Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(24)

I struggled to pull breath back into my lungs that curled abused and beaten beneath bruised ribs. But I didn't need to breathe to pull a trigger. I jammed the muzzle of the 9mm into the mass that squatted on top of me and emptied the clip I had just put in. Like before, I got jack shit for my trouble.

"Full of sulfur spice and ancient earth and a world far from here."

Auphe, he was tasting it in me. That stuttered my lungs to painful life. I wheezed and used the oxygen to propel my body into motion under him. I tried to roll, dropping my gun and pulling a knife from the calf sheath. My fingers passed through the slit in the denim and fastened around the rubber hilt. My roll was less successful. Flickers of scarlet light still burned into mine. Hanks of knotted hair smelled like a slaughterhouse and felt like rope against my skin. And that grin, that goddamned grin, was still inches from me.

Then it was in me.

Teeth went through jacket and shirt, into my chest, and ripped a piece of me away. Sawney had succeeded where the Black Annis had failed, and he had done it so easily. Had made me food, and I hadn't been able to do a damn thing about it. Food. There's a special horror in that, a particular twisted terror in a part of you being eaten.

It hurt, but not as badly as it should. The shock of it muffled the pain, wrapped it in cotton, and let me plunge the knife into his back without hesitation. What it could do that the gun couldn't I didn't know, and when his grin widened, I got my answer. And with that answer came other things. There was blood on my face—my own blood—and the sound of a purring swallow.

"Soft and sweet, your flesh, traveler." The cold tongue lapped blood from the wound. "Sweet and spiced with madness." He laughed then. It wasn't dark or deranged, deep or demonic. It was happy as a child with ice cream, and that was worse. So much f*cking worse.

If ever there were a time for a gate, promise or not, this was it. But even if I could have managed one the size I needed, and I had head-splitting doubts that I could, Sawney would only have gone with me. Eat me here, eat me somewhere else, I didn't know the difference. I did know panic, though. Sheer, kick-in-the-gut panic, and I used it. I twisted the fear into energy and momentum and I tried again to throw the bastard off. This time, I did it. I didn't take the time to get to my feet. It was time I didn't have. I got to all fours and scrambled backward with all the speed I could muster. When you can smell your blood on someone's breath, that's pretty damn fast.

He was fast too. Faster than I was. Faster than anyone I'd seen. He was ten feet away and he was directly in front of me, yanking me up with a hand on my throat. Up, not to my feet—my feet weren't touching the floor and neither were his. We hung in the air, the goddamn air, three feet of empty space beneath us. He had two smiles now, one sheened with my blood and one the gleam of metal. It was the scythe from the museum. Sangrida had taken good care of it. It was as capable now of carving human flesh as it had been six hundred years ago. I'd seen that in Sawney's recent victims and I was about to feel it as well.

"Traveler, abide with me." Red light blazed to bloody suns. "Abide in me. Special boy with the special taste. The taste of madness, the taste of me." The cheer, the horrifically affectionate cheer, was the silken touch of a spider's fatal web, and I wished he would shut the hell up. I wished I weren't so sure it was Auphe madness he was tasting in me. I also wished I had brought my Desert Eagle with the explosive rounds. Wish in one hand and shit in the other and hope you aren't facing Sawney f*cking Beane when you do it.

I was reaching for another blade, knowing it probably wouldn't do any good, but doing it anyway. Because you don't give up and you don't give in. Niko taught me that. If they're going to take you down, you make them pay. It was good advice. I'd been taken down before; I'd always made them sorry as hell. This bastard wasn't going to be any different.

And I wasn't a boy—special or otherwise. I wasn't a lost little girl or terrified pregnant woman either. When he sliced me up with his scythe, piece by piece, I would take the same from him. It might not kill him and it might not even hurt him, but I would take it anyway. I damn sure gave it my best shot. My knife punched through cloth that felt like flesh…could have been flesh for all I knew. This thing had come back from bone and ash. He remade himself; who knew the limits to that remaking? The blade slid into flesh, scraped bone, and kept going. This time I twisted it, viciously and with all the force I could manage. And he let me. Guests go first, right? It's when you're the guest and dinner all in one that you run into trouble.

I twisted again. The bastard was cold, like ice, and I could feel cold creeping up the metal to the hilt and into my hand. My knuckles cramped, but I wrenched the blade one last time. Sawney's patience had run out, however, and so had that of his scythe. It flashed toward me. They were like those paintings—Sawney and the scythe—the ones from the museum, the abstract kind. A metallic glitter of iron, scarlet light, a jet gloss of flesh, all fogged by thick darkness—a jumbled bit of art in motion as the scythe slashed. I couldn't see the whole, but it could see me.

Too bad it didn't see Nik.

The blade of the scythe missed my stomach by millimeters. It tore through my leather jacket as if it were no more substantial than an illusion as Niko hit Sawney from the side and carried him away from me. The icy clamp peeled from my throat and I fell. Landing in a crouch, I coughed against the air that had curdled in my frozen throat. Niko and Sawney had landed ten feet away: Niko on his feet and Sawney on his back with a sword pinning him to a wooden pallet. Dead center through his gut … or what I guessed to be his gut. The sword blade disappeared into the darkness that was Sawney, but Nik didn't stop there. His hand a blur of motion, he slammed a dagger into the Redcap's neck to pin him further. Then, because he was loaded for bear, he drew his second big blade. He'd seen how much effect my gun and my knife had had, but he swung the machete anyway. When I saw where he aimed, I knew what he was thinking. If you can't kill it …