Blackout

6

Boggle was not the game old people played, because wouldn’t that have been too easy?

What it turned out to be was a nine-foot-tall mudencrusted, humanoid lizard that weighed about five hundred pounds, had pumpkin orange eyes full of fury, and about six cute little kiddies to make the whole thing a party.

“You said she was a mom,” I hissed at Leandros from behind a tree. The boggle, Ms. Boggle, whatever name she went by, had just tossed another tree, a complete tree from roots to top that she pulled up out of the ground with no effort whatsoever, at us. She’d missed by inches. In this situation, as in all situations, inches mattered; they could embarrass you and they could make or break you. I was leaning toward embarrassment as the better choice.

Leandros was unperturbed by the trees sailing through the air—another day at the office with staplers, copy machines, bad coffee, and trees almost crushing you. No big deal. That was nice for him. “She is a mother. See behind her? The boglets? Those are her children.”

Her children. Her cute bundles of joy. The kiddies were only seven feet tall with grinning jaws, lashing tails, and teeth that curved inward shark-fashion. Yeah, they were so sweet and adorable that I wanted to tie ribbons around their necks and put them on the cover of a Humane Society calendar. “You said she liked us. If she likes us, why is she throwing maple trees at us?”

“Oak. That’s an inexcusable mistake, whether it’s nighttime or not. Didn’t you see the shape of the dead leaves? The root pattern?” He gave up when I picked up a small rock and winged it at him. He dodged easily behind his shelter of another tree. “Never mind. I didn’t say she liked us. I said she didn’t necessarily hate us, depending on the present we brought her.”

I heard the rustle of leaves above me and looked up to see eyes that spread their own lambent pumpkincolored light, letting me see the teeth, the scales, and claws of black that were about the size of your average butcher’s knife. “Then give her the damn present,” I said, pointing the Eagle up at Junior. I’d taken down a Wolf, but I wasn’t sure what a round would do against those layers of muddy scales, besides extremely pissing off their owner. “Before I ruin this boggle’s dream of making the basketball team at his junior high.”

“Now that we’ve seen they’re all accounted for and thriving, which means they haven’t fallen victim to Ammut’s spiders, it would be a waste to give her what we might need to bribe her with at a later date.”

It had been two, going on three days now since Leandros had appeared in his brotherly glory. Two and a half days combined with a couple of hazy memories that I couldn’t depend on. Was it any doubt I would think I hallucinated half of what the guy said? His actions made me trust him. His words often made me want to beat him with a two-by-four.

“Later date? You mean from-beyond-the-grave later date? Because I have better plans for my afterlife than tossing rhinestones at a white-trash monster living in pigsty heaven instead of a double-wide. They’re going to kill us. They won’t bother to eat you as you’re made up of bean curd and soy, but I’m pure pizza, fried chicken, and burgers. They will eat my ass. Give her the damn bling.”

“You and common sense. I’m not sure I can get used to that combination. I suppose I may as well ask her if she’s heard anything.” He put a hand in his coat pocket and then tossed out a handful of pearls. They landed in the mud pit that Mama Boggle had climbed out of and where she now crouched on the edge. In a small clearing in the trees of Central Park, you didn’t need a moon to see. The sky was as orange as the eyes of the boggles. New York was a city so big that it sucked the darkness out of the night itself.

Some of the pearls stuck in wet mud while some rolled on the surface of more dry pieces. Whatever color they were in the daylight, they were all orange here. That didn’t stop the big boggle—Boggle with a capital B—from pulling her enormous dark claws out of yet another tree and squatting on muscled legs and rolling them around with a talon tip. “From the world of water. Fresh. Untouched by any human’s grubby baby paws but yours.” Her voice was so deep and loud, an auditory avalanche, I expected the ground to shake under our feet.

Leandros stepped out from behind his tree as I used the Eagle to swat the talons reaching for my head. If mommy was in a better mood, I didn’t want to change that by shooting her kid. That and it was a kid, a juvenile mega-alligator with a brain hanging up in that tree. If you walked into the Everglades and got your leg bitten off by a leftover prehistoric lizard, you had no one to blame but yourself. That was their territory, not yours, and this part of the park was the same as far as boggles were concerned.

“They eat muggers and sometimes joggers who stray from the common paths. Don’t feel too bad for them,” my companion suggested.

I ignored my brother. Goodfellow and the vampire had dropped us off in the limo at the park’s south entrance, and now I saw why. While they were sipping champagne and headed to an after-hours party, I was again smacking the claws of the boglet above me. “No. Bad boy. Bad. Behave or you’ll get a time-out.” They ate muggers and joggers. I didn’t have a problem with that. Muggers were rotten people and joggers who came this far out in the name of exercise had to be insane. Getting eaten was the best thing for them. It had to save a fortune in psych meds. As for the all-monsters-are-evil twitch, I told myself that it didn’t apply to baby monsters, and it grumbled but shut up. I was a softy for kids. Who knew?

“Boggle.” Leandros had walked forward, his sword in hand. “Ammut has come to the city. Do you know of Ammut?”

“No. No Ammut. I care not for strangers or the city. I care for home only,” she said, holding up one particularly large pearl before a large harvest moon eye, “and for my trinkets.” There was a rough, chain saw buzz in the air. She was purring … if boggles purred.

“Then you haven’t been attacked by Nepenthe spiders in the past two weeks.”

I turned my head to watch the exchange and felt a tongue lick the top of my head. “I am not kidding,” I warned the boglet, without taking my eyes from Leandros and Boggle. “Don’t make me shoot off the end of your tail. The other kids will make fun of you.”

“Spiders,” she said, the purr disappearing. “Disgusting pests. Boring vermin.” Letting the pearl fall back to lie with the others, she rammed her hand down into the mud up to her elbow joint. Pulling back, she yanked free a black articulated leg more than three feet long. I recognized it, from the beach and from a motel bathroom. It was the leg of a Nepenthe spider. “Many came, all died, but they are not good for eating. They smell unclean.” She threw the leg over her hulking shoulder. “They scuttled, full of poison. We did what you do with such things.”

“You squashed them,” I said.

Her grin, twice the size and voraciousness of her offspring, gleamed. “It was good hunting practice for my children. They could not eat them, but they could kill them. Yes, we squashed them and will do the same to any more that come here.”

“And Ammut?” Leandros asked.

“I do not know Ammut.” It was the same as she’d said before, which made her finished with our conversation. As she played with her pearls, the other boglets moved closer to us. They were up for another practice hunt if we didn’t move it.

“Where is it?” asked the boglet above me, its rumble a lighter reflection of its mother’s. “The Auphe in you, it is all but gone. You taste weak.” Again with the weak. Did I need to start pumping iron?

Leandros’s hand was on my arm. “We are done here. Let’s go before they try to store our limbs in the mud with that of the spiders.”

I let myself be moved along. “What did it say? Where did my ‘off’ go? My ‘off-fey?’ What—” My mouth shut abruptly, my teeth snapping together and barely missing the tip of my tongue, as Leandros gave me a particularly brisk yank that had me running to keep up. It was a good idea since the boglets had decided they might be in the mood after all whether we moved our asses or not. I put the gun away and drew one of my knives. Little monsters. Little seven-foot-tall monsters. Underage monsters then. It didn’t matter how big they were, only that killing them would be the equivalent of doing in a ‘tween, which would be wrong, no matter how annoying they were—baby monsters and ‘tweens.

One boglet raced up beside me as we hit another clearing. They could walk upright or go on all fours, and their speed setting was on all fours. I’d watched some TV last night while trying to readjust or remember home. Nothing good had been on—there was no porn channel—but I had caught some animal special. It would’ve been difficult to not catch as Leandros had tripped me when I’d tried to walk away—the several times that I’d tried to walk away. He had a move for everything. That meant that against my will, and I had a feeling it wasn’t the first thing he’d made me do against my will, I’d watched a show about Komodo dragons.

A Komodo could run a man to the ground in seconds. Seconds. These guys must’ve used that special as an exercise tape.

I saw the tooth-crammed grin, the light of the eyes, and the claws of one large hand slashing out to gut me. I dropped flat instantly. That boglet tried to stop, dirt and dead grass flying as he dug in, and the one behind me ran over the top of me and kept going. He was a dog chasing a ball that his master had only pretended to throw. He was the slow one in his class, but he seemed happy. Let him run to China and back if it kept him that way.

The one who’d made a try for me did manage to stop, flip head for tail, and lunge back at me where I lay on my stomach. I was up in a fraction of a second and his stopping skills improved as the surface of his luminous eye came to rest against the point of my knife. I could feel the slight give under the tip. A sixteenth of an inch and it would puncture, and that wouldn’t make his mama proud of his hunting skills at all.

“Weak?” I leaned in until my own grin made a clinking sound as it touched his. Teeth to teeth. Hunter to hunter. “I taste weak?” I heard hisses and growls from behind me. I reminded myself—baby monsters, emphasis on baby. No matter what my hand wanted to do, it was going to listen to me. “Kids. You’re so cute. I don’t have to want to kill you. To kill you I only have to be better than you.” The fetid breath mixed with mine, but his eyes were gleaming now, from pained moisture. “Junior, I’m better than you. Go home to Mommy.”

He thumped his tail against the ground. I was concentrating on his eyes and the intent smoldering there, but I heard the sound. It was a signal. The rapacious snapping and rumbling from behind went silent. “You are not weak. We will go.” He gave a cautiously sinuous step back away from my blade and I let him. The scaly lids blinked to take away the pain. As tough as they were, if I’d scratched his cornea I’d have been surprised. I’d been careful, but I’d been ready. If I’d had to jam the blade through his eye into his brain, I would have, but teenagers do stupid shit all the time. Giving him the chance to think it out and make the smart choice was the right thing to do. When he was a full-grown monster, then I’d hold him accountable for his decision-making skills and take him out without a second thought. Until that happened, I’d make like a social worker.

Slithering past me, he and his brothers and sisters ran, disappearing into the trees. I turned my attention to Leandros, who had a boglet on the ground, one foot on the grass, one on the muddy throat, and his sword embedded a few inches into flesh over where I guessed a boggle might carry its heart. “Jesus, Leandros, you’re not going to kill it, are you? It probably has a date for monster homecoming later. Cut it some slack.”

“I hadn’t planned on killing it as that would annoy Mama Boggle. She’s fond of her children. I was merely keeping it from killing me while I kept an eye on you.” He stepped back, removing his foot and his sword. The boglet gave a growl before following the rest of its litter, exhibiting a definitely dejected slink to his lope. “Killing a boglet would bring Boggle and the rest of them on us. That we might not be able to handle. Boggle on her own is more deadly than all her children combined.”

“Good point,” I granted. “She looked badass, but I didn’t know she was that badass.”

“I told you on the way over… . Never mind. Why do I try?” He turned his eyes up to the sky, searching for the answer or peace. I looked up too. I didn’t see either one. “Amnesia or not,” he started again, sheathing his sword, “your attention span hasn’t changed. If you didn’t kill your boglet because of the mother, then why didn’t you?”

I started walking beside him when he began moving. “It was a kid. Killing a kid, even a monster kid, you shouldn’t do that.” Because death was forever and blackbirds fell from the sky. If you had an opportunity to spare one, if only for a little while, you should.

“That’s true, although you normally would’ve taunted the boglet more. You do enjoy a good insult.”

“I insulted,” I protested, my breath a frozen fog as a mix of fallen leaves and dead grass crunched under my feet. “I didn’t spend all night doing it, but I’m freezing my ass off out here. And what did that thing mean when it was talking about my being weak? About off? My being off or not having off. Something. What was he talking about?”

“Face it, little brother,” he answered, walking faster, despite not having complained about the cold once. “Even to boggles, your humor has always been a little off.”

We didn’t go home after Central Park and, when I asked where we were going, Leandros answered to do something worse than play hide-and-seek with mud-loving homicidal alligators.

“What could be worse? Saddling them up and riding them like broncos in some bizarre supernatural rodeo? I’m sure Goodfellow has a few assless chaps he could lend us.”

“Smart-ass.” Leandros snorted as we reached the edge of the park and he hailed a taxi. “That certainly didn’t disappear with your memory.”

“Worse things than being a smart-ass,” I grumbled.

“Far worse,” he agreed. “So be prepared, because we’re going to see one of those far worse things.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“Our annoyed clients.”

The building was close to Central Park but on the opposite side, making me glad for the taxi. I’d run enough today. The limo was long gone. Promise and Goodfellow had better things to do. Lucky them. I’d asked Leandros if he wasn’t worried about Promise becoming an Ammut snack—Goodfellow had someone else to bunk with; I wasn’t sure Moses would approve, but not my business. Regarding Promise, Leandros had said she was staying with several vampires; there was safety in numbers. Normally she would’ve stayed with us or vice versa, but he was afraid I’d have a glitch of die-monster-die and try to stab her with a kitchen knife if she reached past me for a breakfast bagel.

Inside, we made the grade past the doorman, just barely, considering all the mud we were streaked with, and not exactly fragrant mud either. We stank. The security desk had our names and had us sign in. Leandros signed Sun Tzu. I didn’t ask. I was learning to bob and weave those lectures. I signed Captain Hook. Unlike me, he did ask.

I’d turned toward the elevators and got a lecture anyway. You should never take an elevator. Elevators were death traps—metal boxes that turned into untelevised caged death matches when something slithered in there with you and tried to tear you apart. And if you survived, you still had to walk out wearing monster guts from head to toe. It was not a good look from security’s point of view. Leandros all but smacked my hand as if I were a two-year-old reaching for a hot stove when I aimed a finger for the UP button.

On the stairs Leandros asked, “Why Captain Hook? It’s not one of your usual fake names. Did you forget?”

Nope, I did remember those from my fake IDs in South Carolina. Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the Thirteenth, and Halloween. Movie villains R us or R me. I started climbing. “No, I remember those. I was thinking about Nevah’s Landing. You said you told me the story Peter Pan there when I was a kid, right? I was kind of picturing my memories chasing me like that albino crocodile with the ticking clock chased Hook.” I remembered it as well as the blackbird, if not more. Creepy damn thing.

“Albino?”

We passed the third floor. “Yeah, the one that ate Hook’s hand. Albino. Big white crocodile with red eyes. It would sneak up and whisper in your ear. Spooky as hell. That’s a damn scary story to be telling a kid by the way, Leandros. But it is like that. My memories are whispering with that blackbird memory,” my inner self with its rampant monster prejudice was whispering more, “but I just can’t make them out. And what floor did you say this meeting is on?”

“Sixteenth,” he answered, but there was a distracted tone in his voice. Maybe the albino croc had scared him as a kid too and he’d forgotten it. Although I doubt anyone or anything had scared Niko Leandros, no matter what his age.

Christ. I would rather take the death trap. Sixteen floors. Forget death trap. I’d rather take a real crocodile gnawing off my leg. “If we haven’t found anything yet on …” Crap, what was it again? “Ammut,” I said triumphantly. “If we haven’t found anything on that life-force-sucking, spider-loving Egyptian bitch to report, why are we here?”

“To tell why we have nothing to show, hope they don’t attempt to kill us for the delay, and to find out how many more of her victims have gone missing or been found dead.”

“Dead. Kill. Say them like bad words,” someone scoffed.

The voice was striking, as was the Wolf’s surprising plunge out of nowhere to the fourth-floor landing, hitting the tile barely a foot from me. She was all that made a Wolf, predatory in her speed, there was no doubt, but she was all female too, that being almost more dangerous than the Wolf in her. She crouched on all fours, silver blond hair like a bridal veil over her face. Through the winter strands I could see tilted amber eyes the same color as the skin that showed between the white leather shirt and black jeans. Her arms were bare. Her throat and her lower abdomen were the same except for a tattooed choker around the first and wicked slashes of scar tissue across the last. She smiled, teeth bright against her darker skin, as she tossed her hair back to show her face. I wanted to say she was beautiful. She was beautiful, but it wasn’t a human kind of beauty. Hers was the beauty of a mountain so high, so fierce, so deadly, it would suck the oxygen from your lungs and take your life in a heartbeat for the crime of wanting to see that beauty up close.

Remaining on all fours, she said, “Where have you been, pretty boy? You leave, who is here to play games?” Beauty like hers took; it never gave. And if it pretended that it did, it was only to soften you up to make your fall that much harder.

The same kind of hard fall that Wolf I’d shot in the head had taken. “Delilah.” I didn’t remember her face or her body or her unique lupine smell, but Niko and Goodfellow had said the Alpha of the Lupa pack liked to play games. And as my ex, she especially liked to play them with me.

Also, the first night we’d been in the city, while I slept, Leandros had made index cards. Memory joggers. Who was who. Who could be trusted and who could not. The guy was brilliant in everything he did. The way he fought the boggle, when he sparred, all the books he had—each one weighing twenty pounds minimum—the precise way he made his tea, the equally precise way he disarmed me when I thought I was a hotshot back in South Carolina. Not even a week and some of those days were cloudy, but I saw what I saw: Niko was an expert in everything he did, mental or physical. He was the kind of man the world saw only every few centuries. Born to rule and gifted by nature beyond all others.

But nature does hate perfection. The guy couldn’t draw his ass out of a wet paper bag. I’d thumbed through my stack of cards on the subway to the Ninth Circle. The first had been a stick figure with circles for breasts, long blond hair indicated by two swoopy lines, a fluffy dog tail, and a fang-filled smile. Delilah (bad) was written in machine-perfect calligraphy at the top of the card. There’d been stick men with angel wings, Ishiah (good) Samyel (good), a stick woman with vampire fangs, Promise (good), a round thing with Mickey Mouse ears and a skinny tail marked Mickey (debatable). Then there’d been one stick figure with curly hair and three legs. I didn’t need the Robin Goodfellow (Run for your life) to ball it up and throw it at Leandros, which I had.

“I thought the Lupa pack wasn’t committing to this fight,” Niko said at my shoulder.

She stood and shrugged as more Lupa rained down around her. “I can change my mind—did change my mind. Spiders took four of my pack. What the Kin is learning, what the vampires know, I want this bitch to feel. We Lupa are untouchable. To kill Lupa is to take your last breath.” The Wolves around her smiled in a lightning-swift shadow of hers. They smelled her arousal. I smelled it. “Except for you, pretty boy.” The muzzle of my Desert Eagle was pressed against her forehead as her fingers ran along my jaw. My brain might stay out to lunch forever, but my body always knew what it was doing.

“Any present I give to you, you are free. Do as you wish. Play, kill, eat.” She laughed, the gun not existing in her reality at all. She slapped me in the face, playfully to another Wolf maybe, but it was a damn hard smack to a human. She laughed again. “Stop with the silly puck cologne. Who do you hide from in this city? Yourself?”

I didn’t have a chance to wonder why she’d think I was into cologne, much less Goodfellow’s cologne when she was under my gun, feinting, and leaping over me, a diver into water far below. That it wasn’t water, only more stairs, didn’t matter. She landed on her feet and kept running. Her pack moved around us. I felt the swipe of claws and pulled a combat knife with my other hand to slap back hands and paws and several elongated jaws with fangs ready for one tiny opening. Play to them, following their Alpha’s lead. Except for Delilah, they all were obviously All Wolf—stuck in between. Wolf eyes, human face. Wolf face, human eyes and hands. Some used hooded jackets to hide and some needed nothing; they simply were exotic-looking women. But if you knew …

“Delilah is Alpha, but the whole pack is that All Wolf cult?” I asked, rubbing my burning jaw as I watched them all disappear down the stairs in the blink of an eye, wolves on a rabbit. Run, run, run.

“Her vocal cords.” He answered the question I hadn’t asked. “That’s not an accent. Delilah’s All Wolf is hidden inside her, but she’s All Wolf, and more than that, she’s Kin; make no mistake.” He tapped my arm and pointed. “Kin.”

There were bloody fingerprints, footprints, and paw prints on the stairs. Kin were killers, I’d been told—every last one of them. I touched my jaw where Delilah’s fingers had been. There was a smudge of blood there too. “You think Delilah is now our only client?”

“I think she may be,” he said as he started running up the rest of the stairs.

But the boardroom he charged into was empty except for a card with neatly written letters, Fourth Alternate Location, resting in the middle of the table. The blood was from a dead security guard at the end of the hall. He wasn’t human. He looked human … until I lifted his upper lip to see small fangs, right before they slid out of sight, the gums sealing over them. Nature—keeping the vamp’s secret for them. I checked his vitals just in case, although I wasn’t precisely sure what made a vampire dead. “No heartbeat,” I was informed. Born, not made—live, not undead. They were the same as humans that way with the same vital signs or lack of them after a she-Wolf Alpha took one down. And they even bled red like humans. Made sense. They used to drain humans. You wouldn’t eat what you couldn’t digest. I hadn’t seen a scratch on Delilah, and Leandros said vamps were fast and strong—very fast, very strong. She was something all right.

“They must’ve suspected the Lupa were coming for them,” Leandros said, tapping the card against his palm. “They took precautions and moved the meet.”

Precautions. In other words, you did not fuck with the Lupa, but, damn, they would fuck with you if they felt like it. If you wanted to be noticed you had to make a big bang—such as taking out an unprecedented council of the supernatural joined to fight Ammut. Delilah was ambitious and hot. She was also a matter-of-fact killer, but we couldn’t all be perfect.

“So …,” I said casually as I straightened, “that was Delilah, huh?”

Leandros already knew where this was going. I could tell by the twitch of his jaw. “Yes, that was Delilah as the conversation on the stairs and the index card I gave you made perfectly clear.”

“And I nailed that?”

The roll of his eyes indicated I was beyond immature.

I gave a smug grin. “Damn, I’m good.”

We ended up at not the first, second, or even third, but the fourth alternate location, which had to be Leandros’s idea. Who else would have four? Two days and I’d seen enough of his ways to know that. I was surprised he could stand up without a chair sticking to his ass, the gravitational pull of his anal-retentive nature too strong to be overcome by mere furniture.

We’d taken another cab up until about a twenty-minute walk away. Leandros wanted either to determine if the Lupa were following us or to simply kill my tired ass, one of the two. I missed the Landing with its twelve streets where everyone walked slow and in a hurry meant not stopping to sit on your neighbor’s porch to “chat a spell.” All right, an exaggeration about the porch thing, but I damn sure missed the twelve streets.

“And the fourth alternate location would be?” I asked as I hunched in my jacket, tired of the cold, the endless walking and running, and not too happy with the smell.

“Brooklyn. Gowanus Canal.”

“I liked the Central Park place better,” I grunted. “It didn’t stink.” I didn’t know if the water stank to him, but it did to me—like a chemical-coated rotting body. “And there were hot Wolf chicks.”

There weren’t many … Correction, there weren’t any people I could see hanging around, ready to jump in for a swim as we moved through several rusted-through tanks to a scrap metal yard. As for Gowanus Canal, an up-close look said they should’ve called it Gowanus Ditch. Encased in concrete forever as far as I could tell from the lights reflecting off the dank, fetid black water, it wasn’t close to being a tourist attraction. You weren’t going to see any gondolas with singing guys in striped shirts around here. If they fell in, they’d crawl out a mutated creature with superpowers that involved killing you with a massive wave of stench.

“Up here.”

I turned away from the canal and followed Leandros up some broken concrete stairs to a squat corrugated metal building. There were no windows, only a light showing under and around the door. Weatherproofing was not their primary issue. He knocked once, said, “Leandros,” and opened the door. Our clients were waiting for us, all of them.

Also dead, every damn one.

This time it wasn’t the Lupa. This time I saw what I’d only heard about in my briefing at the bar to catch me up to preamnesiac speed. At a much less fancy table than at the conference room, they were gathered around what must have been a rickety poker table. Vampire, Wolf, succubus, incu … incub … the male version of succubus, and something I had no idea about, other than he was as dead as the rest now lying scattered around the large shack. All of them except one were curled into dried husks. Their eyes were sunken so far back into the sockets, only withered raisins remained. What skin I could see that showed outside their clothes was almost transparent and veined with dark blue and cancer-clot purple.

Leandros knelt beside the one client who hadn’t had his life force sucked out by Ammut. She’d done him in the more popular modern way—ripped him to pieces. He’d been halfway to turning, patches here and there of black fur, now slowly receding back under the skin, his dead eyes yellow but clouding to a human-appearing dull brown, and teeth still bared in a frozen snarl. She’d disemboweled him and used his blood to write on the back metal wall.

Give them to me. The letters were large; the medium used to write them sincere. You’re not screwing around when you make your demands painted with someone’s death.

“Give them to me?” I read out loud, confused. “Isn’t she doing a bang-up job of getting her victims herself? Not like she needs our help.”

Shaking his head, Leandros admitted, “I have no idea.” He stood and nudged the dead Wolf with his boot. “Vukasin. The Kin Alpha liaison. Not that high up in the order of things. The Kin wouldn’t show us that much respect.” The nudge turned his body over to show this side had no face. A few scraps of muscle and skin clinging to scored bone. Life force and just life, both brutally taken—Ammut didn’t limit herself to one way of killing. “Not Delilah’s work, but she would’ve been capable of it and I have little doubt she’ll claim it. The Kin will believe her and think taking out this Alpha a very bold move, despite her All Wolf cult breeding. I’m beginning to think we were right. Delilah may well end up running the entire Kin before long.”

He left Vukasin to study the other bodies and then headed toward the door. “Not that that’s our concern now. Ammut’s path of destruction is getting worse. To take out the council who hired us. That is true disdain and an escalation of feeding. We have to stop her before they form a council on dealing with inept subcontractors such as ourselves.”

I followed him. “We’re just going to leave them here? I know about monsters.” The sky is blue, what goes up must come down, and here there be monsters. “I remember knowing about them even if I don’t remember much else, but I also remember hardly anyone else knows. How do we keep that from happening?”

“We take care of our own bodies, and we leave the bigger messes for the Vigil. This is a bigger mess.”

Outside in the cold air, I asked, “Who’s the Vigil?”

“They keep humans from finding out about the supernatural. If that happened, there would be worldwide war. Their calling is to prevent that, which means they make things such as this disappear. You know how at night the garbage piles up and the street sweepers come through so in the morning, it’s all clean as if it were never there?”

I shut the door behind us, to hide the bodies from plain view in case this Vigil was slow on the uptake. “I guess that depends on your definition of clean, but yeah.”

“The Vigil are the street sweepers, and, on occasion when too noticeable, people like us can be considered garbage to be disposed of as well. So try to keep a low profile,” he said, starting along the canal at a faster pace. How the Vigil found out about these messes was a mystery he didn’t bother to explain, and I didn’t bother to ask. I had more than enough freaky shit on my plate as it was. That one could wait. “Ammut could still be here somewhere in the scrap yard. If you can smell her, we should search.”

If I couldn’t smell her, the place was too big to search, but we were out of luck. I took a few steps closer to the canal and hooked a thumb toward it. “Over that? I can’t smell anything over that god-awful …”

I didn’t get to finish the sentence as a loop of wet muscle thicker than a man’s waist erupted out of the water and wrapped around my chest and one arm to yank me into and under the water. It was unbelievably fast and the light bad. I hadn’t seen if it was scaled or not—if it was a giant snake or a tentacle, but it didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it was crushing the air out of my chest, what little air I’d had to begin with after the first tight squeeze expelled it from my lungs. It dragged me deeper into the water, moving almost as quickly through the water as outside of it, which meant even if Leandros could’ve helped me, we were leaving him behind.

I had the one arm free and I used it to fumble for my gun. I went by feel. I was afraid if I opened my eyes the chemicals in the water would blind me. Finding it instantly—true love couldn’t bring anything together as fast as my hand and the grip of my Eagle—I fired in the direction I was being dragged. I emptied the clip and the one I carried in the pipe to grow on. Nothing. I was losing my remaining air, my chest aching with oxygen loss and the pressure squeezing me until I felt as if I’d break in half. I went for my Glock next, but I was slow and clumsy, a pounding in my ears—I knew I wasn’t going to make it and if I did, why would it do any more good than the Eagle?

But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try. I let the Eagle go with the fuzzy, blood-drenched thought that all monsters were bad and why had I let anyone tell me different, and I went for the Glock with a hand now too weak to grasp anything, but trying … goddamn it, still trying. I expected to fail with my last semicoherent thought and I did. I expected to die, but I didn’t. Not thanks to Ammut or the first or second mouthful of water I finally couldn’t help but inhale and choke on. Nope, that was not how I went.

Instead, the world blew up.

Blue skies, pirate ships, flying children; they were there again as I woke up, soaked in freezing cold water—almost drowning brought them back every time. Only this time I didn’t think I’d almost drowned. “Almost” was kicked out of that sentence. There was a hand on my forehead tilting my head back, a mouth pressed hard against mine, air blown in inflating my chest, and I didn’t know what it meant—not quite. I couldn’t breathe—so wasn’t I dead? Hazy, sluggish thoughts, but logical. Dead and logical, that took talent.

There went another pirate ship sailing overhead, backlit by stars where there were no stars.

And didn’t I hear a waterfall?

“Cal, you son of a bitch. I’ve had enough this week. Do you hear me? Goddamn enough.”

More air was blown into my lungs, but they didn’t have any idea what to do with it. Lazy damn lungs. The ship disappeared, the sound of the cascading water faded away and panic set in. Jesus, I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t move; I couldn’t goddamn breathe… .

It did turn out that I could vomit. And I did so profusely, all over the front of the shadowed figure I saw bending over me as I opened my eyes. Efficient hands rolled me on my side where I kept emptying my stomach and lungs of canal water. It went on for what seemed a year or so—and not the best of years, although it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. As oxygen took the place of water, I dragged in breaths between the heaving and began to think a little more clearly. As in, what the fuck happened?

Was that CPR?

Was that Goodfellow giving me CPR? Please God no. It’d been a rough day already. Mouth to mouth from the puck would never be lived down.

The same hands were slapping my back firmly, only making me barf more. I appreciated the effort. Puking wasn’t great, but I didn’t want any of that putrid, tainted water left in me, not a damn drop of it. I didn’t know how chemicals could taste like death, but they did. I doubled up, knees to chest, and went from vomiting to coughing, which hurt worse.

“Cal? Can you hear me? Damn it, little brother, can you hear me?”

Actually, I could barely hear the words. The pounding in my ears underwater had gone to a ringing so loud that I was surprised I heard anything at all. I kept coughing and slanted my eyes up to see a blurry Leandros kneeling over me, hands keeping me on my side. On his shirt, coat, and braid, he was wearing the chili dog I’d eaten at the bar since he’d starved me at his tofu diner, and I was dimly pleased I’d found the time to sneak it in.

“What?” I coughed again, vomited again, then glared at him. “What … you … do?”

He held up something I recognized—a grenade with a smirking smiley face on it. This one was red with devil horns. Have a not so nice day! That would explain the ringing in my ears. “I borrowed a few from you. Inelegant but effective.” It disappeared and a hand wiped at my mouth as I kept coughing. Good for him. I was too weak to do it myself and he deserved more puke. “She had you. Ammut. I could see the wake where she was pulling you through the water, too fast for me to stop her. I threw a grenade in front of her. It was the only thing left to do.” He sounded apologetic, despite the fact I’d driven him to more cursing. The man didn’t swear much, I’d noticed, even in situations when he should’ve been whipping them out nonstop. Swearing or not, he should sound sorry. Damn, damn sorry. Boggles, homicidal Wolves, dead clients, Ammut nearly drowning me, and my brother blowing me up to finish the job. As workdays went, not a good beginning.

“I almost lost you. Again.” He was blurry, yeah, and his voice faint, but I heard. He meant what he said. The blame was as solid as the concrete beneath me and as dark as the water he’d pulled me from—and it was aimed in one direction. “Ammut. This fucking bitch is going to be sorry the universe ever spit her into existence.”

The f-bomb. Now we were cooking. Forget the other cursing, this was serious language from an equally seriously upset, vengeance-bound brother … who had almost lost me twice in a week. He did deserve more than barf. Any brother who’d gone through that would. I was getting back the finer movements of my arms and legs, and I managed to lift my hand to snag it in his coat. “Leandros …” I coughed spastically, grabbed what air I could, then tried for the most annoyed, pissy little-brother-worthy expression I could manage. As I didn’t remember what that looked like, I hoped I got it right.

He bent closer to catch my hoarse words. “I’m here, Cal.”

Sucker.

“Worst … fucking … first … day … ever.” Then I threw up on him again.

As punctuation went, it was perfect.