The gray of a corpse.
Lots and lots of children, I'd thought. How lucky that hadn't happened. How amazingly lucky.
Fuck.
The small hand was curled next to the bodach's, a miniature shadow of a hideous counterpart. There was the glitter of sparkle polish on the tiny nails. Pink, I thought. Pink or lavender. It was hard to tell in the dark. I pulled the monster off her in one ragged motion.
"Hush, little baby." There was a heated breath on the skin of my feet and I looked down to see painted lips writhe in a grin baring bloodstained teeth. "Don't say a word. Not a word."
This time the serrated blade went into an eye, puncturing it like a rotten plum. And it didn't stop there. Neither did I.
By the time Niko found me I was sitting in the car. I'd kept the windows down to hear him on the off chance he called for help. It was a remote possibility at best. Like he'd said, we could handle a few bodachs. I might not be old enough to drink just yet and Niko only a little past that point, but we were adults. Big, grown men with even bigger weapons. We could take a bodach or two.
"Problems?" He leaned in the driver's-side window.
"You get them all?" I countered impassively with my own question. I didn't look up from the dashboard. I'd thought about turning on the radio as I waited. A distraction would've been… good. And although it was an old car with an even more ancient sound system and only one working speaker, the radio worked… mostly. But the thought of accidentally tuning in to a slow ballad made the silence seem sweet. No more soft, soft singing, not tonight.
The door opened and Niko slid behind the wheel. He wasn't much on letting me drive his elderly baby. Take out one fire hydrant and you're branded an insurance risk, go figure. From the corner of my eye I watched as he turned on the dome light and looked me over. I knew what he saw, a study in black bodach gore. It had splashed me liberally from my neck downward. I'd tried to wipe it off, but it was as sticky and thick as tar. Short of kerosene and a ruthlessly wielded scrub brush, the shit wasn't coming off. "You got them?" I repeated as he continued to study me in silence.
"That's a given," Niko said without an ounce of arrogance. "Although mine weren't quite as… mmm… permeable as yours." A finger touched an inky swath that coated the back of my hand. The blood clung to his finger and stretched between us, a clot of black spiderwebs, when he pulled away. Niko winced in empathy for the rough night I'd have cleaning off the stuff. "Maybe some sort of lotion mixed with a citrus juice will get it off. We'll experiment, come up with something." Heedless of the further mess on the back of my neck, he laid his hand there and squeezed lightly. "Now, what happened?"
There wasn't much point in putting it off. It wasn't anything I was prepared to share with anyone else, but Niko wasn't anyone. He was everyone, the only true family I'd ever known. And with him I wouldn't have to say the words. Raising my eyes to his, I let him see what lurked in mine.
"Ah, damn. Damn.'" For a fleeting moment, he rested his forehead against mine. Then he straightened to drop his hand from my neck and ask bleakly, "Where?"
"Top of the Ferris wheel." Along with the bits and pieces of the world's deadest bodach. Little girl lost and not a cop in sight. How could she not have been missed? I rubbed a hand across my mouth and exhaled, "A little girl."
Niko's thoughts were running along the same lines as mine. "It must not have taken her here at the carnival. Perhaps they're too unsure of their new hunting ground, don't have their bolt-holes set up just yet. She was probably taken from town. From her bed. Her parents may not even know that she's gone."
The carnival was upstate, about three and a half hours from our home in the city. On the outskirts of Hudson Falls, it would be simple enough for one or more of the bodachs to slip into town and disappear with a child—a child smelling of soap and toothpaste with her fingernails painted the color of Easter eggs.
"Did you touch her?"
It was a question I expected. Fact was, I almost had. Despite knowing better, I'd reached down to touch the curve of a still cheek, stopping myself only at the last second. "No. But she was there when I killed that son of a bitch. Not a lot of room in one of those cars." And if I stopped to think about it, really examine it, it would be safe to say bodach wasn't the only blood I was wearing. The dirt on my bare feet had a red tinge, one that didn't come from the muddy ground. Leaning my head back against the seat, I closed my eyes and said, "Can we go? I want to take a shower."
"We'll go," he promised. "I'll only be a minute." He climbed back out and I heard the murmur of his voice at the rear of the car.
"He didn't touch her, but there could still be DNA at the scene. I don't believe the police will buy a kidnapping by a literal boogeyman," Niko was saying with a dark irony. "And I'd like to keep my brother from being entered into a criminal database. I need you to clean it up. Thoroughly."
"What about the child?" That was our client's voice, gruff and bass enough to shake the glass in the car windows. He was… truthfully, I didn't know what he was. Maybe a giant of some kind, maybe not. He worked in the carnival sideshow as Bartholomew the Bull, World's Tallest Man. He might've been; I don't know. He was about eight feet. Damn big for a man, although not so much for a giant. The second mouth high on his forehead he kept concealed by a long hank of ginger-colored hair. The faint pattern of scales along his oversized jaw he passed off as bad skin, and the heavy gold hoop hanging bull fashion from his nose distracted from the overly liquid brown of his eyes. He did a good job of going stealth among the sheep, but it wouldn't stand up to an intense scrutiny, the kind that would come from a police investigation once kids started disappearing. Having the bodachs on his home turf was bad news for a live-and-let-live kind of monster, but Bart was a little too slow on his feet to catch them. Strong enough to rip them limb from limb, yeah, but just not quick enough.
And that's how we had ended up here. Half a year ago when we'd been on the run from the Auphe, we'd had to take money where we could get it. I'd used a fake ID to work in a bat and Niko had pulled body-guarding gigs for a guy who paid all his employees, including his accountant, under the table. Once we'd defeated my extended and bloodthirsty family, we'd had more options… but our talents were still fairly singular. Starting our own agency seemed a natural choice, at least for now. We planned on still doing the usual mundane babysitting of the famous, rich, and attention seeking. But there were other potential clients out there as well. We had more than one foot in the shadow world of the inhuman, and their money spent just the same. And this time we didn't limit ourselves to being bodyguards. If you had the money, we were willing to at least listen. Maybe we would discover if your favorite succubus was seeing you and only you. We might pull a job delivering a shipment of cursed jewelry. Or we could end up as glorified exterminators… like now. It sounded humorous, but it didn't feel that way. Not now.
"Put her in the water," came Niko's reluctant reply. "A pond, lake. Make it a place they'll soon find her, but also one that will take care of washing the evidence away or at the very least degrade it."
"And the bodachs?" Bartholomew ground between overlarge teeth, sounding more disgruntled. It could be he thought cleanup should be included in the price, but those are the breaks. We kill. We don't clean. You have to have some standards. I kept my eyes shut. I'd been swimming in bodach stench so long now I could barely even smell myself anymore. Turning my head to the side, I tried to surrender to the weariness seeping from my overstrained muscles.