“I’m not done yet. She almost got her way. That evil bitch almost got her way,” I said with an emotion so dark and jagged it cut more easily than all the blades I owned.

“You want me to call Promise and tell her?” he asked. “Fuck it. That’s a stupid question. I’ll call her.”

He did. I didn’t listen. I, who listened to everything, paid notice of the smallest detail, didn’t listen. I hadn’t listened to much since two a.m. I knew she would be hurt, even after Xolo’s effects had worn off and she remembered how she’d trusted her thief and liar of a daughter with such an unnatural ease, considering their history. I knew she would be shamed and guilty that Cherish had risked all our lives over a lie and a lust for power to equal the Auphe’s. I imagined she ached for me, although Cal couldn’t tell her exactly what Xolo had made me see. She would guess like Cal had guessed, and all the guesses in the world couldn’t equal what I’d seen. I’d seen Cal die twice in my life. Two failures to protect him; one real, one illusion, both as carved into my memory with the same sharp edges.

Could a four-year-old be held to a promise?

Yes.

Could he do it justice?

Not always.

We were headed for the subway when Delilah began to peel off in another direction, the jacket making her barely legal. Her copper eyes looked through me, one roughened pad of her finger touched my forehead, then my chest. “Sick. Run it out. Hunt it out. Fight it out.” She shook her head. “Or go to the woods and never come out.”

Because that’s what a sick wolf would do—go to the woods, whether the woods were trees or a jumble of empty buildings, and wait to die.

As far as I could tell, it was better than that hospital bed I’d spent that night in. The wolves weren’t wrong. Cal had been listening to Delilah, because he had us off the subway ten blocks from home and had us running it. Ten blocks was nothing compared to my normal regimen, but after the battle I barely remembered, it tired me.

But not too much. The moment we entered the apartment, I pulled my tanto knife out and savagely slashed the rug in front of the coffee table to shreds before tossing it into the hall. It was where I’d seen Cal, seen the circle of blood. I still saw it, not with my eyes, but I still saw it. I couldn’t have that thing in here. Not with me.

Cal closed the door behind the flying cloth and gave a light shrug. “Never liked it anyway. Too Pier 1.”

I stood in the center of the floor, with no idea where I should go or what I should do. “You keep dying,” I finally said. I didn’t mean for it to sound accusatory, but I thought that it did. So much for my lifelong vaunted self-control. “You keep dying, and I keep breaking my promise.”

“I’m still here, so you haven’t broken it yet.” He moved in and peeled off my coat. Stained in blood and fluids, it probably wasn’t salvageable, but he tossed it in the sink anyway. “But, yeah, I can see how it’d seem that way.” He took my arm and moved me toward the bathroom. “You were supposed to let me carry the weight this time, Nik, remember?” He turned on the shower. “And I did. At the last second, I figure out how to get rid of the Auphe. And guess what? You still get screwed.” Once possessed by a creature that had lived in mirrors, he’d had a fierce phobia of the reflective surfaces for nearly a year. Fighting the fading but still-lingering effects of it now, he looked at himself in the simple square of glass bolted to the wall. “I don’t look like so much to be such a huge damn Achilles heel, do I?”

I wondered how long it had been since he’d actually seen himself full-on, not just in quick snatches. His hair had grown since the phobia had started, but he kept it cut at shoulder length, so no change there. His face had become more lean, his brows darker and thicker, but his eyes . . . Once you’re no longer a small child, the color of your eyes doesn’t change, but what’s behind that color does. Whatever lurked there had gone darker in Cal. And then I looked at myself to see the same thing. After this week . . . after this night, I’d gone darker as well.

“I think I need a haircut.” His faint grin faded as he went on. “I’m probably going to die before you, Nik.” His eyes locked with mine in the reflection. “I’m not as good as you are. I’m not as smart. And it won’t be your fault. It’ll just be life and death and all the fuckups in between. You made a promise to yourself eighteen years ago when you should’ve been playing with Legos. Well, you did it. You kept me alive. Despite Sophia and the Auphe, you managed to keep my ass alive. Now let it go. It’s my responsibility from now on.” He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Keep watching my back, yeah, and I’ll keep watching yours, but bottom line . . . you’ve put your time in. If I go, it’s not because you failed. It’s because whoever I was taking on was better or luckier than me or, shit, I was just having a bad day. And, hell yeah, still kill the son of a bitch who took me out, make it hurt too, but . . .” The smile was dark, worried. “Just try to do it with a little less suicidal fury. Homicidal fury is good. Suicidal, bad. Got it?”

“And you’ll do the same if it goes the other way?” I already knew the answer to that. I’d seen him dive headfirst into death twice in the past year to save me. He’d do the same to follow me.

“Yeah.” He hung his head for at least a minute, then shook it ruefully. “We’re screwed, aren’t we? Okay.” He exhaled, straightened, and accepted it. I couldn’t do any less for him than he would do for me. “So we go out together, then. Just like with the Auphe. Sounds like a plan.” He pushed me toward the streaming water. “You’re a bloody mess. I doubt you want any souvenirs of tonight, much less spider intestinal goop on your leg.”

He left and I showered. When I was done, we sat side by side on my bed, his shoulder resting against mine to remind me what was true. I couldn’t even go in the living room without seeing the lie in vivid detail—an afterimage on the floor that was as bright and real to me as any camera’s flash. Like the night before, we watched the sky lighten. This time it wasn’t celebrating our freedom. This time it was me not being able to close my eyes for more than a minute without seeing Xolo’s handiwork, and it was Cal not letting me spend that time alone.

The sun came up on a new day.

I hoped it was Cherish’s last.

We ran our asses off in the next week. Literally. My jeans were getting a little looser. But if that’s what it took. I followed Delilah’s recipe—run, hunt, fight. Because she was right—Niko was sick. If I’d come home to find his dead body on the floor I’d have been sick too. Way past sick. Homicidal/suicidal—just opposite sides of the same coin.

And although Nik hadn’t said, my body had to have been on the floor, apparently with a lot of blood soaked into the rug around it. As the rug had been eight-by-six and he’d slashed it all to pieces, that illusionary pool of blood must’ve been pretty damn large. Pretty damn horrific.

When I’d seen him in the park, he’d been gone. What was left was a Niko-shaped weapon, a human killing machine. No emotion, no thought, no soul. Whatever he had seen on that floor couldn’t be erased by destroying a rug, but if it made him feel better, I was happy I’d held the door open for him to throw it through.

He didn’t talk much in the days after, not that Nik was ever one for running off at the mouth. So I did the talking for both of us. Considering my conversation skills—pretty damn lacking—he probably wished I’d died after all, but it kept him occupied. Occupied, annoyed—they were close, right? At the end of the week, finally . . . finally I got a swat to the back of my head when I asked whether werewolf sex or vampire sex deserved the most porno points.