Blackout

10

“I am going to make Goodfellow rue the day he ever gave you that gift certificate. His Christmas present to me is years of aggravation from you. Tricksters—no wonder they’re the least popular supernatural creature alive,” Niko growled. We were at Goodfellow’s place to tell him the news about Ammut in person, discuss, plot, and all that shit. Why not just use the phone? Because he wouldn’t answer the damn thing or return voice mails. After two hours we gave up and made like Jehovah’s Witnesses, knocking on his door.

I blew air upward to clear the hair from my eyes. I could see why I’d had a ponytail. This was on my last nerve and that Goodfellow approved of it meant it was fashionable, and I didn’t want to be fashionable. That meant I tried. I didn’t want people to think I tried. Cool guys who kick monster ass do not try. Our coolness is inherent, goddamn it.

“It was the only clean thing I had left,” I grumbled as I pounded my fist against the puck’s apartment door for the third time. “I don’t think I like doing laundry.” The object of Niko’s exasperation was the T-shirt I was wearing under my jacket. It was black. When it came to me, I’d discovered this was the same as saying water is wet. It had cheerful yellow letters across the front: I LIKE PEOPLE! Below that were the words THEY TASTE LIKE CHICKEN!

“You didn’t actually say you think you don’t like doing laundry, did you? Because if you did, I may have to hurt you in ways the Spanish Inquisition itself couldn’t begin to imagine.” He was favoring his leg, but short of wrapping a pain pill in tofu in the hopes of shoving it down his throat as you would a cranky cat, there wasn’t anything I could do. He was one stubborn bastard.

“I told you to take a pain pill before we left,” I said unsympathetically, “or wait until the guy answered his phone instead of coming over here to kick down his door. Don’t be getting apocalyptic on my ass. It’s not my fault.”

“Apocalyptic on your ass?” The aggravation, not that genuine anyway, shifted into a more encouraged echo. The old Cal must snark more than I did. That made me wonder when he/I had time to breathe.

I grinned. It took some effort, but I did it. “Hey, medieval’s been done.”

Before I got a comeback on that one, the door finally opened and Goodfellow, in all his unclothed glory, snapped, “One knock, wait. Two knocks, leave. Three knocks, and I turn Salome loose on your testicles.”

“Oh, fuck me.” I covered my eyes as fast as possible with my hand. “No, wait—I didn’t mean that. I absolutely did not mean that. Just words. Bad words, very bad. I probably shouldn’t curse as much anyway. I blame Leand … Niko for not raising me better. Hell, I blame you too. When you answer the door, put on some goddamn clothes.”

“I’m a puck with normal puckish needs. You feel I can’t walk around in my own home as I please? As a puck and a homeowner, I’m offended.”

“As a person with eyes, I’m offended,” I shot back, offended eyes still shut.

“He’s not as secure in his masculinity as he could be,” Niko said, his tone indicating that while he was having a good time at my expense, he was also not entirely unfreaked-out himself. “Unfreaked-out” … Was that a word? At the moment, did I care? Hell, no. “Although to be fair,” he continued, “not many men would be in this position.”

“‘This position’ is why I didn’t want to answer the door. I obviously have better things to do.” I peered through the crack between two fingers to see Goodfellow wave a cranky hand to invite us in. I edged in, back to the first wall I could find, sealed my fingers again, and waited until I heard a distant bedroom or bathroom door shut. I was about to relax when I felt a touch against my thigh and promptly nearly shot Goodfellow’s mummy cat between her firefly yellow eyes.

“Holy shit.” I slid down the wall to crouch, gun dangling from my hand as Salome—yeah, that was her name, I was pretty sure—curled herself around my neck and purred in my ear. Of course, purring doesn’t often sound like gravel grinding or avalanches crushing hikers beneath them, but we weren’t all perfect.

“You’d better find a grip on the situation or Salome may eat your head. She likes fear. Fear is catnip to a mummified feline.”

I looked up, growling at Niko’s enjoyment of my, yep—I admit it, full-blown terror. We were in a marble foyer. There was a living area, a kitchen that probably came with a chef, through another door, a dining room, and directly across from us a hall that ran to bedrooms and whatever else the orgy king had going on. Rich. Goodfellow was rich. That wasn’t worth wasting a thought on. What would be were the two or three gold-barred white feathers I saw here and there down that hall. Ishiah’s feathers. “This is so not good for a working relationship with your boss.” I groaned. “That guy needs some Rogaine for birds or something. Christ.”

“Don’t be such an infant.” There came the increasingly familiar swat to the back of the head. “It’s sex. You’re a grown man. You’ve done it and with an incredibly psychotic Wolf to boot. More times than I could begin to count.”

“Then you have no problem with my seeing your vamp Promise parade around our place buck-ass naked?” Actually that was a mental picture I had no problem with. Definitely worth remembering more than a mummy in a museum basement, which was why I guess the visual of her was still spectacularly vivid, practically 3-D. She was pale, but she had all that hair and those clutch-of-violet eyes and probably some spectacular ti … The smack was to my forehead this time, banging the back of my head against the wall—a two-for-one special. “Ow. Jesus. What was that for?” I complained, rubbing my forehead, then the back of my head, then my forehead again.

“You know perfectly well what that was for.”

Yeah, okay, he did have me there.

By the time Goodfellow came back, leaving whoever left those feathers—yes, I told my mind, I know who, so shut up—hidden in the bedroom, I was sitting on his couch while trying to decide whether to shoot the cat, now humping my leg—I didn’t even know cats humped—shoot Niko, whose smirks might be invisible but still detectable, or shoot myself. The puck, wearing a dark green robe, flopped down on the wraparound contour couch and demanded, “Explain, and if this is not very, very good, I’ll let Salome hump the both of you to death.” I stopped trying to shake the cat off and gave Goodfellow my full attention, which was enough to let me see from his sprawled position what he was wearing under the robe.

Okay. Myself. I was shooting myself. There was no way around it. I pried the cat off my leg and tossed her into Niko’s lap. If he was so determined to put himself between me and bodily injury, here was his chance. “I’m hungry. I’m making a sandwich. You two … do … whatever. Discuss. Maps. Plan. Evil Egyptian snob. Me smart.” And I was past the enormous rock crystal coffee table and all but sprinting toward the kitchen.

“Some things never change,” Goodfellow commented caustically. “Mice ever cower beneath the shadow of the mighty hawk. Oh, and Cal? Your T-shirt isn’t accurate. They don’t taste like chicken. People. More like a cross between beef and pork. And don’t give me that holier-than-thou judgmental look, Niko. I get that enough in the bedroom. Either I ate with the natives or I joined Captain Cook on the spit. He was a bastard and a half anyway, already practically pickled in his own rum. He didn’t as much roast as ignite and explode.”

Thoughts of chowing down on a pickled and barbecued captain didn’t bother me half as much as a puck who didn’t own underwear. I started rooting around in his double-doored, Easter Island statue-sized refrigerator and grabbed whatever looked the least healthy. Luckily Goodfellow wasn’t like Niko. He liked his food expensive, but other than that, he didn’t give a rat’s ass, especially when it came to things like heart disease and diabetes. In that respect, at least, he was just like me. Exactly like me. Equal; I didn’t fall short in any way. In any way at all. I scowled as I dug through some drawers, then hovered my hand over a fork before regaining some self-control. I went for the knife and started to chop bread and brisket.

“Speaking of pickled, cut down a gallon or so on your cologne. Delilah said she smelled it all over me after we were at the bar.” That must’ve been before yesterday, because I remembered it fairly clearly. “Not the impression I want to be giving hot lady werewolves.” For Niko and my head, which was beginning to throb from all the smacks, I added, “The nonpsychotic, non-Mafia, nonkiller ones I might meet in the future, I mean.” I hadn’t smelled his cologne on me, but I hadn’t tried to either. I damn sure wasn’t going to try and smell him now or whatever or whoever else was on him. That thought didn’t quite end up in my thumb being the next thing chopped next to the brisket, but it was close.

I was never going to be able to work at that bar again.

“My cologne, that’s asking quite a lot of me to give up,” the puck said with such polished smoothness and without pause that it meant he was lying.

It also meant he wasn’t trying to do a good job of it. Pucks were professional tricksters, born and bred, both Niko and Goodfellow had said. Why he would bother to lie about cologne, I didn’t know or care. I wasn’t puzzling through his personal life like Sherlock goddamn Holmes. Monsters trying to kill us—now that was worth puzzling over.

Niko filled Robin in as I ate my sandwich with wasabi mayonnaise. He told it all: my relapse into fuzzy memory land. The puck exhaled at that, almost as if he expected it, but he didn’t say anything. He only listened to the rest of it. Our dead clients and Ammut trying to carry me upstream to spawn like a salmon, he already knew about. That just left the attack of the spiders, which didn’t really need telling. That seemed to be an endless loop playing in my life. And then Niko laid out my logic of Ammut being an uptown girl, living the high life, probably in a penthouse.

Perched … Hadn’t someone said she liked to perch? Who had said that? The mummy. I lost my appetite but kept eating automatically. That damn mummy … Wahanket … He was what had happened yesterday. He was what I hadn’t wanted to remember. It came into sharper focus—the small spider that had attacked me, Niko boxing it up to send to Goodfellow, the trip to the museum, then slices in the darkness: suffocation, fire, an axe, and a feeling—a feeling of taking my own hand and meeting myself face-to-face. Of finally knowing who I was.

Heeeere’s Cal.

Then the relapse. A very conveniently timed relapse combined with a photograph and one basset hound- sized spider led to only one conclusion. It turned out I was Sherlock Holmes after all. But I’d known hours ago when I’d seen the picture for the second time that I had a choice to make. Now I knew how to go about making it.

I’d had one relapse, but if I were a betting man, and, hey, maybe I’d find out I was, I’d lay money down that I wasn’t going to have another.

“You?” My thoughts and sandwich both were interrupted. “You figured that out about Ammut? You came up with that? Do you even know how to use a map?” Goodfellow asked with a helping of disbelief as large as the helping of green mayonnaise dripping off my sandwich onto the granite kitchen island.

“Okay. Enough already. What was I before? Someone with the brainpower of a poodle?” I took another bite as I glared at the two of them.

“I wouldn’t want to insult the poodle, but …” The puck held up his hands. “Jesting. Kidding. All in fun, I swear. No, you’re smart enough with or without your memory. Your priorities are simply different.” His eyes followed another dollop of mayonnaise to fall. “Not with regard to cleanliness or appetite—those remain the same—but … never mind. Fine. Ammut is camouflaged as a socialite or a cougar or one of the wealthy women who gobble boy toys instead of life forces. Between Promise and me, I’m sure one of us has come across her. And was fortunate enough not to be eaten by her.”

“Monogamy,” Niko said, regarding the bald cat batting at his braid with the caution one would use when trying to give a piranha a surprise proctology exam, “may have saved your life.”

“And the rest of the world’s sanity.” I finished the sandwich and headed back into the fridge for a second raid, not that I’d regained my appetite, but my body was overriding my brain. That was when I heard the sound of movement in one of the back bedrooms. “Shit, gotta go. Arrange something. Society thing maybe. Mix with the rich and the life force-sucking bitch. Kill her then. Good plan. Call us. Later.” I was in the living room, grabbing Niko’s arm and dragging him out of the condo with the door firmly slammed behind us, by me, before five seconds passed. I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty for throwing out Niko’s idea about the society crap without giving him any credit, which was the reason we’d come over to Goodfellow’s condo. Add that to the map inspiration and I’d come off a genius.

“You are the biggest coward when it comes to Goodfellow’s personal life. I’m almost ashamed to claim you as family.”

He was so full of himself, with that tiny flake of mummy cat skin on his black shirt. “You want we should go back in there and have some kind of clothing-optional round-robin Egyptian villain discussion with an underwear-free puck and my boss, the guy with wings and a flaming sword? By the way, we don’t know where that flaming sword has been.”

“I hate to agree with Robin, but you need therapy. You do. Staying a virgin until you were twenty has obviously done profound damage to your psyche.”

“Twenty?” I moaned. Twenty years old?

“Or maybe it was twenty-one,” he mused.

You didn’t tell people that, whether it was true or not. Bastard. I didn’t speak to him again until we hit the bar. By then it was eleven at night, but it could’ve been eleven in the morning. It didn’t matter. Sin is open twenty-four hours a day. That was why I liked New York … or so I thought. It was a good reason. This bar was considerably different from the peri one. First this was a Kin bar—all Wolves, all the time. There was a fur ball at every table.

By the way, ever had eight breasts bounced in your face at once? I can’t recommend it enough. I headed straight for the stage. “Don’t they hate us?” I said distractedly, digging for money in my pocket. “Especially after what’s-his-name, their liaison with us, was supposedly killed by the Lupa since Delilah is going to hog Ammut’s glory?”

“Vukasin. This is his bar. They may hate us, but they honor their word,” he said, following me. “And their deal with us. For now.”

Vukasin, the dead Wolf. Yeah, the neon vuk me in the window should’ve been a clue, but I’d gone with the breasts. Clues, at that moment, I didn’t care about. Who said I didn’t have great priorities?

“We may hate the Lupa,” the stripper said as she crawled to the edge of the stage and sniffed my hair, “but we honor them now as our pack; Delilah as our Alpha.” Wolf hearing was damn good, as she’d demonstrated, but the breasts? Better. The octuplet breasts continued to shake in my face and I was having trouble deciding which set to slide the money between. This bar was much darker than the Ninth Circle, which was dim, but there were enough strobing red lights here to shine in the silver white reflection of wolf eyes and to emphasize those all-important breasts. The patrons didn’t bother to give Niko or me a sideways look, except for a sneer for being human … a sheep … even if a sheep in the know about the supernatural world. They didn’t look, but they did sniff. They caught the scent of metal, guns, and knives, then shrugged and continued to ignore us. Sheep, but armed sheep, smart sheep that their Alphas told them to leave alone until Ammut was taken care of, and wouldn’t it be easier to have a beer and watch the she-Wolves dance?

I totally agreed. “Row one, two, three, four, or the G-string—can you give me a hint?” I asked the stripper as I waved the bills in my hand.

Niko jerked me down to sit in a chair by the dance stage. “We’re looking for Vukasin’s Beta or his mate. Is one of them here?”

This Wolf had a full mane of wolf hair, wolf eyes, ears, everything Wolf except the human-sized breasts, ass, and arms and legs that allowed her to swing around the pole upside down. I’d seen that when we’d walked in the door and put it in a mental photo album to revisit in the future. It was weird, it was bizarre, but I wasn’t going to judge free porn—furry or not. Now she changed completely to human … except for feral yellow eyes. I missed the other six breasts.

She crouched on all fours, stopped sniffing me, and tossed back the wild mane of reddish brown hair that fell down to her hips. All the better to see you with. She was certainly no Wolf in a grandma suit. If she had a grandma suit, she’d left it at home. I searched my pocket for another bill. “Vukasin had no mate, but I was with him. I’m Nashika.” She ran a finger along my jaw and then tasted it as if I were cake batter she’d scooped out of a bowl. “I’m one of the few left of my pack. After Delilah killed Vukasin, she moved on to his pack. I was allowed to join the Lupa as I’m she-Wolf, not he-Wolf and not high breed. It is the same reason Vukasin would not make me his mate. I am All Wolf. My disgrace is my salvation.” She passed a hand in front of her eyes to demonstrate that. “The high breeds were not so lucky as to be invited.” The noninvitation sounded more like not-surviving. Delilah might not have actually been the one to take down Vukasin, but she’d taken down nearly all his pack. She probably owned the bar now too.

“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 with 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.

“Very much so. Verbally abusive, emotionally abusive, especially towards you, which would explain Niko being as much of a guardian in addition to brother when it involves you. Sophia had quite the pitching arm as well when it came to bottles and glasses.” He poured himself a third glass. “She was also a thief, a liar, and a whore—three qualities I usually favor, but in her case, combined with the maternal instinct of a wolf spider, she gives the rest of us liars and thieves a bad name. As for whoring, I’ve often been offered money for my brilliant performances, but I never took it.” He grinned and poured a second glass. “But it’s good to know I have a career to fall back on if the thieving and lying fail me one day.”

“Except …” The prompt had a threatening tone.

Goodfellow handed the second glass to Ishiah, who’d drifted up, no wings or feathers this time. “If it’s for money, it’s not cheating. It’s a righteous occupation of long standing. If one dies penniless in a ditch, monogamy becomes difficult … or far more easy, depending on your outlook.”

At Ishiah’s outlook, a fierce glower, the puck sighed. “Just remember the Good Samaritan story from that book you’re so very fond of. Picking someone who’s been mugged out of a ditch and carrying them home to oil them up? I know they were big on oiling people in those days, feet and all, but when you’ve been beaten and mugged, oil isn’t what you’re looking for. Trust me, there’s more to that story than anyone knows.” Ishiah’s glower went to nova-heat proportions. “Fine. Fine. I’ll wander off to a table then. Wave when you’re done discussing things of great import, and I’ll be back with something of far greater import in my pants. Dusty and unused for almost five hours now. Ah, sirens at table six. Perhaps they can sing sad lamentations of a warrior retired from battle.”

When he was gone and handing out his monogamy cards to the sirens, beautiful women with a green tint to their skin, Ishiah picked up the wineglass and drained it. After the two swallows that it took, I asked him, “Why? Man to bird, why? Why Goodfellow? Are you that hard up to be laid? How does he ever stop talking long enough to actually screw anyone?”

He instantly fisted my hair and smacked my face against the bar. He was nice enough not to do it hard enough to break my nose, and I was nice enough not to pull the trigger on the gun I had shoved against his throat.

“Show him the respect he deserves. He is your closest friend. He knows you.” That had to be true, because Goodfellow wasn’t rushing over to break this up. He knew his … mmm … Wingnificant Other wasn’t going to smash my brains out on the bar and that I wasn’t going to shoot him for trying. Niko, lurking somewhere outside the bar, hadn’t come in either … to prevent violence or avenge the fact my beer hadn’t been served to me in a baby bottle. Ishiah wasn’t a threat—or a monster. He was just my sometimes boss.

I straightened, put my gun away, and pushed the hair back so I could see. If it didn’t grow and fast, I was going for a buzz cut. “He knows me. He’s my closest friend. Everyone says so, but how do I know for sure?” Now was a time for facts. Considering the decision I’d made based on a brother’s need and in spite of a picture I, still to this minute, wish I’d never seen, I wanted facts to go with it. That was why I was here. Ishiah knew Cal … and knew me, but as an employer, not a friend. He’d be more likely to tell the truth and not soften the blow.

“What he told you about your mother,” the eavesdropper said, “do you think you told him that? All of that? You and Niko are secretive—anyone raised the way you were would be—so despite Robin’s being your friend, would you have told him that?”

No. Friend or not … no. That kind of past abuse … The rest of it was one thing, but to know two kids, kids I didn’t remember although I was one of them, had lived through that. I wouldn’t be throwing those details around. You shouldn’t be ashamed, but you were. You shouldn’t feel guilty and tainted, but you did. Niko had carefully edged around that information, blurring it, but Goodfellow had given me the real deal and, although I recalled none of what he’d told me happening to Niko or me, I felt it the same as if he’d kicked me in the stomach. It wasn’t a good feeling, which was why Niko hadn’t told me … and why Goodfellow had. Goodfellow was my friend, but he was Niko’s friend too.

Robin knew what Niko was doing to me—for me. After all, he was the supplier, the dealer in the dirty deed, but he also knew what Niko was doing to himself. He wasn’t going to choose between us. He gave me a hint about my past self through the truth about my mother, but the rest was up to me. Niko, unlike me, had walked through that past, whole and unshadowed, but how long would he stay that way if he lost his one anchor? If he lost his real brother?

The choice to claim the past and the old Cal that went with it was one Goodfellow was letting me decide for myself. He didn’t know I’d already made it.

But I still wanted to know it was the right choice.

“Then how did he know?” I asked as I heard a Wolf pass behind me and laugh. It wasn’t a nice laugh, gloating and gleeful with the whisper of sheep behind it. I let it go. It was happening more and more now in the hour I’d been in here. From that, I gathered that pigeons like Ishiah rated above sheep, but Wolves rated above both—in their furry little minds.

“Because it’s what he does. He’s a trickster that has lived longer than I can remember, and I’ve lived a very long time.” There were the wings, not in disturbance this time, though. Spread and lifted high, they made you think of eagles proudly surveying their domain. “I’ve seen man take his first step. Robin has been around long enough to have probably stepped on one of man’s slippery ancestors crawling from the ooze. He can take the smallest fact and spin an entire tapestry from it. But you gave him that one small fact at some time or another and you never would have if he weren’t your friend.”

I was getting so much truth now that I was surprised they didn’t charge extra for it. Abusive whore of a mother. No wonder Niko had to raise me. A horny puck that never shut up as a best friend, but, considering the T-shirt slogans I picked out, it was a wonder I had a friend at all.

I finished my beer and got another from Samyael. Good old Sammy was quick with the beer. “Can I ask you something, boss?”

“‘Boss’?” He took my empty and disposed of it under the bar. He was doing my job tonight. “You usually only call me boss when I have an axe against your neck.”

“An axe, huh? I must call in sick a lot.” I drank half of the second beer. As Goodfellow said, fate was fate; genes were genes. I wasn’t an alcoholic yet or I’d have gone into DTs in the Landing as I hadn’t touched the stuff there. But that didn’t change the fact he was trying to tell me something about who I’d been—he simply wouldn’t do it outright. Ishiah might. “So can I? Ask you something?” He paused, already looking as if he regretted it, but nodded.

“Is Cal a good guy?” Not me, but Cal, because there was still a difference. I didn’t watch his face for the response. I drank some more and waited.

When he finally answered, I accepted the single-word reply with a slight tip of my head in thanks. This time I was the one who had to take a while to think. When I was done, I asked him one more question. “If Niko had to choose between me and a burning orphanage full of big-eyed kids hugging fluffy kittens, which would he choose?” It was facetious as hell, but it got the point across.

Ishiah took the beer from me and drank it himself. “Irish courage … in a way. I picked that up from Robin. What it took you barely months to find out about him, it took me thousands of years. I was such a pretentious ass and full of dangerous, even deadly conviction. I judged him. It was only when I judged myself that I saw the truth. Now I won’t deny any truth.” He replaced my bottle with two more—one for me and one for him.

“Niko’s flaw—and it is a fatal one—is that if it came down to saving the world or saving you … he would save you.”

Fatal to the world and big-eyed orphans, I could see that, but to me it meant one thing:

How could I do anything less?

I didn’t know if it was my sheepness that offended the Wolves or my singing. But finally the last sounds that had kept them howling and hiding under their tables wasn’t enough to hold one of them back. He was too drunk to care about our Kin agreement or too tone-deaf to appreciate the song. While the rest of the Wolves covered their ears and kicked in agony instead of trying to kill me, this guy had had enough.

One or two or seven or twelve had been giving me the eye—blue, yellow, orange, brown, green, take your pick—and muttering among themselves. The more I drank, the more they muttered and the less their loyalty to the Kin word mattered. Then again, the more I drank, the less putting a bullet in a fuzzy ass bothered me, which made us even. I couldn’t say if that bullet would be lethal or not as my double vision was getting worse. I was matching Goodfellow drink for drink, which made me some sort of superhero with a mutant gene for consuming oceans of alcohol. And with mass quantities of alcohol comes singing.

The puck had started and I had followed. From the startled looks the peris gave me, that was not me, but considering this particular me was probably going away, screw it. I’d party while I was here. As for the singing itself, we weren’t bad. A karaoke machine would’ve helped me with the lyrics if not my kick-ass sheep rep, but I had a good voice, go figure, and of course pucks were great at everything, so said Goodfellow.

But while American Idol might’ve thought we could shoot gold records out our asses, the Wolves didn’t care for the higher notes of the song and “Danny Boy” was not their thing. I thought their pained howling added to the song, which was sad, or so Goodfellow told me. The peris took it in stride. Ishiah had said he’d given up his judgmental ways. That didn’t leave him much room to bitch.

But when the one Wolf broke, there was more than enough bitching to go around. I was sitting in a chair, singing my lungs out while Robin did his wailing standing on top of our table. Whether he was drunk or not didn’t make a difference. I was grateful he’d kept his clothes on. Get a person up on a table and it’s a given. Clothes start flying off—the same way the Wolf flew toward me. I saw them—wait, just the one—damn double vision headed toward me like a fur-covered Scud missile. He was young, an All Wolf, a mixture of human teenager and wolf, even when he changed. He lost his clothes, but he still had dark blue human eyes and thickly callused human hands with wolf nails. I knew because I felt them around my throat.

I tipped the chair over, landed on my back, jammed a foot in his fur-covered stomach, and tossed him over my head. Goodfellow dodged him neatly, kept singing, and, yep, the shirt came off. He was whipping it around, dancing some sort of Irish jig, holding a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and the son of a bitch continued singing as if a homicidal Lassie hadn’t that second flown by.

It was impressive. I was impressed, no denying it, as I lay on the floor and drank my beer. I’d have been more impressed if he’d put his shirt back on. Well, shit, the Wolf was back. This time he landed on my chest and stomach with enough weight and pressure to have me spewing beer into his face. Coughing, I waved a hand at the Budweiser foam now dripping off his snarling muzzle. “Cujo. Old Yeller.” I waved a hand. “Someone give me a gun to put the poor rabid bastard out of his misery. Wait. I have a gun. I think I have two.”

I wasn’t serious. I’d learned my lesson. You don’t bring a gun to a dogfight and you definitely don’t bring one to a puppy fight. This guy barely qualified as a puppy. One of those Lupa Wolves would’ve swallowed him whole. I broke my beer bottle over his shiny black nose. Moist shiny black nose—that meant he was healthy. If he left me alone, he might stay that way.

He didn’t—leave me alone or stay that way.

Now the rest of the Wolves were getting caught up in the fight. The growls had tripled and when Old Yeller, who had tumbled backward yelping at the pain in his nose, started back toward me again, he had a friend. This guy was not young; he was twice the size and five times the Wolf. He had scars running thick and gray through his black fur, fangs that were made for tearing flesh, half of one ear missing, and from the abrupt silence of howls in the bar, he was one badass son of a bitch.

Goodfellow hadn’t stopped singing, although the Wolves had, but the choice of songs was too close to home now. This one—he could’ve been mistaken for a small black bear in the woods but with the temper of a grizzly. He was a fighter, a killer, and he knew what he was doing.

Him, I shot. Teen Wolf, eh, not worth it. I peppersprayed him. Mailmen and monster killers of the world, unite. The black Wolf I put a round in didn’t make a sound. He went down, crawled a few feet away to settle in a pool of his own blood and watched me with enraged eyes. Wolves healed fast. He was biding his time. The kid, the Wolf version of Benji, had changed back to curl naked on the floor, his swelled-shut eyes flowing with tears, and his nose pouring snot. But they were both alive … and it didn’t have to be that way. Neither one looked the least bit grateful, though. Bastards. Someone else wasn’t grateful for my restraint either.

Leandros came through the front door, walked through the quiet Wolves muttering in confusion, the sirens who were applauding Goodfellow’s talent, before grabbing my shirtfront to drag me up off the floor and out of the bar.

“Hey,” I protested, “don’t take it out on me if your ass froze out here for two hours. I didn’t ask you to follow me. And the Wolves started the bar fight. It was hardly a bar fight anyway. Barely counted. I didn’t kill anybody, did I?”

He did wait until I managed to get my feet under me before continuing to drag me, this time not as silently. “Maybe you should have. Maicoh, the one you shot, holds grudges. Or instead of killing him, perhaps you should have tried thinking instead. If you are intoxicated, especially this intoxicated, which you’ve had the sense to never be in the past, you run the risk of someone better than Maicoh killing you. Someone besides me. And pepper spray? Are you suicidal? You are not a mailman.” I was about to say that was what I’d been thinking, except more pro-mailman, when he gave me a not-so-gentle shake—ninja punctuation to equal my vomit punctuation from last night. “And why were you singing? You don’t sing.”

“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.