Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(63)
I would have stuck to coincidence, too, if it hadn’t been for the second attack. Jack working with his prey didn’t make sense and I wasn’t sure I believed that’s what was happening here. Didn’t believe one hundred percent, which was important. I wasn’t a gambling man. It was ridiculous to pin a theory on Niko’s estimated eighty-nine percent. He was throwing numbers around and if I had to hear one more time how he scored first in his college statistics class . . .
“I have arrived.” The door was wide, soundlessly picked and opened as always. “Where are the flower petals beneath my feet? Where are the virgins to feed me honey and grapes? At the very least where is my theme song? Some Barry White would be astoundingly appropriate.” The puck was grinning cheerfully, haloed by the weak sunlight. Ten hours away from Jack had either done him good or . . . shit, he’d gotten laid too.
Goddamn it, I remembered those days. I had to get back out there. Unfortunately the Auphe weren’t popular with paien just for a chat. Screwing was almost always a no go. Humans were completely out of the question. I couldn’t risk getting someone pregnant. I couldn’t risk making another Auphe mix-breed like me.
“Where’s my pizza?” I demanded flatly.
“I brought you pancakes the other morning. Once a year is my limit for taking pity on the celibate.” He clapped his hands together and kicked the door shut behind him. “What’s the lead on Jack? The sooner we put him down like a pack of plague-ridden squirrels, wretched rodents, the sooner I can stop babysitting you two and get back to the debauchery that is my life.”
“Monogamous debauchery?” I tapped fingers on the arm of the recliner. “Is that possible? And what about Ish stealing all your cards from the bad old days of whoring, whoring, and a little more whoring?”
“He made that all better. Kissed it better, isn’t that the saying?” The grin was all debauchery now, monogamous or not. “Would you like to know where he kissed it?”
“Nik,” I said desperately, “how about you fill him in on my massive f*ckup.” Forget the hundred percent bar. I would own that f*ckup, propose to that f*ckup, and marry that f*ckup if it would stop Goodfellow.
Niko, whose face was more impassive than usual, meaning his hangover was epic, was leaning against the wall while Goodfellow sprawled on the couch. I didn’t blame him. The wall looked safer. “We already told you about Jack’s victims being what he could consider wicked.”
“Not that that explains why Jack first went after Niko and kept on him once he dumped me like bad chicken salad,” I interjected.
“You have much in common with bad chicken salad. I’d not thought of that. Nausea inducing, occasionally deadly. A smell that is decidedly off . . .”
“Hey!” I protested. “I shower every day. Ask Nik. He keeps trying to charge me for that Amish soap of his I steal.”
Robin waved it off, having accomplished his goal of pissing me off for the day. “Back to Jack. It is still true about Niko. He shouldn’t be wicked in Jack’s eyes,” Robin mused. “Wholesome and noble as a nun knitting socks for orphans, that is your brother. He is a warrior but not a murderer.”
“Then there is the fact we have now run into two groups of humans. They’re obviously homeless, but they dress in white sweatshirts, don’t drink or do drugs, but they are very insistent that we pray to Heaven and God and they have large knives to force the issue,” Niko went on. “It seems unlikely Jack who is concerned with the wicked and these humans who are concerned with sending souls to Heaven would appear at the same time and not in some way be connected.”
“And once again, they don’t give a damn about me, just Niko,” I said. “How would they know I wasn’t human unless Jack told them? They called me a Godless creature, which I’m guessing means paien and especially Auphe aren’t welcome into their Heaven.”
They had been concerned about my soul at first and were now concerned about Niko’s. They wanted to save his soul for Heaven—just like Jack wanted to save the skin of the wicked. But Niko wasn’t wicked, not immoral, not . . .
Sinful.
“Shit,” I said. “A sinner. That son of a bitch Jack thinks he’s saving sinners. He kept saying saving and I thought he meant it as in saving the skin of the wicked as trophies. He didn’t. He meant save as in save us from our sins. Save our . . . what? Souls?”
Did it matter? There were a thousand types of crazy. Religious crazy was one pretzel in a jumbo-sized bag of them. How or why it got Jack’s rocks off was irrelevant to the fact that it did and what he would do to make it happen.
“It would explain why he kills by skinning,” Robin said with an uneasy edge. There was something peculiar in his voice, swimming in the depths. Something more than what we were now guessing. “‘And the priest who offers any man’s burnt offering, that priest shall have for himself the skin of the burnt offering which he has offered.’ Leviticus 7:7–9.”
I wasn’t surprised the puck knew his Bible. If there was a commandment he hadn’t broken, he’d take it as a personal challenge. As he’d once said, Christians love to take the sin out of “sinsational.”
“Jack bases his pathology in religion—many do. He even has followers who want to be his apprentices. It’s not that uncommon for religious cult figures. You led your own religion in the past not to forget,” Niko pointed out to Goodfellow, “but that doesn’t explain why he has zeroed in on us to begin with.”