I grinned and panted in the fine spray aimed at my face. Ah, refreshing. Mummy cats were pussies, literally, if that slowed them down. I kept on grinning as we chased Suyolak until he went to ground like all prey. I could do that, because it was all about the here and now. My cousin cursing at the wheel. Left-over fries to munch. A tug-of-war as a sex-starved puck unsuccessfully tried to steal my racy calendars while desperately declaring monogamy and celibacy as the number one killer, miles ahead of heart disease. Then, when he lost the tug-of-war, pulling out a white and gold peri feather to slowly run through his fingers-a sensation he seemed to be memorizing. There was also the Auphe unconsciously humming under his breath along with Barry Manilow on the radio, the sunglasses beginning to slide down his nose as he seemed to find a meditation groove-no matter how evil and unnatural Manilow was. The ninja/ samurai/assassin-could-be if didn’t-wannabe glancing sideways at his brother as if slicing his throat to stop the non-melody was out of the question, but the fantasy of it not completely so.

It was good, all of it. The future was a myth, the past as lost as the innocence that falls away with a baby’s first breath. The here and now…

It was what made life worth living.

We ended up back in Wyoming at Yellowstone Park right before twilight. I’d never been there before. Rangers wouldn’t let Sophia scam the tourists, so no parks for us as kids, but I damn sure knew a lot of red-light districts like the back of my hand. Then when Niko and I were on the run from the Auphe, hoping to hide as best as we could, wide-open spaces made up of thousands of acres weren’t what we were looking for. That was a Where’s Waldo? freebie right there.

Rafferty parked past the West Entrance just as most people were leaving, trickling out in carloads. We wouldn’t have made it in if the park ranger at the station hadn’t decided to keel over almost face- first into his beef stew. Luckily, he barely missed it and began snoring loudly enough that I hoped a passing lonely bear didn’t molest him. With an irritable healer along for the ride, who needed Obi-Wan and his hoodoo protection for what I’d always strongly suspected were his love droids?

Yeah, I almost jumped in with Robin to fight for Catcher’s calendars, but who could blame me? Delilah and I hadn’t had a whole lot of alone time on the trip and that had nothing to do with her possibly having orders to kill me. When you weighed possible death against certain sex, I was the same as any other guy-I was willing to toss those dice. But time hadn’t been kind to Cal junior. It wasn’t the best road trip I could’ve imagined-in that or any respect. Surrounded by death and very little sex, I could’ve gotten the same if I were a hundred and stuck in a nursing home-if there were nursing homes for Auphe. What a way to spend the prime of my life: all but celibate, attacked daily, more Auphe than I’d ever been, and with all the porn hogged by a monster-sized wolf in a butterfly collar.

Life pissed me the fuck off.

We drove to the first parking area we could find. It was empty by the time we arrived… except for a certain black truck. They said Death rode a pale horse. In fiction maybe, but in the real world, Death rode in a coffin in the back of a very plain, unnoticeable black truck. I was out of the car and at the back of that truck in seconds. Rafferty didn’t say anything to stop my progress, which was a good-enough go-ahead for me. If Suyolak had been there, I’d have been on the asphalt with a healer footprint on my back. Rafferty wasn’t letting anyone get ahead of him on this guy.

The doors were unlocked, which meant only one thing, but I opened them warily all the same. I’d seen what this guy could do. I’d felt what he could do. I’d nearly lost my life because of him and the twisted virus he’d turned loose at the hotel.

Dying was inevitable. You came into this world with an expiration date and there wasn’t much you could do about that. Like Rafferty had said, your heart has only so many beats in it. There were the unexpected ones too, like milk going bad a week early. It came with the territory when you fought for a living. I didn’t mind dying, the same way I didn’t mind winter. Both were coming, one way or the other. However, if I curdled early, I wanted to go out fighting all the way. I didn’t want to have some bubonic-plague-spreading asshole pointing a finger at me, and like that sour milk being poured down a drain, so I’d go-without landing a blow. Someday someone or something would kill me. Fact. But I wanted them to see the scars of that encounter every time they looked in a mirror.

Hugs and kisses from Cal Leandros, shithead.

The doors didn’t creak spookily. No reality show ghost hunters/plumbers jumped out to wave idiotic electronic toys to either detect those passed on or snake your sink. As if when you died and there was life after death, which I highly doubted, you’d hang around the place where you took the big dirt nap. Get thee to a beach and haunt it if you have no place better to go. People-stupid when they lived; potentially stupid when they died.

But this was no illusion of a haunting. It wasn’t the site of a vengeful mass murderer lying in wait either. It was only a truck… with a coffin in the back, a coffin made of metal and with the lid pushed to one side. “The seals are broken.”

I could’ve jumped at the deeply somber voice right at my ear. Instead, I chose to give my balls a moment to descend and crabbed over my shoulder, “Do you want me to piss my pants, Nik? Seriously? Isn’t the car a little fragrant enough at this point?”

“As entertaining a story as that would be to tell, you’re correct. I apologize.” He rested a hand on my shoulder and hoisted himself up into the truck, not that he needed the support. Then again, maybe we both needed it in the coming battle. Rafferty had said it himself: Suyolak was better than he was. If he went down, we would have to step up, very probably only to follow the healer right back down. Fighting a losing battle is one thing. Fighting an absolutely hopeless battle is a different thing altogether. It certainly made catchy slogans harder to come up with. “I’ll be back.” Well, no, I won’t. “Yippe ki yay, motherfucker.” Too upbeat. “Hasta la vista, baby.” Too temporary and so idiotically clichéd. “I regret I have but one life to give…” Okay, that I could see. I did regret I had but the one life and that it wasn’t enough to kill the bastard. When you were Auphe and that wasn’t enough to kill something, damn if you weren’t having a seriously bad day.

I followed my brother. There was grit under the soles of my shoes, lots of it-probably what was left of those seals Abelia-Roo hadn’t kept up to OSHA standards, thanks to that overblown ego of hers. I should’ve known that from the first second she spoke to us. Abelia was many things, bad ones, familiar ones from my childhood, but she was also sharp as they came. Sometimes sharp wasn’t enough, though. She had a heart on its last legs, but she wasn’t anywhere close to senile. She did think a lot of herself, however, a damn lot, more than Goodfellow did of himself, if possible. The seals had failed because, unlike Rafferty, she thought she was better than Suyolak. If she’d thought less of herself, tried harder and stayed on top of her duty, the seals, and the iron coffin would’ve been sealed tight as it had been all those generations before.

But now we were left with an empty metal box filled with dust and a smell like a cobwebbed attic that hung in your nose and lingered on the back of your tongue. “I’ve always enjoyed a challenge,” Niko remarked, sifting through the powder to lift something out. “I think perhaps there are other things I could enjoy instead. Bonsai trees, painting, forging my own weapons. The opportunities are endless.” He opened his hand to show me the small braid of several yellowed hairs. “Voodoo.”