"I am Kin, but I am also free," she announced as if it were common knowledge.
"Free being?" I asked.
She tossed back the rest of the drink and gave a sly smile. "Not caught."
14
Delilah was a wolf of her word. She took the pay, and two days later she showed up in the tunnel as shown on the map of the Second Avenue subway project Niko had sketched on a bar napkin. She also brought four other wolves with her. Big ones, all half-and-halfs and wearing hooded sweatshirts to cover the fact. It didn't stop an experienced eye from spotting the glitter of golden-brown irises, thickened black nails, and jagged teeth made for the ripping out of throats.
Niko, Promise, Robin, Boggle, Delilah with her wolves, and me, if we couldn't take care of the problem, we might as well grab a walker, move south with the snowbirds, and let Sawney have New York.
"Did you leave the kiddies with a nanny?" Robin asked as he looked up at the boggle. He didn't have any better memories from the fight with her mate than Niko or I did. It showed in the wary distance he kept from her.
From the contemptuous snap of her jaw and gale-force snort of rancid air, she managed to say without words that the boglets would do just fine on their own. I wasn't sure where she'd gotten into the tunnel system to eventually meet us, but I doubted it had involved a MetroCard.
"This is quite the mix." Promise's hair was in a braid this time, one woven with black cord, then wrapped in a thick club at the base of her neck. She smiled to show the tips of pointed canines. "The very best parties always are."
In contrast, Delilah was already frowning in impatience. "We go now. Skipped dinner. Mealtime is now."
"You didn't eat simply to work up an appetite for this?" Niko had brought his axe again and raised it slightly in respectful salute. "You are the warrior."
"Devious and ravishing." Robin sidled closer. He'd made the sacrifice called for by filthy tunnel water and wore jeans. My jeans. He didn't own any. Hit men after his ass he had plenty of, but casual wear for revenant hunting—that he was lacking.
"Devious, ravishing." She snuffled his hair, neck, and shoulder and it wasn't in what I would call a sexual way. "Hungry."
"All right, then. Moving along. Let us return Sawney to the hell from whence he came." Goodfellow was in the lead and moving with alacrity. He was armed with a sword, as was Promise. I had my guns, and the wolves and the boggle had what nature gave them. As we moved, Boggle … if she had a name, she also wasn't sharing…slid under the water with the slow grace of a crocodile. When she surfaced, the mud was gone, and her mottled scales held the pattern of an entire desert full of rattlesnakes. Then she went under again. The water here had been thigh deep; now it was almost waist high. It didn't cover her completely. You could still see the ridge of her spine and the glow of her eyes in the dim light, but she moved fast. So fast that within seconds she had disappeared—past Goodfellow and gone.
"You know, I'm not quite sure she'll need the rest of us after all," Robin remarked.
She had something beyond what her mate had possessed—more speed, more decisiveness, more of a predatory nature. I'd thought how our past informant had been content to sit and wait for his prey to come to him. This boggle, she wouldn't be. I'd made an assumption that all boggles were happy to dwell in their mud until dinner wandered by to be mutilated. It wasn't true. She would range, she would hunt…she chased down her prey, and having seen her in motion, I didn't think she would have it any other way.
It'd be fucking fantastic if she were the answer to our Sawney problem, but I knew better. Things were never that easy. And insanity, like Sawney had in spades, carried you a long-ass way.
We found that out in less than an hour. The tunnel we ended up in was long abandoned and most likely long forgotten. The lights had gone dark who knew when and remained that way. No one had come to replace burned-out bulbs. No one came for anything as far as I could tell. Niko, Robin, and I carried flashlights. No one else needed them. The wolves and Promise got by easily on our reflected light and I didn't know if the boggle needed light at all. As for what the revenants required…bump into it in the dark. If it's not cold and clammy, take a bite out of it. You didn't need light for that. Revenants weren't smart, but they didn't have to be, and the fact that Sawney had somehow lifted them an IQ point or two only made things worse for us. Worse being?
They came out of the water.
I thought the massive swell was the boggle at first, because they rose as one. Boggle was what my mind expected and so for a split second that's what I saw. Then reality—at least forty more revenants, six inches from us. Six inches. They couldn't have surrounded us as at least one of us would've felt them under the water as we passed them, but this…this was right up there with being the next best thing. I couldn't have smelled them separately from the ever-present rank decomposition already in these unused tunnels anyway. The wolves might have, though, if those revenant sons of bitches hadn't been covered with several feet of sluggishly flowing, horrifically ripe water. Now that several feet had become six goddamn inches and we were beyond screwed.
Niko and I were in the lead, having just traded off with Delilah and Promise ten minutes ago. The four other wolves were strung out loosely behind their silver-haired Alpha, and Robin was pulling rear guard.
Six inches. I kept thinking it, but it bore repeating. I was so close to the revenant that I could see the poreless stretch of pallid skin stretched across bone. I could see that behind the thick coating of white that covered their eyes was a fine tracery of purple veins, the size of a stream of spider silk, and that the lips had no lines in them. Lastly, I saw that every tooth in every yellowed grin was flecked with dried blood like speckling on a quail's egg.
Such a short distance, and it let me see more detail than I wanted. It also let me jam the Glock in the belly of the revenant before me and blow his spine in half. Six inches … six miserable inches, it isn't the space you want between you and a hungry foe, but at least you don't have to aim. Unfortunately, the same was true for them. They passed over us in a wave. No specific attacks on individuals—tidal waves don't do that. They just take you the hell down. Drowning in the ocean's version of a sucker punch wouldn't be pleasant; drowning in tainted tunnel water and moistly putrid flesh wasn't any better.
I lost the flashlight. I lost the Glock too, but that was purposeful. I let it go and went for my blades. One was the serrated knife, a mercenary magazine special, and the other a kukri. Niko had shown me how to be effective with the minimachete. Now I was ready to give the same lesson to a revenant or ten. I came up from the water, the thrashing bodies, and ripped through everything solid around me. Everyone in our temporary quasi team was experienced enough to give everyone else their room. Personal space, it's yours—kill at will.
It wasn't easy getting back up to air—air to breathe, air to slash metal through. It was a process of clawing and stabbing and biting. If you wanted to give a label to something that already had the perfect one: Survive. Process. Method. Survival. When I surged upward, I was spitting out something other than water. They weren't dead, they weren't decomposing, but damned if they didn't taste as if they were.
I kept both hands in motion, doing my best to clear the area around me. The serrated knife took out one throat; the kukri did the same but with a cleaner slice. All around was…what? The dimmest flickering of illumination from flashlights dropped underwater, a horde of white-eyed zombie wannabes, five giant wolves leaping and sending shredded intestines spilling through the air, a soaked and bloody puck and human with sword and axe, a vampire ripping an entire head from a revenant's shoulders. What did you call that?