by Rob Thurman
The Peter Pan albino crocodile smiled in my head and that long grin … Oh, shit … It was made of metal. Every tooth was bared in that horrific grin, shining like a serial killer’s blade. Here we have left you presents. Here you have brothers and sisters.
Or my mind could stop goddamn teasing me and tell me itself. I waited a second, but there wasn’t any more from the crocodile that seemed to know more about things than Niko and I combined. Lucky crocodile. Lucky me, because I didn’t want to see it anymore, not the gleam of one hideous fang.
“You call him,” I said as I stood back up. “I’m scared shitless he might have it set to speakerphone and I’ll hear something that will make me jab my eye out with the closest sharp object.”
“Where are you going?” he demanded—overprotective or on my ass to keep away the lazy. The result was the same.
“To brush my teeth,” I said before he could. I couldn’t save him from the chain of deception, but I could save him from at least one link in it. It was all in that brother handbook.
Whatever part of that brother I was.
It was Delilah who led us one step closer to Ammut and a bigger step to the old me—hours before the party Goodfellow had managed to set up. She called us with the location of a brownstone with a basement full of bodies. That was a surprise; then again, maybe not. Niko had said she wanted to impress the Kin by killing or saying she’d killed Vukasin, but she’d impress them even more if she killed an Alpha and helped bring Ammut down—all while letting us do the heavy lifting.
Ambitious and smart didn’t begin to do this chick justice. If I had one chance before this was all over … Ah, damn, she’d eat me alive. Literally. During the act probably. The real Cal, like me, was a killer, but unlike me, his moral judgment about it had to be more blurry than mine. He could run with the Wolves, while everyone else heard only baaing when I was around. I was nothing but a sheep in their eyes—a very badass sheep, but badass or not, a sheep was a sheep. Kill someone in the middle of sex? I couldn’t do that. But I didn’t doubt that Delilah would and Cal could. She would for the sheer fun of it. Trying to kill Vukasin and the council before Ammut beat her to it showed she loved her slaughter, and Cal would do it in self-defense. I hoped it would be self-defense.
Niko missed his brother. Yeah, self-defense. That guy loved the hell out of his brother, and a stone cold killer—he wouldn’t have raised one of those. He was like frigging Gandhi with a katana and a boot in your ass—ethical but pragmatic. He wouldn’t have brought up a human version of a monster.
The laughter in my head was twofold this time, one fold hysterically amused and one fold darkly bitter. What lived in Cal, good, bad, and in-between, made me not particularly sorry I was only part of him, the silhouette of him on the sidewalk fading more every hour as the sun moved across the sky.
I wondered if I’d remain part of him, aware, or if I’d disappear completely.
Now I lay me down to sleep …
What of you would I possibly want to keep?
Or maybe I’d be a voice in his head. I hope I said better things than I’d had to hear. But better yet, I wouldn’t be there at all. Better to sleep, locked in his subconscious, because I had a feeling he wouldn’t listen to much of what I had to say.
“What are we doing here?” Goodfellow said as the taxi stopped. When he’d called us to tell us about the party, Niko had said we’d gotten wind of Ammut moments before his call and to grab his sword and pick us up at our place.
“Delilah called,” I said as I opened the door and stepped out of the cab. “She said there were some leftovers here for us. Investigation, clues, all that crap.”
Once he and Niko were out and the cab was pulling away, he said, “If Ammut shows up at the charity event”—which was what rich people called an excuse to get hammered—”this entire trip will have been a waste of time. I hate wasted time. It interferes with my wickedness and dissolution. Do you think becoming this degenerate comes without practice? I’ve invested millennia in becoming the magnificence that stands before you. But it takes time and upkeep to maintain these heights. Time not spent in what may well be a putrid pit of spiders and bodies.”
I shrugged. “Hey, preaching to the choir, but Niko insisted. Said he’d paddle my ass with a sword if he had to.”
“I already have someone to do that. Although once upon a time if Niko had said that to me …” Goodfellow didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Niko was already leaving us on the sidewalk as he headed up the brownstone’s stairs at a fast pace, quick as legs could move without it actually being labeled running. It was much better being on the other side of the Goodfellow personal-life TMI seizure for once.
“That was fucking great.” I grinned. “Do it to him again.”
And that request had Niko through the door and inside before Goodfellow had a chance to say or do anything. I knew I could pick a lock from my few days in the Landing. One night I’d forgotten the key to my room. I hadn’t felt like waiting for the guy at the motel desk to get out of the bathroom when he was done whacking off and since I could hear him whacking off, I hadn’t felt like looking around for a master key either. I’d gotten through my door in about three minutes. Niko went through the brownstone door in three seconds. Or so I thought until I reached the top of the stairs myself and saw the lock was busted out with claw marks and the smell of Wolf on the door. Delilah and her pack didn’t care about picking locks and bricks might save the Three Little Pigs from them, but it wouldn’t save anyone else.
It was a one-residence brownstone. You didn’t see many of those anymore. The hallway was dusty enough to tell that no one had lived here for a while, but the path through that dust said someone did use the place now and again. The pictures on the wall were of an older woman and man. Ammut didn’t seem the domestic kind of monster, with the life sucking and all, which made it easy to guess this couple had owned the brownstone and Ammut had eaten them. It had most likely been when she’d first come into town before she got settled in a place of her own and started eating things tastier than human sheep.
I heard a faint crackle under my shoe and crouched down to touch a finger to an all but invisible glitter on the floor. They were scales, the ones I hadn’t been able to see at the canal, but not crocodile scales. There was no Peter Pan villain here. These were more like snake scales. Smaller, finer, and they smelled like poison … of something rank and rotten—the Nile during a drought with dead fish and creeping putrefaction for miles. “Holy shit.” I half gagged and brushed it off my hand quickly. When she’d left the hearts at our place, she must have been in human form, or mostly, because I hadn’t caught a whiff of this.
Straightening, I pulled out the Eagle. The smell was getting stronger. Farther down the hall, Niko already had his sword in one hand. With his other he made a gesture. It wasn’t the finger, which right now was one of the few gestures that meant anything to me. I had to know signs and be a monster killer too? Was there a merit badge for that at monster killer Scout meetings? Disemboweling revenants in your bathroom and hand signals for something that wanted to do the same to you? Then hot chocolate and cookies. Good time had by all.
I gave Niko an expression that was universally recognized as “What the fuck?” by the memory challenged and nonmemory challenged alike. His sword hand gave a minute twitch that made the katana-paddling threat more genuine, but instead he gave a few more generic motions of his hand. He pointed up and then down. Okay, that I got. How anal-retentive one had to be to have hand signals for up and down that weren’t simply up and down, I didn’t get, but the rest I did. I was the bloodhound. Where was the hamburger? I took a deeper breath as behind me Goodfellow silently closed the door. After my pretty loud “holy shit” of moments ago, being quiet was most likely behind us, but you never knew.
I tilted my head back, up toward the stairs, and took one more breath. Down—the stench was definitely stronger down. Delilah hadn’t been lying when she’d said a basement full of bodi
es. She hadn’t mentioned the maker was down there with them. Ammut couldn’t have been here when the Lupa were. The Wolves wouldn’t miss that stink and Ammut wouldn’t miss a chance at some furry num nums. Suck the life force, bypass hairballs and indigestion later. It was efficient. I had to give her that.
I moved down the hall next to Niko and pointed toward the floor. Decomposition, adrenaline, fear, Wolves, urine, and Ammut; it was all under our feet. Since I also didn’t know the sign for “The bitch is right here,” I used my free hand to squeeze his wrist hard. He nodded. Monsters in daylight were nothing for him, but to me it was wrong and Ammut was a monster; no some are good and some are bad here. Her invisible trail had unnatural and, yeah, abomination, all but embedded in it. Her, I had no problem killing.
There was a flicker of motion—dark, light, dark—at the door we’d just walked through. Behind Goodfellow appeared white blond hair, amber skin, a tattooed choker of wolf eyes, and a sly smile. Our own Delilah had shown up for the party.
The gun in my hand was aimed and the trigger was on three pounds of pressure and holding before I had a single thought. When that thought finally showed up, it was to forget Ammut. This was the bitch I would enjoy killing. What I’d felt for her at the missed massacre of our clients had been a happy, curious mix of dangerous, hot, and damn straight I’d nail that.
That was what it was like to be human. To have violence not be your first instinct. Huh. Who fucking knew?
Well, I’d been happy then when it came to Delilah, but I wasn’t happy anymore.
She’d betrayed me, but I was past that. I’d expected that. We were predators. We did what we did best. Kill to live, kill to protect our own and, in Delilah’s case, she was her own. Her self-interest was the only thing that mattered to her. And if she played a game or two with someone or something outside Wolves, that was all it was—a game. I’d known that all along, but I’d liked the game and I’d liked her. I’d expected her to go after me eventually. That was part of the game and I knew her rules. But she knew mine too. Going after my family or my friends broke every goddamn one of them. I should’ve blown her away days ago when I saw her for the very first time since she’d pulled that shit.
It was an easy mistake to fix.
“Not the time.” Goodfellow moved next to me, out of the way—no one said his sense of self-interest wasn’t finely honed as well—and pushing the Eagle down. “Very much not the time,” he hissed, barely audible. “Throw her at Ammut first if you want. She makes good cannon fodder.”
True. Then there was shooting her in front of Nik… . Wasn’t that why I hadn’t shot her when she’d stabbed us in the back last year? I hadn’t wanted him to see me do the chick I was screwing—do in a way that ended up with a bullet in her head and my Auphe out instead of in. Wasn’t that it?
Then a pain hit and hit hard. Jesus, what hurt? What inside me felt ragged and ripped, torn, and trashed?
There it stopped, the flood of cold rage and the memories, the pain—all of it. I blinked and it was gone. I remembered vaguely Delilah about to shoot a healer and a friend sometime in the past. I couldn’t remember why I hadn’t killed her—whether it was due to Niko or some lingering affection for her wild ways. The wild ways themselves were a blank too. No mental sex shots for me. Wasn’t that the way? Wondering about nonsense words like Auphe or about being human made no sense, and I didn’t have the time to stand pondering the philosophical nature of humanity now. What made a man a man? Who cared? There was a killer in the basement and a killer flanking us, and this place stank worse than a slaughterhouse. Time to go to work. I’d handled Ammut’s spiders. I’d do the same to her … only without the fork.
I turned my back, depending on Goodfellow to watch it, and moved past Niko to stand behind the door to the basement. A rug beneath my feet puffed up dust and the smell of death as I pushed at the door carefully with the gun muzzle. Ajar, the heavy wood swung with ease and no haunted house screech of rusted hinges. Too bad. That would’ve given an excuse to flip on the lights, if the power was still on, and go pounding down the stairs shooting anything I could see—”see” being the key word.
Niko’s hand on my shoulder stopped me from edging down the first step. I waited and, as my eyes adjusted, a small amount of light became visible. A street-level window was somewhere down there, a small and filthy one from the amount of light it let in, but when you’re old and have bad hips, you don’t come down to your basement to clean the windows in case someone needs to come to kill the monster that ate you. They couldn’t have had a housekeeper?
The first foot on the step wasn’t mine. No surprise. Spanking boglets and sending them running back to mommy kept me from being benched, but lacking my entire mind didn’t make me MVP. I did make sure mine was the second foot, and Goodfellow and Delilah didn’t fight me for the honor. I couldn’t see what color the stairs were, but I could tell they were painted. Brown, gray, some color that wasn’t impossible to see in the gloom, but neither were they easy.
The body was.
It was … I had no idea what it was. It had wings but not feathered, more like that of a bat. It had a child’s face, sharp teeth in a small gaping mouth, and large eye sockets. The closest thing I could come up with was a flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz. The eyes that had been in those sockets were desiccated to the size of raisins and the wings looked brittle enough to disintegrate with a touch. Dark blue or purple veined every inch of the skin I could see as it had the victims in the scrap metal shed. The rest of it was wrapped in a spiderweb cocoon, which was apt as it looked as if it had been sucked dry—a fly in a spider’s web. Ammut had her pet spiders storing food for her here in her emergency freezer. This one hadn’t made it all the way down to the pantry. She’d eaten it on her way out.
That last Oreo on the go. It happened to us all.
I edged around it, following Niko’s lead, and kept moving down the stairs, one slow, cautious tread at a time, and stayed grateful the body didn’t have a vest and fez. That would have been beyond my weirdness threshold, assuming I had a weirdness threshold that didn’t involve undead cats and naked pucks. Swiveling my head, I tried to cover both sides of the basement around the stairs until Niko’s painless but pointed jab in my gut combined with pointing to the right had me focusing on that. He’d cover the left, I’d cover the right, and nothing would be lost in the seconds it took to watch both on your own.
Killing monsters for a living was not for the loner, not for a long-lived one at any rate. We reached the bottom of the stairs, and I could barely see the paler color of Niko’s hair at all. The rest of him bled into the darkness. The man wore way too much black. As if I could talk, I amended to myself, and checked over my shoulder. Delilah, whose almost-white hair stood out in the gloom, a moth wing pressed against a night’s window, was behind me and Goodfellow behind her. It was good planning on the puck’s part. With the partial new opinion I had of her—knowing implicitly what she was capable of caused very confused emotions—trusting her to guard all our asses wasn’t an option. It didn’t matter that I could see how that amused her, a spark of reflected light in amber eyes. She could be amused all she wanted as long as Goodfellow put that sword through her if something looked off or if she breathed wrong.
At the bottom I automatically moved to stand back to back with Niko. I couldn’t tell where Ammut was more specifically than the basement. I smelled her everywhere, the pungent odor rolling at me from all sides. I could smell too much and couldn’t see enough. I felt something against my foot, a shadowed heap. I used my toe to flip it part of the way over … slow, silent, careful. It was a Wolf—male, not a Lupa. It had human features except for the mouth crammed with wolf teeth and tufted ears. It too was mapped with dark veins and cocooned. The veining would be part of whatever process Ammut used to pull the life out of her victims. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t fresh hearts pooling blood on your countertop either.
As Delilah came to the last step with Goodfellow right behind h
er, I stepped away from Niko and farther into the deepening shadows to make room for the two. Blind was no way to work, not and stay alive, but Niko took care of that and finding Ammut all in one fell swoop. It wasn’t ninja magic. It was good old mundane road flares; one tossed past me and one on his side of Ammut’s cookie jar. They lit up the space like two small bloody suns. There were at least seven bodies I could see before me. All were cocooned. Here were some of the missing victims we hadn’t been able to track down, spider-delivered from the parts of the city where Ammut was too snooty to go herself. Fortunately, the basement was damp with one pool of moisture by the heap of bodies. That moisture kept them from bursting into flame as the flare was close enough to touch them. I scanned the area. Cracked concrete walls that revealed the old brick beneath, bodies, puddles; that was it. I even checked above my head. If a spider was going to jump you … If anything was going to jump you, that was where it would be in this place. Seeing nothing there or under the stairs, the flare banished shadows there as well, I turned to take in Niko’s half of the space.
More bodies; almost twenty in a pile reached to the exposed aged beams above us. The basement was bigger than I’d imagined before Niko played God and lo, there was light, but it wasn’t so big that I could see there was no sign of Ammut. I smelled her, but I didn’t see her. Either she’d left two seconds before our cab dropped us off or she was under that mound of bodies. It was big enough for a monster to burrow beneath.
I was already moving toward it when I discovered there was a third option that I hadn’t considered.