Her foot struck his neck above the flare of the latissimus. Bones splintered.
The noise was louder than she expected. Below, the chanting ceased. At the same time, she heard a chorus of dull collisions above as more of her brethren landed on the roof. Louder than landings or breaking bone, though, was the rust scream of the door behind her opening.
Who would be so stupid as to open the closed door into an abandoned warehouse when its mate lay unhinged on the floor beside it?
She turned and saw Abelard.
He looked from her, to the vampire on the floor, and back. Few could recognize a man or woman covered by the Blacksuit, but Abelard saw through the layer of her office to the person beneath, and was stunned or foolish enough to call out her name. “Cat!”
The trapdoor behind her exploded. Fortunately, the Blacksuits chose that exact moment to abandon subtlety and burst in through the roof.
*
Lost beyond herself, Tara heard a voice, her mother’s voice almost but deeper. In her left ear it whispered: “Something is wrong.” In her right: “Permit me—”
The world cracked open, and Seril’s voice dissolved into a mess of sea-foam sound. Tara felt as if she had been torn from her body, then realized she was actually being forced back into it. Her flesh felt tight about her soul, like a dress shrunken in the wash.
The Guardians would not have interrupted the ceremony. They must have been disturbed.
Attacked.
Tara needed to help them. To help Her.
She realized with a tremor of fear that she was thinking of Seril in capital letters.
*
As the rosary guided Abelard to the waterfront, he had noticed that every Blacksuit in the city was going his way. They flitted from shadow to shadow down side streets, or leapt across the rooftops, featherlight footfalls filling the night with a sound like rapid beating wings.
When his carriage arrived at the broken warehouse, Blacksuits writhing on its roof like maggots upon old meat, he swallowed hard, threw the horse its pay, and ran toward the abandoned loading dock. He expected imminent arrest, but either Justice’s attention was elsewhere or the Blacksuits deemed his arrival part of a larger plan. Great birds of shadow bristling the buildings above, they watched him stumble and fall, panting, through the warehouse’s one standing door, just as Cat broke Captain Pelham’s neck.
Unthinking, Abelard cried out her name, but his voice was lost amid the crack of shattered stone as gargoyles erupted from the floor.
Talons out and wings flared, the great beasts leapt for Cat, but Blacksuits rained through the ceiling to repulse them. Battle was joined. Within it Cat darted and struck, locked in combat with a giant tiger-headed gargoyle who wore a torque of glimmering silver.
Abelard’s tracking rosary pointed straight ahead. Fear quickened in his stomach and caught in his lungs, or perhaps that was cigarette smoke.
He could hide, watch, and wait for this to pass. The Blacksuits would take care of everything. That was their purpose: to protect and defend. But in the last two days, he had spent too long hiding, watching, and waiting.
He remembered the dry, wooden snap of Raz Pelham’s breaking, spine and a strange thought rose from the chaos of his mind: who were the Blacksuits protecting, and from what?
Tara was somewhere inside that maelstrom.
He ran in after her.
*
Pressure and confinement ushered Tara back to consciousness. She found herself in the warehouse basement, cradled in a male Blacksuit’s unyielding arms. Before she could object, he bent his legs and leapt twenty feet into the air.
She struggled in his iron grip as they reached the apex of their flight. About her and below the Guardians were locked in battle, gray blurs afflicted with parasites of black. Seril’s children were losing. Blacksuits grabbed their wings, locked their arms, and pulled them to the slab floor.
Tara was weak, denied starlight by this damned cloud cover, but she had tricks at her disposal, especially against enemies like these who seldom fought a Craftswoman. As her captor prepared to land, she twisted her right arm around, and grazed with her palm the sculpted precision of his external obliques. The Blacksuit was divine in origin, thus too tightly woven to easily dismantle, but divine Craft was still Craft. She drank it in.
She could draw only a miniscule amount of power, but that was enough. The Blacksuit’s enhanced leg muscles went slack. Instead of landing he collapsed, and Tara pitched from his arms, falling unceremoniously on her face.
As she rose to a crouch a flailing gargoyle shook a Blacksuit off his arm, hurtling the servant of Justice toward her. Dodging, she careened into a downed Guardian who bucked and clawed as six Blacksuits bent a thick, flexible band of iron around his wings. She scrabbled away on hands and feet like a crab, breathing hard. Near the battle’s edge, her fingers touched something soft and cold behind her, wrapped in cloth. A human body.
Turning, she saw Captain Pelham, splintered bone protruding from the skin of his neck. His mouth worked without sound, but his red eyes recognized her.
“Shit,” she said, her first word since wakening. Glancing about, ready to duck or dodge, Tara squatted over Raz’s shoulders, worked her left hand beneath his throat, and peeled free the skin wedged between the flagstones. She placed her right hand over his broken spine, then pressed down with her full weight and pulled up at the same time. Raz’s body flopped like a landed fish, but she heard the cheerful pop of bone settling, more or less, into its proper position. Close enough for his own formidable powers to heal the rest.
A hand fell on her shoulder. Swinging around she saw first the Blacksuit, then the woman within. Cat, wrapped in Justice’s embrace.
Tara’s second word after awakening was the same as her first.
You will surrender, the suit said in a voice scarcely like Cat’s own. You are accused of collaboration and conspiracy to commit murder. Around them gargoyles fell, wrestled to the ground by superior numbers. Iron bonds were fitted and locked around wings and arms and legs. Tight clamps held fanged mouths closed. Tara smelled burnt flesh and stone.
“They’re innocent!” She pulled ineffectually against Cat’s grip. “They haven’t committed any crime but hiding from you.”
The Stone Men are accused of conspiracy to commit murder. They will be tried. Cat leaned close to Tara’s face. As will you.
Tara called upon the Craft and prepared to fight, to free herself whatever the consequences, but the opportunity never came.
Abelard crashed into Cat from behind in a flare of orange and brown robes, ripping her hand from Tara’s arm. Tara saw him frozen in time, eyes wide, cigarette clenched between his bared teeth. A tracking rosary dangled from his fist.
A Blacksuit tackled him. Tara leapt to his defense, blind with fury and adrenaline, her knife out and her power drawn about her.
Cat’s fist struck her in the cheek.
The force of impact lifted Tara off the floor. A host of fireflies obscured her vision, and scattered when she hit the ground shoulders first.
Breath left her in a rush. Cat settled like a sack of wet sand on her chest, threading an iron band around Tara’s arms and beneath her back as she thrashed, a netted wild thing. She heard a click and the metal tightened, pressing against her skin until her bones creaked.
Tara saw the last of the gargoyles fall. Blacksuits wrestled Aev and David to the floor bare feet from one another, and bound them. Groans of pain and the muffled expletive aftermath of combat mingled with the Blacksuits’ calm, scraping voices as they recounted to each captive the crimes of which they were accused.
Cat gathered Tara in her arms and stood. Other Blacksuits lifted Abelard, squirming and likewise restrained, and Captain Pelham, who hung limp though his neck was mostly healed.