Rob Thurman - Deathwish

Huge, unobstructed if grimy windows. The Auphe had good night vision. They could see where they wanted to go—see the way in. And they were there, every last one of them, following us from rooftop to rooftop, maybe. From the top of a bus or truck. I didn’t care. They were there, and that’s what mattered.

Niko and I pushed through the front doors, then slammed them behind us. They were unlocked. Wasn’t that lucky? Yeah, right. Planning is better than luck any day.

It was a trap. The Auphe knew it was a trap. A paste-eating, booger-picking kindergartner would’ve known it was a trap. That was the Auphe weakness. They were strong, incredibly fast, fanatical, hard as fucking hell to kill, but they were arrogant.

Promise, Cherish, Robin, Niko, and me. What could the five of us possibly accomplish against their eighteen? Take one or two with us? Maybe. But other than that, not a damn thing.

But there were no Promise, Cherish, or Robin. There were others, though, those who wanted the Auphe gone almost as much as we did.

Niko and I made our way to the center of the warehouse. He didn’t draw his sword, one of the strangest things I’d seen in a battle—Niko without some blade drawn. “Samuel!” he rapped. From twenty feet away, Samuel tossed him a large metal briefcase that just happened to contain a nuclear device. Tossed . Okay, Nik had explained a suitcase nuke was much smaller in destructive power than the kind dropped from a plane that can take out whole cities. But it would take out a chunk, and they were tossing it like a basketball—even though Samuel had told Niko it weighed only about fifty pounds.

“Don’t worry, Cal. It’s not volatile. It has to be triggered, not dropped,” Samuel said.

Right. That guy should watch more TV.

I didn’t pull my gun from my holster, another first for an expected battle. I looked at my brother and wanted to repeat what we’d said after we’d fallen out of the sky. I wanted to ask if he was sure. He still had a chance to make a run for it. He still had a chance to live.

He anticipated me. “Together,” he repeated.

I barely had time to nod when the eighteen gates opened behind us, and Niko and I dropped to our knees instantaneously. That’s when the Uzis of thirty of the Vigil who had been waiting in the warehouse moved between the Auphe and us and fired. Just as Niko had planned it with Samuel and his companions four days before, they formed a shield for us, to give us time to do what was needed. They were a line of the best-equipped human assassins in, if at least not the entire city, definitely a fifteen-block radius.

They might as well have been carrying Super Soakers.

The Auphe had smelled them, smelled more than the five they’d counted on, smelled a far bigger trap than they’d been expecting, and they didn’t care. Nope, a shit they simply did not give. And if it had only been the Vigil, they wouldn’t have a reason to. They couldn’t have smelled anything in the air but a cloud of fear sweat. The Vigil had been around, and Uzis were fun and all, but this was the Auphe. The Vigil might be the only humans alive besides Nik who knew what the Auphe were and what they could do. They had every reason to be afraid, and the Auphe proved it. A blur of motion, they leapt from their gates, some up to the walls and some across the floor straight toward the men and into the near wall of bullets.

I was occupied wrapping a cloth over my nose and mouth and tying it behind my neck. It smelled strongly of the oil Niko used on his swords. I was going to use my gun oil, but something that smelled of Niko . . . it had a better chance. Gave me a better chance.

“How many seconds?” Niko asked as he opened the case.

We’d discussed this at least twenty times in the past few days, but it came down to me. How fast I could open a gate and how fast I could shut eighteen down. Then there was moving through and . . . shit. Shit. I didn’t know. I could only guess.

“Cal.”

Niko had his hand hovering above a computerized trigger. The Vigil were being torn to pieces around us. Bullets, bullets everywhere, but these were the Auphe. If they couldn’t dodge it, and most they could, it didn’t matter unless it took their head off, and I didn’t see a single headless Auphe torso. Which I happily would’ve wanted an eight-by-ten glossy of if I had. I did see human guts, heard screaming, limbs ripped from bodies, and throughout it all the switchblade stab of hyena laughing. I saw it all—the future of the world. If the Auphe had their way.

Fuck ’em. They weren’t getting it.

I wrapped the second cloth over my eyes. “Five seconds. Go.” I heard the click of the timer being switched on, and I opened the gate to hell. Tumulus. It was half of the plan. Forget gating. The Auphe can run too. We needed someplace we could blow up the size of a few football fields. Even the Auphe couldn’t run that fast. Especially with what Niko was packing.

When I said “Go,” I tore a hole in reality. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it—inside me, howling in glee, all but screaming my name. And I discovered there was something better than meditation for pushing down my inner monster; the thought of a nuke three feet from me.

Niko’s hand grabbed my arm and yanked me through. I felt the ripple of pure power and then we were there. I couldn’t smell it, only the oil-soaked cloth over my mouth. I couldn’t see it, thanks to the blindfold. But it touched me. The biting cold on my face, the grit of glass sand under my hands and through the knees of my jeans. I was back.

Four seconds.

Niko had said no when I told him back at Rafferty’s what we needed to do. He’d seen me the first time I’d returned from Tumulus. He’d heard and seen what I’d done when hypnotized to recover the lost memories of this place and what had happened to me here. We both thought the same. If I went back, that’d be it. No lost memories to save me. No juvenile traumatic amnesia this time. More likely the two years I’d lost to begin with would all come flooding back and do to my brain what the Auphe had done to the Vigil.

But it could be that wasn’t true, I’d argued. Maybe every time I thought of going back to Tumulus and losing my sanity, I was thinking of being dragged there by the Auphe. Maybe it wasn’t just the place but the monsters that went with it and what they would do to me if they ever took me there again.

Three seconds.

I felt the eighteen gates open around us.

I’d argued with Niko for hours over it. Saying it was worth the risk. He wouldn’t agree—it wasn’t going to happen—until I said the Auphe were following me. They wanted Niko dead. They wanted me alive. Either way, if Niko went through to Tumulus without me, there was no guarantee all the Auphe would follow him and his bomb. Some would stay for me, and Nik knew it. It was the only reason he’d given in. It was him, naturally, that came up with blocking my sense of sight and smell. Blocking as much of Tumulus as we could. And it seemed to be working.

And the time element . . . if I kept the gate open, like Niko had suggested when he’d wanted to go through alone earlier in the week for reconnaissance, if I kept it anchored to our world, it might keep the time flow there and here the same. Although, hell, at this point, the time difference was the least of our concerns.

They came through their gates. I heard the whisper of sand under their feet and claws. I felt their eyes on me the same as I’d felt them watching me the past days.

Two seconds.

I didn’t think they knew what the bomb was, but they did recognize a trap that would actually work. Smelled the confidence on Niko, the vicious triumph on me—not the fear they’d scented on the Vigil. Mad, feral, but smart as the most cunning of predators. A predator like that would retreat, think things over, see what would happen.