A/N: Sorry I didn't update in a day or two – AP exams take up all one's brain power. Hopefully I will be updating more frequently now that most of them are over. And . . . meep! I just got Roadkill from the library, but unfortunately my sister's got first dibs and I have to wait till she's done with it before I can read it. Can't wait, can't wait, can't wait! :D Also, I am aware that – according to the Leandros canon – there wouldn't be time in between Madhouse and Deathwish for this to happen, but heck, it's AU.
You know you are gone on a book character when you scratch his name into the sidewalk with your pocketknife while waiting to be picked up from an AP exam. Unfortunately, I started too late and only got through "Niko Le . . ." before my mom drove up.
EIGHT
Sleeping With The Dead
After doing my damnedest to sew Niko's shoulder back to his neck – something I am really bad at – Niko walked around the house, stir-crazy and driving me up the wall. I never realized how much I valued those times home alone until Niko was not at the dojo and was instead occupying himself with making my life miserable. Housework was a bitch. Of course, he didn't tell me to do stuff, he asked me to, but to Niko it's one and the same.
"I thought you were into quiet suffering," I griped, slapping a can of Comet onto the kitchen counter. A puff of blue smoke rose into the air. I flopped onto the couch beside him, the exertion from cleaning the toilet wiping me out. He was watching the Discovery channel on television. "You trying to finish what the Auphe started?" I demanded, reaching for the remote. "Bore yourself to death?"
He snatched the remote away from me. "Do not attempt to rouse the sleeping lion, little brother, or it will bite your ass." And with that pious proverb and a thwack on the head, he promptly ignored me.
I studied the way he held himself, his arm propped up on the arm of the couch and his back straighter and more ramrod than usual. The brackets around his thinned-out lips spoke of the painkillers he had refused. I really wasn't used to seeing him in pain. It sucked.
"What do you think the Auphe want?" he asked finally.
"Us," I muttered. "Or more specifically, your dead mutilated body and my mindless screaming ass dragged back to Tumulus."
"No, I don't think that's it," Niko mused, muting the television. "If that's what they wanted, they could have finished me today. They could have attacked us on the way back from the dojo."
"They're predators. Catch the mouse and let it go."
"But wouldn't they leave a calling card? Something – besides this," he motioned to his shoulder, "that would frighten us? Cal, it's almost as though they don't want to frighten us. Or you. If they are here, now, watching and aware of us, wouldn't they be taking every opportunity to terrorize us?"
"Much as I hate to admit it," I grunted, sinking lower in the couch and sitting on my spine, "I think you have a point. Damn it. New rules. I hate new rules – I was just getting used to the old ones."
"I have a feeling we'll learn the game soon enough," Niko said, not particularly comfortingly. As far as I was concerned, this new game and its rules could go to hell.
I couldn't sleep that night. I was scared as shit to let my defenses down. There was no relaxing, no sweet blissful surrender to the goddess Sleep (upon whose altar I laid frequent sacrifices), when I was waiting for an Auphe to gate in here and finish what it had started. Or start something else. Who knew what they wanted anymore?
The sheets twisted around my legs as I flopped onto my stomach and pillowed my chin on my folded arms. How is Cal? What kind of a question is that? Of course, I hadn't witnessed it, but I could just picture it in my mind – an albino monster with metal teeth and glowing red eyes squatting on Robin's floor, shitting his carpet like the animal it is, and asking how I was. Like a damn mutual acquaintance, like a family member dropping by to say "Hey". In a way, such a casual reference like that brought the fact home that I was one of them more than any amount of snarling "Mine"s at the windowpane. Shit, how was I? Fine and dandy, thanks for asking, and how's uncle Balrog? Has he cut back on the live appetizers? His cholesterol was bound to give him trouble one of these days.
Just one of the family.
I shuddered and held up a hand in front of my face. White, pasty-pale, narrow – only half a genetic code away from being a skeletal claw with blood crusted under long nails. I closed my hand into a fist and tucked it under my stomach, which had begun to boil with nerves. That couldn't be me, I wouldn't let it.
After a few more minutes of restless tossing and turning, I finally slid from the sheath of blankets and stood up. Dragging my blanket off my bed and wrapping it around my shoulders, I drew my knife out from under my pillow and left my room. Padding across the short distance between my room and my brother's, I slowly pushed open the door and peered inside.
All safe, all quiet. The window was shut. Good window. Niko was lying rather stiffly on his back, apparently asleep. His shoulder was probably giving him hell – he had refused to take the pain medication. Then he had been a damned big brother and gone and noticed the odd smell in his grass tea when I had tried to melt a couple painkillers in the steaming liquid. I'd nearly gotten that cupful down my pants for my trouble.
Slipping through the door, I closed it gently behind me. The moment I crossed into his room, I knew Niko would wake up. He did not disappoint, his grey eyes suddenly glistening in the darkness. He didn't look away from the ceiling as he asked, "What's wrong?"
"The whole damn world," I replied matter-of-factly, and sat down next to the bed, leaning back against it and drawing up my legs. The knife dangled from one hand, ready for use should it be needed. I felt Niko's gaze on the back of my head, and I struggled not to shift uncomfortably under it. Yeah, so, bite me, it was pathetic, the whole guard dog business. But hell, it was only sensible, right? I mean, you know where they are going to strike, you protect it. You wear bullet proof vests to protect you from bullets. You sit sentinel at your brother's bed to protect yourself from . . . other things. Insanity, for one. Because that's what was in store for me if they ever got through my defense.
Niko let it go, not bothering to say anything. I was glad. Now that I was here, my mind was at rest and I realized I was tired as shit. Grimacing at the crick I expected in my neck tomorrow, I leaned back and rested my head on the edge of the mattress and closed my eyes. I was out instantly.
The next morning, I woke up with said expected crick in the neck, as well as a sense that something was wrong. Jerking up, I found that I had slumped over and was lying on the floor. A pillow had been stuffed under my face. Sitting up, cursing the hardness of floors, I scrubbed my hands through my hair and looked around, yawning like a cavern. Niko was out of bed. I could hear him in the kitchen.
My sixth sense – my Auphe sense – went crazy as I dragged my ass into the kitchen and fell into a chair. Niko deposited a cup of coffee in front of me.
"What's wrong?"
"Shit, you notice every frigging time," I grunted, rubbing my eyes with my fingers. "Something's not right. Don't know what – something . . ." A gate. Yeah, I realized, jerking up. The leftover feel of one, stagnating in the air like the stale smell of last night's fish. Shit. Shit, shit, when had they come? And why on earth were we still walking around with all our limbs attached?
I jumped from my seat and stood like I was ready to spar in the middle of the kitchen. It was ridiculous to get all defensive now, they were gone, whatever they'd wanted here. Or they were hiding here somewhere.
"Cal?"
"A gate. Oh, damn, Niko. They opened another damn gate in the frigging house last night."
"You think they're still in the apartment?" Niko snatched one of his many blades from the counter.
"Don't know." I glanced around for a weapon of my own, realizing I had left my own blade in Nik's bedroom. Niko slapped a second knife into my hand and I closed my fingers tightly around the rubber grip. This could be it.
Niko veered off toward the living area to do a check, and I headed toward the bathroom and bedrooms. My logical half was screaming the idiocy of this suspicion to me. I mean, if the Auphe were hiding in the apartment, why in hell hadn't they gotten around to their usual dismemberment and incapacitation routine? Why wait? But this was no time for logic. How logical was the fact that we believed demonic elves with evil intent were on our asses?
The half of me that had spent life on the run told me that it was always better to be safe than sorry.
The bathroom was clear, although it took me longer than I would have liked to admit to summon up the courage to throw back the shower curtain. I could just imagine it, the Auphe squatting naked and wriggling in the tub, grinning up at me from under long white locks like malignant bathing beauties gone all wrong. Except for the millipede curled in the corner and the hairball stuck in the shower drain, the tub was clear. As was the toilet, the sink, the medicine cabinet . . . and then I smelled it.
Violent death isn't a smell you forget easily. Once you've smelled the raw flesh exposed to the air and festering puddles of old blood, you recognize it right away. Hell, I've smelled it so many times I need to cover my nose every time I walk by the butcher's section of the local supermarket – it brings back too many bad memories. A dark bar and a slut of a girl who had been a bitch but hadn't deserved to die, Cerberus' employees torn to pieces for misdemeanors, a megalomaniacal puck standing in a puddle of my brother's blood, the bodies swinging on the meat hooks in Sawney's lair – yes, there were just too damn many unpleasant memories related to that particular smell. And now it was in the apartment.
Following my nose and trying to shove down the fear of finding Promise or Robin or Georgie mutilated as a fulfillment of their sick oath, I left the bathroom and walked into my bedroom . . .
It was lying in my damn bed. In my damn frigging bed. In the dimness, a mess of blood and golden curls, staining my sheets and staring glazed-eyed at the ceiling. "Shit!" I hollered, backing out of the room and banging into the lintel, whirling around to face the hallway, swallowing bile and trying not to dart to the bathroom to heave.
Niko passed me in a whoosh of displaced air that stank of butchered human, and I felt my knees turn to jelly. I didn't know any blond girls. Well, besides Delilah, but she was pale moon white-blond, not honey-colored springtime blond. Like this girl. Like this corpse. In my frigging bed.
Niko came back out of my room, one hand bloody with examination. He placed his clean hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. "You know who she is?"
I shook my head, unable to trust myself if I opened my mouth.
"Neither do I. There were several mutilating bite marks, but only one fatal one to the neck. Judging from the spray of blood on the wall beside the bed, I would guess she was still alive when . . ."
I wrenched away from him and darted into the bathroom to throw up. Niko stood in the doorway until I had calmed down enough to croak, "And I needed to know . . . all that . . . right now . . . , why?"
Niko shook his head. "Sorry, Cal. Stay in here. I'll clean this up." He shut the door, and I obeyed, sitting on the edge of the tub, mopping strings of vomit from my chin, looking over my shoulder into the tub to make sure nothing was gating in behind me. This was one case of deferring responsibility to the older sibling that I didn't mind submitting to. Let Niko deal with it – I'd be more hindrance than help at this point.
One thing was certain, however. We couldn't stay here. I refused to stay here. I wondered what Niko would say to the proposal of moving in with Promise for a few days? If he didn't like the idea, then I'd settle for the YMCA, an exercise mat at the dojo, a back alley, a bench in Central Park and a newspaper. Anything but here. I couldn't sleep in that room again for a long time.
What the hell do they want? I couldn't stop my brain from replaying that particular question over and over again. I counted off the gruesome things that had shown up in my vicinity within the past few days – the blood-sucking flower, the scaled bird, and now a dead girl. That, plus the particularly violent dreams I'd been having lately, the pickle-infested pile of Auphe shit on Robin's apartment, the attempt on Niko's life, and the revenant and the car accident . . . It just didn't add up. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. What in hell? What in bloody, bloody hell do they want?
