Madhouse

14

Delilah was a wolf of her word. She took the pay, and two days later she showed up in the tunnel as shown on the map of the Second Avenue subway project Niko had sketched on a bar napkin. She also brought four other wolves with her. Big ones, all half-and-halfs and wearing hooded sweatshirts to cover the fact. It didn't stop an experienced eye from spotting the glitter of golden-brown irises, thickened black nails, and jagged teeth made for the ripping out of throats.

Niko, Promise, Robin, Boggle, Delilah with her wolves, and me, if we couldn't take care of the problem, we might as well grab a walker, move south with the snowbirds, and let Sawney have New York.

"Did you leave the kiddies with a nanny?" Robin asked as he looked up at the boggle. He didn't have any better memories from the fight with her mate than Niko or I did. It showed in the wary distance he kept from her.

From the contemptuous snap of her jaw and gale-force snort of rancid air, she managed to say without words that the boglets would do just fine on their own. I wasn't sure where she'd gotten into the tunnel system to eventually meet us, but I doubted it had involved a MetroCard.

"This is quite the mix." Promise's hair was in a braid this time, one woven with black cord, then wrapped in a thick club at the base of her neck. She smiled to show the tips of pointed canines. "The very best parties always are."

In contrast, Delilah was already frowning in impatience. "We go now. Skipped dinner. Mealtime is now."

"You didn't eat simply to work up an appetite for this?" Niko had brought his axe again and raised it slightly in respectful salute. "You are the warrior."

"Devious and ravishing." Robin sidled closer. He'd made the sacrifice called for by filthy tunnel water and wore jeans. My jeans. He didn't own any. Hit men after his ass he had plenty of, but casual wear for revenant hunting—that he was lacking.

"Devious, ravishing." She snuffled his hair, neck, and shoulder and it wasn't in what I would call a sexual way. "Hungry."

"All right, then. Moving along. Let us return Sawney to the hell from whence he came." Goodfellow was in the lead and moving with alacrity. He was armed with a sword, as was Promise. I had my guns, and the wolves and the boggle had what nature gave them. As we moved, Boggle … if she had a name, she also wasn't sharing…slid under the water with the slow grace of a crocodile. When she surfaced, the mud was gone, and her mottled scales held the pattern of an entire desert full of rattlesnakes. Then she went under again. The water here had been thigh deep; now it was almost waist high. It didn't cover her completely. You could still see the ridge of her spine and the glow of her eyes in the dim light, but she moved fast. So fast that within seconds she had disappeared—past Goodfellow and gone.

"You know, I'm not quite sure she'll need the rest of us after all," Robin remarked.

She had something beyond what her mate had possessed—more speed, more decisiveness, more of a predatory nature. I'd thought how our past informant had been content to sit and wait for his prey to come to him. This boggle, she wouldn't be. I'd made an assumption that all boggles were happy to dwell in their mud until dinner wandered by to be mutilated. It wasn't true. She would range, she would hunt…she chased down her prey, and having seen her in motion, I didn't think she would have it any other way.

It'd be fucking fantastic if she were the answer to our Sawney problem, but I knew better. Things were never that easy. And insanity, like Sawney had in spades, carried you a long-ass way.

We found that out in less than an hour. The tunnel we ended up in was long abandoned and most likely long forgotten. The lights had gone dark who knew when and remained that way. No one had come to replace burned-out bulbs. No one came for anything as far as I could tell. Niko, Robin, and I carried flashlights. No one else needed them. The wolves and Promise got by easily on our reflected light and I didn't know if the boggle needed light at all. As for what the revenants required…bump into it in the dark. If it's not cold and clammy, take a bite out of it. You didn't need light for that. Revenants weren't smart, but they didn't have to be, and the fact that Sawney had somehow lifted them an IQ point or two only made things worse for us. Worse being?

They came out of the water.

I thought the massive swell was the boggle at first, because they rose as one. Boggle was what my mind expected and so for a split second that's what I saw. Then reality—at least forty more revenants, six inches from us. Six inches. They couldn't have surrounded us as at least one of us would've felt them under the water as we passed them, but this…this was right up there with being the next best thing. I couldn't have smelled them separately from the ever-present rank decomposition already in these unused tunnels anyway. The wolves might have, though, if those revenant sons of bitches hadn't been covered with several feet of sluggishly flowing, horrifically ripe water. Now that several feet had become six goddamn inches and we were beyond screwed.

Niko and I were in the lead, having just traded off with Delilah and Promise ten minutes ago. The four other wolves were strung out loosely behind their silver-haired Alpha, and Robin was pulling rear guard.

Six inches. I kept thinking it, but it bore repeating. I was so close to the revenant that I could see the poreless stretch of pallid skin stretched across bone. I could see that behind the thick coating of white that covered their eyes was a fine tracery of purple veins, the size of a stream of spider silk, and that the lips had no lines in them. Lastly, I saw that every tooth in every yellowed grin was flecked with dried blood like speckling on a quail's egg.

Such a short distance, and it let me see more detail than I wanted. It also let me jam the Glock in the belly of the revenant before me and blow his spine in half. Six inches … six miserable inches, it isn't the space you want between you and a hungry foe, but at least you don't have to aim. Unfortunately, the same was true for them. They passed over us in a wave. No specific attacks on individuals—tidal waves don't do that. They just take you the hell down. Drowning in the ocean's version of a sucker punch wouldn't be pleasant; drowning in tainted tunnel water and moistly putrid flesh wasn't any better.

I lost the flashlight. I lost the Glock too, but that was purposeful. I let it go and went for my blades. One was the serrated knife, a mercenary magazine special, and the other a kukri. Niko had shown me how to be effective with the minimachete. Now I was ready to give the same lesson to a revenant or ten. I came up from the water, the thrashing bodies, and ripped through everything solid around me. Everyone in our temporary quasi team was experienced enough to give everyone else their room. Personal space, it's yours—kill at will.

It wasn't easy getting back up to air—air to breathe, air to slash metal through. It was a process of clawing and stabbing and biting. If you wanted to give a label to something that already had the perfect one: Survive. Process. Method. Survival. When I surged upward, I was spitting out something other than water. They weren't dead, they weren't decomposing, but damned if they didn't taste as if they were.

I kept both hands in motion, doing my best to clear the area around me. The serrated knife took out one throat; the kukri did the same but with a cleaner slice. All around was…what? The dimmest flickering of illumination from flashlights dropped underwater, a horde of white-eyed zombie wannabes, five giant wolves leaping and sending shredded intestines spilling through the air, a soaked and bloody puck and human with sword and axe, a vampire ripping an entire head from a revenant's shoulders. What did you call that?

Hell. You called it hell, because chaos was far too pretty a word.

And where the fuck was our boggle?

"Travelers."

Once again, they said it as one. And, I was sorry to note, that with repetition, it did not get any less freaky. It was still wrong and unnatural, even for a revenant.

Delilah catapulted over my head as I dodged one revenant's rush and permanently ended another's ability to move at all. I recognized her as she was the only white wolf among the minipack. The silver-blond fur was a startling glow as she soared over. Her brother Flay managed about three-fourths wolf when he changed. He could run on all fours but could walk on two as well. Delilah, as far as I could see, went all the way. Wolf through and through and big as hell. When she landed, she did what Promise had done. She removed a head, but she did it using her jaws. And then she did another and another and another. The other wolves, one with the remains of a hooded sweatshirt still tangled around his neck, were cutting their own swath, and doing the job we paid them for. All except one. Whether he was a shade slower, slightly less agile, the reason didn't matter. What did was that he got caught. Several sharp-nailed hands managed to fasten on to him, and even more mouths bit through brownish fur to flesh and didn't let go.

When he disappeared under the water, he didn't come back up. I tried to make my way over in his direction and I saw Nik do the same. It was too late. The wolf was gone. Despite that, we were holding our own. We weren't kicking ass and taking names, but we were alive, most of us, and right now that was good enough for me.

Sawney had an entirely different idea of what was good, and he brought that idea with him. Carried it along as he slithered along the wall and up on the ceiling over our heads. The knotted hair hung down over the black emptiness of his face, but the amused red shimmer of his eyes gave away his mood easily.

"Heads up!" I called to the others.

"Traveler."

The word came from only Sawney this time with just the faintest echoing murmur from his choir. "Traveler with the frenzied taste. Madness and cream and butter."

"Cream and butter, my ass" I said flatly. Auphe and insanity, maybe that went as hand in hand as it did with Sawney, but I damn sure didn't want to hear about it. "You bastard."

Over the snarls of wolves, the splashing of water, and the thudding of metal chopping through flesh, he shouldn't have heard me. My voice didn't have the carrying properties his did and I hadn't shouted it, but it didn't matter. He heard.

"Yes, traveler, cream and butter." There was a tone of lazy contentment, as if he wasn't hungry at the moment, not for an entire meal, but a casual taste would be all right. He wouldn't be above that, not a connoisseur like him. Whether he would've tried for it or not, I didn't find out, as another connoisseur, one of gems and metal, finally showed up.

She came through the wall. Brittle tile shattered as concrete shook, shook again, cracked, and there she was in all her glory. And right then, that was a helluva lot of glory inmy eyes. Grace as well, no matter that she'd ended up in the wrong tunnel. She flowed through the large hole and up the wall, spiking her claws nearly half a foot deep through the tile to propel herself along with more speed than I would've thought possible for her bulk.

There are moments in life to savor and cherish, to keep and warmly recall at a later date. The flare of surprise in Sawney's scarlet eyes was one of them. Seeing that smug bastard caught off guard for once— yeah, it was the goods. It was the shit. The absolute shit.

I flipped a revenant over my shoulder, pinned it with a knee in its back, and started to take his head. It took some doing sawing underwater, even with the commando knife, but the ones whose throats I'd slashed were slowly staggering back up their feet. They weren't in prime fighting condition, but they were moving, they were in the way, and there was no time for that inconvenience. When, with water up to my collarbones, I jerked my attention up from the writhing revenant beneath me, I saw Boggle lunge and cover Sawney altogether. The shine of his scythe and crazy smile vanished under the ripple of scales and surging flesh.

Maybe we were going to luck out. Maybe it was going to be that easy. She would rip Sawney to pieces and we would bathe in a rain of his blood. Maybe I'd even catch a drop on my tongue like a snowflake. See what he tasted like.

Finally, I felt the spinal discs separate under my knife, and the parting of a remarkably tough spinal cord; then I was standing with my eyes still on the boggle. She was moving. The claws of her hands and feet were embedded in the ceiling, keeping her aloft, but her head was whipping back and forth. The movement was too quick for me to see him in her mouth, but I knew he was there. The only thing that would've made this any better was if the boggle had been wearing the pearl and diamond tiara that had been included in Promise's payment. That would've been the cherry on the goddamn sundae.

"She has him."

Niko was at my shoulder, the axe dripping in his hand. "Yeah, she has his ass," I said with a warm glow in my gut that beat Christmas morning all to hell.

There was a particularly vicious snap of the scaled head, a sense of flight, and a brutal thud as a dark mass hit a far wall. Score one for Mama. "Don't notch a point in the air," came the warning. "It's crass." The axe took out one of my shambling revenants, who was sucking in air through his throat with a shrill whistle.

"I wasn't going to." An utter lie. "I do plan on punting his decapitated head like a football, though." I flung water and gore from both knives and started toward the wall where Sawney adhered like a drying clot of blood.

Niko moved with me. "Stabbing a football isn't the same as playing it, I hope you're aware."

I hadn't played well with others when I was a kid. Invitations to baseball or football games didn't often come after the "Your mom's a thief and a whore." That type of thing is hard to take from another kid, especially when it's true. It tended to lead to lashing out. Some of that lashing out was verbal; some involved a switchblade. Better to spear a football to the gym floor than some junior high asshole's poisonous tongue to the same polished wood. "I can kick. I kick your ass on a regular basis, don't I?"

"No. Not once," he shot me down ruthlessly as he swung the axe loosely, up and over. "And without vast improvement, not ever."

Not my day for getting the bullshit through. I didn't mind. Putting an end to that child-killing monster put a rosy glow over the entire scene. Dead and incapacitated revenants, whole and less than, floated in the water. There were wolves…eating. Robin and Promise gave them a cautious berth as they moved toward us through the water. The fur balls were on our side for the moment, but they had different dining manners than the rest of us. Get too close to their food and they might take a chunk out of you by pure instinct. Automatic and unthinking. As they were with us, they might be sorry afterward. Several sets of lambent amber eyes focused at us over mouths filled with flesh. Then again, they might not.

I turned my attention back to Sawney. The redness of his eyes was barely detectable and the scythe hung limply from the ebon-skinned hand. His back was to the wall, and how he was staying suspended there, I couldn't have guessed and didn't bother to try. I was more interested in how he was going to come down. It was going to be hard and it was going to be messy, and I wanted to be involved in both of those.

Boggle wasn't done with him yet, however. She soared across the open space—a cave-in, falling in a completely improbable direction. She hit Sawney and the wall and took both down. There was a cascade of tile and concrete, flesh and bone, and it all disappeared under the water about thirty feet away. Revenants and their parts bobbed in the resulting tidal rush.

"She's not like the old boggle, is she?" Robin was unwounded except for a long scratch along his jaw, and if Promise weren't wet, she would've been as pristine as before we'd entered the subway tunnel. "He was a lazy creature." He continued watching the water roil frantically where Boggle and Sawney had vanished. "Deadly, but content with the status quo. I doubt this one would be. She's beyond magnificent."

"Thinking of asking her out?" I asked with a snort. Not even Goodfellow had the balls for that.

"I don't date those with children." He touched a finger to his jaw and wiped meticulously at the blood. "It takes the focus from where it should truly lie."

"With you." Promise carried it with a heavy dose of irony to its natural conclusion.

"Am I wrong?" Finishing with the blood, he used his free hand to comb carefully through his curls. He was grooming himself. In the aftermath…hell, it wasn't yet an aftermath…during, he was grooming himself during a battle. "There are those who wish to experience me and those who wish to kill me. If that's not exclusive focus, what is? You can't be considered self-centered, if you sincerely are the center of all attention, now, can you?"

I didn't respond. The violent disturbance of the water had stopped, and as I took a step forward, Niko's hand settled on my shoulder. "Wait," he ordered. "She doesn't need us getting in her way." That we didn't particularly need to be torn apart by a blood-enraged boggle, he left unspoken. The water rippled, calmed…

Then it turned blacker than it already was. The will-o'-the-wisp of our lost flashlights was slowly vanquished by billowing darkness. I didn't know what color Sawney's blood was—despite temporarily having his arm chopped off, Sawney hadn't felt it necessary to bleed a drop for us. What I did know was that boggle blood was black. A spill of octopus ink, just like this.

"I'll pass on pick of her litter. Raising carnivorous offspring does not fit my lifestyle." Robin, along with Niko, had fished a secondary flashlight from her jacket pocket and lit the place up. But the light wouldn't touch some things and Sawney was one of them.

He rose out of the water and hung inches above it. In one hand he held either a handful of cloth, a blanket, or … shit. Scales. The material rippled with scales and was lined with the black velvet of blood. "These caves"—drop by drop that same black fell from the point of the scythe to the water below— "they are not the chill of the sea caves of home." He shook it, his new blanket, to the rustle of the largest piece of snakeskin in the world. He'd skinned her, and, from the blood that had poured free, he'd done it while she was alive. The dead didn't bleed. I imagined, also, that the skinned didn't live long after the process.

"I shall wrap myself in it when the cold finally comes." The bright blaze of his eyes was back as he pulled the skin up to his face and rose higher in the air. "Ahhh, the sweet smell of a mother. The incomparable scent of orphans. I cherish your gift, travelers."

I'd let the Glock go, but never the Eagle—not with what it held. I pulled, fired, and with three shots, I saw Delilah coming up behind and below Sawney. … I saw it through him. The hole was not quite the size of a grapefuit, although the rounds should've blown him in half. There should've been Sawney on one side of the tunnel and fucking Beane on the other. Whatever he was made from was as hard as stone…harder. Delilah wasn't deterred. She hit him. Landed on his back and wrapped her jaws around his neck with room to spare. He was man-sized. She was not. She was Wolf and Kin and she dwarfed him. Not as Boggle had, but enough that she could've torn through Ms throat as if it were paper. Could've.

Should've.

Didn't.

She leaped free a split second before the scythe would've opened her up. When she landed, she was shaking her head hard as if her jaws or teeth ached. Gritting my own teeth, I aimed and pulled the trigger again, this time aiming for his head. But he was gone. Between one blink and the next, he'd faded like smoke. He was fast, Niko and I had seen how fast in the warehouse, but this…Christ. How can you hope to kill something you can't possibly catch?

Quick or not, he could've gone in only one direction. I refused to believe he could've gone over our heads without us seeing at least a flicker of motion. I started forward down the tunnel, only to be knocked backward by a wave of water and flesh. Raw, weeping flesh. Horrifically injured, she'd been stripped of skin from neck to crotch. Flayed and still alive.

"Where?" Boggle roared, arms uplifted, fists clenched. "Where? Where? Where?" Turning, she pounded those fists against a wall to bring down another section next to the rough entrance she'd made. "Where? Where? Where?" Whirling, she snatched up the nearest creature, which happened to be a wolf, and pulled him into two pieces like a tasty piece of taffy. The lupine jaw snapped feebly for several seconds afterward, and it was far more disturbing than I wanted to admit.

"As the Irish, a brilliant people, say, a good retreat is better than a bad stand. Also the Bard once pontificated that the better part of valor is discretion. I am nothing if not loaded with discretion. Shall we?" Robin turned and began to sprint back the way we had come.

I couldn't say he had the wrong idea. Attacked by our own wounded, crazed ally and Sawney gone…things weren't going as planned. One half of the wolf, a gray male, fell from Boggle's hand and the other was thrown against the far wall. The back legs and hindquarters slapped limply against the surface, then dropped into the water.

"Where?"

"Fortune may favor the brave, but pucks are remarkably long-lived. I say we go with the latter advice." Niko yanked me the rest of the way aloft as I was pushing up from the water. And for the second time in a week we were running through a tunnel. This time we had the addition of Robin and three wolves—as well as the world's most pissed-off boggle.

We could have killed her. She was more savagely fierce than her mate had been, but she was injured and there were seven of us. It would've been enough, but…she was our partner. We'd gotten her into this. It didn't seem right to finish off what Sawney had started. Although in the end, it wouldn't have mattered what our moral stance was on skinned boggles and their murderous rampages. If she had chased us, that stand Robin wanted to avoid would've taken place, brutally and instantly. If she chased us.

She didn't.

She chose to go after Sawney. He was long gone, I had the feeling, but I wished her the best of luck. I also hoped she lived. I couldn't spend every day tossing raw meat at a mud pit full of baby boggles. I had a job. I had things to do. I was responsible for their father's death. I didn't want to go there with their mother too. Guilt gets old. It gets so damn old.

Beside me ran the white wolf, who within six steps transformed to a naked human female. Except for the scars on her stomach and the choker tattoo around her neck, she was wet and gloriously nude. I handed her my jacket as we ran and her upper lip lifted to show her teeth in an amused smile. She also thought about patting me on the head, I could see it, but she took the jacket and slipped it on.

I liked Delilah—why, I wasn't sure. Perhaps because she was like Niko … if he were a completely immoral female. Lethal and laconic. The familiar is always comfortable. The fact she was sexy as hell didn't hurt.

She wasn't Georgina. Never would be—I knew that. But I'd have to learn to settle for a warm touch or a secret smile from someone else, and it would have to be enough. Or I could spend that part of my life alone. Not only did I have hormones that strongly disagreed with that, but without that wall between us, George might eventually convince me.

And then she would die. Or worse. Delilah or Charm would never die for me, not if they could avoid it.

We all ran on, slowing when it was clear Boggle wasn't following us but delving farther into the depths for Sawney. When we finally hit a maintenance tunnel, we had three half wolves—one in my jacket and two naked. None of them minded. The two males were partially covered with patches of fur here and there, one with a stub of tail and the other with a misshapen jaw and joints. Badly bred or not, they ran far faster than the rest of us did, although I knew Promise could've kept up.

They disappeared around a turn and I turned to • Delilah. "Sorry about your friends."

She was wearing my jacket with casual flair. It fell past her hips and hung open enough that I saw the curve of her apricot-colored breasts. I'd already seen them in their entirety; it didn't change the fact I was still looking.

"Friends?" Her amber eyes slanted in my direction. After she'd changed back from what Wolves considered their true shape, her silver-blond hair had fallen free to hang like a wedding veil in color and sweep. "Keep up with the pack or don't. Die for the pack when needed. Pack is all. There are no friends." With that, she was gone too. Despite her sly glances and my hazily half-ass thoughts on the matter, I didn't know if I'd see her again or not. Delilah was Delilah. She lived, like most fur creatures, in the here and now. Planning ahead wasn't a priority or a concern.

"Furry women are tricky, kid." Robin was waiting for us. "I suggest a spoonful of butter before and after any snorkeling activities. Hairballs. Also, diamond-studded flea collars? They are a bitch to find for anniversary gifts." He'd put away his sword under his coat and continued with a more serious and uncertain shrug. "On the other hand, her abdomen. You know…she may be infert—"

I waved him off with a growl. "I think the fact Sawney got away again is a little more pressing, okay?" We were letting down a dead little girl right and left. It was in my pocket, my reminder—the sunny barrette of a girl who would never see the sun again. My social life and the lack thereof paled in comparison to that.

"And he nearly slaughtered a boggle to do it. Single-handedly." Niko had retrieved his cello case from where he'd left it, dry and safe. We hadn't been hit with a random search yet, but our luck would run out sooner or later. If Sawney stayed down here, we were going to have to find a different access. "The fact that he did it with a hole that ran the entire depth of his body isn't encouraging either." Closing the case with a snick of buckles, he looked at me steadily. "Next time, go for the head shot."

I was a good shot, not Olympic quality or anything, but competition-wise, I could've held my own. A head shot, though, on a moving target wasn't easy under the best of circumstances, and I'd yet to see anything remotely less than absolutely crappy circumstances demonstrated during our recent battles. Niko knew that as well as I did, if not better.

"Head shot," I confirmed solidly.

"No wiseass remarks?" he asked, hefting the case. There was no mockery in the comment, no faked surprise; he knew what he was asking of me.

"Too bad Halloween's over. We could use his head as a pumpkin. Stick a candle in there and scare the kiddies." I put the Eagle in its holster. "That work for you?"

It wasn't much of an attempt, a letdown of my smart-ass tongue. But the entire night had been a letdown. Other than taking out more revenants and losing two wolves and a fair piece of Boggle, we hadn't taken care of Sawney, hadn't learned anything new. That the rest of us were alive was our only achievement.