Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(27)
Because here she came.
In a heartbeat the Hindu scavenger of war’s battlefields had turned and leaped into fluid motion over the banister. She almost flew. Like a bird following a propeller of whirling steel, she soared toward us . . . nearly beautiful even knowing what she was. One who stripped the meat from the bones of the dying, consuming their flesh and life gleefully all in one. An inexplicably cruel part of nature. Yet, still impossibly beautiful—an angel of death with every sword a flash of quicksilver.
Then she was nothing more than meat. That tends to happen when I open a gate inside of someone rather than around them. In midair she disintegrated in an explosion of tarnished gray light, followed by the billowing stench of burned flesh, the spray of blood and long, cauterized limbs scattered everywhere. What was left of her fell, a tangle of parts, swords, and snuffed-out wildness.
Bambi’s mom goes down. And stays down.
Not that Disney ever showed you that part.
I had ducked a tumbling sword that had flown overhead, nearly taking off my head. I should’ve thought more about the swords. Eh, water under the bridge. I took another swallow of Mountain Dew. The caffeine was just not kicking in. “You’re right, Robin. She was one rude bitch.” Most murderers, male or female, were. The foyer was now somewhat of a mess, but it had been a little uptown for me anyway.
Goodfellow let the tip of his sword hit the marble floor, which wasn’t the way to treat your weapons. “What did you do?”
“I’m having an identity crisis.” I shifted my shoulders without much concern. “And there’s the fact that she was trying to kill us, then eat us. Hopefully in that order. I did what I do.”
“It seems as if the now ex-doorman liked her job and didn’t want to lose it over your complaints,” Niko said. He wanted to say more and he would say more, but not until we were alone. He trusted Robin, we both did, but there were things he said only to me—the things that I hated about myself. The monster in me that would never let me be right or clean. The darkness that waited and not at all patiently for its turn.
All that wasn’t true anymore.
Niko hadn’t quite gotten it in the past months. I wasn’t shamed by what I was. I didn’t hate it, not any longer; I was confused, some, yes, but not ashamed. Or more likely, Nik being Nik, he did know and that made it all the more important that the coming conversation be private. He didn’t want anyone else, even Robin, to realize the half Auphe wasn’t half these days. No . . . I was farther along the road than that now. He trusted me, but he wasn’t the only one in my world and not all of them would feel the same.
Instead when he commented, he was as studiously detached as only he could be. “So . . . you know what a peymakilir is. Studying behind my back?”
“Goodfellow has one painted on his guest bathroom wall behind the toilet. It’s screwing a satyr and the whole thing is labeled in hellish detail in gold paint. Hard knowledge to avoid when you’ve got a full bladder.”
Robin, meanwhile, hadn’t caught on to the fact that the peymakilir disposal conversation was over. “You blew her up. You opened a gate inside her like you did with Suyolak.” Suyolak, the antihealer who’d started the Black Death. Suyolak, the Plague of the World. Suyolak, the * who’d totally had it coming.
Goodfellow moved his shoe so the remnants of a peymakilir hand slid off that fine Corinthian leather. “But Suyolak was desperate measures.”
“Then,” I agreed.
“You’re wasting gates on something you could’ve easily shot. Gates are for emergencies,” he continued, mouth twisted in distaste. No one liked a gate or the way it looked, the way it tore apart the world and made it scream, the way seeing it twisted the brain and stomach. No one liked them—except Auphe. “Emergencies,” he emphasized.
“Then,” I repeated with a dark grin. “And emergency is a relative term.”
I wasn’t a morning person, nope. I hadn’t had more than two hours’ sleep. I was fuzzy headed and irritable. I smelled like milk gone off and was sick of the taste of Mountain Dew. None of it was excuse enough. It wasn’t an excuse at all. I’d done it because I wanted to—simple as that. She was far more of a killer than the men I’d sent away by the Ninth Circle, and she wasn’t human. There was no thought needed on her before or after the fact.
Robin had been our friend since we’d met him six years ago at his car lot. He was the first we’d had, the first we’d trusted. But Nik had protected me from . . . hell, the entire world basically . . . for so damn long that he simply couldn’t stop, whether I needed it or not. He hadn’t mentioned anything to Robin and he wouldn’t. But I would. The puck deserved to know that things had changed. That I had changed over the past months and more radically than he’d no doubt already guessed. He knew I’d been more shadowed. He knew that in the past weeks I’d regained my gating ability, but he hadn’t known to what extent. The way of the gun was all right—I still loved my babies, but the Auphe way was a new toy. And I wanted to play with that toy.
And now Robin did know.
Goodfellow was a trickster. He lied, but not to us. I wasn’t going to lie to him.
“Goodfellow, what havoc have you wrought now?” A smooth voice came from the top of the stairs as jade green cat eyes blinked at the carnage decorating her foyer. “This reminds me of when you were mourning the fall of the Sacred Band of Thebes. You ravaged and eventually burned down my establishment in Greece.”