by Rob Thurman
While it was large enough to hide Ammut, it was also big enough for six spiders to leap out of while Ammut, on the petite side for a monster, came boiling out from under the seven bodies behind me. All in one moment, I saw the thrash of long black jointed legs, cocooned bodies tumbling; Delilah literally ripping off her clothes—I heard the material shred under her hands—and becoming a large white Wolf that fell to all fours to jump; Niko’s and Goodfellow’s swords swinging, and Ammut.
It was one moment of ivory fur, claws, and fangs, silver slicing quickly enough that the air itself should’ve been cut. It was one moment of yellow eyes and dripping venom with legs scrabbling too fast for nature to have intended—a hideous, inescapable speed.
It was a lot to take in and I didn’t bother. I had Ammut on my ass and that took priority. I was firing as I swiveled. When something is that close to you and moving that damn fast, equally quick as her spiders, aiming is a luxury. If you’ve got a full clip, pull the trigger and keep firing. You’ll hit it, one way or the other—hopefully before it hits you.
I hit Ammut with three hollow points. It gave me enough breathing room to get a split-second look at what I was shooting at rather than just a greenish blur. Mythology sketched on a bar napkin said she was part lion, part alligator, part hippo, and that would have been a lie because mythology was always a lie. Deduction told us she had to look human part of the time. That time wasn’t now. No, now she faced me, a glittering coil of green and bronze scales, the same coil that had yanked me into the canal. There were arms, appearing disturbingly boneless, and the face was almost lionlike, a blunt muzzle only finely scaled. The scales on the sleek head were almost all copper and bronze compared to mixing with the deep green below. I could see how it might seem like a lion’s mane, a shining cascade of tawny glitter, because her eyes were almost all cat too.
Round and gold but with no discernible pupil, they were clear and luminous as the moon had been in the night sky of Nevah’s Landing. Despite her death-inwater stench, despite her being a monster, she wasn’t repugnant. She was … natural, a creature you’d see in the jungle or slipping into the waters of the Nile. I hadn’t expected that. The spiders were repulsive, because, let’s face it, spiders suck. They’re creepy and nasty even when small, and they need smashing with your boot, but Ammut didn’t give off that feeling. If she’d had wings, she would’ve been a dragon, and I’d just shot that dragon.
Not that she seemed to care. I’d burned through one clip—three rounds in her and the rest in the wall. She was so quick I’d barely seen her at all, much less how she slithered, diving and striking out of the way of the bullets. Her last move had been the quickest, her tail wrapping around my legs. As I pulled at my Glock in its holster with my other hand, she said softly, “Where are your brothers and sisters?” A human voice—a woman’s voice; musical and husky, it was almost sexy.
Softer still. Her face was close enough to mine that I could smell her breath. It smelled of flowers, sweetness overlying the rest of her foul scent. “I will not devour you or your companions. You have only to tell me.” Closer. “Where are you brothers and sisters, half-breed?”
The last words were uttered in a voice not human in the slightest. It was the voice of the Eden serpent. But it wasn’t cajoling Eve into taking a bite; it was flat-out telling her to get her naked ass in gear toward that apple tree before he ripped off a mouthful of her nude flesh and shoved it down her throat. That was the snake on me now, and the hypnotic speed and breath drenching the air with a gallon of overwhelming perfume/pheromones was not distracting anymore. It was a sign I’d screwed up. The weight heavy on my legs was a sign too. The sign of my changing all that was the muzzle of the Glock I jammed in one of those round eyes and the trigger I pulled with it.
I didn’t get her, not completely. She was that goddamn fast, but I winged the side of her muzzle, bright gold blood spattering. The coils wrapped around my lower legs tightened until I felt the bone seconds from snapping. That I, somewhere from my past, already knew what that felt like didn’t make me any happier. I was about to shoot her again, only this time I was smarter. I shot at the one part of her that wasn’t moving—her length crushing my legs. I aimed for the edge of the coil. I’d seen—or not seen actually—that impossible speed in action. The last thing I wanted to do was shoot myself in the leg when her snaky self disappeared. Good thing too, because she did disappear and I hit the floor instead of my foot. That didn’t mean I stayed on my feet. She hadn’t broken my legs, but she’d bruised them and then some. I fell as they gave out beneath me, but that didn’t stop me. Four spiders on a beach, even more in my apartment, a boglet too big for his britches; I’d be damned if an overgrown garter snake was going to get the best of me whether I could walk or not.
She streaked past me, seeing all her spiders but one dead, and decided discretion was the better part of valor against a puck, a Wolf, and two highly pissed-off sheep. Smart move. I nailed her in the tip of her twitchy tail with my combat knife, through the flesh, and into the wood of the bottom stair as she slithered up. Smarter move, I smugly congratulated myself … until she ripped off the stair and kept going. Motherfu—
Get ahead of her.
Sure. When I could fly.
You know how. Open the door. Your door. It’s easy. Easy-peasy pudding and pie. Stomp the snake and watch her die.
I didn’t listen to the crazy. I was getting expert at that now, lots of practice. Not to mention the basement door already was open, which was how she was getting away. Instead, I started after her the only way I did know how. Yeah, I was crawling, but I was crawling with a gun, another knife, and one badass attitude. My time wasn’t of the Olympic variety but the never-give-up mind-set was. Already at the top of the stairs, she turned and spit. It wasn’t the usual villain spitting in disgust at the feet of his enemies. That would’ve been B movie over-the-top and disgusting, but not as bad as this. This was a spray of something venomous. It wasn’t the Nepenthe poison—as the last spider squealed and died impaled on Goodfellow’s sword while Delilah, still in wolf form, was tearing the legs off an already-dead one. This was something else. Niko immediately started vomiting as he’d been lunging after Ammut and me. He managed to vomit all over the back of my nonfunctioning legs. I didn’t hold a grudge. He owed me one from the canal incident. Delilah spit a spider leg out of her white muzzle and yakked up something best not thought about. Goodfellow turned green and bent over to gag, but managed to hold it back.
Me? I wiped the mist off my face, over my hair, and said, in perhaps not my kindest moment, “Pussies.”
Better parts of me surfaced, and I struggled to turn over and pat Niko gingerly on the back, as he’d done for me at the canal and, unfortunately, he suffered the same result I had. Half of me was glad I wasn’t a sympathy puker and the other half was getting worried. Niko was my brother, my family. He was all I fucking had. “Hey.” I squeezed his upper arm instead of the back thing this time. “You need a doctor. I know you said when the spider clawed you that we don’t do hospitals—no spreading the supernatural word, but you and I are human. And right now, that’s good for you. A hospital can handle an unknown poison.” At least they’d better be able to handle it or some white coats would be damn, damn sorry.
Whatever I’d said caused Delilah the Wolf to nearly choke on her next yak, and I wasn’t sorry at all on that one. Goodfellow straightened, the green in his face still there, but he was upright and that was something. “No, no hospital needed. Ammut’s venom isn’t like Nepenthe venom. It’s more a defensive mechanism as opposed to an offensive one. It’s not lethal, not even to humans. It’ll wear off in about fifteen to thirty minutes.” And some creatures were more affected than others. Goodfellow somewhat, Delilah somewhat more, humans … It was the aftermath of a New Year’s Eve party. Puke, breathe, then puke some more.
I couldn’t walk, Niko and Delilah were not in prime fighting condition, and Goodfellow looked as if he had a case of the flu. He could’ve gone
after her, but he wouldn’t have caught her. She was too quick and if he had—one person against Ammut wasn’t the best way to keep your friends alive.
So we sat in the basement while Ammut either ran out of the house in her human form—buck-ass naked, I assumed, or maybe she wore scales even in human form—or sped up to the fourth floor of this place, burst through a top window, and snaked off across the rooftop. I’d take the rooftop if I were her. One more spider slunk out behind Ammut’s seven-victim pile, but it was small and I took care of it with one round. My legs slowly regained feeling. I stripped off my jacket, then my shirt—apathy means never having to … eh, fuck the rest—and sacrificed it to Niko’s occasional eruptions of tofu, health shakes, and faux food that didn’t belong in the body anyway. I held his braid out of the way, very prom date of me, rested a hand on his back, and trusted Goodfellow. The expression I shot the puck said if that trust wasn’t earned, I’d be strangling him next with a fluid-stained snarky T-shirt that wasn’t that clean to begin with.
Delilah emptied her stomach only twice. Wolves were tough. Then in a fluid movement of skin and fur, she was human again, crouching close by—close enough that I had my gun pointed at her. She didn’t notice she was nude or didn’t care. Didn’t care, I’d say. She looked proud—as proud as she had as an enormous white wolf straight out of the Arctic. “You are not.” Her eyes were as amber when she was human as when she was wolf, but intriguing with their oval tilt. She could’ve had Japanese Wolf in her, with those eyes and that same amber skin, but the snow blond hair was a trick. Who could say who she was? No one had that right. And who was I to care? She was unique and stunning, as implacably deadly as the edge of my knife, and I wanted nothing to do with her—nothing good.
“You are not. Yet you are. And you know nothing,” she said, her voice almost as husky as Ammut’s.
A predator. A murderer. A manipulative liar. A killer through and through. I hated her. I did.
But, goddamn, she had the most amazing breasts ever. She put that little red Wolf at the strip club to shame. With the tattooed choker of wolf eyes and Celtic swirls that circled her neck, the vicious scars across her stomach, she twisted me inside and I couldn’t say why.
She smiled, her teeth white and even, human, but they’d worn blood in their time, I knew. “Baa baa, little boy lost in the woods. Are you a sheep in killer clothing or a killer in sheep clothing? Find out. Soon. Or I will.” She was gone almost as quickly as Ammut, snatching up her clothes and taking the stairs three at a time. And, yes, her ass was as amazing as her breasts.
Sometimes it’s either shit or go blind. This was one of those times. Horny and hate—two sides of one coin.
Goodfellow and I continued to wait and, when Niko could finally sit up, my legs were sore but functional, and he was a much lighter green than before. He hadn’t puked in at least ten minutes. I gripped his shoulder. “You with us, Nik?” I asked. If I sounded concerned, shit, I was. It would be hard to drag a half-dead brother to a hospital while choking the life out of a puck who’d lied to you.
“Cyrano?” My grip tightened. It hadn’t been enjoyable watching him struggle against the poison and it had been less enjoyable not knowing what to do about it. Not knowing what I’d do without him, my family—a family I’d gotten attached to way too soon, but some things you couldn’t control. I’d looked over my shoulder in Nevah’s Landing often enough to know that someone should be there, standing with me. Now that I knew who that was, he was staying there. I didn’t care what I had to do to make that happen.
The truth isn’t pretty, but it is what it is. And questioning it is a waste of time.
He’d fed me when the woman who whelped me hadn’t. He’d clothed me. He’d made me go to school… . Okay, that had doubtless sucked. He searched for me when I was lost. He kept me alive when I was drunk and Wolves wanted to eat me. He gave me a home. He hired metaphorical buses so he could not so metaphorically throw himself under them for me. He did all of that for me.
Brothers—it went both ways.
He slowly wiped his mouth on my shirt, then coughed. Finally, he raised his head and rubbed at his bloodshot eyes. “It was nearly worth it to get rid of this offensive T-shirt of yours.” He tossed it over the top of the tofu special on the floor. Tofu did not make for fragrant vomit. “I have had much better days than this.” More of a graygreen now, he said, “You called me Nik. Then you called me Cyrano.” Uneasy, pleased, and then both emotions vanished under a set expression. “Did she hurt you?”
“Drain a little life out of you?” Goodfellow added, sitting on the stairs above me where he’d moved about fifteen minutes ago out of Niko’s immediate range, his voice drifting down from behind. “Although you’ve more than enough to spare. It might improve your attitude. Mellow you somewhat. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
I reached up and smacked his leg hard as I answered Niko. “No. She choked me with a few gallons of perfume, which slowed me down some. It was strong”—almost impossibly so, close to hypnotic—”and after, it was the same old, same old. ‘Where are they? Give them to me. Where are your brothers and sisters?’”
Behind, I heard Goodfellow make a noise, unidentifiable, but when I glanced back, he was smooth faced and innocent as a babe again. Right. I gave my attention back to Niko, who had been looking at Robin as well with what was my best guess of puzzlement and dread, but trying to read emotions under green nausea was difficult. “How about we go home? Because I am done with basements. This one or any future ones.” We made it up, neither one too steady, but Goodfellow helped and, despite aching legs on my part and a rebelling stomach on Nik’s part, we made it upstairs, down the hall, and out the door. I zipped up my jacket to conceal the missing shirt and to keep from freezing my ass off as Goodfellow flagged down a taxi.
Niko was alive, Goodfellow was alive, I was alive, and Delilah was gone. As things went, that put us on the plus side of the scoreboard. The fact that no one was curious why I hadn’t gotten sick wasn’t discussed. They also hadn’t commented—very cautiously hadn’t commented—on my not being curious as to why Ammut’s poison hadn’t made me all but vomit my stomach then intestines up … as it had Niko, as it would a human. I didn’t bring it up either. They didn’t want to have to answer, and I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to hear Niko have to make up another lie—that her perfume had protected me by canceling out the poison and that being bitten by her spider had inoculated me against other poisons of the Ammut kind. He would’ve come up with something. No, I didn’t want to ask.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Listen to Wolves such as Delilah who don’t always lie.
Stop lying to yourself.
Half-breed, Ammut had whispered. Twice now, she’d said that. Half-breed, and that made me important to her, a monster that thought people weren’t worth eating. She needed me to find others like me, those half-breed brothers and sisters—whoever they were, wherever they might be. Brothers and sisters Niko, I was positive, knew nothing about. The look he had given Goodfellow had said as much.
Half-breed.
I was half human. I was Niko’s brother, so I must be.
Had to be.
But, Jesus, what was the other half?
12
I didn’t want to leave Niko alone, not until he was one hundred percent, so I asked Goodfellow to stay with him. The puck had calls to make, the rest of that party to set up. Niko could recover and, between calls, Goodfellow could bore the crap out of him by discussing the origins of Roman vomitoriums, because he’d yet to shut up about it. Show the guy some puke and it was nostalgia time for the wild and crazy days of a crumbling empire.
Niko was all about history, though. He might enjoy it … until the part where men were gladiators, body oil was cheap, and if there was a hole, someone’s dick was shoved in it. It reminded me of pictures in the news where deer would get their heads stuck in plastic Halloween pumpkins. I could visualize oiled-up gladiators running around in a drunke
n, panicked frenzy with their dicks stuck in ancient Roman wine bottles.
“Amphorae,” Robin said, punching in another number on his cell while Niko moved through some katas on the exercise mats, his way of recuperating—working the poison out of his system. “Ancient Roman wine vessels were called amphorae.”
“Shit, did I say that out loud?” The fact I had was only half the reason I was getting out of our place, but it was reason enough. I’d already popped some Tylenol for the residual ache in my legs. “But, hey, whatever. Fun, new knowledge … about the correct name of where gladiators could put their dicks if they were out of other options.”
“In Rome, you always had options.” His wicked smile was enough to have me bolting for the door as he started talking on the phone again.
“Cal, I told you I didn’t want you going out alone, not when Ammut obviously knows who you are and where to watch for you.” Niko stopped his workout. He was still paler than someone with his darker skin should be and the blond hair was almost brown from sweat. He looked sick, better, but still sick, and I kept that in mind.
“It’s broad daylight,” I protested. I’d showered—for a vegetarian, Niko could vomit with the best of them—and now I was back in fresh jeans and a black T-shirt. Just black. I’d run through all my clean and barely passable as clean T-shirts with nasty sayings that came courtesy of Goodfellow’s gift certificate, and had borrowed one of Nik’s shirts. Or stolen it, let’s be honest.
“And we were only just attacked in broad daylight,” he said, extra slowly in case I’d missed that fact.
“Inside. I plan on staying outside where all the world can see. I have a hunch about Ammut I want to check out. You need to get better and you have only hours to do it. I’ll be back in no time.” From the sweat he ignored running down his face, he wasn’t convinced. He squinted his eyes at the flow, like Clint Eastwood … damn macho. The sweat did not exist; only me and my idiocy did. “I’ll even bring back some Pepto. Have you in the pink in no time.” I grinned and was out the door before his poison-weakened body could lay a beat-down on me … or a sit-down. That was more likely. He’d tackle me and sit on my back until I came to my senses.