“Probably not, but he made an effort and that may count. Fractionally. I have to think on it.” His lips tightened. “My God, your legs.”
“Looked at yourself lately?” He’d cleaned off the blood from himself in the car while it was still fresh. It didn’t change the fact that he appeared to have been attacked by five or six tiny dominatrices with small whips. And it wasn’t his legs, although they were now covered with pants, but his arms, his chest, his neck, and a few cuts on his face, from being pulled down through the floor by the Cyclops. I’d seen it in the car and here. We were all sliced and diced, some more than others and some less. Niko and I had the most. Kalakos and Robin the least. Kalakos because he was careful. I swallowed the growl. Robin, in spite of running full-out, because he had a few millennia of practice at dodging sharp objects. I respected the puck’s skill. I didn’t respect Kalakos’s investment in keeping his skin whole.
But whichever half you fell into, the more or the less, the four of us were all injured, Niko had pointed out. “The subject of the first class for blind butchers wouldn’t have fared as badly as we did.” That was a Nik joke. Not the type that are funny because they’re true, but the type that aren’t funny because they’re
“Tired?”
I groaned. “You have no idea.”
Five minutes later he’d kicked Robin off the one couch in the room and had me on it with pillow and blanket before I had half pulled on a Chen-donated pair of cotton pajama pants. Goodfellow complained; I didn’t blame him. The cushions were soft and comfortable. The floor wasn’t going to be either one. But I heard Nik telling him it was time for his shower and first aid assisted by Niko himself.
My brother, he knew how to take one for the team.
“Monogamous or not, I am horrifically wounded and need all the first-aid assistance I can get,” Robin agreed promptly. “Ish would want that. For my health…my best interest. I’m sure of it.”
Ishiah wasn’t on a mission. He’d gone to Vegas to hole up in a hotel room and recover. Or flown farther, to Mexico, where they sell Viagra in barrels, not bottles. Whichever it was, I knew he had sun, and nothing trying to eat his feathered ass. I wished we could say the same.
Knife under my pillow, I slept instantly and hard and dreamed of Grimm. Of living his life shackled and chained. Tortured and craving the taste of raw meat. Dreamed of freedom and traveling a land I didn’t know existed. Learning things I hadn’t suspected, but knew I needed once I saw the world…the real world. I had a nightmare of killing a teacher, but I couldn’t remember what she looked like or what her name was or why she kept talking when she should’ve been dead. I dreamed grim and Grimm, but no more than five or six times.
Maybe seven.
Isn’t that the lucky number?
16
I was swatted awake the next morning by a paper in the face. It was rolled up and I wondered briefly if I’d piddled on the couch. “Up and at ’em, couch thief. Janus came back last night and wiped out about half an acre of Central Park. At least I’d say it’s a reasonable assumption it was Janus, as the unnatural and unseen tornado out of a clear sky makes less sense, but is a weatherman’s wet dream. One drop of rain and they’re on TV yap-yap-yap, counting every drop, predicting the planet-threatening sprinkle but a mere five days away.”
I snatched the paper from Goodfellow’s hand as he kept yap-yap-yapping himself, to find it was in Chinese, which left me out. But there was a picture zoomed in on a circle of trees splintered and flattened. “Shit.” Central Park. “The boggles.” I’d come to the conclusion that Grimm wouldn’t mess with family or friends, but I hadn’t considered enemies. Some enemies can be more useful than friends on occasion. Then there were the kids. …“Jesus,” I groaned, and sat up, every muscle aching.
“You were right. Grimm is intelligent, too intelligent.” Niko was handing me some kind of sticky pastry with a napkin wrapped around it and a cup of coffee. I looked at both blankly for a good minute before I recognized what they were and what to do with them. Morning was not my thing. “He may have gone after something we value but can’t claim as family. It’s a fine line, if it’s one he’s indeed walking.”
I grunted and ate. “Go?”
“Yes, I think we should. The area that was destroyed isn’t close to the boggle pit, but it’s not far enough for comfort either. And there is no other reason for Janus to have been there. We weren’t.”
“Games.” One in which Grimm was several moves ahead of me. Did he think I cared enough about the boggles to come after him? Or that I cared that they were too useful for him to be screwing with? He was outlining the boundaries, dipping a toe in the water to see if Caliban the shark snapped at his leg and pulled him under. He wanted to know how far he could push, yet keep the possibility of my changing teams. Observation had shown him how I felt about family and friends; now he wanted to know how I felt about others.
Did I know myself? You can spend enough time with a monster that would rip off your arm like a turkey leg if you eventually let yourself get used to it. A give and take that goes on for years. Information for pay. Sparring for experience. As long as you’re equally matched and you both can walk away…some were convenient to have around. Like Boggle and her litter.
“I need more coffee,” I mumbled. “Lots more coffee.”
At first I thought the mud pit was empty. To be polite we’d shouted we were coming for a “consultation” with Mama Boggle when we were several hundred feet away in the deepest part of the woods of the park. It wasn’t necessary. She had a nose as good as a Wolf’s, but temperamental was a boggle’s nature. That and predatory, homicidal, and they liked bright, shiny things. Mama Boggle was nine feet of scales, claws, pumpkin orange eyes. She was a humanoid alligator with the backward bite of a shark’s mouth, and a magpie’s attraction to gold and gems. When she was mildly annoyed, she’d uproot full-grown trees and throw them at you. If you were a mugger or a lost jogger, she ate you.
As informants went, she was a good one. If she knew anything and you bought her a bag full of Tiffany’s best, she’d tell you. If she didn’t know anything, she’d ignore you…or go back to throwing trees at you. If she hadn’t had the kids to feed and teach to hunt, she would’ve been more interested in killing us, but keeping her litter in line took a lot of time and energy. They looked just like their mom, but only seven feet tall and not that bright. They’d outgrow it. And when they did, I wasn’t sure what would happen. One boggle in Central Park was survivable. One with a litter of boglets—they were occupied teaching and learning, also doable. But when the boglets became full- grown, I didn’t think Central Park could sustain that many adult boggles. I knew we couldn’t take on that many if worse came to worst.
Unless they stayed on the dim side.
I crouched by the pit and knocked on the edge of the mud. It wasn’t as crusted around the edge, thanks to yesterday’s storm that had finally cleared up around late afternoon. I lifted my hand and wiped the coating of mud on the grass. “Boggle?” I swiveled my head to look up at Nik and the others. “I smell sulfur. Janus. But not strong. Not like it was here. More like the boggles brought the scent back on them.”
“I don’t care for the sound of that. Unless they did us a favor and took Janus apart to keep his bright and sparkly pieces for souvenirs,” Robin said with a yawn as he stood beside me, leaning on his sword. The floor hadn’t been conducive to sleep, he’d said…repeatedly. That was intended to make me feel guilty.
It didn’t.
I was about to knock again when the pit erupted and widely sweeping arms wrapped around Goodfellow and me and dragged us under. So much for the neighborly visit. My last sight was Kalakos holding Niko back, yelling, “It’s too late! You can’t fight that! And there are others…”
I didn’t hear any more about the others as mud filled my ears, nose, but not my mouth. I kept that shut. It was true that enemies could be more useful than friends once in a while, but that didn’t mean you ever forgot what they were. You’d be tempted to…with every interaction you survived, but if you let yourself forget, you’d be delivered from that temptation in a less than biblical way. I’d always known that about Mama Boggle. The first time you dropped your guard, she’d take you down.
Which is why, when I’d knocked with one hand, I’d been aiming my Glock with the other dead center at the
