by Rob Thurman
“Yeah, okay. I’ll call her,” I grumped. “A foot massage would’ve been nice, though.”
When I came back with a paper tucked under my arm and three bags, Robin was awake and Salome was following a homeless man around the parking lot. “Uh . . . Goodfellow?”
“She’s just playing,” he said dismissively. When he saw that didn’t quite put my mind at ease, he added, “Not serious play. We won’t have to stuff his body in the trunk or anything. What do you have against cats anyway?”
“Nothing . . . not against live ones that aren’t feline-shaped velociraptors.” I handed him a bag and put mine in the front seat—eminent domain, cat. Suck that up. Squatting rights were over. I also handed Niko a bag. “Plain yogurt, melon, and I bribed them to make you an egg white omelet. They cooked it in butter, but it was the best I could do. And you don’t have to massage my feet.”
“If only I could massage your brain into working,” he muttered, then exhaled, reaching out a hand to rest on top of my head and give me a light, affectionate push. “I apologize. It’s your decision, even if I think it’s an idiotically foolish one.” Nik did know how to make with the esteem boosters.
“Everyone deserves a chance.” Or the few people I liked deserved a chance. The rest of the world . . . eh. “You taught me that by giving me about seven more than I deserved.”
Before he could comment or give me any more ego-boosting brotherly compliments on my idiocy, a motorcycle rumbled behind me and came to a stop, going silent. “I’ll make sure there’s no problem,” I went on to promise him quietly.
“You talk of me, pretty boy? I cause trouble? Never.”
I’d smelled her over the motorcycle exhaust, but now I turned to see Delilah sitting on a pearl metallic white Harley. The paint almost exactly matched her hair, which was pulled back into a waist- length ponytail. She was wearing white riding leathers too, not to escape road rash. Wolves were too quick. If they crashed, they’d change in midair. If they did break a bone or two, they’d heal quickly in fur form. Delilah just liked to look good and she did look damn good in the leathers. Dark amber-tinted sunglasses hid equally amber eyes.
“I prefer the Godiva look, but it does have a certain superhero slickness to it,” Robin offered as he investigated the contents of his bag.
“Superhero. No fun.” She toed down the kickstand. “Supervillain.” She smiled, her teeth bright against her dark gold skin. “Queen of Wolves. Queen of World.”
“I guess that would make me one of your cabana boys,” I said dryly.
She climbed off the bike in one smooth motion. “Work on stamina; then we see. And dirty talk.” She shook her head with a disappointed clicking of her tongue. “Like Mormon with the dirty talk.”
Goodfellow choked on a bite of waffle. “You?” he coughed. “You’re bad at dirty talk? You said ‘Goddamn it to fucking hell’ in front of that Catholic priest and the two nuns in the restaurant the other day. And you are bad at dirty talk?”
There was a big difference between cursing like five shiploads of sailors and actual sexual dirty talk. “Just choke on the waffle and die already, okay?” I snapped.
“I mean, had I known you were so verbally impaired in the erotic area, I could’ve given you some pointers. Written a few hundred pages of my best lines down for you.” He stabbed another bite of waffle, obviously too entertained to bitch about how beneath him the food was. “I had to help rid you of that crippling virginity of yours, and considering your charming personality and wide variety of fashion-unique T-shirts and jeans, black, black, and more black, don’t think that didn’t take some doing. And now to know I sent an unskilled and untalented worker into my field of expertise, I can barely live with myself.” He pointed an accusing fork and waffle combo at Niko. “He’s your brother. Isn’t all this your responsibility?”
“Don’t I suffer enough?” Niko retorted. “He can easily outshoot any policeman on the New York City Police Department, but he can’t hit a target the size of a small watermelon from less than a foot away? Do you think yellow is actually a paint color I would choose for the bathroom wall behind the toilet if I had any other choice?” he asked with a resigned twitch of his lip.
This would’ve gone on for a while. It had in the past, but Abelia-Roo’s RV rolled up beside us. She stepped out a minute later, which happened to be at the same time Salome, who must have found the homeless guy too boring a prey, jumped up on the trunk of the Eldorado. The old Rom’s eyes, the spray of wrinkles around them deepening in disgust, flickered over us. “A traitor, an unholy half-breed, a goat, and a dog.” She nodded toward Salome. “The dead cat could do better than the four of you combined, I have little doubt.”
“Dog?” Delilah snarled with a genuine rumbling wolf growl. “Withered frog of old woman, will rip your arms and legs like sticks, tear your throat, piss in your foul mouth, then you know Wolf, not dog.”
Abelia shook her dusty black skirt and toyed with the earrings cascading in silvery chandeliers from her drooping earlobes while she flashed toothless gums in a superior smirk. “I have the finest and most special of herbs for a flea bath. Best among all the Rom. I’ll sell to you at the lowest price to be found. My word and my promise.”
And just like that, we were on the verge of a Rom banquet for Delilah while the rest of us ate French toast and omelets—right in the middle of the IHOP parking lot. Not that I had a problem with Delilah eating Abelia-Roo; there were simply better places for it. Canton, Ohio, was not New York. The weird, strange, the out-of-place; it would get noticed here. And we were all three. I got between Delilah and the old woman while Niko ushered our beloved employer back into her Candy Land RV.
“If you want to come with us, you can’t eat her,” I told Delilah, “at least not until after the job is over. Then snacks all around for all I care.”
She bared her teeth, but moved away back to her motorcycle and leaned against it as if Abelia wasn’t worthy of being eaten. Stringy. Maybe spoiled and maggoty in the heat. That settled, I tossed the paper to Niko when he came back to the car. “All ten kids are dead,” I said. Ten kids had been minding their own business. Then a truck drove by, and now those kids were headed six feet under—not to prom; not to homecoming; not to the science fair. They were gone for good. “Abelia tell you anything? How this could happen?”
Niko took his breakfast and started on it, although he didn’t look too enthusiastic. As it turned out, it had less to do with the cooking than with what Abelia-Roo had reluctantly admitted when he’d backed her into a corner. “It seems that our employer will admit the seals she spoke of earlier may be weakening through, of course, no fault of hers—of course,” he repeated, and Niko was not much on repeating himself. “It could only be that the zinc and iron powder she was sold was contaminated. How can she be held responsible for gadje selling chemicals that are inferior, less than pure?” The bite he took of his omelet was smooth and controlled, but if he’d let himself, he would’ve stabbed at the egg angrily. But that wasn’t my brother.
“Suyolak was able to do this shit just because one of Abelia’s subpar seals has the coffin leaking like a rusty hazardous waste barrel?” I asked, not particularly surprised—by Abelia or our luck.
“Now think what he can do if he gets out of the coffin,” Niko offered as he continued carving off pieces of his eggs with careful, controlled motions. “Nearly a thousand years of rage simmered to the sharpest of storming insanity. Damage so catastrophic that the Black Death will look like a forty-eight-hour flu.”
“So stocking up on cough medicine isn’t going to do us any good.” I’d reclaimed my seat before Salome could. Not that I got sick; I had an Auphe souped- up immune system, but I had the feeling that this Suyolak guy could take my immune system and tear through it like tissue paper. He might forget disease altogether and go for stopping my heart, burst vessels in my brain, or if that was too mundane, he could instead tie my intestines in a bow. I was sure he’d had a long time to think of a whole mass of
party tricks.
“Not a good deal, no,” my brother responded dryly, “which is why we’ll need Rafferty. We’ll also need to know if the truck is still on the Lincoln or not.”
“The waitress didn’t happen to mention a truck and a coffin, did she? A man weeping into his pancakes over his dying relative or just weeping fluids in general, green and puslike, perhaps?” Robin finished off his waffles, unfazed by his self-painted image. “And did she happen to be hot? Stunning? Worthy of a shred of my attention?”
“Believe it or not, no, she didn’t see anything. No big black trucks that anyone saw. And, yeah, she was hot . . . in that I-never-saw-a-sheet-cake-I-didn’t-like kind of way. I’d never seen knuckle hair on a woman before. Go for it. I’m sure Ishiah would understand your leap off the monogamy diving board into that pool.”
I opened my bag and had my French toast, cream cheese, blueberry deluxe down in three minutes flat. “So what now? Keep following the Lincoln?” And keep checking the Internet via Niko’s BlackBerry for disease outbreaks. Those were about our only choices. Canton wasn’t New York, but it was still far too big a city to stop at every gas station to ask questions.
“Go west, young man,” Robin confirmed with a yawn as he balled up the trash, tossed it at me, and took advantage of the free backseat to stretch out again.
Salome eyed me in the passenger seat, her grin less cheerful than usual, but she settled down on Robin’s stomach. And that had me wondering. . . . I looked around the parking lot, double-checking, and groaned, “Oh damn,” at the sight of a limp body hanging over the edge of a Dumpster. “You psycho cat from Hell, you didn’t. . . .” The legs at the Dumpster kicked and the homeless guy came back out with a prize of several bags of leftovers.
“Calm down,” Robin said dismissively. “She doesn’t kill humans.”
“How do you know for sure?” Niko asked pointedly.
“Because I spray her with a water bottle if she does. Very effective.”
Delilah, back on her Harley, pulled up on my side of the car. “Ride with me?” She patted the seat behind her with a coy smile. “Vibration can be interesting. Very interesting.”
I would bet it could. Delilah and I cruising down the highway, with me sitting in the politically incorrect “bitch seat” . . . There’d be some serious vibrations all right, but I just couldn’t do it. If she didn’t kill me, Nik would for giving her the opportunity. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure I’m that secure in my masculinity.”
She gave a snort down her elegant nose. “True. Why would you be?” Then she roared off while I continued to sit in a pimpmobile with fuzzy dice, feeling an odd kinship with the soft and easily squashed dual fluff balls hanging from the mirror. “You know,” I exhaled, “I’ve had better times on a job.”
Niko started the car. “When?”
I thought about it, then gave up. He was right. They all sucked in their own unique way, although with the Kin trouble, I expected this one to stand out. “Why don’t you drive already?” I growled.
He raised an eyebrow, punishingly turned the radio on to something that made even Salome howl in terror, and we were off on the Leandros Road Trip to Hell.
Meditation led to control—sometimes. Other times, meditation led to naps in the warm sun that streamed over the convertible. Take it a little further and naps led to dreams. And when the dreams turned into a nightmare, I wasn’t much surprised. With my life? Get real.
But there was a difference between this nightmare and my usual ones. It was startlingly clear. Normally I have only flashes of claws and teeth, darkness, and the sensation of falling, pain, and screaming. Fun. Flashes were all I wanted of that. I was into abstract dreaming. If you could frame one, you could sell it as art . . . extremely deranged, horrific art. This one, though—this one was crystal clear, painted not with a brush but with the sharp edges of a knife.
The day was gone. It was night with a moon so huge and brilliant that the horse cast shadows on the dried mud road. There were reins wrapped around my hand, and I knew if I turned my head, I’d see a gypsy wagon painted in red, yellow, and green, although the colors would be muted and faded even under this moon. A harvest moon—I had no idea what that meant, but I knew that’s what hung pregnant and heavy in the sky.
“It’s a time for the gadje to celebrate what they scrabbled in the dirt for. Their plump and juicy vegetables, which later on we’ll barter for, stealing those muddy farmers blind in the process. Then we’ll make a nice stew and drink wine to toast their stupidity. With full bellies, we’ll sleep with our wives or the willing wanton. The good old days.” The man was straddling the broad rump of the horse and facing me. He had hair to his shoulders. It was black like mine, but with a slight wave to it. He also had dusky skin, dark eyes, and a sly and cheerful smile. He was dressed in black pants and a rough, woven shirt. Cream or white, I couldn’t tell. Over that was an embroidered vest, his best festival gear. His feet were bare and dirty—roguish. He was a good- looking guy, Rom through and through. The women probably loved him, gadje and gypsy both. Robin would’ve jumped him in a heartbeat.
And that’s what made it disturbing when that smile widened. “And when we leave that farm, Mama, Papa, and their three little ones will be dead. Cholera. In minutes they’ll be rolling on the floor, clawing at their throats while bucketfuls of vomit gush from their mouths. Masses of it until they choke on it. I’ll let their dog live, though. I like dogs. Not that they like me.” He swayed with the horse and rested his hands on his knees. “They don’t like you either, eh, my friend? Because they know who you are, what you are, just as I know what you are.” The horse stopped and the man leaned slightly toward me. “I can cure you.”
That’s when he changed. The shoulder-length hair, its waves turned to tangled clumps, fell to his corpse- raddled feet. The clothes were rags and the body beneath them a skin-covered skeleton. The face was the same: a skull with skin; dingy teeth framed by shriveled lips. The hands that had been resting on his knees were now resting on mine. His nails were at least a foot long—thickened and yellow. They were twisted and corkscrewed, a graveyard party favor. The eyes were blank white orbs. There was nothing to see in a pitch-black coffin, was there? He’d kept himself alive . . . barely . . . all these years, devouring himself, but there was no point in wasting energy in keeping your vision if there was nothing to see.
“Suyolak.” I jammed a hand against his bony sternum and pushed him away from me. The horse was a skeleton now too, one covered with a dusty hide and a slow swish of a matted tail.
The living skull grinned. “The Plague of the World”—one perverted spiral of a nail touched my own chest—“meets the Unmaker of the World. What good Rom doesn’t like a little competition?” The nail was touching my chest, but I felt it in my head. “I could remake the Unmaker, Caliban. I could kill those worthless parts of you and let the better take over. You could be whole. For the first time in your life. One. Complete.”
There was an ache in my brain that sharpened to a stabbing pain. “You can’t make me human,” I gritted. “No one can.”
“Human?” The skull flew back and the laughter spiked the pain in my head to the nearly unbearable. “No, bar. No, my brother. I said cure, not castrate.” The white eyes glowed like the moon. “I’ll make you what you were meant to be all along. Auphe.” The nail flicked up as the palm of the desiccated hand moved to take its place on my chest. “So easy it would be, brother. You’re human on the outside only. Let me put you right. Let me cure you.”
For a second I saw myself as if I were separate from my body. I saw albino skin, jaggedly sharp angled joints, pointed chin, a legion of metal teeth, an acid rainfall of pallid hair, and eyes that were a blazing red inferno that would eat you alive.
If you didn’t already live there.
If it weren’t already home.
I woke up on the living room couch, trying to back my way through it. I’d already pulled my gun from its holster and was a millimeter of force
away from shooting our front door. With my other hand I was feeling desperately at my face. It was all I could do not to try to rip it off. But it was the same as it had always been. Human. No matter what that bastard said, I was at least half human. It didn’t seem like much, but it was. I wasn’t an Auphe in a cheap polyester human Halloween costume. No fucking way. I put the Eagle back in the holster, grip sweaty and tight, and drew in ragged lungfuls of air. Human—human enough. That was all that mattered—never mind how I ended up on the couch; never mind the pure-Auphe trick.
My cell phone rang. Not a big surprise. You went to sleep in a car somewhere in Ohio and woke up in your loft back in New York and that was going to make anyone’s sphincter pucker, even Niko’s. I ran a quick hand over my face again, just to make sure, and answered it. “It’s not my fault,” I said as soon as I flipped the phone open.
“Somehow I doubt that,” Niko said grimly. “Where are you?”
“Back at the loft. I had”—Jesus, how humiliating—“a bad dream. Either that or Suyolak paid me a visit. If I get to pick, I think I’ll take the dream.”
There was a pause. It was either Niko thinking, un-puckering, or both. Finally he said, “We can’t rule out that he did speak to you. Healers ‘talk’ to your body while they mend it. They tell the blood when to clot or when to thin, tumors to shrink. It’s a combination of telepathy, telekinesis, and skills as yet uncategorized. Your brain is part of your body. He well could have spoken to you while you slept and your conscious defenses were down. But as fascinating as I find all my own lectures to be, I’m more concerned with your building gates in your sleep.” I heard him take a deep breath and go on more evenly. “And how you’re going to get back here.”