Deathwish

11

Alcohol, stale piss, and bad cafeteria food.

Infection, sickness, and blood. Everywhere the sulfur sweetness of dying organs, the rot of gangrene, the stench of death. In all my life I’d never smelled so much death. It was on every surface in every room in this god-awful place of the living dead.

I sat in the hard plastic chair beside Nik’s bed, my elbows on my knees and fingers locked over the back of my neck. I wanted to rock. Swear to God, I did. But that’s all I needed. To have some angel of mercy think I’d lost it and drag me upstairs to the crazy ward.

Speaking of . . . there she was now. Nurse Panties in a Wad. She frowned at me from the door to Niko’s room. Gray hair in tight waves, coolly efficient blue eyes, and starched scrubs. The same type of scrub top I’d bummed from one of the ER nurses. I’d used my shirt as a bandage for Niko’s head wound. Soaked with blood, it had gone from light gray to dark red. Every inch of it. He’d bled and bled and bled.

I focused on the nurse. She was the lesser of two evils. “What?” I demanded.

“I told you, young man, visiting hours are over. You need to leave.”

I don’t know why they wear the stethoscopes looped around their necks. It just made for one convenient strangling temptation. “I’m staying. I’m family.”

“He looks like a big boy. Perfectly capable of spending the night on his own. He should come around soon. I’ll tell him you’ll be back in the morning,” she said, folding her arms.

I picked up the remote from the bedside table as if I hadn’t heard a word she’d said and switched on the TV.

“Sir . . .”

Young man to sir. Wow. A promotion.

“I’m staying,” I repeated through my clenched teeth. “I’m family.”

With that she gave up. When she was gone, I kept flicking through channels, not seeing a damn one of them. There was a rustle of sheets and I dropped the remote in my lap as I swiveled in the chair. Hazy eyes blinked and Nik said hoarsely, “Making friends . . . wherever you go.”

I smiled, one so sharp and relieved that it actually hurt, and wrapped my hand around his arm. “Hey, Cyrano, you really awake this time?”

His hand moved to touch a row of twenty-five stitches along a hairline stained orange with Betadine. “I wasn’t before?”

I let go of him to press the button on the rail that lifted the head of the bed up. “You kept telling me to put down my gun and finish my homework. You forgot I graduated Niko’s home-school academy with honors two years ago.” There was still dried blood in his hair although they’d gotten all the glass out down in the ER. The tie he used to pull the top of it back was long gone, and the stained blond strands fell inches past his jaw, messy in a way I don’t think I’d ever seen it. Not even as kids.

“Honors?” His hand dropped back to the sheet and blanket covering him to midchest. “You spilled pizza sauce on the final.”

“Yeah, you’re awake this time.” My smile faltered. It had been hours of silence, then two more of him drifting in and out. I’d cooled my heels in the ER waiting room forever. Security made it clear the only thing I’d get by trying to push my way back there was arrested. Finally, after tests and scans and stitching, I’d been able to go back to see him. He was still out cold. Concussion, they said. Moderate. He’ll wake up soon. Here. Fill out these forms. There was enough Rom in me that I promptly lied on every line of them and handed over one of Niko’s fake IDs. We’d stopped our running days, but some things would never change.

I’d waited until the registration lady bustled off to make copies before I threw up in the garbage can beside Nik’s gurney. Rom, Sophia had said, didn’t go to doctors or hospitals, although with good old Mom I thought it was more cheapness than a cultural thing. This was the first hospital I’d been in, and the smell of it was unbearable. I’d thrown up twice more after Niko had been moved to his own room. Fortunately, he had a bathroom there. Made for more convenient puking. Lucky me. Since then, I was dealing with it and this strange, cold, painfully bright place. Seeing Nik awake and finally with it should’ve made it easier.

It didn’t. A bright red string, scarlet as his blood, had run through me, stitching me up, keeping me together . . . so I could watch out for him. Guard him. Wait for him. Now the waiting was over and the string was unraveling and I was unraveling with it. “Want some water?” I didn’t wait for an answer, pouring lukewarm water into a plastic cup from a plastic pitcher with a hand that felt just as plastic, and handed it over.

He took it and slowly sipped. “What happened?”

I took the cup back when he finished. “You don’t remember?”

“I remember . . .” His brow furrowed, wincing with the movement. “I remember Mickey getting in the car and . . . nothing. That’s all.”

“The pizza sauce, you remember. A bad-ass tossing our car around like a Frisbee, that you forget.” I slid down in the chair a few inches and rubbed tired eyes. “Oshossi. He picked up the car and flipped it. You were thrown out through the back window. I still had my seat belt on. He shot at us with a bow that could’ve taken down a rhino, and I shot him with my BB gun.” It may as well have been for all the good it did. “Hit him at least five times, and he strolled off into the storm like nothing had happened.”

“Then?”

The word prompted me into realizing I’d gone silent. “Then? Oh. You were . . . hurt.” I rubbed my eyes harder. “You were thrown through the back window. Someone heard the crash and called the cops and an ambulance. I barely had time to get rid of our weapons. I don’t know what the hell the cops made of the giant goddamn arrow shish-kebabbing the car.”

Bracing himself on the rails, he sat up a little farther. I could see him taking stock. “Just my head, then.”

“Trust me, it was enough.” Enough blood, enough worry, enough of the whole damn ball of wax. I looked away at the window. More snow. The city was down for the count . . . buried. “But you’re okay now,” I said. It sounded kind of belligerent, maybe, but there you go. I resolutely kept my eyes off him and on the window. “And I’m not holding your hand in some sort of made-for-TV brotherly death-scene crap, all right? So stay okay. Don’t die.”

The sheets rustled again. “I won’t,” came the grave assurance, as if it were a perfectly reasonable request, and, hell, it was.

This time I looked at him. “Promise, you bastard?”

“I promise.”

“Good.” I picked up the remote and started clicking through the channels again. “Glad that’s settled. Can I have your Jell-O?”

There was no Jell-O. Only clear liquids and painkillers for the concussion victim. Nik passed on the meds, although by the lines bracketing his mouth, he could’ve used them. I’d given up on TV and had gone back to the tried-and-true elbows on my knees, hands on back of neck. I kept the rocking in my mind and almost dozed off in that position. The adrenaline of the past five hours had sucked me dry, and trying to keep from a total sensory meltdown in this place wasn’t helping either.

“Cal.”

I blinked. “What?” I ran back his words in my mind that I’d only half heard in my fog. Promise. He’d asked about Promise. “Yeah. I called her. Told her you were okay. She and Cherish can’t get here until tomorrow. The city’s shut down.” Although a vampire could probably walk the miles and miles through the flying wall of snow. I’d managed to convince her not to give it a try. “Maybe you should call her. She’s worried.” I patted my scrub top for a few seconds before I realized I wasn’t wearing my jacket. Reaching down, I picked it up off the floor and pulled my cell phone out of the pocket to hand to him.

He took it. “I will, but I want you to go lie down. I’m safe now. I have this watch.”

Concussed, but he had this watch. And truthfully, concussed or not, he probably had a better handle on it now than I did. “You’re okay?” I persisted. “Because you . . .” Because he hadn’t been. He’d bled like a stuck pig and had been barely responsive. He hadn’t known who I was. Was asking for a fourteen-year-old version of me. He hadn’t been okay at all. “You’re all right?”

“Cal.” He pointed at the empty other bed. “One hour and I’ll wake you. Go.”

I gave in. Nik was Nik again, and he knew what he was capable of. I got out of the chair, took off my sneakers, and climbed onto the other bed on top of the blanket and sheets. God help me if I messed up Nurse Panties in a Bunch’s clean bed. My head hit the pillow, and the sharp smell of industrial-strength bleach sent a spike of pain like an ice pick through my brain. I didn’t mind. The pain faded, and all I could still smell was bleach. No death or rot or creeping decay. It was such an utter relief that I slept instantly and slept hard, dreaming of sheets hung out to dry in the sun, of a thousand hungry rats tearing them down, of a living statue with blazing gold eyes, and of red snow.

It was everywhere. Bloody flakes falling from the sky. Piling so high you could drown in it.

And I dreamed of being watched. Of someone standing beside the bed, looking down at me. Someone who didn’t belong.

I might sleep hard and it might take me a while to get up to full speed in the morning, but if the situation calls for it, I can wake up instantly and razor sharp. In this case all it took was the shuffle of a rubber sole. I was awake, across the room, and in the chair just as the Nurse Bitch on Wheels walked in the room. She did have a real name printed nice and neat on her name tag. I’d read it and forgotten it instantly. It hadn’t said Satan’s Bedpan Pusher of Despair, so it was wrong anyway. No point in committing it to memory.

She eyed the slightly wrinkled empty bed, narrowed that gaze at me, but checked Niko’s vitals without comment and told him he might be discharged tomorrow. Maybe. If he stayed alert, there were no setbacks, the follow-up CT scan was good, the neuro doc agreed, and the planets all fell into alignment . . . it could happen.

When she left, Niko looked at me. “Exactly how shut-down are the roads?”

I checked the window again and shook my head. “Unless we can rent skis in the gift shop, it’s not happening.”

He studied me, weighing the pros and cons. I had to look like shit; I knew that. There’s only so much overload you can handle before you shut down, but I wasn’t leaving Nik alone either. No way, no how. “All right,” he said. “Take us back to Rafferty’s.” He didn’t want to ask, I knew. Hated it, in fact, to have me do what he’d rather I never did again. Didn’t want to put me in that situation, but he also knew the situation I was in now wasn’t much better.

I could’ve stood and went to the small closet to get the clear plastic bag that held his clothes, shoes, phone, and wallet. Could’ve scooped up my jacket from the floor, cradling it and the bag under one arm and placing a hand on Niko’s shoulder. I could’ve taken us out of here in a heartbeat.

I didn’t.

I sat, unmoving, in the chair. The hell with my situation. He was in one of his own. “Yeah, right. Traveling when you’re perfectly healthy has Robin puking and you five shades of green. It used to have blood coming out of me like a faucet. We’re not risking it with you having practically cracked your skull open. We wait for the doctor and the scan. By then the roads will be clear and your brain won’t be oozing out your ears from me dragging you through a gate. Hell, that’s probably on your discharge instructions. No traveling through rips in space for at least a week. The hospital cannot be held responsible for unnatural horrors of the supernatural world.” I saw the pain pills in a small paper cup on the table beside him. “So take your pills, and in the morning we’ll be out of here.”

In the end, after a lot of squabbling—that would be bitching on my side and calm, forceful logic on his—we compromised. He took one of the pills and I took the pillowcase from the next bed, wadded it into a ball and took a deep whiff whenever the other smells, smells straight out of a slaughterhouse, got to be too much. Niko finally slept after making sure I was hanging in there, and I think I ended up slightly buzzed from the bleach.

It definitely kept me awake and alert, which was good because when Niko woke up at about seven a.m., he wanted every detail I could dredge up about Oshossi and the battle. Other than almost killing my brother, I hadn’t been concentrating on those little personal details that make monsters so gosh-darn interesting. Like acid spitting, leeches for intestines, liquefying your internal organs and drinking them like Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup—fun stuff like that. When it came to Oshossi, I’d been preoccupied with my brother sprawled and bleeding in the snow, so I didn’t pick up much new from what I’d noticed at the car lot.

“I hit him several times with the Glock, I know that,” I said as I swiped his blueberry muffin from his breakfast tray. He’d been upgraded to food for people with teeth by the day-shift nurse. Nurse Tiger-Stripe Thong/See-through White Pants Combo. I called her Tigger for short. For that and for her bouncy nature. You know the wonderful thing about Tiggers? Nothing. Not a damn thing. They’re annoying as hell with all that bouncing and good cheer.

“He flinched but he didn’t go down,” I added before chewing and swallowing. “As a matter of fact, he grinned.” I picked out a blueberry—it smelled a whole lot better than bleach—and fiddled with it. “Good teeth. Just as sharp as before. His dentist would be proud. Bet he flosses like crazy.” Yeah, flossed pieces of punks like me out of those back molars like nobody’s business. “Cyrano,” I said seriously. “He is bad fucking news.”

“Because he rolled, then flipped our car?” He regarded the fake scrambled eggs and hockey-puck sausage with the same distaste he showed flesh-eating revenants. “It would take serious strength and physical framework to do something like that.”

“Yeah, but”—absently I gave him the last half of the muffin—“more that, hell, Nik, he wasn’t even trying that hard. It was like at the car lot. Like he was fishing, caught us, and thought, Nah, too small. Not worth my time. And tossed us back. You were down. My gun wasn’t putting him away. He didn’t even draw his bow on me. He just took the bullets, smiled with those freaky teeth, and disappeared. We might’ve killed his cadejos and ccoas, but he doesn’t think we’re much of a threat. I think he’s telling us to mind our own business.”

“From what you say, it wasn’t our best showing, and he is a hunter. Has been one for thousands of years. He might consider us unworthy prey.” He considered the muffin, sighed, and ate it. “I think I’m embarrassed for us.”

“I think I’m glad I’m not a head mounted on his wall somewhere.” I focused on the smell of the blueberry muffin and nothing else and managed to keep it down. “You want to get cleaned up? There’s a shower in the bathroom. If Promise sees you like that . . .” Bloodstained hair, Betadine, a bruise spreading across his forehead to match the fading black eyes I’d given him.

“No good?” he asked. “I’ll definitely enjoy being clean, but I hardly think it would matter to Promise. I never claimed to be as vain as Robin.”

He missed it. Niko, who hardly ever missed anything. “You look human, Nik,” I said bluntly. “You look way too human right now.” Blood, bruises, faint lines of pain. Human. Vulnerable. Promise had seen it before, but not to this degree and not in a hospital. It was a reminder that couldn’t do anything but hurt her. I knew I wasn’t enjoying it.

He could’ve died. Could’ve bled to death in the snow. My family, my only damn family.

Which led to something I was far better at than meditation. Denial. Very big, very bad denial. I took the tray and started in on the leathery eggs. One bite was enough. Jesus. That was physician-assisted suicide right there. “There’s shampoo and crap in there. Try not to flash me on the way.”

Fifteen minutes later he was back with clean damp hair, the Betadine scrubbed away from the stitches, and wearing scrubs instead of the hospital gown. He was still bruised, but he was steady on his feet, which was a good thing, because Promise was there, having walked past a scolding Nurse Tigger like she didn’t exist. They really were fascist with their visiting hours there.

She walked past me the same way she had Tig, so I took the tray out to the hall to give them quality vamp-human time. Cherish was waiting out there in black-on-black with a collar of gold, pearls, and onyx. She liked the shiny stuff, no way around it. She and Robin, they would always be thieves, but there were worse things to be. As long as the thieves were on my side when the chips were down, their private lives were none of my business. Hair swept up into a smooth coil pinned with more pearls, she held the hand of Xolo. He was in a parka, new from the sheen of it, with a hood that kept anyone from seeing anything but large shadowed eyes.

“You saw him again, then? Oshossi?” Her leather-gloved hand tightened on Xolo’s.

“You could say that.” I dumped the tray on a metal cart loaded with other dirty ones. “You could also say you owe us a car.” I folded my arms and leaned against the wall beside her. “I’m hoping you’ve never seen this guy fight, because I’d like to think you’d have mentioned he invented ass kicking and has a black belt in taking names.”

“No, I never saw him fight.” Her mouth, painted the color of poppies today, tried for a smile but didn’t pull it off. “I saw other sides to him. I do know he has never lost prey once he’s started the hunt. He’s very proud of that. Too proud, I thought. Arrogant, perhaps even foolishly so. But I was the fool. This is it, then?” she said more to herself than to me. “You and the others have faced him and barely escaped with your lives. I am a fighter.” The blackness fogged her eyes, and I saw her fangs, if only for a second. “An excellent fighter, but I’ve seen you and your brother . . . with the cadejos and the ccoas. You’re hunters, just as Oshossi is. If you can’t take him, neither can I.”

“Hey.” I wasn’t sure if I was insulted or felt bad for her. I rolled a meditation bead against my wrist and had a flash of that insight everyone’s always talking about. Know thyself.

Yeah . . . I was insulted.

Okay, okay, I felt a little bad for her too. “It’s not just you, remember? It’s all of us. Robin’s been around longer than Oshossi, you can bet that. When he has to, he can fight like hell. He might not like it, but he can do it. And if it hadn’t been for the car thing, I think Niko would’ve given Oshossi something to think about.”

I touched another bead. “Niko’s human, but . . .” I stopped and thought about it. “He’s a Caesar, an Alexander, a Genghis, a Minamoto no Yorimasa.” And he’d always said I never paid attention to the history books he’d used to teach me. “Some people are born warriors. He’s one of them. What it takes some creatures hundreds of years to learn, Nik was born knowing. Every once in a while the world comes up with a natural-born predator. We’re lucky nature screwed up and gave Cyrano a conscience along with it, or it’d be Alexander all over again.”

Huh. I’d gone through the entire mala, bead by bead, and hadn’t noticed. And I’d talked more than I usually did about personal things, and what the hell was up with that? So what if Cherish was Promise’s daughter, and Promise was with Niko. So what if that sort of made her family. So what if . . . damn, I was getting soft in my old age. Twenty—who knew you went to instant pudding then.

I grabbed my cynical nature and pulled it back into place. She was not family. She might have come around to care for someone other than herself, but that didn’t mean I trusted her.

My phone rang, and I walked down the hall from her. I’d brought my cell out of the room with me to call Robin. I’d called him last night, and I was hoping he’d learned something between then and now. He’d beaten me to the punch. “How’s Niko?” he asked.

“Good,” I said. “Once he gets his CT scan we’re out of here. You find out anything about Oshossi yet?”

“I did indeed,” he responded smugly. “He’s renting a brownstone in Harlem, the entire thing. He apparently likes his privacy.”

“It only makes things easier for us.” I pressed against the wall as a gurney went flying by, nurses doing CPR as they ran. It was pointless. I could smell the death on the guy.

“Easier?” Robin said incredulously. “You did say he flipped over your car last night, didn’t you? I can’t see there will be anything easy about this.”

“Hell, he might just spank us and send us on our way,” I said wearily. That hour of sleep hadn’t done me much good.

“I’m going,” Cherish said over my shoulder, having moved up behind me. “That will keep him there. After all, it’s me he wants. Anything, anyone else is incidental.”

She had a point, although he’d known her location when he’d sent the ccoas after her and his cadejos had followed her. He hadn’t been there then either. The only time he’d shown up was to warn the rest of us to back off, and that’s what it had to be because he could’ve made things much more nasty for us if he’d wanted. Maybe he wanted his animals to do his work for him to show the contempt he had for a common thief.

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. With Promise involved, we were up to our necks in it. I looked back toward Niko’s room. Not that I liked it, not one damn bit.

“You coming back to the house?” I asked Goodfellow.

“No. But I’m on the move and, no offense, I’m better off on my own. I’ve honed my escape abilities over the years.” That was probably true. The fact that he’d stuck with us for so long, confined unnaturally for any puck, yet had been ready to help when the fight came, that said something about Robin. Something better than you could say about me.

“But I am staying in those hotels worthy of my presence,” he continued. “If you need help, you’ll know where to come for me.” That was the thing about traveling. I had to know where I was going. I couldn’t open a gate blindly to a place I’d never been or seen at a distance. And Robin had filled me in on what hotels were good enough to suit him. . . . There weren’t many. I knew all their locations, passed by their doors in my years in New York. “And call me when you’re ready to take on Oshossi. Just make sure there are no cars readily available when you do.” With that he disconnected.

I shoved a hand through my hair. I needed a shower too. I’d cleaned all of Nik’s blood off me in the sink last night, scrubbing until my skin was red and stinging, but there were moments where I could still feel it. It was something that was happening way too much lately. It was easier to be irritable than thinking about that, and I turned my attention to Cherish and Xolo. “Seriously,” I asked with annoyance, “what is up with that thing? Why don’t you just get a dog? Alpo’s easier to come by than goat’s blood.”

“Some of us aren’t as fortunate as the four of you,” she said with an edge of bitterness, and turned to walk back to the room. “Sometimes pets have to do.”

Not many pets played Go Fish, but she was right. I was lucky, and I intended to stay that way. No matter what I’d thought on the beach when the Auphe had taken the eel. No matter that I thought we were going to die. No matter that I’d found out it was even worse than that. Whatever happened to me happened, but I was keeping Nik safe and alive. The real shitfest had yet to come. So let it. I wasn’t going to lose what I had, even if I lost myself.

Denial: Sometimes it was all that kept you going.

I took my shower while Promise and Cherish watched over Nik, who would’ve been offended that I thought he couldn’t take care of himself even with a concussion. They came to take him to CT while I was in the shower. Promise went with him. By the time they came back I’d gotten our weapons back from Rafferty’s, where I’d tossed them before the ambulance had come. The hospital had metal detectors at the ER entrance, but Cherish had said the front doors were clear. Good news, because walking out of this place unarmed wasn’t my idea of smart. Promise and Cherish had brought extra blades for us, but I felt more comfortable with my own and I definitely felt better with my gun—not that it had done me any good with Oshossi.

I’d shoved them in the closet. With Cherish standing outside the room door guarding it, I passed over Niko’s katana and various other blades. As he dressed, he slid them into place and put his coat on to conceal them all. His clothes were clean except for a blood-stain on the shoulder of his coat and the shirt beneath. I was still in the scrub top. My jeans were all right, though, as was my jacket. The nurse came back to say the CT had come back normal, and Nik would be discharged soon. When soon dragged into the second hour, we left. What the hell? The ID they had was false, and no one noticed as we walked out.

No one but the Auphe.

We were on the stairs when the gates opened. I didn’t have to warn anyone. They opened on the landing a floor below us. A straight shot and that’s what I took, firing several shots at the first of the seven, but it had already slid to the side as my finger pulled the trigger. Then I felt two more gates open behind us. Nine of them, four of us. That wasn’t even odds, nowhere near. One of the ones who’d appeared behind us was carrying something. At first I didn’t recognize what it was. I didn’t recognize it because I didn’t want to.

Cambriel’s head.

It was held by a handful of copper hair, the normally neat braid a tangled mess, the light brown eyes filmed. “I brought you a present, treasonous cousin. Traitorous brother. To put you in the breeding disposition. We hope it pleases you.” Scarlet eyes were bright with homicidal glee. “We made sure that he knew he died because of you.” The metal teeth flashed. “He had a long time to think of that before we finished. So very long.”

I didn’t think about that. I couldn’t. If I did, I’d make a mistake, and we couldn’t afford one now. “Mi Dios,” Cherish murmured in dread. She had called me Auphe, but now she saw the real thing. Walking, talking carnage. Even vampires feared the Auphe, were their victims like anyone else.

We hadn’t been able to handle two before between four of us with Niko in top shape and Robin with his thousands of years of experience there. I didn’t think we could take nine. I knew we couldn’t take nine.

I didn’t know if I could build a gate around all of us, four and Xolo too. That would be a big one, bigger than I’d attempted before. And a half-ass gate? I didn’t know what that would do. Take half of our bodies out of here, leave the other half? It was risk that might be as dangerous as the Auphe. So I opened one behind us, between the two Auphe and us. I concentrated. I stayed in control . . . God knew how. They were there. Right fucking there, and if we didn’t get out of there someone was going to die.

My gate was open, tarnished and greedy and big enough for two people to pass through at the same time. “Go!” I rapped. Promise didn’t hesitate. Cherish did for the briefest of moments, but then followed, dragging Xolo behind her. The Auphe watched them go, unmoving—their silver teeth showing in wider, contorted grins. Then Niko and I lunged for the gray light of the gate.

The Auphe closed it in our faces.

I felt them jerk it out of existence, collapse it into nothingness.

I hadn’t known they could do that. I hadn’t . . . oh, Jesus. It was Niko they wanted first. Last time, this time. The one person I could least afford to lose. The one I couldn’t lose.

The two who had appeared behind us on the upper stairs moved apart, leaving the way clear between them. “Run,” the one with Cambriel’s head said. “Give us our chase. Give us our thrill. Run, meat. Run, whore. Run.”

We did. We ran up eight flights. For anyone else with a concussion it probably wouldn’t have been possible. For Niko it was not only doable, but he had to slow down so that I could keep up. Ultraconditioned athlete or machine, take your pick.

At the fourth-floor landing a man in scrubs and a lab coat was scanning a clipboard. With one quick motion Niko gave him a hard shove back through the door and slammed it in his face. We went up four more before the scream came. He hadn’t stayed behind the door like he should have. I didn’t have time to feel guilt over his death. I didn’t have time for anything but the running, lungs burning and legs propelling with all the strength they had. We were still ahead of them, but only because they let us be. They were taking their time, drawing it out. Having their fun.

The last door was locked. I shot out the lock and we were on the roof. We could’ve gone out onto one of the occupied floors, but I didn’t think that would stop the Auphe. Not this time. They were in the heat of the chase, insane with it. A cold insanity and ready. They were so damn ready. Niko and I ran to the edge. At least sixteen floors up, there was nothing below us but the street. Nothing to hold on to, no way to climb down.

The door slammed open across the roof and they were there. Blood on their teeth and claws, dripping down pointed chins. Running. So quick I barely had time to point the Glock, but not time to pull the trigger—they were so fast they were almost on us when Niko tackled me and we went over the edge. I felt the concrete ledge hard against my knees, the breath-sucking tumble. Then there was free fall, lights flashing past us, and the hard thud of the ground beneath us. Not the street, but the bristle of winter grass.

I’d tried one last time. Tried one last time on the way down to be Auphe, and the Auphe had let me.

Niko rolled off of me to lie at my side, and I stared at the morning sky above Rafferty’s backyard. I waited slow seconds as the air finally began to wheeze back into my lungs. I’d created the gate one floor down as we fell from the hospital roof, the gate open one moment and closed the next. The Auphe had allowed it. Why? Because even in the madness of the hunt they knew what they wanted.

Me. And Niko had played on that when he’d pushed us over the edge. Him they wanted dead, but me they needed alive. They’d still been at their homicidal vengeful play, trying to take him, then the others. I had a feeling, though, playtime was about to be over. They might live almost forever, but they didn’t know that I would. They’d tire of the chase and soon. Torture was good fun and all, but they had their plans too. Then they would all come, and it wouldn’t be long. Not two, not nine, but every last one of them—which would accomplish both their goals. A massacre, and me pulled back to hell to remake the Auphe race.

I coughed and said hoarsely, “I never thought my dick would save our asses.”

“You had to say it, didn’t you?” Niko studied the sky with me. Blue and clear—a good day to still be alive. “But in this case you’re an idiot whose penis did save our lives. And I hope I never have to say or think that again.” It had been our only chance, Nik’s plan, the only way I wouldn’t have seen my brother die before my eyes while they held me back.

And if for some reason it hadn’t worked, hell, hitting the pavement would’ve been one goddamned better way to go.