Someone had shot me.

“Traitor!” The howls began. “No Wolf is such a coward. No Wolf kills out of reach. No Wolf.” The howls were everywhere now. “You are not a true Wolf. You are not our Alpha. You are not Wolf.”

It wasn’t Delilah’s voice. It wasn’t a single voice either. Three, maybe four. The rest of the pack, those left alive. They didn’t sound happy with Cabal. No, not happy at all. A white Wolf leaped over me and was gone-on a mission, not from Buddha, but I heard the sounds of that mission being completed. Snarls and growl after growl that would send shivers down your spine at how it took up every molecule of air around us. They call them a pack of wolves. They should call them a storm. A storm of wolves rolling over an ex-Alpha to wash this place clean of him. I didn’t shiver at the sound; I didn’t have the energy. I swallowed blood, touched my chest to feel more of it, and resumed my standard shit… shit… shit-only slower and with less enthusiasm.

Besides the sounds of Wolves fighting one another and dying, I heard the slice of metal sizzling through the air to hit flesh with a meaty thud. “How is he?” The voice cracked. “Merciful Charon, turn away. Another time we need a thrice-damned healer and he’s currently occupied dying himself.” Robin… Robin talking about Rafferty’s dying, talking about my dying. Well, hell, give a guy the benefit of the doubt. But it was also Robin protecting me while I was down, giving Niko a chance to check me out. Because there was nothing else for Nik to do. Like Robin with Ish, Niko couldn’t say good-bye. He’d done it once. I didn’t think he could ever say that again.

The moon gone from orange to red radiated a light so bloody, I wouldn’t have known where my own ended and the light began. Did I really want to see it pouring out of me that badly? Wasn’t suffocating in it enough?

“Cal.” Hands pulled me up so damn carefully until my head and upper shoulders were supported against him. Nik, on his knees, bent down the rest of the way to murmur in my ear. “It’s all right. Cabal shot you, but it’s all right. Rafferty will heal you.” Because Niko could never admit to himself again that I could die on him. It took months to drag him back from the hallucination of it, back to himself. I refused to let him go back there again. I wouldn’t let Cabal put him back there for real.

Cabal, a Wolf with a gun… a Wolf with a gun and damn good aim. His pack was right. That wasn’t the Wolf way. My reputation preceded me and that had caused a Wolf to do what a Wolf would not do, which in turn had a bullet proceeding into my chest… into one of my lungs from the blood that kept rising in my throat. Preceding and proceeding and hadn’t he bothered once to look past me to see the real monster? Rafferty was dying, Robin had said, and Niko refused to believe. If Rafferty did die, Suyolak would kill us all… to a man and to a Wolf, and my keeping my brother sane, instead of the usual other way around, wouldn’t be a problem.

Niko’s hand rested on my chest. I saw the dark fluid that ran between his fingers, instantly covering his hand. With his other, he dug in my left jeans pocket. “Messy. I can always depend on you to be so damn messy… yes. Your sheer lazy ways save your life. Why am I not surprised?” He pulled out a Twinkie wrapper, uncovered the wound by pulling up my shirt with bloody fingers, and spread the plastic wrapper to cover the gunshot wound with it. The air that had been whistling in and out stopped. A Hostess wrapper wasn’t the next best thing to sterile, especially with a bit of crème still left on it, but it did get the job done. I could breathe the tiniest bit better. One death by sucking chest wound slightly delayed. Go team.

Nik kept his hand pressed to the wound, keeping the plastic airtight. “Rafferty, now. Kill that bastard now!” The Ördögs were dying in droves around us, Robin no longer looking as if he didn’t know what to do with his sword. He was an avenging angel, righteous with fury. An avenging, very horny angel. Ishiah was rubbing off on him, the avenging part at least. The metal flashes of the blade were so fast, so damn quick, I didn’t know if I saw it at all or if it was the streaks of light that heralded the darkness of approaching unconsciousness.

“Nik?”

He looked down at me, grim and furious, at fate… at me. I didn’t blame him either way.

Six months ago I had died… only I hadn’t.

And I didn’t plan on doing it for real this soon either. I wouldn’t put him through that again. Not now. Not for as long as I could avoid it. I wouldn’t do that to my brother. That was the easy way out, and while I liked easy, for Nik, I would and could do the impossible.

I wasn’t going to die and neither was Rafferty.

I spoke again before he could, feeling the blood trickle down from the corners of my mouth, hearing the faint gurgle behind my words. “I fought with… my girlfriend today.” I sucked in a breath and kept going. “Ate a Big Mac. Lost part… of me. A good part. Human part. I fought… for my… life.” I grinned at him, more blood in the back of my throat, rising higher. “Don’t you… fucking dare… think I’m… done yet.”

His hand, calloused from years of training, fighting, weapons sparring, rested on my forehead. “Promise, you bastard?” His mouth had always been home to the most fleeting of smiles, the wry quirk of lips, the angry line when someone crossed his, the twist of pain, the curve of belief. It was curved now. He believed. Of all the times I’d almost died, I wasn’t going to let a simple bullet accomplish where far less mundane motherfuckers had failed.

“Promise.” My grin became something else-not the grin of a little brother, but one of what Rafferty had labeled me: old and new; chaos and control. I let my head fall to one side to see Rafferty and Suyolak. Rafferty was on his knees. Good, ruthless, and maybe he could’ve taken Suyolak if it hadn’t been for Catcher and the rest of us pulling him into the depths like an anchor. He was on his knees protecting us while he had one breath left in him, but protecting and fighting were too much against the Plague of the World.

Too bad I was the Plague of the World as well or what was left of them. Or better yet, something the world had never seen. Suyolak was wrong. It had seen him, a long time ago. It had only just seen me, the new me.

Something old, something new, something unlike anything on this earth. I would keep one promise to Nik, I thought, but I’d have to break another to do it. I’d thought I’d need a compelling reason or an act of God to open another gate.

Suyolak was the compelling reason.

I was the act of God.

I couldn’t open one and appear next to Suyolak to shoot him before he stopped my heart. He would kill me before I pulled the trigger as much as I’d wanted to believe differently. He’d kill me if I even aimed my gun. But he couldn’t kill me before a thought was sent flying his way. After maybe, but there’d be no after for him. There was something I could do all right… something he wouldn’t anticipate. Something no one would think of. Something I’d only this moment thought of. Something fun.

I opened the gate.

I opened it in him… inside of him.

Ever see Fourth of July fireworks?

This was better. He glowed, bright as the scarlet moon, then brighter, brilliant as the sun, if the sun were an explosion of blinding silver light. Now there was a silver lining to a dark day. The light shone through his skin, his eyes, his open mouth as he screamed. And he did scream, the Plague of the World. He screamed until every Ördög and Wolf left screamed with him.

Me?

I laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh as it fought its way through the tide of blood. Fun? Goddamn, yes, it was fun. I meant it, too, and I felt it in every part of me. He’d been a disease that had enjoyed every death he’d caused. Rafferty was supposed to be his cure. I wasn’t anything close to a cure. I was the fire that made the scorched-earth policy what it was. If you burned it, you killed it. If you ripped a hole in reality that sucked the majority of Suyolak’s internal organs and torso into a radioactive dimension that no one had the key to but me, it was close enough.