Madhouse (13 page)

"It's worth the trouble," Nik corrected with patience, but as his patience tended to be of the ironclad variety, it didn't do me much good.

I tightened my lips. The boggle had nothing to do with the revenants. We could hire double the wolves, hsigos, or whoever else we came across. No, this was about me. I was getting over Darkling and it was time to do the same with boggles. "Jesus, fine," I surrendered with ill temper. "I'll deliver the invitation. Happy?"

"Actually smug would be more precise. Now"— he tossed me a shirt from my bureau—"there is a pool of puck vomit on the living room floor. Enjoy."

I did not.

I neither enjoyed it nor cleaned it up. I slapped a scrub brush in the slack hand of a bleary-eyed, swearing, and painfully sober Goodfellow before showering, and taking off into the late-morning sun. It was an unusually warm day for November and I would've been able to get by with only a T-shirt as long as I didn't mind my holster showing. I minded, and I thought New York's finest probably would as well. I ended up wearing the lightweight weathered denim jacket that I wore in the summer for the same purpose. As for Niko, as accessories went, I wasn't sure if he counted as summer or fall. I wasn't the type of guy into lugging around extra crap unless it was a weapon, although Nik definitely did fall into that category. "I'm trying to think of you as a backpack or a little dog in a ninja outfit," I said finally, "but it's not working. I thought I was supposed to do this myself. Tough love and all that shit."

"Cal," he responded with vast tolerance for my idiocy, "it is a boggle."

"Je-
sus
," I growled. Threading through the crowded sidewalk, I planted a rib-cracking elbow into the ribs of a well-dressed pale man with a satchel, a Rolex, and hungrily twitching fingers who was following with voracious intent an oblivious thirteen-year-old girl. He stumbled, snarled, and faded back. He could've been human; he could've been something else. Sometimes you can't tell the monsters from the maniacs, and sometimes there's no difference at all.

Boggles came down on the monster side. They weren't smart, but they weren't stupid. They were driven by logical needs: greed and hunger. You could reason with a boggle … as long as you were on equal footing. We'd laid that groundwork with our boggle, although in the end it hadn't worked out too well for either party, but this other boggle—he was new territory. Friend, foe, or food, we'd have to prove it all over again.

We took the 6 train uptown from Astor Place, got off near the park, and walked east, enjoying the sun. In the park, free of the city's crush of humanity during the week, I'd be able to smell the boggle out. It might take a while and more exercise than I cared to invest, but I could do it. That was the easy part. After that, it was hard to say what would happen. An invitation to party with revenants in a subway tunnel, that wasn't necessarily a universal passion, whether you got paid for it or not. Boggles were homebodies as well. But if baubles were what got you through the day, Promise could offer far more variety than the boggle was likely to get from random victims.

I could see it going either way—if, and this was a big if—he wasn't pissed about what had happened to his fellow mud-dweller. It's one thing to be territorial; it's another for the only other member of your species in three hundred square miles to end up dead. Very thoroughly dead. If I were a boggle, I knew I'd be wondering how long it would be until whoever had done that came after me. He was about to get his answer, just not in the way he probably would've guessed.

"You think boggles have names?" I stepped off the path into a wide grassy area and shaded my eyes from the sun. We'd called ours Boggle and he'd never offered up anything else. It wasn't surprising. Snitches don't love their cops, and Bog had certainly never loved us. We hadn't exactly loved him either, but I'd … hell, gotten used to him, I guess.

"I imagine they do. I doubt they call themselves Boggle One and Boggle Two as in the highest level of literature you care to pick up." Niko still hung back in the trees, his black on gray blending in with the shadows.

"You were the one who homeschooled me, Cyrano. If I'm afraid of big words, you have no one to blame but yourself." I inhaled deeply and after an hour of roaming the park I finally caught a whiff. Mud and boggle. "Got him."

I'd long passed Charm's particular meadow. It was impossible to distinguish her scent from that of yellowing grass and the dried remnants of clover warming under the sun, and I hadn't seen or heard her as we'd gone by. I took it as a sign. As with Ishiah's opinion of the pucks, it was neither good nor bad. It was what it was. The bittersweet regret had nothing to do with her; that all belonged to me. I knew I had fucked up, but I'd meant to. Aimed to. Amazing how for the best reason, you do the worst thing. And George was my reason, in more ways than one.

"Which direction?"

I pulled the sunglasses out of my pocket and slipped them on. "Past the far end." There were more trees there. Through those would be a small area, about twenty-five by twenty-five. Big enough for a wallow, but hidden by the trees—that's how boggles liked it. "Maybe Ham would help us out with Sawney. I don't know if he's a fighter, but we could ask. If you trust him around Promise," I added with a grin.

"You know I trust Promise." I did trust her too, at least when it came to Niko. She'd do anything for him, and I meant it. Anything, and God help you if you got in her way. "There's not much she wouldn't do to save your neck. But she doesn't seem too fond of Ham." I grinned wider.

"That would be Promise's business, and, as we've seen, she is very good at business. If Ham ignored her threat …" A millimeter slice of white teeth flashed, then disappeared. "I only hope I'm there to see the end result."

"Yeah. I'd buy that ticket." But his feeling for the homeless or not, I doubted Ham would go down in the tunnels with us. He'd met us once. No way was he that invested in our problem.

Just as we went beyond the next line of trees, we came across a whole mess of them. Or it might've been more accurate to say a litter of them—boglets…seven of them, sunning themselves around the edge of the muddy water. They were mud-encrusted creatures the size of a full-grown bull alligator, minus the tail. With lazy yellow eyes, flickering tongues, and claws stained with old blood—they were predatory toddlers in a wide-open playpen. "Great," I muttered as over a half dozen sharklike heads turned toward us with a curiosity that was becoming more and more avid by the second. "Where's she going to get a babysitter?"

The more important question—the truly pertinent one—would be whether the boggle we'd killed had been their father. I couldn't recall any information on boggle mating habits off the top of my head. Did they have two sexes? One? Seven? I didn't know. If they went with the usual two, I already knew this female didn't have much of a dating pool to choose from. As odds went for our boggle being her boggle…shit.

"About boggle birds and bees…," I said, moving a casual hand toward my holster. "Care to do a little informing?"

"Boggles mate for life."

It didn't get more informative than that.

As avid curiosity began to change to avid hunger, the boggle offspring began to shift. The slit pupils of their eyes dilated as they rose to muscular crouches. And as they moved, so did the muck on the edges of the water. The surface quivered, then abruptly exploded upward.

She was big. Easily the nine-foot standard, the same flat head and backward curving rows of teeth that I remembered from Boggle. If there was a difference in superficial appearance between the male and female, I couldn't see it. Classic brown dappled scales glinted here and there through the coating mire, and the claws were identical as well. Over a foot long and the black of volcanic glass, they could cut a tree in half with one swipe, and if they could do that to solid wood, it didn't take much imagination to picture what they could do to less sturdy flesh.

When the Great White mouth opened, liquid mud streamed from between the teeth and became a brown mist in the air as she roared. The smaller ones immediately echoed the roar, over and over again, until the air was full of the reek of the half-digested flesh of their last meal.

"Guess what, Nik," I muttered, squeezing the grip of my gun with whitened knuckles, "I'm now even less over boggles than I was before."

It was like before too, only this time the boggle wasn't fighting simply for the sake of the adrenaline-pumping violence; this one was fighting for her children. Eyes as big as human fists focused on us, and a clawed foot came out of the mud and water to slam onto solid earth. The ground shook under my feet, and I brought my gun up. We had options, sure. We could run. But mama boggle could run too, and as quickly.

We could stay and fight. Niko and Robin had been able to take one boggle. Niko and I could do the same. But there wasn't just one—there were eight. Seven were only half the size of what had spawned them, but that didn't change the fact that they were killers, or that from their stealthy sideways slither, they were already practiced ones.

Run or fight.

Live or die.

Or we could just give them a present.

I had to admit, I hadn't thought of that. As choices went, it had sailed cleanly under my radar. The result was that I was almost as mesmerized as the boggles by the dripping cascade of diamonds and rubies that hung from Niko's hand. The jewels blazed in the sun like rain-drenched poppies. My sunglasses dimmed the colors and sizzling glory by barely a fraction.

"Pretty." "Pretty." "Shiny." The boglets had stopped moving and were staring at the necklace with rounded eyes and unconsciously grasping claws. Mom wasn't as easily impressed. Her other foot hit the ground and she thrust her head closer with brutal force. The gems were reflected in the cold sheen of her eyes and she gnashed her teeth repetitively. Finally, the lethal weapon that was her hand was held out.

"Tiffany's?" The question oozed out with splintered shards of bone and more remnants of mud.

Niko stepped forward and deposited the necklace across her scaly palm. "Of course. We would not insult you with anything less."

She brought it closer to study it. Held it near to her eyes, up to the sun, let it dangle in the air, and then finally…she purred. Or maybe it was only the grinding of more bones caught in her throat. As sounds went, they were remarkably similar. "You have more?"

"Many more. Anything you can imagine." Nik looked up at her and added without hesitation, "You should be aware, however, that we did kill the other boggle here in the park."

There was no softening of the blow, no attempted explanation … no "He tried to kill us first. It was self-defense. Sorry for your loss and I'm positive he's in a better place." He simply gave her the information and waited to see what she would do with it. I think for every lie our mother had told in her fairly short life, Niko had racked up an equal number of truths…often in situations where deception would've been the easier and far safer choice. Considering how many years we'd spent on the run and literally living a lie, it was a peculiar dichotomy. Nik had done a lot of things to keep me alive that cut across the natural grain of who he was. He'd told the truth when he could. When he absolutely couldn't, he'd used lessons Sophia had unwittingly taught us to keep me from the hands of the Auphe, and he'd not once hinted he'd regretted what he'd done for me.

I did. I regretted the hell out of it, but right now? Wearing a fine spray of boggle mud on my jacket, smelling old blood and decomposing flesh, I honestly wished he'd picked this moment to lie like a fucking dog.

"You." Transparent lids blinked over her eyes as the head began to weave slowly. "You killed him. You." Not a question, but a tasting of the words and the reality behind them. "My mate. Their sire."

I still had the .50 up and the trigger halfway home when she clacked her teeth again and said abruptly, "Opals. Black opals. Do you have black opals?"

And that was that. Boggles might mate for life, but apparently they didn't mourn for it.

Although I'd been dispatched to extend the invitation, Nik did most of the talking. I'd say he'd planned for that the entire time. I had certain talents and skills, but negotiation of the nonviolent kind wasn't one of them. So while the discussion of price went on, I played with the kiddies—which meant I hid in the trees while they tried to eat me. Fifteen minutes later, I was soaked with sweat, hanging in the lower limbs of an oak, and pistol-whipping two boglets who were about to take chunks out of my legs.

"Cal, playtime is over. Let's go."

The juvenile killers, who'd been shaking off what they considered love taps, moaned in disappointment and loped back toward the muck at their mother's beckoning snarl. I dropped to the ground and did some snarling of my own as I holstered the gun. "You know, Cyrano, as a therapist, you suck out the ass."

"It's a hit-or-miss process," he responded solemnly as we wove through the trees. "Constantly changing and developing. Jung once wrote…"

What I had to say about Jung wasn't hit or miss at all. It was very precise, graphic, and involved Niko's intestinal tract.

"You didn't enjoy yourself? Why not? Children are always enamored of you."

Yeah, kids loved me. Loved to eat me. Werecubs, boglets, I was walking milk and cookies for them all, but I wasn't thinking about that, and I wasn't concentrating on Niko's dry teasing either. Seeing boggles again had brought up some buried emotions all right, but not the one my brother had planned on. No, that wasn't true. It was the emotion…guilt…that he'd hoped to resolve, but this time the guilt was focused elsewhere. Niko and Robin hadn't ended up the casualties as intended a year ago, but someone else had.

"I miss Boggle," I said quietly. And I did in a way. Not for who he'd been, but for
what
he'd been. He'd been our informant and like Robin's tended to be, he was homicidal as hell, but he'd been a piece of our lives. When you lived life on the run you didn't have many constants. Boggle had been one for two years and I'd gotten him killed. He'd deserved it, no doubt, but I didn't have to like the fact it had been because of me.