Slashback

7

Cal

Present Day

The things you did for big brothers.

I gave a philosophical—a big word Nik had taught me—sigh as I tossed the man in the Dumpster face-first. Catching his kicking feet as he bellowed in rage, I snapped, “Stop dicking around. I’m trying to do a good thing here and that’s not a big hobby of mine.”

If anything, the flailing of the feet doubled. It wasn’t as if I could hear what he had to say if he was choking on garbage anyway. I grabbed an ankle and yanked him back out to dump him on the cracked asphalt of the alley. Landing on his ass, he snarled and tried to scramble backward. “Hey, asshole, cut it out.” I pulled my Desert Eagle from its holster under my jacket and pointed it at him. “That?” I nodded at the garbage container. “Wrong place. This?” I glanced at my watch. “Wrong time. Me?” My lips curled, then bared teeth in a wolfish grin. “Totally wrong fucking guy to mess with. Now stop moving and answer my damn questions.”

This little interrogation was going down in broad daylight, but in this part of town, the fact I was holding a gun on a steroid-popping, greasy-haired semi-brain-dead shithead wasn’t going to raise an eyebrow. If I got any reaction at all from a passerby, it’d probably be a thumbs-up and an offer to help dispose of the body for half the take. This guy had nowhere to go and nothing he could do.

Too bad he was too stupid to know that.

He propelled himself to his feet and charged me, fists swinging. They were big fists. He was a big man, but being big doesn’t mean you can fight. You’re only as good as the last ass you kicked. From the looks of him in motion that had been either a hundred-pound starved druggie or a five-pound ankle-biting pooch.

I could’ve ducked under his wild swing easy enough, but that meant his momentum would carry him toward the street. I’d have to chase him and while it would be a short chase as he was no better a runner than a fighter, I wasn’t in the mood.

I’d been at this for hours, since the whorehouse pussycat had confirmed it was Jack peeling people like bananas. Nik had obtained a list of the victims from the Internet and split it between us. We didn’t know if Jack thought all humans were wicked or there was an actual reason he was choosing particular victims. Nik was hoping for the latter. Catching a killer with a pattern would be a helluva lot easier than assuming every single human in NYC was fair game. We had skills, but bodyguarding millions of people nightly wasn’t one of them.

That led me here to this particular piece of crap. There are some nuggets of info about the victims that news articles miss. You had to do it the old-fashioned way—talk to the friends and family. This was the first one I’d tracked down and I didn’t know if his sister had been Jacko’s definition of wicked, but her brother was covered head to toe in it. He was a bad, bad boy. I’d gone to the address Niko had traced from the victim’s name, talked with the half-blind and wholly pissy grandma. She’d assumed I was a “customer” and told me Big Mike was at his regular spot. I’d been curious enough to ask how she’d known I wasn’t a cop. Her cackled laughter had followed me down the three flights of tenement stairs.

When the half blind knew what you were and what you weren’t, maybe it was time to stop calling it an identity crisis and just go with identity.

Big Mike was still coming for me with all the speed of a nearly dead, morbidly obese cow and I stepped to one side, extended my arm and clotheslined him. His neck hit my arm with a meaty thud and he was back down. I stood over him as he gasped for breath, his face turning faintly blue. I bent over and nudged him in the ribs with the silencer on my gun. “You know I train every day thanks to an anal-retentive brother? Nah, I know you don’t, but I’m telling you. I could’ve broken your neck. I could’ve hit your nose and driven bone splinters up into what passes for your tiny brain. I could’ve kicked your testicles so far up into your body that you sneezed them out. But I didn’t. I took you down with a move I saw on WWF, you pathetic sack of shit. Here’s some advice: get a new job.”

Big Mike’s current job was drug dealer and occasional leg-breaker for anyone who needed that sort of thing. I glanced at my gun, snorted, and put it away. I’d planned on using it only for the fear factor, but I didn’t even need it for that. I slapped the man’s violet-colored cheek lightly. “This is how it’s going to go, Mikey. When you can breathe again . . . if you can breathe again, you’re going to tell me about your sister. What did she do before she was killed? What was she into? Was she like you or was she innocent?” After seeing Big Mike and his grandma, I was on the fence.

Nobody knew better than I did: sometimes genes do tell.

“Hooker,” I said over the steaming plate of Chinese. “Sixteen and new to the trade. That’s probably why it didn’t make the news.” Sixteen and a prostitute. I hadn’t blamed her genes for that. I had blamed her brother though and thoroughly enough that the world’s most dedicated plastic surgeon would pin up a picture of Frankenstein’s monster to aim for as the best possible outcome.

I’d always known I was lucky when it came to brothers, but sometimes I forgot others didn’t have that. It had been the one thing in my life I’d not once had to question and because of that might be my only true blind spot.

I stabbed at the orange chicken with my fork. I’d decided years ago that if you hadn’t grown up with them in your hand, then chopsticks were for posers. The fact that I hadn’t been able to learn to use them was coincidence. “Thanks,” I added.

Niko, who could do that catch-a-fly-with-chopsticks thing and therefore not a poser, tipped his head slightly to one side. “For what?”

I shrugged as the loud chatter in the tiny restaurant ramped up another notch. There were cockroaches in the bathroom big enough to take a plunger to the toilet themselves if it stopped up, but nobody cared. The food, whether it had an antenna or two in it or not, was too good. “Just for doing the brother thing.” And doing it in a way many brothers couldn’t be bothered to. “What’d you find out?”

“Thief and rapist.” He went for a square of tofu that shivered the same as a tiny cube of vomit-flavored Jell-O would. I grimaced and savored my chicken all the more. “I believe we have our pattern. Jack is targeting those with what some would consider to be wicked behavior and with no leniency for the unwilling, those who are actually victims.”

I frowned, not completely convinced. “But that doesn’t explain you. I mean, I get why Jack would want me if I were human. I’m a killer.”

“And you think I’m not?” Niko raised his eyebrows.

I waved my fork, dismissing the words. “You’re lethal as hell, I know, but you kill in self-defense or in defense of others. You drip nobility instead of sweat. You’re Buddha, Jesus, Mother Teresa, and the Easter Bunny rolled into one. You shouldn’t be on Jack’s Naughty versus Nice list.”

“You forget Cherish.” His eyes were clear. He had killed Promise’s daughter, but he didn’t feel guilt over it. I would have known if he did. Damn good thing too. He had not a single reason to feel blame over her.

“She had the supernatural living version of a nuclear bomb and planned on using it. Hell, you saved the world, Nik. If that’s not the definition of noble I don’t know what is.”

“She did, that’s true, but that’s not why I killed her. I killed her for revenge. For what I thought she’d done to you. For what she did do to me. And while she did fight, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been unarmed. I would’ve killed her all the same.” Matter-of-fact. He made no apologies.

I understood, and I was glad he did as well. Cherish hadn’t been a person. She’d been a swirling void of sociopathic lies and murder. Whatever made a person or a paien what they were . . . their soul if souls existed in that way . . . she didn’t have. She killed, manipulated, and then psychically brainwashed anyone who got in her way with visions so terrible they were capable of driving you mad. Niko hadn’t killed her. He’d exterminated her. She’d had far less worth than one of those bathroom cockroaches and far less purpose on this earth.

Not to mention she was a serious bitch.

“Wish you’d let me come. Grabbed some popcorn and cheered from the sidelines. But whether you think that makes you a killer or not”—and it didn’t—“Jack couldn’t know about that. He just hit town. His victims now are obvious, right? He can see them spreading all that wicked far and wide. We haven’t had a job in weeks. You haven’t had to put anyone or anything down. There’s nothing I can think of that would have him all over you. You should be innocent in his beady, psychotic eyes.”

Niko passed me his fortune cookie—a tradition long-standing since the very first time we’d had Chinese food. “It makes no difference. In fact, if he continues to come after me, it would be convenient. Knowing his victims are on the shadier side of the law, moral and otherwise, doesn’t make him much easier to locate. There are still too many. There are over ten thousand prostitutes alone in the city. There’s certainly no way to shadow them all. And when you factor in thieves and rapists and murderers, whatever else Jack considers wicked, it’s impossible. There simply is no way to track him down coming from that angle. But him coming to us, that is useful.”

“Would be useful if we knew how to kill him or even touch the bastard. I can’t do to Jack what I did to the peymakilir, not unless we’re far, damn far away from him. The explosion would send those spikes of stone or crystal, whatever the fuck, that covers him flying. That’s the kind of shrapnel you can’t avoid or live through.”

Suddenly the shadow of one righteously pissed off brother was looming over me. He hadn’t moved, the sun hadn’t shifted its rays through the front window—how he managed to loom, I didn’t know, but he did.

Unblinking eyes fixed on me and stayed. As far as Niko was concerned, the restaurant had disappeared. It was him and me and I was screwed. “Yes,” he said softly and the word was worse for that unsettling softness. On Niko it was the pause and stillness the split second before a copperhead struck and pumped your veins with venom. Nik was my brother and he loved me, but that meant he’d do anything to keep me alive. Sometimes with me that took tough love—and a lot of it. “The peymakilir. I was saving this for home, but now that you’ve brought it up. There is absolutely no excuse for what you did to that creature, Cal, and you know it. I know you think you need to practice to face Grimm and you’re most likely right, but that was not practice. That was reality.”

The anger was gone as abruptly as it came. I expected that. Nik couldn’t stay angry with me and, believe me, there were times he should have. Would’ve been better for the world if he did. So I wasn’t surprised when it bled out of his face and eyes.

But what came in its wake was worse.

He reached across the table and looped his fingers around my wrist, holding my hand down against the table. The grip was immovable. “Do you feel that? The heaviness? It’s the same in battle. You feel the consequences of killing in the weight of your gun, the heft of a blade. When you can kill with a thought, you put yourself beyond that.” I wouldn’t have thought it possible but the weight on my wrist and hand increased. “And beyond that, Cal, is the step you take to not fighting Grimm but being him.”

Nik always said I never would become that. He wouldn’t let me. I waited to hear that certainty again.

I didn’t.

“When you were a child you would take some things on faith, even if you didn’t understand why I asked you to do them.” His set face softened, settling into lines of regret. I would’ve given a lot not to hear what he was saying, but he would’ve given anything at all not to have to say it. “You need to do the same now. What you’re doing is . . . wrong.” There was a brief hesitation but it was said firmly. With belief but not the kind of belief Niko had always had in me.

Wrong? Niko thought I was wrong?

“You’ve said if you became what you didn’t want to be that I should stop you. Cal, look at me.” I only realized as I heard it that I wasn’t. I was looking past him, around him, anywhere but at him. Niko was my one true mirror and I didn’t want to see myself there. Not now. “Cal.” Reluctantly I moved my gaze back to his. I’d joked to myself about my identity crisis and now it was time to pay the piper.

And he didn’t even know about the men by the Ninth Circle, the ones I’d thrown off the world before I’d kick-started my conscience into bringing them back.

His grip loosened and his thumb passed over the back of my hand; then his forefinger tapped it, the same as he’d done time and again when I’d been a child. “If your first instinct is to fight as an Auphe with gates and not as a human with guns and knives, you’ll become too quick. I won’t be able to stop you. But, Cal . . .

“You will be able to stop me,” he ended.

There was no running. I didn’t knock my chair over. I got up casually, if a little woodenly, and walked to the bathroom.

I didn’t vomit in that bug-ridden restaurant bathroom either, but it was a near thing. Gagging and dry-heaving didn’t count. Niko was doing what I’d asked him for years now. Watching me. Making sure I didn’t become too much of a monster, because, face it, there was no escaping being somewhat of one. I didn’t blame him for doing what I told him, for trying to save me before it came to that. I didn’t blame him for anything. I blamed myself. For the first time in my life Niko thought I could hurt him. I’d known I could if the monster came. I’d known the monster would try. Cal would be gone and to the monster, to the Auphe in my place, Niko would only be meat in its way.

I’d known, but for the first time . . .

For the first time Niko accepted the truth. I’d told him he should, more times than I could remember, but I’d never meant it. I’d said it and I’d not once meant it, because I was a fucking coward.

His denial before had let me wallow in that same denial occasionally. Now that was gone. And denial. Jesus, denial is a fucking miracle of a thing. I had no idea how badly I’d miss it—need it like the air I breathed. I wanted it back. And I wanted Nik’s blind faith in me back. The faith that while I could change and I could try to murder the entire world, that I would not do the same to my brother. I wanted to be able to see myself through his eyes and not see the constant potential of his blood on my hands.

But we all wanted something. I also wanted the old identity crisis back, because this new one was no goddamn fun. Life was like that. Hey, you over that whole tormented pity party about being a monster? You seeing the upside now? Feeling good about yourself? Yeah, that shit ain’t happening on my watch. Now stand still while I rip out your guts and make you wish for the good old days when self-loathing was your favorite hobby. I have bigger plans for your fucked-up psyche now.

Fratricide—it’s a big word, but say it with the class, Cal. There’s a good boy.

I hung my head over the toilet and retched one more time. Then that luxury was over. Soon Nik would be kicking down the door and the manager would be calling the police.

He was giving me a moment, but it would pass. He’d think he’d broken me when it was the other way around. Okay, yeah, I had to give up a few patches of denial. Suck it up. Niko was giving up what he’d thought was the truth and having to live with a new one—his brother might not always be his brother.

That if that happened I could kill him with less thought than it took to make a gate.

Straightening, I grabbed a paper towel as cheap and rough as they came and dry-scrubbed my face hard enough to hurt. I wanted that tiny bit of pain. It distracted from the mass that roiled through me, a dirty whirlpool filled with the debris of doubt, fear, and the sharp and terrible thought that being a monster would be better. Easier. Painless.

That I’d process later. Actually, that wasn’t me, not how I rolled. I would pack it away in one of those mental strongboxes and that would be good enough. Dealing was for heroes. I was no hero. For now I would do exactly as Nik told me. If that made Grimm the better Auphe, that was how it had to be. I would do anything, stop anyone who tried to hurt my brother and that included myself. I wasn’t going to let it get to the point where Nik had to do it for me. I’d always asked him to be ready and it had not once been fair to put that weight on him. I was responsible. No one else. That he had to tell me was bad enough. How that felt for him, I couldn’t imagine.

All I could do was make sure he didn’t have to feel it again.

Tossing the wadded paper in the general direction of an overflowing garbage can, I reached for the door handle. Time to see if my brother needed gluing back together.

I underestimated him—mentally. I knew better than to underestimate him physically.

Rubbing my shoulder where it had impacted the wall instead of the mat, which was what I got for not paying attention, I grumbled, “Sneaky bastard.”

Folding his arms, not a bead of sweat on him, he looked down at me with raised eyebrows. “Would you like to tell me what you did wrong with that particular move? Everything. Every single thing you did was utterly wrong.”

“Isn’t it usually?” I rolled from my side to my back, making no effort to get back to my feet. The sparring area of our converted garage apartment was generally the most humbling place around for me. Nik was right. If I stopped using the gates as first line of defense or offense—offensive on so many levels—that was me. If I did stop and then went sideways in the worst possible way, he could handle me—the same way he was handling himself now. With perfect ease.

Nik was good. Fine. Better than I’d begun to hope back at the restaurant.

I, conversely, wasn’t doing such a bang-up job. Unless you counted the banging-into-the-wall part of the workout.

His eyes narrowed as he studied me. “You’re thinking. When you should be thinking, you don’t. When you shouldn’t be, you do. Research puts you in a virtual coma. There have been times I’d have been tempted to check your pulse if I couldn’t see your drool spreading over my antique books. And this”—his bare toe prodded the bottom of mine—“should be pure muscle memory by now, but your brain is bouncing so hard inside your skull that you ran into a wall simply because I stepped out of the way.”

Flipping me over his shoulder—hell, nearly over his damn head—was not “stepping out of the way.” But in our version of a sparring routine it was close enough to the truth that I let it slide.

Crouching next to me, he swatted the side of my head. I’d been thinking all right and as usual Nik knew what about. “Do not be an idiot, little brother. You’re still you. You told me you needed my help to keep you that way. I should’ve listened. I didn’t, not like you needed me to. Now I know. I’m not humoring you any longer and that means I’ll make damn certain you will stay Cal. Now and always.” His lips quirked fondly as he gave me a light pat to the chest. “The once and future king of smart-ass.”

Knowing the truth and feeling exactly the same about me, wasn’t that better than denial? Hell, yes. It was the best. If you got that in your lifetime from anyone, you were damn lucky. Feeling an ugly knot of bristling barbed wire unwind itself in me, I grinned up at him. “You’re getting your feelings all over me. It’s disgusting.”

“There are many times, uncountable really, that I’ve mentally replaced you in this scenario, Caliban. You can’t imagine.” Robin had drifted silently, as always, through our locked door to lean against the concrete wall and watch us.

“You’re right. I can’t imagine. Don’t want to imagine. Your fantasies have to have been banned by the Geneva Conventions as psychological torture.” I sat up. “And even you can’t find being smacked and lectured a turn on.”

The smirk was so rapacious I could see the neon XXX pop up over his head like in an old Acme cartoon . . . with an added huge dash of porn. “Do you think I’ve not been so naughty in my life that I didn’t deserve some discipline?”

The images of Catholic uniforms, rulers, the principal’s office—basically every porno cliché I’d seen in my life with the addition of Goodfellow and my brother shut down my brain instantly. For my own protection. Minutes later when it rebooted or whatever computers do when you turn them off and then back on after kicking them viciously, I was still sitting on the mat and Niko and Robin were talking about Jack.

“No,” the puck was saying. “I’ve had no luck. The paien community wants nothing to do with him. They’ve a good track record of they leave him alone and he sticks to humans for the entire skinning and horrific deaths situation. If they knew anything, which they don’t, they wouldn’t help. They’re quite big on survival instinct.”

Niko had sat down on the couch to pull his socks back on. He made that simple action look deadly. Considering how many times he’d threatened to kill me with one of them, that wasn’t surprising. “Cal and I did find out some further information on his victims. They were all involved in behavior that the strictly moral with no shades of gray could find objectionable. There is no centralized location from where he chose them however.”

Goodfellow frowned. At least he wasn’t looking at Nik’s feet. A foot fetish might’ve finished me off right there. “That will make him impossible to hunt down. Over eight million people in the city and call me cynical, but you can take it to the bank at least four million are doing something morally objectionable in Jack’s eyes. Even jaywalkers aren’t safe. Some hipster might dine and dash and be skinned before he had a chance to digest that stolen appetizer. There isn’t any possible way to anticipate where he might go and his next victim. There simply is no way to narrow it down.” Then a smile flashed across his face. It was more lascivious than the one he’d given while watching the aftermath of our workout.

“I was wrong. There might be one place that would draw him in. I had my annual reminder in my e-mail this morning.” The smile widened far enough that I didn’t need to worry about Jack. My skin was ready to leap off my body and leave without me all on its own.

“Oh God,” I said involuntarily.

“Keep that thought. You’ll be saying it repeatedly over the next few hours. Get dressed.” He frowned. “There will be a pat down involved. Weapons might be a problem. And, Niko, any coat like your dusters that resemble trench coats well loved by flashers will probably be frowned on.”

“Oh God,” I repeated. “Let Jack have New York. We’ll move.”

Goodfellow slapped my shoulder. “Be brave. We’re going on a field trip.”

The Javits Convention Center was hardly a field trip, but what was inside was a different world, I’d give the puck that. We’d come to the sane conclusion that we’d need our weapons if Jack did show up. That meant getting into the center via a fire door locked from the outside and avoiding security while getting the badges necessary to wander around without paying for them.

For a trickster that took less than ten minutes.

That there was a storm system brewing above looked promising on the Jack front, but what was inside was so much more promising I may have forgotten about Jack temporarily.

I moved through a not particularly busy crowd but a very enthusiastic one and did my best not to walk right over anyone who stopped in front of me because my attention was elsewhere. Too many elsewheres to keep track of.

“What did you say this was called again?” Niko asked Robin as they walked beside me. That’s where it sounded like they were, best guess. I wasn’t going to waste any of my vision on them to confirm it. My vision was all booked up, thank you very much.

“The Triple-Xpo. It’s a yearly event that applauds quality in the adult film industry and the sexual lifestyle industry that goes with it,” Goodfellow replied as smoothly as if he were president of it all. Hell, he probably was.

“Ah,” Niko said at the same time I summed it up. “Porn stars.” And they were everywhere. This was a thousand times better and easier than trying to stake out ten thousand prostitutes, most of them in Brooklyn.

There was no ducking the smack to the back of my head. I didn’t even try. “You are to respect these women and their career choices,” Nik told me firmly.

“I have nothing but gratitude in my heart for each and every one of them,” I said truthfully. “Do you know how long it’s been since I broke it off with Delilah?” If that’s what you called threatening to shoot your sociopathic, murder-spree-bound werewolf friend-with-benefits—broke it off, gun to the head. To-mato, ta-mato. “These women have gotten me through a very difficult period in my life. God bless them, each and every one.”

We were meandering through a maze of booths where actresses and models autographed pictures and nobody was naked, which was more than I could say about most of the people that I’d met through Goodfellow, especially in his premonogamous days when I’d make sure to call before I dropped by his place to prevent the awkwardness of walking in on an orgy. That had happened several times, more than it ever should to someone just wanting to hang out, watch a game, and have a beer.

There were also booths that sold “toys.” Toys for adults and I left it at that. I had no interest in toys. Nature had given me all the toys I needed.

“This reminds me of a time when the three of us were in Greece for the bacchanalia,” Robin mused with a lascivious grin, “and . . . ah, I meant when I was in Greece with some friends of mine. Fertility rites, drinking, festivals, plays. Of course this was before the modern miracle of silicone, but nonetheless, very good times.” He lifted a hand in a casual wave. “Ah. Savannah, lovely as ever,” Goodfellow addressed as we passed an autograph booth with a woman with dark hair, wry blue eyes, and a pixie smile.

“Robin!” She waved enthusiastically.

“Lisha,” he called at the next booth. She lifted her head from the fantasy book with a dragon and a head on a pike decorating the cover that she was reading between autographs.

“Robin!” She said his name like a four-year-old would say “Santa Claus.”

“Miranda Lee.” That was the next booth. Blonde, freckles. The girl-next-door type who was about to eat her dinner. New York’s biggest cheeseburger.

It went on like that for several minutes until it ended with a run of platinum blondes.

“Robin!”

“Amber.”

“Robin!”

“Amber.”

“Robin!”

“Amber!”

“Robin!”

“All right, enough.” Niko took Goodfellow’s collar and urged him at a faster speed while I marveled at how many Ambers there were in the business. “Yes, we’re very impressed. You know every woman—”

“And man. Don’t be sexist,” Robin interrupted.

“Fine. And man in the business,” Niko went on, “but we are here to find Jack. He wouldn’t attack someone in the middle of this exhibition hall. It would be beyond noticeable. We need to find a secluded spot where those he judges so harshly might pass while alone and unseen.” I heard the faint clank of metal in Niko’s coat as he moved. Whether he’d be mistaken for a flasher or not, he had to have the coat to cover his katana and cover up the various other blades on him.

“Very well.” Robin pulled free and straightened his suit jacket. “Although it wouldn’t hurt you to learn to enjoy yourself while on the job. Shop for a gift for Promise. She’s hundreds of years old and has gone through five elderly husbands in the past fifteen of them. Do you think she might not want something to tuck away in the nightstand drawer for nights when you’re not there or for nights when you are—”

Nik snared the handful of suit collar again and this time dragged the puck along. “This looks familiar,” I drawled. “Oh yeah, you’re usually doing that to me.”

“I have two hands. Do not test me.” He moved faster yet and I had to pick up the pace as he and Goodfellow began to leave me behind. In minutes we’d left the color, noise, and milling people behind us and were down a hall Robin knew had an available bathroom only those familiar with the convention center would know of.

“The guest stars are here every year. They’ve sussed out the nooks and crannies and where best to go and not be bothered by a persistent mouth-breather. There are occasionally those who aren’t as respectful as they should be. This is the most remote of those locations.” There’d been three such remote locations but with two hastily improvised OUT OF ORDER signs, we’d whittled it down to one. Goodfellow was keeping his distance from Nik while staring morosely at the wrinkles in his jacket.

Leaning against the wall by a very sad plastic potted tree, I asked, “We’re staking out a bathroom for a monster? I read Dracula and I remember Van Helsing doing some impressive shit, but that wasn’t one of them,” I snorted. Niko lifted an eyebrow at the statement and I revised it. “Okay, I watched Dracula, the old one with that guy from The Matrix, and I don’t remember anyone in that looming outside a bathroom either.”

“I despair of you. I honestly do. I didn’t make you read Dracula, a classic, while homeschooling you because you said it made you uncomfortable. That it reminded you of the Auphe.”

I grinned. “Lying to get out of homework. I feel bad, Cyrano. No teenager would do that. What was I thinking?”

“Eighteen was far too soon to let you graduate. I don’t know what I was doing all those years ago. I should still be assigning you research papers on a weekly basis and hiding your guns until you complete them.” He leaned against the wall with arms crossed, but feet planted and spread slightly for balance. Always ready—on bathroom duty or not. After all these years it still didn’t fail to impress. I was wondering when a copy of Dracula would appear on my pillow when I had a chance to be impressed further.

There was a scream, a banging of the door at the end of the hall, and a woman with long brown hair came running past us, her face gray with terror. She was blind with it. She didn’t see the three of us as she ran between us. The only thing that registered was escape, the end of the hall, the people she’d left behind for a quiet moment to herself. Whatever was after her was horrifying enough that three people would be no help to her. She needed the three thousand in the exhibition hall.

“Jack,” I said, pulling my Glock with a silencer in deference to the crowd several hallways away.

Jack it was. He came boiling through the door, ripping it free, buckling the metal and tossing it across the hall to bounce off the wall and then slam onto the floor. The hall wasn’t as well lit as the rest of the place, but it became less so as half the lights fried from the electrical discharge that simmered in the air around the storm that was Jack.

“Where flees the adulteress?” His voice was all that I remembered it being—disgusting and spine-chilling for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on. “Where goes the wicked one?”

“That was Mandy,” Goodfellow said as he unsheathed his sword from his own long coat that hung over his suit Nik had traumatized him by creasing. “She is married, but her husband is in the business, and is it adultery if it involves your occupation and the party of the first and the party of the second both consent to said parameters of the relationship?”

“Be grateful he doesn’t know Shakespeare,” Niko grunted, his own katana already in hand. “‘First kill all the lawyers.’”

“Every trickster, pucks or others, has a law degree. It’s the perfect con.” Robin was trying for cheerful, but seeing Jack for the first time and having heard our story of failure of all our weapons against him, the cheer was strained.

Jack filled the back of the hall entirely. The destroyed lights and his own inherent darkness made him the same form impossible to pin down. Mist, fog, shadows, sparks that circled like a whirlwind within him and two oval-shaped eyes that were the last color you’d see if you were an unlucky bastard standing outside when a bolt of lightning struck you from an overcast sky. He was everything and he was nothing, all in one, and that was a problem. You can’t fight everything and you can’t fight nothing.

“What the fuck.” I just shot him seven times. Shooting him hadn’t worked when he’d attacked me in my room, but I liked to think two of my best qualities were persistence and the ability to hold on to resentment to my dying day. And I did resent Jack for showing up at one of the least convenient times in my life—especially when I’d been ready to give him a pass and ignore his existence.

The bullets disappeared into the tempest and Jack didn’t react, same as before. Niko was on him then, katana moving in an arc of sheer quicksilver beauty. It struck Jack and the force of whatever it hit threw Nik back several feet. He managed to land on his feet, growled, and attacked again.

“This is not your time. This is not your turn,” Jack said thickly . . . so thickly it sounded as if he had a mouthful of shit, blood . . . or the skin he was so fond of taking. That’s what bothered me. A storm spirit should sound like the wind or the rushing train of an incoming tornado, not as if he had a mouthful of fresh, blood-soaked flesh.

“I am coming for you, but now the wickedness of the adulteress.” The rest of the lights exploded but there was enough drifting in from the entrance of the hall to see that Jack hadn’t gone. His electric-chair eyes were bright and hovering in the blackness.

“You were right. He is quite annoying.” Goodfellow was at Niko’s side now, both swinging blades at Jack.

“Go right and get down,” I shouted. Over the strike of metal against God knew what and the rising sound of wind and the sizzle of electricity, it was getting loud. We wouldn’t be alone here much longer. As Niko and Robin went flat on the floor, I raised my other gun. I had the explosive rounds custom-made by naughty people for the Desert Eagle. Time to see if they worked any better on Jack than normal rounds did. I fired high and to the left. I waited for the explosion—when it came to explosive rounds you didn’t worry about a silencer. You shot and you ran like hell before the cops showed up.

I knew the round had hit Jack and I waited, but I heard nothing. Not a muffled thud, positively no explosion. I fired again, and again nothing. I’d have heard more if I’d chugged a marshmallow at him.

Then it was Jack’s turn. He turned the hall into . . . hell. I was struck by something. I didn’t know if it was Jack himself or the force of a hurricane, but I was slammed from wall to wall, up to the ceiling, then back down to the floor. It hurt, distantly, because what I was thinking over all that was that I couldn’t breathe. All of the oxygen, all of the air itself was sucked out of the hall and my lungs did more than burn. I felt them almost collapse from the negative pressure. It couldn’t have been a complete negative pressure or they would have, but it was close enough to leave me sprawled on the floor, half believing I was dying and wholeheartedly wishing I would. It would be less painful.

After moments or minutes, I couldn’t tell, my lungs were slowly beginning to cooperate again. Bit by bit. It was a long time before I was breathing anything close to normal and it would’ve been longer before I remotely thought about trying to get up, but Goodfellow was slapping my face hard and yanking at my arm. “Humans,” he muttered. “You depend far too much on breathing as often as you do. Cal, up. We need to go before Mandy brings back every man, woman, and security guard who swings a mean dildo.”

Niko appeared on the other side of me, took that arm, and between them, they had me on my feet. “All right, little brother?”

I wasn’t going to get into it with Nik over how meditation taught him control over his breathing and therefore he could recover faster than I could. I’d let him have this one, no argument. “Anyone . . . else . . . hit . . . the . . . ceiling?” I gasped as they hurried me along down a different set of halls toward yet another exit only Robin knew about.

“Yes, that was unpleasant,” Niko replied, tucking my Eagle back into my holster as he and Goodfellow slung one of my arms over each of their shoulders in order to move more quickly.

“Rather like I imagine clothing would feel in a dryer—if I were poverty stricken and didn’t have everything I own including my Armani socks dry cleaned.” Robin gave me a concerned glance as we exited into the night. “Did you get that, Cal? I’m incredibly wealthy and snobbish to boot. Aren’t you going to comment?”

It was nice when people cared enough to rub your nose in their high-and-mighty lifestyle in an effort to provoke you and determine you’re not brain damaged from hitting the ceiling. “Fuck you,” I mumbled, my legs working better now that my breathing kept improving.

His lips curved upward in relief. “There’s the ass we know and barely tolerate. Of course there’s no need to believe a mere ceiling would make an impression on your brother, Achilles reborn.”

“Jack will have moved on,” Niko said. “We’ve spoiled his one opportunity to take someone unseen. There is much light and too many people currently rushing about looking for a mysterious attacker for him to be able to accomplish anything further here. This hunting ground is ruined for him. We may as well go home and try again tomorrow.”

“Great.” I tried standing while Goodfellow hailed a cab. “Maybe we should get some oxygen tanks.”

Or, as I’d thought before, move the hell out of New York.

The next afternoon I felt surprisingly not too bad. Niko and I both had plenty of bruises, but nothing broken. That was the good news. The bad news was Goodfellow was back and we were having the same conversation we’d had yesterday before the clusterfuck with Jack. Considering where we’d been while having it, clusterfuck could have several meanings, but I wasn’t about to say that aloud and have Niko threaten to spar political correctness in me if it took him and my aching muscles the rest of both our lives.

“That was the last day of the convention,” Robin sighed, playing with one of Niko’s knives in the workout area. He was uncannily talented in hitting the crotch on the silhouette printed on the paper targets. “There is nothing else in the city like that right now. Nothing I could think of large enough that it would be guaranteed to draw in Mr. Judgmental.”

“He does seem to have some unknown problem with us or me now that Cal is off his menu,” Niko reminded. “And he did say my turn—or our turn, as Cal has annoyed him greatly and he’ll kill him for that alone—was yet to come. But we can’t depend on that to have him show up anytime soon. He could commit unlimited more murders before he decides to pay another visit. We can’t wait.”

I was sprawled on the couch and reaching for the TV remote when I had a tickle in the base of my brain—the lizard hindbrain where violence and fun are one and the same. “I have an idea.”

Niko blanched, visibly as he hadn’t done at Goodfellow’s plan. To be fair, he’d heard and gone along with more of my ideas over the years. His recovery, as they say, was ongoing. “I’d prefer you didn’t.”

“Have some faith.” This could be good. “He doesn’t like the ethically challenged or the morally conflicted, right?” It was a shame he didn’t want me as I had all of that with a cherry bomb on top. “Fine. Since we can’t narrow down crime, let’s go make some crime. A big one, one he can’t possibly ignore.”

“Please do not tell me what you have in mind.” Nik pinched the bridge of his nose. “I am not a begging man, but, Cal, please.”

My grin was so wicked I was almost disappointed Jack didn’t appear and promptly skin it right off my face. “Let’s burn some shit down. A whole lot of shit.”

I didn’t often come up with the plans, too lazy, but when I did, they were frigging spectacular. When it came to devastation and destruction . . .

I was a genius.