Deathwish

3

“A speargun? A goddamn speargun?”

“You’ve said that five times now, little brother. I don’t think it’s going to change with repetition.” Niko had laid the two metal spears on our kitchen table to examine them. “It’s rather an ingenious weapon for fighting nonhumans . . . if it weren’t for the ammunition difficulties.”

“Yeah, they’re a little larger than crossbow quarrels. Hard to haul around. Good for a couple of bad guys; not so much for more,” I said. I was examining something myself—the hole in Niko’s coat. “You’re sure they weren’t trying to kill you?” Trying to kill him while Robin and I had been making our way through the crowd. Fast, but not fast enough. Goddamnit.

Promise’s driver had dropped Robin, then us off after our less-than-successful job. Promise went home with her wolves. Robin went home alone. Promise was one helluva fighter, but while she’d been around centuries, Goodfellow had been around almost as long as the Auphe. If push came to shove, he had enough millennia of weapons practice to take either Niko or me, maybe both at once . . . if he were sober. If any of us could handle the Auphe, it would be him . . . especially in his home territory. Although he damn sure would sooner avoid it if he could.

And while it was now two thirty in the morning in our own home territory, I was too wired to sleep. “You’re sure?” I repeated, sticking my finger through the hole in the gray cloth. If it wasn’t bad enough the Auphe were back, now someone had tried to spear Nik like a goddamn sea bass. Jesus.

“Yes. They had the opportunity and they didn’t take it.” He was sitting on a kitchen chair with hands folded across his stomach. “Which is quite curious. I think . . .” He frowned. “I think we’re going to have to do something neither one of us is going to like.”

“Oh, Christ, what?” I asked apprehensively. If Nik didn’t think we were going to like it, I really wasn’t going to like it. It’d be up there with a Drano enema.

He stood. “Think about it. I’m sure it will come to you. Do you want first watch?”

When we thought we’d lost the Auphe while running or when we thought the Auphe were gone for good, we hadn’t kept watch. Now here we were, the bad old times again. “Yeah, no way I’ll sleep yet.” I continued to fiddle with his duster until he pulled it from my hands.

“We have enough to occupy our minds.” He pinched the nerve right above my elbow. There was that tough love again. “No what-ifs, understand?”

“Fine. Jeez.” I rubbed my arm. “I’ll let your dry cleaner worry about it.”

“Good,” he nodded. “If you get bored, try reading a book instead of making paper airplanes out of the pages.”

“What? You’re not going to grill me about the park? About how they were all female? We’re not going to go over that for hours and hours until I try to skin you with a butter knife?” I asked, surprised. I’d been waiting for the discussion all day. I’d seen that unrelenting look in his eye. What had changed since then?

“No,” he paused, then shook his head. “I want to think about it first. And I’m familiar with your record of noticing details in any given situation.”

“Pathetic?” I freely admitted.

“Nonexistent,” he corrected. “Read a comic book or color if you can’t handle that. There are crayons in the desk drawer.” He disappeared down the hall to his bedroom. Crayons. Smart-ass bastard.

Naturally, I skipped any of his suggestions and went straight to why he didn’t want me thinking about the Auphe. What was that about? What happened to two heads are better than one? And you couldn’t say anyone knew more about the Auphe than I did, personally anyway. I might not be detail oriented, but those details were part of my genetic code. I couldn’t avoid them if I wanted. What was Nik up to? After contemplating that long enough to make me bat-shit crazy and getting nowhere, I distracted myself by thinking about what Niko had said before that.

With Seamus’s case—spearguns and all—what were we going to have to do that neither of us would like? It took me nearly half an hour to figure it out. And he was right.

I didn’t like it one damn bit.

I surprised myself by sleeping for a few hours after Nik took over. I’d learned to do that on the run, no matter how scared or emotionally screwed, you had to sleep or you couldn’t function. You couldn’t run from the Auphe if you can’t run at all. When I woke up and staggered down the hall in a T-shirt and pair of sweatpants to the living area, the first thing I said was, “No fucking way.”

Niko was already dressed and doing his morning katas with his sword in the living room. “Figured it out, did you?”

Yeah, I had, and there was no way. “Wahanket tried to kill us last time.” Wahanket, an informant also known as Hank when he wasn’t trying to kill us, lived in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum. It was a good place for a walking, talking mummy with a fondness for cowboy hats.

“No, he tried to kill you, although I’m sure he would’ve gotten around to the rest of us if you hadn’t taken his hand off.” He gave a quick movement of his blade, a flick to rid it of imaginary blood. “Besides, Goodfellow’s informants always try to kill us. It’s tradition.” He whirled, and I dodged the swipe of the katana. “Unfortunately,” he continued, nodding in approval at my footwork, “only the more homicidal of snitches have anything worthwhile to say.”

“Great.” I went over to the fridge and stuck my head in. There was Nik’s carrot juice, wheat-free bagels, cottage cheese, some sort of soy thing, and my week-old Chinese. I took the Chinese. “You know he makes mummy rats? Undead bony things running around.” I made a face as I stuck a fork in the cardboard container. “Can you imagine what else is down there? Gah.” I took a bite and chewed. “Then again, I could get to blow another piece off of him. There’s a plus.”

“No explosive rounds this time.” He sheathed his sword with the proper respect. “I don’t think Sangrida would appreciate that, considering all the artifacts down there. Best to stick with your Glock. No Desert Eagle.” Sangrida was a Valkyrie and the museum director. It probably wouldn’t do to piss her off. If the myths were true, she’d dragged many a warrior kicking and screaming off to Valhalla. And if the myths weren’t true, she was strong enough to take a cab from the museum curb and beat us to death with it. She was definitely tall and muscular enough to.

“If we go, and I don’t think we should.” I took another bite, considered the odd taste of the chicken, shrugged, and went on. Food poisoning was the least of my concerns. Assuming I could even get it. I never had, and I’d eaten things five seconds away from growing penicillin. “The hell with Seamus and his money. He’s not worth that kind of grief. And I don’t want to be a mummy. I definitely don’t want a certain part of me mummified. It’s just now getting some action.”

“Yes, yes, your sexual exploits aside . . . there were the whole two of them, yes?” he asked with mock curiosity. He didn’t wait for an answer and ignored my glare. “Those aside, we can’t assume this is only about Seamus. It seems odd someone would follow a vampire only to watch him. If they don’t want to kill him or me, what do they want? I don’t think this is just about him.”

“And you’re doing it for Promise.” I finished the carton and dumped it in the garbage.

“Yes. If this is about all vampires, I’d like to know as soon as possible.” He didn’t say he could go see Wahanket without me. He knew better than that.

“Okay. We’ll go.” I sighed and scratched my ass absently. “Should we take Robin?”

“I don’t know. What does the Magic 8 Ball that is your ass say?” he asked dryly.

We took Robin without any input from my ass, thanks for asking.

“We should’ve brought an offering. Hank doesn’t like it when you don’t bring an offering,” Robin said glumly. We’d managed to get him through the museum with a minimum of the I-slept-with-her, I-slept-with-him patented Goodfellow tour. When he started in on taking Cleopatra’s virginity and how the legend of the asp was simply Octavian’s Freudian longing for a penis . . . or for a bigger penis, as his was virtually nonexistent, we’d yanked him along.

“I don’t think a present and some Get Well Soon balloons are going to do the trick.” I snorted. “He’s going to be pissed. I cut off his damn hand. Only Darth Vader gets away with shit like that.”

The basement was the same as it was during my last visit, a virtual city of crates and forgotten exhibits. Robin led us through it as easily as he had before, only this time I heard several cries from different directions. The croak of dried vocal cords. There was also the sound of claws tearing at the wood of crates. Those weren’t rats. Great. Hank had gone from homicidal maniac to crazy cat lady. I wasn’t sure which was worse. At least mummified cats didn’t piss. All I smelled was the dust of years and years.

When we finally came across Wahanket’s lair, Robin had gotten bored and was now telling us Brutus hadn’t even been at the forum when Julius Caesar was killed. “A vicious rumor. And he had it all over Octavian, let me tell you. Hung like Pegasus, he was.” It was enough to make you wish for an attack of mummified cats after all.

“You.”

It was a death rattle from beneath the sand. It was Wahanket, and he sounded every bit as pissed as I expected.

“You. Mutilator. Maimer. Auphe.”

Robin’s informants really did know their shit. He knew I was Auphe. And if he knew that . . . “Then you know I came by the maiming hobby honestly,” I said coldly and without remorse. I might hate the Auphe, but I wasn’t above using their reputation if I had to, and why not? Most believed it anyway. “And it’s not like you didn’t deserve it, you withered son of a bitch.” I had my gun, but it was holstered. If I couldn’t use explosive rounds, I had something that would be more effective than the Glock. I held a sword, short and thicker than Niko’s katana, and perfectly capable of taking more than a hand off.

“Why not come out, Wahanket? And we can discuss things without any mutilation.” Niko said. “Perhaps,” he added matter-of-factly.

There was a moment of stillness, then Wahanket stepped into the dim light. The first thing I noticed was he had a new hand. Sort of. It was scaled with wickedly curved black claws. I had a feeling a stuffed Komodo dragon down here somewhere was missing a piece. The rest of him was the same. Blackened flesh, resin-soaked bandages, a pit of a nose, and empty eye sockets that held a faint yellow glow. He wasn’t slow like the mummies in the old black-and-white movies. He was quick when he wanted to be, with the scuttle of a cockroach. A very fast, murderous cockroach—something you definitely didn’t want living under your sink.

Robin raised eyebrows at the “hand,” but said smoothly, “See? That’s not bad at all. Caliban did you a favor. It’s very . . . ah . . . fashionable. Useful as well. A can opener has nothing on you, I’m sure.”

Dark brown teeth clicked as he moved closer. I could see a rib bone sticking through cracked flesh, and something on the claws of the dragon hand . . . brown, crusted—I had no problem figuring out what it was. Maybe we should ask Sangrida if any of her security guards had gone missing.

“What do you seek here?” he hissed with a curled scrap of leathery tongue. “What do you think I would possibly give unto you?”

Like that was fair. Yeah, sure, I had blown off his hand; there was that. But he had started it. Had tried to kill me with a malicious glee, and if you think a mummy is bad, a mummy with a gun is much worse. Luckily, he had lost that along with the hand and it seemed he hadn’t gotten a replacement yet.

“Information per usual,” Robin replied, rocking back on his heels and smothering a yawn. It could’ve been a hangover remnant or his deal-making bullshit extraordinaire. “Remember the good old days, Hank, before you tried to kill us? VCRs, DVD players—who showed you how to connect to the Internet? To the really good porn? At the very least, you owe me, if not them. You are a scholar—when not on a killing rampage. I made life down here bearable for you. And I doubt you can find a replacement for me.” He cocked his head toward a gaunt, furless cat that had clawed its way, slithering like a snake, up to the top of a nearby crate. The same yellow light that dwelled in Wahanket’s eye hollows were in its as well. “Mummifying piss pots for entertainment is going to get old after a while.”

“Or if you don’t want to play ball, asshole, we can start chopping off other parts until you have to stitch yourself together like a goddamn quilt.” I patted the sword against my knee suggestively.

Niko sighed, “Your lack of diplomatic skills are appalling.” He then said to Wahanket, “The sooner you tell us what we want, the sooner we’ll leave you in peace.” He drew his own blade, only more diplomatically, naturally. “And I won’t dismember you and toss the pieces in the river for trying to kill my brother. A reasonable option, don’t you think?”

I really didn’t see how that was any different than what I said, minus my trademark colorful language, but apparently the “in peace” worked. That or the fact that if he hadn’t been a match for me, he wasn’t going to be one for all three of us. Plus, Wahanket seemed to be as tired of looking at us as we were of him. Taking his hand might’ve taken some of the spirit out of him, but I doubted it. The son of a bitch was probably just biding his time. “Very well. Ask and begone.”

Niko described Seamus’s problem, our failure to do much about that problem, and the man he’d tangled with. “He was utterly average. Purposely so, I believe, except for the scar behind his ear. An inch in size, half-moon shape, it was so regular and even that I believe it was self-inflicted.”

“Or inflicted by someone else,” the mummy grunted, curling his one set of claws in demonstration. “I believe I know of what you seek.”

Considering we’d had next to nothing to go on, I was surprised he knew so quickly of what it might be. . . . A remote possibility, he said, the rumor of two-thousand-plus years, but it could be what we’d come across. “I’ve heard of men with this scar before. There is an order called the Vigil. Human. They have existed since several hundred years B.C. Barely.” He dismissed the age with the superiority of a creature that had walked the earth when the first pyramid was built. “I have heard they follow the inhuman, unhuman, the monsters among the world. They seem to have no other desire than to watch on occasion, or so it seems. As to why they do this thing . . .” The hardened upper lip cracked as it revealed the blackened maw in a sneer. “Bring one to me and I shall make him speak the truth.” The claws swiped the air in a decisive, eviscerating curl. “I could do with a companion. One would be amazed at how removing internal organs leads to the most interesting of conversations. Information does flow.” The flesh-encased skull turned toward me, as what passed for his eyes flared with a harsh light. “Perhaps you will be on my table one day. My knife in you, cutting you away. Your liver, stomach, intestines. I will save your heart for last to see how long I can coax it to beat. Perhaps minutes, perhaps an hour. Bound to an agony so total and savage that it will strip you of sanity itself.”

Oh, sure.

Now, who wouldn’t love that?

“Right,” I drawled. “I’ll call and make an appointment for that. Be sure to wait by the phone.”

That was all we got out of Wahanket, and a little more than I wanted to know, because I didn’t have any doubt one day he’d try to make good on his threat.

Get in line.

As we made our way out at about the halfway point, I heard a skittering behind. I didn’t smell anything, but I heard it. And if I heard it, then Niko and Robin had probably heard it before me. “What now?” I asked, starting to turn.

Niko shook his head and gave a dismissive shrug. “Just one of the cats.”

Oh, sure. Just one of the undead mummified cats. No big deal. I grimaced as I heard the croaking cry. That Wahanket was one sick bastard. As we walked on, the croaking got closer until finally Robin jerked and cursed in the gloom between the dim bulbs, “Bast’s bountiful breasts,” and shook his leg. That skinny, zombie-gray, wrinkly fleshed cat from Wahanket’s lair had leapt, hooked its claws into Goodfellow’s pants, and it wasn’t letting go. Flickering jack-o’-lantern eyes looked upward and it croaked again.

“Do something,” Robin demanded, shaking his leg again.

“What would you have us do?” Niko asked blandly. “It’s already dead.”

“And it’s just a cat,” I observed, hiding the grimace this time. Just a cat. Just an undead, walking, croaking, creepy-as-hell cat.

“Monster killers, my immortal ass. Fine. I’ll take care of it myself,” he muttered as he tried to yank it off. It didn’t budge; it had to be strong as hell. Robin then drew out a blade as long as my forearm from within his long brown leather coat. He tried, without luck, to slide the blade between his leg and its body. It was clamped on too tightly. “All right, then,” he said with determination. “If that’s the way it has to be.” He angled the blade under its chin, and that’s when we heard it. Loud and clear.

The purr from beyond the grave.

It was like the rattle of bones, but that’s what it was, all right. Rough and coarse and rapturous.

“No.” Robin shook his head. “Absolutely not.” The blade fell away. “Absolutely not.”

As Niko had said last night: Repetition didn’t change a thing.

By the time we reached the stairs it had climbed Robin’s leg, slithered under the coat, and wedged itself under his arm. And Goodfellow, who always had an answer for anything—whether you asked for it or not—had an expression of disgust and despair on his face. “I don’t like cats. Even live ones. They’re demanding and annoying, they imagine themselves to be so very superior, and they shed.”

“That one won’t shed,” I grinned. “As for the rest . . . sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” I ignored his snarl and turned to Nik to say, “Think we should tell Sangrida? Before there’s a mummified security guard walking around here too?”

“I already passed that message along through Promise once Wahanket went rogue.” Niko had had his sword in hand, wary of any traps the mummy might have set. Bad things happened down here. We’d seen that on a previous visit. Now he sheathed it as we reached the top. “No one comes down here now without Sangrida, and she is capable of handling Wahanket.”

Maybe. She could break him like a twig if she could catch him, but he was cunning as hell. Still, her museum, her problem. Hell, we had more than enough of our own to worry about at the moment.

We parted ways with Robin and his new best friend at the front entrance as Niko dragged me to the main branch of the New York Public Library. I wasn’t a fan. Not that I didn’t read. I read—and not comic books, as Niko claimed. And not porno mags—well, yeah, okay, I did look at porno mags on occasion. What twenty-year-old didn’t? But I read mysteries and sci-fi once in a while too, which I picked up in used bookstores. I liked older books. These days, the space suits on the front of books aren’t made to showcase the proud Double D astronaut. And you couldn’t tell me Spandex couldn’t keep out the vacuum of space. NASA had no idea what they were doing.

Despite my perfectly valid literary choices, Nik had made sure I knew my way around the library the first week we’d moved to New York. The mythology section was home base for months. I had to give credit where it was due: My brother had done all he could to shove the knowledge in my head, and some stuck. But mostly? Mostly, I read a sentence and forgot it the second I hit the period. Having the knowledge of the Auphe in my head was monster news plenty. I didn’t want to study the other kinds hanging around. Enough . . . hell, enough was just enough. I picked up the info I needed on the streets and during fights—Nik was the only person who’d give you a lecture on the monster you were fighting during the fight itself.

“. . . and is well-known for the barbed poisonous tail.” Duck and slice said tail from body. “It also builds a nest of mud and clay, and lays eggs in the chest cavity of its dead victim as a means of procreation.” A thrust of steel and a jet of dark blue blood comes spurting from its heart. “Are you paying attention, Cal?”

Honestly, wasn’t that enough studying?

This time as I trudged through the main lobby, about to call Internet shotgun while Nik dealt with the books, is when I saw it. “Hey, look.” I nudged Niko in the ribs and nodded my head toward a guy sprawled in one of the chairs reading the Post. On the front page in the bottom corner read the headline: NAKED ALBINO MENTAL PATIENT GOES BUS SURFING.

Had that naked albino mental patient not been a creature bent on the torture and murder of my family, friends, and me, it might’ve been funny. As it was, the lack of humor I was feeling had me snarling at the man, who started to protest when I moved over and yanked the paper out of his hand. He then took one look at my face and backed away slowly.

“I apologize for the rudeness,” Niko said. “He’s off his medications and consequently more himself than usual.” He handed the man a couple of dollars for the paper. I ignored the guy as he slid carefully past me with the money and worked at putting a lot of space between himself and me.

“If I hear voices, it’s because of whatever freaky-ass vitamin you put in my morning coffee when I’m not looking,” I muttered as I scanned the short article.

“If you hear voices, it’s because you only eat irradiated nitrates and have grown a microwave-spawned tumor in your frontal lobe.” He took the paper from me. “Assuming you have a frontal lobe or a lobe of any kind. My latest theory is your skull hosts a hamster running in a wheel that keeps you upright and less coherent.”

“Don’t you mean ‘more or less coherent’?” I snorted and continued reading over his shoulder.

“No.”

I thought about a light punch to his kidney, thought about the elbow I’d get jammed in my diaphragm before I got halfway through the punch, and decided to finish the article instead. It wasn’t much. A few people had spotted something on top of a bus that had looked pretty abnormal, and somebody in the police department had filled them in on the melanin- and clothing-challenged mental patient, but he’d been captured and returned to the hospital. All was well. These aren’t the ’droids you’re looking for and all that. No, of course, the name of the hospital or patient couldn’t be revealed. Confidentiality rules. Blah, blah.

“Somebody actually covered it up,” I said, surprised. This wasn’t a random reporter spotting a boggle in Central Park and doing a Bigfoot-hits-the-big-city story on it. This was a genuine cover-up with an authority figure involved and everything.

“That they did. But who are they and why did they do it?” He folded the paper. “How is a good question as well.”

They were all good questions, but . . . “We don’t really have time for any more mysteries right now. Hell, we don’t have time for Seamus’s,” I pointed out. I thought it was too bad the spear had gone through Niko’s coat instead of Seamus’s heart. It would’ve solved at least one of our problems, because, truthfully, I didn’t give a damn if the guys shadowing Seamus were a threat to him or not. “Screw the mysteries and let’s go have a hot dog.”

Niko looked at me and shook his head. “Where did I go wrong?”

I flopped in the chair the guy with the paper had just vacated. “Okay, Cyrano. Spoon-feed it to me. Bruce Willis was a ghost. Darth is Luke’s father. The Crying Game chick is packing sausage and it’s not for a picnic.” I raised my eyebrows and made a come-on gesture with my hand. “And?”

“If an organization that follows and watches supernatural creatures has existed for thousands of years and we have proof that someone is covering up the existence of these creatures, doesn’t it seem logical that they might be connected? Or even the same entity?”

He was so smug. “Not necessarily,” I said, just to be contrary.

Sighing, he swatted me with the paper. “Bad dog. Go and research. And if I find you playing Mine-sweeper or looking at pornographic sites—”

“Yeah, yeah. You’ll kick my ass.”

“See? You can be logical when you want,” he said as I heaved out of the chair and headed for the computer section.

I didn’t find anything, and I looked, but other than a thousand sites for candlelight vigils, and one paramilitary skinhead group out in Wyoming, I was out of luck. No super secret organizations mentioned, and they definitely didn’t have their own Web site. What a crock, considering this was the Internet age. How’d they recruit? Hang around haunted houses on Halloween and say, “Hey, wanna see something really cool?”

Niko didn’t have any luck either, which made me feel somewhat better, until he took over my computer. Then he found something. A year ago, most of the Auphe had died in a collapsing warehouse. Thanks to the wild energy of an impossible gate I’d created, it went down so quickly that apparently only a few had a chance to gate their own way out. Lucky us.

The archived newspaper article called it a gas explosion. When Nik and George had been kidnapped months ago, we’d left a church littered with dead vodyanoi , man-shaped, oversized leech creatures that were big and heavy enough to be damn hard to dispose of. The church had burned to the ground. Arson, the police said. Someone had cleaned up two very big messes of ours. Maybe there was a Vigil; maybe not, but there was something going on out there. And weeks ago when Sawney Beane, our least favorite mass-murdering monster, had left a tree full of dead bodies in Central Park . . . those bodies had disappeared. They hadn’t made the news at all.

Mysteries on top of mysteries. I didn’t like mysteries. Mysteries only meant trouble.

Like I’d thought earlier at the museum about Sangrida and Wahanket, we had trouble enough without looking for more.

Or so I’d hoped anyway . . . until Nik’s cell phone rang.

Enough was never enough, was it? Seamus wasn’t enough, and now this. One thing we’d learned over the past few months: Work doesn’t stop when things turn bad. Our lives were, in a word, complicated as shit. Okay, three words, but “complicated” didn’t really get the point across. Family, serial killers, allies who were anything but . . . day to day, it seemed like a miracle if I lived long enough to eat my lunchtime chili cheese dog. So, when you got the karmic swat, as Nik would probably call it, we kept going. We kept living. We kept working, because if we didn’t, Christ, we would never work. And Nik’s teacher’s assistant salary from the university combined with my bartender pay was about enough to pay our utilities. It was our other work, our real job, that paid the bills. And while it was more interesting than serving drinks to the frequently inebriated and the occasionally incontinent, it was also a damn sight more gory.

We did it all. Ransom deliveries, de-bodaching carnivals, exterminations. Whatever someone was willing to pay us for that didn’t involve compromising too much of our souls. Which is how we ended up freezing our asses off under the pier at Coney Island later that evening. Promise had found us another client, because a Scottish vampire wasn’t enough of a pain. I sat cross-legged in the sand, waves colored the purple-gray of the twilight sky nearly reaching my shoes, and sifted absently for a rock. Over the three hours we’d been sitting there, I heard one set of footsteps above us over the sound of the waves, and the occasional shout and laughter from the boardwalk, but that was it. The wind off the water had a vicious bite, and if I didn’t have to be there, my ass would’ve been someplace warm like everyone else’s.

But it wasn’t the frigid air that I was thinking of. Or whatever client we had, what they wanted. I wasn’t thinking of the Vigil either. Did they exist? Did they not exist? Did I care? Nope.

Right now I was thinking the same thing that had come to me yesterday morning as I’d lain on my back in Washington Square Park, surprised that the world hadn’t ended then and there. It was something more important than cold, clients, and mystery organizations combined. Something that had to do with our problem. Our lives . . . or deaths. I was thinking of something that actually mattered. I couldn’t picture doing it, not really, and that didn’t say too much about me. Not at all. Because it might be the best thing to do—if I had the guts. In fact, it might be the only thing that would work, and it didn’t have to be permanent. If I survived.

“You know,” I started diffidently, flinging the pebble I’d found into the water, “I was thinking . . . if I—”

“I’d find you,” Niko said, watching the water. He had his hair pulled back in a short ponytail, and was in a long black coat, gray shirt, and black pants, and had his sword lying across his lap. He looked every bit as deadly as he was and every bit as confident. I missed his long braid. It had hung to his waist and been good for annoying him with a tug. It had also been a sign of simpler days. Days when we’d been totally in the dark about why the Auphe had wanted me, days when they’d wanted only me. Ignorance/bliss, all that. I wished I really were as ignorant as Niko had accused me of being when he’d homeschooled me when I was sixteen. Ignorance can get you killed, but at least you’d be happy up until the hammer fell and shattered your clueless skull to bone fragments.

Nik turned his view from the water to look at me and emphasized, “Wherever you went. I’d find you, little brother.”

“Yeah,” I admitted, not surprised he knew what I was thinking. A lifetime of familiarity will do that. “You would.”

No, running wasn’t the answer. Even if there were a chance the Auphe would follow me if I left the others—after all, where was the fun in mentally torturing your prey if he wasn’t around to see it? Yeah, even if . . . Niko wouldn’t let me. I could run and disappear as well as any fox, or any Rom, for that matter, but Niko was the one who had taught me. Anywhere I could think of, he could do the same. Probably beat me there.

“We’ve made our stand, Cal. All of us. You can’t take that choice from us. Now . . .” He gave a stinging swat with the flat of his sword to my knees. “Watch the water or you’ll be dinner. Of course, the creature would promptly vomit you back up. All the bitching and moaning.” He curled his lips. “No one could suffer that on their stomach.”

I snorted and tossed another rock. “If anything comes out of there, their balls will be icicles. Kind of cuts down on the agility. I think we’ll be okay.” But when it came out of the water, it didn’t have balls . . . at least none that I could see. Not that I was looking for them or anything.

Swear to God.

It was like nothing I’d seen before, and I’d seen quite a bit in the past few years. The flesh was a mottled light gray on dark and was covered with a thick layer of slime. Its head was featureless except for round black eyes and a backward slash of mouth filled with a double row of triangular teeth. It had no neck; its wide chest was smooth and without nipples; the arms were short, with webbed hands; and the rest of it was a muscular fish tail. It looked like a shark with human arms. Like it was evolving slowly toward the land, and if that was the case, I was never coming to the beach again.

It threw itself up on the wet sand, tail thrashing, and its mouth opened wide enough that I could’ve stuck my entire head in it. “Holy shit!” I sprang to my feet and yanked my gun free.

“Wait.” Niko grabbed my wrist. “That’s our client.”

“You’re shitting me, right? Tell me you’re kidding.” I looked at the polished black eyes and the gnashing mouth. “What the hell is it?”

“A mermaid.” He frowned. “Merman? I think Mer is correct. Either way, this is the client Promise passed our way. Now, help me pull him farther up. I imagine whatever is chasing him will be right behind him.”

“A mermaid? Jesus, Disney was way off the mark there, weren’t they?” I holstered the gun, seized one slippery, thick arm and helped Nik drag the heavy body farther up into the sand. “What the hell is after it?” . . . that could possibly be worse than this, I silently finished.

Most of the time I went into a job with at least a sketchy knowledge of what we were after, and sometimes sketchy is all we had. But this time I hadn’t asked, my mind still on the Auphe, and Niko, always the teacher, had let me get away with it . . . for a reason. Learn your lesson the hard way and you’ll always remember it. And this was the result of that lesson—being more than mildly freaked out by our own client, and wishing like hell I’d worn some gloves. I wiped the slime on my jeans as I waited for Nik’s answer.

“Promise wasn’t sure. It seems no one speaks their language very well.” The immediate whistling shriek from the Little Mermaid proved that, as Niko continued, “It was all the go-between could do to figure out it wanted help, that something was attacking the local school of Mers.”

As swimmers rarely disappeared here, I guessed the Mer weren’t eating people, though they certainly looked capable of it. I supposed that made them if not the good guys at least not the bad ones. But, damn, what the hell was it they couldn’t handle? And a whole school of them to boot. I wasn’t shy about asking that either as I pulled my gun again.

“They’re a peaceful people, apparently.” He actually said that with a straight face, like he hadn’t seen those teeth. “And my best guess is this one was working as bait to lead their attacker or attackers to us, so be ready.”

I was. When one third of it slid out of the water onto the sand under the pier, I was as ready as I was going to be—which turned out to be not very.

It was the length of three SUVs, I was guessing, end to end and as big around as a Volkswagen. Part of it was hidden in the crashing waves. Dead black, it had scarlet eyes with pupils as big as my fist. It also had a spray of teeth exploding at an outward angle from barracuda jaws that looked perfectly capable of snapping a boat in half while Spielberg pissed his pants.

“We’re going to need a bigger beach,” Niko murmured.

“Funny. Real funny.” I hadn’t brought the explosive rounds. I rarely needed them and they made a lot of noise. Attracted a lot of unwanted attention out in the open like this. Not as unwanted as the kind that was trained on us now, though.

I backed up as the jaws opened and slammed shut. “What the hell is that thing?”

“I think it’s a Jinshin-uwo. In Japanese mythology, it’s an eel that . . .” Niko’s usual pre-battle lecture was cut short when the massive head heaved up and forward before coming down on the ground with a force that would’ve crushed anything beneath it to jelly.

Like our client.

“Oh, shit.” It wasn’t much of a eulogy for the poor guy, but at that moment I was more concerned that the same wasn’t going to happen to me. Although seeing those two-feet-long teeth designed to do nothing but tear flesh, crushed might be the better way to go.

As the head turned, the jaws clamped around the dead Mer, ripped it in half, and ate both pieces. Two bites, snap, snap—gone. I, along with Nik, backed farther under the pier. “The eyes?” I said.

“The eyes,” he confirmed.

Confronted with something this big, short of crawling into its stomach and stabbing it before you were digested, the eyes were pretty much the only way to go. And while it was fast, it didn’t seem to be as quick as many of the things we’d faced. The eyes were doable. I aimed my Glock at one grapefruit-sized eye and that . . . well, that was pretty much all I remembered until I woke up facedown in the sand.

It was hard to breathe. Why? Why was it so damn hard? Where was the air?

I sucked in a breath and something soft and powdery spilled into my mouth. Coughing and choking, I got an arm under me and struggled to turn over. I wavered on my side for a second and then dropped onto my back. Still coughing, I could see the sky above me. Purple. Good color, purple. I was a fan of purple. Grape soda and twilight skies . . . good stuff.

Good . . . wait. Wasn’t there something I should be doing?

Christ. Nik.

I got my elbows under me as I finally pulled some air into my lungs and blinked at what I saw. I was at least forty feet from the darkness under the pier and if the pain slowly blooming across my back was any indication, I was lucky my spine wasn’t broken. I also saw the reason I’d ended up facedown. The giant eel had moved farther under the pier, its midsection still in the water, but its tail was out and whipping with violent fury. It was safe to say it had gotten me but good. I must’ve hurtled through the air like a crashing plane. Down in flames.

“Cal!”

I couldn’t see Niko, but I could hear him, and that was enough to snap me back to full alertness. I staggered halfway up, fell back down, then got back up again . . . all the way this time. My gun was still clenched tightly in my hand and as I lurched across the sand I fired. There were five muffled pops from the silencer and, just as I’d thought, not a single reaction from the eel. The rubbery flesh was too thick. The bullets probably felt like a fly bite to it, if it felt anything at all. I could’ve left the gun at home and brought a goddamn sushi chef for all the luck I was having with this giant unagi roll. I stumbled on through the shifting sand, gaining momentum and steadiness with every step.

Closer, I could see Niko’s sword flashing, reflecting the stray beams of the streetlamps from the boardwalk. The eel’s head was moving back and forth just as fast. A lot faster than I’d anticipated. Apparently, it had figured out its eyes were its weak point, the same as we had. Or maybe that’s a knowledge that big bad-ass eels are born with. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. What I cared about was that Nik was taking on that thing alone. I ran faster, then dove to the ground as the tail headed my way. It passed over my head with only inches to spare. I smelled the dank salt water that sprayed over me. I turned my head to one side and flattened myself as much as possible as the tail swung back. This time I felt the skim of flesh against my ear. It was ice cold and unnaturally smooth, like a leech. I gritted my teeth, refused to shudder at the sensation, got up, and moved. And I mean moved. I kicked off my shoes and tore ass up the length of the monster, and when it turned its head away from Nik’s sword, I put eleven silenced rounds right in its bloodred eye.

That it noticed.

It didn’t die. It didn’t thrash about in agony. It just noticed.

But that was enough to put its attention squarely on me. Its right eye turned to jelly, it opened its mouth—the teeth cutting through the air like the maiming snap of a bear trap. I could smell the Mer on its breath. The blood, the flesh. I could smell other flesh, too, caught in its teeth. Decaying. Rotting for days, weeks. I gagged at the reek of it as I desperately dived to one side. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Niko go for the other eye. But the thing wasn’t surprised from behind this time. It knew where Nik was, knew that danger well. It snapped its head back. Niko was hit by the snout and flung across the beach, narrowly missing one of the pier columns. That would’ve broken him . . . shattered every bone to pieces no one could put back together again.

I slammed another clip home as he landed on his back. He wasn’t moving, but he would. I’d survived it, and he was stronger than I was. More conditioned. Tougher. He’d get back up, and that’s the way it was going to be. So help me God.

But since I didn’t believe in God, I was going to have to help myself. I rolled, got back to my feet, to be faced with an open mouth as tall as I was. The head turned slightly to get me into the sight of its one good eye as its flesh bunched muscularly, ready to surge forward. I jerked backward as I fired into the maw. Nothing. Nothing. Not a damn thing fazed it.

Until the gate opened.

And out they came. A swarm of the deadly, the fatal, the world’s first murderers. They’d hunted dinosaurs once, Goodfellow had said. For fun. There’d been easier things to catch and eat. But for a helluva good time, for a real party, they killed dinosaurs. The eel wasn’t much different.

Thirty-eight sets of claws were buried in the black meat. As one, they dragged it foot by foot across the sand. With jaws snapping and long body twisting, it tried to escape. It didn’t. Section by section, it was wrenched backward into the largest gate I’d seen since . . . hell, since I’d tried to destroy the world. Black blood spilled on the pale sand as half of it disappeared into the whirl of gray light. Metal teeth buried in rubbery flesh and wrenched massive pieces free to toss away onto the sand, a pack of hyenas savaging their crippled prey. Those same teeth, now stained black, all grinned in my direction as they called me, voices as one—the crooning of a chlorine gas- tainted wind.

“Cal-i-ban.”

Death in the air, death in my name.

Then they went back to the business—the fun—at hand, taking the eel to a hell that put anything in the Bible in the shade. The last attacker visible clawed its way up onto the eel’s back. Hand over hand it ripped into the now slowly thrashing body—they were eating the eel, I thought numbly. On the other side. They were eating it while it was still alive. The last Auphe kept up its bloody passage until it was behind the now-sluggish head.

“You,” it hissed, bloodred eyes fixed on mine, teeth bared in the same happy, insanely twisted grin, but not murderous—it was possessive. Coveting. And that was worse. God, that was so much worse. “You are ours. For no other. Ours.” The hot-lava gaze slid to Niko. “And you, sheep, you are no more. Blood to soak the ground, screams to tear the air. Meat. Meat to feed us.” The grin shimmered black and silver. “Meat to feed your brother.”

Then they were gone. Eel and Auphe. The gate closed. There were only sand, dark waves, a rising sliver of moon, and . . .

And . . .

And we were going to die. All of us. They were going to kill every last one of us, and I didn’t see any way around it. But . . .

The way it—she—had looked at me. It meant something. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t. If she coveted anything, it was my death. That’s all. That’s all it could be. Fuck, I almost laughed, wasn’t that enough?

My legs wanted to give out and dump me hard in the sand, but I refused to let them. Dinosaurs had never ruled the earth—the Auphe had. And if it weren’t for humans breeding like rabbits, they still would. Now billions of humans might live on, but we were soon to be as extinct as those dinosaurs. Buried and gone. All of us, me included.

But not now, I thought as I caught grip of the last gossamer strip of sanity as it went sailing by. I held on tight, held on for all I was worth. Not now, I reaffirmed savagely. Not yet.

I turned to see Nik sitting up and staring back at me. For once he looked as stunned as I felt. As if he didn’t have the answer. Even though he always had the answer. Even though he always came through. Never failed. Which wasn’t fair. It was a weight no one should have to carry, but he did it day after day. Battle after battle. Catastrophe after fucking catastrophe. He never hesitated and he never gave up. On anything. On me. He should have. There were times that if he had we wouldn’t be here right now. In this place, this position. Niko, Promise, and Robin . . . they’d be living their lives. I’d be gone, but it would’ve been worth it. To save the only family, the only friends I’d ever had.

But that chance was gone. That ship had fucking sailed.

But I had another chance. A chance to do something good. Something I should’ve done a while ago.

I walked over to put my hand down and help Niko up. Not that he needed it, but he took it all the same. He stood, one arm cradling his ribs. Hopefully, they were only bruised, not cracked or broken. His jaw was set against the pain, and broken ribs or not, I knew he’d make the climb back up to the boardwalk stoically. That was Nik.

“It’s okay,” I said. I couldn’t feel his hand against mine or the sand beneath my bare feet, but that didn’t matter. I had one focus now. One.

“Okay,” he echoed dubiously, head turned down toward me. He said it as if he couldn’t believe that I had, as if he wondered how I could imagine that any of this could possibly be okay. Doubt; Niko hadn’t ever shown it, not on the outside. Not when we were kids—not last year when he had to kill me to save me. But I saw the faint shadow of it now. It was time for me to take the burden for a while. Time that I was the one to never give in, never give up. To believe, against all odds and logic, that we would make it. Force myself to believe, because that’s what was needed. To do what Niko had done for me his whole life.

Even if it was a lie.

“It’s more than okay,” I said, trying to sound optimistic. I’d never actually felt optimistic, so pulling off a completely unknown emotion was a stretch, but I gave it my best shot. I put my hand on his arm to support him if the ribs were broken and he needed it. He wouldn’t, but I did it anyway. “I’ll think of something. We’ll kick so much pasty nightmare ass, we’ll be limping for a week. Blisters on our soles the size of lemons.” Bullshit, utter and complete, but then again . . . maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t bullshit or a lie. I’d always claimed to be a monster. Now was the time to step up to the plate and live it. “I’ll think like them. I’ll anticipate them. I’ll be ready.”

And why not?

Who better to think like the Auphe than their own family?