by Rob Thurman
“Yeah, her hair was nice, neat; she combed it a lot, but that wasn’t what I was really looking at,” I responded.
He’d regarded me with disbelief and turned his need for psychotherapy on Niko as I’d planned. I wasn’t going to make any great breakthroughs in science or literature or even in the field of hangman obviously, but I’d been homeschooled by Niko. I knew what the word “comely” meant. I just didn’t have to admit it. I was thinking how it was worth the revenge Nik was bound to visit upon me, when Rafferty woke up and said sharply, “The next exit. Take the next exit.”
“What? Our Suyolak- napper go off the beaten path?” I asked.
“Yes, damn it. Now take the exit!”
It was getting more than a little weird not being the only foulmouthed, grouchy ass around. Maybe that was a reminder to me not to travel, to build no more gates—so I could retain my title as chief asshole on this cross-country trek. No more good moods for me if I wanted to retain my title. “Taking it already, Fluffy. Don’t go frothing at the mouth. They shoot your type for that, you know.”
The next exit happened to be yet another tiny town over the state line into Wyoming. It had a four-way stop, a post office, and a Dairy Queen coming soon—the big time. I didn’t see a single reason for making a pit stop or detouring here unless your rent payment was massively overdue and you needed stamps. Or you were a vegan witch who wanted to salt the earth of the junk- food giant before it was built. Curse the land and save some cows.
But I didn’t believe in magic or that Suyolak and his driver were that desperate to mail anything. Neither did Niko. “Why here?” he said from the seat behind me. “It’s early to stop for the night. Even if Suyolak is draining his kidnapper of life bit by bit, I can’t see him stopping this soon.”
“I don’t know. All I do know is they came this way and I can smell the sickness ahead. Somewhere is Suyolak’s taint, and people are either dead or dying. The son of a bitch is here.”
He was the healer. “Which way?” I demanded.
It was left and through the four-way stop, the adrenaline of that world-drawing tourist attraction was killing me there. We then turned onto another road, another, and finally onto gravel followed by dirt. It had taken a good half hour, if not longer.
The rearview mirror was empty. Abelia and her buddies had stopped on the gravel at least a mile back, not that they couldn’t have gotten farther. They could have, but after the zombie amoebas, they were giving us more space. Abelia might have the biggest baddest ovaries around—probably shot them at her enemies like cannon balls, but her clan members weren’t as tough as she was, and if anyone died a gruesome death, she would most definitely prefer it was us. And Delilah was annoyed enough that she’d kept going when we’d gotten off the interstate. But that didn’t bother me. Just as her possibly trying to kill me didn’t bother me. She was Kin, doing what Kin did. I’d gone into this whole thing—sex, part-time relationship—with open eyes. I didn’t have much right to bitch, and I didn’t have to feel anything I didn’t want to feel. I didn’t. That was that. My story, write it down.
I parked the car in front of a house surrounded by trees in the middle of nowhere. The driveway was packed dirt and longer than two city blocks. The whole thing should’ve been run-down and creepy, with broken windows, holes in the roof, a rotting clapboard, Halloween-style haunted house with a skeletal body or two down an abandoned well out back. It wasn’t. It was painted cheery yellow with pristine white shutters and some kind of flowers, blue and purple, surrounding the porch. There was even a rocking chair as immaculately painted as the shutters. I did not want to see Suyolak here, not in this impossibly cheerful house under an equally impossibly blue sky. I’d never be able to watch a Hallmark commercial again . . . because I spent so much time doing that anyway, but still. Nobody should be sick here. They should be gardening or some such shit. Playing with their golden retriever. Baking cookies. Washing their car. Not dying among the scent of blue and purple flowers.
But as grim as that might be, it wasn’t actually the point. “I don’t see a truck and I don’t see a coffin,” I said. As harsh as it was, we couldn’t stop every time Suyolak took a civilian down. If we did, we could lose him. If we did, he’d know, and he’d make sure we lost him by dropping everyone he could.
There was a rumbling growl behind me, throat vibrating and air ripping, and it wasn’t Catcher. “He’s here.” Rafferty vaulted over the door with wolf speed, but still in human form. Catcher was right behind him. Both hit the door at the same time and it went down in a shattered mess of wood and safety glass.
Salome was moving too—out of the car and then under it. Considering the number of revenants she’d taken down, that was not a good sign. I ignored it, though, and, with Niko and Robin, was on the porch and inside the house in seconds.
There was a neat and clean living room to the right, stairs leading up in the middle, and a dining room to the left. At the back of the dining room was an arched doorway to a sunny kitchen. There was a man on the black and white tiled floor in plain view. He wasn’t moving, and he wasn’t Suyolak. Sad to say, that made him a low priority. Niko was ahead of me on the stairs, Robin beside me, and Rafferty and Catcher already out of sight above us. That’s when I heard a howl loud enough you would’ve thought it would have blown off the roof. It wasn’t terrified, but it wasn’t a whoopee-here-comes-the-ice-cream-man yodel either. Catcher was not happy about something up there and a moment later I got to be unhappy about it too. We all did. There was enough unhappy about the situation to go around.
It was in the nursery—it and the mother, along with stuffed Pooh Bears and Tiggers here and there and more of them and their friends dancing in a mural painted on the wall behind the crib. It was just like the outside of the house—all too perfect; all too good to be true. That’s what you get for being happy and having it all. That’s what happens. Someone or something like Suyolak comes to take it away.
Or worse.
She sat in the rocking chair by the big, bright window. Her head was down, a long sweep of chestnut brown hair, gleaming and thick, hanging like a curtain over her face. I’d bet that the first thing her husband had noticed about her when they first met was that hair. It made you think of wild horses and beaches. Why? I don’t know. It just did.
Her hands cradled a large mound of stomach and she was singing . . . in Rom. I knew only the curse words. Sophia had been free with those, even if I didn’t know anything else, but I certainly recognized the language when I heard it or an archaic version of it.
It was a lullaby. Anyone, Rom or not, would’ve known that. The lilting harmony, the warm love and expectation . . . if only it hadn’t had to gurgle its way through a throat full of blood. She lifted her head to smile at us with red-coated teeth. “It’s a boy.” The red fluid trickled out of both sides of her mouth as she said it. “A boy.” One hand moved in a slow circle over her stomach. “Snips and snails and puppy dog tails.”
“Oh shit,” I muttered. I already had my gun out. She was sick, she was a victim, but she smelled so wrong, I didn’t know how Catcher and Rafferty were still in the room with her. There was decay and death and a smell of . . . hell . . . a human gone off. Like bad milk. It was the only way to describe it.
She coughed and scarlet sprayed into a fine mist in the air, but she was beyond noticing or caring. “My precious baby boy.” Her eyes were on us and the whites were pure blood. Proud. She looked so proud and so absolutely insane. “Here he comes.”
She was right. He did come or he tried. Under the swell of her stomach I saw movement. It looked like tiny fists pressed against the flesh from the inside. Whatever was trying to be born, I didn’t think was wanting to do it the old-fashioned way. I knew, knew that if it had its way, it would rip its way to freedom and blood would splatter on the highly polished wood floor that matched the too-good-to-be-true living room, the too-perfect-to-exist dining room one. The wood gleamed brilliantly enough, you could almost see your reflec
tion. I would’ve rather looked at that than looked at her, which with my past mirror phobia was saying something. But I didn’t. I kept my eyes up, because as much as I didn’t want to look, I didn’t want to die from carelessness either.
The woman in the rocker didn’t move as her stomach rippled, didn’t cry out in pain; she only kept smiling a beautiful, peaceful smile of joyful motherhood.
“Rafferty,” Niko rapped as Robin crossed himself; Robin, who was not only not Christian but one of the original pagan tricksters—pre-Christian and then some. I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t Christian either—I wasn’t anything, but if I’d known more than two lines of the Lord’s Prayer, I’d have been zipping right through it. Because this . . . this was horror-movie stuff where the devil was real, heads spun around, and Hell was just a zip code away.
“Do we kill it or not?” my brother demanded. His mouth was tight. He knew killing the baby—or what had been a baby—meant killing her as well, and he didn’t like it. But he would do it. Niko always did what he had to do, no matter the consequences to himself. He’d suffered enough consequences in his life for being a good man. If it came to that, I’d do it before I’d let him—but as it turned out, neither of us had to make the choice. Someone else did.
The healer shook his head and crouched a few feet away from her. His eyes unfocused and he shook his head again. “It’s not viable outside the womb, and she’s not viable for long either.”
No, she didn’t look it—twisted and warped, blood pouring out of her mouth, eyes, ears, dying from the poisonous thing inside her. And it was poisonous, as much as a truckload of cyanide. The Vayash had thought the same about me. If they hadn’t feared the Auphe so much, I was positive they would’ve dragged a pregnant Sophia off and made sure I never became a walking, talking reality. And I could understand that, believe it or not. If this was what they’d pictured, fuck . . . I wouldn’t have blamed them.
But I hadn’t turned out that way, so I still blamed them plenty, not for me, but for turning their backs on Niko. “You can’t heal her?” I asked, my gun still pointed. She was dying, a storybook mom in a fairy-tale house, and, damn, that sucked, but no way was I facing that thing inside her without a gun. I didn’t care what Rafferty said about its expiration date. If it got out . . . the last thing I wanted to face without a gun was a Suyolak mini-me.
“I could keep her alive, but I can’t heal her.” He ran a hand over his face hard enough to redden the skin, then reached over to touch her knee. Her eyes immediately went blank and she slumped forward limply. The thing inside of her still moved for a moment or two, distorting her stomach, but then it stilled too. Call me a chickenshit, but I was glad I hadn’t had to see it. I couldn’t imagine what it looked like now, but I was sure it was nothing like a newborn baby boy.
“What the hell kind of disease does this?” I dropped the muzzle of the gun to point at the blood splattered around her bare feet. There was a butterfly tattoo on her ankle, a color between red and pink. Rose—as rosy as her life had been before Suyolak had decided to play.
“Not a disease,” Rafferty responded as Niko ripped the sheer white curtains from the window and draped it over the woman’s still body. “Genes. Suyolak turned the fetus’s genes into a mirror image of his own.”
“Genetic tampering,” Nik said, turning to him. “You said he could do only so much in the coffin and that wasn’t much. Kill a few people with bacteria and viruses that already are available. Genetic manipulation is far beyond that.”
“He’s more than a thousand years old. How does he know about genes anyway?” I added, stepping back from the blood slowly pooling outward.
“First, genetic manipulation is assuming the patient lives. This . . . atrocity . . . never would’ve lived outside its mother and neither of them more than ten minutes. It was his mirror, to lure us here, and mirrors reflect, but mirrors don’t live or have the talent of what they imitate.”
“Easy to twist and destroy,” Robin said quietly. “Not so easy to remake a living creature and keep it that way.”
Catcher leaned against Rafferty’s leg as the healer said without emotion, “No. It’s not. As for genes, healers have known about genes since there were healers. Even if they didn’t know what to call them, they could still sense them, but there aren’t many strong enough to manipulate them.”
“Except for Suyolak?” Niko commented, leaving the “and you” silent. There was still another victim downstairs. Who the hell knew what he might do?
“Except for Suyolak . . . and right now all he can do is make a temporary mirror of himself to lure us off track and give his driver time to get farther away.” Rafferty’s eyes were lamps of gold now, rage directed at Suyolak, and I was thinking probably for him too. “The husband is dead. We need to go.”
“Is that your opinion, Hippocrates? Are you sure you wouldn’t want to wait around for monsters- made-from-scratch waiting to pop out just for the fun and distraction?” Robin asked acidly. Despite the fact he’d lived longer than we had and seen more than we ever would, he was still shaken. Hell, we all were, but Goodfellow was always the most vocal of us all. He had the guts to show what the rest of us hid. “Because this first was so enjoyable.”
“Shut up,” Raffety ground out between his teeth.
It didn’t stop Goodfellow. “The proud mother- to-be may have died a death from the most unsettling of horror movies, and the father is deceased on the kitchen floor, but that’s no reason we can’t stop, have an Irish coffee, and eat some cake on our way out. I’m quite sure she was a great cook. There’s bound to be sugar-and-butter-filled goodness somewhere in the refrigerator. We should enjoy. Because that would be more useful than anything you’ve done so far in this place.”
“Shut up.” This time it was me, saying it under my breath as I moved casually between the puck and the healer. “Really. Shut the hell up before he . . .” Well, there were so many things I could think of at the moment: pieces rotting and falling off; pieces I liked and preferred to keep. It didn’t pay to forget Rafferty was a healer, but he was a predator too—a carnivore; a massively pissed-off, guilting carnivore. Healer or predator, which came first? I preferred Suyolak found that out, not the rest of us.
“Shut up? You have the unmitigated gall to tell your elder and your superior in every way to shut up?” Robin was a predator too, only without the fur and fangs. We all were predators. But . . .
Niko finished my thought before I barely began it. “We are after Suyolak, not one another. I want civility, and I want it now. Do any disagree?” He didn’t idly swing his katana toward his feet as he normally did. Instead, he buried more than two inches of the blade into the bloody floor and didn’t look like he’d have a problem doing the same to flesh instead of wood. Rafferty and Goodfellow weren’t the only ones who were pissed. We all were: mad and more than a little rattled, not that we’d admit it. I’d seen a lot of killers in my day, some sane, some insane. I’d always thought the insane were the worst and we’d thought Suyolak the same way, but right now . . . Suyolak was too sane. Sociopathic, genocidal, but with a focus so crystal clear, it was like a laser. Burning. Blinding.
“Let’s go find this son of a bitch and do things to him that make this seem like a fucking baby shower,” I said with savage bite.
Robin exhaled and let his dissatisfaction with Rafferty go. “Fine. I refuse to admit I was out of line. I am never out of line. In fact, I created the line, but I will graciously skip the kitchen when we leave.”
That was the best we could hope for. Rafferty paid no attention to what was, for a puck, almost an apology, and headed for the stairs, Catcher at his heels. The rest of us turned to leave a nursery where Pooh had seen things no bear ever should. I grimaced and then gave Robin’s shoulder a light shove. “Which line did you come up with? The one you don’t cross or the one you jump over with both feet?” He glared back at me and his hand hovered near one of the daggers he kept tucked away.
“Naughty, naughty.”
I gave him a dark grin.
Niko, behind me, said abruptly, “It wasn’t much of a distraction, however, was it? Horrifying, yes, but time-consuming? Not by as much as would be worth the trouble. Suyolak had us following his false shadow for an hour at the most. Why did he bother if he couldn’t slow us down more than this?”
As answers went, the one we received was immediate and succinct.
First the detached garage out back blew up, and seconds later Niko’s car followed it.
Timing, as with women, gambling, fighting, and massive fiery destruction, really is everything.
10
Cal
A car fire wasn’t that much to see, whether it was in an already-engulfed garage or just out front in the open, not in comparison to other things I’d seen. An explosion was an entirely different animal from just a fire, but, hey, I’d been four seconds from ground zero of a nuclear one. Sort of. There was enough truth to that that a simple car explosion shouldn’t faze me; not that or the flames visible through the house’s shattered windows, front and back. And it didn’t . . . until all the ammunition in the trunk of Niko’s car started exploding with it. I carried a lot of guns and even more ammunition. Better safe than sorry; better lead than dead. There was enough in that trunk to start my own gun shop if we broke down in the Midwest with no way home, not that that was my plan, but it was good to be prepared. But now the stock was going up with the car and there wasn’t much we could do about it as we dived to the living room floor as bullets randomly slammed into the outside of the house and some came through the walls themselves. Until now, I never met an explosive, incendiary, or armor-piercing round that I didn’t like. That was the military for you. Six hundred bucks for a toilet while an armory sergeant was smuggling out whatever it would take to buy that big boat or pay for little Susie’s med school. And if he was busy, there was always eBay.