The first time he had died.
This time, the very last time . . . I saw nothing.
Nothing.
The gray of gone.
My brother was gone.
Then I was in the hall, the katana I didn’t remember picking up back in my hand, my mala beads discarded. The blood seeped through my shirt, sticking it to my skin. My hands were covered with it. There had been ccoa around him . . . five dead. I knew who had sent them.
I was the gray of gone as well, but I heard a familiar whisper. Cal telling me the same thing I would’ve told him.
Wake up.
Telling me that, because brothers know you can fight like this but you shouldn’t. But waking up wasn’t an option. Waking up to his surviving the Auphe but not a South American immortal. No. If I woke up, I wouldn’t be able to do what I had to do.
Wake up and I’d know.
I couldn’t know. Not now. Not yet.
Not until every last one of them was a cooling corpse.
I didn’t listen to any more whispers, and I didn’t know anything after that. I made sure of it. I didn’t know how I made it to Central Park, but I was there. I didn’t know how long I searched for them. I didn’t know if I found them or they found me. I didn’t know if it was cold. I didn’t know if there was snow or grass beneath me. I didn’t know anything. There was only a whiteness in my head, an emptiness with only one thought. One concept. One word.
Death.
There were cadejo, slippery black canine shapes. They lunged and retreated. Came and went. I sliced them to pieces. They couldn’t touch the white void in me. Nothing could.
The ccoa were quicker, some on the ground, some leaping from the trees. They didn’t die as quickly, but they died. My hands, still covered with blood . . . now dried a red-brown, swung the katana and they died. Some with slit throats, some with open bellies. It didn’t matter . . . as long as they died.
The Gualichu came—the spider with a thousand legs. A thousand to avoid. A thousand to cut.
It was timeless in the void . . . the cadejo, the ccoa, the Gualichu. They were swallowed and gone in the whiteness. To note how long it took was to care. I didn’t care about anything anymore. Beyond death there was nothing.
Only the white.
Only the void.
My blade cut through the spider’s bulbous body. Thick fluid poured free. I moved through it to chop the creature in half. It may have screamed. It may have not. Everything was muffled, wrapped in layers of cotton—sound was distant, the moon an amorphous haze, the lifeless bodies around me meaningless shadows.
Only one thing was clear, one figure sharper than anything seen in my life.
Oshossi.
“All this for a thief.” He stood on the swell of a hill. “All this fury and rage over a common thief.”
Words. Meaningless words.
I walked toward him, unable to even feel the ground beneath me. Unable to feel the air in my lungs. I didn’t need air. I only needed this. Death. Vengeance.
I’d said I’d keep him safe. I’d told him that before he even knew what the word meant, and then I’d turned my back and this piece of dead flesh standing before me had made a liar of me.
A liar to my brother.
A failure to him.
A crack appeared in the void and the white filled with blood. My lips peeled back from my teeth. I had no words for Oshossi, because there were no words for what I would do to him. No way to express the agony in which he would die. There would be blood in my head, on my hands, and filling the air like a warm rain. After that, I thought that red-drenched void might then swallow me as it had swallowed everything else, and it would be a long, long time before I came out. If I ever came out.
I’d lied to him, I’d failed him, and I’d lost him.
I took another step, a double-handed grip on my katana. I met gold eyes and moved to extinguish them.
“Nik?”
It was the only thing as clear as Oshossi. The voice.
His voice.
I turned my head, so slowly—the air as thick as glue, and saw him. Impossibly solid, impossibly there, impossibly real.
Caliban Leandros of the Vayash Clan.
Cal.
My brother.
Whole. Not bloody. Not torn. Not dead.
How could that be? It couldn’t. It was impossible. A trick. Just another shard of broken glass that sliced my brain.
“Nik, what the hell are you doing here alone?” He had his gun in one hand and his cell phone in the other. The GPS tracker connected to mine. Beside him a white wolf whose back came as high as Cal’s waist snarled silently.
A trick . . .
I looked down. My hands were bloody but not with the dried blood of before, not Cal’s blood. This was fresh animal gore. My coat was streaked with it, too, but my shirt that had been stiffened and caked with the blood of his body held against mine, head cradled on my shoulder, it was clean cloth again.
But which was the trick?
“I came home. The door was wide open. Your mala beads were on the floor.” I had dropped them, hadn’t I? They’d held nothing for me anymore. He looked past me and growled, “What did this piece of shit do to get you here alone?”
Only a goddamn trick.
I fell to my knees, let the katana tumble from my hands, and pressed my eyes with the heels of my hands. Cal’s hands were instantly on my shoulders. I recognized the hard grip of them, recognized the urgency. “Come on, Cyrano. You’re starting to scare the shit out of me.” I looked up, seized his jacket, and pulled him against me in a rough hug, one hard enough I know his ribs groaned under the pressure. His eyes—worried, determined, fierce—and alive. Not the dead, dull gray. They were alive.
“Nik?”
I rested my forehead on the top of his shoulder and struggled to find my way out of my own Tumulus, my own private hell. He smelled like beer, wolf, and my herbal soap, since he could never be bothered to buy his own. He smelled like my brother. He smelled like one last chance at sanity. A hand cupped the back of my head. “Nik, what the hell did he do?”
I pulled air into my lungs, breathed for what seemed like the first time since I’d seen him dead on the apartment floor. Straightening, I let him go but refused to release my one-handed grip on his jacket. If this was the trick, I didn’t care. I would take it and not look back. I turned my head to see Oshossi still standing on the hill, unmoving. “You said thief.” My voice was guttural and thick. It had been one of the few words to penetrate the void. “You said a common thief.”
“You know nothing, do you? You truly do not know,” he said, gold eyes narrow with disdain. “You only spring to the defense of family, vampire family, take her word, no doubt, until she could have Xolo force you to take it, whether you wanted to or not.”
“Xolo? What’s this have to do with that goat sucker?” Cal demanded, gun between Oshossi and us. Behind us the white wolf, Delilah, stood stiffly with head lowered and ears back.
Oshossi whirled his machetes casually. “Nothing. You literally know nothing. It’s amazing. Criminally so.” He jammed one machete into the ground at least eight inches and kept the other one in movement. “Xolo is mine. He is special among his kind. Most chupacabras have mild telepathy, only enough to immobilize their simpleminded goat prey.” The pointed teeth smiled. “They are nearly as simpleminded as the goats themselves, but, ah, our equally simpleminded Xolo has much, much more mind control than his average brothers and sisters. He is a potent weapon, an idiot savant with a rare talent. Once he has time to study his new prey, to feel out the workings of their mind, he can push their thoughts here and there. And he can make anyone see anything. Put a picture, a memory in their head that is as real as any genuine one. All he needs is someone to pull on his leash and tell him to do it. You can see how valuable that would make him to me.”