I ripped the blade free and slashed it across its throat. But its throat wasn’t there. I was quick.

Auphe was quicker.

I felt the claws ripping across my chest and I dove for the floor. Ignoring the puddle of Auphe blood pooled on the wood, I swung both blades outward in an open scissors motion and caught its legs. Barely. Trailing more blood, it leapt on top of the table and then back onto me, taking me down. For all the damage I’d done, to an Auphe it was superficial. It could live with it. I didn’t plan on letting it. This time my blade punctured its chest, but not its heart. They didn’t carry their hearts in the same place as humans, and suicide run or not, this Auphe had no plans on going anywhere without me.

The Auphe laughed from above, tasting its own blood as if it were wine. “A worthy piece of prey. Struggle all you wish. We shall take you, we shall take them all, and only then shall we take him.” This time teeth found my throat just as my other blade, strapped to my thigh, found its heart between its ribs from behind. I felt a jolt of satisfaction as strong as the pain that flared under my jaw. Getting a knee between us, I heaved it off.

With my blood flowing down my neck, I was halfway up when it came back with my knife embedded in its heart. Still fighting. Essentially dead, but still fighting. I pulled my blade out of it and sliced it across its abdomen, spilling its guts to the floor. It kept coming, taking one step, another, until it fell. Finally, it fell. It was the first time I’d ever seen shock in the eyes of an Auphe. A human had killed it, a sheep with mere blades.

Then came the second one.

There was silencer gunfire. . . . Cal . . . But the Auphe was as quick as the first. It came across the hall—touched with some blood, but not much, and moving so fast that I only managed to get the knife in my hand up bare inches before it was on me.

But Cal was on me first.

He wasn’t as quick as the Auphe, but he knew where this one was going. Cal had a head start and he made use of it. He hit me hard, his back slamming against my chest, and almost simultaneously the Auphe hit him. We impacted the dining room wall and hung there, pinned. Cal gave a guttural, “No. Me first. You take me first.” A human shield between the Auphe and me, protecting me where his gun had failed to. I tried to push him off, but in this he was as strong as I was, if not stronger. Cal would die for me. I knew it, but I didn’t have to accept it. I shoved again. Neither he nor the Auphe moved.

Despite the strained bulge of Cal’s bicep, one brutal clawed hand held Cal’s wrist down and the gun along with it. The other hand closed around Cal’s neck. That narrow jaw dropped to reveal its ripping capability in all its savage efficiency. Cal faced it head-on. “Me first,” he snarled again. “Take me, you bitch. Go on. Do it.”

There was a hesitation, then the jaws closed and it laughed. “You do not know. Cousin. Brother. Auphe.” It laughed again, and this time when it spoke I thought my eardrums would bleed. The Auphe language was as sharp as my blades, as brutal as a bullet-shattering glass. With every unnatural sound Cal tensed against me tighter and tighter. Then the gate appeared behind it and it sprang backward, disappearing just as Robin’s sword blow from the right and Promise’s from the left would’ve taken its head. Instead the gray light took half their blades before the gate vanished.

Cal fell off me. He tried to push away, but couldn’t coordinate the movement. He did manage to hit the wall solidly enough to lean against it beside me. His eyes were infinitely aged beyond that long-ago three-year-old boy, but the dread was the same. “You’re bleeding,” he said, the words syrup slow, before sliding down the wall and sheathing fingers in his still shower dripping hair as he drew up his knees. “I can’t do this.” He looked up at me with more desperation than he’d ever given an Auphe the satisfaction of. “You have to let me go, Nik. You have to.”

And selfish son of a bitch that I was, I kneeled down beside him and gave him my answer.

“No.”

Blind. I was so damn blind. I didn’t see what he was asking for. Not until his eyes fixed distantly on the gun that had dropped from his hand to skitter across the floor when the Auphe had disappeared. Cal wasn’t talking about running this time.

Auphe were quick, Cal was quick, but I’d never been so quick in my life. I grabbed his shoulders and held him firmly against the wall. “You promised me a long time ago. You promised you wouldn’t do that to me. You may as well pull the trigger on me first,” I said quietly, “do you understand?”

He swallowed thickly and bent his head to butt it against my chest like he hadn’t since he was five or six years old. “What did it say?” I asked, moving one hand to cup the back of his head. He’d understood it, one of the flashes that came from those missing two years, picking up the Auphe language. I wished he hadn’t, because I’d known without asking what it had said—I didn’t need to speak Auphe to understand what I’d wanted so badly to be wrong about.

The Auphe Cal had killed last year in Florida had been male. The last male we’d seen. Turn it around and you could say Cal had killed the last male Auphe.

When Cal had said all the Auphe in the park were females, I’d been uneasy. And when he’d confirmed the last Auphe before them, the dead one, had been male, I’d gone from uneasy to a balance of sharp worry and denial. Then I saw the shock in the eyes of the Auphe I’d just killed. It hadn’t expected to die. This hadn’t been a suicide run. They thought the four of us couldn’t take the two of them. They’d wanted to kill me in front of Cal and to make sure he knew, truly understood their new plan for him. No death. No escape. Nothing half so easy.

“They said . . .” He failed and tried again, but choked on the words.

“Never mind. It won’t happen. We won’t let it,” I denied, shaking my head. “You don’t have to say it.”

He did anyway. “The last male Auphe.” He shuddered with every word, but it didn’t stop him from repeating it in dull horror.

“I’m the last male Auphe.”

7

Guts stink.

Human, monster . . . it didn’t matter. They were rank, nasty, and had long ago lost the ability to bother me. They say nurses can wipe a patient’s ass with one hand and eat a sandwich with the other. It’s all in what you get used to, right? I lived a life where I was used to guts on the floor. Lucky me. Yeah, lucky, lucky me.

A pair of rubber gloves, a garbage bag, and I was good to go. I wasn’t wasting a Samuel favor on a mess this small, and as I was the only one not wounded, it fell to me. I doubted Promise’s cleaning service would’ve really understood. We don’t do windows and we don’t do body parts. Sorry.

“She’ll have to move. Between the cadejos and this, the stench will never come out.” Robin sat carefully at one of the dining room chairs. The flesh over his ribs was clawed and clawed deep, but other than that he and Promise had held off the second Auphe long enough that it hadn’t had time to turn its attention to Niko until the first one fell. Promise was worse off than Goodfellow, bitten on her shoulder and hip, and clawed from the nape of her neck to the small of her back, but she would heal a whole lot faster than he would, and feel it less.

Nik had a good swipe across his chest and a shallow bite on his neck. As it was right over his jugular, it would have to be shallow, wouldn’t it? A little deeper and he would’ve bled out before we could’ve done a damn thing to stop it. He would’ve died on the floor next to the Auphe and that . . .

Hell, that would’ve been that.

There’s another fact besides the guts-stink one. Sometimes you get pushed so far. . . . So much shit happens that you end up with three choices: You can eat your gun, you go catatonic and wear a diaper the rest of your life, or you can suck it up and go on.