“Why the hell do they keep coming back?” Cal muttered as he reached for a gray apron and wrapped it twice around his waist.
“Pride,” Ishiah responded, folding his arms.
“Pride?” Cal took a bottle of tequila and poured a large shot as a chupracabra approached the bar. “Yeah, I guess I can see that.” Facing your fear and spitting in its eye. I knew that was something he could relate to. Depositing the tequila in front of the goat sucker, he said, “Five bucks. Or you want to run a tab?”
The chupa, who looked remarkably like a shaved dog in a hooded jacket, looked at him with the dull blankness of the barely sentient before putting a dirty five on the counter and moving off with his drink. I wasn’t surprised. Cal complained often that monsters weren’t big tippers.
A rustle of feathers shifted my attention from the departing chupa to Ishiah. Aside from the gold-barred wings, which flickered in and out of existence, he didn’t look like anything that belonged on the roof of your typical manger scene. He was not quite the same as other peris. He was bigger, had more presence. Tall and broad-shouldered with light blond hair, fierce blue-gray eyes, a pronounced scar along his jaw, and one extremely large sword under the bar, not many of the patrons started anything when Ishiah was around.
“So you managed to pry Robin out of his well of self-pity?” he asked, looking down at a lightly snoring Goodfellow.
That was somewhat harsh. True perhaps, but harsh nonetheless.
“Wouldn’t let you in either, huh?” Cal said knowingly. “Yeah, we got him out and sobered him up. He’s doing better.”
Ishiah seemed relieved. He was hard to read, but our mother had spent Cal’s and my childhood sizing up many a mark. You couldn’t be Sophia’s get without picking up a few things. Looking back down at my book, I continued the dagger practice as I read. Relieved or not, Ishiah didn’t say anything further about Robin as I multitasked, reading about the fall of Potidaea, flipping the blade, and thinking of the Auphe in the park. Instead he asked, “Why is your brother here? He’s hardly a drinker.”
True, and it was rare that I came to the Ninth Circle. Drunken werecats spewing hairballs far and wide wasn’t my idea of an enjoyable evening, but I did make exceptions and this was one. I kept my eyes on my book as I tossed the dagger up into the air yet again and caught it blind. One: because it was good practice. You always know where your weapon is, whether you can see it or not. Always. Second: It annoyed Cal, as he couldn’t do it. I smiled to myself. Being an older brother wasn’t always about protection.
“We have business after work,” Cal said, although that wasn’t the real reason. We did have business, Seamus’s business, but that wasn’t why I was here. Ordinarily I would’ve met Cal after work, here or at the stakeout location, but with the Auphe in the here and now, things were different. Now none of us were to go out alone after dark in the more deserted areas of the city if we could avoid it.
Not that the Auphe wouldn’t appear in broad daylight—we’d seen that and their no doubt justified faith in the human desire to not see what it didn’t want to see—but it was rare. Georgina had promised me she wouldn’t go out at all once the sun set, although I was hoping that the Auphe had forgotten about her or decided that Cal himself had. As monsters went, they weren’t precisely plugged into the community gossip, and Cal had seen next to nothing of her in the past months. Even if the Auphe had been following him for some time, they could take it that she didn’t mean a thing to him. With their twisted brains, I doubted they could even imagine she meant anything at all to him if he didn’t spend nearly every day with her.
It wasn’t true, or it hadn’t been. Cal had cared enough that he’d done everything he could to push her out of his life. To keep her safe. And he had. Hopefully, the Auphe would believe what he’d so desperately attempted to make true, or had missed those incredibly rare visits altogether.
“Auphe business?” Ishiah’s voice darkened a fraction.
“Is that a good guess or do you know something?” And at that moment, Ishiah wasn’t Cal’s employer. The peri wasn’t Robin’s sometime friend, sometime enemy right then. He was someone who might have information that could save us.
The only thing Cal and I had in common physically were gray eyes, and I raised mine to see his turn empty and cool. Ishiah wasn’t easily intimidated, but when it came to the Auphe, he had the same reaction as everyone else. He certainly wasn’t going to do anything in their favor, but seeing is believing, and I wanted to see this very clearly. I closed my book and stared at the peri with a gaze as empty as my brother’s. And if my dagger did embed itself in the table this time, it wasn’t anger, it wasn’t a loss of control. . . .
It was incentive.
“No. I haven’t heard anything . . . yet.” He looked at the table, the dagger, and then at me. I wasn’t here often enough for Ishiah to have much insight into me, not firsthand, but I thought he caught a glimpse now.
He went on, his eyes still taking my measure. “But we peris suspected the Auphe weren’t all destroyed. Millions of years of survival have served them well.” Shaking his head grimly, he added, “And when there’s one Auphe left, people are going to die.” He turned back to Cal and nodded toward his throat. “As for how I know . . . the Auphe have a distinctive saw-toothed edge on their claws. Makes for an interesting pattern.”
“That’s astounding, Sherlock. Take a bow.” Cal poured a beer with a whiskey back for a wolf that slunk up to the bar. “Let me know if you do hear anything. Things are going to get nasty. You might have to find a new employee of the month.”
“One who doesn’t terrorize, impale, and melt the clientele?” he said, brows lowering in an annoyed scowl. “Pity me. I’ll have to scour the city.”
“You just can’t let that go,” he grumbled as he cleaned the bar top, the tension passing. “And, come on, only one of those was intentional. Accidents happen.” Now, those were work stories he hadn’t shared with me. He caught my narrowed glance from the corner of his eye, dropped his head, and groaned.
“Yes, I’m rather particular about the mutilation of my patrons. My apologies.” Ishiah turned and went about the business of running the bar, and Cal kept serving up the drinks, avoiding my gaze when he could, and muttering, “Ah, shit,” when he couldn’t. I saw a discussion in our future. A very long, detailed, unfortunate discussion . . . unfortunate for my brother, at any rate.
When eleven came, the peri Samyel came in to work the rest of Cal’s shift for him. For a peri, he was considered mellow. From the one thing Cal had bothered to tell me, Sammy hadn’t heaved anyone through the wooden door of the bar for almost several days now. They must’ve gone through quite a few doors. A temper can be an expensive habit.
Cal took off the apron, passed it over, and turned to me. I was standing at the bar with book in hand. “Ready?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he answered, retrieving his leather jacket and shoulder holster from beneath the bar. Lifting the hinged countertop, he walked through. “Although I think this sounds like a waste of time. Probably a crock cooked up by Seamus to get some Promise time. I don’t trust that haggis-eating son of a bitch one damned bit.”
“Cal,” I said with amusement as I shrugged into the long gray duster that covered the sword strapped to my back, “you don’t trust anyone. It’s your religion, your mantra, and I believe you have it on a T-shirt.” Not that I trusted Seamus either; I didn’t, but I did trust Promise.
“Hey, not true,” he scowled defensively. “I trust you. I trust Robin.”
“And?” I prodded patiently.
“I trust Promise to do what’s best for you,” he evaded. He did trust her for that, but just as I came first with my brother, so did I come first with Promise. That could lead to situations. It had led to a situation in the past that hadn’t ended well for Cal. She’d pushed him to access his lost memories even though I’d told her before of the one previous attempt, which had had a catastrophic effect on my brother. She knew the danger, but because of me—for me—she’d pushed him regardless. And because Cal wanted to keep me safe as much if not more than she did, he let her. It hadn’t ended quite as badly as the first time, but badly enough that Cal nearly lost himself in a black pit of memories that could have destroyed him. He’d also unconsciously built a gate that led straight to Auphe hell, Tumulus, and had had absolutely no control of it or himself. I’d had to knock him unconscious.