Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(87)

I was bleeding again from the nose; I tasted the salt. The ears too, like in the museum, but I was also bleeding from my mouth. I swallowed the copper of it and went on, because that was fine; better than fine. It was just goddamn great. And I was laughing—because once I pushed through the pain, once I embraced the head-crushing agony—traveling was fun as hell. And I liked it far more than was good for me, because it tasted just like Sawney said I did.

The next time I faced Sawney I put one in his forehead and when I flashed behind him I emptied the clip in the back of his head. While grinning through blood-coated teeth, I fired bullet after bullet, blowing away the curve of skull to show the glassy mass within, taking that head shot Niko had once asked of me in the subway.

That's when Sawney turned his head completely backward to grin at me. In his mind, it was all fun and games, even if we both died. With the sound of bones cracking, his body turned at a slower pace to keep up with his head. The scythe rose high.

And this time I didn't flash out. This time my brain tied itself in an exhausted knot and the traveling flowed out of me, riding on the blood. But that was all right, because, for once, Sawney was standing still.

Which was when Niko set him on fire.

The flamethrower had been concealed in the oversized backpack Nik had been hauling. Although whether Sawney would've known what it was was debatable. Although Sawney knew a lot of things he shouldn't, thanks to Wahanket probably. Even without that help, he would've learned fast in this time and place. Yeah, one smart son of a bitch. Too bad for him that wasn't going to help him now. Too damn bad.

As I staggered back from him, the stream of flame enveloped him and he went up like a bonfire. Covering him from head to toe, Niko manipulated the fiery stream like a fire hose, and from the look on his face, he was enjoying it as much as he said he would. Sawney, however, was not. The insane laughter had turned to insane screams. The hooked revenants and the ones on the ground screamed with him. Sawney whirled in the air, bright as the sun, singeing and burning the bodies around him. The screams…they didn't stop. They went on and on as Sawney spun faster and faster. Niko kept the flame on him.

"Now, you bastard," he said quietly, "now comes your justice."

And while Justice was blind, she could give you one helluva sunburn. He burned for what seemed like forever. I watched silently as I used my hand and then my sleeve to mop the blood from my face and spat out the red stuff as well. The headache was fierce, but not as agonizing as it had been. I'd either broken through the wall or just flat-out broken period. Either way, I couldn't have cared less as I watched that monster begin to fall in on himself. The hair was gone, burned away. The crystalline spine and skull were naked to the eye and melting like glass in a furnace. In other places, the flesh, already black, was hardening, then crumbling to ash beneath him. And still the screaming went on. I was glad my ears were already bleeding. It saved some time.

"Prometheus, look what you have wrought," Robin marveled at my elbow.

The revenants that remained had turned to run, and I didn't have the energy to lift my gun to stop them. Without Sawney, they were little threat. Promise took the head of one in passing, but as for the rest…screw it. We let them go. They wouldn't be hanging around Columbia anymore, and like cockroaches there would always be more in the city. No matter how many you stepped on, they would always be there.

Sawney burned on. He clawed the air as his insides turned into a river of melting ice or evaporated with an ugly, chemical-tainted hiss. We didn't have a stake to roast him on as they had had in the fifteenth century, but twenty-first-century technology made up the difference.

"No, travelers. No."

There was only a black, twisted thing left now…small as a child and shot through with a glitter of smoked diamonds. When the plea didn't work, the laughter came back, a harsh caw through disintegrating vocal cords, but crazy as ever. "I will be back. From ashes and bone to flesh and murder. You cannot stop me. None can."

"Promise?"

She moved at Niko's rapping of her name and lifted a bottle from her bag. Smaller than Nik's backpack, it held one thing only … a glass bottle of sulfuric acid. "If you can come back from a few scattered molecules"—Niko's smile was cold and sure "we'll certainly be ready and waiting to see it."

Either he smelled it or somehow sensed what it was, and for the first time the laughter and screaming combined into one sickening whole. Insanity wasn't so fun for Sawney anymore; true insanity was being pulled from the shores of mortality by a riptide of acid and flame. I hoped it hurt. God, I hoped it hurt, and I hoped he was as terrified as every one of his victims had been.

Especially one tomboy little girl who'd lost her sunshine barrette.

Then it was over. The small dark form fell in on itself and the flames burned wildly on the ground. Niko kept the flamethrower going for another five minutes before finally switching it off. The embers flared, then dulled, leaving only ashes and blackened bone. It had taken him over five hundred years last time to come back from that.

It wasn't long enough.

Promise poured the acid in a steady stream over the remnants. They smoked and melted into the ground. It hadn't taken an army after all.

He was gone.





22




The trip back through the bodies wasn't any less terrible knowing the reason for all that death had been eliminated. The people were just as dead as they had been before. We killed the hooked revenants, but left them hanging. Cleanup on this scale wasn't something we were set up to do even if we were inclined. Ken Nushi would have to deal with that or, with the way bodies were disappearing lately, he might not. Instead of cobbler elves, could be there were little mortuary elves that cleaned up the scene of the massacre with tiny mops. I t made as much sense as anything else. Something had definitely been at work cleaning up Sawney's first victims—the bodies in the park.