“Be nice if one time was all it took.” The sky was as pure blue as yesterday when we’d come tumbling out of it. “Everyone else crawled in a hole and pulled it in after them?”

“Yes, although Promise and Robin aren’t too happy about it.” Promise and Cherish had gone to New Jersey. If Oshossi’s animals could sniff them out in that smell, more power to them. Robin had gone wherever Robin went. Someplace where condoms were stored by the crate and clothing was not only optional but highly frowned upon.

It made facing the Auphe a shade less terrifying.

“It was you and me in the beginning, Nik,” I said. “You and me in the end.” It was the way it was supposed to be. Meant to be. Fate coming full circle.

“If this time in the beginning you could come already potty trained, it would be a big plus,” he said dryly before disconnecting.

I snorted and slid the phone into my jacket pocket as the second watcher joined the first. Five minutes later, there was a third. They had to be curious. Annoyed. Ticked the hell off. Where were the rest of us?

“Yeah, you keep watching,” I muttered. I’d been right when I’d talked to Nik on the beach days and days ago. If I’d ran while the others hid—even if they’d had to do it all their lives—they would’ve been safe. Although Niko was like the Auphe. They might have genetic GPS, but in a way, so did he. There was no guarantee who would’ve found me first.

I ducked my head against the cold wind and started walking. It was going to be a long day of dragging these bitches from place to meaningless place. And the night? I didn’t want to think about the night. That’s when it could go wrong in all the worst ways.

I had hours to kill before that, though, and there was one thing I’d always meant to do. If I was going to go out, good hand or not, and chances were much better than ever that I was, I wasn’t going out with that on my body. That was a black and red tattoo I had on my bicep. I’d been possessed once—yeah, yeah, old news—and my pilot during the whole ordeal thought it would be an absolute blast to get MOM surrounded by a heart on my arm. To say I’d considered peeling the skin off with my combat knife didn’t really give the flavor of how much I hated it. Had hated her.

I wasn’t going to die with that on me. I found the nearest tattoo parlor, waited my turn before sitting, taking off my jacket, rolling up my sleeve, and saying, “Cover it up.”

The guy—big, fat, and with a curly beard—blinked, bored. “With what?” Whether I didn’t love my mommy or not anymore wasn’t his concern.

“With damn Big Bird for all I care. Just cover it up.”

It wasn’t that easy. It’s never that easy. A whole slew of them came over to discuss the situation. A tattoo was a reflection of your inner self, your true blah, blah, blah. You couldn’t just slap anything on there. Well, obviously I had, as no one had fought me about the whole mom issue. Apparently moms got more respect than Big Bird. One guy had actually suggested that it would be easy to blend the tattoo I had now into a dragon, as if that wouldn’t get me laughed out of the bar. Assuming Ishiah ever let me back in after Cambriel’s death.

A dragon. Christ. While piles of flaming lizard crap from the sky were deadly enough if you weren’t careful, it certainly wasn’t worth bragging about to have survived. I could never wear a short-sleeved shirt again.

Finally I pointed at a red and black band on the wall. Funky lettering. I felt the invisible Niko thwap me over my ear and corrected myself quickly. Latin. It was Latin. “What about that? What’s that?”

“Armband. A lot of our guys retiring from the military are getting that. It says ‘Brothers in Arms,’ ” Curly said.

Huh. How about that? The right colors and, this time, the right sentiment.

Last time it hadn’t hurt or the thing inside me had enjoyed the pain. Hard to say. This time it did. I didn’t mind.

The things that matter are worth it.

You could still see the heart with the MOM, but just barely, and only if you knew where to look. The ghost of gone. Just like Sophia herself. She was gone, but if you knew where to look in me, you’d still see her. It was the best that I could hope for, though, and I was happy with it. I let them tape it up with gauze, paid, and headed outside. Hours had passed and the light was bleeding from the sky.

Timing. Now was when I found out if I was on the right side of it—or tomato paste on the wall.

Radioactive tomato paste, as it turned out.

Because that note in Nik’s voice on the phone? Can I just get a “Holy shit” from the choir, please?

“A nuke? A goddamn nuke? A fucking nuke? A . . .” My mouth was still moving, but nothing was coming out. I’d run out of curse words to say. Me. That hadn’t ever happened in my life. “What’s wrong with a nice normal bomb? You know, in case things go wrong, we only take out a few buildings, not the whole damn city.”

Robin had found Niko and me a place to stay temporarily. It was a furnished studio apartment, the best he said he could do on short notice, but it was on the first floor. That’s all we needed. The first floor. I met Nik there and I would’ve wrinkled my nose at the smell of old cat piss dried into the floor if I didn’t have other things on my mind—radioactive things.

“First off, there is no such thing as a nice normal bomb. There are bombs dropped from planes. There are missiles. Trucks filled with fertilizer and diesel fuel. And there are multiple charges placed around a building to detonate it. None of which fill our need. Besides, I thought the mere idea of a nuclear weapon would make you happier than the porn you hide under your bed. It certainly puts your Desert Eagle in the shade,” he replied, a wickedly amused glitter in his eye while his face remained passive.

Despite my love for my Eagle and various other weapons of semiexplosive destruction, I wasn’t, believe it or not, turned on by the thought of a nuke. “There has to be something. We brought down the last warehouse without a stick of dynamite.”

“That’s because then you were the bomb.”

Not much you could say to that.

“Well, what the hell were you asking for when you called Samuel?” I asked, sitting on the fold-out couch that sagged a good half foot in the middle cushion. I didn’t think Robin had tried as hard as he said he had. I doubted he appreciated those days and days of celibacy.

“I thought since the Vigil has contacts within the police and city government, they would most likely have agents within the military as well. Thousands of years of conspiracy does give one maneuvering room for job placement. And the military has weapons, including explosive devices, that the public know nothing about.”

“Seems complex.” I grunted. “There are bombs out there that should wipe out anything the size of a couple of football fields that you don’t need a truck to haul around. I’ve seen them.”

“There are?” Niko asked as he leaned against the cracked wall. It held his weight, surprisingly. It looked like a forty-pound five-year-old could take it down. “Where did you see them?”

“You know, TV, movies. Mission: Impossible wouldn’t lie.”

He closed his eyes. “I tried, Almighty Universe. I did my best.” Straightening, he went on, “Since the Auphe move so quickly, we need a large area of destruction, and since you cannot build a gate big enough to drive a truck through, the Vigil suggested a suitcase nuke as being the most appropriate for the task.”

“The Vigil trust us with a nuke? Even a baby nuke?” I asked skeptically. A nuke? The Vigil had a nuke? They did have a finger in every pie, pretty scary pies.

“Probably not, but Samuel does. He’s seen what we would do to keep the Auphe from taking the world back. I didn’t say what their plan was this time.” He wouldn’t. Niko wouldn’t tell anyone that. “But that they had one and they had to be dealt with. Now. He convinced his superiors that whether our plan worked or not, we would make sure that the city would be safe. We’d die to keep that promise.”