Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(44)

As plans went, it was simple. Niko had never felt the need to overcomplicate. The more tangled the approach, the equally tangled your body parts were likely to be when it all went wrong. There were more revenants in the tunnels than we could handle; therefore we'd do a little recruiting. There were those who wouldn't mind snacking on a horde of revenants…that would be pay enough for them. Then there were a few species who happened to like money and expensive things.

Boggles, for one, were suckers for jewelry. Gold, silver, precious or semiprecious, as long as it was bright and shiny, they coveted it. It was rather amusing to see a huge hulking figure caressing chunky gold chains that would barely fit around one of his enormous fingers. Good for a chuckle, right up until you remembered where the jewelry came from: people.

"Since when do we depend on anyone but ourselves?" I looked up. "And what are we going to pay? We going to hock your tofu collection?"

"Since doing it alone could take us months or get us killed. As for financial incentive, Promise says she has far more jewelry than she could wear in two lifetimes. Vampire lifetimes," he added with a quirked eyebrow.

A boggle would definitely demand a good chunk of Promise's collection. Seemed fair. She had gotten us involved in this bit of community service. Once it was determined Sawney was out of the museum, Sangrida hadn't seemed to consider it her problem any longer. She'd washed her Valkyrie hands and turned her attention to cleaning up her sirrush-splattered basement. And Promise couldn't justify anything to the rest of the human board of directors other than the "reward" money for information, and the reward money wasn't really enough to make it worth our while following Sawney's slaughter from beginning to end. Yet here we were.

Back in the old days when we were on the run, we'd been right along with Sangrida—not our responsibility, not our problem.

When had that changed?

"We can also enlist a few wolves. We're not popular with the Kin, but not all werewolves are Kin."

True—though the better fighters tended to be. "Okay, wolves are fine. Wolves, I get." I hadn't had the opportunity to avoid wolves in the past year like I had boggles. Wolves were everywhere. Let a problem with them get to you and you wouldn't be able to leave the apartment. "But there's probably only one boggle in the park." They were tremendously territorial. Central Park would only be big enough for two, and Niko and Robin had already killed the one we knew of. "Just one isn't worth the trouble." It was a lie. One boggle alone could take out his weight in revenants.

"It's worth the trouble," Nik corrected with patience, but as his patience tended to be of the ironclad variety, it didn't do me much good.

I tightened my lips. The boggle had nothing to do with the revenants. We could hire double the wolves, hsigos, or whoever else we came across. No, this was about me. I was getting over Darkling and it was time to do the same with boggles. "Jesus, fine," I surrendered with ill temper. "I'll deliver the invitation. Happy?"

"Actually smug would be more precise. Now"— he tossed me a shirt from my bureau—"there is a pool of puck vomit on the living room floor. Enjoy."

I did not.

I neither enjoyed it nor cleaned it up. I slapped a scrub brush in the slack hand of a bleary-eyed, swearing, and painfully sober Goodfellow before showering, and taking off into the late-morning sun. It was an unusually warm day for November and I would've been able to get by with only a T-shirt as long as I didn't mind my holster showing. I minded, and I thought New York's finest probably would as well. I ended up wearing the lightweight weathered denim jacket that I wore in the summer for the same purpose. As for Niko, as accessories went, I wasn't sure if he counted as summer or fall. I wasn't the type of guy into lugging around extra crap unless it was a weapon, although Nik definitely did fall into that category. "I'm trying to think of you as a backpack or a little dog in a ninja outfit," I said finally, "but it's not working. I thought I was supposed to do this myself. Tough love and all that shit."

"Cal," he responded with vast tolerance for my idiocy, "it is a boggle."

"Je-sus," I growled. Threading through the crowded sidewalk, I planted a rib-cracking elbow into the ribs of a well-dressed pale man with a satchel, a Rolex, and hungrily twitching fingers who was following with voracious intent an oblivious thirteen-year-old girl. He stumbled, snarled, and faded back. He could've been human; he could've been something else. Sometimes you can't tell the monsters from the maniacs, and sometimes there's no difference at all.

Boggles came down on the monster side. They weren't smart, but they weren't stupid. They were driven by logical needs: greed and hunger. You could reason with a boggle … as long as you were on equal footing. We'd laid that groundwork with our boggle, although in the end it hadn't worked out too well for either party, but this other boggle—he was new territory. Friend, foe, or food, we'd have to prove it all over again.

We took the 6 train uptown from Astor Place, got off near the park, and walked east, enjoying the sun. In the park, free of the city's crush of humanity during the week, I'd be able to smell the boggle out. It might take a while and more exercise than I cared to invest, but I could do it. That was the easy part. After that, it was hard to say what would happen. An invitation to party with revenants in a subway tunnel, that wasn't necessarily a universal passion, whether you got paid for it or not. Boggles were homebodies as well. But if baubles were what got you through the day, Promise could offer far more variety than the boggle was likely to get from random victims.