A thick-skinned hand dropped the gnawed dead rodent it was holding and took the bag from me. Within seconds, red sauce was dripping from wickedly large yellow incisors. A naked gray tail wrapped around his feet as he ate. After the first seven tacos, he slowed down and licked his hands clean. “So, so, valued customers, picture of part. Picture of car.” Mickey wasn’t a mechanic by any means, but with a picture he could track down what you wanted in a matter of thirty minutes. Sometimes less. In a yard this size, that was something.

“It’s not about a car part,” Niko said. “Not this time. It’s something a little more . . . interesting.”

“Interesting.” The round eyes took us in with sudden calculation. “That is new word from you, this interesting.”

“Yeah, interesting.” I leaned against the cold metal hood of a totaled car. “Because you know what, Mickey? You sound bored. You probably are bored.” I thought about adding that he could get a nice big wheel to run around in, but didn’t figure that would help our cause. Maturity; it was no damn fun. “We’re here to help you with that. Wouldn’t you like to get out? See some trees. Frolic in nature. Good times.”

“Frolic.” Another dead rat tumbled from above where Mickey had been perched. It was the size of a beagle, and it landed on my foot. Mickey clicked yellowed teeth in a rat smile. “But, as see, frolic fine here.”

I eased my foot from under the heavy weight. The fur was spiky and stiff with dried blood, the mouth frozen in its last snarl. There was one poor damn bastard that wasn’t going to be working at any theme park. “Yeah, I’ll bet you do.” I wondered what would happen if Mickey were to meet Robin’s new cat. You wanted interesting—that would be interesting.

Niko picked up the strand of persuasion since I didn’t seem to be accomplishing much. “This would be an entirely new endeavor for you. Spying versus procuring. It would pay well. Lunch every day for three months.” And while I had my suspicions that I’d be the one making that daily delivery, Niko went ahead and filled Mickey in on the details. Oshossi, the basics of what we wanted to know, the zoo . . . cadejos, ccoas, and who knew what else.

Mickey had finished the tacos and started on the burritos, as Niko finished. “South America?” Whiskers slick with either blood or hot sauce bristled dismissively. “Tourists.” With his accent, that wasn’t quite fair—I doubted he had his green card. But either way, he didn’t seem impressed. It was a good sign. If we could get Mickey on the inside for a day or two, long enough to find out where Oshossi was—Central Park with his animals or elsewhere—we’d be ahead of the game. For once.

Delilah had tried, but hadn’t been able to find Oshossi, and his creatures wouldn’t talk to her people—if they even could talk. Still, if Oshossi didn’t control it, he didn’t trust it, and his crew seemed to follow right along with that. And no wolf was going to bow his neck for a nonwolf. That put going undercover out for them. So what we needed was a spy, one who didn’t give a damn about pride and usually gave dollar for dollar value. You hired him; he’d come through. Mickey was as close as we had to that.

If we went into the trees of Central Park ourselves looking for Oshossi, chances were we’d never come back out. There could be a hundred ccoas in there, for all we knew. They knew we were standing with Cherish, lucky us, but Mickey would be a new element—a local yokel to clue them in on the city. He’d been here at least the two years we’d known him; that put him up on them. They should see him as an asset. He might be able to find Oshossi. At the very least, he could get a head count.

If they didn’t eat him first.

The thought had occurred to him too. “Three months. Your humor, such wit.” He gave a chittering wheeze that was what passed for a rat laugh. “A year. Two meals a day. Every day.”

And the negotiations began. It was too bad Goodfellow wasn’t here. The Rom lived to haggle, but somehow that gene had skipped us. Niko had cold silence and his sword. I had my temper and my fists. If those didn’t work, we were screwed. Wheedling and schmoozing didn’t come naturally to us.

But Nik did his best and we ended up with six months, two meals a day.

No way I was coming out here twice a day for half a year. Hell, there had to be delivery services that would do it. Leave the food at the gate. I didn’t know who ran the yard, but Mickey didn’t seem to worry that much about being spotted.

Speaking of spotting, I saw something worse than the dead rat as the two of them hammered out the deal. In one of the cars one stack over, a hand was hanging out of the window. The fingernails were dirty, the skin gray as only a corpse can be. Mickey didn’t kill people—that we knew of—but the occasional bum did die in the yard of natural causes. Exposure, heart attack—it didn’t matter. Mickey liked his takeout, but when it wasn’t available, he made do with what was. And that wasn’t always rats.

I turned away to ask, “You need a ride there? You gonna drive yourself? Or did you have a bad hair day when they took your driver’s license photo?” The bared teeth let me know Mickey’s lack of temper might not be all I thought it was.

He rode with us in the back of Niko’s car . . . after retrieving a jar full of darkly sloshing fluid. The black eyes reflected in the rearview mirror when he lifted his head for the occasional look around. When he did, I could feel hot breath against my neck. Not a good day for wearing my hair in a ponytail. I also smelled things on his breath—tacos, rat . . . human. Digested human flesh; it was a smell you couldn’t forget. If I didn’t smell it again for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t matter. It was something that was with me for good. It smelled like raw pork, but just different enough to make your flesh crawl. It said “You are meat.” Whatever you wanted to think in your happily ignorant world, it all came down to that: You are meat.

It was dark by the time we stopped by the park to let him off. He opened the jar and begin to rub the contents across his fur in sweeping strokes. “Is blood and oil,” he explained. “Smell scent of you on me.” He snapped his teeth together in demonstration. “Kill me, yes. In seconds. Meet here again. Two days.” Leaving the jar and large smears of the mixture on the vinyl seat, he slipped out the door and shadowed his way into the trees.

I looked in the backseat one more time after he was gone. “I am not cleaning that up. I’m not even helping you clean that up. That is nasty.”

“It wouldn’t matter if it were essence of pizza and hoagies. You’re a lazy son of a bitch and all the meditation in the world won’t change that,” Nik retorted.

“Now, would Buddha have said that?” I asked with mock disappointment. “I don’t think so.”

“Buddha never found your underwear in the kitchen sink.”

I had an answer to that ready and waiting as Niko started the car, but my cell phone rang—the cell phone that now was only for emergencies. Gate-creating emergencies. I flipped it open, saw Seamus’s number, grabbed Nik by the arm, and took us. I could build a gate and walk through it, but I could also build one around me if there was no room for the alternative. It was more difficult, but I could do it. That’s what I did in this case. Niko and I were outlined in gray light, and in a fraction of a second we were gone. Then we were at Seamus’s loft, right in the path of a charging ccoa.

It was so close I could smell its breath. It wasn’t as bad as Mickey’s, but it wasn’t exactly potpourri either. I could also see the dilated prey-seeking pupils and the piranha teeth. I could probably have seen its damn tonsils if I didn’t get my ass in gear and move. I dove one way while Nik went the other. In my quick drop and roll, I could see he was a muddy gray under his olive skin, but he wasn’t puking as Robin had when I’d once taken him through a gate, which was good. He also kept on his feet, which was even better. It looked like we needed all the help we could get.