Deathwish

9

That evening Niko and I had driven to one particular junkyard we’d been to more than once in the past. We’d passed through the unlocked gate when I let Niko know what I thought of the new arrangement between him and Promise. Honest dishonesty?

“As philosophies go,” I observed, “I gotta say: That’s fucked up.”

“No one asked you to say. It’s between Promise and me.” Niko eyed my wrist and narrowed his eyes.

“Jesus, yes, I’ve done my meditation. Give it a rest, Buddha.” I had done it, and I tried to do it every hour. So far it had worked. Either that or no one had really pissed me off. I had to say it was probably the second one, but I was still in there, meditating my ass off. Shoving the monster down. Niko said it would help, and if he said so, then that was gospel in my book. I’d do it until it became habit, and who knew? It might have me slamming less heads against the bar at work. “I’ll pay my tab next week,” my ass.

Habits. Meditation might make it there, but there was another old habit between Nik and me that I never needed reminding of. Without warning, I twisted sideways and jammed a foot in his abdomen. “See?” I said. “Meditation. My foot is one with your stomach.”

“Forgive me. I shouldn’t have doubted you. You seem so much more at peace.” Instead of the hands on the ankle and the wrench I expected, his leg twisted around mine and took me to the ground. The knuckles of his fist pressed just hard enough against my larynx to make the memory stick. “By the way, sometimes the fish sticks were fried zucchini,” he added, “and cartoon Great Danes don’t actually solve mysteries.”

“So you were born a diet Nazi.” I waited until he moved to sit up. I didn’t try anything else. There was no countermove to having your larynx crushed. Choking and dying tended to take up the rest of your attention. “And now you’re talking trash about Scooby. You are one evil bastard.”

“So I’ve been told.” He held a hand down to me. “By you. Repeatedly.”

I took his hand, got to my feet, and dusted off the jeans I’d borrowed from him. Black, of course. “It’s hard to be a ninja-slash-samurai-slash-Buddha-loving bad-ass in regular blue, huh?” I muttered. “God forbid.” I picked up the bag from the ground and started deeper into the piles of metal and trash that surrounded us, following the zigzag path. I didn’t limp as I went, but I wanted to. “I thought Buddha was about harming no living creature,” I grumbled on.

“Buddha was a wise man.” He walked beside me, apparently unaffected by my blow to his stomach. “I am not.” He didn’t seem particularly affected by that either.

“Maybe you should work on that.” I went ahead and limped as the muscle in my leg spasmed. What the hell. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know.

“It’ll pass,” he assured me, not especially sympathetically, as I limped on. “In approximately sixty seconds. And next time you’ll remember.”

A few seconds of discomfort were worth a few extra years of staying alive—because staying alive or sane was looking like an easy option now—but the smell out here? Nothing was worth that. Saturday in a Bronx junkyard—what’s not to love? I pulled the sleeve of my shirt over the heel of my hand and covered my mouth and nose. In reality, it wasn’t the junkyard so much as the waste station just up the river. But smell or not, this was where Mickey lived, and Mickey was who we needed to talk to. Which was why we were once again separated from the others in the loft. With Oshossi and the Auphe, it had come to the point where it was impossible to stay together all the time, not if we wanted to eventually get our asses out of the gigantic frigging sling they were in. I didn’t have to tell Niko that sooner or later the Auphe were going to seize the chance and attack the others while we were gone. Or us. More likely us. You didn’t need Auphe genes or a crystal ball to see that coming. Just a brain cell, and you were set there. But our choices were pretty much nonexistent, and sucking it up was the only thing left to do.

We’d run into Mickey two or so years ago when looking for parts for Nik’s decrepit car. You wanted parts for a decrepit thing, you came to a decrepit place. Mickey wasn’t decrepit, though. He could find pretty much anything you wanted. Nothing too new, of course, but anything used showed up in a junkyard sooner or later. Mickey had seen us walk in back then, smelled the difference on me, and offered up his services . . . for a price.

Luckily, Mickey’s price wasn’t as steep as Boggle’s tended to be. Where Boggle loved jewels and gold, Mickey was all about the food. He wasn’t your typical junkyard rat, content with rotting leftovers. He wanted the real thing, he wanted it fresh, and he wanted a wide variety. Chinese, Greek, Italian, Mexican, whatever; he liked it all. That didn’t mean he didn’t catch his own meal on occasion if times were hard. In that he was like your typical junkyard rat.

He ate his own.

“Smells good.”

The voice was oil spreading across concrete, smooth and slick. Very slick indeed, which was Mickey all over. I slowed and looked up at a pile of cars to see liquid black eyes reflecting the setting sun. Cool and cunning, I couldn’t be sure if they thought it was the Mexican food that smelled good or me. So far, the preference had been for takeout, but it didn’t pay to take anything for granted. “Hey, Mick. Brought you tacos this time.” And about a dozen burritos. Mickey had an appetite. A tamale to go wasn’t going to get it for him.

“Been long time. Yes, long, long time.” Black fur and skin slithered over shattered safety glass and rusted metal to hit the ground next to us. He was the same inky color as a cadejo, but where they had been doglike, Mickey was what I’d labeled him: a rat . . . if a rat crouched four feet high, had dark-skinned human hands, and talked. Niko said that there were old Rom legends about a shobolon, a giant rat with human characteristics. There were also legends of wererats. Whatever Mickey was, he wasn’t saying. Although considering the thick accent, I was betting he had something in common with Nik and me. And we weren’t part wererat.

Besides the accent, Mickey had a sense of humor. Okay, maybe not so much, but he didn’t have a bad temper, which wasn’t always the case with our informants. He was fairly mellow, considering what I called him. I doubted it was even close to the name he’d been given at birth.

A thick-skinned hand dropped the gnawed dead rodent it was holding and took the bag from me. Within seconds, red sauce was dripping from wickedly large yellow incisors. A naked gray tail wrapped around his feet as he ate. After the first seven tacos, he slowed down and licked his hands clean. “So, so, valued customers, picture of part. Picture of car.” Mickey wasn’t a mechanic by any means, but with a picture he could track down what you wanted in a matter of thirty minutes. Sometimes less. In a yard this size, that was something.

“It’s not about a car part,” Niko said. “Not this time. It’s something a little more . . . interesting.”

“Interesting.” The round eyes took us in with sudden calculation. “That is new word from you, this interesting.”

“Yeah, interesting.” I leaned against the cold metal hood of a totaled car. “Because you know what, Mickey? You sound bored. You probably are bored.” I thought about adding that he could get a nice big wheel to run around in, but didn’t figure that would help our cause. Maturity; it was no damn fun. “We’re here to help you with that. Wouldn’t you like to get out? See some trees. Frolic in nature. Good times.”

“Frolic.” Another dead rat tumbled from above where Mickey had been perched. It was the size of a beagle, and it landed on my foot. Mickey clicked yellowed teeth in a rat smile. “But, as see, frolic fine here.”

I eased my foot from under the heavy weight. The fur was spiky and stiff with dried blood, the mouth frozen in its last snarl. There was one poor damn bastard that wasn’t going to be working at any theme park. “Yeah, I’ll bet you do.” I wondered what would happen if Mickey were to meet Robin’s new cat. You wanted interesting—that would be interesting.

Niko picked up the strand of persuasion since I didn’t seem to be accomplishing much. “This would be an entirely new endeavor for you. Spying versus procuring. It would pay well. Lunch every day for three months.” And while I had my suspicions that I’d be the one making that daily delivery, Niko went ahead and filled Mickey in on the details. Oshossi, the basics of what we wanted to know, the zoo . . . cadejos, ccoas, and who knew what else.

Mickey had finished the tacos and started on the burritos, as Niko finished. “South America?” Whiskers slick with either blood or hot sauce bristled dismissively. “Tourists.” With his accent, that wasn’t quite fair—I doubted he had his green card. But either way, he didn’t seem impressed. It was a good sign. If we could get Mickey on the inside for a day or two, long enough to find out where Oshossi was—Central Park with his animals or elsewhere—we’d be ahead of the game. For once.

Delilah had tried, but hadn’t been able to find Oshossi, and his creatures wouldn’t talk to her people—if they even could talk. Still, if Oshossi didn’t control it, he didn’t trust it, and his crew seemed to follow right along with that. And no wolf was going to bow his neck for a nonwolf. That put going undercover out for them. So what we needed was a spy, one who didn’t give a damn about pride and usually gave dollar for dollar value. You hired him; he’d come through. Mickey was as close as we had to that.

If we went into the trees of Central Park ourselves looking for Oshossi, chances were we’d never come back out. There could be a hundred ccoas in there, for all we knew. They knew we were standing with Cherish, lucky us, but Mickey would be a new element—a local yokel to clue them in on the city. He’d been here at least the two years we’d known him; that put him up on them. They should see him as an asset. He might be able to find Oshossi. At the very least, he could get a head count.

If they didn’t eat him first.

The thought had occurred to him too. “Three months. Your humor, such wit.” He gave a chittering wheeze that was what passed for a rat laugh. “A year. Two meals a day. Every day.”

And the negotiations began. It was too bad Goodfellow wasn’t here. The Rom lived to haggle, but somehow that gene had skipped us. Niko had cold silence and his sword. I had my temper and my fists. If those didn’t work, we were screwed. Wheedling and schmoozing didn’t come naturally to us.

But Nik did his best and we ended up with six months, two meals a day.

No way I was coming out here twice a day for half a year. Hell, there had to be delivery services that would do it. Leave the food at the gate. I didn’t know who ran the yard, but Mickey didn’t seem to worry that much about being spotted.

Speaking of spotting, I saw something worse than the dead rat as the two of them hammered out the deal. In one of the cars one stack over, a hand was hanging out of the window. The fingernails were dirty, the skin gray as only a corpse can be. Mickey didn’t kill people—that we knew of—but the occasional bum did die in the yard of natural causes. Exposure, heart attack—it didn’t matter. Mickey liked his takeout, but when it wasn’t available, he made do with what was. And that wasn’t always rats.

I turned away to ask, “You need a ride there? You gonna drive yourself? Or did you have a bad hair day when they took your driver’s license photo?” The bared teeth let me know Mickey’s lack of temper might not be all I thought it was.

He rode with us in the back of Niko’s car . . . after retrieving a jar full of darkly sloshing fluid. The black eyes reflected in the rearview mirror when he lifted his head for the occasional look around. When he did, I could feel hot breath against my neck. Not a good day for wearing my hair in a ponytail. I also smelled things on his breath—tacos, rat . . . human. Digested human flesh; it was a smell you couldn’t forget. If I didn’t smell it again for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t matter. It was something that was with me for good. It smelled like raw pork, but just different enough to make your flesh crawl. It said “You are meat.” Whatever you wanted to think in your happily ignorant world, it all came down to that: You are meat.

It was dark by the time we stopped by the park to let him off. He opened the jar and begin to rub the contents across his fur in sweeping strokes. “Is blood and oil,” he explained. “Smell scent of you on me.” He snapped his teeth together in demonstration. “Kill me, yes. In seconds. Meet here again. Two days.” Leaving the jar and large smears of the mixture on the vinyl seat, he slipped out the door and shadowed his way into the trees.

I looked in the backseat one more time after he was gone. “I am not cleaning that up. I’m not even helping you clean that up. That is nasty.”

“It wouldn’t matter if it were essence of pizza and hoagies. You’re a lazy son of a bitch and all the meditation in the world won’t change that,” Nik retorted.

“Now, would Buddha have said that?” I asked with mock disappointment. “I don’t think so.”

“Buddha never found your underwear in the kitchen sink.”

I had an answer to that ready and waiting as Niko started the car, but my cell phone rang—the cell phone that now was only for emergencies. Gate-creating emergencies. I flipped it open, saw Seamus’s number, grabbed Nik by the arm, and took us. I could build a gate and walk through it, but I could also build one around me if there was no room for the alternative. It was more difficult, but I could do it. That’s what I did in this case. Niko and I were outlined in gray light, and in a fraction of a second we were gone. Then we were at Seamus’s loft, right in the path of a charging ccoa.

It was so close I could smell its breath. It wasn’t as bad as Mickey’s, but it wasn’t exactly potpourri either. I could also see the dilated prey-seeking pupils and the piranha teeth. I could probably have seen its damn tonsils if I didn’t get my ass in gear and move. I dove one way while Nik went the other. In my quick drop and roll, I could see he was a muddy gray under his olive skin, but he wasn’t puking as Robin had when I’d once taken him through a gate, which was good. He also kept on his feet, which was even better. It looked like we needed all the help we could get.

There was no Oshossi, but there were three ccoas. They were quick and had been predators since they weaned from their mama’s teat. They were dangerous as hell, and from the dripping saliva, also hungry. I saw the two at first; the third came from above. If they could climb a tree in the jungle, they could climb a fire escape here. And if they could leap from a rocky ledge onto their prey, they could do the same from the upper loft. It came down like an avalanche, as deadly and a whole lot faster. I’d switched back to the Glock .40 from the Desert Eagle, which hadn’t done as much good as I’d hoped it would. As he struck the floor, I put ten in the head just like I’d thought with the last one, and swear to God, I almost hated to do it even though the last one had nearly turned me into lunch. It seemed more like an animal than a monster, a smart and beautiful animal. I didn’t like killing it, but I did. There was a scream of pain that sounded oddly human, and a tumbling of black and silver fur over a sleek line of muscle. Then there was nothing but a big, dead cat. I shook it off. If it had landed on me, I’d be one dead son of a bitch, my throat ripped out before I could’ve pulled the trigger. It might just be an animal, but it had been one damn deadly one.

Robin was holding off another with his sword while Promise and Cherish did the same with the third. Promise’s crossbow bolts only enraged the one attacking them. The cat was quick enough that Cherish had only struck three blows that I could tell. They were deep blows, but not deep enough to stop it. Nik was with them in seconds. He took the cat from behind. It whirled before he managed to slice it, but that didn’t last long. From the corner of my eye, I saw him strike one paw aside, then evade the other, dodge the enormous snap of mouth, and impale it in the heart with his katana.

That was impossibly quick.

I knew Nik could fight. I knew he was better than I was, that he was better than nearly anything or anyone you could name. But sometimes when you saw him in action, you almost couldn’t believe it—that a human could be that fast and that lethal. He’d worked at being that way since he was twelve, but I honestly thought he was born that way as well. A genetically superior athlete who could’ve gone to the Olympics. Instead, for me he became a killer. Too bad for him that they didn’t hand out the gold, silver, or bronze for that.

I turned toward Robin to see him just finishing off his as well. And there we were. . . . Three dead ccoas. It sucked. Monsters were one thing, but this was something else. Oshossi didn’t give a damn about his pets, and I’d sure as hell rather be killing him than them.

So why wasn’t he here with them? He was smart, but that didn’t seem smart. If he wanted Cherish so badly and his ccoas had tracked her down, why hadn’t he come with them?

Cherish’s teeth were bared as the ccoas’ had been, and her sword dripped blood onto the floor. She realized it and covered the fangs with lips painted as red as the silk top she wore. “You came.” It was said with a gratitude I wouldn’t have guessed she had in her. She was coming around. She might have more Promise in her than any of us thought. “Madre said that you would, and you did.” She gave a formal dip of her dark head. “My thanks.” Raising her eyes to Niko, she said with a trace of amazement, a fellow predator’s respect, “You are every bit the swordsman Madre said you were. I’ve seen nothing like it. Not in my life. Not ever.” The dimple appeared. “Perhaps you could give me lessons.”

“If you’ve seen nothing like it, then obviously you weren’t watching me.” Robin frowned at the blood spatter across his pants. “And I do it with unparalleled panache and style, but of course that wouldn’t be noticed while you’re so occupied ogling your mother’s property.”

So Robin wasn’t getting anywhere with Cherish. That had to sting. I didn’t think he’d not gotten anywhere with anyone he wanted except for Niko. Robin was lethal too, in a whole lot more ways than one. In the bedroom, out of the bedroom—he bragged about both. For a guy who practically excreted Rohypnol out of his pores, this had to be pissing him off like crazy. I gave him a grin to let him know I knew, and he gave me a silent snarl back. Moving over to Niko, I asked, “You okay? I know traveling isn’t such a hot feeling when you’re not an Auphe.” Which, I thought, was why it didn’t bother me.

I might not have said it aloud, but he heard it anyway. “You are not an Auphe,” he said between clenched teeth, clenched probably to keep his lunch down, although the muddy color of his skin was fading and returning to normal. “And I’ll recuperate. Give me a few minutes.”

“Yeah, okay.” It wasn’t a lot to ask considering he’d gotten a good feel of what was inside an Auphe, and, like it or not, what was inside me. It was an unnatural thing, ripping a hole in the fabric of reality. You knew that as soon as you saw it, but to pass through that rip, you felt the unnatural twist of it to your bones. It wasn’t right. It was unwholesome and awful and it wasn’t right.

I’d used to feel that. . . . Like Robin had. Like Niko. The wrongness of it.

I didn’t anymore.

Whatever that meant, whatever it said, it wasn’t good.

But you play with your Auphe half and you can’t expect it to stay buried. It wanted to play, a lot more than you did.

Robin laid his sword on the dining room table, folded his arms, and sighed. “What now? Samuel and his happy-go-lucky band of game wardens? Or are we pushing our luck there, making them our personal janitorial team?”

“I’ll take them.” We really didn’t want to push the Vigil into thinking we were their version of overt. That was all we needed on top of everything else. And if the Auphe could get rid of an eel the size of a truck, I could get rid of three panthers. “I’ll open a gate to the river. If it’s good enough for the Sopranos, it’s good enough for us.”

I didn’t wait for Niko to object, and he would have. Risking sharpening the Vigil’s attention on us versus me playing with Auphe fire, he’d take the first any day. But that wasn’t the right thing to do. Everyone was already in danger from the Auphe because of me. I wasn’t going to add the Vigil to that. Who knew how long they’d listen to Samuel that we were okay, that we weren’t going to get noticed. I squatted down to study the nearest ccoa. Because, let’s face it, we did shit that had a damn good chance of getting noticed.

And we did it a lot.

“What do you think? Two hundred and fifty pounds? Three?” I opened the gate absently.

That was a mistake, thinking it was as simple as the small amount of effort involved. Thinking that I didn’t need to pay attention. Forgetting how much my Auphe side did want to play.

But it had gotten so easy. Once it had brought pounding headaches and unconsciousness. Two weeks ago it had brought blood gushing from my nose or ears. Now it was like turning a key in a lock. Normal. No pain. No exhaustion. Just the feeling of doing what I was meant to do.

Maybe what I was meant to be.

The last male Auphe.

It was back . . . the cold touch, the slither of bloodthirsty satisfaction. I laid a hand on wet black fur, still warm, and lifted it back up to stare at my red palm and fingers. I had killed, I would kill again. And, hey, was that such a bad thing? Was that so wrong? To do what you were born to do . . . to follow the fire and ice that burned and seared your blood. To touch blood, to wear it, to spill it, to taste it . . .

No.

No. Absolutely fucking not.

This was not going to happen. That’s not who . . . what I was going to be. I took all the control I had, made the massive effort, and shoved those alien thoughts out of my mind. They had to be alien . . . otherwise they were mine. All mine. And that couldn’t be. It couldn’t, damn it. Luckily, I pushed them out or down before Niko clocked me one. He’d been across the room; now he was kneeling beside me, looking grim. “Control,” he said.

“I’ve got it. It’s gone.” I wiped the blood from my hand onto the black jeans.

“Pay attention.” That was said with an edge, an edge that had every right to be there.

“I know. Sorry.” Sorry didn’t quite get it for not treating opening a gate with the cautious respect it deserved. It was wild and feral. I wasn’t going to tame it, and if I weren’t careful, it would eat me alive. The best I could hope to do was control it and keep it on a short leash. And watch it—always watch it. Keep a wall up. I wasn’t what those bitches said I was. I was human, at least enough to stop the part of me that wasn’t.

The gate was still open, the cold light spilling through the ragged gash. I sucked in a deep breath. I had it now; it didn’t have me. “Let’s get them through.”

To the side I saw Cherish watching me with the clouded black eyes of a vampire ready for battle. “You are Auphe. I thought you were lying.”

“Why the hell would I lie about something like that?” I bit off as Niko and Robin helped me heave the first dead weight through the light. “How’d you know?” I went on quietly for Nik’s ears only. But as usual, Robin couldn’t let anything be for someone else only, not if that someone wasn’t him.

“You were speaking Auphe.” The fox face pulled into an expression of distaste.

Those two years they’d had me—I must’ve learned the language then. I’d seen that when I understood the Auphe before—telling me I was the last male. But understanding it and speaking it, those were two different things. . . . And they were just two more things tying me to them.

“What’d I say?” I didn’t remember, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. If it had been anything like what was going through my mind . . . Jesus.

“I have no idea. I don’t understand Auphe, and I don’t want to. Imagine ground glass shoved into your ear canal. That’s what it sounds like, and it’s about that pleasurable to hear,” he grunted as we tossed the next cat through. “But your brother knew before you started with that. He was already moving.”

“Nik?” The last ccoa slid into the gray. I closed the rip and ignored the disappointment of letting it go. Control. I had it. I did.

“You opened that thing and you weren’t you. Before you touched the blood. Before you spoke that hell-spawn language. I knew the second you opened the gate and weren’t paying attention.”

It was something Niko didn’t allow himself often—anger—and it was completely justifiable. I hadn’t paid attention and I’d nearly gotten lost. I’d gone from swearing not to open any more gates, to doing it to try to outthink the Auphe, to emergencies in case of attacks, and finally to just cleaning up around the house.

Which is how the road to hell is paved with a little maid service.

“It won’t happen again,” I said grimly.

“See that it doesn’t. I won’t enjoy knocking you out, but I will.” I took it for what it was: reassurance. Niko was my lifeline. If I started to fall, he’d drag me back.

“No one I’d rather have beat my ass into unconsciousness,” I said wryly.

“Not that this macho brotherly love fest isn’t bringing a tear to the eye,” Robin drawled, “but I think we need to talk about moving. Oshossi knows where we are now. If we don’t go, every night is going to be Sundown Social at the Zoo. Pet the predator. Kiss the carnivore. All things I could do without.”

It was a good point. Niko, Robin, and Promise discussed it; Cherish watched my every move with wary eyes; and I, ignoring her as I ignored most of the others who gave me that look, ended up playing Go Fish with Xolo. Which, in a strange way, was what I needed. I didn’t want to think about Oshossi and his overgrown kitties. I didn’t want to think about the Auphe. I didn’t want to think about me.

The chupa had crept out of the back bedroom while the others talked, silently watched them with those large eyes for a while, and then moved over to me. I was on the couch, arms folded and doing my damnedest to keep my mind a blank. No matter what Niko would’ve said with dry sarcasm, it wasn’t that easy. Xolo sat on the floor opposite me and placed a pack of cards on the artistic metal curve of table between us. The shaved dog face regarded me gravely. I scowled back. It was habit. I didn’t have anything against Cherish’s pet. He tended to stay out of the way, gave up the remote when I wanted it, and didn’t eat my leftover pizza in the fridge. As roommates went, he wasn’t so bad. Weird, but not as bad as Robin, who’d gotten so desperate it wouldn’t have surprised me to see him humping a table leg.

“What?” I asked. “What do you want?”

Just as gravely, he dealt the cards. Seven to me, seven to him. Hell, why not? I played Go Fish with him. He held up his fingers when he asked for my cards. Any threes? Up would go three fingers. It didn’t work so great for jacks, queens, and kings, so we discarded them. Those eyes would blink, moonlike, the fingers would flash, and the cards would go down. The bastard couldn’t talk, couldn’t fight, could barely dress himself, and he beat me seven games to three.

I turned the cards around to look at the backs. “Are these marked? Are you cheating?” Or was I less bright than a mentally challenged chimp?

“I hate to interrupt your vastly important task”—Niko’s hand pulled the cards from mine and slapped them on the table—“but we’ve narrowed our options.”

“Yeah? Rafferty’s place?” Rafferty was a healer we’d used before. He’d disappeared months ago, but as it was most likely a voluntary disappearance, there wasn’t much we could do about it. He wouldn’t want us sticking our noses in his business, and he had a lot of business to take care of. His cousin was sick, a kind of sick Rafferty couldn’t heal. We’d checked his house after a month of not being able to contact him. . . . We had business too, and it frequently called for a healer afterward. From the looks of the overgrown yard, the house had been locked up and temporarily abandoned. Both Rafferty and his cousin were gone. Rafferty wasn’t one to give up. If he couldn’t cure his cousin, he’d find someone who could.

“Figured,” I added.

“Or Ishiah’s,” Nik said. “From what you’ve said, he can handle himself well.”

“Ishiah’s?” I leaned back against the couch. “You’re shitting me, right? One day, and he’d kill us before Oshossi or the Auphe could.”

Robin immediately backed me up—so immediately, in fact, that I wondered who he was actually trying to keep safe—us or Ishiah. “All of us shoehorned into that overgrown canary’s place? That’s an exercise in natural selection waiting to happen. Survival of the fittest. And that walking feather duster is fit.” His left eye twitched. “Very fit.” This had to be the longest Robin hadn’t gotten laid in, damn, at least in the span of human existence—at least once we’d stopped braiding each other’s back hair and thinking of lice as a tasty treat. “Desperate” didn’t begin to cover the shape he was in.

I was so locking my door tonight.

Rafferty’s place. On the one hand, Rafferty did have the nature preserve behind his house, a good location for supernatural wildlife that wanted to eat you. On the other, it might take Oshossi a while to find us there. I said so, and Niko agreed. As for the Auphe, of course they had to be watching us, but following us on the open road in daylight? Doubtful. We’d lost them time and time again when we’d lived on the run. They always eventually found us, but that we lost them to begin with proved they weren’t infallible.

“Once we get the report from Mickey, we will definitely have to be more proactive about tracking down Oshossi. Robin and Mickey are doing what they can, but we need to get this resolved more quickly,” Niko said. Now that we’d committed ourselves, which I still didn’t think was the best idea, he was right. But helping Cherish fight off a few cadejos and snakes was different than actively going after the one who sicced them on her. He was probably going to be a little harder to take care of than the wildlife.

“Tracking him down and killing him in a truly inspired fashion,” Promise added. Cherish flashed her a smile that was laced with surprise at the fiercely maternal note. If nothing else, this whole thing appeared to have her seeing the error of her criminally wild and wicked ways and bringing her and Promise closer. Good for them. Not too good for the rest of us trying to avoid maiming, mutilation, and, worse yet, pet-dander allergies, but good for them.

“What is up with Oshossi and that goddamn temper of his? And what did you steal from him,” I asked Cherish, “that pissed the living hell out of him?” If I were going to get killed, it’d be nice to know it wasn’t over a lamp or a first-edition Mark frigging Twain.

Cherish frowned, but turned a dining room chair around to face the rest of us and stretched languidly on it. Yep, Robin in a female body. I still couldn’t figure why they hadn’t gotten together at least for a night. She might be the vampire version of eighteen, but apparently had her hormones more in control than Goodfellow did.

“Oshossi,” she considered. “Oshossi is powerful. Every forest in South America belongs to him and he engages in constant guerilla warfare to prevent their destruction.” She tapped fingers on the knee of one long black-clad leg. “But don’t think that makes him some sort of hero. He will kill anyone—anyone who threatens his agenda, crosses his path in the forests, or simply annoys him. He is not a creature of patience or forgiveness.”

“And you, not doing your research, took him for an easy mark.” Robin shook his head. “Even the lowliest of my junior salesmen would know better than that.”

She glared at him. “Regardless, I robbed him, and that lack of forgiveness is firmly aimed in my direction. Our direction,” she amended, glancing at Promise.

“What did you steal?” Niko asked as he simultaneously gestured to me, tapping his meditation beads. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t blow it off. I’d seen where a lack of control had gotten me. I fingered the beads around my own wrist and got to work. I still kept part of my focus on the conversation, which had to not help the meditation. But hearing Cherish’s story was important. I had at least two brain cells. I could split them up.

“Is that so important?” she countered, tilting her head, the black hair falling behind her shoulders, and her violet eyes challenging.

“Yes,” he replied, unyielding. “I think it is.”

“Fine,” she replied, lashes half covering her eyes with what looked like regret or even shame. “It was a necklace. Gold, diamonds, and chunks of turquoise as big as a baby’s fist. I endangered all our lives for one piece of jewelry that was in no way worth the price we’re paying now.”

“Did it do anything?” I interrupted, remembering the power-draining crown another puck had blackmailed us into getting for him.

“Do anything?” she said with confusion. “It sparkled and it looked quite amazing on me. What else would it possibly do?”

“So you hocked it?” Robin asked. “Once it wasn’t quite so amazing?”

“As I said, I bore of pretty things quickly and move on to the next. I’m thinking of changing my ways. It seems a good survival move.” She sighed and touched the ruby choker at her throat. I wondered if it were stolen too.

“Yes, then you can marry men with a foot and four toes in the grave. That’s certainly more respectable,” Robin offered with a smirk.

Promise tapped her crossbow against her leg and said in a voice as sweet as honeysuckle, “I believe, Goodfellow, that I have a painting you should see.”

I saw where this was going, and it was going to be long, drawn-out, and something I’d heard a hundred times before. I went back to concentrating solely on the meditation, bead by bead. Boring but calming, as much as I hated to admit it. When I finished, those moon eyes were still on me. “Jesus,” I groaned to the chupa. “Okay. Deal another hand.”

I played Go Fish for another two hours. I lost again.

Lately, it was a familiar feeling.