Roadkill (38 page)

“The bacteria in the water,” Rafferty said. “He’s agitated them to a thousand times their normal activity. That light is them dying. He turned them into . . . hell, stars. But microbial stars don’t live long.”

“Is he going to boil us alive, because, quite frankly, that is the one near death I’ve avoided throughout the millennia, and I’ve no particular interest in it now.” Robin had his sword out too, but for the first time it looked useless and he, thanks to those millennia of experience, was Niko’s equal in swordsmanship . . . if he was sober. “Although at least these wretched clothes from that equally wretched, low-fashion and inedible food store are machine washable. If I do die, at least my corpse won’t reside in shrunken, wrinkled rags.”

“No. We’re not going to be boiled alive, but you just made me wish we would be,” Rafferty growled.

Rafferty was a lightweight when it came to surviving the puck experience, but he was also right. We weren’t boiled alive. A good portion of the water splashed down about two feet from us . . . a generous estimate. “Cutting it a little close, isn’t he?” I said it to Nik, because when it came to healing, fine, Rafferty was our guy . . . Wolf . . . both. But when it came to logistics in a battle, I trusted my brother over anyone and everyone.

And when it came to the abrupt smell of copper and calcium and the five piles of dust that appeared on the ground behind us, it looked like I didn’t have to worry about trusting or not trusting a certain someone ever again. Abelia-Roo and her men were gone. The scent and the flicker out of the corner of my eye had me whirling around, Eagle pointed—except there was nothing for it to do. A dust buster was the only thing that would be any good now. Niko bent down and ran his fingers through one heap. The residue flew off his fingers, finer than flour dust.

“It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah all over again,” Robin said in a hushed tone, finally impressed enough to be almost quiet.

“Shit,” I repeated, without the “holy” this time. There was nothing much holy about this. She’d been a bitch from Hell, Abelia, one so full of hate and loathing that every foot she put to the earth had most likely poisoned it . . . with just a slower poison than Suyolak’s version. That she could be gone so quickly and quietly, without a screech or a curse, was shocking and almost unbelievable. Like someone’s snapping the fingers at a town-destroying tornado and its simply disappearing. Poof. Gone.

“I couldn’t protect everyone.”

I looked back, but Rafferty hadn’t bothered to turn around. “They were the ones that caused this clusterfuck. They’re responsible for Suyolak’s escaping that coffin. If someone had to go . . .” He shrugged again. He did that a lot. It was not my favorite thing, especially under deadly circumstances where I had no control. I had issues with control. We’d all seen that, but tricking myself into believing I had control was something that had saved my sanity more than once. Tricks and wire stitching us together sometimes was all you had, and I was missing it badly now.

“We all make difficult decisions in battle. You are Solomonic in your wisdom,” Goodfellow said to Rafferty smoothly, if hastily. There was nothing wrong with knowing which side of your bread was buttered, and as he’d been alive before bread or butter, Robin had mastered that maneuver.

“If you think your silver tongue will save you, goat, it will not.” It was Suyolak’s voice—a real voice this time, not manufactured in my brain. I heard it. I heard
him
. “To make it close to a fair contest, he will have to sacrifice more of you. All of you, and even then . . .” He stepped into sight.

It was darker now and I didn’t have the eyes of the three Wolves, but between the lingering twilight, the rising moon, and the flickering glow of dying bacteria, I could see him as he came around the left curve of the spring. He was human again with flesh, dark eyes, and black hair that touched the ground and that cheerful Rom smile from my dream. It was that damn-are-we-going-to-have-some-fun smile; the isn’t-the-world-one-big-party smile; a have- I-got-something-to-give-you grin. The last one was the one I believed. He had something to give us all right, a great big frigging present, and if it was what Abelia and her men had gotten, we’d be damn lucky piles of dust.

I hadn’t believed in luck since I was five.

“He used them to reconstitute himself,” Niko said. “Abelia and the others. He drained the life out of them to make himself whole.”

“Not only them, Vayash cousin.” He was closer, a little more than seventy-five feet away. Almost nude, he had only strips of faded cloth hanging from him. Hundreds of years in a coffin were rough on the wardrobe. He made a washing motion with his hands and the twisted, foot-long fingernails fell away. “I also took the trees, the grass, twenty-one elk, six bears, two mountain lions, several sheep, and numberless small vermin. Some creatures I didn’t know existed in my time. It’s always a pleasure to kill something new.” He stopped and pointed at me. “You are new.”

“And old and something the world had never seen before. Yeah, been there, heard that,” I snapped, turning back, and this time I had something for the Eagle. I aimed and when the ground came up to smack me in the face, I was more than a little disappointed. Not surprised, no, that Suyolak had given me an invisible swat, but there was a complete lack of satisfaction, no doubt about it.

I heard Delilah’s growl, but it wasn’t her normal one . . . human or wolf. It was frightened—Delilah, who was never scared, who wasn’t just borderline suicidal against an enemy, but flat-out ecstatic kamikaze all the way. She didn’t fear pain or death. I thought she didn’t fear anything, but I was wrong. I wasn’t the only one. “He is
wrong
,” she snarled. “Unnatural. Unclean.”

I could smell it, what she smelled. Even on my stomach, facedown in the dirt, I could smell it. It had lingered around the coffin, but his odor this close . . . It could choke you. It was rotting flesh and disease and mass graves sweltering under a hot sun, but beyond that—beyond
who
he was to
what
he was, it was alien. Delilah was right. He was wrong and unnatural. Even the Auphe, twisted monsters that they were, had belonged here. They’d died elsewhere, but they’d risen from this earth. As much as you wanted to deny they were natural, they were actually nature at its most effective. Suyolak was outside nature; a mistake that could destroy what had accidentally spawned a creature it had no hold over. Nature had been an ant creating the foot that would crush it.

I had no idea what was in the dirt I was inhaling, but it must’ve been some potent stuff. Philosophical thoughts in a not-so-philosophical situation by the farthest thing from a philosopher as you could fucking find. Suyolak was one huge-ass mistake. Didn’t need to say more than that. I got my hands under me and started to push up as I felt a hand tangle in the back of my jacket and pull me the rest of the way. Not to my feet, which was asking a little much right then, but to my knees. “What . . . the hell . . . was that?” I tasted blood in my mouth and I was hoping it was from a split lip or broken nose, because both of those were better than nearly anything Suyolak could dream up.

Niko decided that if I could talk, I could stand after all and finished the job by pulling me to my feet. He was right. I weaved, even with his hand still holding me up, but I did stay up. Niko was the rock that at times held me up and at other times could take me down as efficiently as Suyolak had—which reminded me. “What was that?” I repeated, wiping dirt and blood from my face.

“A distraction,” Rafferty answered, his shaggy hair tangling in the wind.

A distraction could be good. If I’d distracted Suyolak enough that he’d swatted me with his antihealer mojo, then Rafferty might have been able to swat him right back—only harder. I looked past him. Shit. Suyolak was still standing, still grinning, looking so much the cheerful Rom, so like our mother, he could’ve been her slightly more sociopathic cousin. With hair grown long in the coffin and a face that was meant to attract the unwary, to anyone but us he would look like a god come to Earth. To me, he looked like a trap. One thing he didn’t look was one bit distracted, which meant I was the one distracting Rafferty, not Suyolak—and that wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.

“Why the hell didn’t you take him while he was doing the same to me?” I held on to my gun stubbornly. I might be the fly and Suyolak the swatter, but that didn’t mean I was going to be flattened without getting off at least one round—not next time.

“Probably because if he had, you’d have done more than hit the ground. You wouldn’t have gotten back up again,” Niko said as he steadied me.

“I took only one or two beats of your heart.” Suyolak raised his voice over the growling that was still coming from Delilah and had been joined by those of Catcher. “You do not miss them now, do you? One or two seconds of your life. Believe me, by the time I am finished here, you’ll be glad to die those few seconds sooner than the rest.”

Now Rafferty did split enough of his attention to the nearest warm body. It happened to be Goodfellow. He took his arm and pushed him toward Catcher. “Hang on to him. You might need some help, but do it. He’s okay now, but that could change when it all starts. It could flip a switch and I don’t want him any closer to Suyolak.” He took Catcher’s face, gripping the fur on both sides, focusing on him. “I’ve got one chance at this, Catch. I can do this, but not if you go Cujo on me, okay?” The growling and snarling had stopped and Catcher regarded him with an eerie silence before pressing his nose into his cousin’s hair, snuffling, and then blowing out air in an aggrieved sigh. But he stayed put, aggrieved meaning agreeing if not particularly liking it.

“Good.” Rafferty straightened. “The rest of you stay back and out of the way. That’s the best thing you can do for me. I’ve got more power up between you and him. Hopefully he won’t get through again if you don’t give him reason to. He wants me first.” With that, he moved toward Suyolak and away from us. Ill- tempered and bossy to the end, that’s who he was. Cranky I could understand, but telling me what to do, that wasn’t going to fly. Like him, I’d gone up against creatures better than I was, and I’d survived, but that was only because I’d always had help. Without the last, I still would’ve gotten the job done, but I wouldn’t have walked away to tell the tale. We’d gotten Rafferty into this. It would be a piss-poor partnership if we didn’t help him to live to pass through and see the other side of it.

The hand that had been holding me up now moved to my shoulder to hold me back. “Wait,” Niko ordered.

I hadn’t moved. There was a time to make your move. If you were good, you knew it when it came. There were many things I wasn’t especially good at in life: handling customer relations, dealing with relations of any kind, keeping the smart-ass in check, not recognizing addiction when it bit me and everyone around me in the ass. But one thing I did know was the right time. The shot I’d tried to take at Suyolak hadn’t been it. That had been the first punch in the first round. That wasn’t the moment I was talking about. Our moment in this game now was the last ditch, now-or-never-again time that you had to take or you wouldn’t live to take anything else. I knew it because Nik had taught me to know it . . . and being half predator—more than half, whichever—that didn’t hurt either.

We were waiting for the end of the line, and we weren’t there yet. “You’re embarrassing me in front of the other kids, Mom,” I grumbled.

“I feel for you,” he commented wryly. But he let his hand drop away, because he trusted me. It was impossible to fathom how he kept that trust day after day when my subconscious was determined to do everything it could to deserve anything except that trust—or maybe it wasn’t so much trust as acceptance, unconditional and never-ending. I’d been wrong earlier when I’d thought I hadn’t felt lucky since I was five. I should’ve felt lucky every single day of my life.

“I wish someone felt for me,” Robin complained with a sneeze. He was crouched beside Catcher with one arm hooked around the Wolf’s neck. “Felt for me, felt
of
me. Anything at this time would be welcome, because I had much higher hopes of this ending with me not dead. So any fondling or groping would be welcome.” Catcher turned and gave him one broad lick across the mouth and nose before going back to snarling and staring at the two healers approaching each other. “Not what I had in mind, but the effort is . . . ah . . . appreciated, thank you.” Goodfellow scrubbed his face with his sleeve.

“You should’ve said more in your call to Ishiah,” Niko said, moving to stand beside me now that I could actually stand on my own. “If you can actually consider monogamy, then you owed Ishiah more than a weak excuse for a good-bye.” Niko, like me, did understand the impossible nature of a good-bye, but unlike me, had the balls and the spine to tell someone else to go above and beyond.

“Your brother might need a mommy, but I do not,” Robin shot back stiffly, still hanging on to Catcher. He didn’t need a mommy, but it looked as if he had one huge teddy bear. “When I tell Ishiah . . . Whatever I plan on telling him, it won’t be only because I don’t think I’ll be around later for the consequences. He deserves better than that.”

“Not soap opera.
Battle
. Be ready,” Delilah contributed with an impatient toss of white hair and a deep rumble in her throat that outdid Catcher’s. “Humans, pucks, even
Auphe
. Hopeless all.” Delilah, who didn’t trust anyone but herself and didn’t want to; whole and complete within herself, that’s what she thought. She was the unlucky one, but I didn’t think she’d ever know it.

Catcher moaned. He knew what it was to be lucky, to have someone—family or otherwise—and that meant what he was now seeing had to be his worst nightmare: Rafferty and Suyolak coming together.

The moon had risen behind the antihealer. It was the same moon from my dream. Huge and orange, shedding the light of a forest fire down on us. It hardly ever looked like that in summer. I took it as a sign that fate was feeling particularly bitchy, giving a nightmare-perfect background to another nightmare, the one we were facing. Suyolak spread his arms under it. “So long has it been since I’ve seen the sky. So long has it been that I walked in a world that had never seen my like”—he lowered his arms and finished lazily—“and is now seeing it again, Wolf.”