Slashback

15

Cal

Present Day

It wasn’t fair.

Robin and Ishiah made plans. I guessed that’s what they did. I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t care. I had my own plan. If I could lure Jack far enough away from Niko, then I could open a gate inside him. Nik wouldn’t die from the mass of moving crystal-feathered shrapnel that was the inner Jack and I’d try to gate away in time to avoid the same fate. If I made it, great. If I didn’t, shit happened. I’d go down fighting. It was the best end I had hope for in my life anyway.

Life wasn’t fair, childish to complain, but there you go.

I would save Nik—that was the bottom line. He hadn’t survived twelve years ago to die at the whim or hand of the same monster now.

Life wasn’t fair and who told you that it was?

That’s what they always said. Fine. This time I said, that’s who, and I didn’t care if that was childish or immature. I said it was going to be fair therefore it would be and God help you if you got in my way. But God wouldn’t help, would He? God didn’t interfere and that was a damn shame for you.

I knew because I did nothing but interfere, and I didn’t work in mysterious ways. I worked in bloody ones.

At least Jack had let Niko take his katana with him; that was something. That his phone was centered in Nik’s perfect anal-retentive manner on his dresser meant no tracking him by GPS, which was why I was ripping the list off the printer of the search I’d done on abandoned churches in the city. Ishiah said Jack would be in a church. I’d find that church and if I had to tear it down brick by brick to get to Nik, I would. I shoved the list in my pocket and went to my room to get a few things. Opening a gate in Jack was the only chance I had, but Nik would tell me to prepare for any eventuality. He had learned that lesson the hard way. I wouldn’t do him any justice to forget that now.

“Where are you going?”

Goodfellow sounded odd, his words moving slowly as though the air was water. “To the churches. To kill Jack. To bring Nik home.” It was a stupid question and he seemed to realize it.

“I think I meant more what will you do?” He chose his words more carefully now. “To accomplish those things. Jack can’t be killed.”

“An Auphe can kill anything. You know that.” He did. He’d seen it often enough before.

As I finished gathering my weapons, he said tightly, “If they don’t care about surviving, that’s true. But I know better than to have this talk with you and I don’t know that I would do any differently. This once I won’t play the hypocrite. Start at the top of your list. Ishiah and I will begin at the bottom. If we find them first, we’ll call you.”

The air was air again and I felt more human than I had in a long time. Nothing brings out the humanity in you like sheer terror. “He thinks it was his fault. I tried to help him. I think I did, some, but what if he thinks he deserves this? To be to Jack what I was to Junior? What if he doesn’t fight hard enough? Shit, Robin, what if he doesn’t wait for me?”

He pushed me hard enough to have the pain of my broken rib slicing through my panic but not hard enough to actually injure me. “Don’t be an idiot. Yes, he feels guilty, but do you think for a second your brother would willingly transfer that guilt to you?” He pushed me again, this time in motion toward the hall and then the front door.

Robin was right. Nik wouldn’t do that to me. He would do anything to be there when I showed up, still alive . . . still fighting. I glanced at the door, then back at Goodfellow. “I won’t be needing that. Look for him. Find him. Call me.” I pulled the gate, a gate I thought about because Nik would want me to, around myself and left this world.

I reappeared at the location of the first church. I knew it, had passed it a hundred times. It was one of the locations I was familiar enough with to travel through a rip in the world and arrive at its step. I was wearing Niko’s long coat he’d left behind. It covered up enough weapons to take out the entire NRA. Nothing covered up that I’d appeared in broad daylight out of thin air surrounded by the violent purple and black oil slick of a wound that was reality torn around me. I was separated from the sidewalk by a chain-link fence, but it wasn’t much of one and people saw. I don’t know how many, but from the shouts and gasps it was more than one or two.

There’d be hell to pay for that later . . . if there was a later. I didn’t care about the consequences. I did care about finding Nik as fast as I possibly could. If I had to reveal every hidden paien alive to an unknowing human world, so fucking be it.

This church wasn’t that old. It was that ugly, square industrial look from the 1950s with one of those steeples that don’t actually have a cross or a bell and you wonder why they stuck a steeple on it at all. What did I know though? Sophia and religion hadn’t gone hand in hand. As far as I remembered, I’d never been in a church. It had nothing to do with being Rom. Rom were the same as everyone else; some were more religious than others and religious traditions varied from clan to clan.

It was amazing the shit your mind could come up with to stop the mental images of your brother being skinned alive that ran through every thought like a garrote rusted red with old blood.

Time to go.

I shot the chain and lock off the door and ran into my first church. I searched the two floors and the basement, kicking down the more flimsily locked doors. I didn’t get what I was praying for. Except for rats the building was empty.

The next church called for a taxi. I had to gate back home to come out and catch it. I couldn’t flag it down at the church. From inside I could hear the people gathering on the sidewalk, the disbelieving voices. If I didn’t come out of the church, it was a little better. Not a lot better, but a little. They wouldn’t see more proof that someone . . . something had been there to begin with.

I needed the taxi for the second church as if I’d passed that address, I didn’t remember it. And if I couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t gate there. As the cab pulled up at the second address, I told the driver to keep going and gave him a new one. This one was already half converted into condos and workers were moving inside and out. If Jack was there anywhere, there would be a good deal more screaming and slaughter or a pile of cooling dead bodies hidden somewhere inside.

The next was the same, as was the next. Nothing stayed undeveloped for long in this city. The longer I searched, the more Niko’s chances declined. Unless . . . unless Jack didn’t kill during the day no matter how safe his lair. Junior had his attic, his skylight . . . for Jack to watch maybe, or maybe for another reason. Jack didn’t belong to Heaven anymore. At night under the stars and the moon might be the closest he could come to being home. I couldn’t see the stars in the New York night sky with so much light pollution, but Jack’s eyes weren’t mine. Neither was Jack’s mind. Jack’s mind wasn’t the mind he’d always had either. Maybe Jack was crazy enough to think the stars were the eyes of his fellow angels watching his work with approval.

If I wanted to lie to myself and grasp at straws, I would. In my life I’d learned one thing: the truth will kill you as often as it sets you free.

The next church was Jack’s. Not his one true church, but it belonged to him. The first floor was empty, but the basement was home to fourteen fucking hoodie-wearing acolytes. If I never saw another hoodie or whoever had spread the fashion gospel on those goddamn things, I’d be happy as hell. The men had been sleeping when I came down the stairs. It was a small area, meant for storage, not a dormitory, but that’s the purpose it served now. They sat up on old sleeping bags, not one of them with a knife in hand. From the direction they were reaching they slept with them under flattened, ancient pillows. It was a good place if you were smart enough to sleep with your hand under there grasping the handle. They weren’t that smart. They did know me. I saw it in the set of their jaw, the disgust in their eyes. One stood up—the leader, ready to face me unarmed. That’s what a brave if stupid leader would do. The rest were all still reaching for those knives when I sent Jack a message.

It was a messy one.

But sometimes you have to make a mess to get the point across.

I did think about it, Nik, before I did it, as you’d told me to. I decided if the consequences of being Auphe over human in this instance meant getting you back, it was more than worth it.

The basement was covered in gore, charred flesh, far-flung limbs when I finished walking down the stairs to jump the last stair to the concrete and moved across to the one remaining—the one I hadn’t opened a gate within to turn inside out, upside down, round and round. He was still standing, the one who would know of any of them, where Jack might be. That hoodie had been white; it was Carrie-crimson now, but he was covered in a little worse than pig’s blood.

I grinned at him with teeth that couldn’t be as sharp and wicked in reality as they felt in my mind. “Careful. The floor’s slick. I wouldn’t want you to fall and hurt yourself.”

That disgust in his eyes was gone. It’s easy to hate an idea—that of a Godless creature—to want to destroy what was behind it . . . when it’s only an idea. It’s harder when that idea is a reality right in your face. Dripping down your face in this case. That’s when there’s only room for fear. This guy might think he was going to Heaven when he died, but God oh God, he didn’t want to die like that, now did he?

I circled him. “It’s funny really. When I was a kid . . . and I was once a kid, hard to believe, I know. But when I was little, one of the scariest things I came across was a jack-in-the-box. I practically pissed my pants at the sight of one.” I tugged on his hood as I’d tugged on Nik’s braid hours ago. “Yet now that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for Jack in his godforsaken fucking box and you’re going to tell me where that box is.”

He did.

I didn’t doubt that he would. He could barely get the words out fast enough; they tumbled over each other, a run of stones racing down the side of a mountain. That was usually a warning sign of something bigger and worse to come

This wasn’t any different from that.

There may have been an assumption on his part that I’d let him live if he talked. I wasn’t an idiot and I wasn’t naïve. I’d dealt with the Auphe race. Jack was a poison, a disease that could spread even if he was gone. The Auphe had taught me to be a fan of the scorched earth policy. Burn it, salt it, let nothing ever grow here again.

That’s what I did, and then I went to find Jack.

Jack’s church was one of those I thought of as real churches. Not real in a sense of what one worshipped in an ugly church was inferior to what one worshipped in this type of church. It was just what I’d grown up seeing in movies and on TV as the epitome of the House of God. It was stone with a steeple that pierced a sky now purple and pale orange with dusk. There was a stained glass window in front that was two stories tall. There was no scene, no grazing sheep, or sunlight streaming from the sky. It was a complex mixture of rectangular and square shades of glass—a thousand windows, each leading to a better place. The doors were a dark wood and arched at least four feet over the tallest person to walk through them.

I saw all of this once I’d gotten through a fence much more secure than had been at the first church. I gated through it. I had no time for a fence this difficult. This one even came with the kind of razor wire you saw on prison fences. It was ugly and evil, an odd choice to surround a building even I thought of as beautiful. Jack was inside there though, a cancer that made all that beauty an empty shell that didn’t yet know it was terminal. Didn’t know there was no cure strong enough to save it.

Until me. I could save it. I could be the scalpel that cut Jack away. It wouldn’t be clean but clean was overrated as long as you got to live.

The double doors weren’t locked. Why would they be? Jack loved all the company he could get. As Robin had said, who among the city would Jack consider truly innocent? Not many and trespassing would be equal to thou shall not kill in his warped mind. Jack had his own commandments and ten didn’t come close to numbering them.

Inside with the doors shut behind me I could still see well enough though the light was gray and dim. There was some clutter, but not as much as the other empty churches had. Jack had cleaned up. Why not? Who wanted to skin people in an untidy work area? Nik would applaud his work ethic. I swallowed with difficulty. Surprised something that automatic would be that hard to do. I swallowed again and although there was no blood in my mouth I thought I could taste it . . . because I could smell it.

The air was saturated with the scent of blood. Old, recent, fresh. I’d thought Junior’s house had smelled—I’d had no idea what bad truly was. I’d fought enough over the years that the coppery tang of fresh blood had long stopped bothering me, but this wasn’t the same. Old blood was a horror I couldn’t explain to someone who couldn’t experience it. It was something I wouldn’t be rid of for at least a week. And here . . . there was an ocean of rotting blood. Jack had more victims than the police had ever found. I couldn’t smell anything over what they had spilled here. I couldn’t smell Nik.

“Nik!” I shouted as I limped forward. The ribs were beyond codeine now. “Niko!” I shouted again. I wasn’t trying to be subtle. I wasn’t looking to hide. I wanted Jack to find me. I couldn’t lead him away if he didn’t know I was there. I also couldn’t forget how fast he was. I wasn’t that fast, but for Jack I’d have to be. Whipping my head back and forth, I scanned the church and saw nothing. The basement then. I’d go . . . wait. Up. There was a paler glimmer . . . blond hair, Nik’s hair in the balcony above. Through the ornate carved wood rail I could see him, a shadowed fall crowned with that rare recessive blond Leandros hair.

Above, like Junior’s attic. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Junior had said his master liked to watch from the sky. That could be true or it might be that Jack wanted to be either closer to what he remembered of Heaven or just free of Earth when he did his work. Angels must have wings for a reason.

Niko’s form didn’t move and I instantly ran to the back where the stairs would lead up because he was not dead. I could smell nothing but what soaked this place inside and out, not even Nik’s normal scent, but my brother’s freshly spilt blood, that I would know . . . over anything at all. Jack hadn’t shown up, but he had to be here and I’d be ready for him. I reached for the handle of the door that should lead to the stairs when the blot of gloom under the balcony became something else. Knit out of the shadows, the reaped souls, and the desertion of faith that now filled this place, Jack became.

The killing gate I had planned for him took only a thought. I didn’t have time for even that. A grip of ice sank into both of my temples, through flesh and bone, and I was the storm. I was the lightning that passed through my brain. The floor disappeared beneath me as I hung in midair, arms and legs splayed as I convulsed. Jack’s incandescent glow of white-blue eyes gazed into mine. “We both come and we both go, you said.” Thick with clots of flesh and blood, the phantom of them if not the actual things themselves, the words fought through. “Now I think you, Wolf-in-the-Flock, Auphe-in-the-Flock, you will go nowhere.” He must have dropped me as I was now looking up at the ceiling, unable to move, unable to understand what he said next although I could hear it.

“Pray for deliverance. Pray for mercy. But they will be prayers unheard for I will not let them pass, half a soul or not.”

He hovered over me, but I couldn’t distinguish between the lightning-shot blackness and the electricity misfiring in the darkness of my brain. Was there a difference? I couldn’t . . . think. There was the smell of freshly mown grass, the taste of metal and butterscotch, the warm sensation of Delilah’s skin under my hands. I floated on it all. It seemed strange. It seemed right. It seemed . . .

I was tired.

A wolf among the sheep. Half wolf, half sheep.

There was something I needed. . . . It was on the tip of my . . . what? What was . . . now there was the smell of Oreos. Mrs. Spoonmaker’s Oreos. I smiled and closed my eyes. I was so tired.

With the taste of burned butterscotch in my mouth, I slept.

DIY electroshock therapy is not an Auphe’s best friend.

It was a while before I could link enough words and images in my head to come to that conclusion.

Before that I drifted. It could’ve been minutes. It could’ve been days. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. There was darkness around me and dancing lights, few and distant as the stars of a post-apocalyptic sky. That was all right, came the muzzy feeling. The world had to die sometime. It wasn’t anything as complicated as a thought—it was a feeling, warm and reassuring in the futility of it all. Best to go along. Ride the light to a world better than this. Let it all go. . . .

Including Niko.

That was a thought, fully formed and capable of dissipating the fog in my brain with the force of a high noon, summertime Death Valley sun. Nik. Where was Nik? I sat up, pushing against the floor beneath me. It felt like polished wood, smooth and perfect. My muscles didn’t mirror that feeling. Every single one in my body ached as if I’d run for my life for several hours, was hit by a bus, another bus, and then hit by a train before deciding to top it off with the New York City Marathon for kicks. Tiny shivers and spasms twitched . . . Jesus . . . everywhere as I curled into a ball, resting my forehead on my knees until it passed.

I remembered in the fuzziest of ways cold hands, one on each side of my head, and then a lightning storm inside of it. Jack, friend and pal that he was, had given me a free shock treatment. He’d zapped my brain, and the rest of me incidentally, quickly but thoroughly. The seizures that would cause were what had my muscles tied in what felt like unbreakable knots.

After a minute, all I had time to spare, I looked up and around me. My muscles continued to howl, but I told them to talk to my broken rib and get back to me. I was in a basement from the looks of it, a fancy one. The floor was wood, stained and polished to a high gloss that reflected the flickering lights of the four candles Jack had left me.

I thought it was to see the chains. Feeling them around my wrists wasn’t enough. He wanted me to see how helpless I was as well. That was the kind of dick he was. My hands were in front of me, the wrists wrapped in several tight loops of thick chain that in turn was chained around a wooden column that would be theoretically holding up the ceiling. The chain wasn’t padlocked. That would be too easy and not Jack’s style. The ends were melted into one tangled whole. Lightning, good for so much more than scrambling a brain.

The basement.

The imprisonment.

The symmetry of the chains.

I get it, Jack. Funny fucking ha-ha. Just like the good old days twelve years ago.

I hadn’t seen what Junior had done to Niko while I was in the attic and Niko hadn’t told me. He’d only said that he’d killed Junior and we were safe. I was safe. But he didn’t have to tell me he’d been chained and he didn’t have to tell me where. He’d had the smell on him as we sat in our own bathroom and he washed the blood from my chest and from around his wrists. He’d been with the dead . . . in the basement. I didn’t know how Jack knew about that. He hadn’t been there for that particular show or had and found a reason not to interfere. It could’ve been Junior’s routine. Chain his victims in the basement, kill them later in the attic. Jack would definitely know that about his apprentice. He’d obviously known about two neighbor kids next door who’d disappeared after Junior’s death. Had guessed why we’d vanished.

Jack knew more than he should.

I tried flipping that switch in my brain, starting small, a tiny gate to eat away at the chains and set me free. Nothing. There was only the creeping return of the muzzy sensation around the edge of my thoughts. If I couldn’t do something so small, gating myself was impossible. Jack had seen me moving like him, if not as quickly. Jack had taken a leap of faith . . . wasn’t that hilarious . . . that frying my brain would put a stop to that, temporarily. Permanently. Either one suited Jack.

Yeah, Jack knew way more than he should, but Jack didn’t know me.

Gating didn’t make me who I was. It was a part of me, but with or without gates, I’d always be half of something that could take him out if I had to use my last breath to do it. I remember the torn flesh weeping blood that had circled Nik’s wrists from his stay in Junior’s basement. I’d seen him pop a dislocated thumb back into place, with a towel clamped in his mouth to keep from screaming. If my brother had the balls to do that for me when he’d been a kid, there wasn’t anything that would stop me from doing the same for him as an adult.

Junior must have used handcuffs on Nik. Dislocating a thumb wouldn’t help with chains. A willingness to give Jack his pound of flesh would. Or half a pound. Nik had been right. Thinking you’re invulnerable makes you sloppy.

Jack had gotten sloppy.

He’d seen human weapons were nothing compared to him. They couldn’t hurt him, and he hadn’t bothered to take mine. He’d also left me that slack, not too bright of him either. I loved the arrogant ones. I was thinking all that when I maneuvered my hands and pulled the Mossberg Tactical shotgun out of Nik’s coat. I thought on it harder than I had to. If I hadn’t, I’d think about what Jack was doing to my brother right now.

I couldn’t think about that. God, I . . . no. Just no.

This had happened to him when he was fifteen. When he was unarmed and had no experience with the evil in the world, other than the kind that then he had only watched. Trapped in a basement filled with the dead while Junior had been offering me to his master upstairs, he’d thought it was his fault for not believing me. The wonder wasn’t that he’d had a time bomb in him. The wonder was that he hadn’t given up on life then and there. The wonder was Nik himself who did not give up on me, no matter the odds, who saved my ass every last time.

I wasn’t going to be any different. I was getting him out of this. Somehow. And I was going to make him goddamn proud as I did it.

If that meant that I had to take on Jack with no gating ability and no weapon that could touch him, I’d fucking come up with something. Step one: the chains. If I’d known Jack was going to turn this into a psycho high school reunion of sorts I’d have brought bolt cutters. Now, I tucked the shotgun under my arm, pressed the muzzle against the chain and fired. I then switched hands and did the same several inches over.

My hands and face burned as I reloaded and ran up the stairs.

Cuts and embedded metal fragments from the shattering of the chain in two places when I hit it with a couple of steel slugs were responsible for that. There were ugly powder burns on my hands as well to accent the blood that made me look as if I were wearing black and red gloves. I’d had to aim close to where the chain wrapped around my wrist. If the chain didn’t shatter completely, I’d still have to pull my hands free of metal that wasn’t completely intact, looser but still snug, and would be the new equivalent of razor wire.

That was what had happened, and that’s what I’d done. I’d yanked my hands free, losing large patches of skin down to meat. Nothing I couldn’t live without. Nothing I gave a damn about.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Nik, wait for me, goddamn it. You’d better fucking wait.

I kept running, limping, moving up any way I could. It was hard to breathe and if a piece of bone in your lung felt worse than this, I pitied the bastard that had that. I hit the first floor, didn’t slow down as I ran for the door to the balcony and went up those too. As I staggered out onto the balcony, I was surrounded by color. Subtle but true. Moonlight washed through the stained glass of the giant window I’d seen walking into the church. The soft light wafted in a quiet drift of blue, purple, and the deep green of grass on a night shadowed grave.

This time, this close, I could smell Niko’s blood and I jerked my head to the left. He was standing with his katana between him and Jack. He knew he didn’t have a chance, but he was buying time, hoping I could get away and would have the sense to run.

He knew better than that, but he still tried. Nik was incapable of giving up on me, no matter how bleak the odds. Who did he think I’d learned it from? And Jack had picked up on that, was playing with him. “I left him his weapons,” came the thick flow. “His human toys. He had knives. If he’s the soulless animal I know him to be, he’ll do as they do when caught in a trap. I am kind however. He won’t have to gnaw his way free. He can use a knife to cut off his hand. I did chain both hands. Cutting off the second hand will be more of a puzzle without another to cut with, but Auphe are nothing if not persistent.”

I leaned in the corner between wall and rail. “Nik, get down.” He jerked his head toward me. I think it was the first time in my life I’d managed to appear and him not see me coming, not counting gates. But we were both caught in a past nightmare now and we were both less sharp and more desperate than we’d ever been.

There was blood on his face that started at his hairline, followed closely in front of his right ear, and ended at the tip of his chin. Superficial but messy and as Nik had told me in the beginning of this, a game, but also a start to being skinned alive if that’s what Jack wanted.

Reloading on my run up the stairs, I didn’t think the shotgun would work and thanks to ECT for Dummies, Jack had taken gates out of the picture. Chances were that both Nik and I were going to die here, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for Jack. When he looked back on taking us down, if it couldn’t be with fear, then I’d settle for vast annoyance. “Nik, down!” I repeated as I fired the first slug into the swirling mass of every nightmare come to life that coiled between us and instantly pumped the shotgun for the next round.

Nik didn’t get down, because Nik knew I had no plan. He would fight the same as I would and if we survived, kick my ass for suggesting he wouldn’t.

“I neutered your mutt of an Auphe. I filled his head with the light of the storm. He can’t leave. He can’t walk through doors not meant for him. He can’t save himself and he can’t save you either,” Jack gloated, the slug having disappeared in the shadows around him before it dropped to the floor coated in ice. “He cannot do anything. He may as well be human now, weak and ready for judgment, but he still won’t have it. Death is all that’s for him. Redemption is beyond him, neutered or not.” The glitter of his eyes focused on me, disappeared—toward Nik, and then back to me. “But who shall first give up his skin to the priest that is Jack? Who is the first offering?”

Nick slashed with his katana in a movement as quicksilver fast as Jack’s lightning. He was aiming for the eyes, but it was the same as with anything we’d tried. The blade bounced back and Jack laughed. The son of a bitch laughed. “You then, with a skinning tool of your own. I think I shall use it on you and then use your skin to choke your soulless sibling to death. A fitting end for the talented apprentice you took from me. Hammersmith gave me many of the wicked. Now you die in my pet’s name.”

Not happening.

This was fucking not happening.

I was about to fire again, then take on Jack with my hands and teeth when I saw them.

Through those squares of color, I saw, blurry and lit only by streetlights, but it was enough. This time when I shouted, “Niko, get the fuck down!” he listened.

The stained glass window exploded behind him. As glass flew through the air, Ishiah, Samyel, and four other peris from the Ninth Circle hung in the air, white and gray and copper wings beating the air into a storm that rivaled the one that was Jack.

“You are sick, brother,” Ishiah said as they circled him. “Pyriel, you are Fallen and this cannot go on.”

Jack’s eyes faded to the barest glimmer for a moment. “Brothers.” He sounded confused. “No, no, I am not with you any longer. I am my own creation. I am judgment and redemption. I am not of you but I am sanctioned or I would’ve been punished long ago.”

“This,” Ishiah said with a grim twist to his mouth. Sadness. Resignation. It was time to put the rabid wolf down. “This is your punishment and it is long overdue.” He arrowed in, a hawk stopping on a rabbit. Samyel and the others followed. They covered Jack and buried hands in the blue and white flaring mist around him. Immediately a lightning storm exploded on the balcony, at least fifty bolts. I had gone down as quickly as Nik when the window had burst and I was grateful for that now. Ishiah and the others were thrown back, glowing and burning. But as quickly as they’d been tossed aside, they were back and every time the lightning threw them away they returned. Jack tired and the lightning became jagged and intermittent. The peris were on him then and stayed on. They began to peel back pieces of . . . something—ragged chunks of darkness that bled in the sizzle of faint bolts of electricity. They were removing the storm spirit from Jack—Pyriel—tearing it to pieces to free what it had latched on to hundreds of years ago.

They were peris, retired angels with limited powers, but it was enough to kill a parasitic storm spirit and without that spirit, Pyriel was frozen. He might not want to fight his brothers. He might be all but powerless himself now that the spirit that had fed on him and channeled his life force all those years was gone.

I didn’t give a rat’s ass either way.

The peris, each trailing a limp drapery of dead or dying storm spirit with them, soared higher. They’d done their part, nothing I’d expected, nothing I’d hoped, but now it was my turn. Jack, when the darkness had flowed away like the outgoing tide, was revealed to be a glass statue, one that had been shattered and glued back together by a senile, blind man. Angles, knife-sharp edges, jagged shards that cut not only skin but the air itself solidified. You could almost picture that there had once been wings that could lift him into flight, but now were melted together into a crippled caricature—layered with the same fractured glass that made up the rest of him.

Yet . . . I could see what he once had been before he changed. Something awe-inspiring. Something beautiful.

Crystal and cut glass, each feather on his wings a knife blade of diamond made to slash and fly. He would’ve been something. Hell, a glory. Now he was the ice over a winter lake and if I looked hard enough I thought I might see the eyes and mouths of his victims wide open with terror as they drowned trapped beneath the frozen barrier.

The parasite was gone, but what had been beneath it, the angel, his eyes, the same blue-white, were as insane as they’d ever been while he’d been Jack. Angels went mad too. It wasn’t as much a surprise as I’d thought. All that power, all that judgment—there’d be no Hell if angels hadn’t gone mad or bad in the first place, would there?

Who better than me—something darker and more deadly than any demon—to kill an angel?

He’d thought himself judge, jury, and executioner. Now it was my turn to play that part. I aimed the Mossberg at him. It didn’t matter if you were from Above or Below or somewhere in the middle; you touched my brother and you died.

“You’re wicked, Jack,” I said without emotion. “You’re wicked and wrong and I damn sure am not here to save you.”

I shot him in the head and then the chest, shattering him to hundreds of pieces falling as tears from Heaven. Niko was at my side as Pyriel—no, Jack, he’d always be Jack to me—continued to rain down on the floor with the soft ringing of bells. You know how the movie goes: when you hear a bell ring, an angel gets his wings. Or gets a slug in the head. Choose whichever version you like.

“My turn,” Niko said firmly, the rope he’d escaped easily enough still in tatters around his wrists. Jack had left him his weapon as he’d left me mine. Jack had made sure he could escape to stand and fight. Jack who’d wanted a challenge from the one who’d killed his worshipper twelve years ago. Jack—who’d gotten exactly all that. I wished he’d had longer to enjoy it. I wished we all had. Sick or not, Jack had been far beyond the grace of a mercy killing.

Wordlessly I passed over the shotgun and Nik used the barrel to beat those pieces of Jack, glittering bright as a crop-killing frost, to a fine, crystalline sand. The metal flew up and thundered down more times than I cared to count. With every blow the sound of rotten ice breaking beneath careless feet echoed. Gone, but it didn’t matter. You could hear the death in him the same as before I cut him down. Finally a wind blew in through the destroyed window and Jack—his presence and fatal song—simply blew away.

Gone, just like that. As if he’d never existed at all. I’d have killed all the angels in Heaven to have made that true.

“Feel better?” I asked, moving to stand beside Nik as he dropped the shotgun to the floor.

He wiped at the trickle of blood running down his jaw and bumped my shoulder. “You know, little brother, I think that I do.”

We were at home . . . surprising me as I hadn’t thought we’d live to come back. The start of the plan, if not the rest of it, had worked out—color me all kinds of fucking surprised. I’d started at the top of the list of churches, Ishiah and Robin at the bottom and we’d met, more or less in the middle. Fortunately, Ishiah had a plan of his own he hadn’t told me about, one he hadn’t had much faith in—that the peris from the bar could kill and remove the storm spirit from Jack. Peris were forbidden from killing paien in New York, parasites included. He doubted he could get all of the crew from the Ninth Circle to risk expulsion from the city or that they’d be able to accomplish it if they did agree. That spirit had been riding Jack a long, long time. Fortunately, Ishiah had been wrong on both counts. For an ex-angel he had less belief than I’d have thought.

In the end, it was what Robin had suggested. Without each other, the spirit and Pyriel weren’t even the halves of a whole. Easy prey.

Promise was with Niko in his bedroom, taking care of the cuts on his face and his wrists. As the door was closed, she could be taking care of other things, but I doubted it . . . this time. My hands looked like they’d been through a meat grinder, my ribs told me breathing wasn’t on the menu for supper today, and my face was peppered with tiny fragments of metal chain. All of which Goodfellow was working on, but it wouldn’t be long before Nik was out to take over.

“It’s difficult to believe Jack would go to those lengths to relive Junior’s favorite scenario. He was the master after all. Junior was only the apprentice . . . or the worshipper. I’m not certain what label to put on that wretched bastard,” Robin said. “Putting you in the basement instead of Niko. Niko in the closest thing to an attic instead of you.” Nik had mentioned it was the same setup from twelve years ago when we left the church, the things I’d already known but as always hadn’t talked about, what Junior had done to us both, which was a good thing. Not talking about it all those years, trying to protect each other, that had been a mistake.

Or mostly a mistake.

“Either he hated losing an apprentice or he was the dramatic sort. Or both,” he continued. He was right about one thing: it had been as close to being exactly the same as Jack could make it. Robin was bathing my hands in peroxide diluted with sterile water. After that he’d follow with antibiotic cream, loose bandages, and we’d hope there wasn’t any scar tissue that was bad enough to limit my range of motion. Pulling a trigger was important in my business.

“The light was different,” I murmured. I couldn’t tell Nik. I’d sooner eat my gun. But I needed to tell someone or I’d end up having a meltdown the same as my brother. There’d be no avoiding it. Some secrets eat you from the inside out until nothing is left.

“The light?”

“The skylight in the attic was red. Everything looked red there. Everything looked bloody before it actually was.” I flexed my fingers under the loose gauze and winced. That was not good. That put the ribs into perspective.

“Nik used to call me a rubber ball when I was a kid. All the time. He said I could bounce back from anything. He said I was amazing that way.” That was a warm memory. I’d keep that one. “Then the Auphe took me when I was fourteen.”

“And you didn’t bounce back,” Goodfellow said quietly.

“No, I’d stopped bouncing a little earlier, when I was eleven. I stopped after what I saw in the attic. What I heard really.” I flexed my other hand, and, damn, that was worse than the first one. “I pretended. Fake it until you make it, right? I faked it with the best of them. But no more bouncing, not the real kind. That’s when I knew I was right not to tell him. I didn’t want him to be like me.”

Resigned to fate.

“Tell him? Tell him what?”

“I was awake part of the time, in the attic. Nik doesn’t know. Nik can’t know,” I warned. “I was awake when Junior cut me with his knife, telling me I was an innocent. I had no sin in my blood to drain, but he liked that part. Loved it. He knew I wouldn’t mind.” I’d still been confused and half out of it from the drugs but I remembered him holding me close, with an arm wrapped around my bare back as he dragged the point of the knife through my skin to watch me bleed.

Robin rested his elbows on his knees and folded hands against his mouth. “Gamisou. The monster.”

I almost laughed, but Nik could’ve heard. I held it back, but it wasn’t easy. “Monster. That’s what he thought he was, but then a Grendel opened a gate into the attic and Junior found out how wrong he was. The Grendel . . . fuck, the Auphe, I mean, slashed him to pieces. Left him dying on the floor. I’d never seen anything like it. It tore Junior apart with no more effort than it took to breathe.” Vicious and predatory and fucking murder made of moonlight and blood. “Before they’d only watched me. I didn’t know. I had no idea what they could do.” I’d had no idea how outside of the world and everything in it they were. How alien and how fucking unstoppable. “And then it came over and whispered in my ear. I was on the floor, trapped in a corner. I’d never seen one close up, only through windows. I didn’t know they could talk. . . .

“It had bent down and pressed those metal teeth to my ear and hissed possessively, ‘You belong to us, little cousin. One day we will come for you. Next year, the year after, the year after. You will not know, but we will come and take you through that.’ A black talon pointed at the roiling mass of ugly, tarnished light that had torn a hole in the world and hung there, waiting. ‘We will take you home to your true family. Wait for us. Watch for us.’

“Then it and the gate were gone. Nik had pounded up the stairs just as I’d let my eyes shut. I’d heard him talking urgently to me, but I wasn’t hearing words anymore. I did hear the meaty thump that was the knife ramming into Junior’s heart, Nik finishing him. For all that the Auphe had half killed him, Nik had completed the job. Nik had killed to save me.”

“How could you not tell him?” Robin had his hand on my shoulder squeezing. It was the same one Nik gave me when he knew I needed reassurance, but not the embarrassment of the words.

“How could I? Nik was meant for college, meant for a real life. If I’d told him the Auphe would be back for me anytime, he never would’ve tried those things. He wouldn’t have gone to school and it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference. Even at eighteen Nik wasn’t a match for all the Auphe.” I’d known that and I’d thought I was doing the right thing. “You know, Robin. It took four of us and a suicide run that never should’ve worked to do that.” I slumped back in the couch and let my head fall to stare at the ceiling. “Three years before they came for me. It was a long time. It was so fucking long knowing every night might be the night. But it was worth it. Niko didn’t get all the college he wanted or that real life, but he got a taste and that’s better than nothing, right?” I believed that. I had to, but for one other person to tell me so, for one other person to know—that would be good.

Secrets are so goddamn heavy.

“It is worth that.” Robin moved from the coffee table to sit next to me. “You’re a hero, Caliban. I know you refuse to believe that about yourself, but you are. You say how Niko raised you, how he saved you. What you don’t let yourself see is that you saved him as well—more than he knows. You let him see there was more to life than abusive mothers and life on the run. It didn’t last long, but it lasted long enough for him to know it was possible and build the same thing for you both now. And, no, I won’t tell. You each have far too impossible heights of guilt. It’s like an unholy competition. I refuse to add to that.”

I lifted my head and let the corners of my mouth twitch into an honest smile. “Thanks. And thanks for letting me get it out. I have mental graves all over the place and I get tired of reburying that particular one.”

There was silence; then Robin asked one more question. “Do you think Jack shorted out your gating abilities for good?”

I tilted my head back again, this time with my eyes shut. “I don’t know. With Grimm out there and all, I should care, but right now, I don’t.”

And while it wasn’t a practical feeling, it was a good one.

That was enough for me.

I’d seen enough holes in the world to last me a lifetime.