“How you doing there, Spartacus?” The first to step forward, he got the name—so sayeth the movie. I rubbed between his ears. Goodfellow knew everything and everyone—Captain Cook, Ramses, the Pied Piper, and even Caligula, he’d once said. I couldn’t quite hear the echo of that particular memory, but I knew it. Chances were he’d known Spartacus in the day too … and had that movie cued up on his DVR and ready to go at all times. Plus, Salome might be less inclined to bite off my head if I brought her a friend.
“You did this. You did this to me, you empty vessel. Worthless and weak.” The mouthy mummy remained pretty crispy too. Niko … Niko had set him on fire. That was what had happened. It wouldn’t destroy him, he’d said. It wouldn’t hurt either, only slow him down. Good informants were hard to find; he’d said that too. Wahanket would survive it, and he had. Then I’d come along—me and a convenient fire axe. He’d survived that as well, but that impression … It would be a little more lasting.
That was the first time I’d seen the shadows and felt the pain inside. That was the first time my brother had drugged me. Niko had also said the mummy had once tried to shoot me and before I’d made with the axe, he had tried to strangle me as I’d deprived him of something. Wahanket had been clear. I’d had something he’d wanted, but I’d lost it. But what was that something? The same thing Ammut wanted? The same quality the boggles and Wolves thought I was missing? Creep, creep, came the memories, but not fast enough—not as fast as Ammut was moving.
Now was the time to find out the why of all those things. That was why I’d come back to Wahanket. He knew who I was—what I was—and he was going to tell me. I wasn’t waiting on the Nepenthe venom to wear off on this. This was something I might not want to know, but I needed to know. Ammut had proved too dangerous to the others to let things take their natural course.
Wahanket, professional disperser of information, was going to tell me all those things I didn’t want to hear about Cal, but I needed to, because Cal was far more likely to be able to handle Ammut than I was. Cal would be able to protect his family and friend when I might not be able to. The first night in Nevah’s Landing, I’d turned out the light and slept in the darkness, because, while monsters lived in darkness, so did killers.
I’d guessed killer for me. I thought now I’d guessed wrong.
“I don’t think I’m as empty as you thought.” I sniffed the air. “You smell Extra Crispy. I’d have taken you for an Original Recipe guy, but you never know.” Spartacus wrapped his paws around my wrist and proceeded to chew away mouthfuls of the rugged, water-stained black leather jacket and spit them on the floor. “You never goddamn know. Take another look at me, Wahanket, and tell me what I was and what I’m becoming again. Tell me or I’ll chop you into pieces so small you won’t be able to stitch yourself back together with your teeth, because I’ll pound them to dust. And whatever you have that passes for lips, I’ll rip off. Your gums … hmm. What the fuck. I’ll just pop your head in a box and toss it in the East River. See how that affects your sewing project. Home Ec. What a bitch, huh?”
Spartacus agreed by tearing off half my jacket sleeve. Oh yeah, this destructive little shit was going straight to Goodfellow. For all the torment he’d caused me, the puck deserved it. Salome might kill things and people; this guy would kill an apartment—more specifically Goodfellow’s penthouse.
Wahanket’s marsh-light eyes sharpened as they fixed on me. “You are correct. You are becoming again.” The teeth snapped in a satisfied smile … or mummy constipation; it was a hard expression to read. “You shall be you again, and if Ammut does not have you, one day I will.”
I tickled Spartacus’s stomach and the cat opened his mouth to show me a preview of
Jaws 15
, the IMAX version. Luckily, it was a yawn. “Yeah, I’m bored too, buddy. Now where did I leave that axe?” I didn’t ask as a threat. I asked out of genuine curiosity. I
was
bored. I was done playing around with this barbecued son of a bitch. Playing with something that can’t run or even crawl—where was the challenge in that? “Who am I, Wahanket? And if you don’t cough up something in the next five seconds, you’ll have to write down the information I want, because I’m going to cut out your tongue.”
Wahanket pulled himself up onto the ancient bench, lying on his chest to watch me. He wasn’t bored at all. “Do not worry. I shall tell all you wish to know. The meat tastes sweeter when it knows why it was chosen, flavored with the disbelief that any could bring it down. Despair and disbelief, nothing teases the palate so much as those.” Gold flakes had transferred to the bench into the blackened flesh of his hand. I could see the spark of them, a starry night, when he pointed at me. “You … You are Auphe.”
That was what the boglet had said. I was off, that wasn’t news. I was absolutely off. But the word wasn’t completely that. It was somewhere in the middle of “Off” and “Ouph-fey.” A human tongue couldn’t exactly replicate it. But I could see the word in my head, dripping with black bile, smelling of blood, part of me.
In
every part of me.
I was Auphe.
Always had been, always would be. A word made of screams and slaughter, murder and madness, albino pale skin, red eyes, the shine of hypodermic-needle teeth—more needles than a hospital would need in a month. White, red, and metal, like my Peter Pan crocodile.
Here you have brothers and sisters. Baby boy, baby boy.
The shadows grew wider around me, but I didn’t stop. I did have a brother. Not one that a crocodile had given me, but a real one, and he needed the real Cal. And real or not, Cal or not … I kept my promises. I told Niko I’d be his brother and there was only one way to do that—by bringing Cal home. “Auphe,” I said with a distance so great that I may as well have been on the moon. “Who are the Auphe?”
“Were. Who were the Auphe?” One of the flakes of gold fell from his hand to the floor. A speck of the sun falling to Earth, a soul falling much farther. “They are all gone now, except for you, half-breed. But once they were the first.”
“The first what?”
“The first of anything. The first of everything. They were the first to walk this world. They were the first to kill simply for pleasure. They invented murder, created torture, conceived terror. This world was theirs for millions of years.” The yellow glow softened. “So very long ago, when Death itself bowed to its masters.”
“They set the gold star standard for nightmares like you. Great. How did I get to be one? Half of one?” Because one of them damn sure hadn’t been trolling for a good time and met up with Sophia. Easy or not, she had to have some limits.
The gold is gone, and you’re still here, brat. You’re still goddamn here.
Or not. Sometimes a whore is a whore to feed herself and her children. Sometimes it’s for drugs or rent or because it’s her body to do with as she pleases. And sometimes someone like my mother sets a gold star standard of her own. They’d paid her to make me … not to have me. You have babies; you
make
monsters. I’d been an experiment; I knew it. I
knew
it. I didn’t know why yet, why the Auphe would want a half-breed, but the hell with the how and the why of it. That was coming fast and furious on its own, clawing up through my subconscious. I’d know, whether I was ready or not, and I didn’t need this asshole to tell me that.
“I’m a monster then, like Ammut?”
Wahanket laughed. It sounded as if he were choking on his own mummified organs, if he hadn’t removed them. “No, you are not a monster like Ammut. Ammut will be a child in your shadow when you return. Ammut is simply a creature like any other creature, eating to live. Enjoying meals that taste especially finer than others, as you would taste. She kills to survive. You … Auphe … You are the only monster in the world. We all pale before you.” He clacked his teeth together. “Which is why you are a challenge; why your life will taste the most flavorful of all there is.”
This piece of shit was sewing himself back together for one reason only—to get his own chance of sucking me dry of Auphe. To make a meal of someone and something he should never have fucked with from day one. Informants are difficult to come by, eh? Then we’d have to try harder. This one had answered his last question, although he had told me what I required. Cal, the real one, could handle Ammut. It was all I needed to know.
I put the mummified cat down and I found that axe.
When I was finished, I didn’t need to put his head in a box. A hundred skull fragments weren’t going to knit a Christmas sweater or put themselves back together again. I dropped the axe in the midst of a pile of shattered bone, cracked resin, and one very ex-mummy. “The first,” I said to the remnants. “I’m one of the First of this world.” They invented murder, created torture, conceived terror, he’d said.
“Invent, create, conceive, and you wanted to screw with that. You should’ve thought about what the First would do to you instead of what you would do to it.” Bone crunched under my boot. “And you, mighty Wahanket, were barely worth the fucking time.”
When I turned to leave, I felt a weight thud onto my shoulder. Spartacus rubbed his bedraggled, bandaged head against mine with the same death-by-avalanche purr that Salome had. “I’m not leaving you, Kojak. I have a better home for you. In fact …” The eyes still glowed on top of the crates. Wahanket had made pets, but he hadn’t made any friends. Not one had interfered in his destruction. There were what looked like ten mummy cats watching me watching them. “Eh, why not? If Goodfellow is so oversexed that he can’t put his damn pants on to answer the door, he deserves what he gets. Come on, guys. Get your wrinkly King Tut tails in gear and let’s show a trickster what trickery and revenge are all about.”
One of the best things about NYC … An ex-but-soon-to-be-again monster can walk down the sidewalk surrounded by a bunch of loping dead cats, catch a cab with an extra fifty thrown in by calling himself a vet student with some patients in dire need of bandage changing, make an extra stop, and not long after that be back home. I opened the door, sat on the couch, grabbed the remote, and turned on the TV.
Niko was now in the kitchen, showered and mixing something that would not only eradicate any Ammut toxins remaining, but probably anything living at all. “Where did you go?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, Mom?” I changed the channel. “Oh, hey, Robin.” He had started talking about tonight’s party when I’d left for the museum and he was still on his cell phone, making plans for the catering, talking a mile a minute, when I’d returned. If Ammut ate us, that would be one big, fat wasted catering bill. “You’d better shut off your phone and get your ass back home. I left you a present.”
He brightened, a magpie at the sight of a shiny coin. “A present? I love presents. I can’t believe you, especially you, actually got me … Oh,
skata
. What am I thinking?” He jammed the phone in his pocket, grabbed his coat, and was out the door before I made it to the next channel.
“What did you do?” Niko demanded, turning off the blender. “What did you get him?”
I held up one arm that was missing three-fourths of what had been a tough, thick leather jacket sleeve and grinned at him. “Eleven dead cats. The doorman thought it was hilarious. I don’t think he likes Robin much. And I think the condo board is meeting as we speak to discuss enforcing pet limits with a subcommittee looking into pet aesthetics. Not everyone can be Best in Show or win beauty pageants. Stuck-up asses.”
“Buddha save us.” From the glance he gave the blender and then me, he was entertaining the thought of throwing the contents at me. “You took Wahanket’s mummy cats. Why?”
I shrugged, turned back towards the TV, and changed channels again. “Well, first off, he was a malicious evil shit who killed cats to make mummies out of them. That is beyond sick. They deserved a better home.”
“Don’t tell me you just said, ‘He
was
a malicious evil shit.’ “
“That would be reason two.” I clicked off the TV. “No one needs an informant like that. I don’t care how hard it is to find one. He tried to shoot me, strangle me, wanted to eat me, and he was a cat killer. The first three I could deal with. Cat killer, no.” I peeled off the ruined jacket and tossed it over the back of the couch. Twisting again, I could see the kitchen area where Niko was thinking. I could see the quicksilver motion behind his eyes and all but hear the hum. Wheels turning, and it was a few hours too soon for that.
I tried to distract him. “Since you found me, Niko, tried to show me who I was”—and keep me who I wasn’t, I thought—”you’ve been something for me to shoot for. You walk the straight and narrow. You’re a good man, best man I’ve known in my whole week now. But you’re a good man in a job where good is a drawback. You’ve made allowances, excuses, and you’ve made them, I know, for what you thought were the right reasons. Let a cat killer live; maybe get information to save other lives. But, Nik, when you do wrong, the reason is never right enough.” It was a difficult concept to grasp as the shadows wrapped around me, but I did. For now … I still did. Cal wouldn’t, but I did. Then again, I might be underestimating Cal. For himself, he might never know, but for his brother … I thought he did. Niko had his honor, and I would’ve guessed Cal would do anything to let him hold on to it. Who’s to say a monster can’t love his brother?
“
You
are lecturing
me
?” Niko sounded as if that would knock him flat before his toxic milk shake would.