If they didn’t eat him first.
The thought had occurred to him too. “Three months. Your humor, such wit.” He gave a chittering wheeze that was what passed for a rat laugh. “A year. Two meals a day. Every day.”
And the negotiations began. It was too bad Goodfellow wasn’t here. The Rom lived to haggle, but somehow that gene had skipped us. Niko had cold silence and his sword. I had my temper and my fists. If those didn’t work, we were screwed. Wheedling and schmoozing didn’t come naturally to us.
But Nik did his best and we ended up with six months, two meals a day.
No way I was coming out here twice a day for half a year. Hell, there had to be delivery services that would do it. Leave the food at the gate. I didn’t know who ran the yard, but Mickey didn’t seem to worry that much about being spotted.
Speaking of spotting, I saw something worse than the dead rat as the two of them hammered out the deal. In one of the cars one stack over, a hand was hanging out of the window. The fingernails were dirty, the skin gray as only a corpse can be. Mickey didn’t kill people—that we knew of—but the occasional bum did die in the yard of natural causes. Exposure, heart attack—it didn’t matter. Mickey liked his takeout, but when it wasn’t available, he made do with what was. And that wasn’t always rats.
I turned away to ask, “You need a ride there? You gonna drive yourself? Or did you have a bad hair day when they took your driver’s license photo?” The bared teeth let me know Mickey’s lack of temper might not be all I thought it was.
He rode with us in the back of Niko’s car . . . after retrieving a jar full of darkly sloshing fluid. The black eyes reflected in the rearview mirror when he lifted his head for the occasional look around. When he did, I could feel hot breath against my neck. Not a good day for wearing my hair in a ponytail. I also smelled things on his breath—tacos, rat . . . human. Digested human flesh; it was a smell you couldn’t forget. If I didn’t smell it again for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t matter. It was something that was with me for good. It smelled like raw pork, but just different enough to make your flesh crawl. It said “You are meat.” Whatever you wanted to think in your happily ignorant world, it all came down to that: You are meat.
It was dark by the time we stopped by the park to let him off. He opened the jar and begin to rub the contents across his fur in sweeping strokes. “Is blood and oil,” he explained. “Smell scent of you on me.” He snapped his teeth together in demonstration. “Kill me, yes. In seconds. Meet here again. Two days.” Leaving the jar and large smears of the mixture on the vinyl seat, he slipped out the door and shadowed his way into the trees.
I looked in the backseat one more time after he was gone. “I am not cleaning that up. I’m not even helping you clean that up. That is nasty.”
“It wouldn’t matter if it were essence of pizza and hoagies. You’re a lazy son of a bitch and all the meditation in the world won’t change that,” Nik retorted.
“Now, would Buddha have said that?” I asked with mock disappointment. “I don’t think so.”
“Buddha never found your underwear in the kitchen sink.”
I had an answer to that ready and waiting as Niko started the car, but my cell phone rang—the cell phone that now was only for emergencies. Gate-creating emergencies. I flipped it open, saw Seamus’s number, grabbed Nik by the arm, and took us. I could build a gate and walk through it, but I could also build one around me if there was no room for the alternative. It was more difficult, but I could do it. That’s what I did in this case. Niko and I were outlined in gray light, and in a fraction of a second we were gone. Then we were at Seamus’s loft, right in the path of a charging ccoa.
It was so close I could smell its breath. It wasn’t as bad as Mickey’s, but it wasn’t exactly potpourri either. I could also see the dilated prey-seeking pupils and the piranha teeth. I could probably have seen its damn tonsils if I didn’t get my ass in gear and move. I dove one way while Nik went the other. In my quick drop and roll, I could see he was a muddy gray under his olive skin, but he wasn’t puking as Robin had when I’d once taken him through a gate, which was good. He also kept on his feet, which was even better. It looked like we needed all the help we could get.
There was no Oshossi, but there were three ccoas. They were quick and had been predators since they weaned from their mama’s teat. They were dangerous as hell, and from the dripping saliva, also hungry. I saw the two at first; the third came from above. If they could climb a tree in the jungle, they could climb a fire escape here. And if they could leap from a rocky ledge onto their prey, they could do the same from the upper loft. It came down like an avalanche, as deadly and a whole lot faster. I’d switched back to the Glock .40 from the Desert Eagle, which hadn’t done as much good as I’d hoped it would. As he struck the floor, I put ten in the head just like I’d thought with the last one, and swear to God, I almost hated to do it even though the last one had nearly turned me into lunch. It seemed more like an animal than a monster, a smart and beautiful animal. I didn’t like killing it, but I did. There was a scream of pain that sounded oddly human, and a tumbling of black and silver fur over a sleek line of muscle. Then there was nothing but a big, dead cat. I shook it off. If it had landed on me, I’d be one dead son of a bitch, my throat ripped out before I could’ve pulled the trigger. It might just be an animal, but it had been one damn deadly one.
Robin was holding off another with his sword while Promise and Cherish did the same with the third. Promise’s crossbow bolts only enraged the one attacking them. The cat was quick enough that Cherish had only struck three blows that I could tell. They were deep blows, but not deep enough to stop it. Nik was with them in seconds. He took the cat from behind. It whirled before he managed to slice it, but that didn’t last long. From the corner of my eye, I saw him strike one paw aside, then evade the other, dodge the enormous snap of mouth, and impale it in the heart with his katana.
That was impossibly quick.
I knew Nik could fight. I knew he was better than I was, that he was better than nearly anything or anyone you could name. But sometimes when you saw him in action, you almost couldn’t believe it—that a human could be that fast and that lethal. He’d worked at being that way since he was twelve, but I honestly thought he was born that way as well. A genetically superior athlete who could’ve gone to the Olympics. Instead, for me he became a killer. Too bad for him that they didn’t hand out the gold, silver, or bronze for that.
I turned toward Robin to see him just finishing off his as well. And there we were. . . . Three dead ccoas. It sucked. Monsters were one thing, but this was something else. Oshossi didn’t give a damn about his pets, and I’d sure as hell rather be killing him than them.
So why wasn’t he here with them? He was smart, but that didn’t seem smart. If he wanted Cherish so badly and his ccoas had tracked her down, why hadn’t he come with them?
Cherish’s teeth were bared as the ccoas’ had been, and her sword dripped blood onto the floor. She realized it and covered the fangs with lips painted as red as the silk top she wore. “You came.” It was said with a gratitude I wouldn’t have guessed she had in her. She was coming around. She might have more Promise in her than any of us thought. “Madre said that you would, and you did.” She gave a formal dip of her dark head. “My thanks.” Raising her eyes to Niko, she said with a trace of amazement, a fellow predator’s respect, “You are every bit the swordsman Madre said you were. I’ve seen nothing like it. Not in my life. Not ever.” The dimple appeared. “Perhaps you could give me lessons.”