“We have to go,” Cal called from below. “Cops are coming.”
All the shattering of glass was bound to have drawn attention. As for staying downstairs, he knew I’d call him if I needed him in the fight. Otherwise I needed him to stay out of the way. I needed the room. If only Promise and Cherish had known that.
I put away my katana, fetched my fallen blade, and moved down the stairs to the first floor. “For the best hunter in South America, he spends quite a bit of time either escaping us or letting us go,” I mused. I gazed over my shoulder at Cherish and wondered if she was telling the truth—the entire truth. Xolo’s hazy eyes drifted over me. Then again, Cherish was guarding what seemed the most helpless of chupas, and she was Promise’s daughter. Something completely worthless couldn’t have come from Promise. Could it?
No. No, Cherish deserved a chance.
“Nik, you okay?” Cal’s hand urged me toward the door. I’d stopped, unaware. “Your head hurt?”
Slightly foggy, I shook off my Cherish thoughts for another time and then we were on the sidewalk, moving fast. “No. I’m fine.”
“I’m surprised Oshossi didn’t pick you up and catapult you through the floor,” Robin said. “Much like a Three Stooges movie.”
“We fought with blades. He’s good.” I slid the knife back in its place. “I’m better.”
“Unless he starts throwing cars around again, that makes you hot shit.” Cal was looking over his shoulder with distant eyes. He’d been doing that quite a bit lately. With the Auphe searching for us and finding us more often than not, I wasn’t surprised.
“Cal?”
He jerked his attention back to us. “Yeah, the cars. Stay away from the cars.” He said it to Cherish. “Or start running again, because we’re done. Probably in more ways than one.”
Back at Rafferty’s, Cal watched the snow from the kitchen window. It was falling again, although in scattered swirls rather than the blizzard of before. “Are you hungry?” I asked, about to fix what few groceries we’d stopped and obtained on the way home. I’d already patched up the shallow slash on my side.
He shook his head and kept watching.
“What is it?” Cal wasn’t much for introspection. Unlike Xolo, if he was looking, there was something to see. I moved to his side and saw nothing but snow and hundreds of bare trees.
He narrowed his eyes and kept them on the window. “One of them is watching us.”
The Auphe.
“Right now,” he added grimly.
13
“I can’t see it,” I said, calm. Maybe a little too calm. The bogeyman was right outside, but look at me. Look how calm, cool, and collected I was. Like ice. You could frost a beer mug on my ass. “But it’s out there.” The Auphe bitch. I breathed on the glass and wrote in the condensation I SEE YOU. I didn’t really see it, but I felt it—as much as if it had been standing outside the window, inches away, facing me, all grins and murderous cheer. “It must have opened its gate pretty far away, because I didn’t feel it.”
“But you feel it now?” Niko stood by my side and kept his eyes focused on the night beyond the glass. “This is new, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, new.” New, fun, and exciting. Feel a monster’s eyes on you. Hurry and call in now for a sample. Comes with a free prize. “All the traveling I’ve being doing lately. Maybe it’s another instinct thing that finally popped up. Pack animals sensing their own kind.”
That sense of being watched for days—it’d started out small, like a small dose of paranoia, and it had grown and swelled, to the point that I was looking over my shoulder every hour or so, until I’d looked out of the window today, this very minute, and known. “They’ve always known where I was, Nik. Always. Since the day I was goddamn born. It was part of their plan.” And remaking the entire world in their image, that had been one helluva plan.
“We guessed they were watching us since we stopped running, but this makes even more sense,” he said. “They wouldn’t have to watch us all the time to know where we were. And it would explain how they followed us all those years. How we wondered why we never lost them for long. How they always managed to track us down again and again.”
“They could sense me, no matter where we went.” A biologically built-in tracking system. GPS built into the genes. The results were slower but as sure. Sticking together these past few days had been the worst thing we could’ve done, all of us, because I led them to us. The Auphe could sense themselves in me. Sense their blood just like I was one of them. It was one more repulsive goddamn tie to them and a hideous thought, but that thought, as horrible as it was . . .
It gave me another one.
I grinned darkly and saw the reflection of my teeth in the glass.
A really nasty idea.
One every last piece of shit of them deserved.
Timing. It was all about timing. The same way setting off a bomb is about timing, because the Auphe were a living bomb. Too late and you might miss your target. Right on time, way to go. Too soon? Too soon usually meant you weren’t going to be around to appreciate the other options. . . . You were going to be tomato-colored paste on a wall somewhere. And when the explosive had a mind and an agenda of its own, yeah, you were probably screwed. It didn’t bother me that my whole life hung on a “probably.” Hell, it always had.
The next day, Delilah, who had refused to talk on the phone, refused to fear any Auphe, now shivered with an all-over body twitch of disgust when I sat in the cubicle beside her in the main branch of the New York Public Library, the mythology section. It seemed appropriate. “You stink.” She cupped her hand over her nose. “Of suburbia.” It was as close to horrified as I’d ever seen her.
I wasn’t sure what suburbia smelled like. Pink flamingos, Virgin Marys, waving flags, and Big Wheels, maybe. “If you weren’t so damn stubborn, you wouldn’t have to smell me,” I retorted.
Every time I’d tried to talk to her on the phone she’d disconnected, until I’d finally agreed to meet her. Since I was an Auphe homing beacon, I made sure she was there a half hour before I arrived and she’d promised to stay a half hour after I left. Then again, promises and Delilah—I wasn’t sure she was patient enough to always keep them. Smart enough, yes. Patient . . . different story.
“Better clean death than your stench.” She left her cubicle to sit on the desk of mine, very obviously not there for the book learning.
“The Auphe won’t give you that.”
“Yes, yes.” She rolled copper eyes. “To wait thirty minutes. Sneak like weasel. Cower like sheep. I understand.” Her silver ponytail hung over her breast. “Where is your keeper?”
“Safe.” Nik was a lot safer alone and on the move than he was with me. Not that it hadn’t taken some convincing . . . on both sides. We’d had to convince each other and ourselves that it was the right thing to do. If I was wrong about the Auphe being imprinted on me like Satanic baby ducklings, if they were simply following with more skill than any creature should have, I could lose Nik. If I was right and the Auphe got pissed off that I was the only one they could find . . . then Nik could lose me.
Of the games they’d played with us the past week this time, I was finally dealt in. And my hand was good—aces high, because I didn’t think I was wrong.
Not this time.
And that promise I’d made to Nik, how I’d outthink them, how I’d get us out of this—I might just be able to keep it.
They were all gone now—Promise, Cherish, and Robin. They’d scattered before the sun had come up. The Auphe watching that night had been joined by another one and had stayed put as the others left. Both had melted out of existence when Niko and I had driven off that morning in his car before going our separate ways in the city. I hadn’t felt one since. Not yet. Definitely not when Niko and I had split up.