“You ever think of just hauling Cherish’s ass off to Central Park and dumping her there?” he asked, gray eyes calm and, yes, ruthless. “Let God, Zeus, and Allah sort it out?”
“No.” She was Promise’s daughter, and although a careless thief, she wasn’t entirely without merit. Although even if she had been, I would do what I could for her for Promise’s sake. And she did seem to be changing for the better . . . or at least trying to. Putting people if not before her, then at least equal to her. It counted for something, especially in one that young. And she did care for Promise now, and that counted for much more than just something. “Do you?”
He didn’t answer, rubbing his knuckles thoughtfully along his jaw. “I think I’ll plead the Fifth on that one.” Getting out, he slammed the door shut. “Not too fair to Promise to make her think my shit smells like roses if I’m actually thinking something . . .”
“Survival oriented?” I offered.
“That sounds better than ‘homicidal.’ Yeah, thinking something survival oriented about her daughter. Let’s go with that.” He started to grin, but it twisted to a frown as his eyes slid from one side of the street to another.
“Cal?” I looked as well, but saw nothing. That didn’t mean there was nothing to see.
He looked back at me. “Eh, it’s nothing. Just feeling paranoid. What with the Auphe in heat and a South American ass-kicker after us. Go figure.”
We walked the two blocks as the snow began to fall. It wasn’t the puffy flakes of Christmas cards and winter wonderlands. It was small pellets of hard white ice that bit at your face and collected under the collar of your coat. Breath billowing in the air, Cal pulled at the handle of the bar’s front door. It didn’t budge. “Huh. It’s past noon. It should be open.” He dug in his pocket for the keys, turned one in the lock, and opened the door. He didn’t go in; he didn’t take even a step. I saw him inhale sharply. His grip on the door handle tightened.
The lights were out, the windows covered, but I could see Ishiah in the interior gloom of the empty bar. He sat at a table alone with a bottle of whiskey and a glass. “Go away.” His voice was one of the perfectly sober. I thought he wished he weren’t.
“Who?” Cal asked, his own hoarse.
“Cambriel.” He lifted the full glass and drained it. “Go away.”
Cal closed the door with a jerky motion and rested his forehead against it. He had smelled them as soon as he had opened the door. I hadn’t needed to. Seeing Ishiah was enough to know what had happened. Cambriel was a bartender I’d seen before. Cal had talked about him a few times. Had said he didn’t quite have the peri temper that Ishiah had, but damn close. When push came to shove and the bar erupted, he could fight like a winged lion. Hold his own against the wolves, the vampires, the revenants.
But not against the Auphe.
Cal had worked at the bar for a while now. Months. Day after day. It was an association the Auphe couldn’t have missed, and one we hadn’t even considered. “It’s just a job, Nik,” he said, closing his eyes. “Just a stupid goddamn job. I didn’t know Cam. I mean, he poured a mean shot and never turned me in if I took a long lunch, but I didn’t know him. Him or Ishiah. They’re just guys I work with.”
If that were true, and I wasn’t sure that it was, for the Auphe it seemed to be enough. “Call Delilah and let her know.” He didn’t move. I took a handful of his jacket and shook him lightly. “Cal, call. Now.”
“Okay.” He straightened and stepped away from the door as if it were red-hot. “Call Delilah. All right. I got it.”
Keeping my eyes on him, I stepped far enough away that he couldn’t hear my conversation with Georgina. She answered on the first ring. “Niko. Hello.”
“Will you be there?” I asked.
“I already am.” There was the usual gentle impish-ness in the words.
Georgina had held court at a tiny ice cream shop since she was eight. People came, they bought ice cream, and they asked what they needed to ask. She alone had kept the shop and its Methuselah-aged owner up and running. She didn’t take money for what she did. Georgina was like that.
I called Robin next. Friend, enemy, wary ally, whatever Ishiah was to him, he should know what had happened. I caught him in the middle of what I fully expected to and managed to end both his good mood and aerodynamic lift instantly. I disconnected in the middle of his cursing. What he did with the information was his decision, but I had a feeling letting Ishiah drink alone in an empty bar that had been a former Auphe Ground Zero wasn’t going to be the one he made.
“Cal.”
His eyes, fixed and bleak, were back on the bar door. At my call, he looked away and shoved his cell phone in his jacket pocket. “Delilah’s okay. Hasn’t seen anything.”
“Good. Let’s go.” I put my own phone away and felt the brush of steel in my pocket. One of the smaller throwing knives I carried—barely five inches long. I had ten on me now, along with my katana, wakizashi, and tanto blades. It was adequate for an average day. It didn’t feel adequate today.
“Go where?”
“Do your meditation,” I advised, turning and heading toward the nearest subway entrance. We had the car, but seeing Georgina meant a very roundabout approach. I didn’t see any Auphe on the rooftops, and Cal obviously didn’t smell any now or sense a gate. They probably weren’t here anymore, but probably wasn’t good enough. We absolutely could not be followed. That meant several evasion tactics, train switches, and fall backs.
“Why would I need medi . . . shit, we are not going to see George. We can’t risk that.” He came after me, hand on my shoulder stopping me as he moved in front of me. “Nik, no. Okay? Just no.”
“It’s all we have,” I explained. “We’ll take care. We won’t be followed.”
“Can you guarantee that?” he demanded.
I gave him patient silence as the snow beat harder.
“Yeah, yeah. You can.” His hand fell away. “I still don’t want to take the chance, and I don’t want to go. She won’t tell us anything anyway. And I really don’t want to see her.”
Understandable. Hurt; no one wants to embrace that. Cal had done all he could to be rid of Georgina, to save her from precisely the sort of thing that was happening now. The right thing and the easy thing; they could never be one and the same. “She may not, but I want to ask. I have to explore all our avenues, no matter how dim the chance. And you can wait outside.” Because separating was not an option.
“Shit,” he said again. “Ten blocks down. That’s the best I can give you, Cyrano. I’m not taking any chances on them remembering her. You’re the best, but I just can’t.”
I didn’t want to take chances with Georgina either, but I was more concerned with his being that far away. But he was stubborn, and if I pushed it, he might take it up to fifteen blocks.
It took us well over an hour to get to the ice cream shop, but the time was well spent. I knew we hadn’t been followed and I canvassed a four-block radius around the building. I’d left Cal those ten blocks away, huddled in a corner where a liquor store butted up against the larger building next door. “Hurry up,” he said, pulling up the collar on his jacket and sticking his bare hands in his armpits. “My balls are finally getting me some action. Turning them into ice cubes isn’t much of a thanks.”
“Go inside, then,” I said impatiently. “Buy something—a brain cell, perhaps.”
“No, thanks. If somebody accidentally dropped a bottle behind me . . . yeah, I think you get the picture. Enclosed places with one way out aren’t exactly my friends right now. Now hurry the hell up. Go get jack shit off George so we can go.”
It was Cal and his stubborn bravado . . . not at their best, but there. And that counted. I pulled off my gloves, black silk hunting ones. They kept the warmth in and allowed the finer touch for pulling triggers and tossing knives. I handed them to him. I didn’t bother to ask where his were. I knew he had no idea. “And don’t put them down your pants. Your balls will have to survive as best they can.” I left him as he was pulling the gloves on and looking up at a white sky that kept falling. . . . He was doing his best not to imagine a portrait of Georgina through a frosted plate glass window.