Текст книги "Night Broken"

Автор книги: Patricia Briggs

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I followed. The soil under my knees was softer than I expected. No rocks, no roots, no marsh, nothing with stickers–not that I was complaining. But if I hadn’t already known Coyote was manipulating the landscape, the lack of nasty plant life would have proved it. There were no signs of any other people or animals despite the way this trail looked like some kind of thoroughfare for coyotes or raccoons.

A high‑pitched wailing cry broke the silence of the night and sent unexpected, formless terror through my bones, leaving me crouching motionless under the cover of bushes like a rabbit hiding from a fox. The first howl was answered by another.

I wasn’t the only one who froze; Gary had stopped, too. Coyote sat down and turned to face us.

“His children break the night with their hungry cries,” Coyote said. “That we hear them in this, my own land, means that they have hunted this night, and there are more people on their way to the other side.”

“Dead,” said Gary. “You mean Guayota has killed more people.”

Coyote nodded, as solemn as I’d ever seen him. “You need to understand this, both of you. Once Guayota took the first death, he can never stop. He will kill and kill and, like the wendigo, never be free of the terrible hunger because death never can satisfy that kind of need. He cannot stop himself, so he needs to be stopped.” He lifted his head and closed his eyes. “They are quiet now. We need to keep going.”

The pitch of the trail changed to an uphill climb, gradually getting steeper and steeper until I was scrabbling up a cliff face. I could no longer see Coyote or Gary, and I hoped they were still ahead. I dug in my fingernails and shoe edges and hauled myself up. Sweat gathered where sweat generally gathers and rolled in jolly, salt‑carrying joy all across the burns I’d acquired fighting Guayota.

Eventually, I chinned up over the edge of the cliff and rolled onto … a lawn. In front of me was a hedge, and under the hedge were Coyote and Gary, lying side by side. There was space between them, and I elbow‑crawled forward until I was even with them but still under the hedge. Beyond the hedge was a manicured lawn just like the one I’d crawled over.

That cliff edge had been a barrier between Coyote’s lands and the real world. I hadn’t noticed the transition on the way out here, but now, lying beneath the hedge, my senses were crawling with information that hadn’t been available–the sounds of night insects and the scents of early‑spring flowers.

Coyote’s road had looked and smelled exactly as I expected–but real life doesn’t do that. Real life is full of surprises, big and small. I’d keep that in mind the next time Coyote showed up.

That we were out of Coyote’s place meant that the hedge we lay under was real, as was the yard and the house it surrounded. The back of the house was lit by bright lights. I saw the silhouettes of trees and bushes. Between us and the house was a kidney‑shaped pool encased in a walkway of cement. In the night, with the house lights shining in my eyes, the water looked like black ink.

The house was a high‑end house, not rich‑rich but nothing that a mechanic’s salary would have touched. Maybe there were some distinguishing features on the front of the house–like an address. But from my viewpoint, the house looked like any of a hundred other expensive houses. The deck, jutting out fifteen or twenty feet from the house and three feet off the ground, was the most interesting feature, that and the dogs.

The two dogs were chained at opposite ends of the deck, each chewing on rawhide bones as long as my calf. At least I hoped they were rawhide bones.

Coyote shoved something in my hand. I didn’t have to look down to know that I held the walking stick, but I did anyway. It looked much as it had the last time I’d seen it: a four‑foot‑long oak staff made of twisty wood, with a gray finish and a ring of silver on the bottom. The silver cap that sometimes became a spearhead was covered with Celtic designs. It looked like something I could have bought at the local Renaissance fair for a couple of hundred dollars.

The last time I’d held it, I had felt its thirst for blood, and its magic had thrummed in my bones. Now, the wood was cool under my fingers, and it might as well have been something I bought at Walmart for all the magic I sensed.

“It knows how to hide itself better,” Coyote murmured, sounding like a proud parent.

I watched the dogs, but they didn’t seem to hear him as he continued talking. “I taught it a few tricks and gave it an education. It helped me out of a few jams.”

I was going to have to return the walking stick to Lugh’s son, and tell him that Coyote had taught it a few things. Why did I think that might not go over too well?

“Do you remember what the walking stick’s original magic was?” asked Coyote.

“Makes sheep have twins,” I told him. The dogs didn’t react to my voice, either.

“And?”

“That was it,” I told him. “Lugh made three walking sticks. This one makes twin lambs. One of them helps you find your way home, and the third allows you to see people as they really are.”

“Hmm,” said Coyote. “Are you sure your source was reliable?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“I think,” said Coyote, “that you should recheck your source. Maybe there were three staves that all did the same thing, or maybe there was only ever one. Or maybe”–he gave me a sly look–“I was just able to teach it to ape its brethren. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Look at the dogs.”

I tightened my grip on the walking stick and looked. “It’s hard to see anything with those stupid lights,” I complained.

Coyote gave me a look, then glanced at Gary. “Okay. But look fast.”

I frowned at him–and Gary sighed, rose to his knees. In his hands he rolled two small rocks, like the ones he’d been playing with when Coyote and I had first come upon him. He lobbed them, one right after the other, and took out the big lights.

Both dogs surged to their feet, glanced at the lights, then right where the three of us crouched.

“Gary,” said Coyote conversationally as he turned around and raised his butt in the air until he was crouched like a runner in a sprint at the Olympics. “You should stay until the end of this story. Sometimes the end of the adventure is much better than the beginning. Besides, you might be more useful than you know if you stick around.”

Gary answered something, but I’d finally remembered that I was supposed to be looking at the dogs. Under my hand, the staff warmed, and I realized it was happy to be back with me. Then I looked, really looked at the dogs, and the walking stick’s affection and Gary’s and Coyote’s voices were abruptly secondary.

The dog nearest me was female; I could see her form inside the dog’s body–sort of wrapped in the flesh of the larger animal. She had a woman’s body, naked and made more disturbing by a head that was a smaller version of the dog’s. She had dog’s paws from her ankle on down. She crouched on all fours. Binding magic wrapped her from head to paw in a shimmering pinkish fabric–since joining the pack, I was getting pretty good at spotting those. Pack bonds were part of my daily life, and what held her was a magic very similar but not the same. If the pack bond was spider silk woven into a chain, this was a Mandarin’s robe used as a straightjacket.

That was not all I saw, though, because my seeing of her was not limited to what I could sense with my eyes. Age. She was so old, this dog. Older than the structures around her by millennia or more.

Her eyes glistened red in the night and focused on us. She opened her mouth, displaying sharp teeth that were too many and too long to fit in her mouth. She barked at us, the noise bigger than it should have been and with an odd whistling sound to it that made me want to cover my ears–it wasn’t that unearthly and terrifying sound that Coyote had said was the tibicenas, but it was something akin to it. Everything about the tibicena was bigger, more powerful than the lines of the body she presented to the real world.

The other dog … the other dog was Joel. If the woman’s binding magic was a robe, his were silk ties. They wrapped securely around him but did not envelop him completely. They weren’t part of him yet.

Like the female, he saw us, too. The dog’s body that encompassed him was poised on the deck, watching us, but silently. While the dog was motionless, Joel was not. He pulled and tugged at the bindings, peeling them back and leaving gaping wounds that bled behind. As soon as he cleared one place and started on another, the bindings grew back.

I wondered how old the man I’d killed when I shot Juan Flores’s dog had been.

Coyote leaned forward, and whispered into my ear, “When it looks like a mortal creature, the mortal flesh encompasses the tibicena and may be killed as any mortal creature. When it is wrapped in the tibicena’s form, it cannot be harmed by mundane means.”

And when he said the word “tibicena,” the head of the walking stick sharpened into the blade of a spear. My eyesight sharpened, too, and I saw that there was a third layer I had not been able to distinguish before. Surrounding each dog was a shadow that grew more solid as my hand clenched tighter on Lugh’s walking stick, a shadow that was large and hairy with red eyes, as in the story Kyle had told. Huge–polar‑bear huge. Four or five times as big as any werewolf I’d ever seen. Gradually the other, smaller forms disappeared inside the giant dogs–both of whom were looking directly at me.

Coyote slipped back, grabbed my ankle, and dragged me backward, out from under the hedge like I was a rabbit he’d caught. He dropped my ankle, grabbed my elbow, and hauled me to my feet. Before I could catch my balance, he all but threw me down the cliff face we’d come up. I managed to stay on my feet, using the bottoms of my shoes like skis and leaning my weight back on the walking stick for balance in a mockery of glissading.

As a kid, glissading down steep, snow‑covered mountain slopes had been an upgrade in difficulty and fun to simply sledding. “Fun” wasn’t a term I applied to glissading down a cliff that had no snow for padding in case of accident and using an ancient artifact that might break–and wasn’t that a lovely thought? I had a pretty good idea about what would happen when an old fae artifact was destroyed. At least the spearhead had returned to its more usual form, so I wasn’t likely to stab myself with it, too.

I didn’t fall until I was almost at the bottom. So when I rolled, I hit that improbably soft ground and emerged not much worse for wear. Gary landed on his feet beside me, and on the other side, Coyote grabbed my arm–exactly where he’d grabbed me before so I was sure to have bruises–and hauled me to my feet, again.

“Run,” he said.

Gary grabbed my hand and pelted down the path, pulling me in his wake. The path still had its cover of greenery, but now the ceiling of leaf and stem was tall enough for us to stand upright in.

As soon as I was running all out, Gary dropped my hand. I tucked the walking stick under my free arm, put my head down, and ran as the howls of the dog became baying and a second dog joined in the chorus. Joel had evidently lost his battle for control–and Coyote’s trick with the landscape didn’t stop the dogs from hunting us in it.

Speaking of Coyote … I glanced over my shoulder in time to see that a four‑footed coyote had stopped in the middle of the path behind us. He was a little bigger than the usual coyote, but if I’d seen him out my window, I wouldn’t have given him a second look. He gave me a grin and a wag of his tail before running the other way.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Gary chanted as he ran. “Stupid freaking Coyote. Always getting me in trouble.”

I bumped him with my shoulder. “Accept some responsibility for your own life,” I panted, finally. “You could have stayed sitting in the middle of the road. You choseto come with us.”

Gary gave me an irritated look. “Whose side are you on anyway?”

He wasn’t as out of breath as I was. Maybe he had more practice running.

“I didn’t know there was a side to be on,” I grunted.

I could still hear the dogs. No. Not dogs. I thought of the giant forms, the ones that Coyote said could not be harmed by mundane means. These were Guayota’s children. They were tibicenas.

“They sound like they’re getting closer,” Gary said. I wished he hadn’t, because I’d been thinking the same thing.

“I thought Coyote was going to divert them.” My voice was breathy because I didn’t have much air to spare.

“Right,” said Gary. “Just like he diverted the police when I ended up in jail. I think we’rethe intended diversion here.”

“He dumped me in a river where there was a monster killing things,” I told him.

“There you go. That’s the Coyote I know and hate.”

The woods and brush thinned, and we were running on the hill down to the gravel road we’d traveled before.

“Which way?” said Gary.

I looked frantically, but there was nothing to distinguish one direction from another. Although the moon had been in the sky when we ducked into the tunnel of brush, there was no sign of her now. I felt down the pack bonds and the bond I shared with Adam. Though I could tell they were somewhere, I got no sense of where they were in relation to me. The connection was foggy, as if they were a lot farther away than an hour’s walk.

“You pick,” I said, as we hit the bottom of the hill–and he jerked my hand and pulled me to the right.

I made the mistake of looking up the hill and caught sight of one of the tibicenas cresting the top–the female. She saw us and bayed twice before plunging down the hillside after us. I quit looking back and concentrated on running–and on hoping that she didn’t give that cry we’d heard before, the one that had frozen me in my tracks.

“Isn’t that walking stick supposed to take you home?” Gary asked. “Why don’t you say the magic words? ‘There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.’”

Where did he get enough breath to be sarcastic? If he wasn’t being sarcastic, then he didn’t know fae artifacts as well as I did.

“They aren’t Dorothy’s ruby slippers,” I said. “Fae artifacts have a mind of their own, and this one is particularly contrary.”

I’d turned my head to glance at him, and I noticed that there was a house in the distance–the first house I’d seen all night.

“Look, Gar–” I ran full tilt into something solid planted right in front of me. I lost my balance, and my feet skidded sideways to tangle with Gary’s. Everyone fell, tumbling and rolling on a gravel driveway because Gary and I had been running really fast. And the solid thing hadn’t been a tree, like I thought, it had been Adam.

“Hi,” I said, panting, sprawled out on top of my husband, who’d done the chivalrous thing and taken the brunt of the fall. “A funny thing happened when I went to get a glass of water.” He smelled so good, warm and safe and Adam.

Coyote had dumped Gary and me right in front of Honey’s house, at the exact spot where my husband stood … had been standing until I hit him running full out when he wasn’t expecting an attack from the ether.

Still lying flat on his back, Adam looked over at the walking stick that had missed clocking him in the head by an inch, maybe less. Coyote hadn’t fixed the walking stick entirely, or possibly at all, because I got the distinct impression that the walking stick had tried to hurt Adam but hadn’t quite managed it. I tightened my hand on the old wood, and the impression faded until it was only a stick in my hand. The effect Adam had on me was such that it was only then I remembered that I should be afraid.

I lifted my head and listened as hard as I could. But I couldn’t hear them.

“Are they still following us?” I asked urgently.

“We’re not dead,” said Gary, who hadn’t moved from his prone position on the ground. “I’d guess that we lost them when we got dumped back here. It’s too much to say that we’re safe, not when Himself is about–but safe for now.”

“I take it you met with Coyote?” Adam said politely as he sat up so I was sitting on him instead of lying on him and glanced at Gary. “Both of you?”

Gary got up and started pulling goathead thorns out of his arm. “I hate Coyote,” he said without aiming the remark at anyone.

I ignored Gary and answered Adam. “Was it the walking stick that gave it away?” I asked with mock interest that would have worked better if I weren’t still trying to catch my breath. My heart was beating so hard that the force of my pulse almost hurt.

“No, I figured it out earlier, when your scent trail disappeared into nothing. Mostly. The walking stick just meant my suspicions were correct.” Adam closed his fingers on my shoulder, not quite hard enough to hurt. “ Don’tdo that again,” he said. “My heart can’t take it.”

“I didn’t intendto do it the first time,” I half whined. I would have all‑the‑way whined, but it was suddenly too difficult to whine. Why was it that I could run and run–but a minute or so after I stopped, I couldn’t breathe anymore?

I could happily have stayed safe in Adam’s arms all night if it weren’t for the fact that I was covered with sweat, and I had to straighten and give my diaphragm a fighting chance to force my lungs to start working properly.

I stood up, and Adam’s hand loosened, sliding from my shoulder to my arm until he had my hand.

“I’ll certainly try not to wander off with Coyote again without your knowing about it. But ‘try’ is all I’ve got,” I told Adam when I had control of my breath again.

He looked up at me. There was heat in his gaze–there is always some spark of heat when Adam looks at me, but there was also need that was deeper than sexual. I could see the shadow caused by worry, possessiveness, and a vulnerability that allowed him, the Alpha wolf, to stay on the ground when I was standing. That vulnerability (and the possessiveness) meant that Adam would never let me leave him, as he’d let Christy leave him.

I didn’t like him vulnerable to anything, even to me. I pulled on Adam’s hand, and he stood up.

“I love you, too,” I told him, and he smiled because he’d let me see what he felt. I cleared my throat. “I think Coyote was trying to help.”

Gary made a derogatory noise. When I looked at him, he was staring down the road. He didn’t trust in his safety, even when the danger couldn’t be heard or scented. I wondered if he wanted to be safe, or if he was more like Coyote. Like me, he was covered with sweat, but he seemed to be breathing better than I was. He must have stayed in good shape while he was in prison.

“Where did Coyote take you?” Adam asked. He had kept my hand.

“Let’s go find someplace to sit down,” I said. I needed a shower more than I needed to sleep–and I needed to sleep, now that the adrenaline charge was dying down, like a bee needed flowers.

Honey had a picnic table in her backyard. Sitting on the table, Gary and I took turns telling Adam what had happened. I don’t know why Gary sat on the table, but I was still so jumpy that I didn’t want to chance trapping my legs if we had to run again. Adam paced. I envied his energy: he hadn’t been chasing after Coyote all night.

Before we’d gotten very far in our narrative, Darryl, then Mary Jo, joined us. Mary Jo gave me a full glass of water. I drank half of it and dumped the other half over my head to rinse away the sweat that was still dripping into my eyes with stinging force. The water helped my eyes but not my cheek.

“You can turn into a coyote between one breath and the next,” said Mary Jo when I got to the bit about running from the tibicenas. “I’ve seen you do it. You are faster that way, so why didn’t you change when the tibicenas were chasing you?”

“Clothes,” said Gary. “You try changing when you’re wearing your clothes, and the next thing you know, you’re tangled up in your jeans.”

“At least you don’t have a bra,” I agreed sourly.

“While you were out running around, you got an interesting phone call,” Adam told me, pulling my cell phone out of his back pocket. He hit a button. “Wulfe wants to talk to you.”

I put it up to my ear. If he’d said that last before he’d hit the button, I’d have objected. Jumpy and exhausted are not a good state for talking to Wulfe, Marsilia’s right‑hand vampire. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been trying to kill me–and Marsilia, the vampire who ruled all the vamps in the Tri‑Cities. There was an outside chance that Wulfe had actually been trying to protect Marsilia, but I had no trouble assigning him as much villainy as seemed to want to cling to him–and a bit more.

“Mercy?” Wulfe’s voice was enough to wake me right up.

“You wanted to talk to me?” I wished I had more of Mary Jo’s glass of water left.

“Mercy,” he whispered. “Mercy. I can still taste you in my mouth.” I pulled the phone away from my ear because I didn’t want his voice that close to me. “I long for your blood on my tongue, little coyote‑girl.”

Creepy. Of all the creepy people and monsters I’ve encountered–and a lot of monsters are pretty creepy–Wulfe is the one who gets to me the worst. I think it’s because he scares me the most. I had been thinking about drinking, and he started talking about it, as though he was reading my mind. He does that kind of thing a lot. He knows it bothers me, and that just encourages him.

“And I can see you turning to dust in the middle of the afternoon under the hot summer sun,” I told him, trying to sound bored. I did a pretty good job. Exhaustion and boredom sound a lot alike. “If your dream comes true, then mine gets to come true, too.”

“Life is not so fair, Mercy,” he said, and someone in the same room with him made a noise.

Any adult who has ever watched a porn flick knows that noise. It’s the one that real people don’t make unless they are faking something.

“If you just called to flirt, I’m hanging up.”

He drew in a shaky breath, then moaned.

I hung up.

“Who was that, and why was he having phone sex with you?” asked Gary.

“I need to wash my brain,” muttered Darryl. “Next time I see that vampire, I’m going to squish him like a bug.”

“I feel violated,” I said, half‑seriously.

The phone rang, and I set it on the table. It rang again, and we all looked at it.

Adam picked it up and hit the green button on the screen.

“Mercy, you spoil all my fun,” Wulfe said, sounding less psychotic and more petulant. “You keep killing my playmates. It’s only fair that you take their place.”

I don’t know which playmates he was talking about. Andre? Frost? Frost was the last vampire I’d killed.

“No,” said Adam, as if Wulfe had been asking a question.

“I told you I’ll only talk to Mercy,” said Wulfe, dropping into singsong. “I know something you don’t know.”

“What?” asked Adam.

“I have news about a man who was looking for a house this week with room for his dogs. He paid cash. Lots of cash.”

“Where?” asked Adam.

“Oh dear,” Wulfe said. “You don’t think I’m going to tell you, do you? I could have told youan hour ago.”

Adam looked at me. I took the phone. Coyote said that Guayota and his dogs had killed again tonight. This wasn’t just about Christy anymore. Guayota needed to be stopped.

“It’s me,” I said. “But if you keep screwing with us, I’ll call Stefan and see if he can’t figure out what your news is.”

Marsilia, the mistress of the local vampire seethe, was courting Stefan with as much delicacy as a Victorian gentleman courted his chosen lady. He’d been her most loyal follower for centuries, and she’d broken the ties between them with brutal thoroughness in order to maintain control of her seethe. Now that he was finally talking to her again, if he asked her for information, she’d give it to him. Even if it was for me.

There was a little silence on the line. Then Wulfe said, sounding hurt, which was absurd, “I have no reason to help you, Mercy. One of my sheep brought me some interesting‑for‑you information. But if you aren’t going to be nice, you don’t get it.”

Vampires.

“Nice how?” I asked.

“Come to my house tonight,” he purred. “You remember where it is, right? I’ll give you my information if you play well enough.”

“She isn’t going alone,” said Adam.

“Oh no,” agreed Wulfe. “Nothing says fun like an Alpha werewolf. Just you two, though.”

I was going to be a zombie for the meeting with the lawyer and the cops tomorrow. Adam would have to do all the talking for me–he’d had about ten minutes more sleep than I had. But if Wulfe knew something, anything that would give us an advantage over Guayota, we needed to find out what it was. In less than a week, he’d killed who knows how many people. The official report, according to Adam’s private investigator in Eugene, was that four had died in the fire Guayota had started in Christy’s condo. There were all those women in the field in Finley and however many he’d killed tonight. Coyote had said Guayota wouldn’t stop until he was stopped.

“Fine,” I said. “Give me time to shower, and we’ll be there.” I hung up my phone and looked at the time.

“When’s daylight?” I asked.

“About three hours,” Adam said. “About a half an hour before we’re scheduled to meet with the lawyer.”

“I could take Warren or Darryl,” I said. “You could sleep and go meet with the lawyers. I’d join you later for the police and keep my mouth shut. Possibly drool on your shoulder and snore.”

He shook his head. “No. I’ll drool and snore on you, too. The one thing that is not going to happen is you visiting the court jester of the evil undead alone.”

11

Wulfe’s house was in a housing development that had been an orchard ten years ago. The houses in this one almost escaped that “we were all designed by the same architect and you can pick one of three house plans” sameness. It had been in place long enough for hedges and greenery, but not quite long enough for big trees.

The neighborhood was firmly middle‑class, with mobile basketball hoops in front of the garage doors in driveways and swing sets in the backyards. The people who lived right next door to Wulfe had a giant cedar kid’s activity center–it was way too huge to be merely a swing set–and an aboveground swimming pool in their side yard. The side yard right next to Wulfe’s house. Those hadn’t been there the last time I’d visited.

Wulfe’s neighbors had a yappy little dog that started barking as soon as we pulled into Wulfe’s driveway. No lights turned on, and I bet that it yapped at cars driving by, cats trespassing in its yard, and bugs flying past the window. There is nothing more useless than a watchdog that barks at normal things the same way it does at a thief at the door.

“This is where Wulfe’s home is?” asked Adam, turning off the engine.

“I know,” I told him. “Blew my mind, too.”

He looked at the swimming pool. “I feel as though I need to warn them about what occupies the house next door.”

“If it helps,” I said. “They are probably the safest people in the Tri‑Cities. He’s not going to feed so close to home–and you can bet that nothing else is, either. Unless their yappy dog drives Wulfe crazy; then all bets are off.”

Adam shook his head and hopped out of the SUV. I jumped out of my side, too. I couldn’t see the ghosts. Vampires’ lairs always have ghosts, but they only show up when the vampires are asleep. I could feel them like a dozen eyes watching me from the shadows.

I met Adam in front of the house and let him approach and knock on the door while I kept an eye out behind us for an ambush. The man who opened the door had a line of big hickeys on his neck and wore nothing but a pair of jeans. When Adam wore nothing but his jeans, it was sexy; this guy was just disturbing. He wasn’t fat, but there was no muscle on him, just loose skin and softness where muscle should be, as though someone had siphoned all the muscle out and left him … dying. His eyes were dead already.

He didn’t really look at us. All of his attention was focused behind him even though his eyes were on us. “My master says you are to follow me,” he told us.

We entered the house. Though it looked spotlessly clean, the interior of the house smelled. I remembered that from the first time I had visited here, but it was worse than I remembered, as if I’d filtered some of it out in my memories. My nose caught the charnel‑house odors of blood, meat, feces, urine, and that odd smell of internal organs. Faintly but pervasively, I could smell an underlying scent of something rotting.

Adam took point, and I followed, watching behind us as I had on the porch. Wulfe’s sheep led us into the kitchen, where we were treated to the sight of Wulfe lying down on top of one of those 1950s chrome and green Formica kitchen tables. There were three chairs that matched the table: two of them were knocked over, and the third was tucked in where it belonged on the side of the table where Wulfe’s head was.

Like the guy who was ushering us into the house, Wulfe was naked from the waist up. Wulfe had been about fifteen when he was made a vampire, old enough to hint at the man he would never become. His ribs showed, and his skin was almost powder white, a shade paler than his hair. Last time I’d seen Wulfe, his hair had been buzzed, but it was longer now, maybe half an inch long, and it had been shaped.

He lay faceup, back slightly arched and eyes closed. One foot, wearing a purple Converse tennis shoe, was flat on the table, pushing his knee up. The other leg was outstretched, that foot bare and pointed like a ballet dancer’s. He’d painted his toenails green, and they matched the color of the Formica tabletop. I didn’t know if that was on purpose or not.

The light over the dining‑room table was on, and someone had put daylight bulbs in the fixture because the tabletop looked more like an operating table than a place people might sit down and eat breakfast.

“Wulfe,” Adam said dryly. “It’s what’s for dinner.”

“Yes!”Wulfe said, suddenly sitting cross‑legged and facing us. “See, Bryan? I told you he would get it!”

“Actually, you said shewould get it, master,” the man who’d let us in said.

Wulfe looked at him thoughtfully. “Am I still allowing you opinions?”

The man blinked at him.

“How long have you belonged to me, Bryan?”