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Just not today. It was way too damn early for that.

“Need appointment and card.” The single unarmed hand with the ebony talons was held out palm up. The voice was surprisingly understandable considering the freakish size of the mouth and the equally freakish number of teeth, although she didn’t have much to say. Couldn’t blame her attitude there as I understood it. I wasn’t doling out advice to the sad and lonely at my job, bartender or not. The less I had to talk to what passed for clients at work, the better.

“Ah, yes.” Robin reached inside his jacket for a wallet, gave it a brief glance and returned it before fishing out a second one. “Actually I don’t need an appointment and how you fail to recognize me time and again, I will never know.”

“This puck, that puck, all fucks. Who can tell the difference?” Robin was told with bored indifference.

He stiffened. “You could not be further from the truth if you were the drooling picture of sub-intelligence—which you are. I have no difficulty seeing why you’re working the door instead of upstairs as you have so little personality to work with, despite what you could do with eight hands.” Flipping open the apparently extra-special wallet, Goodfellow had his mouth open for more insults, barely warmed up, when he said something else instead.

“Where’s my card? I have a lifelong platinum-class come-and-go-as-I-please membership card. Wait . . . where’s my card for Aphrodite’s Pleasure Palace—best strippers in Greece? Godiva’s Clothing Optional Hair Salon?” Replacement cards were pulled out, read in the light spilling from inside the house, and discarded as if they burned to the touch. “The Salvation Army? Big Brothers, Big Sisters? Soup Kitchen? Humanitarian aid in a trickster’s wallet?
My
wallet?” The horror was clear and true in his voice. “I am tainted beyond redemption.”

Niko squeezed his shoulder with false comfort and commented smoothly, “As you said, it’s inspirational when your sexual partner accepts you for who you truly are.”

“No hair salon, huh?” I popped the top on my soda. “It’ll be hard to be a pretentious ass with an eight-dollar Supercuts’ special.”

“That pigeon will rue the day his mother laid that rotting, spoiled egg that hatched him,” Robin gritted before pushing past the guardian, his sword in his hand so improbably fast that I barely saw his hand move. “Tell Bastet that I am here and don’t pretend you don’t know who and what I am. Tell her
now
. You can do that as you are or with my sword through your heart. That choice I leave up to you. Are you listening to me, you misbegotten vulture? That glazed look of insipid boredom, believe it or not, is not inspiring me with reams of confidence.
Go
.”

She gave him a look that was anything but bored. It was seething with the metal-edge of rage and the red haze of hunger. Her kind was always hungry. It didn’t stop for them. For a moment I thought she’d act on it, but she turned, and moved toward the stairs, suddenly all but drenched in disinterest. To the eye. I pulled in and sampled a deep breath of the adrenaline leaking out into the air before asking with casual curiosity, “How attached is your friend to the help? She a big fan of her pet peymakilir?”

“Of one such as this? Not likely. Rudeness to the clients wouldn’t be tolerated if she knew about it.” Sword still in hand, Robin deposited his woefully charitable wallet into a small trash can that looked to be made of gold. Idly, I wondered if it would fit under my jacket. “And, believe me, she’ll know the very moment I see her.”

The peymakilir was halfway up the stairs now, as slow as if every step was weighed down by chains. Slow and not worth a second glance, you would’ve thought. Yeah, and if you had that thought in our world, you wouldn’t have many more of them.

Because here she came.

In a heartbeat the Hindu scavenger of war’s battlefields had turned and leaped into fluid motion over the banister. She almost flew. Like a bird following a propeller of whirling steel, she soared toward us . . . nearly beautiful even knowing what she was. One who stripped the meat from the bones of the dying, consuming their flesh and life gleefully all in one. An inexplicably cruel part of nature. Yet, still impossibly beautiful—an angel of death with every sword a flash of quicksilver.

Then she was nothing more than meat. That tends to happen when I open a gate inside of someone rather than around them. In midair she disintegrated in an explosion of tarnished gray light, followed by the billowing stench of burned flesh, the spray of blood and long, cauterized limbs scattered everywhere. What was left of her fell, a tangle of parts, swords, and snuffed-out wildness.

Bambi’s mom goes down. And stays down.

Not that Disney ever showed you that part.

I had ducked a tumbling sword that had flown overhead, nearly taking off my head. I should’ve thought more about the swords. Eh, water under the bridge. I took another swallow of Mountain Dew. The caffeine was just not kicking in. “You’re right, Robin. She was one rude bitch.” Most murderers, male or female, were. The foyer was now somewhat of a mess, but it had been a little uptown for me anyway.

Goodfellow let the tip of his sword hit the marble floor, which wasn’t the way to treat your weapons. “What did you do?”

“I’m having an identity crisis.” I shifted my shoulders without much concern. “And there’s the fact that she was trying to kill us, then eat us. Hopefully in that order. I did what I do.”

“It seems as if the now ex-doorman liked her job and didn’t want to lose it over your complaints,” Niko said. He wanted to say more and he would say more, but not until we were alone. He trusted Robin, we both did, but there were things he said only to me—the things that I hated about myself. The monster in me that would never let me be right or clean. The darkness that waited and not at all patiently for its turn.

All that wasn’t true anymore.

Niko hadn’t quite gotten it in the past months. I wasn’t shamed by what I was. I didn’t hate it, not any longer; I was confused, some, yes, but not ashamed. Or more likely, Nik being Nik, he did know and that made it all the more important that the coming conversation be private. He didn’t want anyone else, even Robin, to realize the half Auphe wasn’t half these days. No . . . I was farther along the road than that now. He trusted me, but he wasn’t the only one in my world and not all of them would feel the same.

Instead when he commented, he was as studiously detached as only he could be. “So . . . you know what a peymakilir is. Studying behind my back?”

“Goodfellow has one painted on his guest bathroom wall behind the toilet. It’s screwing a satyr and the whole thing is labeled in hellish detail in gold paint. Hard knowledge to avoid when you’ve got a full bladder.”

Robin, meanwhile, hadn’t caught on to the fact that the peymakilir disposal conversation was over. “You
blew
her up. You opened a gate inside her like you did with Suyolak.” Suyolak, the antihealer who’d started the Black Death. Suyolak, the Plague of the World. Suyolak, the asshole who’d totally had it coming.

Goodfellow moved his shoe so the remnants of a peymakilir hand slid off that fine Corinthian leather. “But Suyolak was desperate measures.”

“Then,” I agreed.

“You’re wasting gates on something you could’ve easily shot. Gates are for emergencies,” he continued, mouth twisted in distaste. No one liked a gate or the way it looked, the way it tore apart the world and made it scream, the way seeing it twisted the brain and stomach. No one liked them—except Auphe.
“Emergencies,”
he emphasized.

“Then,” I repeated with a dark grin. “And emergency is a relative term.”

I wasn’t a morning person, nope. I hadn’t had more than two hours’ sleep. I was fuzzy headed and irritable. I smelled like milk gone off and was sick of the taste of Mountain Dew. None of it was excuse enough. It wasn’t an excuse at all. I’d done it because I wanted to—simple as that. She was far more of a killer than the men I’d sent away by the Ninth Circle, and she wasn’t human. There was no thought needed on her before or after the fact.

Robin had been our friend since we’d met him six years ago at his car lot. He was the first we’d had, the first we’d trusted. But Nik had protected me from . . . hell, the entire world basically . . . for so damn long that he simply couldn’t stop, whether I needed it or not. He hadn’t mentioned anything to Robin and he wouldn’t. But I would. The puck deserved to know that things had changed. That
I
had changed over the past months and more radically than he’d no doubt already guessed. He knew I’d been more shadowed. He knew that in the past weeks I’d regained my gating ability, but he hadn’t known to what extent. The way of the gun was all right—I still loved my babies, but the Auphe way was a new toy. And I wanted to play with that toy.

And now Robin did know.

Goodfellow was a trickster. He lied, but not to us. I wasn’t going to lie to him.

“Goodfellow, what havoc have you wrought now?” A smooth voice came from the top of the stairs as jade green cat eyes blinked at the carnage decorating her foyer. “This reminds me of when you were mourning the fall of the Sacred Band of Thebes. You ravaged and eventually burned down my establishment in Greece.”

“But every lady and gentleman on the premises fled the flames in a state of complete sexual satisfaction,” Robin countered promptly.

Above the eyes was an elaborate arrangement of amber-fire hair . . . or a mane that would cover feline ears if she had them. Her face was smooth skinned and without fur, but there was a split in her lush upper lip and ivory fangs when she smiled. She was a cat, in some aspects at least, and who better to run a cathouse after all? She lifted a hand and beckoned. If she was furred in other areas, her green silk dress kept that a mystery. “You may as well come up. I don’t care for peymakilirs, but they are excellent guardians. I assume you had good reason to kill her?”

“Don’t I always have good reason for my kills?” he challenged, willing to take the heat for this one. Keeping the Auphe swept under the rug for the moment.

“These days, perhaps.” An eyebrow arched. “You have mellowed. But you will have to pay the cleaning service’s bill. I am most certainly not running a charity here. Now come along and introduce your friends. One of them smells absolutely delicious.”

*  *  *

We spent the next hour in a room full of expensive furniture and more expensive cats, male and female. Our hostess—she preferred it to madam—was Bastet, the original Egyptian goddess of fertility and sexuality. After tiring of being worshipped she took her avocation, so to speak, on the road nearly four thousand years ago and now owned fourteen of the best houses of the most ill repute around the globe. She was a proud business-woman and only incidentally a former lover of Goodfellow’s. Of course, who over the age of two hundred and didn’t mind pucks wasn’t a former sexual partner of his? Only those with quick minds and quicker running skills.

Surrounded by silk cushions, he asked her about all the storm spirits and gods while stunning humanoid felines tried to feed Niko peeled grapes and tiny dead shrew from a golden bowl. He didn’t seem pleased. I, who was having the milk thoroughly licked out of my hair by four of Bastet’s purring employees, wasn’t exactly weeping with sympathy for him. Robin had been right about the milk. They couldn’t get enough of it.
Loved
it. Four rough tongues scratching my scalp and drenching every strand of hair I had in
paien
cat saliva, I, conversely, loved not at all.

Although the bare breasts were nice, even if covered in silky fur.

“I am sorry, my precious goatling,” Bastet sighed as she lounged on a massive sofa with sapphire silk cushions large enough that each one was designed to substitute as a bed. She had a bare foot in Robin’s lap and was using it to massage his crotch lightly. Ishiah wasn’t going to care for that at all, no matter what he said about accepting the puck in all his ways. “No storm spirits have come our way and no rumors of them either.”

“And what about Jack?” he asked grimly. “Have you heard any rumors of Jack?”

Her slit pupil eyes widened. There seemed to be only one Jack in the
paien
community and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper. Bastet stared at us with the unblinking wariness of a cat cornered by a coyote before looking away. “Now is not a good time to be human in New York. Nor is it ever a good time to get in the way of Spring-heel himself.” She removed her foot from its perch. “Go. I want no part of this. You know he prefers humans, but if he thinks one of us is carrying tales, he’ll kill us just the same. More quickly, but we’ll be dead nonetheless. Now go.”

“He’s here then. You’re certain?” Niko asked, pushing away the bowl of grapes with its fur-covered garnishes.

This time Bastet bared an impressive brace of pointed teeth, survival instinct triumphing over fear, and pointed at the door.
“Go.”

That was a yes if ever I heard one.

Goodfellow’s face was more grim than his voice had been. He had his confirmation and he wasn’t happy about it. Some things in life you’d rather not know. Not believe. Life didn’t care about that though. Once you’re stuck with something, especially when that something is known to be unstoppable, you’re screwed. That was the truth of it. And it appeared as if we were stuck.

Whether we wanted to believe it or not.

6

Niko

Twelve Years Ago

I didn’t want to believe it. Yet there it was. Black and white, a piece of someone’s soul stapled to a telephone pole.

It was brutal and ugly and in no way matched the pure blue sky of a perfectly crisp autumn Saturday. The sun itself was cooperating, spreading a buttery glow on peeling siding, warped wood, weeds masquerading as grass and scrawny trees that had two or three poppy red leaves—gilding something tawdry into a place that for that hour looked as if it was a home you’d actually want. It was the same as that moment in
The Wizard of Oz
when it turned from black and white to every color in the spectrum. This wasn’t a movie special effect; it was a natural one.

And it was ruined by the paper fluttering against the wood where it was pinned.

Cal saw it first, but then he had been watching for something like this. I hadn’t. He didn’t point it out. He stopped the skateboard that was all but useless on the cracked and broken sidewalk and squatted down to pretend to tie his sneaker. I noticed that it was already tied in an effective, if sloppy, Cal knot almost at the same moment I noticed the poster. It covered layers of L
OST
posters but it didn’t say L
OST
. It said M
ISSING
in bold black letters. I always wondered about that—the difference between missing and lost. Whichever word was chosen for you, you were still gone all the same.

Whichever was chosen, you rarely came back.

“Kithser.” I studied the face on the cheap photocopy. “David.” I hadn’t known his first name was David. I’d only known him as the seventeen-year-old drug dealer and probably thief three streets over who’d once tried to sell crack to Cal. It was the week we’d first moved in. Kithser was big for someone who did crack. Big boned, muscle-bound enough that if he wasn’t doing crack, he was certainly juicing. Definitely well fed, I guessed, by the family who was now looking for him.

Did his family know how he was on the streets? That he was mean and nasty with the steroid psychosis lurking in the twitching beside his glassy eyes. Who knew? Either they were softhearted and hoped he’d change or they’d made him the way he was and missed that drug money.

When had I become this cynical? I reached out to fold a corner under and keep the paper from flapping in the wind. “It’s an old picture,” Cal noted, giving up on his sneaker. A finger plopped directly in the middle of David Kithser’s face. “See? It doesn’t show where you broke his nose.”

Whether someone loved him or not, you didn’t try to sell my little brother crack. Cal wouldn’t have taken it, but the next step would’ve been Kithser trying to steal any money he had on him. That would’ve led to Cal bashing him in the balls . . . testicles. Damn it, whacking him in the
testicles
with his battered skateboard. From that point on, it was hard to say what would’ve happened. Cal had been armed. I didn’t let him take a knife to school, but after school and on weekends, I wanted him able to protect himself. Against Grendels. Against Kithsers, against those even worse than the Kithsers. The only good neighborhoods we knew were the ones we rode through on buses.

Luckily I was two blocks down, saw it, and that was the end of Kithser bothering my brother. I could’ve taken him down without hurting him much. Steroid muscle is useless muscle for the most part. But with drug dealers, bullies, perverts, and what else oozed about, you needed to make an impression. A thoroughly broken nose did that and was essentially harmless in the long run. Kithser had never seen a drop of his own blood in his life until then, I could tell. Most bullies haven’t.

And Cal helpfully kicking him in the b— testicles when he was down and rolling around screaming about his nose hadn’t done much for his pride either. Kithser had paid attention to the lesson and he hadn’t come back to our street. So I’d thought.

Or maybe someone had gone over to his street instead.

Expectant eyes slanted up at me in a rainwater gaze. Now I’d see the truth. No way to avoid it. Not even I could ignore this. “You know the killer got him. Right, Nik?” You’re not an oblivious idiot anymore, are you? Because worrying about keeping you alive is getting to be a chore. I could see all those thoughts spinning under the dark hair.

I rested a hand on his shoulder and squeezed lightly. His bones were thin and light under my fingers. Fragile. Breakable. A spun glass version of a brother. I hoped for that growth spurt soon. A knife and some hand-me-down martial art moves from the dojo wouldn’t always be enough.

“Maybe,” I answered, noncommittal. “He leads a bad life. Lots of trouble.” Missing a week now, the poster said. Not crashing at a friend’s place then. “But . . . maybe.”

Cal blew a random strand of hair out of his eyes and rolled up the too-long sleeves of his cast-off sweatshirt one more time. “Can we get pizza after?”

I’d already ripped the stapled poster free. I’d done it completely without thought and stared at it with a combination of dread and curiosity. What was I doing? “After what?” I asked, distracted.

Picking up his skateboard, Cal tucked it under his arm and nodded at the paper. “After you go around the neighborhood asking stupid questions about Kithser.”

“How do you know that’s what I’m going to do?” Bemused at his sudden psychic ability to know what even I hadn’t known, I folded the missing poster in half.

“Because that’s you. Good.” He had an expression of patient resignation on his face that I knew was identical to the one I wore when I was cleaning up his SpaghettiOs and soda handprints in the kitchen. “Just . . . good. You can’t help yourself. You don’t want to get someone in trouble if they don’t deserve it. You know, in case the weirdo next door is a butcher.” There was a heavy load of sarcasm on the word butcher.

“Wouldn’t you want the same benefit of the doubt?” I knocked lightly on top of his head. “Although all the trouble you get in you almost always deserve,” I added with exasperated affection.

Cal was stubborn and getting him off topic wasn’t easy at the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times. “You’re right, Nik. He
is
a butcher. But he butchers people, not cows.” That’s when the glow that hung in the air faded and the sun was only the sun again. The wizard behind the curtain was just a man, possibly one with an inhuman grin and huge, serrated knife dripping blood.

By then Cal was already walking toward our rental, done trying to convince me. There was work ahead and he wanted it over with as soon as possible. “Bible or crutches?”

We’d learned a few techniques from watching Sophia. She could work an entire block in twenty-five minutes lifting valuables to be fenced later and she had a routine that didn’t fail often. It was difficult to get into a house to talk to and scam suspicious neighbors in our crumbling section of town. It helped to have one of two things.

“The Bible or the crutches?” Cal asked again. “And what about the pizza?”

“The crutches,” I decided. The Bible worked less and less for Sophia. It seemed people were as upset by pushy Christians knocking on their door as much as they were the possibility of a home invasion. “Yes, pizza, but vegetarian. You need some vegetables. Otherwise you’ll turn into a can of SpaghettiOs.”

“Okay, but extra cheese.” Which was remarkably agreeable for a kid who loved pepperoni and any other kind of questionable meat more than life itself. It made me wonder uneasily exactly how bad the smell was to him coming from next door. Was there meat in that basement and was it questionable in a very different way?

I planned to find out.

After retrieving the hard-used crutches, we started canvassing the neighborhood. I went from a fifteen-year-old who looked seventeen to a teenager with a hugely swollen foot and ankle, two pair of socks stuffed with more socks, a pathetic limp, and a solemn-eyed little brother holding a box of cookies he could only be selling for school. Granted it was an empty box, another prop and victim of Cal’s appetite, but it would get the job done.

Crutch and drag. Crutch and drag. I looked down at Cal. “This is wrong, all right? We don’t do things like this unless we’re trying to find out if a killer lives next to us and I don’t think that will ever come up again. We don’t do it to steal. We’re not Sophia.”

“I know, Nik. You’ve said it like a thousand times. We’re not. But sometimes I think things would be easier if we were.” That was true. I wasn’t so naïve I didn’t know that, but that didn’t mean it was the way it was going to be. Not for me and not for Cal. I’d remind him as often as I had to. If it had to be a thousand, then a thousand it would be. He was holding up the box, taking a whiff, and giving a small smile at the lingering aroma of cookies.

He caught me watching him from the corner of his eye and gave me a look of his own as he kicked a small chunk of concrete down the sidewalk. “You should slump more,” he suggested. “You still look too tall and too . . . um . . . ninja-ish. Badass.”

Right then I gave up on the language. His school was the educational version of
Pulp Fiction
. Mine was a teen version of a supermax prison, metal detectors, police, and all. If we made our way through with only foul mouths, we would be doing well. There also might be a serial killer and there
were
monsters. All that was enough to worry about. So I let it go and took his advice. I slouched more, aimed for a pained expression, and slowed my pace.

We talked to Mrs. Spoonmaker first, Cal remembering to cough once or twice for that flu I’d told her he had the day before. We didn’t pull the cookie scam on her. I thanked her for calling our schools and casually asked if she knew David Kithser? If she’d seen him around lately. We went to school together and he owed me money for doing his homework. That she would believe. If I said I was his friend and she knew him, she wouldn’t talk to me at all. He was a bad guy. In our world minding your own business about bad guys was good business for yourself.

Cal perched on her couch covered in faded orange and red roses. Covering him were her seven cats. Cats liked him, loved him really. The moment they smelled him they would swarm. Now wasn’t any different. They draped over his shoulders, lap, and feet. If they happened to have a dead mouse tucked away, they’d present it at his feet like an offering. Cal didn’t mind. Affection from anyone but me was rare. He knew when to appreciate it—even in the form of a dead rodent. He stroked the cats, surrounded by a cloud of purring and flying fur. Each one took a turn bracing on his chest to stare into his eyes. I didn’t know what they were hoping to see, but they always seemed satisfied when their turn was over.

Mrs. Spoonmaker knew Kithser. “No better than he had to be,” she’d said with pursed pink lips that matched the pink tint in her short curly white hair. She also said that she hadn’t seen him in months and good riddance. We moved from house to house after that. Five houses down Cal stopped on the sidewalk, several feet away from the porch. “Dog,” he warned. “Big dog.”

I couldn’t smell him like Cal could, but a second later I heard the barking. Loud, ferocious, and absolutely crazed. Big dog was right. Big and wild to attack. Unlike cats, dogs did not like Cal. Not some dogs, not most dogs. All dogs. They had two reactions: fight or flight. And when the reaction was fight, it was instinct that ran back to their prehistoric ancestors—to the death.

Dogs were good for howling their lungs out when the Grendels were around too. We didn’t talk about that, Cal and I, but he knew. Dogs hated him because dogs hated Grendels. Man’s best friend hated monsters and man’s best friend hated Cal. There was nothing to be said about that because it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t.

“We’ll take the next house,” I said.

Cal stood silently behind me as the dog next door continued to bay the invisible moon down from the sky. This door, boiled cabbage green, opened to a hugely tousled mane of platinum blond hair with glossy black roots, long red fingernails with a rhinestone at each tip, and an impatient expression. “I’m running late. What the hell do you kids want? And what the hell is that damn dog barking at?” Beyond the yellow, crimson, fake diamond glint and irritability, there was a woman. She was dressed in a skintight miniskirt, thigh-high boots, and a glittering bikini top that, while extremely skimpy, NASA must’ve helped engineer to hold up an enormous cargo load. She was holding a shirt in her hand as well, but that didn’t seem quite as important.

How did they stay up? Physics had never been so interesting or useful until now.

“Mrs. Breckinridge,” Cal said, surprised, moving up beside me. “Nik, she’s a substitute teacher at school.” I cleared my throat. He was never going to be the male equivalent of Miss Manners, but there were some requirements I expected of him, behavior that helped us blend into average society. “Um . . . sorry. Mrs. Breckinridge, this is my brother, Niko. He broke his ankle. He’s helpless and pathetic and won’t rob you.” He was curious at her presence, but he was also a Leandros when he had to be, there with the story. “Hey, I didn’t know you lived on my street.”

“I’m never home long enough to really live anywhere. Too many bills to pay.” Thick, fake eyelashes blinked. “You’re the kid with the weird name who always sits in the last row? Haliban. Caliban. Something from Shakespeare, right?”

His teacher but obviously not a very good teacher.

Cal said flatly, “Cal. My name is Cal.” Sophia had told him long before school ever would about Caliban, Shakespeare, and
The Tempest
. She wanted him to know why she’d named him after the shambling monster-child of a bitch sorceress. The only part she’d gotten right was that about the bitch.

“Well, Cal”—she fished a five out of her pocket and passed it to him—“my new favorite student. How about you forget you ever saw me and what I do for a second job. The principal is the stick-up-her-ass kind. All sorts of morals—
her
morals, the judgmental old witch. She’d fire me like that”—she snapped her fingers—“if she knew I was stripping. Dancing, I mean. Dancing. You think you can do that? Keep your mouth shut?”