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Chapter Eleven
Our group settled in to grim silence as we left Chelsea.
O’Brian, who had remained remarkably calm during the entire confrontation, was the first person to speak up. “In all my goddamn years, I ain’t never seen a damn thing like this.” He shook his head in sad disbelief. “When did we become cops who did nothin’ while people get shot?”
Mercedes must have known I wasn’t in any mood to comfort him or answer questions, so she replied, “There wasn’t anything we could have done. It’s not like they would have recognized or respected our authority.”
“But we just stood there. We didn’t help. We just…we stood there.”
“If we’d fired first, more people would have died,” Tyler added. “It wasn’t a fair fight.”
It still wasn’t.
With twenty-one necromancers scattered throughout the city, I was beginning to think we were on the losing end of an unfair battle. They were mortal enough, I’d proven as much, but once they figured out I was coming for them, they would rally their troops. Things were going to get tough very quickly.
It was hard for me to think about fighting, when it all felt terribly pointless. While I knew, deep down, I would do whatever it took to protect my city, I was also seeing my worst fears realized.
I hadn’t wanted to involve my loved ones in dangerous situations because I didn’t want them to share my risk. The life I’d chosen to lead was not an easy one, and I didn’t want to risk losing the people I cared about if they became collateral damage. Slowly I’d begun to let them help. I’d allowed people in where before I would have fought alone.
Tonight, I was reminded why I’d chosen the lonely path to begin with. Keaty was dead, and it was my fault. He might have agreed to come along of his own free will, but I was the one who had put him in harm’s way, and without me, he’d still be safe in his brownstone.
I ruined lives.
The distance from Chelsea to Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t far, but we had already spent hours that night wandering from one end of the city to the other. Though New York was a pedestrian city by nature, it didn’t mean we weren’t starting to feel the exertion. My feet were sore, and I didn’t need to check the time to know we were running out of nighttime hours. I should have directed everyone to my small apartment where we could wait out the night in relative security.
The apartment was safeguarded by a number of supernatural elements, and though it wasn’t a perfect system, it would definitely keep the risen at bay. But we still had at least an hour before I had to get really worried, and the Dirt Hog Roadhouse was a mere three blocks from my house. I’d passed it before in my walks through the city and never gave it much thought.
Now it was the only thing on my mind.
Finding it turned out to not be such a difficult task at all.
We rounded the corner onto 8th Street, where the bar was located, and I stopped dead, forcing everyone behind me to halt as well. In the middle of 8th was a massive grouping of Harley Davidson motorcycles, all parked in tidy lines with their chrome accents glimmering in the light of a nearby fire.
These bikes were in such perfect condition it was clear no one had touched them during the exodus from the city or the following descent into lawlessness. Which suggested to me the folks who owned these bikes were more frightening than the other criminal elements within the city, and that meant one thing.
Necro biker gang.
I thought of Jock’s leather, and it occurred to me I hadn’t paid too much attention to it. Was he wearing colors—a sign of his gang affiliation? He might have been, but I hadn’t noticed.
As we got closer I noticed each of the bikes was marked with the Jolly Roger, a skull and crossbones. From within the bar across the street, the sound of a rowdy party echoed out into the otherwise-silent night. The lights of the roadhouse were off, but the shifting orange of fire suggested they’d found another source of illumination for their festivities.
At hearing the fun they were having, my anger returned to a rolling boil.
Who were these assholes, to be in the throes of a wild night of drinking and bad behavior, when one of their own had stolen someone precious to me? I ached to claim one of the automatic weapons we had in our possession and perforate the bar with bullet holes. But I was also a pragmatist. I needed someone in this bar to tell me where the other necros were. There was no way all twenty-one of my remaining targets were inside like sitting ducks.
“Are we planning on going in there?” Tyler asked.
“Did you have a better idea?” I checked the clip of my gun to see how many bullets I had left.
“I do,” Reggie suggested. “How about not going in there?”
“You losing your nerve?” I kept my weapon out, knowing there was no sense in holstering it if I was going into the lion’s den. “I never thought I’d see a vampire who was afraid of a few humans.”
“If I wasn’t afraid of humans who could do this, I wouldn’t be very smart.” He indicated the mess around us, and I had to give him props for standing up for himself. He was right, this was the kind of messed-up situation where even the undead like Reggie, Clementine and Holden ought to be worried.
These bikers wielded a great deal of power, and that wasn’t something to mess with.
“Have you been here before?” I turned my attention to O’Brian, not wanting to debate the merits of courage versus cowardice with Reggie.
