NaNo '10 - Ch. 9 (part 2)

[writingispurdy]

too big to fit in one LJ post WHEE


“Do you mind if I take a seat, Ruby?” There was little bench space left, since her bag had apparently been upended in order to get at something in the bottom. A book, I noticed, and with sudden clarity I saw that it was The Bible-especially stamped with a name and in immaculate condition. It wasn't the girl's name, but it belonged to someone near to her: Roderick Ballantine. She held it close, as if it might fly off, as if it were her only companion.

“Who's Roderick?” I asked.

Her eyes went small and scared, but quickly dropped to the stamped Bible and her pale skin flushed brightly. “M-my father.” She spoke around the growing obstruction in her throat. “I'm looking for him. He disappeared.”

The way she looked seemed disparate from the way she spoke, almost as if she were a shy little child in a body too old for her, but her determination was as strong and viable as my own. Old eyes and a young soul. I felt somehow trusting, as if I had walked into a bubble that surrounded the girl and kept her safe and I could say what I wanted to. It's what her eyes told me, but it was also something more than that.

“I'm looking for someone, too,” I admitted. Her eyes finally seemed to take me in, apprehension fleeing and something like kinship taking its place. “There's a lot of people gone missing lately. Do you...” I looked up, and Tony was purchasing our tickets to Chinatown, his eyes surveying the crowd for where I'd gone. “Do you know anything about what happened to him?”

She shrugged. “The police think that he was shot dead. I know,” her face strengthened considerably, and I felt it growing hot in my own chest, “that he wasn't. I was there when he walked away. Only for a moment. There was no sound, no shot, no blood when I went to find him. Only that the lights were acting strangely. Something... else happened to him.” Her fingers knotted in her handkerchief again, and the tears welling up in her eyes were threatening my own. “And n-now I haven't got anywhere to stay, I just have to keep looking for him.”

“Why can't you stay with your mother?” It seemed the logical question, but her face dropped even further.

“They think it was my mother that did it.”

I could think of absolutely nothing to say to this frank revelation, and so I simply moved to rest my hand on the girl's shoulder-

We're surrounded by men in uniform, all of them shouting. Me shouting the loudest, though I can't hear a thing over the piercing ring, the incessant howl coming from the girl's mouth. Her hands are clamped desperately over her ears, she drops to her knees, shrieking. The light bulbs explode in rainbow sparks, all the lights flash and die. From the inky darkness, a hand reaches out for me, and once I've grabbed it and intertwined our fingers, I see it's Tony. The only lights are the flashes of gunpowder.

-and a throbbing headache began just as she shied from the touch.

What had that been? The girl could cause power outages? As I watched her eyes drop to her bible, I considered the vision carefully. Reading the future or the past from a particularly loud head was something that had always come easily to my Romany ancestors, but the future was a tricky thing. It usually had a way of never happening the way you saw it.

What could the meaning of Tony's hand in the darkness possibly be?

“Hey!” came a voice at once from the crowd, and my head shot up.

That voice was familiar, and, judging by the way Ruby jumped and shrank, she recognized it, too. There was a short man in a fedora coming at a run toward us, jostling through the crowd without so much as an apology, and his green eyes were full of fire. I rose indignantly to my feet, and it was only when he completely ignored me that I realized there was no way he would recognize me.

“Hey,” Caine kept on, not short on breath but short on patience, hovering over the girl who had curled up into herself as she was scolded, “I told you not to move! You got any idea how much trouble you could get yourself into, running around on your own?”

I had expected fear in her eyes, from her immediate reaction to his voice, but it was more akin to childlike obedience. She had clasped both hands together, and had pressed them to her lips, worriedly looking up at him.

“S-sorry, Mister Caine,” she peeped.

“Excuse me,” I said suddenly, thrusting myself into the conversation. Caine finally looked up, running eyes over me as he'd done the first time we'd met, and he stuck on the eyes. He was calculating, wondering where he'd seen them before, and his plastered fingers flexed defensively.

And then I saw the way he stood just then, one leg and arm in front of Ruby's position on the bench, slightly obscuring her from view-if I had known him better, I could have said protectively.

“Are you looking after this girl?” I asked, making sure that my voice was as it had been when I'd met him. It wasn't a game, but I wondered if he could guess.

His fists tightened defensively, and his walls went up all around him. He was so very good at hiding everything, I wondered what had forced him to learn it. “Yeah, I am. So what?”

I almost laughed, and he saw it twitch on my face. Before he could insert an unkind jab, I said, “Mister Caine, you remember me, don't you?” I reached for my pendant and held it up where he could see. His face hardened even more for just a moment, scrutinizing me and my pendant, and it washed back in record time.

“Oh, hell,” he murmured, getting in a second good look at me.

“Tony,” I said as my companion approached, looking far more confused than any of the others, “this is the Mister Caine I was telling you about.”

Both men suddenly went into full defense, like two cats tensed and ready to fight. Each began analyzing the other as quickly as he could, and I could tell that Tony didn't like what he saw. Caine was harder to see through, though I was sure that two men as mulish as these two were not going to see eye to eye. Caine closed the gap between them, but it was Tony who got the first question in.

“All right, so who the hell are you working for?”

Once I had Ruby alone again, I asked her how she had come to meet Mister Caine. She brightened, and it seemed as though the entire station had filled up with sunlight, or had at least filled up my eyes.

“He rescued me.”

It seemed unlikely. “When I met him, he was selling out one Chinese gang to help another, and only if it worked in his own interest.” I didn't want to dash the sunshine in her eyes, especially when it felt so warm and welcoming in my own, but there was no point in lying to her.

She shook her head immediately. “I've been on the trains since this morning. I arrived on the Third Street platform when there was hardly anyone else about, and after the train had gone, I was alone. It was...” She didn't even have to speak for me to know. Somehow, sitting with her, I could feel all the sunshine die, and cold, dark, dripping fear took its place. It gnawed in my gut like it was my own. “It wasn't right.”

The unnatural pressing of the darkness in the White Dragons' warehouse, yes, I knew.

“It seemed darker than usual, and the air smelled different. Even the walls looked different than they should have, like nothing was as it should have been. As if I were somewhere else.” She was visibly shaken, and it took her the slightest moment to recover. “And then, the lights went out, one by one. I was in the dark, and I knew. I knew I wasn't alone anymore.”

I held back the frightened feeling in my throat.

“I tried to find my way to the stairs, but I couldn't see a thing; it'd gone completely black. I tried shouting, but I couldn't hear anything but the wind in the tunnels. And I didn't want to risk wandering onto the track so I... I stayed where I was and I waited.”

It had been so cold, I could feel my skin prickling as she remembered.

“And something moved,” she said, her own throat closing up. “I could feel it breathing. I don't remember how long it was before I heard his footsteps, but I knew that something was just sitting there and watching me. Like a cat and mouse.”

I glanced up at Caine, who stared angrily up at Tony while his mouth moved in angry jerks. My companion simply frowned; the expression didn't suit him.

“Then, Mister Caine was there,” she breathed, and relief spread down to my fingertips in a wave. “He was wearing that.” She pointed to the pendant Ming-xia had given to both of us, and I instinctively took hold of it. “It was glowing bright as a star. He scared the thing off, whatever it had been, and brought me here. He hasn't left, aside from buying me a ticket. He wants me to go home, but I can tell-” She stopped abruptly. “I'm sorry,” she said, appalled, “I've done it again.”

“Done what?”

She held a hand to her heart, and I was filled with unexplained joy, my head full of singing lights. “You're feeling happy, aren't you?”

“What can you do?” I asked, astonished, as the feeling drained just as easily as it had come.

“I don't know what to call it,” she answered honestly. “Father said that I am... very empathetic. What can you do?”

I flashed my eyes to blue as an answer, and delight bubbled in my veins as her reply.

I wondered for only a moment how long the boys were going to continue arguing. That was when the chandelier flickered.

Both pairs of eyes raised to the ceiling, hoping it was only a hiccup in the circuits. When it happened again, Caine loudly hushed Tony and he, too, joined us in staring fearfully upward. The crystal plinked together innocently in a breeze that didn't belong, and I knew the feeling that was slowly crowding in around us. Old dust and darkness, creeping into a cellar without a light.

Every light in the building died at once. Loud gasps and the occasional shriek from the evening commuters was the only signal that anyone else had noticed even a fraction of the terror that was clawing its way out of my gut.

“Ruby!” Caine barked, and it was not out of anger but a sudden, horrible spike of concern. He couldn't hide that.

“Mister Caine.” Her voice wobbled quietly.

And at last I notice the soft glow emanating from my chest. Both pendants were shining, two lonely pools of pearly light in a deathly dark sea.

In the darkness, Tony had found my hand.

The station attendants were trying to shout over the babbling horde of frightened traingoers, but to little use. Those who could scuffled toward the doors, which had been thrown wide open in attempts to shed miniscule light inside. Several of them grouped around the four of us, whispers of the soft light from our pendants, but those, too, were hushed quickly. It was the unnatural silence that I had felt in the White Dragons' warehouse.

“Oh God,” Ruby whispered from somewhere close. In the light off Caine's pendant, I could see her eyes wide and cold. Her fear was rippling off her in waves, I could practically see it for the darkness. It stuck to the walls of my heart, made it hard to breathe, and I felt my fingers go tightly braided with Tony's.

“Doors,” came Caine's gruff instruction, as if he went unaffected by Ruby's ability. As if he were the only sensible one within ten feet of her. Maybe he was. I wondered, in the midst of all the flaring emotion, how he managed it.

We shuffled through the dark toward the open doors, where station attendants ushered everyone out into the street-where, I noticed, even the street lamps and traffic lights had gone out; a crowd of vehicles had gathered in front of the station, and the murmuring had grown to a muted roar. As if amplified by the utter silence inside.

Then, something brushed by me. Just the softest autumn breeze at my ear, displacement of air as an unseen something moved by as quickly as a bullet. But no sound. Moving through a place I couldn't see, couldn't sense. And the light from the door disappeared.

Ruby held in a tight scream, which couldn't be said for the men and women near us who gave out loud gasps and shrieks. Someone babbled in Italian, someone was praying. What had happened to the doors? They hadn't closed, I'd have heard it. I could still hear the traffic, the loud concerned voices on the sidewalk.

The was something in the way. Oh God, there was something blocking the door. I could hear it breathing, wet and sick like a dying animal. Hot, sticky breath from a mouth I couldn't see. Hidden eyes blinking and watching.

And it had a partner, weaving around us like a black snake on millions of tiny clawed feet. Claws hissed on the floor, and as a group we jerked and turned to the sound. I could feel the air coiling, full of tension, ready to spring.

“Stairs!” Caine shouted.

I complied completely. When Tony, still and dumbstruck, refused to budge, I tugged hard on his arm and forced him to follow. And we were followed.

Whatever I had felt in the warehouse had been something lurking, something more shadow than creature, a gatherer of information. It was a hunter, it was quiet, it stole in the night. This... this was a killer. It was bestial, it was hungry. I could barely see a foot in front of me, but I could hear it. Hear it crawling after us, breathing honey-thick breath down the back of my neck. I couldn't turn, couldn't turn back and look for fear I would see something that would tear my mind to shreds.

We hit the stairs down to the platform just as the noise behind us came to a halt. We didn't stop, not even when the thing gave an unearthly howl that pricked all the nerves in my body to stand at attention; my vision blurred and my head swam when a man gave one last terrified, garbled scream before he was cut off. No other sound, just the sudden absence of his voice.

The platform was dead, a black void with two yawning half-circles at either end leading into the cold earth. Not a soul was waiting for us, cleared out to the lobby upstairs or... One of the tunnels gasped, the air was sucked through it as whatever it was followed us down the stairs. Inhumanly fast, and coming.

“Ev, what...?” Tony's hard voice had gone small, but I held tightly to his hand.

“Tunnels, come on,” I urged them, tugging Tony after me. “No electricity in the rails, we've got to get out of here.”

Caine took the first leap down to the tracks, and once it was safe he held up his arms for Ruby to jump down to. Just as he set her on her feet, the air on the platform changed. It stank of dead leaves, tasted old and useless in my throat.

“Go!” I shouted, shoving Tony onto the tracks before me, just in time as I leapt down myself as a current of hot air swept over my head. This time it was Tony's turn to drag me, and with our hands cemented together, we took off running after Caine and Ruby. Legs pumping at full speed, we were engulfed by the tunnel, and the sound was sucked out of the world around us. Intermittent sparks from the electricity in the lines trying to come back to life lit the way, throwing lightning shadows up against the curved brick walls.

A piercing scream from our pursuer lit up the terror from my toes into my eyes. It ricocheted all around us, seeming louder every time it bounced back to my ears. Like a train, it rushed up behind us, dogging our heels and snapping with jaws I couldn't see.

And then, another scream. Lit up from the quick flash of electricity, I saw Ruby's shadow on the tunnel wall pitch forward and only after a terrifying second did the sound of her hitting the ground reach its way back to me, and her sharp cry as she turned to see exactly what was following us. Caine was too far ahead, he'd turned back but the thing was closing, gnashing, gibbering.

Not the girl, please, she's just a kid.

I freed my fingers from Tony's and did the least sensible thing I could think of. I skidded to the tracks beside her body, and even though she was shaking and afraid and once I had touched her every one of her screaming emotions careened into my head, I grabbed her in my arms and I shielded her from the rearing creature that bore down upon us. It took the air with it when it moved like thunder, and even the sharp reports that could only have been frantic gunfire from Caine's gun-his face lit from below and scared for the first time-didn't slow it.

Just a kid.

Maybe I'd see Knox again.

The world jumped, shook around me. The shadow stopped just feet from where we were huddled, suddenly reeling back as if I'd thrown boiling water at it. And I finally could see my attacker. I almost wished that I hadn't. The thing bore thousands of grabbing claws, and as it reeled back and away from me, it crashed against the opposite wall, its wave of lost momentum peaking to the ceiling as it suddenly regathered itself and took shape.

Its shadow body shifted like smoky water, claws sunk into the wall, long snake-like form twisted and curled across the wall and ceiling, coiled and ready to strike. It had no face, only a black abyssal maw that dripped with dark smoke. Its bulk took up nearly the entire circumference of the tunnel, twisting up along the ceiling to peer eyelessly down at us. It hissed, and the hair stood stiff on the back of my neck, my arms. Ruby shivered, burrowed her head into my shoulder, refused to look and see what I couldn't look away from.

It dove again, straight at us, but cracked right off of some sort of barrier like a bullet. I think that it was Tony shouting, his voice had gone raw, but it was Caine's footsteps that finally caught back up to us. He stood board-straight and strong, knees bent for action, and he held the glowing pendant out in front of him like a shield. The light intensified, a shockingly bright flash in the pitch black tunnel, when our two pendants worked as one.

And then it was gone. The light off of us dimmed slowly, and when it had finally returned to its normal pearly glow, the four of us were alone in the tunnel. No more shrieking sound of spectral creatures, no more dread terror or the sound of gnashing teeth at our ankles. Just a cold, empty subway tunnel and the shaking, crying girl in my arms.

We crawled quietly out into the next station, where, as with the other, the lights had gone out and not a soul was present. Though there was something so unnameably different about this time around. The air was crisp and real, I could breathe again.

“My name is Teddy,” came Caine's voice from beside me.

“Eveline,” I replied quietly. It didn't seem to surprise him. “Thank you.”

“Eveline,” he tested it out. “I need you to do something for me, all right?”

I supposed that it was the least I could do.