Blackout

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.”

The Peter Pan albino crocodile smiled in my head and that long grin … Oh, shit … It was made of metal. Every tooth was bared in that horrific grin, shining like a serial killer’s blade. Here we have left you presents. Here you have brothers and sisters.

Or my mind could stop goddamn teasing me and tell me itself. I waited a second, but there wasn’t any more from the crocodile that seemed to know more about things than Niko and I combined. Lucky crocodile. Lucky me, because I didn’t want to see it anymore, not the gleam of one hideous fang.

“You call him,” I said as I stood back up. “I’m scared shitless he might have it set to speakerphone and I’ll hear something that will make me jab my eye out with the closest sharp object.”

“Where are you going?” he demanded—overprotective or on my ass to keep away the lazy. The result was the same.

“To brush my teeth,” I said before he could. I couldn’t save him from the chain of deception, but I could save him from at least one link in it. It was all in that brother handbook.

Whatever part of that brother I was.

It was Delilah who led us one step closer to Ammut and a bigger step to the old me—hours before the party Goodfellow had managed to set up. She called us with the location of a brownstone with a basement full of bodies. That was a surprise; then again, maybe not. Niko had said she wanted to impress the Kin by killing or saying she’d killed Vukasin, but she’d impress them even more if she killed an Alpha and helped bring Ammut down—all while letting us do the heavy lifting.

Ambitious and smart didn’t begin to do this chick justice. If I had one chance before this was all over … Ah, damn, she’d eat me alive. Literally. During the act probably. The real Cal, like me, was a killer, but unlike me, his moral judgment about it had to be more blurry than mine. He could run with the Wolves, while everyone else heard only baaing when I was around. I was nothing but a sheep in their eyes—a very badass sheep, but badass or not, a sheep was a sheep. Kill someone in the middle of sex? I couldn’t do that. But I didn’t doubt that Delilah would and Cal could. She would for the sheer fun of it. Trying to kill Vukasin and the council before Ammut beat her to it showed she loved her slaughter, and Cal would do it in self-defense. I hoped it would be self-defense.

Niko missed his brother. Yeah, self-defense. That guy loved the hell out of his brother, and a stone cold killer—he wouldn’t have raised one of those. He was like frigging Gandhi with a katana and a boot in your ass—ethical but pragmatic. He wouldn’t have brought up a human version of a monster.

The laughter in my head was twofold this time, one fold hysterically amused and one fold darkly bitter. What lived in Cal, good, bad, and in-between, made me not particularly sorry I was only part of him, the silhouette of him on the sidewalk fading more every hour as the sun moved across the sky.

I wondered if I’d remain part of him, aware, or if I’d disappear completely.

Now I lay me down to sleep …

What of you would I possibly want to keep?

Or maybe I’d be a voice in his head. I hope I said better things than I’d had to hear. But better yet, I wouldn’t be there at all. Better to sleep, locked in his subconscious, because I had a feeling he wouldn’t listen to much of what I had to say.

“What are we doing here?” Goodfellow said as the taxi stopped. When he’d called us to tell us about the party, Niko had said we’d gotten wind of Ammut moments before his call and to grab his sword and pick us up at our place.

“Delilah called,” I said as I opened the door and stepped out of the cab. “She said there were some leftovers here for us. Investigation, clues, all that crap.”

Once he and Niko were out and the cab was pulling away, he said, “If Ammut shows up at the charity event”—which was what rich people called an excuse to get hammered—”this entire trip will have been a waste of time. I hate wasted time. It interferes with my wickedness and dissolution. Do you think becoming this degenerate comes without practice? I’ve invested millennia in becoming the magnificence that stands before you. But it takes time and upkeep to maintain these heights. Time not spent in what may well be a putrid pit of spiders and bodies.”

I shrugged. “Hey, preaching to the choir, but Niko insisted. Said he’d paddle my ass with a sword if he had to.”

“I already have someone to do that. Although once upon a time if Niko had said that to me …” Goodfellow didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Niko was already leaving us on the sidewalk as he headed up the brownstone’s stairs at a fast pace, quick as legs could move without it actually being labeled running. It was much better being on the other side of the Goodfellow personal-life TMI seizure for once.

“That was fucking great.” I grinned. “Do it to him again.”

And that request had Niko through the door and inside before Goodfellow had a chance to say or do anything. I knew I could pick a lock from my few days in the Landing. One night I’d forgotten the key to my room. I hadn’t felt like waiting for the guy at the motel desk to get out of the bathroom when he was done whacking off and since I could hear him whacking off, I hadn’t felt like looking around for a master key either. I’d gotten through my door in about three minutes. Niko went through the brownstone door in three seconds. Or so I thought until I reached the top of the stairs myself and saw the lock was busted out with claw marks and the smell of Wolf on the door. Delilah and her pack didn’t care about picking locks and bricks might save the Three Little Pigs from them, but it wouldn’t save anyone else.

It was a one-residence brownstone. You didn’t see many of those anymore. The hallway was dusty enough to tell that no one had lived here for a while, but the path through that dust said someone did use the place now and again. The pictures on the wall were of an older woman and man. Ammut didn’t seem the domestic kind of monster, with the life sucking and all, which made it easy to guess this couple had owned the brownstone and Ammut had eaten them. It had most likely been when she’d first come into town before she got settled in a place of her own and started eating things tastier than human sheep.

I heard a faint crackle under my shoe and crouched down to touch a finger to an all but invisible glitter on the floor. They were scales, the ones I hadn’t been able to see at the canal, but not crocodile scales. There was no Peter Pan villain here. These were more like snake scales. Smaller, finer, and they smelled like poison … of something rank and rotten—the Nile during a drought with dead fish and creeping putrefaction for miles. “Holy shit.” I half gagged and brushed it off my hand quickly. When she’d left the hearts at our place, she must have been in human form, or mostly, because I hadn’t caught a whiff of this.

Straightening, I pulled out the Eagle. The smell was getting stronger. Farther down the hall, Niko already had his sword in one hand. With his other he made a gesture. It wasn’t the finger, which right now was one of the few gestures that meant anything to me. I had to know signs and be a monster killer too? Was there a merit badge for that at monster killer Scout meetings? Disemboweling revenants in your bathroom and hand signals for something that wanted to do the same to you? Then hot chocolate and cookies. Good time had by all.

I gave Niko an expression that was universally recognized as “What the fuck?” by the memory challenged and nonmemory challenged alike. His sword hand gave a minute twitch that made the katana-paddling threat more genuine, but instead he gave a few more generic motions of his hand. He pointed up and then down. Okay, that I got. How anal-retentive one had to be to have hand signals for up and down that weren’t simply up and down, I didn’t get, but the rest I did. I was the bloodhound. Where was the hamburger? I took a deeper breath as behind me Goodfellow silently closed the door. After my pretty loud “holy shit” of moments ago, being quiet was most likely behind us, but you never knew.

I tilted my head back, up toward the stairs, and took one more breath. Down—the stench was definitely stronger down. Delilah hadn’t been lying when she’d said a basement full of bodies. She hadn’t mentioned the maker was down there with them. Ammut couldn’t have been here when the Lupa were. The Wolves wouldn’t miss that stink and Ammut wouldn’t miss a chance at some furry num nums. Suck the life force, bypass hairballs and indigestion later. It was efficient. I had to give her that.

I moved down the hall next to Niko and pointed toward the floor. Decomposition, adrenaline, fear, Wolves, urine, and Ammut; it was all under our feet. Since I also didn’t know the sign for “The bitch is right here,” I used my free hand to squeeze his wrist hard. He nodded. Monsters in daylight were nothing for him, but to me it was wrong and Ammut was a monster; no some are good and some are bad here. Her invisible trail had unnatural and, yeah, abomination, all but embedded in it. Her, I had no problem killing.

There was a flicker of motion—dark, light, dark—at the door we’d just walked through. Behind Goodfellow appeared white blond hair, amber skin, a tattooed choker of wolf eyes, and a sly smile. Our own Delilah had shown up for the party.

The gun in my hand was aimed and the trigger was on three pounds of pressure and holding before I had a single thought. When that thought finally showed up, it was to forget Ammut. This was the bitch I would enjoy killing. What I’d felt for her at the missed massacre of our clients had been a happy, curious mix of dangerous, hot, and damn straight I’d nail that.

That was what it was like to be human. To have violence not be your first instinct. Huh. Who fucking knew?

Well, I’d been happy then when it came to Delilah, but I wasn’t happy anymore.

She’d betrayed me, but I was past that. I’d expected that. We were predators. We did what we did best. Kill to live, kill to protect our own and, in Delilah’s case, she was her own. Her self-interest was the only thing that mattered to her. And if she played a game or two with someone or something outside Wolves, that was all it was—a game. I’d known that all along, but I’d liked the game and I’d liked her. I’d expected her to go after me eventually. That was part of the game and I knew her rules. But she knew mine too. Going after my family or my friends broke every goddamn one of them. I should’ve blown her away days ago when I saw her for the very first time since she’d pulled that shit.

It was an easy mistake to fix.

“Not the time.” Goodfellow moved next to me, out of the way—no one said his sense of self-interest wasn’t finely honed as well—and pushing the Eagle down. “Very much not the time,” he hissed, barely audible. “Throw her at Ammut first if you want. She makes good cannon fodder.”

True. Then there was shooting her in front of Nik… . Wasn’t that why I hadn’t shot her when she’d stabbed us in the back last year? I hadn’t wanted him to see me do the chick I was screwing—do in a way that ended up with a bullet in her head and my Auphe out instead of in. Wasn’t that it?

Then a pain hit and hit hard. Jesus, what hurt? What inside me felt ragged and ripped, torn, and trashed?

There it stopped, the flood of cold rage and the memories, the pain—all of it. I blinked and it was gone. I remembered vaguely Delilah about to shoot a healer and a friend sometime in the past. I couldn’t remember why I hadn’t killed her—whether it was due to Niko or some lingering affection for her wild ways. The wild ways themselves were a blank too. No mental sex shots for me. Wasn’t that the way? Wondering about nonsense words like Auphe or about being human made no sense, and I didn’t have the time to stand pondering the philosophical nature of humanity now. What made a man a man? Who cared? There was a killer in the basement and a killer flanking us, and this place stank worse than a slaughterhouse. Time to go to work. I’d handled Ammut’s spiders. I’d do the same to her … only without the fork.

I turned my back, depending on Goodfellow to watch it, and moved past Niko to stand behind the door to the basement. A rug beneath my feet puffed up dust and the smell of death as I pushed at the door carefully with the gun muzzle. Ajar, the heavy wood swung with ease and no haunted house screech of rusted hinges. Too bad. That would’ve given an excuse to flip on the lights, if the power was still on, and go pounding down the stairs shooting anything I could see—”see” being the key word.

Niko’s hand on my shoulder stopped me from edging down the first step. I waited and, as my eyes adjusted, a small amount of light became visible. A street-level window was somewhere down there, a small and filthy one from the amount of light it let in, but when you’re old and have bad hips, you don’t come down to your basement to clean the windows in case someone needs to come to kill the monster that ate you. They couldn’t have had a housekeeper?

The first foot on the step wasn’t mine. No surprise. Spanking boglets and sending them running back to mommy kept me from being benched, but lacking my entire mind didn’t make me MVP. I did make sure mine was the second foot, and Goodfellow and Delilah didn’t fight me for the honor. I couldn’t see what color the stairs were, but I could tell they were painted. Brown, gray, some color that wasn’t impossible to see in the gloom, but neither were they easy.

The body was.

It was … I had no idea what it was. It had wings but not feathered, more like that of a bat. It had a child’s face, sharp teeth in a small gaping mouth, and large eye sockets. The closest thing I could come up with was a flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz. The eyes that had been in those sockets were desiccated to the size of raisins and the wings looked brittle enough to disintegrate with a touch. Dark blue or purple veined every inch of the skin I could see as it had the victims in the scrap metal shed. The rest of it was wrapped in a spiderweb cocoon, which was apt as it looked as if it had been sucked dry—a fly in a spider’s web. Ammut had her pet spiders storing food for her here in her emergency freezer. This one hadn’t made it all the way down to the pantry. She’d eaten it on her way out.

That last Oreo on the go. It happened to us all.

I edged around it, following Niko’s lead, and kept moving down the stairs, one slow, cautious tread at a time, and stayed grateful the body didn’t have a vest and fez. That would have been beyond my weirdness threshold, assuming I had a weirdness threshold that didn’t involve undead cats and naked pucks. Swiveling my head, I tried to cover both sides of the basement around the stairs until Niko’s painless but pointed jab in my gut combined with pointing to the right had me focusing on that. He’d cover the left, I’d cover the right, and nothing would be lost in the seconds it took to watch both on your own.

Killing monsters for a living was not for the loner, not for a long-lived one at any rate. We reached the bottom of the stairs, and I could barely see the paler color of Niko’s hair at all. The rest of him bled into the darkness. The man wore way too much black. As if I could talk, I amended to myself, and checked over my shoulder. Delilah, whose almost-white hair stood out in the gloom, a moth wing pressed against a night’s window, was behind me and Goodfellow behind her. It was good planning on the puck’s part. With the partial new opinion I had of her—knowing implicitly what she was capable of caused very confused emotions—trusting her to guard all our asses wasn’t an option. It didn’t matter that I could see how that amused her, a spark of reflected light in amber eyes. She could be amused all she wanted as long as Goodfellow put that sword through her if something looked off or if she breathed wrong.

At the bottom I automatically moved to stand back to back with Niko. I couldn’t tell where Ammut was more specifically than the basement. I smelled her everywhere, the pungent odor rolling at me from all sides. I could smell too much and couldn’t see enough. I felt something against my foot, a shadowed heap. I used my toe to flip it part of the way over … slow, silent, careful. It was a Wolf—male, not a Lupa. It had human features except for the mouth crammed with wolf teeth and tufted ears. It too was mapped with dark veins and cocooned. The veining would be part of whatever process Ammut used to pull the life out of her victims. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t fresh hearts pooling blood on your countertop either.

As Delilah came to the last step with Goodfellow right behind her, I stepped away from Niko and farther into the deepening shadows to make room for the two. Blind was no way to work, not and stay alive, but Niko took care of that and finding Ammut all in one fell swoop. It wasn’t ninja magic. It was good old mundane road flares; one tossed past me and one on his side of Ammut’s cookie jar. They lit up the space like two small bloody suns. There were at least seven bodies I could see before me. All were cocooned. Here were some of the missing victims we hadn’t been able to track down, spider-delivered from the parts of the city where Ammut was too snooty to go herself. Fortunately, the basement was damp with one pool of moisture by the heap of bodies. That moisture kept them from bursting into flame as the flare was close enough to touch them. I scanned the area. Cracked concrete walls that revealed the old brick beneath, bodies, puddles; that was it. I even checked above my head. If a spider was going to jump you … If anything was going to jump you, that was where it would be in this place. Seeing nothing there or under the stairs, the flare banished shadows there as well, I turned to take in Niko’s half of the space.

More bodies; almost twenty in a pile reached to the exposed aged beams above us. The basement was bigger than I’d imagined before Niko played God and lo, there was light, but it wasn’t so big that I could see there was no sign of Ammut. I smelled her, but I didn’t see her. Either she’d left two seconds before our cab dropped us off or she was under that mound of bodies. It was big enough for a monster to burrow beneath.

I was already moving toward it when I discovered there was a third option that I hadn’t considered.

While it was large enough to hide Ammut, it was also big enough for six spiders to leap out of while Ammut, on the petite side for a monster, came boiling out from under the seven bodies behind me. All in one moment, I saw the thrash of long black jointed legs, cocooned bodies tumbling; Delilah literally ripping off her clothes—I heard the material shred under her hands—and becoming a large white Wolf that fell to all fours to jump; Niko’s and Goodfellow’s swords swinging, and Ammut.

It was one moment of ivory fur, claws, and fangs, silver slicing quickly enough that the air itself should’ve been cut. It was one moment of yellow eyes and dripping venom with legs scrabbling too fast for nature to have intended—a hideous, inescapable speed.

It was a lot to take in and I didn’t bother. I had Ammut on my ass and that took priority. I was firing as I swiveled. When something is that close to you and moving that damn fast, equally quick as her spiders, aiming is a luxury. If you’ve got a full clip, pull the trigger and keep firing. You’ll hit it, one way or the other—hopefully before it hits you.

I hit Ammut with three hollow points. It gave me enough breathing room to get a split-second look at what I was shooting at rather than just a greenish blur. Mythology sketched on a bar napkin said she was part lion, part alligator, part hippo, and that would have been a lie because mythology was always a lie. Deduction told us she had to look human part of the time. That time wasn’t now. No, now she faced me, a glittering coil of green and bronze scales, the same coil that had yanked me into the canal. There were arms, appearing disturbingly boneless, and the face was almost lionlike, a blunt muzzle only finely scaled. The scales on the sleek head were almost all copper and bronze compared to mixing with the deep green below. I could see how it might seem like a lion’s mane, a shining cascade of tawny glitter, because her eyes were almost all cat too.

Round and gold but with no discernible pupil, they were clear and luminous as the moon had been in the night sky of Nevah’s Landing. Despite her death-inwater stench, despite her being a monster, she wasn’t repugnant. She was … natural, a creature you’d see in the jungle or slipping into the waters of the Nile. I hadn’t expected that. The spiders were repulsive, because, let’s face it, spiders suck. They’re creepy and nasty even when small, and they need smashing with your boot, but Ammut didn’t give off that feeling. If she’d had wings, she would’ve been a dragon, and I’d just shot that dragon.

Not that she seemed to care. I’d burned through one clip—three rounds in her and the rest in the wall. She was so quick I’d barely seen her at all, much less how she slithered, diving and striking out of the way of the bullets. Her last move had been the quickest, her tail wrapping around my legs. As I pulled at my Glock in its holster with my other hand, she said softly, “Where are your brothers and sisters?” A human voice—a woman’s voice; musical and husky, it was almost sexy.

Softer still. Her face was close enough to mine that I could smell her breath. It smelled of flowers, sweetness overlying the rest of her foul scent. “I will not devour you or your companions. You have only to tell me.” Closer. “Where are you brothers and sisters, half-breed?”

The last words were uttered in a voice not human in the slightest. It was the voice of the Eden serpent. But it wasn’t cajoling Eve into taking a bite; it was flat-out telling her to get her naked ass in gear toward that apple tree before he ripped off a mouthful of her nude flesh and shoved it down her throat. That was the snake on me now, and the hypnotic speed and breath drenching the air with a gallon of overwhelming perfume/pheromones was not distracting anymore. It was a sign I’d screwed up. The weight heavy on my legs was a sign too. The sign of my changing all that was the muzzle of the Glock I jammed in one of those round eyes and the trigger I pulled with it.

I didn’t get her, not completely. She was that goddamn fast, but I winged the side of her muzzle, bright gold blood spattering. The coils wrapped around my lower legs tightened until I felt the bone seconds from snapping. That I, somewhere from my past, already knew what that felt like didn’t make me any happier. I was about to shoot her again, only this time I was smarter. I shot at the one part of her that wasn’t moving—her length crushing my legs. I aimed for the edge of the coil. I’d seen—or not seen actually—that impossible speed in action. The last thing I wanted to do was shoot myself in the leg when her snaky self disappeared. Good thing too, because she did disappear and I hit the floor instead of my foot. That didn’t mean I stayed on my feet. She hadn’t broken my legs, but she’d bruised them and then some. I fell as they gave out beneath me, but that didn’t stop me. Four spiders on a beach, even more in my apartment, a boglet too big for his britches; I’d be damned if an overgrown garter snake was going to get the best of me whether I could walk or not.

She streaked past me, seeing all her spiders but one dead, and decided discretion was the better part of valor against a puck, a Wolf, and two highly pissed-off sheep. Smart move. I nailed her in the tip of her twitchy tail with my combat knife, through the flesh, and into the wood of the bottom stair as she slithered up. Smarter move, I smugly congratulated myself … until she ripped off the stair and kept going. Motherfu—

Get ahead of her.

Sure. When I could fly.

You know how. Open the door. Your door. It’s easy. Easy-peasy pudding and pie. Stomp the snake and watch her die.

I didn’t listen to the crazy. I was getting expert at that now, lots of practice. Not to mention the basement door already was open, which was how she was getting away. Instead, I started after her the only way I did know how. Yeah, I was crawling, but I was crawling with a gun, another knife, and one badass attitude. My time wasn’t of the Olympic variety but the never-give-up mind-set was. Already at the top of the stairs, she turned and spit. It wasn’t the usual villain spitting in disgust at the feet of his enemies. That would’ve been B movie over-the-top and disgusting, but not as bad as this. This was a spray of something venomous. It wasn’t the Nepenthe poison—as the last spider squealed and died impaled on Goodfellow’s sword while Delilah, still in wolf form, was tearing the legs off an already-dead one. This was something else. Niko immediately started vomiting as he’d been lunging after Ammut and me. He managed to vomit all over the back of my nonfunctioning legs. I didn’t hold a grudge. He owed me one from the canal incident. Delilah spit a spider leg out of her white muzzle and yakked up something best not thought about. Goodfellow turned green and bent over to gag, but managed to hold it back.

Me? I wiped the mist off my face, over my hair, and said, in perhaps not my kindest moment, “Pussies.”

Better parts of me surfaced, and I struggled to turn over and pat Niko gingerly on the back, as he’d done for me at the canal and, unfortunately, he suffered the same result I had. Half of me was glad I wasn’t a sympathy puker and the other half was getting worried. Niko was my brother, my family. He was all I fucking had. “Hey.” I squeezed his upper arm instead of the back thing this time. “You need a doctor. I know you said when the spider clawed you that we don’t do hospitals—no spreading the supernatural word, but you and I are human. And right now, that’s good for you. A hospital can handle an unknown poison.” At least they’d better be able to handle it or some white coats would be damn, damn sorry.

Whatever I’d said caused Delilah the Wolf to nearly choke on her next yak, and I wasn’t sorry at all on that one. Goodfellow straightened, the green in his face still there, but he was upright and that was something. “No, no hospital needed. Ammut’s venom isn’t like Nepenthe venom. It’s more a defensive mechanism as opposed to an offensive one. It’s not lethal, not even to humans. It’ll wear off in about fifteen to thirty minutes.” And some creatures were more affected than others. Goodfellow somewhat, Delilah somewhat more, humans … It was the aftermath of a New Year’s Eve party. Puke, breathe, then puke some more.

I couldn’t walk, Niko and Delilah were not in prime fighting condition, and Goodfellow looked as if he had a case of the flu. He could’ve gone after her, but he wouldn’t have caught her. She was too quick and if he had—one person against Ammut wasn’t the best way to keep your friends alive.

So we sat in the basement while Ammut either ran out of the house in her human form—buck-ass naked, I assumed, or maybe she wore scales even in human form—or sped up to the fourth floor of this place, burst through a top window, and snaked off across the rooftop. I’d take the rooftop if I were her. One more spider slunk out behind Ammut’s seven-victim pile, but it was small and I took care of it with one round. My legs slowly regained feeling. I stripped off my jacket, then my shirt—apathy means never having to … eh, fuck the rest—and sacrificed it to Niko’s occasional eruptions of tofu, health shakes, and faux food that didn’t belong in the body anyway. I held his braid out of the way, very prom date of me, rested a hand on his back, and trusted Goodfellow. The expression I shot the puck said if that trust wasn’t earned, I’d be strangling him next with a fluid-stained snarky T-shirt that wasn’t that clean to begin with.

Delilah emptied her stomach only twice. Wolves were tough. Then in a fluid movement of skin and fur, she was human again, crouching close by—close enough that I had my gun pointed at her. She didn’t notice she was nude or didn’t care. Didn’t care, I’d say. She looked proud—as proud as she had as an enormous white wolf straight out of the Arctic. “You are not.” Her eyes were as amber when she was human as when she was wolf, but intriguing with their oval tilt. She could’ve had Japanese Wolf in her, with those eyes and that same amber skin, but the snow blond hair was a trick. Who could say who she was? No one had that right. And who was I to care? She was unique and stunning, as implacably deadly as the edge of my knife, and I wanted nothing to do with her—nothing good.

“You are not. Yet you are. And you know nothing,” she said, her voice almost as husky as Ammut’s.

A predator. A murderer. A manipulative liar. A killer through and through. I hated her. I did.

But, goddamn, she had the most amazing breasts ever. She put that little red Wolf at the strip club to shame. With the tattooed choker of wolf eyes and Celtic swirls that circled her neck, the vicious scars across her stomach, she twisted me inside and I couldn’t say why.

She smiled, her teeth white and even, human, but they’d worn blood in their time, I knew. “Baa baa, little boy lost in the woods. Are you a sheep in killer clothing or a killer in sheep clothing? Find out. Soon. Or I will.” She was gone almost as quickly as Ammut, snatching up her clothes and taking the stairs three at a time. And, yes, her ass was as amazing as her breasts.

Sometimes it’s either shit or go blind. This was one of those times. Horny and hate—two sides of one coin.

Goodfellow and I continued to wait and, when Niko could finally sit up, my legs were sore but functional, and he was a much lighter green than before. He hadn’t puked in at least ten minutes. I gripped his shoulder. “You with us, Nik?” I asked. If I sounded concerned, shit, I was. It would be hard to drag a half-dead brother to a hospital while choking the life out of a puck who’d lied to you.

“Cyrano?” My grip tightened. It hadn’t been enjoyable watching him struggle against the poison and it had been less enjoyable not knowing what to do about it. Not knowing what I’d do without him, my family—a family I’d gotten attached to way too soon, but some things you couldn’t control. I’d looked over my shoulder in Nevah’s Landing often enough to know that someone should be there, standing with me. Now that I knew who that was, he was staying there. I didn’t care what I had to do to make that happen.

The truth isn’t pretty, but it is what it is. And questioning it is a waste of time.

He’d fed me when the woman who whelped me hadn’t. He’d clothed me. He’d made me go to school… . Okay, that had doubtless sucked. He searched for me when I was lost. He kept me alive when I was drunk and Wolves wanted to eat me. He gave me a home. He hired metaphorical buses so he could not so metaphorically throw himself under them for me. He did all of that for me.

Brothers—it went both ways.

He slowly wiped his mouth on my shirt, then coughed. Finally, he raised his head and rubbed at his bloodshot eyes. “It was nearly worth it to get rid of this offensive T-shirt of yours.” He tossed it over the top of the tofu special on the floor. Tofu did not make for fragrant vomit. “I have had much better days than this.” More of a graygreen now, he said, “You called me Nik. Then you called me Cyrano.” Uneasy, pleased, and then both emotions vanished under a set expression. “Did she hurt you?”

“Drain a little life out of you?” Goodfellow added, sitting on the stairs above me where he’d moved about fifteen minutes ago out of Niko’s immediate range, his voice drifting down from behind. “Although you’ve more than enough to spare. It might improve your attitude. Mellow you somewhat. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

I reached up and smacked his leg hard as I answered Niko. “No. She choked me with a few gallons of perfume, which slowed me down some. It was strong”—almost impossibly so, close to hypnotic—”and after, it was the same old, same old. ‘Where are they? Give them to me. Where are your brothers and sisters?’”

Behind, I heard Goodfellow make a noise, unidentifiable, but when I glanced back, he was smooth faced and innocent as a babe again. Right. I gave my attention back to Niko, who had been looking at Robin as well with what was my best guess of puzzlement and dread, but trying to read emotions under green nausea was difficult. “How about we go home? Because I am done with basements. This one or any future ones.” We made it up, neither one too steady, but Goodfellow helped and, despite aching legs on my part and a rebelling stomach on Nik’s part, we made it upstairs, down the hall, and out the door. I zipped up my jacket to conceal the missing shirt and to keep from freezing my ass off as Goodfellow flagged down a taxi.

Niko was alive, Goodfellow was alive, I was alive, and Delilah was gone. As things went, that put us on the plus side of the scoreboard. The fact that no one was curious why I hadn’t gotten sick wasn’t discussed. They also hadn’t commented—very cautiously hadn’t commented—on my not being curious as to why Ammut’s poison hadn’t made me all but vomit my stomach then intestines up … as it had Niko, as it would a human. I didn’t bring it up either. They didn’t want to have to answer, and I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to hear Niko have to make up another lie—that her perfume had protected me by canceling out the poison and that being bitten by her spider had inoculated me against other poisons of the Ammut kind. He would’ve come up with something. No, I didn’t want to ask.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

Listen to Wolves such as Delilah who don’t always lie.

Stop lying to yourself.

Half-breed, Ammut had whispered. Twice now, she’d said that. Half-breed, and that made me important to her, a monster that thought people weren’t worth eating. She needed me to find others like me, those half-breed brothers and sisters—whoever they were, wherever they might be. Brothers and sisters Niko, I was positive, knew nothing about. The look he had given Goodfellow had said as much.

Half-breed.

I was half human. I was Niko’s brother, so I must be.

Had to be.

But, Jesus, what was the other half?