Cal stared out the window, hand tightly fisted in the pocket of his jacket. I could see the round outline of it. Cal knew all about control. He had it in spades, although it might not appear like it to anyone else. To anyone who caught him napping on the couch, snarling at the Ninth Circle’s patrons, or slamming a revenant’s head repeatedly against a wall until brain matter came out its ears, it might not seem that way, but every minute of every day Cal was exercising a control he wasn’t even cognizant of. His mind used it subconsciously to keep two years of his life lost, to keep it from driving him insane—literally. He himself used it on a more aware level to not kick daily multiple asses of every creature out there that mocked, scorned, or outright hated him for his Auphe half. He used it to stay in one place when running, from the police seeking Sophia and then from the Auphe, was all he had ever known. He used so much of it, in fact, that I wondered . . .
Was there any left?
When we finally stood outside Seamus’s building, Cal took several seconds to carefully scrape back every strand of hair and tie it off. Stalling. Thinking. “I think it might be best,” I offered before he could speak, “if we waited until later to worry about telling them about the gate. With Cherish and that chupacabra there—they have no need to know, even if we knew they could be trusted.”
He nodded immediately with relief. “When all this Oshossi and Auphe shit is over. Yeah, then.”
I slipped off one of my Tibetan prayer bead bracelets. I wore a double row of them on each wrist. Made of steel, they were as good at deflecting a blade as they were for meditation. I handed it to him and he stretched the mala curiously, then put it on. “Robin will think we’re going out,” he snorted.
“I’m quite sure I don’t want to know what Goodfellow thinks about anything dating related. There’s only so much depravity I can face on a daily basis.” I tapped the beads around his wrist. “It’s for meditation. Say one mantra per bead. Do the entire bracelet every hour.”
“Mantra, huh?” he said. “And what’s my mantra?”
“Whatever you want it to be.” The temperature had dropped drastically, and the sun was gone. Several scattered flakes of snow blew past, a few hitting my jaw. “It’ll work best if it’s tailored for you. A word or two or three that makes you feel calm. Safe.”
“ ‘Thermonuclear warhead’ is a mouthful.” He fingered the bracelet, then pulled the jacket sleeve down over it. “So is ‘wholesale Auphe genocide.’ ”
“Why do I think you’re not trying?” I asked dryly as the wind picked up along with the snow, and we stepped into the building. Cal, calm and safe. Unfortunately, I had to ask myself if there’d ever been a time when he’d felt that way. I paused by the stairs as it hit me. It was the memory I’d had just days ago. The Auphe at the window. It wasn’t the best of ones for me, but for Cal maybe that wasn’t true. It had been our routine. When Sophia left us alone, it was our time and it was a welcome time. A safe time. “Fish sticks and cartoons.”
He looked at me warily as he pushed open the door to the stairwell. “All that granola and carrot juice has melted your brain. What are you talking about?”
I didn’t blame him. It sounded ludicrous aloud, yet . . .
Fish sticks and cartoons; he’d been three when Sophia had taunted him about his father, but he’d been five before he really understood, before he actually saw an Auphe himself. Five years old before he’d started searching every window he passed for the nightmare that usually lives only in a child’s darkest imaginary closet. Up until then, Sophia’s words had just been words, ugly and frightening, but just words. When she was gone, he and I were alone with our ritual. After he was five, he never thought we were alone again. And for the two years prior to that, I hadn’t ever let him think that I knew we weren’t. Of all the things I’d done in my life, I thought I was proudest of that than of anything else.
“It was a long time ago.” He’d been so damn young, we both had, but some memory had to linger. And if not a memory, then a feeling. “Just say it, or my new mantra will involve your head, the nearest wall, and twenty-four prayer beads an hour.”
He didn’t bother to say “You wouldn’t,” because he knew I most certainly would. Instead, he grumbled, then muttered low under his breath. I couldn’t hear it, but he had said it. I could tell by the spark of surprise in his eyes. “I feel . . .” He climbed up a step and another before stopping. “Hell, I remember. I watched cartoons and you made me fish sticks.” For a moment he was only a twenty-year-old caught in a pleasant memory. No monster father, no malicious mother. No impending Armageddon. Carefree. Unburdened. What he should’ve been, and what he never could be.
“Yogurt isn’t tartar sauce, Nik,” he sniped, but there was a smile behind it.
“You thought it was.” And our neighbor at the time, ninety with ten cats, had given me free containers of it if I dragged her garbage can to the curb for her. Her granddaughter bought the yogurt for her, and the old woman hated it with a passion. It might be my health-conscious nutrition had begun with a mother who rarely bought groceries and a cranky cat lady who’d survived nearly a century of dipping everything in lard and didn’t see a reason to change her ways.
“I was dipping fish sticks in goddamn cherry yogurt.” He started back up the stairs. “I should so kick your ass.”
“You should,” I agreed amiably, as he moved fingers under his sleeve to bead number two and repeated his mantra silently.
“You tell anyone about it and I’ll kill you.” Bead number three. “Dead.”
“And you’d have every right,” I said as mildly as before, and far more self-satisfied than could be good for my karma.
“Damn straight I would.” Bead number four. Calm and controlled, he was working his way there. Slowly, perhaps, months away—a long, long path, but he would get there. If he continued to work at it. And if I had to throw him to the floor and sit on him every hour on the hour to accomplish that, so be it.
But there is only so much meditation can do. What we found upstairs was enough to destroy an entire five hours of meditation, much less five minutes’ worth.
I opened the door to see Cherish and Robin sitting at a table with cards in hand. The former had a pile of clothes at her feet, and the latter was nude except for one sock. Unfortunately, that sock wasn’t in a place that would’ve provided the rest of us with any comfort. I said a mantra of my own. It didn’t help. There was only one answer to this. I started walking. Fast.
Goodfellow had once told us he had invented the game of poker. I doubted that was true, but I didn’t doubt he excelled at it. The only excuse for his catastrophic loss, catastrophic from my point of view at least, was the desire to show off his puckly attributes to Cherish. As Cal had once told me after accidentally interrupting one of Robin’s more dissolute fests, there was a good deal to show off.
Green eyes turned brightly sly at the sight of us. “Niko.” He knocked on the chair to his left. “We have room for one more.”
“I think you already have three at the table,” I said. And if I walked even faster, I wasn’t the slightest bit ashamed. I, usually the hunter, in Robin’s case knew very well what it was like to be prey. And as prey, you do what you have to to survive.
Run like the wind.
Cal was somewhat less restrained in his comments than I had been. “Jesus Christ, I cleaned my guns at that table last night, you perv. Where the hell am I supposed to clean them now?”
“Perhaps the same place you got laid today?” Robin said smoothly.
“How’d you know that?” Cal demanded.
“It’s a sixth sense,” came the complacent answer.
“Being a nosy, sex-sniffing bastard is a sixth sense? Since when?”
By that time, I was in the bedroom and with relief closed the door behind me. Promise looked over from where she was firing her crossbow at a large painting on the wall. It was an especially fine rendition of Pan of the Green Wood. He was playing his pipes for a virginal maiden clad in a sheer Greek stola. Every bolt was buried in two areas: the curly head and those puckly attributes I’d seen in passing.