Slashback

3

Cal

Present Day

The next morning there were no smiley face pancakes waiting for me. There was only Niko wearing sweatpants and already finished up with his two-hour-long workout over in the gym-designated area of the space. As he toweled the sweat off his neck and chest, one of the heavy bags still swinging from what had probably been a roundhouse kick, I went to the kitchen cabinet to dig out a box of cereal. Ignoring the high stools, I boosted up to sit on the breakfast counter, my usual spot, and ate a handful of Captain Crunch dry. Cooking was for wusses who couldn’t fuel homicidal fury on pure sugar alone.

“Why aren’t you at the university?” I asked while chewing. Manners and me, we weren’t much on a speaking basis. “Don’t you have an eight a.m. class on Tuesdays to teach about boring dead guys?”

“Normally. I’m surprised you knew. It means so much to me that you take an interest in my work,” he said dryly, dumping his towel in the workout hamper.

“As often as you’ve kept me from being one of those boring dead guys, I feel I should give a little back.” I tossed down another handful of sugar. That was the great thing about the life span in our career: you rarely lived long enough to develop diabetes from poor nutrition. “So? What’s up then?”

“We have a business appointment, which naturally you’ve forgotten as your brain has all the retention qualities of a sieve. We’ve twenty minutes before we have to leave. I get the first shower since you’re still grazing your way through endless vistas of sugarcane.”

“You used to say I was smart.” Sieve, my ass, and what was wrong with Captain Crunch? It was the perfect food.

“You are smart when you can be bothered. You, little brother, can rarely be bothered,” he said with a Death Valley dryness to his voice.

He had me there. As the bathroom door closed behind him, I slid down, my feet hitting the floor, and moved to check the calendar, the note taped to my door, and then down at the neat marker writing across the box of cereal in my hand. Yeah, Nik tried to keep me updated on these things, but I was hopeless.

I finished up the half-full box of cereal and thought about it. There was Grimm, a jack-in-the-box you never knew when was going to pop up and spill your guts on the floor. There was this new serial killer who dropped bodies like kids dropped water balloons. Now a job too?

I checked the calendar and the notation again. Eh, what the hell? This wasn’t like me telling Ishiah to forget a freebie-of-the-week on Jack the Rippers. This was only the Kin. Granted, they could lick their own junk and run the supernatural crime in NYC at the same time, but they were still the Kin. The day we couldn’t handle the werewolf mafia with one hand while jacking off with the other was the day it was time to hang it up and get out the walker. Our multitasking beat theirs every time.

Twenty minutes and thirty seconds later—Niko loved his schedules; he’d have made a great fascist—we were moving down the sidewalk. He was looking for a cab. I was looking for something more important and I spotted mine first. The blessed hot dog cart. If Leonardo da Vinci had painted it, light would’ve spilled from the heavens to radiate around it in an ethereal luminous glow . . . and the guy hawking the dogs would’ve looked a little like a woman under his beard, but art was art.

That is to say, I didn’t give a crap about it. I just wanted my dog.

“More onions,” I told the man as he spooned them on top of the mustard and relish. “Seriously, dump them on there.” The guy huffed in annoyance but loaded it up with triple onions and handed it over.

As we walked on, I took a bite. New York may be low on ambience, but it knew how to do a dog right. As I took an enthusiastic second bite, Niko asked, “Why? I don’t have anything approaching your sense of smell and even I am offended.”

I loved onions enough that my enhanced scenting abilities had accustomed themselves to the smell over the years. They didn’t bother me at all now. “First, I like onions. Second, it pisses off Wolves. Third, I like pissing off Wolves.”

Almost as much as killing them.

I tightened the choke chain on my inner darkness, gave it a mental smack, and a “naughty bastard” with my usual resignation—maybe even fond resignation. It was the same reaction you’d show your pet great white when he brought back half of a surfer instead of the beach ball you’d thrown into the water. He was a bad boy, true, but he was also only doing as he was created to do. How could you hold that against him?

Just keep your grip tight on that leash and make sure it didn’t happen for real.

I took a third bite of the hot dog and it was as amazing as the first two. “Tastes good and pisses off Wolves. There is no downside.”

And I proved that when we arrived at the office of the Beta Ivar. Alphas were too high up to muddy their paws with Niko, a human sheep, or me, a sheep deep-fried in Auphe Hell with his own bogeyman squatting in his brain. That meant poor Ivar, icy blue eyes watering copiously from my onion breath, had to deal with hiring us. When it came to Wolves, I was used to the lack of respect and the occasional yellow squirt of fear from the ones who’d actually seen an Auphe before they were erased from the earth. Except for my pale skin, I didn’t look anything but human—slate eyes, black hair—but I smelled like Auphe to those who had the noses sharp enough to tell.

Even under the onions, to a Wolf it would come through as easily as a scalpel slicing flesh. Fortunately for Ivar, he, like many Wolves, had never come across a true full-bred Auphe. He’d only heard the legends and he only knew my smell was wrong. I saw it in his face twisting in disgust. Wrong. Didn’t belong in this world . . . didn’t belong in any world. It was a battlefield scent—a legion of marching grim reapers shoved into one body, and Ivar didn’t care for it, didn’t care for any of this at all.

But you had to be smart to be Beta in your pack, especially if your pack was Kin, and that had him concentrating on other things—things that were annoying. Things that he could react to while he ignored the rest and did as his Alpha ordered.

He growled, “A sheep who grazes in an onion field is not a very smart sheep.”

Ivar sat behind a battered desk in the office of what I liked to think of as a CAW—conveniently abandoned warehouse. Movies were full of them. Reality was as well . . . except they weren’t genuinely abandoned; they only appeared to be. The Kin bought up the ones on the edge of being condemned and used them for various purposes. Members of the pack not high up enough to have their own place slept in them. Drugs and prostitutes from other cities sometimes were unloaded there. A location to hire non-Kin sheep that weren’t good enough to see where Ivar or his Alpha actually lived—another good use. And sometimes the Kin used them to store food. Fresh food. The kind that was still capable of screaming.

You never knew though. Some packs ate people and some would consider that on par with stealing creamed carrots from a baby’s spoon. Too easy. A humiliation to a predator. Until we saw differently, we’d assume Ivar’s pack were predators with the ballsy taste to hunt only those that challenged them. If we didn’t, we’d have to do extensive background checks on every single job we took—checks that would take longer and cost more than the job itself. The strong survived, sure, but it was the practical that let you put the food on the table, that kept you upright and mobile.

Ever see a starving man kick a monster’s ass? Me neither.

“I doubt Niko said I was smart when he agreed to a meet.” I slouched in a chair as battered as the desk, the morning light a hazy glow through the dirty window. “I’ll bet he did say we could take care of your business if you didn’t screw around with us. Satisfaction guaranteed or your next of kin gets your money back.”

Nik didn’t bring up the fact I’d started the back and forth, irritating Ivar with the hot dog. He didn’t like to waste time on petty insults. He wanted the facts, the money, and to get to work. He didn’t see the entertainment value in baiting the clients. Later, when he unsheathed his sword, he’d find amusement enough. Not that he’d admit that. Not even on the inside, and, on the outside, he was always setting the example. One day he was going to realize it was a lifetime too late for that. He could make a katana dance and defy gravity like no man on earth, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about genetics, mine or his. When he realized that, then I hoped he’d realize something else. . . .

If you were a born warrior and your career was basically combat, you might as well enjoy it. He’d be happier for it.

Hell, I knew I was.

Where I slouched, Niko didn’t sit at all. He stood perfectly upright, back straight, alert and ready—a general facing his troops . . . or one criminally minded Wolf who might or might not want to give us some money. He suggested, clearly short of patience, “May we move this along past the interview stage so that we can find out the exact nature of the job?”

That’s when Ivar did screw around with us. But this kind of screwing around was expected. It was the annoying part of dealing professionally with Wolves. It was the pack way. You had to prove you were tough enough to deserve their business. And “interview” was defined as Ivar and three other Wolves doing their level best to rip us apart.

Beginning as a fairly average-sized man with average brown hair and average blue, if watering, eyes, Ivar flowed over the desk to end up as the next best thing to a grizzly bear. Muscles bulged under the thick spiky coat of fur as blue eyes rounded and shaded to the yellow of a scorching desert sun. The gaping jaws were large enough to crush my skull while puncturing the bone with fangs nearly seven inches long. Ivar wasn’t a big man, but he was one damn big Wolf. The rags left from his shirt were snagged on his claws as he landed on me . . . almost. I lunged out of the chair a split second before it shattered into splinters.

One roll and I was up, Eagle in hand, and burying a round in Ivar’s chest as he spun in the wreckage of the chair to face me. Then I flung myself flat and put a second round in the stomach of the black Wolf that sailed over me. A flash of gray and silver, Niko and his katana whirled with a spray of blood whipping in the wake as two large red Wolves howled in near unison. Their blood was darker and more scarlet than their fur, hitting the floor in heavy splatters. Following that Niko swiveled again and using one hand to grip fur combined with a little applied physics and the smaller of the Wolves was tossed through the window. The explosion of glass rang like funeral bells as I heard it hit the pavement below followed by a loud thump and an even louder yowl of pain.

Back on my feet in a crouch, I faced the black Wolf who’d flipped head over tail from the shot to his stomach but was ready for more. I threw myself to one side and then the other. He mirrored my movements, which landed his neck right into the jaws of Ivar, who’d been leaping in our direction. With his head in profile, I planted the muzzle of the automatic between the Beta’s eye and the pointed tuft of ear. There was the thud of a metal blade cutting into flesh and Nik’s voice drifting over my shoulder. “Is the interview done? If not, you’ll want to forget the mops and call for a fire hose to handle the extra blood.”

Ivar, who’d managed to stop short of tearing out the throat of the black Wolf, eased his jaws away from it and my gun. In a shimmer of fur and a ripple of flesh, he was that average man again. But this time he was naked with a bullet wound to the right of his chest. I hadn’t aimed for the heart. This was, after all, just the testing ground, not the war. “The interview is done,” Ivar agreed with a begrudging lift of his upper lip. We passed, but we weren’t Wolf and we weren’t Kin. He had to respect our skill, but he didn’t have to like it or us.

The faint breathlessness to his voice, the result of a bullet-nicked lung—a very familiar sound—would fade quickly. Probably before we left. Wolves healed fast. He waved off the other Wolves, still in lupine form and snarling with displeasure, and they limped from the office. Ivar sat back down behind his desk, unbothered by his nudity—Wolves have no sense of modesty. Why would they? They were Wolves first, people a very distant second. “One hundred thousand for the job.” His nails extended to the thick blunt ones of the Wolf and he tapped them on the desk. “We have someone whose ambition has become . . . irritating . . . to the Kin. We respect the way of the pack, the order of domination and submission. Alphas rising, falling—same as it has been since the beginning of time. But this one, she cheats. She denies the honor of the Wolf. That cannot be tolerated.”

She. That answered any question we might have had on what the job was. There was only one “she” that the Kin would subcontract out on. Delilah. Delilah definitely did cheat and considered honor something puppies cowered behind. Not to mention stupid. Last I’d known my ex-fiend with benefits had taken over half the Kin with her all female pack. The Kin allowed females membership in the Kin, but it didn’t allow female Alphas.

Delilah didn’t give a rat’s ass what the Kin allowed. She wanted to be head of the Kin and given enough time, she would be. Ivar and his three Wolves . . . she’d have eaten them alive literally—howling, screaming, and all—as a lesson to others who dared get in her way.

Niko had put his katana away. “We do not get involved in politics. Assassination is a slippery slope that tends to rebound with endless blood feuds and vengeance-vows. We prefer to keep our killing clean.”

That was Niko’s line and I stood with him on it. Although I had to admit it was a tempting offer. I wanted Delilah dead anyway. We hadn’t had friendship. We hadn’t had love. But we’d had companionship, acceptance, and unbelievably wild sex. The never knowing if she’d try to hang the head of a half Auphe on her wall as a trophy had been a price I’d been willing to pay for that. Acceptance for a half Auphe was a rare thing, even more rare among sexual partners. Bottom line: I didn’t trust Delilah, but she had liked me as I was. I didn’t get that often.

Then she tried to kill another Wolf friend of mine, her first ploy to rise in the Kin. I didn’t have many friends. I could count them on one hand and have that all-important middle finger left over to put to good use. Trying to kill me was one thing—my eyes were open when it came to Delilah’s sociopathic ways. But trying to kill my friend; I wasn’t letting that go. I had one rule. She knew it, and she’d broken it without regret. Killing her was on my list; being paid for it would’ve just been a bonus.

But this was between Delilah and me alone. The Kin wasn’t invited to that party.

“Don’t worry,” I told Ivar. “She is dead. It’s only a matter of when my vacation time comes due.”

Ivar didn’t like it. I didn’t blame him. However, he did have something to add before we left. “We’ve heard about the body from last night—the skinned one.” His upper lip wrinkled in distaste. If a Kin Wolf found a piece of violence to be excessive, that was something indeed. “Don’t come to the Kin with questions about it. We want no part of it.”

“What? You afraid?” I was more incredulous than anything else. Ivar was a Kin Beta. Admitting he was afraid, or insinuating the rest of the Kin were, would have ended up with him dead a long time ago. The Kin took their reputation seriously.

“We want no part of this trouble,” he repeated flatly. “No Kin will speak of it. Don’t bother asking. Don’t bother us with anything right now or we’ll decide we want you as dead as Delilah.”

I didn’t like having the Kin put me in my place, but if the word was out to keep quiet, they’d die before they broke with the edict of the Alphas. Whatever this thing was flinging bodies around, it had to be one truly evil, badass son of a bitch to have the Kin lying low.

It was annoying. As was having to go through an “interview” for nothing. Okay, the second wasn’t true. I had liked the fighting. What was life without your daily dose of exercise? And this exercise was more enjoyable than Niko’s preferred ten-mile run. It put me in a good mood for the rest of the day.

The night was a different story.

I’d brushed my teeth, for the third time. That onion breath was persistent as hell. The towel covered the bathroom mirror as always. I could manage quick glances when I needed to. That was enough for me. It was a phobia I’d come by honestly. I didn’t waste time trying to overcome it or being embarrassed by it any longer. Life was too short.

One last rinse and spit of toothpaste and I was in my bedroom. I changed into sweatpants and flopped on my back on the bare mattress of my bed. I’d been forced two weeks ago to wash my sheets and blanket at knifepoint, Niko’s knife, but I’d forgotten them at the Laundromat. I had a short attention span if carnage wasn’t involved. I’d wandered off to find some. By the time I remembered what I’d been doing, the sheets were long gone. I’d have to end up buying new ones. Whenever I got around to it. Or I’d wait for my birthday. Nik was a practical gift giver.

It was late, hours past midnight. Not that it mattered. Early, late—I could sleep anytime, anywhere. A lifetime on the run taught you that—among other less legal skills. Ten seconds after I hit the mattress I was gone.

A medium-length pornographic dream following that, I was catapulted to consciousness by the shattering of glass, something slicing into my stomach, the sharp spiking stench of ozone in the air, and fingers or something like fingers fisted painfully tight in my hair. And a voice, one that bubbled and flowed thick as tar, words from lungs dead and drowned. “Black hair. Like the dark within you. I covet it. I covet the skin that binds it within you.”

Our skin-loving serial killer hadn’t waited long at all after dumping that body on us. Serial killers are bad, but impatient ones—they’re the worst.

“I’ve waited for you and your skin,” the voice spilled on. “I shall take your darkness, wicked creature. I shall save you.”

Lying in the warmth of my own spilled blood, I gathered his understanding of “save” was a hop, skip, and a fucking minefield away from my definition. Unless he meant save a chunk of my flesh like a nowhere mint condition stamp—a trophy of his raving psychosis. It was a good guess. Those who mixed their raving and their potpourri bag of psychotic issues loved trophies.

I may have misheard though. Save was only my best guess as to what the jackass said. I had to catch the words between the sounds of the breaking glass. The window was gone, but impossibly the sound went on and on all around me—an endlessly flowing, then crashing, waterfall of fracturing crystal. Amidst that were the gunshots of the Glock I kept under my pillow. The gun had a silencer, but they’re not as quiet as they make out on TV. The shots did get louder as I neared the end of the clip. Nothing happened other than my running out of ammunition. He didn’t move except to keep cutting me and slamming my head up and down by my hair. With my left hand, I pulled the combat knife from under my mattress and took a swing. Other than a shimmer running through blackness, I would’ve sworn he didn’t move, but the knife didn’t connect. He was quick, too damn quick for me and that was quicker than most.

Son of a bitch.

The thing wasn’t made of mist, no matter first appearances—more like surrounded by it, concealed by it. The pounding in my head and the pain in my stomach would’ve made the inner solidity clear alone, but I could see, as well. The room was dark, and what squatted on top of me almost as dark, but inside of the smoke I could see serrated razors of midnight obsidian slicing through the haze. A multitude of overlapping angles, sharp and deadly, just barely visible, but they were there.

Hell’s own geometry.

There were shards upon shards stabbing out from the core, each two to three feet long. Hundreds of pieces of volcanic glass come to life. Jagged pieces of . . . what? How had my knife missed him, a hunchbacked creature practically made of primitive blades?

Then there was a hint of movement, a shadow growing within the shadow, as if the crystalline daggers shifted in unison, spread, and fanned out above me like wings. There was a sound that set my teeth on edge, the hollow chime of shattered glass pieces scraping and breaking as they ground ominously against one another. It had me gripping my own useless knife even tighter against the threat of the phantom blades articulating in the murk above me.

A clot of the shadowed mist came up and electric blue-white eyes flared to life, studying the blood, my blood, that dripped out of the sharp-edged darkness. There was a hiss and if hisses could be disappointed, this one was. “You are not mine to save. Not of my keeping. You are not of the Flock.”

I was a lot of things, but this shithead was right—part of a flock wasn’t one of them. Not a sheep for a monster to prey on and damn sure not a pelt to be saved and nailed to a supernatural whackjob’s wall.

I couldn’t gate him away. Hell, we were a little too attached at the moment for that. I was about to gate myself out to the hall instead and hope not to take the most dangerous part of him with me when I heard the explosion of my door being kicked open. The weight disappeared from on top of me, taking its sharp blade or talon and what felt like a handful of my hair. I was out of bed in an instant to see Niko knocked backward out of the doorway and against the hallway wall with his katana flung to one side but remaining in his grip. My brother didn’t lose his weapons. But what happened next was quick enough that he didn’t have a chance to use his sword. It was also quick enough that I barely saw it.

There was an impression of a long-fingered hand . . . no . . . the shadow of an impression wrapped around my brother’s neck, a ripple of the darkest of shades and then nothing. It was gone. If I wasn’t bleeding, head aching from the vicious jerking of my hair and mild whiplash, and Nik didn’t have a bright red handprint around his neck, I wouldn’t have been able to swear anything had been there at all.

“You’re bleeding.”

The cut, a familiarly clean surgical slice, the same kind Niko had pictures of on his phone from the body that had fallen into the stairwell, was about six inches long. It started a good four to five inches to the left side and barely above my navel and ran in a perfectly straight line to the right. And, yeah, it was bleeding, but it wasn’t gushing. That meant it wasn’t too deep, which was a good thing. That was the area I kept my guts and they tended to work better on the inside than out. “Some,” I dismissed, wiping a hand over it. All that did was smear the blood to cover my stomach. The new blood that welled out of the slice was steady but fairly slow. “It’s not bad. Whatever it used, knife, talon, extra-sharp press-on nail, it didn’t go any more than half an inch deep, I don’t think.”

“Not deep enough to skin you,” Nik said. “But enough for a start.”

“There is that, the asshole.” I covered the wound with my hand. It’d do for the moment. “What the hell did it do to your neck? I can see its handprint.” Long, knifelike fingers etched in red.

“It’s a burn.” Niko touched it lightly. The smell of ozone, the crackle of lightning in its eyes. If all Niko had was a burn, he was lucky. “Between first and second degree, I think.” He’d already started to check out the rest of our converted garage, but neither of us had seen which way it had gone. Back out the window that sat almost two stories high among the steel beams? Through the front door, locking it behind it? Down the damn kitchen sink drain? It had moved so fast I had no idea where it had gone or what it looked like, other than impressions. There was only the sense of a black wraith hovering around a mass of smoky glass knives appearing and disappearing out of the corner of my eye. That couldn’t be right. I’d been attacked by many monsters in my life, but nothing that looked so . . . inorganic . . . inorganic and maybe with wings. That was some crazy shit indeed.

Nik was scowling up at the window. It had been a problem in the past and we’d probably put iron bars on this time, but that would have to wait for the glass replacement people to wake up and get to work. As often as this happened, we might want to invest in a two-story-tall ladder.

There wasn’t anything to be done about it now and Niko gave my shoulder a light shove. “You’re dripping on the floor. Stitches. Go.” As I turned toward my room to give him something to bitch about—that always cheered him up—he nudged me again. “To the room without the bubonic plague–ridden mounds of filthy clothing on the floor.”

I stood in Nik’s sterile room of Zen and did my best not to bleed on his equally sterile floor. I didn’t lie on his bed and wait. I’d ruined enough of his bedding over the years to actually feel guilty when I did now. “Everything in its place” wasn’t a motto that worked as well for your brother when your bloodstains were on his sheets. When Niko, arms filled with supplies, walked in two minutes later he frowned. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

“I’m waiting for the plastic. I told you last time to get a plastic mattress cover. You spent half your teacher’s salary on sheets this year alone.” Not that part-time teaching at NYU paid much.

“Idiot. Get on the damned bed,” he ordered as he deposited the medical supplies on his spare and Spartan dresser. “I’ll invest in red sheets if you’re that concerned.”

I gave up on the plastic and on trying to be considerate. I wasn’t much good at it anyway. Once I was flat on the bed, a gloved hand pulled my bloody one away from my stomach and wrapped it around a damp towel. I used it to wipe the blood from my palm, fingers, knuckle creases, pretty much every millimeter of skin. It didn’t distract me from hissing at the cold swipe of Betadine across the cut. Six inches long. Lots of stitches, but Niko was quick. It wouldn’t take too long. I glanced down at the sliced flesh. It was in a different spot from long ago, a lifetime ago, and longer and deeper, but similar enough that it reminded me . . .

“You remember when—”

“We don’t talk about that,” he cut me off instantly, a little more sharply than I thought he meant to. That was a sign that he was certainly remembering it too. Hell, how could he forget? But talking about it?

No, we didn’t. There are life-changing events and life-ruining events and sometimes there is something that falls between. Twelve years since it had happened and we still didn’t talk about it. For two entirely different but equally valid reasons, but the result was the same. I blamed the disorientation of having a fairly decent sex dream interrupted by a monster who’d tried to skin me, was impervious to hollow-point rounds, and so fast as to be almost invisible for having let the comment slip at all. Nik was right.

We definitely did not talk about it.

“He was right on top of me, the son of a bitch, and I hardly saw him,” I said, changing the subject. “I shot him. There was no way I could miss, and nothing. He didn’t flinch. I didn’t even see him when he hit you. It was just . . . shadows of something already gone. Shadows and knives. He was that goddamn fast.”

Niko had already injected the area with lidocaine and was using a probe to see how deep the incision actually was. He looked up at me, face somber. “I’m sorry.”

“No big deal. I’m not feeling a thing.” Probing the cut wasn’t why he was apologizing. We both knew it and we both let it go. I didn’t want to talk about it either. The past was the past. Neither one of us wanted to dig up that mental childhood grave. It was ancient history and it was best to stay that way, especially for Nik.

If not for the reasons he thought.

He gave a faint but thankful curve of his lips, then went back to work. “It’s barely half an inch deep. If it wasn’t so long, I wouldn’t bother with stitches. But with your . . . energetic lifestyle”—kicking ass any chance I got—“you’ll constantly be ripping it open if I don’t.” He applied more Betadine. “Whatever he is, you were correct, he wasn’t serious. Not this time. He was simply playing.” He began stitching. “The ones that like to play are never the easy kills. Still numb?”

“Yes, Mom. Still numb,” I snorted. “And I’m not sure it was play. He looked at my blood. Just, hell, looked at it and said basically I wasn’t his to take. I don’t know if I wasn’t good enough a specimen. Too many scars to make a nice rug or if it’s because I’m not human.”

Niko gave me the look, the one I’d lived with my whole life. I changed it up a bit. “Not completely human. Ishiah did say it was only killing humans and Edward Scissorhands said I wasn’t a sheep. But playing or not playing, bullets, knife, sword, and neither of us touched him. He could’ve had us on a silver platter with a frigging caviar garnish if he’d wanted.” Hard to say if it was for real or just a dry run. I gave in to the inevitable. “I never thought I’d say this with your giant brain, but you might need help with the research. The next time he comes back and is serious he’ll have his choice of which of us he wants to wear as his summer jacket and which his winter coat. We need the info on this thing now. Or preferably a half hour ago.”

“My cell is on the table beside you. Call Goodfellow.” Robin Goodfellow was our go-to guy on all things paien. What he didn’t know, chances were you didn’t want to know. Niko kept stitching while I called. He’d trained for this when we lost our last healer back to the home country. Niko could go to the hospital if worse came to worst. He was human inside and out. I wasn’t. One scan, one blood test, and that was something else not worth talking or thinking about. Nik had been taught by the best healing spirit around. He could handle most serious trauma. If it was critical . . . with ventilators, heart-lung bypass machines, lacerated livers, kidneys, a nicked heart—then, hey, nobody lived forever.

By the time Goodfellow arrived Niko had finished with me and had rubbed ointment on his neck. The burn looked painful, but not serious. That had me in a slightly better mood when Robin picked our lock, walked in, and dumped a Styrofoam container on the sand-colored kitchen counter. Nice kitchen, big apartment, flat-screen TV, and all the weapons money could buy. We’d moved up in the world since the bad old days. “As requested,” he said. “Why such a request, I don’t want to know.”

I lifted the lid immediately and grinned. He had brought me a smiley face pancake. “That puts you one up on Nik.” Hell, it even had “Cal” incised across the happy, syrup-drenched forehead.

“He’s an actual adult?” the puck asked Nik with a large helping of disbelief in his snake-oil smooth voice. “You’re quite sure about that?” It was five in the morning, but as always Goodfellow was dressed like he was heading for a photo shoot at GQ.

In sweats of his own, although considerably newer and less bleach stained than mine, Niko shrugged. “Some jump developmental hurdles. Some scale them slowly but with determination and success. And then some, like Cal, are laziness incarnate and run around them. I consider it a miracle he doesn’t eat with his hands.” All this was said at the same time he set a bottle of Tylenol on the counter by me and tapped it meaningfully. Lidocaine doesn’t numb forever and he knew it would be wearing off about now.

I took a closer look at the pancake and scowled. “What exactly is that hanging from the bottom? Right under the smile?”

“Sausage link,” Robin answered promptly. “Smallest they had for authenticity. I toothpicked it there myself. You can thank me at any time.” I would’ve thanked him by throwing it at his head, but I was hungry. Sometimes pride takes a backseat to an empty stomach.

While I ate, Niko described the skinned body, showed Robin the pictures, told him about the attack on me and then him, the speed involved, the smell of a lightning strike—my cut and his burn in the shape of a hand. Goodfellow listened, studied the pictures, the handprint, and gave a speculative hum. The entire thing had taken three minutes total. Pucks were not known for being slow or bringing up the rear—unless it was in a sexual context. He knew, I could tell. Already, he knew.

He’d taken off his suit jacket and now slouched on our beat-up sofa that I refused to give up as it was shaped perfectly over the years to my lazy ass. There was an unhappy look in the usually sly green eyes. He was a fox faced with an empty henhouse. A barn cat who’d already eaten all the mice and had nothing left to entertain him. “It appears to be . . . but no, it couldn’t be him. He’s been absent for over a hundred years. The real one anyway. I doubt seriously it could be him.”

“Who? Who the hell can’t it be?” Finished with breakfast, I sat on the coffee table to face both of them. Robin was a puck. Pucks lived long lives. Thousands of years, hundreds of thousands, some even more. Robin Goodfellow, as far as we knew, was the oldest puck alive. If anyone knew everything about absolutely anything, it was him.

“Did he say anything about your hair?” he asked abruptly. “Cal, did he say anything about that shaggy mop of yours?”

Absently, I pushed my hand through the mess. Thick, black, and straight, it hung almost to my shoulders. I could get it into a ponytail, barely, to keep it out of my face for fighting. “How’d you know that? He said he liked the color. That it was black. Something about it meaning I was wicked and he wanted it. Hell, I think he took a good hunk of it with him.” Lucky it was thick. I didn’t care about my hair, not like Robin with his six-hundred-dollar haircuts to keep those Great God Pan brown curls just as they’d been drawn on temple walls. But I didn’t want a bald spot over my ear either.

“Ah, skata.” He ran a hand over that expensive haircut and turned it into a tumbleweed. “Dark hair. He likes dark hair. More importantly he likes to kill or ‘save’ people with dark hair. He thinks it’s a sign of evil. Wickedness. At least goes the rumor. If it’s him.” He shook his head. “I’m not certain. It could be or it could be other things. This is a diagnosis I do not want to commit to without more information. Truthfully, I’d rather not commit to it at all.”

He was looking less and less happy by the moment. “Niko? Did he mention your hair? The rumor also goes that he tends to associate blond hair with whores and whores also with wickedness. Red hair too. Whores, whores everywhere. It’s a theme with him. He is a judgmental bastard. He cannot abide wickedness. Odd in a killer, isn’t it?”

Niko gave a forbidding frown. “You wish to know if he called me a whore? Is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes, yes. Don’t be so sensitive. There was a time when next to Caesar that was the highest position in the land. I myself had a franchise of fertility temples—” Niko’s expression darkened and Robin returned to the point. “In deference to your prejudicial ways, let me rephrase: did he mention the color of your hair or call you immoral?”

“We will go with immoral. Yes, he may have mentioned it.” Niko folded his arms. “What of brown hair like yours? Would he consider you free of corruption, as pure as the driven snow?”

“No, wicked as well, only slightly less so. He’d still kill me, but I wouldn’t be his first choice like the darkly depraved and the wickedly wanton.” He glanced at both of us, but the usual humor was lacking in the barbs. “But with what Cal has said and his victims in the past, apparently it’s only full-blooded humans he’s after—if it’s him. Being me has always had its advantages, even with serial killers.” He gave a grin, but it also wasn’t the same, not his customary con-man special. He made the effort though. Robin was worried, but Robin was also still Robin. If he had but one finger out of the grave he’d still be using it to yank our chains.

“If this creature is what I think he is, he’s killed before. Paien history says almost forty people, in the eighteen hundreds in England. All human. History rounded down by about a hundred. Someone, no doubt the Vigil, did an excellent job of covering up the murders and the skinnings from the populace. It was passed off as a few high-strung people startled by an obvious prankster leaping about in the manner of a seven-foot-tall frog while spitting blue flames.” He curled his lip. “Intentionally described to be ridiculous. Supposedly nothing damaged but dignities. This monster became a mere idiotic urban myth to them after the fact. Now it seems the lethal truth he’s always been is back for more. It’s too early for news this bad.” The disdain for bad storytelling was gone. He rubbed the heels of his hands over his closed eyes. “Offhand, I know of no way to stop him as he wasn’t stopped. He simply disappeared. Oh, and those slices to the bone of the victim in your cell phone picture? That’s a J. He likes to sign his work.”

“Who then?” Niko demanded. “Who is he?”

“Spring-heeled Jack. Spring-hell Jack.” He gave a laugh, but I didn’t hear any amusement in it. “One and the same. Either way if it is Jack, then he has brought Hell to New York. And I don’t know if there is anything we can do about it.”