Chapter 10
brADLEY
When Griffin got back from his meeting with the MEA, my brain was still picking at a loose thread. I couldn’t stop remembering the fight. That had been the Hive, and it was impossible, it was impossible, but I had stopped them. I had done… something… and stopped them.
My mind froze at the implications, too many thoughts vying for my attention so that I could barely hold on to the one, true thing I knew. This was only the beginning. Whatever Williams was planning, whatever evil I’d unlocked for him, he was barely getting started.
By the time I heard heavy footsteps, I was already on my feet, waiting anxiously for Griffin at the door of… well, was it forward to think of it as our box?
His expression was grim, his face a mask of unhappiness. “Let’s go.”
I looked at the expressionless MEA suit behind him. “Has something happened? Do they not want to question me? Did you…”
What was the end of that question, Bradley? Convince them? Could I sound more suspicious?
“Will the MEA be supporting us?” I asked helplessly. I wasn’t even sure who I was asking. The suit? Griffin?
Griffin’s lips pulled tight, and he snorted. “No.”
“Do they… they have the technology. They must be able to see it’s the Hive.” I knew how peevish I sounded, a petulant child unhappy with his Christmas presents. But I didn’t want the red one!
“Come on. We’ve been given leave to go, and I’m not waiting for them to invent an illegal broom parking ticket just to keep us locked up.” Griffin grabbed my arm, his fingers tight on my elbow. His face was so different from earlier, when he’d cleaned my wounds carefully, when he’d been so gentle.
“What happened?” I murmured, but his lips only tightened, and he tugged harder, rushing me down the hall and through the desks of the officers on duty.
As we passed, many turned to stare at us, and I saw the frightening commander from her position at the door to her office. “Er, do they not want to talk to me?”
I’d given my statement twice already: once at the crime scene, and once again at the station, as though they were testing me to see if I was able to recall what I’d told them. But more fool them. The fight and the aftermath were burned into my mind.
Nothing would change in the retelling because I wouldn’t forget a moment of it until the day I died. The screams, the chaos, the thrum in my brain, and the terrifying urges that pushed the Hive forward.
Outside, Griffin guided us through the pedestrian traffic on the street, and it was strange, impossibly so, to see people walking along, talking on cell phones, behaving normally. I rubbed at my temples, then pushed up my glasses to scrub at my eyes.
My hands came away wet, and I pushed harder, as though I could squeeze the tears out, as though I could push out the memory and the horrible truth that was carved into my mind.
As I gasped, breath too sharp, too hot, Griffin stopped, and I ran into him, my shoulder hitting his chest. I was still grinding my knuckles into my eyes, tears and snot leaking out.
“Hey,” he said.
And that undid me. I found myself sobbing into his shirt, my hands coming around to grasp at his back. I had spent my whole life studying the Hive, being called a crackpot. Even my own family saw it as an amusing fascination of mine, akin to collecting butterflies or rare spellbooks.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “What are we going to do if they won’t help us?”
Because that was the crux of it. We were two men against the most powerful foe that humanity had ever faced.
It had nearly killed us all once. It would try again, and I doubted that our modernized technology or weapons would be any more effective than the swords and lances our ancestors had fought with.
“Well, if they won’t help us, we’ll have to help ourselves.
” Griffin’s voice rumbled against my ear, and I found my breath coming slower, my gasping sobs comforted by his reassurance.
His hands were tight on my back, pressing into my skin, gripping me just as firmly as I was holding on to him.
“Listen, I don’t have a theme song, but I know how to pull together an A-Team when I have to. ”
Griffin’s A-Team apparently started with a drink at a bar that I never would have suspected was magical. The ambiance lent itself more to violent arguments over card games and women peddling their wares, rather than spellcraft and magical artifacts.
I had wiped all the tears and snot from my face using a handkerchief, but I knew my eyes were likely still puffy and my face blotchy. Griffin hadn’t said anything, though, just guided me to the bar and ordered for both of us.
“A Mexican lager for me, a vodka and Coke for him.” He raised an eyebrow at my affront. “What? You going to tell me you want it straight?”
“Well, I do have a head injury,” I said stiffly. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be drinking.”
“If we’re really doing this,”—Griffin accepted his bottle from the bartender—“we’re going to need a drink.”
I took a tentative sip. The Coke was too sweet, and I scraped my tongue with my front teeth. The cut of alcohol almost made me gag, but after shaking myself, I swallowed another mouthful.
“It’s a drink, Your Highness, not poison.” Griffin’s smile barely lasted a second.
I tilted my head. “What happened?”
“The MEA isn’t convinced it was the Hive,” he said shortly. “They could see an actual locust and convince themselves it was a Halloween prop.”
“Something else happened,” I said, thinking of how angry he’d been, how tense.
His fingers twitched on the glass, and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye, not even turning his head.
I frowned when he didn’t say anything, thinking of all the worst-case scenarios.
Before I could guess, he said, “There were kids. Williams is leaving a trail of mundanes to power up this magic, and this time it was kids.”
I couldn’t help but gasp. “Monstrous.”
“Yeah, well, there were kids at the oracles’ camp, too.” He threw his head back, finishing off the last of his lager, then ordered a whiskey.
“Is that all it was?” I asked.
“Does it need to be more than that?” Griffin snapped.
I raised my chin, about to argue for the sake of it, when a voice cut across the room.
“That’s Griffin Gallows!” Someone laughed.
We both turned and saw three men, their arms slung around each other's backs, jovially drunk as they made their way toward us. “I heard you took out a gargoyle with an electrical wire and some cement!”
“No, no, it was a sea dragon, and it was an old fishing net and shark bait.” The one in the middle jostled his friends.
“So. To what do we owe the pleasure of your presence, Griffin Gallows?” The one on the left swayed, nudging the others forward until they were nearly touching our chairs.
“See, this is our bar, and I know you think you’re big time, some big deal, but out here, we’re the big deal.
And if you want to look for clients in our territory, you need to pay the price of admission. ”
“I’m just here for a drink,” Griffin said, and the way his hand tightened on the tumbler made something uncomfortably warm pool in my stomach.
“Yeah?” The one on the right looked at me. “What’s he charging you? I bet we can do you better.”
“We’re just here drinking,” I said, hyperaware of the shape of the vowels in my mouth. Could I sound any more like a rich client?
“Okay, we’ll make it easy. Ten percent fee, and we won’t beat you up in front of your client.” The one in the middle cracked his knuckles. “Sound good?”
“Let me see.” Griffin stood, and where I’d lost myself to tears and desperation, he was angry. I could see it in every tense line of his body. He wanted this fight. “Three drunks in a bar shake me down in front of my very good friend, here? I think that does sound good.”
One of the drunks started forward, but before any of them could even touch Griffin, there was a solid crack, and the man pulled up short. Desperately pinwheeling his arms, he tried to back away from the sword that had suddenly appeared at his throat.
One drink in, and still I felt impossibly slow as I followed the sword down to a hilt, and a hand and arm and, oh, look, a swordsman wearing a flannel shirt and worn jeans.
“Gallows,” the man said, a Southern drawl permeating his words. “If you ruin my favorite watering hole…”
“It took you long enough, Julian.” Griffin leaned back against his bar stool. “If you’d stepped in earlier, we wouldn’t be having this standoff. And these two wouldn’t be wishing they’d invested in adult diapers.”
He tilted his chin in the direction of the two men who’d stood back while their friend tried to attack him. Sure enough, they looked utterly terrified. One was gaping, the other trying to help his friend up from the floor.
“Go,” Julian said. “Come back when you’re ready to apologize to Cora for the insult of your presence.”
I looked around, glancing at the bartender to see if his name was Cora, but he nodded his head at the sword. When I squinted, I could see the name carefully carved along the blade.
As the three drunks scampered off, Griffin ordered us another round, and I followed him and Julian back to a table in the corner.
“I assume this isn’t a social call,” Julian said. “And if you want to dance, my card is full.”
“What if I have a job?” Griffin asked.
Julian glanced at me, leaning back in his seat so that both of us were in his line of sight. “The last time you had a job for me, I ended up in Timbuktu missing a toe. What makes you think I want another job from you?”
“Kids are getting killed,” Griffin said. “And because I’m asking.”
Julian blew out a breath. He looked over at me. “What’s the job?”
“We need to stop JA Williams,” I said. “And we need to do it fast, before he summons the Hive back into our realm.”
Julian laughed, the sharp bark of a sound so familiar that I didn’t even flinch. “You have a bridge you want to sell me, Griffin?”
“We’re serious,” I said. “The Hive are back. They’re here. A few hours ago, JA Williams used his link to the Hive to destroy the oracles’ camp. The MEA has the evidence, but they won’t listen to me… to us.”
I exhaled in frustration. I needed to find a better way to explain this. I needed to be able to show people. Perhaps if we’d kept one of the helmets…
“Is this for real?” Julian asked Griffin.
For a second, my stomach clenched with terror. What would Griffin say? Was that why the MEA had let us go? Had he denied what he’d seen? Had he told them what they wanted to hear in exchange for our freedom?
‘Oh, yeah, that kid is a crackpot. Off his rocker. It was just a bunch of oracles on drugs. You know how they run.’
Instead, he shook his head, and I felt something loosen in my chest. He looked at me, and in his dark eyes, I saw belief. Something else, too, a shadowy emotion. Guilt? For what? For not being able to protect me or the oracles?
“It’s real, Julian.” He blew out a breath. “If you do this, I’ll forgive you for the banshee.”
Julian narrowed his eyes, looking between us. “Are you sleeping with him? I’m not—”
Griffin and I overlapped, both of us speaking at the same time.
“It’s not like that, Julian—”
“We’re merely trying to stop an apocalypse here—”
We both stopped, and Julian’s brow was furrowed. “If you say so, Gallows. So, what’s the play here?”
“The play is we need a thief.” Griffin looked between us. “And unfortunately, my best thief is in Turkey, trying to steal a set of tsar’s diamonds.”
“There’s Rebecca,” Julian suggested. “I know you have history with her—”
“She stole my shoes.” Griffin threw up his hands. “While I was trying to run from some very angry Italians who were shooting at me.”
“She gave you another pair,” Julian said.
“I didn’t want Manolo Blahniks! I wanted my boots!” Griffin narrowed his eyes. “What about Trader?”
“In prison,” Julian said. “Isis?”
“She’s in India, something about gold and a statuette of Shiva.” Griffin blew out a breath. “We could probably do it with a window man. Doesn’t have to be someone who’s good at everything.”
“I might know someone,” I said. “Perhaps.”
Both men turned to look at me, Julian curious, Griffin incredulous. I blushed.
“I work in antiquities. You meet people.” I stood. “Shall we?”
The library was silent. It was evening, and librarians moved between stacks, each focused on their work, studiously ignoring the patrons. It was one reason I preferred this branch. Fewer people likely to ask questions like, “Are you seriously interested in the Hive?”
The third-floor circulation desk was occupied by one woman, her white hair pulled back into a severe bun. When she looked up at me, eyes narrowed, she said only, “Historical fiction is two floors down.”
“Brigette. I know we’ve had our differences of opinion, but I’m here for a very serious reason.
” When she looked back down at her book, ignoring me and the two men behind me, I said, “Please. I have the money. And, if things go well, I’m happy to verify that any original Morgan le Fay grimoires in the library’s collection are fakes, meaning any attempt by the MEA or non-governmental organizations to seize them would be pointless. ”
Brigette looked up, eyes sharp. “The Merlin grimoire, too?”
“I will declare as many grimoires as you have… acquired for the magical studies collection are reprints or fakes.” I raised an eyebrow. “If you’re willing to do some work with me and my… er… team.”
Brigette stood. She put up a small sign declaring that the desk was closed. “Tell me about the job.”
“Not here.” I looked between her and Julian, then helplessly at Griffin.
“Come on. Let’s go back to his place. We’ll explain there.” Griffin led the way, and I was grateful to let him, up until we unlocked my front door and saw Elaine sitting on my couch, examining the text we’d stolen from Williams.
“My god, Bradley,” my sister said, her gaze sweeping over the two new members of our merry band. “What have you gotten yourself into?”