by Rob Thurman
The next day, Delilah, who had refused to talk on the phone, refused to fear any Auphe, now shivered with an all-over body twitch of disgust when I sat in the cubicle beside her in the main branch of the New York Public Library, the mythology section. It seemed appropriate. “You stink.” She cupped her hand over her nose. “Of suburbia.” It was as close to horrified as I’d ever seen her.
I wasn’t sure what suburbia smelled like. Pink flamingos, Virgin Marys, waving flags, and Big Wheels, maybe. “If you weren’t so damn stubborn, you wouldn’t have to smell me,” I retorted.
Every time I’d tried to talk to her on the phone she’d disconnected, until I’d finally agreed to meet her. Since I was an Auphe homing beacon, I made sure she was there a half hour before I arrived and she’d promised to stay a half hour after I left. Then again, promises and Delilah—I wasn’t sure she was patient enough to always keep them. Smart enough, yes. Patient . . . different story.
“Better clean death than your stench.” She left her cubicle to sit on the desk of mine, very obviously not there for the book learning.
“The Auphe won’t give you that.”
“Yes, yes.” She rolled copper eyes. “To wait thirty minutes. Sneak like weasel. Cower like sheep. I understand.” Her silver ponytail hung over her breast. “Where is your keeper?”
“Safe.” Nik was a lot safer alone and on the move than he was with me. Not that it hadn’t taken some convincing . . . on both sides. We’d had to convince each other and ourselves that it was the right thing to do. If I was wrong about the Auphe being imprinted on me like Satanic baby ducklings, if they were simply following with more skill than any creature should have, I could lose Nik. If I was right and the Auphe got pissed off that I was the only one they could find . . . then Nik could lose me.
Of the games they’d played with us the past week this time, I was finally dealt in. And my hand was good—aces high, because I didn’t think I was wrong.
Not this time.
And that promise I’d made to Nik, how I’d outthink them, how I’d get us out of this—I might just be able to keep it.
They were all gone now—Promise, Cherish, and Robin. They’d scattered before the sun had come up. The Auphe watching that night had been joined by another one and had stayed put as the others left. Both had melted out of existence when Niko and I had driven off that morning in his car before going our separate ways in the city. I hadn’t felt one since. Not yet. Definitely not when Niko and I had split up.
It had to be one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I knew the Auphe wanted him, almost more than they wanted me—because of me. Walking away from him based on a feeling, an ability I barely knew existed—“tough as shit” didn’t begin to describe it.
And for him to let me go? He almost couldn’t do it. Literally. He’d spent his life making sure I kept mine, and to not be there to watch my back now? I didn’t think he could take that first step away. He didn’t think so either. This wasn’t a fight with a mummy or a battle with a werewolf. This was the big time—the real monsters. Our monsters.
Walk away? Now?
I saw it in his eyes. Impossible conflict. My big brother, who’d guarded me since my first breath, and he couldn’t do it. Not even if it meant saving us all. He believed in me—he did—but when belief runs up against a lifetime of habit, belief can be kissing the canvas in a heartbeat. Just that one step . . .
I took it because I knew he couldn’t.
“Tell the son of a bitch Samuel hey for me.” I grinned before turning and merging into the crowd on the sidewalk. If it was the last look he ever had of me, I wanted it to be of the same cocky, cynical, stubborn bastard I’d always been. That thanks to him, I’d lived long enough to be. When I finally gave in and glanced back, he was gone.
It was the right thing to do, but I’d never felt more alone in my life. Your brother watched your back and you watched his.
Always.
God.
But he was safe. I believed it. I believed it because I had to.
“Safe.” In the library Delilah leaned down to whisper by my ear. “Safe is overrated. Safe is not fun.”
I let my thoughts shift from Nik to the image of a very nude, very limber werewolf, then gave myself a metaphorical smack back to reality. Not that doing it in the stacks with Delilah wouldn’t have been entertaining, not to mention some stress relief, but I didn’t have the time. And not really the concentration. Knowing the Auphe could appear on the top of a shelf any second and snatch me away while I was going at it was enough to take the lust out of anybody’s thrust.
“Safe is all I’ve got right now, if I want to stay above ground and kicking.” I ignored the warm press of her upper leg against my arm. And I didn’t sweat. No court in the land could make me swear otherwise. “I need a favor.”
She sighed, bored. She didn’t pout. Wolves don’t pout. They may get indigestion from eating you if you annoy them, but they don’t pout. “Favor? What favor?” she demanded with a careless yawn.
It was an easy enough one for her, just information, though for what she charged you’d think it was much harder. Before I left she did kiss me with a punishing nip of teeth and the soothing silk of tongue. It had me wanting to rethink safe, but I couldn’t. I’d been heading for this moment my whole life. Whether I lived or died, it ended now.
I left the library, hoping Delilah was smart and patient enough to stay behind as long as she’d said, because I had one of them on me now . . . watching. It had just moved into range. Of course, I wasn’t sure what that range was, so it wasn’t too helpful to me. I assumed within eyesight. I didn’t look around. We had one small advantage in this, and I didn’t want to give it away. My phone rang while I was clambering down the bottom of the stairs. I answered to hear Niko say brusquely, “You alive?”
“It’s cute how you worry.” I grinned, equally relieved to know he was in the same shape himself. “How’d it go with Samuel? Did they go for it?”
“They did. More importantly, they have the equipment upstate, although they also said officially it didn’t exist.” For some reason that seemed to amuse him, but he didn’t say why. “They flew it down from Fort Drum. I met them and was instructed on it. What’s the address Delilah gave you? I’ll call it to Samuel.”
I gave it to him. Flew it down from the army base. Damn, the Vigil did have some unbelievably serious influence. “You haven’t seen any of them following you, have you?”
“No, I’m clean as far as I can tell. You were right. They are homed in on you. Do you have any?”
“One.”
“One.” Nik didn’t say it like it was good news. To him it wasn’t. One could as easily call in the other seventeen, and he wouldn’t be there. That was the bottom line. He wouldn’t be there.
“Just one. Broad daylight. Thousands of people.” All separately might not have stopped them, but the combination could pull it off.
He exhaled, sounding calm and matter-of-fact, and absolutely not fooling me one damn bit about any of it. “Samuel said they can be ready starting tonight.”
“Be nice if one time was all it took.” The sky was as pure blue as yesterday when we’d come tumbling out of it. “Everyone else crawled in a hole and pulled it in after them?”
“Yes, although Promise and Robin aren’t too happy about it.” Promise and Cherish had gone to New Jersey. If Oshossi’s animals could sniff them out in that smell, more power to them. Robin had gone wherever Robin went. Someplace where condoms were stored by the crate and clothing was not only optional but highly frowned upon.
It made facing the Auphe a shade less terrifying.
“It was you and me in the beginning, Nik,” I said. “You and me in the end.” It was the way it was supposed to be. Meant to be. Fate coming full circle.
“If this time in the beginning you could come already potty trained, it would be a big plus,” he said dryly before disconnecting.
I snorted and slid the phone into my jacket pock
et as the second watcher joined the first. Five minutes later, there was a third. They had to be curious. Annoyed. Ticked the hell off. Where were the rest of us?
“Yeah, you keep watching,” I muttered. I’d been right when I’d talked to Nik on the beach days and days ago. If I’d ran while the others hid—even if they’d had to do it all their lives—they would’ve been safe. Although Niko was like the Auphe. They might have genetic GPS, but in a way, so did he. There was no guarantee who would’ve found me first.
I ducked my head against the cold wind and started walking. It was going to be a long day of dragging these bitches from place to meaningless place. And the night? I didn’t want to think about the night. That’s when it could go wrong in all the worst ways.
I had hours to kill before that, though, and there was one thing I’d always meant to do. If I was going to go out, good hand or not, and chances were much better than ever that I was, I wasn’t going out with that on my body. That was a black and red tattoo I had on my bicep. I’d been possessed once—yeah, yeah, old news—and my pilot during the whole ordeal thought it would be an absolute blast to get MOM surrounded by a heart on my arm. To say I’d considered peeling the skin off with my combat knife didn’t really give the flavor of how much I hated it. Had hated her.
I wasn’t going to die with that on me. I found the nearest tattoo parlor, waited my turn before sitting, taking off my jacket, rolling up my sleeve, and saying, “Cover it up.”
The guy—big, fat, and with a curly beard—blinked, bored. “With what?” Whether I didn’t love my mommy or not anymore wasn’t his concern.
“With damn Big Bird for all I care. Just cover it up.”
It wasn’t that easy. It’s never that easy. A whole slew of them came over to discuss the situation. A tattoo was a reflection of your inner self, your true blah, blah, blah. You couldn’t just slap anything on there. Well, obviously I had, as no one had fought me about the whole mom issue. Apparently moms got more respect than Big Bird. One guy had actually suggested that it would be easy to blend the tattoo I had now into a dragon, as if that wouldn’t get me laughed out of the bar. Assuming Ishiah ever let me back in after Cambriel’s death.
A dragon. Christ. While piles of flaming lizard crap from the sky were deadly enough if you weren’t careful, it certainly wasn’t worth bragging about to have survived. I could never wear a short-sleeved shirt again.
Finally I pointed at a red and black band on the wall. Funky lettering. I felt the invisible Niko thwap me over my ear and corrected myself quickly. Latin. It was Latin. “What about that? What’s that?”
“Armband. A lot of our guys retiring from the military are getting that. It says ‘Brothers in Arms,’ ” Curly said.
Huh. How about that? The right colors and, this time, the right sentiment.
Last time it hadn’t hurt or the thing inside me had enjoyed the pain. Hard to say. This time it did. I didn’t mind.
The things that matter are worth it.
You could still see the heart with the MOM, but just barely, and only if you knew where to look. The ghost of gone. Just like Sophia herself. She was gone, but if you knew where to look in me, you’d still see her. It was the best that I could hope for, though, and I was happy with it. I let them tape it up with gauze, paid, and headed outside. Hours had passed and the light was bleeding from the sky.
Timing. Now was when I found out if I was on the right side of it—or tomato paste on the wall.
Radioactive tomato paste, as it turned out.
Because that note in Nik’s voice on the phone? Can I just get a “Holy shit” from the choir, please?
“A nuke? A goddamn nuke? A fucking nuke? A . . .” My mouth was still moving, but nothing was coming out. I’d run out of curse words to say. Me. That hadn’t ever happened in my life. “What’s wrong with a nice normal bomb? You know, in case things go wrong, we only take out a few buildings, not the whole damn city.”
Robin had found Niko and me a place to stay temporarily. It was a furnished studio apartment, the best he said he could do on short notice, but it was on the first floor. That’s all we needed. The first floor. I met Nik there and I would’ve wrinkled my nose at the smell of old cat piss dried into the floor if I didn’t have other things on my mind—radioactive things.
“First off, there is no such thing as a nice normal bomb. There are bombs dropped from planes. There are missiles. Trucks filled with fertilizer and diesel fuel. And there are multiple charges placed around a building to detonate it. None of which fill our need. Besides, I thought the mere idea of a nuclear weapon would make you happier than the porn you hide under your bed. It certainly puts your Desert Eagle in the shade,” he replied, a wickedly amused glitter in his eye while his face remained passive.
Despite my love for my Eagle and various other weapons of semiexplosive destruction, I wasn’t, believe it or not, turned on by the thought of a nuke. “There has to be something. We brought down the last warehouse without a stick of dynamite.”
“That’s because then you were the bomb.”
Not much you could say to that.
“Well, what the hell were you asking for when you called Samuel?” I asked, sitting on the fold-out couch that sagged a good half foot in the middle cushion. I didn’t think Robin had tried as hard as he said he had. I doubted he appreciated those days and days of celibacy.
“I thought since the Vigil has contacts within the police and city government, they would most likely have agents within the military as well. Thousands of years of conspiracy does give one maneuvering room for job placement. And the military has weapons, including explosive devices, that the public know nothing about.”
“Seems complex.” I grunted. “There are bombs out there that should wipe out anything the size of a couple of football fields that you don’t need a truck to haul around. I’ve seen them.”
“There are?” Niko asked as he leaned against the cracked wall. It held his weight, surprisingly. It looked like a forty-pound five-year-old could take it down. “Where did you see them?”
“You know, TV, movies. Mission: Impossible wouldn’t lie.”
He closed his eyes. “I tried, Almighty Universe. I did my best.” Straightening, he went on, “Since the Auphe move so quickly, we need a large area of destruction, and since you cannot build a gate big enough to drive a truck through, the Vigil suggested a suitcase nuke as being the most appropriate for the task.”
“The Vigil trust us with a nuke? Even a baby nuke?” I asked skeptically. A nuke? The Vigil had a nuke? They did have a finger in every pie, pretty scary pies.
“Probably not, but Samuel does. He’s seen what we would do to keep the Auphe from taking the world back. I didn’t say what their plan was this time.” He wouldn’t. Niko wouldn’t tell anyone that. “But that they had one and they had to be dealt with. Now. He convinced his superiors that whether our plan worked or not, we would make sure that the city would be safe. We’d die to keep that promise.”
“Dying’s the easy part,” I muttered. As plans went, it was like most of mine—semisuicidal—but even I hadn’t come up with the damn nuke. And the Vigil knew the Auphe. They knew that even eighteen could one day, no matter how many hundreds or thousands of years it took them, take back what they thought was theirs. They still must have trusted the hell out of Samuel . . . and Niko. If they knew anything about the supernatural community, if they had investigated Nik, they knew he would keep his word. NYC would be safe.
When they’d investigated me, and I’m sure they had, they must’ve thought it was a good thing they had Nik to fall back on. I was one of those guys who didn’t look too good on paper, or while being possessed, or creating mass chaos going undercover in the Kin.
Or being the last male Auphe. Good thing they didn’t know about that. Even if a human male would do, just not as well, I was sure the Vigil would think long and hard about popping one in the back of my skull to be on the safe side and try to deal with the Auphe another way.<
br />
But there was no other way.
I didn’t want to think about this anymore, the pressure of not taking out NYC with me if I bit the dust. Thinking about if we did pull it off, I still might not be coming back—the rational part of me anyway. Really, really didn’t want to think about it. I rested my head and stared at the ceiling. A nuke. Goddamn spy movies. And why did our government have suitcase nukes? Weren’t only terrorists supposed to have them?
“How many followed you?” Great, a subject worse than nukes.
“Three.” I looked back down at Niko, my ass already complaining from the couch. I didn’t think it’d be any more comfortable when we folded it out, but it didn’t much matter. Sleep was going to be hard to come by until this was over anyway.
“Three,” he repeated grimly before adding, “fifteen more to go.”
I got up to check out the bathroom, because the thought of eighteen Auphe in one place—that’ll make your bladder sit up and take notice. “Shit!” I called out. “Is there such a thing as a giant supernatural cockroach straight from the depths of hell?”
“No. Be a man and deal with it.”
I could’ve shot it. It was that big. I kicked it in the toilet and flushed. Three times. Then I returned to Cat Urine Central. “Okay. The world is safe for pissing again. Enjoy.”
“And to think I worried about you today, being alone.” Niko drew his katana and looked it over. “Almost.”
I snorted. “I think I feel a tear coming on.”
He turned the katana over and laid it on the back of his hand. It balanced perfectly. “You are sentimental, I will give you that.” He sheathed the sword. “Your plan or not, you’re coming back, Cal. All of you. I won’t have it any other way.” I’d made it clear I wasn’t too damn sure about that, and it showed. I could hide a lot of things, but not that.