Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(14)

It didn't make me any less glad to show him my backside. There's only so much talk of genital stealing you can hear before, damn, it's time to go. And this basement…there was something about it. If you stood still and closed your eyes, New York would fade away. There would be low guttural chanting, a choking lack of air, and the desperate scrape of fingernails against bloody desert stone. Wahanket had made this place his own, and it wasn't a place where I wanted to spend a lot of time. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.

We were three rooms away from the stairs when Niko and Robin stopped simultaneously with weapons drawn. That's when I heard it too: the faintest unidentifiable rustle. I might not know what it was, but I did know what it wasn't—it wasn't human. There was no aftershave, no shampoo or soap, no wool or synthetics—no people smell at all. Not fresh anyway. There were thousands of other smells down here…animal, plant, mineral. Some strong, some not, and no way to tell which was packed away in a box and which was out and moving around.

With the hundreds of crates, it was close quarters for my gun and I drew my knife. It wasn't a sword, but at twelve jagged inches it was close enough. "Is the flashlight just a special effect," I asked Robin, "or do the lights work down here?"

"In this section, no. Wahanket disables them on a routine basis." Goodfellow had placed the flashlight on a dust-coated, empty display case and cautiously stepped away from it to keep from giving away his position in the darkness. Niko moved several steps in the other direction, and using his free hand on the top edge, vaulted onto a five-foot-tall crate.

And he immediately came crashing back down under several hundred pounds of scales and surging muscle. For one brief second, I saw the snapping of dinosaur-sized jaws, the flare of orange eyes in the glow of the stationary flashlight. I saw a yellowed ivory grin.

Then reality slid into place, and I slid with it, sinking my blade into the eye of the writhing monstrosity on top of Niko. Not a dinosaur—hell, the Met didn't even have dinosaurs—but something just as horrific in its own right. It was a serpent, the size of a man and half again as long, with the powerful legs and feet of a jungle cat. The inky black of its underbelly was spotted with the palest finger smudges of gold, and it blended into the darkness so efficiently that once it flowed off Niko, it disappeared instantly. But first, there was the grate of its bony eye socket against my knife as it ripped its massive head off the blade, the twist of a heavy tail that slammed me against a crate several feet away, and a steam-whistle screech that had my ears ringing.

"Caliban?"

I could see only the faintest smear above me, a pale oval to go with Robin's distant call of my name. I blinked. It didn't improve things any. If anything, it made things worse. Orange, black, gold—a hurricane rush, and then the oval and the voice were gone. It was just me and the darkness. Shit. I tried rolling over. Once, twice, three times was the charm. Three times was also a faceful of floor, but it was still progress. I managed to get my hands under me and push up. I was halfway there when a hand under my arm boosted me the rest of the way.

Nik. I steadied myself with a hand on his shoulder, then pulled it back when I felt the wet warmth. "Shit. You okay?"

"It's not mine. Have some faith, little brother." He'd vanished under something that could've been a baby T. Rex, showed up dripping with blood, and I was supposed to have faith. I looked at my hand briefly before wiping it on my jeans. It was hard to tell with only the reflected glow of the flashlight, but the liquid on my skin looked pale gold, not red. That, more than Niko's denial, halted the twist in my gut.

"Where's Robin?" My knife was at the base of the crate I'd impacted and I moved to retrieve it.

"I think it took him." He was already moving, following spatters of the monster's blood, and I came up hard on his heels. We were silent from that moment on. It would probably hear us coming nonetheless, but we didn't have to make it easy for it … because we would find it. We would get Goodfellow back. This was nothing compared to the shit we'd all gone through together. A big lizard—a pissed-off giant gecko. So what? Hell, Robin would make a belt out of it by the time we caught up.

Boxes and boxes, a labyrinth of them every which way I turned. I clipped several as we ran. We'd left the flashlight behind. It would give us away quicker than my nose would. There was some light now— small emergency lights up in the corner juncture of ceiling and wall. Hank hadn't gotten to these yet, but they were dim enough to do more harm than good. They created impenetrable pits of black shadow that looked as thick and sticky as tar and just as capable of sucking us into suffocating depths. They'd make good places for a serpent to hide and wait for its next meal to wander by.

Or to leave what was left of its last one.

I saw his sword then, lying on the floor half in and half out of the shadow. Robin didn't treat his weapons with the reverence Niko did, but neither did he discard them carelessly like trash. "Niko?" I said grimly.

"I see it." He disappeared into the blackness to investigate, and I kept following the blood. As I passed a stagecoach, fake trees, and a massive stuffed bear, the spatters turned into an unbroken trail.

"Follow the Yellow Brick Road," I muttered as I careened around a corner into the next room, slipped, and nearly fell in a lake of lizard fluid. It stretched almost seven feet across and was still flowing sluggishly from the belly of the serpent. Minute tremors ran under the scaled hide, but it lay on its side with its mouth open and unmoving. The remaining eye stared at nothing as a putrid stench began to seep from the hundreds of slices that bisected the stomach.