“Naivete in you, little brother. I’m surprised.” He lifted his own bag and stepped over the wreckage of our door. The landlord was not going to be pleased, but for a hundred bucks we could get him to nail it shut with plywood before the place was emptied out.
I guess I was naive, because it looked like Niko had been right about her after all. When we made it to her place and told our story, Promise wasn’t unhappy. She was pissed.
“He is dead. Dead.”
Eyes ebony, whiteless, and frozen with rage, Promise was saying all the right things, in my book. Seamus dead. Yep. Totally on board with that. As icy as Niko himself, I hadn’t seen her like this often. It made me wonder what she’d been like back in the blood-drinking days. She might be an omnivore now, but she’d been a carnivore once. Niko said she didn’t talk much about her past, and there was probably good reason for that. To see her sweeping out of the darkness at you—you’d think angel, you’d think demon. And you’d be right on both counts.
“Dead,” she repeated. This time I saw her fangs and I saw them lengthen before my eyes. I’d seen her climb walls, seen her snap necks, but that was a new one for me.
Nik didn’t seem surprised, but when you have a kid brother who’s half monster, not much can shake you. “We’ll take care of it,” he said, catching her wrist lightly as she paced past him. Her hair loose and a mass of motion around her, she was like a wind—the gale-force kind that takes down everything in its path. “After the Auphe, we will deal with Seamus. Together.”
“If Seamus is cooperative enough to not attack you again before then,” Robin added.
“Not helping,” I muttered as I continued to unpack my guns onto Promise’s dining room table—even if I was thinking the same thing.
He drained his wineglass and raised his eyebrows. “Who said I was trying to?” He sighed, green eyes somber. “Helpful or not, it’s the truth. But, really, what’s the difference? We’re already watching for the Auphe. We’ll watch for him as well. When you’re neck-deep in it, what’s one more dollop of manure?”
Maybe the death of Niko, that’s what. Seamus was determined. Then again, I thought as I stared down at my guns, he wasn’t the only one.
Robin’s hand moved past mine into the long bag and pulled out a sword. “Something for every occasion. Except clothes. I hope you don’t expect to wear mine. Your skin would probably melt at the touch of true fashion.”
“I have clothes, jackass.” I pushed his hand away, and looked back at Promise and Niko.
“I brought this on us.” She stood still now, and I could see glints of purple behind the black clouding her eyes. “If I hadn’t suggested we take his case. If I hadn’t let him fool me for an entire century that he had changed his ways.” Her face was stone. “I’ll have his heart, scarlet and still in my hand, and none of you will interfere. He is mine.”
“The challenge was to me,” Niko countered. “We will finish him face-to-face.” Face-to-face. Face-to-goddamn-face, because although he had drilled in me over and over that there was no honor in battle, only survival, Nik did have honor. Maybe the only person in the world who did.
“The challenge may be to you,” Promise argued back, “but the insult is to me, that my affection could be transferred so easily.”
I didn’t know if Niko would’ve gone further with it, or asked about that meeting she hadn’t mentioned yet. Considering Promise’s mood, it probably wouldn’t have done any good. But it didn’t come to that. One phone call ended the topic.
That same one phone call had us sitting at a diner across the street from a church in Brooklyn. There George’s father was having a memorial service on the first anniversary of his death. He’d been sick a long time, George had said, before he died. He’d kicked the drugs, but he hadn’t been able to survive the deadly present a few dirty needles had left behind. We hadn’t been able to go to the funeral, as we were recuperating from some serious wounds at the time, but we could pay our respects now—for George—from a safe distance away. If the Auphe were watching, we were having lunch. Nothing more. I doubted they understood the concept of mourning death anyway. It was a ceremony that escaped or bored them, and they most likely ignored it entirely. Why bury what you can eat? Why mourn a long-gone snack?
As for George, I thought she’d know we were there. She might refuse to look far into the future, but the little things were just there to her. We’d arrived too late to watch her go into the church. I hadn’t seen her dark red cap of hair or deep gold skin. She wouldn’t have worn black. That wasn’t her. Whatever she believed about death—I’d never asked—she wouldn’t honor her father by looking different than she always was. He wouldn’t have wanted that.
Hell, I’d never met the man. How did I know what he would’ve wanted?
I clicked the salt and pepper shakers against each other and looked away from the church. If she’d been there, why would I want to see her anyway? Seeing was just the next best thing to not having. They both sucked, but it was my choice. I would live with it.
“I’m not eating here.” Robin looked at the laminated menu with unadulterated horror. “They think grease is a marinade and that a Band-Aid in your food is à la carte.”
“We’re not here to eat. So just order something and sneer at it like you normally do,” I ordered.
Promise, in one of her hooded cloaks, was sitting across from me and farthest from the window. Niko sat next to her, eyes moving from the people in the place to the street outside. He was always on watch. He’d taught me, and I was good enough. But there was good enough and there was Nik.
He tensed minutely and that was something I was good at picking up on. I turned back toward the window, blinked, then narrowed my eyes. “Holy shit.” When a dead guy shows up at a memorial service and he’s not the one being eulogized, you take notice.
“Samuel,” Niko said. “Unexpected.”
“Unexpected” was the word for it. Samuel had once worked for the Auphe, keeping close to me while in a band that played at the hole-in-the-wall bar I’d worked at—keeping an eye on me from feet away. Even the Auphe couldn’t do that. But then he had changed his mind, had died to save us from them. He’d worked for them in the beginning for the promise of saving his brother. I couldn’t say I might not have done the same. And I hope I would’ve died to make up for the mistake like I thought he had when I found out how horrific a mistake it was. But now he was standing in front of the church. Alive. It was his brother that they were holding the service for, and I wondered why George had never felt the need to bring up the fact her uncle was still alive. I knew the answer to that the instant I asked it. She thought it was his decision to tell us.
And that’s what he was there to do.
He looked away from the church over to the diner. He saw us immediately through the glass. He saw us, because he’d been looking for us. One of the little things George was willing to share—that we would be there. Where’d she draw the line? Between what was little and what was big? How did she know? How did she know she couldn’t look at our future, hers and mine, but she could look at this? And why did both of us have to be so damn stubborn?
Either way, it was over. No point in thinking about it now . . . or ever again.
I watched as Samuel crossed the street toward us. He was a tall black guy with a close-shaven goatee, big and tough . . . now moving with a limp. He hadn’t had that before. His head was shaved too, new as well. It showed a half-moon scar behind his ear, clear as day—the same kind that Niko had described on the guy following Seamus. Samuel hadn’t seen me since the days before Niko and Robin had managed to get the Auphe-hired hitchhiker out of my head. So when he hesitated after coming through the door before moving over to us, I understood it. Darkling had been every bit the son of a bitch the Auphe were, and when it had squatted inside me, I hadn’t been the safest person—safest thing—to be around.