by Rob Thurman
Delilah pried her muzzle out of the cushions, aimed it at me, sighed. It was an odd sound as it went from lupine to human as she shifted back. She braced one elbow and propped her head up as her silver hair covered her shoulders and breasts like winter’s first snow. Winter’s first snow didn’t conceal very much. I was grateful for that. Exceedingly grateful and felt no shame. I was a puck. I couldn’t help myself by my very nature.
“No sense of humor.” That was the only thing that gave Delilah away as an All Wolf, nonhuman vocal cords. Slightly rough, like a purr, and fooled you into thinking she had an accent, instead of noticing she was a werewolf. “What happened, little goat? You used to see the fun in everything.”
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but I’d been good at faking it all my life. At this particular moment in this particular life, I couldn’t be bothered to fake humor, fun, or anything else that fell in that category.
“I have too many other things to deal with, all more important than you. My banker is Midas, and you know what he’ll do if the contract isn’t met.” Every paien knew of Midas. Most creatures had a tiny amount of gold in them, many trace elements in fact—Midas only cared about one. It was less than one-fourth a milligram in his entire body for your average individual. If the contract wasn’t satisfied, Midas would take that back from the one paid, from everyone in his family, from everyone in his extended family, from everyone in his business, to finally everyone in his species. It was such a small amount that you wouldn’t miss it at all if it weren’t for the fact that Midas killed you when he took it. That’s why I banked with him. Everyone tended to think that as a puck, a born con man, I didn’t deserve services for payment given. Midas kept them . . . honest.
I grinned as I did when I was one up on the competition, which was always, and pointed the blade at where her heart would beat under soft skin. “This wouldn’t be my first extinction, nor my second. Are you bored now? Is this all too tedious for you? Because I can call my banker any time of the day or night. He’s available twenty-four-seven and he loves his work.” It would take all the Wolves in the world drained and dead to have a hope of recouping two million. You worked with Midas when you wanted to keep someone honest, but you also worked with him when you felt you had nothing to lose.
I was feeling both of those.
I was feeling a little homicidal madness as well. I’d fought with Vikings. When I’d lost my temper then, their infamous Berserkers had feared me. Live as long as I have and vacations from reason were not unheard-of and in some of us, the norm. There was no therapy for lives millions of years too long, no mental institute capable of curing that. Although Freud had told me that I’d end up in one. Rude, quite so. That rudeness was why I’d talked him into a phallic obsession he’d take to his grave. Quite the competition.
I won.
“The Vigil?” I prodded Delilah with the tip of my sword, a crimson teardrop falling free to the carpet from between a pair of perfect breasts tipped with mouthwatering apricot. “Are we going to do better now? Fulfill the contract? Behave as good puppies should or do I let my banker foreclose on your life and the life of nearly everyone you know and every Wolf that ever howled?”
She flipped to all fours and growled. The position was more intimidating, oddly enough, in human form than it would’ve been in Wolf. Amber eyes stared at me through the rain of white hair that half hid her face. “Go.” The growling became the grind of gravel in her throat. “Contract will be kept. When it is over, I will split your ribs and eat your heart.”
“My heart? Good luck finding it. Bring a microscope.” I laughed and there was no denying it. It had nothing to do with humor or the slightest grasp of reason, and she could hear it.
Her claws extended to pierce the leather of the couch and she growled, “Rabid.”
At this particular moment, to a Wolf, I was indeed rabid as they understood it. “Temporarily,” I bared my teeth to match hers, “but do as the contract says, and you have no worries. Don’t and I’ll kill you before Midas can and let him have the rest of the Wolves.” I put the sword under my coat after saluting her with it and left.
I did snap a quick nude picture of her on my phone, but anyone I knew had to have seen that coming.
9
Caliban
I’d slept for two days straight, which hadn’t made Niko happy. Steering my sleepwalking self to the bathroom hadn’t made him any happier, but I hadn’t ruined the bed. Kudos for me—even as ruined as it already was.
Niko didn’t leave. At the deepest levels of unconsciousness, I knew he was there. When you spend your life waiting for a monster to explode through the window and take you to its personal hell, you get a sixth sense about not having someone watch your back when you can’t do it yourself. Nik watched my back while ordering pizza and Chinese food when he grew hungry. It smelled so bad that I didn’t want any part of either—and I ate New York hot dogs, which probably contained actual dog and a few victims of the Mafia. The human one. The Wolf one too; it could be. What did I know? Nik, I guessed, didn’t care, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
It’s hard to chew when you’re basically unconscious. I had tried. It meant a great deal to him, asleep or awake, I could tell. That all he was giving me was foodlike and not-so-much-foodlike meals to eat meant there was nothing else available. If tofu or soy was available for delivery, he’d have been forcing that down me instead. I stumbled with his assistance into the bathroom, and I slept. Eat, piss, and sleep—that was the cycle. The other issues were fine, eating and toilet breaks, but sleep was what I craved most. I slept hard, deep, and in spite of that, I dreamed.
I’d dreamed of him for the past few days—the boy who ran over misty green hills, who laughed when his brother chased him, who tried to ride sheep and ended up panicking them all, and who despised shoveling manure over the garden as punishment. The boy who existed but didn’t exist because I was supposed to forget him—forget and obey my guardian. Obey Goodfellow. But the boy didn’t agree and he wasn’t playing that game or any game—not this kid. The one with the darkest of red hair, almost black, and eyes darker—the color of a night’s sky before the moon and stars came out. Sometimes I thought I saw his throat covered in blood, but then it was gone. It didn’t seem to bother him. I followed his lead and didn’t let it bother me. His name was Cullen and he took no crap, then or now. He didn’t even take Goodfellow’s shit, but he thought we could trust whatever he was planning . . . for now.
There had to be a plan. Robin was always scheming.
Since Cullen was a kid in the know and this was nothing more than a dream, I had no problem with going along with him. “Lot of sheep in Scotland,” I mumbled. “Lots of sheep shit. Don’t blame you. Wouldn’t want to shovel that either.”
“Cal.” A hand was on my shoulder, shaking me. Someone . . . Nik was saying my name. I opened my eyes to see a stained and cracked ceiling, immediately identifiable as a no-tell motel anywhere in the continental United States. “You were talking in your sleep,” Niko said, resting his hand on my forehead. “About riding sheep.” He sounded tired but pleased. “Is there anything about your sex life you want to tell me about?”
Sheep? Oh, the dream. Green and blue and the red of genuine ruby, the exact wet shine and hue of blood. It was all a jumble that meant nothing now that I was awake.
“Awake? Yeah, I’m awake.” I yawned until my jaw ached and ignored the sheep remark. Niko didn’t need more ammunition to use in mocking me. I lifted my head from the pillow and glanced around, cataloguing the broken TV, the bent lamp, and a chair stained in enough ways that a CSI team would have a frigging orgasm or coronary, one of the two. There was a sharp pain to one temple and a sear of lava heat across my back. Shot. I’d been shot. We’d been fighting a Bakeneko and not doing that great a job of it when someone . . . the Vigil, had to be . . . had shot me. I’d gated us. We’d been back in our place and . . . nothing. It was a
blank. I had no memories after that. I sat up, oddly stiff and achy. “I feel like I’m ninety. How long have we been here? Hell, where is here?”
“Arkansas.” Nik didn’t sound happy about it as he cracked open a bottle of water and handed it to me.
“Arkansas?” I shuddered. “Why? Who hates us that much?”
“I suppose this could be considered Sophia’s fault, as we were working in a carnival here when you were thirteen. The field we set up in is behind this motel. Or it could be Robin’s fault for not asking me if I wanted you gating when you were too out of it to know what you were doing, in addition to being shot and having burned through the epinephrine you’d already injected. But with Grimm in our apartment, things were moving quickly, and I doubt he thought he had a choice if we were going to survive. I will make him understand in the future that if we have even a spare second and you’re down, he’s to ask me about gating. I’ll also give him a list of ages with better homes to return to, such as any of them were, should he feel the need to make suggestions again.”
Niko was pissed. I could see that Robin had a long, long talk in the future about suggestions and who was allowed to boss me around. It was one person, Nik, and Nik didn’t have any problem taking it to hand-to-hand or sword against sword if someone wanted to argue that. In any event, I’d gotten bossed by someone. I would’ve minded more, but the fact that I couldn’t remember much of anything after gating to our place and before doing the same to Arkansas had my choices at pretty much nil. If Robin hadn’t told me to gate, Grimm might’ve eaten me by now . . . or worse.
Didn’t you have to love a life where being eaten was the least objectionable entrée on your goddamn menu of “I’m screwed with a side order of roasted fuck”?
I tried sitting up to discover I was suddenly ninety years old. “Jesus, I know I was shot, but what the hell?” I winced and tried again, this time as stiff as I’d been in a three-year coma. With Niko’s assistance, I made it and tried moving my upper body at least to loosen it up.
“You most likely feel muscle pain, as you’ve slept for two days, other than letting me take you to the bathroom. The food you ate in bed, which wouldn’t reduce the arthritic feeling in the least. But you were stubborn. You refused to go to the table and eat,” Niko said with less sympathy than I thought I deserved.
“Big brother.” I turned my head away from the table by the blind-covered window and tried to control my gag reflex. “If you could smell what is on that table, you wouldn’t eat there either. I hope you didn’t. If you did, you probably have syphilis. If you were a woman, you’d be pregnant and have syphilis. Do me a favor. Stay away from the table.”
He slanted a glance of disbelief at me but opened the door to our room and shoved the table out before moving to sit on the edge of my bed. No one knew when I was or was not kidding as well as Nik did, and no one wanted to deal with pregnancy and syphilis. “How do you feel now, besides sore and stiff?”
I closed my eyes and roamed around my brain. My body was nothing. As long as I had all my limbs and wasn’t pinned under something that weighed roughly the same as a building, I could stay in the fight. It was a matter of how far you were willing to go. I’d been willing to go as far as necessary for my whole life. But the gating . . . that was different. No matter how determined I was, it could knock me down and keep me down, depending on the circumstances, one of the circumstances being when I’d first done it. When it was new, and I was younger, lacking in experience. If I was unconscious for a day and no more, I’d been doing exceptional.
“I’m good. I’m not sure why I slept so long unless it’s the same when I first started gating.” I yawned again. When that had happened, it took me down and out. One little gate could knock me out for a day back then.
But that didn’t seem right, did it? It wasn’t the same feeling of exhaustion. It was almost like I’d been drugged.
“Do not come back until tomorrow at the very soonest.”
“Odiemus.”
“Obey.”
Okay, that was weird. Weird instructions, weird foreign languages, more freaky dreams I couldn’t remember or shouldn’t remember, and my life was full of enough similar weirdness that I was going to ignore all of it. Whatever this was, if it was anything at all and not my brain cells being destroyed from the gating, I didn’t want to know.
I sincerely did not want to know.
Instead I went with what made sense. That when I’d started gating in the past, that gate would knock me out for hours. It took a while, but I’d improved until it was no worse than walking up a flight of stairs. If that was the case, I’d improve again. I opened my eyes, tangled a hand in Nik’s long braid, and held on. I’d started doing this when I was around fourteen, as soon as his hair was long enough, to get on his nerves, as little brothers do, but it had ended up as a reassurance, a habit to check that he was with me.
Neither of us missing, neither of us dead.
“If there’s a drugstore we can rob,” I offered, “I can gate us home no problem.”
Niko tapped a finger on my forehead. “I suppose the concussion you gained from being shot in the head is nothing?”
“It was a graze.” I yanked at his braid with less strength than I hoped, but that didn’t mean anything. “I gated already twice with this.” I dropped my head back on the pillow. “The first Vigil shooter was much better. The second one with a night scope should’ve dropped me like a bag of dirt. I hope they weren’t paying him much. He wasn’t worth it.”
“He was being attacked by a Kin Wolf while shooting at you. I think he should merit some respect. Shooting, and that close to accurately while being gutted by a werewolf, isn’t the same as serving Slurpees at the 7-Eleven,” Niko responded neutrally. He was torn between hating the guy for shooting me and having respect for him for doing it while basically being eaten alive. Niko did value commitment. I didn’t blame him. I’d have the same respect for the guy who’d shot me if I had Niko’s standards: duty first, dealing with the gnawing of your intestines second. I wasn’t Nik, though. If I was doing a contract for hire, I would be fee-first. If a Wolf showed up wanting to chow down on my internal organs, that would have me shooting the Wolf or running away—I would’ve already been paid, so screw the target, and the Wolf. The Vigil were not me, no proper sense of priorities, and wasn’t that too bad? The Vigil were too motivated for their own good.
There had to be easier jobs out there for an assassin.
If the Vigil had any sense, they’d hire me instead of trying to kill me. That was quasi-military organizations, like the Boy Scouts, for you all over. They couldn’t see the bigger picture. If they could, Boy Scouts would be selling cookies too, not getting their asses financially kicked by the Girl Scouts, have more money, afford more camping trips, up their training, and then the Vigil could’ve outsourced this job to them.
Okay, maybe not. The Vigil wasn’t thinking things through, not as much as they could have. I was hazardous to the extreme, but like the Cold War of the eighties with the nuclear policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, wouldn’t you rather I was on your side? Wouldn’t you want me as your fail-safe? Your Last Strike? Instead they’d come for me after I’d shown I was blatantly out of control. Who wants an out-of-control nuke? Not many people. Who’d piss off an out-of-control nuke?
Not many people. Stupid people. The Vigil. Apparently.
I was thinking about that, not happily, when I noticed I didn’t have a shirt. . . . Niko must’ve cut it off back at our apartment to bandage my back. I was considering stealing his when I felt the gates open. Three of them.
“Shit.” I catapulted out of bed, grabbed my pants folded over the CSI chair, and pulled them on before going for my boots, which were neatly lined up beside the tiny table between our two beds. “Gates. Three gates.”
Gates were no good. Gates that weren’t mine were extremely bad, but I had pants, which made t
he situation a little less of a nightmare. I didn’t see Nik’s katana anywhere in the room, nor did I see my shoulder holster or guns. I didn’t remember it, but it looked like I’d probably gated us out while Niko was doing some first aid on me, our weapons in a neat pile on Niko’s dresser. His anal-retentive neat fetish would get us killed yet.
“Grimm?” Niko yanked his shirt down—aerodynamic for the coming fight. It was the one that I wished I had the opportunity to swipe, a gray one I remembered from the Bakeneko hunt. It had been washed in the sink, was my bet, but still showing the faded brown bloodstains he’d gotten from me bleeding all over him. He snatched at his boots, gray to my black, just as quickly as I’d seized mine.
“No.” I slid my feet into my ten-year-old combat versions I’d bought at a military outlet place, broken in perfectly, and felt for the knives normally sheathed inside. They were still there. Fucking A.
“This feels different. Weaker, stranger, not Auphe. Bae.” Bae, the offspring of the half human/half Auphe Grimm and succubae, who if given the choice would have nothing to do with Grimm. Succubae hated the taste of the energy of the Auphe, part or whole.
A succubus had been the only one to gag after kissing me. At nineteen, that does serious damage to your ego. I didn’t know if the fact that it was my Auphe-tainted life energy was corrupted and disgusting to her delicate palate and that it had nothing to do with halitosis made me feel less revolting or more so. I would’ve been able to buy mouthwash, but there wasn’t anything I could do about having a dark and not particularly tasty life force.
Was this the time to be thinking about this?
No. Not so much.
“How did Grimm know to send them here? Robin sent us here by picking a random age. If they did catch him he wouldn’t be able to give us away, because even he wouldn’t know where we were. That was brave of him. I shouldn’t have threatened to kill him.” Niko pulled his own two blades from his boots. Italian poniards, sleek, narrow, and silver—they could slice you before you knew they were in the air and swinging at all. “But the fact remains that we don’t have any idea how Grimm knew where we went.”