"You won't swing it wide, that gate," he countered scornfully. "I hear them, you know, your true family." He tilted his head as if listening. "They're waiting and not very patiently. They would destroy everyone in this room. Everyone."
Like Robin, he was a talker. Talk. Talk. The fury in me didn't want to talk. It wanted to kill. Luckily enough, that's what I wanted as well. I lunged at him as he was explaining what I would or wouldn't do. He was better than I was; I knew that. He'd taken Niko. That made him just about better than anyone on the planet. But there are things that can give you an edge in a fight, things that can at least get you into the game. One of those—the best one, in fact—was no fear of death.
I didn't want to die, but if I couldn't save Niko and George, I was dead anyway. If I saved them, I could go without complaint. And pure, unadulterated rage helps in that, blurring the survival instinct. It can make you sloppy, but it can also help in certain situations.
The ones where you don't care if you walk away top the list.
Hob caught the katana on his Spanish blade, twisted his wrist so that I would hit the point of the poniard if I didn't pull back. I didn't. The punch of metal tore through my hip, lodging in bone. I think it hurt. It must've hurt. I didn't feel a thing. I did a half turn, ripping the dagger from his hand. I then sliced him across the chest with Niko's sword. He was still too quick for it to be fatal, but it staggered him enough that he retreated several feet. I used my left hand to yank the poniard from my flesh and bone. "Lose something?" I said with false sympathy.
"I have more, freak," he hissed, his hand disappearing in his shirt to appear with another. "I always have more."
The primeval-forest eyes, the tangled brown curls, the pale olive skin—he was a force of nature… deadly but stunning. You could see in him that he might well be the first. You could sense the age and the cold-blooded apathy that comes from knowing all things pass. All things but you.
This time he brought the fight to me. I blocked the one aimed at my heart, barely, and the one at my neck, although I felt the tug of a nasty slice. Still no pain… liquid adrenaline had taken the place of blood in my veins and it blocked everything but the burn of single-minded purpose. I pressed in close to him as I blocked the return slash. This close the sword was no good, but I had the dagger in my other hand and I rammed it into his thigh. I received something in return. I knew I would. He was too skilled… It was too bad for him that he valued his life so much. It was really holding him back.
This time I felt the pain as a blade sliced through my side, opening a gaping gash. "I can do this as long as it takes," he murmured with infinite boredom by my ear. "Piece by piece, strip by strip, I'll have you down to dripping bones, and when I'm done draining your gifted girl, I'll beat her to death with what's left of you."
Under his detachment, I heard something. A sliver of agony, the smallest taste of fear, it was there. "Before that, I'll throw it open." I twisted the knife in his thigh and watched the cords in his neck stand out in pain. "If we're going to die anyway, I'm taking you with us, you son of a bitch. I'll even tell them you're Goodfellow. They really have a hard-on for him."
Abruptly, he pushed me away hard and I stumbled backward. He followed me and took me to the ground. Pressing the poniard against my neck until my head was hyperextended back, he wiped the blood from my neck and raised his crimson hand high. Nothing happened. The Calabassa remained dull. "See, freak? Do you see? The crown turns away from your polluted blood. How does it feel to have proof you are the monster you always thought you were?"
He'd known Freud too, I guessed. And maybe at any other time it would've hit me hard. Right now, it was just more meaningless blather from an asshole that was making himself too damn hard to kill. Fortunately for me, I wasn't going to do the killing. Not personally. "I lied." As I grinned with teeth tasting of my own blood, he leaned harder with the blade and I could feel more warmth well across my skin. "You're right. I wouldn't let them through." A faint shimmer of uncertainty crossed a face that had known nothing but triumph its entire long life. "But we can go to them."
The blade pressed deeper for one brief moment before George's blow nearly took his head off. He'd underestimated us, the Hob. Underestimated us all. I saw the six-foot-tall candlestick in her hands as she swung. Her wrists were raw and weeping where she'd torn free of the ropes. She must've worked for hours upon hours, but why not? She knew we were coming.
The knife had flown from my throat and I was up and moving. Hob was on his knees, already recovering from the shocking wound that soaked his brown hair scarlet. But recovering wasn't recovered and I took my chance. I hit him, wrapping my arms around him, just as he staggered to his feet. Face-to-face. Old monster to new. Off-balance for that split second, he wavered under me, then fell.
Through the door to hell.
Taking me with him.
I expected it. It was a price, a high one, but it was one I was willing to pay. I imagined they called after me, Niko and George, but I didn't hear them. It was just as well. I didn't want them to hear me either. Niko had heard me scream one too many times in his life.
Hob screamed too. In that place of tomb stench, frozen air, and a sky that pulsed like a cancer. Where the whispers punctured eardrums and the molten eyes swallowed you whole. Where talons touched and caressed as intimately as murder. He screamed and screamed. On and on, it seemed like forever, but it couldn't have been. It couldn't have been more than one scream really or a small part of one. Because then he was there and I was here and the gateway was gone. I was on the floor of the church basement with Promise's hands locked in my hair and Robin's clutching my clothes. They'd pulled me back. As I was closing the rip, they yanked me back through.
"You did it on purpose." Goodfellow's voice was both awed and horrified. "You opened the door to Tumulus for the sole intention of pushing him through." He held me up in a sitting position, but his eyes were locked on the empty air where the gateway had hung.
The air here was thicker and it took me a moment to reply. "I'm learning," I finally said with bone-deep weariness. And I was learning. Fast. Motivation was one hell of a teacher. "Nik?"
"I have him." Promise's hands disappeared.
George's took their place. She tackled me every bit as wildly as I had Hob, but with much kinder intentions. Her hands threaded into my hair, then clasped behind my back as she squeezed me with a strength you would never suspect her small frame held. Robin, who had been supporting me, melted away and she rocked with me. "He was wrong," she said fiercely, smudged and dirty face determined as I'd ever seen it. And then she kissed me. There were no words for what it was like, the living poetry of it. Time changed with it too, as it had with the gate to Tumulus. But this change was far for the better. When it was done, her hands framed my face and her voice, while soft, was every bit as determined as before. "You're not a freak, Caliban. You're a light, do you hear me? A light in the darkness."
Over two weeks she'd been his prisoner. Over two weeks gone from her family, gone from those who loved her, and this was what she had to say. It was beyond humbling. I buried my face in the silk of her neck and struggled to breathe air suddenly heavy and choking. And for the first time I held her. Arms tight around a warmth I'd thought impossible for me. For the first time…
And the last.
Chapter 21
The cops came.
Considering all the noise we'd made … I'd made… destroying the church doors, I wasn't much surprised. They pulled up as we rounded the far corner in the van. Flay had genuinely been prepared to wait his fifteen minutes, but we made it out in just under ten. It had seemed longer… hours, weeks, decades. The mind plays strange tricks under that kind of pressure. This time there was no opportunity to burn the building as we had torched the cop car. The revenants had fled, but what the police would make of heaps of dead vodyanoi was anyone's guess. I had the feeling we wouldn't see anything about it in the Times. Goodfellow had suggested as we'd run out that we sprinkle them with salt and melt them like garden slugs. If Hob had been the evil twin, Robin definitely didn't occupy position of the good one in that dynamic. The annoying one would be his highest achievement.