An animated metal cat. It was bizarre and then some. How could it move? Was it alive or some sort of ancient Egyptian sorcerer's mind trick? I didn't know, although I was leaning toward the latter. I believed in monsters—hell, yeah. But magic? If there wasn't some form of flesh or bone behind it, I had a hard time buying into it. I did know that I preferred the walking statue idea to the thought that it was some dried-up cat mummy.
Fake magic or real, it led me to Wahanket. With his preoccupation with technology, I should've pictured him surfing the Net or watching cable, but I couldn't. The mental image was too incongruous. It was much easier to imagine him plunging an ancient dagger into the chest of some poor schmuck writhing on an altar. Or maybe dragging his foot and moaning as he shambled toward his prey. Shamble, drag. Very shambolic. Was that even a word?
Probably not, but I was right about one thing: He wasn't surfing the Net. He was…dissecting something—a rat, I thought. A really big rat. Huge. I made a face and drawled, "Supper?"
"You, uneducated baboon, should not mock the ways of your betters." The curdled shadows instead of a sickly glow in his eye sockets must have meant he was feeling mellow. "Which would be everyone inhabiting this infested world, including my new pet." He indicated the rodent with the flourish of an antique scalpel.
Pet? And I realized he wasn't taking it apart; he was putting it back together. I wasn't sure if that was less disturbing or more so, and I decided to ignore it altogether. Shifting my gaze slightly away from the bloodstained crate doubling as an operating table, I said, "I'm here about Goodfellow."
"The puck." The scalpel was discarded for a needle threaded with a fine silver wire that gleamed between hard black fingers. "His tongue is impertinent, but his gifts are acceptable. What have you brought me?"
Fortunately I'd thought of that. Unfortunately that early in the morning the street vendor supplies had been skimpy. "Yeah, about that …" I looked down at the gun in my hand. Normally I didn't make a habit of giving up a weapon to a creature I barely knew and didn't trust, but I'd be fooling myself to think Wahanket would need a gun to try to kill me. Or to take me apart and put me back together in some sort of hideous parody of Cal Leandros. "Here."
The dark hand curled around the grip, and I felt the brush of skin harder than horn. "Ahhh, such a pretty toy. The modern equivalent of the flintlock." He abandoned the rat for a closer examination. "I have seen many images, but there are no examples of such recent firearms down here in my domain." The teeth gnashed in a grin. "Man's enthusiasm for killing his own kind still pleases me, even after all this time."
As my eyes drifted back reluctantly, behind him I thought I saw the rat twitch. No, I was sure of it … with belly still gaping half open and eyes blankly empty, it twitched. I looked away again and decided breakfast wasn't the way to go today. "Great. I'm glad you're happy. Sorry there's no bow and ribbon. Now can we talk about Robin?"
"Baboons were never one for patience." He pulled out the clip as if he'd done it a thousand times. "Interesting."
The rat squeaked. It was faint and raspy and nowhere near being on my list of latest frigging greatest hits. "Goodfellow," I emphasized sharply. Hearing my own voice was better than hearing the alternative. "Someone's trying to kill him. You know anything about that? You know who might be gunning for him?"
The clip was slammed back home and a tongue as weathered as beef jerky clicked against the teeth. "You ask much of me. I hold the secrets of Osiris, the knowledge of Thoth, the death rolls of Anubis, but a list so long? You request the impossible."
That was the standard line. Your poor, your hungry, your huddled masses yearning to kill me, that was Robin's motto. "How about you narrow it down to the top twenty or so? Think you could do that?" There was the scrabbling of paws and the moist thump of what I hoped was a tail against wood. "Come on, Hank. I gave. Now you give, and you can get back to your Franken-rat, okay?" Poor damned trash muncher. I was no rodent fan, but Jesus.
"Twenty?" The weapon was placed carefully, almost lovingly, on top of a glass case containing a stuffed baboon, which, by the way, did not look like me. "As I have said, impossible. You ask me to separate twenty grains of sand from the desert's mighty stretch. Such a task cannot be done." There was a hole in his chest. I hadn't noticed that before. A sunken hole and the shine of gold and turquoise deep within. "Perhaps I could thin the wheat from the chaff and give you a hundred creatures who wish death upon the puck." Arms of bones and ropy flesh wrapped with brown wrappings crossed. "Go. Return in seven days and I will have the information you seek."
"Seven days …" I started to protest as there was a louder thump, wet and horrible, and then the skitter of racing paws. I looked down; I couldn't help it. Hurriedly, I looked back up, tasted bile, and hoped I never saw a rat, dead or undead, again as long as I lived.
"Go." The glow was returning to Wahanket's hollows of bone.
I went.
A week … I only hoped Robin lived that long.
I went back into the maze, wandered far enough away from Wahanket that I felt a little more comfortable, and then I did it again…once more doing what I'd told Nik I wouldn't. I sat on the dusty floor, cross-legged, and held out my hand. I focused, twisted that focus, and it came. I kept it smaller than a full-sized gate as I had before, but went for just a little bigger this time. From the size of an orange to that of a basketball. And I then focused harder. The gate, nothing but the gate. No thoughts of Tumulus or the Auphe. No thoughts of feeding someone to them. No thoughts that weren't mine. It wasn't going to happen. I wouldn't let it. Maybe I wouldn't even admit to having them in the first place.
The gray light swirled and eddied like a particularly dangerous riptide and it glowed like flesh-melting radioactivity. It was still ugly as hell and clamped down on the base of my brain like a vise. It hurt, it felt cold and wrong, and here I was doing it anyway.
Why? Because like I'd thought before, it could save my life someday. It could save Niko's life. That made it worth doing. It made the pain, the blood, and the sense of teetering on a chasm hungry for just one misstep worthwhile. The Auphe had never given me a damn thing I wanted to have or know, but if some genetic trick of theirs could ever save my brother or anyone else I cared about, then some good would come out of the horror show they had tried to make of me and the world.
I really wanted that bit of good. I'd saved Robin and myself before. I wanted to be able to do that again if push came to shove. Niko lived a life of monsters and madness because of who I'd been born. And he held his own—we both did, but if I could have that emergency exit available, I'd feel better. I'd feel maybe a fraction less responsible for the mess the Auphe had made of both our lives.
If only I could get a little goddamn better at it.
Despite my determination, the chasm whispered at me. It said things…bad things. It wanted things too, things even worse. I could almost touch those things, taste them, feel them…
Shit.
With a massive effort, I shut them out. They were gone and I felt a slight sense of satisfaction … a very wary satisfaction. I wasn't stupid.
The pain spiked and with a hiss at the sharp ache, I closed the doorway. The light faded away and I wiped my nose with the dish towel I'd brought for the occasion. It worked better than the paper towels had. As I did, I thought it was nothing. Just things I imagined the Auphe thought and felt. I was in a creepy as hell basement doing an even creepier thing and who wouldn't imagine some crap in that situation? It was a fluke the first time and my imagination this time.
The blood kept coming and I wadded the cloth and held it against the flow for nearly ten minutes before it stopped. My ears were okay. Only that big gate I'd made to escape the sirrush had set them off. Wiping my face thoroughly, I fished the Tylenol out of my pocket and swallowed two. The headache, the blood, it was all still there. Practice didn't seem to be making perfect. That super gate I'd opened while fighting the Hob months ago had definitely gotten down and dirty with whatever I used to open those rips in reality. I could almost feel the blockage in my brain. Like a damaged area, hardened…thickened like scar tissue. I'd have to get around it or push through it.