Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(2)

And Central Park was full of them.

They liked the park. It was big, and it was full of snacks. No one notices if a mugger, murderer, or rapist goes missing. It was a good place to hit the human buffet and not be noticed. We'd once had an informant here of the very same opinion. He was gone now, dead by Niko's sword. Somewhere to the north lay a mud pit empty of a boggle with the worst New Yawk accent I'd ever heard. I kind of missed him sometimes. If nothing else, he'd been entertaining. Bloodthirsty and homicidal, but amusing—up to a point. Trying to kill Niko had been that point.

"Are we there yet?" I checked my watch. We had about five minutes until the meet.

"Did you look at the map that was sent with the instructions?" Niko looked down his long nose to ask in a forbidding tone that said he already knew the answer.

"That's what I have you for." I grinned. "I'm just here to carry the heavy stuff. The union says thinking rolls me into overtime."

Niko pulled his katana from beneath his gray duster, looked at the moonlight glimmer of it, and then looked at me with an eyebrow raised.

"Yeah, right," I dismissed, unfazed.

"You're assuming I wouldn't paddle you with it like the child you are."

Okay, that threat I bought. He could do it all right, and he actually might during one of our sparrings just for his own personal amusement.

"And yes," he added, "we are almost there." He took another three steps. "And now we are."

I looked around, but didn't see anything even in the bright moonlight. Shoving my hands in the pockets of my black leather jacket, I took a whiff of the cool November air. Instantly, I grimaced. I might not have seen anything, but I damn sure smelled it. The scent was dank—stagnant water with the ripe and rancid taint of day-old fish beneath it. "They're coming." I freed a hand and rubbed at my nose. "And they stink like you wouldn't believe. Something from the water." A fish of the day you definitely didn't want to order.

"Aquatic," Niko murmured. "That narrows it down to a few hundred in the nonhuman pantheon. Very helpful."

"Hey, I tried." Getting accustomed to the smell, I shifted impatiently on the grass and checked my watch again. "Crooks, monster or human, they're all the same. No damn consideration."

I suppose that's how my gun found its way into my hand as the first figure appeared out of the trees. "Bishop-fish," Niko murmured. "Nothing extraordinary. Easy to kill."

If I was a little disappointed at that, I kept it to myself. As creatures went, it wasn't that impressive. I'd seen someone more grimly unnerving in a mirror. Sometimes I wasn't sure who I meant by that. It could've been the creature known as Darkling, who a year ago had crawled out of a mirror to put my body on like a snazzy suit and take it cruising on the road to hell, or it could've been my own mundane reflection. Either way, there was no denying the both of us had our moments and either of us could eat fish boy for lunch. Although dead Darkling, every molecule the monster to my half, might've enjoyed it a little more.

Maybe.

Dappled here and there with the ghost of scales over nearly transparent pale skin, the bishop-fish had the form of a human. Sort of. The shape of his head was a little off. Hairless and only lightly scaled, it was oddly flattened and the mouth had thick, rubbery lips and tiny triangular teeth. No kelp eater, this one. He wasn't wearing a stitch—not a damn thing, which told me he didn't rub shoulders with the local New Yorkers much. I looked down. Even they would give that a glance. Yeah, that.

Now I knew where fish sticks came from.

I decided keeping my gaze on his eyes was the lesser of two evils despite their unblinking bulge. Guess you can't blink if you don't have eyelids. Round pupils took us in and the mouth opened to gurgle, "These are the demands. First—"

That's when I shot him.

My patience with kidnappers was long gone before I had even taken a step into the park. I put a bullet in his chest, which exploded like an overripe tomato and splattered fluid in a wide arc. With his impossibly wide mouth gaping, he teetered and began to fall. I stepped forward and slipped the paper from the fleshy claw as Mr. Fish Stick crumpled to the ground with a disturbingly wet slapping sound. "I can read, *," I muttered.

Niko said from behind me, "Really? When did you learn?" Raising his voice, he asked mildly, "Is there anyone here we could negotiate with that my brother would find less annoying?" Like me, he knew there was someone else in the trees. I smelled them and he heard them. Rustle one leaf, step on one frost-brittle piece of grass, and he would hear it. He was all human, Niko, like our mother, Sophia Leandros, but when he did things like that you had to wonder.

The smell I was picking up from a distance wasn't as bad as that of the fish. It was the scent of old things and attic must and hundreds of abandoned spiderwebs. In other words, it smelled like Niko's library of books. Knowing Niko would be watching its approach, I squinted at the paper in my hand, ignoring the damp slime on it. If the moon hadn't been so bright and plump in the sky, I wouldn't have been able to see anything. I might have monster smelling—whoopee…what a superpower—but I had human vision. As it was, I could make out only a few words. Money wasn't mentioned. I wasn't that surprised. Very few monsters were into the material world. Vampires, pucks, and werewolves liked to live high on the hog, but most of the nonhuman world was more interested in eating. Lots and lots of eating.