole for their group to squirm into.
“Look,” Kaiden said, pointing at the walls around the door. There were pockmarks and bullet holes in the wooden parts of the barricade, and burnt scorches of bullet ricochets on the stone.
“So what? They got into a firefight before they ran away,” the nearest soldier was saying.
Kaiden winced as a lance of pain shot up through his frame. He didn’t tell the soldier the obvious fact that they were all missing.
We mutants don’t use guns, he thought. Whoever did this, it wasn’t the Shifter-Lychs, and that’s for sure.
In just a moment, the hole was big enough for them to climb through, and, almost as one, everyone turned to indicate that Kaiden should be the first one through.
“Thanks,” he snarled sarcastically, wondering if he had enough strength in him for one final transformation.
“Get moving!” the soldier behind him said, and Kaiden crawled through the small tunnel of broken debris and into the marble-lined hallway of the Sanctuary of the Archon Bethania.
The light on this side of the tunnel flashed erratically as whatever back-up power the sanctuary was using switched between working and barely-working. Through the flashes, Kaiden could see that he was in a rubble-strewn hallway, one end of which would have once been given over to a long marble desk where officials may have taken tickets and names and coats. Underfoot (under the blood stains) was a red carpet, now soiled with burn marks and bullet holes.
Whoever attacked got this far, then. Kaiden thought, sniffing the air and checking the position of the bullet holes. He had been raised in a Shifter family, and that meant that his parents had attempted to teach him a little of the ways of reading tracks and signs on the ground.
He saw it immediately. Not so many bullet holes, but choice ones located around the desk and the double doors which no doubt led into the main entrance hall. Another short collection of pockmarks on one of the stairwells, with blood spatter.
They shot at someone – or something – running for the stairs, at the people behind the desk, at someone guarding the door? Kaiden ran through the options. Exits... Entrances. Guards... People who could send a warning...
Kaiden made a low growling noise in the back of his throat. It didn’t make sense. The bullet holes and shots fired outside the barricade were far fiercer, and more wild; ricochets and pock-marks on the walls and material, as if it were just blind firing. Inside it was much more concentrated.
They had targets. Guards they had to kill before the word spread. Kaiden saw what had happened. If the fighting had started outside, then by the time the attackers had found their way in here, there would be a lot more blood and spent cases and random bullet holes. No. The fighting started in here, and then moved outside, and the barricade was set in place.
That meant that the attackers had walked in here as friends, not as mutants such as himself. They had charmed or fooled their way in, and then fought their way out.
The attackers knew the Archon Bethania’s court. They appeared as friends.
Kaiden wondered who would do such a thing. Who could appear as a friend to a besieged Archon amidst a burning city?
The answer was obvious: A fellow Archon.
**
The smoke cleared, and for a moment there was a ringing silence as every soldier with Tay waited for the after-images in their eyes to clear, and the bells in their ears to quiet. One of the many problems of being an Elder or a Shifter, Tay thought, was the fact that your senses were often far superior to a mortal’s. While that was a bonus in most situations, in some it meant that they could be more easily distracted and overcome by loud noises and bright lights.
The white smoke burned slightly as Tay tried to blink it away, but it fell quickly to the ground, settling like a mist, revealing the ramp down into the concrete parking bay, flickering lights, and the snarling form of a Shifter-Lych pounding up the ramp and leaping out of the smoke.
“Contact!” one of the soldiers just had time to hell, pulling the trigger of his rifle before the mutant landed on him, tearing into his flesh with a snout like a bat’s, and claws like a reptile’s. The smell of blood blossomed into the air suddenly.
Tay was thrust into the action, raising her heavy pistol to fire at the next mutant as it cleared the gap made by the former. This one was an almost pure-albino Shifter-Lych, its eyes crazed and mad as it frothed.
BANG! BANG! BANG! Three shots to the upper torso and head. She breathed out, looking in satisfaction as the thing fell to the ground and rolled over, about to check whether it needed another shot – but then realized that there were still more.
She turned to see two more charging up the ramp, and the soldiers by her side opening fire to spray bullets down the ramp.
Growls, howls of rage. Dark, shaggy shapes bursting through the smoke – the smell of burning metal from the guns.
Something landed by her side, and Tay whipped her pistol around – but not fast enough; a line of pain bloomed across her arm and shoulder as the thing raked her with its claws.
“Oof!” She rolled with the attack, hitting the ground and rolling to get away from the beast’s second swipe, popping up to fire into the exposed belly of another beast, before turning on her heel to fire behind her at the one that had attacked her.
BANG! A solid hit to the chest of the mutant, but it kept coming.
BANG! BANG! Two more. It was impossible not to miss – but it seemed as though the creature was immune to pain, its fangs gnashing together, its chest in ruins as it raised itself up on wolfish hind legs to pounce.
Tay had only one more option. She stepped forward towards the beast, one hand behind her back smoothly pulling Kaiden’s hunting knife from its sheath as the creature brought its own talons downward...
Her blade jutted up under the thing’s jaw, piercing the mutant’s skull and brain cavity – and suddenly it was falling on top of her.
“Agh!” Tay half-yelped, half-screamed as the body of the mutant collapsed onto her, and she hit the deck. All around her the three remaining soldiers were firing full clips at the mutants that had managed to breach the blown gates, as well as pouring firepower into the garage.
“They’re down! Down!” one of the soldiers was shouting, attempting to be heard over the racket.
“Smelly brute!” Tay kicked the corpse off of her, painfully standing up as the soldiers stopped their firing. There were only two left now, and a sea of mutant corpses all over the street.
“How many?” Tay asked, panting. She looked down to where her knife was still stuck in the head of the mutant, now slowly reverting back to the form of an impoverished Feral vampire, its fangs still stuck in a rictus. The knife was lodged deep.
No. I’m never getting that back, she thought, turning back to the soldiers, who were hissing at the bodies and the entrance beyond, still angry and hurt.
“That underground parking lot down there was full of them! Full!” the soldier spat. “Why so many in one place? What the hell were they doing?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Tay sighed, checking her magazine of bullets and leading the way downwards. “You had to blow the doors to get into a sealed room full of mutants. This was a trap.”
Tay held her nose, grimacing as she stepped gingerly over the many bodies on the ground, walking across the darkened parking lot to where she remembered the lifts at the opposite end of the space to be.
Someone locked them in here, she was thinking as she heard the two soldiers cautiously follow her. They were a booby trap.
**
Behind Kaiden, the other soldiers and Koshimada filtered into the hallway, looking around warily. There was a spiral staircase leading up, a smaller, seemingly private service door off to one side behind the desk, and two main doors leading to what must be the central theater.
Koshimada paused, looking first at the main doors ahead, and then at the smaller service door to one side.
You don’t want to rescue anyone, do you? Kaiden found himself sneering at him, but helpless to do anything as the Archon of the Bronx pointed a finger at the door. A team of three of the soldiers lowered their guns and fired at its hinges.
BRRRRRAP! There was a deafening roar of noise, and then a creak as the doors swung in under the assault against their hinges. Gun smoke drifted into the gap between the doors, obscuring their vision for a second, and Kaiden tensed.
I don’t like this at all... he was thinking, just as the first shot rang out through the door.
“WHO GOES THERE?” a voice bellowed, and Kaiden could see the light flickering on the forms of many black-clad, armored soldiers. Servitors. They all had their guns raised and pointing in the direction of the door. There was a large number of them, occupying the ground floor of what looked like a wide three-part theater: A central wooden stage where a lot of people sat on the floor, their hands bound, and another smaller stage that had been turned into some sort of weapons store.
“ARCHON KOSHIMADA OF THE BRONX!” one of the soldiers called back.
“Well, Archon Koshimada,” the servitor who was obviously some sort of captain, “we thank you for your assistance, but Manhattan has already been claimed by Archon Jeremiah of Brooklyn!”
There was another shot ringing out from the depths of the theater room beyond, and the soldier who had answered – Koshimada’s man – fell down dead.
“FIRE!” the Archon Koshimada yelled.
Gunfire erupted everywhere, and Kaiden, seeing his chance, hit the deck and rolled towards the marble desk. The sound of the two groups of Elders fighting was deafening; flashes of muzzle fire and screams of anger and the hisses and snarls as Elders abandoned their firearms in favor of more ancient weapons: claws and swords. Shapes jumped high, bounding higher than any mortal could to land on each other as Brooklyn and the Bronx fought for dominance of the city.
Tay! was all that Kaiden could think from where he had rolled up to the desk. He knew that he shouldn’t feel this way about her. He knew that he should just forget her – she was an Elder, after all – but there was something about her that kept on melting his heart.
I have to find her. I have to save her from this madness! he found himself thinking.
It was all too late, the abomination realized. He had thought that together, he and Tay could save the city of New York from falling apart. Instead, all that had happened was that it had collapsed all the more quickly.