Madhouse (Cal Leandros, #3)(9)

A few exhibits down, Sangrida stopped. The glass of this display case was blackened…scorched by what looked like a small explosion. Glass shards were lying everywhere.

"The case burst from within," Niko pointed out, obviously intrigued. "There is no glass within the exhibit itself, only on the floor."

Also on the floor was a stone box, the lid broken into pieces and scattered far and wide. I toed a piece with my black sneaker. Historical or not, I damn sure couldn't do any more harm to it. "What was in that?"

"Ashes. Fragments of bone." Sangrida shook her head, high forehead knit with worry. "Sawney."

"Sawney?" I repeated curiously, only to be instantly overridden by Niko.

"Sawney Beane? The Scottish mass murderer?" He sat on his heels to get a better look at the box. "The cannibal? I knew the women and the children of the clan were supposedly burned, but the men were executed differently."

"No one is quite sure what really happened. No one who wasn't there." I made a mental note to ask Goodfellow. If he wasn't there, he probably knew someone who was. Sangrida went on, "Of course, mankind doesn't know if Sawney was fact or fiction, but we know better. And although he ate close to a thousand people, he wasn't strictly a cannibal, as he wasn't human." She looked at the shattered box and corrected himself. "Isn't human."

Five words fought to be first out of my mouth. A thousand people and isn't human. I went with the one most pertinent to the immediate situation.

"Isn't?" I repeated. "He came back from ashes and bone? No goddamn way."

Sangrida didn't blink at that language. I guess if you hang around warriors for a few centuries, you get used to it. I had no doubt she could curse me under the table…probably while bench-pressing me with one hand and swilling ale with the other. "I'm not sure. I've never heard of such a thing in regards to him, but it is a chance I don't wish to take."

The explosion from within, the missing remains— I could see her point. "Was there anything else in the exhibit?"

She frowned. "His scythe. Or what was claimed to be. It was a handheld one, his weapon of choice. It is missing as well."

And that was the definition of didn't bode f*cking well, now, wasn't it?





3




There was no way to search the entire museum including the rooms below where the unused collections were stored, not in the two hours before the staff would start arriving. We searched the first floor, found a metal exit door that was crumpled and askew and that said it all. At least the Cliff's Notes version. Either someone had taken Sawney's bits and pieces out of there or Sawney had taken himself.

With that good news under our belts, we left so Sangrida would trigger the alarm that would bring the police. The security, her special security, had turned off the alarm system the instant it went off, benefiting from the five-minute lag built into the system that most of the board of directors definitely didn't know about. There were a lot of old things in the place and not all of them were known to be completely "inactive," so to speak. There was checking to be done before the authorities showed up. With that now accomplished, Sangrida was ready to play the distressed curator. Well, with Sangrida's backbone, the mildly concerned curator.

When Niko and I finally got back to our apartment on St. Mark's Place, I was wishing I had that iron rod running bolted to her spine because I was teetering on the edge of exhaustion. Something to hold me up would've been nice. I yawned heavily. "You think what we saw in the park could be Sawney?"

Niko was stripping off his weapons onto the kitchen table. "I think we don't know enough to make suppositions. There are many creatures that could do what we saw. Perhaps even one not so powerful as to be responsible for the deaths of over a thousand people." He dropped his last blade onto the surface. "But to reintegrate from ash and bone, that would take enormous energy, enormous sustenance. And he wouldn't have had time to take the bodies with him, not when he was on the run."

"In other words, who the hell knows?"

"In other words," he confirmed with a quirk of his lips.

"It'd be nice if there was only one mass murderer to worry about. Hope springing eternal and all that shit. I'm grabbing a shower, then bed. I'm tired of smelling like a leaky keg."

"Convenient. I'm tired of smelling a leaky keg." He headed for his own bedroom, adding casually, "The bathroom is taken care of."

He never forgot, but he usually told me anyway, and it was always said as if it were perfectly natural to secure the bathroom like an enemy encampment. As if I didn't have one helluva weird phobia—even if it were a slowly resolving one.

When I went in, the bathroom mirror was covered with a towel just as he'd assured me. I knew Darkling was gone. He wasn't coming through any mirror ever again, but the fact that I could have a mirror in the apartment, even a covered one, was an accomplishment. The Auphe had stolen my body and tried to steal my mind. Darkling had possessed me and gobbled up my soul. Temporarily, thanks to some help from Niko and Robin, but it wasn't an experience you forgot. Or got over, not completely.

I knocked the glass through the towel and muttered, "Rot in hell, you bastard."

After the shower, I slept for about five hours and then staggered up. Niko and I had already discussed what our next move was. Or, rather, who it was. And at noon we hit Robin's place in Chelsea just as he was rolling out of bed.