They were just playing with us.

Blocking the rain, the gray light of the gate shimmered above me, hypnotic in the twists and turns of it. It slowed me for less than a second—I’d seen my share—but that was long enough. The hand came through to wrap around my throat, black nails snagging in my shirt and my flesh. I didn’t wait for the muscular jerk that would yank me into the light. I emptied my clip into it instead. As the bullets vanished, the hand against my skin spasmed tight enough to cut off my air, then went limp. When it did, the gate closed, leaving a pale arm severed at the elbow lying across my chest. Dark blood pooled on my stomach as the arm suddenly twitched, fingers opening and closing before slowly stilling, this time for good. Dr. Frankenstein couldn’t have done any better. “Shit.” I pried it off of my neck and with a lifetime of revulsion threw it to one side. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“So”—there was no whisper of drenched grass, no ghost of the faintest of footsteps, but suddenly Niko was looking down at me anyway—“other than that, how was your day?”

Actually the day had sucked ass before the park, during the park, and it didn’t look to be getting any better.

We’d called Promise and Georgina to warn them about the Auphe. Niko spoke to both of them; my call wouldn’t have been precisely welcome on George’s part. She had cut me out of her life as of that morning. I’d worked toward that for a year now and I’d finally gotten what I’d wanted, although I’d never really wanted it. But I had bad genes, and not wimpy little alcoholic or schizophrenic tendencies either. I had the DNA of Dahmer and Godzilla combined, and I wasn’t passing that on.

Promise was a vampire and George a psychic, when she wanted to be, and they weren’t helpless against the Auphe. Not completely. It didn’t make me feel any better. The Auphe were the Auphe.

Now we were here to warn the third person in our lives. He was a cocky, annoying, conceited, lazy son of a bitch. He was also a friend, one who’d had a few bad days of his own this week. He was currently holed up in his apartment and had been for three days. No one went out; no one went in. For a chronically social, not to mention horny, puck, that was alarming behavior.

I pounded on the door of his Chelsea apartment. I was slowly drying off; the rain had stopped not long after we’d left the park. “Goodfellow, open the hell up!”

There was silence, then a muffled but cutting reply. “How did you get in the building? You can’t afford to piss on the topiary out front much less walk through the door. Go away.” I heard something hit the door with a shattering of glass. “When I want to see belligerent, fashion-impaired monkeys, I’ll go to the zoo and watch the feces fly.”

That would be Rob Fellows, car salesman of the month, year, decade. Better known to us as Robin Goodfellow . . . Pan . . . Puck, whatever name he’d been passing off at the time. Immortal, stubborn, and could talk shit with the best of them. He’d also saved our lives more than once. That made his nonstop mouth a little more bearable.

“This lost its entertainment value as of yesterday.” Niko folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “Kick in the door.”

Unlike most siblings, I listen to my big brother. I kicked in the door. It was a good door—solid, thick. It took a few tries to get it open. There was quite a bit of damage—splintered wood, locks ripped free of the frame—none of which I planned on paying for. Goodfellow was right. I couldn’t afford to piss on his bushes, and he had money to burn. Besides, tough love was tough love. And right now that’s what the infamous Robin Goodfellow needed.

“Oh, good.” Wavy brown hair disheveled, green eyes bloodshot, the puck was sprawled on his couch in pajama bottoms and an open, wrinkled silk robe. “The Hardy Boys are here to show me the light.”

I walked into the apartment, which was an unholy mess. Considering his housekeeper, Seraglio, had been killed just days ago, that wasn’t much of a surprise. As she had been trying to kill us all at the time, I wasn’t crying a river over that. On the other hand, I still remembered how she’d made me peach pancakes. It was a concept that was hard to fathom. Pancakes and assassination. What a mix.

There were empty wine bottles everywhere I looked, littering the floor, the granite counters, and there was even one embedded in the screen of the plasma TV. Damn, I’d loved that TV.

I nudged a bottle out of my path, moved closer, and winced at the sheer volume of alcohol fumes seeping through Goodfellow’s pores. I had a good nose, as good as your average dog, thanks to my Auphe sperm donor. But even a normal human nose could’ve picked this up easily. “Jesus.” My eyes watered as I squinted at him. “How are you not dead?”

“I was there when the first grape was fermented,” he grunted. “It makes for a tolerance a fetus like you couldn’t begin to comprehend.”

“So you were the one who taught Bacchus to drink?” Niko asked with a gleam of skepticism in his gray eyes that came from a year’s familiarity with Goodfellow and his . . . er . . . exaggerations. He didn’t wait for the answer, instead making his way to the kitchen.

“Actually, I did. Of course, I think he’s in AA now.” Mournfully, he lifted a bottle into the air, then drank. “It is to weep.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” I sat on the massive rock crystal coffee table in front of him. “Okay, Robin, you deserved a little holing-up time, but now you’ve got to shake this off. The Auphe are back playing their games. They messed with Nik and me in the park. They could come here next. They were toying with us. They might be more serious with you. As in rip you open and get drunk on that alcohol you call blood. You have to be ready. Sober your ass up.”

“Gamo the Auphe.” Goodfellow had known the Auphe when people were still living in caves, gnawing on mammoth bones and picking fleas off one another. He had a healthy fear of and respect for them. Very healthy. At least up until now, apparently. “Bring them on.” He took another drink. “Lead their pasty asses hither. I’ll give them something to chew on.”

I wasn’t sure whether he meant his sword or himself, and that worried the hell out of me. He’d been through it, I knew, but I wasn’t sure how to deal with a depressed and ashamed puck. I’d never seen him less than confident—brazen as hell. Cocky and way too willing to show you why that word was appropriate in more ways than one. Anything different from that, I wouldn’t have been able to picture as of last week. Now . . . now I’d seen it and it wasn’t right. It wasn’t puck—it wasn’t Robin. I didn’t like it. Goodfellow had lived a long, long time. Now wasn’t the time to give up.

I reached over and snatched the bottle out of his hand. “Okay, fine, you fooled some people into worshipping you as a god. And, yeah, their descendants chased you for thousands of years, wanting to kill you for deserting them. So what? They failed. Get over it already.”

The glassy eyes blinked several times before he gave a slurred drawl. “You know, say it that way and it doesn’t sound so bad.” Of course it had been more than that. Two people had died—died very bloody, terrible deaths because of his massive puck ego, when he had been their “god.” He hadn’t meant for it to happen, but it had and that’s what had him in the bottle, not being worshipped and nearly killed by the last of his followers’ tribe. Speaking of bottles, he grabbed at it and missed. I’d seen Robin drink, but I’d only ever seen him drunk twice before. The first time had been when he’d met us, and the last time had been days ago. Both had been for only a few hours. This time, I would bet he’d spent every minute of these past three days like this.

“Look,” I said sharply, “we don’t care what you did back then. We only care what you do now. You’re a friend, and you were a friend to us when any person with the sense God gave a mentally challenged rock would’ve run the other way.”