City of Shadows Read online

  I smiled. “In a heartbeat. But you haven’t even begun to see me harass someone yet. The first step in any manhunt is to find people they know. But they knew no one. According to our best sources, they didn’t associate with anyone outside the mosque. They had no friends, no family, no other associates. Therefore, we have to start somewhere. Point us somewhere else, we can go there and harass someone for real.”

  Kozbar’s eyes narrowed. “I serve seven thousand of my fellow Muslims. I cannot be expected to track all of them, or be invested in their affairs.”

  I looked to Father Pearson, confused, then back to Kozbar. “How many people are you hosting who live in the complex?”

  Kozbar shrugged. “Two hundred? We have a lot of room.”

  I kept my face placid, but internally, I cringed. In Europe, one of their major concerns with Islam has been their tendency to riot. Whether it be for perfectly sound reasons (where Algerian emigres have been in France for decades, but aren’t allowed to assimilate) to rioting at the drop of a hat (political cartoons), as a cop, all I could think was How many people does it take to start a riot? Almost any historian worth his salt could answer: If the conditions are right? One kid with a rock.

  Given the way we were greeted, I decided against asking Kozbar to investigate the refugees he sheltered. If saying hello was cause to nearly get me shoved through the front door, asking this Imam to do … anything … would probably end in a full brawl.

  “Who would know about the two perps?” I asked.

  Kozbar’s eyes widened. “Perps? You would call two members of my Mosque as perps! They’re dead. They’re the victims.”

  I blinked, confused. “They were shot in the middle of an armed robbery while trying to kill police officers. ‘Perpetrator’ is a simple descriptor.”

  Kozbar huffed up and leaned in. “Simple-minded, perhaps. You have no idea what they went through. Who swayed them away.” Kozbar jammed a knife hand at my chest. I parried again, but he paid no notice as he kept jabbing. “Get out. Get out of my mosque.”

  At home, this would end with an apology (from him), a summons, or Kozbar in cuffs. He would promptly be released from jail by the cowardly DA and the more cowardly mayor, who would be more concerned about having their heads cut off in the middle of Times Square than enforcing the law. But he would at least think twice before pushing around anyone who used words they didn’t like. It wasn’t a matter of what the end result would be, it was purely a matter of principle.

  In this case, I had no recourse that wouldn’t escalate the problem. But we couldn’t just go quietly. If we let him bully us out of the mosque, he’d be unapproachable later—he’d think he could bully us again. If I thrashed him first, he’d be so hostile later, he’d still be unapproachable—assuming his parishioners didn’t drag us out into the street and beat us to death. We needed to have a balance—leave the building on top. There needed to be no mistake that it was our choice to leave. It wasn’t a matter of ego or pride. It was purely a matter of practicality.

  Kozbar jabbed at me again. I parried his right hand with my left, clawed my four fingers around his thumb. I grabbed it with my right hand as well, digging both thumbs into the back of his hand. I twisted the hand to the outside of his body and burst through. It leveraged his body back and down, lest his elbow break.

  Kozbar hit the floor with a solid thud. He had martial arts training—he slapped the ground with his free hand to absorb the impact and tucked his chin once he knew he was going to fall—so I followed him down, dropping my knee into his chest to pin him. I stopped short of dropping my full weight on him. He wouldn’t have a cracked rib cage, but he’d know I ended up on top.

  I pulled back on his arm, twisting it to just short of causing a spiral fracture. It didn’t hurt, but it was uncomfortable. “I am so sorry about this,” I told him unapologetically. “But you shouldn’t poke someone who’s trained in hand to hand. It can end badly. Reflexes and all. I would like to thank you for your cooperation today, and I look forward to talking to you at a later date. Thanks.”

  I stood, backed up, gave everyone a friendly wave, and pushed on the doors with my hip so I could keep an eye on all of them as we left.

  “Keep walking calmly,” I said to Pearson as the doors closed.

  We made it a block away before we allowed ourselves to relax. Pearson gave me a sidelong look. “Wasn’t that just a tad vengeful for a wonder worker?”

  I rolled my eyes. One of the many things I disliked about having my secret out was how other people decided to evaluate my actions. “That would require I be angry. At most, he was annoying. I went through worse abuse as a rookie. It was a purely practical calculation.”

  Pearson’s eyes widened, and his brows shot up. “Really? You didn’t even feel a little good about it?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. It’s not personal for me. If this Soul Stone is a supernatural object that can cause problems, it needs to be back under lock and key. If it’s just a fancy rock that someone’s using to inspire problems, then we need to get it back.”

  I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and frowned. I put my back up against the wall of the nearest building to avoid blocking traffic and looked up. The sky had gotten even darker since we had been in the mosque. I looked at my watch. “Is it always this dark around here at noon? Is my watch off?”

  Pearson frowned, checked his watch, checked the sky, and said, “Now that you mention it? No. Not really.”

  The next sensation I had could best be described as a ping. Almost like someone had lightly flicked me in the right side of the head, just above my ears. I blinked. The next ping flicked against me slightly harder. I looked right. The next ping came right between my eyes, but there was no physical source for the sensation.

  The next ping came both between my eyes, as well as to my left, at ten o’clock.

  Those two points had only one thing in common. They were young Muslims … both wearing long, matching raincoats. Four of them at each point.

  It is a common trope that when people lose one sense, their other senses become heightened. Apparently, when I prayed that my sense of smell for evil to be taken away so I could endure the stench of London, I had gotten another sense. Some wonder workers had telepathy in the confessional. I guessed this was going to be as close as I got.

  “Get ready, Father,” I said sotto voce.

  Pearson didn’t even look down from the dimming sky. “Understood,” he said, just as quietly.

  I strode back the way we came, taking long steps. The group of Arabs stopped suddenly. Three of them were smart enough to break off from the group, leaving only one man behind.

  I smiled at the lone tracker and raised my hand, offering it. “Hello. I’m Thomas Nolan.”

  Bewildered and uncertain, the tracker raised his hand. “Pleased to—”

  I promptly kicked him in the balls. For good measure, when he bent over I dropped a hammer fist on the back of his head, where it meets the spine. He crashed to the sidewalk, catching himself as he fell. He tried to get up. I kicked him in the side of the head. He stopped moving, unconscious.

  No. It wasn’t a fair fight. But I’m from New York City. As far as we can tell, Marquis of Queensbury is a Ben and Jerry’s flavor.

  I dropped to a crouch and rolled him over. I quickly frisked him. He had a bottle of acid, which seemed standard at this point, and a machete.

  I nearly laughed. So much for their knife control. If we were lucky, that meant our pursuers had only melee weapons. If that was the case, we were fine.

  Then the automatic rifle fire opened up. So much for gun control.

  I darted away from the street to brace up against a car wheel for cover.

  Pearson looked at me like the world had gone sideways. “Friends of yours?”

  I shook my head. “They’re new to me. At least, we have some cover, right?”

  Then, down the street, back from where we came, cars exploded. I jerked and scrambled away from the explosions. �
��Down the street!”

  What? Did they issue grenade control, too?

  Pearson reached for me. I was certain I knew what he was going to say. They were herding us. That was obvious. But there was no other way for us to avoid being blown up.

  Then a thick laser beam cut through the cars at the other end of the block like a hot knife through butter. The car exploded at the other end, the gas tank obviously ruptured.

  Between the laser at one end and the exploding cars at the other end, there was only one solution. I reached over and grabbed Pearson around the waist. “Hold on.”

  Levitation, please Lord. We need some levitation—

  We shot up four floors in a split second. We came down hard on the roof, but I didn’t mind. I pushed to my feet, then yanked Pearson along with me. We crept over to the edge of the roof and looked down. There were a collection of shooters. Two of them had AK-47s. They were spraying without even looking.

  Then there were the special ones.

  One had a sword … I wasn’t all that surprised. It was curved backwards, a slashing weapon made for horseback. It wasn’t that surprising.

  Another one used a simple handgun. He aimed for a car, fired, and the car exploded.

  The other one fired lasers out of his eyes, slowly sweeping the block, mowing down anything in his way.

  Because of course, that’s how my luck runs.

  Normal people would have decided to take this opportunity to run. It would have been the sensible thing to do. We were out of the line of fire. Any civilians down there were either dead already or running away. We could have left that minute. The armed (and probably armored) London cops would then show up, and they could handle them…

  And how many will die in the meantime?

  I looked at Pearson. “I’ve got to stop them before some London cop walks into this without knowing what they’re up against. You good here?”

  Pearson looked at me, then narrowed his eyes. “Bollocks you’re not leaving me here. Fly us back down, and we’ll have a right set-to with those thugs. My title is combat exorcist, not retreating Jesuit.”

  I smiled. I grabbed Pearson again. We took off, and I dropped Pearson on the sidewalk around the corner. I levitated up and over the buildings and came down at the other end of the block, again, around the corner. We had perfect flanking positions right behind them. The automatic weapons chattered deafeningly, and the explosions blotted them out every so often.

  I charged in during a lull in the gunfire. I took five large running steps and leaped for the shooter. My left arm slammed against the stock of the AK-47 while my right elbow crashed into the shooter’s ear. His head rocked to the side. I swept the rifle up in my hands and slammed the butt of the gun into his face. I slammed his head against the brickwork of a building. I pushed past him, rifle in hand. Oh, cool, it had a bayonet at the end.

  I worked the action to check how many rounds were left… The slide was locked open.

  It was empty. I flinched. Ahead of me was one of the attackers. His eyes glowed from within, blotting out the pupils, irises, and whites of the eyes.

  I guess this is source of the laser beams.

  He was ten feet away. I had an empty gun. He had laser eyes. I dove to one side and hurled the AK-47 at him. I had aimed for his chest. Instead, the bayonet slammed into his right leg. He screamed and looked down at his leg at the same moment that his eyes ignited. He didn’t blow his own leg off but fired into the sidewalk, reducing it to slag. The recoil of shooting something that close propelled him off the sidewalk and into the side of a building. I sprung to my feet, swept up the rifle, and smashed it into the side of his head. As I intended, I broke the orbital socket, making it compress against the right eye. As a bonus, I broke the nose so it was at right angles to his face.

  Laser Eyes laughed. He grabbed the rifle in mid-swing, he focused his brilliant gaze on me. I shoved off of the rifle and dove away from him.

  His eyes fired off a beam of energy… which immediately detonated against the broken orbital bone and the disjointed nose.

  The resulting explosion gave new meaning to “smoke coming out of his ears.” Thankfully, the lasers cauterized the wound, leaving black smoldering holes where his eyes, ears, and jaw used to be.

  The light show had caught the attention of Laser Eyes’ colleagues. They turned to me.

  At the other end of the block, Father Pearson darted around the corner with a loose brick. He slammed it against the first gunman’s head. Pearson took the AK and clubbed that gunman down. This caught the attention of the next nearest gunman to him. That was another rifleman and the man with the handgun that fired exploding bullets. Hand Canon stepped back from the car he’d been using as a platform to fire from so he wouldn’t shoot his buddy with the AK-47.

  Pearson noted the unwanted attention and dove over the hood of the car in front of him, coming down the other side. He darted down the line of parked cars as they exploded. Pearson sped past the car the rifleman had used for cover. He dropped to the street, aimed for the man’s ankles, and fired a burst. The bullets tore up his ankles, and he dropped over. Pearson pushed to his feet and burst forward. He came up as Hand Canon bent over to take a look down between the two cars.

  Pearson smacked the handgun to one side, stabbed the muzzle of the AK-47 next to the man’s ear, and pulled the trigger. The sound blew out his ear, and Pearson disarmed him and clubbed him with the rifle.

  Meanwhile, I squared off against three others. Two with AKs, and the third with a sword.

  I stood with my hands spread, but at the ready, in a passive stance. “I offer you reconciliation with God and mercy from me if you give up now.”

  The swordsman smiled. He looked over his shoulder and said, “Take care of the other one.”

  I picked up the AK again. It wasn’t much against a sword, but it had a point. “You don’t want to do this.”

  Swordsman smiled. “I want to do nothing else, infidel.”

  Then, his sword began to glow. It was bright white and red. In fact, it looked …

  A lightsaber? Are you kidding me?

  Swordsman hefted it in a two-handed grip, over his head, and charged me.

  I charged him.

  As his blade came down, I thrust the AK at his wrists. I met the blow at his wrists with the stock of the rifle, then followed through with a headbutt to his face. He staggered back, then brought the sword down and around, like a baseball swing. I didn’t let the swing pass his hips before I slammed the rifle down on his arms. The impact didn’t jar the sword from his grip, but it sent him off balance and staggering into a parked car.

  The blade sank through the car like it wasn’t even there, leaving a burning, melting scar in the engine block. I rammed into him, pinning him to the car.

  Then, as the two riflemen approached Pearson, he popped out of concealment and fired a bullet several feet behind and between them.

  The resulting explosion knocked the riflemen off their feet. It blew me off of Swordsman and slammed me against the ground. I tried to get up, but my hands and feet met resistance.

  I looked down and had to take a beat to process what I saw.

  The shadows had crawled up from the sidewalk and slithered around my wrists and ankles like tentacles. For a moment, I thought I had hit my head. Maybe I had been jostled through the time zones too often.

  Then the shadows pulled at my arms, forcing them apart, spreading them. I pulled at them, but I might as well pull on chains for all the good it did. They didn’t even slow as they pinned me, spread eagle.

  Swordsman recovered from the explosion. He saw my predicament and didn’t question it. He smiled as he raised his glowing blade over his head. “Insh’Allah, infidel.”

  Father Pearson grabbed his sword hand by the wrist and jammed the pistol into the back of Swordsman’s head. “Deus vult, heretic. Drop it before I see what this thing does to the human skull at point-blank range.”

  Swordsman hesitated a moment. “You wouldn’
t dare. You don’t have the moral character we do to die like that.”

  Pearson tightened his grip and said, “My soul is prepared. How’s yours?”

  The sword stopped glowing and dropped to the concrete. Pearson smacked him on the side of the head with the pistol to drop him. Swordsman fell to one side. Without Swordsman there, the shadows let me go. I scrambled away from the pavement, a little freaked out. The entire sidewalk was in the shade from awnings, buildings, statues. If any one of them could come alive at any moment …

  This might be harder than I thought.

  Pearson helped me to my feet. He had picked up the sword in one hand and still held the pistol. He held the sword upside down. It had a guard over the grip you might see on a pirate cutlass. In the pommel, there was a small fleck. It was perfectly square, and shiny, almost like a piece of oversized glitter. It was perhaps a millimeter squared. There was a matching flake in the pistol grip.

  “I checked the bullets,” Pearson added. “There’s nothing special about them either.”

  I frowned as I took out my cell phone. I took photos of each and emailed them to myself. I went over to the remains of Laser Eyes to see if I could see anything in what was left of his head.

  And there it was, in what some refer to as the third eye, right over the bridge of the nose—another shiny black flake.

  I took more pictures. “What did you say that Soul Stone was made of?”

  Pearson nodded. “Obsidian.”

  “And what do these look like to you?”

  “The same.”

  “I figured. I—” I kept taking photos as the flake in the skull of Laser Eyes flashed. It was as though someone flicked a match and it immediately went out. The flakes in the sword and the pistol also flashed out of existence, barely leaving burn marks.

  And, of course, at that moment, the police arrived.

  7

  Jurisdictional Conflicts

  Aaron Shaw was not my idea of Scotland Yard detective. I’ve met a few. While there is some pomposity that I usually associate with the FBI, he was scruffier than any Scotland Yard officer that I’d ever encountered. He was a little shorter than I was and fairly sturdy, mostly martial arts with a touch of weight lifting. If he couldn’t do a five-minute mile, it wasn’t that long ago that he could. His brown hair was short-cropped, almost military. But he had a five o’clock shadow and growing. His tan spoke of a career out of town. Somewhere equatorial, perhaps. For some reason, India and Australia came to mind.