Not that Disney ever showed you that part.
I had ducked a tumbling sword that had flown overhead, nearly taking off my head. I should’ve thought more about the swords. Eh, water under the bridge. I took another swallow of Mountain Dew. The caffeine was just not kicking in. “You’re right, Robin. She was one rude bitch.” Most murderers, male or female, were. The foyer was now somewhat of a mess, but it had been a little uptown for me anyway.
Goodfellow let the tip of his sword hit the marble floor, which wasn’t the way to treat your weapons. “What did you do?”
“I’m having an identity crisis.” I shifted my shoulders without much concern. “And there’s the fact that she was trying to kill us, then eat us. Hopefully in that order. I did what I do.”
“It seems as if the now ex-doorman liked her job and didn’t want to lose it over your complaints,” Niko said. He wanted to say more and he would say more, but not until we were alone. He trusted Robin, we both did, but there were things he said only to me—the things that I hated about myself. The monster in me that would never let me be right or clean. The darkness that waited and not at all patiently for its turn.
All that wasn’t true anymore.
Niko hadn’t quite gotten it in the past months. I wasn’t shamed by what I was. I didn’t hate it, not any longer; I was confused, some, yes, but not ashamed. Or more likely, Nik being Nik, he did know and that made it all the more important that the coming conversation be private. He didn’t want anyone else, even Robin, to realize the half Auphe wasn’t half these days. No . . . I was farther along the road than that now. He trusted me, but he wasn’t the only one in my world and not all of them would feel the same.
Instead when he commented, he was as studiously detached as only he could be. “So . . . you know what a peymakilir is. Studying behind my back?”
“Goodfellow has one painted on his guest bathroom wall behind the toilet. It’s screwing a satyr and the whole thing is labeled in hellish detail in gold paint. Hard knowledge to avoid when you’ve got a full bladder.”
Robin, meanwhile, hadn’t caught on to the fact that the peymakilir disposal conversation was over. “You blew her up. You opened a gate inside her like you did with Suyolak.” Suyolak, the antihealer who’d started the Black Death. Suyolak, the Plague of the World. Suyolak, the asshole who’d totally had it coming.
Goodfellow moved his shoe so the remnants of a peymakilir hand slid off that fine Corinthian leather. “But Suyolak was desperate measures.”
“Then,” I agreed.
“You’re wasting gates on something you could’ve easily shot. Gates are for emergencies,” he continued, mouth twisted in distaste. No one liked a gate or the way it looked, the way it tore apart the world and made it scream, the way seeing it twisted the brain and stomach. No one liked them—except Auphe. “Emergencies,” he emphasized.
“Then,” I repeated with a dark grin. “And emergency is a relative term.”
I wasn’t a morning person, nope. I hadn’t had more than two hours’ sleep. I was fuzzy headed and irritable. I smelled like milk gone off and was sick of the taste of Mountain Dew. None of it was excuse enough. It wasn’t an excuse at all. I’d done it because I wanted to—simple as that. She was far more of a killer than the men I’d sent away by the Ninth Circle, and she wasn’t human. There was no thought needed on her before or after the fact.
Robin had been our friend since we’d met him six years ago at his car lot. He was the first we’d had, the first we’d trusted. But Nik had protected me from . . . hell, the entire world basically . . . for so damn long that he simply couldn’t stop, whether I needed it or not. He hadn’t mentioned anything to Robin and he wouldn’t. But I would. The puck deserved to know that things had changed. That I had changed over the past months and more radically than he’d no doubt already guessed. He knew I’d been more shadowed. He knew that in the past weeks I’d regained my gating ability, but he hadn’t known to what extent. The way of the gun was all right—I still loved my babies, but the Auphe way was a new toy. And I wanted to play with that toy.
And now Robin did know.
Goodfellow was a trickster. He lied, but not to us. I wasn’t going to lie to him.
“Goodfellow, what havoc have you wrought now?” A smooth voice came from the top of the stairs as jade green cat eyes blinked at the carnage decorating her foyer. “This reminds me of when you were mourning the fall of the Sacred Band of Thebes. You ravaged and eventually burned down my establishment in Greece.”
“But every lady and gentleman on the premises fled the flames in a state of complete sexual satisfaction,” Robin countered promptly.
Above the eyes was an elaborate arrangement of amber-fire hair . . . or a mane that would cover feline ears if she had them. Her face was smooth skinned and without fur, but there was a split in her lush upper lip and ivory fangs when she smiled. She was a cat, in some aspects at least, and who better to run a cathouse after all? She lifted a hand and beckoned. If she was furred in other areas, her green silk dress kept that a mystery. “You may as well come up. I don’t care for peymakilirs, but they are excellent guardians. I assume you had good reason to kill her?”
“Don’t I always have good reason for my kills?” he challenged, willing to take the heat for this one. Keeping the Auphe swept under the rug for the moment.
“These days, perhaps.” An eyebrow arched. “You have mellowed. But you will have to pay the cleaning service’s bill. I am most certainly not running a charity here. Now come along and introduce your friends. One of them smells absolutely delicious.”
We spent the next hour in a room full of expensive furniture and more expensive cats, male and female. Our hostess—she preferred it to madam—was Bastet, the original Egyptian goddess of fertility and sexuality. After tiring of being worshipped she took her avocation, so to speak, on the road nearly four thousand years ago and now owned fourteen of the best houses of the most ill repute around the globe. She was a proud business-woman and only incidentally a former lover of Goodfellow’s. Of course, who over the age of two hundred and didn’t mind pucks wasn’t a former sexual partner of his? Only those with quick minds and quicker running skills.
Surrounded by silk cushions, he asked her about all the storm spirits and gods while stunning humanoid felines tried to feed Niko peeled grapes and tiny dead shrew from a golden bowl. He didn’t seem pleased. I, who was having the milk thoroughly licked out of my hair by four of Bastet’s purring employees, wasn’t exactly weeping with sympathy for him. Robin had been right about the milk. They couldn’t get enough of it. Loved it. Four rough tongues scratching my scalp and drenching every strand of hair I had in paien cat saliva, I, conversely, loved not at all.
Although the bare breasts were nice, even if covered in silky fur.
“I am sorry, my precious goatling,” Bastet sighed as she lounged on a massive sofa with sapphire silk cushions large enough that each one was designed to substitute as a bed. She had a bare foot in Robin’s lap and was using it to massage his crotch lightly. Ishiah wasn’t going to care for that at all, no matter what he said about accepting the puck in all his ways. “No storm spirits have come our way and no rumors of them either.”
“And what about Jack?” he asked grimly. “Have you heard any rumors of Jack?”
Her slit pupil eyes widened. There seemed to be only one Jack in the paien community and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper. Bastet stared at us with the unblinking wariness of a cat cornered by a coyote before looking away. “Now is not a good time to be human in New York. Nor is it ever a good time to get in the way of Spring-heel himself.” She removed her foot from its perch. “Go. I want no part of this. You know he prefers humans, but if he thinks one of us is carrying tales, he’ll kill us just the same. More quickly, but we’ll be dead nonetheless. Now go.”