But which was the trick?

“I came home. The door was wide open. Your mala beads were on the floor.” I had dropped them, hadn’t I? They’d held nothing for me anymore. He looked past me and growled, “What did this piece of shit do to get you here alone?”

Only a goddamn trick.

I fell to my knees, let the katana tumble from my hands, and pressed my eyes with the heels of my hands. Cal’s hands were instantly on my shoulders. I recognized the hard grip of them, recognized the urgency. “Come on, Cyrano. You’re starting to scare the shit out of me.” I looked up, seized his jacket, and pulled him against me in a rough hug, one hard enough I know his ribs groaned under the pressure. His eyes—worried, determined, fierce—and alive. Not the dead, dull gray. They were alive.

“Nik?”

I rested my forehead on the top of his shoulder and struggled to find my way out of my own Tumulus, my own private hell. He smelled like beer, wolf, and my herbal soap, since he could never be bothered to buy his own. He smelled like my brother. He smelled like one last chance at sanity. A hand cupped the back of my head. “Nik, what the hell did he do?”

I pulled air into my lungs, breathed for what seemed like the first time since I’d seen him dead on the apartment floor. Straightening, I let him go but refused to release my one-handed grip on his jacket. If this was the trick, I didn’t care. I would take it and not look back. I turned my head to see Oshossi still standing on the hill, unmoving. “You said thief.” My voice was guttural and thick. It had been one of the few words to penetrate the void. “You said a common thief.”

“You know nothing, do you? You truly do not know,” he said, gold eyes narrow with disdain. “You only spring to the defense of family, vampire family, take her word, no doubt, until she could have Xolo force you to take it, whether you wanted to or not.”

“Xolo? What’s this have to do with that goat sucker?” Cal demanded, gun between Oshossi and us. Behind us the white wolf, Delilah, stood stiffly with head lowered and ears back.

Oshossi whirled his machetes casually. “Nothing. You literally know nothing. It’s amazing. Criminally so.” He jammed one machete into the ground at least eight inches and kept the other one in movement. “Xolo is mine. He is special among his kind. Most chupacabras have mild telepathy, only enough to immobilize their simpleminded goat prey.” The pointed teeth smiled. “They are nearly as simpleminded as the goats themselves, but, ah, our equally simpleminded Xolo has much, much more mind control than his average brothers and sisters. He is a potent weapon, an idiot savant with a rare talent. Once he has time to study his new prey, to feel out the workings of their mind, he can push their thoughts here and there. And he can make anyone see anything. Put a picture, a memory in their head that is as real as any genuine one. All he needs is someone to pull on his leash and tell him to do it. You can see how valuable that would make him to me.”

A picture . . . a portrait of my brother and blood and death. How easily I’d been persuaded to Cherish’s way of thinking today and earlier at the Harlem brownstone. As soon as a doubt would surface, so would the dizziness, and then they would both just as quickly disappear. The more I questioned, the further I’d been pushed into ignorance and compliance. Xolo. All Xolo. He hadn’t known us long enough to map out our minds until now, and as we’d previously agreed to help Cherish, she hadn’t needed to order him to manipulate us that much. Not until I started questioning. And then Cherish had him make a kamikaze of me.

“Christ, I get it now,” Cal cursed. “That’s how she pumped my brain about Nik at Rafferty’s and the hospital—what a fighter you are. Were you the best of us? Were you my keeper? No wonder I’d talked so damn much. I never talk that much. Not about us. Not about family. And I never would’ve thought she was part of the family without that damn chupa. She was looking for the perfect weapon. And, shit, Niko, you are the perfect weapon.”

That was it, then. My questioning earlier in the day might have hurried her plan a little, but it had been her plan all along. It was why she’d watched us spar so closely, watched us all fight. Robin, Cal, and I; she chose among us the one she thought best able to defeat Oshossi.

She had also made the most fatal mistake of her life.

“You can see how valuable that makes Xolo to me, the things he can do. You can also see why I could not allow him close to me with his new mistress. Why I depended on my creatures to dispose of her and bring him back. He is completely docile to whoever has him and feeds him.” Which was why Cherish had become so alarmed to see Cal trying to give blood to him in Rafferty’s kitchen. “And he knows well the workings of my mind. He could have me drown myself in the river, if so ordered, while thinking I’m but walking through the forest.” Which was why he could walk into the car lot but fled the brownstone where Xolo had been.

He stopped the motion of the last machete and let it point down toward the ground. “I use him to save what forests I can. To save what belongs to me. I want him back. I need him back. He can move the minds of men . . . the will of governments.”

“Then take him. If you have more creatures, find her, kill her, and take him,” I said, my voice empty and savage all at once. “We won’t stand in your way.” When I didn’t come back from Xolo’s illusion, she’d know either Oshossi had killed me or we’d killed each other. Either way, she wouldn’t stick around. In fact, I was positive she was gone already.

“And if she were here now?” he said, dark face curious.

“I’d kill her myself,” I responded flatly.

Oshossi looked around at the death that surrounded us. “My pets.” His stony face set dangerously, then relaxed slightly. “Victims, all of us. Go. But stand in my way again and you’ll be my victims next time.”

We went. I couldn’t feel my legs, but they still worked. Cal had come up from his crouch with my katana and wrapped my hand around its hilt. My other was still firmly fisted in his jacket. “Do you want to tell me what the son of a bitch Xolo made you see?” He had a good guess, I knew, but a guess wasn’t the same as details. Details I could not do.

“No.” There was snow beneath us—I could see it now—white and pristine as the void had been . . . the void that had shattered into a thousand pieces of sharp-edged, blood-streaked milky glass inside my head.

“You have interesting lives. Even Kin life not quite so interesting.” Delilah walked beside us in human form now, the change so quick it was a blur. Her bare feet walked through the snow without hesitation. “Pretty boy, give jacket now.”

“I lose more jackets this way,” Cal grumbled, but his worried gaze was still on me. “And stop calling me pretty boy. Upgrade me to smoking-hot man-meat, at least.” Delilah laughed until she nearly howled . . . a genuine wolf howl. Cal waited with uncustomary patience as I managed to unlock my fingers from his coat. He passed it over to a still-laughing Delilah while I immediately grabbed a handful of the back of his shirt.

“Where were you?” I demanded, and shook him. Shook him hard. And he allowed it without complaint. “Where were you?”

He didn’t bring up that I’d been gone only a half hour less than he had. He let it be. “I closed up the bar and met Delilah back at our place about two thirty. Like I said, the door was open, your malas were thrown down. I knew something was wrong.” His jaw tightened. “Really wrong. I used the GPS in our phones and tracked you to the park. I made a gate, Delilah came along for the ride, and we pinpointed your location.” He looked over his shoulder at what lay behind us. The Vigil would be busy tonight, if there was anything left that Boggle and her brood didn’t eat. “You killed everything, Nik. Everything.” He didn’t say it with awe—he said it for what it was. Fact. Cherish might have needed proof, but Cal had always known what I was capable of.