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“What about Narcissus? He’s not still all mushy about Chimera, right?” I said.

“No, but the only time we’ve been allowed to see Narcissus, he was gagged.”

“Narcissus has a reputation,” Bobby Lee said, “of being a tough bastard. I don’t think he would have rolled over for them.”

Bacchus shrugged, and I finally freed my hand. “I don’t know,” the werehyena said, “but he couldn’t tell us to attack them. For all I know Chimera may have taken his tongue. He did that to Dionysus, my . . . lover.” He hugged himself, head down, eyes closed. “He gave me the tongue in a box wrapped with a ribbon.”

I’d been given a box once with pieces of people I cared about in it. I’d killed the ones who’d hurt them, killed them all. But the damage done to my friends had been permanent. Nothing I could do would fix it, because they’d been human; they didn’t grow back lost body parts.

Bacchus kept his eyes closed, his face very still, as if he were holding himself tight, afraid to lose control. I didn’t know what to say in the face of his pain. How did I go from trying to kill him to feeling bad for him? Maybe it was a girl thing, or maybe I’d been oversocialized as a child. Whatever the reason, I found myself wanting to help him, but not wanting to risk any of my own people. Cris was dead on the floor of Narcissus in Chains. I hadn’t known Cris long; his loss wasn’t that great to me, it just wasn’t. But if I went in there in force, I’d be risking people I would miss.

Still . . . “Can you draw a plan, a layout of the club, mark where everybody is being held?”

He opened his eyes, his expression surprised, the tears he’d been holding back trailing down his cheeks, forgotten. “You’ll help us?”

I shrugged, uncomfortable at the frantic relief in his eyes. “I’m not sure yet, but it doesn’t hurt to find out what we’d be up against.”

Bacchus took my hand again, pressed it to his cheek. I thought at first it was going to be some kind of hyena greeting, but he laid a soft kiss on my hand and let me go. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet, Bacchus, don’t thank me yet.” I didn’t say out loud that if the club looked too hard to take, like it would cost too many lives, I wouldn’t do it. I kept it to myself, because he might lie, make it seem easier. The person he loved was being tortured. People will do a lot of things for the person they love, even stupid things.

62

BOBBY LEE INSISTED on calling Rafael first thing. Nathaniel and Caleb helped me get Bacchus settled in the kitchen. He was still walking like things hurt. Gil had sat down at the end of the couch first thing, huddling. He’d been withdrawn since I told him to stop screaming. Normally, I’d have asked what was wrong, but screw it, I didn’t have time to baby-sit him right now.

The kitchen was dim and depressing with all the windows and the sliding glass door boarded over. We had to turn on all the lights. My sunny kitchen had been turned into a cave.

An hour later we had a fair map of the inside of the club. Bacchus knew the guard schedule for the hyenas but not for Chimera’s men. He did the best he could but said, “Chimera changes his routine, sometimes every day, at least every three days. One day he kept changing his orders every hour or so. It was weird, weirder even than normal for Chimera.”

“How unstable is he?” Bobby Lee asked.

Bacchus actually seemed to think about that for a second or two. I’d thought it was a rhetorical question; maybe I was wrong. “Sometimes he seems fine. Sometimes he’s so crazy it scares me. I think it even scares his own people.” Bacchus frowned then said, “I heard them say things, like he literally was getting crazier and they were afraid of him, too.”

The doorbell rang. It made me jump. Nathaniel jumped off the kitchen counter, where he’d been sitting. “I’ll get it.”

“Check and see who it is first,” I said.

He looked back over his shoulder, the look on his face clearly saying that I was telling him something he already knew. After months of sharing room and