by Rob Thurman
It was a good question. Niko considered him for several seconds, then gave impassive permission. “You’re leaving.”
“You’ll call if you need my help?”
“You’re leaving,” Nik repeated, his voice cooling even further.
Samuel nodded in acceptance. “If you change your mind.” He pulled a few bills out of his wallet and let them fall by Niko’s plate. It was only when he was at the door that he called back over his shoulder, “Sorry about the coat. Hope that covers it.” The door shut behind him and he headed back toward the church.
Niko’s coat? What . . . ? Oh, hell. The speargun. The Vigil guy with the scar. Samuel had just confirmed they were behind that . . . were watching Seamus. Why? Did they think he was going to be overt? Noticed? Whatever. I only hoped they killed the bastard. It would be one less thing on our plate to worry about. Less worry, I could use more of that. I didn’t need the distraction, not with what I was trying to do.
What I was still trying to do hours later.
You didn’t notice the tinting at night on the windows. Promise’s guest room, one of four, looked over Central Park—it was a blot of darkness surrounded by thousands of lights. Fairy lights, if you lived in some fantasy world. I’d never seen that world, not even in my dreams.
Not that all my dreams were bad; they weren’t. I had nightmares, more now that the Auphe were back, but I had good dreams too. I usually didn’t remember them, but I’d wake up with the sensation of warmth on my face, of floating. No details, but I’d take it. Then there were the XXX-variety dreams. Now, they were all about the details. Testosterone, gotta love it.
But dreams would have to wait. I had things to do. Things to think.
Think like an Auphe.
I told Nik that I would. Told myself that I could. Whether I wanted to or not.
Auphe blood—was that the same as an Auphe brain? An Auphe soul? Stupid question—they didn’t have souls. No damn way. But the blood . . .
Last week to fight a killer, I’d opened a gate and traveled through it. It was one of a handful I’d opened and one of the few times I’d felt it. Slippery, cold, savage. Carnivorous and content with that. Very content. It had only lasted a few seconds, but that was long enough for me to decide traveling wasn’t a good idea. Opening a door in reality could open a door in me. It let the Auphe part of me out. Let it take a peek around. It had disappeared with the gate, and hadn’t shown up again. If I guarded myself, it might never. Yet here I was, inviting it in. Sit down, have a beer. Let’s talk.
How ’bout those Yankees?
I sat on the bed and stared out the window, watching as the lights slowly began to swim. And I thought. Ugly, bile-black, murder-red thoughts. They crept in and I let them. I liked to think they weren’t mine . . . that they were the result of two years of being held by the Auphe. Two years of a prisoner’s intimacy with his captors, knowing what roamed in their twisted brains. I didn’t remember that lost time, but it was there. I wanted to think that’s where the thoughts came from. I wanted to deny they were mine. Deny they were me. Then I said, Fuck it, and just thought them.
For a long, long time.
“Cal, stop it.”
I heard the words, but I didn’t understand them. They were just sounds. They came and went, but they didn’t mean anything.
“Stop it. Now.” A hand fastened tightly on my forearm and gave it a hard shake, bringing me back to myself. Words were words again. “What are you doing?”
My hand, it was haloed in gray light. A gate . . . very small, contained. I blinked and let the light bleed into nothingness. I raised eyes from my now-normal hand to Niko. “Thinking.”
Bad things. Such bad, bad things.
He didn’t let go of my arm. “Don’t. I know you said you would, but we’ll get out of this without that. It’s not worth it.”
To save Nik and my friends? It was worth it. It could eat my soul if I had one, and I thought it just might. It could turn me inside out; I didn’t give a damn. If it saved my brother, it was worth it. “I think they’ll come tomorrow or the next day,” I evaded. “Not all of them. Three or four. Probe our defenses. A suicide run, if they have the chance.” Because vengeance is all. Sacrifices have to be made. “It’s what I would—” My lips twisted and I corrected, “It’s what an Auphe would do.”
Niko hesitated, not like he doubted me, but more as if I didn’t have all the facts. But if there was something I didn’t know, he didn’t fill me in. Instead, he just said, “All right. That’s good intelligence to have.” He moved his hand from my forearm down to my wrist, squeezing tightly. “But don’t do it again. Don’t go to that place. I mean it, Cal. No more.” To that place in my head where things were dark and memories were black holes, sucking up everything around them until you forgot there had ever been anything to remember at all. Or to forget.
“Cyrano, shit,” I dropped my head and rubbed at weary eyes with the heel of my free hand. “It’s all we have. How goddamn selfish would I be if I didn’t use it?” The lights had gone still again outside the window. Fairy land. I pulled loose of Niko’s grip—because he let me—and in turn I yanked at his arm until he sat on the edge of the bed. “You’ve put it on the line for me all your life. It’s my turn to step up. You can’t stop me. You can kick my ass, yeah, on a daily basis if you want. But you can’t stop me. Not until this is over.”
He studied me, frowning. “You are so damn stubborn.”
“Learned from the best,” I said truthfully.
He exhaled. “Be careful, then. Can you at least do that?”
I was saved from answering by the car crash from the living room. For a second I forgot we were several stories up. The sound was exactly the same. A waterfall smash of shattering glass and the scream of twisted metal. Niko lunged into motion and I was on his heels.
In the living room, Promise’s largest window was gone. With curtains billowing, the cold air whipped through to carry with it tiny pieces of glass—a razor-edged wind. On the floor was a thick carpet of the shining stuff. Misshapen pieces of the metal framework were embedded in two walls, the ceiling, and glittered in the light as much as the glass did. Diamonds and silver.
In the middle of it all, she stood.
Not Auphe. I eased my finger fractionally off the trigger of my Glock. Not Auphe. Don’t pull the trigger. Not Auphe.
Straight black hair whipped around her shoulders, blood covered her hands and sword, and her eyes . . . I saw those eyes almost every day. Wildflowers in spring.
“They’re right behind me.”
Although Niko and I had moved into the room, it wasn’t said to us. Violet eyes found violet eyes as Promise appeared in the hall. She had a crossbow in her hand and an expression of wary affection and resignation on her face.
“Cherish, what trouble have you brought now?”
A dimple flashed by a very familiar mouth. “It’s only a little trouble, Madre.”
Robin had been the one to pull the first watch and was in the living room when the window had exploded. He now stood, back pressed to the wall, next to the absent window, with his own sword high. He took off the head of Cherish’s trouble as it flowed over the bottom edge of the window. The first of her troubles, rather. They weren’t as little as she claimed. More and more came, pouring into the apartment in an undulating wave.
That’s when the big picture hit me, jerked from Auphe dread to an almost equally crappy reality. She had crawled . . . no. With that much force, she must have raced up the side of the building to throw herself through Promise’s window. And the trouble she was talking about had come right behind her.
“Black cadejos,” Robin said as he took another head. “Whatever they bite will rot off in a matter of days. Nothing can heal it.” He swung his sword again. “And, worse yet, they smell like dog piss.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I murmured to Niko, the icy clamp at the base of my spine easing. Cadejos. Big, ugly, and flesh rotting, but not Auphe. “I’m sure you knew t
hat.”
He growled and stepped into the fray, beheading two cadejos with one blow. Several across the room had leapt up to the wall and were running along it. I nailed them in their low-slung foreheads. They did smell like dog piss. Not surprising—they looked like dogs as well . . . if you crossed one with a weasel. Black skin, sleek black hair, short legs, long length, and a whiplike tail. They were like a living puddle of oil, but with baleful yellow eyes and a mouthful of teeth that could’ve come from the dinosaur that made that oil.
I fired again at one that vaulted toward me. The silencer chuffed as I hit it midchest. I ducked as it tumbled over my head. Another one, the size of a German shepherd, was hurtling toward me. I jerked my gun over, but before I had the shot lined up the thing was down, chopped into three separate pieces. Niko stood on one side of the body and Cherish stood on the other, both with bloody blades buried in the cadejo’s flesh. “Little boys,” she smiled at him, her dimple appearing again. A vampire with a dimple . . . what the hell was up with that? “They need protecting.”
Crossbow bolts went through the eyes of three cadejos sweeping up behind Cherish. As she looked over her shoulder, eyes widening slightly, I drawled, “When your mommy’s done watching your ass, we’ll let the adults set up a playdate for us.”
She wasn’t offended. Instead she laughed. If you didn’t know she was a vampire, you would’ve guessed her to be only ten years younger than her mother—she looked about nineteen or twenty. And her mouth and eyes were the same as Promise’s. Her chin, though, was more pointed, her face a little wider at the cheekbones, her nose thinner. But it was the perfectly black, perfectly straight hair parted precisely in the middle to fall just past her shoulders that was the first definitive sign. The light brown skin was the second: Cherish’s father had left his biological stamp on his daughter too. The third, and obvious even to me, was the madre. Spanish for “mother.” Cherish’s father was either a Spanish or Latin American vampire.
Still laughing, she whirled and took out another cadejo. Robin handled the last two that eeled through the window. That left five. Niko took two, Promise and Cherish one each, and I shot the last in the head. And then I aimed at what had wriggled in behind the couch. It wasn’t a cadejo. It was wearing clothes. I could see a slice of jeans and a bit of red sweatshirt.
“No.” Cherish stepped between us. “He is with me.” She turned. “Come out, Xolo. Come out, perrito.”
Pale fingers edged around the couch and perrito slowly edged into view. My Spanish was pretty rusty, despite Niko’s best educational efforts, but that I recognized. Puppy. And I could see why she called him that. It was a chupacabra, like the one from the bar. Puppy was a good name for something that looked like a cross between a bald dog and a lizard. It was the size of a small human—about five-three; no hair; round, mellow brown eyes; and with a bony spinal ridge that started midskull. As it moved out into the open, it pulled the hood of the sweatshirt up to cover the ridge and ducked its head shyly. I didn’t know much about chupas aside from what I’d seen in the bar. They didn’t talk as far as I could tell, they drank tequila, kept to themselves, and they didn’t tip.
“Oh, hey, another big spender. So glad I could save your life at no charge,” I snorted and let the muzzle of the gun fall toward the floor.
Cherish let her arm drape around the goat sucker’s red-clad shoulders. “Xolo. Xolo. He is a good perrito. Safe and good. I promise.”
He leaned into her side like a child and watched us with those unblinking soft brown eyes. He was a pet, not that bright, or was one introverted son of a bitch. She patted him on the shoulder and pointed to the couch. “Rest. Nap. There will be food soon.”
Unless Promise kept a goat in her freezer, “soon” seemed a little optimistic, but Xolo took her at her word. He went to the couch, like a good perrito, curled up, and was out like a light. With a bifurcated upper lip, eyes closed, and sneakers that could’ve been mine, he wasn’t much to look at. There were bloodsuckers and then there were bloodsuckers, and a goat sucker didn’t stand up too high next to the vampires, trolls, bodachs, wolves . . . the usual. Unless you were a goat, they weren’t much to worry about—as far as I knew. Trouble was, that wasn’t very far.
“Nik?”
He moved next to me, the blood staining his boots with each step. Promise’s beautiful rug was ruined, a sopping mess of cadejo blood. The entire room was a battlefield of the fallen, and the dog piss smell was not improving matters. “Chupacabras suck blood from animals. They have a mild telepathic ability said to be used to freeze their prey. Most references say they are harmless to humans.”
“Just lousy tippers.” I looked over to the piano where Promise had several photographs in polished silver frames. One I’d noticed before. It was old, a black image on tarnished metal. Promise and a little girl, dressed in clothes I’d only seen in movies. Promise sat in a chair, the little girl at her feet. The pose was stiff, but the small hand held in the larger one . . . that was warm. I’d wondered about that photo before. Vampirism isn’t a contagious disease. You’re born a vampire. Vampires have children, and I guessed now that that little dark-haired girl was Promise’s daughter.
Had Nik wondered like me, or had Promise told him? I don’t think she had, and while I was doing this whole thinking fest, I went on to the next thought, which was: That was a mistake. She had really screwed up. Seamus, now this. The past was the past, but family was family—it could fuck up things in a heartbeat. I was living proof.
“I’m not looking for a step-niece, in case you were wondering,” I told him lightly as I dug a hand into my jeans pocket. With cell phone in one hand and card in the other, I muttered as I punched buttons, “Payback time, Samuel.” When he answered, I said brusquely, “Promise’s place. Bring a van.” I took another look around. “Forget that. Bring a truck.” I was sure their psychics would know where her place was. Flipping the phone shut, I crossed my arms and took my first good, detailed look at Cherish. She was dressed in a long-sleeved, high-necked, sleek black dress. It was slit to her thighs, the skirt separated into four pieces for easy movement. Beneath it she wore black leggings and black boots. Vampires . . . they could never wear jeans like a normal person.
“Cherish, what have you done now?” Promise demanded with a weary tone to the words. The bottom of her silk robe fluttered in the rush of air circling the apartment.
Not done . . . but done now.
She had Promise’s eyes, but while the color was the same, what was in them was far different. There was a swirl, wild and wicked. It reminded me of what I saw in Goodfellow. I’d seen a street performer doing origami once—folding brightly colored squares of paper into cranes, tigers, horses, dragons, you name it. That was the quality I saw in Cherish and Robin. They treated life the same way. They twisted and folded it until they got the result they wanted. Life, like the paper, didn’t have much to say about it. But the two of them enjoyed themselves, so normally I would’ve said what the hell? Live it up.
If not for the Auphe, Seamus, and a horde of flesh rotters. If that wasn’t a hat trick of shittiness, I didn’t know what was. Cherish’s trouble was one trouble too many.
“You’re always so quick to think badly of me, Madre.” Scarlet-stained sword still in hand, she kissed Promise’s cheek. Blood and daughterly affection; it was a weird mix. Goodfellow was probably getting turned on. I made sure not to look and see. “And it was so very bright and sparkly,” she smiled, “not even you could’ve resisted taking it.”
“Strangely enough, I think I could have.” Promise returned the kiss but it seemed strained. “But you have made your bed, Cherish, as you have so many times in the past. You must handle this alone. We’re in dire straits ourselves.”
“She’s right. Next to our shit,” I nudged a dead cadejo with my foot, “this is playtime at doggie day care.”
“The Auphe are coming for us,” Niko said impassively. “If you stay here, they’ll be after you as well. I don’t believe you or your
mother would want that.”
She definitely hadn’t told him. Promise had messed up indeed. Knowing Niko, knowing how he felt about Promise—how he trusted her, he might have thought that long-ago-photographed little girl was dead. Not a matter of honesty—a matter of too much pain for her to talk about.
Cherish would’ve been a lot less trouble dead, and that was my honesty—because from the set of her chin and the desperate spark in her eyes, she wasn’t going anywhere. “The Auphe.” The olive skin grayed. “How did you get involved . . . never mind.” She shook her head, the sweep of hair coming to rest on her shoulders in a fall of black silk. “I can’t leave. I can’t do this alone. And Tíío Seamus told me to come to you if I needed help. That you had friends, strong ones. I’ll need all the friends and all the assistance I can get. Oshossi wants me, and he won’t stop. He will never stop. This is what he does.”
“Hunts,” Robin cleared up our confusion. He’d turned over a glass-sprinkled cushion and dropped onto the couch. “Never met him, but he’s some sort of immortal creature. Likes to hunt. Likes to fight. Usually sticks to South America. He’s a forest type. Nature and whatnot. Likes dogs too. Obviously. If he’s come all this way to this place of concrete and steel, he is wholly pissed.” He propped his feet on a dead cadejo-canine. “So you stole from him, eh? Thievery. Tsk.” He raised eyebrows at Nik and me with his next words, “Uncle Seamus, eh?”
Cherish gave a deceptively delicate shrug, recognizing a kindred spirit. “It’s a hobby. Everyone should have one.” It was said breezily, but the pallor remained. Between the Auphe and this Oshossi guy apparently wasn’t the best place to be, but it didn’t have her offering to leave. “And, yes, if it is any concern of yours, Uncle Seamus. Step-papa Seamus, whatever you wish to call him. Family takes care of family. But when I told him that what I took I had already sold and couldn’t retrieve it, he sent me here. He knew he and I couldn’t handle Oshossi alone.” Damn Seamus, jumping at the chance to make things harder for Niko. The more distractions, the easier he’d be to kill. Then again, he wanted Promise. He wouldn’t want to risk her. He might have genuinely thought the group of us had a better chance than just he and Cherish. And when Promise told him the case was off, I doubted she’d brought up that the reason was the Auphe . . . for my sake.
