Page 186 of The Wild Charge

They made their slow, limping way across the room, through the door, the sounds of violence behind them fading with each painful step.

Forty-Seven

Between her trench coat, the scarf covering her hair, and the Jackie O. sunglasses, Raven felt confident she wouldn’t be recognized and singled out for assassination in the middle of Times Square. Not to mention, Abacus had their hands full at the moment. But she had a detail all the same. Toly stood two feet in front of her, hood pulled up over his head, scanning the flow of foot traffic around them.

“Okay…” Miles said from the other end of the phone she had pressed to her ear. “And…I’m in. Ha! This is amazing.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Hold on, and…okay. Five, four, three, two–”

Above her, all the of crawlers, electronic billboards, and commercials fritzed out. The videos went to static; the billboards went black. And then a man wearing a black demon mask filled every screen. When he began speaking, the words boomed out across the street; a transcript of his words began to roll across the tickers.

Ian had pitched his voice to something low and sinister, something straight from a movie villain, and it sounded nothing like his regular speaking voice. “Good evening. What you’re about to witness–”

“Is it rolling?” Miles asked. “I can see it on my end.”

“It’s rolling.” Raven bit back a smile. “Well done, you.” The little genius could hack into anything.

“It’s also playing on all the TVs at JFK and La Guardia,” Miles said, voice tinged with pride.

“Brilliant. But whatever will all those travelers do without CNN?”

He snorted.

“…I’m joined this lovely night,” Ian was saying on all the screens. Pedestrians had stopped to gape up at the massive display. “By some of New York’s most esteemed citizens, all of whom you’ll recognize, I expect. All of whom are attending a very particular sort of auction at the moment.”

Albie, she knew, was operating the phone used to film the whole thing, and the scene panned to the side, through a wide glass wall, and offered a glimpse of a lit stage, and a scantily-clad, swaying girl in the grip of two burly guards. Gasps rippled through the audience.

“That’s right, ladies and gentlemen,” Ian said. “If you have the funds, and the access, you can have your pick of the litter. Blonde, brunette, redhead. Dark skin, light skin. Whatever nationality or look you most desire. The variety is, in a word, astounding. And the mastermind behind all of this?”

The camera panned to Jack Waverly, hunched and shivering in his chair, the tip of Ian’s sword cane resting at his throat.

~*~

How were there so many of them? A seemingly endless supply of guards kept pouring out of the door and Fox braced his feet against the onslaught, fighting back-to-back with Abe: tight, close-quarters fighting that was punctuated by grunts and curses. A knife wound was weeping in his right arm, and he could feel the bruises coming up beneath his clothes. There were too many, and he didn’t have the room he needed to bring his spins and kicks into play. It was a crush of bodies, and he could feel his strength fading. Behind him, Abe breathed loud and harsh; if he went down, and Fox was surrounded – well, there wouldn’t be any getting out of this.

As if allowing doubt in had jinxed him, someone’s elbow hit his throat and he choked. He slashed a hand, and then a forearm with his knife, but he couldn’t stop gasping, and his eyes watered, and –

Oh, shit. Yep, he was going down. A much-larger body slammed into his and Abe gave way behind him. Thank God for his helmet, was all he could think, as they tumbled end over end down the concrete stairs to the next landing. He wound up flat on his back, all the air forced from his lungs, which didn’t help the whole breathing situation. But tangled up with the bodies they’d already dropped and kicked down the stairs, the quick barrage of gunshots that followed them didn’t hit home.

“Fuck,” Abe breathed on a hiss.

Struggling to take a breath, Fox forced himself up on his hands and knees. He snatched up a dropped riot shield and held it over his head as he moved to Abe’s side – where he sat clutching his thigh.

Fox tried to ask if he was hit, coughed instead, and dug a torniquet out of his pocket. He dropped it in Abe’s lap, drew his gun, and turned to face the guards on the landing above, shielding them both as best he could.

Rounds struck the shield, cracks spidering across the thick plastic, breaking up his line of sight. Fox reached around its edge and cracked off three rounds from his .40…and his hand went white with pain. The gun fell out of it as it spasmed, and he drew his arm back to find a neat hole straight through his palm, blood pouring across his glove and down his sleeve.

“Fuck,” he wheezed. He could shoot left-handed, but dropping the shield seemed like a terrible idea at the moment.

Crack. Crack. Crack. It was nothing but a craze of fractured impacts now, impossible to see through.

Sorry, love, he thought in Eden’s general direction.I don’t know that I’m getting out of this one.

But then–

Someone above shouted in alarm. Followed by a wet, meatythunk. He had just enough visibility through the shield to see a body tumbling down toward them, unwieldy and, most likely, unconscious.

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