Chapter 18

Ifound Bear in my dreams but didn't call him to me. He was sleeping too. Sleeping, which meant he was hours ahead of us, still somewhere in Europe. I bent and brushed a hand over his face, sweeping back his dark hair. He was going to break hearts one day with his striking features and fierce belief in doing the right thing.

"You'll be better than me," I whispered. "I'm going to shape this world so you can be better than me. So that you don't have to be the monster I am."

I stepped back from him and let myself just sleep. It seemed only minutes later that Cowboy was shaking me awake. "Three hours and five minutes," he said.

I sat up and brushed my hands through my hair. "Did you eat?"

"Yeah."

"Leave most of the stuff here. For now, it's home base." That being said, I had one other place we could go if we needed to. I wrote a note on a piece of paper and stuck it to the door.

"No cleaning?" Cowboy quirked an eyebrow up. "It could use a good cleaning."

"You want someone pointing out that there are bags full of weapons?"

When Ruby followed me out, I closed the door and started down the hall. I'd pulled a T-shirt on over the corset. Dinah rested in my shoulder holster along with a second gun. Diego was on my back, also under the very loose shirt. The T-shirt hid the guns and the tattoo on my back. The underbelly of New York knew me. I pulled an army green cap down on my now-dark head. Cowboy had on a pair of sunglasses and had changed out his boots for a pair of army hikers, and his flannel shirt for a white T-shirt.

He fit in better now. We both did.

I led the way out of the building, down to the street, and headed straight for the building across the way.

Cowboy grabbed at me. "What are you doing?"

I slid between traffic, Ruby next to me, flipped off a driver who honked at me, and was across the street in a matter of seconds. Cowboy worked hard to keep up, doing better than most trying to move through the traffic like a native New Yorker.

"I want to see if there's any residue of the spell." I worked my way around the building, careful not to touch the stone. Here and there, spots on the building continued to glitter from the spell that had rained down on the place.

I ran my fingers over the brick. Parts of it were warm, as if it had been in the sun, but this side of the building was in the shade. I looked up and down the alley, then stepped out. I snapped my fingers and Ruby came tight to my side.

"What do you think?" Cowboy asked.

"You touch it, see if it gives you anything." I pointed at the still-shimmering brick I'd put my fingers on.

He reached out and jerked back like he'd been bitten by a snake. "That fucking burns."

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 mind for how to find the hidden entrance.

"Fuck, I can't believe this." I dropped to the floor and took a deep breath, hoping . . . there! Just the faintest scent of abnormal. "Ruby, here." I pointed and she snuffled, and then she was off and following the scent to the back wall. I followed her, shoving boxes out of the way. There was no door. Her nose jammed against the connection between wall and floor.

I pulled a knife as Cowboy let out a low gurgle. "Fuck, hang on!"

I had to keep him alive.

He was too young to die like this.

I jammed my knife into the boards and pried until one board came loose. Underneath, there was a face peering back up at me. One I knew.

"Goddammit, don't be a cunt. I've got a dying man here!" I snapped.

"NIX?" The spluttering man spewed spit into my face. I stepped back as the floor beneath me dissolved and showed a set of steps. A tiny man wrapped in a long traditional Chinese kimono all but floated up the stairs and hovered over Cowboy, narrowing in on his hand. "Oh yes, very bad, very bad indeed. Let him die."

"No." I glared at him. "Fred, you help him!"

"He's part demon, let him die."

Sirens wailed, police sirens. I grabbed Cowboy and pulled him up and onto my shoulders in a deadlift that even impressed me.

"Still so strong," Fred said.

I was already moving, passing the strange little man on my way to the stairs. He wasn't Chinese any more than I was, but he liked the style of clothing.

Ruby followed me and then Fred followed behind her. He sealed up the entryway as feet pounded above us. We were safe.

For now.

I stood in the semi-darkness, waiting for Fred to turn on a light. When it came, it was in the form of a candle. Not the safest considering the building timbers were still the original wood beams.

"This way," Fred waved for me to follow and I did. The space around us was too narrow and made me think of a mine shaft. "Here, here." He stopped in front of a too-small door and I had to put Cowboy down in order to get us both through. On the other side was a far larger room with two beds and a wall full of medicinal ingredients.

I laid Cowboy down and Fred went to work on him, slathering his hand with a thick red paste and lighting it on fire. The sparkles in the paste shot into the air and then ghosted down onto Cowboy's face, sinking into his skin.

"He's close to death," Fred said. "I don't know if he'll pull through." He moved around Cowboy, touching various points on his body, shaking his head and clucking his tongue. His white hair was pulled back in a thin braid that ran all the way to the floor, and his almond-shaped eyes narrowed as he worked. Almond-shaped, but the deepest amber color I'd seen in a soul outside of the wolves in Montana.

"He'll either pull through by midnight or be dead. Nothing else I can do," Fred said.

I slumped and shook my head. "It was my fault."

"You make him a demon?"

I briefly told Fred about what we'd seen at the apartment building, how I'd touched the stones and asked him to do the same.

"You didn't know it would eat him from the inside out. Not many abnormals have true demon blood running through them, not even you, despite what you might think." Fred motioned for me to follow him, though that would imply we went to another room. No, he sat me down at a small table barely big enough for two and proceeded to make a pot of tea using a bare kettle and sprinkling some sweet-smelling herbs directly into the water. "How are you here? Last I heard, all the dangerous ones were taken."

I grimaced. "I could ask you how you were not taken."

"They don't look underground. Not yet. There are some still hiding deep in the subways, under buildings like me, and I have a few things up my sleeves yet." He sprinkled a few more packages into the teapot, then handed the empty papers to me to smell.

"I don't think you'd try to drug me," I said. "You liked Killian too much."

Fred smiled, but it was sad. "For a bad man, he was very good. Like you."

I shook my head. "I feel like I've woken up into a nightmare, Fred." I couldn't explain to him how good it felt to talk to someone who would understand. Cowboy was young; he hadn't seen enough of the world to realize how ugly it could be, and maybe now he never would.

"Yes, it is bad. But you are here now. Maybe there is hope." He poured me a cup of tea into a mug that read "I love NY." I couldn't help but notice how many of his mugs, tea towels, and general paraphernalia had that slogan emblazoned on them. I smiled as I took a sip. The warm tea was good, not overly sweet and just what I needed. No, I needed Fred and his amber eyes.

"Tell me what you know," I said.

"The purge"—he paused and took a sip before going on—"was just a cover. It wasn't even political, though it looked that way in the beginning. Most of the population didn't even care that we existed with them. They looked away, and we pretended we were human, and we paid our taxes and . . . that system worked."

I didn't nod, just watched him as he told his tale.

"There are multiple facilities, and some sort of abnormal seems to be running them. That is all I know, and even that is based on rumor and speculation as much as what I've seen with my own eyes. As soon as it got ugly, I burrowed in." He made a waving motion with one hand to encompass the space we were in.

"I think . . . it's a different kind of demon, a fallen angel on a crusade or some such shit, but I'm not sure yet." I took a sip of the tea, tasting cardamom and ginger, a hint of something else. Maybe pepper.

Fred's eyes widened, looking like glowing lanterns in the dim light. "Who would be fool enough to call a fallen angel to this side? To destroy us? Not a human!"

Part of his charm was his belief in the humans, as if they were innocent children and not capable of making the same mistakes as an abnormal.

"I don't think anyone called them out of the ether. I think they fell, Fred, they fell from grace." His jaw dropped and I gave a slow nod, then took another sip of my tea. "I have a tablet from the facility I was in. I need to crack it. Is Harden still around?"

Fred blew out a slow breath. "If he is, Rio would know."

How was I not surprised? I was being pushed toward Rio on all fronts, it seemed.

He looked down. "I tried to help at first, but it was chaos in the early months. So many of ours went missing and I didn't know . . . I just didn't know what to do."

I reached over and put a hand on his trembling fingers. "Fred, Killian told me once that he believes that people are put into play every second of the day. Even if we don't understand how the things we do will spool out or where the ripples will land. There's a pattern to it. Maybe you hid because I would need you now. Because I need Cowboy and you saved him. I don't know if Killian was right, but I also don't think he was wrong."

Fred gripped my fingers. "He chose well in you, Nix."

I smiled. "I miss him."

Those words fell from my lips, and then they trembled and I caught myself fighting tears. I did miss him. I missed him like I had cut off an arm and tossed it away. Only I hadn't been the one to toss it. Part of me knew he thought I was dead. He wouldn't have let them take me otherwise. The other part of me said to stop being stupid, that anyone was capable of breaking trust.

"Do you . . ." I had to stop and catch myself. Ruby laid her head on my lap and I dropped a hand to her, needing her comfort. "Do you know what happened? How was he taken?"

Fred blew out a breath. "We all thought you were dead, you understand? He said you died delivering your girl, and he was taking the children to Ireland—"

I put up a hand to stop him, staring at him as if I were not sure I wasn't dreaming. "What did you say?"

He blinked a couple times. "Ah, well, that you died delivering—"

"No. You said . . . children. Plural." I couldn't breathe while he reached for me and took my hands in his.

"Your daughter . . . she survived, Nix. Killian took her and Bear and ran for Europe as the purge hit."

Hot and cold, I couldn't understand how I could be both at the same time, but the two sensations roared through me, his words burning into my mind.

My daughter had survived.