Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(57)

The key to his survival had been the memories of our boggle, which had been triggered by his mate, and by Darkling. Darkling, at one with my body and my mind, had set up an ambush in Central Park. While Boggle had attacked Goodfellow, Darkling…I … we had shot Niko. Point-blank range. I leaned toward guns. Knives were okay, but guns were the top of my comfort level, and Niko hadn't forgotten that. When I'd been taken by Darkling, my brother had worn a bulletproof vest in anticipation of just such an event. It had saved his life.

Robin knew that he was an assassination target of two attempts already. When we'd told him we were bringing in another boggle, it had brought the fight of the past year to mind. While Niko had expected the gun then, Goodfellow hadn't. Darkling wasn't human; he would have no particular attachment to a gun. Nonhumans rarely did. That type of thinking would've gotten Robin killed if he'd been in Nik's place. As lessons went, it had made an impression on the puck.

Hameh birds, a sirrush … a man with a gun was a long way from creatures such as those. Long way, long odds. But pucks, gamblers to the last one, knew all about odds and they knew their payoffs. I'd wondered how someone as long-lived as him had gone down so easily. Now I knew. He hadn't. After the Hameh, he'd bought a bulletproof vest and started wearing it under his finely woven fall sweaters. The damned things probably matched, cashmere and Kevlar.

Reclining on overstuffed pillows and a sage green silk cover, Robin was lounging in Promise's guest room with a distinctly superior smirk on his pointed face. Look at me. Look how clever. The breadth and reach of my intelligence are so unfathomable to the average brain that I must appear godlike to you lesser mortals. Whether it was only in my head that I heard it or he'd actually said it aloud, it didn't matter. My hand was already closing around something on the dresser to toss at him. Gilded French vase, crystal decanter, statue of Venus, I didn't look. I didn't care. I hefted it and cocked my arm back as if I were trying out for the majors when Niko took me by the scruff of my shirt and began to hustle me out of the bedroom.

"He really doesn't deal with the unexpected well, does he?" Robin commented as if I and my makeshift weapon weren't there. Rolling onto his stomach, he hissed at the cold as Promise, who didn't look particularly pleased to be playing nurse, placed an ice pack over the spreading bruise. Fondness only went so far. Seeing a half-naked Goodfellow was apparently the outer limits of that affection. "In his world there are no good surprises and all pi?atas are filled with evil-tempered tarantulas and poison-spitting snakes." I heard the clucking of his tongue before he rested his face in the pillows for a muffled finish. "We do need to work on that attitude or he'll never be able to enjoy the true…"

I didn't hear anything further as the bedroom receded behind us. Promise's home had soft and gloriously woven rugs, draperies, and tapestries on the wall that all worked to soak up noise like a sponge. I looked at what was in my hand as Niko kept marching me along. A candelabra, silver and gold. It would've made a nice dent in that curly head. "He deserves it," I said, knuckles whitening as my grip tightened.

"Why?" At the end of the hall, we went down the winding stairs as the metal was deftly worked from my clenched hand. "Why does he deserve it? For being a self-righteous ass, which is nothing new, or"—he put the candelabra on the nearest table— "for scaring you?"

"I have Sawney and the Auphe to scare the shit out of me," I dismissed stiffly. "Goodfellow doesn't come close to making that list." After depriving me of my expensive puck swatter, Nik released me, and I promptly began to prowl the living room in ever-widening circles. I plunked the keys of an ivory-colored small piano, glanced at several pictures in simple polished silver frames, and kept walking.

"There is more than one type of fear, little brother. You had a not so healthy taste of that with Georgina and me, and you did your best to forget about it." His gaze drilled into mine, letting me know what he had thought and still did think of that idea. Very damn little. "To push it down where you wouldn't have to look at it, to think about it." He leaned against the wall as I shifted my wary glance away from him to the floor and kept pacing. "Or to deal with it."

I had exactly zero desire to talk about this, but I knew the difference that would make. When I passed the piano this time, I slammed a fist down instead of a few fingers. The discordant crash didn't make me feel any better, but it did make me feel like I had company in my chaos. "I deal," I gritted. "I deal just fine."

"Yes, you're dealing. You're dealing a path of destruction through a home that Promise is quite fond of." Fingers tapped lightly against folded arms as he led into what he'd said before, more than once, although he hadn't said it as often as I'd expected him to. He knew better than I that I wasn't ready to hear it. Not then. "Cal, Robin is alive. Georgina and I are alive. That is what's important—what did happen, not what could've happened."

What did happen, not what could have. Yeah, it was all very Tao and accepting and all that. But, Zen crap aside, it could easily have gone the other way. Over the past year and a half we'd been lucky so many times. That luck, sooner rather than later, would have to run out. The law of averages wasn't going to be our bitch forever.

I touched a finger to the cool keys again, this time tentatively, and then I sat down to play. It wasn't pretty music. It wasn't ugly either. Yet, in a way, it was both. It was alien—that was the best description. Dissonant and illogically strung together, wild note to wilder yet, but it hung together somehow. A symphony from swamps and caves, jeweled bones and forgotten dungeons, living tombs and empty graves—the Darkling places. He had been related to the banshees, a male version whose history had never been recorded, whose true name along with the rest of his gender was lost in time. But like his female cousins, he liked music, and he liked to sing.