I was hauled onto my feet and pulled along roughly, then lifted by my arms and thrown onto a metal floor. A door slammed. I seemed to be in the back of a vehicle. I couldn’t see anything through the hood they’d pulled over my head; I could hardly breathe through it. My chin ached where it had been ground into the concrete, and my wrists, bound again, chafed in their tight restraints. A big, many-cylindered engine chugged to life. I heard Emma say something, and one of the goons barked, “Shaddap!” and there was a slap, then quiet, as rage coiled in my chest.
The vehicle juddered and shook. No one spoke. Two things occurred to me as we waited for our fate to reveal itself: that these goons must work for Leo, the only person in New York everyone seemed to be afraid of, and that I’d lost my duffel bag. My duffel bag with Abe’s operations log in it. The only thing he’d bothered to keep locked in his secret underground bunker. Full of sensitive information. A near-full accounting of his years as a hollow-hunter. And I had lost track of it.
I’d last had possession of the duffel going into Frankie’s. The tutor must have taken it off me between there and the abandoned theater. Had he looked inside it? Did he know what he had? What was worse: if he threw it away, or if he read it?
Not that any of that mattered now. If these really were Leo’s guys, and he was as terrible as everyone seemed to think he was, I might not live out the day anyway.
The driver hit the brakes hard. I started to slide across the metal floor when a goon grabbed me by the neck. The vehicle stopped and I heard the doors open. We were dragged out, hustled into some kind of building, down a hall, and through a loop entrance so gentle I almost didn’t realize what had happened. Then we were taken outside again, but now our environment felt and sounded different. It was cold, and the street was bustling. We had passed into an older era. The sound of people’s shoes on the pavement was different—harder, because no one wore sneakers. There were cars all around us, and their engines were rougher-sounding, their horns throatier, their exhaust smokier.
When I stumbled twice on uneven pavement, the man who had my arm warned me not to try anything stupid, then tore off the hood before marching me on again. I blinked against the sudden bright daylight, trying to take in the scene and figure out where I was. I knew that my life might depend on a quick escape later.
It was New York, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century—1930s or ’40s, I guessed. The old cars and buses were unmistakable, and every man wore a suit and hat. My captors blended in perfectly here. They’d felt comfortable taking off my hood because they no longer had to worry about me seeing where I was. They probably controlled the whole place. Shouting for help in this loop would’ve done me no good—the goons would’ve killed any normals who gave them trouble. The only things they bothered to hide, so as not to make a scene, were their machine guns, tucked inside newspapers under their arms.
We walked down the street. Nobody seemed to notice us, and I wasn’t sure if that was just the way of New Yorkers, or if people here were trained to ignore Leo’s men because it was better for their health. I tried to look behind me, to see if my friends were there, but that earned me a slap on the back of the head. I could see my captors in front of me and to each side, and I could hear, somewhere to the rear, Dogface and Wreck, talking low.