“No. That would be far too easy on him.” He loomed. Niko could loom like nobody’s business. “On you.”
“Nik, it wasn’t that big a risk. Hell, no risk at all.” The dripping water pooled in the small of my back, still cool, but not as cool as Niko’s expression. The cooler it got, the more pissed he would be. “We know better now. They won’t kill me.” No matter how much I demanded. “That’s not in their playbook anymore.”
“And as the Auphe are completely sane and utterly logical, we’ll depend on that? No, I don’t think so. It only takes one Auphe to get the taste of your blood and lose sight of its goal.” His lips tightened. “Just one. A shark can be docile, but throw one in an ocean of blood and all it would know is slaughter. The Auphe are the same. You can’t depend on madness. Or worse yet, they might not be as mad as we think. In that case, they might lose patience with vengeance and just take you. Leave the rest of us for later and take you to where I can’t get you back.”
It was true, although I had my doubts the Auphe would ever lose their lust for vengeance. If anyone could be mad and patient, it would be them.
“You’d have done the same thing,” I pointed out, going around an argument I didn’t want to have and crap I didn’t want to think about. Not yet. I wanted a few hours of denial. Just a few. Was that so bad?
“Logic? You? Now I know you’re desperate.” He tossed me another towel from the counter. “And it’s my responsibility to keep you safe. The right of the firstborn. Part and parcel of being the big brother.” His jaw set. “It could’ve taken you, Cal, do you understand? It could’ve taken you or killed you.”
I took the towel and scrubbed at my damp hair before countering, “It could’ve killed you too.” I swiped at my wet neck with the cloth. And it had come close. So goddamn close.
He exhaled, “This is getting us nowhere. And waiting to be picked off one by one isn’t the best strategic plan spawned in history. We need to find them. Go after them for a change. Surprise them.”
Go after them? Okay, that wasn’t just crazy talk. That was Hannibal Lecter eating his own foot with Dijon mustard wacko. “They live in Tumulus, Nik. Hell’s ghetto.” It wasn’t really hell, but it was a place—far from this world—that would make any mythological hell look like an amusement park. Two years of my life had been swallowed up by a nightmare dimension where time ran in all different directions, which explained how I’d come back to Nik only two days after my kidnapping but two years older. That was the one thing I did know about Tumulus. The rest was so thoroughly blocked out, I had only the faintest of impressions left. Rock and sand as red as blood, a sky the color of pus, and the cold of a long-closed tomb. But I didn’t have to remember to know that sticking your dick in a bucket of acid was a better idea than going there.
“I don’t know anything about it.” I twisted the towel in my hands. “I don’t know how big it is. I could open a gate right in the middle of the Auphe, for all I know. We could drop right in their laps, and that’s not like Santa’s lap, okay? We won’t be getting any candy canes out of the deal.” Tumulus. Christ. I felt the towel rip under my grip. “Not to mention the me-going-crazy thing. But, hey, why don’t I mention that?” Only the amnesia, the defense of an adolescent mind, had saved me the other time I’d gone to Tumulus and come back. I knew it wouldn’t save me again.
“Not we, Cal. Me,” Niko said, absolute. He reached over and took the towel from me. “If you can get me through, I could do a little reconnaissance, that’s all. I doubt odds are high that I would walk into the center of the Auphe.”
Him, not me. I should’ve known that and would have if the mere thought of that place didn’t have every nerve in me firing in dread and sheer fight-or-flight panic. Nik would never consider sending me over there. It could’ve been my idea and our last hope and he still wouldn’t have allowed it.
“No.” I was as absolute as Niko. “That’s their territory. You don’t take on someone like the Auphe on their territory. You should know that. You taught it to me. They could find you. Time is weird there. You could be gone a minute or a year. There could be pockets of no air.” The air had been thin there, hadn’t it? High-altitude thin? Hadn’t I struggled to breathe when they had dragged me there from home? Hadn’t I thought I’d suffocate? I felt my lungs suddenly ache for oxygen before a black curtain dropped down, wrapped around the flicker of memory, and took it away. Banished, like always.
“No.” This time I snapped it. “Make that hell no. Fuck no. Any goddamn no you want. I’m not doing it.”
“The time component. I hadn’t considered that.” Which gave away a frustration he didn’t allow to show. Niko didn’t forget to consider all aspects of a situation. Ever. But he’d been on target. We were basically sitting around, plastic ducks lined up at the carnival waiting for a BB gun to take us out. How do you fight an enemy you can’t follow? Can’t locate? They wouldn’t keep playing with us forever. They’d get serious sooner or later, mad or not, tire of the games, and then. . . . yeah, then.
“What if you kept the gate open? Linking our world to theirs? That might keep time running consistently in both places.”
I couldn’t believe it. He was still talking about it. Fine. He could have that conversation all by himself. “We need to dump the body,” I said, as if the subject of Tumulus had never come up, never existed. In fact, Tumulus was where the Easter Bunny painted his eggs—one big damn fairy tale. “Robin said the river.”
Niko frowned, but it was for himself, not me. He’d brought up something he knew I had problems with—profound, mind-melting problems—and for nothing. But it wasn’t for nothing. He was trying, and right now that’s all we had. Grasping at the thinnest and craziest of straws. I reached over and slapped his stomach with the back of my hand. “Hey, I’m the one not speaking to you, remember?”
The frown faded. “No river. Goodfellow’s since had a better idea while you were showering. Promise needs more time to heal before riding to the river is an option.”
“How is she?” I asked. More importantly, how was Nik when it came to Promise?
“Resting. She’ll be more mobile tomorrow.”
“And will you be staying with her tonight or shacking up in a guest room?” I stood, grabbed my sweatpants from the shower, and wrung them out. “Did you decide if you can live with good enough?”
“I don’t know,” he answered quietly. “Not yet.”
Sophia . . . that bitch hadn’t done too damn well by either one of us. She’d made me a monster and made Niko the brother, father, and caretaker of that bouncing baby monster. She’d screwed us both up so badly, I didn’t think we’d ever get over it. She’d burned on earth and I hoped she was doing the same in hell.
I moved past Nik into the hall and back to my room to dress. He followed. “So what is the plan, then?” I asked, pulling on jeans and a rumpled sweatshirt I fished out of my duffel bag. “Use Samuel again?”
“No.” Niko picked up the damp towels from the floor, wadded them into a tight ball, and hit me precisely in the center of the chest with them. You wouldn’t think cotton could sting. You’d be wrong. “I’m quite sure the Vigil would like nothing more than an up-close look at an Auphe, a nice and tidy autopsy to find out their vulnerabilities. All of which is one step away from dissecting you. They want the Auphe gone, and while Samuel may be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt there, who knows what the rest of the Vigil may have in mind. The less opportunity they have to focus on you, the better.” And while I was human on the outside, the inside wasn’t quite the same. They’d have something to look it. Good times on the autopsy slab.
“No dissections; got it.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, I put on socks. “So what’re we doing with it?”