Scary thoughts. Scary, scary thoughts.

“Who’s your… ah… elderly friend… oh gamiseme tora.” The puck pulled his arm away so quickly, it was a wonder he didn’t yank it completely out of its socket. “The skila from the Sarzo piece of skata clan. Is this a nightmare? Zeus’s wandering prick, let it be a nightmare.” Goodfellow, as a puck, trickster, and used car salesman, had been put in charge of the previous bargaining with Abelia- Roo down in Florida. He claimed he was mentally scarred for life. I’d been there. I believed him.

“She wants us to find an iron coffin they seem to have ‘misplaced,’ ” Niko said dryly. “Perhaps they left it at a rest stop.”

“An iron coffin… an iron coffin? No. Suyolak? You’ve lost Suyolak? You have lost the Plague of the World?” Robin hissed. “You did not. You couldn’t have. You have one responsibility: to guard the evil you spawned, and you’ve let him escape?”

I looked curiously at Niko. He might not speak Rom, but if there was a monster, Rom or otherwise, he knew about it. He began speaking as casually as if he were telling a story about a well-known relative. The facts were at his fingertips and he did love to share those facts. “Suyolak, as legend goes, was a gypsy born almost a thousand years ago, one with a special gift. He had the knowledge of the cure for any illness, but he was chained to a rock. It was said should he break free, he would destroy the entire world. The Sarzo Clan wasn’t mentioned.”

“So he’s a healer. Why would a healer destroy the world? Why lock him up?” Admittedly, however, the coffin was more practical than a big rock; you never knew where the next condos would be going up.

Robin’s mouth curled with disgust. “The reason he has the knowledge of every cure is that he has the knowledge of every disease. Had, in his day, caused every disease. He’s an antihealer. You do recall something called the Black Death, do you not? Fleas may have spread it, but he was ground zero for the outbreak.”

Abelia-Roo’s black eyes didn’t blink as the truth came out. “It is so. He was a walking plague. Wherever he would go, people would sicken and die. He himself will not die; that cure he saves for himself. Age itself he tosses away.”

“And I’ll bet that was useful,” I said with scorn. “Send him to a town, make a couple of people sick, then come and cure them… for a price. I’m thinking like a Sarzo now, hey, Nik? Maybe I’m not Vayash after all.”

They still didn’t blink-like black marbles, those eyes. “It is said Suyolak grew to prefer killing over money or loyalty to the clan. He cured no longer. So, while he slept, exhausted by several of the prettiest girls of that day and drunk beyond oblivion, he was locked away beyond iron and zinc that his powers could not pass through. We carried him with us through the years, from country to country. He was our burden. All clans have one… a duty… a watch to carry out.”

I wondered if that made me the Vayash’s burden. Not that I was sure putting me in an iron box would do them any good. Healing was based on psychic talents, which were blocked by iron. Niko would be proud I remembered that. I didn’t have any idea if my traveling was based in the psychic realm, but I did know trying to put me in any kind of box was only going to end in my seeing how many Rom I could stuff in there… like clowns in a clown car-only with no way out.

“He is ours,” she went on, tucking the defensive bags away back under her shawl, “and now after all these years, hundreds, more, of bearing our burden without complaint, someone has taken him. Men with guns. Sarzo died to protect our duty. And if those who have taken him turn him loose… then Sara-la-Kali help us.” Her eyes pinned us. “Now, you, who owe us for the help we gave you in the past, must return him to us.”

Goodfellow protested immediately, his mobile face outraged, “We paid for that help and about ten times more than it was worth. I can’t hold my head up among the other tricksters for that.” Then, as inquisitive as he was angry, he asked, “How do you know he’s not dead? He could be bones in there. You haven’t opened it up to take a peek, have you?”

“And be struck blind, deaf, and dumb instantly, foolish puck? Or have my heart explode in my chest? No.” For the first time she seemed unsettled. “We heard him now and again. Through the iron, we would hear his screams of fury. His sly whispers of rewards for his release. His singing. The old songs… the ones for death. Dirges for any so suicidal as to try to look on his face.”

Her dried face shriveled further, cheeks hollowing. “Whoever took him, for whatever reason, it won’t matter. Once they set him free, birds will plummet from the sky. Fish will turn belly up. Every creature whose path he crosses will fall to a crumpled corpse.

“He will devour the world.”

“Why is it always the world?” I tossed at the wall one of the Nerf ninja stars I’d given Niko as a joke and watched it bounce. “Why is it never just half a block? Or Jersey? You know, something we could live without?” It was after work and almost four a.m., but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to see my bed any time soon unless I gave in.

I wasn’t giving in.

“Because life is a lesson to be learned, not recess for lazy-minded little boys.” Niko snatched the star from midair and tossed it himself. This time the foam imitation of a weapon actually embedded itself in the moss green wall. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. Niko not only defied belief, but physics too. “Have you heard back from Delilah regarding the park attack?”

“No. Either she’s busy on a job or sniffing around”-I grinned-“so to speak. To see what’s up.”

“And you’re sure they were Kin Wolves?” he persisted.

“Definitely. They brought a revenant.” Only werewolves in the Kin would be hanging around with a revenant. They used them as pure dumb muscle-usually for things the Kin found too boring or disgusting to do themselves and because they considered them completely expendable. I had to agree with them there.

“Since Delilah’s a wash for now,” I went on, “what about this job… this job we are so not going to take, right?” I crossed my arms across my chest from where I was reclined on our apartment couch. The apartment was a nice loft in SoHo thanks to a big payday we hadn’t expected… much nicer than anything we’d ever had. Up until then, we’d lived in anything from rat holes to trailers to not-quite-converted warehouses. But the sofa was the same one from our first days in New York almost three years ago. It was battle battered, repaired several times over, and perfectly hollowed out to the weight of my back and slothful ass. It took a long time to get furniture to fit the pickiest parts of my body.

“Plague of the World. A walking, talking, most likely extremely annoyed grim reaper out to destroy anything in his path. He also apparently lives forever. And you feel we should let this one pass?”

“You forgot he likes to sing,” I grumbled. “Maybe he’ll hit American Idol and that asshole Brit will humiliate him to death.” I didn’t watch reality TV. I was victimized by it. They turned it on in the bar. It was so hideous, you couldn’t ignore it and if I shot the TV, it’d come out of my pay-like everything else.

Niko looked at me with as much disappointment as if I’d admitted to eating puppies for a late- night snack. “You watch-”

“No,” I said, cutting him off. “I don’t. And I don’t work for Abelia-Roo either. She’s a liar. She almost got you killed. And she’s hornier than Robin, which scares the living shit out of me. Let her find someone else.”

He considered it for a moment, slipped the sneaker off one of my feet dangling over the sofa’s arm, and then beaned me in the forehead with it. “That, in case you were curious,” he said, “was social responsibility knocking at your door.”