Rob Thurman - Madhouse

They always looked abandoned from the outside with blackout curtains or blinds on the windows to keep up the impression. The doors were also kept chained, but if any homeless happened to be smart enough to find another way in … well, yummy manna from doggy heaven.

Delilah's place had once been a school. There was a rusty chain-link fence and graffiti everywhere. Old graffiti. Any newer aspiring artists wouldn't do any better than the homeless. She used the key to open the chains and relocked them through a small hole fashioned in the steel-bar-enhanced safety glass. Sniffing me quickly, she nodded. "Come."

Before we'd gotten within ten blocks of the place, she had produced a small spray container, like a tiny perfume bottle, and squirted me liberally with it. "From the puck," she had said. And I remembered it from our previous run-in with the Kin. "Will make you smell different. Not like you. Not human food. Not Auphe." Not human, because someone might want to join in on the meal. And not Auphe, because…hell, that didn't need explanation.

She had chosen a room on the third floor and we made our way quietly up darkened stairs, stopping if she heard any other wolves. I might not have the scent of a human or an Auphe, but I had to be something, and if they saw me, they would know it wasn't wolf. Managing to avoid that, we reached her place. It was a big room that had once been two. A wall had been knocked down with a sledgehammer from the looks of the ragged concrete frame. The institutional walls had been painted an umber color, smoldering in the low light of the occasional lamp. The shades were light reddish brown glass run through with hundreds of random fractures, Tiffany in a postmodern world.

There was no couch, only cushions. A nest of six large cushions made up what I guessed to be the equivalent. Three feet by three feet, they were forest green, deep brown, rusty red.

"Nice place," I said politely and then got to the point. "You don't eat people, do you?" For nutrition, I meant. I knew the vast majority of the Kin did as well as some non-Kin wolves. "I might have issues with that."

"People." She slipped off her jacket, then her shirt. She wasn't wearing a bra and suddenly people pitas seemed a little less important than they had been. But I held on, because it was important. I wasn't Auphe and I wasn't sleeping with someone who would do the things Auphe would do. "No challenge," she dismissed. "I am a hunter. Hunter. I am not jackal like some Kin."

Okay, that was good to know. There was another pile of cushions, slightly larger across the room, and they were white, every one of them—the barest shade paler than Delilah's hair. "You sleep as a wolf, don't you?"

She peeled my jacket off me in one smooth motion. "Wolf dreams." Her eyes were bright. "They are richer, sharper. You taste, smell, hear, touch. The very same as this world here." She shrugged, which did interesting things to very interesting parts of her. "Maybe that is the world. Maybe this is only the dream."

"Dreamtime." I considered the holster, then slipped out of it. Robin would no doubt say she'd like me to keep it on. Kinky and all, but shooting off your own balls during sex is more kink than I cared to think about. And was I babbling in my head nervously? Yeah. So what? It was my second goddamn time. I could be nervous if I wanted. "Sounds similar to something that Aborigines in Australia believe. Nik told me about it once, said it was…" Great, I was babbling outside my head now.

But it was the last word I said that night as I was tackled to the floor. Last string of coherent words anyway. I did say a few single explosive ones. Delilah was no nymph. She wasn't soft and slow, meandering and mild. Delilah was a whirlwind of wants and needs and demands, and before the night was over, she taught me how to be the same.

I was glad, though, that she couldn't smell me through Robin's concoction. Couldn't smell the lingering doubt under the savagely sharp pleasure. The faint remorse beneath the sheer holy shit spine-knotting euphoria.

The touch of guilt behind every bite, thrust, and caress.

The regret.

The New York Metropolitan Museum was big. I knew that. But it was something I knew in the back of my head…like that the sky is blue. That fire burns. That a man can't get it up in fifty-degree water no matter what Robin thought. Basic, commonsense knowledge.

So while I knew the museum was big, I never thought about it—not until early the next morning when I was lost in the basement under the main building. I had gotten Sangrida's permission over the phone to be there, just checking for more sirrush, I'd said, and she'd made sure the same door to the basement was unlocked, but that was it. And it wasn't as if I could request a security guard to help me find the mummy. First, I didn't know which men were hers and not your average rent-a-cop, and, second, I didn't know if she was aware that Wahanket had made a burrow under her feet.

I didn't think pissing off the mummy would be a good idea. I'd seen the cold rage lurking behind the yellow glow that filled those eye sockets. He hadn't tried to kill us, but he still wasn't what I'd call an easygoing guy. And if he lost his home, I damn sure didn't want him sleeping on my couch.

Robin had led us confidently through a maze of stacked crates and dusty, forgotten exhibits. I'd paid attention, but apparently not enough. And now, lacking a trail of bread crumbs, I was thoroughly lost. The lights were back on this time, and I wandered through row after row of delicate gilt furniture covered with heavy plastic drapes, canvases of all shapes and sizes, marble statuary, dramatic black-and-white masks, and grime-covered case after case of weapons. Swords, daggers, even axes. It was amazing. You didn't even need to be a puck to get itchy fingers at the sight of it.

But that would be wrong, and, more importantly, difficult to smuggle out past the guards at the entrance. Now, that was a Robin thought and it brought me back to the reason I was there. Time to stop window-shopping and get to it.

Neither he nor Nik would be happy to know where I was or what I was doing. Robin because I was poking my nose where he'd made it very clear he'd as soon chop it off. Nik…Nik would not be enthusiastic— strongly not enthusiastic—about the fact I was roaming around the location of a sirrush attack. There could be a hundred of those damn things down here; there was room.

Finally stopping beside a Japanese screen, I gave in to the inevitable and called out, "Wahanket."

Nothing.

I tried again, louder this time. "Wahanket!"

This time there was a rustling and there was a sense of motion in the corner of my eye. I turned, gun in hand. Sangrida had left one of her guards' 9mms for me at the basement entrance I'd used, under the stairs. It wasn't the Viking broadsword I'd expected, which was fine by me. They were heavy as hell. During the museum's working hours, getting my own gun through security wasn't feasible, but this one would do.

The motion and flicker I'd seen materialized into a small figure. It was cat-sized, no doubt because it was a cat. It sat and stared at me with black-and-white eyes. Painted eyes. The rest of it was a deep tarnished bronze with the glimmer of gold around its neck. It stared for a few more seconds, then stood and disappeared smoothly into the shadows with the clink of metal paws against the floor. It was an invitation and I accepted it.

An animated metal cat. It was bizarre and then some. How could it move? Was it alive or some sort of ancient Egyptian sorcerer's mind trick? I didn't know, although I was leaning toward the latter. I believed in monsters—hell, yeah. But magic? If there wasn't some form of flesh or bone behind it, I had a hard time buying into it. I did know that I preferred the walking statue idea to the thought that it was some dried-up cat mummy.