Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(51)

When he disappeared under the water, he didn't come back up. I tried to make my way over in his direction and I saw Nik do the same. It was too late. The wolf was gone. Despite that, we were holding our own. We weren't kicking ass and taking names, but we were alive, most of us, and right now that was good enough for me.

Sawney had an entirely different idea of what was good, and he brought that idea with him. Carried it along as he slithered along the wall and up on the ceiling over our heads. The knotted hair hung down over the black emptiness of his face, but the amused red shimmer of his eyes gave away his mood easily.

"Heads up!" I called to the others.

"Traveler."

The word came from only Sawney this time with just the faintest echoing murmur from his choir. "Traveler with the frenzied taste. Madness and cream and butter."

"Cream and butter, my ass" I said flatly. Auphe and insanity, maybe that went as hand in hand as it did with Sawney, but I damn sure didn't want to hear about it. "You bastard."

Over the snarls of wolves, the splashing of water, and the thudding of metal chopping through flesh, he shouldn't have heard me. My voice didn't have the carrying properties his did and I hadn't shouted it, but it didn't matter. He heard.

"Yes, traveler, cream and butter." There was a tone of lazy contentment, as if he wasn't hungry at the moment, not for an entire meal, but a casual taste would be all right. He wouldn't be above that, not a connoisseur like him. Whether he would've tried for it or not, I didn't find out, as another connoisseur, one of gems and metal, finally showed up.

She came through the wall. Brittle tile shattered as concrete shook, shook again, cracked, and there she was in all her glory. And right then, that was a helluva lot of glory inmy eyes. Grace as well, no matter that she'd ended up in the wrong tunnel. She flowed through the large hole and up the wall, spiking her claws nearly half a foot deep through the tile to propel herself along with more speed than I would've thought possible for her bulk.

There are moments in life to savor and cherish, to keep and warmly recall at a later date. The flare of surprise in Sawney's scarlet eyes was one of them. Seeing that smug bastard caught off guard for once— yeah, it was the goods. It was the shit. The absolute shit.

I flipped a revenant over my shoulder, pinned it with a knee in its back, and started to take his head. It took some doing sawing underwater, even with the commando knife, but the ones whose throats I'd slashed were slowly staggering back up their feet. They weren't in prime fighting condition, but they were moving, they were in the way, and there was no time for that inconvenience. When, with water up to my collarbones, I jerked my attention up from the writhing revenant beneath me, I saw Boggle lunge and cover Sawney altogether. The shine of his scythe and crazy smile vanished under the ripple of scales and surging flesh.

Maybe we were going to luck out. Maybe it was going to be that easy. She would rip Sawney to pieces and we would bathe in a rain of his blood. Maybe I'd even catch a drop on my tongue like a snowflake. See what he tasted like.

Finally, I felt the spinal discs separate under my knife, and the parting of a remarkably tough spinal cord; then I was standing with my eyes still on the boggle. She was moving. The claws of her hands and feet were embedded in the ceiling, keeping her aloft, but her head was whipping back and forth. The movement was too quick for me to see him in her mouth, but I knew he was there. The only thing that would've made this any better was if the boggle had been wearing the pearl and diamond tiara that had been included in Promise's payment. That would've been the cherry on the goddamn sundae.

"She has him."

Niko was at my shoulder, the axe dripping in his hand. "Yeah, she has his ass," I said with a warm glow in my gut that beat Christmas morning all to hell.

There was a particularly vicious snap of the scaled head, a sense of flight, and a brutal thud as a dark mass hit a far wall. Score one for Mama. "Don't notch a point in the air," came the warning. "It's crass." The axe took out one of my shambling revenants, who was sucking in air through his throat with a shrill whistle.

"I wasn't going to." An utter lie. "I do plan on punting his decapitated head like a football, though." I flung water and gore from both knives and started toward the wall where Sawney adhered like a drying clot of blood.

Niko moved with me. "Stabbing a football isn't the same as playing it, I hope you're aware."

I hadn't played well with others when I was a kid. Invitations to baseball or football games didn't often come after the "Your mom's a thief and a whore." That type of thing is hard to take from another kid, especially when it's true. It tended to lead to lashing out. Some of that lashing out was verbal; some involved a switchblade. Better to spear a football to the gym floor than some junior high *'s poisonous tongue to the same polished wood. "I can kick. I kick your ass on a regular basis, don't I?"

"No. Not once," he shot me down ruthlessly as he swung the axe loosely, up and over. "And without vast improvement, not ever."

Not my day for getting the bullshit through. I didn't mind. Putting an end to that child-killing monster put a rosy glow over the entire scene. Dead and incapacitated revenants, whole and less than, floated in the water. There were wolves…eating. Robin and Promise gave them a cautious berth as they moved toward us through the water. The fur balls were on our side for the moment, but they had different dining manners than the rest of us. Get too close to their food and they might take a chunk out of you by pure instinct. Automatic and unthinking. As they were with us, they might be sorry afterward. Several sets of lambent amber eyes focused at us over mouths filled with flesh. Then again, they might not.