Except George.
When Niko found me it was not quite an hour later. I'd left the apartment without my phone. It was just me and my present. And it was mine, no one else's. I had left a note, though. With the Auphe out there, I couldn't just walk out. I hadn't said where I was going or why, but I should've known Niko would track me down sooner rather than later.
I didn't look up when the bell tinkled rustily as the front door opened. I didn't have to; I knew who it was. The soda shop was empty except for the two of us. Mr. Geever had closed it up while George was gone. People kept coming in to see her, leaving flowers and colored paper stars, creating a memorial for a girl who wasn't even dead yet. Geever couldn't handle it. The street outside smelled overwhelmingly of roses and lilies, funeral flowers. I'd swum through them to use the key I still had from opening the place for him two weeks ago. Only two weeks. Jesus.
"So." Niko slid into the booth opposite me. "When did the overwhelming craving for ice cream hit you?" When I didn't answer, he asked quietly, "What's in the box, Cal?"
It sat in front of me, stripped of paper and ribbon… just a plain white box now. No cheerful paper, no shiny silver ribbon. Nothing left to distract from what lay inside. "George," I said tonelessly, looking up at him. "It's George."
He reached over and pulled the box out from beneath my hand. Lifting the lid, he stared down at the contents. The fury behind his eyes was swiftly squelched, but his lips remained a knife's edge as he dipped a careful hand in to lift out a mass of copper curls. It could've been worse. I knew that. It didn't change the fact that when I'd opened the box for the first time and saw George's hair I felt something break inside.
"Encouragement from our friend Caleb. He knows, then, about the crown." He rubbed a thumb along a length of red silk and gently returned the tumbled coils to the box. "We're almost there, little brother. A few days at best and we'll have another one to put in his damned hand and your George will be free."
Not mine. If I ever had doubts about that before, I didn't now. George wasn't for me, not if she wanted to live to see the ripe old age of twenty. Caleb had admired our work. He had wanted something from us and chose the most vulnerable person in our circle to use as leverage. Why he'd gone to such lengths we still didn't know, but did that matter? The result spoke for itself.
"Flay wake up yet?" I asked, reaching over to put the lid back on the box. I couldn't look at it anymore.
"Actually, yes." He stood. "Why don't we go discuss things with him? It'll be much more entertaining to hurt him while he's awake."
"You're trying to cheer me up, aren't you?" I said suspiciously.
"Perhaps. Is it working?"
"A little," I admitted. Picking up the box carefully, I slid out of the booth. "Let's go chat with the furry prick."
Promise had been relieved of guard duty and was gone. Goodfellow had taken over—if you could call watching porn on cable guarding. He was also on our phone, speaking some Slavic-sounding language. A helluva long-distance call, but if it found George, he could run it into the millions for all I cared. Niko took the box from my hand and placed it carefully on Robin's lap. It was a combination of incentive and a simple right to know. Goodfellow had a great deal of affection for George too.
We didn't wait to see his response. Our own had been enough. We entered Niko's bedroom and closed the door behind us. "Snowball." I bared teeth in the nastiest sort of grin. "I hear you're feeling better."
Better, maybe, but he wasn't completely healed, not yet. The slashes that had run from chest to navel were brutally ugly and red, but they had mostly closed. A few more days and they'd be shiny pink scar tissue. The glassiness had faded from his eyes, leaving them alert if not precisely sharp. There was still a wheeze to his breathing from a damaged lung. That might take more than a few days to heal, maybe a week, but it would. Wolves were tough bastards. You let one crawl away from a fight and chances were it would keep crawling.
Flay's red pink eyes glared at us and the muzzle wrinkled to show a few teeth of his own. Still in wolf form, he yanked at the sheet with shredding claws. "Hungry." The throat spasmed with effort. "Hungry."
"Really?" I sat on the edge of the bed and patted my stomach in consideration. "Whatta ya know? Me too. And you know what they say about Auphe." I leaned close until my nose was a bare inch from his neck and inhaled. "We'll eat anything." I hated the Auphe, loathed that they were a part of me. That didn't mean I was above using them when I had to. Why not? They'd done their level, hellish best to use me.
A hand landed on my shoulder and pulled me back. "You'll get indigestion," Niko said with reproof. "If not a hair ball." The blade of his sword flashed past me to land edge first on Flay's stomach. It balanced with the utmost serenity, needing but one really deep breath from the wolf to slice open his abdomen. "We talked earlier, you and I," my brother noted almost idly. "But I wonder if perhaps you didn't put your all into that conversation. Now, with Caleb less than pleased with your efforts, you might be able to search your mind." Several split white hairs floated upward. "Truly rack it. It certainly wouldn't hurt you to get on our good side."
"And it might even keep you alive," I added darkly. I didn't mean it, of course, but I could lie with the best of them. A lifetime of being on the run is good training in deceit.
"Begin with why you led Caleb to believe the crown would be so difficult to locate in Cerberus's organization. It took us barely days." Niko made a good point. It hadn't been exactly a Herculean endeavor.
Flay looked down at the line of silver crossing his stomach before letting loose with a resigned growl. "I knew. I… saw it… was for her. Vain whore. But knew… couldn't—" The jaws worked painfully. "Could steal, but… couldn't get away. Also wanted…" This time the jaws worked in a different way, into a hateful grin. "Cerberus dead. Wanted him dead. Couldn't do. Not by self."
I felt a grudging respect for the wolf. He'd pretended to Caleb to be less than he was. Less intelligent. Less cunning. In actuality, he was pretty damn smart. After all, who had ended up taking the up-front risk? Not Flay. He had made his move only when Cerberus had been distracted trying to kill me. First in his puppy class after all.
"Clever." The curl of Niko's upper lip lent a different flavor to the word. He said it in the way you might compliment a cannibal on his willingness to experiment outside a burgers-and-fries diet. We may have lived in deceit, but not once had my brother ever embraced it. He did what he had to do, but I didn't doubt that it chafed at his sense of honor. "Tell us how you met Caleb."
"At Moonshine." Ears flattened to his skull. "Never seen him… there before. He talked. Wanted me on inside. Wanted spy. Offered money." There was drool on his muzzle. It was the kind you saw on a dog when it stumbled onto something that tasted bad. Apparently Caleb's offer hadn't gone too well. "Wanted to. Hated Cerberus. Stick it to him—what not good? But… afraid. Hated him, but afraid. Know my limits. Know my worth." From the way he spit the word, obviously he found it lacking in himself. "Turned him down."
"And what changed your mind, asshole?" I asked with disdain. "Figure out your little plan of having someone else do the dirty work for you? Or did he up the price?"
His eyes bored into mine, so foreign, yet they held an emotion so common to every living, thinking creature that it floored me. "You." He coughed and it wasn't from the tattered lung. His hands tore the sheet over him, ripping it to forlorn streamers. The next sentence he said with the utmost care. It was the first nearly complete and whole one I'd heard from him even as he struggling to produce every word with all the clarity he could muster. "You aren't only one with a George."