Nightlife

by Rob Thurman

  Looking up, I saw Niko raise his eyebrows at Samuel and say gravely, "My ego is shattered." The words were joking, but his gray eyes were cool and distant, a frozen layer of unconcern over a lake of mistrust. I might be running out far in front, but I didn't have the corner on suspicion. Niko was smart as hell and wary as shit, and that had kept us alive. Had kept me free.

  But now would be the time, wouldn't it? This was the moment I would step up and say Samuel was okay. He wasn't a Grendel in the world's best human suit. Wasn't a crook. He was just your average Joe, a good guy, one I'd enjoyed talking to. So I should tell Nik that, right?

  Shit. Not in this lifetime.

  Yeah, Samuel seemed like he was all right, but realistically, I didn't know him from Adam. Snap judgments? I'd gotten over those about the time I was toilet trained. Swore off diapers and faith in the human experience all in one week. You had to admire my efficiency. "Niko, this is Samuel. He's with the band," I said neutrally before adding slyly, "Minion to the leather god."

  Niko kept pouring pretzels into a bowl, precisely to the rim, no less, no more. The Zen of pretzel arranging—it's long been a lost art. "Ah. The singer that time forgot. To be more exact, that the eighties forgot. His hair spray bill must be staggering."

  "You've got a lot of room to talk, Rapunzel," Samuel pointed out. "You're not exactly going for the brush cut look yourself."

  I grinned and reached over to tug on Niko's braid. "He's got you there."

  Samuel took a handful of pretzels, disturbing Niko's pristine sculpture of bread and salt. "You two brothers?"

  Niko gave him a narrow-eyed look, then repaired the damage. "That obvious, is it?" he asked blandly.

  "Oh yeah. You boys are just two sides to one coin." Samuel chewed with a marked lack of enthusiasm. "Man, Where'd you get these? Dumpster? Sawdust factory?"

  "How'd you know? You play the best joints; you get the best grub," I grunted. After serving some beers and a shot or two, I turned my attention back to Samuel. "You guys are pretty good. Retro, but harder than I'd have thought, Genghis's leather pants aside."

  Niko gave an inaudible humph. Inaudible, but heavy in the air nonetheless. "Yeah, yeah, Nik. It's not the Beatles, I know. No 'Long and Winding Road.'" I raised my eyes toward the empty, sterile heavens. To Niko there had been one band in existence; the rest was just derivative noise. "You were born old, you know that?"

  "Their work is timeless. It transcends the bubblegum pap that passes for music now. A Beatles song is a flawlessly executed kata. Anything else is simply wrestling in Jell-O," he returned with disdain.

  I snorted, "You're only hurting your argument there. Jell-O wrestling is even better than the mud kind." Behind Samuel, who was following our discussion with interest, the crowd parted like the Red Sea and the leather god himself appeared.

  A tousled mass of bleached blond hair was tossed a la Fabio over an overly muscled shoulder that had to owe something to steroids. A red silk, or its white-trash cousin polyester, shirt hung open to show a broad hairless chest with only one or two razor cuts. Manly sweat coated chiseled features as flame-hot blue eyes seared the air. Granted, the eyes were closer together than your average weasel found attractive, but otherwise Genghis knew how to take care of business. Business being fronting a band and keeping the horny little girls happy. A rough life, but someone had to lead it. The asshole.

  A hand tanned a suspiciously orange color slapped the bar. "Who the hell do I have to screw to get a beer in this place?"

  I considered and tilted my head toward Niko. "That," my brother commented coolly, "is almost as humorous as my fist inserted into your left nostril."

  Giving up the taunting while I was still mobile, I fetched a brewski for leather boy. "There you go, Mr. Khan. No whoring of your body necessary."

  Offset eyes gave me a disinterested once-over. After all, I wasn't a band babe. Hell, I wasn't even a woman. No record exec, no one who could advance his career in the slightest… just Joe Blow bartender, so far below the radar that I didn't even register.

  His next beer I'd spit in.

  He took a swig of the beer, wiping off the foam mustache with the back of his hand. "Friends of yours, Grainger? You're sure spending enough time over here. Thought we were going to do another sound check."

  "We've done ten, Roy," Samuel said with only a glimmer of a strained quality to his patience. "The equipment's fine." Then he added under his breath, "It's your voice that's the problem."

  It was the faintest whisper and passed by Genghis completely. Not by me, though. I had good ears too. Not pointed maybe, but sharper than ordinary. Not bothering to smother the sardonic quirk of my lips, I felt it widen into a full-fledged smirk when the singer hissed, "It's Genghis. Jesus Christ, Grainger." Finishing the beer in one long gulp, he slammed the mug down. "We're back on in five if you can tear yourself away."

  I waved at his back as he disappeared into the crowd. "Nice guy. Salt of the earth. The stick up his ass is just a bonus."

  "Let us not make light of the rectally challenged." Niko disposed of the mug with disdain, wiping his hand thoroughly on a towel afterward. "The condition is no doubt congenital. Completely beyond his control."

  "You've got that right." Samuel stood and gave us a faintly apologetic grimace. "A born asshole. But it's his band, his van, and my cross to bear until a better gig comes along." Ramming hands into the pockets of his jeans, he aimed a jaundiced look at the makeshift stage where Genghis was waving an imperious hand. Turning back to Niko and me, he gave us a companionable nod. "See you guys Friday."

  "Back for another show? Damn, seriously?" I couldn't keep a sliver of disbelief from my voice. They had packed the place, but still… make playing this hole-in-the-wall a regular thing? What the hell for?

  A philosophical smile lightened Samuel's dark features. "It's a dump, no doubt. But the competition is fierce out there. Sometimes you take what you can get until something better comes along."

  True. True words. But truer ones might be that sometimes you got out while the getting was good. But that was my motto and I didn't share it with Samuel. And I didn't tell him that by Friday Niko and I would be long gone. We'd be a soon forgotten memory, the same as we were to so many people already. Just ghosts. Because in a world of monsters, you had to be a ghost to survive.

  Chapter Five

  The next morning I was dressed and out before Niko. As events went, unprecedented wasn't the word. Desperate situations… I didn't have any illusions that my brother had slept soundly through my leaving. I wouldn't have even wanted him to, not with the threat of the Grendels looming. As it was, I simply skipped out on the last fifteen minutes of my watch duty. I knew Niko would wake up the moment I opened the front door, and more than that, he would know exactly where I had gone, and why. A note wasn't needed. But I didn't understand why my feet carried me there.

  Or maybe I didn't want to.

  It was too early for the soda shop to be open. I knew that. I also knew it would be open anyway. And I knew George would be waiting for me. How I knew, I couldn't say, and the headache that analyzing it would cause wasn't something I aspired to. So, as with so many things in my life, I let it go. I let it go and walked on.

  When I reached the shop the security gate was already up and George was standing at the door. In a slim sweater of jumbled golds, reds, and browns and the silky sweep of a dark bronze skirt, she watched my approach with her arms wrapped around her waist. She looked older. Such a short time had passed since she'd been giggling and drinking her pineapple shake, yet it could've been years, from the haunted quality of her eyes. Through the glass, the bright copper of her hair was muted, the gold of her skin tarnished… a shadow of the Georgina I knew.

  I stood and looked at her, just looked. It was easy to picture my hand rising to grasp the handle and pull the door open. I could see it so clearly, yet my hand didn't move from my side. Maybe it knew what part of me didn't want to admit. The door was locked. If I tried to open it, it wouldn'
t budge. I knew that in the same way I knew George would be here.

  She didn't say anything, my girl. Not a word. She only watched me in return with a smile so wistful and fleeting that I might have imagined it. Then she leaned a few inches closer and her lips grazed the glass to frost it with her breath. In the fog her finger traced a few curving lines, simple and spare. And then she was gone. Disappearing into the gloom of the lightless shop, she was the autumn glitter of dying leaves and then she was nothing. Nothing to hold in your hand, nothing to catch the eye. Nothing at all.

  Her breath the only thing left behind, my finger followed the same path hers had taken. I frowned. A car. She'd drawn a car. What the hell? As the glass warmed, even that vanished, the same as its maker. Knowing how it would end, I tried the door anyway. I'd been right.

  Locked.

  By the time I made it home Niko was up and packing. It was a ritual for him, done in just the same way every time. As for me… we'd been on the run for so long, Niko and me, that I'd stopped putting our personal touches on the places we stayed. Because in the end, that's all they were… places. They weren't homes, just disposable living space. Forget that and one day you might slow down; you might take the time to regret your loss. And if that happened, if you took one second to mourn what you were leaving behind, well, your ass was grass. Devil takes the hindmost, but Grendels went one better. They took the middlemost and even the front-runners if there was the smallest misstep.

  All this bleak and impersonal existence might scar the soul, but hey, it was a nice bonus if you were a chronically lazy bastard like myself. Packing usually consisted of shoving my dirty laundry in a garbage bag and putting on my shoes. Sixty seconds max. The excruciatingly efficient Niko tended to take longer. That might've been surprising had he not had so many sharp pointy things to gather up. We didn't quite need a U-Haul for all his weapons, but it was a near thing.

  Walking into his room, I leaned around him to extend a finger and run it along the smooth, silver satin of an elegant dagger. "The acid of skin is detrimental to the metal," Niko said mildly as he rolled another blade in a length of dark green felt. He didn't mention my absence and I was grateful for the restraint.

  "And all the blood is like mother's milk," I snorted, raising a different and more eloquent finger for his perusal.

  "Actually…" He curved his lips in a contemplative shadow of a smile. "Never mind."

  I lowered my finger before he took the notion to treat it like a wishbone. "So when do we pull out, Master? In the morning?"

  "Patience, Grasshopper." Rapping me reprovingly across the knuckles with the swaddled weapon, he went on. "He who makes haste risks falling from the path of enlightenment."

  And suddenly George's good-bye to me made sense. Swearing, I fell back against the wall, the mattress creaking and complaining beneath me. "It's your car again, isn't it? Your goddamn hunk-of-junk car." The same hunk of junk I spent more than my fair share of time moving from one side of the street to the other to save it from the wrath of the boot.

  I would never see Niko looking sheepish. It simply wasn't in him. But he did shift minutely, almost a whole millimeter, and his nose somehow or another became more hawkish. "She runs reliably nearly seventy-five percent of the time. For the money that's more than acceptable."

  Seventy-five percent of the time wasn't so great when you were on the run all of the time. And wasn't this a blast from the past? The last time we'd had this conversation, I'd taken a walk on the Grendel side. Here was hoping we didn't have a rerun of that little experience. Still, I had no real desire to bring up that nugget of ancient history, so I kept my mouth shut for once and quietly watched as Niko continued to pack.

  Not fooled for a moment by my silence, Niko zipped up the long duffel bag and set it easily on the floor. "I honestly don't believe there is any desperate hurry, Cal. Boggle has his muddy ear to the ground. If he's not heard anything, chances are, that Grendel was a lone anomaly." His eyes narrowed. "A lone ex-anomaly, if you will. In any event I believe we comfortably have a few days to get things in order." Clearing his throat, he added offhandedly, "Perhaps buy a new car."

  "You think?" I drawled sarcastically.

  Niko was as deadly with a headlock as he was with a sword. He had me in one before I could blink. With his mouth close to my ear, he warned mildly, "Be careful, little brother. Any further comments from the peanut gallery and I may just purchase a motorcycle. Perhaps strap you to the handlebars when we leave town."

  "Couldn't be any worse than that death trap we're rattling around in now." I feinted an elbow at his gut and then simultaneously hooked a foot around his ankle and bit him on the arm. Niko went down and I landed on top of him hard. Rolling off, I bounced to my feet and aimed a one-two punch at the air. "Put 'em up. Put 'em up. I'll take ya with one paw tied behind my back." It was faked, the humor, but Niko went along regardless. He wasn't one to let me stew.

  Niko snorted through his long nose, sitting up with ease. "The lion? Hardly. Toto maybe. A member of the Lollipop Guild on your very best day."

  Triumph over Nik wasn't something to be wasted, no matter how black my mood, and I gave him a faint grin. "Sore loser." Reaching down a hand, I heaved him to his feet. I was under no illusion that I'd actually taken Niko down. It was a simple move he himself had taught me and one he was more than prepared against. Every day in every way, my brother was testing me, teaching me. I rubbed my thumb over the faint bite impressions in the skin of his arm. "Maybe we should put some barbecue sauce on that."

  This time I was the one who went down. And it damn sure wasn't a legal move. After all, how often is a Grendel going to give me an atomic wedgie?

  An hour later we hit the streets in search of a good used car. We started in Brooklyn but kept New Jersey open as an option. A scary last-ditch option. Grendels had nothing on a Jersey car salesman. Emerging from the womblike darkness of the subway and a heavy nap full of copper and glass dreams, I blinked at the bright sunlight that spilled out of a piercingly blue October sky.

  Grumbling incoherently, I fished in my jacket pocket for sunglasses.

  "Fear not, night dweller," Niko said with mocking gravity. "It is merely the sun, something you would see more often if you would roll out of bed before late afternoon."

  I would never know if my morning sluggishness was inherited (the Grendels had obvious nocturnal preferences), or just sheer human laziness on my part. Either way Niko was damn hard to take this early. Rolling my shoulders, I snarled silently and kept trudging down the sidewalk, brightening only when I spotted a hot dog stand a block down. Five minutes later I was happily buried face-first in a chili cheese dog heaped with onions and relish. Everything but the kitchen sink—just the way I liked it. It really was the simple things in life that kept you going.

  Niko kept his distance, claiming the fumes were making his eyes water. Big baby. He wouldn't touch anything that was even remotely in the mystery meat family. "Do you have even the vaguest idea what is in that thing?" He eyed the dripping dog with distaste.

  "Nope." I took another bite. "I've carefully avoided that knowledge my entire life just so I could enjoy this one moment. You mind?"

  He folded his arms and gave me an exasperated look I was more than familiar with. "It does no good to survive the Grendels if you lodge a mass of shredded rat and chicken lips in your heart. Not to mention dissolving your intestines altogether."

  There was more of the same, but I tuned it out and savored the bliss that only a New York hot dog can give. By the time we reached the tiny car lot I was licking the last of the orange chili off my fingers. While I might have been able to ignore my brother, he was incapable of ignoring me when I was at my Miss Manners best. Hissing between clenched teeth, he fished a clean napkin out of his own pocket and pressed it into my hands. "Do me the favor of rising from the preschool hygiene level." The gray eyes narrowed. "In fact you'd also be doing yourself a favor." Niko was good at threats, very good. I'd never seen anyone or anything no
t at least hesitate in the face of one of his chilling smiles or predatory stares.

  Me, I just burped and tossed him back the now soiled napkin. "Come on, Grandma. Let's buy a car."

  We wandered the lot with a slowly increasing sense of pessimism. It might have been a small one, but the cars were mostly new or older, immaculately expensive models. Quite a few convertibles were available for the consumer on the go who liked inhaling big chunks of pollution while idling in never-ending traffic. Good for building up your tolerance to carbon monoxide. Still, I couldn't deny my hand swept across the clean lines of a classic Mustang before I shoved it back in my pocket. "I think the only thing we could afford here is a pair of skates," I grunted.

  "You might be right." Niko still had the napkin in his hand. Frowning in annoyance, he was looking around for a garbage can when we were nailed. A flashing charismatic smile, a pricey suit, sunglasses that cost more than Nik and I had to spend on a car—it all was aimed in our direction like a heat-seeking missile.

  "Oh, damn," I groaned wholeheartedly.

  "It's an unfortunate fact of life," Niko said with grimly amused resignation. "Where there are graveyards, there are flesh-eating revenants. Where there are cars, there are car salesmen."

  "I'll take the flesh eaters any day. At least they leave you your soul." The guy was getting closer. "How about we make a run for it?"

  His hand snagged my jacket before I could move, and he reproved smoothly in a line straight out of our childhood cartoons, "Honestly, Cal, are you a man or a mouse?"

  "Neither, remember?" I grumbled under my breath. What a waste of time. There was nothing here we could remotely afford. It was bad enough to suffer through this crap when you actually got a car in the end. To do it for no other reason than to not look like a coward as you sprinted for safety—that just sucked.