by Leanne C. Harper
ROSEMARY STARED OUT INTO the spring rain. Gray and dirty, outside it looked more like winter. Chris Mazzucchelli droned on in the background. Christ, how had she ever gotten involved with a jerk like him? Living underground with him had shown her the difference between dealing with Chris on an occasional basis and being together nearly twenty-four hours a day. He was no longer a romantic rebel in her eyes; he was a vicious punk. The problem was he was her vicious punk.
She returned her attention to the crisis at hand, but her eyes were immediately caught by the sight of Chris’s rattail bouncing up and down on his back as he paced the dingy little Alphabet City hotel room they were using as a safe house.
“We lost eight capos to this double cross. Fiore, Baldacci, Schiaparelli, Hancock, and my brother. Dead. Vince Schiaparelli looked like he had been turned inside out. Fiore’s skin turned into stone and he choked to death. Hancock and Baldacci weren’t there anymore—just puddles with bones sticking out. My brother—” Here even he gagged and hesitated. “Three more, worse than dead. Matriona and Cheng walked away. They’re fine, just fine. Since then we’ve been able to do nothing more than stay even, if that.”
“And what did we get? Siu Ma. We already knew about her. We’ve tried to kidnap her twice, for Christ’s sake. We know who’s behind the Immaculate Egrets. But we still don’t know who the ultimate leader is.” Rosemary Gambione shook her head. “Even if Croyd knew something truly useful, they didn’t get it out of him. Great. The Shadow Fists must have gotten to him. We hit a few more Shadow Fist operations, lose some more of our people, and we’re just as far away as ever. Even worse, they’ve started using some kind of biological warfare against us. I wonder whose side this Croyd is really on.”
“Well, O fearless leader, any ideas? I’ve done everything I can think of.” Chris spun on her, anger and fear mixed evenly on his face. “And do me a favor, don’t bring up your fucking father again. I’ve had about all I can take of that, too.”
“Find your informer, this Croyd. Maybe he does have something more. Let’s try to find out how the Shadow Fists got hold of this wild card virus they used. If they have it, we need it.” Rosemary thought but did not voice her apprehension that if the Families were this far behind, they had already lost the war. She was the sole surviving don. The Shadow Fists had gotten all the others. This war had begun to feel like Vietnam, and they weren’t on the right side.
“I’ll do what I can. By this time he’s probably in Outer fucking Mongolia.” Chris looked unimpressed by her request.
“Chris. Get him.” Rosemary used the drill sergeant tone deliberately. She suspected that he did not always follow her orders. She wondered at the speed with which the papers had gotten hold of her true background and whether the source could have been within the Family. Mazzucchelli looked back at her with swiftly concealed loathing.
“Anything you say. Dear.” Chris stalked across the room before turning back at the door. “By the way, you might find it amusing that our boy Bludgeon apparently beat the shit out of Sewer Jack Robicheaux a few nights ago. He found out that Jack turned us down, I guess, and took it upon himself to teach the dirty little Cajun a lesson in manners. I gave him a little bonus for the job, in your name, of course.”
Rosemary sat on the bed. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She was completely isolated from her people. Chris told her it was the only way to guarantee her security, but the situation was getting to her. She looked across the room to the door. She didn’t feel like an all-powerful Mafia don. She felt like a prisoner.
Bagabond let herself into C.C. Ryder’s loft expecting that C.C. would be in the studio. Instead, Cordelia was bothering C.C. again. She wondered what Cordelia wanted this time. Bagabond had had to dodge around even more people wearing the useless surgical masks. She had no sympathy for those panicked by this new outbreak of the wild card virus. Maybe it would do them some good. Paced by the ginger cat, Bagabond walked over to the couch and sat down on the floor beside C.C. The ginger put her head in Bagabond’s lap. Both women nodded to her before continuing their discussion.
“There’s something weird about that Shrike. I can feel it.” Cordelia leaned forward to make her point. “And what they’re doin’ to Buddy just isn’t right. He wrote those songs!”
“Cordelia, Shrike Music is a perfectly legitimate business. I know people who record for them. They’re good business people. If Holley gave up the rights to his songs, that was his decision to make.” C.C. shook her head wearily. “This business is full of trade-offs. That’s the way it works. You know that by now. Buddy’s got his new songs. They’re good. Let it be.”
“But I can tell by talking to Buddy that it wasn’t his decision. He jus’ won’t tell me what happened.” Cordelia got that look on her face that told Bagabond that she was not about to give up. Bagabond got up and went into the kitchen. Cordelia’s obsession with saving the world reminded her uncomfortably of some of the younger nuns she’d met as a child. They had all wanted to be saints, real ones.
“The old-timers got ripped off. Look at Little Richard. It wasn’t right; it wasn’t fair. But it was legal. You can’t do anything about that. Buddy has other preoccupations now. The concert went fine. Leave it.”
“But you saw him a few weeks ago. Playing in a Holiday Inn in New Jersey! Somebody has to help him, and I’m going to do it.” Cordelia’s eyes shone with the fervor of the converted.
“Let Buddy get on with his life.”
“Hey, it’s not even my idea dis time. They want to see me.” Cordelia waved her hands innocently in the air.
C.C. shook her head in resignation. “So what’s this great plan of yours?”
Bagabond hacked off a chunk of cheddar cheese for herself and another for the cat. Nibbling at hers, she walked back into the living room.
“I have an appointment to meet a Shrike exec tomorrow. I put him off until well after the concert.” Cordelia scooted down on the couch and put her arms around her knees. “And I need to know what to ask him.”
“Me.” C.C. sighed and reached down for a bite of Bagabond’s cheese.
“Right. You. My expert on recording contracts.” Cordelia bounced once in triumph and grinned over at C.C. “I want to see the original contracts, right?”
“I guarantee you that they are not going to let you see Holley’s contract.”
“I’ll find a way.” Cordelia grinned unself-consciously. “Woo, hey, I gotta go.”
Cordelia was up and headed for the door. “I see you two later. Bye, y’all.”
Chris Mazzucchelli burst into the room to face Rosemary’s drawn Walther. He waved both hands in the air languidly, then dropped them and threw himself down on the bed.
“Put that silly thing away before you shoot yourself. Jesus Christ, woman.”
“I haven’t seen you for days. Where the hell have you been?” Rosemary lowered the pistol but did not holster it.
“I’ve been a good little boy. I’ve been out finding Croyd just like you wanted.” Chris rolled over onto his elbows. “I’ve got an address all ready for you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Chris. I’m not leaving this room.” Rosemary sat down on a chair across the narrow room from Chris. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Maybe if you exposed yourself to a little ‘danger,’ you’d get some idea what we’re up against. You sure as hell don’t know anything now.” Chris sat all the way up on the bed. “Or is that more than your heart would take? Your father would never be caught dead hiding his face like this.”
“All right.” Rosemary knew she was being baited, but the question was whether Chris had the guts to kill her. “Where?”
“In Jokertown, in a hotel near the docks.” Chris smiled openly in triumph. “Fitting, don’t you think?”
Chris got up and walked over to her. He stroked her cheek. She tensed but did not pull away.
“C’mon, baby, we’ve got until tomorrow.”
It took hours to get rid of him. When he finally left—to make final preparations for her security, or so he said—she went to the bathroom and pried open the window. With one foot on the sink and the other on the water tank, she levered herself outside onto the fire escape.
Rosemary climbed the fire escape to the roof, silently cursing at the least rusty squeak it gave. On the roof she walked as quietly as possible to a small flock of pigeons cooing on the edge of the building. When they did not fly off at her approach, she scattered some crumbs from the sandwiches she had been eating for weeks.
“Bagabond, help me.” She tried to catch the eyes of each pigeon, wondering how long it could carry her image in its tiny brain. There was no other chance. “Bagabond, I need you. Chris is going to kill me.”
Bagabond was her last hope. Chris wouldn’t dare just shoot her. It would be too obvious to the few mafiosi still loyal to her father and the Gambione name. He had had to find another way. This was it, she could feel it.
Bagabond pulled off her headphones. Something, like a fading echo within her mind, had broken her concentration on C.C.’s newest tapes. She tracked it back through the lines of consciousness that intersected in her mind, identified the medium as a bird’s mind, then found the pigeon who carried the vision. Rosemary called to her again out of the pigeon’s memory.
Rosemary had given her address. Bagabond knew the area. She sat stroking the ginger’s back as she debated meeting Rosemary. She couldn’t trust the woman anymore. In the message she had left among the pigeons, Rosemary promised to tell Bagabond who really killed Paul. The Mafia leader sounded sincere, but Bagabond had seen her in action before. She was a lawyer. She was trained to say whatever would best serve her purposes at that moment.
But even Rosemary’s training could not hide the fear that was carried by every pigeon she had reached. Rosemary was terrified. Bagabond remembered the first time they had met. The social worker, frightened then but frightened of not being able to help, had done everything she could for the street people. Bagabond remembered Rosemary’s teasing questions about her dates with Paul and going shopping together for just the right outfit to impress him. Rosemary had given her back part of her life.
But she had paid that debt. She’d already saved Rosemary’s life once when Water Lily had betrayed her. Betrayal. What about Paul? Wasn’t helping Rosemary betraying Paul? Bagabond still suspected that Rosemary was more involved in his death than she would admit.
Bagabond stood up and dumped the cat onto the floor. She picked up her old coats and wrapped them around her. Even if she decided that Rosemary was lying about Paul’s death, she had meant too much to her for too long to abandon her now. She turned off the tape deck and amplifier. The green telltales that had illuminated the room dimly faded to black. Bagabond’s eyes adjusted almost instantly as she walked unhesitatingly across the loft toward the door and the New York City night.
Down on the street she began gathering her forces. Bagabond contacted the pigeons, the cats and the dogs, and the rarer ones: the pair of peregrine falcons, the wolf who had escaped from his would-be owners, and the ocelot who spent her time prowling the parks for stray dogs. The wild ones listened to her call and were ready to follow her.
Rosemary was north near Jokertown. It would be a long walk to this hotel where she would be meeting someone who planned to harm her. Bagabond slipped into a subway entrance and began working her way through the tunnels toward Jokertown. She had gone almost a mile underground when Jack called.
Jack had been missing since the night of the concert. Cordelia had been concerned, but she had assumed that he was doing what he wanted and had not tried to find him. He and Bagabond continued to avoid each other, and she had not tracked him down either. The strength of his sending was incredible. Bagabond fell to one knee, then collapsed under the weight of it.
She caught snatches of images. It was enough to tell her he was in a hospital. But that was not the message. Jack was cycling through the human-alligator as fast as he could, using the alligator-persona to contact her and the human to communicate. It was Cordelia. She was in trouble. Filtered through Jack’s perceptions, Bagabond understood that Cordelia had called for Jack but he was physically unable to help her. Not only was he switching between alligator and human, he was alternating between consciousness and coma. Jack was expending all the energy he could muster to ask her for help.
Bagabond concentrated. Cordelia’s fear resonated through everything Jack sent. Images cascaded through Bagabond’s mind. A needle, the pain of an injection. A street empty of pedestrians or traffic. Anonymous buildings. They looked like apartments, but Bagabond did not recognize the neighborhood.
“Where, Jack? Where?” Somewhere else rough concrete cut into her hands and knees. It was to the north, it had to be. She could tell that much from what she had seen of the apartment houses crowded onto hills. With part of her fragmented mind she tried to match what she had seen with the views of the birds and the animals in the north end of Manhattan. Abruptly she lost Jack.
“Jack!” For long seconds he was gone entirely. He was dead to her and she feared that his efforts had been fatal. Then abruptly she was seeing the numbers over the building’s front door through Cordelia’s eyes. “The street, Cordelia, the street?”
She did not know if Cordelia had heard her or not, but corner street signs appeared. Washington Heights. She also felt the rough hands on her arms and the gun at her head. There was a haze across the images that she recognized. Cordelia had been drugged with something psychoactive and disorienting that would prevent Cordelia from concentrating enough to harm her attackers even if she would betray her principles.
Cordelia’s face floated in her mind shaded by both her own memories and Jack’s. Cordelia’s young enthusiasms and energy, her devotion to life and helping others, pulled Bagabond north toward her. But Cordelia’s face was overlaid by Rosemary’s. The ginger screamed her empathy with the turmoil in Bagabond’s brain.
She had promised to help Rosemary. Cordelia had the ability to help herself, if she would use it. But could she, drugged, and would using it destroy the girl, as Bagabond had been destroyed? Rosemary had killed Paul, or caused his death. Bagabond knew that as well as she knew anything. She had been blinding herself to it because of her overwhelming desire to keep Rosemary as her friend. Rosemary had chosen her path. Cordelia had not had time to choose hers.
The falcons wheeled in midflight and headed north, and the ocelot bounded after them.
Her bodyguards followed Rosemary down the filthy hallway of the flophouse where Croyd was hiding. If Croyd was there at all. Rosemary remembered the men she had seen in prison movies being escorted to their deaths. The two big mafiosi said nothing to her. She didn’t even know their names. Chris had told her he would wait outside to keep watch. The walls were mildewed and stained, and the hallway smelled of cigarette smoke and urine. Abruptly the two men stopped. The dark-haired man on her right motioned her forward.
She couldn’t tell if Bagabond was there, watching and waiting. Rosemary had come up with a plan to take care of two of her problems. She knew she could convince Bagabond that Paul’s death had all been Chris’s doing. Bagabond would kill Chris in revenge. With Chris out of the way maybe she could make some kind of deal with the Shadow Fists. Get out alive. Maybe.
Please, God, Bagabond, be here.
Bagabond found one of Jack’s underground motorized carts. He had made her memorize the tunnel system underlying the entire island. She silently thanked him as she switched from one passage to another, risking a crash by pushing the cart as fast as it would go. The markings on the walls passed as she sped north. Above her and through the tunnels paralleling her route, her animals kept pace as best they could.
The hawks arrived first and circled the building. Through their eyes Bagabond could see the motions of the men inside. Cordelia was huddled in a corner but still alive. Bagabond tried to send that information to Jack, but she got no response. Ignoring Jack’s silence with difficulty, she began setting up her warriors before she arrived.
There was a broken window at the top of the 1940s apartment building. She sent the hawks through it to wait at the top of the stairwell. The ocelot was almost there. She had used roofs as well as streets and had outpaced the others. The wolf was blocks back, trying to avoid being seen. The black and calico she kept with her, but she sent the ginger into the building to be two of her eyes. For the others she called rats from the surrounding buildings. Many waited to be renovated and housed her creatures. As her animals converged, she felt the warmth of her strength build.
By the time she climbed up the stairs of the subway station at Two Hundredth, she was in place. She cycled through the consciousnesses of her animals, controlling them and holding them ready, and as she did, she tried to touch Cordelia. The girl was a blank without Jack to amplify her mind. With the part of herself that remained human and aware of why she was here, Bagabond urged Cordelia to use what she had been given to protect herself.
The black she had left to guard her car. He had been unhappy but she refused to risk him. The younger calico she took along but left up the block from the building. A combination of points of view told her that two men loitered at the main entrance of the partially renovated red-brick apartment house. The ocelot paced restlessly back and forth in the darkness of an alley beside the apartments. At the touch of a thought she sprang out and raced for the men, running silently for the hunt. She leaped for the closest guard and tore out his throat before he realized that he was being attacked. The other human was fast enough to pull his pistol, but his first shot was wild. He never got a chance for another. As she slunk into the five-story building, Bagabond made sure that no one was taking any notice of the noise or the bag lady. She jerked her head as the rhythmic wail of a car alarm began a few blocks away, but no one else reacted to it except the nervous ocelot.
Still trying vainly to get something from Cordelia, Bagabond sent the ocelot and the ginger ahead of her up the fire stairs. Moving quietly, she followed while tracking the presence of her creatures within and without the building. She spread a living net centered on Cordelia and a well-dressed Oriental man, confronting each other in a fourth-floor apartment. The rats scuttling through the walls and across the floors told her that the teenager was still alive.
As she climbed the fourth flight of stairs, she heard the voices echoing through the open door. The Oriental was interrogating Cordelia. She could not understand the words. Disrupting her concentration, Rosemary’s face flashed across her mind. She mentally thrust it and the accompanying guilt away from her down into the submerged, fully human part of herself.
Rats broke from side rooms and ran down the hallway. Three guards stood outside in the bright light cast by the bare light bulbs in the ceiling. Heavy hitters in expensive tailored suits that normally hid the guns they had drawn. Bagabond wondered what these people feared from Cordelia.
The wolf was making his way up the stairs at the far end of the hall. The ocelot strained at her side. The sight of the rats had made the well-dressed killers nervous. She used her other eyes to look into the room where Cordelia still lay curled up on the floor as she was questioned. Damn her Catholic-martyr syndrome. Bagabond could not sense even stirrings of Cordelia’s power. The girl was keeping her promise to herself or she was incapable of acting. A huge man who looked like a sumo wrestler and wore a Man Mountain Gentian T-shirt stood silently in the corner, but even through the rat’s dim vision Bagabond could see the bloodlust in the way he moved constantly, clenching and unclenching his fists as he looked at Cordelia.
Abruptly Bagabond sent the ginger cat yowling down the hall. As she had hoped, the three men pulled their guns but held their shots when they saw it was just a cat.
“Goin’ after the rats. Great!” One of the men voiced his hope as he reholstered his weapon. The other two were agreeing when the ocelot sprang away from Bagabond’s side. One swipe of the ocelot’s paw tore away most of a face and ripped the jugular before she used the shoulder of the dead man as a platform for her leap to the next. On the opposite side, one of the guards shot at the gray shape lunging across the scarred wooden floor, claws scrabbling for purchase. Only one shot creased the wolf’s hindquarter before he was on his enemy, jaws closing on the man’s throat. The last man had managed to wedge his forearm into the ocelot’s mouth and was beating her with the butt of his gun when the wolf caught his free arm.
Bagabond knew the noise would alert the men inside. She could only hope that Cordelia would use the distraction to advantage in the short time before she could get there. The sumo was too close to Cordelia to stop.
When she slid behind the remains of the guards and into the apartment where they had been interrogating Cordelia, Bagabond saw only a sharply tailored pants leg and an Italian shoe disappear into a connecting room. She didn’t see the wrestler. Cordelia was wavering to her feet, saying something as Bagabond started forward to free her. The huge hand around her throat stopped her.
“Forget about me, you crazy bitch?” The sumo spoke with an English accent. Stepping completely out of a closet, he spun her toward him. Bagabond’s breath was cut off and she felt her windpipe closing underneath his inhuman strength. She attacked him directly but her telepathy did not affect him. He was too human, she realized, in a part of her darkening mind that could still perceive irony. The ginger had already fastened her claws into his leg, but it had no effect. Bagabond called for the ocelot and the wolf, but her mental power was fading with her physical. She could not seem to override their desire to feast on their kills. As she considered all the deaths she had felt, she wondered how her own would be received by the wild ones. Would they remember her? She kicked at her tormentor, but she couldn’t seem to get her legs untangled from her skirts and coat.
The wind of the hawks’ passing brought her back to consciousness long enough to hear their hunting screams. She felt blood drip onto her face before she was flung away. She was blind, but through the eyes of the ginger lying across the room, she saw her attacker driven back toward the window. The shattering glass showered her as he crashed through to plunge forty feet to the ground. Bagabond thought she felt the building rock when he hit, but she decided that it had to be a hallucination from the oxygen deprivation.
The ocelot and the wolf crawled contritely over to her and leaned against her to give her strength. She could feel the rats running rampant throughout the building as the cats ran among them, scattering but not killing the vermin. As far as she could reach, her wild animals were going crazy. She did her best to bring them back to normal and sent those she could touch to their homes before returning to the bare apartment. Opening her eyes, she saw Cordelia, arms still tied behind her back, leaning over her.
“Girl, you got to take responsibility for yourself and what you are. I ain’t goin’ through this again. Not even for Jack. Either learn to use what you have or go live in a convent.” Bagabond started to slide into the warm darkness again. She was not sure whether she had actually spoken to Cordelia or whether she had imagined it.
Rosemary was feeling increasingly afraid of the entire situation. Chris was up to something; she could feel it. She did not have to be a telepath like Bagabond to sense that she was in trouble. She had not seen any animals around her, not even a rat. It was not a good sign. Where the hell was Bagabond?
She deliberately slowed as she walked down the hallway. She tried to focus on her danger and use it. What was waiting for her in the filthy little room she was about to enter? Rosemary drew her own gun.
She tried the knob. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open onto the room and its occupant. The man who had been described to her as Croyd stood there, about to leave.
“Who the hell are you?” He was obviously surprised to see a woman. With the gun Rosemary gestured for him to sit back down on the iron-framed bed. She kept her back against the wall beside the door. “Christ, you’re Maria Gambione!”
“I need to know what you actually found out.” Rosemary leveled the gun on the man across the tiny room, holding it firmly just as she had always practiced. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Outside on the fire escape Chris waited for Rosemary to go down with the virus. Mentally he urged her to get closer to Croyd. He could not hear what they were saying. It did not matter as long as Croyd did to her what he had done to the capos. Chris knew Croyd had to have access to the virus somehow. Nothing else could have done that. Why didn’t she close in?
He saw her gun go up. Croyd moved faster. Before Chris could get out of the way, Croyd had thrown the bedside lamp through the window and followed it out onto the fire escape. Chris scrambled backward, but in his haste to get away from Rosemary, Croyd was across the iron grating of the landing. Seeing Chris at last, Croyd tackled him and threw him down the next flight of steps. Chris gagged and tried to crawl away down the steps. A shot narrowly missed Croyd, and he clambered up the ladder two steps at a time.
Rosemary had frozen when Croyd went through the window. As the echoes of the crash rang through the flophouse, she heard her bodyguards coming for her. She followed Croyd out the broken window and saw him start up the fire escape. She fired at him more to keep him moving than to kill him. The only way out was down the escape. Chris was coughing and convulsing on the landing below her. As she heard her men break down the door behind her, she was running down the steps and jumping over her lover. She did not stop.
“Bastard!” she hissed at him as she left him behind. She was headed for the ground. She knew now that Chris’s men would kill her on sight. It would take luck and fast moves, but there was just a chance she could lose the bodyguards and the men out front. It was her only chance.
