The fact that she whispered as I passed her, “Who’s your daddy?” made her a stone-cold bitch and had me popping an extra pain pill. If Jack killed me in my sleep, I couldn’t say I’d be that sorry to go.
In the morning, if five thirty a.m. could be called morning, when Nik and I were walking through East River Park, I hadn’t stopped twitching at random moments. We were headed for the river itself. Goodfellow had said that if Bastet hadn’t known anything about Jack no one would, but Bastet had been afraid. She’d said it herself; Jack left the paien alone unless they pissed him off. She wasn’t willing to risk it. Neither had the Kin, they’d made that clear.
That didn’t mean I was ready to give up asking around. Bastet was afraid, the Kin were cautious, but there were some that were too stupid to be either of those. Jack had started off with a mad on for Niko and me for whatever unknown reason, so it wasn’t as if we could back off. He wanted Nik and I’d gotten in the way enough that he wanted me dead—Flock-worthy or not.
That meant we hit up our last informational option because off the top of my head I couldn’t think of anything else to burn down that wouldn’t kill people in the process. Once we would’ve gone to our top informant, Boggle, but we’d accidentally gotten two of her children killed by Grimm and it’d be a long time before she was over that. If ever. Boggle would kill anything and everything that moved, but she loved her litter of man-eaters.
But there was a vyodanoi that lived in the East River. I’d never used him . . . her . . . it—I had no idea about their reproduction or genders and I didn’t want to—but he came around the Ninth Circle on a weekly basis and was a helluva lot more chatty than his fellow vyodanoi. He seemed to have a rubbery leechlike extension on the pulse of the paien world in NYC. He knew things that would no doubt get him killed someday, but for now, he talked. And the more he drank, the more he talked, which was why I was carrying a jumbo-sized plastic bottle of vodka in each hand. Niko had commented the family-sized vodka was a truly classy five a.m. purchase. I told him they were out of grape-flavored condoms and beef jerky or I’d have thrown them in just to see the look on the clerk’s face at how I wined and dined my dates. Niko’s reply that that was actually a step up was uncalled for.
The bastard.
There was a reason the vodka was the cheap stuff. I doubted any vyodanoi I saw at the bar had ever seen Mother Russia because I hadn’t once seen one of them drinking the top-shelf vodka.
“You’re unusually tolerable this morning,” Niko observed as we walked through trampled grass and mud under a sky that was clinging tightly to the darkness of night, stubbornly refusing the dawn.
“I don’t want to talk about it. Promise is the devil,” I added darkly. “But other than that, I don’t want to talk about it.” Life was much easier when he was spending nights at her place. Thanks to Grimm and now Jack, I foresaw a good deal more twitching in my future.
“I’d say I feel sorry for you, but I’d be lying. After what you put me through when you were a kid on that subject, turnabout is fair play.” We’d reached the shore and I slid garbage—the seashells of NYC—out of the way while Niko spread two large garbage bags for us to sit on. We were likely to be here a good while. Boris, I didn’t know his real name . . . I didn’t know if vyodanoi had names . . . so I went with Boris. The vyodanoi species originated in Russia, so Boris was good enough, which made Niko and me Bullwinkle and Rocky. Joy. Regardless, Boris had his traditions.
He’d talk and he’d talk for free—the vodka didn’t count. Seven ninety-nine was practically free. What Boris did demand is you keep him company. He didn’t like to drink alone. When it came to passing along information, that wasn’t a preference. It was a rule. It was some Russian tradition, Goodfellow once mentioned when I brought it up. In Russia, if you were comfortable enough to get shit-faced with someone, that made you family.
I didn’t want to be Boris’s family, but sometimes you had to take one for the team.
“I am not at all fond of this plan,” Niko commented, sitting on the plastic he’d laid out. He assumed a lotus position that made my knees hurt just seeing it.