Madhouse

18

The next morning—actually, the next sunup. Sunup is not morning. It's hell and not fit for any human being, but Niko, having ascended to a higher plane of existence beyond simple things like time, wasn't human when it came to exercise. He dragged my ass out of bed and off we were to run a thousand laps around Washington Square Park. Okay, maybe not a thousand, but it felt like it. Washington Square Park was the nearest park to our apartment, but it was not a very big park and we had to run a lot of laps for Niko to feel like we'd gotten a good workout.

There would always be things we couldn't outrun: vampires, the wolves…Delilah would catch me in five seconds easy, but Niko made damn sure I could outrun things like revenants. He ran me at least once a day; morning, afternoon, night—it varied. He ran all three times, which made him faster than me and less likely to have his lungs turn inside out. Good for him. Me? If I could've figured out a way to get out of the one run, I would've. That's why I had a gun. Shooting is easy; running with Niko was hard. He always ran me into the ground, until I was soaked in sweat and couldn't take another step without my legs folding beneath me to dump me on the ground. Because that was real life for us—running to save it.

I still hated it.

After that and a shower, Niko and I sat in the kitchen and tried to figure things out regarding Goodfellow. Finding Sawney was something we were leaving to the end of the discussion, friend before foe and a better subject than dwelling on the Psychiatric Center slaughter.

Niko started by grilling me on the guy who'd shot Robin. He grilled me yesterday after the attack, but between my job at the bar, hoping Robin didn't grope him when he took in ice packs, and the killings at the Psychiatric Center, we'd been a little busy for a repeat grilling. He was hoping I'd remember something new and I did.

"Black hair and dark eyes. Skin a little darker than yours. What I think was some kind of Arabic accent. Faint, though And he kept saying his task was done. That he was honored to die." Well, he got his wish there. "He also called Robin a betrayer. He didn't get into any specifics there. Wouldn't say if he was alone or not and I gave him plenty of reason to speak up." And I wasn't sorry for one damn bit of it. "Oh, wait. Hell, there is something else. The son of a bitch used some fancy move to throw me off of him—one that you've definitely never taught me," I said before popping the tab on the Coke and taking a swig. "Holding out on me, Cyrano?"

He frowned. "A move I've never shown you? Describe it." He had some soy, rice-powder, mud-colored drink he was nursing. He'd long ago learned not to offer me one. It was all I could do to keep my own down watching him drink his.

I got up and went ahead to illustrate the move a few times from the floor. He helped by assuming my role, straddling me with a finger pointed under my chin. Finally when he was satisfied, I returned to my chair. "Hmm. And an Arabic accent, you said." Niko moved over to the groaning bookshelf against the living room wall and scanned the contents. He chose a book, sat, and thumbed through it. After a few minutes of reading, he said with satisfaction, "Varzesh-e Pahlavani. An ancient form of Iranian martial arts, although in those days it would've been called Persian arts. It's well over two thousand years old."

"The accent, Persia, and Robin definitely twitched when you mentioned Babylon a few days ago." I wrung a note from the metal of the can. "I think we have a location pinned down." It was all right, this. Just me and Niko—like back in the old days. Research, learning crap I didn't care about, practicing obscure moves. Yeah, the old days…the days before I had to worry about an obstinate car salesman who couldn't be bothered to worry about himself.

Damn it.

Within seconds Nik was back with another book. Under his breath he was muttering names…Tammuz, Utukku. I drank my Coke and let it drift in one ear and out the other. When he hit on something, he would let me know. He didn't. Sighing, he closed the book. "We'll have to push Robin on it again, but now for Sawney." His eyes darkened to match the grim curl of his lips. "I think I have something."

"Yeah?" I said, surprised. "What?"

"I called the TA who shares the office with me while you were showering. I wanted her to pick up more classes for me until this is done. She had news."

"Good or bad?"

"Bad." He replaced the book on the shelf. "But informative. Students are disappearing at Columbia. Several. It hasn't hit the papers in a big way yet as they are students. Prone to wandering off after parties and not showing up for a day or two. But Shannon said she heard these students were reliable, not the kind to take off without telling someone."

"That could be anyone. Could be your average serial killer." I knocked the salt and pepper shakers together. "Sawney's not the only predator around."

"True. But I have a feeling about this. There's something about Columbia I can't put my finger on. Something I think I read once and have forgotten. We need to look into this."

"More so than the sewers?" I said skeptically and rapped the shakers again. I was equally skeptical that Niko forgot anything he ever read, but it was possible. He had a lot of information crammed in that head. "It's a college," I went on. "I doubt he's shacking up in the dorms."

He took the clanking shakers out of my hand and put them out of reach. "Trust me, and it'll certainly take less time than roaming more miles of sewers."

There was no doubt Niko was hell on wheels when it came to tracking and finding predators. That we hadn't found this one yet bugged the hell out of him…he'd gone from Zen to ice-cold and that didn't spell well for Sawney. "We'll need some sort of in. The police might not be there in full force, but the students will be on edge. Faculty too. I'm too young to pass for a cop." Although it'd be easy enough to get the fake ID. We'd been getting it since I was sixteen and Niko eighteen. Any Rom worth his salt could find a way easy enough and we had. Our clan might not accept us thanks to my Auphe half, but Sophia knew the tricks. And from watching her all those years we knew them too. "And you're too …" I shrugged.

"Too what?"

"Hell, you're like a James Bond villain. Cool, collected, lethal, and not a donut in sight. No one would buy you as a cop either." Besides, even though at twenty-two he could pass for twenty-six or twenty-seven easy, that was still too young for him to be convincing as a plainclothes detective. And his chin-length hair would immediately brand him as an imposter if he were in a uniform.

He snorted. "When I start drinking my soy-milk shaken, not stirred, then we'll talk. As for an in, if there is one, Promise will know."

And she did. Between her rich dead husbands and being a vampire, Promise was prominent on the social/charitable and nonhuman scene. If it was a fat, feebleminded rich guy you needed or a man-starved socialite, she just had to pick up a phone. The supernatural world was a little trickier to navigate because of trust issues, alliances, and creatures that didn't think there was a damn thing wrong with murder. But in the end she came through for us.

A long ride uptown on the A train later, we were at Columbia Presbyterian talking with a Japanese healing entity, O-Kuni-Nushi, known to his oblivious human colleagues as Ken Nushi, doctor and special seminar instructor for the premed upperclassmen at Columbia University.

A healing spirit, more powerful than a human healer by far, would've come in handy not so long ago, but he didn't know Promise at the time and vice versa. He knew of someone who knew someone who knew someone and so on. As it turned out, he could still do us a favor. First, he was actually willing to pay us. Second, he was able to confirm the students were missing and the college was more concerned than the cops were at this point.

"You are correct. Two students have disappeared on campus over the past two days, also a maintenance man." Behind his desk, Dr. Nushi steepled long, thin fingers, two of which were banded with jade rings. One was white, one red. He had a face that was oddly monkeylike—large ears, black hair in a widow's peak, broad nose, and soulful eyes. Even more oddly, indifferent student that I was, I happened to remember a mythology lesson from years before. In the Japanese mythos, monkeys were thought to bring good fortune. If you needed a doctor, good fortune would be a nice bonus along with a cheerful bedside manner.

"I cannot say what has taken them," Dr. Nushi continued. "But there is something here. A predator, human or not, I can't say. But there is a stillness…an air…" He looked at me, then opened his hands in a "who knows?" gesture. I had an air about me too, he seemed to think, but he remained silent on that subject. Luckily. Niko cared for comments about my Auphe heritage even less than I did. "I cannot put a finger on it," he said, "but I know. Death is here. A good physician recognizes it. This is walking, talking Death and it is using our campus as a feeding ground. Human or non, I want it gone. This is a place of knowledge, not death. But I didn't know what to do with the police saying we must wait forty-eight hours. I didn't know who to contact, not until Mrs. Nottinger called with the offer of your services." He nodded his head toward Promise.

"Sawney Beane." Niko had bowed to Dr. Nushi before he'd taken a seat. Now, in black on black, he sat straight in the deep blue brocade chair with face impassive. "It may be the one we're looking for hunts here now. It may be, as you say, a human. Either way, we will look into it." He looked at Promise, then back at me. "The tunnels and sewers might not be to his liking. He'll no doubt have several prospects going at one time, trying to find the best possible location for his true home. Once he settles on one he'll stay there, but I don't think he has yet. He could be hunting here and taking his victims back to whichever location he's trying out now. Whichever cave."

"If that is true, you will certainly be more help than the police," Nushi said.

"The police aren't here, then?" Promise asked. We knew they wouldn't find Sawney, if he was hunting here, but if they were patrolling the campus in force, they could make things difficult for our investigation. There should've already been rampant speculation about a serial killer with as many bodies as Sawney was leaving around.

But the thing was, bodies weren't being left around. We'd seen that, having checked the paper for several days after finding the bodies in the trees. There'd been nothing until the slayings at the mental institute. No stories on the ones in the trees or on the various body parts floating in the tunnels that could've been stumbled across by the construction crews. Mysteries. We had too much on our plate already, but it was something we'd need to come back to—eventually. Right now … it could wait, but we'd look into it. Maybe in a few weeks … or months. After Sawny, a vacation was the only thing I wanted, not mysteries.

"They are peripherally involved, but as I said, the students are adults legally, as well as is the maintenance man, and it has not yet been two days. They are investigating, but as there are no signs of foul play as of yet …" He spread his hands wider, then placed them on the desk. "They are certainly not here in force." The brown eyes sought out us all one by one. "This is my home, but I am no warrior. Mrs. Nottinger has said you are for hire. I will pay whatever you require to take care of this situation before it worsens."

Someone was actually going to pay us to risk our lives. Hot damn. It made horrific, near-death experiences a shade less annoying. I shoved my hand into the pocket of my black leather jacket and fingered a well-worn rip. I'd given Delilah my good one, but I liked this one too. I couldn't replace it; it was a classic, but I did need to replace the Glock, and explosive rounds for the Eagle didn't come cheap.

"Results will not necessarily be immediate. We will do our best, but Sawney is a one-creature slaughterhouse, quite literally," Niko cautioned. "And if the killer is human, the police would probably find him before we did."

"Then your best is all that I can ask." Dr. Nushi bowed. Nik bowed. And the meeting was mostly over. Except for Promise politely but firmly asking for Nushi's home address for billing purposes. She flashed a bit of fang in either strong incentive or flirtatious behavior. With vampires it was hard to tell. As the tips of Nushi's large ears flushed pink, I went with flirtatious.

We were given false student ID that would pass anywhere on either campus if we were stopped for any reason. Although I couldn't imagine why we would be. I looked the twenty-year-old punk-ass kid that I was. Niko, twenty-two, looked twenty-six, and could pass for a grad student or the TA that he was easily enough. Promise…Promise had an ageless quality, but no one would stop her because they thought she was a serial killer.

One student had disappeared on the way to French class, one while doing laundry in the basement of one of the dorms, and the maintenance man was a mystery. He'd gone out on a call, but taken the documentation with him. No one confessed to putting in a request and no one knew where he'd gone.

We separated to cover the most ground, mingling among the potential meals and looking for dead bodies and/or monsters. I took a map. Niko navigated by either the stars or his innate sense of place on the planet. It was past seven and dark; Promise carried her cloak over one arm and drifted. Two seconds later I'd lost sight of her. She knew how to move. I only knew the direction she'd vanished by the turning of male heads and one or two female ones.

I looked down at the map, considered it for a second, and then wadded it up to toss it into the nearest trash can. It wouldn't help me find Sawney. Smelling him would and thinking like him would. I wasn't entirely happy with the fact that I thought each would be an identical exertion. I'd been a happy-go-lucky maniac myself for over a week once. It wasn't difficult at all to remember the curve and slide of that particular thought pattern. Far too easy, in fact. One jump and you were on the ride, whizzing along with the wind cackling like insane laughter in your ears.

I tried my nose first. It felt safer.

Columbia is bigger than it looks, and it looked plenty big enough. We were concentrating on the Morningside Heights campus, where the students and employee had all disappeared. Nothing had yet happened at the med school and hospital fifty blocks up. There was Morningside Park bordering one side of the campus and Promise said she would inquire of any nonhumans within, a polite way of saying she'd ask the local yokels if they'd seen a new monster in the neighborhood.

I went from building to building, and first I thought it was going to be easy, because I smelled him right off the bat. But it wasn't long before I realized that, yeah, his scent was present…everywhere. Rank and unmistakable. He was hunting here all right. From what I could tell he'd roamed every nook and cranny of the school. Keeping to the shadows, avoiding the security lights, but owning it … every inch.

Hot damn. We were finally on to something. From the smell of it he was here almost if not every night. Every night…but not that many students were missing. This couldn't be it, could it? One of his possible locations? Or his new home? He liked caves, and there wasn't much cavelike about this place. Still, something was going on. All we needed to do was find the bastard, slice off parts, and ask him what.

But finding him was a problem. With his smell literally everywhere, I wasn't sure how to pinpoint it. It's never easy, is it? "Well, shit." I stopped and crouched on the long strip of grass between Broadway and Amsterdam that connected two sections of the campus.

"Pretty boy." A hand tickled behind my ear. "Frustrated?"

Delilah.

"You could say that," I grunted, surprised. I hadn't heard her coming; she was Kin after all, but I'd smelled her behind me. Wolf and vanilla, but what in the hell she was doing here I had no idea. I turned my head and looked up at her as she twirled a lock of my black hair around her finger. "That son of a bitch Sawney."

She wrinkled her nose, eyes turning new-penny bright. "He is here. He is everywhere. The stench of insanity." Which was true. He definitely had the stink of crazy all over him. Of course he had the same to say about me. She sat beside me. "Rabid, but that is normal for him. Stop looking." She shook her head disapprovingly. "He will eat you." Her face, her mouth moved inches from mine. "Let me eat you"—her tongue touched my lower lip— "instead."

Okay, that was even more of a surprise than her showing up—not so much the offer, as the timing. I wasn't Robin—Jesus, who was?—but I knew when someone was interested in me or at least interested in parts of me. And my parts and I felt the same way about her, although half of that combo felt guilty as hell about it. Not that that mattered. This wasn't the time or the place. Two students passed, girls, blond and brunette. They looked at us and hurried on, their long legs striding faster. I might look like a punk-ass twenty-year-old kid and Delilah a cross between a model and a kick-your-ass biker chick, but we still didn't pass in the human world. Not really. Those girls wouldn't know why they felt the way they did about us, but they sensed the difference in us somehow.

"Little girls," Delilah said with a derisive toss of her ponytail. "Scared of monsters in the big bad woods."

I hung my head for a moment. She didn't mind being different. I wondered why I did. "How'd you know I was here anyway?"

She sat beside me, her own long legs clad in leather. She stretched and reclined on her elbows in the grass. "Called Promise. Puck answered. Says Columbia. From there." She touched a finger to her small, straight nose. "I find your scent."

"And what do I smell like?" I asked with a reluctant curiosity. "Flay didn't seem to care for it, whatever it is."

The copper of her eyes darkened back to light brown as she puzzled on the question. "Strange. Interesting. Good and bad. Right and wrong." She gave an acquisitively hungry smile. "Sweet and sour."

I reached over and ran a thumb along the lower curve of that smile. "I hope that's about sex and not making me a meal. You wouldn't be the first werewolf that tried to make me dinner, and you wouldn't be the first one I killed."

She wasn't impressed, snorting. "Pups."

"Not all of them. Cerberus was no Red Riding Hood reject." Never mind that it had taken all three of us … Flay, Niko, and me … to take him down. We'd done it. I wasn't sure anyone else could have.

"Cerberus." The smile was completely different now, dark and gloating. She lifted the snug white shirt she wore to bare her scars. "Not fit to bear his cub. Flay and I, our family, to Kin Alphas we are not good enough. Not high enough in pack. Not pure. We are better than pure. We are Wolf." She rested a hand on her flat stomach. "But Cerberus said there would be no cub." Her lips tightened and she pulled the shirt back down. "No cubs ever now."

I could think of absolutely nothing to say at first, although I'd suspected before from the extent of the damage that could be seen that she wouldn't be making her nephew, Slay, any little cousins. Sorry seemed wholly lacking, and I finally went with my instinct. "He died painfully, in one god-awful bloody mess."

It was the right thing. The smile returned, blazing bright as her eyes. "Sex. Now." She took my hand, stood, and yanked me up with such strength that both of my feet almost left the ground.

Not that it wasn't nice to be wanted, to be used and abused, but the screams that ripped through the air emphasized that some things have to wait. Hey, I'd already gotten laid once this year…okay, once in a lifetime. What was my hurry?

One of the girls who'd walked past us came running back. She was alone this time, with blood on her face and jacket. I didn't bother to ask what had happened. It was self-evident enough. Sawney or a revenant had come creeping out of the shadows for an evening snack. She kept running past us with white-rimmed, unseeing eyes. I ran in the direction she had come from. Delilah followed, more out of boredom than any desire to save a human, I thought. She stayed in human form, but kept up with me easily regardless. As we ran, I pulled out my cell phone, gave Nik the terse facts, and tried for more speed.

We passed several students going in both directions. They veered away from us; it was obvious we weren't jogging for our health. We covered the length of the grass-covered walk, vaulted the small iron pole and chain fence that framed the grass, and followed the blood. It was the only way we found her … by the smell of her blood. It was thick in the air, as thick as the inescapable scent of Sawney and revenants.

And it was a revenant that had her, not Sawney. While Sawney's spore was hours old, that of the revenant was as fresh as the girl's blood. Both came from a building of red brick, narrow windows, and chimneys. It looked like a house, not a campus building. It was surrounded by low hedges and that's where we found them—the victim and three revenants. In a crook of hedge and building, shadowed and protected from a casual glance, they were feeding on her. One was at her throat, one at her chest, and one at her stomach, and there wasn't a damn thing we could do for her. The revenants had made scraps of her in a matter of minutes. It was the dark-haired one. Her short cap of hair didn't show the blood, but what strips of skin remained did.

I growled and kicked the head of the revenant from her throat. I wasn't wearing sneakers today. I was wearing scuffed black combat boots, thick-soled and heavy, and I broke the bastard's neck instantly with the blow. Not that that stopped him. His body staggered up and toward me while his head was bent at an acute angle. I'd broken the bone, but the spinal cord was still intact. Damaged probably, but not enough to make a difference in the primitive organism that was a revenant. Delilah, apparently forgoing the wolf this time, took one out with a knife. Took him down, out, and had him in pieces within seconds. Why worry about losing a perfectly good set of clothes in the transformation for a mere three revenants—I could see her point. The leather pants…and what they contained…yeah, that would be a crime…shit.

I worried less about my hormones and more about the third revenant that jumped me with claws and teeth as sharp as any knife and a lot less hygienic. I ducked and he slammed into the one with the catastrophic crick in his neck, and they both tumbled down. I didn't use my gun. It was difficult enough scuffling in the middle of campus without being noticed, even at night, and I used my own knife and took one head while Delilah took the other.

"And you leave me nothing. You are an inconsiderate brother, to say the least."

I looked over my shoulder at Niko, who stood with katana drawn. "You're getting slow, old man. Get a scooter and we'll talk about saving you some ass to kick."

I barely saw the swat, but I certainly felt it. Resisting the urge to rub the back of my shoulder, I looked down at the dead girl, then away. "Our new boss isn't going to be happy." I didn't blame him one bit. I wasn't happy either.

"No, he won't be. They're getting bolder." Niko knelt beside the girl. "They dragged her off the path, but where did they come from? Here?" He looked up at the building.

"Kinda small," I commented and it was true. It simply wasn't large enough. If revenants and Sawney had set up shop there, someone would've noticed. It wasn't like they could hide out in ye olde attic like first cousins' flipper kids.

"Yes, it is," he said absently, standing. "But seeing is not always believing. Tell me what you smell." He glanced over at Delilah. "You as well."

I inhaled deeply as Delilah did the same. It reeked. The whole goddamn place stunk to high heaven of Sawney and the revenants, far more so than any other place on campus, which was saying something, and far more than any other place he'd been: the warehouse, the sewers, the Second Avenue subway. That was it for the sewers, then. It was kind of a relief that there'd be no more trudging through water. "This is it all right," I confirmed, trying not to gag.

Delilah agreed with a nod. "The Den. They come here. Go from here. Live here."

Not exclusively, but from the sheer concentration of odor, here more than anywhere else.

"Well then, Alexander Sawney Beane." Niko smiled, that rare, anticipatory smile that didn't bode well for whoever was at the end of his sword. "Knock, knock."

We had left campus before any students or security spotted us. Promise and Niko notified Dr. Nushi of the events and the bodies—which I suspected would soon disappear. Sawney or more revenants could come for them or that mysterious whatever that seemed to have a license in body collection. Nik and Promise went back to our apartment for research and other things. And for once, other things were in my schedule as well. Damn, twice in a year—where were the Guinness people when you needed them?

Delilah had an apartment … of sorts. Wolves weren't really all that good at things like rent and damage-deposits and utilities. Not your average wolf anyway. That's what Alphas were for. Alphas took care of the pack. Told them where to live, found the food to take down…the members of an Alpha's pack were, in a way, his children. In werewolf society, especially in the Kin, the Alpha of a particular pack would buy up a building or two—yeah, they had that kind of money—and take care of the power and water. Then their pack would move in. They might settle in one corner of a warehouse or they might settle in a series of apartments, moving from floor to floor every month or so. It depended on the wolf.

They always looked abandoned from the outside with blackout curtains or blinds on the windows to keep up the impression. The doors were also kept chained, but if any homeless happened to be smart enough to find another way in … well, yummy manna from doggy heaven.

Delilah's place had once been a school. There was a rusty chain-link fence and graffiti everywhere. Old graffiti. Any newer aspiring artists wouldn't do any better than the homeless. She used the key to open the chains and relocked them through a small hole fashioned in the steel-bar-enhanced safety glass. Sniffing me quickly, she nodded. "Come."

Before we'd gotten within ten blocks of the place, she had produced a small spray container, like a tiny perfume bottle, and squirted me liberally with it. "From the puck," she had said. And I remembered it from our previous run-in with the Kin. "Will make you smell different. Not like you. Not human food. Not Auphe." Not human, because someone might want to join in on the meal. And not Auphe, because…hell, that didn't need explanation.

She had chosen a room on the third floor and we made our way quietly up darkened stairs, stopping if she heard any other wolves. I might not have the scent of a human or an Auphe, but I had to be something, and if they saw me, they would know it wasn't wolf. Managing to avoid that, we reached her place. It was a big room that had once been two. A wall had been knocked down with a sledgehammer from the looks of the ragged concrete frame. The institutional walls had been painted an umber color, smoldering in the low light of the occasional lamp. The shades were light reddish brown glass run through with hundreds of random fractures, Tiffany in a postmodern world.

There was no couch, only cushions. A nest of six large cushions made up what I guessed to be the equivalent. Three feet by three feet, they were forest green, deep brown, rusty red.

"Nice place," I said politely and then got to the point. "You don't eat people, do you?" For nutrition, I meant. I knew the vast majority of the Kin did as well as some non-Kin wolves. "I might have issues with that."

"People." She slipped off her jacket, then her shirt. She wasn't wearing a bra and suddenly people pitas seemed a little less important than they had been. But I held on, because it was important. I wasn't Auphe and I wasn't sleeping with someone who would do the things Auphe would do. "No challenge," she dismissed. "I am a hunter. Hunter. I am not jackal like some Kin."

Okay, that was good to know. There was another pile of cushions, slightly larger across the room, and they were white, every one of them—the barest shade paler than Delilah's hair. "You sleep as a wolf, don't you?"

She peeled my jacket off me in one smooth motion. "Wolf dreams." Her eyes were bright. "They are richer, sharper. You taste, smell, hear, touch. The very same as this world here." She shrugged, which did interesting things to very interesting parts of her. "Maybe that is the world. Maybe this is only the dream."

"Dreamtime." I considered the holster, then slipped out of it. Robin would no doubt say she'd like me to keep it on. Kinky and all, but shooting off your own balls during sex is more kink than I cared to think about. And was I babbling in my head nervously? Yeah. So what? It was my second goddamn time. I could be nervous if I wanted. "Sounds similar to something that Aborigines in Australia believe. Nik told me about it once, said it was…" Great, I was babbling outside my head now.

But it was the last word I said that night as I was tackled to the floor. Last string of coherent words anyway. I did say a few single explosive ones. Delilah was no nymph. She wasn't soft and slow, meandering and mild. Delilah was a whirlwind of wants and needs and demands, and before the night was over, she taught me how to be the same.

I was glad, though, that she couldn't smell me through Robin's concoction. Couldn't smell the lingering doubt under the savagely sharp pleasure. The faint remorse beneath the sheer holy shit spine-knotting euphoria.

The touch of guilt behind every bite, thrust, and caress.

The regret.