Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(16)

I was a lot of things, but this shithead was right—part of a flock wasn’t one of them. Not a sheep for a monster to prey on and damn sure not a pelt to be saved and nailed to a supernatural whackjob’s wall.

I couldn’t gate him away. Hell, we were a little too attached at the moment for that. I was about to gate myself out to the hall instead and hope not to take the most dangerous part of him with me when I heard the explosion of my door being kicked open. The weight disappeared from on top of me, taking its sharp blade or talon and what felt like a handful of my hair. I was out of bed in an instant to see Niko knocked backward out of the doorway and against the hallway wall with his katana flung to one side but remaining in his grip. My brother didn’t lose his weapons. But what happened next was quick enough that he didn’t have a chance to use his sword. It was also quick enough that I barely saw it.

There was an impression of a long-fingered hand . . . no . . . the shadow of an impression wrapped around my brother’s neck, a ripple of the darkest of shades and then nothing. It was gone. If I wasn’t bleeding, head aching from the vicious jerking of my hair and mild whiplash, and Nik didn’t have a bright red handprint around his neck, I wouldn’t have been able to swear anything had been there at all.

“You’re bleeding.”

The cut, a familiarly clean surgical slice, the same kind Niko had pictures of on his phone from the body that had fallen into the stairwell, was about six inches long. It started a good four to five inches to the left side and barely above my navel and ran in a perfectly straight line to the right. And, yeah, it was bleeding, but it wasn’t gushing. That meant it wasn’t too deep, which was a good thing. That was the area I kept my guts and they tended to work better on the inside than out. “Some,” I dismissed, wiping a hand over it. All that did was smear the blood to cover my stomach. The new blood that welled out of the slice was steady but fairly slow. “It’s not bad. Whatever it used, knife, talon, extra-sharp press-on nail, it didn’t go any more than half an inch deep, I don’t think.”

“Not deep enough to skin you,” Nik said. “But enough for a start.”

“There is that, the *.” I covered the wound with my hand. It’d do for the moment. “What the hell did it do to your neck? I can see its handprint.” Long, knifelike fingers etched in red.

“It’s a burn.” Niko touched it lightly. The smell of ozone, the crackle of lightning in its eyes. If all Niko had was a burn, he was lucky. “Between first and second degree, I think.” He’d already started to check out the rest of our converted garage, but neither of us had seen which way it had gone. Back out the window that sat almost two stories high among the steel beams? Through the front door, locking it behind it? Down the damn kitchen sink drain? It had moved so fast I had no idea where it had gone or what it looked like, other than impressions. There was only the sense of a black wraith hovering around a mass of smoky glass knives appearing and disappearing out of the corner of my eye. That couldn’t be right. I’d been attacked by many monsters in my life, but nothing that looked so . . . inorganic . . . inorganic and maybe with wings. That was some crazy shit indeed.

Nik was scowling up at the window. It had been a problem in the past and we’d probably put iron bars on this time, but that would have to wait for the glass replacement people to wake up and get to work. As often as this happened, we might want to invest in a two-story-tall ladder.

There wasn’t anything to be done about it now and Niko gave my shoulder a light shove. “You’re dripping on the floor. Stitches. Go.” As I turned toward my room to give him something to bitch about—that always cheered him up—he nudged me again. “To the room without the bubonic plague–ridden mounds of filthy clothing on the floor.”

I stood in Nik’s sterile room of Zen and did my best not to bleed on his equally sterile floor. I didn’t lie on his bed and wait. I’d ruined enough of his bedding over the years to actually feel guilty when I did now. “Everything in its place” wasn’t a motto that worked as well for your brother when your bloodstains were on his sheets. When Niko, arms filled with supplies, walked in two minutes later he frowned. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

“I’m waiting for the plastic. I told you last time to get a plastic mattress cover. You spent half your teacher’s salary on sheets this year alone.” Not that part-time teaching at NYU paid much.

“Idiot. Get on the damned bed,” he ordered as he deposited the medical supplies on his spare and Spartan dresser. “I’ll invest in red sheets if you’re that concerned.”

I gave up on the plastic and on trying to be considerate. I wasn’t much good at it anyway. Once I was flat on the bed, a gloved hand pulled my bloody one away from my stomach and wrapped it around a damp towel. I used it to wipe the blood from my palm, fingers, knuckle creases, pretty much every millimeter of skin. It didn’t distract me from hissing at the cold swipe of Betadine across the cut. Six inches long. Lots of stitches, but Niko was quick. It wouldn’t take too long. I glanced down at the sliced flesh. It was in a different spot from long ago, a lifetime ago, and longer and deeper, but similar enough that it reminded me . . .

“You remember when—”

“We don’t talk about that,” he cut me off instantly, a little more sharply than I thought he meant to. That was a sign that he was certainly remembering it too. Hell, how could he forget? But talking about it?