"Filthy and excited, and exactly how would this be different from your norm?" Promise asked with the perfect appearance of genuine interest.

"Well, color me annoyed as shit," I gritted before Goodfellow had a chance to fire a shot back. I twisted the crick out of my neck and started toward the hole.

Niko fisted a handful of my jacket, holding me back as he moved ahead. "My turn to go first," he said mildly.

He did it with more grace than I had. Soon we were all standing in a new tunnel. Nine by nine, it was carved out in the earth beneath the asylum tunnels. "Our little friends have been busy." Robin looked around, bent down to touch the dirt door, and came up with a finger wet with red mud.

"Very busy indeed," Promise added. "That is fresh. Tonight's kill."

"Good. That means we're close." Niko moved— fast, smooth, and still as coolly pissed as he'd been when he'd dropped down into the pit.

I hadn't thought of this whole mess from Nik's point of view. Sawney had defeated him easily at every turn, had killed allies he'd enlisted, had attacked his brother with impunity and actually consumed part of him. Niko was not happy—in no way, shape, or form—and was determined to make this encounter with Sawney our last. My brother—he'd never learned to spread the blame around. It was our failure, not his, but he wouldn't see it that way. Couldn't see it that way. He'd lived the majority of his life under the weight of sole responsibility. There was no changing that habit now.

One damn good brother, but as I'd thought many times before, too good for his own good.

As we moved, we found more signs of Sawney's victims. There was no more jewelry, but there were clothes. Ragged and dirty. Knit caps and ancient coats. Shoes with peeling soles. So many clothes was bound to equal a whole damn lot of victims—the homeless we'd known he was concentrating on now.

He'd figured out pretty quickly that these weren't the days when travelers disappeared and it was considered a hazard of the day. He knew people would look for him if he stuck to your average New Yorker

who had a job, wife, husband, children, parents…the ones that would be missed. But as we'd seen, the homeless were perfect and he wasn't the first monster to think so. They even traveled, pushing carts from here to there. I doubted that was a prerequisite for Sawney anymore, the traveling. When you lived in a city this big, you didn't need to wait for the wayward traveler moving across the countryside. And then there was his taste for the mentally ill, and that definitely tipped the scale. There was safe and there was madness-flavored fun … a win-win for our boy Sawney. We'd known that, but seeing it on such a large scale…

Jesus.

The clothes didn't litter the dirt floor. They were hung whimsically from the ceiling, like the gauzy curtains you'd see in a harem in an old movie. Some shirts were pinned to the walls with one arm pointing the way ahead and the other hanging limp. Shoes were lined up at the base of the wall to march in the same direction. When the shirts and shoes ran out, then came the hands and feet. The palms of the hands were punctured by nails pinning them to the packed dirt wall, and the index fingers pointed the way. In the same frozen march as the shoes were the feet with dirt plumping up between gray toes. I looked away. Even if I'd been completely human, I wasn't sure I could've stayed that way after what we'd seen in the past week.

This whole god-awful show made me wonder if he'd anticipated we'd come all along or if it was just more of his sick sense of humor played out for his own entertainment. Right before we killed him maybe I would ask him. At least the blood was less easy to see, soaked up by the earth beneath our feet. It was still there, though; the revenant proved that.

He was cut in half and left on the floor long past where the body parts finally ended. A chain was wrapped around him several times over and trailed off into the darkness. Sawney had taken away the bottom portion of the revenant with him and left a torso with a head, arms, and hands. The same hands that were feverishly shoving dirt into the gaping mouth. Red mud was oozing from the corners and I realized he was trying to suck the blood, nourishment, from the dirt. White eyes fixed on us hungrily and the hands sprang to a new task—dragging the revenant toward us with a greedy scrabbling of fingers. But the chain sprang taut and he moaned in despair.

"I believe we have another campus poacher," Niko said as he watched the form writhe. Like I'd thought earlier: Any good predator like Sawney knew you didn't kill in your own backyard. You didn't leave a neon-bright trail of bodies to your lair. Apparently the revenants just didn't grasp the concept.

"I guess Sawney did find out about their extracurricular activities." And from the looks of it, you didn't want to piss off Sawney because punishment was as inventive and harsh as what we'd done in the sewers. "Want me to …" I tapped the barrel of the gun against my leg. Put him out of his misery wasn't quite right. I didn't give a shit how miserable he was. He deserved to be. Put him out of my misery would be more accurate. This was every gory horror movie come to life and I could pretty much do without it.

"No need." Niko's sword swung and a head rolled. The teeth snapped and would for a while, but the light would fade from behind clouded-glass eyes and all would still. Eventually. If he'd been whole and fed, we could've questioned him. I doubted he would've talked, but we could've tried. But half of a starved revenant is in feed mode and nothing else. They need the nourishment to regrow the missing parts; thinking shuts down and instinct takes over. Unfortunately instinct didn't know that even a revenant couldn't regrow half of a body. He could've gone on existing that way for months and months, though, and I was sure Sawney would've given him every moment of that time to suffer.

"Not one wolf would come, eh? Hmm, I wonder why," Robin said, skirting the body and kicking the head out of the way while deftly avoiding the teeth. "The leg humpers have become more intelligent than I; if that's not a bad sign, I don't know what is."

"I'm beginning to wonder how even an army was able to take him." Promise had long put away her dagger and now had her own sword out. She tended to be fonder of crossbows, but this situation called for more sheer destructive power. Better to slash at a revenant than worry about aiming for an eye socket.

"Not a good thought." Valid, but not good. I stepped over the body and followed the chain into the blackness. Alice down the rabbit hole. She found madness; so did we. But we found the bodies first.

They hung from the ceiling, a forest of them. In reality, it wasn't more than twenty, but it seemed like a hundred when I caught the first glimpse of them. They hung from hooks fixed in wooden beams that must've supported the floor of the tunnels above us. Like the carcasses of cattle they hung. There was so much dried blood that the dirt floor had coagulated to a hard surface beneath my feet. The hall had ended in a cavern dug by revenant hands. It wasn't the same as a rock cave, but it was as close as you could get. Sawney had come home.

I looked up at all the naked limbs, slack faces, empty eyes and muttered, "Holy shit." Some were decomposing, some were stiff in rigor mortis, and some looked as if they'd been plucked off the street only hours ago. The smell of rot was so thick that it seemed you could've scooped a handful out of the air if you tried. I didn't put it to the test.

"Are you ready?"

I turned my head toward Nik and answered darkly, "More than."

"Be careful," he ordered in a barely audible voice—no giving Sawney any hints of what was going to happen. "Being a distraction doesn't mean being a dead one. Watch yourself. If he gets too close, move back and we'll try something else."