"Okay," I panted. "There has to be a way to kill these things for good. What is it?"
"Bathe them"—he was finally beginning to get a little short of breath himself—"in the blood of a virgin. Care to open a vein?"
I snarled soundlessly, wiped handfuls of gore-covered feathers from my palms onto his shirt, and then bolted for the first floor. The pounding at the basement door was beginning to warp the metal, and I wasn't waiting around to play games with the group of parched blood drinkers that were seconds away from coming through. "I can't believe I hauled my ass over here to warn you, and all you do is give me shit." Still pounding up the stairs, I looked back over my shoulder at him with narrowed, dubious eyes. "You are giving me shit, right?"
"Trust me, if it were true, I wouldn't be trying so hard to get you laid. I'd be selling you by the ounce instead," he retorted.
We both hit the door simultaneously and burst out of the stairwell. The building didn't have a lobby; it wasn't that sort of building. What it had was a lounging area for artwork and those who made it—an informal art gallery. There were people sitting on the floor drinking weird teas and paint-thinner-strength coffee. Canvases were piled against the walls, funky twisted bits of metal and chunky pottery were grouped here and there, and there were naked, painted people posing like living statues. I guessed that's what they did before they went upstairs to orgy central, because your paint was bound to get smeared all to hell up there.
I vaulted one guy who was lying flat, stargazing at the cracked and yellowed ceiling. I wove in and out of a few more and then I was outside. Behind me, I heard the mild wonder of: "Cool. That's one motherfucking big parakeet."
It wasn't what I wanted to hear, to say the least. Another thing I didn't want to hear was the thrum of massive wings, but I heard it nonetheless. It was raining as I hit the sidewalk. There were sheets of heavy, gray water and black clouds that brought twilight several hours early. Into that twilight flew Hameh after Hameh. I looked up as they circled. They were the color of the rain almost exactly, lost against the sky. As for hearing them…you could make out their voices over the hiss of the falling water and the blaring horns of cabs, but only if you listened hard. No one in New York listened hard.
Beside me, Robin looked up, the inhuman perfection of his profile washed clean. "Baal of the Winter Rain," he said softly. "The fortune that is finally due us."
"Yeah, it's great for the crops and all, but what the hell is it going to do for us?"
"Watch," he ordered with vengeful anticipation.
The Hameh soared, circled, and one by one they began to explode. It wasn't loud. Muffled by flesh and feathers, the whump was barely audible. From the inside out, they ruptured, and pieces of them fell along with the rain.
"Blood is the only thing they can drink, the only liquid they can even touch." Teeth flashed in the pelting water as he stepped back under a dingy awning and out from under a very different kind of rain.
There was the scent of burnt feathers and scorched flesh in the wet air as I followed him. It wasn't a pleasant smell, in the ordinary sense, but at that moment I didn't mind it at all. It was apple pie and fresh coffee to my nose. Sweet and fragrant roses all the way. I continued to watch the fireworks show above. Boom. There went another one.
And the rain continued to fall.
10
"I'm not sure which disturbs me more—that you could have been killed or that you could have been killed at an orgy. What precisely would you have me put on the tombstone? Here lies Caligula Leandros?"
"Oh, Jesus, that reminds me. You should've seen the size of Goodfellow's…" From the annoyed twist of Niko's eyebrows, I decided it was a subject for another time. "Anyway…bottom line is Robin's in trouble." I finished loading the Glock and holstered it. "Someone is pissed as hell at him and apparently has a zoo in their backyard to pull from."
"That in itself is curious." Nik had just made his fifth blade disappear under his coat and now had numbers six and seven in his hand. "The Hameh and the sirrush are from the same general geographical area. Sirrush are Babylonian and the Hameh are mentioned in Arabic mythology, but they are more like animals, not intelligent entities. It's as if someone sicced a guard dog on him. We should ask who in that part of the world Goodfellow has managed to so thoroughly annoy."
"That could narrow it down to a few thousand." I leaned against our kitchen table. "If we're lucky."
"When have we ever been especially showered with luck?" Niko asked dryly as he disposed of knives number six and seven and considered number eight before flipping it high in the air. It didn't come down again as far as I saw. His hand flashed and it was gone.
I snorted. "No comment." Actually I had plenty of comments about the rather bitchy Lady Luck, but we had things to do and Scottish assholes to kill.
Robin had declined an invitation to our hunting trip, but Promise had come along. The three of us spent the night combing the parks, the piers, and any condemned and abandoned buildings we could locate. The parks were good hunting grounds and any large empty structure could function as a substitute for a cave. It was a reasonable plan … if this wasn't New York City. A city this size? We were whistling in the wind and we knew it. But we kept it up. It was better than doing nothing and we hadn't heard back from Ham yet.
Yeah, it was the best we could do right now, but that didn't change the fact we came up empty—that night and the two nights following that. We didn't run across a single Redcap or revenant, which was unusual. Revenants were plentiful in the city. A few of them worked for the Kin doing jobs that the wolves considered beneath them. The others worked for themselves, eating what they could catch. They weren't bright, but they were fairly quick. They didn't go hungry too often, and it was unusual to go through the park at night and not spot at least three or four. We didn't see a single one…anywhere.
But at one park we did run into several sylphs cocooning a lowlife for later consumption. They were smaller creatures, the size of a seven-year-old child, with pale gold skin and hair and the amazing wings of giant butterflies. Purples, blues, greens, red, orange, yellow…any color you could think of. Their eyes were huge and the same gold as the skin. Beautiful, like the fairy tales in books…not the fairytale reality that stalked our streets. When you saw a sylph, it was enough to make you believe in Peter Pan, Tinkerbell, and a place built solely on magic.
And you'd keep believing it right up until they ate you.
It was at that same point you'd probably notice they had eight multijointed golden legs and were more spider than butterfly. And like the spider, they didn't drink blood or eat flesh, not separately. After cocooning their prey, they injected a chemical that dissolved the internal organs to soup. Eventually there would be nothing but a dried husk hanging in a tree that would disintegrate in the first brisk breeze.
Frankly, I didn't care if the homicidal butterflies ate a hundred muggers or drug dealers. New York could use a little cheap crime control. But, as Niko logically explained while smacking the back of my head, it might not always be a petty criminal they snared.
There were many things I'd done and many things I'd killed, but there was something about killing a giant butterfly, even one with spider legs, that wasn't going to leave any fond memories. I'd never been one for pulling the wings off something smaller than I was. But when they opened their mouths and I saw poison-dripping pincers and a circular gullet lined with tiny triangular teeth, I changed my mind. Tinkerbell took one in the gut, and, as it snarled with sizzling poison gushing from its mouth, the only thing I felt was gratitude I was out of spitting range.