Afraid of him? No. Afraid for him? Every day. Every single day.

He came back with a bottle of something purple that consisted, per label, of nearly two percent genuine fruit juice. It was effort on his part and so, against my better judgment, I drank it. The chili cheese dog was half eaten and the rest tossed to the squirrels brave enough to face the onion fumes. There weren’t many.

“You only get one bitch-free one,” I reminded him as he tossed a piece of bread with mustard toward a squirrel sitting on a brightly colored swing set. “You shouldn’t waste it.”

“I know. Just not all that hungry.” He threw the last bit and wiped his hands on his jeans. After a minute of quiet, he said, “When I opened the gate, I had a flash . . . a feeling. It was what I was thinking before, but this . . .” He shrugged. “It might confirm it. I don’t think the Auphe are done playing with us, with you guys yet. I think they still want their fun. The end game is coming. . . .” When they would kill us and take him to an existence a thousand times worse than any death. “But right now?” he continued. Rubbing a thumb along the arm of the bench, he studied the faint rust smear as if it held the secrets of the universe, before looking up at me and saying flatly, “I think they still want to play. Pick you off one at a time and let the rest of us wallow in it. But . . .”

“But?” I prodded.

“I don’t know for sure. Hey, I’m only the diluted product.” He gave a humorless grin. “Watered-down whiskey. The half-and-half of the evil empire. But still good enough for stud service. Lucky me.” He gave a minute twitch that I saw him refuse to let grow into a shudder.

I ignored it. He would’ve wanted me to. Sometimes support is all that keeps us standing, and sometimes it’s what lets us give up and fall to our knees. So instead, I snorted. “Only you could make a dairy reference melodramatic.” If that were his best guess, that’s what we’d have to rely on, because the Auphe followed no logic of battle I’d read of. They had the driving purpose of a dying race. They had obsession and sadistic madness; it was a mixture that was difficult to predict.

“Also, I’ve been thinking. . . .”

“Thinking? That’s astounding, little brother,” I interrupted, tilting my head down to peer over the top of the dark glasses. “Would you like a gold star for that? I’d hate for excellence to go unrewarded.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he repeated between gritted teeth, “maybe we should ask Delilah about Oshossi. He could be holed up in Central Park or staying someplace else and just keeping his pets there. She might know.”

Or he could simply want to put off returning to where he’d lost control and opened up a gate to hell without even realizing it. Either way, I could see the benefit. He needed time, and we could use the information. Cherish wasn’t going to go away, no matter how tempting it was to wish that she would. At least she’d made the offer to stand on her own. That had meant something to Promise.

I checked my watch. We had another hour before we’d said we’d be back, and a quick trip to Delilah’s work shouldn’t get her noticed by the Auphe. “If anyone would know his movements, it would be the Kin,” I commented. “Is she at work this early?” An extra hour wasn’t going to have Cal forgetting about what had happened, but as for distracting . . . I thought Delilah was up to the task.

“Yeah,” he tried for a grin, but as with the chili dog, he only made it halfway through. “I think they have a breakfast buffet.”

He was right. The strip club did have a breakfast buffet. I avoided it like the plague it was. We sat at a table while Delilah, not as picky in her nutritional needs, methodically made her way through an entire pound of bacon. As bouncer, she apparently ate for free. At least it was cooked. She looked at me and shook her head as she delicately snapped another piece in half and chewed. “You fight like wolf and smell like sheep. Strange.” I wasn’t a complete vegetarian, but I was close, and I suppose to a wolf I did smell less than predatory. Cal, on the other hand, must have smelled like the great stalker of pepperoni and cheeseburgers that he was. A meat and nitrate eater through and through.

When she finally finished the pile of pork, she pushed the plate away and leaned elbows on the table. “You two come here. What happened to not safe? What happened to Auphe? What happened to no sex? No sex.” Blond eyebrows lifted mockingly in Cal’s direction. “You think you are so special? You think your dick is so . . .”

I gripped Cal’s shoulder sympathetically and decided that being elsewhere for this discussion was a good idea. I rose and crossed the room, dodging tables and early clientele. The bathroom was cleaner than I would’ve given it credit for. It was barely offensive at all . . . except for the incubus. He was one of the dancers, unless the leather chaps and G-string were simply personal-preference morning wear. With an incubus, you never knew. Like his sister succubi, he had blue and silver hair. It was tied back in a long tail that rested across skin that glittered like mother-of-pearl. Makeup and dye to those who didn’t know better. Liquid black eyes took me in as he finished his business. The lascivious smile he flashed me didn’t show his snake tongue, but I knew it was there.

One might think it odd for an incubus to work in a male strip club that catered to gay men, as opposed to one for women. It wasn’t. Incubi and succubi had one priority, and that was to suck a human dry of energy. The sex of their victim didn’t particularly matter. Did it matter to the average diner if his steak came from a cow or a bull? Incubi and succubi were no different. Male or female victims, they’d weaken or kill them and move on. I wondered how many customers had dropped dead of “heart attacks” since this one had started work here.

The Vigil had their philosophy: Humans were all fair game as long as you didn’t get noticed while eating them. Cal and I had once had a philosophy as well. You don’t bother us, and we won’t kill you. When you were on the run, you didn’t have time for other people’s problems or playing hunter to lions gone man-eater. You looked after your own and kept moving. But now we’d settled. This was our home. If the occasion arose that I could make it a slightly safer place . . .

And practice was practice.

I turned and opened the bathroom door. “Delilah,” I called in a low voice, knowing her wolf ears would pick it up easily over the thumping music. “Incubus. Yours or mine?”

She waved a hand and said loudly enough for my human hearing, “He started yesterday. My day off. Idiot human boss. Bad for business. Yours.”

I turned back and closed the door behind me. The incubus’s salacious smile turned to a baring of impressively long snake fangs. He had more than the teeth; he had the quicksilver agility of a snake as well. That helped him for nearly ten seconds—which was impressive for an incubus. They didn’t often have to fight. Their prey was usually more than willing. This one, though, he was more challenge than most. The bathroom was too cramped for the katana, and I pulled my shorter wakizashi sword in one hand and my tanto knife in the other. He reared back, then jerked toward me in an attempted strike. It got him gutted for his trouble. It didn’t stop him. He slithered backward, bones suddenly liquidly malleable. He streaked up one wall and across another before hurtling through the air at me. I swung my blade. A neck parted. Practice was over. Quickly.

Disappointing.

His body continued to writhe, serpentlike, for several moments, the nearly invisible scales whispering against the tile floor. When it stopped, I cleaned the cobalt blood from my blades with paper towels, and sheathed them. As I stepped out of the bathroom, Delilah was there to lock the door and slap an out-of-order sign on it. “Full now,” she said. “Will eat for lunch.”