Julia Ferrick was about to say something she was sure to regret when she noticed that a little girl, no older than five, now stood on the other side of the metal gate watching them. The child sniffled, her hand slowly rising to her face to rub at her eyes. The little girl began to cry.
"What's the matter, sweetie?" Julia asked.
"Don't feel good," the small child whined, beginning to cry all the harder. Julia moved closer to the gate, wanting to get the attention of one of the daycare workers, when the child in front of her began to retch. Thick streams of milky white vomit poured from her mouth to splash upon the sidewalk, spattering her shiny, black patent leather shoes.
Julia was about to comfort the little girl through the thick bars of the metal gate when motion at the periphery of her vision caught her attention. She glanced down upon the puddle of vomit at the child's feet.
It was moving.
Now matter how badly she wanted to, Julia Ferrick could not pull her eyes away from the horrific sight. The child had regurgitated maggots; not just one or five or even twenty, but hundreds of them.
"I trew up bugs," the child whined over and over again in a dazed chorus. "I trew up bugs. I trew up bugs. I trew up bugs."
Julia felt that she might be sick as well, and finally tore her gaze away to look upon the playground for help.
"Could somebody — anybody — help here please!" she cried out, on the verge of panic. Then she saw that the staff was in a panic of activity, the other children sick as well, all of them throwing up as the little girl at the fence had done.
One of the staff members fainted, hitting the ground dangerously close to an undulating pile of maggot infested sick.
"Got to call 911," she mumbled, reaching into her bag for her cell phone. "This isn't right. It isn't right at all."
Julia hit the emergency button that would immediately dial for help and brought the phone up to her ear, gazing into the playground at the children all in the grip of sickness. They were all crying, some curled into convulsing balls on the ground. Even the little girl at the fence now lay at the base of the gate, trembling as if freezing.
This was a nightmare, she thought as the voice on the other end of the phone asked her to state her emergency.
The worlds were about to leave her mouth when she noticed that her son now gripped the black iron bars of the gate in his gloved hands. His hood had fallen away to reveal his closely cropped hair and the condition that had changed his face and the skin of his entire body. The bumps upon his forehead seemed more pronounced, red and angry as though ready to burst.
As he stared intensely through the bars at the children overcome with illness, Daniel Ferrick made a sound the likes of which his mother had not heard for number of years. In any other circumstance, she would have paid a great deal of money for a chance to hear it again.
Her son was laughing.
Eve could smell the prominent stink of fear upon the commuters milling around the main terminal of New York's Grand Central Station. The city was freaked, but given the circumstances, could she blame them?
The toad rain ended around thirty minutes after it had begun, followed by random incidents of bizarreness that they had heard about on the radio in the limousine on their way to the station: spontaneous human combustion, stigmata, spectral rape, and myriad other claims that were coming in seemingly by the minute. And if what Doyle was hinting about was even remotely true, this was just the tip of a really nasty iceberg.
Now, perhaps ninety minutes after sunup, she followed the mage as they wound their way through the early morning commuters that seemed paralyzed by the turn of events. Eve was careful to avoid any patches of daylight coming in through Grand Central's high, ornate windows. Fortunately, though the rain of toads had stopped, the more conventional showers continued and the clouds outside meant she didn't have work on it that hard. She had slipped her suede jacket back on, but been careful not to let it get wet.
Announcements were made over the stations PA system, departures and arrivals, but nobody seemed to be going anywhere. The crowd teemed with people unsure of what they ought to be doing. Should they go on with their day-to-day lives? Go to work and ignore the fact that toads had rained down from the sky? Exposure to the preternatural had that effect on some people. When they had gone to bed the night before their perceptions of the world had been solid and clear, but now all that had changed. They had been shown just a hint of the truth that she, Doyle and certain other unsavory types in the paranormal circles had known for most of their lives.
The world was anything but "normal."
Some tried to laugh it off. She could hear them among the crowds that milled about. But beneath their levity she could sense the tension, smell the fear as it took root and prepared to blossom.
Eve sympathized. They were in Manhattan, and thanks to all the nasty shit going down she just knew she was not going to be able to stop at Barney's for a little shopping expedition. It pissed her off. A visit to New York always meant a Barney's trip for her. The last time she had picked up a spectacular silk top and Prada boots that were totally out of fashion now. Doyle dressed well, for a man, but this was because he was a product of his era and not because he had any real appreciation for clothes.
It was a weakness for Eve. She might even have gone so far as to call it an obsession. There was no sin in wanting to dress well, she always said. So few people caught the irony. After all, without her own sins, clothes might never have been invented.
Doyle stopped at the top of the marble staircase that would take them underground, into the subway system.
"We're going down?" she asked, still fascinated by the weird vibe she was picking up from most people within the station.
"Yes," he said, taking hold of the brass railing and beginning to descend. She followed. "Despite Sweetblood's best intentions, a link had been established between the medium, her psychics, and the mage."
Doyle went around a random commuter who stood frozen on the stairs, clutching the handrail as if for dear life. He had been very brief in the car, giving to Squire only their destination, as if he had needed time to process the information that he had obtained at the brownstone. Eve found it particularly nasty that Doyle had to stick his fingers into somebody's brain to find what he was looking for. Better him then her.
Not that she hadn't rooted through her share of viscera in her time. It was only that brains were so grotesquely unpleasant to the touch.
"So you got Sweetblood's location out of the medium's brain?" Eve asked.
"With some minor difficulty, yes," Doyle confirmed.
"Don't you think that was kind of sloppy on your old pal Lorenzo's part?" she asked him curiously. "Leaving that kind of information lying around in somebody's head when he's supposedly all hot and bothered about not being found?"
They reached the bottom of the stairs and proceeded through a pair of double doors into the underground system.
"That is where Sanguedolce's arrogance worked against him," Doyle said.
Eve thought he sounded more than a little arrogant himself. She didn't know what it was with mages, all of them so full of themselves that she was surprised they could fit their swollen heads through their front doors.
"He never believed that another mage would demonstrate the skill necessary to actually track him," Doyle said, grim satisfaction etched upon his face. "And, Heaven forbid that they did, he left a warning that should have successfully ended the trail."
She looked about the platform. There were people waiting, but not half as many as there should have been at this time of the morning. "But Sweetblood wasn't counting on you being the one doing the looking, was he?" she asked, playing with the man's cockiness.