by Rob Thurman
“Monster,” he croaked. “Auphe!”
No one else had heard the “Auphe” over the loud bickering of the customers as Niko wrapped his hand around the beak, shutting it tightly. The wings flapped desperately as Robin did his best to calm him down. As he did, Niko said, “The Artful Dodger from Dickens. His real name in the book was Jack Dawkins. Jackdaw. A jackdaw is one of the known tricksters. Very clever. I wonder who fooled who? Did Dickens fool his readers or did Jackdaw fool Dickens?”
“He’s very…free…with his knowledge,” Kalakos said, eyes fixed on Jackdaw, but the comment was meant for Niko.
“And you just noticed?” I asked wryly.
Goodfellow wasn’t having any luck with the convincing or restraining until he snapped, “He is what he is. Do you want to annoy him enough that he tells us to let you go for him to handle your squawking death wish?”
I pulled out the Glock and slapped it down on the book. “I’ve never seen a trickster turn into a bird before, but Thanksgiving is only a few months away. I’ll bet you wouldn’t taste that different from turkey.” Then I picked up the gun and aimed it at one MoonPie eye, the muzzle a half an inch or less away. “So shut the fuck up, as plucking feathers all day from your dead ass isn’t my idea of a good time.”
Jackdaw stayed a bird, one that bowed his head to hide his eyes and the tears dripping from them. I didn’t know birds could cry. “This is what I am,” I said flatly to Kalakos. “Whether I try to back down from the paien’s insults and attacks or I am this, I am always treated the same once they know. Terror or attempted slaughter. I learned that a long time ago.”
Kalakos watched as Dodger rapidly turned the pages of the book. “How long since you were able to try to back down?”
“Sixteen. The day I escaped the Auphe.” The two years of captivity I didn’t know. I didn’t remember if I’d backed down or fought. I did know one thing: I might have backed down in the beginning, but I must have learned to fight. Or I wouldn’t have made it back with teeth coated in black Auphe blood.
The pages of Dodger’s book were flying faster and faster. It was a good indication that this wasn’t a conversation he wanted to be a part of and as soon as he was rid of us the happier he’d be. “Humans only notice once in a while that I’m not…right. But I don’t live in a human world anymore. It wouldn’t be safe for them. Eventually…” I shrugged.
“Everything is not eventual,” Niko refuted sharply.
“But eventually everything is,” Kalakos said. It wasn’t a counter to Niko. It was as if he were saying it to himself.
“There is nothing. There is no Janus.” The crappy cockney accent had disappeared and the voice was that of a bird, a harsh caw, but an improvement. “I am sorry. I am sorry. Please. Please.” The tears had slowed but not stopped. He’d been about to scream my identity to every monster in the place, and I recognized crocodile tears whether they came out of the eyes of a bird or not.
Sometimes I took off my mask and showed who I was, could be, would be.
There were times it was necessary…like with a giant screeching tattletale of a blackbird.
There were times it was purely instinctual.
And there were times I enjoyed it.
“Dodger.” I leaned closer and picked up a fallen black feather, ran my finger along it. “I’ve been looking into goose-down mattresses. Good for insomnia. But expensive as hell.” I considered him before smiling—a sociopathic shopper finding a bargain. “But you…you’d be free. And better than cable when I have you pluck your own feathers out one by one”—I let the one I was holding drift away—“…by one.”
Dodger dived his beak back into the book, turned a few more pages, and then: “Here. It says here. There are commands or spells or phrases, but none specific in a way they can be written down for the sake of history. They are…” He peered at the word, puzzled, as a last fake tear fell from the end of his beak. “Mutable? Indefinable? Erratic?” He hunched. “I am sorry, Lord Auphe. That is the best I can decipher.”
Lord Auphe. Now I did feel like shit, crocodile tears or not. He was afraid; I knew it was true. The tears were an act; the fear wasn’t. Almost everyone who knew the truth was afraid. I grabbed Robin’s wrist and took off his five-trillion-dollar watch, shiny and gleaming as they came, and tossed it on the book. “Sell it. Buy Mrs. Jackdaw something nice. And keep your mouth shut until we’re gone or a jackdaw mattress won’t have a chance to hock anything.”
As I was turning to leave, with Goodfellow bitching and snarling about his watch before demanding the location of other book stalls with more helpful information, I saw it, a black blot overhead. Bad things come from beneath, beside, and overhead. I didn’t skip a location and hadn’t since I was fourteen.
It hadn’t been there before. It had been brick shadowed in the gloom of torches and lanterns, but now it was pure black with the sheen of dirty oil. “Goodfellow, stop your bitching. What’s that?” I pointed up.
“Zeus’s pubic lice. We took up a collection. They were supposed to be exterminated three weeks ago or I never would’ve brought us here.” He already had his sword drawn. “The blood. The blood our clothes are soaked in. It woke them. They sleep in the side tunnels. It’s the manananggals.” It was the sound a cat would make coughing up a hairball or Salome would make coughing up a Great Dane, but apparently it was serious. Goodfellow was already moving back toward the entrance. “I’m going to eviscerate every last one of those lazy exterminators. Run. Run!”
Strange, twisted heads lifted from their bargaining to watch with suspicion and nervousness as we tore through the market, trusting that if Goodfellow thought it was bad after facing Hephaestus and his crew, it was plenty goddamn bad.
“Manananggals,” Niko said as we ran, his own sword out, “are descended from the ancestors of bats. An offshoot. They’re similar to vampires, although vampires are descended from Homo sapiens, humans. They suck blood through a hardened, long, tube-shaped tongue, sometimes even taking the blood directly from the heart if they strike deeply enough. They form in colonies as real bats do, but are much larger. They—”
A dark olive-skinned hand came up to smack the back of Niko’s head like the countless times my brother had smacked mine. Kalakos growled, “We are about to die. Could we do it without the enlightening voice-over? Khul!”
“I still hate you, Kalakos,” I said, “but that is a memory I’ll keep to my dying day.” Which might be this day.
I looked up to see the stream of silent wings in rippling motion, a river of night streaming over our heads. Niko’s general pissiness at having his lecture interrupted was apparent. “Fine. One last fact. They don’t attack one at a time or even two or three. The entire colony will swarm down on us the same as a school of piranha. They will blanket us. There’s no way from beneath that. They’ll suck us dry in seconds.”
Jesus. Could this day get any worse? And dying in a pink shirt was still in my future. Goddamn it.
We were halfway to the arch when I raised my eyes again. One of them hit the wall, tumbled, and, before it straightened, its flight let me see more than I wanted. What fresh hell was this? They were cut in half at the waist. No legs. Only a waist and a heavy sac of intestines that should be cascading out…but weren’t.
“Holy shit, why are they sliced in half? What keeps their guts from falling out? That is disgusting. Niko…”
“If we live, you can Google it when we get home. I don’t want to weigh you down with so much information that it slows your running.” If we lived…I was currently on Niko’s shit list, which made one not that invested in living.
“I was listening. I didn’t do anything. It was Kalakos. I marvel at every fact that falls from your lips, I swear.”
“You’d best hope and pray we do die.” One drop of vengeance in an ocean of head slaps I’d received over the years and Niko was holding a grudge. After the past two days, the calming effects of his meditation were taking a beating.
It didn’t matt
er. It looked as if my suggested hopes and prayers were coming true. Now I heard them, the rustle of their wings. They were coming down, the shroud to cover the dead—and we were the dead. The size of a medium beagle, they had pinpoint eyes of milky white, ears huge and pointed, snub muzzles pouring gray mucus, clawed hands at the juncture of the wings, and a curved dagger of a tongue plenty long enough to reach my heart. I lifted the Glock, but it was hopeless. I could take out ten Cyclops, but these were in the hundreds. Three swords and a fast reload and we were screwed all the same.
Until it came through the arch we’d been running for: a flying serpent with intensely blue scales, black wings, four taloned feet and legs curled under its belly, a sleek head with a sunburst of black spines, and eyes that rivaled the sun at noon.
It also breathed fire. We’d had some serious run-ins with fire today. We dived to the slime-covered floor as the flames of an entire forest fire turned the colony of bloodsuckers above into ash. It continued with its flight and smashed through the far wall, and here was hoping this was not the day for a scheduled tour or that ticket was going to be really worth the price.
“That was a dragon,” I told the puck accusingly. The blackened ash continued to fall.
“I’m aware.”
“You said there were no such things as dragons.”
“There aren’t.” He tried to wipe the ash from his face and hair, making it worse. “And don’t ask. Just embrace a little mystery in your life and that you have that life left to embrace anything at all.”
That wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t done.…I mean, shit, a dragon. Who as a kid doesn’t want to believe in dragons? But I didn’t get a chance to push it. Dodger, puppy-dog tears and a watch he could trade for a condo, started squawking loudly enough that the whole market heard this time. “Auphe!” A wing pointed. “Auphe! With the black hair! Auphe!”
I’d said there were creatures down here I hadn’t seen before topside. There were creatures I couldn’t have dreamed up or have made out of a squid, a vampire, a revenant, an entire pack of Wolves, a shark, a Sasquatch, a pig, a chain saw, and a hot-glue gun. “I think I want the bats back. At least that would’ve been quicker,” I muttered, holding out my left hand to have the xiphos slapped into it.
It would’ve been.
I’d told Kalakos at Dodger’s booth. This was my life. Massive unpopularity and/or fear. Anything between was as atypical as it came.
Vendors and customers both attacked. It wasn’t all of them. Some were too small and harmless for the weapons we were carrying. Some were too huge and gelatinous to move more than an inch every fifteen minutes. Some, led by Jackdaw, were watching from the side and taking bets. A trickster, a lying, betraying, crocodile tear–spurting trickster, could figure the odds with no problem.
“When have any of your informants ever once not ended up not trying to kill us?” I gritted.
The puck lifted his shoulders without a trace of guilt. “I warn you each time. I can give you the information, but I can’t make your brain absorb it or your ego swallow it.” He swung his sword and sliced a clump of those fourteen long blood leeches he’d talked about earlier on our way through the tunnel. They had reared up over his head, their tails knotted for a base of balance—a base that also tangled and wouldn’t let them separate to flee when Robin’s sword cut through rubbery flesh. Sucker mouths lined with a circle of teeth all made the sound of a fox-caught rabbit.
Ever heard a rabbit scream? It’s the sound of a burning house full of trapped children. I haven’t heard anything worse for fear and pain, and I hoped I didn’t.
I avoided the flopping of their death throes. I hoped it was their death throes and they weren’t like worms: Chop one in half and you suddenly have two. Niko took off two heads of a three-headed humanoid lizard with one stroke of his sword. A creature that was either a Turkish Karankoncolos or a down-home Sasquatch—I couldn’t keep them straight—was leaping toward Goodfellow and me as if it were a spring-loaded grizzly bear. I shot it in the chest three times, which knocked it sideways into Niko.
“Shit!”
I tossed aside monsters and planted the Glock in the bear-thing’s humanlike ear and put two more rounds in at the same time a silver blade came through its throat and out one slitted purple-black eye. You could say that took care of it. I pushed and helped roll its three hundred pounds off Nik, who staggered to his feet.
“’Kay?” I asked.
He nodded, somewhat out of breath with katana and xiphos in hand. He pointed to the arch, which was a good substitute for “run” when you didn’t have the air to say it. He went with me on his heels until another freak I’d yet to see rushed me. It was shaped like a woman, a wild tangle of black, brown, and gray hair. Her nails were corkscrews of years of growth. She was nude, not that that went into the positive column. Her teeth were perfect pointed triangles in her gaping mouth—all of her teeth and all of her mouths. She had one mouth on her chest, her stomach, each arm, each leg, and they all made the same mmmmm sound I made when I was extra hungry and smelled a chili cheese dog.
Today I was the chili cheese dog. I shot her in the one place, oddly enough, she didn’t have a mouth: her face. She tumbled backward into something that might have been…Hell, I didn’t have a clue. It was tentacles, a seven-foot-tall writhing mass of transparent tentacles, each tipped with a black seven-inch-long thorn and equipped with crimson suckers. It should’ve been a claw or a talon, but it was a thorn, and I could see the tears of dark red poison welling from the tips. Worse, I could see the poison pumping its way down the tentacle through the translucent flesh. It was like a thick vein, and beside it was a much larger tube of the same color that nothing was coursing through. It led to the suckers, and I imagined the flow of that vessel worked in the opposite direction—to suck up flesh from a paralyzed or dead victim. The poison might not be a poison; it could liquefy instead for easier consumption.
It could be both.
After this party, H. P. Lovecraft could suck my dick. This was one of his worst nightmares or wettest dreams. What had been wrong with that ass?
With no face. No mouth. No orifices at all that I could fall back on to aim a bullet up in a desperate time of need. I shot it in what was roughly its middle while chopping off the tentacles that flashed toward me with the xiphos. The bullets were swallowed into its mass with no effect. The sheared pieces of tentacles fell and didn’t move again. Relief, yeah, but when the thing had a hundred of them, tipped with poison, I couldn’t put a sword into a major organ, if I could find one, without getting close enough to get wrapped up like a mummy, all while being stabbed by toxic barbs.
I was part Auphe and resistant to many venoms, but this thing had gallons. If it worked fast and Sushi-zilla ate even faster, I could be sucked up like a milk shake in seconds, nothing left but bones and bad clothes. But not today. I’d had enough today. I’d had Janus nearly land on us, a tribe of Cyclops, bat-shit crazy gods, a monster of metal and fire too unreal to be believed. I was done for the day. Finito.
I holstered the Glock to fish in the pocket of those stupid pants Goodfellow had forced on me and closed my fingers around one of my favorite toys. “Nik, Robin, Kalakos! Go! The whole place is going to be covered in seafood stew in six seconds!”
We’d been close to the arch and I could see the three of them battling like hell. Heads were flying, limbs; monsters were taking them down right and left, but they didn’t fail to get back up again and again. I waited until they made it to the arch itself. And they weren’t doing it for themselves alone; they were clearing me a path, because I was going to have to run like a son of a bitch.
I chopped several more lashing tentacles with the xiphos while lifting the grenade. I hadn’t used it at the armory when the Cyclops and the fire giant had attacked. Throwing a grenade into a room filled with thousands of pieces, shards, and splinters of metal? The shrapnel from that would’ve killed us before Hephaestus’s creations had a chance.
I removed the
safety clip and pulled the pin with my teeth. It looks great in movies. In real life it hurts like a mother and can screw the hell out of your teeth, which was why this was the first time I’d done it. With one hand swinging a sword, I didn’t have much choice. “I’ll think of you next time I’m drinking sake,” I said, then turned and ran. My path was paved with bodies of prejudiced paien, but that didn’t slow me down. Once I released the spoon on the grenade, I had about six seconds. I had enough left in me to be standing up on the street hailing a cab in six seconds.
Or that’s what I thought, until I checked behind me and saw how fast that thing was coming up behind me. Too fast and too close. In six seconds I’d be dinner and half-digested. I let go of the grenade’s spoon, counted to three, whirled, and threw a homer.
It hesitated at the blow of what had hit it and flew through several layers of tentacles to embed itself there. That’s what I hoped, that curiosity would kill the Kraken. I didn’t stop to check. But while three seconds was enough to stop the thing before it reached me—fingers crossed—it wasn’t long enough for me to reach the arch to hide behind its six-foot-thick walls. Niko was starting back, to throw his martyred self on top of me or to kick my ass for not exercising more, running more, running twice the hours every day to be faster. Robin grabbed him around the chest, yelled my name, and pointed to the side.
I blinked and thought, What the hell? If it didn’t work, it was that much more convenient.
One second later, the grenade blew. I tumbled over and over until I lost count. If I was in a wreck and the car rolled, it would feel like this, but without a seat belt. I had my hands over my ears, but I thought I heard the splat of exploding Jell-O. It was my imagination, more likely, as I heard nothing but ringing when I lifted my hands away.
Dizzy, I was trying to get enough equilibrium back to tell up from down when Niko threw open the lid of the coffin. He said something. I didn’t know what. I couldn’t hear a thing, but it would be along the lines of, “Are you all right?” “That was the bravest thing I’ve seen.” “You were Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and Batman combined.” “I’ll do the laundry for the next year.”