Rob Thurman - Moonshine

I walked away before Niko could try to convince me that I hadn't frozen in the face of the enemy. I had. It had cost us the first crown, and I wasn't about to risk losing another. Frankly, guarding George's last chance wasn't a responsibility I was up for.

An hour and a half later we were back on the road, flush with success… and something else. "Jesus." I grimaced as the alcohol fumes wafted my way. "Goodfellow, it's actually coming out of your pores."

A haunted look sought me out over a rapidly emptying bottle of fruit brandy. I'd long lost track of how many such bottles he'd sucked down during the previous hour. "I've lived through the fall of Rome,, the Hundred Years' War, even that sleazy Troy debacle, but I've never faced anything such as that." He took another hurried pull on the bottle before repeating in a shell-shocked whisper, "Never."

Dinner had not gone well for our puck. Abelia-Roo's hands had been anywhere but on her fork. For once, Robin had been the hunted, not the hunter, prey of a wizened, bare-gummed predator. Niko, behind the wheel, was not surprisingly unsympathetic to his plight and offered little comfort. "Be grateful we didn't leave you there. She seemed quite serious about the leash threat." He arched an eyebrow in consideration. "Then again, it may have been more of a promise than a threat."

Goodfellow had a response to that. By now, I knew that he had a response to anything. I managed to turn on the radio just in time to drown it out. After tuning in to the first station I came across, I pulled on the lever on the bottom of the passenger seat to ease it back. Toeing off my shoes, I put my feet up on the dashboard, shifted onto my side, and dozed off. Stomach heavy with food, mind dull with heat, there wasn't much else to do. There was a long stretch of blissfully empty darkness that was broken what must have been hours later by a hand on my shoulder. I squinted at the orange and pink sky outside the window and revised my estimate. Many hours later—it was morning. I sat up and ran fingers through sleep-rumpled hair. Beside me, the owner of the hand that had pulled me from sleep growled, "Trouble."

Trouble all right, and it was reflected in the rearview mirror as flashing red and blue lights. Fan-fucking-tastic. I glared at Flay, who seemed to have replaced Niko at the steering wheel, and asked with typical morning ill humor, "Do you even have a license, Snowball?"

"Do you ?" came his impatient gargle.

He had a point. Mine hadn't come as a prize in a box of cereal, but neither had it come from the DMV. While it was good enough to pass a casual glance, it couldn't fool the computers, which was why we were driving instead of flying. Good fake ID was easy enough to come by; excellent fake ID was increasingly rare in this hyper-security-sensitive world.

"Shit." I looked over my shoulder. Niko, Promise, Robin—they were all already awake. I immediately pegged Goodfellow as our best bet. He'd been running under the radar longer than the rest of us by far. If anyone had passable paper, it would be him. It was a good thought, in theory, until I took in the bloodshot eyes and white-knuckled fists pressed to his head, and breath that could embalm a corpse. I went immediately to our next best hope. "Promise?"

She could've pulled it off, I think. If not by convincing the cop that she'd been driving, then by the simple fact of being Promise. I'd never know, because it didn't come to that.

The Auphe came first.

I didn't see the rip in the air he plummeted through, but I doubted that it was more than ten feet up. He came down fast—too damn fast.

Walking toward us, the cop was freshly stamped from the hero cookie cutter. Square jaw, wide shoulders, impenetrable sunglasses paired with an impenetrable expression. Disciplined, stalwart, a noble defender of order—it took less than five seconds for him to die. The Auphe landed on top of him, knocking him to his hands and knees. An infinity of teeth found the bare strip of skin over the starched collar and passed through it as if it were no more substantial than a flesh-colored mist. Then there was another mist, this one red and viscous. I didn't remember moving, yet somehow I'd traveled from my seat to the back of the RV. Hands pressed against the glass, I saw the cop try to struggle upward. With one hand supporting his weight, he used the other to claw at the nightmare on his back. It was futile. His strength had disappeared with the blood pouring from his mutilated throat.

I wouldn't have recognized the growl that filled the air as my own if it hadn't been for the searing sensation of barbwire in my throat. I did recognize the gun in my hand, and better than that, I recognized that I could shoot through the window glass as if it were air. But as my finger tightened on the trigger, someone beat me to the punch.

Niko was a dark shadow in the sun's morning glow.

He was on the Auphe as quickly as the Auphe had been on the cop. Unfortunately, the Auphe had preternaturally fast reflexes, something his victim lacked. Or rather, had lacked. The dark glasses had fallen from the cop's face to reveal eyes that passed from stunned to empty. Arms and legs spasmed, then gave way and the cookie-cutter hero fell. He didn't get up again. He never would.

The Auphe rode him all the way down. Lean and sleek, the bundle of sinew and claws showed the new day a dripping crimson smile. It was the same grin he turned on my brother as Niko's sword swung to separate head from body. Overconfidence—it wasn't a failing exclusive to humans. The Auphe knew how fast he was—what he didn't know was how fast Niko was. It was a mistake, a big one, and it lost him the bottom half of that charming smile. The narrow mandible disappeared in an explosion of black blood and bone as the Auphe flipped backward, saving the rest of his head. Niko followed so closely that it was impossible the Auphe could escape. Unless…

Shit. Shit .

I tore through the RV, tumbled through the door, and ran. A car, the first to pass since our stop, nearly hit me. It had slowed to gawk at the fallen cop. When I rocketed into its path with a gun and a matching metallic snarl, the driver swerved, gave up on the looky-lou, and sped off with squealing tires. I ignored the breeze of a bumper kiss and kept running. I passed the dead man lying in the emergency lane, vaulted the dry ditch, hit sand and scrubby grass, and kept moving. I was still fifty feet away when I felt it. It was only a shadow of the eviscerating sensation I'd felt when I'd unwittingly opened my own, but it was still a first. I'd never been able to sense an Auphe doorway before it opened—not until now. A ghostly hand pulled my intestines into a knot just before the air began to bleed gray.

The Auphe couldn't speak, not without a jaw, but he made sounds nonetheless. They were horribly triumphant gobbles that sprayed blood in an arc as he threw himself on Niko's sword with enough force to impale himself right up to the hilt. Arms wound with ropy muscle wrapped around Niko's shoulders and with what was either a laugh or a death rattle, the Auphe fell backward with him toward the gate. I hit them both in an impossibly long tackle, taking us away from that hungry silver light. As we hit the ground, I screwed the Glock into one pointed ear and pulled the trigger. Repeatedly. The pointed skull deflated into a misshapen mass and turned the surrounding soil into a rancid blot. Repugnant, but not as much as the door that hung before us—still open, still ravenous.

"You don't want to go there."

Niko's hand was on my arm gripping hard. "Where does it go? Cal, where does it go?"

"You don't want to go there," I said again dully, my eyes locked on the doorway. It was bad, what lay behind it. There wasn't a word for the bad of it.

Then it closed, like the popping of a soap bubble. And with it, the awful blackness in my head receded. Blinking, I levered myself up off Niko and the dead Auphe. "Cops." I cleared the hoarseness from my throat and tried again as I swiftly patched over the cracks in my artificial calm. "The cops will be coming. We need to get out of here."