Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(69)

She wrinkled her nose, eyes turning new-penny bright. "He is here. He is everywhere. The stench of insanity." Which was true. He definitely had the stink of crazy all over him. Of course he had the same to say about me. She sat beside me. "Rabid, but that is normal for him. Stop looking." She shook her head disapprovingly. "He will eat you." Her face, her mouth moved inches from mine. "Let me eat you"—her tongue touched my lower lip— "instead."

Okay, that was even more of a surprise than her showing up—not so much the offer, as the timing. I wasn't Robin—Jesus, who was?—but I knew when someone was interested in me or at least interested in parts of me. And my parts and I felt the same way about her, although half of that combo felt guilty as hell about it. Not that that mattered. This wasn't the time or the place. Two students passed, girls, blond and brunette. They looked at us and hurried on, their long legs striding faster. I might look like a punk-ass twenty-year-old kid and Delilah a cross between a model and a kick-your-ass biker chick, but we still didn't pass in the human world. Not really. Those girls wouldn't know why they felt the way they did about us, but they sensed the difference in us somehow.

"Little girls," Delilah said with a derisive toss of her ponytail. "Scared of monsters in the big bad woods."

I hung my head for a moment. She didn't mind being different. I wondered why I did. "How'd you know I was here anyway?"

She sat beside me, her own long legs clad in leather. She stretched and reclined on her elbows in the grass. "Called Promise. Puck answered. Says Columbia. From there." She touched a finger to her small, straight nose. "I find your scent."

"And what do I smell like?" I asked with a reluctant curiosity. "Flay didn't seem to care for it, whatever it is."

The copper of her eyes darkened back to light brown as she puzzled on the question. "Strange. Interesting. Good and bad. Right and wrong." She gave an acquisitively hungry smile. "Sweet and sour."

I reached over and ran a thumb along the lower curve of that smile. "I hope that's about sex and not making me a meal. You wouldn't be the first werewolf that tried to make me dinner, and you wouldn't be the first one I killed."

She wasn't impressed, snorting. "Pups."

"Not all of them. Cerberus was no Red Riding Hood reject." Never mind that it had taken all three of us … Flay, Niko, and me … to take him down. We'd done it. I wasn't sure anyone else could have.

"Cerberus." The smile was completely different now, dark and gloating. She lifted the snug white shirt she wore to bare her scars. "Not fit to bear his cub. Flay and I, our family, to Kin Alphas we are not good enough. Not high enough in pack. Not pure. We are better than pure. We are Wolf." She rested a hand on her flat stomach. "But Cerberus said there would be no cub." Her lips tightened and she pulled the shirt back down. "No cubs ever now."

I could think of absolutely nothing to say at first, although I'd suspected before from the extent of the damage that could be seen that she wouldn't be making her nephew, Slay, any little cousins. Sorry seemed wholly lacking, and I finally went with my instinct. "He died painfully, in one god-awful bloody mess."

It was the right thing. The smile returned, blazing bright as her eyes. "Sex. Now." She took my hand, stood, and yanked me up with such strength that both of my feet almost left the ground.

Not that it wasn't nice to be wanted, to be used and abused, but the screams that ripped through the air emphasized that some things have to wait. Hey, I'd already gotten laid once this year…okay, once in a lifetime. What was my hurry?

One of the girls who'd walked past us came running back. She was alone this time, with blood on her face and jacket. I didn't bother to ask what had happened. It was self-evident enough. Sawney or a revenant had come creeping out of the shadows for an evening snack. She kept running past us with white-rimmed, unseeing eyes. I ran in the direction she had come from. Delilah followed, more out of boredom than any desire to save a human, I thought. She stayed in human form, but kept up with me easily regardless. As we ran, I pulled out my cell phone, gave Nik the terse facts, and tried for more speed.

We passed several students going in both directions. They veered away from us; it was obvious we weren't jogging for our health. We covered the length of the grass-covered walk, vaulted the small iron pole and chain fence that framed the grass, and followed the blood. It was the only way we found her … by the smell of her blood. It was thick in the air, as thick as the inescapable scent of Sawney and revenants.

And it was a revenant that had her, not Sawney. While Sawney's spore was hours old, that of the revenant was as fresh as the girl's blood. Both came from a building of red brick, narrow windows, and chimneys. It looked like a house, not a campus building. It was surrounded by low hedges and that's where we found them—the victim and three revenants. In a crook of hedge and building, shadowed and protected from a casual glance, they were feeding on her. One was at her throat, one at her chest, and one at her stomach, and there wasn't a damn thing we could do for her. The revenants had made scraps of her in a matter of minutes. It was the dark-haired one. Her short cap of hair didn't show the blood, but what strips of skin remained did.

I growled and kicked the head of the revenant from her throat. I wasn't wearing sneakers today. I was wearing scuffed black combat boots, thick-soled and heavy, and I broke the bastard's neck instantly with the blow. Not that that stopped him. His body staggered up and toward me while his head was bent at an acute angle. I'd broken the bone, but the spinal cord was still intact. Damaged probably, but not enough to make a difference in the primitive organism that was a revenant. Delilah, apparently forgoing the wolf this time, took one out with a knife. Took him down, out, and had him in pieces within seconds. Why worry about losing a perfectly good set of clothes in the transformation for a mere three revenants—I could see her point. The leather pants…and what they contained…yeah, that would be a crime…shit.