"Boom chika bow wow."
Robin slid up, patterned head to toe in green leaves. He was a forest and in the forest were eyes—the cagey, wise ones of foxes peering through the foliage. "Someone has you down pat," I snorted. "Who's running around here painted like a henhouse?"
"They're resting." He grinned shamelessly. "They're very, very tired." The grin widened. "But you, on the other hand, are wide-awake. Care to help yourself?" He waved an arm toward the inside of the apartment. There were thirty people at least, all brightly colored and most of them horizontal.
"Are they all human?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Then no." I took his arm and pulled him into the hall. "I need to talk to you. There's trouble."
"Isn't there always? It's exhausting. Perhaps I should dress first?" he suggested dryly. "I'm perfectly comfortable as Zeus made me, but not everyone is as amenable."
With the two naked girls holding my attention, I hadn't even realized Goodfellow was wearing the same party attire as everyone else…absolutely nothing. "Crap," I groaned, blinked, then looked away hurriedly. "Goddamn, Goodfellow. You have a permit for that?" Talk about your weapons of mass destruction. Jesus.
"Now you know precisely why I'm so smug," he said with mock hauteur. "Give me ten minutes." He disappeared back into the interior of the apartment. I waited in the hall, a lack of faith in my own willpower keeping me there—not to mention a healthy dose of survival instinct. It wasn't only lamias that could drain a man unto death. The girls still framed in the door looked entirely capable of doing the same. Not necessarily a bad way to go, though.
"All right, kid, I'm cleaner than a nun's pair of Sunday panties. What trouble are you speaking of?" Robin, dressed with damp hair, had stepped back into the hall to close the door behind him. The red and blue girls were still intermingled close enough to be only seconds away from making purple, and I craned my head to catch one last glimpse as the metal swung to block them from sight.
"Ishiah." I straightened and said seriously, "He said someone is targeting you. He doesn't know who or why, but the word is out."
"The sirrush," he announced after a short stretch of silence as we walked.
"Yeah." The building had the typical flavor of artist tenants…old, decrepit, and smelling of pot. There was one lonely light overhead and it flickered uncertainly. "So who's after you? Who'd want to kill you?" I waited a beat and added, "Besides me, I mean."
"You must be joking," he said incredulously. "I couldn't begin to guess. Ex-lovers, ex-business partners, ex-marks…there isn't a PDA in the world big enough to compile that list."
The light gave up the ghost entirely as we reached the stairwell. There was still illumination from the street coming through a distant, dirt-filmed window, but it was gray and wispy—a ghost among us. It reminded me. "It can't be Abbagor. He's dead." Abbagor had been one of Robin's acquaintance/informants. A troll the size of a Lincoln, he'd lived and died under the Brooklyn Bridge. And Niko and I had nearly died with him. He'd been one malevolent, flat-out evil son of a bitch and every time I passed the bridge I flipped it off in his memory.
"Even if he were alive, it wouldn't have been him. Abby did his own dirty work. He enjoyed it far too much to farm it out." He started down the stairs.
"The Auphe." I hadn't wanted to say it, because I didn't want it to be true, but burying your head in the sand was only going to leave your ass up and chewed the hell off.
"No," Robin denied. "They're not above subcontracting, but they would be more subtle than a sirrush. Auphe are insidious, cunning, all the things a poor, simple sirrush is not." He sighed as he moved downward. "Thinking about my own horrific end, what a way to ruin a good orgy."
"Sorry about that." I followed him. His hands were empty, but mine were not…one of them at least. I held the Glock against my denim-covered outer thigh. "I assumed you'd want to know you've been marked for death. I don't know what I was thinking."
"When it comes to murder and assassination, it is the thought that counts. I appreciate the effort." The words were sober, the expression anything but…until he moved on. "It's hardly the first time. Or the hundredth for that matter," he said absently as he looked back at me. "You're well? Before she left, Delilah said you were recovered. Do you have full strength in your arm?"
"Normally I'd flex, but after what I saw upstairs, I'm keeping the sexiness to a minimum." The stairs were concrete and slick from years and years of pounding feet. "And, yeah, I'm fine."
"Good—that's good, because your chest looked…" He grimaced. "Never mind." Hitting the landing, he paused to say slyly, "I think she was attracted to you, our wolf girl. The situation was too dire for the customary ass-sniffing and leg-humping that is so prized on the wolf social scene, but there was definitely a look in her eye."
"Do you want more than one person trying to kill you?" I drawled. "I don't really have the time, but the inclination is no problem whatsoever."
He didn't have time to take me up on the offer. Someone…something else spoke in his place.
"Give me drink."
Goodfellow had been about to move down another step. He stopped, set his mouth tensely, and held up a hand before I could open my mouth. I turned my head and looked up past the spiraling box pattern of stairs, then down past the same. There was nothing to see or hear other than a faint dripping sound and the flicker and buzz of elderly lightbulbs.
The words were raspy as sandpaper against rock and utterly devoid of humanity. And then there was a clicking sound…nails against concrete. A slow, patient tapping, silence, then the clicking again.
A rustling started…scales or feathers, I couldn't tell.
"Give me drink."
"Go." Robin grabbed a handful of my jacket and hurled us both toward the landing door. I didn't stop to protest or ask who was so damn thirsty. If Goodfellow said go, then going was a damn good idea. I slammed into the door and flung it open.
It was waiting for us.
It was a bird. Gray as ash, round black eyes, and the size of a half-grown German shepherd. It used jet claws to score the dirty tile, sending chunks of it tumbling aside. The black beak, sharp as a sword, gaped to show an inner maw the plague yellow of jaundiced flesh. "Give me—"
"Drink," grated the one behind us.
Identical to the other, it came up the stairs toward the door propped open by Robin. It didn't waddle like you would expect from a bird. It stalked with the smooth gait of a creature used to running its prey into the ground. The flattened head cocked to one side. There was red on this one's beak and staining the feathers of its chest black. Now I knew what it had a hankering for, and it wasn't lemonade. I turned. The one in the hall had snaked closer, one clawed foot held in the air like the weapon it was. The talons were four inches long and, if they were capable of punching through the floor, they were capable of punching through flesh.
"Bad?" I said over my shoulder.
"Bad," Robin affirmed tightly.
That was all I needed. I raised my gun and fired at the one in the hall. The gray head exploded, feathers filling the air. Some, coated with black blood, stuck to the wall and floor and me. The body poised motionless for a second, then fell sideways, talons still extended in either a last-gasp pursuit of prey or from postmortem pissiness. Take your pick.
I heard the scrape of metal against scabbard as Goodfellow pulled his sword. Following that was a gurgle of someone not getting the drink they so desperately wanted. I turned just in time to see the feathered head bounce down the stairs. "Bad," I commented, "but not that bad."