25

The two dead guards in the hallway provided me a warning as to what I’d encounter, but I still wasn’t prepared for the scope of what I found.

My jaw dropped as I took stock of the situation. The orchestra pit had been transformed into an impromptu meeting room, the far side having been barricaded and hammered together with spare planks and nails. The orchestra seats had been torn out, replaced instead with a sprawling table that looked as if it had been slapped together out of whatever pieces were too good for the barricade. A dozen chairs had been assembled on either side of the table. It was on and around those that the carnage lay.

A quintet of men, dwarves, orcs, and half-breeds sat in the chairs, slumped over or leaning back, some of them with looks of horror carved into their faces, all of them with limp jaws and glassy eyes. Around each of them sprawled several thugs, some having collapsed onto the table or onto spare chairs, others on the ground, clutching their chests or doubled over into fetal positions, some with weapons in hand and other with clenched fists.

Seventeen men, all told. All of them unmoving. Unflinching. Dead.

I crossed to the nearest seated body, that of a dwarf with a wild, bushy beard, a crown shaved clean as a whistle, and a slew of dark tattoos encircling his eyes. I vaguely recognized him. The head of the Razors, a guy by the name of Redmace who’d taken over after I’d helped put the previous head, Occam Silvervein, in jail on drug charges. I placed a couple fingers against his neck, hoping to feel a pulse, but I might as well have been holding my digits to a slab of beef. A warm slab, but a stiff one nonetheless.

A stiff one… I knelt down and tested Redmace’s arm, trying to flex it at the elbow. It resisted—vigorously.

I flashed back to Biggie’s corpse in my apartment, sitting there, eyes open, clutching his stomach. Cairny had been baffled at how he’d undergone rigor mortis in an hour or less, but Redmace had been dead for, what? Three or four minutes? I checked his elbow pit for tract marks, then his neck, but I didn’t see anything. Not that it could’ve been drugs. Injecting one man with a cocktail to force his body to seize was plausible, if firmly in the realm of the bizarre. Administering it to an entire room of drug lords, dons, and bodyguards simultaneously was nigh on impossible. It would’ve taken an army of ninjas to inject everyone. Unless a chemical had been administered through drinking water, or aerosolized in the air.

I pulled the mask off my face and took a tentative sniff, taking note of an odd, musky odor in the air, like that of a pet ferret. A cold dread filled me, and I briefly wondered if I’d already been exposed before realizing how stupid of an idea that was. Anything potent enough to drop a dozen and a half men in their tracks would’ve knocked me to the ground as I’d made my way down the hallway. Besides, Bonesaw had been in the room, as had his boss with the cold, fulsome voice, and they’d been unaffected.

Even though logic reigned supreme, the cold dread didn’t dissipate. It only grew stronger, because if drugs hadn’t been to blame for Biggie’s death and subsequent rigor mortis, then what had? What could cause a score of bruisers and badasses to keel over mid-breath? When I’d delved into the sewers hoping to catch word about Shay, I’d known full well I might be faced with violent psychopaths, murderers, and thugs for whom cruelty was second nature, but this? Something powerful had torn the life force from everyone in this room. Something evil. Something…with claws.

I knelt down further, casting my eyes to the ground. The years of decline hadn’t treated the King’s Theater’s floors well. Between the removal of the orchestra seats, the construction of the barricade, the carpentry of the table and chairs, and the heavy boots of countless thugs and homeless people who must’ve called the room home at one point or another, it was hard to find a scrap of wood that hadn’t been scratched, scuffed, or dented. But there were sections here and there with fresh scuffs, fresh scratches. Some in sets of three. Just as there’d been in my apartment.

A werewolf or griffin subservient to Bonesaw or his boss would’ve been terrifying enough, but not one motionless thug had been torn open at the throat or had his entrails littered upon the floor. Not one man was soaked in his own blood. They all simply lay there, frozen but warm.

And yet at least two people had survived it.

I just had no idea how.

I kept gazing around the room, unable to process the scope of what had happened. Redmace, dead. An old guy wearing a black suit, clutching a cane and with an eyepatch over the right side of his face. The head of the Blacks. The orc contingent from NWX. Two other gang bosses. All dead. The underworld would be thrown into chaos. There’d be infighting for weeks. Months, probably. People would die, not just gang members but the more vulnerable members of the city, those at the bottom of the pecking order who’d be easy pickings for whoever filled the power vacuum—unless Bonesaw and his Winds of Change gang could consolidate everything.

From the sounds of fighting trickling through the walls, they were trying. I heard more shouts, more slams and crashes and whumps, more cries of pain.

It occurred to me I should get out while the fighting raged. I couldn’t have more than twenty minutes until the Captain would pull the cord on her strike teams, and even though the infighting would weaken the gangs, I didn’t want to subject my fellow police officers to crazed knife-wielding hooligans and mysterious dark magic if I could avoid it.

And yet… I wasn’t any closer to finding Shay. I had a name—the Winds of Change—and a vocal assurance that Bonesaw was involved, and that was it. I hadn’t heard mention of her. No mention of any prisoner at all. I hadn’t caught so much as a whiff of her lilac-scented perfume, just a weird acrid stink that faded with every passing moment.

I wrinkled my nose, sucking in more of the off-putting scent. I hadn’t noticed it until I stepped into the room. I stepped back toward the hallway and took another sniff. Nothing. I crossed to the far side of the orchestra pit and did the same. There I smelled it. Kneeling, I searched for claw marks and found them, outside in the adjacent hallway.

Come, my pretty, he’d said. Follow the sound of my steps. I was too late for that, but I could follow tracks and a scent. And if Bonesaw was working for the man with the voice of a greased fish, then he’d be the one with knowledge of Shay. He was the one I wanted.

And pet gargoyle or not, I’d find him.

I sent a prayer to the gods to keep the Captain, Rodgers, Quinto, and the rest of the tactical strike officers safe when they inevitably came after me before setting off into the hallway. The pervasive darkness outside of the meeting room made tracking the claw marks difficult, but I did the best I could, hoping beyond hope that my nose led me in the right direction.

I followed the faint, weasel-like aroma more or less in the direction I’d come from, up a spiral staircase to the theater’s backstage area. I paused in the shadows as a pair of panicked thugs raced by, shouting for help before exiting stage right, then kept going, using my nose and the power of insincere prayer to guide me as I hopped from shadow to shadow, taking refuge behind everything from a wooden cutout of a pirate ship to a grove of faded pine trees. The darkness of night enveloped me in its quiet embrace as I slinked by, hiding the claw marks but also myself. It was all I could do not to bumble into stacked boxes, giving myself away.

I stopped as I broke free of the backstage curtains and props, pausing at the edge of a warm glow radiating from two lanterns in the center of the storage and loading room. I would’ve welcomed the light if not for what it illuminated: eight thugs, all pacing in the center of the space. Two dwarves, four men, an orc, and an ogre—not Bonesaw, though. His complexion was too light, and his head too narrow. They carried bats, clubs, and knives, some of them bloodied. Rival gang members lay prone here and there, surrounded by pools that glistened in the near darkness.

And wouldn’t you know it, at the center of the group of eight was the subbasement hatch, thrown open, lantern light illuminating it from within.

I glanced at the loading doors, which remained chained from the inside. I’d been right, in a way. Someone had planned on using the sewer entrance, same as me. It must’ve been how Bonesaw’s gang had moved their men in, allowing them to take the rival gangs by surprise.

I sniffed the air. Maybe it was my imagination, but I swore I could still smell the ferret stink. And there. Near the hatch. Were those scratches? Was the sewer the gang’s escape route as well?

The thugs wandered around the stacked crates and coils of rope, some of them serious, others chuckling. They probably thought they’d eliminated their threats, and in terms of the gangs, it looked as if they’d succeeded.

But I was still here.

I hadn’t planned on plunging myself into danger. I liked living. My life had sucked once upon a time, but it didn’t any longer. But the only reason it didn’t suck, the only reason my life was full of joy and laughter and good cheer, was because of Shay. She’d been the one to pull me back from the brink, to sit through my blatant sexism and asinine jokes, the one to nurture the good that lingered inside me, the one to push me to rekindle my relationship with my son and my ex-wife and father, to put down the bottle of whiskey and limit my beers to meals. She was the shining light in my life.

If she wasn’t worth risking my neck for, who was?

I took a deep breath to settle my nerves. I was outnumbered eight to one, locked in a hostile abandoned theater with backup too far away to make a difference, chasing a man who commanded the power to stop twenty men’s hearts with the snap of a finger.

At least I had the element of surprise on my side.