passages

[priorcommitment]

Goodfellow usually chose bars that reflected his personality, upscale and pretentious. This time he threw image to the wind and picked the first one we came across. We lucked out. It was dark, as all good bars are, but it was clean—from what I could tell. Plants were everywhere… hanging in baskets, creeping over the tables, casting branches toward the ceiling. And I'd have sworn there was a bird on every one of those branches. Parrots, finches, parakeets… and a shitload of others I couldn't identify. I wasn't much on our fine-feathered, jet-force-crapping friends. These seemed well behaved enough, chirping or squawking only occasionally, but I still shot a wary eye upward when I grabbed a spot at the bar. "Weird place," I commented, checking the pretzel bowl suspiciously for white streaks.

"Bacchus be damned," Robin groaned. "It's a peri bar. Just my luck. My catastrophic, bowel-churning luck."

Before I could ask what the hell a peri was, the bartender came over… wings and all. Dove gray barred with silver, they were tucked neatly against his back. In a black T-shirt and jeans with short wavy black hair, he looked like your typical Mario from Queens. The wings could be a gimmick of the bar and stuffed in a locker before he headed home. Could be, but apparently weren't. Stopping opposite us, his round black eyes fixed on Goodfellow and he said without preamble, "Ishiah wants to talk to you."

"I don't remember asking you what Ishiah wanted," Robin responded in a bored tone. "Two beers with a whiskey back."

The peri's wings rustled in annoyance, and without further comment he moved down the bar to fill the order. "What's a peri?" I asked. Wings, feathers. Nah, it couldn't be. It had been a long time since I'd been as naive as that. Pre-third-trimester was about where I'd place it. It didn't stop me from yanking Goodfellow's chain. He needed it. We both needed it.

"They're not…" I looped a finger over the top of my head. "Are they?"

Robin rolled his eyes in disgust and said, "You truly are an uneducated delinquent, aren't you?" The alcohol arrived. As the peri slid the glasses in front of us, he opened his mouth to speak again. Goodfellow beat him to the punch. Holding up a finger, he said coldly, "Don't." Then he pointed the same finger down the bar. "Go."

Shedding a few disgruntled feathers, the peri hesitated, then obeyed with a scowl. There were other customers waiting to be served, oblivious humans and creatures as odd as any peri. "Overgrown cockatoo," Robin muttered. Not wasting any time, he did his shot, my shot, then chugged half his beer. Setting the mug back down, he said with reproof, "You have mythology books in your apartment, absolute reams of pertinent information. Pages and pages. Do you use them to blow your nose or to wipe your ass?"

I snorted into my beer, then took a swallow. "They're Nik's books. Hell, you already know they're Nik's books. Besides, out in the wild, he points and I shoot. It's a good arrangement."

"Gods. And you embrace your ignorance. That's what so astounds me." Goodfellow shook his head and finished his beer.

I examined a pretzel carefully and popped it into my mouth. I wasn't hungry. I didn't want it, but it was there. So often in life that's what it comes down to. It was there. "Yeah, yeah. Not angels, then?"

He cast a disgusted look at me over the top of his empty glass. "Yes, that's exactly what they are. And on Fridays they have a potluck with St. Nick, the Easter Bunny, and the tooth fairy." Resting his forehead in his hand, he mumbled, "You exhaust me, I swear it."

I had another pretzel. "So," I repeated offhand, "not angels, then?"

"Hermes, blow me." Reaching over the bar, he snagged a bottle of whiskey and poured it with a liberal hand before starting the lecture. "The peris, as a race, have been around as long as I have. Perhaps longer. They've been thought to be angels, fallen angels, the offspring of demons and angels. Always colored with the brush of the holier-than-thou. Messengers. Creatures of light. Creatures of power." He laced the labels with all the mockery in him, which was a helluva lot.

"And what are they really?"

"Publicity hogs." He slammed another shot. "Nosy, pushy publicity hogs. Nothing more. Trust me, Caliban, I've seen nothing of the divine in them." His eyes went distant and dark. "Nothing of the divine in this world."

=====

Robin grimaced. "Heroism can be so banal." He finished the new beer deposited before him. Up, down, bang against the bar. "Let's quit this place before we come down with a raging case of histoplasmosis."

As we stood, the bartender said sharply, "That's thirty bucks."

"Put it on Ishiah's tab," Goodfellow replied derisively. He started to walk toward the door before reconsidering. Turning back, he picked up the bottle of whiskey and carried it away with him. "This too. It's the least of what that bastard owes me."

"Who's Ishiah?" I asked as we climbed the stairs up to the street.

"Someone almost as annoying as you."

=====

With his pale blond hair to the shoulders, straight slash of dark brows, gray-blue eyes, and white wings barred with gold, the only thing that kept him from being a figure straight out of a stained-glass window was his weapon-calloused hands and a long scar along his jaw from chin to ear. Ishiah, who owned the bar, was one kick-ass angel if ever there was one. You could all but see the flaming sword, not to mention the nonflaming boot he'd be happy to put up your ass. Of course he wasn't really an angel. As far as I knew, those didn't exist. Ishiah was a peri, and no one quite knew what they were. They were rumored to be the offspring of angels and demons, but how could that be? The first didn't exist. As for demons…open your eyes. Demons are everywhere. They're us.

"And how am I doing that?" I snorted. I'd decided against bringing up what Niko and I had found in the park. He might be my boss, but I didn't really know Ishiah, and I definitely didn't trust Ishiah. Not yet. Not that I had any reason not to trust him. Trust simply wasn't an emotion I was very good at. "By slinging drinks and making change because the cheap-ass bastards don't tip? Yeah, that's scary shit right there."

The wings flexed, shimmered with light, then disappeared. It was a neat trick. I didn't ask how he did it or how any of the peri did it, for that matter. We all have our secrets. Everyone in this bar had their secrets because there wasn't a human among them. Ishiah, now looking like just a man, albeit an unusual one, said in a lower tone for the two of us only, "You're being Auphe."

=====

The twilight eyes studied me. "Let us say you don't precisely look happy. And when you don't look happy…" He raised eyebrows in the direction of the clientele, some who knew through the grapevine and some who could smell the Auphe in me, who were either clustered on the far side of the room or at closer range silently snarling. "That happens. It's not good for business."

"Happy? I'm happy." I bared my teeth in a fixed grin. "See? Happy."

"Gods save us. I haven't seen an expression like that since Medusa went through menopause." Robin Goodfellow dropped on a stool and shook his head. "Quick. Brandy before you destroy my will to live with your catastrophically bad temper."

Ishiah immediately drifted off. He and Robin had some sort of problem with each other. I had no idea what it was, as both were silent on the subject. But with Robin's mouth, if one of them didn't leave, there'd be little left of the bar for me to terrorize with my inner Auphe. They would pull the place down around our ears.

"Catastrophic temper?" I reached for the good stuff I kept under the bar just for Robin. A hundred years old, it was still barely fetal in age to his point of view. Yet another mystery: why Ish would stock it for him. "Come on."

=====

I gave him his beer and kept my chew toy jokes to myself. Ishiah was right. It really wasn't good for business, and he'd given me a break with this job.

I didn't know if it was as an unspoken favor to Robin or to piss him off. I had asked Goodfellow once which it was, and he had declared smoothly that if I didn't want the job, I'd make a great junior car salesman and he had a place for me waiting at his lot. Hell, no. I didn't know if I had a soul or not, but if I did, I wasn't giving it away that easily. If there were a surer path to damnation than being a car salesman, I didn't know what it would be.

=====

Less than a moment later, Ishiah returned and watched Robin disappear out the door. He looked exasperated. Scratch that. Not exasperated—highly, profoundly annoyed. And intent, very intent. It was a peculiar combination. "Oh, hey. I get it." I grinned, pouring a small amount of Robin's gift into a glass. I wasn't a drinker, to say the least, but he was right. One wouldn't hurt; it could only help. "You have a thing for him."

He turned his gaze to me. It was still annoyed. "Insolent bastard."

"True enough, but it doesn't change the fact." I tossed the bar towel over my shoulder. "You were watching his ass, don't lie." I had no idea if Goodfellow had a good ass or not. That wasn't the way my boat floated, but Robin had told me and everyone in the free and not-so-free world that he did. Could be Ishiah had an opinion on the subject. "By the way, is it a good…"

He turned and walked away before I had a chance to finish. In reality, I kind of doubted that's what it was all about. If it were, Robin would've been walking out of here with feathers in his hair, down his pants, and a smug grin on his face.

=====

"I told you serving drinks would aggravate it. You should've told Ishiah that you were injured and couldn't work." He stared pointedly at the jacket, and I picked it up with an annoyed groan.

"I was afraid he'd turn me into a pillar of salt. Besides, he's pretty iffy about me working there, period. Apparently when I'm grouchy, I exude Auphe." I snorted. "And I'm guessing they don't make a roll-on for that."

We were already out in the hall and moving as I yawned heavily. "It's only because the clientele already know thanks to the loose-lipped werewolves." Niko focused on the bandage, visually checking for blood as I pulled on my jacket. Satisfied that it was unstained, he continued. "If it weren't for them, no one would know."

Niko tried hard, he did, to make me believe I really wasn't that different. And even though it wasn't true, I was grateful as hell for the effort. "The peri would know," I said absently as I zipped the jacket. "They know, shit, everything as far as I can tell. At least everything that has to do with who or what passes through their bar. Although Goodfellow seems to have them bamboozled."

=====

"Hey, Ham, thanks for talking to us."

He patted the couch for Promise, giving her another wide smile before turning to Nik and me. "No problem. Like I said, if Ishiah lets you work in the Circle, then you're good by me. He's not one for slackers or troublemakers."

Unless you happened to be a friend of Robin's, because I fell in both of those categories. But I kept my mouth shut on that and got to the point.

=====

There was a barrette on the dresser in my room, all that was left of one of Sawney's victims. Katie the tomboy's sunny hair clip. "I'm ready for a little hunting trip," I said with determination. I could call Ishiah and ask to get my shift switched from tonight to this afternoon. He wouldn't have a problem with it, and if he did, I'd sic Goodfellow on him.

As it turned out, Ishiah wanted to speak to me, the sooner the better. I showed up at the Ninth Circle an hour later, wondering, not for the first time, if it was Ishiah's dark sense of humor or if there was more to peris than Robin knew.

"Good. You're here."

I continued to wrap the bar apron around my waist and nodded. "Here I am," I confirmed, puzzled. Ishiah wasn't usually one for berating the obvious. "Although, trust me, I deserved a sick day."

"You found the elusive Sawney Beane, then?" His wings were out in force and rustling impatiently.

"Rumor mill's already working overtime, huh?" The bar was mostly empty, but last night it would've been full, and monsters like to gossip the same as anyone else. "Yeah, we found him, and he pretty much kicked our asses." I poured myself a glass of tomato juice. Not as manly as a slug of whiskey, but better at replacing iron from blood loss. "So, what'd you want to talk to me about? Am I going to be employee of the month? Is there a plaque involved?"

"After impaling that Gulon with a beer tap? It seems unlikely," he said with annoyance.

"He brought in outside appetizers. It's against the rules." Not to mention that the appetizer had been a dog. A big playful mutt who hadn't had a clue what was in store for him. The beer tap had cleaned right up when I'd finished with it. No harm done, although the Gulon probably wouldn't agree with that assessment. "How is Rover doing, by the way?"

"That is beside the point," he said, eyes stony. I wasn't buying it. One of the other bartenders, a peri named Danyeal—Danny to me—said Ishiah had kept the dog, which was now fat, happy, and a veritable fountain of urine whenever his master's back was turned.

"And what was the point again?" I asked innocently.

"Never mind." He got out while the getting was good and folded his arms. "I want to talk to you about Robin."

"Goodfellow?" I said curiously. "You're not going to ban him from the bar, are you? He'll only show up more often if you do. Probably move the hell in."

"No." The wings were spreading now. It was the unconscious reaction of peris to stress or danger. Danny flared his wings at even the hint of a bar fight, but as the steely Ishiah was about the furthest thing from high-strung as you could get, I was betting that danger of the big and bad kind was the option here. "I'm hearing things," he announced quietly.

"What kind of things?" I prodded.

"There's word that Robin is being targeted. I heard it just today." Catching a glimpse of feathers from the corner of his eye, he hissed in exasperation and the wings wavered like a heat mirage and disappeared. "I don't know who's behind it. I don't know if it's true, but the rumor is out there. I would tell him myself, but his harridan housekeeper won't put my calls through. And if I showed up at his home in person, I might have to tell him over crossed swords."

I still wanted to know what had led to the peculiar animosity on Robin's side versus the vexed watchfulness on Ishiah's, but now wasn't the time. "Targeted?" The museum. "He was attacked two days ago by a sirrush. We thought it was a random thing. Shit." I grabbed my cell phone. "You don't know anything? Who's behind it? Why?"

"No. Nothing. It's the flimsiest of hearsay, the source of which I can't determine." His jaw set as his eyes narrowed. "And I've made the effort." His hand clenched into a fist. "An extensive effort."

Damn. If Ishiah couldn't get to the bottom of it, it was going to be a hard nut to crack. Goodfellow's answering machine picked up and I swore again. "I've got to go." I ripped off the apron as I came around the bar and tossed it on the counter.

"Make sure the son of a bitch watches his back," he commanded.

"I'll do one better," I responded as I hit the door. "I'll watch it for him."

=====

"Let me tell you a story."

Goodfellow was drunk. Not buzzed, not a little loose, but absolutely shit-faced. I'd long lost count of the number of drinks he had. What was the point? He never paid for them anyway—another way of thumbing his nose at Ishiah.

"How about I tell you one? It's about the moron who got loaded when there was someone out there trying to kill him." I kept my eyes on the rest of the bar. I always did, but this time I did it with a mental target branded on every patron's vulnerable areas. Robin seemed to have forgotten about the attempts on his life, but I hadn't.

"Why don't you stop serving him?" Ishiah said at my shoulder before finishing acidly, "Although the alcoholic fumes emanating from his pores should drop any creature in its tracks."

"I tried. He threatened to go somewhere else and guzzle." I checked my watch. It was nearly three thirty a.m. I'd gone to the apartment to change after the tunnel fiasco, then had come to work. I'd been dead on my feet before I even got there. Now I was wondering just how difficult it would be to drag the puck back home with me, because it was doubtful he was up for fighting off a foot fungus, much less your generic inhuman killing machine. The thought didn't make me feel any less beat. "At least I can keep an eye on him here."

"And why do you bother? Most do not. He's an extraordinary amount of trouble. He always has been. He always will be." It was said without anger or accusation. Ishiah said it as if it were nothing more than the truth—the sky is blue, the earth is round. Neither good, nor bad. It simply was what it was. Although there did seem to be a trace of more personal observation of this particular puck than simple general knowledge of the race at large.

"He saved my life." I caught the glass that came tumbling through the air across the bar, refilled it, and set it back in front of Robin. "He stood with me and Nik against some pretty nasty shit when he damn well should've run the other way." I would have. At the time I didn't give a shit about anyone but Nik and myself. Goodfellow, the ultimate self-serving creature, had risen above in a way I know I wouldn't have. Not then.

"Robin's changing. After all this time." I couldn't read the emotion on Ishiah's face. A coma victim wasn't as deadpan as my boss could be when he wanted. Whatever lurked behind the current stony façade was well hidden, but from the phrase "after all this time," I could guess. "And I do have many years of perspective on our friend," Ishiah apprised us as he studied Goodfellow's slumped form. "More than he would probably like, and I don't mean that in a neg—"

He didn't get a chance to finish. Robin had started talking again, seeming oblivious of both Ishiah and the crowd noise that swelled at his back like a wave. "Let me tell you a story," he muttered into his glass.

Second verse, same as the first.

"Yeah," I groaned. "You've been telling it awhile now." And he'd yet to get past the word "story."

"This story"—his gaze meandered up, then in an uncertain circle until it managed to find me and attempted to scorch me with a fuzzy glare—"features a god of unparalleled charm, unsurpassed wit, with a male beauty unseen in this or any other world…" He took another swallow of his drink. "And who was hung like the Trojan horse."

"No relation to you, I'm sure," I commented blandly.

Ishiah had moved from my back to beside me at the bar to say with quiet intensity, "Robin, you don't want to tell this one."

It was rather serious talk for what sounded like one of Goodfellow's usual cock-and-bull stories— heavy on the cock, light on the truth. His glare expanding to include Ishiah, he ignored the warning and went on. "And this god, so very perfect in every damn way as he'd be the first to tell you, met a people. Warm, friendly, open-minded…always a plus…and too unbelievably stupid to possibly kn—"

"Enough!" Ishiah's hand slammed down on the bar with a force that temporarily halted all conversation in the room. If he had actually been feeling some sort of satisfaction, it was gone now. His wings were visible as well and that wasn't a good sign. "Caliban, take him out of here now. Do not let him near another drop of alcohol. And"—as he leaned in toward Robin, the scar at his jaw blanched bone white—"if this seems to be a problem for you, Puck, if you wish to be difficult, I'll be happy to help your friend carry your shiftless, corrupt, and unconscious body out of here."

=====

First: Bar fights are the same, human or otherwise. The enthusiasm is identical; only the level of violence changes. Second: Peris can fly. Really. Third: Peris, flying or grounded, have hellacious tempers. Four: Pucks don't let anyone tell them what to do. Five: Even blind drunk, said pucks can kick some serious ass.

Before it was all over, there were chunks of fur, scales, feathers, and some things I didn't recognize littering the floor. There were also pools of blood and splatters of vomit, all covered with the glitter of shattered glass in an unpleasant kaleidoscope that I had no intention of cleaning up. Finally, there were Ishiah and Danyeal. They were flinging drunken fighters through the door while hovering in midair with wings fiercely beating, and it was something to see: The biblical exit from Eden meets a caged death match. I pushed up, sat on the bar, drank half a beer, and enjoyed the show. Meanwhile, Goodfellow took on two wolves with a bar stool and a glass mug. One fur ball ended up choking on ground glass, while the other poor fuzzy bastard ended up impaled with a wooden stool leg. Both would live…werewolves were sturdy.

=====

It was two hours later, six a.m., and my turn to open the bar. Sleep—who needed it? The Ninth Circle kept irregular hours. Some patrons like the night, some the early morning, some all damn day long. Ishiah switched it around enough that everyone could find what they needed on one day or another. It made for weird hours, a weirder schedule, and no damn dental either. Figured.

=====

A hand abruptly landed on the junction of my shoulder and neck. It wasn't a friendly grip either. "What now, boss?" I said with a groan. "I haven't impaled a customer in days."

"No," he agreed with bunched jaw. "You did, however, serve a vodyanoi a margarita on ice."

"So?" I shrugged, not seeing the problem.

"With salt," he added.

"And?" I twirled my fingers in an impatient come-on-already gesture.

"And half his face melted onto the bar." He bent slightly to put his head even with mine. "Salt tends to do that to them."

"Oh." I winced. I hadn't done it on purpose, although it was a good one to remember. As a matter of fact, Robin had mentioned that once the last time we'd dealt with them—salting them like a garden slug—but I'd thought he'd been joking.

"But, honestly, how can you tell about his face? I mean, come on." I grimaced. A vodyanoi was not pretty by any stretch of the imagination. Mythology says they look like scaly old men with green beards. In reality, they appeared more like humanoid leeches. Neckless, they did have a sketch of a human face to draw in their prey. A mottling of colors. Small liquid eyes, a dark mark on gray flesh to imitate a nose, and a sucker mouth they used to slurp out your blood. Quick in the rivers and lakes, they were slow and awkward on land, which is why they rarely left the water. Why this one had donned a coat and hat and lumbered his rubbery way to the Ninth Circle for a drink, I had no idea, but I would've thought he would at least know what salt looked like … for facial preservation if nothing else.

A wad of rags and a spray bottle of industrial cleaner were slapped on the bar beside me. "I'll supervise," he announced with stony impatience.

I nodded a good-bye to Promise and headed down the bar. It curved like the bow of a ship and by the time we reached the end of it, I could hear the shrill keening coming from the unispecies bathroom down the hall. "Jeez, he's not still melting, is he? That'll be one helluva mess, and you can bet your ass it won't go down the drain in the floor." Actually, I did feel bad … a little. A vodyanoi would eat you if you dipped as much as a goddamn pinky toe in his particular watery territory, but this guy had been here for a drink, nothing else, and I'd melted the poor son of a bitch.

"You worry about the cleanup. I'll worry about the vodyanoi." Ishiah watched me wipe a slick, snotlike substance from the bar before I began working on the set-in gray-green stains. After a few minutes of watching me apply the elbow grease, he said grimly, "Robin was shot, wasn't he?"

You had to hand it to the peris; if it was worth knowing, somehow they knew it. It came from running bars. If there was information available, it was going to pass through a bar before anywhere else.

I raised my eyes to his. "Why you asking if you already know?"

"Exercise your social skills for a moment, would you?" He leaned across the bar, nose to nose. "I know he survived. I know he walked away. What I don't know is how badly he's hurt."

"Not bad." I continued scrubbing and snorted, "The son of a bitch was wearing a bulletproof vest. Can you believe it?"

"So he was shot and by a human." He moved back, eyes distant and speculative. "I guess that solves that, then."

That stopped my cleaning. "You mean you know who the hell is behind this?" The cloth, heavy and ripe with vodyanoi flesh, fell to the floor. "You know?"

"The sirrush, the Hameh birds, now a human." The wings were out in full force. "Robin Goodfellow once did a … he did a thing that was not quite ethical. It was a long time ago and he's grown since then. Changed. I hope." The wings waved, disturbed. "And it was so very long ago that I can't imagine anyone seeking retribution now, but…" He shook his head, scar whitening at his jaw. "Obviously that isn't the case."

"Let me get this straight. You know who's behind this and Robin doesn't?" I said with disbelief.

The wings disappeared instantly as control returned to face and body. "He knows. He may even have known before he was shot, suspected at least. But he's certainly not going to tell you or your brother."

"And why the hell not?" The question may have sounded belligerent. It should have; it was.

"He respects the two of you," Ishiah answered slowly as if he couldn't quite believe it himself. "He considers you friends—Robin Goodfellow who has had very few of those in his life. He doesn't want to change that. He doesn't want to disappoint you."

Now, there was a concept to boggle. Robin didn't want to disappoint us? Robin who chased my brother relentlessly before Promise staked her claim. Robin who lied, cheated, and picked pockets just to stay in practice, who had killed a succubus in cold blood because she wouldn't give him the information we needed? Robin who sold used cars? That Robin didn't want to disappoint us?

I liked that Robin, I'd finally been forced to admit to myself, but did I think he'd worry about disappointing us? No. I didn't buy it. Unless…

"Just how not quite ethical was this thing he did?" I asked with apprehensive curiosity.

"You do not want to know, and, regardless, it's not my story to tell." He folded his arms across his chest. "I would give you more information on at least who these bastards are, but general knowledge isn't specific. Knowing the why and the very broad who doesn't get us any closer than if I knew nothing at all." The control flickered and I saw more than wings. I saw light and fire and my ears ached from the pressure, and then it was gone. "Go. Ask him. Maybe you can convince him where I can't. Stubborn bastard."

Jaw still a little loose from the light show, I was suddenly alone as he disappeared into the back room. I peered over the bar expecting to see smoking footprints burned into the floor, but there was nothing. Peris.

=====

Shaking her head impatiently, she had lifted a small fist to knock again when the door was flung open and out came Ishiah in one hell of a temper. That wasn't the surprise. He was always in a temper, a hot-blooded guy to look as if he should be sporting a halo. The surprise was that he was there—that Robin had opened the door for him. Wings out of sight, he moved between Seraglio and me, didn't look at either of us, and strode down the hall toward the elevator.

=====

"I saw Ish in the hall." He'd been trying to talk sense into Robin, have him tell us what was going on, I knew. Ishiah wouldn't tell us himself, but he could use his time to endlessly prod Robin into telling us himself. "He seemed pissed. Even more pissed than usual." Which meant Robin hadn't cooperated.

I licked my fingers clean of the sticky sweetness from the bun. "He also seemed worried about you. Seriously, Robin, who is he? He knows you, and I mean really knows you, the good and the bad. Not many people can say that." Niko and I couldn't, not entirely—not with Robin holding back on us.

He hesitated, pushed the food around on his plate, then exhaled. "What is he would be more appropriate. A recruiter for the good and noble life, you could say, one with a moral code even more stringent than that of your brother." He gave a mock shudder at the thought. "It's uncanny. Unhinging might be the better word. Far too many Boy Scouts in the world." The mild annoyance deepened to something darker. "We have a history, Ishiah and I do. One of him pushing and pushing and utterly pissing me off. He'd have me give up everything that makes me the magnificent specimen I am."

"The lying, the cheating, the screwing everything in sight?" I asked with a grin.

"Exactly." He took a bite of eggs, outraged at the thought.

It was hard to imagine the guy with the balls to try and recruit Robin Goodfellow to the straight and narrow. Even harder to imagine why. "He really did seem worried as hell about you," I said again. He'd been angry, but controlled because I hadn't seen his wings as he'd stalked off. There'd been only a pale gray leather jacket, blue shirt, and faded jeans. His blond hair had covered the scar, so it didn't give anything away. Blond hair…but pale, not the more familiar darker shade I'd seen every day of my life. Overcast blue-gray eyes in contrast to pure winter sky, fair skin to Rom olive, an inch or two taller, but …

The realization prickled in the back of my brain, not quite made but worming its way up. Robin liked Niko, a helluva lot. He had chased him relentlessly in the past before Promise showed up. Hell, chased him a little bit after that too. And Ishiah…Ishiah looked like Niko.

No. No, that wasn't it at all. Niko looked like Ishiah.

=====

Ishiah had said Robin had done something not quite ethical in the past. No surprise, right? But from the way he had said that, from the way Robin refused to talk about it, not ethical, in reality, probably didn't begin to cover it. Not for the retribution it had put into motion. We didn't even know how long ago whatever had happened had taken place.

I did know it was a mess, and if we hadn't needed him fighting with us so badly, I'd have been tempted to leave him at Promise's with Ishiah to keep an eye on him. But we needed everyone we could get. Hell, I planned on asking Ishiah if he'd close the bar for a night and take on Sawney with us. And if he could bring another peri or two with him, that would be fan-frigging-tastic.

It didn't turn out that way.

"No," he said in flat refusal. "I'm sorry."

He didn't sound sorry as he stood behind the bar, arms folded and looking a little too much like Niko for my peace of mind. Now that I'd had the thought, it was a done deal. I couldn't unthink it, and I had no desire to be roaming around Goodfellow's subconscious cravings, sexual or otherwise. None at all.

"I thought you wanted to help Robin," I demanded. I'd stopped by the bar as Niko went on to check out that idea he'd had regarding Sawney. It was a good idea, damn good. Here was hoping it worked.

"I do want to help Goodfellow with his problem from the past, but Sawney Beane is not that problem. I have to prioritize."

He actually said it. Prioritize. An insane mass murderer, unknown assassins, creatures with wings, a man with genes far more demon than angel, talking birds, talking mummies, dead wolves, revenant after revenant, skinned boggles, and he actually had the stones to say prioritize.

I was…well, hell, not to be repetitive … boggled.

"But you can have the night off," he added politely. "I'll consider it a personal day. Your check will, of course, be docked."

Forget boggled, now I was just pissed.

"Sawney could kill Robin as easily as whoever's after him. So you're saying you'll be okay with that?" I leaned across the bar to emphasize the accusation.

"Priorities," he said, unmoved, "and I also have a prior commitment. Not that that's any business of yours." Thick dark brows lowered. "I would think that you would be more concerned about preparing for the battle than berating your employer. And if you keep mutilating the customers, you won't have one of those for much longer."

I managed to leave without taking a swing at him, but it was a near thing. As Ishiah had a temper every bit as bad as mine, he would've swung back. He might look like a Nordic version of Niko, but there the resemblance ended. No matter how long-lived Ish might be, he was hell on wheels. He might be the most moral son of a bitch in the city, according to Robin, but right now, he wasn't any damn help.

=====

I saw blood bloom on Robin's neck, red dripping down Niko's hand, I saw Seraglio begin to pull the trigger of the gun aimed at Robin's head, and then I saw wings.

Wings, pale blond hair, and a blade moving as fast as he fell. Ishiah.

=====

Goodfellow was upright, hand pressed to his throat. He pulled it away to look at a palm wet and red. "Gods bleed." He gave a liquid cough. "Seraglio would be pleased." Then he dropped or he would have if I hadn't caught him on one side and Ishiah on the other.

"Jesus." He had blood on his lips and his eyes had gone unfocused and hazy. I slapped my hand over the torn flesh of his neck. "I thought you had a prior commitment," I snapped at Ishiah. It was easier to snarl at him than concentrate on the warm wetness pouring through my fingers or the drowned gurgle to Robin's ragged breathing. So much for the damn bulletproof vest.

"This was it." If there was any regret over killing Seraglio, I didn't hear it. I didn't expect to. He'd done it to save Robin. If he hadn't done it, I would've done it myself, and you wouldn't have heard any regret in my voice either. It was pointless to show what you couldn't change.

We dragged Goodfellow rapidly toward the door and out into the cool night air. "Nushi. We need to get him to Nushi to be healed. Promise?" I said with desperate demand.

"Hundred and ninetieth Street and Fort Washington, apartment number twelve-C," she said swiftly as both she and Niko looked back at the limp puck with grim worry. They didn't have long to look. Within a second he was gone, pulled upward and out of my hands. Ishiah took him. Powerful wings bunching with muscle, he lifted a now-unconscious Robin into the air and soared away. Going to Nushi. Right now he was the only one fast enough. And he would be.

He had to be.

=====

“You’re late.”

I didn’t look up at Ishiah’s annoyance. Cal’s employer was both bark and bite. Either way, Cal could handle it.

“It’s funny. You say that every time.” I heard Cal toss his jacket behind the bar. “Like you expect something different.”

Ishiah owned the bar the Ninth Circle. He hired Cal as a favor to Goodfellow. The two of them, peri and puck, had issues with one another, Cal had told me. Actually, he’d said they bitched about each other until they made his ears bleed. Always with the turn of phrase, my brother. Apparently, the behavior ranged from cool exchanges to out-and-out threats of violence. While it was entertaining as hell, Cal had yawned one night after work, he never had figured out what their history was. For all their sharp words, they had a certain respect for one another, it seemed. If it hadn’t been for Ishiah swooping in, literally, at the last minute earlier in the week, Robin would be dead. That said something. And I knew Cal was grateful.

But that didn’t mean he was going to be on time.

It was an understanding the two had. Ishiah had given Cal a job when he didn’t particularly want to. And as Cal tended to alarm a good deal of the clientele, it was no doubt best to get some liquor in them most days before he showed up. Sedate them somewhat. But with an understanding or not, Ishiah still called Cal out on it. He was the boss; that was his job. It wouldn’t do to let the other employees see Cal get any special treatment . . . especially as he was the only one without wings. Peris, like every other creature on the planet, weren’t without their prejudices.
The Circle was a peri bar. That meant quite a lot of plants and birds. Peris had a fondness for birds. It also meant Ishiah, Danyel, Samyel, Cambriel, and another peri whose name Cal had never mentioned beyond “it has a lot of z’s in it,” were all peris. The average peri might look like the customary depiction of angels, through a very dark lens, but they weren’t. No one was sure what they were or how long they’d been around.

Myth said they were half angel, half demon, but I had serious doubts that that was the truth—I’d yet to see mythology get anything completely correct. The big picture was close, if you blurred your eyes, but every one of the details was twisted or flat-out wrong.

It’s annoying when information doesn’t live up to your standards. Someday your life might depend on it, and when you’re bleeding to death on the ground, you may wish you’d taken it with a grain of salt.

As for peris: Peris had wings, peris had tempers, and peris kicked ass. I gave a quirk of my lips. Cal had told me that in exactly those words after working there for a time. That was my brother: the succinctness of the truly lazy.

=====

A rustle of feathers shifted my attention from the departing chupa to Ishiah. Aside from the gold-barred wings, which flickered in and out of existence, he didn’t look like anything that belonged on the roof of your typical manger scene. He was not quite the same as other peris. He was bigger, had more presence. Tall and broad-shouldered with light blond hair, fierce blue-gray eyes, a pronounced scar along his jaw, and one extremely large sword under the bar, not many of the patrons started anything when Ishiah was around.

“So you managed to pry Robin out of his well of self-pity?” he asked, looking down at a lightly snoring Goodfellow.

That was somewhat harsh. True perhaps, but harsh nonetheless.

“Wouldn’t let you in either, huh?” Cal said knowingly. “Yeah, we got him out and sobered him up. He’s doing better.”

Ishiah seemed relieved. He was hard to read, but our mother had spent Cal’s and my childhood sizing up many a mark. You couldn’t be Sophia’s get without picking up a few things. Looking back down at my book, I continued the dagger practice as I read. Relieved or not, Ishiah didn’t say anything further about Robin as I multitasked, reading about the fall of Potidaea, flipping the blade, and thinking of the Auphe in the park. Instead he asked, “Why is your brother here? He’s hardly a drinker.”

=====

“Auphe business?” Ishiah’s voice darkened a fraction.

“Is that a good guess or do you know something?” And at that moment, Ishiah wasn’t Cal’s employer. The peri wasn’t Robin’s sometime friend, sometime enemy right then. He was someone who might have information that could save us.

The only thing Cal and I had in common physically were gray eyes, and I raised mine to see his turn empty and cool. Ishiah wasn’t easily intimidated, but when it came to the Auphe, he had the same reaction as everyone else. He certainly wasn’t going to do anything in their favor, but seeing is believing, and I wanted to see this very clearly. I closed my book and stared at the peri with a gaze as empty as my brother’s. And if my dagger did embed itself in the table this time, it wasn’t anger, it wasn’t a loss of control. . . .

It was incentive.

“No. I haven’t heard anything . . . yet.” He looked at the table, the dagger, and then at me. I wasn’t here often enough for Ishiah to have much insight into me, not firsthand, but I thought he caught a glimpse now.

He went on, his eyes still taking my measure. “But we peris suspected the Auphe weren’t all destroyed. Millions of years of survival have served them well.” Shaking his head grimly, he added, “And when there’s one Auphe left, people are going to die.” He turned back to Cal and nodded toward his throat. “As for how I know . . . the Auphe have a distinctive saw-toothed edge on their claws. Makes for an interesting pattern.”

“That’s astounding, Sherlock. Take a bow.” Cal poured a beer with a whiskey back for a wolf that slunk up to the bar. “Let me know if you do hear anything. Things are going to get nasty. You might have to find a new employee of the month.”

“One who doesn’t terrorize, impale, and melt the clientele?” he said, brows lowering in an annoyed scowl. “Pity me. I’ll have to scour the city.”

“You just can’t let that go,” he grumbled as he cleaned the bar top, the tension passing. “And, come on, only one of those was intentional. Accidents happen.” Now, those were work stories he hadn’t shared with me. He caught my narrowed glance from the corner of his eye, dropped his head, and groaned.

“Yes, I’m rather particular about the mutilation of my patrons. My apologies.” Ishiah turned and went about the business of running the bar, and Cal kept serving up the drinks, avoiding my gaze when he could, and muttering, “Ah, shit,” when he couldn’t. I saw a discussion in our future. A very long, detailed, unfortunate discussion . . . unfortunate for my brother, at any rate.

=====

Ishiah came up as I sat. “I heard what happened last night. Going on a trip?”

“No. We’ve learned the hard way that there is nowhere we can go that the Auphe can’t follow.” I didn’t ask how he knew. Peris were the grapevine of the supernatural world, but that quickly? He could only have gotten it from Goodfellow. I suppose that tipped the Ishiah scales more toward friend than enemy . . . at least for today. I accepted a bottle of water he offered and rolled the blue glass between my palms. “But Cal won’t be back here until this is taken care of.”

“Business will boom.” Beneath the gruffness, I heard a reluctant sympathy. “He blames himself. He snaps and snarls as much as I do, but I’ve been around a long time. I see.”

My face didn’t move, but whatever he saw behind it was the end of the conversation. Without further word, he put a glass before me on the bar and left.

=====

Delilah slapped her hand on the bar, snapping, “Pigeon! Whiskey. Now.”

Amusing though it might be, I didn’t have time to see the fun and games that were going to start with Ishiah. Herding Cal toward the door, I said, “She could’ve broken your neck with one blow if she’d wanted. That’s the tap a mother gives her cub.”

“Being smacked by a she wolf,” he muttered, “it gives new meaning to ‘bitch slap.’ ”

“Don’t complain.” I opened the door and shoved him out just as I saw Ishiah pull his sword from beneath the bar. “You could’ve stopped her.”

=====

That favor was at the door as we spoke. Ishiah’s voice carried when he was annoyed, and he was almost always annoyed. This was no exception. As we entered the living room, he was nose to nose with Robin. “Your laziness and sloth know no bounds, do they?” he demanded. “I have a bar to run, my own life to lead. I do not exist solely to be at your beck and call. And I most definitely do not wake up every morning with nothing but the happy expectation of running errands for you. Difficult to believe, I know.”

Robin yawned in his face. “You’re so very good at that. The temper, the scowl. Absolutely terrifying. You must drink shots of testosterone in your morning coffee.” He nudged the oversized garbage bag at his feet. “Here’s the package. Dump it wherever you like. Stuff it and mount it as a souvenir in your bar for all I care. Your choice entirely.”

“It’s not.” The wings flared, appearing from nowhere, and a few feathers flew free. I picked up one as it drifted to the floor by my feet. Between translucent and white with a dusting of gold, it was twice the length of my hand. Robin had Ishiah so frazzled that he was actually molting. The puck was one gifted son of a bitch, I had to give him that. “You are not handing me a bag of Auphe. I know you are not.”

“Think of it as a conversation piece.” Robin grinned lazily. “And I expect you to take it off my bar tab in trade.”

Refusing to believe it, Ish took a step back, bent, and untied the bag. Immediately, the blue-gray eyes darkened in disgust. “Unholy creature.” He retied the bag, then wiped the palms of his hands on his jeans. “One. You actually managed to kill one. You’ve more survival skills than I gave you credit for.” He looked past Robin as he said it . . . to Niko and me.

“I’ve killed Auphe,” Robin said in protest. “In fact, I’ve killed many whilst I saved the entire world last year. Didn’t you get the memo?”

“I’ve always known about your survival skills.” Ishiah picked up the bag with little effort, despite the weight of it. “That’s why history writes of the Last Stand of the Three Hundred, not the Three Hundred and One.”

“Someone had to live to tell the tale. There’d be no heroes if there wasn’t anyone left to talk them up, now, would there?” Goodfellow gave an arrogant tilt of his lips before muttering, “All I wanted was the company of a few hundred half-naked, oiled-up men, and out of nowhere I’m facing the entire Persian army. Where is the luck?”

“I’m certainly getting none my way.” Ishiah headed toward the door. “The next call I expect will request an anecdote for your eulogy. Anything else, and don’t bother.” He put his all in the growl, but as he’d been the one to save Robin’s life days ago, I had a hard time buying it.

=====

“Or Ishiah’s,” Nik said. “From what you’ve said, he can handle himself well.”

“Ishiah’s?” I leaned back against the couch. “You’re shitting me, right? One day, and he’d kill us before Oshossi or the Auphe could.”

Robin immediately backed me up—so immediately, in fact, that I wondered who he was actually trying to keep safe—us or Ishiah. “All of us shoehorned into that overgrown canary’s place? That’s an exercise in natural selection waiting to happen. Survival of the fittest. And that walking feather duster is fit.” His left eye twitched. “Very fit.” This had to be the longest Robin hadn’t gotten laid in, damn, at least in the span of human existence—at least once we’d stopped braiding each other’s back hair and thinking of lice as a tasty treat. “Desperate” didn’t begin to cover the shape he was in.

=====

Cal wanted to carry the burden this time, but no one could carry that one alone. The moment I turned off the engine, he woke up. He blinked once, took in his surroundings, and said, “You know the only thing Ish will be interested in giving us is his foot up our asses?”

“You could be right.” Unfortunately for Ishiah, whom I thought so far to be honorable in his fashion, I was more concerned about my brother than I was about his ass-kicking threats. The sooner we solved Cherish’s problem, the sooner we could completely concentrate on our bigger one. And by now some information on Oshossi could’ve surfaced among the bar patrons. “But our options are limited.”

“You ever think of just hauling Cherish’s ass off to Central Park and dumping her there?” he asked, gray eyes calm and, yes, ruthless. “Let God, Zeus, and Allah sort it out?”

“No.” She was Promise’s daughter, and although a careless thief, she wasn’t entirely without merit. Although even if she had been, I would do what I could for her for Promise’s sake. And she did seem to be changing for the better . . . or at least trying to. Putting people if not before her, then at least equal to her. It counted for something, especially in one that young. And she did care for Promise now, and that counted for much more than just something. “Do you?”

He didn’t answer, rubbing his knuckles thoughtfully along his jaw. “I think I’ll plead the Fifth on that one.” Getting out, he slammed the door shut.
“Not too fair to Promise to make her think my shit smells like roses if I’m actually thinking something . . .”

“Survival oriented?” I offered.

“That sounds better than ‘homicidal.’ Yeah, thinking something survival oriented about her daughter. Let’s go with that.” He started to grin, but it twisted to a frown as his eyes slid from one side of the street to another.

“Cal?” I looked as well, but saw nothing. That didn’t mean there was nothing to see.

He looked back at me. “Eh, it’s nothing. Just feeling paranoid. What with the Auphe in heat and a South American ass-kicker after us. Go figure.”

We walked the two blocks as the snow began to fall. It wasn’t the puffy flakes of Christmas cards and winter wonderlands. It was small pellets of hard white ice that bit at your face and collected under the collar of your coat. Breath billowing in the air, Cal pulled at the handle of the bar’s front door. It didn’t budge. “Huh. It’s past noon. It should be open.” He dug in his pocket for the keys, turned one in the lock, and opened the door. He didn’t go in; he didn’t take even a step. I saw him inhale sharply. His grip on the door handle tightened.

The lights were out, the windows covered, but I could see Ishiah in the interior gloom of the empty bar. He sat at a table alone with a bottle of whiskey and a glass. “Go away.” His voice was one of the perfectly sober. I thought he wished he weren’t.

“Who?” Cal asked, his own hoarse.

“Cambriel.” He lifted the full glass and drained it. “Go away.”

Cal closed the door with a jerky motion and rested his forehead against it. He had smelled them as soon as he had opened the door. I hadn’t needed to. Seeing Ishiah was enough to know what had happened. Cambriel was a bartender I’d seen before. Cal had talked about him a few times. Had said he didn’t quite have the peri temper that Ishiah had, but damn close. When push came to shove and the bar erupted, he could fight like a winged lion. Hold his own against the wolves, the vampires, the revenants.

But not against the Auphe.

=====

I called Robin next. Friend, enemy, wary ally, whatever Ishiah was to him, he should know what had happened. I caught him in the middle of what I fully expected to and managed to end both his good mood and aerodynamic lift instantly. I disconnected in the middle of his cursing. What he did with the information was his decision, but I had a feeling letting Ishiah drink alone in an empty bar that had been a former Auphe Ground Zero wasn’t going to be the one he made.

=====

Halfway through my beer, Ishiah came up to the table. He hadn’t said a word when I’d come through the door. He’d looked at me briefly, then went back to serving a customer. It wasn’t an engraved invitation or anything, but I took it to mean I wasn’t banned. He didn’t mention Cambriel when I went up for my beer. I’m not sure he ever would. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to. Cambriel deserved better. To be remembered. But to think of him was to think of his severed head dangling from the hand of an Auphe, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t go there, knowing if it weren’t for me he’d still be alive.

I finished my beer in several swallows, nursing it be damned, but the memory didn’t disappear as easily as the alcohol did.

“So,” Ishiah said to Robin, “you survived the Auphe.”

“I did,” Robin said smugly, as if he’d actually been there. But I’d give him credit this time. It might not be lying, bragging, or his enormous ego. He could be referring to the entire crappy experience instead of only last night. “I was beyond brave, an unparalleled fighter, a morale booster with no equal.”

“And he didn’t get laid once,” I added, which seemed the bigger feat to me.

Ishiah raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “You’re saying after all these years you’re finally listening to me?”

“Listen? To you?” Robin scoffed. “If I listened to you and your thousands of years of bitching, I’d be a monk. A poorly dressed, destitute, horrifically celibate monk.”

“I simply wanted you to behave like a halfway rational creature,” Ishiah retorted.

Oh, this was going to be good. I leaned back out of the way.

“Behave? Oh no, what you wanted is for me to cut back on the drinking, the lying, the stealing, the conning, and the whoring about. The very things that make me the magnificent specimen I am today,” Robin said indignantly.

“Maybe if you had, you wouldn’t have ended up on the verge of being killed by descendants of former worshippers,” Ishiah pointed out, brutal but true.

Robin sputtered, “Please. As if you weren’t chased over sand dunes by a band of Israelites desperate for a holy souvenir. They plucked you like a chicken. You looked like a mangy pigeon when I found you.”

Looking less like Niko by the second, because where Niko’s anger was cold, Ishiah’s was red-hot, Ishiah said dangerously, “I did not.”

Robin countered spitefully, “They could’ve barbecued those things and served them up in a sports bar.”

Oh yeah. This was good, all right. And I didn’t even have to pay for a ticket.

They were leaning over the table, almost nose to nose, eyes narrowed to slits, faces flushed with rage. Robin huffed out a breath and said between gritted teeth, “Are you coming back to my place or not?”

Ishiah growled, “No, we’re going to mine. It’s closer.” He tossed me the apron. “Close up the bar tonight. I won’t be back.”

I caught it, surprised. That wasn’t the way I’d thought it would go at all. Then again . . .

Niko and Ishiah resembled each other. It’d taken me a while to notice, but it was true. Dark blond to light. Dark skin to pale. Gray eyes to blue-gray, but still, they could’ve been brothers. They looked a lot more like each other than Nik and I did.

I’d always thought Robin had a thing for Niko, but now it seemed more likely that Niko had reminded him of someone else. Although he hadn’t been a substitute—from Robin’s hounding, it had definitely been a true attraction, but now . . . the truth came out. Niko would be one relieved son of a bitch.

And as soon as I closed up the bar, Robin and Ishiah wouldn’t be the only ones getting some.

I hoped.

=====

That night I went back to work too. It was the first time I’d been back since Robin and Ishiah had exited in a storm of feathers and angry, sexually charged words. Ishiah wasn’t there, which was a good thing. I would’ve had to say something, then he would’ve had to kill me, which would make finding another job a bitch.

Robin did show up, though, and I sat down with him on my break and had a beer. Before he could open his mouth, I held up a hand. “No details. I don’t want even a hint of a detail, okay? I have to work with this guy. If he looks over and sees me picturing you, him, and a feather duster, he’ll ram a beer tap into my neck and serve me up until I run dry.”

Goodfellow smiled slyly. “Coward.” But he drank his Scotch and didn’t even mention how far down a peri’s feathers went.

=====

Robin had leaned back slightly at the sharp curve of my lips, so I touched the beads at my wrist to remember who I was—who I really was—and let the grin slide into something less lethal. “Okay, give me at least one story to hold over Ish’s head. Just nothing that’ll make my ears bleed or swear off sex for the rest of my life. Can you do that?”

Seamus and the Auphe in me instantly forgotten, Goodfellow gave a grin equally as scary as anything I’d shown, I was sure, and drawled, “Let’s start off with a hypothetical question: If someone endowed with flammable feathers cooks in the nude, is that a lifestyle choice or a death wish?”

Right behind my boss, Ishiah, in the bar’s storage room. I don’t know if he heard me, saw the light from the corner of his eye, or just sensed it. But his wings sprang out of invisibility into a banner of gold-barred white feathers as he turned and was already swinging a fire axe. We had one mounted in every room—less for fire; more for beheading.

=====

“Whoa, boss. I’m not that late,” I said with a grunt as I hit the floor hard to avoid a haircut that would’ve started about chest level.

“Do not do that in this establishment,” he snarled. “Do you understand me?”

Ishiah was my boss and he was a good boss, which meant he paid me and hadn’t killed me. But he had a temper like Moses seeing the Golden Calf and breaking the Ten Commandments. No, that was more like a temper tantrum. Okay, Ishiah had a temper like God taking out Sodom and Gomorrah for being the Vegas of biblical times and turning Lot’s wife into a saltshaker just for wanting a look. Biblical references . . . Niko homeschooled me, and I knew a lot of obscure information when I bothered, which, according to everyone I knew, was rarely. But in this case it wasn’t applicable. Ishiah wasn’t an angel. There were no angels or demons, no Heaven or Hell. Fairy tales built on myths built on more myths, all built on the first caveman who refused to believe his kid, his brother, his mother, were gone for good. Who knew what the truth really was? Who wanted to know? Not me.

=====

But here’s what it wasn’t. No angels. Ishiah was a peri, probably where the angel myth began . . . there and with all the Greek gods with wings. After all, the Auphe were where the elf myth had started and if you took away the hundreds of needle-fine metal teeth, the scarlet eyes, the black talons, shredding jaws, nearly transparent skin, and a raging desire to destroy humanity, then I guess you were close enough. The pointed ears were the same, right?

=====

“Got it. No traveling in the bar. I’ll make a note.” I didn’t think he’d really chop my head off, but with Ishiah, you could never be sure. Can’t say I blamed him, because you couldn’t always be sure about me either . . . especially when I opened gates.

=====

But my brother wasn’t the problem at the moment; it was my boss.

“Can I get up and sling some beer or are you going to cut my head off?” I asked Ish. “Either way, I really need to take a piss. It’s been a long day.”

He thought about it, then grunted and lifted the axe. “I’m docking you two hours.”

=====

I made my way to the bathroom, then out to the bar to toss the jacket under it and grab an apron. “Good crowd tonight,” Sammy commented. Samyel was another peri, dark to Ishiah’s light blond, with wings barred with gray. “Quiet.”

=====

Ishiah, wings now gone, came out of the back room with a beer keg and scowled at my making personal calls on my first five minutes of company time. “Two and a half hours,” he said.

Normally he would’ve made it three. I wasn’t the only one getting sex. A fire axe to the neck and docking my pay were actually mellow for him. That was the good part. The bad part was he was getting it from a friend, the only one I trusted besides my brother, and this friend and frequent fellow monster killer liked nothing better than to threaten me with the details . . . and that was worse than any axe.

When Robin Goodfellow, a puck, threatened you with sexual details, you didn’t need a porn channel and you didn’t need Hustler; when he claimed to have cowritten the Kama Sutra, you believed his bragging ass. And the last thing I needed was to have my boss see me looking at him and trying damn hard not to picture wings and legs and other things in positions you’d need Silly Putty for bones to achieve. That would make him lose his mellow real fast. Goodfellow would like nothing better than to see his adventures on IMAX, but Ishiah was probably more private.

And my twitching at the mental picture wouldn’t liven up the bar any.

=====

“Well? I’m listening. Were you in dire circumstances? Was it make a gate or die? I’ve always assumed if you escaped near death, you would give me a call afterward. Common courtesy.” He leaned farther. My calm and cool-as-ice brother had a temper too. You had to dig for it, had to push him, but it was there and it could rival Ishiah’s. Ice to fire, but when it was your butt in a sling, whether it was frozen or singed didn’t much matter.

=====

“And I handled it, was late, and traveled to the bar,” I admitted.

His eyes narrowed. “Because lateness was life threatening?”

I could’ve half joked and said that with Ishiah it could be, but that would have been shitty of me. And while I had no problem being shitty with anyone else, I damn sure wasn’t going to be shitty with Nik. He was the sole reason I was alive, the sole reason I was sane.

=====

“These ‘feces,’ as you call them, are my patrons,” Ishiah said from behind me. He spoke Rom and we didn’t. Then again, he knew Robin Goodfellow from thousands of years back. You’re going to pick up a few things along the way. Niko would know it himself; he knew a couple of languages, but Rom—he refused, with good reason.

“Do you think I don’t have a bag for you too, little birdy?” she snorted. “Or stories of your kind to tell?”

How she knew he was a peri I didn’t know. Both he and Samyel had their wings out of sight. Peris could do that. The wings came and went in a glitter of light. Where exactly they went, I didn’t have a clue. I did know Ishiah wouldn’t back down from a tiny withered woman. But it didn’t come to that. Suddenly Abelia-Roo was done playing. “Shoo, little birdy. I’m ready to talk business with these two, words not for your ears. Fetch my wine and I’ll be the sweetness and light of an angel itself.” She spread her hands above her head. “See my pure gold halo? See the bright sparkle?”

Ishiah scowled, the long scar on his jaw stretching to a gleaming white, then bit off, “See that you are.”

He looked at me. “You owe me.” He was gone before I could say I’d be just as happy if he tossed her out—happier, in fact.

=====

“No, but rubbing warm, scented oil all over your favorite puck is. I wrote it in myself.” Robin, our selfproclaimed favorite puck, draped an arm over Niko’s shoulders and his other one over Abelia-Roo’s narrow ones. I’d seen him come in the front, wavy brown hair windblown, green eyes bright with anticipation, and I didn’t think it was at seeing us. He was looking for Ishiah. He did that daily now . . . more than daily. It was a wonder either one had the strength to stand upright.

Scary thoughts. Scary, scary thoughts.

=====

The feet spread into a V, letting me see wildly tousled brown hair, overly bright eyes, a mostly empty bottle of wine cradled against his chest with several empty ones in the floorboards, and clothes. I might not be a God-fearing or believing man, but say hallelujah. There were clothes. I moved closer. It wasn’t clothes after all, but pajamas. Silk, expensive like all Goodfellow’s things were, and it looked like the shirt was on backward and inside out. There were also feathers in his hair—white and gold ones; Ishiah’s feathers; my boss’s feathers. And there was no unseeing that as much as I wanted to. “So, Goodfellow . . . ,” I started.

“Tell Niko that I fixed his window. Free of charge.” As he tilted the wine bottle back and finished it off, I looked at the driver’s window. It was gone, and there was a mound of safety glass and a hammer on the asphalt beside the door.

=====

“Someone needs to verify they’re taking their heart medication,” he mumbled, and sat up. “Ishiah suggested it. He thinks I should go and test my resolve or more realistically, he thinks, to give my resolve a rest.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” It was way too early to follow a puck’s train of thought. They were bullet trains at the very least. They would suck you into their two-hundred-twenty-five-mile slipstream and it would be all over for you.

He hesitated, groaned, then said, “Monogamy.”

“Monogamous? You and Ish? You?” My mouth opened, closed, and opened again as I heard Niko, infallible warrior born and bred with nerves of titanium steel, fumble wildly at the M word and drop his bag. “I mean . . . you?” Robin? The horniest puck in a race that all but defined themselves by their level of horny. Wouldn’t other pucks rush to form an intervention? Monogamous Anonymous? They’d tell him they’d have him off his feet and onto his back again in no time. Or his front. Or all fours— whichever he’d prefer. That Robin? “Seriously?”

Robin glared silently. It was answer enough.

“How . . . Christ, how long?” I felt like the hammer on the ground had levitated and smacked me in the head. It was that unbelievable—inexplicable even. Only brain damage could explain it—profound, massive brain damage.

“The whole six months.” He dropped his head in his hands. “I haven’t had it this bad since . . . Hades, since Pompeii when I was almost married. I mean, Zeus and all his conquests: Leda and Europa and Io and Callisto and so on and so on. How can this be?” He banged his forehead on the seat in front of him.

“Monogamy. How can I support such a perverse lifestyle choice, especially when it involves me? How? Better yet, why? Why would I do something so horrifying and unnatural?”

Robin had once almost been married to a woman named Cyrilla. I remembered the name because it was one of the few times he’d said something about himself that had mattered, not the usual bragging and name-dropping. Cyrilla had mattered to him; she still did, although long gone, and I hadn’t forgotten. Then was monogamy that out of the question? And he would’ve married her too, that had been clear, if she hadn’t died with Pompeii. I knew that. He’d told me and I believed him. But that had been a long time ago and just the one time. Besides . . .

Robin Goodfellow?

“And Ishiah has a problem with this?” Niko closed the trunk, immediately giving a minute wince that meant he wished he could take the question back. The soap opera that was Robin’s life could be timeconsuming and we didn’t have the time.

But . . . I was curious.

“Yeah, I thought he wanted you to be a little less . . . er . . . Goodfellow,” I added. “You remember. . . . Less whoring around, less lying, stealing, and cheating.” I’d thought that somewhat uptight. Robin was who he was. He was a puck, a trickster; he was born to do exactly what he did. Where did Ish get off saying he should be any different? “He’s changed his mind?”

“It seems so.” He kept his forehead pressed against the back of the seat. “It seems he’s mellowed somewhat over the past millennium and feels he has been unfair to me; may have coerced me into fidelity. As if anyone could coerce me into anything I didn’t want,” he snorted, promptly forgetting his rampant fear of the one-on-one relationship he’d been raving about seconds ago. “So he thought a small separation of a week would put things in perspective for me. I would decide if I wanted to jump the first Hooters waitress I saw or stay noble and true for him. And—wrap your mind around this—he’ll be all right with it either way. He’s ready to accept me for good or bad . . . for nonpuck or for puck. He said he was wrong and he likes me the way I am, and the way I’ve always been. It just took him a while to become a little less judgmental and come to his senses.”

“And this is bad how?” Niko asked as he swept a few stray bits of glass from the driver’s seat and sat, shutting the door behind him. “This is the perfect Goodfellow situation. You can have your cake and eat it too.” And we all knew how much Robin liked his cake. “I would think you’d be celebrating.”

I went to the passenger side and was greeted by fangs shown in a cheerful greeting, jack-o-lantern eyes, and a ruby collar with gold ID tag around a hairless neck. I opened the door and Salome, who was sitting upright, regal, and ready for her ride, didn’t move. I opened my jacket and showed her my gun. She opened her mouth and I watched her already-visible fangs slide farther out of her gray gums and double in size. I closed my jacket and got in the backseat with Robin.

“Celebrating what?” he asked mournfully. “That I’ve become something I’m not or that I’m afraid to become something new—if I even can become something new? And is new necessarily better?” This time he leaned against the backseat. “Perhaps peris and pucks cannot be. To do one justice, the other has to give up part of himself.” He closed his eyes. “Bedtime. Wake me up at the first ninety-year-old lady in need of flashing.”

“Or the first Waffle House waitress.” There were times I thought that maybe a hundred thousand years of screwing anything and everything would get old after a while, even for a puck. Then I would go to the next logical thought: This was Robin we were talking about. Not to mention that pucks were born sex addicts. It was in their genes. I knew how hard it was to fight those, even if mine was only a half dose. I was glad it wasn’t my problem to figure it out, but I had sympathy for Robin. When you were born to lie, cheat, steal, trick, and screw everything in sight—when that was your purpose designed by nature itself, that was a lot to fight against.

“When you’ve had sex with more than two people, you’re allowed a comment.” Goodfellow flicked a feather my way with an annoyed jerk of his hand. “Now? Not quite.” Then he was instantly snoring and more feathers were wafting in the air.

=====

“The waitress didn’t happen to mention a truck and a coffin, did she? A man weeping into his pancakes over his dying relative or just weeping fluids in general, green and puslike, perhaps?” Robin finished off his waffles, unfazed by his self-painted image. “And did she happen to be hot? Stunning? Worthy of a shred of my attention?”

“Believe it or not, no, she didn’t see anything. No big black trucks that anyone saw. And, yeah, she was hot . . . in that I-never-saw-a-sheet-cake-I-didn’t-like kind of way. I’d never seen knuckle hair on a woman before. Go for it. I’m sure Ishiah would understand your leap off the monogamy diving board into that pool.”

=====

I turned the radio up a little and opened a bag of Cheetos. I offered one to Niko. He refused, of course, with a look of distaste for the food and disgust for my hopeless eating habits. I then turned to offer the bag to Robin in the backseat. “You know, for what it’s worth, this whole monogamy thing with Ish? I think you should give it a try. In your lifetime you’ve screwed your way through half the world population, if not more. Not to mention Ishiah can take your shit. And believe me, that’s a lot of shit to take. A lot,” I emphasized. “Give it a chance. Listen to the radio. There wouldn’t be a twenty-four-hour love song station if there wasn’t some truth behind that whole hearts and flowers crap, right?” I patted his shoulder with a dusty orange hand. And why not? Ish was a good guy, a good boss—trying to chop my head off with an axe wasn’t that far out of line. Forgive and forget. And Goodfellow had been a better friend than I deserved. If he could find happiness, why not?

=====

Yet another good mood was washed away in the cemetery’s ornamental pond. We were attacked again, this time by two ill-tempered swans. The one time I wished Salome had come along for the fun and she couldn’t be bothered. I asked Robin if skinny-dipping with the big white birds could be considered cheating on Ishiah. If I’d had any positive feeling left at all from my traveling that Niko hadn’t managed to drown, they were finished off by Goodfellow trying to strangle me while a swan pecked irately at my head.

=====

Robin woke up at that—part of him anyway. A puck mind could sense this type of opportunity at any level of consciousness. “A foursome should be united front enough,” he mumbled. He was climbing out of the car and his eyes hadn’t quite opened yet, but he was unbuttoning his shirt. “Prepare for the pucking of your life.”

“Ishiah,” I said. “And I can’t believe you actually consider that a pickup line.”

His eyes opened to peer through wind-tangled strands of light brown hair and his fingers paused at the third button. “You couldn’t have let me stay asleep, could you? If I’m unconscious, it can’t be cheating.” He buttoned his shirt, tucked Salome under his arm, and headed for the back of the car.

“Even if I were conscious,” he muttered as he opened the trunk to retrieve his bags, “sex with the magnificence of me would at worst be considered a heroic act of community service. Ishiah would no doubt give me a medal for benefiting humanity. And that line has worked more times than you’ve drawn breath.”

He plucked the key from Niko’s fingers, scanned the squat building, and started for the far end as he grumbled on. “Cheating isn’t even a word in my language. Just as the old saying that the Eskimos have many words for snow, we have many words for sex—a thousand and three, I think, but not a single one for infidelity. Doesn’t that say something? Doesn’t that mean something?” He vanished behind the motel door, still talking to himself; still questioning himself. But Robin was the only one who could come up with those answers.

=====

I wasn’t sure if Niko had either. Robin might be living the puck ultimate terror of monogamy, but Niko was a big fan of the “Trust no one” philosophy. He had his exceptions. He trusted me, and he trusted Robin as well. He trusted him to watch his back in a fight and to step up whenever we needed help. He trusted him in any situation that could go south fast. But he’d also been chased ruthlessly by Robin before the puck’s reconnection, in all senses of the word, with Ishiah. Niko had an infallibly long memory and an extremely sharp sense of survival. Whether it was a sudden catastrophic monogamy failure and things going south in an entirely different way than how the phrase was normally used, Niko would be prepared for any eventuality.

=====

I leaned against the car. “You survived the night,” I said to Nik.

“Barely.” He continued eating a sandwich of sprouts, sprouts, sprouts, and some liquid slop to keep them on the bread—well, slop and a tangibly foul mood. “Robin and Ishiah had phone sex last night . . . until I cut the line. Then Goodfellow used his cell phone. I broke it, quite, quite thoroughly. When he finally went to bed, in less than five minutes he was asleep and having what I guessed from the moaning to be a dream of the nocturnal emissions kind. I slept in the bathtub with a knife wedging the bathroom door closed.”

=====

Niko—another one who didn’t do much laughing, not on the outside anyway, although I could often smell the silent humor on him—walked up to us across the Wal-Mart parking lot while carrying a bag in each hand. He looked down at us with a neutral gray gaze. “Have you seen—” Interrupted by the ring of his cell phone, he switched one bag to his other hand and answered it. “Yes, Ishiah?”

I’d never liked caller ID. It took the surprise out of life, and life could use all the surprises it could get as far as I was concerned—good ones at least. Of course, with the way things were going, this wasn’t a good one. But I didn’t know that yet.

A Wolf’s hearing is more than exceptional and I had no ethical problems listening to Ishiah’s side of the conversation. I wasn’t entirely the goody-goody suburban Wolf Delilah labeled me. No Wolf alive was. And, hey, I was nosy. My life had been limited for a long time. Eavesdropping was a minor sin for a little entertainment value.

This Ishiah, the monogamy quandary—or victim, depending on your opinion of Goodfellow—didn’t waste time on pleasantries. “Where’s Robin?”

There was a thrum under the voice that vibrated the air in a way a human couldn’t hear—in a very unique, deep, and musical way. A peri. A puck and a peri: That had my eyes crossing. The profane and the pure. It wasn’t precisely a Match dot com dream come true.

“I was about to ask my traveling companions the same thing. Still in the store, I was assuming.” Niko looked over his shoulder back at the building. “Although considering the type of store it is, I would’ve thought he would have been in and out in five minutes.”

“He just called me and he doesn’t sound . . . himself. He sounds drunk and confused. You need to find him. Now.” All right, a righteous and pure peri, but a pissed-off one. And worried too.

“Now,” Niko confirmed, flipping the cell shut with a brisk snap that showed how concerned he was. “It has to be Suyolak. Robin certainly wouldn’t drink any alcohol he could purchase from liter bottles in that store. Rafferty, Catcher, can you find him?”

I was already on my feet, nose in the air. Thousands upon thousands of scents, but a puck was easy to pick out a piece of bright green yarn in a mass of bland tan ones. Rafferty was most likely feeling for him with his healing talent as well as following with his own nose, but four legs were faster than two, and I streaked through the parking lot with my cousin and Niko behind me. I had Goodfellow’s scent off the bat. There were many scents actually: several kinds of cologne; silk; shampoo that cost more than the car we’d been riding in. He did like the finer things in life.

=====

By the time it had hopped out of sight, Goodfellow was sitting up and talking to the peri on his phone either Niko or Cal had retrieved for him. “I’m fine, Ish. Lassie helped me out somewhat. What happened? Ahhh . . . some sleepwalking. Not anything to worry about. Didn’t I say Lassie saved me? So how much danger could I have been in really? Other than falling down a well or getting trapped in the ‘old mine’?” I bared my teeth and Goodfellow bared his back at me. Not only did he speak Greek, but he spoke Wolf fairly fluently as well. “No. You don’t need to come. Our doggy healer can handle it, he’s quite sure. Oh, and anything I might have said while asleep that was of a sexual nature I promise to back up when I get home. No, back up was not a euphemism. I don’t use euphemisms. If I meant that, then that’s what I would’ve said. I am sitting in a filthy ditch at the moment, but if you want to discuss details right now, we can.” Apparently Ishiah, thank Fenris and all that runs with fur, didn’t. He was far more interested in the issue of Goodfellow’s safety.

Ishiah didn’t seem too reassured from his reply regarding the subject, but in the end, the puck convinced him, more to keep the peri out of harm’s way than for our sake, I thought, and we were out of the ditch and headed back to the car and McDonald’s. After all the excitement, I was hungry again. I was thinking strawberry sundae.

=====

“That monogamy lasted, what, a whole day? But then again a dick has no morals, yeah?” Rafferty said as I sniffed denim and cotton.

“Clever. By dick I can choose whether you mean me or the splendor that precedes me like Excalibur. Bravo.” He clapped in appreciation. If hands could be facetious, these were.

I rolled my eyes back to see that unwavering Pan smile turn more conceited. I almost lost my breakfast into the plastic bag, but decided it would be a waste of good fries and kept searching through the bags with vague curiosity.

“Oh, help me.” Rafferty dropped his head into his hands.

“And I haven’t made up my mind yet about monogamy.” Although from hearing him talk to Ishiah on the phone, I was beginning to doubt that. “If I had decided against it, I’d do you. I don’t like you, despite your helping me with the concussion, you being the exceptional ass and all, but I’d do you. You’re doable in a shaggy, natural man-wolf of the wild way.” He folded his arms. “And if I had decided on monogamy, it wouldn’t mean that I couldn’t still look or fantasize or talk the talk. I simply couldn’t walk the walk. Unfortunately for my decision-making process, I do truly love walking the walk. Besides, considering our current situation, I don’t believe making choices about monogamy should be my primary concern. Staying alive long enough to ponder it at a later date while surrounded by naked flesh in a succession of strip clubs is slightly more important.” The last words were so faint, even my wolf ears barely heard them. “Or naked flesh and feathers.”

For someone who feared monogamy, he sure did like to talk about it, I snorted to myself. When a creature is forever like a puck, could monogamy be forever, though? I came to an instant conclusion. When one is forever, nothing can be forever. But something doesn’t have to be forever to be good, and I knew that Goodfellow did have it good now, whether he’d completely come to realize it or not. I could smell it on him. I could see it around him like a halo . . . like an aura of I’m-getting-laid-andyou’re-not. But not just laid; more than that—something extraordinary.

Right now I’d have settled for the just-laid part.

Lucky puck.

=====

“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 goodbye, 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.”

=====

Nik kept his hand pressed to the wound, keeping the plastic airtight. “Rafferty, now. Kill that bastard now!” The Ördögs were dying in droves around us, Robin no longer looking as if he didn’t know what to do with his sword. He was an avenging angel, righteous with fury. An avenging, very horny angel. Ishiah was rubbing off on him, the avenging part at least. The metal flashes of the blade were so fast, so damn quick, I didn’t know if I saw it at all or if it was the streaks of light that heralded the darkness of approaching unconsciousness.

=====

Off to one side, this time too far to hear, I saw Robin making a follow-up call, to say what he couldn’t before—not that I could know precisely what he said to Ishiah. I could guess, but with Goodfellow, a guess was the absolute best and worst you could hope for. As I watched him talk, it began to snow—just on Robin . . . snow, in the middle of summer. No. It wasn’t snow. It was feathers—white and gold feathers falling from the sky like a cascade of cherry blossom petals that I’d once seen in Central Park that had filled the air like a cloud come to Earth. Talk about when you care enough to send the very best.

Maybe there was a little magic in the world after all.

=====

“Love you too, little brother.” He kicked me under the table with meticulous precision, hitting some sort of nerve that made my ankle and foot go instantly numb. It wasn’t the first time either. How did he do that? “There’s Ishiah. I’ll be back.”

He left the table and had one of the peris, a big blond one—light blond hair and skin compared to Niko’s darker version—up against a wall and was talking with him as I cursed and rubbed my ankle. When I looked closer, it wasn’t so much of a talk as Niko telling the peri something—forcefully. He didn’t have a finger planted in the guy’s chest, not physically anyway, but he was laying down the law somehow. As he did, the peri’s wings appeared.

They came out of nowhere in a shimmer of light, a flash of brightness as if the sun had exploded. Not there, then there. It was like a magic trick. I felt as if I should applaud and send his feathered ass to Vegas for a new career. With gold-barred white feathers, he did look like an angel, a muscular, anger-me-not, scarred angel, but an angel all the same. I could see where the myths had come from. If this guy came after me with a flaming sword, I’d get my ass to temple quick. Cross a desert. Free a cheap source of labor. Whatever. Just say the word.

Minutes later they were both back at the table. “Cal,” Leandros said in introduction, “this is your employer, Ishiah. He owns the bar. You’re the only nonperi to work here, so you can expect the patrons to give you somewhat of a hard time. When you come back to work, that is, which won’t be until this Ammut mess is cleared up.”

I stood, trying not to favor the still-throbbing ankle. “You’re the boss, huh?” I didn’t offer to shake hands. That would be too surreal in this world, and I didn’t have an instinct to stick out a hand unless it had a weapon in it. A shaker I was not, it seemed. I went with the assumption that Niko had explained about my memory problem. “I made a pretty decent server at a diner. I think I’ll do okay as a bartender. Oh yeah, if I try to kill you, I’m sorry. Just a reflex. I’m having trouble getting it through my head that monsters … er … nonhumans aren’t always evil.”

The peri switched focus from me to Leandros. “Robin told me, but I didn’t completely understand. This …” His wings spread to a span nearly twelve feet wide. Then they tucked back in before spreading wide again. If he’d been a hawk, I would’ve said he was unsettled. “Never mind. Take as long as you need.” He turned his attention back to me for the last part. “Take as much vacation time as you require until your memory returns. The Ninth Circle isn’t what you would call a tame drinking establishment. We tend to lose at least one customer weekly. I want you at your best when you come back.”

“My old self. Gotcha.”

The peri gripped my shoulder and somewhat harder than an employer-employee chat called for. “Let us just say whenever you’re ready.” Then he was gone with one last long look at Leandros before he was behind the bar with another peri, this one with dark hair.

“You are a bunch of touchy-type people, I gotta tell you.” There was a trail of feathers from in front of me all the way back to the bar. As with the indecisive wings, that didn’t strike me as a good sign. Didn’t birds lose feathers when stressed? If I were a bird, I would. “Is he molting? Does he have some sort of giant-bird disease?”

“Only if Goodfellow gave it to him.” Pointing back at my chair, he added, “You may as well settle in. We’ve a long meeting ahead of us. Promise, Robin …”
He went on some more, but I blanked it out as I realized that my part-time boss, who looked like an angel and shed like a dog with mange, was the other half of the monogamy special that the puck bragged about. I hoped Goodfellow hadn’t told him about the fork incidents. I’d hate for him to get pissed at me and have to put Polly-Want-a-Cracker down. I only killed bad monsters—I was coming to terms with that—and he didn’t seem bad.

All monsters are. You know that. You’re born a monster, you die a monster, and there is nothing but slaughter between.

“Cal? Are you listening?” Leandros’s hand pushed me into the chair. “Obviously not. I suppose it’s good to know some things don’t change, amnesia or not.”

I was listening, but to myself, not to my newly discovered brother. There was no denying whose voice was in my head. It was mine and, although people lied to themselves all the time, I didn’t sound unsure on this. No tent-revival hellfire preacher was more absolute. I didn’t get it. The puck wasn’t human and he’d helped Leandros find me. The peri wasn’t human and he didn’t come across as a bad guy except for a little get-thee-sinning-asses-out-of-Eden grimness to him. Two nonhumans who were good enough not to try to kill me should balance the spiders and that revenant creature that had. It should prove what Leandros had told me. You took it on a case-by-case basis, because not all monsters were like people. Some were good and some were bad. They weren’t all evil. They all didn’t need to die.

=====

Like Ishiah, the guy with the feathers, she said nearly the same thing: “You told me on the phone, but I hadn’t comprehended he’d be quite like … this.” The fingers touched the back of Leandros’s hand in what appeared to be support as the ocean of heather concentrated on me. “You’ll be yourself soon enough, Caliban. I can wait until then to touch your hand or kiss your cheek.”

=====

Leandros braved an undead paw and put a pretzel in front of me. He did it automatically. I could see a lifetime of feeding the “little brother” behind it. It was so automatic, in fact, I guessed there’d been times we’d gone hungry as kids. Or Leandros had anyway. All his pretzels on hungry days, I’d bet, had gone to me. It was things like that that had made me believe his and Goodfellow’s story more than the words. “We can go there tonight. If I had a choice, I’d leave you here with Ishiah and Samyel, but I think you would be safer with the three of us. Too many old enemies know you work here.”

=====

I squatted down beside the dead Wolf and touched her hair. It was thick and black, like mine, but long. “We can’t leave her just lying here.” Killer or not, person or creature of the wild, asphalt was not a peaceful place for any body to find its rest.

“Ishiah will take care of her. This street is nonhuman. It’ll be handled.” Niko’s hand landed on my back and grabbed a handful of my jacket to urge me up. “She’s playing with you. Delilah. She knows one of hers couldn’t take you, much less all of us. If Delilah wanted you dead, she would’ve come herself.”

=====

Delilah (bad) was written in machine-perfect calligraphy at the top of the card. There’d been stick men with angel wings, Ishiah (good) Samyel (good), a stick woman with vampire fangs, Promise (good), a round thing with Mickey Mouse ears and a skinny tail marked Mickey (debatable). Then there’d been one stick figure with curly hair and three legs. I didn’t need the Robin Goodfellow (Run for your life) to ball it up and throw it at Leandros, which I had.

=====

I stared at it and raised my eyebrows at him. “A party? What kind of party?”

“Halloween. Ishiah hosted it at the Ninth Circle. Whatever you must say about the preternatural, they do like their celebrations. Pagan creatures did invent them, after all.”

=====

Ishiah was dressed normally as Niko had been, but with his wings out. Goodfellow stood behind the bar. I could see him only from the waist up. He was bare chested. “What’s the puck dressed up as?”

There was a sigh and the sound of the drawer shutting. “He thought it would be entertaining to have his costume complement Ishiah’s. Ishiah went as an angel and Goodfellow went as”—you can’t hear eyes roll, but you can imagine that you can—”the Baby Jesus.”

I grimaced. “That means he’s wearing a diaper… .” I didn’t get to finish.

“Preswaddled.”

Preswaddled. That meant he was naked behind that bar. Holy shit, why did he ever bitch about me ruining his clothes when from his talk and the illustrations to go with them he rarely fucking wore any.

=====

He tossed a handful of business cards on the table. They were green with bronze-colored lettering. Trying to cover up my confusion, reaching for casual, I picked one up with a hand that wanted to shake. I didn’t let it, and read the lettering aloud. “‘Robin Goodfellow, Monogamite, established 2010.’” Beneath that was a phone number.

“What’s the—”

“Suicide Hotline,” Robin answered before I had a chance to finish. “I’ve heard their call volume has increased tenfold.” He bowed his head in a solemn tilt. “I do what I can.” Then he was heading for the door. “Niko, I left you a few things as you’ve not been eating much while we looked for your wayward, apron-wearing brother. Enjoy. I’ll see the two of you later. I just have time to surprise Ishiah before he heads to work.” He paused as he opened the door, his eyebrows rising as he smirked. “Forget mice and men. The best-laid plans of vice and sin never go astray.”

He added more seriously, “But other things often do, well intentioned or not. Something to keep in mind.”

As the door slammed, I said, “There’s a lot I didn’t understand with that whole conversation and a lot I wish I hadn’t understood. Maybe I’ll skip the Ninth Circle.” There was no way I was going to the bar. Halloween Cal waited at the bar. I wasn’t ready to be Halloween Cal. At that moment I wasn’t ready to be any kind of Cal. “You don’t think Goodfellow and my boss have done it on the bar, do you? Where I serve drinks? Gah. I think I need a nap to wash my brain.” That was good. That sounded offhand, not on the edge of losing it at all … Never mind the sweat still soaking the back of my neck, the pain, the sickness so sharp I’d have left my own body to escape it if I could.

=====

“Holy shit.” I slid down the wall to crouch, gun dangling from my hand as Salome—yeah, that was her name, I was pretty sure—curled herself around my neck and purred in my ear. Of course, purring doesn’t often sound like gravel grinding or avalanches crushing hikers beneath them, but we weren’t all perfect.

“You’d better find a grip on the situation or Salome may eat your head. She likes fear. Fear is catnip to a mummified feline.”

I looked up, growling at Niko’s enjoyment of my, yep—I admit it, full-blown terror. We were in a marble foyer. There was a living area, a kitchen that probably came with a chef, through another door, a dining room, and directly across from us a hall that ran to bedrooms and whatever else the orgy king had going on. Rich. Goodfellow was rich. That wasn’t worth wasting a thought on. What would be were the two or three gold-barred white feathers I saw here and there down that hall. Ishiah’s feathers. “This is so not good for a working relationship with your boss.” I groaned. “That guy needs some Rogaine for birds or something. Christ.”

“Don’t be such an infant.” There came the increasingly familiar swat to the back of the head. “It’s sex. You’re a grown man. You’ve done it and with an incredibly psychotic Wolf to boot. More times than I could begin to count.”

“Then you have no problem with my seeing your vamp Promise parade around our place buck-ass naked?” Actually that was a mental picture I had no problem with. Definitely worth remembering more than a mummy in a museum basement, which was why I guess the visual of her was still spectacularly vivid, practically 3-D. She was pale, but she had all that hair and those clutch-of-violet eyes and probably some spectacular ti … The smack was to my forehead this time, banging the back of my head against the wall—a two-for-one special. “Ow. Jesus. What was that for?” I complained, rubbing my forehead, then the back of my head, then my forehead again.

“You know perfectly well what that was for.”

Yeah, okay, he did have me there.

By the time Goodfellow came back, leaving whoever left those feathers—yes, I told my mind, I know who, so shut up—hidden in the bedroom, I was sitting on his couch while trying to decide whether to shoot the cat, now humping my leg—I didn’t even know cats humped—shoot Niko, whose smirks might be invisible but still detectable, or shoot myself. The puck, wearing a dark green robe, flopped down on the wraparound contour couch and demanded, “Explain, and if this is not very, very good, I’ll let Salome hump the both of you to death.” I stopped trying to shake the cat off and gave Goodfellow my full attention, which was enough to let me see from his sprawled position what he was wearing under the robe.

=====

“Your mother was a raving alcoholic. Raving in most things from what I gather, but alcohol being one of her primary obsessions.” His own glass was flanked by two bottles of wine. I’d seen his tolerance. Alcoholism would be a problem for him only if someone started giving him entire barrels of the stuff. “As a result, you and Niko rarely drink. Tempting the fate of bad genes isn’t always a good idea.” He considered his glass for a moment, then touched it to mine. “But then sometimes fate is fate and one learns to live with it if not embrace it. If you don’t remember anything at all in the wilds of your amnesia, Caliban, remember that. Remember it well.”

Now there was the best kind of lie, one that wasn’t a lie at all. He’d told me something, something important, but I didn’t have enough of my past yet to know what it was. “A raving alcoholic, huh?” He wasn’t pulling any punches.

“Very much so. Verbally abusive, emotionally abusive, especially towards you, which would explain Niko being as much of a guardian in addition to brother when it involves you. Sophia had quite the pitching arm as well when it came to bottles and glasses.” He poured himself a third glass. “She was also a thief, a liar, and a whore—three qualities I usually favor, but in her case, combined with the maternal instinct of a wolf spider, she gives the rest of us liars and thieves a bad name. As for whoring, I’ve often been offered money for my brilliant performances, but I never took it.” He grinned and poured a second glass. “But it’s good to know I have a career to fall back on if the thieving and lying fail me one day.”

“Except …” The prompt had a threatening tone.

Goodfellow handed the second glass to Ishiah, who’d drifted up, no wings or feathers this time. “If it’s for money, it’s not cheating. It’s a righteous occupation of long standing. If one dies penniless in a ditch, monogamy becomes difficult … or far more easy, depending on your outlook.”

At Ishiah’s outlook, a fierce glower, the puck sighed. “Just remember the Good Samaritan story from that book you’re so very fond of. Picking someone who’s been mugged out of a ditch and carrying them home to oil them up? I know they were big on oiling people in those days, feet and all, but when you’ve been beaten and mugged, oil isn’t what you’re looking for. Trust me, there’s more to that story than anyone knows.” Ishiah’s glower went to nova-heat proportions. “Fine. Fine. I’ll wander off to a table then. Wave when you’re done discussing things of great import, and I’ll be back with something of far greater import in my pants. Dusty and unused for almost five hours now. Ah, sirens at table six. Perhaps they can sing sad lamentations of a warrior retired from battle.”

When he was gone and handing out his monogamy cards to the sirens, beautiful women with a green tint to their skin, Ishiah picked up the wineglass and drained it. After the two swallows that it took, I asked him, “Why? Man to bird, why? Why Goodfellow? Are you that hard up to be laid? How does he ever stop talking long enough to actually screw anyone?”

He instantly fisted my hair and smacked my face against the bar. He was nice enough not to do it hard enough to break my nose, and I was nice enough not to pull the trigger on the gun I had shoved against his throat.

“Show him the respect he deserves. He is your closest friend. He knows you.”

That had to be true, because Goodfellow wasn’t rushing over to break this up. He knew his … mmm … Wingnificant Other wasn’t going to smash my brains out on the bar and that I wasn’t going to shoot him for trying. Niko, lurking somewhere outside the bar, hadn’t come in either … to prevent violence or avenge the fact my beer hadn’t been served to me in a baby bottle. Ishiah wasn’t a threat—or a monster. He was just my sometimes boss.

I straightened, put my gun away, and pushed the hair back so I could see. If it didn’t grow and fast, I was going for a buzz cut. “He knows me. He’s my closest friend. Everyone says so, but how do I know for sure?” Now was a time for facts. Considering the decision I’d made based on a brother’s need and in spite of a picture I, still to this minute, wish I’d never seen, I wanted facts to go with it. That was why I was here. Ishiah knew Cal … and knew me, but as an employer, not a friend. He’d be more likely to tell the truth and not soften the blow.

“What he told you about your mother,” the eavesdropper said, “do you think you told him that? All of that? You and Niko are secretive—anyone raised the way you were would be—so despite Robin’s being your friend, would you have told him that?”

No. Friend or not … no. That kind of past abuse … The rest of it was one thing, but to know two kids, kids I didn’t remember although I was one of them, had lived through that. I wouldn’t be throwing those details around. You shouldn’t be ashamed, but you were. You shouldn’t feel guilty and tainted, but you did. Niko had carefully edged around that information, blurring it, but Goodfellow had given me the real deal and, although I recalled none of what he’d told me happening to Niko or me, I felt it the same as if he’d kicked me in the stomach. It wasn’t a good feeling, which was why Niko hadn’t told me … and why Goodfellow had. Goodfellow was my friend, but he was Niko’s friend too.

Robin knew what Niko was doing to me—for me. After all, he was the supplier, the dealer in the dirty deed, but he also knew what Niko was doing to himself. He wasn’t going to choose between us. He gave me a hint about my past self through the truth about my mother, but the rest was up to me. Niko, unlike me, had walked through that past, whole and unshadowed, but how long would he stay that way if he lost his one anchor? If he lost his real brother?

The choice to claim the past and the old Cal that went with it was one Goodfellow was letting me decide for myself. He didn’t know I’d already made it.

But I still wanted to know it was the right choice.

“Then how did he know?” I asked as I heard a Wolf pass behind me and laugh. It wasn’t a nice laugh, gloating and gleeful with the whisper of sheep behind it. I let it go. It was happening more and more now in the hour I’d been in here. From that, I gathered that pigeons like Ishiah rated above sheep, but Wolves rated above both—in their furry little minds.

“Because it’s what he does. He’s a trickster that has lived longer than I can remember, and I’ve lived a very long time.” There were the wings, not in disturbance this time, though. Spread and lifted high, they made you think of eagles proudly surveying their domain. “I’ve seen man take his first step. Robin has been around long enough to have probably stepped on one of man’s slippery ancestors crawling from the ooze. He can take the smallest fact and spin an entire tapestry from it. But you gave him that one small fact at some time or another and you never would have if he weren’t your friend.”

I was getting so much truth now that I was surprised they didn’t charge extra for it. Abusive whore of a mother. No wonder Niko had to raise me. A horny puck that never shut up as a best friend, but, considering the T-shirt slogans I picked out, it was a wonder I had a friend at all.

I finished my beer and got another from Samyael. Good old Sammy was quick with the beer. “Can I ask you something, boss?”

“‘Boss’?” He took my empty and disposed of it under the bar. He was doing my job tonight. “You usually only call me boss when I have an axe against your neck.”

“An axe, huh? I must call in sick a lot.” I drank half of the second beer. As Goodfellow said, fate was fate; genes were genes. I wasn’t an alcoholic yet or I’d have gone into DTs in the Landing as I hadn’t touched the stuff there. But that didn’t change the fact he was trying to tell me something about who I’d been—he simply wouldn’t do it outright. Ishiah might. “So can I? Ask you something?” He paused, already looking as if he regretted it, but nodded.

“Is Cal a good guy?” Not me, but Cal, because there was still a difference. I didn’t watch his face for the response. I drank some more and waited.

When he finally answered, I accepted the single-word reply with a slight tip of my head in thanks. This time I was the one who had to take a while to think. When I was done, I asked him one more question. “If Niko had to choose between me and a burning orphanage full of big-eyed kids hugging fluffy kittens, which would he choose?” It was facetious as hell, but it got the point across.

Ishiah took the beer from me and drank it himself. “Irish courage … in a way. I picked that up from Robin. What it took you barely months to find out about him, it took me thousands of years. I was such a pretentious ass and full of dangerous, even deadly conviction. I judged him. It was only when I judged myself that I saw the truth. Now I won’t deny any truth.” He replaced my bottle with two more—one for me and one for him.

“Niko’s flaw—and it is a fatal one—is that if it came down to saving the world or saving you … he would save you.”

Fatal to the world and big-eyed orphans, I could see that, but to me it meant one thing:

How could I do anything less?

=====

But while American Idol might’ve thought we could shoot gold records out our asses, the Wolves didn’t care for the higher notes of the song and “Danny Boy” was not their thing. I thought their pained howling added to the song, which was sad, or so Goodfellow told me. The peris took it in stride. Ishiah had said he’d given up his judgmental ways. That didn’t leave him much room to bitch.

=====

He did wait until I managed to get my feet under me before continuing to drag me, this time not as silently. “Maybe you should have. Maicoh, the one you shot, holds grudges. Or instead of killing him, perhaps you should have tried thinking instead. If you are intoxicated, especially this intoxicated, which you’ve had the sense to never be in the past, you run the risk of someone better than Maicoh killing you. Someone besides me. And pepper spray? Are you suicidal? You are not a mailman.” I was about to say that was what I’d been thinking, except more pro-mailman, when he gave me a not-so-gentle shake—ninja punctuation to equal my vomit punctuation from last night. “And why were you singing? You don’t sing.”

“It’s a wake, and ‘Danny Boy’ is what you sing when someone dies. It turns out I cut my hair for the right reason after all.”

He stopped again. “Who died?”

“No one you know.” This time I was the one moving him. I shoved him or he allowed himself to be shoved. I saved my ego and didn’t guess. “Look. A tattoo place. Ishiah said it opened yesterday. Run by some ancient Mayan guy. Acat. Another one of those, ‘Yeah, I’m a god, okay, maybe not, but I live forever’ things. Good for business. Keeping the street monster-eclectic and human free.”

“Are you feeling the victim of discrimination?” He had immediately stopped yet one more time the moment I’d said tattoo, balancing with ease on the curb. It looked effortless, and apparently it was, because when I shoved harder, he was concrete—a mountain.

“Nah, I have sheep solidarity with you. At least I can say there are two humans in the city. Good to know.” He tensed under my hand as I said that, but I was too drunk to know why and too drunk to care that I didn’t know why. And too drunk to care that I didn’t care. It was a very Zen thought process. Good for me. Good for drunk-off-his-ass me. “And, Niko, you’re getting a tattoo. I have one.” I waved the arm it was on. I was proud that I didn’t stagger. I was a mountain too. Look at me. “Brothers-in-arms, right? It’s a brother thing. In the fucking handbook, I know it—if I could ever find the fucking handbook. Now it’s your turn.”

So he’d understand.

When the time came, I wanted him to understand. The tattoo would tell him then what I couldn’t tell him now.

“And what tattoo am I getting?” The mountain was shifting, minutely, under my hands.

“Bros before Hos.” I got him off the curb and across the street, where he stopped for the last time.

“My body is a temple. I may let you deface it with graffiti if it means that much to you that I reciprocate your brotherly brand, but that phrase is not an option.” Ah, there was a limit to all that family do-or-die after all.

“It’s not that exactly. Christ. It’s just sort of the same sentiment, but without the hos and with the same sort of rhyming… . Just shut up and get the goddamn tattoo, would you?”

He did. In the tiny shop that was spotlessly clean, he did it because I asked, maybe to get more of the brotherhood back that a spider had stolen. Or maybe he was just too damn tired to fight about it. Mourning one brother, adopting a new one—because Cal and I weren’t the same, as much as Niko was trying to tell himself that we were. Trying to tell himself I was the old Cal, only with a creamy icing of happy-go-lucky contentment on top.

It was hard work, adoption and lying to yourself. It would make anyone tired, this superninja included. I handed the wrinkled napkin to a red guy with earlobes down to his shoulders and four arms—or that might’ve been that annoying double vision. Niko, in the chair with his shirt off and his upper arm bared for the needle, frowned at the writing on the stained paper. “What is that? I don’t recognize it.”

“Aramaic.” I sat down on the one small plastic chair provided for those who wanted to wait. Yawning, I finished the thought. “Ishiah wrote it for me. Figured it was the one language you probably didn’t know.” And wouldn’t be able to read until he was ready to hear it and I was ready to tell it.

“There are many dialects incorporated through other languages, regions, time periods… .”

I dozed off, and I couldn’t blame the alcohol. Faced with death by boredom, my brain took the only other way out—unconsciousness. When I woke up, it was morning and I was in my bedroom at home. I wasn’t in bed, though, and my knife-practicing wall no longer said Screw you.

It said something worse.

Something that was getting damn familiar.

=====

I didn’t know personally if Cal was a good guy or a bad guy, but I did know he was a shadowed one. I also knew what Ishiah had told me, but that wasn’t anything I’d repeat. I also knew people reacted to me like a grenade that inexplicably didn’t go off. I know Wolves and boggles had lost respect for me, even though I could still kick their asses. I knew body-temple Niko wouldn’t have gotten a tattoo for his Cal unless he thought it would help the return of part of that Cal—some of him but not the part that remembered, not that unhappy part. No one who cared for his brother wanted him unhappy.

=====

Ishiah, his tux in one piece, closed the door behind us. “This wasn’t the brightest thing you could have done, Caliban. Robin is one of the best, if not the best, tricksters in this world. Are you familiar with the Greek tale of Oedipus Rex? It wasn’t simply a story. It was truth. There were two prophecies. Robin had nothing to do with the first or the second, but when chariot rage, the original road rage, ended in murder, he did arrange for the rest of the prophecy to come true. Marrying mothers, jabbing out eyes with golden hairpins, suicide. All three members of that royal family were murderers or potential ones. Tricksters don’t care for either. That was only a job to him. Justice. This”—he waved an arm at the inside of the penthouse and twenty-four avid yellow eyes followed the movement—”is personal.”

I’d felt my own eyes cross the same as Salome’s, but mine was in boredom, not pleasure. “Sorry. I missed most of that. Oedipus Rex … Was that a dinosaur? Like a T. rex?”

“I may as well post the ad for your replacement now.” He followed the puck. “Your tuxes are in both bathrooms. If your ‘gifts’ haven’t eaten them.”

He flipped me off when I called after him gravely. “Adoption is love. I saw that on the side of a bus, so it’s gotta be true.”

“That wasn’t very angellike,” I added as I watched the finger disappear with him.

“Understandable, since he isn’t one.” Niko went for the first bathroom. “And if Robin does cause you to blind yourself with anything from an antique hairpin to a banana, I will have no sympathy.”

=====

She looked away for a moment, then back and remained silent. Goodfellow and Ishiah had been willing to give me clues, but she was completely loyal to Niko. I didn’t mind. In fact, I preferred it.

=====

Goodfellow, Ishiah, and I watched them go, dark blond head bent to the brown/blond one. “She looks like a tiger with that hair,” I mused.

And she’ll eat you like a tiger if you piss her off onefifth as much as you’ve pissed me off,” Robin growled.

I gave him a narrow-eyed glance and an equally narrow smile. “Do you really want to play, puck? I can make the time.”

Surprise flashed behind his eyes and as quickly was gone. Pucks were much better than my brother at playing a part, and he didn’t want to have to tell Niko the show was over. That he gladly would let me do. “You’re back then?”

My smile—only half of what I’d pretended it was, I hoped—widened. “About seventy, seventy-five percent.” I hooked an arm around his neck and squeezed, messing up his tie and collar mostly on purpose. “I missed remembering you, you horny bastard. Besides, think about it. Would a ‘good’ Cal dump eleven dead cats in your apartment? Or turn Wahanket into a dust pile that could double as an ant condo?”

“Good Cal tried to stab me with a fork,” Robin pointed out as he tried to straighten his tie, but he didn’t shake off my arm. Before Nik and I had shown up, and before Ishiah had come around to admit his own stupidity, Robin hadn’t had many friends—any friends. There were prejudiced bastards even among the supernatural kind. Tricksters weren’t favorites by any means.

“Good Cal thought you were a monster,” I reminded him. “Now I know what a monster is.”

“Ammut?” Ishiah standing beside us murmured, and although I couldn’t see the wings, I heard them rustle.

“Her too.” But she wasn’t the only one. I let go of Goodfellow and straightened my suit jacket to feel the weight of my weapons in place. I smelled her all right. She was here, and my grin now? I didn’t think there was a word for it. Not in these modern days. Not anymore. The first to invent, create, conceive. The first to smile for all the wrong reasons.

“Come on, guys,” I said. “Let’s go kick some Egyptian ass.”

=====

“Does Niko know you’re almost you again?”

“Can you picture the invisible cross he’s dragging around on his back,” I asked, “hear the splish-splash of Pontius Pilate lathering up with hand sanitizer?”

“Yes.”

“That’d be a no then,” I snorted.

“Blasphemy,” Ishiah muttered under his breath at my exchange with Robin as a feather wafted out of nowhere to land in Goodfellow’s wineglass.

“I’m beginning to have serious doubts about this nonangel crap you peris are spouting.” Other than that comment, I went back to concentrating on the room. Ammut was here. I had the musty corpse taste of her in the back of my throat, under the bacon, but the entire room reeked of Wolves, vamps, other supers who could pass for human, and humans themselves soaked in perfume or cologne.

=====

Niko shook his head. “Goodfellow might be all right, but he does love that murderous bald cat of his. Ishiah? I have no idea. And Promise only just lost her own daughter. I think that opens her up to maternal feelings that could be turned back on us.”

=====

“Can you still feel me?” I tightened my fingers. “How about now? Can you feel me now, Goddess? You murdering bitch.” The eyes were open again and they weren’t so beautiful any longer. “Let Niko go or we’ll see how you manage to tie on the lobster bib and chow down on anything in the future without your fucking heart.”

Ishiah had told the truth in the bar when I’d asked the question.

I was a bad guy, when I needed to be, which made me the right guy for the job.

=====

“I’ll check them out. See if they’re salvageable. I’ll call if I need help. There come Promise and Robin now.” The chair was kicked aside as the door to the roof opened. “They missed the real thing, but they can take you to the after-party.” I gave his braid one last yank, tossed it over his shoulder, and said, “Ask Ishiah what your tattoo means. I’ll be back in time for you to kick my ass over it. Swear.”

He sheathed his sword, jaw tightening before he exhaled. “You’re the most goddamn stubborn man I know. Goddamn it, I missed you, you asshole.” Three curse words in two sentences—that was more big-time emotion for Nik. He wrapped one arm around me and that brotherly man hug I’d tried to avoid in Nevah’s Landing came back to bite me in the ass. The one arm made it brotherly. That my ribs nearly gave way and my spleen pretty much did too made it manly. That I returned it just as hard was, hell, just manners.

I was always about manners.