They were the best.
That’s why I ran. Not because they were behind me, but because I suspected they were also in front of me. They’d been waiting for me at the apartment building at St. Marks’s, where Niko and I lived. I’d come home to see them lining the roof, and I’d felt the internal wrench as they ripped holes in reality and slithered through. The dread was instant. If they knew for sure where I lived, they knew where I went. If they knew that, they knew the same about Niko. Months ago they had said they’d kill everyone in my life before they killed me. I believed them. Reapers and rippers and older than time—living murder wrapped in cold flesh. They didn’t lie. Why would they when blood-soaked destruction was so much more entertaining?
Yeah, it had been months, but they said it, I believed it, and now was apparently the time. Long months of waiting, but, hell, I’d have been happy to wait a little longer.
No such goddamn luck.
I came off East Eighth Street, crossed Astor, then hit Broadway and kept running. This time I was hit, a big, ancient black Lincoln, but it only grazed my hip. There was the screech of brakes as I was knocked to the asphalt. As I scrambled back to my feet and kept moving, the skies opened up and dropped a waterfall of icy rain. I was soaked instantly, but the cold I felt on the outside couldn’t touch what swirled inside me. Once on Fourth, I was running through the people. The human and the non-. The blissfully ignorant and the voraciously aware. The dinner and the diner.
Among the walking, talking snacks that were now cursing the rain, I could see the occasional pale amber eye, the gleam of a bared tooth. Upright Hammers. And they knew me as Hammer had. Smelled me. Werewolves were good at that. Leg humping and sniffing out a half-Auphe—it was all a piece of cake.
There were other monsters among the unwitting, but I didn’t bother to pick them out. I didn’t have time. I didn’t have time for anything except getting to Nik. It was a fifteen-minute run, going as fast as I could. Fifteen minutes was a long time. I didn’t let myself think it might be pointless, that Nik had been at the park for more than an hour now. I just gulped wet air, tried not to think how much easier it would be if I shot the people milling in front of me, blocking my way, and kept running.
There were people in the park, but they were all leaving—running themselves, although not as desperately as me, for shelter from the unexpected downpour. When it was cold enough to shrink your balls and wet enough to prune up everything else, it tended to put an end to casual walks and Frisbee playing. Niko would be on the far side of the green. There were bunches of trees gathered around the perimeter of the park. We worked out by a particular group of them in the northwest corner. As I ran toward it, I smelled the grass crushed under my feet, the mud, the dead leaves, the acid-free oil Nik used to clean his swords. . . .
And Auphe. I smelled Auphe.
Elf and Auphe, one and the same. Proof that mythology never failed to get it wrong. How it had gotten blond, prissy, silk-wearing elves from the world’s very first monsters, I would never know. After pointed ears and pale skin, the resemblance stopped, and the steel teeth, razor claws, and lava eyes of a demon started.
I ignored the few people who gave me quick stares as they ran in the opposite direction, and tried to get more speed. I couldn’t—I was giving it all I had and more. But then I was there. I was in the trees. The leaves had all fallen and the dark branches should’ve been bare as they split from the trunk to spread against the sky. They weren’t. They were filled with Auphe, as pallid as the winter sky behind them. They were hidden enough by the rain that I could barely see them, but they were there. There had been no one behind me because they had beaten me here, the same twenty from the apartment building. From the roof to the trees—it was only a step for them. Open a door in reality, pass through, and there you were.
The one on the bus hadn’t been following me. It had been playing with me. Homicide and humor—it was one and the same to the Auphe.
And Niko faced them all.
Revealing himself, he stepped from behind a glistening black tree trunk. Jesus. Alive. Fucking alive. And he was ready, with dark blond hair pulled back and katana held high in the pounding rain. The Auphe didn’t blink, didn’t move. “Gun,” Nik said calmly.
I was already reaching under my jacket for the Glock .40 in my shoulder holster. My grip should’ve been tight and cramped with adrenaline, but I’d pointed one weapon or another so many times over the past four years that my touch was light and confident. The rest of me could’ve taken a lesson. Normally I was good at this—I saw monsters all the time and faced them head-on. Kicked ass, tail, flipper . . . whatever they had. But this . . . this was the Auphe. Half of my gene pool. They’d been not only the bogeymen of my childhood, but of my whole damn life. Outside windows at night, around darkened corners, trailing behind me from the time I was born until I was fourteen. Bad, right?
Wrong.
There was worse. They took me. For two years. I didn’t remember those years and I probably never would, but inside, at a level I couldn’t access, I somehow knew what they had done. Could feel it. Seeing just one was enough to have the taste of screams and blood in my mouth and a chunk of ice in my gut.
Seeing twenty of them was like seeing the end of the world.
Pointing a gun at the end of the world seems fairly goddamn futile. I did it anyway. “It’s broad daylight, assholes. Seems bold even for you,” I said tightly. I didn’t freeze, not this time. I swallowed the bile, grew a pair, and kept the Glock steady. Two-headed werewolves, mass murderers, dead bodies hanging like fruit in a tree, I’d faced all of that—I’d face this. “Or did you get the weather report I missed out on?”
“Faithless cousin.” Hundreds of titanium needle teeth bared at me as the closest one spoke. “The blind do not see us.”
“And when your eyes are ripped from their sockets,” hissed another, “neither will you.”
Jesus, family. It was a bitch.
But maybe they were right. Even if the water falling from the sky hadn’t been the next best thing to the biblical flood, it still might not have mattered. Because if you saw them, you’d have to be insane, wouldn’t you? So instead, maybe you’d just turn your head and keep moving as your brain glossed over what simply couldn’t be. Maybe your average human was smarter than I gave him credit for.
“We nearly wiped your race from the face of the earth.” We’d also gotten our asses spanked and handed to us on a silver platter in the process, but Niko didn’t feel the need to mention that. Show the enemy no weakness. A throwing knife appeared in his free hand as he continued without hesitation, “We finish what we start.”
That’s when they fell from the trees. Predators who had no equal. The hundred others we had killed had been a suicide run we’d unexpectedly survived. A big-ass explosion, a collapsing building, and the good fortune of several lifetimes; I didn’t think we’d get that lucky again.
They were like lightning as they fell—that quick, that deadly, and that inescapable. I heard steel hit flesh as Niko swung his blade, and I also heard the thud of my back hitting a tree as clawed hands lifted and threw me before I could get a shot off. God, they were so damn quick. Another one snatched at my shirt, scoring the skin of my chest, and tossed me to the wet ground and then landed on me to pin me there. I could see my skewed reflection in the mirror of its teeth as I jammed the muzzle of the gun under an unnaturally pointed chin and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit nothing but the rain. The gate, one of twenty opening, gobbled up the Auphe just as it gobbled up the others.