Blackout

3

I deserted the rest of my food and walked out of the diner, with more than my arm up my sleeve. I waved an “I’ll be back” at Miss Terrwyn, then ducked her scowl before hitting the door. She had a soft spot all right, but no tolerance for slackers. Outside, I considered standing but decided, whatever this guy had to say, I’d prefer to hear it sitting down. And with a knife, I thought, I could hurt someone standing or sitting. Was I that confident? I took stock in myself and four dead spider monsters and decided that, yeah, I was. This guy could be as quiet and armed as he wanted. I was armed too, and had a T-shirt whose EAT ME message no one had yet been able to take me up on. I might not be a bad guy, but nobody had said I couldn’t take care of myself.

While I might have the haircut of a sheepdog, I was one badass motherfucking sheepdog.

I sat on the bench and leaned back as if this sort of thing happened to me every day and twice on Christmas. “You’re my brother,” I echoed him. I started out very skeptically, but his darker skin to my pale, his blond hair to my black, all meant nothing when I looked into eyes the same color gray as mine. All right, we were related, but that didn’t mean brothers, and being related didn’t mean there was love, warmth, family bonding, and all that shit either. Cain and Abel. The Godfather movies. These were some of the things I hadn’t forgotten. I had to play it safe. I wasn’t a bad guy, but I wasn’t a stupid one either. If my brother was so worried about me, where had he been when I’d taken on four giant spider monkeys from Hell by myself?

“Are you waiting for a brotherly man hug?” I drawled. “Yeah, keep waiting, buddy.”

He crouched down in front of me to be eye to eye. I could feel my knees pop in outraged sympathy at the fluid movement. “You don’t remember, do you?” For a moment he looked lost beyond an innate confidence he wore the same as he wore his skin. That lost expression was the same lost I’d been feeling for days. “Damn. We were afraid that might be it.”

“You found him? More lost than Atlantis ever claimed to be and there he is. Grab him and tag his poutanas yie ass before he wanders away again.”

I spared the quickest of glances toward a brown-haired man about thirty feet down the sidewalk and moving toward us fast before I had the knife at the blond guy’s throat the second I faced him again. “No one is grabbing or tagging any part of me. Period. We clear?” No, I wasn’t stupid, and I didn’t like the looks of this one damn bit. I hadn’t killed Luther the perv when I tossed him through the window, and I had no real desire to kill anybody, because I was not a bad guy. This guy, though, wasn’t your average anybody. He was like me. He moved like me, carried weapons, was a killer. I’d seen that in one quick look. But what I couldn’t see was what kind of killer he was. I killed monsters. I didn’t know where he drew the line or if he had a line at all.

“Goodfellow, stay back.” The eyes that so oddly mirrored mine stayed calm. “Cal, I’m going to take the knife. Don’t be alarmed.”

Don’t be alarmed. He had balls, I had to give him that. He could fight me for the knife and, from the way he moved, he might give me a run for my money, shark to shark, but to tell me up front that he was going to disarm me and think that I was just going to let that happen. He could kiss my …

Holy shit.

The knife was gone and my hand was empty. I was unarmed and facing someone very dangerous. This was serious, but more than that, it was flat-out embarrassing. I flexed my fingers and dropped my hand as casually as if I’d been swiping a fly instead of holding a blade at someone’s throat. He was like me all right, only better, and that added proof to having the same color eyes. “Cal,” I said, disgruntled. “You called me Cal. So which is it? Calvin, Calvert, or Calhoun?”

Brother. I might have a brother. I’d wrapped my mind around a lot of crazy-ass shit these past few days, but I could have hit a wall on this one. A brother … holy hell. When I looked over my shoulder at that empty spot, was he the one I was looking for? This guy? Tired, he looked tired—at least he did to me, with the skin under his eyes a deeper olive than the rest of his face, but his lips still quirked up slightly at the edges at my belligerent question. “Caliban. It’s short for Caliban.”

“Like the monster, the one from Shakespeare.” Jesus. I was all about that, from the beach to my fake IDs to the real deal. I flashed monster cred as if it were a goddamn gold card. I was a wannabe like Miss Terrwyn had said. Again, embarrassing. Could you roll your eyes at your own idiotic ego?

My remark about Shakespeare had the almost-smile fading from his lips. “No, not like the monster.”

“Where have you been? Have you been here all this time? The days and days we searched without sleep, with barely a hope to keep us going, and, Zeus, what are you wearing? Is that gingham? Tell me that’s not a gingham apron. I’m not sure I care to go on in this vale of tears knowing that you are actually wearing a gingham apron. Why are you wearing a gingham apron?” The other one, the brown-haired guy down the sidewalk, had stayed back for all of two seconds before he was at our side, his green eyes pained as if it hurt to look at me.

“Because I can’t cook,” I answered absently. It was happening. Right now. I hadn’t found my past, but it had found me and hauling family with it. I’d thought maybe associates in the same business. I’d thought maybe, wild chance, a friend or two. But a brother? I didn’t know if I was prepared for a brother. Worse yet, I didn’t know if a brother was prepared for me. Then again, I worked hard at the diner, and slaying monsters. I wanted to mouth off once or twice or twenty times, but I didn’t, because it wasn’t smart, careful, or safe. I’d been nothing but those three things since I’d woken up in the Landing, with the minor exception of throwing Luther through the window. Maybe I wasn’t giving myself credit. I wasn’t a bad guy, right? So maybe I was a good deal in the brother department too. On sale and barely used.

As for his being a killer, if I was his brother and one he missed enough to come looking for, he couldn’t be that bad either. No worse than I was, or I wouldn’t have had anything to do with him. I knew right from wrong. I knew people from monsters.

One, like Luther, you disciplined. One, like the spiders, you destroyed.

“You’re wearing an apron with ruffles because you can’t cook. Ah. That makes perfect sense. You’ve no idea how I appreciate your clearing that up for me,” the other guy, the fashion critic, said. “You’re wearing blue as well? Bright, frighteningly neon blue? I’ve never seen you wear anything but black and gray. And your hair, what by all that is unholy … Actually I approve of the hair. If less were hanging in your face, that would be better, but overall—I approve.” He sat on the bench beside me with a weary “Whoosh,” stretched his legs, and wrapped an arm around my shoulders to give me a slight shake, then a rough squeeze. “You scared us, kid. Scared the Hades out of us.”

I dropped my eyes to his hand on my shoulder. The man, the self-proclaimed brother who had disarmed me as if I were a kitten with a ball of yarn, smiled. “There’s that brotherly man hug you’re so intent on avoiding.”

“He’s my brother too?” I asked, mildly panicked.

Mr. Touchy-feely answered for himself. “No, you’re not that fortunate. You’re not as endowed, not as fashion conscious, not as rakishly charming, not as … Malaka!” he yelped as I stabbed him in the leg with the fork I’d had up my other sleeve. I had two sleeves. I wasn’t only arming one of them. I’d slipped a knife up one and a fork up the other before I left my table in the diner.

“I’m not as crazy about being touched either.” I stood up, pulling the fork out of his leg as I did, to face “my brother.” All that smart, careful, and safe I’d been so smug about a moment ago had disappeared. That was interesting. As for the not-a-bad-guy thing … I knew I shouldn’t kill people, but I didn’t think good guys stabbed people with forks either. These two were bringing out the worst in me or they were bringing out the me in me. I hoped it was the first. “If you think I’m going to swallow whatever crap you two are throwing at me without some questions, lots of goddamn questions, and without some proof, then brother or not, you don’t know me at fucking all.”

But maybe it wasn’t them at all. Maybe it was just him doing it, the one I’d stabbed, because I smelled it now. I smelled him.

Three drops of blood fell from the tines of the fork to make a trinity of scarlet on the sidewalk. The smell grew even stronger. My subconscious had known what my conscious hadn’t. I should’ve smelled the difference, noticed the difference sooner. If they were telling the truth, though, they knew me and I knew them, which meant I was used to them, used to the green-eyed one’s smell. He wasn’t human. He didn’t smell like Lew or Terrwyn or anyone else in this town. He smelled of grass and trees, the musk of bucks in rut, the dew on a meadow blanketed by a morning mist. He also smelled of a fox in the henhouse.

Sneaky.

“You’re one of them.” I changed my grip on the fork, a less respect-my-space hold and more of one suited to puncturing a carotid artery. Thank God I hadn’t grabbed a spork. “You’re a monster.”

Why I could smell that and no one else could was something I didn’t have time to think about. I had to decide whether to take out a monster in broad daylight in front of the diner patrons watching through the window and the sheriff who’d be showing up soon. Or should I back away from this all? Let these two explain themselves. Do the sensible thing like I had since I’d washed up here.

Fuck that.

He was a monster.

Abomination.

I slashed at his throat with the fork; then something happened. I had no idea what. It was that abrupt, as if I were watching a movie and the power went out. No people. No light. Nothing at all. When I woke up in the backseat of a car, “the something that had happened” was driving and I could see the hair was in a braid, not a ponytail. Not that it mattered, but it was always nice to get things cleared up. I sat up slowly and rubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand. It hurt—my head not my hand. Not much, but there was a definite mild ache.

I’d dreamed when I’d been out. I’d been in a car, old and junky, looking through the back window at the road unspooling behind. With every beat of my heart I’d thought they were coming. They were coming. They would always be coming. I’d been young in the dream; too damn young to know what to do. A kid, early teens maybe. That was all I could remember of it. That and that there was someone with me. He was the only hope I had that whatever was coming might not find me, and he had blond hair—the same color as the guy driving this car.

Not that that meant anything. Dreams were dreams. I had reality to deal with now.

“You. Blond guy. What did you do to me?” I asked, hoarse enough to know it had been several hours for my throat to be that dry. Without slow-motion replay in my brain, as I didn’t remember seeing one damn thing before the darkness had sucked me down, I was genuinely curious to hear the answer. He was the one who had taken me down, that I knew. The other one had been in front of me when I attacked. The monster, the one who’d said he was my brother, had been behind me. Lesson learned: Don’t turn your back on anyone, not even your brother.

“I hit you,” he said matter-of-factly, eyes still on the road. “But it was for your own good.”

Isn’t that what they all say? And I hadn’t seen him move, not even a flicker out of the corner of my eye. Either he was that incredibly fast or I was that utterly focused on bleeding a monster dry. Maybe both. “That’s not very brotherly of you.” Neither were the handcuffs I was wearing. I rattled the links. “You going to sell me overseas into the sex trade?”

“Like we could give your ungrateful, utensil-waving, frenzied fork-stabbing self away. We’d have to pay them, give them frequent-flier miles, not to mention a ten-year free warranty, and then change our addresses,” continued the familiar fox-in-the-henhouse complaining. “I’m Robin Goodfellow, by the way. In case you were curious who you attacked besides a good and faithful friend who has spent days worrying about you and watching your brother worry as well. His name, as you haven’t asked, is Niko, and he should’ve hit you harder.”

That one, Goodfellow, was in the passenger’s seat. Despite the fact that I had stabbed him with a fork and had then tried to kill him with the same, he didn’t appear as pissed off as I would’ve been. Then again, aside from being a monster, he was also mouthy enough that probably everyone he met tried to kill him with the first thing that came to hand. Fork, keys, chair, Pomeranian—whatever they had.

“I didn’t know monsters had names.” I studied the glass of the the back window as he muttered more about my ingratitude and general lack of anything desirable in a sentient being. I could kick out the glass, but I couldn’t kick it out and escape before Niko stopped me. He was apparently some sort of ninja/samurai frigging Jedi Knight who probably didn’t bend the fucking grass he walked on, and he didn’t need a T-shirt saying EAT ME to reassure himself about his general badassness. I was suddenly glad I was wearing my new blue shirt that didn’t label me as something I hadn’t been able to back up. Miss Terrwyn had given me that reprieve with plain blue cotton. She was gone now, though. I was gone too—in the wind. In a week I’d be only a memory to her, her brother, and everyone else who’d met me at the diner.

I was going to miss them. It was stupid. I hadn’t been there even a week, but there you go. They’d given me a free haircut, shirt, and the stamp of approval on my soul. Cal-the-not-so-bad-guy. I was guessing from the handcuffs that my brother and his monster partner had spun some tale of escaped convict … wanted by the feds … blah blah. And now Cal-the-not-so-bad-guy was Cal, a guy bad enough he had to be dragged out of town unconscious by some mysterious authorities. That sucked. My good reputation, all four days of it, was shot. It shouldn’t have mattered that much, but it did. They’d given me more than I’d given them, although I had cleared up their monster problem. That was something.

I saw a sign as I looked out the window and squinted quickly to read it as it receded in the distance. It said nothing about Nevah’s Landing. Yeah, I was long in the wind. “Where’s the Landing? My weapons are there.”

My apron was gone too but that wasn’t the important thing. There was something in the Landing for me besides slinging hash and winning the approval of the locals. There was something that I hadn’t gotten around to yet. Something that needed doing. Something that felt more familiar than these two guys. Something that only I … No. No.

I turned away. I was looking for my past and it was here in the car with me. I didn’t need the Landing anymore, despite the lingering feeling of a hooked finger that tugged in my gut, a whisper that said, Come back. Come play. I didn’t even know why I’d been there to begin with. Maybe my past and present knew.

“You … um … Niko. You’re supposed to be my brother. Why was I in Nevah’s Landing fighting monsters?” I settled back against the seat and began scanning the floorboards for something to pick the handcuff lock.

“I am not supposed to be your brother. I am your brother. Although there could be a certain sense of destiny to it.” He pulled off the exit we’d been approaching and into the parking lot of a motel almost exactly like the one I had stayed in, where my weapons still were. I was going to miss them, not that I remembered using them. But their cold metal in my hands was comforting. It beat a teddy bear hands down. “I am your brother. I was supposed to be your brother since before either of us was born. Karmic debt. It appears I was Vlad the Impaler or Genghis Khan in a past life.” He parked the car. “As for Nevah’s Landing, you were there because of Peter Pan.”

I’d been about to comment on all that mystical destiny crap, but I choked on it instead, coughing out, “Peter Pan? You’re shitting me, right?”

“I cannot shit you,” solemn as a proverbial judge, “it is not in my nature.”

Uh huh. It hadn’t been long since he’d kidnapped me, but I already knew better than that.

Goodfellow, ignoring the exchange, said, “I do not want to hear how a tale that appropriated the name of a member of my mighty race led Cal to wearing a girly apron in a diner in the quaint and culturally deprived town of Nevah’s Landing. I’ll check us in.” He opened the door and climbed out with only a small limp. I should’ve stabbed deeper. A monster in human form was still a monster. And monsters were wrong, evil, alien, unclean. Abominations. I knew that. Oceans were made of water, forest fires were made of a thousand flickering flames, and monsters were made of murder. I knew it.

But I didn’t know about Peter Pan and Nevah’s Landing. I shifted my attention from picturing a target on Goodfellow’s back as he limped away to Niko, now turned to face me. “You were seven years old and I was eleven when we passed through Nevah’s Landing,” he started, holding out the handcuff key to me. I took it after a brief hesitation and didn’t take my eyes off him as I unlocked the cuffs. He was faster than I was and better than I was. That didn’t make me at all comfortable, whether he was my brother or not.

“We stayed about a week. Our mother, Sophia, did some fortune-telling, tarot readings, and other things.” He glossed over “other things” so quickly I almost didn’t catch it. Whatever those other things had been, he wasn’t going to make that part of the story. “It was cold, like it is now, too cold for swimming. You were bored.” I didn’t know how he did it, but with the tiniest movement of an eyebrow he made me feel as if at seven I had been bored frequently and not afraid to nag an older brother about it. “So I told you the story of Peter Pan and Never Land. Nevah’s Landing. Never Land. It wasn’t that much of a stretch. The real Nevah of Nevah’s Landing was actually the matriarch of a family who settled …”

I groaned and let my head flop back against the seat. My two captors weren’t familiar, but this feeling—a frustrated weight of boring knowledge I didn’t need or want—was surprisingly so. “At least you remember something,” Niko observed, looking pleased with himself, even though the emotion wasn’t plastered across his face. Pleased and relieved, and while I couldn’t point out specific physical clues to that, I knew it all the same. “Very well. Historical education aside, I told you the story of Peter Pan. I even took you to the library there so you could look at the pictures in the book. You always were about the pictures. You called Nevah’s Landing Never Land for months after we left. I think you saw it as it was in the book, a sanctuary for lost boys.”

I ignored the jab at my not being well read unless the books came with lots of pictures and big print—hey, I’d known Shakespeare, hadn’t I? Instead, I concentrated on the first moments that I could remember. When I’d woken up on the beach, the second before as I’d drifted in and out of consciousness, what had I seen in the darkness?

Pirate ships. Princesses. Waterfalls. Tree houses. A safe place. You couldn’t get there if you couldn’t fly, and the pirates were ridiculously easy to defeat. The crocodile, though, that white crocodile—it whispered to me, with an unbelievably wide stretch of toothy smile and jack-o’-lantern eyes. They were only whispers, but it could do other things if it wanted. What those things were a seven-year-old boy couldn’t imagine, and it told me things; things I didn’t remember. But it also said it was my friend. Who’s going to tell a phantom crocodile no when he tells you that? No seven-year-old I could think of. That was one scary damn thing to put in a kid’s book, that ghost of a crocodile.

“My own personal safe place. That’s why I, what? Trucked in some eight-legged monsters so I could fight in a place that was comfy-cozy? Or I went there for another reason and happened to find giant spiders splashing around in the surf without their water wings? No one knew me there. I hadn’t been staying there. Did I track the monsters there and decide because I had so much fun in Never Land as a kid I’d give them a free exterminator job?” Although I didn’t mind the thought of killing monsters for free—a community service—I had a damn lot of weapons, and those cost. I couldn’t have bought them on diner tips. “And what about the amnesia? Care to explain that one? Did I catch a cliche virus and just kept killing because deep down I wanted to be monster killer of the month?” My lips flattened. “Peter fucking Pan doesn’t answer a single one of those questions.” I could see Goodfellow on his way back to the car. “And what about him? He’s not human. If you’re my brother, if you know about the monsters, why are you hanging out with him?”

“Because, as he said, he’s a friend and a good one.”

I grunted, “He’s a monster. Not only is he a monster, but he’s one that never shuts up. What’s good about that?”

“He grows on you.”

“Like a fungus?” I snorted.

“More like a sexually transmitted disease.” He opened the door and swung a leg out. “Now, let’s get in the room, eat, and I’ll tell you the rest of the story, amnesia and all. You’ll get your memory back, Cal. This isn’t permanent. You’ll remember. I promise.” Strangely, it didn’t sound like a promise he was one hundred percent sure about. Maybe it was only hope. Hope and monsters, what a mix.

The room was practically a carbon copy of the one I’d had back in the Landing, except this one had two beds instead of the one, but two still weren’t enough. “I’m not sleeping in a bed with either of you.” I folded my arms. “I don’t care if we were all Siamese triplets separated at birth. It’s not happening.”

“Conjoined, not Siamese, you politically incorrect Neanderthal.” Goodfellow sat at the table and rubbed at his leg while giving me a pointed glare. “And, when you’re returned to your normal state of mind—not that I ever considered it normal until now—you owe me twelve hundred dollars for these pants. Tine puncture marks don’t go well with fine couture.” I had some thoughts on his “couture,” but he chose that moment to pull a sword out of his long brown coat, rotate it with a deceptively lazy speed, and slap it across the table. “Also, I don’t accept checks or plastic, especially not yours, as I faked most of them myself.”

That was a big sword, and he handled it as if it weighed nothing. He moved with the same lethal grace the Niko guy did. I wasn’t quite the hot shit I thought I was, the killer born on a South Carolina beach. Not in this company. At the very least I had some competition. “Jesus, were you born with that in your hand?” I asked with reluctant admiration.

He grinned wickedly. “Kid, you don’t want to know what I was holding when I was born.”

“We need only two beds, because Robin and I will take turns keeping watch. Besides, you didn’t mind sleeping with me when you were four and were afraid of the neighbor’s dachshund,” Niko said as he stripped off his own coat.

“Keep watch? You afraid I’ll try and run or … I was not!” I said with automatic outrage when I caught up to the important part of the conversation.

“I think her name was Princess Poochika. She was brown with short legs. She looked like a Ho-Ho with a pink rhinestone collar. You thought she was the reincarnation of Cujo.” He sat on the bed and dropped his head in his hands to rub his eyes with the heels of his hands. He was more than tired. He was exhausted—because of me. Because he’d been looking for me. I’d wondered every day in Nevah’s Landing if anyone had given a shit I was gone. Now I had my answer.

“You can be forgiven. She was a little temperamental. Nipping little kids’ ankles was her favorite activity.” He raised his head. “Come here, Cal.”

I unfolded my arms just so I could fold them again stubbornly. “Why?”

He exhaled. “Just come here.”

“Why?” I repeated.

“Cal.” One patient word. My name … my real name. Caliban. He’d told me that. If I owed anyone, it was him. It was too bad for us all that I didn’t have the trust in me to owe anyone anything. Whether the color of our eyes said we were related, even brothers, I, this version of me, had been born on that beach—my first emotion had been a general “What the fuck?” My second one of suspicion. You could be a not-so-bad guy and be suspicious too, in certain situations. In the past few days suspicion had worked well for me. I was sticking with it.

I cocked my head with attitude and skepticism. “If there’s no why, there’s no Cal.”

Niko rubbed his face again and said for what would be the last time, “Cal, I need you to come here.” He didn’t sound irritated. He only sounded more tired. I almost felt bad for the guy, almost. Shit, I did feel bad for the guy, but I was still beach Cal, and beach Cal didn’t trust anyone without proof—especially when that anyone knocked you out and kidnapped you. That was what I thought, but my body had opinions of its own. Without any orders from my brain, I took the few steps between us.

Stopping, I asked warily, “So, what do you want?”

His hand moved toward me, and I flinched, but it was too late. He cupped the back of my head and turned it to one side. He was looking at my neck, the healing bites. “You were bitten by one of the Nepenthe spiders. That’s why you have amnesia.” It was good information, if utterly meaningless, to have. But before I could move, Niko pulled me down in one quick motion to rest my forehead on the top of his blond head. “Missed you, little brother.” That I didn’t immediately pull away was a thought I did think and then promptly tried but failed to unthink.

Moving back, I asked, trying for some control of the situation, “What the fuck is a Nepenthe spider?”

Niko removed his shoes, moved up farther in the bed, and closed his eyes. “Your turn, Goodfellow,” he murmured, before falling asleep between that breath and the next. He hadn’t gotten under the covers or beat the pillow at least once to soften it up. He was just here and then gone. It was sort of … Zen, I guess. I am awake; now I am asleep. I’ll chant later. Now that—all that—felt vaguely familiar too. This Niko—my brother, shit, denial was beginning to fail me—was as ninja/samurai on the inside as well as the out. How’d you become one of those these days? Climb a mountain and live in a cave for ten years? Take a class in an online school of dubious accreditation? Who knew?

Goodfellow had taken his foot and scooted a chair over so he could prop his legs up, ankles crossed. “I need to keep the weight off it,” he explained. “There was no doubt some sort of mustard-spawned Ebola on that fork you stabbed me with.” I stared back at him, wholly unimpressed. “Which,” he continued, “might have a civilized being slobbering heartfelt apologies in my direction.” The sly green eyes fixed on me in anticipation. When nothing was forthcoming, he tapped his chest. “If you’re confused, this is my direction. You don’t need a compass, kid.”

“You’re a monster,” I pointed out, as he seemed to keep forgetting.

“I’m a monster? That’s rather … interesting.” The interest wasn’t the amusing kind as the cocky smile faded and the eyes darkened. “How about we agree that I’m not human, but not necessarily a monster either.” He folded his hands across his stomach. “Oh, and before I forget, I do have to tell you that no matter how incredibly hot you find me, I am in a monogamous relationship.”

That overrode any monster issues instantly. “Dude!”

He grinned. “It’s simply my standard disclaimer. In the past you have never tried to ‘get with this,’ as they say. Although you have seen me naked. You couldn’t look me in the eye for days.”

“Dude!”

“I can’t be held responsible for your shame at your own shortcomings or your puritanical sexual mores.” The grin was wider, definitely wider and considerably more evil. “Now, do you want to order pizza or Chinese?”

I decided I wanted to go to bed. The hell with the food. The hell with the Nep … Nef … whatever fucking kind of amnesia spider it was. I’d find all that out from Niko or from them both when Niko was awake. Goodfellow made the monsters from the beach seem like one tiny ladybug I’d crushed under my boot. They didn’t scare me. He did. My curiosity could wait and so could my hunger. It was only as I’d kicked off my own boots and crawled under the covers of the other bed, fully clothed—very fully clothed—that I realized I’d never gotten an answer as to why one of them was keeping watch. Was it to make sure I didn’t take off, or something else? Considering how easily Niko had taken me down, I had the uneasy suspicion it was not my sneaking off they were worried about.