“It’s a wake, and ‘Danny Boy’ is what you sing when someone dies. It turns out I cut my hair for the right reason after all.”
He stopped again. “Who died?”
“No one you know.” This time I was the one moving him. I shoved him or he allowed himself to be shoved. I saved my ego and didn’t guess. “Look. A tattoo place. Ishiah said it opened yesterday. Run by some ancient Mayan guy. Acat. Another one of those, ‘Yeah, I’m a god, okay, maybe not, but I live forever’ things. Good for business. Keeping the street monster-eclectic and human free.”
“Are you feeling the victim of discrimination?” He had immediately stopped yet one more time the moment I’d said tattoo, balancing with ease on the curb. It looked effortless, and apparently it was, because when I shoved harder, he was concrete—a mountain.
“Nah, I have sheep solidarity with you. At least I can say there are two humans in the city. Good to know.” He tensed under my hand as I said that, but I was too drunk to know why and too drunk to care that I didn’t know why. And too drunk to care that I didn’t care. It was a very Zen thought process. Good for me. Good for drunk-off-his-ass me. “And, Niko, you’re getting a tattoo. I have one.” I waved the arm it was on. I was proud that I didn’t stagger. I was a mountain too. Look at me. “Brothers-in-arms, right? It’s a brother thing. In the fucking handbook, I know it—if I could ever find the fucking handbook. Now it’s your turn.”
So he’d understand.
When the time came, I wanted him to understand. The tattoo would tell him then what I couldn’t tell him now.
“And what tattoo am I getting?” The mountain was shifting, minutely, under my hands.
“Bros before Hos.” I got him off the curb and across the street, where he stopped for the last time.
“My body is a temple. I may let you deface it with graffiti if it means that much to you that I reciprocate your brotherly brand, but
that
phrase is not an option.” Ah, there was a limit to all that family do-or-die after all.
“It’s not that exactly. Christ. It’s just sort of the same sentiment, but without the hos and with the same sort of rhyming… . Just shut up and get the goddamn tattoo, would you?”
He did. In the tiny shop that was spotlessly clean, he did it because I asked, maybe to get more of the brotherhood back that a spider had stolen. Or maybe he was just too damn tired to fight about it. Mourning one brother, adopting a new one—because Cal and I weren’t the same, as much as Niko was trying to tell himself that we were. Trying to tell himself I was the old Cal, only with a creamy icing of happy-go-lucky contentment on top.
It was hard work, adoption and lying to yourself. It would make anyone tired, this superninja included. I handed the wrinkled napkin to a red guy with earlobes down to his shoulders and four arms—or that might’ve been that annoying double vision. Niko, in the chair with his shirt off and his upper arm bared for the needle, frowned at the writing on the stained paper. “What is that? I don’t recognize it.”
“Aramaic.” I sat down on the one small plastic chair provided for those who wanted to wait. Yawning, I finished the thought. “Ishiah wrote it for me. Figured it was the one language you probably didn’t know.” And wouldn’t be able to read until he was ready to hear it and I was ready to tell it.
“There are many dialects incorporated through other languages, regions, time periods… .”
I dozed off, and I couldn’t blame the alcohol. Faced with death by boredom, my brain took the only other way out—unconsciousness. When I woke up, it was morning and I was in my bedroom at home. I wasn’t in bed, though, and my knife-practicing wall no longer said
Screw you
.
It said something worse.
Something that was getting damn familiar.
11
AbominationAbominationAbominationAbomination-AbominationAbominationAbomination.
I wobbled for a second as I woke up or realized I was awake. It wasn’t that easy to tell the difference between the two. I was in bare feet, sweatpants, and a T-shirt. It was cold. We needed to get that window fixed. I hated the cold worse than I hated Niko’s tofu. The wall in front of me, the knife wall, was covered with that scarlet word, from as far up as I could reach down to the floor. My hand was cramping and I lifted it up to see the pen I was holding. The red was ink, not blood; that was something.
“You’ve been at it for three hours. I gave up trying to wake you up after the first hour. This, naturally, means you will never drink again.”
Sleepwriting; it was better than sleepwalking, I guessed. I dropped the pen as I turned. Niko was lying on my bed, which was neatly made with fresh sheets and a blanket—a pillow too. Fancy schmancy. “How’d we get home?”
“Cab. You were upright, technically, but not especially coherent. You went to sleep on the sidewalk while I unlocked the door and then woke up, only to pass out again here on your floor, which, lucky for you, was as always padded with your dirty clothes. I thought it might be a good idea for one of us to be conscious in case the spiders returned. I made your bed and have been here since.” He sat up, indicating the gauze wrapped around his biceps. It showed about half an inch, the rest covered by his own T-shirt sleeve. Removing the tape and bandage and pulling up that sleeve, he revealed a black and red band similar to the one I had around my arm but written in a different language. “All of this following getting a tattoo I did not want or need because you insisted it was in something called
The Good Brother Handbook
.”
“Yeah?” I studied it with interest. “What’s it say?”
His eyes narrowed and there wasn’t a trace of the dry humor I’d seen once or twice when he wasn’t forcing himself to live a lie. “Don’t get my brand-new sheets there wedged up between your ninja-ass cheeks,” I said, providing all the humor and then some. “I remember what it says. Maybe I’ll tell you on Christmas. Don’t go researching ancient Aramaic and spoil the surprise trying to read it yourself.” I did remember too, and I didn’t have a hangover. For someone who didn’t drink often, I was still expert at it. A natural talent for fighting off toxins, the fun kind and the spider kind, that was me.
Yesssss. Never weak.
I moved back to my original position, facing the wall. No one was going to need any help reading that. Covering the entire thing was that one word.
Abomination
. My subconscious had a thing for that word when it came to monsters, a real obsession. First, it whispered it in my head and now it spelled it out in reality, covering every inch, every single inch.
Except …
Precisely in the middle of the wall were six different words in letters so much smaller than the others that they were barely noticeable.
AbominationAbomination-Where are your brothers and sisters? Give them to me AbominationAbomination.Abomination.
“I gotta say”—I scanned the entire wall—”I’m an industrious worker in my sleep.”
Abomination
, I ignored. My subconscious didn’t like monsters—or part of it didn’t; that was perfectly clear and had been from day one. And from day one when I thought monsters, I’d also thought automatically abomination. But the other thing written on the wall …
Where are they? Your brothers and sisters? Give them to me.
Selfish.
Where?
Where?
Where?
It was what she’d wanted in the park. That was what she’d said after demanding I give them to her. My brothers and sisters, and as far as I knew, I had only the one. Ammut, the bitch, making demands I couldn’t meet because I didn’t understand. I couldn’t wait to catch up with her. Goodfellow better have his socialite/cougar trap all but ready.
Wait. When they’d brought me back from South Carolina, that had been scratched in the concrete in front of our place. Where are your brothers and sisters? She’d always wanted that from me, whatever that was, from day one.
I reminded Niko of what was carved out front and said, “Now we know for sure what the ‘them’ is in the ‘give them to me’ love note she left yesterday. You’re positive we don’t have any other brothers or a sister hanging around? Maybe Mommy Dearest sold one in a Walmart parking lot for booze?” I groaned as I massaged my hand and sat down next to Niko on the bed, practically bouncing off the snug, hospital-corner-tight army blanket. “You going to tell me what happened in the park now? Before you sent me on my vacation down South? I told you what I remember. Why don’t you tell me?”
He gave up on that particular deceit—liar, liar, pants on fire—and this time told the truth. “I don’t know.” What came after that sounded true too, but uneasy as if he didn’t know, but he’d started guessing and his guessing would be good. He was too smart for it not to be. He had his suspicions, but he wasn’t sharing them—a different type of deceit, but deceit all the same. “I don’t know what Ammut wants or what that means.” He rolled off the bed and stood abruptly, then gave me his back with the next words. “I’m the only brother you have.” I wonder if he knew that sounded more like a question than a fact. “And she has no reason to want me. I won’t taste any better than any other human.”
I didn’t call him on it. Niko was so far over the edge in this mess that he was going to have to ride it all the way out. The lying and half-truths were nothing compared to what else he’d done, something completely outside his moral code.
I’d seen that moral code this week or so. He’d walk back three blocks to give back change to someone who hadn’t charged him enough for a PowerBar. He was loyal to his friends, devoted to me, possibly pathologically so, loved a vampire—seeing past the outer monster to the core of the true woman beneath, and had given up vamp nookie to babysit me until the amnesia passed. He’d raised me from birth—what person did that if they weren’t functional parents? Not even brothers did that, but this one had. The guy had honor in a way that almost eclipsed the word itself.
What he was doing now, not only lying, but
doing
— he’d be punishing himself so thoroughly on the inside that I didn’t need to add to it.
One time had been enough for me to figure it out—one time and a spider in a box. New toothpaste plus memory relapse. That and the constant harping on my dental hygiene.
Brush your teeth, brush your teeth.
He was worse than any dentist. I didn’t have to be a genius to know where he was putting the Nepenthe venom. It was only enough to keep me from recovering any further memories. Keeping the status quo, thanks to the box o’ spider he’d FedExed to Robin—one of the few memories of that day I’d hung on to.
If anyone would know how to make that ancient nepenthe potion of the pharaohs, or know someone else who did, it would be Goodfellow. He was the one who’d known of its existence in the first place and who knew its effects. He did that for Niko, and he’d given me enough of a clue in the bar for me to make my own decision. Under the cloak of talking about my mother’s alcoholism, he’d told me … Sometimes, genes or no genes, you simply had to accept who you were.
I didn’t know personally if Cal was a good guy or a bad guy, but I did know he was a shadowed one. I also knew what Ishiah had told me, but that wasn’t anything I’d repeat. I also knew people reacted to me like a grenade that inexplicably didn’t go off. I know Wolves and boggles had lost respect for me, even though I could still kick their asses. I knew body-temple Niko wouldn’t have gotten a tattoo for his Cal unless he thought it would help the return of part of that Cal—some of him but not the part that remembered, not that unhappy part. No one who cared for his brother wanted him unhappy.
Niko wasn’t the kind to make mistakes often, but with me … and with Cal, he had.
I didn’t know Cal, that was true, but I knew myself. I wasn’t a murderer. I
was
a killer, but only if I had to be. I wasn’t an abusive shit like our mother was said to have been. But most of all, I wasn’t a thief. I wasn’t stealing Cal’s life or Niko’s brother. I’d thought it before: Niko Leandros was a born martyr, but now it was time for him to walk away just this once and let someone else take the stoning in his place. Cal wasn’t happier this way, because I wasn’t Cal; I was only a piece of him.
Whoever Cal was didn’t make a difference. I wasn’t complete. I wasn’t the real deal, but real or not, illusion or the foundation of an actual person,
I
was a good guy. If you could have anything in the world, that was one of the better things to have. Tombstones crack and fall. Fortunes come and go. Legends fade. What you did with your life, no matter how short it was or how real it was, that counted.
That lasted forever.
“Did you fall asleep?” A sharp elbow stung me over my ribs.
I let it all slide out of sight. It was a waiting game now. My memories would come back, but I couldn’t pick when. That was out of my hands, although using Niko’s vomit-worthy toothpaste instead of the minty-fresh venom-laced one would make sure it did happen and sooner rather than later. Sitting around thinking what a damn heroic guy I was wasn’t going to make anything happen on the Ammut front, though. I had to pay that rent.
“Thinking how annoying it would’ve been to wake up to five or six Nikos instead of just the one. You’re damn annoying all on your own. More brothers? No way.” I elbowed him back. “Since we don’t know anything about what bat-shit-crazy Ammut wants from us, why don’t we dangle ourselves in front of her so she can ask us personally? Get Goodfellow to hold whatever rich shits of New York party he’s going to tonight.” The puck had said it would take days to do right and be believable. But if we put enough bait in the trap, it wouldn’t have to be believable—only too good to pass up. “Have him invite a crapload of vamps and Wolves and whatever else crawls out from under the beds along with humans. Stack the deck. It’ll be too juicy a temptation. Ammut will either try to eat the guests or jump us to ask us about the brothers-and-sisters thing.”