Chapter Twenty-Two

In the six weeks sinceNyko had seen his little brother, Shon hadn't changed much. His mouth still shaped a permanent pout, his black hair stood up in spikes all over his head, and his black Om R?u eyes looked coated in a bright ceramic glaze. His body type was Nyko's exact opposite; where Nyko was all bulk and bulges, Shon was lean and mean. The youngest Brun was marked with the required teeth tattoos and, like Jacken and Nyko, wore them on his forearms. Unlike Jacken and Nyko, that was the only place Shon was marked.

Shon's upper lip tugged up, displaying one of his unnaturally long canines, as he continued to point his gun directly at Nyko…and didn't seem at all nervous about it.

Nyko let his own gun wilt down to his side.

A police siren skirled its high-pitched woo-woo into the night, the noise drawing steadily closer. And another.

The employee door above banged open. "Shon!" a man shouted. "Take care o' that cockhead, then leg it! It's the fuckin' bobbies!"

Shon's nostrils quivered as he inhaled and exhaled.

Down the stairs, Nyko heard Thomal groan and stir. "Shon." Nyko uttered his brother's name in a rush.

Shon pulled the trigger.

A bullet slammed into Nyko's right bicep, catching his muscle on fire. He bellowed in pain—bellowed in shock and anger. His fingers went lifeless, his gun clanking down the stairwell to join Thomal's headset in the abyss.

Shon turned around and darted up the stairs.

Teeth bared, Nyko exploded after his brother, then checked himself at the employee door, pausing to do a quick glance into the hallway. No one. Stupid fast idiots. Nyko stole down the hall. The door to apartment 6G was hanging woozily on one hinge, and he slowed his strides as he approached. Shon and his cohorts had to have gone in here. Nyko did another quick check. Clear. He entered and cautiously made his way across the living room, one hand gripped around the hilt of his sheathed blade. The blood from his bullet wound was seeping slowly down his arm, oozing past the ribbed cuff of his sleeve to trace his fingers then trail over his knife hilt.

He swept the room with his eyes. The apartment was spookily quiet. There was only the intermittent creak of the front door behind him as it twisted in a breeze brought in from the open terrace. The noise ran up his spine. He skirted the edge of a wide puddle of blood at the far side of the living room, his fangs pulsing. Whose blood? Dang it, where were Dev and Gábor?

He pushed the "speak" button on his headset. "This is Nyko," he said in an undertone. "I'm checking in. Where is every—?"

"Freeze!"

Nyko spun toward the open doorway, and his pulse leapt forward a beat.

A police officer was hunkered in the jamb, his black gun leveled at Nyko two-fisted, his legs braced wide. "Drop your weapon!"

Weapon? Oh, the knife. Nyko carefully peeled his bloody hand off the hilt of his blade.

"I said drop it!" the cop blared. "You're under arrest."

Nyko remained still and watched the cop. Jail was a no way, José option for their sun-allergic breed. Where to escape to…? His mind raced in rhythm with his heartbeat. He heard more people clomping down the hallway. Soon he'd be outnumbered. Now or never. He turned and leapt through the open sliding glass door of the terrace, catapulting himself into a handstand on the guard railing, then back-flipping over the other side into open air: a full rainbow arc, a perfect ten from the judges for the harrowing gymnastic maneuver. Now the question was: would he stick the landing?

The Park Place building whooshed by him as he fell through the night, down and down, lights and colors a messy whirl. His hair whipped into his eyes. He circled his arms and cycled his feet, all the while drawing in great lungfuls of air to harness the power of the moon. He hadn't been topside in so long… A bolt of panic shot through him as the pavement rushed up fast to meet him. Come on… He blanked his mind, going into a near trance as he reached deep inside himself. His body thrummed. A bubble formed around him, providing buoyancy just as his feet hit the asphalt—hard. His ankles compressed painfully, but…he wasn't dead. He stumbled forward a few steps, caught his footing, then shot a glance over his shoulder and up.

The cop was gaping down on him from the sixth floor balcony, his handgun hiked back next to his ear, his entire face sagging as if pulled there by four G-forces of shock.

Oopsy-daisy. Here's hoping the guy is a heavy drinker.

Headlights swiped across Nyko.

He leapt out of the way, but the driver chased after him. Nyko ran, but his sore ankles bobbled sideways, and the car was able to catch up and ram him. He caught air, flew several feet, hit, and rolled across the street for several more feet, tearing the elbows out of his turtleneck. He sprawled to a stop onto his back, dizzied.

Car doors slammed.

A man's face loomed into Nyko's vision. His mind registered: bad guy. But in the next breath, he knew he'd be okay. The man's scent spelled R-E-G-U-L-A-R, and there wasn't a human alive who could take him out.

Nyko moved to rise, but the man pushed him back down, the hand on his chest very strong. What's this? Nyko back-stepped his senses and caught it then; the man's scent was sort of off. Who the heck is—? A fist rocketed toward his face and his lights blinked out.

Nyko popped his eyes open.Tied to a chair. Pain in right arm. Om R?u male nearby.

He tabulated sights, smells, and sensations in 3.5 seconds.

"Welcome back to the livin', half-R?u."

The Om R?u male Nyko had scented was standing directly in front of him, making it impossible to ignore the sheer size of him. Shirtless, dressed only in combat boots and tight black leather pants, the man was a towering fortress of muscle with the body of a heavyweight boxer, shoulders, arms, and chest bulging with thick, hard slabs, his abdomen striated. Black flame tribal tattoos whipped up the entire front of his torso, erasing all doubt that this was a Topside Om R?u. A lip scar tugged the man's mouth into a sneer, adding more menace where none was needed. Lip scar…

So Nyko was finally meeting Videon.

Three other men were in the room, smelling like regulars, but kind of not, too, like the guy who'd punched Nyko.

Their odd group appeared to be gathered in the living room of a condemned building. The windows were closed off with crisscrossed boards, drywall had crumbled away in sections, exposing the bowed and splintered wood frame beneath, and there was a fire-charred hole in the middle of the floor, revealing part of an empty apartment one floor below. No electricity equaled lanterns set up around the room. Wisps of black smoke curled up from their glass chimneys, adding a distinctive kerosene stink to the stench of Videon's caustic acid blood.

Nyko concentrated for a second on the sort-of-regulars. To a man, they were big, their bodies covered with a staggering variety of tats, and their eyes were narrow and mean. Probably ex-cons, the kind of men who asked questions, maybe, after all the killing had already been done. They didn't seem like the type to wear jewelry, but necklaces glinted at each man's throat. Nyko squinted. Not necklaces, amulets. He nearly shivered from a feeling of evil enchantment.

"Ye havin' a brown-trouser moment, fella?" Videon asked, then smiled cruelly. "If not, ye should be."

Probably so. The advantage-disadvantage ratio was fairly obvious. Nyko was currently chained from ankles to collarbone to a chair that felt bolted to the floor, and even though he was bigger than Videon—because Nyko was bigger than every man—in this case, it wasn't by much. "What do you—" want? The last word dropped off the end of Nyko's sentence as Shon sauntered into the room.

His little brother crossed to a rusted-out radiator and sprawled against it, crossing his arms, his eyes cold, black ice. Just watching.

Videon indicated Shon with a nod of his head. "Yer brother here says he don't know where the entrances to yer lair are. Says he gets transported in and out in a vehicle with blacked-out windows."

Nyko glanced at Shon again. That was true. The community doled out information about their secret entrances on a need-to-know basis only. The Travelers knew, of course, since they brought supplies into the community, and the Special Ops Topside Team, as they did their own driving on missions. The Dragon women had found out, too, because once they'd engineered an escape from ??ran?. But no, Shon didn't know.

"Says ye know, though. So ye'll be tellin' me." Videon grabbed a gym bag and dropped it at Nyko's feet. "I couldn't break that fuckin' mare o' yers tryin' to get the information out o' her. What was her name?"

"Candace," Shon supplied.

Bile brewed in Nyko's throat. Candace was the Traveler Videon had tortured to death, which had led to Marissa getting captured, which had led to Pandra letting Marissa go—a whole chain of events had been set in motion by Videon's brutality.

Videon rolled his neck, cracking vertebrae. "Goin' to get it out o' ye, though."

"No," Nyko said. No, you won't break me and also, No, I won't let you hurt me. Covered all over with marks that had come from torture, he was done with that. Plain and simple. There wasn't a man on this earth, regular, demon, large, or larger, who could make him endure it anymore. Death would come first.

Videon's laugh was coarse and grating. "I was hopin' ye'd be full o' piss about it. Funner that way."

Nyko shifted against his restraints. They were tightly secured. "Why do you even care about our entrances?" he asked. "You're not after Toni."

"But Raymond is," Videon answered. "And since I'm gettin' myself into a bit o' a war with that scunt, I'm acquirin' what he wants."

Another ex-con entered the room. It was the guy who'd punched Nyko. He was also wearing an amulet. "Preston's ready," he told Videon.

So these jerks had succeeded in capturing Dr. Preston. An ache speared through Nyko's throat. It was his fault the team had failed to save the plastic surgeon. If Nyko wasn't such a freak of nature, then he and Thomal would've made it up to the sixth floor in time to help Dev and Gábor fight the bad guys, and the outcome would've been different.

"I'll be there in a tick, Kevin," Videon answered, an ugly grin still aimed at Nyko. "I ain't finished with this tonk, yet."

"I don't think Preston has much life left," Kevin said. "He's bleeding out fast."

Videon growled. "All right. Is Jerry ready for the ritual, too?"

"'Course."

"Let's crack on, then." Videon waved his men toward the door. "Shon, ye guard this bloke."

Kevin frowned. "They know each other, Videon."

"Aye, they do. So it'll be another test o' his commitment to us." Videon shot Shon a heavy-lidded glance. "He'll pass." Videon left with his men, the gym bag swung over his shoulder.