by Rob Thurman
Be good at your job, but don’t think your job is good.
The road to Hell …
I squatted down beside the dead Wolf and touched her hair. It was thick and black, like mine, but long. “We can’t leave her just lying here.” Killer or not, person or creature of the wild, asphalt was not a peaceful place for any body to find its rest.
“Ishiah will take care of her. This street is nonhuman. It’ll be handled.” Niko’s hand landed on my back and grabbed a handful of my jacket to urge me up. “She’s playing with you. Delilah. She knows one of hers couldn’t take you, much less all of us. If Delilah wanted you dead, she would’ve come herself.”
Delilah didn’t think a pack member could take me, but she thought she could. Since she had gotten her Alpha and pack killed off to the last Wolf, she might be right. I sure knew how to pick them. “If this is a game, I don’t want to play.” I stood up. “I’m a killer, but I don’t think I want to be if this is how it is. Protecting is one thing. Playing, using killing as a damn pastime, that’s wrong.”
I remembered, in that moment, wings flapping behind my eyes. I was young, little—I had no idea how little, but enough that I remembered being surprised and shocked when a blackbird flew into a window at a house we were living in. I didn’t recall the house itself, but I thought it was grubby, dirty, old. I was sitting in grass and weeds, playing with a plastic truck that had three wheels. I was happy, content, until the sound of a stick breaking, but softer, more muffled. The bird had hit the window, and I looked up in time to see it fall to the ground without a single flutter of a feather. A blond boy was there. Six or seven, he was older than me. He picked up the bird gently, then carried it off to a deeper patch of weeds and laid it down. It was swallowed up by green and yellow. I asked why.
Why, Nik? Why won’t it fly away?
Because it’s dead, Cal. It broke its neck.
But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the bird’s fault some stupid person had built a house in its way. It wasn’t right that birds died, because if birds died, then maybe everything died.
They do, the other boy explained gravely. It’s the way things are, Cal.
“It shouldn’t be,” I murmured to myself. “Blackbirds shouldn’t die and neither should Wolves or people. Not like this. Not for goddamn sport.” I put my gun away. It wasn’t reassuring anymore or to be drooled over the size of the hole it could put through something—or someone’s head. It was a necessary evil.
“You remember?” Leandros asked. His hand hadn’t released my jacket and he gave me a light shake. “You remember that?”
“I remember the blackbird. That’s all. But it’s enough to know that if I like what I do [an excessive enthusiasm for my work Leandros had said], then maybe I’m a dick.” I looked away from the Wolf and all that had roamed untamed and free in her. Wolves were wolves. They killed. I got that. They had evolved that way. You should stop them, but you shouldn’t blame them. If it runs, you chase it. If you catch it, you kill it. If you kill it, you eat it. That sounded familiar too, but if you’d ever seen a lion eating a zebra on the Discovery Channel, you knew that.
Facts of life. Zebras didn’t die of old age as much as a little boy and a dead blackbird wished they did.
I exhaled and let it all go. It was coming back, faster and faster now. Soon enough who I was now would be who I was then, and it’d all be the same as it ever was. There was no point in thinking about that. There were other things to do. “The park,” I said. “Someone said Central Park and boggles. Boggles, huh? I guess you’re not talking that game old people play.”
6
Boggle was not the game old people played, because wouldn’t that have been too easy?
What it turned out to be was a nine-foot-tall mudencrusted, humanoid lizard that weighed about five hundred pounds, had pumpkin orange eyes full of fury, and about six cute little kiddies to make the whole thing a party.
“You said she was a mom,” I hissed at Leandros from behind a tree. The boggle, Ms. Boggle, whatever name she went by, had just tossed another tree, a complete tree from roots to top that she pulled up out of the ground with no effort whatsoever, at us. She’d missed by inches. In this situation, as in all situations, inches mattered; they could embarrass you and they could make or break you. I was leaning toward embarrassment as the better choice.
Leandros was unperturbed by the trees sailing through the air—another day at the office with staplers, copy machines, bad coffee, and trees almost crushing you. No big deal. That was nice for him. “She is a mother. See behind her? The boglets? Those are her children.”
Her children. Her cute bundles of joy. The kiddies were only seven feet tall with grinning jaws, lashing tails, and teeth that curved inward shark-fashion. Yeah, they were so sweet and adorable that I wanted to tie ribbons around their necks and put them on the cover of a Humane Society calendar. “You said she liked us. If she likes us, why is she throwing maple trees at us?”
“Oak. That’s an inexcusable mistake, whether it’s nighttime or not. Didn’t you see the shape of the dead leaves? The root pattern?” He gave up when I picked up a small rock and winged it at him. He dodged easily behind his shelter of another tree. “Never mind. I didn’t say she liked us. I said she didn’t necessarily hate us, depending on the present we brought her.”
I heard the rustle of leaves above me and looked up to see eyes that spread their own lambent pumpkincolored light, letting me see the teeth, the scales, and claws of black that were about the size of your average butcher’s knife. “Then give her the damn present,” I said, pointing the Eagle up at Junior. I’d taken down a Wolf, but I wasn’t sure what a round would do against those layers of muddy scales, besides extremely pissing off their owner. “Before I ruin this boggle’s dream of making the basketball team at his junior high.”
“Now that we’ve seen they’re all accounted for and thriving, which means they haven’t fallen victim to Ammut’s spiders, it would be a waste to give her what we might need to bribe her with at a later date.”
It had been two, going on three days now since Leandros had appeared in his brotherly glory. Two and a half days combined with a couple of hazy memories that I couldn’t depend on. Was it any doubt I would think I hallucinated half of what the guy said? His actions made me trust him. His words often made me want to beat him with a two-by-four.
“Later date? You mean from-beyond-the-grave later date? Because I have better plans for my afterlife than tossing rhinestones at a white-trash monster living in pigsty heaven instead of a double-wide. They’re going to kill us. They won’t bother to eat you as you’re made up of bean curd and soy, but I’m pure pizza, fried chicken, and burgers. They will eat my ass. Give her the damn bling.”
“You and common sense. I’m not sure I can get used to that combination. I suppose I may as well ask her if she’s heard anything.” He put a hand in his coat pocket and then tossed out a handful of pearls. They landed in the mud pit that Mama Boggle had climbed out of and where she now crouched on the edge. In a small clearing in the trees of Central Park, you didn’t need a moon to see. The sky was as orange as the eyes of the boggles. New York was a city so big that it sucked the darkness out of the night itself.
Some of the pearls stuck in wet mud while some rolled on the surface of more dry pieces. Whatever color they were in the daylight, they were all orange here. That didn’t stop the big boggle—Boggle with a capital B—from pulling her enormous dark claws out of yet another tree and squatting on muscled legs and rolling them around with a talon tip. “From the world of water. Fresh. Untouched by any human’s grubby baby paws but yours.” Her voice was so deep and loud, an auditory avalanche, I expected the ground to shake under our feet.
Leandros stepped out from behind his tree as I used the Eagle to swat the talons reaching for my head. If mommy was in a better mood, I didn’t want to change that by shooting her kid. That and it was a kid, a juvenile mega-alligator with a brain hanging up in that tree. If you
walked into the Everglades and got your leg bitten off by a leftover prehistoric lizard, you had no one to blame but yourself. That was their territory, not yours, and this part of the park was the same as far as boggles were concerned.
“They eat muggers and sometimes joggers who stray from the common paths. Don’t feel too bad for them,” my companion suggested.
I ignored my brother. Goodfellow and the vampire had dropped us off in the limo at the park’s south entrance, and now I saw why. While they were sipping champagne and headed to an after-hours party, I was again smacking the claws of the boglet above me. “No. Bad boy. Bad. Behave or you’ll get a time-out.” They ate muggers and joggers. I didn’t have a problem with that. Muggers were rotten people and joggers who came this far out in the name of exercise had to be insane. Getting eaten was the best thing for them. It had to save a fortune in psych meds. As for the all-monsters-are-evil twitch, I told myself that it didn’t apply to baby monsters, and it grumbled but shut up. I was a softy for kids. Who knew?
“Boggle.” Leandros had walked forward, his sword in hand. “Ammut has come to the city. Do you know of Ammut?”
“No. No Ammut. I care not for strangers or the city. I care for home only,” she said, holding up one particularly large pearl before a large harvest moon eye, “and for my trinkets.” There was a rough, chain saw buzz in the air. She was purring … if boggles purred.
“Then you haven’t been attacked by Nepenthe spiders in the past two weeks.”
I turned my head to watch the exchange and felt a tongue lick the top of my head. “I am not kidding,” I warned the boglet, without taking my eyes from Leandros and Boggle. “Don’t make me shoot off the end of your tail. The other kids will make fun of you.”
“Spiders,” she said, the purr disappearing. “Disgusting pests. Boring vermin.” Letting the pearl fall back to lie with the others, she rammed her hand down into the mud up to her elbow joint. Pulling back, she yanked free a black articulated leg more than three feet long. I recognized it, from the beach and from a motel bathroom. It was the leg of a Nepenthe spider. “Many came, all died, but they are not good for eating. They smell unclean.” She threw the leg over her hulking shoulder. “They scuttled, full of poison. We did what you do with such things.”
“You squashed them,” I said.
Her grin, twice the size and voraciousness of her offspring, gleamed. “It was good hunting practice for my children. They could not eat them, but they could kill them. Yes, we squashed them and will do the same to any more that come here.”
“And Ammut?” Leandros asked.
“I do not know Ammut.” It was the same as she’d said before, which made her finished with our conversation. As she played with her pearls, the other boglets moved closer to us. They were up for another practice hunt if we didn’t move it.
“Where is it?” asked the boglet above me, its rumble a lighter reflection of its mother’s. “The Auphe in you, it is all but gone. You taste weak.” Again with the weak. Did I need to start pumping iron?
Leandros’s hand was on my arm. “We are done here. Let’s go before they try to store our limbs in the mud with that of the spiders.”
I let myself be moved along. “What did it say? Where did my ‘off’ go? My ‘off-fey?’ What—” My mouth shut abruptly, my teeth snapping together and barely missing the tip of my tongue, as Leandros gave me a particularly brisk yank that had me running to keep up. It was a good idea since the boglets had decided they might be in the mood after all whether we moved our asses or not. I put the gun away and drew one of my knives. Little monsters. Little seven-foot-tall monsters. Underage monsters then. It didn’t matter how big they were, only that killing them would be the equivalent of doing in a ‘tween, which would be wrong, no matter how annoying they were—baby monsters and ‘tweens.
One boglet raced up beside me as we hit another clearing. They could walk upright or go on all fours, and their speed setting was on all fours. I’d watched some TV last night while trying to readjust or remember home. Nothing good had been on—there was no porn channel—but I had caught some animal special. It would’ve been difficult to not catch as Leandros had tripped me when I’d tried to walk away—the several times that I’d tried to walk away. He had a move for everything. That meant that against my will, and I had a feeling it wasn’t the first thing he’d made me do against my will, I’d watched a show about Komodo dragons.
A Komodo could run a man to the ground in seconds. Seconds. These guys must’ve used that special as an exercise tape.
I saw the tooth-crammed grin, the light of the eyes, and the claws of one large hand slashing out to gut me. I dropped flat instantly. That boglet tried to stop, dirt and dead grass flying as he dug in, and the one behind me ran over the top of me and kept going. He was a dog chasing a ball that his master had only pretended to throw. He was the slow one in his class, but he seemed happy. Let him run to China and back if it kept him that way.
The one who’d made a try for me did manage to stop, flip head for tail, and lunge back at me where I lay on my stomach. I was up in a fraction of a second and his stopping skills improved as the surface of his luminous eye came to rest against the point of my knife. I could feel the slight give under the tip. A sixteenth of an inch and it would puncture, and that wouldn’t make his mama proud of his hunting skills at all.
“Weak?” I leaned in until my own grin made a clinking sound as it touched his. Teeth to teeth. Hunter to hunter. “I taste weak?” I heard hisses and growls from behind me. I reminded myself—baby monsters, emphasis on baby. No matter what my hand wanted to do, it was going to listen to me. “Kids. You’re so cute. I don’t have to want to kill you. To kill you I only have to be better than you.” The fetid breath mixed with mine, but his eyes were gleaming now, from pained moisture. “Junior, I’m better than you. Go home to Mommy.”
He thumped his tail against the ground. I was concentrating on his eyes and the intent smoldering there, but I heard the sound. It was a signal. The rapacious snapping and rumbling from behind went silent. “You are not weak. We will go.” He gave a cautiously sinuous step back away from my blade and I let him. The scaly lids blinked to take away the pain. As tough as they were, if I’d scratched his cornea I’d have been surprised. I’d been careful, but I’d been ready. If I’d had to jam the blade through his eye into his brain, I would have, but teenagers do stupid shit all the time. Giving him the chance to think it out and make the smart choice was the right thing to do. When he was a full-grown monster, then I’d hold him accountable for his decision-making skills and take him out without a second thought. Until that happened, I’d make like a social worker.
Slithering past me, he and his brothers and sisters ran, disappearing into the trees. I turned my attention to Leandros, who had a boglet on the ground, one foot on the grass, one on the muddy throat, and his sword embedded a few inches into flesh over where I guessed a boggle might carry its heart. “Jesus, Leandros, you’re not going to kill it, are you? It probably has a date for monster homecoming later. Cut it some slack.”
“I hadn’t planned on killing it as that would annoy Mama Boggle. She’s fond of her children. I was merely keeping it from killing me while I kept an eye on you.” He stepped back, removing his foot and his sword. The boglet gave a growl before following the rest of its litter, exhibiting a definitely dejected slink to his lope. “Killing a boglet would bring Boggle and the rest of them on us. That we might not be able to handle. Boggle on her own is more deadly than all her children combined.”
“Good point,” I granted. “She looked badass, but I didn’t know she was that badass.”
“I told you on the way over… . Never mind. Why do I try?” He turned his eyes up to the sky, searching for the answer or peace. I looked up too. I didn’t see either one. “Amnesia or not,” he started again, sheathing his sword, “your attention span hasn’t changed. If you didn’t kill your boglet because of the mother, then why didn’t you?”
I started walking beside him when he began moving. “It was a kid. Killing a kid, even a monster kid, you shouldn’t do that.” Because death was forever and blackbirds fell from the sky. If you had an opportunity to spare one, if only for a little while, you should.
“That’s true, although you normally would’ve taunted the boglet more. You do enjoy a good insult.”
“I insulted,” I protested, my breath a frozen fog as a mix of fallen leaves and dead grass crunched under my feet. “I didn’t spend all night doing it, but I’m freezing my ass off out here. And what did that thing mean when it was talking about my being weak? About off? My being off or not having off. Something. What was he talking about?”
“Face it, little brother,” he answered, walking faster, despite not having complained about the cold once. “Even to boggles, your humor has always been a little off.”
We didn’t go home after Central Park and, when I asked where we were going, Leandros answered to do something worse than play hide-and-seek with mud-loving homicidal alligators.
“What could be worse? Saddling them up and riding them like broncos in some bizarre supernatural rodeo? I’m sure Goodfellow has a few assless chaps he could lend us.”
“Smart-ass.” Leandros snorted as we reached the edge of the park and he hailed a taxi. “That certainly didn’t disappear with your memory.”
“Worse things than being a smart-ass,” I grumbled.
“Far worse,” he agreed. “So be prepared, because we’re going to see one of those far worse things.”
“Which is?” I asked.