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Raph wasn’t worried.
The police knew that the suspect with the abducted seven-month-old was on one of two subway lines: the M or the E. They had officers at every station along them and at all the lines connecting to them, from Bryant Park to Jackson Heights.
The perp had a history of violent drug offenses and erratic behavior. The cops knew just when the man had burst into his ex’s apartment, breaking through both the latch on the door and the restraining order barring him from being anywhere near the place. Broke the grandma’s jaw while he was at it, from the sound of the APB, all while his ex was at work.
Took the kid, punched the old woman who tried to stop him, grabbed an infant carrier, and was gone—he and the kid both swallowed by the freezing mist of a December night.
In Queens, though, it’s hard to disappear. A half-dozen witnesses watched him descend into the Court Square subway station.
This one was going to be an easy collar for the cops; it was just a matter of time before they caught him. Nightwatcher didn’t need to get involved. He let the urgent chatter of grainy voices on the police radio wash over him, waiting for the inevitable patter of victory. Suspect detained, the kid recovered. All in a day’s work. The police would be patting themselves on their backs and hitting the nearest bar for celebratory beers in no time. Meanwhile, Nightwatcher would be on guard for anyone else who might take advantage of law enforcement’s distraction.
But that victory didn’t come. Seconds stretched into long, chilly minutes, then into a numbing hour. And still, no suspect. No kid.
It was like he’d just vanished.
Where the fuck did this dude go?
Raph shifted uncomfortably in the Nightwatcher suit. He’d been still for too long, watching, waiting. The metal plating reflected the misty orange glow from the streetlamps below, but the thing wasn’t very well-insulated, and the bitter chill leeched in, pushing Raph’s hands and feet from a low throb into actual, tingling pain.
He wasn’t in a great mood to begin with. They were coming up on the second Christmas without Leo.
The first time around, they’d at least had his letters. They were all penned in blue ink (of course!) in that ridiculously regular looping handwriting Mikey jokingly called “Leo-font” and postmarked from the other side of the world—Japan, South Korea, Malaysia. Mikey had pinned them up on the corkboard while Donnie had hung lights. Raph and Splinter tried to straighten the tree April had brought in from its awkward lean. They’d really tried that first year. They’d tried to pretend everything was normal and that it was, in fact, a merry Christmas. That Leo would be home soon.
This year was different. No letters. No lights. No tree. Still no Leo. Was he coming home at all?
Either way, they were done pretending. Through unspoken agreement, it seemed like they’d all come to conclude that it would be less painful if they just pretended it wasn’t Christmas at all. Let the topside-New York deck the halls or whatever. The sewers didn’t change much.
It was about the only thing they could agree on these days. “I don’t need this shit!” Raph had yelled at Donnie earlier that night when his brother had asked, tone weighted with judgment, just where exactly Raph was going.
Raph had erupted. “I don’t need anyone lookin’ over my shoulder every freaking minute. I didn’t need Leo doing it, and I sure as hell don’t need you!”
Raph’s chest tightened at the memory—the flash of hurt in Donnie’s eyes before it hardened into steel, the set of Donnie’s jaw as Raph turned from him and stalked toward the exit.
Mikey was standing there in his atrocious Cowabunga Carl getup, the bulbous mask grinning grotesquely at Raph even as Mikey’s wide eyes held a pleading expression. Shame flared, but it didn’t dampen the anger, and he’d brushed by his brother without a word, the tang of regret already souring his stomach.
Don’t need you.
Had he said that? He hadn’t meant it like that. He just didn’t need a damn babysitter. He didn’t want to do as they had—curling into their small, little lives. Donnie and his inane tech support job. Mikey and those demeaning kids’ parties. Maybe they were content to be pressed into the sewer mud, like Splinter apparently wanted. But Raph needed something more. He needed to be useful! He needed to be… needed.
Don’t need you.
He rolled his shoulders, feeling the pop of tight ligaments, stiff from the cold. Fat lotta good he was doing right now. Useful? Hell, he was just as helpless as the police. There was a violent man, probably high as fuck, with a baby out there somewhere, and he was doing jackshit about it.
But what could he do? It’s not like he knew where this asshole had taken the kid. He had one subway stop, maybe two, before the net descended. They should have caught ‘im by now. He just couldn’t have made it that far by train.
Unless he didn’t go by train.
It was Donnie’s voice in his head—a nagging whisper that Raph shook away. It was stupid. Why’d anyone go into a subway station just to not take the subway?
Think logically. Donnie’s voice returned, carrying that sharp edge he used when he was done waiting for his brothers to catch up. There was another option.
“Get the fuck outta my head,” Raph mumbled to the voice, crossing his arms over Nightwatcher’s metal plating as if denying entry.
But, damn… Wait, the Donnie in his head was right. Raph’s breath quickened as a memory blossomed—a memory from years ago when four pre-teen turtles escaped the sewers to explore the subways in the wee hours. Court Square station was an old one. And it had more than just the M and the E lines. Far back in its recesses, there was a forgotten metal door, a rusty padlock, and an ancient, long-abandoned access tunnel north to Queensbridge.
Crap.
It might be nothing. It was probably nothing. But the image of that door itched in his mind.
Damn it.
It would be fastest to get there by sewer. Nightwatcher spun across the wet, graveled roof and swung down the fire escape, making more noise than a ninja strictly should, but there was a cost to that much plating and leather. Now at street level, he melted into the shadows and disappeared down the nearest manhole.
The sight that greeted him when he slid past the milling police at Court Square subway station was just as grim as he’d feared. Beyond a tangle of piping and old masonry, through a gap tight enough that he scraped his armor on his way through, that old access door stood ajar. The padlock lay in pieces in a pool of foul brown seepage at its base. The door’s flaking green paint showed scrape marks of bolt cutters under his twin helmet lights.
It wasn’t proof that the man had escaped this way. There was no telling when the padlock had been cut. All Raph had was a broken lock and a bad feeling.
He slipped through the door.
The depth of blackness that greeted him was absolute. But Raph had grown up in tunnels like these. His helmet lights cut two bright circles onto the stone walls and the muck of silty flood-remnant at his feet. After the bitter cold of the surface, the temperature felt uncomfortably balmy.
Raph hefted the Nightwatcher’s manriki-gusari in either hand, the clink of chains resounding from tunnel walls. He began walking.
For many long minutes, all that could be heard was the squish of mud under Raph’s booted feet and the distant rumbling of subway trains overhead. The air of the tunnel pressed in against his suit, thick with the smell of mildew and wet stone. He was clearly not the only one to have been down here. Trails of footprints mingled, then diverged. Raph could not tell if any were fresh. The detritus of human habitation lay along the sides—old beer cans and torn plastic bags. The occasional bright flash of graffiti caught in the headlamps.
But, from what he could tell, he was alone.
What was he thinking? Why hadn’t he called in the tunnel access and left the rest to the cops? It had probably been a couple of hours now. If the guy had made it to the unguarded F line at Queensbridge, he could be anywhere in the city. Or outside it altogether. This hunt was a needle in a haystack, and Raph was just following a long-dead trail. Useless. Completely fucking useless.
And that’s when he heard the singing.
At first, it was just an echo, barely discernible above the subway thrum from the tunnels above. But gradually, it became more distinct—someone singing way out of tune, some kind of old 80s torch song from what Raph could tell. He dimmed his helmet lights and loped quietly forward until the sound became clear. Then Raph extinguished the lights altogether and backed himself up against a steel support trestle.
Down the tunnel from the other direction, a pinprick of blue-white light grew—a cell phone flashlight that bobbed and weaved. The singing arched into a broken falsetto, then crashed. Raph heard the person cough wetly and spit, then resume the song in a lower register. As the figure neared, Raph made out a vague shape of a thin man, cell phone in one hand. In the other hand, he hefted a baby carrier, the kind that fits into a car seat.
Raph swallowed, pulled back, and waited. He slowed his breathing, let his thoughts go, and relaxed his body, trusting to his training and experience. When the man reeled in front of him, Raph swept his manriki-gusari forward, smooth and low. The steel chains glinted in the light of the man’s cell phone as they snaked around his legs, yanking him off his feet with a terrified scream. But Raph had no time to pin him down; he leaped for the baby carrier, catching it in mid-fall, wrapping his suited body around the thing to stabilize it.
Panicked bleats and gasps came from the mud behind him. Raph, partway uncurled, turned on his helmet lights to look inside the carrier.
No baby. Just a Bacardi bottle, half an inch of amber liquor still swirling at the bottom.
The sight was a gutpunch.
“Raaugh!” Raph whirled with a snarl at the man squirming in the mud, trying to wriggle his feet out of the chain. He picked the man bodily up by the neck and slammed him against the tunnel wall.
“Where’s the kid?” he growled.
“Kkhhhrgh,” the man shuddered under Raph’s gloved hand, and Raph remembered only belatedly to loosen his hold enough so the man could talk.
The man gasped and writhed, but Raph’s hold did not loosen more than enough to allow him to take a wrenching breath. The man struggled vainly, then seemed to think better of it. His body went suddenly loose and slack in Raph’s grip, his head lolling to the side as he caught his breath and took a look at his assailant.
Raph imagined what he must see in the reflective visor, a wan face and pale eyes. Straw-colored hair matted with mud and plastered against his forehead. Raph could smell the rum on his breath even through the helmet.
“Where is he?” Raph shouted, shaking the man a little.
And, to his horror, the man started to giggle.
“Gonna show her. Gonna show her,” he breathed in a delighted sing-song. “She wants to keep me away from my son? My boy? I’m gonna show her what it feels like.” He grinned sloppily into Raph’s visor. Almost like they were old drinking buddies. “I’m gonna show her,” he trilled again, blinking.
Raph wanted to smash his face in. There was a seven-month-old baby out there somewhere. Out in this wilderness of cold, wet concrete. And here was this man laughing. On some fucking revenge spree with a helpless baby as his victim, and he was laughing.
Raph’s fingers twitched. Tightened. The grin fell from the man’s face as he stuttered for breath again, his eyes bugging out a little.
It would feel so good to squeeze.
Hey, there, brother. Ease up there a little, huh?
Leo. That was Leo’s voice—something Raph hadn’t heard in almost two years. Raph gasped, sucking in a sharp breath. His grip on the man’s throat relaxed a bit.
Catch more flies with honey, you know?
“I’m not trying to catch flies, dumbass,” Raph mumbled to his absent brother. He shouldn’t have to listen to Leo’s advice anymore. Leo left. He was gone. Raph could handle this himself.
You have an objective, Not-Leo insisted. Nothing is more important in this moment than that baby. Get him to talk. You need him talking. Try agreeing with him.
Raph felt a grimace of disgust ripple across his face under Nightwatcher’s visor. But he swallowed in a breath and stepped back, letting his hand drop from the man’s throat.
Suddenly unsupported, the man slid down the slime of the wall, landing with a wet plop in the muck.
“Well, that makes sense,” Raph forced out the words to the inebriated man now heaped at his feet. He reached down and began unwinding the manriki-gusari chain around the man’s ankles. “Makes sense you’d want to… to show her.”
“Yeah,” the man nodded in relief. “Just to show her.”
“What it feels like,” Raph prompted.
“Yeah,” the high-pitched giggle was back. Manriki-gusari forgotten. Drinking buddies once more. “Show her what it feels like.” The man leaned his head back against the damp wall, his eyes falling shut.
Sheesh. How much had this guy had?
“So, uh. Where’d you stash the kid?” Raph tried, tentatively. He pushed down the rage in his gut and kept going. “Somewhere she’d never think to look, I bet.” He forced a lightness into his voice and turned his back to the wall so he leaned next to the man instead of facing him. He tried pretending this was Casey, and they were just shooting the shit on the fire escape. He had a big surprise for April, and Raph was just asking where he’d hidden it. So casual. Just nice and easy. “Somewhere smart is my guess,” he encouraged.
“Oh, yeah.” The man’s head drifted to the side again, in Raph’s direction, as if the two were sharing a secret. “She’ll never think of it.” He smirked sloppily, then continued, slurring his words. “We went there ‘gether, before the kid was born, on her day off. But she’ll never, never think of it.” The man tapped his head lazily with a forefinger.
“Pretty clever, man,” Raph affirmed, but he was getting worried. The man seemed to be fading fast. He shoved his shoulder. “So tell me. Just between you and me, dude. Where’d you leave him?”
At first, Raph thought he wasn’t going to answer. That stupid fucking smile was back. But then the giggle started again, and the man opened his eyes, gazing blearily into the Nightwatcher mask. “The hospital. Left ‘im at the hospital. With the angels. At the hospital.” His eyes slid heavily shut again. “He’s with the angels now.”
Raph breathed with relief. The hospital? If the kid was at a hospital, then he was safe.
“Hey, what hospital?” Raph reached to shake the man, but he slumped over bonelessly and was unresponsive. “What hospital?” Shit. The man was breathing, barely. Raph peeled off one glove and checked the man’s pulse. Present. But he’d passed out and wasn’t waking up any time soon. Crap.
Raph stood straight and turned on his police radio, but all that met him was a storm of static. He was too far underground. He needed to get up top. If the kid were at a hospital, then all Raph would need to do is call in an anonymous tip about the location of the perp, and call it a night.
Raph didn’t even bother to zip-tie the man. He wasn’t going anywhere, and Raph had a call to make. He resisted the urge to kick the unconscious man for good measure, then turned once more to the tunnel leading north.
Raph took off at a brisk training-speed trot, and the floor of the tunnel sloped gradually upward. As he ran, the police radio stammered into a more coherent transmission.
“Fffffsssshht…scriptions of the suspect…ffffsssht…calling in backup for alternative locatio….ffffsssshht…Amber alert…sssssssssst...copy that.”
The hope that had boosted Raph’s spirit came crashing down. The baby was still missing.
Raph emerged from a similar green door at Queensbridge station and turned to kick it shut, releasing a resounding thwunk and an anguished screech of metal from the hinges. He breathed through his teeth, then leaned forward to lay his forehead against the door and retrieve his T-phone from its pouch at his side.
The anonymous call went quickly. He gave the man’s location, his condition, and the presence of an empty baby carrier. And his words… at a hospital. With the angels. And then Raph hung up. Let them try and figure it out.
After making the call, he climbed back to rooftop level, where the bitter cold bit at him again. It almost felt good after all that musty dark. If he could only think! The closest hospital was across the East River on the F line—New York Presbyterian. But if the baby were there, they’d know. They'd damn well know. Had the man lied to him? Just been making shit up to avoid being throttled? It made him half want to turn back just to use the man’s face as a punching bag.
Raph ripped off his helmet, letting the cutting cold breeze from off the harbor push against him. He crouched, digging his fingers into his scalp. What did he mean? What was all that angel shit? Was the baby already dead? Is that what he meant by with the angels? No baby was going to survive long on his own out in this cold, so he might as well be dead, angels or not.
“FUCK!” Raph screamed at the low, orange sky.
Dude. You gotta chill.
Mikey. Mikey’s voice now, light and soothing.
Perfect. Raph rolled his eyes. “I’m not gonna chill, Mikey,” Raph spoke aloud. “There’s a baby out there somewhere.”
That’s why you gotta get your head together, bro. You gotta think about it from a different angle. See things from someone else’s point of view for a change.
“I don’t want to see anything from the point of view of that sick fuck!”
But Raph’s mind was already working, even as his fingers dug deeper until the green skin of his skull. The mom of that baby must be terrified right now. Utterly freaking out. Who wouldn’t be? But however many months ago, things musta been different. She went somewhere with that man. But why would you go to a hospital on your day off? And what kind of freakish hospital has angels?
A hospital with a graveyard.
What kind of hospital has an actual graveyard?
A really, really old one.
The world shifted. Focused.
And suddenly, Raph knew exactly where that baby was.
And he knew that he could get there the fastest.
It would be a three-minute ride plastered to the top of an F-line subway car and then a four-minute sprint. But Raph called it in anyway as he ran. Another anonymous tip for the police.
The baby was at the Roosevelt Island Smallpox Hospital.
The brief subway ride was a dizzy, breathless blur, then he was out again in the night air. Distant sirens wailed as he flung himself south from the Roosevelt Island subway station and toward the ruins, eschewing secrecy for speed. He felt his muscles burn. Running all-out in the Nightwatcher outfit was a bitch, but it would take too long to peel the thing off. His own breath was heavy in his ears.
The bulk of the old hospital rose before him. Constructed before the Civil War, abandoned after half a century of use, its stone walls now loomed eerily over the southern tail of Roosevelt Island, gaping windows staring like empty eye sockets southwards towards New York Harbor. Roofless, its gothic arches pointed skyward. Tonight, it was aglow in reflected cloudlight from the surrounding city—misty and isolated with water lapping on both sides. Between worlds.
The last time he’d been here was with his brothers some summer night long ago that tasted, in his memory, of laughter and teasing. Back then, the place had seemed just another of New York's haunted oddities, the personal playground of four reckless young turtles when the rest of the narrow East River island had gone to bed.
How many smallpox-infected New Yorkers had died here? How many children lie buried in the graveyard at the building’s base, looked over only by stone angels? In the summer, the place could be reimagined. A site for picnics, for strolls, for days off from work to admire the ruins when disease and death seemed far away, just a story. But this was December, a deadly cold one. And Raph did not know how long the baby had been left there, exposed to the elements.
Angels. He and his brothers hadn’t spent much time at the graveyard, those years ago, favoring the high-wire maze of beams and turrets the old ruin offered to show off their flips and leaps. But now, Raph vaulted over the rickety iron gate at the northwest corner, landing among jutting, broken stubs of marble. He swung his head, scanning with his helmet lights for anything resembling an angel. But everything was so overgrown… weeds and ivy. How was he to…?
A trampled patch of grass caught the beams of light. A small headstone. A worn and decayed angel carved into its top. And below, partially buried in wet leaves, the white of a flannel onesie.
Raphael dove for the bundle. The baby lay face down, but he scooped him up, carefully supporting the neck, and turned him around, clumsily wiping mud and leaves away from the small, pale face with his Nightwatcher gloves. Was the baby breathing? He couldn’t tell through his mask, so Raph ripped it from his head and let it fall into the weeds. The baby’s eyes were tight shut, his lips bluish in the night’s cloudglow. Then he gave a squirm and a pathetic, exhausted attempt at a whimper, and Raph knew he was alive.
The onesie was soaked. Raph ripped off his gauntlets and gloves, fussing a moment with the tiny snaps, and then gently peeled the baby’s little arms and legs out of the freezing thing. He had to get him warm.
Holding the baby in one arm, Raph undid the buckles on one side of this chestplate and ripped it roughly loose so that he could hold the baby to the warmth of his plastron, tucking his chin over the child’s soft head. Raph melted down to kneel on the ground and focused on pouring as much of his own warmth as he could into the small body. Donnie had said that, thanks to their mutation, they were partially warm-blooded, and he ferociously willed his heat into the child. How long had it lain there? How long had it cried with no one to hear?
The baby whimpered again and moved a little, as if trying to edge even closer to Raphael.
“You’re okay. I’ve gotchya. I’ve gotchya, now.” Raph spoke gently into the small head. Blue and red lights danced against the dilapidated wall behind him, the sirens coming close. “You’re gonna be okay.”
Raph felt tears roll down his face. He gave the child a surreptitious kiss on the top of his head. “You’re not alone anymore, ya hear me? You got people who love ya. They’ve been looking for ya. They’ve missed ya, and they’ll be so, so happy to have you back. You’re gonna be okay.”
They were finally there—an ambulance and a half-dozen police cars careened over the muddy field and swerved to a halt.
Unwilling to let the child be exposed to the cold again, Raph ripped out the leather lining from the inner chestplate of his suit and wrapped the child with it. The baby squirmed and mewled again. Then Raph once more donned his mask and gloves, hopped the fence with the baby tucked in tight to his side, and walked forward into the swirl of emergency lights. He stalked toward the nearest, shocked paramedic and pushed the baby into her hands before disappearing again into the shadows.
When Raphael staggered home to the lair, his Nightwatcher gear lay ripped and mud-smeared but safely in hiding. The gray light of pre-dawn crept over the Atlantic.
In his arms, he carried a tree. It was a small fir, maybe three feet if he was being generous, and its branches were broken and bent all on one side, so it was lopsided. Which was probably why he’d spotted it on his way home, lying in an alley, tossed away by some disappointed NYC Christmas tree salesman who didn’t want to take the time to dispose of the thing properly. But it would look okay in the lair if he moved the couch over a bit and backed it up against a wall.
It would be something. Some kinda Christmas, anyway. Even if maybe not the one they hoped for. One with Leo.
For now, he grabbed a bucket, put a few inches of water in it, and stuck the tree’s stump inside, leaning its top against the wall. It could wait until he had a little sleep.
Raph wasn’t surprised to see the computer light coming from beneath the door to Donnie’s lab. He stood at the door for a minute, resting his forehead against it and feeling its coolness. But in the end, he turned without a word toward the kitchen. Ripping off one of the scrap papers from a stack Mikey used for grocery lists, and finding the stub of a pencil in the junk drawer, he sat at the kitchen table and wrote:
I do need you. Both of you. All of you. I remembered that tonight. I’m sorry. —R
He left it by the coffee maker, where Mikey and Donnie would be sure to find it.
And then, aching through to his marrow both with weariness and with some other kind of emotion that he was just too damn tired actually to name, Raphael went to bed.