He’d kept his word, anticipating the Auphe twice . . . as much as anyone could. You could anticipate a tornado, a tsunami, yet there were times when there was no place to go to escape them. This, I thought, was one of those times.
“Did you flip them off on the way down?” I asked.
“Hell, yes, I did.” He gave a small smirk, but it faded away almost instantly, and the emptiness was back again.
I sat up, reached over him to take his right hand that still held his gun, and placed it on his chest. “If the time comes and we can’t win,” I said steadily, “you go first.” I’d done all I could to protect him his entire life. I would protect him at the end of it as well.
His knuckles tightened on the Desert Eagle. “That won’t stop them from killing the rest of you.”
“No, but it will infuriate them, madden them. If I take the one chance their race has at survival, they’ll take the rest of us quickly. They’ll be too infuriated to do otherwise.” And if they didn’t . . . we’d fight until our choices were gone. If it came to the torture the Auphe had promised, we would have an escape. A clean death. I’d rather die by my hand than the hand of an Auphe. Either way, Cal wouldn’t have to see it. I might not be able to save his life, but I could save him that, and I could save him from much worse. I would never let the Auphe take him again.
He looked at me with eyes unutterably exhausted and far older than they had any right to be. “Together.”
“Together,” I promised. I held up a hand and he let go of the gun to clasp it, hard and desperate, then he pulled himself up to a sitting position.
He let go and rubbed his face. “I think we have codependency issues.”
“There’s no one I would rather have them with, little brother.” I stood and nudged his hip with my foot. “Up. You need to sleep. One hour in a day and a half doesn’t quite qualify.”
“Cyrano,” he responded. The shadows under his eyes had advanced to circles so dark they were almost black. “I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.”
I thought he would’ve proven that true had I not palmed two sleeping pills at the hospital. Slipped into his coffee, he’d collapsed on the living room couch, dead to the world. Promise, who stood beside me, leaned down to brush the hair from his face. She didn’t bring up the breeding remark the Auphe had made on the hospital stairwell. Either she didn’t truly want to know or knew Cal wouldn’t want me to talk about it. “We’re not going to survive this, are we?” she said softly.
I said nothing. It was answer enough.
“Perhaps you, Cherish, and Robin would if you ran,” I said eventually. “If you hid. Once Cal and I are gone, they’d have little reason to follow you. You can’t torment those who are already dead. Wasting their time on you would be pointless.”
“But the Auphe are mad. What is pointless to us may not be so to them.” Her hand wrapped around mine. “All my life I’ve only survived. With you, I’ve actually lived. That is worth dying for.”
To say I had mixed emotions on that was an understatement. Pride and automatic refusal. But I could refuse all that I wanted. Promise would do what she wished.
Cherish would run. Oshossi would suddenly seem not quite so bad. He could kill her, but the Auphe would kill her. As for Goodfellow . . . a knock on the door, a scant moment of metal scraping the lock, and he was there. “So,” he said impatiently, “are we going after Oshossi or not? I had to perform with someone far, far below my standards to get this information. I would hate for it to go to waste.” His annoyance faded as he took us in. My stony face, Promise’s determined one, and Cal limply unconscious and worn to his last reserves.
“Arhidia, what’s happened now?” The apprehension was easily read in his tense frame.
I filled him in. Halfway through, he was on one of the chairs with his head in his hands. When I reached the part about us plummeting over the edge, he was muttering over and over under his breath, “Gamiseme. Gamiseme. Gamiseme.”
I spoke enough Greek to agree with him. I repeated the same thing to him that I had to Promise. “You should go. When the three of us are gone, they’ll have no reason to come after you. And as long as you’ve lived, no one could be better at hiding than you, assuming they could even pick you out from the other pucks. None of us expect you to die with us.”
His shoulders braced and he straightened to lean back against the chair. “And miss all the fun?” The careless smile disappeared. “I’ve run from battles all my life, counted my own life as far more important than anyone else’s. You, on the other hand, have faced death with me. For me. No one in all my years has ever done that. I stand with you now.” He turned a little green with the words, but he was resolute all the same.
It wasn’t what Cal would’ve wanted. It wasn’t what I wanted, but bravery and loyalty could be unshakable. In this case, I knew it was. We would, if nothing else, give the Auphe something to think about.
“Tell us what you learned of Oshossi,” I said, changing the subject. There was nothing more to say about it. Nothing more to do but to go down fighting.
Cal had mentioned the brownstone Robin had told him about on the phone. And as far as the puck could tell, Oshossi had no backup locations. “It’s that or the park with his zoo. If he kicks our asses, well, that was that. But if we come out ahead on this one and he makes a run for it, then we’ll only have eight-hundred-some acres to search for him. What could be easier?”
“Soon. Coming soon.” We turned as Cal mumbled in his sleep, and it wasn’t Oshossi he was dreaming of. That I knew. His hand clasped open and shut. It was the serrated-edged combat knife he always slept with that he was missing. I picked it up from the coffee table and slipped the handle into his hand. His disturbed breathing smoothed out and he dropped into a heavier sleep.
“One last time,” I said to Cherish who had appeared at the hallway entrance. “We’ll try one last time for you and then, unfortunately, I believe you’ll be on your own.”
“It’s more than I could ask,” she said gravely.
It was much more, but Promise was willing to die with us. I owed her daughter at least one more effort. Although I was beginning to wonder—all this over a necklace? Oshossi might have his pride on no prey escaping him, but this seemed excessive over a handful of rocks and metal that held no other purpose. There is pride and then there is obsession. And to walk away when he might have easily killed us, it gave one pause. But I’d given Promise my word and I would live up to it this one last time.
Cal slept nine hours, knuckles white from his grip on the knife’s handle every minute of those hours. I ignored the ache in my head and watched him. There had been a time when he had slept that way every night, except he had done it under a bed curled in a ball. The first time the Auphe had taken him, when he’d come back he’d spent months that way.
During that time I’d slept little as I watched for the Auphe. Cal hadn’t talked much then; some days not at all. We’d been hiding in Charleston, South Carolina, at that time. I’d studied martial arts since I was twelve. Whatever city Sophia had dragged us to, I’d find a dojo. I’d collect cans or, when I could fool someone about my age, work any job I could find to pay for those lessons. I’d never forgotten that face at our kitchen window when I was seven. Or the others I’d seen since. And at eighteen, almost nineteen with a barely responsive brother, I went every day for as many hours as I could, taking him with me. I hadn’t known the Auphe for what they were then. I thought I would have a chance.
I became a warrior, a killer, but all I had managed was to put off the inevitable.
Eighteen Auphe. It may as well have been a hundred.
I detected the change in Cal’s breathing and looked up from the blade lying across my lap. “We’ve had a helluva run,” he said. “At least those bitches will remember that.”