“I’m still here, so you haven’t broken it yet.” He moved in and peeled off my coat. Stained in blood and fluids, it probably wasn’t salvageable, but he tossed it in the sink anyway. “But, yeah, I can see how it’d seem that way.” He took my arm and moved me toward the bathroom. “You were supposed to let me carry the weight this time, Nik, remember?” He turned on the shower. “And I did. At the last second, I figure out how to get rid of the Auphe. And guess what? You still get screwed.” Once possessed by a creature that had lived in mirrors, he’d had a fierce phobia of the reflective surfaces for nearly a year. Fighting the fading but still-lingering effects of it now, he looked at himself in the simple square of glass bolted to the wall. “I don’t look like so much to be such a huge damn Achilles heel, do I?”
I wondered how long it had been since he’d actually seen himself full-on, not just in quick snatches. His hair had grown since the phobia had started, but he kept it cut at shoulder length, so no change there. His face had become more lean, his brows darker and thicker, but his eyes . . . Once you’re no longer a small child, the color of your eyes doesn’t change, but what’s behind that color does. Whatever lurked there had gone darker in Cal. And then I looked at myself to see the same thing. After this week . . . after this night, I’d gone darker as well.
“I think I need a haircut.” His faint grin faded as he went on. “I’m probably going to die before you, Nik.” His eyes locked with mine in the reflection. “I’m not as good as you are. I’m not as smart. And it won’t be your fault. It’ll just be life and death and all the fuckups in between. You made a promise to yourself eighteen years ago when you should’ve been playing with Legos. Well, you did it. You kept me alive. Despite Sophia and the Auphe, you managed to keep my ass alive. Now let it go. It’s my responsibility from now on.” He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Keep watching my back, yeah, and I’ll keep watching yours, but bottom line . . . you’ve put your time in. If I go, it’s not because you failed. It’s because whoever I was taking on was better or luckier than me or, shit, I was just having a bad day. And, hell yeah, still kill the son of a bitch who took me out, make it hurt too, but . . .” The smile was dark, worried. “Just try to do it with a little less suicidal fury. Homicidal fury is good. Suicidal, bad. Got it?”
“And you’ll do the same if it goes the other way?” I already knew the answer to that. I’d seen him dive headfirst into death twice in the past year to save me. He’d do the same to follow me.
“Yeah.” He hung his head for at least a minute, then shook it ruefully. “We’re screwed, aren’t we? Okay.” He exhaled, straightened, and accepted it. I couldn’t do any less for him than he would do for me. “So we go out together, then. Just like with the Auphe. Sounds like a plan.” He pushed me toward the streaming water. “You’re a bloody mess. I doubt you want any souvenirs of tonight, much less spider intestinal goop on your leg.”
He left and I showered. When I was done, we sat side by side on my bed, his shoulder resting against mine to remind me what was true. I couldn’t even go in the living room without seeing the lie in vivid detail—an afterimage on the floor that was as bright and real to me as any camera’s flash. Like the night before, we watched the sky lighten. This time it wasn’t celebrating our freedom. This time it was me not being able to close my eyes for more than a minute without seeing Xolo’s handiwork, and it was Cal not letting me spend that time alone.
The sun came up on a new day.
I hoped it was Cherish’s last.
15
We ran our asses off in the next week. Literally. My jeans were getting a little looser. But if that’s what it took. I followed Delilah’s recipe—run, hunt, fight. Because she was right—Niko was sick. If I’d come home to find his dead body on the floor I’d have been sick too. Way past sick. Homicidal/suicidal—just opposite sides of the same coin.
And although Nik hadn’t said, my body had to have been on the floor, apparently with a lot of blood soaked into the rug around it. As the rug had been eight-by-six and he’d slashed it all to pieces, that illusionary pool of blood must’ve been pretty damn large. Pretty damn horrific.
When I’d seen him in the park, he’d been gone. What was left was a Niko-shaped weapon, a human killing machine. No emotion, no thought, no soul. Whatever he had seen on that floor couldn’t be erased by destroying a rug, but if it made him feel better, I was happy I’d held the door open for him to throw it through.
He didn’t talk much in the days after, not that Nik was ever one for running off at the mouth. So I did the talking for both of us. Considering my conversation skills—pretty damn lacking—he probably wished I’d died after all, but it kept him occupied. Occupied, annoyed—they were close, right? At the end of the week, finally . . . finally I got a swat to the back of my head when I asked whether werewolf sex or vampire sex deserved the most porno points.
We also hunted that week—revenants, mostly. They were easy to find, only moderately difficult to kill, and so disgustingly fond of eating human flesh that chopping the head off one didn’t bother me at all.
We fought too. We sparred in Washington Square Park, me cursing the cold. We sparred in dojos. We sparred anywhere you could swing a wooden sword or throw a human body, but not at the apartment. We didn’t spend much time there at all. I was already checking Craigslist for a new place. Nik would never be able to walk into that apartment again without seeing me dead at his feet.
Toward the middle of the week I scooped up the mala beads that were lying carelessly on the coffee table and handed them to him. His lips had tightened. “I’m not sure those are for me anymore.”
“They better be, because you have to teach me more about this meditation crap.” I held back one bracelet for myself. “Now that the Auphe are gone, I need to deal with this gate shit. I need to be at peace and one with the whatever. You know, less of the creepy blood-licking homicidal monster thing.” I half grinned, half grimaced. “It seems to put people off.”
“You didn’t lick the ccoa blood off your hand,” he pointed out.
No, but I’d damned sure thought about it when I’d opened the gate to the river. “I did worse in the warehouse,” I responded honestly. And I had. The Auphe weren’t gone, no matter what I said or what the Vigil thought. As long as I was around, the race lived on. There was a different race going on inside me, and right now the human half wasn’t too damn far in the lead. By a nose, maybe, and I was hoping for better than a photo finish. I might not want to rain on my own parade, but denial takes you only so far.
So we meditated. He might not have been moved to do it for himself, but he did it for me. I only fell asleep fifty percent of the time, which put me in the A-for-effort column. We also did the meditating in the park. Talk about being at one with the world. Sit on the frozen ground long enough and you’ll be one all right—practically need a crowbar to separate your icy butt from the packed snow.
Niko talked to Promise daily on the phone, but she didn’t come to our place and he didn’t go to hers. I didn’t know if it was just understood or they’d talked about it. As Nik had thought, Cherish had disappeared nearly thirty minutes after he’d left the New Jersey house. Gave her confused mother a malicious smile and spat at her feet, saying, “Seamus was a better parent and a better vampire than you. And I was a far better lover to him than you ever were.” Death, vengeance, and betrayal weren’t enough—she had to toss in a gothic soap opera too. Then with gloating laughter, she had taken Xolo into the night. Gone. And with Xolo holding her back, Promise hadn’t been able to do a thing to stop her. Although Cherish had manipulated us so well that she’d barely needed the chupa up until the end. Robin was humiliated he hadn’t spotted it, and jealous that he might not have been able to pull it off half as well.