Okay, maybe he wasn't done ragging on me after all about the previous night, but it was said with acceptance. Exasperated acceptance, but acceptance still. I'd made my decision, gone through with it, and Niko was going to stand behind me on it. The swat he delivered to the back of my head as he stood and circled the table didn't change that. Gave it a helluva punctuation, though. "My hand's not quite as tired as I thought," he informed me.

I rubbed the area and scowled, "You can't smack out stubborn."

"Oh, I think you'd be very surprised what I can do when I put my mind to it. Promise will meet us here this evening and then…" He looked down at the swaddled axe and smiled. It was something Niko rarely did; he was usually more subtle in exhibiting his emotions—head-smacking aside. This smile, however, had its share. Anticipation, retribution, and an icy anger. Niko would walk out of here carrying a cello case, but it didn't look like music was going to soothe his beast, not until Sawney was back where he belonged. Dead and in minute pieces. Not surprisingly, I didn't have a problem with that. And the more old subway tunnels we ended up splashing through and the more rats we dodged, the less problem I had. Even if Sawney hadn't killed the people in the park and warehouse, even if he hadn't tried, fairly successfully, to turn me into dinner, I would've long lost any tolerance for him.

That night, as planned, we made our way into the tunnels through the SAS. The extension of the Q train to Second Avenue and Ninety-sixth Street was a great idea—and the city had been having that same idea for longer than I'd been alive. After all the false starts and financial disasters, there were enough half-built and abandoned tunnels to hide a hundred Sawneys.

Now, that was one crappy thought. One of that son of a bitch was plenty.

The water was thigh high in the latest tunnel we hit, a maintenance one long out of use, and cold enough that I'd lost the feeling in my feet and legs. This tunnel itself was inky black except for our flashlights, and the rats were big enough that at some point they must've mated with dogs. Great Danes from the looks of them. None of this was the worst I'd come across in my life, nowhere near. But after hours and hours of it, I was losing my patience, and I had considerably less of the commodity than my brother. It wasn't something I was good at.

"That last rat had a subway conductor in his mouth," I grunted. "You saw that, didn't you?"

"Don't exaggerate. It was a dead coyote and only a medium-sized one at that."

I rolled my eyes in Nik's direction to see if he really thought that made it better. From the raised eyebrow that met my gaze, apparently he did, and I sighed and sloshed on.

"The wildlife is varied and interesting." Promise was doing the same, to my left and slightly ahead of me. Although she didn't slosh when she moved through the water—she didn't make any sound at all. Even Niko, quasi-ninja extraordinaire, caused the faintest ripple now and again, but when Promise moved, you wanted to rub your eyes to verify that she was actually there at all. Then again, dressed all in black as she was, without the paleness of her hair and skin, your eyes would've let you down too.

I didn't know whether moving that silently was a skill vampires were born with or one they gained over the years of their long lives. While I was curious enough to ask, the cockroach as big as my hand that fell from above to land on my shoulder distracted me. The dead body that came floating by distracted me even further.

The mass slowly drifted toward us speared by our flashlights … a tangle of clothes and limbs, pallid white hands with fingers curled like the legs of drowned spiders. As the body came closer, I got a better look, and said with a grimace, "Leftovers?"

It wasn't a body. It was pieces of one. Two bloated arms and a leg ripped off from below an absent knee were wound up and trapped in sopping cloth as the entire mess of it floated along. It wasn't pleasant to look at and less pleasant to smell. There was no way to tell if Sawney's scent was mixed in this toxic soup somewhere. I had a good nose, but I wasn't a bloodhound.

"I guess 'waste not, want not' isn't a concept Sawney embraces." Niko bent for a closer examination. "Death occurred somewhere around two days ago from the looks of the decomposition."

It wasn't just a guess. There was a book sitting on one of our shelves that spelled out the stages of decomposition in a corpse…dry corpse, wet corpse, soggy…whatever you were looking for. I knew because I'd once used it to prop up one leg of the coffee table. Nik, on the other hand, had read it, memorized it, and on occasion the knowledge had come in very handy. Despite that, I still had no desire to crack that book.

"Two days, give or take, yes," Promise gave a confirming nod. Considering she was old enough to have lived through a time when vampires still fed on humans, she would probably know. She aimed her flashlight down the tunnel. "The question now is the distance they've traveled. How far is the larder they slipped from?"

There was only one way to find that out and we moved on. Promise had her hair in an intricate twist that was wound tightly around her head. Despite the delicacy of it and her large shadowed eyes, she didn't look out of place in this hellhole. She … I don't know…fit, in some strange way. From day one, if you'd asked me to picture her life, I would've imagined that every day of it was spent in elegance and quiet luxury. That she was to the manor born, as they say.

But she'd once given me the hint that that wasn't the truth, not her truth anyway. She hadn't gone into any detail, but I got the impression Promise had been born to dirt and hardship rather than silk and satin. Not all vampires had lived in a castle with bug-munching flunkies to wait on them hand and foot. I didn't know Promise's age, but it was possible she was old enough to have been born into some pretty rough times in history…for vampire or human. It would explain all the rich husbands with fastly approaching expiration dates she'd had. Our bodies might escape the conditions that made us, but our minds rarely do.

Whatever her origins, she moved through the tunnel as if it were an aisle in Sak's—boldly and comfortably. I followed and Niko pulled up the rear. Every fifteen minutes or so, Nik and I would switch off, but we kept Promise, her flashlight now turned off, in the lead. Vampire night vision was better than both of ours put together. When the revenants came, she spotted them several seconds before we did and raised a hand to halt us in our tracks.

To look at, they weren't so different from the body parts that had been carried our way—decomposing and hideous to behold. Nature's imitation of a corpse—slick putrid-appearing flesh, white-filmed eyes, and yellowed, rotting teeth framed by bloodless gums and a dead black tongue. Some of them wore filthy clothing; some of them wore nothing at all. An anatomically correct revenant is nothing to write home about…literally. With all their smooth mottled flesh, I had no idea how to tell the difference between male and female. But knowing how to kill them was info enough.

It wasn't too difficult…killing them. Although, if you just chopped a piece off, it would grow back— given enough time. Simple minds, simple nervous systems, Niko had explained disparagingly. Upright salamanders with an attitude, that's what I said. Bottom line, not that hard to kill, but if you didn't finish the job, a revenge-seeking revenant would show up a few months later sporting new limbs and a hard-on for a little mutilation of his own. The motto is "Make sure the imitation dead are the genuine dead."

So, when the first revenant appeared into the weak orange light ahead of us, I wasn't worried. When the next five showed themselves, I only pulled my Glock. I wasn't wasting the .50 and expensive rounds on these guys. But when the following sixteen slunk into sight, I did spend the time to be grateful that I didn't see Sawney with them. A revenant was a walk in the park, a couple of revenants…cake, but twenty-two? I'd been accused of being a little cocky, but I wasn't stupid. Certainly not that stupid. Twenty-two was going to be a workout, no way around it. Because revenants, when they wanted to be, were fast. They weren't the cheetahs of the preternatural world, but they were the hyenas. Their asses could move.