Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(12)

"How the hell did a bunch of humans manage to capture and kill these guys?" I finally broke down and took a bite of the weird stuff in front of me. It looked and smelled like chicken pudding. That's what it tasted like as well, but cinnamon sweet. It wasn't half bad.

"How did they manage?" He gave a little shrug. "They had an army. Literally. If you have some bizarre fascination with taking up with where they left off, you're a few short."

"Even counting you?" Niko had gone back to playing with the knife. Palm to the back of the wrist, back of the wrist to palm. The waiters were watching the show from across the restaurant—some giving silent whistles in awe at the sight, some looking a little perturbed.

"I'd advise you not to get ahead of yourself," Robin said with a jaundiced air. "Is anyone offering to pay you to chase after what may end up only being a phantom? Anyone? Hello?" He cupped a hand to his ear. "What? No answer? Quel surprise."

"And if this is real? If Sawney is back … if he isn't the phantom you hope, what do you advise then?" Niko countered, flipping the knife to tap the table lightly with its handle.

Robin went back to working on his meal. "Perhaps he'll be dieting. He is older now. Age wages hell on the waistline." He looked up to see Niko's patient eyes on him. "Oh, fine," he grumbled. "I don't have any further information on Sire Beane, but I have a friend who may—Wahanket. Well, friend is rather a strong term … an acquaintance. He tends to gather facts, has a desiccated finger in many a pie." He added smugly, "I do know people."

"Yeah, you know people," I commented sourly, remembering another of his informants, Abbagor, who'd tried to kill us … twice. "Too many goddamn people."

Wahanket, though, turned out to not be nearly as bad as Abbagor. Equally as freaky, but nowhere near as homicidal. And he lived in the museum we'd left only hours ago, which made him more likely than anyone to know about Sawney and his Great Escape.



The Eight-sixth Street station was starting to seem awfully familiar. After exiting and walking over to Fifth Avenue, we were back where we'd started. The Met was packed when we walked in. There were drifting couples, hordes of tourists from every country imaginable, people wandering alone, and a school group of screaming rug rats from hell. They must've left their indoor voices on the bus; even the empty suits of armor looked pained as they thundered by. We kept moving past them as Goodfellow murmured something about the lost art of child sacrifices. In one wing, he stopped before a bust with blind marble eyes and the sneer of white stone lips. "Caligula, you dumb son of a bitch." He shook his head. "I told him horses weren't the monogamous kind, but did he listen? No, not for a second. Insanity, tyranny, and one screwed-up love life, that was Little Boots for you." He sighed, "Threw some great parties, though."

Shrugging off the nostalgia, he led us to a corridor off the exhibit hall, and that in turn led to another corridor and a locked door marked authorized personnel only. Niko offered, "I'm sure Sangrida Odinsdóttir would be able to provide us with a key."

"Please. You insult me." Robin slid a bright green glance back over his shoulder as he slipped a kit of small metal tools from his pocket. "Not that that can't be arousing in certain situations."

Niko had left the restaurant knife behind and wasn't practicing with any of his at the moment, but the shimmer of metal was embodied in the minute rise of his eyebrows all the same. "No fun," Robin muttered and got back to the job at hand. "An entire absence of revelry whatsoever."

Within seconds we were on stairs and heading downward into the gloom. The steps ended in a rabbit warren of storerooms. "Wahanket or Hank as I like to call him used to be up top, mixing and mingling, so to speak, but eventually he was shuffled off down here with the other passé exhibits. I think he much prefers it here. Dark, cramped, musty…much more like home."

"Where the hell was home?" I turned sideways to move between a row of crates. "A gopher hole?"

"Not quite." Robin had produced a small flashlight and switched it on. Either the overheads didn't work or his friend wasn't into a lot of light. We moved along and entered an open area encircled by a Stonehenge of piled crates. There weren't any signs of habitation, but that's where he stopped, voice echoing in the empty area, "Hank? You up for a visit?" he called cheerfully.

There was a long stretch of silence, and then a sibilant hiss, dry as dust and abrading as sand, came out of the darkness. "A long time, Peter Pan. It has been a long time, long time."

"Get the guy a VCR and some Disney movies and this is the thanks I receive," Goodfellow grunted. "I've brought friends, Hank. Let's reduce my emasculation in front of them and call me Pan, shall we?"

A brown figure materialized out of the dark into the dim white light of the flashlight. He seemed to be made entirely of sticklike bones and resin-hardened bandages. A gaping pit of a nose and empty eye sockets were all that could be seen of his face. He looked like the title villain from every bad mummy movie I'd watched when I was a little kid, come to life. But he wasn't slow like they were. He wasn't slow at all. He slipped in and out of the thick shadows, scorpion-quick and snake-silent. It was the cowboy hat, though, that was the crowning touch. I wondered if Sangrida knew about her squatter. Or knew that he was raiding the…