He was so smug. “Not necessarily,” I said, just to be contrary.
Sighing, he swatted me with the paper. “Bad dog. Go and research. And if I find you playing Mine-sweeper or looking at pornographic sites—”
“Yeah, yeah. You’ll kick my ass.”
“See? You can be logical when you want,” he said as I heaved out of the chair and headed for the computer section.
I didn’t find anything, and I looked, but other than a thousand sites for candlelight vigils, and one paramilitary skinhead group out in Wyoming, I was out of luck. No super secret organizations mentioned, and they definitely didn’t have their own Web site. What a crock, considering this was the Internet age. How’d they recruit? Hang around haunted houses on Halloween and say, “Hey, wanna see something really cool?”
Niko didn’t have any luck either, which made me feel somewhat better, until he took over my computer. Then he found something. A year ago, most of the Auphe had died in a collapsing warehouse. Thanks to the wild energy of an impossible gate I’d created, it went down so quickly that apparently only a few had a chance to gate their own way out. Lucky us.
The archived newspaper article called it a gas explosion. When Nik and George had been kidnapped months ago, we’d left a church littered with dead vodyanoi , man-shaped, oversized leech creatures that were big and heavy enough to be damn hard to dispose of. The church had burned to the ground. Arson, the police said. Someone had cleaned up two very big messes of ours. Maybe there was a Vigil; maybe not, but there was something going on out there. And weeks ago when Sawney Beane, our least favorite mass-murdering monster, had left a tree full of dead bodies in Central Park . . . those bodies had disappeared. They hadn’t made the news at all.
Mysteries on top of mysteries. I didn’t like mysteries. Mysteries only meant trouble.
Like I’d thought earlier at the museum about Sangrida and Wahanket, we had trouble enough without looking for more.
Or so I’d hoped anyway . . . until Nik’s cell phone rang.
Enough was never enough, was it? Seamus wasn’t enough, and now this. One thing we’d learned over the past few months: Work doesn’t stop when things turn bad. Our lives were, in a word, complicated as shit. Okay, three words, but “complicated” didn’t really get the point across. Family, serial killers, allies who were anything but . . . day to day, it seemed like a miracle if I lived long enough to eat my lunchtime chili cheese dog. So, when you got the karmic swat, as Nik would probably call it, we kept going. We kept living. We kept working, because if we didn’t, Christ, we would never work. And Nik’s teacher’s assistant salary from the university combined with my bartender pay was about enough to pay our utilities. It was our other work, our real job, that paid the bills. And while it was more interesting than serving drinks to the frequently inebriated and the occasionally incontinent, it was also a damn sight more gory.
We did it all. Ransom deliveries, de-bodaching carnivals, exterminations. Whatever someone was willing to pay us for that didn’t involve compromising too much of our souls. Which is how we ended up freezing our asses off under the pier at Coney Island later that evening. Promise had found us another client, because a Scottish vampire wasn’t enough of a pain. I sat cross-legged in the sand, waves colored the purple-gray of the twilight sky nearly reaching my shoes, and sifted absently for a rock. Over the three hours we’d been sitting there, I heard one set of footsteps above us over the sound of the waves, and the occasional shout and laughter from the boardwalk, but that was it. The wind off the water had a vicious bite, and if I didn’t have to be there, my ass would’ve been someplace warm like everyone else’s.
But it wasn’t the frigid air that I was thinking of. Or whatever client we had, what they wanted. I wasn’t thinking of the Vigil either. Did they exist? Did they not exist? Did I care? Nope.
Right now I was thinking the same thing that had come to me yesterday morning as I’d lain on my back in Washington Square Park, surprised that the world hadn’t ended then and there. It was something more important than cold, clients, and mystery organizations combined. Something that had to do with our problem. Our lives . . . or deaths. I was thinking of something that actually mattered. I couldn’t picture doing it, not really, and that didn’t say too much about me. Not at all. Because it might be the best thing to do—if I had the guts. In fact, it might be the only thing that would work, and it didn’t have to be permanent. If I survived.
“You know,” I started diffidently, flinging the pebble I’d found into the water, “I was thinking . . . if I—”
“I’d find you,” Niko said, watching the water. He had his hair pulled back in a short ponytail, and was in a long black coat, gray shirt, and black pants, and had his sword lying across his lap. He looked every bit as deadly as he was and every bit as confident. I missed his long braid. It had hung to his waist and been good for annoying him with a tug. It had also been a sign of simpler days. Days when we’d been totally in the dark about why the Auphe had wanted me, days when they’d wanted only me. Ignorance/bliss, all that. I wished I really were as ignorant as Niko had accused me of being when he’d homeschooled me when I was sixteen. Ignorance can get you killed, but at least you’d be happy up until the hammer fell and shattered your clueless skull to bone fragments.
Nik turned his view from the water to look at me and emphasized, “Wherever you went. I’d find you, little brother.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, not surprised he knew what I was thinking. A lifetime of familiarity will do that. “You would.”
No, running wasn’t the answer. Even if there were a chance the Auphe would follow me if I left the others—after all, where was the fun in mentally torturing your prey if he wasn’t around to see it? Yeah, even if . . . Niko wouldn’t let me. I could run and disappear as well as any fox, or any Rom, for that matter, but Niko was the one who had taught me. Anywhere I could think of, he could do the same. Probably beat me there.
“We’ve made our stand, Cal. All of us. You can’t take that choice from us. Now . . .” He gave a stinging swat with the flat of his sword to my knees. “Watch the water or you’ll be dinner. Of course, the creature would promptly vomit you back up. All the bitching and moaning.” He curled his lips. “No one could suffer that on their stomach.”
I snorted and tossed another rock. “If anything comes out of there, their balls will be icicles. Kind of cuts down on the agility. I think we’ll be okay.” But when it came out of the water, it didn’t have balls . . . at least none that I could see. Not that I was looking for them or anything.
Swear to God.
It was like nothing I’d seen before, and I’d seen quite a bit in the past few years. The flesh was a mottled light gray on dark and was covered with a thick layer of slime. Its head was featureless except for round black eyes and a backward slash of mouth filled with a double row of triangular teeth. It had no neck; its wide chest was smooth and without nipples; the arms were short, with webbed hands; and the rest of it was a muscular fish tail. It looked like a shark with human arms. Like it was evolving slowly toward the land, and if that was the case, I was never coming to the beach again.
It threw itself up on the wet sand, tail thrashing, and its mouth opened wide enough that I could’ve stuck my entire head in it. “Holy shit!” I sprang to my feet and yanked my gun free.
“Wait.” Niko grabbed my wrist. “That’s our client.”
“You’re shitting me, right? Tell me you’re kidding.” I looked at the polished black eyes and the gnashing mouth. “What the hell is it?”
“A mermaid.” He frowned. “Merman? I think Mer is correct. Either way, this is the client Promise passed our way. Now, help me pull him farther up. I imagine whatever is chasing him will be right behind him.”