Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(84)

I wobbled, then steadied. "Sneaky f*ck."

"Pithy, but accurate." Robin used his flashlight to scan the circumference of the pit. "Where did he … ah. There." There was an exit, one small enough you'd have to crawl through it while dragging your dinner behind you. "Wonderful. Crawling through dirt. Color me filthy and excited."

"Filthy and excited, and exactly how would this be different from your norm?" Promise asked with the perfect appearance of genuine interest.

"Well, color me annoyed as shit," I gritted before Goodfellow had a chance to fire a shot back. I twisted the crick out of my neck and started toward the hole.

Niko fisted a handful of my jacket, holding me back as he moved ahead. "My turn to go first," he said mildly.

He did it with more grace than I had. Soon we were all standing in a new tunnel. Nine by nine, it was carved out in the earth beneath the asylum tunnels. "Our little friends have been busy." Robin looked around, bent down to touch the dirt door, and came up with a finger wet with red mud.

"Very busy indeed," Promise added. "That is fresh. Tonight's kill."

"Good. That means we're close." Niko moved— fast, smooth, and still as coolly pissed as he'd been when he'd dropped down into the pit.

I hadn't thought of this whole mess from Nik's point of view. Sawney had defeated him easily at every turn, had killed allies he'd enlisted, had attacked his brother with impunity and actually consumed part of him. Niko was not happy—in no way, shape, or form—and was determined to make this encounter with Sawney our last. My brother—he'd never learned to spread the blame around. It was our failure, not his, but he wouldn't see it that way. Couldn't see it that way. He'd lived the majority of his life under the weight of sole responsibility. There was no changing that habit now.

One damn good brother, but as I'd thought many times before, too good for his own good.

As we moved, we found more signs of Sawney's victims. There was no more jewelry, but there were clothes. Ragged and dirty. Knit caps and ancient coats. Shoes with peeling soles. So many clothes was bound to equal a whole damn lot of victims—the homeless we'd known he was concentrating on now.

He'd figured out pretty quickly that these weren't the days when travelers disappeared and it was considered a hazard of the day. He knew people would look for him if he stuck to your average New Yorker



who had a job, wife, husband, children, parents…the ones that would be missed. But as we'd seen, the homeless were perfect and he wasn't the first monster to think so. They even traveled, pushing carts from here to there. I doubted that was a prerequisite for Sawney anymore, the traveling. When you lived in a city this big, you didn't need to wait for the wayward traveler moving across the countryside. And then there was his taste for the mentally ill, and that definitely tipped the scale. There was safe and there was madness-flavored fun … a win-win for our boy Sawney. We'd known that, but seeing it on such a large scale…

Jesus.

The clothes didn't litter the dirt floor. They were hung whimsically from the ceiling, like the gauzy curtains you'd see in a harem in an old movie. Some shirts were pinned to the walls with one arm pointing the way ahead and the other hanging limp. Shoes were lined up at the base of the wall to march in the same direction. When the shirts and shoes ran out, then came the hands and feet. The palms of the hands were punctured by nails pinning them to the packed dirt wall, and the index fingers pointed the way. In the same frozen march as the shoes were the feet with dirt plumping up between gray toes. I looked away. Even if I'd been completely human, I wasn't sure I could've stayed that way after what we'd seen in the past week.

This whole god-awful show made me wonder if he'd anticipated we'd come all along or if it was just more of his sick sense of humor played out for his own entertainment. Right before we killed him maybe I would ask him. At least the blood was less easy to see, soaked up by the earth beneath our feet. It was still there, though; the revenant proved that.

He was cut in half and left on the floor long past where the body parts finally ended. A chain was wrapped around him several times over and trailed off into the darkness. Sawney had taken away the bottom portion of the revenant with him and left a torso with a head, arms, and hands. The same hands that were feverishly shoving dirt into the gaping mouth. Red mud was oozing from the corners and I realized he was trying to suck the blood, nourishment, from the dirt. White eyes fixed on us hungrily and the hands sprang to a new task—dragging the revenant toward us with a greedy scrabbling of fingers. But the chain sprang taut and he moaned in despair.

"I believe we have another campus poacher," Niko said as he watched the form writhe. Like I'd thought earlier: Any good predator like Sawney knew you didn't kill in your own backyard. You didn't leave a neon-bright trail of bodies to your lair. Apparently the revenants just didn't grasp the concept.

"I guess Sawney did find out about their extracurricular activities." And from the looks of it, you didn't want to piss off Sawney because punishment was as inventive and harsh as what we'd done in the sewers. "Want me to …" I tapped the barrel of the gun against my leg. Put him out of his misery wasn't quite right. I didn't give a shit how miserable he was. He deserved to be. Put him out of my misery would be more accurate. This was every gory horror movie come to life and I could pretty much do without it.