It was hard to see through the smoke, and I stumbled back as I tried to think of a plan. Nothing came to mind other than beating Zombie Connor down, but I was reluctant to do that. I stopped when I backed into the wall of windows. I glanced over my shoulder in an effort to find one of the handles, but when my hand found one, the handle bit me. Luckily it was my one gloved hand, but it still hurt. I screamed in pain and Zombie Connor rushed me.
“Give me the bat,” the rotting corpse said, and started prying it from me.
“No!” I shouted. “I’m too young to have my brains eaten!”
“Just give me the bat!”
I held on as tight as I could, but it was no use. Connor’s two hands were stronger than my single one that held the bat. He was strong for a zombie. He tore it away from me and raised it over his head to strike me. Of all the ways I had imagined my death, getting beaten by my zombified mentor while trapped by a cannibalistic window handle wasn’t one of them.
Zombie Connor’s blow never came. He swung the bat down in a fluid arc, but he went wide and smashed through a section of the window. The tiny metal fangs I felt biting into my glove let go, and I pulled my hand away, nursing it while the zombie went to town on the rest of the window. When the one section of the frame was clear of glass, he tossed me my bat, his hand still attached to it as it flew through the air at me.
Zombie Connor looked out the window, then back at me before his eyes melted away.
“Hope you can swim, kid,” he said. He ran for the gaping hole in the window and leapt out. Seconds later, I heard a splash. I could burn to death up here or I could take my chances leaping into zombie-infested waters. I opted for the water when the sleeve of my coat started to smolder. I took one last look at the warehouse full of burning fish and leapt out the window, hoping I could at least use the rotting zombie as a flotation device.
25
Once I hit the water, whatever glamour was being caused by the traps in Cyrus’s warehouse flew away. Connor was already swimming for the shore and I was relieved to see that his flesh wasn’t rotting and his hand was still attached. I could only imagine the amount of paperwork I would have had to fill out if I’d clubbed my partner to death.
Not finding Cyrus here meant that he was still at large, which made me increasingly nervous-especially for Jane. He and whoever he was working with had trapped me so easily. I realized that I really needed to step up my game of Jane and Go Seek before he or the Sectarians found her.
The next morning, Connor and I had the Inspectre send Greater amp; Lesser Arcana to check out the remains of the warehouse while the two of us filled out mountains of forms regarding the incident. When the investigators returned, the best they had come up with were a few burned pieces that might have been vaguely fish shaped, but could just as easily have been vaguely blob shaped, too. With no leads on that front, I snuck out of the office and headed out to deal with Jane.
I made sure I wasn’t followed to the Upper East Side. When Jane opened the door to her hotel room, I was glad to see she had used the chain across the door as a precautionary measure. It meant she was starting to be cautious, rather than being the slightly naпve girl I had dined with at Davidson’s insistence. When Jane saw it was me, she looked relieved and let me in.
“Why do you smell like smoke?”
“Long story,” I said. “Let’s just get you moved again. I’ll tell you on the way.”
We quickly packed her things and rode silently in a cab to a new hotel, far west in Chelsea, finally giving me the opportunity to slip her journal into the bottom of one of her bags as I helped her unpack. The relief of giving up that guilty burden was tangible, and despite my near death last night, and the danger of Jane’s current situation, I found that helping her was actually a small oasis of fun. Once we were done unpacking, I sat down and told her about my brush with death at the hands of Cyrus’s fire trap.
“My God,” she said with genuine concern. The look on her face was far more sincere that I’d expected from a recently exiled cultist. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, then remembered all the fish art that had been on display at the warehouse, not to mention the stolen fish from Irene’s that we had chased all the way back to Jane’s old employers.
“Do you recall anything from your time with the Sectarians about a fish?” I asked, hoping for something useful.
Jane thought it over a moment and then shook her head. “For a while, we had a lot of fish coming in. I remember the one you were after, but I’m afraid they kept me in the dark as to what they do. I only received and processed the shipments. Sorry.”
I was disappointed, and she saw it on my face.
“We kept pretty accurate records, though,” she added encouragingly. “You’d be surprised what OCD sticklers Sectarians can be about keeping track of things. They’re like the Felix Ungers of the cultist world.”
Maybe there was something useful in that, and I wrinkled my brow while I thought about it.
After I had been silent for several minutes, Jane spoke up again. “You okay?”
I snapped out of my thoughts, none the wiser about what to do. Jane’s concern for me was touching, but it was me who should have been concerned about her.
“How’s your recovery coming?” I asked.
Jane struck a superheroic pose, hands on hips. “Nothing short of miraculous, thanks to that bag of mystical healing thingies you left with me. I’m running out, though.”
I doubted I could easily get access to another emergency kit in a hurry. I still hadn’t told anyone in the Department that I was secretly nursing Jane back to health.
When I said nothing, she said, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking for anything more. You’ve done more than enough already…it’s just that I’m kinda dwindling my savings here…”
I still wasn’t sure how to help Jane other than hiding her, but maybe if I got her out and about, we’d hatch some kind of plan.
“Let’s get you out of here,” I said, “go for a little walk, see how well you’re healed up. I’ve got a couple of errands to run anyway.”
Jane looked a little frightened by the prospect. She hadn’t really stepped foot from the hotels I had been moving her to. “You sure it’s okay?”
I nodded. I doubted anyone from the Department would run into us, and none of the Sectarians would probably do anything during daylight hours if they saw us either. Plus, I had made sure that no one had followed us downtown.
“C’mon,” I said. “It’ll be fun. We can try to one-up each other over who’s been more damaged lately-you for falling off of the roof or me from smoke inhalation.”
The metallic blue-checkered framework of Manhattan Super-Storage took up the entire northeast corner of Twenty-Third Street and Tenth Avenue. The sun shone off the boxy building, casting streaks of light from its many windows down onto the sizable crowd gathered out front. I led Jane into the throng as she looked around warily but with a growing good humor in her eyes.
“What is all this?” she asked.
Storage places were never this busy normally, but this was no normal day. The sidewalk was awash with an almost street-fair-like atmosphere-full of food carts, performers, and people pressed together tight like books on a shelf. The scent of grilled meat and roasted corn rose off the food vendors and filled the air with mouthwatering goodness, but I pushed aside all thoughts of getting a bite. Eating could wait.
“These things keep getting trendier and trendier.” I sighed.
A small table was set up by the entrance to three of the loading bays, and I walked over, found my name, and signed in. The bays themselves had been closed off and turned into a common feeder line that wove around a variety of tables. Each was covered in plentiful piles of other people’s belongings. The rest of the crowd, those who hadn’t signed up in advance, lurked near the line in the hopes of getting a chance to browse as well.