You’re born a monster, you die a monster, and there’s nothing but murder in between.
The same refrain as before and it felt as true as before, but I felt something else. She was sad, this vampire—damn sad and with good reason to be, although I had no idea what that reason was.
There’s no such thing as the best. There’s good enough, though. Sometimes. She makes you happy, Nik. A happy brother’s not such a bad thing.
My voice again, but this time it was a flash of memory crawling out of the past, my first real one. I didn’t remember when or why I’d said it, but it sounded as if I’d meant it.
I looked at her hand. “Yeah … I’m sorry. I’m trying to be good, I am, but it’s probably best I don’t touch you just yet.” I might be forgiven for accidentally attacking my boss, but Leandros might not be so forgiving if I did the same to his girlfriend.
She withdrew her hand, her ivory mouth, as pale as the rest of her, losing that reassuring smile she’d been giving me. “I don’t understand.”
Goodfellow almost choked as he laughed around the last swallow of his drink and waved his hand at a peri for another bottle of scotch. Yes, not a glass—a bottle. The puck had some serious tolerance. “He’s telling the truth. He
is
trying to be good, difficult as that is to believe. And polite. What a change a few days down south can make. He’s become a Southern gentleman. It’s almost as amusing as when Venus became too fat to float on that shell. That’s what you get for eating nothing but honey cakes and mead.” He took the new bottle of scotch and poured himself a glass. “To be fair, however, anything the kid does that doesn’t involve him stabbing me with a fork goes in my entertaining column these days.”
Her eyes glanced at the puck skeptically, then back at me. “You tried to stab Robin with a fork?”
I held up three fingers. “Sorry to say I don’t regret a one of them. Okay, strictly not true. I sort of regret the two that didn’t connect.”
Niko intervened when Goodfellow began to look less amused. “Cal has some … difficulties, let’s say, with nonhumans. All nonhumans. He’s having trouble discerning between the good and the bad.”
I shrugged. “Monsters are monsters, and monsters are bad, but I’m working on it.”
Like Ishiah, the guy with the feathers, she said nearly the same thing: “You told me on the phone, but I hadn’t comprehended he’d be quite like … this.” The fingers touched the back of Leandros’s hand in what appeared to be support as the ocean of heather concentrated on me. “You’ll be yourself soon enough, Caliban. I can wait until then to touch your hand or kiss your cheek.”
I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t expecting her to say that, and monsters’ mouths were made to eat you, maul you, tear you; there was no damn silverware on the table, but there were knives. I had knives. My hand was already going for one inside my jacket when Leandros’s hand clamped down on my wrist, not enough to hurt, but enough to shake me out of it.
“Could you please,” he requested in a mild tone and with an unbreakable grip, “not attempt to stab Promise with one of your knives.”
“Or a fork,” Goodfellow interjected.
“Or a fork,” Leandros repeated with a patience that had to make him double as a saint. “Promise, if you could avoid startling Cal until he remembers that you do care for him and he for you, we might all survive this,” he said, and added with a wry tinge to the words, “He startles easily now.”
I could say I did not startle easily, but it was hard to back up when I’d wanted to stab someone for threatening to kiss me on the damn cheek. I decided to ignore the entire thing. It had never happened. Pride saved. “So”—I shook off the hand and rested my own on the table—”let’s talk goddesses and what the fuck you do about them except pray at their altars or run far far away.”
Hours later Goodfellow was close to being buzzed, the bar had run out of scotch, and I knew Ammut, the Eater of Hearts, had been born of the Egyptian Nile; she was as old as Goodfellow, which was so old he couldn’t remember; and she wasn’t a goddess in truth.
Relieved? Yeah, a little bit.
“Everyone back then who could get more than two humans to worship them was claiming to be a god or a goddess. And why not? Free food. Vestal virgins … vestal horny virgins. Fertility rites. Good times. Very good times. If you could pass as one, why not claim it?” Goodfellow had said. While I marveled that there was nothing in his view of history that couldn’t be directly linked to some sort of orgy, he went on with the rest of it. Ammut thought hearts were a nice snack, but she really liked souls much better. Except nonhumans didn’t call them souls, because they weren’t souls. It was a creature’s life force she drained and consumed.
Ammut, in Egyptian legend, ate the heart of a dead person if they were found unworthy of passing on to the afterlife. If you did bad things, it weighted down your heart, much like fried pork chops weighted it down with cholesterol. Sin and fried pork chops—two of the best things in the world, and all they got you was an early death and acting as the dinner for a greedy Egyptian fake goddess.
We’d gone through this all before, but I’d forgotten it. I didn’t think it would be that long before I started remembering things on my own again. Last night lying on a bed surrounded by enough rumpled clothes to stock a Salvation Army store, seeing the city lights through the windows high above, it had felt the way it should. Right. True. As if I recognized it with my body if not my mind. It was the same when I woke up this morning when Leandros had kicked lightly at the bottom of my mattress. I hadn’t thought about shooting him with the gun under my pillow once. I’d been tempted… . It was eight a.m. for Christ’s sake … but I hadn’t actually put any real thought into it. It had felt right too. Then there were the shadows and bits of thoughts I couldn’t connect to any solid memory, but that hadn’t stopped them from popping up today.
“When she sucks out their life force, they die.” I started to take a pretzel out of the bowl, when the dead cat gave me a look. I let her have the pretzel. She didn’t eat it, but she wanted it and that was good enough for me. I feared no giant spider, but her … I was on the fence. “Are there souls? What if she did eat them? Does that mean no afterlife for the unlucky bastard? Is there an afterlife?” The cat didn’t count. She was still moving. She wasn’t so much after life as predeath. Halfway between.
Goodfellow looked up at the ceiling and scratched the bald head of his pet. “That’s far too encompassing a topic for now. Philosophy can wait. Let’s focus on the part of her devouring their life force and they die. That’s enough to get the job done.”
“On that note, I’ve got a job to get done. Be right back.” I got up and searched out the bathroom. Dick in hand, I was reading the graffiti, a lot of which was about me, go figure, and not in a “for a good time” kind of way, when I heard the door swing and smelled the Wolf. It was an accomplishment. The entire place smelled of the furry bastards. I’d be smelling Wolf for a week. Then came the growl, the breath reeking of rotting meat—not much on flossing—and the mangled words, “You are
weak
now.” He moved closer. “I smell it on you.” Closer still. “You are weak like a sheep.”
Mother
fucker
.
Could a guy literally not take a leak in this messed-up world without fighting for the goddamn privilege?
I had no illusions about what normal wolves did to normal sheep, what Wolves did to human sheep, or what this Wolf wanted to do to me. I kept pissing and raised my other hand that held the Desert Eagle to ram the muzzle between his eyes as he started to snap his jaws at my throat. Yeah, I’d learned my lesson the past few days. I now held my dick in one hand and my gun in the other when nature called. Guns worked better than forks.
I dug the muzzle harder into his flesh, the metal grating on the bone of his overhanging brow. He was one freaky-looking Wolf—not in entirely wolf or human form, like a cut-rate Halloween werewolf costume. Not a good look. He looked like a guy overdosing on steroids, Rogaine, and with teeth… . Okay, the teeth definitely couldn’t pass for human. “You’re not that bright, Rover. I don’t know or care why you think the rest of me is weak, but my trigger finger is Arnold-fucking-Schwarzenegger. Now back the fuck off or I’ll blow your empty skull apart and finish pissing on your body like a fire hydrant.” I grinned. “You won’t get a more appropriate memorial than that.”
His skull wasn’t as empty as it seemed. He had at least one brain cell and he used it to back away and out of the bathroom. Puppies.
Weak? I thought I’d proven I was anything but and had Nepenthe spiders to testify on that—if they weren’t dead, but maybe he smelled the amnesia on me and thought without memories I couldn’t kick furry tail and take ID and rabies tags while I did it. Who knew? A few minutes later I was back at the table with Goodfellow picking up the Ammut snooze blah blah right where he left off the second I sat down.
“And the more powerful the nonhuman, the better Ammut likes it. She isn’t wasting much time sending her spiders after the revenants. They’re not worth her time, but the vampires, Wolves, boggles—they’ve been more to her taste, which is why the Kin has said they would cooperate until this is all over. We have yet to find her or her nest of spiders. Before you left for South Carolina, we were going to check Central Park and see if Mama Boggle and her brood were there or if Ammut had gotten to them yet.”
Leandros braved an undead paw and put a pretzel in front of me. He did it automatically. I could see a lifetime of feeding the “little brother” behind it. It was so automatic, in fact, I guessed there’d been times we’d gone hungry as kids. Or Leandros had anyway. All his pretzels on hungry days, I’d bet, had gone to me. It was things like that that had made me believe his and Goodfellow’s story more than the words. “We can go there tonight. If I had a choice, I’d leave you here with Ishiah and Samyel, but I think you would be safer with the three of us. Too many old enemies know you work here.”
“You’re worried about me?” I picked up the pretzel and saluted him with it. “I killed an eighty-pound spider with a fork—even if I missed Goodfellow twice. It looks like killing doesn’t require a memory.” A lesson I’d just taught Rover. “You can put away the diaper and bottle.”
I proved that, again, when we stepped outside the bar into a seven o’clock gloom to head to Central Park. I took four steps, pulled the Desert Eagle, pointed it upward, and pulled the trigger. Then I took another step, this time back, as the body hit the pavement at my feet. It was a Wolf, female, and more wolf than human. Another half-and-half. All Wolf. The jaw was twisted and wide-open for my throat, the fangs bared. Her hands were more like elongated paws, her eyes open and staring pure gold. There wasn’t any blood to speak of, only a hole in her forehead. Shattered bone and burned flesh. The dead don’t bleed. She’d jumped from three stories up; that and the bad lighting made it a good shot. And that was all I felt—the satisfaction of a job well-done.
At first.
I was a not-so-bad brother. I saved people. And I was a killer. I didn’t feel bad about the last item. I only killed monsters, I killed only to save those who needed it. I counted myself on that list. If you were going to try to kill me—try hard. I could guarantee I was going to try my best to do the same back to you. If you were a werewolf perched three stories up, you shouldn’t make any noise when you jump, because any would be too much. It can seal your fate and it had hers. “A Wolf.” I didn’t mention the one in the bathroom. He was more braindamaged mutt than Wolf, drunk, and with delusions of fuzzy grandeur. If he was in the Kin, he probably was their equivalent of a janitor. He hadn’t had the intelligence for more.
I chambered another round in the Eagle. “Not to mention the revenant-thing in the apartment. I thought you said the Furry Mafia was on our side on this one.”
“Except for Delilah. Every pack but hers agreed. The Lupa pack didn’t bother to send a reply.” Niko was resheathing his sword. He was the big killer looking out for the little killer. “Although I think this may be that response.”
My ex’s pack, the Lupa, was named for the wolf that suckled the founders of ancient Rome. Leandros liked shoving those little factoids in your ear at every opportunity. He’d told me too that Wolves weren’t actually werewolves; they were were-people. They’d started out as wolves and evolved to being able to switch back and forth between wolf and human. Some Wolves wanted to go back to what they’d been before that Jurassic mutation. The cult of All Wolf. That had led to inbreeding and damn odd-looking people with pointed ears or jaws, stuck in between human and wolf, unable to be completely one or the other.
My reaction to that lecture?
Tell
me I hadn’t been doing a chick with a hairy back. Dear God, tell me she hadn’t had a hairy back. I’d been relieved to find out that Delilah looked all human when she was human and all wolf when she was Wolf. Not like this one lying at my feet.
The gold eyes were fogging over. They’d belonged in the forest, peering through the underbrush, not dead on a sidewalk outside a bar. Suddenly I wasn’t as proud of my perfect shot anymore. When killers had the eyes of an animal whose predatory temperament was nature and nature wasn’t meant to be the subject of punishment, it was harder to feel a hero. That was how I’d thought of it. I was a cop or a soldier on the front line between the innocent and the nightmares. But I saw it for what it was now. Take pride in whom you’re saving, but don’t take it in the killing. It was necessary, but it wasn’t something to glory in—especially when the creature you killed had thoughts and emotions the same as you, the only difference being a wild and free soul living as born instinct had taught her.