Madhouse

"She has him."

Niko was at my shoulder, the axe dripping in his hand. "Yeah, she has his ass," I said with a warm glow in my gut that beat Christmas morning all to hell.

There was a particularly vicious snap of the scaled head, a sense of flight, and a brutal thud as a dark mass hit a far wall. Score one for Mama. "Don't notch a point in the air," came the warning. "It's crass." The axe took out one of my shambling revenants, who was sucking in air through his throat with a shrill whistle.

"I wasn't going to." An utter lie. "I do plan on punting his decapitated head like a football, though." I flung water and gore from both knives and started toward the wall where Sawney adhered like a drying clot of blood.

Niko moved with me. "Stabbing a football isn't the same as playing it, I hope you're aware."

I hadn't played well with others when I was a kid. Invitations to baseball or football games didn't often come after the "Your mom's a thief and a whore." That type of thing is hard to take from another kid, especially when it's true. It tended to lead to lashing out. Some of that lashing out was verbal; some involved a switchblade. Better to spear a football to the gym floor than some junior high asshole's poisonous tongue to the same polished wood. "I can kick. I kick your ass on a regular basis, don't I?"

"No. Not once," he shot me down ruthlessly as he swung the axe loosely, up and over. "And without vast improvement, not ever."

Not my day for getting the bullshit through. I didn't mind. Putting an end to that child-killing monster put a rosy glow over the entire scene. Dead and incapacitated revenants, whole and less than, floated in the water. There were wolves…eating. Robin and Promise gave them a cautious berth as they moved toward us through the water. The fur balls were on our side for the moment, but they had different dining ma

I turned my attention back to Sawney. The redness of his eyes was barely detectable and the scythe hung limply from the ebon-ski

Boggle wasn't done with him yet, however. She soared across the open space—a cave-in, falling in a completely improbable direction. She hit Sawney and the wall and took both down. There was a cascade of tile and concrete, flesh and bone, and it all disappeared under the water about thirty feet away. Revenants and their parts bobbed in the resulting tidal rush.

"She's not like the old boggle, is she?" Robin was unwounded except for a long scratch along his jaw, and if Promise weren't wet, she would've been as pristine as before we'd entered the subway tu

"Thinking of asking her out?" I asked with a snort. Not even Goodfellow had the balls for that.

"I don't date those with children." He touched a finger to his jaw and wiped meticulously at the blood. "It takes the focus from where it should truly lie."

"With you." Promise carried it with a heavy dose of irony to its natural conclusion.

"Am I wrong?" Finishing with the blood, he used his free hand to comb carefully through his curls. He was grooming himself. In the aftermath…hell, it wasn't yet an aftermath…during, he was grooming himself during a battle. "There are those who wish to experience me and those who wish to kill me. If that's not exclusive focus, what is? You can't be considered self-centered, if you sincerely are the center of all attention, now, can you?"

I didn't respond. The violent disturbance of the water had stopped, and as I took a step forward, Niko's hand settled on my shoulder. "Wait," he ordered. "She doesn't need us getting in her way." That we didn't particularly need to be torn apart by a blood-enraged boggle, he left unspoken. The water rippled, calmed…

Then it turned blacker than it already was. The will-o'-the-wisp of our lost flashlights was slowly vanquished by billowing darkness. I didn't know what color Sawney's blood was—despite temporarily having his arm chopped off, Sawney hadn't felt it necessary to bleed a drop for us. What I did know was that boggle blood was black. A spill of octopus ink, just like this.

"I'll pass on pick of her litter. Raising carnivorous offspring does not fit my lifestyle." Robin, along with Niko, had fished a secondary flashlight from her jacket pocket and lit the place up. But the light wouldn't touch some things and Sawney was one of them.

He rose out of the water and hung inches above it. In one hand he held either a handful of cloth, a blanket, or … shit. Scales. The material rippled with scales and was lined with the black velvet of blood. "These caves"—drop by drop that same black fell from the point of the scythe to the water below— "they are not the chill of the sea caves of home." He shook it, his new blanket, to the rustle of the largest piece of snakeskin in the world. He'd ski

"I shall wrap myself in it when the cold finally comes." The bright blaze of his eyes was back as he pulled the skin up to his face and rose higher in the air. "Ahhh, the sweet smell of a mother. The incomparable scent of orphans. I cherish your gift, travelers."

I'd let the Glock go, but never the Eagle—not with what it held. I pulled, fired, and with three shots, I saw Delilah coming up behind and below Sawney. … I saw it through him. The hole was not quite the size of a grapefuit, although the rounds should've blown him in half. There should've been Sawney on one side of the tu

Should've.

Didn't.

She leaped free a split second before the scythe would've opened her up. When she landed, she was shaking her head hard as if her jaws or teeth ached. Gritting my own teeth, I aimed and pulled the trigger again, this time aiming for his head. But he was gone. Between one blink and the next, he'd faded like smoke. He was fast, Niko and I had seen how fast in the warehouse, but this…Christ. How can you hope to kill something you can't possibly catch?

Quick or not, he could've gone in only one direction. I refused to believe he could've gone over our heads without us seeing at least a flicker of motion. I started forward down the tu

"Where?" Boggle roared, arms uplifted, fists clenched. "Where? Where? Where?" Turning, she pounded those fists against a wall to bring down another section next to the rough entrance she'd made. "Where? Where? Where?" Whirling, she snatched up the nearest creature, which happened to be a wolf, and pulled him into two pieces like a tasty piece of taffy. The lupine jaw snapped feebly for several seconds afterward, and it was far more disturbing than I wanted to admit.