Clearly torn, the cop looked out over the river, then behind him at the barricade and the three other cops trying to stay cool in their cars. “I think we can make an exception,” he said as he handed the ID back. “Just promise me you won’t start a riot,” he kidded.
I snatched Trent’s ID before he could, blinking at the bad picture he’d taken. His eyes were wide and his smile quirky.
“I was in a hurry that morning,” Trent said as he twitched it from my grip, clearly peeved.
“Open it up!” the cop said, whistling three times in quick succession to get the three other men moving. “They’re cleared!” The man looked back at us. “I hope you can talk your friend down, Mr. Kalamack.”
“Thank you. I’m sure my father would have enjoyed meeting you.”
“If you need a place to stay, give me a call,” he added, then fumbled for a card, handing it in. “The hotels are full and you’re kind of stuck here now.”
“I’ll do that, thank you.”
“Tink loves a duck.” Jenks darted back in. “Guys give you their number too?”
Trent shrugged, but the cop was waving us through, and I rolled my window up so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone else. “That was nice,” Trent said, and a tremor passed through me as the barrier scraped back in place behind us. We were in, and it felt wrong.
“How so?” I asked.
Bringing his arm in, he rolled his window up. “Lately, it’s not always good when I’ve been recognized out on the street.”
I thought back to Limbcus. The “them and us” animosity probably wasn’t entirely new to Trent, but finding it in a public setting was. “It happens to me all the time,” I said, leaning to see around the corner before we made the turn into the city. My unease was thickening. The entire city felt wrong, and it was more than the graffiti.
Traffic was almost nil, but the city was closed. Those who were out were driving with little regard for traffic signals, going too fast and treating reds like flashing yellows if no one was coming. In contrast, both of the stadium parking lots were packed.
“There’s no game today,” Jenks said as we passed them.
“They’re using it as an emergency shelter,” Trent said, pointing at the marquee. “I didn’t want to believe it was this bad. How are they keeping a lid on this?”
Apart from the stadium, there was little foot traffic, and those who were out walked furtively fast. Were graffiti was everywhere, covering up and mutilating the new FV symbols. Shops were closed with hand-lettered signs in the window, some of them tagged with territorial graffiti. It reminded me of the chapter on the Turn in my fifth-grade history textbook—the one titled “The Decade’s Darkest Hour.”
“Crap on toast, look at that,” I whispered when I tried to make a right turn to get to the FIB’s tower, only to find it cordoned off. Beyond it, the street was littered with chunks of cement and glass, the cars at the curb covered in debris. The scent of dust and smoke hung in the air like a haze of sun, and a uniformed man was directing people with FIB business elsewhere when the sign saying to take FIB matters to the arena didn’t do the trick. My eyes flicked to the top of the tower, seeing the damage. Hands clenched, I drove past, not wanting to be noticed by the news vans.
“Jenks, you want to do a quick look-see?” I said as I lowered my window, and he whizzed out.
“I don’t understand how they are keeping this out of the news,” Trent said as I turned down a side street looking for somewhere to park. Bits of cement littered the road, and an ambulance was parked illegally in a cordoned-off alley. “There’s a spot beside the ambulance,” Trent said, pointing, and I stomped on the brake when he reached for the door, not waiting for me to stop before getting out.
“Trent!” I protested, but he was lifting the caution tape, eyeing the street behind me as he gestured for me to get through. I leaned forward as I slowly drove under it, carefully sticking to the curb and parking out of sight beside the ambulance. The front door to the FIB was just a block away. We’d never find a better spot.
“Trent, wait up!” I said as I fumbled for the FIB sign under the seat and shoved it on the front dash in the hopes it would be the difference between being towed and left alone. Grabbing my shoulder bag, I got out, trying to be quiet as I shut the door. It was eerily silent between the two buildings, and the air had an unusual musky vampire scent under the increasingly familiar scent of burning furniture.
Trent was scanning the damaged top floor as he came forward with two hard hats and a clipboard from an abandoned front-end loader, clearly here to get rid of the chunks of building. “It’s strange how we need the very thing we fear,” he said as his eyes met mine.
“Beg pardon?”
“The undead vampires.”
“Tell me about it.” I took the hard hat, the glare diminishing as I dropped it on my head. “How do I look?” I asked as we started up the alley, and he gave me a sidelong glance.
“I’d suggest the front door,” he said, his words coming from the back of his throat, and I warmed. Maybe he had a working-girl fetish. My flush deepened as he touched the small of my back, ushering me forward as he lifted the tape for me. Trent was always touching me, but after that last kiss, it felt different. Seeing him in Jenks’s jeans and silk shirt along with that hard hat and the thickening stubble of a workingman wasn’t helping either.
I breathed easier when his hand fell away. Arms swinging, we strode down the side street to the front, picking our way through the chunks of concrete and glass. Jenks’s wings gave me a breath of warning before he landed on my shoulder. “I hope Edden got your call,” he said. “I’ve been inside, and they aren’t letting anyone up there but emergency people. It’s creepy, Rache. The entire building is empty.”
“He promised he wouldn’t ignore me!” I almost hissed as we slipped in behind the man directing traffic; Trent’s small wave and our hard hats said we belonged. Even the news crews didn’t notice us.
“Tell them you’re Margret Tessel. She’s the hostage negotiator,” Jenks said.
“He’s taken hostages?” Concern laced his voice as Trent reached to open the door for me.
Worried, I went inside, the sudden calm and coolness of the air conditioner making me shiver. The very emptiness was shocking. There was trash on the scuffed floor, and the orange chairs were empty. The front desk was unmanned, and the metal and magic detector abandoned. Nearly out of sight, three uniformed FIB officers and one plainclothes were helping get a stretcher and an ambulance crew into the elevator.“Hey!” I called, striding forward and ignoring the beep of the detector as my boots clicked unusually loud on the tile. “Hold the lift!”
But it was too late. The elevator doors closed, leaving only a single uniformed officer and the plainclothes still there as informal gatekeepers. “Top floor, right?” I said, breathlessly as Trent and I halted before them and I pushed the call button, making the plainclothes frown. “Edden is up there already?”
“Ah, who are you, ma’am?”
“Ma’am?” Jenks snickered from my shoulder. “He called you ma’am.”
I tried to turn my grimace into a charming smile with mixed results. “Rachel Morgan and, ah, Trent Kalamack. I called Edden this morning. He was supposed to clear us.”
“Oh yeah!” the uniformed man exclaimed, eyes wide as they shifted from Trent to Jenks and then me. “I heard you came in Wednesday.” Heads down, they both looked at the list on the clipboard. “Neither of you is on the list. Mr. Kalamack, I’m sorry, but I can’t let you up there.”
I sighed at how fast Trent became the governing force here, but he had once been on the city council and was a major benefactor to the FIB’s and I.S.’s pet charities as well as half a dozen others. They knew me only because I caused trouble.
“You should have told them you were Margret Tessel,” Jenks said in a soft singsong.
“I’m sure we can work something out,” Trent was saying, his political voice in top form.
Behind us, the elevator whined to a stop and dinged. I didn’t have time for this. “Is that the latest report?” I said as it opened, and their heads snapped up when I took the papers right out of the man’s hand. Smiling, I backed into the elevator. His head ducked to hide a smile, Trent quietly got in beside me. Jenks hovered at the opening, and I frantically pushed the door-close button, my smile never wavering.
“Ma’am. Mr. Kalamack. Please get out of the elevator,” the plainclothes said, his hand twitching as if to reach for his cuffs, and Jenks’s wings hummed, stopping the man dead in his tracks when he made a motion to reach in and pull us out.
“Do me a favor,” I said, holding the door-close button down and smiling. “Tell Edden I’m on the way up? My calls don’t seem to be making it through lately.”
Finally the doors started to move. The cops reached to hold them open, jerking back when Jenks buzzed them. The pixy darted back in at the last moment, and I exhaled, falling back against the elevator wall with a loud sigh. Trent was smiling as Jenks hung in the middle of the elevator in satisfaction, a pool of dusty sunshine growing under him.
“You can do bold,” Trent said in admiration, and I pulled myself straight, my worry for him flowing back. Why was I working so hard to get him up there? Bancroft had flipped his lid.
“You haven’t seen anything,” Jenks said as he landed on the railing, feet pedaling to stay on when they slipped and his wings caught him before he moved a hairsbreadth. “I’ve seen this woman push her way into—”
“Jenks!”
Grinning, Jenks shifted to Trent’s shoulder. “Ask me later.”
But Trent wasn’t even listening, intent on the report that I’d taken. “This doesn’t sound like Bancroft,” he said, brow furrowed. “Hostages?” He flipped a page, eyes widening. “Oh no.”
I leaned to look and Jenks whistled. It was hard to tell with the fuzzy, enlarged photo, but it looked as if a third of the walls of the entire top floor had been blown out to make a sheltered cave at the top of the sky. “Tink’s little pink rosebuds,” Jenks breathed, hardly louder than his wings. “How much magic did you bring, Rache?”
“Enough?” I said, not sure as I tugged my shoulder bag up. I didn’t have anything that would let me fly, and we were more than thirty stories up. “Is he making any demands?”
Trent flipped through the pages as the elevator dinged. “Not . . . yet.”
His words trailed off as the silver doors parted and the unmistakable scent of fresh air and broken concrete poured into the elevator and down the shaft. Almost immediately the doors began to close, and I put a hand out, stopping them. All three of us looked out into the alien-seeming, broken building as the wind pushed my hair back. The walls between us and the horizon were gone, and though there was still a ceiling, the Cincy skyline spread before us in magnificence unimpeded. Fluorescent lights, some on, some not, hung from the ceiling in a once-regular pattern. Desks and office equipment were shoved into haphazard piles. In one corner by the edge, a huge pile of stuff stretched to the ceiling. It had to be at least forty feet in diameter and was made of desks, pieces of wallboard, and twisted rebar. It looked like a nest.
Bancroft did this? “Maybe we should keep the hard hats on,” I whispered. Between us and the clutter was a much more modest barrier of desks, and behind it with their backs to us crouched two officers and Edden. Almost at our feet and clearly waiting to be taken down were two ominous, coat-covered bodies. The ambulance crew and stretcher were nowhere I could see, but the second elevator was going down.
They’re removing bodies, I thought, inching in front of Trent.
“I don’t know if I’ve got enough magic for this,” Trent said, and Edden turned, still in a crouch. When I gave him a little wave, he frowned and gestured brusquely for us to join him.
“You think?” Jenks darted out, immediately lost in the wind and glare bouncing into the open floor from the nearby building.
“Get over here!” Edden all but hissed, and we jolted into motion, hunched as we half ran. Rebar and wallboard littered the carpet squares, and cool air still flowed from the air ducts. Bancroft’s voice was coming from the weird “nest,” shouting about the sun and having to go deeper.
“Oh, thank God,” Trent breathed when we got closer. “There’s Landon. He looks okay.”
I pulled my gaze away from the covered bodies. Okay was a matter of interpretation. The young man was sitting on the floor, jaw clenched and eyes darting. Doctor Tessel? I wondered, eyes going back to the bodies by the elevator. Not good.
“What took you so long?” Edden demanded as I stepped over the thick extension cord snaking through the rubble to power the monitor the two officers were staring at.
“Took us so long?” I said, peeved as I sat on a prone file cabinet. “We had to romance our way over the bridge and bull our way up the elevator.” Miffed, I sat hunched over on the cabinet to stay hidden. “I swear, Edden, if you keep ignoring my calls—”
“I told them to let you through!” Edden said, and the two officers fiddling with the equipment shrugged as if it wasn’t their fault. Immediately my anger vanished, and seeing it, Edden sighed. “Mr. Kalamack, it isn’t safe up here. I understand your relationship to Bancroft and I appreciate the offer, but I’d feel better if you’d go back downstairs.”