“Will you be there?” I asked.
“I already am.” There was the usual gentle impish-ness in the words.
Georgina had held court at a tiny ice cream shop since she was eight. People came, they bought ice cream, and they asked what they needed to ask. She alone had kept the shop and its Methuselah-aged owner up and running. She didn’t take money for what she did. Georgina was like that.
I called Robin next. Friend, enemy, wary ally, whatever Ishiah was to him, he should know what had happened. I caught him in the middle of what I fully expected to and managed to end both his good mood and aerodynamic lift instantly. I disconnected in the middle of his cursing. What he did with the information was his decision, but I had a feeling letting Ishiah drink alone in an empty bar that had been a former Auphe Ground Zero wasn’t going to be the one he made.
“Cal.”
His eyes, fixed and bleak, were back on the bar door. At my call, he looked away and shoved his cell phone in his jacket pocket. “Delilah’s okay. Hasn’t seen anything.”
“Good. Let’s go.” I put my own phone away and felt the brush of steel in my pocket. One of the smaller throwing knives I carried—barely five inches long. I had ten on me now, along with my katana, wakizashi, and tanto blades. It was adequate for an average day. It didn’t feel adequate today.
“Go where?”
“Do your meditation,” I advised, turning and heading toward the nearest subway entrance. We had the car, but seeing Georgina meant a very roundabout approach. I didn’t see any Auphe on the rooftops, and Cal obviously didn’t smell any now or sense a gate. They probably weren’t here anymore, but probably wasn’t good enough. We absolutely could not be followed. That meant several evasion tactics, train switches, and fall backs.
“Why would I need medi . . . shit, we are not going to see George. We can’t risk that.” He came after me, hand on my shoulder stopping me as he moved in front of me. “Nik, no. Okay? Just no.”
“It’s all we have,” I explained. “We’ll take care. We won’t be followed.”
“Can you guarantee that?” he demanded.
I gave him patient silence as the snow beat harder.
“Yeah, yeah. You can.” His hand fell away. “I still don’t want to take the chance, and I don’t want to go. She won’t tell us anything anyway. And I really don’t want to see her.”
Understandable. Hurt; no one wants to embrace that. Cal had done all he could to be rid of Georgina, to save her from precisely the sort of thing that was happening now. The right thing and the easy thing; they could never be one and the same. “She may not, but I want to ask. I have to explore all our avenues, no matter how dim the chance. And you can wait outside.” Because separating was not an option.
“Shit,” he said again. “Ten blocks down. That’s the best I can give you, Cyrano. I’m not taking any chances on them remembering her. You’re the best, but I just can’t.”
I didn’t want to take chances with Georgina either, but I was more concerned with his being that far away. But he was stubborn, and if I pushed it, he might take it up to fifteen blocks.
It took us well over an hour to get to the ice cream shop, but the time was well spent. I knew we hadn’t been followed and I canvassed a four-block radius around the building. I’d left Cal those ten blocks away, huddled in a corner where a liquor store butted up against the larger building next door. “Hurry up,” he said, pulling up the collar on his jacket and sticking his bare hands in his armpits. “My balls are finally getting me some action. Turning them into ice cubes isn’t much of a thanks.”
“Go inside, then,” I said impatiently. “Buy something—a brain cell, perhaps.”
“No, thanks. If somebody accidentally dropped a bottle behind me . . . yeah, I think you get the picture. Enclosed places with one way out aren’t exactly my friends right now. Now hurry the hell up. Go get jack shit off George so we can go.”
It was Cal and his stubborn bravado . . . not at their best, but there. And that counted. I pulled off my gloves, black silk hunting ones. They kept the warmth in and allowed the finer touch for pulling triggers and tossing knives. I handed them to him. I didn’t bother to ask where his were. I knew he had no idea. “And don’t put them down your pants. Your balls will have to survive as best they can.” I left him as he was pulling the gloves on and looking up at a white sky that kept falling. . . . He was doing his best not to imagine a portrait of Georgina through a frosted plate glass window.
It was overly warm inside the shop when I arrived. It was also empty except for its proprietor, reading the paper with hugely magnified lenses, two body-guard wolves in human form in a booth by the window, and Georgina.
Younger than Cal by two years, she was the oldest soul I’d come to meet. Wrapped in the package of an eighteen-year-old girl wearing a dark red velvet coat that was a bit worn around the hem. Consignment wear, but as with most things regarding Georgina, it was right for her. As this place was right for her. She took what came and always seemed content in it. Her nose was pierced since I’d last seen her. A tiny garnet. She was beautiful, if your eyes were open to what beauty truly was. It was in the softness of chocolate eyes, the pixie cap of dark red waves, skin of deep brown-gold, and freckles that sprinkled a perfectly ordinary nose. She had Samuel’s, her uncle’s, smile . . . slow and thoughtful.
“Niko.” There came that smile.
I sat in the booth opposite her. “Georgina.” I bowed my head to her as I had done to all my instructors at the many dojos over the years. In many ways, she was as much a teacher as they had been.
The smile faded. “I’m sorry. I tried. I did.”
“Tried? What did you try?” My hopes that she would help us were faint, straw-grasping, but if she were at least making an attempt, maybe they weren’t all in vain.
Her eyes were sad as she reached across the table to take one of my hands in hers. “I can’t change things, but I’d hoped I could look and see where the path ends. Where you and Cal will be when this is all over. I wanted to be able to tell you that you would pass through this. Be safe.” Her hands tightened on mine . . . with fear, I thought. “But I can’t. I can’t look because I’m afraid of what I’ll see. I can’t help you, and I can’t comfort you either,” she said with resignation.
“Georgina, you may be all we have.” We might find Oshossi, between Robin and Mickey, but no one could track the Auphe. They were here, there, nowhere . . . a poison-tainted wind.
“I’m sorry.” She squared her shoulders to deny, “There’s nothing I can do.”
Nothing. Nothing she could do. Nothing she would do. Her hands were warm on mine. She couldn’t be moved any more than a marble saint, yet she felt warm. It seemed wrong. The oldest soul I’d met and the oldest I hoped I ever did come to see. She was wise and compassionate beyond her years, beyond a simple human span of years, in fact. I respected her for it, but lately I’d come to see that the compassion of someone who sees the entire world as opposed to the single struggling ant isn’t necessarily a human compassion.
“There’s a reason and a purpose to even the darkest of the dark. Hold on to that, Niko,” she said softly. “Please.”
Purpose. Knowing that your purpose in life will inevitably be fulfilled isn’t a comfort when your purpose is to die ripped to shreds before your brother’s eyes to drive him insane. And that would be a kind and giving act compared to what would be done to him then. Insane or not, catatonic or screaming day and night, they would use him. Violate him until the day he died. Wishing he were dead before they had that opportunity was the best I could hope for.
Hold on to that? Forgive me if meditation only took me so far.
In many ways Georgina, who was fully human, was less human than Cal. In the two years we’d known her, she’d always refused to meddle with the larger affairs of the universe. She’d find a lost dog, tell if a baby would be a girl or a boy, offer hope that, yes, love was coming, and that your sick relative would pull through. She gave warmth and comfort, but she wouldn’t save your life. She wouldn’t save her own, if it came to that. In this situation she wouldn’t even look to see the outcome. Wouldn’t tempt her own philosophy. She had a wisdom only seen in the holiest of people.