Blackout can-6 Page 11

  “Our annoyed clients.”

  The building was close to Central Park but on the opposite side, making me glad for the taxi. I’d run enough today. The limo was long gone. Promise and Goodfellow had better things to do. Lucky them. I’d asked Leandros if he wasn’t worried about Promise becoming an Ammut snack—Goodfellow had someone else to bunk with; I wasn’t sure Moses would approve, but not my business. Regarding Promise, Leandros had said she was staying with several vampires; there was safety in numbers. Normally she would’ve stayed with us or vice versa, but he was afraid I’d have a glitch of die-monster-die and try to stab her with a kitchen knife if she reached past me for a breakfast bagel.

  Inside, we made the grade past the doorman, just barely, considering all the mud we were streaked with, and not exactly fragrant mud either. We stank. The security desk had our names and had us sign in. Leandros signed Sun Tzu. I didn’t ask. I was learning to bob and weave those lectures. I signed Captain Hook. Unlike me, he did ask.

  I’d turned toward the elevators and got a lecture anyway. You should never take an elevator. Elevators were death traps—metal boxes that turned into untelevised caged death matches when something slithered in there with you and tried to tear you apart. And if you survived, you still had to walk out wearing monster guts from head to toe. It was not a good look from security’s point of view. Leandros all but smacked my hand as if I were a two-year-old reaching for a hot stove when I aimed a finger for the UP button.

  On the stairs Leandros asked, “Why Captain Hook? It’s not one of your usual fake names. Did you forget?”

  Nope, I did remember those from my fake IDs in South Carolina. Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the Thirteenth, and Halloween. Movie villains R us or R me. I started climbing. “No, I remember those. I was thinking about Nevah’s Landing. You said you told me the story Peter Pan there when I was a kid, right? I was kind of picturing my memories chasing me like that albino crocodile with the ticking clock chased Hook.” I remembered it as well as the blackbird, if not more. Creepy damn thing.

  “Albino?”

  We passed the third floor. “Yeah, the one that ate Hook’s hand. Albino. Big white crocodile with red eyes. It would sneak up and whisper in your ear. Spooky as hell. That’s a damn scary story to be telling a kid by the way, Leandros. But it is like that. My memories are whispering with that blackbird memory,” my inner self with its rampant monster prejudice was whispering more, “but I just can’t make them out. And what floor did you say this meeting is on?”

  “Sixteenth,” he answered, but there was a distracted tone in his voice. Maybe the albino croc had scared him as a kid too and he’d forgotten it. Although I doubt anyone or anything had scared Niko Leandros, no matter what his age.

  Christ. I would rather take the death trap. Sixteen floors. Forget death trap. I’d rather take a real crocodile gnawing off my leg. “If we haven’t found anything yet on …” Crap, what was it again? “Ammut,” I said triumphantly. “If we haven’t found anything on that life-force-sucking, spider-loving Egyptian bitch to report, why are we here?”

  “To tell why we have nothing to show, hope they don’t attempt to kill us for the delay, and to find out how many more of her victims have gone missing or been found dead.”

  “Dead. Kill. Say them like bad words,” someone scoffed.

  The voice was striking, as was the Wolf’s surprising plunge out of nowhere to the fourth-floor landing, hitting the tile barely a foot from me. She was all that made a Wolf, predatory in her speed, there was no doubt, but she was all female too, that being almost more dangerous than the Wolf in her. She crouched on all fours, silver blond hair like a bridal veil over her face. Through the winter strands I could see tilted amber eyes the same color as the skin that showed between the white leather shirt and black jeans. Her arms were bare. Her throat and her lower abdomen were the same except for a tattooed choker around the first and wicked slashes of scar tissue across the last. She smiled, teeth bright against her darker skin, as she tossed her hair back to show her face. I wanted to say she was beautiful. She was beautiful, but it wasn’t a human kind of beauty. Hers was the beauty of a mountain so high, so fierce, so deadly, it would suck the oxygen from your lungs and take your life in a heartbeat for the crime of wanting to see that beauty up close.

  Remaining on all fours, she said, “Where have you been, pretty boy? You leave, who is here to play games?” Beauty like hers took; it never gave. And if it pretended that it did, it was only to soften you up to make your fall that much harder.

  The same kind of hard fall that Wolf I’d shot in the head had taken. “Delilah.” I didn’t remember her face or her body or her unique lupine smell, but Niko and Goodfellow had said the Alpha of the Lupa pack liked to play games. And as my ex, she especially liked to play them with me.

  Also, the first night we’d been in the city, while I slept, Leandros had made index cards. Memory joggers. Who was who. Who could be trusted and who could not. The guy was brilliant in everything he did. The way he fought the boggle, when he sparred, all the books he had—each one weighing twenty pounds minimum—the precise way he made his tea, the equally precise way he disarmed me when I thought I was a hotshot back in South Carolina. Not even a week and some of those days were cloudy, but I saw what I saw: Niko was an expert in everything he did, mental or physical. He was the kind of man the world saw only every few centuries. Born to rule and gifted by nature beyond all others.

  But nature does hate perfection. The guy couldn’t draw his ass out of a wet paper bag. I’d thumbed through my stack of cards on the subway to the Ninth Circle. The first had been a stick figure with circles for breasts, long blond hair indicated by two swoopy lines, a fluffy dog tail, and a fang-filled smile. Delilah (bad) was written in machine-perfect calligraphy at the top of the card. There’d been stick men with angel wings, Ishiah (good) Samyel (good), a stick woman with vampire fangs, Promise (good), a round thing with Mickey Mouse ears and a skinny tail marked Mickey (debatable). Then there’d been one stick figure with curly hair and three legs. I didn’t need the Robin Goodfellow (Run for your life) to ball it up and throw it at Leandros, which I had.

  “I thought the Lupa pack wasn’t committing to this fight,” Niko said at my shoulder.

  She stood and shrugged as more Lupa rained down around her. “I can change my mind—did change my mind. Spiders took four of my pack. What the Kin is learning, what the vampires know, I want this bitch to feel. We Lupa are untouchable. To kill Lupa is to take your last breath.” The Wolves around her smiled in a lightning-swift shadow of hers. They smelled her arousal. I smelled it. “Except for you, pretty boy.” The muzzle of my Desert Eagle was pressed against her forehead as her fingers ran along my jaw. My brain might stay out to lunch forever, but my body always knew what it was doing.

  “Any present I give to you, you are free. Do as you wish. Play, kill, eat.” She laughed, the gun not existing in her reality at all. She slapped me in the face, playfully to another Wolf maybe, but it was a damn hard smack to a human. She laughed again. “Stop with the silly puck cologne. Who do you hide from in this city? Yourself?”

  I didn’t have a chance to wonder why she’d think I was into cologne, much less Goodfellow’s cologne when she was under my gun, feinting, and leaping over me, a diver into water far below. That it wasn’t water, only more stairs, didn’t matter. She landed on her feet and kept running. Her pack moved around us. I felt the swipe of claws and pulled a combat knife with my other hand to slap back hands and paws and several elongated jaws with fangs ready for one tiny opening. Play to them, following their Alpha’s lead. Except for Delilah, they all were obviously All Wolf—stuck in between. Wolf eyes, human face. Wolf face, human eyes and hands. Some used hooded jackets to hide and some needed nothing; they simply were exotic-looking women. But if you knew …

  “Delilah is Alpha, but the whole pack is that All Wolf cult?” I asked, rubbing my burning jaw as I watched them all disappear down the stairs in the blink
of an eye, wolves on a rabbit. Run, run, run.

  “Her vocal cords.” He answered the question I hadn’t asked. “That’s not an accent. Delilah’s All Wolf is hidden inside her, but she’s All Wolf, and more than that, she’s Kin; make no mistake.” He tapped my arm and pointed. “Kin.”

  There were bloody fingerprints, footprints, and paw prints on the stairs. Kin were killers, I’d been told—every last one of them. I touched my jaw where Delilah’s fingers had been. There was a smudge of blood there too. “You think Delilah is now our only client?”

  “I think she may be,” he said as he started running up the rest of the stairs.

  But the boardroom he charged into was empty except for a card with neatly written letters, Fourth Alternate Location, resting in the middle of the table. The blood was from a dead security guard at the end of the hall. He wasn’t human. He looked human … until I lifted his upper lip to see small fangs, right before they slid out of sight, the gums sealing over them. Nature—keeping the vamp’s secret for them. I checked his vitals just in case, although I wasn’t precisely sure what made a vampire dead. “No heartbeat,” I was informed. Born, not made—live, not undead. They were the same as humans that way with the same vital signs or lack of them after a she-Wolf Alpha took one down. And they even bled red like humans. Made sense. They used to drain humans. You wouldn’t eat what you couldn’t digest. I hadn’t seen a scratch on Delilah, and Leandros said vamps were fast and strong—very fast, very strong. She was something all right.

  “They must’ve suspected the Lupa were coming for them,” Leandros said, tapping the card against his palm. “They took precautions and moved the meet.”

  Precautions. In other words, you did not fuck with the Lupa, but, damn, they would fuck with you if they felt like it. If you wanted to be noticed you had to make a big bang—such as taking out an unprecedented council of the supernatural joined to fight Ammut. Delilah was ambitious and hot. She was also a matter-of-fact killer, but we couldn’t all be perfect.

  “So …,” I said casually as I straightened, “that was Delilah, huh?”

  Leandros already knew where this was going. I could tell by the twitch of his jaw. “Yes, that was Delilah as the conversation on the stairs and the index card I gave you made perfectly clear.”

  “And I nailed that?”

  The roll of his eyes indicated I was beyond immature.

  I gave a smug grin. “Damn, I’m good.”

  We ended up at not the first, second, or even third, but the fourth alternate location, which had to be Leandros’s idea. Who else would have four? Two days and I’d seen enough of his ways to know that. I was surprised he could stand up without a chair sticking to his ass, the gravitational pull of his anal-retentive nature too strong to be overcome by mere furniture.

  We’d taken another cab up until about a twenty-minute walk away. Leandros wanted either to determine if the Lupa were following us or to simply kill my tired ass, one of the two. I missed the Landing with its twelve streets where everyone walked slow and in a hurry meant not stopping to sit on your neighbor’s porch to “chat a spell.” All right, an exaggeration about the porch thing, but I damn sure missed the twelve streets.

  “And the fourth alternate location would be?” I asked as I hunched in my jacket, tired of the cold, the endless walking and running, and not too happy with the smell.

  “Brooklyn. Gowanus Canal.”

  “I liked the Central Park place better,” I grunted. “It didn’t stink.” I didn’t know if the water stank to him, but it did to me—like a chemical-coated rotting body. “And there were hot Wolf chicks.”

  There weren’t many … Correction, there weren’t any people I could see hanging around, ready to jump in for a swim as we moved through several rusted-through tanks to a scrap metal yard. As for Gowanus Canal, an up-close look said they should’ve called it Gowanus Ditch. Encased in concrete forever as far as I could tell from the lights reflecting off the dank, fetid black water, it wasn’t close to being a tourist attraction. You weren’t going to see any gondolas with singing guys in striped shirts around here. If they fell in, they’d crawl out a mutated creature with superpowers that involved killing you with a massive wave of stench.

  “Up here.”

  I turned away from the canal and followed Leandros up some broken concrete stairs to a squat corrugated metal building. There were no windows, only a light showing under and around the door. Weatherproofing was not their primary issue. He knocked once, said, “Leandros,” and opened the door. Our clients were waiting for us, all of them.

  Also dead, every damn one.

  This time it wasn’t the Lupa. This time I saw what I’d only heard about in my briefing at the bar to catch me up to preamnesiac speed. At a much less fancy table than at the conference room, they were gathered around what must have been a rickety poker table. Vampire, Wolf, succubus, incu … incub … the male version of succubus, and something I had no idea about, other than he was as dead as the rest now lying scattered around the large shack. All of them except one were curled into dried husks. Their eyes were sunken so far back into the sockets, only withered raisins remained. What skin I could see that showed outside their clothes was almost transparent and veined with dark blue and cancer-clot purple.

  Leandros knelt beside the one client who hadn’t had his life force sucked out by Ammut. She’d done him in the more popular modern way—ripped him to pieces. He’d been halfway to turning, patches here and there of black fur, now slowly receding back under the skin, his dead eyes yellow but clouding to a human-appearing dull brown, and teeth still bared in a frozen snarl. She’d disemboweled him and used his blood to write on the back metal wall.

  Give them to me. The letters were large; the medium used to write them sincere. You’re not screwing around when you make your demands painted with someone’s death.

  “Give them to me?” I read out loud, confused. “Isn’t she doing a bang-up job of getting her victims herself? Not like she needs our help.”

  Shaking his head, Leandros admitted, “I have no idea.” He stood and nudged the dead Wolf with his boot. “Vukasin. The Kin Alpha liaison. Not that high up in the order of things. The Kin wouldn’t show us that much respect.” The nudge turned his body over to show this side had no face. A few scraps of muscle and skin clinging to scored bone. Life force and just life, both brutally taken—Ammut didn’t limit herself to one way of killing. “Not Delilah’s work, but she would’ve been capable of it and I have little doubt she’ll claim it. The Kin will believe her and think taking out this Alpha a very bold move, despite her All Wolf cult breeding. I’m beginning to think we were right. Delilah may well end up running the entire Kin before long.”

  He left Vukasin to study the other bodies and then headed toward the door. “Not that that’s our concern now. Ammut’s path of destruction is getting worse. To take out the council who hired us. That is true disdain and an escalation of feeding. We have to stop her before they form a council on dealing with inept subcontractors such as ourselves.”

  I followed him. “We’re just going to leave them here? I know about monsters.” The sky is blue, what goes up must come down, and here there be monsters. “I remember knowing about them even if I don’t remember much else, but I also remember hardly anyone else knows. How do we keep that from happening?”

  “We take care of our own bodies, and we leave the bigger messes for the Vigil. This is a bigger mess.”

  Outside in the cold air, I asked, “Who’s the Vigil?”

  “They keep humans from finding out about the supernatural. If that happened, there would be worldwide war. Their calling is to prevent that, which means they make things such as this disappear. You know how at night the garbage piles up and the street sweepers come through so in the morning, it’s all clean as if it were never there?”

  I shut the door behind us, to hide the bodies from plain view in case this Vigil was slow on the uptake. “I guess that depends on your definition of
clean, but yeah.”

  “The Vigil are the street sweepers, and, on occasion when too noticeable, people like us can be considered garbage to be disposed of as well. So try to keep a low profile,” he said, starting along the canal at a faster pace. How the Vigil found out about these messes was a mystery he didn’t bother to explain, and I didn’t bother to ask. I had more than enough freaky shit on my plate as it was. That one could wait. “Ammut could still be here somewhere in the scrap yard. If you can smell her, we should search.”

  If I couldn’t smell her, the place was too big to search, but we were out of luck. I took a few steps closer to the canal and hooked a thumb toward it. “Over that? I can’t smell anything over that god-awful …”

  I didn’t get to finish the sentence as a loop of wet muscle thicker than a man’s waist erupted out of the water and wrapped around my chest and one arm to yank me into and under the water. It was unbelievably fast and the light bad. I hadn’t seen if it was scaled or not—if it was a giant snake or a tentacle, but it didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it was crushing the air out of my chest, what little air I’d had to begin with after the first tight squeeze expelled it from my lungs. It dragged me deeper into the water, moving almost as quickly through the water as outside of it, which meant even if Leandros could’ve helped me, we were leaving him behind.

  I had the one arm free and I used it to fumble for my gun. I went by feel. I was afraid if I opened my eyes the chemicals in the water would blind me. Finding it instantly—true love couldn’t bring anything together as fast as my hand and the grip of my Eagle—I fired in the direction I was being dragged. I emptied the clip and the one I carried in the pipe to grow on. Nothing. I was losing my remaining air, my chest aching with oxygen loss and the pressure squeezing me until I felt as if I’d break in half. I went for my Glock next, but I was slow and clumsy, a pounding in my ears—I knew I wasn’t going to make it and if I did, why would it do any more good than the Eagle?