Rob Thurman - Deathwish

“Safe is all I’ve got right now, if I want to stay above ground and kicking.” I ignored the warm press of her upper leg against my arm. And I didn’t sweat. No court in the land could make me swear otherwise. “I need a favor.”

She sighed, bored. She didn’t pout. Wolves don’t pout. They may get indigestion from eating you if you annoy them, but they don’t pout. “Favor? What favor?” she demanded with a careless yawn.

It was an easy enough one for her, just information, though for what she charged you’d think it was much harder. Before I left she did kiss me with a punishing nip of teeth and the soothing silk of tongue. It had me wanting to rethink safe, but I couldn’t. I’d been heading for this moment my whole life. Whether I lived or died, it ended now.

I left the library, hoping Delilah was smart and patient enough to stay behind as long as she’d said, because I had one of them on me now . . . watching. It had just moved into range. Of course, I wasn’t sure what that range was, so it wasn’t too helpful to me. I assumed within eyesight. I didn’t look around. We had one small advantage in this, and I didn’t want to give it away. My phone rang while I was clambering down the bottom of the stairs. I answered to hear Niko say brusquely, “You alive?”

“It’s cute how you worry.” I grinned, equally relieved to know he was in the same shape himself. “How’d it go with Samuel? Did they go for it?”

“They did. More importantly, they have the equipment upstate, although they also said officially it didn’t exist.” For some reason that seemed to amuse him, but he didn’t say why. “They flew it down from Fort Drum. I met them and was instructed on it. What’s the address Delilah gave you? I’ll call it to Samuel.”

I gave it to him. Flew it down from the army base. Damn, the Vigil did have some unbelievably serious influence. “You haven’t seen any of them following you, have you?”

“No, I’m clean as far as I can tell. You were right. They are homed in on you. Do you have any?”

“One.”

“One.” Nik didn’t say it like it was good news. To him it wasn’t. One could as easily call in the other seventeen, and he wouldn’t be there. That was the bottom line. He wouldn’t be there.

“Just one. Broad daylight. Thousands of people.” All separately might not have stopped them, but the combination could pull it off.

He exhaled, sounding calm and matter-of-fact, and absolutely not fooling me one damn bit about any of it. “Samuel said they can be ready starting tonight.”

“Be nice if one time was all it took.” The sky was as pure blue as yesterday when we’d come tumbling out of it. “Everyone else crawled in a hole and pulled it in after them?”

“Yes, although Promise and Robin aren’t too happy about it.” Promise and Cherish had gone to New Jersey. If Oshossi’s animals could sniff them out in that smell, more power to them. Robin had gone wherever Robin went. Someplace where condoms were stored by the crate and clothing was not only optional but highly frowned upon.

It made facing the Auphe a shade less terrifying.

“It was you and me in the beginning, Nik,” I said. “You and me in the end.” It was the way it was supposed to be. Meant to be. Fate coming full circle.

“If this time in the beginning you could come already potty trained, it would be a big plus,” he said dryly before disconnecting.

I snorted and slid the phone into my jacket pocket as the second watcher joined the first. Five minutes later, there was a third. They had to be curious. Annoyed. Ticked the hell off. Where were the rest of us?

“Yeah, you keep watching,” I muttered. I’d been right when I’d talked to Nik on the beach days and days ago. If I’d ran while the others hid—even if they’d had to do it all their lives—they would’ve been safe. Although Niko was like the Auphe. They might have genetic GPS, but in a way, so did he. There was no guarantee who would’ve found me first.

I ducked my head against the cold wind and started walking. It was going to be a long day of dragging these bitches from place to meaningless place. And the night? I didn’t want to think about the night. That’s when it could go wrong in all the worst ways.

I had hours to kill before that, though, and there was one thing I’d always meant to do. If I was going to go out, good hand or not, and chances were much better than ever that I was, I wasn’t going out with that on my body. That was a black and red tattoo I had on my bicep. I’d been possessed once—yeah, yeah, old news—and my pilot during the whole ordeal thought it would be an absolute blast to get MOM surrounded by a heart on my arm. To say I’d considered peeling the skin off with my combat knife didn’t really give the flavor of how much I hated it. Had hated her.

I wasn’t going to die with that on me. I found the nearest tattoo parlor, waited my turn before sitting, taking off my jacket, rolling up my sleeve, and saying, “Cover it up.”

The guy—big, fat, and with a curly beard—blinked, bored. “With what?” Whether I didn’t love my mommy or not anymore wasn’t his concern.

“With damn Big Bird for all I care. Just cover it up.”

It wasn’t that easy. It’s never that easy. A whole slew of them came over to discuss the situation. A tattoo was a reflection of your inner self, your true blah, blah, blah. You couldn’t just slap anything on there. Well, obviously I had, as no one had fought me about the whole mom issue. Apparently moms got more respect than Big Bird. One guy had actually suggested that it would be easy to blend the tattoo I had now into a dragon, as if that wouldn’t get me laughed out of the bar. Assuming Ishiah ever let me back in after Cambriel’s death.

A dragon. Christ. While piles of flaming lizard crap from the sky were deadly enough if you weren’t careful, it certainly wasn’t worth bragging about to have survived. I could never wear a short-sleeved shirt again.

Finally I pointed at a red and black band on the wall. Funky lettering. I felt the invisible Niko thwap me over my ear and corrected myself quickly. Latin. It was Latin. “What about that? What’s that?”

“Armband. A lot of our guys retiring from the military are getting that. It says ‘Brothers in Arms,’ ” Curly said.

Huh. How about that? The right colors and, this time, the right sentiment.

Last time it hadn’t hurt or the thing inside me had enjoyed the pain. Hard to say. This time it did. I didn’t mind.

The things that matter are worth it.

You could still see the heart with the MOM, but just barely, and only if you knew where to look. The ghost of gone. Just like Sophia herself. She was gone, but if you knew where to look in me, you’d still see her. It was the best that I could hope for, though, and I was happy with it. I let them tape it up with gauze, paid, and headed outside. Hours had passed and the light was bleeding from the sky.

Timing. Now was when I found out if I was on the right side of it—or tomato paste on the wall.

Radioactive tomato paste, as it turned out.

Because that note in Nik’s voice on the phone? Can I just get a “Holy shit” from the choir, please?

“A nuke? A goddamn nuke? A fucking nuke? A . . .” My mouth was still moving, but nothing was coming out. I’d run out of curse words to say. Me. That hadn’t ever happened in my life. “What’s wrong with a nice normal bomb? You know, in case things go wrong, we only take out a few buildings, not the whole damn city.”

Robin had found Niko and me a place to stay temporarily. It was a furnished studio apartment, the best he said he could do on short notice, but it was on the first floor. That’s all we needed. The first floor. I met Nik there and I would’ve wrinkled my nose at the smell of old cat piss dried into the floor if I didn’t have other things on my mind—radioactive things.