"I've lived a long, long time and I've seen many, many things," Robin said, awed, at my back, "and I can confidently say that I have never seen anything quite like that." I didn't have time to respond. They were almost on us and I raised the Eagle and fired several shots.
Explosive rounds, they might not have much effect on Sawney, but they worked like a fucking charm on his boys. We didn't end up fighting them, but we did end up wearing them. I wiped a hand across my face, clearing it of pulverized flesh and thin, watery blood. I didn't wait for Robin's outraged comment about his wardrobe that had to be fast on its way. "Yeah, sorry about that," I said automatically as I heard his disbelieving gurgle behind me.
We moved on without further discussion. All in all, the best thing for me. We stepped over the bodies of straitjacketed revenants and dodged the two slow-moving ones that had craters in their heads. The spoonful of brains they had left kept them moving around, but not too aware.
Which is exactly how I felt when the ground disappeared beneath me.
21
This just wasn't my day.
I used to hate the sensation of falling, same as anyone else. But since I'd made a few gates and traveled through them … a traveler just as Sawney said…that had changed. I still didn't like it, don't get me wrong, but I sort of recognized the feeling. Walking through those gates was like falling, only not just down. It felt like falling down, up, and sideways— all at once. Hard to imagine, but that's how it felt.
So when the floor caved in under me and I fell, for a second I was confused. Had I opened a gate and not even realized it? One moment of confusion, but it was long enough to hit and hit hard.
I lost the flashlight. I didn't lose my gun. If the fall had killed me, I still wouldn't have lost the gun.
I'd landed on my side. I blinked dazedly into the blackness and realized…yeah, that wasn't an Auphe gate. You fell, asshole. Now get the hell up. It was easier said than done. I wheezed as I pulled air into shocked lungs and tried to move. That's when I felt the fingers on my leg. They crept up under my jeans and touched my calf, circles of ice on my bare skin. They moved soothingly, stroking my leg as they sucked the warmth from it. Sawney. Only Sawney drained the heat from you like that. I growled, low and incoherent, in the back of my throat and tried harder to move my arm, more specifically my hand holding the gun. Oxygen-starved, I didn't have much luck.
"Cal?"
It was from above. Niko. He'd managed to avoid falling with me. Good for him. I wasn't surprised, but I was a little relieved.
"Cal?" This time it came from beside me, along with the crunch of boots landing on the debris of shattered tile. There was light, a hand on my face, and then the silver sweep of a sword. The frozen touch on my calf disappeared just as the claws had begun to puncture the skin. That trademark crazy laugh went with them.
I let my arm relax. A futile tremor was all I'd gotten out of it anyway. In the flashlight's glow I could see the Eagle resting in the dirt, my white finger lax on the trigger. I also saw Niko's boots move closer, and then, as I looked upward and he simultaneously knelt, I saw his face. He was pissed as hell. "Sawney." He ran a quick hand over my arms, legs and spine. "I am going to enjoy killing him far more than I should."
I'd gotten a few breaths in and coughed out, "You…and … me … both."
With his help I managed a sitting position. I looked up in time to see Promise and Robin jumping down. It was about ten feet down from the tunnel floor, and they managed it with ease. Certainly more ease than I had. Promise seemed to float down while Robin came down quickly and lightly, a hand bracing his ribs. I knew how he felt. I hung my head and concentrated on breathing. Drowning, falling—I was getting tired of not breathing. "More tunnels?" I asked, shifting my shoulders against a blooming all-over ache.
"New tunnels with the tile replaced and fixed into place over them. Sawney must have had the revenants dig them," Niko said. Hands slid under my arms and hefted me to my feet. "An effective trap."
I wobbled, then steadied. "Sneaky fuck."
"Pithy, but accurate." Robin used his flashlight to scan the circumference of the pit. "Where did he … ah. There." There was an exit, one small enough you'd have to crawl through it while dragging your dinner behind you. "Wonderful. Crawling through dirt. Color me filthy and excited."
"Filthy and excited, and exactly how would this be different from your norm?" Promise asked with the perfect appearance of genuine interest.
"Well, color me annoyed as shit," I gritted before Goodfellow had a chance to fire a shot back. I twisted the crick out of my neck and started toward the hole.
Niko fisted a handful of my jacket, holding me back as he moved ahead. "My turn to go first," he said mildly.
He did it with more grace than I had. Soon we were all standing in a new tunnel. Nine by nine, it was carved out in the earth beneath the asylum tunnels. "Our little friends have been busy." Robin looked around, bent down to touch the dirt door, and came up with a finger wet with red mud.
"Very busy indeed," Promise added. "That is fresh. Tonight's kill."
"Good. That means we're close." Niko moved— fast, smooth, and still as coolly pissed as he'd been when he'd dropped down into the pit.
I hadn't thought of this whole mess from Nik's point of view. Sawney had defeated him easily at every turn, had killed allies he'd enlisted, had attacked his brother with impunity and actually consumed part of him. Niko was not happy—in no way, shape, or form—and was determined to make this encounter with Sawney our last. My brother—he'd never learned to spread the blame around. It was our failure, not his, but he wouldn't see it that way. Couldn't see it that way. He'd lived the majority of his life under the weight of sole responsibility. There was no changing that habit now.
One damn good brother, but as I'd thought many times before, too good for his own good.
As we moved, we found more signs of Sawney's victims. There was no more jewelry, but there were clothes. Ragged and dirty. Knit caps and ancient coats. Shoes with peeling soles. So many clothes was bound to equal a whole damn lot of victims—the homeless we'd known he was concentrating on now.
He'd figured out pretty quickly that these weren't the days when travelers disappeared and it was considered a hazard of the day. He knew people would look for him if he stuck to your average New Yorker
who had a job, wife, husband, children, parents…the ones that would be missed. But as we'd seen, the homeless were perfect and he wasn't the first monster to think so. They even traveled, pushing carts from here to there. I doubted that was a prerequisite for Sawney anymore, the traveling. When you lived in a city this big, you didn't need to wait for the wayward traveler moving across the countryside. And then there was his taste for the mentally ill, and that definitely tipped the scale. There was safe and there was madness-flavored fun … a win-win for our boy Sawney. We'd known that, but seeing it on such a large scale…
Jesus.
The clothes didn't litter the dirt floor. They were hung whimsically from the ceiling, like the gauzy curtains you'd see in a harem in an old movie. Some shirts were pinned to the walls with one arm pointing the way ahead and the other hanging limp. Shoes were lined up at the base of the wall to march in the same direction. When the shirts and shoes ran out, then came the hands and feet. The palms of the hands were punctured by nails pinning them to the packed dirt wall, and the index fingers pointed the way. In the same frozen march as the shoes were the feet with dirt plumping up between gray toes. I looked away. Even if I'd been completely human, I wasn't sure I could've stayed that way after what we'd seen in the past week.