Blackout

4

“I don’t want to go back to New York,” I repeated, spearing a sausage patty with my fork. A patty to go with my petty, and I was feeling petty.

Goodfellow had one eye on that very same fork, smart of him, and one on the waitress with more breasts than she, God, and her bra knew what to do with. “I am sorry,” he told her, “but despite your wealth of exquisite mammary tissue, I am in a monogamous relationship. Disappointing for you, I know, but I have faith that after a grieving process, you’ll learn to live again.”

“I heard you the first time,” Niko snapped at me before going after Goodfellow, “and, Robin, let the woman refill your orange juice and get on with her day, as bereaved as she is over your unavailable status, all right?” He began to whip his granola and yogurt into more of a froth than was called for. The Zen Niko was having issues. I was one of those issues. “Why, Cal, do you not want to go home?”

I chewed the sausage and swallowed, using some of my own orange juice to chase it down. “I was attacked by giant spiders, I’ve lost my memory, I carried more weapons than the Deathstar, and I woke up on a beach a few minutes before I would’ve drowned. If that’s what I do in New York, why would I want to go back? I worked four days at a diner and no one tried to kill me once. The money wasn’t great, but, again, no one tried to kill me. If I’m some kind of monster exterminator, I have to think there’s a better way to make money. And you still haven’t explained why I was fighting the spiders, who for, did I get paid, and what was I doing in South Carolina if I live in New York.” I took a bite of my waffles and said, muffled, around the mouthful, “Or if you’re keeping watch at night for me or for something else. Don’t think I forgot about that because you sicced Mr. Monogamy on me.”

Niko put his spoon down with a sigh. “We, not just you, are working for a coalition of the preternatural in New York. Something is sending the Nepenthe spiders to kidnap werewolves, vampires, revenants, lamia, succubi, incubi, on and on—anything nonhuman. Sometimes their bodies are found, sometimes not, but none are ever seen alive again. We were hired to stop the creature behind this.”

“God, not creature. Well, goddess. Ammut,” Robin said cheerfully, slicing his ham to small pieces. “She’s supposedly an Egyptian goddess, which, of course, I, personally, figured out from the Nepenthe spiders. I was in Egypt hanging at the court of Ramses for a while. That obelisk he built, let’s just say I personally might be the reason he was obsessed with large phallic objects. But I digress. The spiders are from Egypt, originally birthed before the time of the pyramids. Their venom, greatly diluted, can bring forgetfulness to the sorrowful. It was called the nepenthe elixir—psychotherapy for the pharaohs. It was all the rage for the royalty who could afford to lose several servants to catch one of the spiders. However, a direct bite will make an animal or human forget how to run, to stand, to move, to think, to breathe even, making them easy prey. Snap, snap and all the baby spiders have dinner that night. Very efficient.”

Goddess? We were after a goddess?

The next bite of waffle on my fork slowly slid off to splat in a pool of syrup on the plate. “What … the … fuck?” I said with what I classified as extraordinary calm before throwing that calm out the window and trying to stab Goodfellow with the fork—again.

Niko dragged me backward out of the diner, which was across the street from the motel, with his arm in a chokehold around my neck. Goodfellow followed, though, with enough lag that I was guessing he paid the check. I stumbled purposely as he came through the doors, felt the hold on my throat ease slightly—brotherly love turned out to be a great weakness—flipped Niko over my shoulder, and went after Goodfellow again. Who needed guns and knives—forks were my new weapon of choice.

As I hit Goodfellow, he twisted in a move I’d swear no one, unless they had Silly Putty for bones, could accomplish, and I somersaulted over his hip to land flat on my back. My head bounced on the asphalt in a manner I didn’t at all enjoy. Hissing in pain, I blinked against the double vision to bring into focus the two faces peering down at me. One was concerned and one puzzled.

“Was it something I said?” Goodfellow questioned, all innocence. He tilted his head toward Niko. “It could’ve been you. Vampires, werewolves, revenants, yadda yadda. Perhaps you blew a circuit in his view of a two-monster world: spiders and the magnificence that are pucks in all our glory.”

Right then I hated them both equally enough that Goodfellow had a good argument in the blame department. No, not Goodfellow. Puck. He was a puck. He didn’t deserve a name, the annoying shit. “You.” I pointed at Niko with the fork. At least, I attempted to point at him. Things were still a little blurry. As much as I wanted to hold the two of them responsible for that, I knew better. This was my fault. I’d let myself forget one basic fact, the very first fact I knew about myself—the one that nobody, not even Miss Terrwyn, had to tell me. “We have a last name? Same last name? Fuck it. Who cares? What’s your last name?”

“Leandros of the Vayash Clan. Our last name is Leandros.” He reached down, slid his hands under my shoulders, and sat me up.

“Whatever.” I closed my eyes and let the world stop whirling. “You, puck. Go back and get my food. I’m still starving.” I wasn’t, not anymore, but it was a matter of principle. “Leandros, get me back to the motel so I can throw up.”

“Are you dizzy? Nauseated? You could have a concussion.” The last possibility sounded accusatory, and Goodfellow countered in the same tone.

“He tried to stab me with a fork, Niko. For the third time, I might add. He is as my own family, and I’m willing to take one for the team, but taking syrup-coated metal like a spear through my throat is a lot to ask for.” I felt a hand gingerly pat the top of my head. “I’m sorry, kid. I’d have steered you toward the waitress’s bountiful bosom if she’d been out here. Oh, here she comes now … with the manager … who’s calling the police. Skata, it’s always something. Take him back to the room, Niko, and I’ll clear this up here.”

Just that quickly I was on my feet and across the road before I was able to get my eyes open. Then we were in the room, and I was sitting on one of the beds. Vampires, werewolves, other crap, gods. Gods. Goodfellow was on the money. I wanted the world back where and when I thought spiders and pucks were all I knew. Although I had known when I’d woken up in the Landing that the world was full of monsters, not only spiders, I simply didn’t have names to put to them and proof that I was right. I’d let myself think in those four normal days that I might just be a little crazy, because crazy was better than a world made of nightmares.

“Are you all right?”

I stopped rubbing the small lump on the back of my head and looked up at Niko. No. Leandros. Leandros was easier right now. There was too much to absorb and I needed some distance to do that. I needed to be able to breathe and to think. “I just found out that the world is one big frigging horror movie. I might need at least thirty seconds to process that, okay?”

“I can understand that,” he said slowly. “But you do need to know that being a vampire or a Wolf,”—as werewolves apparently preferred to be called. Good for them—”or a puck or a peri or any other number of things, doesn’t necessarily mean they are monsters. The majority are like people. Some are good; some are not. And some …” He let the rest of the sentence trail away.

“And some are?” I prompted.

He exhaled and sat beside me. “And some are monsters with no thought other than killing and no more soul than lies in the bullet of a gun. That doesn’t make the world a horror movie. It merely makes it like it already is, only with a few more layers that ordinary people will never see.”

“Just lucky ones like us,” I said grimly. “Whoopee.”

The puck came through the door then with my food in a Styrofoam container. “I paid off the manager, but I’d advise we leave as soon as possible. You, Junior, now owe me an extra three hundred on top of the damage to my pants.”

“Okay, I have to hurl.” Not from the bill or his obsession with his pants, but from the smell of the food. It looked as though I’d bought myself a slight concussion after all. I made it to the bathroom, slammed the door behind me, and vomited into the toilet. It wasn’t much. I’d had but half of my lunch, no supper yesterday, and not much of breakfast today before having my world—and my stomach—turned inside out.

I had straightened and grabbed the towel to wipe my mouth when the window about five feet up the wall exploded. It was frosted glass for privacy and fair sized, about two feet by two feet. It was the perfect size for the Nepenthe spider that came barging in. Double pincers in simian jaws were opening and closing rapidly, eight black legs were supporting it on the wall and reaching for me, six eyes were fixed on me as its bulbous body finished sliding through the window. It was the size of a big dog, exactly the same size as the German shepherd across from the Oleander Diner that had fled at the sight of me, leaving piss in its wake. The spider’s eyes were the same color as that piss, bright, cheer, middle-of-the-daisy yellow.

I jammed the waffle fork that I still had in my hand right in the middle of all six of those eyes. “Hello, Sunshine.”

Here was the fact I’d let myself forget across the street minutes ago—what I was. I hadn’t been completely serious with my attack on Goodfellow. I was serious now. I kept my arm up and barely out of reach of the pincers as the spider thrashed and screamed. I didn’t know spiders could scream, but this kind was doing a damn good job of it. I pushed the fork in farther until the heel of my hand hit eye and flesh before I rotated the metal, scrambling whatever it was using for a brain. Behind me the door flew open as the spider screeched one last time, twitched violently, and then went seventy-five pounds of dead on the floor. I let go of the remaining five inches of metal and wiped eye goo off my hand and onto my jeans.

“You … You killed a Nepenthe spider with a fork?” Goodfellow said in a strangled croak over my shoulder.

“Yeah.” I snorted and returned to flushing the toilet. I wanted to be a tidy killer for the maid’s sake. “Now imagine what I could’ve done to you at breakfast if I’d really tried.” I gave him a dark grin and added, “Sunshine.”

Goodfellow was less talkative—say “Hallelujah”—as we once again climbed into the car and headed north. Despite what I said about not wanting to go back to New York, I didn’t see I had much choice with spiders either following the two of them or following me. I was guessing me. I’d racked up five to my name so far, and if that didn’t make me the most popular target for the eight-legged crowd, I didn’t know what did. I could try to bail anytime I wanted before we reached the city, but I’d have to start carrying forks by the bucketful if I did.

Speaking of which, I watched as the puck picked up from the floor a clear plastic Baggie containing a plastic fork and knife typical of fast-food “silverware” and then cracked open the car window enough to shove it out.

“That’s called littering,” I commented with the smirk of a mean-spirited ten-year-old bully, which was very close to how I felt. Not pretty, but honest. I wasn’t a bad guy, repeat-repeat, if a damn good monster killer, but I had a headache. I’d been kidnapped—sort of. I was finding out about a weird and creepy world, and I had a job that no one with an ounce of self-preservation would want, where the customers were as freaky as your targets, and you could bet your ass no one tipped—or gave you a free shirt. Being an okay guy was different from being a hero. How long did monster-fighting heroes live in this shadowed world?

“Littering or self-survival,” Leandros added. “Cal, behave and tell Robin you won’t kill him with a fork if he drops his guard.”

Behave? Leandros could claim to be my older brother all he wanted, but I didn’t ever see a moment in the future where his telling me to behave would have any impact on what I did. If that was the brother I had been before, well, best plant a cross in the dirt, because that brother was dead and dust. I was my own man. “No,” I replied, amiably enough. There was no need to be too rotten. I’d already proved my point with the spider. They’d scooped me up like a toddler out of a playpen at Nevah’s Landing, but I knew what I was dealing with now. So did they.

“No?”

“You sound like the Grand Canyon. Every time I say something you don’t want to hear, you repeat it right back. It’s rather unninja of you. Do you get a ninja silence-in-crisis merit badge taken away for that? Do they slice it off with a shuriken from a hundred feet away?” I was wearing one of Leandros’s shirts, black—which led to all the ninja bashing. “And that’s right. I said no. I will collect as many forks as I can and the puckster here will never know when one is headed for his monogamy-loving ass. I don’t know you. Either of you, and all the talk in the world isn’t going to change that.” I leaned back against the seat to watch the scenery pass. “Since I don’t know you, I don’t know what you might do. And since I don’t know that, I don’t know how I’ll react. That’s just honesty. I’m good with forks, but I’m not psychic.”

There was an immediate stinging flick to my ear, not to my head, which was sporting an asphalt headache. He was that considerate at least. “Ow! Shit.” I cupped the ear that burned like fire. He was as bad as Miss Terrwyn had been with a swat.

“Now you know what I, personally, will do if you don’t show respect for your elders.” This time I had seen him move, but he was quick, this brother of mine—cheetah double take quick. “As for Robin, he may just forget about his newly found monogamy and show you a rerun of what you’ve forgotten. He comes by his reputation honestly, from what you told me.”

Jesus. An event I couldn’t remember, but I was doomed to hear about it on a daily basis. “You play dirty.” I sulked, dropping my hand.

“Yes, I do. You taught me how.” Leandros kept driving, seemingly unperturbed at the thought of any reprisal from me. “Since you don’t know us, we’ll tell you anything and everything you want until your memory comes back.”

“Great,” I interrupted before he could say anything further. “I have a shitload of questions for you.” Now that I’d found out about the number of nasties in the world, a list so long, the rain forest would have to be entirely razed to make the paper for it, I could focus on more personal questions. “The puck said one of those spider bites would make someone forget everything, forget how to move, how to fucking breathe.” Jesus. “Even if none of them was left alive to eat me, why didn’t I suffocate on that beach?”

Goodfellow answered that one without thinking twice, which meant he had thought twice or more than twice. The henhouse, I reminded myself. Always remember the henhouse and the fox with a mouthful of feathers. “The only thing I can think is the spider bit something or someone else before you. Like a rattlesnake, it didn’t have a full dose of venom—you received enough that you lost part of your memory, but you kept everything else. You managed to get the ancient pharaoh Prozac, only double or triple the amount. You didn’t forget a recent sorrow. You forgot your entire life. But it does wear off. Have faith.” It was a very smooth explanation, but before I had a chance to comment on how smooth, he’d already changed subjects. “Also, have faith that if you do kill me with a fork, someone will avenge me. Someone with wings, a sword, and a temper to drown the world in fire instead of water.”

“Robin,” Leandros warned.

“What? I’m simply saying. He wanted information. I want to make sure he has the entire picture,” the puck defended himself. He went on to give me more information, not waiting for me to ask for it. Niko and I were brothers. Niko was full Rom with a handful of centuriesold North Greek thrown in, which explained the blond hair. I was half Rom, half gadje—a combination frowned on by the gypsy clans, but not by our mother who had taken off on her own when she was a teenager. She had no prejudices when it came to bed partners, gypsy or non. He put that very carefully. He did not say Sophia didn’t care whom she screwed, but as he went on to say that Niko and I had no other family, that neither of us knew who our father was, it was easy to connect the dots. Mom got around—and around and around and around. That was a good reason that Niko wasn’t telling me this himself. Who would want to tell his brother that his mom was a slut?

Mom was also dead. She’d died in a fire, the result of bad trailer wiring. I waited to feel something on hearing that. Fine, she never met a mattress she didn’t like, but she’d been my mom. She could’ve had good qualities. She could’ve made cupcakes for my birthday or played with me on a beach that wasn’t freezing. There are worse things than liking to screw around. I had to feel something knowing she was dead, knowing she’d burned to death. Goodfellow hadn’t said that; she could’ve died of smoke inhalation, but I knew better. I didn’t remember, but I knew.

She’d burned.

But I felt … nothing. There was nothing but a bitter taste in the back of my throat. I gave up. Why would I want to remember something that horrible if I didn’t have to? I shrugged for Goodfellow to go on. He did, winding it up quickly. She’d died, leaving Niko and me on our own when we were in our teens. We traveled a lot before and after her death, ran into some monsters eventually, and had our eyes opened in a big way. We ended up in New York, met Goodfellow, started a business, and here we were.

For someone who didn’t know how to shut up, he was succinct as a one-line fortune cookie when he wanted to be. “That’s it?” I demanded. “I grew up, ran around, saw some monsters, came to New York, and am now part of the Leandros Brothers and Monogamy Boy Monster Killers Incorporated?”

“And you work at a bar part-time,” he added. “Oh, you were sexing it up with a Wolf, Delilah, for a while, but she tried to kill a friend of yours, thought about killing you, and things haven’t been the same since. The usual drama that goes along with sex. She’s now the first female pack leader in the Kin—that would be the werewolf Mafia to you—as she managed to get her Alpha and entire pack killed. It was quite clever, how she did that, clever in an inexcusably evil way. of course.” He coughed—a fake cough, I thought, to cover up his jealousy of just how clever she’d been. Pucks, I was learning or slowly remembering, were tricksters through and through.

After clearing his throat—uh huh—he continued. “It’s an all-female pack she started too, another first in the Kin. They’ve been kicking furry ass and pissing on names for several months now. It’s quite impressive. She might one day rule the entire leg-humping enchilada. Which is only fair—equal rights for all, regardless of gender.” He tossed a candy bar back to me. “As for monogamy boy, I’ve never been a boy.” His grin gave me crocodile flashbacks. “I was born a man, more than a man. Do you want to hear a little about my history? It’s far more entertaining than yours, I promise you.”

I ripped at the candy bar wrapper carelessly, tossing pieces of it onto the seat around me. “Jesus Christ, no. I don’t want to hear about your history, not a single second of it. Wait a minute. I was dating a werewolf?”

“No, you were screwing a werewolf. Wolves don’t have relationships outside their own kind. Wolf is for Wolf. You two were simply fornicating, fucking, whatever you wish to call it, although you certainly seemed to enjoy it. Your mood improved enormously. Your complexion cleared up, and the hair on the palms of your hands fell off. Naturally you owe all that to me as I was the one to help you lose your virginity. There wouldn’t have been any furry fornication for you if I hadn’t shown you the way, so to speak.” His smirk was as evil as mine had ever hoped to be when I’d commented on his newly found fork phobia. “Do you want to hear that story? I’ve told it to every single creature I know and sent it in to Penthouse Forum. I may as well tell it to the person it actually happened to.”

If we hadn’t been on the interstate, I would’ve thrown myself out of the car. I didn’t think it, I knew it. If this car weren’t so old, Leandros would’ve hit the child safety locks the minute the puck had ever opened his mouth. Instead, he’d reached back and slammed the lock down with his hand. I’d lost my memory, but he hadn’t lost his.

“Goodfellow, if he doesn’t kill you with a fork, I may. Stop taunting him. He’s been through enough.” Finally, Leandros cut in, looking out for little brother. I could see the upside to having a brother—for as long as I was trapped in a car with the puck anyway. “It was with a nymph, Cal. Your first time was with a meadow nymph in Central Park. I think you said her name was Charm. As for Delilah, yes, she’s a Wolf, and off-limits now, considering that she did try to kill a friend and would’ve killed you in his place if it would’ve gotten her what she wanted. I myself have an arrangement with a vampire named Promise. I told you, nonhuman does not mean monster. It only means be careful.”

I’d been doing a werewolf. My brother had an “arrangement” with a vampire. The puck was monogamous with something with wings and a sword and had been nonmonogamous with anything that moved in the past. “Thanks, guys. Way to go with putting my whole monsters-are-evil thing in perspective. Mom’s dead. I don’t have a father because getting a guy’s name when you screw him is so boring. And I did her great example one better by sleeping with someone who wanted to kill me or use me in some bizarre furry Mafia power play. Life is less a horror movie and more of a goth soap opera. Again, thanks so much for saving me from that god-awful normal life I had working in the diner back in Nevah’s Landing. You’re real pals.” I shifted my ass to a corner between seat and door, ate my candy bar, and tried to ignore them. They didn’t make it easy.

Goodfellow explained how there’d been a rumor of an Ammut priestess doing some very bad things for her goddess down in South Carolina, but it was barely a hint of supernatural gossip. We’d known it would most likely end up as nothing, so I’d gone alone. I’d called and said there was no priestess but a nest of spiders—nothing I couldn’t handle, especially with the grenade I’d taken with me. Apparently I’d never had the chance to use it. They didn’t know what had happened—whether the spiders had gotten the jump on me or I’d had a bad day when I took them on—but I hadn’t called back. They hadn’t been able to track me down with the GPS of my phone, the one I’d lost in the water. I hadn’t even been supposed to be in the Landing. I’d been several towns over when I’d called. How had I ended up there? Other than a childhood longing for Never Land, it was a mystery.

I grunted and kept working on the candy bar.

Leandros said they hadn’t found my car, borrowed from Goodfellow’s used-car lot. He was a used-car salesman—didn’t that figure? The puck could probably sell vibrating panties to nuns. The two of them hadn’t known whether the spiders had chased me to the Landing or I had chased them. They’d been depending on me to fill them in once they found me, because not finding me had never been an option. Leandros was very clear about that. He’d let Goodfellow do most of the talking, ninety-nine point nine percent of the never-ending talking, but of this he personally wanted to make absolutely sure I knew I hadn’t been deserted. I was his brother. He was finding me and bringing me back. Nothing and no one would stop him. He’d hunt until he found me or dropped dead of old age still in search of my bleached bones. It was all very Inigo Montoya of him. My identity was buried in black clouds, but movies I knew. Stupid goddamn spider.

“You’re loyal and faithful, like … um … a basset hound,” I offered Leandros in reply as I swallowed the last bite of chocolate. It was lame, no doubt about it, but I had to say something. His knuckles were whitening on the steering wheel. He wanted or needed some sort of acknowledgment. I tried again. “That’s good to know, especially in the monster-killing business.” There. I’d done my duty. On to other things. “Are there more candy bars?”

“You’re my only family, Cal.” He sounded more determined, if possible, to get his point across. “I will not let you down. Ever.” I was half afraid he’d pull over to write that vow in blood. He appeared impassive to the casual eye, but there was a mass of emotion under that outer stoicism. Look at me with the big words. Being impressed with my mental literary skills was a good distraction from admitting to myself that I knew what Leandros was hiding on the inside.

Too fast, all this was too damn fast. It was like meeting a woman’s parents on the first date. It was too much, too soon, and the cherry on top of all the strange and weird I’d woken up to less than a week ago.

“Yeah, that’s great.” I went for casual. There was nothing wrong with casual. “We’re close. Work together. You don’t let your vampire chick eat me. I’m grateful. About those candy bars …”

Goodfellow interrupted me and this time the smug, salacious, mocking voice was anything but. “Do not. Do not joke about this. Niko won’t say or do anything about it, but I will. You respect this and you respect that you are the luckiest man living to have the family you do, to have the brother you have.”

Just like that, casual was gone and I felt a complete and utter dick. I’d been so damn appreciative of what the people of the Landing had done for me, a haircut and a job, and here Leandros was telling me he practically would’ve spent the rest of his life hunting for me if that was what it took. What did I do? Asked for more candy bars. Called him a basset hound—not that there was anything wrong with basset hounds, but this was my brother. I didn’t remember it yet, but he was, and I was an idiot if I didn’t count myself lucky to have any family at all, much less family that refused to give up on me. Granted, he had kidnapped me, but, technically, it was for my own good. I’d wondered that first day in the Landing if I had friends, and I was all but spitting on a brother.

“Leandros, Christ, I’m sorry about the loyal and faithful thing. I’m sure you’re a better brother than a basset hound.” I grimaced. As apologies went, that was a concoction of frigging beauty. “Sorry about being a shit.” I could’ve said more, but, let’s face it, if he was my brother—the kind that evidently swore blood oaths and would battle armies single-handedly to make sure I got regular dental care or a yearly flu shot—then he knew what was under my outer candy-coated shell too.

The tense lines of his shoulders relaxed a fraction. “You don’t have to say that. In fact, it could start a precedent that would have you apologizing every minute of every day, and your time-management skills aren’t that impressive to begin with. Only know that you’re not alone. That’s enough.”

I was off the hook for being an ass, but more than that, I knew I wasn’t alone in the world. Not too many people could say that. It was humbling to know someone always had your back. It honestly was. I sat and “humbled” for a while before asking one more time. “I hate to bring it up again, but after cutting up that spider and flushing the pieces down the toilet, I didn’t get a chance to finish my breakf—”

A candy bar hit me in the forehead. Not particularly offended, I ate it and then napped. Concussions, evil Egyptian spiders, a brother whose code of honor was so deep he’d consider the Knights of the Round Table drunken and corrupt frat boys; it’d been an eventful day. Amnesia-man needed his rest.

When I woke up, we were in New York City, and Leandros and Goodfellow had switched positions. I straightened for a better look. Cars were bumper-to-bumper on all sides, a mighty herd of rush-hour bison headed for the cliff’s edge, too tightly packed to know their fate. I looked past them at the people on the sidewalks. People rushed along, streams of them, crabby and impatient cockroaches muttering and pushing. Late, late, for a very important date. Rude and obnoxious and everywhere.

This was a good place to hide—if you had to.

The Landing would always have a part of me for some indefinable reason, but this—this was home. I knew this city. I knew its heart and its whole, if not the details. I knew Central Park and the subway. I knew the rich places and the less than; the places you could walk alone and the places you shouldn’t. I knew graffiti and garbage-filled stairwells. I didn’t know any specific club or bagel shop, but I highly doubted I ate bagels anyway. I was hot dogs and relish down to my bones. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know where to go to get that hot dog yet. I took it all in.

“Home.”

I couldn’t stop myself from agreeing with Leandros on that one. “Yeah, it is.”

Finally we reached a smaller street and Goodfellow pulled the car halfway up on the curb. “Welcome to the Lower East Side, if you don’t recall, a very exclusive part.”

Leandros was already out of the car as I opened my door. “What’s so exclusive about it?” It wasn’t as nice as some of the other streets we’d gone down. The buildings here were more “old garage” than nice converted apartments.

He nodded for me to get out as well. He didn’t touch me, which was considerate of him. I was trying to go with the flow, but having space to think and time to do it in helped. “The privacy element,” he answered for the puck. “Promise has a deceased husband or two… .”

“Five,” Goodfellow corrected in a manner he didn’t try to pass off as remotely helpful.

“Regardless of the number,” said Leandros, able to grind his teeth with the best of them, “one owned a good deal of real estate. We moved from our last place a few months ago when it became difficult to smuggle out the bodies and more difficult to explain why the “thieves” that kept breaking into our apartment through the window did it by scaling four stories. Here it’s considerably easier to go about the business of our business, and Promise keeps the rent reasonable.”

Goodfellow opened his mouth, noted Leandros’s blanker-than-blank face, then addressed me instead. “See you soon, kid,” he called through the open window. “I’d slap you on the shoulder and say something witty and movingly eloquent, but as you’d only stab me with a fork, I’ll save it for another time.” He raised a hand and the car bounced off the curb and back into the street almost before Leandros finished closing the trunk after retrieving his duffel bag. The shirt I was wearing had come out of that bag. From the heft and clank of it, that shirt was the only nonlethal thing in there.

“I live here?” I asked. The building we stood by had a definite old-garage feel. There were flyers on the metal advertising a hundred different things. There were no garbage-filled stairwells or a homeless guy pissing on a potted bush, but that was probably because there was no potted bush. It was inside living, though, which meant monster killing paid, because I knew that no part-time bartender could afford anything but a cardboard box with wall-to-wall scrap carpeting.

There was some graffiti on the sidewalk, less graffiti maybe than long scratches scraped with something hard like metal. It read, Where are your brothers and sisters? A religious nut had been by recently, it appeared, as the scratches looked fresh. It was along the same line as “Am I not my brother’s keeper?” only more gender friendly. Gotta watch out for the sisters too.

“You live here,” Leandros confirmed. I walked across the letters to the door that had been placed off center into the corrugated metal that fronted the building. Battleship gray, the door opened without a key. You didn’t need a key when someone had taken a crowbar to the lock sometime in the past.

“Okay, that’s not right. I don’t need a memory to know that,” I said. “Great. I get amnesia, attacked by a spider in the john, and robbed. It just keeps getting better and better.”

“Hmm. It happens. It is New York.” Niko went in first and I followed, seeing that I had no neighbors. The entire building was one big space with the metal ceiling two stories high. There were windows up there to see the daylight beginning to dim. To the right was an area devoted to living. I noted a coffee table that looked cheap but brand-new, a couch that was about fifteen years past its prime with only prayer and duct tape holding it together, and beside it a small kitchen area with a bar separating the two spaces. You could eat there too and still swivel to see the TV hanging on the wall … and it was a great TV—big and flat with what I knew had to be one frigging amazing picture. I was in love with that TV.

So I hadn’t been robbed. No one would’ve left that TV. More and more weird.

The other half of the room was devoted to living in another way—keeping yourself alive. There were weights, a punching bag, mats on the floor, and untouched targets on the walls. Fresh paper, black silhouettes of human bodies intact. I liked that too. If you plan on surviving giant spiders, it’s nice to have a home gym to train in. Only one thing was off.

It was pristine, despite the couch carcass. Immaculate with a place for everything and everything in its place. The new targets were the worst, like hotels that fold your toilet paper into a neat point. Who wants their toilet paper practically folded into an airplane? I didn’t know me, not all of me, only five going on six days of me if you wanted to count, but I compared the condition of my motel room on my last day in the Landing with this. “This isn’t right,” I said, walking to the coffee table and nudging the remote control out of its perfectly parallel alignment with the table’s edge. Leandros reached past me and nudged it right back, then started to give me a similar nudge toward a six-foot-long hall. Whoever had converted this place had put up a wall that stopped about nine feet up. You had the open space above you, but you had privacy as well. The hall was dead center of that wall. This time Niko moved past me to lead the way and open the door on the right. I followed him and peered into the room.

There was no floor; only piles of clothes. Chances were that Einstein in his day could’ve theorized there was a floor under all that dirty laundry, but I wouldn’t bet a Nobel Prize on it. The bed was unmade with dark blue sheets and a cover so tangled they were almost one giant complex knot, the kind kids who go to Boy Scout camp learn to make. One pillow was at the head of the bed and one at the foot with a petrified piece of pizza resting on it. The wall you would face while you were in that bed was scarred with hundreds of slashes. The knife that had made them was still embedded in the plasterboard. A black marker had been used to connect all the marks to spell out Screw you. Under the bed I could see the gleam of metal and lots of it. If the bogeyman showed up under there, good luck finding a place to wedge itself amidst that arsenal. It was a disaster area. You could get federal funds to airlift people out of this biohazard nightmare.

I grinned. I didn’t mean to, but this was right. This was the room of a guy who didn’t know what the word pristine meant. “Now this I get.”

Leandros snorted, and the guy had plenty of nose to snort with. “There are some places men aren’t meant to go. This room is five steps above the Bermuda Triangle on that list. I pretend it doesn’t exist and you do what you can to confine your chaos here lest it escape the apartment and gobble up the neighbors. That is the bathroom.” He pointed to the closed door across from my room and then indicated the last room, the one at the end of the hall. “And that is my room.”

His room. His room? “We live together?” Hell, no. Family, brothers, sacred oaths sealed with a bar of chocolate smacking you in the face; I was doing all I could to accept that. But living together? “What if you want to bring your vamp over and do … I don’t know … whatever you do? Bite each other, talk about how sexy losing a pint of blood is, and how iron deficiency is so hot? Do you leave a blood bank brochure taped to the door to warn me? What did I do when I brought over Lassie? Hang a chew toy on the doorknob? Aren’t we a little old to be bunking together as if this were sleep-away camp?”

He could’ve given me reasons. It took two to pay the rent, especially on a place this huge, even with a good deal on that rent. It was also convenient if your roommate was in the same business as you so you didn’t have to explain the spider guts on your clothes and the knives in the dishwasher—the kind of knives you aren’t using on toast unless you planned to gut and field-dress it. The stalest toast didn’t deserve that treatment.

But there were things on his mind other than explaining our living arrangement. “Do you know how very hard I’m trying not to smack your thick skull right now?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Open the bathroom door.”

I didn’t see how that was going to affect his wanting to inflict bodily injury due to my runaway mouth and a weariness that still deepened the creases beside his mouth. Four and a half days searching while not knowing if your brother was dead or alive, I’d have wanted to pop me and my smart-ass self one too. “Is there aspirin in there? You look like you could use it.” I put my hand out and turned the knob. “I think we need to get the landlord over here. It smells like the toilet’s been backed up for a month or you have a body decomposing in the bathtub.”

Holy shit.

There was a decomposing body, and more surprising than that was how fast it moved. I’d have thought the death and putrefaction would’ve slowed it down some, but nope. It was hell on wheels, a graveyard on wheels, whatever you wanted to call it. It snarled in my direction, showing me yellow teeth stained with fluids I didn’t want to think about. The eyes were white and clouded, but it could see. They were fixed on me with unmistakable greed as its mottled tongue swiped at the dead gray of its lips. The slime of its flesh wasn’t nearly covered up enough by the shabby clothes of a bum, and there was nothing at all that could cover up the stench of it out in the open. It saw me, it wanted me, but it didn’t have a chance to reach for me. Its head had already landed on the floor with the sound of a rotten melon splitting apart.

Niko’s sword wasn’t like Goodfellow’s. While Goodfellow went for a more traditional broadsword, Leandros carried a katana he’d pulled from a sheath strapped to his back and hidden by his coat. What had been a fan of silver slicing through the air was now held before him, as ready as it had been before chopping through the zombie’s neck.

“What the fuck? What’s with you people?” I demanded, “First giant spiders, now zombies. Can’t you take a piss without running into a monster? Just goddamn once?”

It did explain the broken lock, though. As zombies were always wanting to eat brains, they couldn’t have enough of their own left to pick a lock. It had smashed it instead.

“Don’t be so dramatic. I wanted you to see how you need to always be prepared, even when you’re home, especially when you’re home. Revenants have always hated us and they work for the Kin, who aren’t particularly fond of us either. And this is not a zombie. There are no such things as zombies.”

The torso on the floor twitched, convulsed, and for a gruesome and nearly pants-wetting moment, I was positive it was going to get to its feet and keep going, decapitated or not. Head? Who needed that? I was damn grateful Goodfellow wasn’t here to answer that question for me.

“No zombies. Thanks for clearing that up for me. With it rotting and smelling like roadkill, I let myself jump to conclusions.” Dramatic, my ass. I stepped over its splayed arm and worked further on the urine-suppression issue when a hand with thick twisted nails grabbed my ankle. Even badass monster killers had freaked-out moments and this was one of them.

“Always cut their head off, and even then it takes a minute of two for them to die,” Leandros advised. “Don’t bother with their arms or legs. They’ll only pick them up and do their best to bludgeon you to death with them.”

“The head. No arms or legs. I’ll write it down. Just let me get my notebook.” I kicked the hand off my ankle and went into my room, then immediately under the bed. When I returned, I had two things with me I didn’t need memories to know that I loved with all the passion of an alcoholic for his next drink. In one hand I had a matte black Desert Eagle .50 and in the other, a knife, also matte black. She was a Ka-Bar serrated combat knife, and if she was good enough for the United States Marine Corps, she might let me survive taking a leak in peace. It wasn’t that peculiar that I could remember things like that, weapons down to the last detail, but I couldn’t remember a brother. That could be blamed on the fact that he and my whole life up until a week ago would take up a much bigger chunk of my gray matter than the best weapons to use to clear a path to the toilet paper.

“Cover me,” I said, stepping over the body this time … after giving it a solid kick in the ribs. He wanted me to be prepared, he’d said. I was prepared, but no one was going to pass up pausing to sightsee at what he thought was a zombie. “I’m going in. I’ll flush twice if I need reinforcements.”

It’d been a long drive and all the new information—new to me at any rate—in the world couldn’t change one of life’s most basic facts: When you gotta go, you gotta go.