Blackout

2

Phone.

That was my first thought when I woke up. The second was that I was glad I was in a bed and not sleeping, too damn literally, with the fishes. The third, nope, still no clue who I was. Fourth … Fourth was a situation a lot of guys faced in the morning. I dealt with it, which, considering I couldn’t remember the faces or details of any woman I knew personally from my past, was pretty noteworthy. Unless I was on speaking terms with Angelina Jolie and then that was more than noteworthy. Either way, I worked with what I had.

Nothing keeps a good man down, but you can get him down for a while if you work at it.

Afterward I stared at the ceiling, as yellowed and cracked as the tub, and went back to my first thought. Where was my phone? I had ID, even if it was fake. I had money. I should’ve had a phone. Hell, three-year-olds had cell phones these days—whatever days these were. There was a bright spot. I was a little fuzzy on the year, absolutely blank on me, but everything else appeared to be in place in my gray matter. Sun in the sky, bacon in the skillet, and a cell phone for everyone past the first stage of mitosis.

So … where the hell was my phone? That could tell me a whole damn sight more than fake licenses. The names were fake, the address was fake … common sense. You didn’t put a real address on a falsified ID. But a phone would have the numbers of people I’d called. Or, on the other hand, it might just have numbers of AA, Guns-R-Us, and a dating service, because where do you find the time to meet women when you’re gutting the spawn of evil for profit or simply as one rocking hobby?

I needed that damn phone.

Rolling out of bed, I padded into the bathroom, hoping I’d overlooked it when I’d been stripping my clothes of six knives, two guns, and something that resembled brass knuckles without finger holes but with spikes—a Tekko. It was Japanese and old, but it worked just fine despite its age. My own name I didn’t know, but that I knew. There were extra clips of ammunition and all six knives were different types with different names and functions. I knew those too. Good old Calvin F. Krueger knew that, but fuck all about himself.

Frustrating.

I poked through the clothes, now dry except for the jacket. The lining was still damp, but they all smelled like soap and not dead squid. Score one for amnesia boy. But nowhere in the clothes or the pile of weapons was there a phone. Take one away from amnesia boy. I must’ve lost it at the beach and, just as the tide had taken the spider creatures, it had no doubt taken the phone as well. Nature, what a bitch.

Okay. I’d do this the hard way, although, considering where I’d ended up and with what, the easy way didn’t seem my style. I fingered the puncture wounds on my neck. They’d scabbed over nicely and my headache was gone. That was something. I dressed in the wrinkled long-sleeve black T-shirt. I noticed only now that it said EAT ME in dark red letters on the front, and, below that, in parentheses, before i eat you. A stash of weapons a gangbanger would drool over, monsters trying to kill me, and a shirt that advertised my dickitude to the world. I was turning out to be one subtle guy.

I finished dressing, down to the roach-stomping boots that didn’t fit quite the same after their double-dipping. I dumped the jacket on the one wobbly chair, shoved the destroyed lamp under the bed to mope with the dust bunnies, and sat while I studied the phone book from the drawer of the bedside table. It was about as thick as a comic book. Wherever I was, it wasn’t anyplace big enough that I could disappear into an anonymous mass of people. In places this small, anyone who lived here would know you didn’t belong. And if anyone came looking for you, they’d be quick to point you out.

Nobody trusted a gadje, I thought absently as I scanned the cover. Ocean waves, a lighthouse, and a breezy script that read Nevah’s Landing, South Carolina . Good for Nevah, whoever she was. She had her own landing. Now let’s see if she had anything else to offer.

Crocodile. They had a crocodile, ticking like a time bomb.

An albino one, pale as a dead soul, with a voice of broken glass and red eyes that saw you, no matter how deep the water.

And it knew my name.

I blinked and dropped the phone book back in the drawer. I didn’t know my name and I was pretty sure a sun-loving, tourist-eating lizard didn’t either. Amnesia was one thing. Small bursts of psychosis were another. I didn’t even know if there were crocodiles or alligators in South Carolina. I suspected that wasn’t amnesia, but more like ignorance. I didn’t mind. I’d take ignorance over the first any day. The ignorant can learn … theoretically. I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do to get my memories back or why they were gone in the first place. My head had been killing me last night, but I hadn’t found any bumps or contusions—only the remnants of a bloody nose. I didn’t think I’d hit my head, although a spider might’ve smacked me a good one in the face. As for being bitten, why would that give you amnesia? Kill you or paralyze you, that I could see. Again, nature is a bitch and an efficient one. Paralyzing your enemy is good stuff. Making him forget who he is will only freak him out all the more and possibly make him run even faster, if he’s the running type. What else could cause amnesia? There was emotional trauma… .

I tilted my head down and read my T-shirt slogan again. It was likely I dished out more emotional trauma than I took in. As a matter of fact … I took off the shirt, turned it inside out, and put it back on. If I had to mingle with the locals—and I didn’t see much way around it, since someone had to know me or have seen me come into town—then I’d better be on my best behavior. Which meant instead of carrying arms, I’d have to make do with charm. Places this small had little law enforcement, but what they did have tended to be bored law enforcement. I didn’t need a retired city cop working as sheriff in his spare time taking one look at me and knowing I was carrying just by the way my jacket fit.

That meant I ended up hiding all the weapons under the mattress. The day this roach motel flipped those suckers, I wouldn’t have to worry about being found out. I’d be eating snow cones in Hell with Satan. It made sense. It also made sense if I could handle what I had on the beach last night, I could deal with any normal townie. I was human like them, not a spider knit from shadows and death, but I was also a human who had the skills to use knives in addition to guns. Chances were I had enough of a different set of skills to take someone down unarmed as well or use what was at hand. I could impale a nosy son of a bitch on a Norman Rockwell picket fence if I had to. MacGyver had nothing on me.

Not that I would impale a person. A monster spider from Hell, yes—a person, no. I had faith that a spirited debate between my foot and their ass would get the job done for most people. I was a killer, but I wasn’t that kind of killer.

Was I?

No. I wasn’t. I hadn’t been as sure of that last night, but I was pretty sure now.

Although … I frowned down at the letters I could no longer see—EAT ME. Thoughts of impaling and kicking ass before I even left the motel room—I hoped anyone I ran across got my particular sense of humor, because it might be an acquired taste.

Leaving the room was harder than I thought it’d be. I knew browsing through the phone book wasn’t going to help me. I had to get out of the yellow pages and into Nevah’s Landing for real if I hoped to accomplish anything. But the room was the only haven I had; the only port in a memory-gobbling sea. That had me ducking my head as I walked out into the gray morning. The desire to twitch came from leaving the weapons. I didn’t want to. No matter what my brain said, my gut said it was wrong in all the ways there were to be wrong. From the fit my stomach was pitching, there were a whole lot of fucking ways.

I went with my head. As far as I knew, there were only people out there, not monsters. Be smart. Be smart and then you’d have less cause to be psychotically homicidal or rashly suicidal. It was good advice, and damn firmly ingrained, so I followed it. And if I twitched once or twice, I told myself it was low blood sugar and let’s get some food already. More good advice, and I was on my way to follow it when I encountered the first local. I’d left the motel, set among scrubby grass and a cracked asphalt parking lot, and started down the street. Begonia Avenue. There were two stores past the motel, an antique store and a junk store masquerading as an antique store. Both were closed. Across the street with the occasional car parked on it was a drugstore, closed, and a clothing store with lots of fancy sweaters in the window, also closed. All that meant that it was Sunday morning in a town so small that if it had ten streets, I would kiss … someone’s ass. Whoever’s. Right now the only person I knew was the porn-loving, walking zit party of a motel clerk.

I wasn’t kissing that ass. If the town had ten streets, I’d be surprised. I was currently being unsurprised when I turned off Begonia to Magnolia and met the second person of my brand-new, blank-slate life. A black guy was leaning with arms folded in the doorway of the only business I’d seen open so far. It was a barbershop, which was more useful than antiques or sweaters on the Sabbath. People had to look nice when they went to church, neat hair and dress clothes—no sweaters, and the place probably already had all the chairs it needed. No antique ones necessary.

The man shook his head the second he spotted me. He was about forty, with dreads pulled back into a ponytail, a dark green button-down shirt, jeans, and a black barber’s smock. “Mmm, damn.” He clucked his tongue in disgust. “Boy, you cannot walk around looking like that. Let me even it up for you.”

I ran a hand through my DIY haircut and shrugged. “Nah, that’s okay. I’m fine with it.” It was the one thing I was fine with. When you’d lost most of your mind, you didn’t worry about your lack of style offending the local hair-care professional.

“Come on,” he said with obvious good nature. You automatically had to suspect anyone that upbeat. It was unnatural. That opinion definitely cemented the conclusion that I didn’t live in a small town. “I’ll do it for free.”

“Free? Why?” I regarded him with even more suspicion, the same level I’d given the deserted beach last night. That seemed to be a current theme for me.

“Because hair is my life, and I don’t want to live with you walking around looking like that,” he replied, straightening and opening the door to his shop. “You look like something’s been gnawing on your head.”

It wasn’t like I could say for certain that he wasn’t right about that. I had the bite on my neck. Who was to say one of those things hadn’t tried to swallow my head whole? And if I looked so bad that a guy was willing to give me a free cut, then that meant I would stick out even more than I already did in this four-way-stop, churchgoing, roll-the-sidewalks-up-on-Sunday town. I hesitated for another second before going on into the shop. I’d wanted to find out if anyone knew me anyway. If anyone had seen me come into town before the beach. If I’d said anything to anyone. This wasn’t home; I’d known that before … not from memory, but from the fact that it wasn’t a good place to hide. Hiding was important. Always. That was a “sky is blue” fact. The memory of why was gone, but the tendencies it caused weren’t. It was an instinct as basic as you’re hungry, you eat; you’re tired, you sleep; you’re out in the open, you run. You hide.

But I was also thinking about ghost white crocodiles. I reminded myself to take it all with a big grain of salt to go with the little bit of crazy.

It was in my best interest to accept the offer, I reminded myself, and I cautiously followed him into the shop. I sat in the one chair he had. There was a tile floor gleaming and empty of a single hair and one big-ass utilitarian rectangular mirror on the wall. I avoided its clear-water shimmer and waited while the smock was shaken over me and tied around my neck. I needed a good question to ask. So … you know me? wasn’t the most subtle. You know you have, okay, had a monster epidemic on your beach? wasn’t any better, and I already knew the answer to that.

He didn’t know. I knew, yeah, but I knew it in a way you knew a secret—one that was dark and wrong. When that kind of secret lived in you, then you could just look at someone and know if they were part of the club or not. This guy wasn’t. His nights were just nights. The glitter of lights outside his window were only fireflies in the dark, not the greedy eyes of a predator. He’d never know how lucky he was. Hopefully. I wouldn’t tell him. He was giving me a free haircut. I wasn’t going to ruin his life with the truth. That was no kind of tip.

“Um … ,” I started. Shockingly articulate, but still without a viable question, I was prepared to wing it. It turned out I didn’t have to.

“I’m Llewellyn.” Fingers tunneled ruthlessly through my hair. “Jumped-up Jesus, look at this mess. Sorry, Lord, but take a look down this way and you’ll forgive the blasphemy.” A squirt bottle was snagged and it was as if a cloud dumped its contents on my hair, soaking it in five efficient pumps. “I know, Llewellyn. It’s Welsh. Do I look Welsh to you? Black Irish maybe.” He grinned as scissors began flashing past my ears with startling speed, making it a damn good thing on my part I’d left my weapons back in the room or instinct would’ve left me with more uneven hair and a dead barber on the floor.

Unaware of my inner defensive instinct, he kept talking. “Most people around here call me Lew. But you’re not from around here. We don’t get much in the way of tourists in the off-season. It’s as cold and miserable here as most places in February. We ain’t Miami. But as pasty as you are—and sorry, man, but you’re like Cool Whip—you’re no sun lover. So I guess any time on the beach is a good time for you. And, like our tourist bureau would tell you, cold water, wet sand, and all the sweaters you can fit in a suitcase. Nevah’s Landing’s got it all. Live it up.”

The scissors kept snipping and I kept trying not to flinch when he laid his first question on me. “So, what’s your name? Where you from? Besides someplace where people don’t give a shit about their hair.”

Since he had answered my one unspoken question, Do you know me, have you seen me around before? I owed him … nothing—not a damn thing. This was my life. I couldn’t afford a misstep. But it didn’t matter, because what I gave him was nothing anyway. “Cal … ,” I said, glumly starting to supply one of my fake names, but I became stuck on which was the least offensive, the least god-awful. And I was stumped. Calvin, Calvert, Calhoun—what a trifecta of bad choices.

It didn’t come to that. Lew, the friendly barber, made the choice for me. “Good to meet you, Cal.” A hand shoved my head forward and there was more metallic clicking. “What brings you to the Landing?”

Cal was better than the full version of any of my fake names and it might not have been a coincidence that they all began with Cal. If you were going to choose fake names, how much better would it be if you could genuinely answer to a fake name because part of it was true?

“Just roaming around,” I answered easily. “I was taking care of my grandma, but she died last month. She raised me.” I shifted my shoulders in the most minute of shrugs. I didn’t want those scissors spearing me in the scalp or neck. “She always told me I should travel when she went. Find who I was besides her, hell, nurse, I guess. See where I fit in. Not that she dragged me down. She never did. She took me in when I had no one else and made the best damn double-chocolate-chip cookies in the world. But she wanted me to travel, and I’m traveling, looking for that place I fit in. It would’ve made her happy.”

It was the biggest load of bullshit ever, and I had no problem spinning it as naturally—more naturally than if it were true. And so much talking at one time almost made my throat sore, but not only was it a massive amount of bullshit I’d so easily shoveled up, it was absolutely perfect bullshit. Dead granny, all alone in the world, I was practically a lost puppy. It covered a number of sins, such as looking ratty and homeless or being a smart-ass. Poor widdle guy lost all the family he had in the world. He’s hurt, wounded, sad. Pat pat. Give him a Milk-Bone. Monster killer, liar—I was beefing up my resume fast. I wondered if it was wrong to be proud of talents like those.

Probably.

“And you think the Landing might be where you fit in?” Lew asked dubiously. “That wouldn’t have been my first guess.”

“Why?” I shot back. “Am I not good enough for your sweater-loving town?”

He snorted. “Seriously, Cal, my friend, are you kidding? There’s a shitload of crazy in little towns. Big cities can’t hold a candle to us. And that’s what I’d have pegged you for—big city all the way.” Lew and I agreed there. “Dressing all in black. And your hair, again, Lord, I’m sorry, but Jesus Christ himself lived two thousand some years ago and he had a better conditioner than you. With hair that bad, you probably come from someplace where no one knows your name or cares enough to tell you to get thine ass to a barber. That smells like big city to me.”

He didn’t give me a chance to reply, to say I’d cut it myself, or to ask what the hell conditioner was. He towel-dried my hair vigorously, combed it again, and said, “There you go. Minimum fuss. I figure you’re a minimum-fuss guy. Wash it, comb it, and you’re done.”

This time I risked the mirror to see hair that was now an inch above my jaw. No more ponytails for me. I dropped my gaze. Mirrors—I was never going to like them. As I moved my head, my hair flopped in my face like a frigging Labradoodle. No, they were curly, weren’t they? Like a sheepdog, then. A pissed-off sheepdog. Damn annoying either way. “I’m glad you don’t want money for this,” I bitched.

“You look like a damn rock star.” I could hear the wide grin in his voice without needing to see it. When I grunted, less than impressed, he added, “Okay, at least you don’t look like a goth bum anymore. That’s something.” He whisked the cape off me. “By the way, if you want to try out small-town life, for your granny’s sake, I know the diner is hiring. Tell them Lew sent you. Can’t get a better reference there, and if you stick around and get paid on a regular basis, maybe you’ll come back. I can always use the business, plus it’ll do my soul good to know you’re not walking around looking like a deranged mop. Do your granny up on high good to see it too.”

I got up and the last thing I expected came out of my mouth. “The diner, huh?” Despite the inner need to move, to run, I had to look at this logically. Monster killing was either my job or my hobby or both. Whichever it was or not, without my memories, I didn’t have a client list to go by.

It was a ridiculous thought. Getting paid to kill monsters. What crappy career fair steered you in that direction? Bottom line, the money I had wasn’t going to last forever. If “Cal” didn’t have a job, I’d soon be as homeless as my hair had labeled me. And this was where I’d woken up without most of my mind; this was the best place I could think of to look for it. My license’s fake address was in New York City. Good luck walking the streets there and randomly running into a clue to my identity. Going against my visceral fight-or-flight reaction was my best option. I had to have gotten here somehow. Maybe I’d find my car. Maybe it would contain some real ID or would trigger my memories. Then again, maybe my badass monster-slaying self rode into town on a fucking scooter. Sticking around was the best thing to do, no matter how wrong it felt.

Brain over guts. Brain over guts. Unnatural, but that was what I was going to do.

Besides, no matter what my guts were clamoring about, there was something about the Landing. I couldn’t put my finger on it and I definitely didn’t belong, but there was something… . I sensed that it was waiting right around the corner, if only I could find the right corner. Something waiting. Something … interesting.

Crazy thoughts for a crazy guy.

It turned out that the diner was two blocks away on Oleander. Besides loving their sweaters, they loved their flowers here too. Campy tourist Southern. The diner was the same on the outside. Flowers were painted on the plate-glass window… . Maybe they were oleanders—what did I know about flowers? Red-and-white awning, a welcome mat that actually said WELCOME, Y’ALL! No joke … WELCOME, Y’ALL! I didn’t step on it as I went through the door. It scared me worse than the dead monsters from the beach.

Inside it was the same. Red vinyl booths, desserts in a rotating pie case, little cow salt and pepper shakers on the table. It was homey and quaint, and anyone, with or without memories, could see this was not my kind of place. I started backing out the door before I was all the way through, but there was no escape.

“Lord, there you are. It’s two blocks. Did you get yourself lost on the way?” She was either Llewellyn’s older sister or aunt. She had the same face, same eyes, but not the same grin. She had no kind of smile showing, big or little. She was also about three times his size, but if you thought anything except “just more to love,” I didn’t think you’d live to regret it.

Moving over to me, she shook her head at my appearance. “I should’ve never answered the phone. That Lew and his damn strays. Three dogs, five cats, and now you.”

“I’m not a stray,” I objected immediately, although, technically, I was.

“Whatever you say,” she replied dismissively, obviously not believing me and as obviously too busy to bother coddling my self-image. “I’m down to one employee. That trash waitress of mine ran off with the principal at the school, if you can believe that. And him married with three kids. Trash, trash, trash.” She looked me up and down. “Lew said your name is Cal. He didn’t say you’d be dressed like some sort of undertaker or vampire. Suppose that’ll have all those silly girls hanging around—see if you sprout a fang. Like they never saw a real man before. Denzel, Clooney, now those are men. Mmm mmm.” She shook her head again, this time probably wishing I was one of those real men. “Well, hardly matters. Might up the business some. All right, Cal, tell me, can you cook? And I mean really cook. Sling it, dice it, and throw it on a plate, looking and tasting pretty?”

The question had me automatically checking for the nearest fire extinguisher. It could drive you nuts, your body remembering what your brain couldn’t. But whoever was doing the telling, it let me know that me and a griddle went together like Frankenstein’s monster and fire. “Not so much,” I said.

“Fine. Then you can replace that home-wrecking waitress of mine.” She pushed up against the counter, reached over, and returned with a red-and-white checkered apron that matched the napkins and the awning outside. That kind of pattern had a name, something that began with a G, but I couldn’t remember it. I doubted it was amnesia, though, and figured it was more of a guy thing that was causing that particular failure. “Now put that on and be the best damn waitress you can be. Don’t let Lew down.”

Taking the apron with two reluctant fingers, I asked, “Don’t you mean waiter? I’m a guy. Guys are waiters.”

“Not in a diner, honey. We only have waitresses. That’s part of our charm.” She gave my arm a light pinch. “Now hustle, Vlad, and stop with the scowl. Smile. This is a happy dining establishment. Happy sells.”

“You’re telling me to wear this”—I held up the apron—”and smile?”

“No, sugar, I know you’ll wear it and smile or you won’t get one tip. And with what I pay, you’re going to need those tips.” She swatted my ass. “You can call me ma’am or Miss Terrwyn. I had the same crazy-ass parents as Lew, but, unlike him, I’m going to respect their wishes when it comes to my name. Now get that apron on and hustle. The church crowd will be here soon. And there isn’t nothing like a good churching-up to give you an appetite.” When I hesitated, she gave me another pinch. “Go! Hustle!”

I went.

I took off my jacket, put that apron on, and hoped that when I did get my memories back, I’d lose this one in the process. But I hustled, as told, and found out I wasn’t a half-bad server—there wasn’t any way I was going to say or think “waitress.” I wouldn’t win any contests, but I dropped only two plates and threw only one guy through the window, all while wearing a red-and-white apron with a goddamn ruffle on the bottom. All in all, I considered that pretty successful.

Or so I thought almost seven hours later as I stood watching the son of a bitch I’d tossed through the glass roll around in the short shrubs outside the window, moaning for an ambulance. Now that … that had a smile on my face. He had it coming. He’d been leering at some teenage girls who were eating a whole lot of pie and giggling whenever I refilled their Cokes, which were actually Sprites, but I’d soon picked up that any kind of soda here was called Coke. It could be a Barney the Dinosaur-purple Grape Crush and it was still called a Coke. It was kind of intriguing, far more so than spider monsters, and that made me think Lew and my intuition were right. Either I’d been born a big-city guy or had lived long enough in a big city to have forgotten that backwater factoid. It also made me think what the hell kind of life did I lead that I found the Coke issue more interesting and exotic than monsters?

“You threw Luther Van Johnson through my window?” Miss Terrwyn’s voice said at my shoulder; she wasn’t much taller than that. “You threw that boy through my window? On your very first day?”

That boy weighed two-thirty easy, with the thirty being his gut. He was also at least forty. He’d been a full-grown man and full-grown pervert for a long time now.

I put the smile away and tried to look contrite. But since I barely knew what the word contrite meant and I in no way was feeling it, pulling that off wasn’t easy. “He had it coming?” I tried, saying aloud the same excuse I’d given myself internally when I’d first considered tossing Luther’s ass like a ball for a golden retriever. Of course I hadn’t been at all difficult to convince, so that excuse might have been somewhat lacking. “Ma’am,” I added hastily.

The high school girls, however, were quick to back me up. “He was looking at us and making these pervy gestures.” One of the girls demonstrated, and it was indeed damn fucking pervy with two fingers and a tongue.

Miss Terrwyn had passed me to lean and look out what was left of the window at good old Luther, who’d stopped flopping around. “Good Lord, I can smell the whiskey on him from here. And, Rachel Kaysha Marie, you could’ve described that. You didn’t have to show us. You girls should be home now anyway. Not sitting around eating pie and mooning over the help. He could be as perverted as Luther out there for all you know. Now get on home.”

The girls went as ordered. One of them had red hair, curly, a cloud of it, bright as fire. I watched her until the door shut behind her. She looked almost familiar, but I couldn’t pin the feeling down, so I let it go as I moved my eyes back to those of my new boss. “You aren’t, are you?” she demanded. “A pervert? With lust in your heart and nothing in your soul but wicked desire, because I have a butcher’s knife behind the counter that’ll do just the trick if you are. We don’t serve that kind of sausage here, no sir. Well? Are you?”

Pervert, lust, wicked desire. None of that rang a bell … Eh, maybe lust. But appropriate lust for the appropriate age group. “No, ma’am,” I replied, and began to bus the table of the pie plates and glasses the girls had left behind. “No butcher knife needed, ma’am.”

“Good. You keep it that way. I have no tolerance for the wicked. Like Luther. If I hadn’t been in back making sure Joseph didn’t set all the food afire, I never would’ve let that man sit down in my diner.” She took another look at him and sighed. “I have to say, it needed doing. But the door is only about fifteen feet away and windows cost.”

That made sense. Windows did cost, but throwing someone out a door just didn’t have the same bang for your buck. But she was my boss and I wanted to fit in here temporarily to find out where I actually fit in when it came to the world. Keeping my boss happy would help me out. I dropped my towel on the table, moved to Luther’s former booth, and stepped over that metal frame that had held the glass. Landing in the bushes with my victim, I took Luther’s wallet out of his pocket and stripped it of money.

“He still alive?” Miss Terrwyn demanded.

“Yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am. You want me to change that for you?” I wasn’t serious—entirely.

“You have a mouth on you, don’t you? I was thinking you were the quiet sort, but maybe I was only thinking you should be the quiet sort,” she warned.

I handed her the money. “Here. That should cover the window. And I’ll take it under advisement, ma’am.”

“You do that. Now get back inside while I call the sheriff. We’ll say perverted old Luther there was so drunk, and on the Lord’s day too, the heathen, that he fell through the window. He’s so liquored up, he won’t remember if it’s the truth or not. Maybe this time they’ll lock him up for a while like he deserves.” She stashed the money away in her own red-and-white apron, then clapped her hands. “Well, come on. We’ve got to close the place up for the night and board up the window. You playing Superman doesn’t change that. Hurry. Hurry.”

That was the beginning of the end of my first day working at the Oleander Diner, the Ole Diner, as everyone who came in called it. I’d worked my ass off, was paid a little better than nothing plus tips, and not one person had recognized me. Or if they had, they hadn’t mentioned it to me.

I had seen one guy walk by outside. I just caught a glimpse of ginger hair and a rangy male frame through the window before he disappeared from sight. He seemed familiar, but not the kind of familiar where you think you know a person. It was more the kind of familiar of recognizing one snake as being poisonous and one as being not. If he was a snake, I’d say he was dead-on poisonous. But that was a weird, freaky thought, so I shrugged and did what I was starting to get good at—I let it go.

Miss Terrwyn caught me watching. “Pshhh. Jesse. Ignore that one. He slinks into town once a week to buy raw meat. He must have some mighty big, hungry dogs, but he’s like Luther. He doesn’t smell righteous.”

I wasn’t surprised she could smell righteous. I wouldn’t have been surprised at anything Miss Terrwyn could do. Before I left for the day, I filled out my paperwork for the job using the Calvin fake ID, and promised Miss Terrwyn I’d be back bright and early. Her bright and early turned out to be different from my bright and early, and there was nothing but a storm of bitching and swats to the back of my head when I did show up at nine a.m. The bitching and swatting was strangely comforting in a way. Maybe I was a monster killer and a masochist, and out there somewhere was a person with a leash and spiked collar with my name on it.

I hadn’t spent the time before nine sleeping, although my body would’ve preferred it. My body would’ve preferred I slept until noon from the way it and my brain complained when I rolled out of bed at seven. I showered, dressed in the same clothes that I’d washed again in more soap the housekeeper had left—I desperately needed to buy more clothes—and spent an hour and a half roaming the streets of the Landing looking for a car that seemed familiar. I’d lost my keys on the beach as well as my phone. Whatever I’d driven into town was a mystery. There was no key to give me a clue to make or model. I walked the town proper’s twelve streets—two more streets than I’d guessed the day before. I owed someone’s ass a kissing. There were only a few cars parked on the streets and none looked familiar or had a New York tag or anything but the standard South Carolina one.

When I reached the diner, I sat on the freshly painted green bench in front and let my hands dangle between my knees as I stared at the Victorian/plantation/some kind of big-ass old Southern house across the street. I wasn’t actually looking at it; it just happened to be in the way of my “What the hell do I do now?” gaze. The house, I didn’t really notice, and the house had the good manners not to notice me either. But the dog on the wraparound porch? It noticed me right off the bat.

As I heard the growl, I blinked and stopped my thoughts running through my brain in the panicked what? where? who? that was my life now. The dog was a German shepherd, big and mostly black with some russet on its legs and the same russet-colored eyes. It’d been curled up by a rocker, but now it was looking at me, its head up and lip peeled back to show its teeth. As far as I knew, I didn’t have anything against dogs. Why would I? Man’s best friend. “Woof,” I said, low and friendly.

The shepherd disagreed with me on the friendly part. It was up in a split second, hitting the large dog flap in the front door to disappear from sight. It left behind a trail of yellow urine on the white board porch. I could see it, just barely, but I could smell it, strong and acrid as if the dog had pissed on my shoe. I might not have a problem with dogs, but this one had a problem with me. I didn’t know who I was, what I was doing here, where I lived, what I did outside the monster thing, and other than keep hoping someone would volunteer that, sure, they’d seen me drive into town in a black 1964 Mustang convertible affectionately known as Fang, license plate XYZ-123, which was parked at the Old Goddamn Mill, I didn’t have any way of finding out. I didn’t know a damn thing about anything—oh yeah, except that the dog across the street didn’t like strangers.

Things were looking bleak, my investigative skills even bleaker, and my dog-whispering skills nonexistent. For one brief second I thought about going to the cops and admitting I didn’t know who I was. They could plaster my face on their database to see if anyone was missing me. But there was the arsenal under my mattress, the fact I knew about monsters, and that I knew that the people living their lives in Nevah’s Landing were cocooned in ignorant bliss. I didn’t belong here. I knew that, but in a world full of houses, dogs, diner food, department stores, condos, sushi, cars, trains, subways, ordinary people doing ordinary things, could I belong anywhere? Or was I like a rat, sticking to the shadows; part of the world, but outside it too?

Did rats have friends? Colleagues? Competitors? Were you born into the rat business or did you just fall into it?

Did anyone give a shit I was gone?

I did. A big one. I felt … a lack, to use a better word. There was a gaping hole in my life and it wasn’t only my memory. Every time I looked over my shoulder, I expected someone or something to be there. It never was, and until I found out who I was, I wouldn’t find out who or what I thought … I knew should be there. And I wouldn’t feel right until it was there.

Of course my brain was scrambled and good, so what the hell did I know?

A hand slapped me briskly on the back of my head, and Miss Terrwyn snapped, “Are you deaf, boy, or mentally challenged? Did you not hear me say be back bright and early?”

I rubbed the back of my head and quickly pushed down the knee-jerk growl. “It is bright and early.”

“Lord help me, a lazy one. Bright and early was three hours ago. Get up and get in there and start slinging the hash. And don’t you have anything but black to wear? You look like the Grim Reaper himself moping around. You think anyone wants Death serving him up pancakes? No, for a fact they don’t.”

I was through the still-swinging doors as she kept dressing me down from behind. She could bitch like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t have to take it, even though, as I’d thought earlier, it was in a bizarre way comforting. I could turn around, walk out of here, and get a bus ticket to New York City—land of my fake IDs. But my brain twisted in a knot trying to avoid that reasoning. There was still no way to find out anything there; it was too goddamn big, and there was no denying there was something about this place. There was something about the Landing that gripped me, a hand around my wrist. I couldn’t deny something was here for me—a clue to who I was. A feeling of safety. A feeling of responsibility. A feeling of belonging, even though I knew there was no way that I did. It didn’t fill that hole in me, but it knew me, somehow, even if I didn’t know it.

The confusion didn’t clear, but it did get shoved to the back of my mind at a particularly hard pinch over my ribs, and my day at the diner began all over again. It wasn’t bad. I didn’t get breakfast as I was late and too busy serving it, but I did get lunch. Joe, a big bald guy working the grill, made me a cheeseburger almost too big to fit on the plate. I had a separate plate for the thick-cut fries and a big glass of tea. That was another thing I learned about the South. The tea came already sweet, the kind of sweet where they tossed a tea bag in a pitcher of sugar and there you go. They called it sweet tea—a nice innocent name for something I would’ve called a glass of diabetic death. But it was good and the food was great. The grease was thick, the cheese hot and melting, the meat pink in the middle, and those were apparently things I liked quite a bit. I wiped at my chin with a napkin, gave Joe a thumbs-up, and he grunted.

The same happened at supper—hot chili with a huge wedge of cheddar. A thumbs-up and a grunt. Four days later I was sitting at a table in the corner. It was Reuben-and-fries day, and I was trying to eat without getting it on the blue shirt Miss Terrwyn had given me, saying she couldn’t look at my silly vampire-wannabe white-boy self anymore. She must’ve gotten it from her brother, Lew. It was the same button-down look and it was patriotic as hell with the red-and-white checkered apron.

Joy.

But I wore it, because my boss wasn’t that bad. She had a soft spot for strays like her brother, whether she’d admit it or not. She’d acted as if the shirt were nothing, but she’d pushed my hands aside to button up the last three buttons for me and spun me around for a look to make sure I was all tucked in—like I were a kid off to his first day of school. She also hadn’t threatened to cut my dick off since that first day with Luther of the sinful desire, which meant her sharp eyes had seen no wickedness in my soul. That meant something. When all you know is that you have snarky tastes in T-shirts and you’re a killer of monsters and you pass Miss Terrwyn’s good-character test, you had to think maybe you weren’t too bad. If I’d killed monsters, then I’d saved innocent people. I defended the honor of teen girls from perverts, even if I overreacted somewhat. I wasn’t such a bad guy. When you had amnesia, finding out something that seemed simple was actually pretty damn huge. Cal Whoever-the-hell wasn’t a bad guy.

Not a bad guy. Not a bad guy.

That I repeated it silently to myself almost hourly was a little weird, but I didn’t hold it against myself. Shit, what hadn’t been weird since I’d woken up on that beach, except for working at the diner? I didn’t mind it. It was peaceful in a way. The customers were all regulars and not one of them was ever in a hurry. Although I didn’t smile as much as Miss Terrwyn told me I should, they still tipped big for the effort, which was good because Miss Terrwyn hadn’t been lying about the pay being for crap. And everyone in town passed through here. None of them had mentioned knowing me, not yet. But it had only been a few days. I hadn’t come across everyone in the Landing yet, but I would. There wasn’t any hurry to take off.

There was one big goddamn hurry.

I didn’t stop eating at the internal shout. I had them frequently, every day, but countering them was the inescapable, annoying feeling I was here for a reason. I tended to take the middle path and ignore both bickering sides of my brain. It wasn’t as if either side was reliable. All I could do was all I could do, and right now that happened to be dipping a French fry bigger around than my thumb into ketchup. The door of the diner opened. I didn’t hear it open, but I saw the light change on the tile floor. I saw someone’s shadow—someone very quiet because that door creaked like a weather vane in a high wind. I’d noted that the first time I walked through it. I’d also noticed there wasn’t any place where I didn’t instantly determine the back way out or notice who was coming through the front way in.

This guy, the quiet one, was tall, dark blond hair pulled back in either a ponytail or a braid, olive skin. He was dressed in a black shirt, black pants, and a long gray duster that moved in the way my jacket had moved when I’d been armed. Everyone else who walked through that door was a happy and harmless goldfish, splashing obliviously along. This one was a shark, a dorsal fin slicing smoothly through the water with not a sound to give him away. My silverware—fork, steak knife, and spoon—had been wrapped in a napkin when I’d sat down to eat. The napkin was wadded up beside the plate. In a split second the steak knife was in my hand under the table; a second later I was back to slathering the fry with ketchup. This guy didn’t belong here, and he didn’t belong here in exactly the same way I didn’t.

Wasn’t that a coincidence?

I was chewing my French fry when a fist slammed down on the table, rattling my plate. “Where in the unholy hell have you been?” a voice demanded, sounding furious. There were other emotions behind the fury, but as that was the one most relevant when you were armed with diner silverware, that was the one I concentrated on.

“Who wants to know?” I countered placidly, dipping another fry and tightening my grip on the knife. I wasn’t a bad guy, I’d figured that out, but I didn’t know the same about him.

“Who?” The anger was overridden by another emotion, one that made me doubt that the fury had been completely real. This one was, though, as real as they came and easy to read: dread. “Your brother, Cal. I’m your brother.”

Well, fuck me running.

I hadn’t seen that coming.