Chapter 14 — The Underworld Tour
1292 Words
The first man never got his shot off.
Varek moved before the blink finished. Sideways off the line of fire, his gun making two quiet sounds... nothing like the shots in the basement... and the two men at the front of the group went down like their strings had been cut.
The other four opened up.
Noise in that alley was enormous. Felt it in the chest like being hit. The wall above came apart and hot dust rained into my eyes. Down on the ground before deciding to be... Varek's hand between my shoulder blades drove me behind the big metal bin at the side of the alley.
He didn't walk forward like he couldn't be touched.
Behind a pile of wet wooden boards instead. A bullet hit his shoulder and a hard crack sounded against whatever he wore under his coat... body jerking left but not going down. Leaned out and fired three times.
Three more men hit the flooded ground.
One left.
That one ran out of bullets. Instead of reloading the gun dropped and a knife came out and he came around the boards straight at Varek's back.
Which put him right in front of me.
Didn't freeze.
The body dropped into the stance before the order came. Low. Small. And when he got close enough the brass bar swung up with both hands.
It hit his knee dead center.
Wet and wrong, the sound of it. The leg bent the way legs didn't bend. He screamed and went face first into the wet ground.
Varek's boot found the back of his neck before he could roll. The gun pressed into the gap between the man's helmet and his collar.
Trigger pulled.
The alley went quiet.
Just rain on hot metal. Burnt and copper and something worse filling every breath.
Empty magazine dropped with a small sound. New one pressed in. Varek turned around.
Breathing hard. Real hard. Face wet from the rain, dust on his jaw, eyes blown wide the way eyes went when the body had been running on pure fear and fury and was only now starting to slow down.
A look at me.
The fast checking look. Hands. Face. Sides. Looking for blood that wasn't supposed to be there.
Up from the mud slowly. Knees shaking. Kept the bar.
Varek crossed in two steps and grabbed my jacket.
"You want to run blind into a free fire zone." Voice raw and rough.
"They used my father's knot."
"They used a dead man to get you outside the walls." A shove back. Shoulders hit the brick. "I should chain you to a pipe in the basement until this is over."
Staring at my face.
The anger in his eyes cracked. Underneath it something else. Math running behind the face. A look at the dead man in the mud. A look at the bar in my hand.
His grip dropped from my jacket.
"The estate is done," he said. "Syris has people in the streets. We go down."
Not back toward the rail yard. Deeper into the Wards.
Ten minutes through flooded alleys so narrow my shoulders nearly touched both walls. Bass from the clubs faded until it was gone. Until there was nothing but rain and footsteps and the distant sound of the city doing what the city did.
Varek stopped at a plain steel door set into the back of a building. A bad smell coming through the wall. Raw meat and cold and something sharp underneath both.
Into a rusted grate on the wall. A faint red light swept across his face.
Bolts turned. The door opened.
"Neutral ground," Varek said. "Don't touch anyone. Don't speak unless I tell you to."
Through.
The cold and bad smell went on the other side. Warmth and low golden light and the quiet sound of money in their place. Dark wood on every wall. Green tables under glass lights. Air thick with cigar smoke and something underneath it that had no name. Something sharp and human that came from rooms where very serious things were decided.
Not a street casino. Expensive clothes and broken noses at every table and the kind of eyes that had seen things and stopped being surprised by them. Moving carefully. Speaking quietly. The kind of dangerous that didn't need to show itself.
"Nothing here is bought with money," Varek said near my ear. "Watch what they use instead."
Past a card table where a man slid a thick sealed envelope to the center of the felt. The woman across from him matched it with a ring of small silver keys. Neither looked happy.
Varek brought me to the big round table in the center of the room and pulled out a chair. "Sit."
"I don't play," I said.
"You're not playing." Hand down on my shoulder pressing me into the seat. "You're learning."
Standing behind me with both hands on the back of the chair. Not touching. Just there. Telling the room something without words.
The man across the table had burn marks covering half his face. A look at Varek. Then at me... muddy boots and cheap jacket... and his one good eye showed exactly what he thought about that.
"Bringing strangers into the Vault now?" Gravel in a tin.
Varek reached into his coat and put a flat black box on the green felt in front of me.
It landed with a heavy thud.
The burned man's mouth closed. The woman at the table stopped what she was doing with her hands.
A box like that held more money than a hundred lifetimes of earning. Untraceable. Unbeatable. A whole syndicate's financial heart sitting on a card table.
"She plays for my house," Varek said quietly. "Spin the wheel."
Shaking hands on the man running the table as the small white ball dropped into the spinning bowl.
Sitting very still.
The black box inches from my hands. The heat of Varek behind me. All around, people who would cut a throat for the copper wire in my jacket.
He's showing me, I thought. Showing me what it looks like out here without his name between me and it.
The white ball slowed. Tick. Tick.
Tick.
A waiter appeared from the crowd. White shirt. No tray. A heavy glass set down two inches from my right hand... dark amber liquid and one square of ice... and went back into the room before a face could be seen.
Nothing ordered. Nothing asked for.
Reaching for the glass slowly.
The smell arrived before it lifted.
Clove smoke. Mint.
Thumb running around the side of the glass. Nail catching something. A rough mark cut into the crystal. Turning the glass just a little.
A snake. Rough and quick like done in a hurry. Coiled up on itself.
Every drop of blood went cold.
Syris was here.
Alive. Varek had lifted him off the floor by his throat in front of five hundred people and he was alive and in this room right now.
A massive sound of metal on metal from somewhere behind me.
Then another.
Turning toward the entrance.
The big steel doors slid shut. Heavy bolts driving into place one after another. Sealing us in.
Men in gray around the tables unslung their rifles all at once. Safeties clicking off filled the room like rain.
The white ball dropped.
Landed in a black slot with one small sound.
Varek's hands closed on the back of the chair. Wood creaking under them.
Not looking at the doors.
Looking down at the snake scratched into the glass.
And for the first time since the basement and the gunfights and everything in between... his face showed something that hadn't been there before.
Fear.
Real fear.
- Writer
