The security detail talked as they moved through the Goblin Market, their tone serious, professional, and lacking much of the flair each of them usually brought to the conversation. That change, as much as anything, told Aaron just how serious the situation was.
“We need to get back home,” Albert said. “It’s as protected as it can be short of stationing an army outside.”
“Options?” Kiara asked.
“Can’t walk back to the car — we’d be sitting ducks on the street for that long — but it’s almost half a mile back to Grand Street and a quarter mile from 7th Avenue to the diner,” Griffin said.
“Alternatives?”
Griffin shook his head, frowning. “Subway’s the best option. Cabs, ride-shares, and the bus are all too vulnerable, especially if we’re assuming our position can be compromised.”
Kiara’s brow furrowed. “What about a pickup?”
“Too risky with our current info,” Albert said. “A larger force means more chances for the enemy to get eyes on and less mobility from start to finish.”
“Not to mention we’d have to wait somewhere to rendezvous,” Griffin added.
“What about less conventional routes or methods?”
“The underground is the only decent alternative,” Albert said. “Without knowing more about who’s on our ass, I wouldn’t trust it. They might be against us on this.”
“The three of us are rarely in the city since we’re usually out delving. That might work in our favor and get us overlooked,” Griffin suggested.
Albert disagreed. “Even if they’re taking a shotgun approach trying to track every drakus in town, whoever is behind it is likely to be looking for newcomers.”
Kiara listened to their thoughts, then let out a long, slow breath. “We’ll take the train back to the car. It’s the most expedient and most adaptable plan. We can adjust on the move as needed.”
They moved with purpose through the subterranean mall — fast, but not fast enough to draw attention in a city infamous for its hustle and bustle — and they reached the staircase leading back up to the public as they finalized their plans. Kiara stopped them before heading up the stairs, where Albert pulled out the case from Mac’s shop.
“Take your wand,” he said, removing it from the case and passing it to Aaron. “Remember: you only need to focus on the specific thing you want the wand to do. You haven’t got the knack for it yet to rely on it fully, but it’s better to have you armed than not.”
“It’s about using your intent to influence the aether channeled through the wand, so it’s like a really simplified version of casting magic that takes very little on your part. It’s not hard, but it’s not exactly simple, either,” Kiara added.
Aaron slipped the wand into the front pocket of his hoodie, cursing that they didn’t have the time to attune the Pocket Dimension Kweeble sold them let alone the wand. The mystic rod was too long to be put anywhere comfortably except the big pocket of his sweatshirt.
I’ll have to be mindful of it so it doesn’t fall out, Aaron told himself.
“Don’t use it in front of normies unless you absolutely have to or you can do it without them seeing the magic discharge,” Griffin concluded. “Let’s roll.”
With a last bit of advice from Albert to “play it cool,” the four drakus took the stairs back to the regular mall and began their first short trek over surface streets to the subway station.
Aaron’s old, anxious habit of watching for things that might be a threat served him well on the brief walk along the busy streets, but nothing struck him as out of place or especially threatening.
“We’ve got a tail,” Albert informed them a couple minutes into the walk, effectively deflating Aaron’s ego.
“Can we lose them?” Kiara asked.
Griffin shook his head. “Not in Chinatown, not well. If we start bobbing and weaving through alleys and side streets here, we’re asking to get boxed in and jumped.”
“We stay the course,” Kiara decided.
It only took a few minutes after they spotted the tail to reach the subway station. Rush hour was in full swing and the station was busy with commuters, yet the teeming bulk of humanity largely gave them an ample berth. Occasionally, Aaron noticed, someone would shoot an unfriendly glance their way, though he had no idea why. Their group moved to one end of the platform, where the crowd kept a distance of several feet from them.
Albert crowded in close to them and spoke under his breath. “There’s at least one more.”
“Start thinking about contingencies,” Kiara said.
Griffin sighed. “I really don’t want to throw down on the train.”
“Neither do I,” Kiara agreed. “I’m inclined to bail, but I want options.”
Their train arrived a couple minutes later and they boarded through the rearmost doors. Then, for no reason Aaron could discern, they crossed the entire length of the car to the front.
People continued to edge away from them, though there was little space in the car to move more than a few inches. This led to them having the small benches at the front to themselves, the people sitting there quickly moving away to give them space.
“Okay, what the hell is going on with people avoiding us and shooting us dirty looks?” Aaron asked.
Albert laughed his wheezy laugh. “A little illusion I threw over us when we got to the station; people will generally give a lot of space to a gaggle of drug-addled hobos who stink to holy hell.”
“Who are the tails?” Kiara asked, all business.
“Blue hoodie with a magazine,” Albert answered. “And the blonde in the yellow blouse.”
Aaron scanned the car and spotted them pretty easily, even with all the straphangers. The guy in the blue hoodie was halfway down the train, reading The New Yorker. He looked about as normal and unremarkable as a person could and was paying them absolutely no attention.
The blonde was even better at her job. She was further down the train holding a newspaper, but she had the presence of mind to react to the illusion, glancing their way every few seconds with revulsion and a hint of fear — just like everyone else in the car except the blue hoodie guy.
“I don’t know if there are any more on us right now, but I’d put money down that there will be,” Albert said. “Soon.”
A woman’s voice announced something over a speaker in the car. Aaron couldn’t hear it very well over the clattering rumble and screech of the train, but he caught the word ‘Broadway.’ An animated map made of LED lights near the roof scrolled and Aaron saw that the next station was Broadway-Lafayette.
The train coasted to a stop with a final shudder. When the doors slid open, someone at the pair in the middle — a teenager, Aaron thought — popped into the train and shouted.
“Baba Booey! Baba Booey! Baba Booey!”
There was a tinkling pop! and the car filled with the foulest stench Aaron had ever encountered. The overwhelming funk of excrement, bile, and other unknown foulness hit his nose and caused him to retch — and he wasn’t alone.
The commuters waiting to board the train were no fools and immediately went looking for other cars after the stink bomb exploded, clearing the way for the passengers already on board to make good their own escape.
When the train began to move again, it was mostly empty. But only mostly.
Five other people remained in the car with them. Each of them, like Aaron’s protectors, were seemingly unfazed by the reeking cloud filling the enclosed space.
“It’s an illusion,” Griffin quietly told him. “Focus on your own senses and you should be able to pierce it.”
That was probably great advice, but Aaron was having a hell of a time following it. He tried to concentrate, but the reek invaded his nostrils and completely disrupted his focus. Was it magic that made it so bad? Or had they found a combination of stenches that were the worst of the worst?
He could feel the tingle of the odor’s particulates trying to crawl down his sinuses into his throat and his eyes were itching, threatening to water. He swallowed hard against the feeling, pushing it back and stifling his growing frustration with it.
This is life or death, Aaron, so get your shit together, he admonished himself.
His companions had risen from their seats when the stink bomb went off, as had Aaron, but where he had reeled from the stench and fallen back onto the hard plastic bench, they now stood, facing the five strangers in the empty subway car.
Kiara was a couple steps ahead, less than ten feet between her and the nearest of the strangers. Griffin stood to her left, his bulk shielding Aaron from being an easy target. Albert was on Kiara’s right, but he had his back to the rest of the car and was performing a series of complicated gestures hidden from the strangers’ view by his own body.
Kiara took another step forward, stopping short of the doors at their end of the train. She looked over each of the five people still on the train, sizing them up. The height difference alone — most of the strangers had at least five inches on her — would have been almost farcical in any other situation. There was nothing comical about this situation. The promise of imminent violence was etched in every line of Kiara’s body.
“Why are you riding our asses?” she called out, her voice easily filling the mostly-empty train car. “You dicks got a problem with drakus going fucking shopping, now?”
One of the strangers — the blonde in the yellow blouse — approached, stopping a couple feet from Kiara. She raised a hand and ran it through the air between them. Ripples appeared around her fingers, revealing a transparent wall of purple energy standing between them and their pursuers.
Aaron squeezed his eyes tightly shut, frustration churning in his gut. Frustration, not anger; Aaron didn’t get angry. But he was effectively hobbled by a stench while Albert, Griffin, and Kiara had stepped up to protect him. Even if the five other people didn’t know for sure that he was their quarry, his three guardians were still sticking their necks out.
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I will not be helpless, Aaron told himself.
The shame of being overwhelmed swept through Aaron’s mind like a strong breeze, blowing the stench and its distraction out of his conscious awareness. His perception of the world condensed into a pinpoint, a tiny picture of the world around him seen through a long tunnel, and he started to feel cold all over.
His senses honed in on so many extraneous details of the scene around him — his eyes darted over every inch of the cabin, his ears thrummed at every shift of footing or clatter of the train, and his own body suddenly felt too present. His clothes, even the weight and lay of his hair, were an electric presence of sensory input.
Each sense was a rapidly-moving radio telescope, taking in every bit of data and processing it into his awareness. He felt far, far away from the scene — more like an observer than a participant — which was as unnerving as it was empowering.
Until, of course, he realized that the flood of sensory information no longer included that malodorous funk and he could actually think. Only he wasn’t thinking, not really. He was simply assessing each threat in the train car and waiting.
In the back of Aaron’s mind — where rational thought hadn’t been overwhelmed — a seed of concern began to grow. It had been a long time since he’d been in a situation with the threat of real violence, but he remembered. He knew the kind of response he was prone to when he was truly afraid. He needed to get his thoughts out of that box, to regain conscious control over his decisions instead of letting instincts dictate his actions.
“We’re just delvers, dude,” Kiara said across the barrier. “We don’t go in for all this intrigue bullshit or whatever the hell it is, so why are you on our asses?”
She was met with silence from their pursuers, so she turned back to Aaron, Albert, and Griffin, hefting her little magic cube on her palm in front of her so they could see its glowing runes.
“Do we throw down or bail?” she asked.
“I like our odds against five,” Griffin said. “Ring the bell after Washington Square and put on the belt at Herald.”
“It won’t stay five, especially if they think we have whatever they’re after,” Albert said. “I say we bail before we’re out of the Village.”
“Can we get off the train at a station?”
“We can’t do it clean with so many on our asses,” Albert said. “And we risk getting penned in up on the streets.”
“If we’re forced to use the streets while we still have tails, that means calling in backup, and that means escalation,” Griffin said. “I think we probably want to avoid that.”
Kiara mulled over her options until the train slowed to pull into the station. Once again, Aaron couldn’t decipher more than about a quarter of what was announced through the speakers, but the map in the car showed they were arriving at West 4th Street-Washington Square.
There was a minor commotion as commuters waiting to step onto the train recoiled from the fug of illusory stench and went to seek other, less smelly compartments. Three people, however, ignored the smell and boarded, bringing the number of enemies up to eight.
“There’ll be more at the next station,” Albert guessed. “Once they have us three-to-one, they’ll make their move.”
“Then we move before the next station,” Kiara said.
Tension was accumulating in Aaron’s body like ice on a windshield in a blizzard. His jaw and shoulders were tight and a trembling cold sensation spread from his stomach up his spine. None of these were good signs. He didn’t know what the plan to get off the train while it was moving was — and honestly didn’t want to think about it too hard — but taking action would be better than sitting there doing nothing.
Perhaps worse than even the jangling of Aaron’s nerves was the fact that their pursuers weren’t idle.
As soon as the train began to roll, they started performing magic. Some of their efforts must have been directed at the invisible barrier, because it sporadically flared or shimmered but otherwise remained intact. Nothing else they were doing had any visible effect as far as Aaron could tell.
His anxiety shot up a few notches and the impulse to lash out — maybe catch them off guard — grew.
That’s the dumbest idea you’ve had in a while, he told himself. They’re not some schoolyard bullies you can take by surprise; they’re probably hardened killers.
Aaron stood up. He had no plan to do anything specific, he just needed to bleed off some nervous energy. His face felt tight — stiff, and frowning — but at least it kept his fear from showing. If he was glad of something in that moment, it was that neither friend nor foe could see how scared he was. It was some small solace that, if things turned violent, they wouldn’t know how much his actions were driven by barely-contained terror.
Griffin turned to him and spoke quietly — not a whisper, but softly enough it was somewhat difficult hearing him. The big man paused when he got a look at Aaron’s face, but he didn’t comment on it.
“In about thirty seconds, things are going to get hectic. Pay it no mind,” he said. “What I need you to do is open that door between the benches, step out onto the gangway, and wait for me. I’ll be right behind you.”
Aaron had questions, obviously, that could be asked about what came after that, but he was pretty sure he knew the most likely answer and he didn’t particularly want to think about it. Besides, he didn’t trust his voice to work with all the tension in his jaw and neck. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t vomit if he opened his mouth, but not sure enough, so he just nodded. Thankfully, Aaron didn’t get long to ruminate on what they were about to do because Griffin was true to his word and half a minute passed quickly.
There was no lead up, no mounting tension. One second everyone in the train was continuing their preparations or glaring at each other across the empty space dividing them, the next pandemonium erupted. Literally.
Tendrils of smoke burst out of the ceiling or, more accurately, from the handrails near the ceiling. There were more than a dozen of them — long strands of darkness as thick as a rope — reaching out and latching onto the eight people on the other side of the mystic barrier.
The fingers of darkness were more solid than they looked and they began yanking and tripping any of the pursuers they could grasp, dragging them into walls or hoisting them into the ceiling. Judging by the resonant clanging of the impacts against the steel of the train car, the shades had some strength behind them, too.
Aaron watched as weapons were drawn and spells began to materialize from the eight strangers under assault. Fires blazed, electricity crackled, and still more magic manifested at the other end of the car. It was astonishing. All Aaron could do was stand there, hand on the wand in his pocket and unsure whether he should act.
His attention was dragged away from the spectacle when Griffin slapped a big hand on his shoulder. Not hard, but not gently, either.
Oh right, the door, Aaron reminded himself.
He stood up and stepped over to the door in the wall beside him. It was, to his surprise, unlocked, and slid right open. The sound level jumped significantly and immediately as the thin barrier between him and the tracks was removed. Aaron stepped out onto the gangway.
Once, when he was young, Aaron took a train ride with his mother. He had passed between cars a couple times on that trip, but it had been a very different experience. Those had clearly been designed with the movement of passengers in mind; these had clearly not. The gangway was barely large enough for him to stand on and he wouldn’t exactly call the safety railing safe.
Another major difference between that trip and this one — that train ride had been through California’s Central Valley. Aaron had watched the low hills and farmland roll by. This train had walls of concrete and steel rushing past just a few inches away on either side.
Leaping from this tiny, swaying platform into that very narrow space, with an entire car still passing by behind him, wasn’t the most enticing of ideas. Fortunately, Aaron didn’t get much time to think about how much he hated this plan.
Griffin stepped onto the gangway right after Aaron did, wrapping one of his arms under Aaron’s armpits, and stepping up onto the flimsy safety rail. He did it all in one smooth motion. The big man glanced up the side of the train and then, without warning or preamble, stepped off.
Aaron wanted to scream — a fun and delightful noise where fury and terror contended over the tenor and tone of the very dignified sounds a body could make in the extremities of terror — but the sound stuck in his throat.
The tunnel was dark, but not pitch black; there were signal lights, the light from the train car itself, and dim lamps set into the walls so maintenance people would be able to see. In that gloom, Aaron saw Griffin reach out with his free hand and grab onto a great steel beam standing upright in the tunnel between two sets of tracks.
Their momentum came to a jarring halt and their feet hit the ground with surprisingly little impact. Aaron barely noticed — his heart was hammering in his chest and ears while his breaths were little more than quick, ragged gasps.
“Blink a few times and force yourself to take a deep breath,” Griffin said. “Try to remind yourself that even if you’d been hit by an oncoming train, it probably wouldn’t have hurt you too seriously.”
Before Aaron could blurt out any of the myriad of friendly, gentle, and non-vulgar retorts that were springing into his mind like a wall of error messages, Albert spoke up from his other side, causing an entirely new logjam in his thinking process. Aaron hadn’t even noticed Albert and Kiara landing beside him in the handful of seconds since Griffin had carried him off the train.
“We need to move,” the smaller man said. “Best case scenario: the magic back there lasts another minute until it dissipates to avoid being seen in the station. After that, we’re going to be getting spit roasted by whoever these fucks are.”
“Gross,” Kiara said, but she quickly took the lead heading down the tunnel in the opposite direction of the train they’d left behind.
They moved quickly — but cautiously — across the tracks to an outer wall of the tunnel. All three of Aaron’s guardians made sure to point out the third rail and advise him not to touch it. That included not stepping on the thin plank covering the top of the metal, which wasn’t meant to support a person’s weight according to Albert.
“Electricity might not cause any serious injury thanks to our nature,” Albert explained, “but it stings like a bitch and it can make you crap your pants.”
Threats of immediate, involuntary incontinence aside, their trek through the tunnel was only a few hundred feet. For all its shortness, it was still a slow and harrowing journey.
Trains frequently screeched past them in the tunnel. Each time, they had to cram themselves into spaces with enough clearance to avoid getting clipped. There were many nooks and crannies that offered safety, but Aaron quickly learned that some were deceptively shallow. Those were marked with white and red stripes, but they could be a pain to see in the dark.
One of those misleading depressions was their destination. There was very little space along the walls on either side of it for at least twenty feet, meaning they’d have to cover the whole distance in one go. They stopped in a relatively larger space so they could go over the plan.
“The entrance we’re aiming for is just ahead,” Albert said, pointing at the nook several dozen feet away. “We’ll go one at a time. I’ll take the lead so I can open the door, then Aaron, Kiara, and Griffin. Wait for a train and move right on its tail; that’ll give you the most time to make the crossing.”
Albert started moving almost before the next train finished passing. After his first step over the track rail, he covered the distance in three impressive leaps. The small man was quick as hell and sure-footed, each ‘step’ falling nearly square in the two or three feet of space between each raised tie.
Well holy shit, Aaron thought, I hope they don’t expect me to move like that.
Once again, Aaron didn’t have long to worry over the situation. The next train came barely a minute later and he had to psyche himself up to go as soon as it passed. The smell of filth and decay, the metallic rattle of trains, even the scurrying of rats nearby; all of it fell away as Aaron concentrated on what he had to do.
He didn’t watch the subway, like he might with a freight train at a railroad crossing. Instead, Aaron focused on the far wall. He hoped it would be a better way to gauge when he should move than watching the train itself and trying to guess when it would end.
As the train rattled past, his field of vision was filled with the silver blur of the moving cars. When the end of the train was past and clear of him, his view changed to the dark concrete on the other side of the tracks.
Aaron dropped down to the tracks a little awkwardly. He turned towards Albert and began taking uneven strides — one long step to get to the tie, one short one to step over — to cover the distance. As much as he was tempted, he didn’t try any fancy jumps using his absurd strength.
It took Aaron ten or fifteen seconds to cover the thirty-or-so feet, but it felt like much longer to him.
In the depths of the tunnel, the tracks were recessed in shadow and could be hard to see, so each step was as much about feeling as it was about looking. On top of that, trains were passing on other tracks and in other tunnels nearby; each rumble and clank in the passage made his heart skip thinking it could be the one bearing down on him. He grit his teeth and refused to let it stall his progress.
When he reached the nook in the wall, he found Albert holding open a door that appeared to be made of stone or, more likely, concrete.
“Wait just inside,” Albert said.
Aaron stepped through, footsteps slapping loudly against a floor that was slightly wet. Behind the door was a narrow tunnel made of mossy brick lit by dingy, yellow, incandescent bulbs in rounded cages made of thick steel grilles. Everything in the passage spoke of age, perhaps being as much as a hundred years old.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“Ekwiyakink, the hidden borough.”