by Rob Thurman
13
The penthouse party was the same as all penthouse parties—this being my second, which made me an expert. It was fancy; everyone was rich and snooty; it had great views of the Manhattan skyline; there was food … absolutely fantastic food. I’d taken over a platter of bacon, mushroom, and crab bits I couldn’t begin to pronounce but could eat by the bucketful, and I was hoarding the platter for myself.
“Does Niko know you’re almost you again?”
“Can you picture the invisible cross he’s dragging around on his back,” I asked, “hear the splish-splash of Pontius Pilate lathering up with hand sanitizer?”
“Yes.”
“That’d be a no then,” I snorted.
“Blasphemy,” Ishiah muttered under his breath at my exchange with Robin as a feather wafted out of nowhere to land in Goodfellow’s wineglass.
“I’m beginning to have serious doubts about this nonangel crap you peris are spouting.” Other than that comment, I went back to concentrating on the room. Ammut was here. I had the musty corpse taste of her in the back of my throat, under the bacon, but the entire room reeked of Wolves, vamps, other supers who could pass for human, and humans themselves soaked in perfume or cologne.
That was what Delilah had meant when she’d said I didn’t need to wear my cologne. I had that spray Robin had given me last year to cover up my Auphe smell from Wolf noses when I’d meet to hook up with Delilah. I hadn’t used it in a long time now. When she’d smelled me in that stairwell at her attempted massacre of our clients, she’d been smelling the mostly human me; the Auphe part of me had been on vacation—gone fishing, buried, or busy.
My best guess was the Auphe in the rest of my genes had become more or less dormant while the ones in the memory portion of my brain—if Niko had been there, he would’ve provided the medical word for that—had become hyperactive trying to repair the venom damage. All my Auphe channeled its energy to that one area. For a while, I was more human than I’d ever been in my entire life.
Or would ever be again.
The Auphe immune system wasn’t like a human one, it was far more efficient and goal-oriented, or there had been many things over my life that I wouldn’t have survived. Those were thoughts for other times though. For now, I was sticking with the original problem—Ammut and her arachnid posse.
Above the penthouse was the rooftop terrace, which was essential. Half the guests were human and taking out monsters was a private thing unless we wanted a shitload of humans convinced they’d been slipped some illegal hallucinogenic. Or we’d have a shitload of dead humans because the Wolves and vamps were certain to make sure the humans wouldn’t be spreading the news of the supernatural—who were natural and not super at all. Either way, shit was involved and it was far too much trouble. That was why we had the terrace… . It was prime cage-fighting territory, minus the cage, with the addition of the possibility of falling to a splattery death on the sidewalk far below.
Eh. Details.
Speaking of Wolves and vamps, we were quickly surrounded by them. One Wolf made a move on my platter of bacon goodies. I growled. He snapped, and I snapped back. He was in completely human form, a high breed—no All Wolf for him—and I looked as human as anyone else, but no matter how human we both looked, snapping at each other like hungry bears over a platter of hors d’oeuvres drew a bit of attention.
“Stop it. Be good. No treats for you tonight,” Goodfellow hissed at the two of us. The Wolf had brown hair pulled back into a short ponytail and ice blue eyes. Average, ordinary, if not for the eyes. If you saw past the unusually pale eyes and smelled what lay beneath, then you’d know much more. He was an Alpha, a big and bad one. “We are wolves amidst the sheep, but the sheep rule this world now. Don’t forget it,” the puck warned.
The vamps, including Promise, who was standing with Niko, looked resigned at the food-aggressive behavior as they gathered around us. Puppies, always piddling on the carpet, always making a mess, always wanting attention. In the spirit of unity, I let the Wolf take a handful off my platter. “Yeah, like you fang manglers never fought over food … while it was still kicking and screaming,” I said with scorn to the other vamps around us. At least the Wolves were honest about it. You’d think the vamps never ordered their steak rare, much less had eaten a person in the old days. “All the dental bonding and porcelain veneers in the world can’t cover up how you used to get your food in the old days.”
Niko lost all expression, not that he usually had much to lose. He knew something was up, which meant he also knew my Nepenthe venom blood levels were down. But there was no chocolate-mint toothpaste here and that meant my brother was up the creek without a toothbrush, a spider, or a hope. I grinned at him, then handed off the platter to my new Wolf friend and opened my Armani-Brioni some kind of hyperexpensive tux jacket to reveal the black T-shirt beneath: IF BEING A DICK IS WRONG … I KNOW I’M NOT RIGHT.
The Wolf growled again when he caught sight of it. “Lighten up, Fido,” I said. “I gave you some Snausages, so shut your Alpo-hole.”
“Ammut is here,” Niko added, stepping forward with a look for everyone except me. “We will kill her and you will pay us the other portion of our fee. If you feel this is a problem, take it out of the Lupa’s earnings. They’re responsible for at least half of this mess.” Not that they were, but if they were going to claim to be, then why not make them cough up the price? “If you don’t exert some domination soon, they’ll be the only ones of you left to make any messes at all.”
Promise had those pristine, perfectly manicured violet nails of hers through the tux of what looked like the lead vampire, a small, unassuming bald man with the blackest, most empty eyes I’d seen. I think her nails went through skin and flesh as well, because there was a pained flicker at the corner of his mouth. “We are civilized now,” she said in a voice that was silk over titanium. “We cooperate with others. We pay our debts. We are beings of reason, not of bloodlust. Do not make me remind each and every one of you why I was the sole vampire to survive the Black Death without being burned alive. Show the Leandros brothers and their companions the respect they are due and perhaps no more of us need perish.” She stepped back, already with a small strip of silver gray cloth to wipe the blood from her nails. She tucked it into the bald vampire’s jacket. “I take blood from no one now. Not even the likes of you.”
A hand grabbed my arm and yanked me into motion. “Let’s do a circuit of the room and see if you’re any closer to finding Ammut’s scent than while standing about stuffing your face with all the work ethic of a minimum-wage slushie operator,” Niko ordered.
“Do you know how hard it is to make the perfect slush—” I didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence. It was for the best.
“You’re starting to remember, aren’t you?” he demanded in an undertone. “What you did to Wahanket. The cats. Resorting to violence over bacon, a bigger giveaway than all the others. It’s coming back.”
I kept my eyes focused on every woman we passed. Ammut was an Egyptian legend, but with those bronze scales and the myth of a lion’s mane, I had her pinned as a blonde. “Yep. Just like you said it would. You said it would wear off and you were right.” The grip on my arm tightened. It felt like the grasp of denial at odds with one of hope, and the double-strength grasp was beginning to hurt.
How did I read emotions from a grip, from the clench of bone, and the ripple of muscle? I’d been hit a damn lot in this job. You picked things up. I could close my eyes and tell you what kind of monster had punched me in the face and if it was because he wanted to eat me, kill me for fun, or was showing off for his girlfriend. I’d been educated in the ways. “I know … No, I remember how much you love being right,” I said, but not rubbing it in too much. After all, he was always right—almost. He’d find out soon enough that this “almost” was one goddamn big one he might never live down. “I also know if you don’t ease up, I won’t be able to use this arm to shoot anything, much less an Egyptian fake goddess
. And, most important of all, bacon is worth fighting over.”
He released me. “I suppose I didn’t expect that it would happen this … quickly. I thought that flash with Delilah at the brownstone was a fluke.”
“Right now, it doesn’t much matter. When I’m all the way back, we’ll have a party. Celebrate my homecoming and Ammut’s going. Oh shit, there she is.” I’d been wrong. She did appear Egyptian and she was a goddess. By one of the long stretches of windows, she stood with a champagne glass in hand. She was alone, a long fall of black hair rippling in waves to the middle of her back. Her skin was dark, but only a shade darker than Niko’s, her lips full and painted a dark red-bronze, and her eyes as black as her hair. Her dress was familiar; green-andgold scales that molded her from a high neck to an inch or so above the floor. She knew it was a trap—anyone with one brain cell would—but she was confident that we would fail and she’d scarf us up the same as those bacon appetizers. I couldn’t blame her. We hadn’t been much of a challenge earlier, and bacon … Damn, it was bacon. How could you not risk a little to get a pound of that for breakfast?
She saw us. She could’ve seen us from the moment we walked in. If it was a trap, it paid to get there first. Saluting us both with the glass, she sipped the champagne and wrinkled a slightly aquiline nose at the bubbles. That quickly the goddess disappeared and something much harder to resist appeared in her place. She took another small swallow and laughed. I could feel the sensation of the carbonation tickling my own nose. I wanted to laugh with her. I could now smell her flower-honey-cinnamon scent over the scent of anyone or anything else. She was your cute baby cousin, if you had one, going to her first school dance, and you’d do anything to make her happy. Get her a limo. Not beat up her loser rocker boyfriend. Take a hundred pictures like a huge-ass dork.
Tilting her head slightly, she smiled directly at us both, bent her fingers in the tiniest of waves, and it became ten times worse.
“Okay, is she fucking adorable or is it just me?” And “adorable”—not a word I’d ever used before, but one I was aware (just barely) existed—was dead-on. She was … had been hot as hell, gorgeous as they came, but without the sexual hunger that quality brought out. Beloved baby cousin was gone and now we had a kitten, a soft bunny … er … rabbit, a puppy with sweet-smelling milk breath. She was all that, the tactile and emotional draw of hundreds of them, and you wanted to go pat her on the head, tickle her tummy, and talk, goddamn truth, baby talk to her.
How the hell do you fight an adorable goddamn monster?
Come on, Auphe, kick in. You, the first killers on Earth, probably wore real, live rabbits on your feet for bunny slippers. If ever I needed some good old murderous rage, now was the time. And here it came, here it came, here it … Shit.
I had nothing.
I groaned. “We are so dead.”
A sex thing, that I could handle. We’d all run across succubi before. I’d slept with a sexual psychotic. Niko’s girlfriend would be very disappointed in him if he were susceptible … in a way that might lose him his dick altogether. Goodfellow was a sexual predator of sorts. If it was legal, he would take it down or had in the past. Kink of the Jungle. There wasn’t a creature alive that could out-sex-vibe him. All of us were inoculated to a certain degree against that approach. But this one?
Screwed. Screwed, screwed, screwed.
“I didn’t know you knew the word ‘adorable,’ ” Niko said as this time I was the one to grab his arm.
“Shut up. I want to go rub her stomach and let her chew on my fingers. I want a piece of yarn for her to play with. I want to get her some milk,” I said, my grip on him getting tighter with desperation. “Jesus, isn’t she getting to you?”
“Some. But I’ve done all those things before.” There was a pause, but I knew it was coming. Sure as shit, I knew it was. “With you. You know, when I changed your diaper and dusted on the baby powder. I didn’t want you getting a rash on your tiny little—”
“Say it and I’ll shoot you right here, right now.” I glared and let go of his arm, but the desire to throw myself into a pile of life-energy-sucking kittens had decreased. “Better yet, let’s go shoot her instead.” Of course, she was gone by then, but she left a scent trail that had me looking down with every step to make certain I wasn’t squashing a puppy. It was headed where we’d wanted her, the rooftop terrace. It was a good choice for her as well. If she was exposed down here, the vampires and Wolves would very easily decide twenty or thirty dead humans were worth killing Ammut, and there were enough of our clients here to do that—to do both. “Should we get the others?”
Niko shook his head. “Goodfellow might be all right, but he does love that murderous bald cat of his. Ishiah? I have no idea. And Promise only just lost her own daughter. I think that opens her up to maternal feelings that could be turned back on us.”
We were at the stairwell, locked at our request to keep the civilians out of the combat zone. It wasn’t locked any longer. “And you and me?” I asked.
“Do you have a deep, hidden desire to rub my stomach?” he countered with lifted eyebrows.
“Okay. Great job, Nik. Thanks. I’m feeling as pissed off and bloodthirsty as it possibly gets. Let’s get this cuddly kitten bitch before I try to beat you to death with a Jersey Costco-sized container of baby powder.” I took the stairs two at a time, the Eagle out. He was on my heels, this time with nothing to say about powder, diapers, or baby Cal’s diaper-rash-ridden ass.
We reached the roof in seconds and slammed the door behind us, blocking it with a heavy wood lounge chair jammed under the handle. That took care of the civilians, but it wouldn’t stop anyone discovering we were missing and wanting to rush up to help.
Civilians. This laugh was nasty and gleeful. Sheep. Bleating prey. Walking leeches. Foolish tricksters. Pigeons of a powerless god. All are nothing.
Now you show up, I thought with cranky irritation. Shadow-time is back, got it? We need to get our shit together. All our shit, regardless of how dark. This situation is going to call for it. Or do you want to go out, the last Auphe on the planet, while fetching this bitch a bowl of goddamn milk?
I didn’t get an answer. I did get a question, though.
“Where are your brothers and sisters?”
The voice came from everywhere … as a goddess’s voice would. Gone were the happy and fluffy. She had us where she wanted us and she had friends far more effective than kittens and puppies. She had her spiders. There were fifteen or twenty; they were climbing over the edge of the roof so quickly it was hard to count them all… . They were beside us, in front of us, over the top of the stairwell door behind us. I waited until three were on the edge and about to jump when I shot them with three silenced rounds in the midst of their daisy yellow eyes. For all my life, five minutes the way we were going, I’d forever link spiders and daisies—bright, sun-seeking daisies that opened their petals to the light to reveal a poisonous black predator hiding within.
“I’m his brother. If you are that interested, you should be talking to me.”
Niko had cut me off before I could ask her what she meant. It was one of the few memories I was still lacking. Niko was my only family, my only brother, and her obsession with me having more was bizarre. It made me wonder … Was she in New York by chance and appetite, or was she here for me and everything else was collateral damage? What did she want from me? Besides what Wahanket had wanted?
“You are hardly worth my interest. I want his true family. I want the whispers and the rumors made flesh. Made real. As they must be. If there is this one, how can there not be others?”
Practice makes perfect, baby boy, baby boy.
More spiders swarmed over and landed on the terrace, but I didn’t shoot them. My gun was up, finger on the trigger, but … fuck … she was right. If there was me, how could there not be more? When Wahanket had told me I was half Auphe, I’d known I was an experiment. Felt it in my gut. I was a freak of monster science, but how many brand-new e
xperiments turn out right the very first time? Or the second? Or the twentieth?
None.
Here you have brothers and sisters.
Worthless failures.
Toys for you, baby boy, baby boy.
The saw grass, the moon white crocodile. Nevah’s Landing. It hadn’t been a sanctuary. It had been an invitation to a fucking family reunion. I could see it—the green, the white, the red … the silver flash of metal.
“Nik, there’s a crocodile out back.” Like in the book … like Peter Pan.
Alligators you could live with. Other things you couldn’t. When I was seven, I’d heard a story about a sanctuary for lost children and then I’d learned there was no such thing. I’d forgotten both, and I couldn’t blame that on any spider bite.
“Cal!”
The small patch of Nevah’s Landing evaporated from the night and I could see the roof again. I couldn’t have been out of it any more than a few seconds, but sometimes only seconds are needed. Now there were at least thirty Nepenthe spiders, black blots of shadow to the casual eye, that had crawled up the side of the building and jumped over the edge of the roof. Advertised as spacious, the terrace wasn’t cutting it for that many giant arachnids. Everywhere was a clacking mandible; everywhere was the scuttle of their legs. There was no place you could turn and not see six alien eyes staring back at you. After this experience and Spider-Man 3, if I ever saw Tobey Maguire, I was going to punch him in the face.
They were on the chairs, crushing the small tables, spilling over one another and, though I turned to aim at the ones behind me, they ignored me. They all teemed in one direction—toward Niko on the other side of the terrace. I’d seen my brother fight nearly every monster alive, and I’d never failed to be awed. I was a hybrid of a creature that every other creature in history had feared, loathed, lived in terror of, and I could kill easily, too easily, but there wouldn’t ever be a day in my life I’d have anything on Nik in sheer skill. But sometimes all the skill in the world wasn’t enough. This many of them—Niko was only human. The most skilled human I’d ever seen at fighting, but at the end of the day … human. Sometimes you needed something that had less in common with unadulterated ability and more about having a soul you could pack away at a moment’s notice.