There was an impression of a long-fingered hand . . . no . . . the shadow of an impression wrapped around my brother’s neck, a ripple of the darkest of shades and then nothing. It was gone. If I wasn’t bleeding, head aching from the vicious jerking of my hair and mild whiplash, and Nik didn’t have a bright red handprint around his neck, I wouldn’t have been able to swear anything had been there at all.
“You’re bleeding.”
The cut, a familiarly clean surgical slice, the same kind Niko had pictures of on his phone from the body that had fallen into the stairwell, was about six inches long. It started a good four to five inches to the left side and barely above my navel and ran in a perfectly straight line to the right. And, yeah, it was bleeding, but it wasn’t gushing. That meant it wasn’t too deep, which was a good thing. That was the area I kept my guts and they tended to work better on the inside than out. “Some,” I dismissed, wiping a hand over it. All that did was smear the blood to cover my stomach. The new blood that welled out of the slice was steady but fairly slow. “It’s not bad. Whatever it used, knife, talon, extra-sharp press-on nail, it didn’t go any more than half an inch deep, I don’t think.”
“Not deep enough to skin you,” Nik said. “But enough for a start.”
“There is that, the asshole.” I covered the wound with my hand. It’d do for the moment. “What the hell did it do to your neck? I can see its handprint.” Long, knifelike fingers etched in red.
“It’s a burn.” Niko touched it lightly. The smell of ozone, the crackle of lightning in its eyes. If all Niko had was a burn, he was lucky. “Between first and second degree, I think.” He’d already started to check out the rest of our converted garage, but neither of us had seen which way it had gone. Back out the window that sat almost two stories high among the steel beams? Through the front door, locking it behind it? Down the damn kitchen sink drain? It had moved so fast I had no idea where it had gone or what it looked like, other than impressions. There was only the sense of a black wraith hovering around a mass of smoky glass knives appearing and disappearing out of the corner of my eye. That couldn’t be right. I’d been attacked by many monsters in my life, but nothing that looked so . . . inorganic . . . inorganic and maybe with wings. That was some crazy shit indeed.
Nik was scowling up at the window. It had been a problem in the past and we’d probably put iron bars on this time, but that would have to wait for the glass replacement people to wake up and get to work. As often as this happened, we might want to invest in a two-story-tall ladder.
There wasn’t anything to be done about it now and Niko gave my shoulder a light shove. “You’re dripping on the floor. Stitches. Go.” As I turned toward my room to give him something to bitch about—that always cheered him up—he nudged me again. “To the room without the bubonic plague–ridden mounds of filthy clothing on the floor.”
I stood in Nik’s sterile room of Zen and did my best not to bleed on his equally sterile floor. I didn’t lie on his bed and wait. I’d ruined enough of his bedding over the years to actually feel guilty when I did now. “Everything in its place” wasn’t a motto that worked as well for your brother when your bloodstains were on his sheets. When Niko, arms filled with supplies, walked in two minutes later he frowned. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I’m waiting for the plastic. I told you last time to get a plastic mattress cover. You spent half your teacher’s salary on sheets this year alone.” Not that part-time teaching at NYU paid much.
“Idiot. Get on the damned bed,” he ordered as he deposited the medical supplies on his spare and Spartan dresser. “I’ll invest in red sheets if you’re that concerned.”
I gave up on the plastic and on trying to be considerate. I wasn’t much good at it anyway. Once I was flat on the bed, a gloved hand pulled my bloody one away from my stomach and wrapped it around a damp towel. I used it to wipe the blood from my palm, fingers, knuckle creases, pretty much every millimeter of skin. It didn’t distract me from hissing at the cold swipe of Betadine across the cut. Six inches long. Lots of stitches, but Niko was quick. It wouldn’t take too long. I glanced down at the sliced flesh. It was in a different spot from long ago, a lifetime ago, and longer and deeper, but similar enough that it reminded me . . .
“You remember when—”
“We don’t talk about that,” he cut me off instantly, a little more sharply than I thought he meant to. That was a sign that he was certainly remembering it too. Hell, how could he forget? But talking about it?
No, we didn’t. There are life-changing events and life-ruining events and sometimes there is something that falls between. Twelve years since it had happened and we still didn’t talk about it. For two entirely different but equally valid reasons, but the result was the same. I blamed the disorientation of having a fairly decent sex dream interrupted by a monster who’d tried to skin me, was impervious to hollow-point rounds, and so fast as to be almost invisible for having let the comment slip at all. Nik was right.
We definitely did not talk about it.
“He was right on top of me, the son of a bitch, and I hardly saw him,” I said, changing the subject. “I shot him. There was no way I could miss, and nothing. He didn’t flinch. I didn’t even see him when he hit you. It was just . . . shadows of something already gone. Shadows and knives. He was that goddamn fast.”
Niko had already injected the area with lidocaine and was using a probe to see how deep the incision actually was. He looked up at me, face somber. “I’m sorry.”
“No big deal. I’m not feeling a thing.” Probing the cut wasn’t why he was apologizing. We both knew it and we both let it go. I didn’t want to talk about it either. The past was the past. Neither one of us wanted to dig up that mental childhood grave. It was ancient history and it was best to stay that way, especially for Nik.
If not for the reasons he thought.
He gave a faint but thankful curve of his lips, then went back to work. “It’s barely half an inch deep. If it wasn’t so long, I wouldn’t bother with stitches. But with your . . . energetic lifestyle”—kicking ass any chance I got—“you’ll constantly be ripping it open if I don’t.” He applied more Betadine. “Whatever he is, you were correct, he wasn’t serious. Not this time. He was simply playing.” He began stitching. “The ones that like to play are never the easy kills. Still numb?”
“Yes, Mom. Still numb,” I snorted. “And I’m not sure it was play. He looked at my blood. Just, hell, looked at it and said basically I wasn’t his to take. I don’t know if I wasn’t good enough a specimen. Too many scars to make a nice rug or if it’s because I’m not human.”
Niko gave me the look, the one I’d lived with my whole life. I changed it up a bit. “Not completely human. Ishiah did say it was only killing humans and Edward Scissorhands said I wasn’t a sheep. But playing or not playing, bullets, knife, sword, and neither of us touched him. He could’ve had us on a silver platter with a frigging caviar garnish if he’d wanted.” Hard to say if it was for real or just a dry run. I gave in to the inevitable. “I never thought I’d say this with your giant brain, but you might need help with the research. The next time he comes back and is serious he’ll have his choice of which of us he wants to wear as his summer jacket and which his winter coat. We need the info on this thing now. Or preferably a half hour ago.”