“My turn,” Niko said firmly, the rope he’d escaped easily enough still in tatters around his wrists. Jack had left him his weapon as he’d left me mine. Jack had made sure he could escape to stand and fight. Jack who’d wanted a challenge from the one who’d killed his worshipper twelve years ago. Jack—who’d gotten exactly all that. I wished he’d had longer to enjoy it. I wished we all had. Sick or not, Jack had been far beyond the grace of a mercy killing.
Wordlessly I passed over the shotgun and Nik used the barrel to beat those pieces of Jack, glittering bright as a crop-killing frost, to a fine, crystalline sand. The metal flew up and thundered down more times than I cared to count. With every blow the sound of rotten ice breaking beneath careless feet echoed. Gone, but it didn’t matter. You could hear the death in him the same as before I cut him down. Finally a wind blew in through the destroyed window and Jack—his presence and fatal song—simply blew away.
Gone, just like that. As if he’d never existed at all. I’d have killed all the angels in Heaven to have made that true.
“Feel better?” I asked, moving to stand beside Nik as he dropped the shotgun to the floor.
He wiped at the trickle of blood running down his jaw and bumped my shoulder. “You know, little brother, I think that I do.”
We were at home . . . surprising me as I hadn’t thought we’d live to come back. The start of the plan, if not the rest of it, had worked out—color me all kinds of fucking surprised. I’d started at the top of the list of churches, Ishiah and Robin at the bottom and we’d met, more or less in the middle. Fortunately, Ishiah had a plan of his own he hadn’t told me about, one he hadn’t had much faith in—that the peris from the bar could kill and remove the storm spirit from Jack. Peris were forbidden from killing paien in New York, parasites included. He doubted he could get all of the crew from the Ninth Circle to risk expulsion from the city or that they’d be able to accomplish it if they did agree. That spirit had been riding Jack a long, long time. Fortunately, Ishiah had been wrong on both counts. For an ex-angel he had less belief than I’d have thought.
In the end, it was what Robin had suggested. Without each other, the spirit and Pyriel weren’t even the halves of a whole. Easy prey.
Promise was with Niko in his bedroom, taking care of the cuts on his face and his wrists. As the door was closed, she could be taking care of other things, but I doubted it . . . this time. My hands looked like they’d been through a meat grinder, my ribs told me breathing wasn’t on the menu for supper today, and my face was peppered with tiny fragments of metal chain. All of which Goodfellow was working on, but it wouldn’t be long before Nik was out to take over.
“It’s difficult to believe Jack would go to those lengths to relive Junior’s favorite scenario. He was the master after all. Junior was only the apprentice . . . or the worshipper. I’m not certain what label to put on that wretched bastard,” Robin said. “Putting you in the basement instead of Niko. Niko in the closest thing to an attic instead of you.” Nik had mentioned it was the same setup from twelve years ago when we left the church, the things I’d already known but as always hadn’t talked about, what Junior had done to us both, which was a good thing. Not talking about it all those years, trying to protect each other, that had been a mistake.
Or mostly a mistake.
“Either he hated losing an apprentice or he was the dramatic sort. Or both,” he continued. He was right about one thing: it had been as close to being exactly the same as Jack could make it. Robin was bathing my hands in peroxide diluted with sterile water. After that he’d follow with antibiotic cream, loose bandages, and we’d hope there wasn’t any scar tissue that was bad enough to limit my range of motion. Pulling a trigger was important in my business.
“The light was different,” I murmured. I couldn’t tell Nik. I’d sooner eat my gun. But I needed to tell someone or I’d end up having a meltdown the same as my brother. There’d be no avoiding it. Some secrets eat you from the inside out until nothing is left.
“The light?”
“The skylight in the attic was red. Everything looked red there. Everything looked bloody before it actually was.” I flexed my fingers under the loose gauze and winced. That was not good. That put the ribs into perspective.
“Nik used to call me a rubber ball when I was a kid. All the time. He said I could bounce back from anything. He said I was amazing that way.” That was a warm memory. I’d keep that one. “Then the Auphe took me when I was fourteen.”
“And you didn’t bounce back,” Goodfellow said quietly.
“No, I’d stopped bouncing a little earlier, when I was eleven. I stopped after what I saw in the attic. What I heard really.” I flexed my other hand, and, damn, that was worse than the first one. “I pretended. Fake it until you make it, right? I faked it with the best of them. But no more bouncing, not the real kind. That’s when I knew I was right not to tell him. I didn’t want him to be like me.”
Resigned to fate.
“Tell him? Tell him what?”
“I was awake part of the time, in the attic. Nik doesn’t know. Nik can’t know,” I warned. “I was awake when Junior cut me with his knife, telling me I was an innocent. I had no sin in my blood to drain, but he liked that part. Loved it. He knew I wouldn’t mind.” I’d still been confused and half out of it from the drugs but I remembered him holding me close, with an arm wrapped around my bare back as he dragged the point of the knife through my skin to watch me bleed.
Robin rested his elbows on his knees and folded hands against his mouth. “Gamisou. The monster.”
I almost laughed, but Nik could’ve heard. I held it back, but it wasn’t easy. “Monster. That’s what he thought he was, but then a Grendel opened a gate into the attic and Junior found out how wrong he was. The Grendel . . . fuck, the Auphe, I mean, slashed him to pieces. Left him dying on the floor. I’d never seen anything like it. It tore Junior apart with no more effort than it took to breathe.” Vicious and predatory and fucking murder made of moonlight and blood. “Before they’d only watched me. I didn’t know. I had no idea what they could do.” I’d had no idea how outside of the world and everything in it they were. How alien and how fucking unstoppable. “And then it came over and whispered in my ear. I was on the floor, trapped in a corner. I’d never seen one close up, only through windows. I didn’t know they could talk. . . .
“It had bent down and pressed those metal teeth to my ear and hissed possessively, ‘You belong to us, little cousin. One day we will come for you. Next year, the year after, the year after. You will not know, but we will come and take you through that.’ A black talon pointed at the roiling mass of ugly, tarnished light that had torn a hole in the world and hung there, waiting. ‘We will take you home to your true family. Wait for us. Watch for us.’
“Then it and the gate were gone. Nik had pounded up the stairs just as I’d let my eyes shut. I’d heard him talking urgently to me, but I wasn’t hearing words anymore. I did hear the meaty thump that was the knife ramming into Junior’s heart, Nik finishing him. For all that the Auphe had half killed him, Nik had completed the job. Nik had killed to save me.”
“How could you not tell him?” Robin had his hand on my shoulder squeezing. It was the same one Nik gave me when he knew I needed reassurance, but not the embarrassment of the words.
“How could I? Nik was meant for college, meant for a real life. If I’d told him the Auphe would be back for me anytime, he never would’ve tried those things. He wouldn’t have gone to school and it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference. Even at eighteen Nik wasn’t a match for all the Auphe.” I’d known that and I’d thought I was doing the right thing. “You know, Robin. It took four of us and a suicide run that never should’ve worked to do that.” I slumped back in the couch and let my head fall to stare at the ceiling. “Three years before they came for me. It was a long time. It was so fucking long knowing every night might be the night. But it was worth it. Niko didn’t get all the college he wanted or that real life, but he got a taste and that’s better than nothing, right?” I believed that. I had to, but for one other person to tell me so, for one other person to know—that would be good.