I put my hand back on the brick, once more feeling the heat but no burn. “Interesting.”
Cowboy tucked his hands into his pockets. “Not really.”
I reached out and took his arm, pulling out the hand that had touched the brick building. Heat blisters filling with pus, and worse, spread across his fingertips even as I looked at them. “Shit. We need to get you something for this.”
I glanced at the building one last time as we left the alley and headed down the street. I took us to the closest subway entrance, paid our fares, and slid into the first train that would take us back to the Financial District.
Cowboy clutched his hand at the wrist. I looked again. The welts were spreading from his fingertips across his palm, creeping toward his wrist.
Ruby gave a soft whimper and bumped her head against his thigh. Sweat ran down his face as he stood leaning against one of the poles. “I’m not much help to you, am I?”
“No,” Dinah said and I shook my head.
“Not yet. But you don’t throw away a tool just because there’s not an immediate need for it. You wait until you can use it.” I slipped an arm around his and dragged him off at the next stop. Heat radiated off his body and I knew we needed to get some hacka paste—and fast. The thick red goo had serious magical properties and could draw poisons out of your system as well as heal wounds.
The trick would be to find someone who had any left. With the abnormals gone . . . well, there was one place that had sold all sorts of goodies. I just had to see if the proprietor was still around.
Up the stairs and out of the subway we went, me on one side of Cowboy and Ruby on the other keeping him somewhat pinned between us.
When he stumbled and went to his knees, I knew we weren’t going to be able to make it on foot. I hailed a cab.
“Why aren’t you yelling at me for fucking up?” Cowboy wheezed.
“I told you to touch it. I can hardly get mad at you for doing as you’re told,” I said as a cabbie screeched to the curb and I opened the door. I shoved Cowboy in, Ruby followed him, and I took the font seat.
“Corner of Third and Rochester,” I said. “Yesterday.”
The cabbie gave me a quick look, saw the butts of my guns and took off into the street, followed by a rather unharmonious blare of horns that was not unexpected.
“Your friend sick?” he asked, giving a quick look at the sweating, pale, pupil-dilated Cowboy in the backseat.
“Bit by something,” I said. “Something he’s allergic to.”
“I have an EpiPen,” the cabbie said.
I stopped him as he went for the dashboard. “Won’t work, we need to get to our stop.” I splayed out a few twenty-dollar bills from my small stash, three times the fare for the short distance.
The cabbie nodded. “You got it, darling.”
I didn’t correct him, though Dinah gave a snigger. I slapped my hand over her, then twisted around to look at Cowboy. “Hang on.”
His jaw was locked and his eyes stared into mine as if he were seeing through me. “Trying.”
Two minutes later, the cabbie pulled over. “Traffic is bad up ahead. It’ll be faster to walk from here.”
I didn’t argue with him. I could see the myriad of orange construction signs and cones up ahead. I moved out of the cab quickly, opened the back door and dragged Cowboy out. Ruby leapt onto the street ahead of us and people moved out of her way.
With Cowboy’s arm slung across my shoulders, I forced him into a stumbling, out-of-cadence jog. “We have to move.”
“Trying.” He bit the word out through clenched teeth.
We were a block away and I could see the old grocery store was no longer there. Someone else had taken over and created a souvenir shop. Fuck. Shit. Damn. I tightened my hold on him and kept on moving toward the space that had once been an entrance to a fixer-upper shop, if you will.
Our only hope for Cowboy was that there was still an underground below the new shop. We reached the big glass doors as a pair of oversized tourists in matching “I love NY” T-shirts tumbled out beside us. “Ruby, let’s go.” I nodded and she slipped through the open door without hesitation.
I was right behind her.
Humans scattered away from me and Cowboy as I shoved my way past the stuffed plushies, mugs, T-shirts—wait. I paused in front of a stand that held lighters and snagged one.
“Hey, you have to pay for that!” a scrawny clerk yelled.
“Ruby, say hello,” I said.
Ruby gave a snarling growl and stalked forward, her hackles rising and her chuffing woofs coming from deeper and deeper in her chest. If the people had scattered before, it was nothing to how fast they moved now. The shop emptied as people went streaming out behind us.
I all but carried Cowboy through to a small room at the rear of the store. I let him down as I went back to the door that we’d come through, shut it, and threw the lock. It would buy me some time to figure out what the fuck I was going to do.
No doubt the cops would be called. Cops who knew me if my shit luck was holding.
It couldn’t be helped, not if Cowboy was going to survive. I hurried back to him. He groaned, but I didn’t have time to comfort him. “Ruby, find . . .” I didn’t know how to tell her to look for an abnormal. My old dog, Abe, could have done it, but only if I’d given him something to smell.
We were in a storage room, and there was no trap door, no door that led out except to the back alley of the building. I put my hands to my head, wracking my
