Blackout can-6

by Rob Thurman

  How do monster genetics work? This time that inner voice sounded amused. This was a voice that had no problem with monsters.

  Who knew? Who cared? I was human, and that was the only genetics that concerned me now. The picture—it was a bad day, bad day, he—me, the both of us, were just having a bad day. Had to be. Why would these people, even my own brother, want me back if that weren’t true?

  I felt somewhat reassured by that train of thought. “Before we start the big Ammut scavenger hunt of the day,” I said, heading out his door, “there’s a spider in my room. Put it in the Dumpster or cut it up and flush it down the toilet again. I don’t mind clogging a motel toilet, but I don’t want to sit down tonight and feel something biting my ass because we didn’t flush hard enough.”

  The dead spider was a small one—barely the size of a beagle. Leandros sent it, wrapped in two garbage bags, boxed, then taped securely, by an express-delivery service to the puck. When I asked him why, he asked if I wanted to see the Halloween picture of Robin again. It was a good point. The puck had it coming. But then he went on to say Goodfellow knew a forest nymph who subcontracted for a CSI lab, all about the bugs and leaves, and might be able to find any clues as to where this particular spider had been in the past twenty-four hours. When he finished that, he went out for an hour to get a better lock to replace the spare he’d installed last night. Yep, we kept spare locks, and, yep, we were running low. That didn’t make you think twice, no, not at all.

  That he didn’t make me go along did make me think. The boggle and Wolf had shown I could take care of myself, but you rarely saw just one bug. Then there was Ammut, but maybe she stuck to the canal or was recuperating from the explosion. Could be Leandros had a black market secret lock guy who would deal with no one but Leandros. Who knew?

  Then again, he was pissed. Or disturbed, annoyed— something in the pissed-off area. With Leandros it was hard to tell simply by looking at him, but he was feeling something all right. That I could tell from the moment he’d walked into the diner. I guessed it was a brother thing. It could’ve been that he hadn’t woken up when I’d killed the spider. He’d been making hourly checks, heard my socked feet, the Central Park squirrel burp, but a killer arachnid he missed? To be fair, it dropped down from the metal ceiling on a silken chain as thick as my finger. Soundless. I hadn’t heard it either. But I’d smelled it. Sour venom, silk that had a sticky sweet scent for wrapping up prey. I’d let it get close enough to see the chitin shine of its legs in the city light through the dirt-coated high windows and impaled it on a sword I’d found under my bed with everything else. I was a gun person, but I kept around a sword or two just in case. I also had a flamethrower.

  Of all the things I’d found out so far … I think I liked that about myself the most. Gotta love a flamethrower.

  I took a shower while Niko was off FedExing Charlotte’s asocial big brother. When I was done, I wiped the mist from the mirror and took a long look—the longest since I’d come to on that beach. I exhaled in relief and covered the mirror back up. It wasn’t me. The Cal in the picture had had his worst day ever when that picture had been taken because that wasn’t me. Eyes, face—it was as if a shadowy film had been peeled away. I still had a mild thing for wanting to kill monsters and a fondness for forks in all their destructive power, but I’d let a bad photo make me think I was something a helluva lot darker than I was.

  I’d also told Leandros his brother sucked, which could have been another reason his mouth was a tight slash of irritation when he came back. It didn’t matter if that brother was the same one making with the insults. I shouldn’t have said it. I’d been wrong, and, worse, I’d told him the brother he would die for was a freak. I’d compared him to a bomb, one in mid-explosion.

  Not the behavior of a good brother, and I was a good brother. Leandros said so. The mirror said so. I fucking said so.

  Good brother. Not-so-bad guy. I repeated it in my head like a … mantra, yeah. Mantra. Niko was bound to know about those since he said he meditated for fun. Who meditates for fun? For your blood pressure, okay, but for fun? It must kick-start his soy-and-yogurt morning. Meditation and soy all in one day; he was such a daredevil.

  By the time he was back with the lock, I was dressed, armed, and ready to kick some ass. I regretted the Wolf, but I didn’t regret the spider. Some are wild, some are bad, and some are evil meant to die. Fighting the boggles I’d enjoyed, because it hadn’t involved killing, but it did have a whole lot of running and fighting and kicking scaly butt. That I liked. I wouldn’t have minded doing some more of that. I’d been wrong on the trip back from South Carolina. This did beat serving up hash and waffles … except the drowning part, but other than that—I liked this shit. Look at me, the adrenaline junkie. Another brick slid into place to help rebuild the old me. “Where to?”

  Leandros’s mood hadn’t improved. He could hold a grudge. I wouldn’t have thought that about him. It wasn’t very karmic. Next time I’d throw the spider, still living, over the wall at him, and I wouldn’t insult the me I couldn’t remember. Lesson learned.

  “Wahanket,” he replied. “He made Salome, and he’s a mummy himself.” And why wouldn’t he be? Keep dishing out the insanity. At least I wasn’t bored. “If he knows how to infuse a dead cat with some form of life force,” he continued, “then he and Ammut may have crossed paths. Plus, they’re both ancient and of Egyptian origin.” He was in the kitchen washing a bowl and spoon I’d used to eat the Lucky Charms I’d found in the cabinet. I’d left the dishes there on purpose. Cleaning was one hobby he hadn’t mentioned, but come on. Except for my room, you could operate in here. Hopefully, scrubbing in the sink would distract him from the high levels of grimness he was radiating. Being a good brother and being lazy could go hand in hand, I was pleased to discover.

  “Maybe they dated,” I offered. “Two wild and crazy kids who both liked screwing around with life forces. Can’t get a match that good online.”

  “Of it all, the sarcasm was one thing you couldn’t forget.” He scrubbed harder.

  I grinned. “That’s amnesia-proof.” Not to mention, the thicker I laid it on, the easier it was to convince him and the others and myself that I wasn’t as lost as I’d been—and I wasn’t. Some things were slightly familiar, the little things that squatted on one brain cell, the people-only dreams—the two genuine memories of which I’d caught the barest fragment. I didn’t have myself or my life back yet. I had found one or two bread crumbs, but the forest was thick and the path turned out of sight.

  Lost, but trying my best to get back home, and trying not to let it show how being lost felt—like falling and falling and seeing glimpses as you went. All the stories Leandros and Goodfellow told me … I couldn’t connect with them. The flashes of memory I’d had, that I felt. I knew them—knew they were real. What people were telling me, though, didn’t trigger any further memories as I’d hoped. The stories seemed as if they were missing something. They were off or wrong, or maybe I was the one who was off, but when I heard them, they didn’t feel like anything other than something that had happened to someone else. Not to me.

  “Maybe your mummy can tell me why the spiders like me so much,” I offered. “That one was number six. Pretty good for someone not in the exterminating business, especially if you count them by pounds.”

  “You did kill a nest of four of them. The fifth could’ve been part of the nest and followed you.” He put the bowl and spoon away, slamming the drawer. The washing and drying hadn’t been enough to let him swim out of that mood yet. I should’ve eaten five more bowls. “This spider no doubt wanted payback. It’s a frequent complication. Those who have killed anything that crosses their path can become inconveniently vengeful when something kills one of their own.” Much like Leandros himself did.

  “They don’t get that occupational hazard deal?”

  “No, they do not. Irksome, I know.” He moved from the kitchen and tossed me my jacket from the couch. “And this is neither a clos
et nor a coatrack, nor has it ever been.”

  “I have amnesia. Cut me some slack,” I protested as I slipped the jacket on, feeling the comfortable weight of metal fall into place. I’d scrubbed the leather down when we’d gotten home to get rid of the canal smell. It didn’t hurt it any. The leather had been plenty distressed long before that wipe down.

  “Laziness and sarcasm—now two things Nepenthe venom cannot affect.” He was already wearing his own weapon-concealing long coat. “Zip up your jacket. It’s a fair trip to the museum.”

  I groaned. Brain damaged or not, I knew I didn’t want to see some dusty old relics or equally dusty and evil-minded mummies who hung about the place. Nonetheless, see them both, I did. The fact that the mummy ended up set on fire …

  Completely not my fault.

  Someone Leandros knew managed to sneak us past security at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art by the devious and cunning method of having someone walk us through the metal detectors and snap her fingers at the guard who moved toward us when the beep beep beep filled the air. Snap. Point. Bad dog. Go. Sit. Her name was Sangrida Odins-something. She was big, blond, and, had she been wearing a metal bra, she could’ve taken out a tank. She also was a monst—She wasn’t human. If I’d been pushed to the wall on it, I would’ve guessed Valkyrie. She looked like Thor from the comic books, only with breasts … and maybe more muscle.

  She aimed an annoyed flap of her hand at the detectors, explaining it was for an ancient gemstone and jewelry traveling exhibit. I understood her lack of enthusiasm for jewelry. She’d probably much rather have a nice gut-stabbing spear than a bracelet.

  Leandros introduced her as the director of the museum. I nodded and kept my eyes off her as much as possible while he asked in low tones as we walked if she’d had any trouble from Ammut or the spiders. If she caught any of what she considered inappropriate looks from me, I knew—in my bones I knew—she’d stomp me to death with her size-twelve sensible-heel shoe. And there was no way it would take more than one stomp.

  Sangrida said they had had no trouble at the museum nor had she had any at home, but she would alert us if she did. As she unlocked a door to the basement, she also stated she wanted to thank us again for handling the museum’s small difficulty before. I waited until the door shut behind us and Leandros and I had started down the stairs before I asked, “What kind of small difficulty did Wonder Woman there have that she couldn’t handle by herself?”

  “A cannibalistic serial killer with a body count of near seven hundred. He rose from his own fifteenth-century ashes to eat whomever he could find and hang dead bodies in trees,” he replied, as offhandedly as if we’d simply dropped by one time to shoo a homeless person out of the souvenir shop.

  “You do that on purpose, don’t you? You and that puck,” I accused with a growl. “You love screwing with my head and trying to scare the shit out of me.” I was tempted to give that blond braid of his a hard pull to let him know my leg was feeling just as pulled. “Making things sound worse than they are. Like Goodfellow freaking me out with that gods and goddesses thing when Ammut is just another monster. And you wonder why I tried to stab him with a fork. Now you’re doing the same damn thing.”

  “No. Goodfellow enjoys that, but as for me?” There was a glimmer of his serious gaze over his shoulder as he went down several more steps, pulling ahead of me. Longer legs, the bastard. “The truth is enough. I’m sure you’ve noticed the bite on your chest.”

  The bite? Holy shit. That enormous scar that looked like someone with a big mouth and a bigger appetite had tried to make me lunch? “That was him? He did that? He tried to turn me into a buffet?” I gritted my teeth. “Before he killed me? He couldn’t kill me first and then eat me? That’s just fucking rude. Tell me he’s dead and tell me he cried like a goddamn baby when he went.”

  “He’s dead. Permanently this time.” He took another step. “Very permanently.”

  “Good. I hope we got paid a shitload for that one. Because, you know, being eaten and all, I think we deserved a fat paycheck for that.”

  “Could we change the subject?” The demand was abrupt and sharply edged.

  Curious, I took the steps faster to keep up with him. “Why? What happened to that shared-past stuff? You know me, I know you. History. I thought we were bonded through blood, family, fighting side by side. All that. Follow me to the ends of the earth, hairy bare feet, ring, volcano. Mordor, here we come. Epic bromance.”

  He stopped, but he didn’t turn to look at me. He simply … stopped. After a few seconds I thought again about tugging on the braid. Ding-dong. Anyone home? But before I could, he said, “Blood doesn’t always mean family. Sometimes it only means blood. As in how much you lost, how you nearly died, and how it was by the barest chance we found a way to save you.”

  And we didn’t talk about that—watching a brother almost die on you. He’d nearly seen it again last night. Leandros was my brother before he was anything else in this world. If you knew where to look, you could see it in his pelting me with a candy bar and stealing pretzels for me from the dead cat. Or searching for me days without sleep because a brother did not lose a brother. Ever. If you had to go to Hell itself to bring him back, then that was what you would do. Memory or observation, either way, it was true about Leandros. Talking about it made him relive it and reliving it—that was obviously bad, and the canal thing last night couldn’t have helped. It hadn’t done me any good, I knew that. But another rule in the Good Brother Handbook—you don’t hurt your brother. Not sincerely. Not outside atomic wedgie range.

  “So … Wahanket’s a mummy, huh?”

  The stiff spine unlocked, the shoulders relaxed, and we were moving again. “A mummy, yes, but a mummy of a human? No, I don’t think so. And Robin won’t tell us, which means he doesn’t know either. He can keep a secret if he wants to, but—”

  “He never wants to?” I snorted.

  “Precisely.” The glance over the shoulder this time was more amused. “Sangrida would probably pay us to evict him from the museum basement, but the destruction wouldn’t be worth the payoff. Now, watch out for the cats. Salome might be the pick of the litter, but she wasn’t the only one in it.”

  Great. More dead cats. Salome’s compadres. If I had to take one of those out, assuming I could take one of those out, would the puck’s cat want revenge as the spider had? Damn. It was too bad Ms. Thor couldn’t have gotten me and a flamethrower past security.

  Past the basement there was another basement. Subbasement. Basement squared. Whatever you wanted to call it, it meant a lot of goddamn stairs. “I don’t like exercise,” I grumbled.

  “I know.”

  We were wending our way through stacks and boxes and glass cases so dusty you couldn’t see what they held. Treasure? Gold? Something sharp like an ancient dagger? That last thought had me stopping to rub at the grime to take a look. I didn’t like exercise, but I did like weapons. “It’s boring,” I went on, disappointed. Tiny carven bits of rock. No daggers.

  “So you’ve said many times. Many, many, many times.”

  Many, many times. Ninja-know-it-all. “Have I ever said,” I asked casually, “there’s a dead koala bear on the ceiling that’s about to bite your head off?”

  His head whipped back as he looked up, his sword out and ready, but I’d already nailed it in the chest as it plummeted down. The shot knocked it ahead of us into the shadows of boxes stacked eighteen feet high. “Winnie was gunning for your ass.” I chambered another round. I knew better than to think I’d killed it with one shot. It was already dead. Predead. Undead. Whatever. I’d most likely just pissed it off. “You should always look up. Even while you’re bitching at me. The worst things come from there, and people never fucking look.”

  Wolves, spiders, furry mummies—that was nothing. Bad things, worse things—the absolute fucking worst came from above; it didn’t matter if I couldn’t put a name or a memory to them right now. I still knew. You didn’t stick your hand into a fi
re, and you always looked up.

  Or be the one looking down.

  Living with one whispering voice in my head was bad enough, but two was getting to be too damn much.

  I shook my head, a sliver of worry spiking through me. “And you’re not just ‘people.’ You should know better.” He should. He did, but he was distracted—by me. That had to stop.

  “Whoops, here he comes again.” I aimed at the form lunging out of the darkness, sputtering candlelight eyes, tawny fur here and there in lonely tufts peeking through its tightly bandaged frame. The ears, nose, and mouth full of non-koala bear fangs weren’t bandaged, though. “It’s kind of cute.” Except for the barracuda teeth implanted in its jaws. I lowered the Desert Eagle. “I’ll feel bad if we kill it. Piglet, Christopher Robin, they’d never get over it.”

  Niko skewered it with his katana in midleap. It hissed, snapped, and tried to pull itself closer using its much longer than average talons to grasp the metal and heave. What was it about mummification that made everything remotely lethal on the thing get so damn much bigger?

  I glanced down at the front of my jeans and considered. Nah. There were bound to be complications.

  “Except for incinerating it, I doubt we could kill it even if we wanted to.” He raised his voice. “Wahanket, we have business with you. Call off your pet before I dice it into a hundred pieces. They can bounce about all they want then, but I don’t think they’ll accomplish much.”

  “Pooh hater,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Winnie-the-Pooh was not a koala—why am I even arguing about this with you?” He pointed the blade at me as the impaled mummified guard bear continued to thrash and hiss. “This creature could kill you as easily as one of those spiders. Keep that in mind.”

  “You mean the six spiders I killed? Really. That easy, huh?” I grinned. “You’re pissed because you missed it, hanging up there. Big bad ninja missed it. Hey, do we keep tabs on things like this? Is that a brother thing? As in it’s my six spiders and one rabid undead Pooh to your … um … nothing? Nothing, right? Did I miscount?”