Roadkill (24 page)

Niko wasn’t amused. He was a patient man, beyond patient, but that massive reserve was put aside for my smart-ass nature and our work in general. Right now he had little to spare for the Wolf who very probably was going to try to kill me. He didn’t like it when people and monsters and all that fell between made attempts on my life. I made my own decisions on where to sleep and whom to sleep with, but he didn’t have to like it and he didn’t have to show my possible assassin any faked appreciation of her humor.

Delilah tilted her head as she stood smoothly to move close to me, inhaling the smell of my sweat. “Wish to play more? Plague of the World can wait fifteen minutes more, yes?”

“No,” Niko said flatly. “The workout was delay enough.” He pointed at the employees’ bathrooms on the side of the building. “Clean up, Cal.” Because, of course, he didn’t have to. Sun, exertion, they were nothing. Me? I had to fucking man up, not melt into a puddle, walk away from a sure thing—sex or death—and go scrub down.

Delilah turned to look at Niko. I didn’t know if he smelled of suspicion or not. Surely even my brother couldn’t control his scent. But it didn’t matter. Delilah already knew I had my doubts, that we all did; she was a smart Wolf. She also knew a doubt wasn’t a sure thing. I was giving her a chance. Niko wasn’t feeling as cooperative at the moment. “
You
want to play?”

Niko didn’t pause to consider. Suspicion, distrust, it made her unworthy of sparring or conversation. And he was done with pretending. “Cal.”

I went. He was right. The Plague of the World came first. Chances, for Delilah and me, came second.

When I made it back to the car, I had hair wet from water from a bathroom sink and smelled of industrial-strength soap good for ridding the restaurant workers of E. coli. It was good for sweat too. As I climbed into the back of the car, Catcher regarded me with a horror that had him nearly climbing into his cousin’s lap. Auphe combined with the smell of twenty lemon groves mixed with bleach must’ve been worse than straight Auphe. Before Rafferty could complain about it, I put out a hand to Robin and said disgruntledly, “Give me the spray. I can’t take the bitching.”

“Speaking of bitching”—Rafferty elbowed his cousin off him and back between us—“your friend Delilah, if you can call any Kin a friend, is getting on my last goddamn nerve. Our families cut ties with our Kin relatives before we were born. We don’t deal with the criminal trash we’re related to. Having to listen to one we don’t even share blood with is more of a pain in the ass than I’m willing to deal with. And I won’t have anything to do with her and her freak All Wolf.”

It was rare I heard the name of the cult, the All Wolf, the Wolves who bred for the recessive traits, hoping someday to get their descendants back to the very beginning. All wolf all the time, even in thought—wanting what Catcher was trying so desperately to get rid of. Up until Catcher in fact, Delilah had been sort of the equivalent of a lapsed Catholic when it came to the All Wolf. She might have had partial wolf vocal cords and who knew what else inside, but she was pure human on the outside. Her faith in the All Wolf was limited until she met Catcher. Then she was born again, raise your paws high, brothers and sisters.

“So get her to back off,” Rafferty added curtly, “or I’ll put her ass in a coma until this is all over with. Got it?” He was sounding more and more like Suyolak all the time . . . and, hell, maybe that was the way it had to be for him to win.

Catcher didn’t seem to agree, giving a mournful-sounding moan, but, yeah, I got it. Rafferty had enough to deal with. So did I, but I’d created the problem by letting Delilah come along, and I’d deal with it. I watched as Delilah rode out of the parking lot ahead of us. Later. I’d deal with it later.

But later turned out to be a little inconvenient.

It was around seven when Rafferty came out of another light doze. I was driving by now, spelling Nik. Robin and Salome were still up front. Everybody thought it best to avoid another Salome/Catcher throw down. Goodfellow, on the other hand, was in the middle of what looked like a mental meltdown. “She was comely,” he’d been muttering over and over, so many times I was tempted to slam my head against the steering wheel to knock myself unconscious. “Why did I deny her? Deny myself?” Then he would focus on me. “She was comely, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah, her hair was nice, neat; she combed it a lot, but that wasn’t what I was really looking at,” I responded.

He’d regarded me with disbelief and turned his need for psychotherapy on Niko as I’d planned. I wasn’t going to make any great breakthroughs in science or literature or even in the field of hangman obviously, but I’d been homeschooled by Niko. I knew what the word “comely” meant. I just didn’t have to admit it. I was thinking how it was worth the revenge Nik was bound to visit upon me, when Rafferty woke up and said sharply, “The next exit. Take the next exit.”

“What? Our Suyolak- napper go off the beaten path?” I asked.

“Yes, damn it. Now take the exit!”

It was getting more than a little weird not being the only foulmouthed, grouchy ass around. Maybe that was a reminder to me not to travel, to build no more gates—so I could retain my title as chief asshole on this cross-country trek. No more good moods for me if I wanted to retain my title. “Taking it already, Fluffy. Don’t go frothing at the mouth. They shoot your type for that, you know.”

The next exit happened to be yet another tiny town over the state line into Wyoming. It had a four-way stop, a post office, and a Dairy Queen coming soon—the big time. I didn’t see a single reason for making a pit stop or detouring here unless your rent payment was massively overdue and you needed stamps. Or you were a vegan witch who wanted to salt the earth of the junk- food giant before it was built. Curse the land and save some cows.

But I didn’t believe in magic or that Suyolak and his driver were that desperate to mail anything. Neither did Niko. “Why here?” he said from the seat behind me. “It’s early to stop for the night. Even if Suyolak is draining his kidnapper of life bit by bit, I can’t see him stopping this soon.”

“I don’t know. All I do know is they came this way and I can smell the sickness ahead. Somewhere is Suyolak’s taint, and people are either dead or dying. The son of a bitch is here.”

He was the healer. “Which way?” I demanded.

It was left and through the four-way stop, the adrenaline of that world-drawing tourist attraction was killing me there. We then turned onto another road, another, and finally onto gravel followed by dirt. It had taken a good half hour, if not longer.

The rearview mirror was empty. Abelia and her buddies had stopped on the gravel at least a mile back, not that they couldn’t have gotten farther. They could have, but after the zombie amoebas, they were giving us more space. Abelia might have the biggest baddest ovaries around—probably shot them at her enemies like cannon balls, but her clan members weren’t as tough as she was, and if anyone died a gruesome death, she would most definitely prefer it was us. And Delilah was annoyed enough that she’d kept going when we’d gotten off the interstate. But that didn’t bother me. Just as her possibly trying to kill me didn’t bother me. She was Kin, doing what Kin did. I’d gone into this whole thing—sex, part-time relationship—with open eyes. I didn’t have much right to bitch, and I didn’t have to feel anything I didn’t want to feel. I didn’t. That was that. My story, write it down.

I parked the car in front of a house surrounded by trees in the middle of nowhere. The driveway was packed dirt and longer than two city blocks. The whole thing should’ve been run-down and creepy, with broken windows, holes in the roof, a rotting clapboard, Halloween-style haunted house with a skeletal body or two down an abandoned well out back. It wasn’t. It was painted cheery yellow with pristine white shutters and some kind of flowers, blue and purple, surrounding the porch. There was even a rocking chair as immaculately painted as the shutters. I did not want to see Suyolak here, not in this impossibly cheerful house under an equally impossibly blue sky. I’d never be able to watch a Hallmark commercial again . . . because I spent so much time doing that anyway, but still. Nobody should be sick here. They should be gardening or some such shit. Playing with their golden retriever. Baking cookies. Washing their car. Not dying among the scent of blue and purple flowers.

But as grim as that might be, it wasn’t actually the point. “I don’t see a truck and I don’t see a coffin,” I said. As harsh as it was, we couldn’t stop every time Suyolak took a civilian down. If we did, we could lose him. If we did, he’d know, and he’d make sure we lost him by dropping everyone he could.

There was a rumbling growl behind me, throat vibrating and air ripping, and it wasn’t Catcher. “He’s here.” Rafferty vaulted over the door with wolf speed, but still in human form. Catcher was right behind him. Both hit the door at the same time and it went down in a shattered mess of wood and safety glass.

Salome was moving too—out of the car and then under it. Considering the number of revenants she’d taken down, that was not a good sign. I ignored it, though, and, with Niko and Robin, was on the porch and inside the house in seconds.

There was a neat and clean living room to the right, stairs leading up in the middle, and a dining room to the left. At the back of the dining room was an arched doorway to a sunny kitchen. There was a man on the black and white tiled floor in plain view. He wasn’t moving, and he wasn’t Suyolak. Sad to say, that made him a low priority. Niko was ahead of me on the stairs, Robin beside me, and Rafferty and Catcher already out of sight above us. That’s when I heard a howl loud enough you would’ve thought it would have blown off the roof. It wasn’t terrified, but it wasn’t a whoopee-here-comes-the-ice-cream-man yodel either. Catcher was not happy about something up there and a moment later I got to be unhappy about it too. We all did. There was enough unhappy about the situation to go around.

It was in the nursery—it and the mother, along with stuffed Pooh Bears and Tiggers here and there and more of them and their friends dancing in a mural painted on the wall behind the crib. It was just like the outside of the house—all too perfect; all too good to be true. That’s what you get for being happy and having it all. That’s what happens. Someone or something like Suyolak comes to take it away.

Or worse.

She sat in the rocking chair by the big, bright window. Her head was down, a long sweep of chestnut brown hair, gleaming and thick, hanging like a curtain over her face. I’d bet that the first thing her husband had noticed about her when they first met was that hair. It made you think of wild horses and beaches. Why? I don’t know. It just did.

Her hands cradled a large mound of stomach and she was singing . . . in Rom. I knew only the curse words. Sophia had been free with those, even if I didn’t know anything else, but I certainly recognized the language when I heard it or an archaic version of it.

It was a lullaby. Anyone, Rom or not, would’ve known that. The lilting harmony, the warm love and expectation . . . if only it hadn’t had to gurgle its way through a throat full of blood. She lifted her head to smile at us with red-coated teeth. “It’s a boy.” The red fluid trickled out of both sides of her mouth as she said it. “A boy.” One hand moved in a slow circle over her stomach. “Snips and snails and puppy dog tails.”

“Oh shit,” I muttered. I already had my gun out. She was sick, she was a victim, but she smelled so
wrong
, I didn’t know how Catcher and Rafferty were still in the room with her. There was decay and death and a smell of . . . hell . . . a human gone off. Like bad milk. It was the only way to describe it.

She coughed and scarlet sprayed into a fine mist in the air, but she was beyond noticing or caring. “My precious baby boy.” Her eyes were on us and the whites were pure blood. Proud. She looked so proud and so absolutely insane. “Here he comes.”

She was right. He did come or he tried. Under the swell of her stomach I saw movement. It looked like tiny fists pressed against the flesh from the inside. Whatever was trying to be born, I didn’t think was wanting to do it the old-fashioned way. I knew,
knew
that if it had its way, it would rip its way to freedom and blood would splatter on the highly polished wood floor that matched the too-good-to-be-true living room, the too-perfect-to-exist dining room one. The wood gleamed brilliantly enough, you could almost see your reflection. I would’ve rather looked at that than looked at her, which with my past mirror phobia was saying something. But I didn’t. I kept my eyes up, because as much as I didn’t want to look, I didn’t want to die from carelessness either.

The woman in the rocker didn’t move as her stomach rippled, didn’t cry out in pain; she only kept smiling a beautiful, peaceful smile of joyful motherhood.

“Rafferty,” Niko rapped as Robin crossed himself; Robin, who was not only not Christian but one of the original pagan tricksters—pre-Christian and then some. I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t Christian either—I wasn’t anything, but if I’d known more than two lines of the Lord’s Prayer, I’d have been zipping right through it. Because this . . . this was horror-movie stuff where the devil was real, heads spun around, and Hell was just a zip code away.

“Do we kill it or not?” my brother demanded. His mouth was tight. He knew killing the baby—or what had been a baby—meant killing her as well, and he didn’t like it. But he would do it. Niko always did what he had to do, no matter the consequences to himself. He’d suffered enough consequences in his life for being a good man. If it came to that, I’d do it before I’d let him—but as it turned out, neither of us had to make the choice. Someone else did.

The healer shook his head and crouched a few feet away from her. His eyes unfocused and he shook his head again. “It’s not viable outside the womb, and she’s not viable for long either.”

No, she didn’t look it—twisted and warped, blood pouring out of her mouth, eyes, ears, dying from the poisonous thing inside her. And it was poisonous, as much as a truckload of cyanide. The Vayash had thought the same about me. If they hadn’t feared the Auphe so much, I was positive they would’ve dragged a pregnant Sophia off and made sure I never became a walking, talking reality. And I could understand that, believe it or not. If this was what they’d pictured, fuck . . . I wouldn’t have blamed them.