To say that had strained things between Promise and me would be an understatement, but we’d moved past it, thanks in part to more pushing, this time on my brother’s part. But there couldn’t be a repeat of what she’d done. Promise had given her word she wouldn’t put Cal at risk again. I knew she was telling the truth. If I hadn’t known that, well . . . Cal and I had more in common than our eyes. If there is no trust, there is nothing. Trust is all.

But Promise had never lied to me. She hadn’t told me much about her past. I didn’t blame her. A vampire’s bloody pretreatment history could only be painful. I understood wanting to forget the predator that biology had once forced her to be. So I didn’t mind that I heard only bits and pieces—the places she’d lived and the historical events that she’d seen. All I cared was that she had never lied. She was honest in a world just the opposite, and a cool oasis in my life. She was who she said she was, and everything Sophia, my mother, the pathologically manipulative liar, had never been.

She was also an accomplished fighter, practiced, efficient, and deceptively deadly. I’d seen her snap a revenant’s neck in an instant and put a crossbow bolt dead center in the eye of a vodynoi.

Common interests—they really do enhance a relationship.

“As for George,” he went on, “I trust her to do what’s best for the universe, life, existence . . . whatever.” Unfortunately, Cal was usually at odds with all those things. He didn’t see the big picture that she did. And he didn’t want to. His life, whatever he made of it, was enough for him. Georgina loved Cal or had loved him—I wasn’t certain which it was now—but she also had a calling. I wasn’t sure that one could trust a calling . . . not on a personal level. Georgina had enormous compassion, but she also had, in her eyes, an even larger responsibility. Fall leaves are brilliant with gold and red. You can cup them in your hand and wonder at them, be amazed at their uniqueness and glory. But eventually they are gone, brown, crumbling, and scattered on the wind. But the tree remains. The tree is what is important. The tree lives on. That was a difficult knowledge to bear, and an even more difficult life to live.

Of course, being the leaf wasn’t exactly desirable either.

“Being wise is a burden.” There was sympathy in my voice that I didn’t bother to hide.

“Being a smart-ass moron is no cakewalk either,” Cal retorted.

“So true,” I offered dryly. “Yet you struggle on.” I was about to step forward to shake Robin’s shoulder when I noticed the snoring had a subtly different quality, and his hand was moving inch by slow inch across the bar. When it made it to the plastic container, I threw the dagger. It slid between his index and middle fingers to punch a hole in the plastic. “That is a tip jar,” I observed mildly, “not an ATM.”

He sat up and glowered. “I’m simply trying to stay in practice. I would’ve put the paltry pilfer back.”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Robin was at the very least as good at lying as our mother, but with his trickster race it was genetic. I couldn’t hold his DNA against him, and his lies were never meant to actually deceive us. Annoy us, entertain us, convince us to change our sexual orientation, but never to actually deceive us. He certainly didn’t use his powers for good per se, but with us he didn’t use them for otherwise either. I retrieved my blade, then took his shoulder to heave him upright. “Time to work, not to steal.”

“Stealing is teaching a valuable lesson to the naive. It’s a community service. I should be honored for my heritage, not condemned.” He shrugged off my hand to carefully smooth the material of his shirt, which would no doubt take the contents of a hundred tip jars to pay for.

We all moved outside onto Eldridge Street, Goodfellow and Cal behind me as I stopped and scanned the street. “Do you feel anything?” I asked.

“Gates? No.” Cal put his hand inside his jacket, and I knew he was feeling the reassuring textured grip of his Glock. “Of course, they could’ve taken a cab, right? Who wouldn’t stop for a clawed, fanged killer freak of nature?”

I gripped his shoulder at the bravado. He always tried to pull it off and he most often did. Not this time. “We’ve handled them all our life, little brother. We’ve survived. That’s not going to change now.”

“Yeah, sure.” He looked away . . . up at the roof of the building. Up where the Auphe would roost.

I exhaled and dropped my hand. It was hard to reassure him when I had doubts myself. I wouldn’t let them take Cal again, but I couldn’t guarantee we wouldn’t die in the process. I couldn’t guarantee I would be quick enough, strong enough, no matter how many hours I practiced, how many miles I ran, how many books I read on the art of war. So I practiced more, ran more, read more, and one day maybe I would feel like it would be enough. One day.

The street in front of the Ninth Circle was packed bumper-to-bumper. Promise had called on my cell and said her car was parked illegally in front of the Tenement Museum three blocks down. Three pathetic blocks, but that didn’t stop my indolent brother from grumbling. Any excuse to share his laziness with the world. He was slightly ahead of us when the revenant sprang out of a deeply recessed doorway. Dressed like a homeless man in ragged layers of clothing to conceal what it really was, it came boiling out of the gloom with claws like ten knives. Cal wouldn’t have caught his scent. The entire block the Ninth Circle was situated on was saturated in so much supernatural scent, he couldn’t separate one from the other. It didn’t stop him from grabbing the clammy wrist, twisting the hand away, and avoiding the slashing claws of the other one. Then he proceeded to seize the hissing creature by its filthy jacket and pound its head against the brick wall.

“I am so”—bang—“not”—bang—“in the mood,” Cal snarled.

The revenant’s companion came out of the same doorway. As with cockroaches, if there’s one revenant, there’s bound to be more. Unfortunately, Raid had yet to come up with a solution to the next best thing to the undead. They might look deceased and mildly decomposing, with moist, clammy gray-green skin and milky white eyes, but revenants were alive and had never been human. They simply had good camouflage. Is that a corpse? Should we investigate? By the time the second question was out, the revenant had already eaten your leg—unfortunately for you.

This second one also had no weapons but what nature had given it and that . . . that was far from being enough. Cal, however, believed in using what nature and the local gun trafficker had gifted him with. He dropped the first creature, whose head had lost its original shape for something even less attractive. He then pulled his gun, a Glock .40, with lightning speed, shooting the other revenant in the face before it had a chance to take another step. I gave an inner nod of approval. Cal practiced. Frequently. I had to force him to run and spar, but he had never needed pushing to keep up his gun skills. Little boys and their toys—the bigger and louder, the better.

The revenant fell with a half-strangled scream. It wasn’t done yet, though. It tried to crawl toward Cal, claws scoring the concrete beneath it. It had perhaps a spoonful of brains left in its shattered skull, but revenants were like cockroaches in that respect as well. “You got balls,” Cal said with a grunt. “I gotta give you that.” And then he shot him again, this time at the base of the skull. That time it did the trick. Nothing quite takes the fight out of a revenant like a severed spinal column.

Cal turned to see Robin and me leaning against the wall, observing the show. I didn’t wear a watch, but I took Goodfellow’s arm and tapped the face of his Rolex meaningfully. “We are on a schedule,” I said mildly.

“Gee, Nik, I hate to slow you down. By the way, thanks for the help,” he said caustically.