by Rob Thurman
“Then you do not especially love Delilah? Or would not be averse to confirming what her nature has her planning regarding Ammut and us?” With a fan of bills appearing in his hand, Niko sat beside me … in the way I’d noticed he always sat, deceptively relaxed but prepared to leap up at any second. I’d noticed a lot about him and what he did since South Carolina, minus a few gaps from yesterday. He trained … nonstop. He practiced every spare minute of the day for the job. But what was the real job? I’d seen that already. Keeping little brother safe and sound from the monsters, although I hadn’t had any problem taking care of myself so far … except with regard to Ammut.
I’d asked during my “rescue” why they couldn’t leave me working at the diner, destitute but monster free. He hadn’t answered.
The Halloween picture was the answer … and soon enough I’d know the question that made sense of that answer. Why I did this. Why my brother, overprotective to the point of putting me in a bubble, let me live a life that had nothing but short life span written all over it.
And why in a picture revealed by a bright flash, I was the only one who stood in shadows.
Or more important, why I wasn’t concentrating more on the naked breasts in front of me. They were only two now, but they were still spectacular and better things to concentrate on—easier. I kept half my attention on them and half on Niko, who was still talking to the Wolf stripper, the nudity bouncing off him as if he had a force field—or a jealous vamp girlfriend.
“No. I have no love for my new Alpha, but I have respect. I am Kin. I am Wolf. I will not betray her. Betraying her would be betraying myself.” She snatched the bills from his hand and then those wrapped around my fingers so quickly I almost lost my index finger to a paper cut. “Telling you the Lupa is waiting for you to find the life drainer so my new Alpha can kill you and claim the credit would not be the Kin way, would it?” She leaned forward, then cocked her head sideways, studying me with eyes curious and wary before kissing me. It was quick and short, but with the definite taste of copper and tongue. She pulled back. “Only a sheep. Clever or not, only a sheep. What did our Alpha Delilah see in you?” Then she was up and prowling from the stage to be replaced by another stripper.
I rolled the taste of blood around in my mouth and didn’t find it as bad as I thought. “A trip to a Wolf nudie bar all to find out that this Delilah, my ex who had bad taste in sheep, was going to kill us and steal our thunder?”
Niko was already pushing me toward and out the door. “No. That was a given. This was to let her know we know. As much as Nashika might miss Vukasin, her pretense at wanting revenge by giving us information is just that. Pretense. She is Kin and all Kin are loyal to their Alpha … unless they can take their Alpha. This little red Wolf wouldn’t have a chance against Delilah on her very best day. She’ll tell,” he explained. “I want Delilah to have second thoughts and perhaps third ones as well. It is one less thing we could do without, her nipping or ripping quite literally at our heels while we take on Ammut. Delilah is confident, but we’ve defeated her once before. She knows we won’t go down as easily as our clients did.”
“And you couldn’t have e-mailed her to let her know we see her coming,” I griped, “and saved me about fifty bucks? You said I needed sex therapy. There was plenty of therapy there, if anyone was feeling like giving a pityhump for a poor sheep, and did I get to touch any of it except for what was the shortest kiss, I hope, of my life? No, I didn’t.” I automatically bent my head to escape most of the swat.
Poodle brain, my ass. I’d learned that habit of Niko’s early on.
I still was tasting blood from the Wolf’s kiss when we made it home. The tang didn’t mix that badly with the wasabi mayonnaise, but it was still blood and we found more of the same waiting for us. The window hadn’t been fixed yet… . It was so high that getting anyone out there to do it was going to be a pain in the ass. I saw learning glass replacement and where to find tall-ass ladders in NYC in my future.
The blood would’ve been carried through that break in the glass … and rested in the eight hearts that had once contained them. I’d smelled it a block away—as little as it was, which was why Nik unlocked the door and then went through ahead of me with his sword drawn and an elbow in my gut to keep me back. Never mind he was limping and I was at my prime, from below the neck anyway. I thought about shooting him in that forcibly pointed elbow, but shooting him to try to protect him from himself might be seen as extreme. Or it might not.
Only one way to find out.
I put aside the fantasies of ninja elbow destruction for the moment and followed him in, closing the door quietly behind us. The blood smell was stronger, but it wasn’t rank. There wasn’t much blood. There doesn’t tend to be in hearts that are ripped out of chests. The blood tends to stay with the body. And then carrying them over in a bag left behind—from Nordstrom, classy—let more leak out, until you’re left with a few tablespoons of blood and the smell of raw meat. That was what was left of eight people—the smell of raw meat. It hadn’t been spiders, and they hadn’t come through the glass. She—and it had been a she, I could all but taste the perfume—had picked the lock and distributed the hearts around the place. One was even on the kitchen bar in a rectangular Japanese-style glass vase I didn’t know we had.
Not that I knew much. Not now … not yet.
Soon.
I stared at the heart swimming in the water of the vase. It was small; a child’s heart. It was February; one of the first things I’d found out when orienting myself in Nevah’s Landing. It was February, but was it a particular holiday? One that featured, among other things, hearts?
Fucking soon, all right. I’d have those memories soon, so I’d know what to do about things like this. Where to put these feelings, because I didn’t want to have them. If you lived this life, you had to have a mental box for moments like this, to shut them away. And you needed thick chains to wrap around the box and sink it to the bottom of the ocean. I needed to find that goddamn box.
“Is it Valentine’s Day?” I asked. It wasn’t my voice and it wasn’t the old Cal’s voice either, because Leandros gave me an assessing glance—one of those looks that said, “Hang in there, little brother, while I break out the straitjacket.”
I ignored it and him. I woke up on a beach with four giant goddamn spiders that I killed. Me. I’d done that. It had been me and monsters and nothing else. No big brothers to keep reality from me, and I’d survived anyway. In fact, I’d excelled for a man with half a brain. I hadn’t lost my shit then; I wasn’t losing it now. “Hearts and flowers. So where are the flowers?” And where was the Eater of Hearts? Where was Ammut?
On the pale gray counter were letters drawn in what little blood there had been left. For a murderer, she had nice handwriting. Neat. Legible. Written in death, same as in the shed where the dead counsel had lain, but you can’t have it all. She’d written four words: Give them to me. Again, the same as in the shed where she’d written it on the wall. At least it wasn’t in hieroglyphics. Niko would’ve had to break out a book or, hell, the guy already knew how to read them.
“Give them to me.” Niko had already searched the place. I hadn’t bothered. After the revenant-in-the-bathroom test, I made sure I could tell if it was only us or someone else still around. Except for the flowerchoking perfume and death she’d left behind, she was long gone. He read the words over my shoulder. “Give them … Give her what?” he questioned. “She’s already taken and is still taking what she wants. What do we have to give her? Why does she keep repeating this?”
In the Park.
Give them to me.
The trees, the grass, spiders all around.
Give them to me. You know. Only you would now with the true ones past and gone. Where they are? How selfish you are, half-breed. Keeping them all to yourself.
The spiders coming closer, more than four. Twenty at least.
Give them to me.
Maybe it had been Valentine’s Day then. It
would explain the echo in my head, though not the truly crappy grade school poetry.
Roses are red, violets are blue.
The sound of two guns firing followed by …
I’m not giving you a goddamn thing, bitch, so fuck you.
It was so nice when a brand-new voice made room for itself in your head. I had me, two more preamnesia mes with radically different opinions on things, and now this Ammut bitch. The joy and the general party atmosphere of it all were too damn good to be true.
I shot the vase. I didn’t hit the heart. I didn’t want to. I just wanted the creepy fucking post-Valentine’s weirdness gone. The death of a child gone. The letters … the words … gone. The water didn’t wash them away. They were too dried for that, but it made mopping them up with a wad of paper towels easier.
“Cal.” He said my name as if he wanted to say that it was all right, but he knew it wasn’t all right. He was the big brother, though, and he couldn’t not say anything even when there was nothing to say. I didn’t look up from scrubbing the letters away, paying attention only to the letters and not to the broken glass. When I cut myself, he found more words to say. “Cal. Stop. Now.”
“Why? Because a little of my blood is worse than a bunch of hearts lying around the place?” Eight people—maybe nine if I found one under my pillow—were dead because of us. People. Kids. Fucking kids. All right. I was losing my shit after all—a little. I was entitled. You couldn’t ignore that much death when it was your fault.
The short sliver of recall that had flashed through was something I felt even more. “I remembered something.” I exhaled, then mumbled as I wiped. “A little. I was in a park. Central Park, I think. There were spiders and I remember a woman’s voice telling me to give them to her. Give them to her. I have no idea what she was talking about, what she looked like, or how I managed to get away from twenty-some damn Nepenthe spiders. I’m good, but a Chuck Norris Samuel Jackson fucking parfait of kick-ass isn’t that good.” I threw the soaked paper towels over the counter into the sink. Shit. The only way I’d know the word parfait was Goodfellow. I’d have to thank him for that later with my foot up his ass. Hopefully he’d be wearing pants by then.
“If I remember that, if that happened, I don’t see me surviving it, but since I somehow did, I don’t see me not telling you about it before I took off on my priestess-hunting sabbatical down south.”
He took another mass of paper towels I’d snatched up but hadn’t needed in my scrubbing fest. Folding them into a neat square, he offered them to me. “Your hand is bleeding.” I pressed the white to the oozing glass cut and watched it turn red. “And perhaps I thought you were safer on a wild-goose chase in South Carolina after some fictional priestess until we found out what Ammut wanted so badly from you, because you didn’t know then either. ‘Give them to me’ means nothing, to you—to any of us.”
“And off I went, but spiders followed me. Turned out I wasn’t that safe after all?” The cut didn’t hurt. The deep ones never did at first. “I was bitten looking for something that didn’t exist, lost my memories, and it still took you four days to find me in Nevah’s Landing where I happened to wander because my subconscious remembered the good old days when we were kids and Peter Pan was around? And that’s me believing I would’ve even gone to begin with. What about the twenty spiders and an Egyptian fake goddess? How’d I get away from them? Fucking fly?” I let the bloodstained towel fall to the ground. “That’s the worst bullshit I have ever heard and I don’t need a memory to know that. It’s not even a lie. Jesus, it’s barely half a lie and zero explanation. Didn’t we grow up on the run with our mom moving from mark to mark? That’s what you and Goodfellow said. Well, you, Leandros, didn’t learn a damn thing from her.”
“I can lie.” He didn’t sound defensive at the accusation, only at the use of our last name instead of Niko.
“You can lie? Just not to me then.” When it was me, he clearly sucked at it. If you thought about it, that made him a good brother. I didn’t feel like a good anything right now. “I cleaned up the spiders last night; you can handle this mess.”
I took a last glimpse of the small, pathetic piece of meat on the counter and for a flicker of time it was much worse than the death of a blackbird. What is a miracle inside a person is nothing but a gravestone of flesh on the outside.
“The bitch gave up her snack just to send us a message.” Which we didn’t understand. Eight wasted lives to tell us nothing. “I say it again, you people need to look into e-mail.”
I slammed my bedroom door behind me, lay on my bed, and started emptying my jacket of knives, throwing them at the wall. It already had “Screw you” spelled out. I would see if I could add to that. Niko didn’t follow me. Wise man—crappy liar, but a wise man. After a few hours, I decided grown men didn’t sulk in their bedrooms. It was almost two a.m. when I headed out of our place on my own—because I needed it, to be on my own. To find not an Egyptian monster, but to find more of myself as Niko was doing his best to keep the old Cal buried … while mourning him with every halfhearted swat and god-awful excuse of a lie, every hour of sleep lost. He wasn’t the only one with good hearing. I heard him up half the night. He was practicing; trying to find a restful mind in an exhausted body—as he was doing now. He was in the gym area in sweats and bare feet. “Use protection” and “Did you brush your teeth?” were his only words in response to my noninvitation when I passed him as he slammed a roundhouse kick into one of the heavy bags.
God, what a fucking bad liar. “Sucked” wasn’t close to the word.
It should be a good thing, seeing easily through the man who wanted to be … who was my brother. It wasn’t. It only made me wonder why he was lying at all. Okay, he thought I was happier this way, and that damn Halloween picture proved him right. I hated to say it, but it was true.
But never mind the picture and my truth; it was the way he was lying. It was weird, as if no lie could explain away our rotten childhood. There were plenty of kids with crappy childhoods. Big deal. Why try so hard to lie and explain something that was almost normal these days?
But no one needed to explain why he followed me when I hit the street. I had a tattoo, the words of which Niko had told me meant “brothers-in-arms” in Latin—could you believe it? I was surprised I wasn’t a parasitic twin in a pouch under his armpit that he patted on the head and fed chocolate pudding—we were that close. Let me loose alone on the town by myself, target of spiders and high-class heart-eating bitches? No way would he let that happen. He couldn’t lie to me, but he could follow me without my seeing him. Somehow, I still knew he was behind me. I didn’t have to see him or smell him. It was pure gut knowledge, no malfunctioning brain cells required.
Always his brother’s keeper.
I hesitated two blocks away, deciding where to go, and headed for St. Mark’s to catch the six o’clock train while consciously not looking over my shoulder for my brother. Why ruin it for him? Niko didn’t have a matching tattoo that I knew of, pussy, but if he had one at all, I was sure it would say Massively Overprotective Brother from Kick-Ass Hell. I doubted they could put that in Latin, but that was what it would say, punctuated with a ninja star or two crossed soybeans, depending on his mood, and announcing his mission to the world.
He had changed my diapers, after all.
That made up my mind for me. No more hesitation. Alcohol—I needed alcohol. Niko could follow me all he wanted and drag my unconscious body home if it came to that. Then he could be the massively overprotective brother who dodged drunken vomit—less martial and heroic when phrased in a tattoo, but I didn’t mind.
I went to the Ninth Circle, thanks to three things. I knew how to get there since I’d already been given the tour of my old life and that hadn’t fallen into one of the black holes of consciousness that riddled yesterday. I knew someone I wanted to talk to would be there. And, a given, there was a huge amount of alcohol. It wasn’t long before I was on what felt like the wrong side of the bar, beer w
ith a whiskey back before me.
“You usually don’t drink the more embalming of the alcohols. You most often stay with beer.”
Goodfellow, not the one I wanted to talk to, had sat down next to me. I did the shot of whiskey. “And why’s that?” I asked.
“Your mother was a raving alcoholic. Raving in most things from what I gather, but alcohol being one of her primary obsessions.” His own glass was flanked by two bottles of wine. I’d seen his tolerance. Alcoholism would be a problem for him only if someone started giving him entire barrels of the stuff. “As a result, you and Niko rarely drink. Tempting the fate of bad genes isn’t always a good idea.” He considered his glass for a moment, then touched it to mine. “But then sometimes fate is fate and one learns to live with it if not embrace it. If you don’t remember anything at all in the wilds of your amnesia, Caliban, remember that. Remember it well.”
Now there was the best kind of lie, one that wasn’t a lie at all. He’d told me something, something important, but I didn’t have enough of my past yet to know what it was. “A raving alcoholic, huh?” He wasn’t pulling any punches.