Blackout

5

“Who am I?”

Leandros was fishing a feather out of his soy milk with an irritated sigh when the question registered. Discarding the feather on the table, he looked at me, and it was strange. It had been strange, weird, and just fucking bizarre from the moment he’d walked into the Oleander Diner—seeing my eyes gazing back at me, not that I spent a lot of time looking at my own in mirrors. But that didn’t matter. There was someone who was literally part of me walking around in the world. We shared blood, flesh, DNA. We were joined, chained together, in a way only nature could pull off. It shouldn’t have felt that odd. How many people didn’t have blood relatives? None. How many people didn’t have brothers or sisters? It was so normal to have siblings that not having a brother or sister would’ve been more statistically off than having one—or that was what I guessed. I didn’t much care about accuracy and statistics. It didn’t change the fact that looking at part of myself was stranger than bathroom-loving spiders and nonzombies by far and away, and I had no idea why.

Maybe because you don’t deserve it.

Bullshit. I did too deserve it. Hard worker, monster killer, protector of the weak, kicker of the alcoholic and perverted ass. Why wouldn’t I deserve family?

“Who are you?” He distracted me from my inner pep talk/argument with myself. “As in you are Caliban Leandros of the Vayash Clan? That you work in this bar that cannot serve one drink in three years that hasn’t had at least one feather in it? That you hunt monsters if they warrant it?” Resigned to the feather issue, he sipped the milk before finishing. “Or who are you, starting from birth until now? Then there’s that most basically raw level, the psychological one. Goodfellow would probably rather tell you that—if you want to be on a ledge without the will to live within five minutes. He drove Freud into a phallic-obsessed psychosis. He could drive you into an early grave. He’s that persuasive.” He fished out another feather. “Besides, we need to return to work on finding Ammut. Her killing won’t have stopped while we were gone looking for you.”

I took a swallow of my own drink. Beer. I deserved it after what Leandros had inflicted on me since eight a.m. We’d run. For no reason. That was the baffling part. No one was chasing us; yet we’d run miles and miles. I’d discovered I goddamn hated running or anything remotely exercise related … even if it was, again, “for my own good.” That kind of epic discovery merited a beer. That we routinely ran every single day, rain or shine, called for a pitcher of beer, but I stuck with the bottle. If we ran again later, it would mean less to puke up. The lunch we’d had a few hours ago had made its own attempt without any alcoholic help. Leandros’s favorite place had turned out not to be vegetarian, but vegan, which was for people who preferred their suicide slow. Starving yourself to death via bean curd took commitment.

“Huh. That’s the most I’ve heard you say since I met you. It’s been only two days, but damn. I didn’t know you had it in you,” I said. “And considering how well we’ve apparently not done against Ammut so far, maybe we should leave her spider-loving ass alone.”

“At least you aren’t saying kidnapped any longer, and you’re the one who does most of the talking. My role is usually trying to keep you from talking as it tends to annoy our clients and our enemies. You do like your”—he searched for the right word—”hobby. And your hobby involves irritating nearly everyone you can. As for Ammut, we can handle her. We’ve handled worse.”

I had a hobby, one I was probably born with, but still it was another piece of me confirmed. I grinned and took another swallow. “Who doesn’t love sarcasm?”

“Anything you’ve killed. I’ve actually seen you hesitate on a deathblow so you could deliver some sort of action movie tagline first.” He shook his head, giving me the same look he’d given the feather in his milk.

“Then I’m a sarcastic idiot?” I grinned again. Brotherly resignation—that was fun too.

The eyes that were my mirror suddenly weren’t anymore. They lightened and I saw amusement in the gray. Did I ever look like that? Content? At peace? The way I semi-avoided my own reflection, who knew? “Yes, you’re a sarcastic idiot, but you’re easier to keep alive than a fichus and you look good in the corner of the apartment.”

“And I can water myself. Handy.” The bar where we were drinking, the Ninth Circle, was where I was a part-time bartender. It was also a “peri” bar. Peris, Leandros had told me, were rumored to be half angel, half demon, but they were simply supernatural creatures with wings and the source of most angel myths. Then he added that all myths were wrong in one way or the other and to never depend on them, assuming I remembered them. I should depend on him instead.

For someone who had kidnapped me—no matter how he phrased it, claimed me as his brother, and made me run this morning until I’d hoped I’d cough up my lungs so I could die and end it all, he made me want to believe him. He had this air about him. If this were a movie, and it seemed more like it all the time, he’d be dead in the first fifteen minutes; it was just that kind of aura of too damn good and noble for this world. A Goose in a world full of Mavericks.

On the other hand, he chopped the head off a revenant as if he were dicing a carrot for a salad. Honorable but deadly. I was lucky to be related to him and that he liked me. If he didn’t, it might’ve been my head bouncing down the hall. I frowned slightly at the thought. “You like me, right? I mean, you swore to find me to the ends of the earth with all sorts of angst in your great big noble basset hound heart, but that’s duty. That’s an obligation. Do you actually like me?” Okay, that didn’t make me sound like a girl at all. “Do you not hate me, I mean. Am I an okay coworker? Do a good job with the monster killing? Not cause too much trouble? Remember to get you a Christmas present, like extra hefty garbage bags for tossing out nonzombie bodies? Am I a not-too-crappy brother?” Oh shit, forgetting Christmas seemed like something I would do, considering the condition of my room. My brain was probably in the same condition—a crazed mess where not one dutiful holiday responsibility could be found until a month too late. “Fuck. Am I a bad brother?”

Under all of that verbal diarrhea was the same thing I’d kept repeating in Nevah’s Landing—I’m not such a bad guy. Tell me I’m not a bad guy. Only this time, here was someone who actually knew for sure.

This was stupid. It wasn’t as though he’d want to waste his time on someone who wasn’t halfway decent. His standards were high—up-in-the-atmosphere high. I could tell—anyone who was around him longer than two minutes could tell. That meant I couldn’t see him putting up with someone who wasn’t worth it. I didn’t know why I wanted the Leandros brothers’ seal of approval anyway. I was who I was. I’d worn a gingham apron without killing anyone over it. Really, how bad could I be?

He studied me so intently that I instantly wished I’d kept my mouth shut. Unless I was eight years old and had a Barbie Diary, this wasn’t the kind of conversation I should be having. I was a guy. Guys were stoic and macho and we had three emotions: bored, angry, and horny. If there were more, they’d have sent around a memo. I slid down in my seat and concentrated on my beer. God knew I couldn’t fake a piss break. Godzilla himself would probably pop out of the goddamn toilet with the luck I’d been having in bathrooms.

Leandros reached across to tap his soy milk glass against my beer bottle. “Aside from a rather excessive enthusiasm for your work, you are a good brother, yes. You’re certainly not a bad one.” He smiled. Though all his smiles seemed barely a reflection of a dictionary-defined one, this one was genuine. “You might have some impulse and sarcasm issues, but other than that, not a bad brother or a bad person. I’m proud to call you my brother.”

That was something. When you didn’t know who you were other than you woke up in a nest of dead spiders and carried a large number of things that could kill an equally large number of people, to hear that from someone who did know you … It was … Damn. I went on the defensive. I had to. I had the reputation of my gonads to protect. “If it weren’t for the sword you carry, I’d tell you what a wuss you are. I’m embarrassed for you, Leandros, seriously.”

“Love you too, little brother.” He kicked me under the table with meticulous precision, hitting some sort of nerve that made my ankle and foot go instantly numb. It wasn’t the first time either. How did he do that? “There’s Ishiah. I’ll be back.”

He left the table and had one of the peris, a big blond one—light blond hair and skin compared to Niko’s darker version—up against a wall and was talking with him as I cursed and rubbed my ankle. When I looked closer, it wasn’t so much of a talk as Niko telling the peri something—forcefully. He didn’t have a finger planted in the guy’s chest, not physically anyway, but he was laying down the law somehow. As he did, the peri’s wings appeared.

They came out of nowhere in a shimmer of light, a flash of brightness as if the sun had exploded. Not there, then there. It was like a magic trick. I felt as if I should applaud and send his feathered ass to Vegas for a new career. With gold-barred white feathers, he did look like an angel, a muscular, anger-me-not, scarred angel, but an angel all the same. I could see where the myths had come from. If this guy came after me with a flaming sword, I’d get my ass to temple quick. Cross a desert. Free a cheap source of labor. Whatever. Just say the word.

Minutes later they were both back at the table. “Cal,” Leandros said in introduction, “this is your employer, Ishiah. He owns the bar. You’re the only nonperi to work here, so you can expect the patrons to give you somewhat of a hard time. When you come back to work, that is, which won’t be until this Ammut mess is cleared up.”

I stood, trying not to favor the still-throbbing ankle. “You’re the boss, huh?” I didn’t offer to shake hands. That would be too surreal in this world, and I didn’t have an instinct to stick out a hand unless it had a weapon in it. A shaker I was not, it seemed. I went with the assumption that Niko had explained about my memory problem. “I made a pretty decent server at a diner. I think I’ll do okay as a bartender. Oh yeah, if I try to kill you, I’m sorry. Just a reflex. I’m having trouble getting it through my head that monsters … er … nonhumans aren’t always evil.”

The peri switched focus from me to Leandros. “Robin told me, but I didn’t completely understand. This …” His wings spread to a span nearly twelve feet wide. Then they tucked back in before spreading wide again. If he’d been a hawk, I would’ve said he was unsettled. “Never mind. Take as long as you need.” He turned his attention back to me for the last part. “Take as much vacation time as you require until your memory returns. The Ninth Circle isn’t what you would call a tame drinking establishment. We tend to lose at least one customer weekly. I want you at your best when you come back.”

“My old self. Gotcha.”

The peri gripped my shoulder and somewhat harder than an employer-employee chat called for. “Let us just say whenever you’re ready.” Then he was gone with one last long look at Leandros before he was behind the bar with another peri, this one with dark hair.

“You are a bunch of touchy-type people, I gotta tell you.” There was a trail of feathers from in front of me all the way back to the bar. As with the indecisive wings, that didn’t strike me as a good sign. Didn’t birds lose feathers when stressed? If I were a bird, I would. “Is he molting? Does he have some sort of giant-bird disease?”

“Only if Goodfellow gave it to him.” Pointing back at my chair, he added, “You may as well settle in. We’ve a long meeting ahead of us. Promise, Robin …”

He went on some more, but I blanked it out as I realized that my part-time boss, who looked like an angel and shed like a dog with mange, was the other half of the monogamy special that the puck bragged about. I hoped Goodfellow hadn’t told him about the fork incidents. I’d hate for him to get pissed at me and have to put Polly-Want-a-Cracker down. I only killed bad monsters—I was coming to terms with that—and he didn’t seem bad.

All monsters are. You know that. You’re born a monster, you die a monster, and there is nothing but slaughter between.

“Cal? Are you listening?” Leandros’s hand pushed me into the chair. “Obviously not. I suppose it’s good to know some things don’t change, amnesia or not.”

I was listening, but to myself, not to my newly discovered brother. There was no denying whose voice was in my head. It was mine and, although people lied to themselves all the time, I didn’t sound unsure on this. No tent-revival hellfire preacher was more absolute. I didn’t get it. The puck wasn’t human and he’d helped Leandros find me. The peri wasn’t human and he didn’t come across as a bad guy except for a little get-thee-sinning-asses-out-of-Eden grimness to him. Two nonhumans who were good enough not to try to kill me should balance the spiders and that revenant creature that had. It should prove what Leandros had told me. You took it on a case-by-case basis, because not all monsters were like people. Some were good and some were bad. They weren’t all evil. They all didn’t need to die.

All monsters. All.

I pushed it all aside for the moment. I had amnesia. Let’s face it: Who knew what else was screwed up in my skull? A half hour later and my scrambled brain had much more to distract it.

The Wolves—there was no real reason to get sidetracked by the Wolves. So said Leandros. The fact that they smelled like a hundred and one wet dogs, I overlooked. I brought it up, don’t get me wrong, but Leandros said, whereas some people were born artists or musicians, I was born with a nose that could smell a meatball sub five miles away. I was talented. Stop complaining about it and stop asking Samyel, the peri bartender, to take them to the nearest groomer for a shampoo and toenail painting. Let them drink and play pool in peace without any “go fetch” jokes. The fact that they all stared at me—at length, every last one, with unblinking eyes, after sniffing in my direction—and then whispered and growled among themselves, I took to mean that I wasn’t their favorite server at the bar. A human—how disgusting. They’d probably hoped when I’d disappeared that it was for good. Whatever.

As I said, I overlooked them … eventually. Then there was the cat. It was Goodfellow’s cat or Goodfellow was the cat’s puck. Probably Goodfellow being the cat’s puck was the right choice. It was bald, it had teeth that made a grizzly bear look like a still-nursing baby rabbit, and it was dead. Deader than dead. Mummified. Glowing empty eye sockets. That didn’t stop it from batting pretzels around the table or stalking one of the Wolves to the back alley. She, the cat Salome, was the only one to return from the alley, but that wasn’t my business. What the dead cat wanted, the dead cat could have. In my opinion, it was one less Wolf stinking up the place.

And, let me repeat: walking, purring dead cat. Dead cat with attitude.

Dead fucking cat. Holy shit.

Following the cat in a general “tie my sanity to the tracks and let the train run over it” was Leandros’s … girlfriend? Lady friend? Vamp friend? Vamp tramp? No, I’d had enough sense not to say any of them or think that last one for more than a second. She didn’t look like a tramp anyway. She wasn’t pretty, beautiful, or hot. She was more of a marble statue under a cascade of moonlight, smelling like flowers and ivy—the glory of a weeping graveyard angel. She was solemn and silk and as much of a promise as her name.

I expected not to like her. I was doing better at restraining the nonhuman twitch and all the Wolves, not to mention other things in the bar, had nearly overloaded it. You could only twitch so much before you either went into convulsions or acclimated. I was doing my best to avoid seizures, which meant acclimation it was. But I’d already made up my mind about this in particular in advance. Whether she was monster or only nonhuman, evil or not, she wasn’t good enough for my brother. It didn’t matter if I remembered his being my brother or not. The puck had said Wolves were for Wolves; humans weren’t good enough. I was all set to have the same opinion about humans and vamps. Keep to your own kind.

First, while Wolves and vampires were born, not made, so sayeth that brother I was worried about, she still was a few hundred years older than he, which made her a cougar. Second, sooner or later she’d leave him when he got older, and he would. All humans did. If he was only screwing her, maybe it would be different, but he was a six-foot-tall ball of commitment. After only two days, I could see that. He would hurt. If I was lucky enough to have family, I didn’t want them hurt. Third, he had told me vampires didn’t drink blood anymore. They didn’t kill anymore—the majority of them. But how many people had she killed before modern vampire technology came up with a good old vitamin-B-for-blood shot, those secret vampire underground supplements you can’t buy online? They were on the wagon now, the vamps, and she could be remorseful as they came for what she’d done to survive in ye olden days. It didn’t matter.

And why would a vamp want to be with a human anyway? What they used to eat? That was like getting horny for your hamburger. Farmer John cozying up to Bessie the cow. It was weird. Fuck not the food, that was my opinion. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t like the idea of it, and I wasn’t going to.

That was that.

Then came the moment she entered the bar, sat down, took off her cloak of violet wool, and extended her pale hand toward me with a concerned “Caliban, how are you feeling?”

There she sat, with striped dark brown and pale blond hair pulled up in a twist that only women can manage. Simple yet somehow complex. I could’ve braided a lariat and taught myself how to rope a steer before coming up with that knot. She wore a dress that covered up too much to be sexy while still being snug enough to catch the eye, with knee-high boots to take the primand-proper down a notch but still look like a lady—a rich one. Her eyes, violet as her cloak, and her smooth face were as concerned as her tone. She looked nice. She sounded nice. It didn’t stop the twitch.

You’re born a monster, you die a monster, and there’s nothing but murder in between.

The same refrain as before and it felt as true as before, but I felt something else. She was sad, this vampire—damn sad and with good reason to be, although I had no idea what that reason was.

There’s no such thing as the best. There’s good enough, though. Sometimes. She makes you happy, Nik. A happy brother’s not such a bad thing.

My voice again, but this time it was a flash of memory crawling out of the past, my first real one. I didn’t remember when or why I’d said it, but it sounded as if I’d meant it.

I looked at her hand. “Yeah … I’m sorry. I’m trying to be good, I am, but it’s probably best I don’t touch you just yet.” I might be forgiven for accidentally attacking my boss, but Leandros might not be so forgiving if I did the same to his girlfriend.

She withdrew her hand, her ivory mouth, as pale as the rest of her, losing that reassuring smile she’d been giving me. “I don’t understand.”

Goodfellow almost choked as he laughed around the last swallow of his drink and waved his hand at a peri for another bottle of scotch. Yes, not a glass—a bottle. The puck had some serious tolerance. “He’s telling the truth. He is trying to be good, difficult as that is to believe. And polite. What a change a few days down south can make. He’s become a Southern gentleman. It’s almost as amusing as when Venus became too fat to float on that shell. That’s what you get for eating nothing but honey cakes and mead.” He took the new bottle of scotch and poured himself a glass. “To be fair, however, anything the kid does that doesn’t involve him stabbing me with a fork goes in my entertaining column these days.”

Her eyes glanced at the puck skeptically, then back at me. “You tried to stab Robin with a fork?”

I held up three fingers. “Sorry to say I don’t regret a one of them. Okay, strictly not true. I sort of regret the two that didn’t connect.”

Niko intervened when Goodfellow began to look less amused. “Cal has some … difficulties, let’s say, with nonhumans. All nonhumans. He’s having trouble discerning between the good and the bad.”

I shrugged. “Monsters are monsters, and monsters are bad, but I’m working on it.”

Like Ishiah, the guy with the feathers, she said nearly the same thing: “You told me on the phone, but I hadn’t comprehended he’d be quite like … this.” The fingers touched the back of Leandros’s hand in what appeared to be support as the ocean of heather concentrated on me. “You’ll be yourself soon enough, Caliban. I can wait until then to touch your hand or kiss your cheek.”

I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t expecting her to say that, and monsters’ mouths were made to eat you, maul you, tear you; there was no damn silverware on the table, but there were knives. I had knives. My hand was already going for one inside my jacket when Leandros’s hand clamped down on my wrist, not enough to hurt, but enough to shake me out of it.

“Could you please,” he requested in a mild tone and with an unbreakable grip, “not attempt to stab Promise with one of your knives.”

“Or a fork,” Goodfellow interjected.

“Or a fork,” Leandros repeated with a patience that had to make him double as a saint. “Promise, if you could avoid startling Cal until he remembers that you do care for him and he for you, we might all survive this,” he said, and added with a wry tinge to the words, “He startles easily now.”

I could say I did not startle easily, but it was hard to back up when I’d wanted to stab someone for threatening to kiss me on the damn cheek. I decided to ignore the entire thing. It had never happened. Pride saved. “So”—I shook off the hand and rested my own on the table—”let’s talk goddesses and what the fuck you do about them except pray at their altars or run far far away.”

Hours later Goodfellow was close to being buzzed, the bar had run out of scotch, and I knew Ammut, the Eater of Hearts, had been born of the Egyptian Nile; she was as old as Goodfellow, which was so old he couldn’t remember; and she wasn’t a goddess in truth.

Relieved? Yeah, a little bit.

“Everyone back then who could get more than two humans to worship them was claiming to be a god or a goddess. And why not? Free food. Vestal virgins … vestal horny virgins. Fertility rites. Good times. Very good times. If you could pass as one, why not claim it?” Goodfellow had said. While I marveled that there was nothing in his view of history that couldn’t be directly linked to some sort of orgy, he went on with the rest of it. Ammut thought hearts were a nice snack, but she really liked souls much better. Except nonhumans didn’t call them souls, because they weren’t souls. It was a creature’s life force she drained and consumed.

Ammut, in Egyptian legend, ate the heart of a dead person if they were found unworthy of passing on to the afterlife. If you did bad things, it weighted down your heart, much like fried pork chops weighted it down with cholesterol. Sin and fried pork chops—two of the best things in the world, and all they got you was an early death and acting as the dinner for a greedy Egyptian fake goddess.

We’d gone through this all before, but I’d forgotten it. I didn’t think it would be that long before I started remembering things on my own again. Last night lying on a bed surrounded by enough rumpled clothes to stock a Salvation Army store, seeing the city lights through the windows high above, it had felt the way it should. Right. True. As if I recognized it with my body if not my mind. It was the same when I woke up this morning when Leandros had kicked lightly at the bottom of my mattress. I hadn’t thought about shooting him with the gun under my pillow once. I’d been tempted… . It was eight a.m. for Christ’s sake … but I hadn’t actually put any real thought into it. It had felt right too. Then there were the shadows and bits of thoughts I couldn’t connect to any solid memory, but that hadn’t stopped them from popping up today.

“When she sucks out their life force, they die.” I started to take a pretzel out of the bowl, when the dead cat gave me a look. I let her have the pretzel. She didn’t eat it, but she wanted it and that was good enough for me. I feared no giant spider, but her … I was on the fence. “Are there souls? What if she did eat them? Does that mean no afterlife for the unlucky bastard? Is there an afterlife?” The cat didn’t count. She was still moving. She wasn’t so much after life as predeath. Halfway between.

Goodfellow looked up at the ceiling and scratched the bald head of his pet. “That’s far too encompassing a topic for now. Philosophy can wait. Let’s focus on the part of her devouring their life force and they die. That’s enough to get the job done.”

“On that note, I’ve got a job to get done. Be right back.” I got up and searched out the bathroom. Dick in hand, I was reading the graffiti, a lot of which was about me, go figure, and not in a “for a good time” kind of way, when I heard the door swing and smelled the Wolf. It was an accomplishment. The entire place smelled of the furry bastards. I’d be smelling Wolf for a week. Then came the growl, the breath reeking of rotting meat—not much on flossing—and the mangled words, “You are weak now.” He moved closer. “I smell it on you.” Closer still. “You are weak like a sheep.”

Motherfucker.

Could a guy literally not take a leak in this messed-up world without fighting for the goddamn privilege?

I had no illusions about what normal wolves did to normal sheep, what Wolves did to human sheep, or what this Wolf wanted to do to me. I kept pissing and raised my other hand that held the Desert Eagle to ram the muzzle between his eyes as he started to snap his jaws at my throat. Yeah, I’d learned my lesson the past few days. I now held my dick in one hand and my gun in the other when nature called. Guns worked better than forks.

I dug the muzzle harder into his flesh, the metal grating on the bone of his overhanging brow. He was one freaky-looking Wolf—not in entirely wolf or human form, like a cut-rate Halloween werewolf costume. Not a good look. He looked like a guy overdosing on steroids, Rogaine, and with teeth… . Okay, the teeth definitely couldn’t pass for human. “You’re not that bright, Rover. I don’t know or care why you think the rest of me is weak, but my trigger finger is Arnold-fucking-Schwarzenegger. Now back the fuck off or I’ll blow your empty skull apart and finish pissing on your body like a fire hydrant.” I grinned. “You won’t get a more appropriate memorial than that.”

His skull wasn’t as empty as it seemed. He had at least one brain cell and he used it to back away and out of the bathroom. Puppies.

Weak? I thought I’d proven I was anything but and had Nepenthe spiders to testify on that—if they weren’t dead, but maybe he smelled the amnesia on me and thought without memories I couldn’t kick furry tail and take ID and rabies tags while I did it. Who knew? A few minutes later I was back at the table with Goodfellow picking up the Ammut snooze blah blah right where he left off the second I sat down.

“And the more powerful the nonhuman, the better Ammut likes it. She isn’t wasting much time sending her spiders after the revenants. They’re not worth her time, but the vampires, Wolves, boggles—they’ve been more to her taste, which is why the Kin has said they would cooperate until this is all over. We have yet to find her or her nest of spiders. Before you left for South Carolina, we were going to check Central Park and see if Mama Boggle and her brood were there or if Ammut had gotten to them yet.”

Leandros braved an undead paw and put a pretzel in front of me. He did it automatically. I could see a lifetime of feeding the “little brother” behind it. It was so automatic, in fact, I guessed there’d been times we’d gone hungry as kids. Or Leandros had anyway. All his pretzels on hungry days, I’d bet, had gone to me. It was things like that that had made me believe his and Goodfellow’s story more than the words. “We can go there tonight. If I had a choice, I’d leave you here with Ishiah and Samyel, but I think you would be safer with the three of us. Too many old enemies know you work here.”

“You’re worried about me?” I picked up the pretzel and saluted him with it. “I killed an eighty-pound spider with a fork—even if I missed Goodfellow twice. It looks like killing doesn’t require a memory.” A lesson I’d just taught Rover. “You can put away the diaper and bottle.”

I proved that, again, when we stepped outside the bar into a seven o’clock gloom to head to Central Park. I took four steps, pulled the Desert Eagle, pointed it upward, and pulled the trigger. Then I took another step, this time back, as the body hit the pavement at my feet. It was a Wolf, female, and more wolf than human. Another half-and-half. All Wolf. The jaw was twisted and wide-open for my throat, the fangs bared. Her hands were more like elongated paws, her eyes open and staring pure gold. There wasn’t any blood to speak of, only a hole in her forehead. Shattered bone and burned flesh. The dead don’t bleed. She’d jumped from three stories up; that and the bad lighting made it a good shot. And that was all I felt—the satisfaction of a job well-done.

At first.

I was a not-so-bad brother. I saved people. And I was a killer. I didn’t feel bad about the last item. I only killed monsters, I killed only to save those who needed it. I counted myself on that list. If you were going to try to kill me—try hard. I could guarantee I was going to try my best to do the same back to you. If you were a werewolf perched three stories up, you shouldn’t make any noise when you jump, because any would be too much. It can seal your fate and it had hers. “A Wolf.” I didn’t mention the one in the bathroom. He was more braindamaged mutt than Wolf, drunk, and with delusions of fuzzy grandeur. If he was in the Kin, he probably was their equivalent of a janitor. He hadn’t had the intelligence for more.

I chambered another round in the Eagle. “Not to mention the revenant-thing in the apartment. I thought you said the Furry Mafia was on our side on this one.”

“Except for Delilah. Every pack but hers agreed. The Lupa pack didn’t bother to send a reply.” Niko was resheathing his sword. He was the big killer looking out for the little killer. “Although I think this may be that response.”

My ex’s pack, the Lupa, was named for the wolf that suckled the founders of ancient Rome. Leandros liked shoving those little factoids in your ear at every opportunity. He’d told me too that Wolves weren’t actually werewolves; they were were-people. They’d started out as wolves and evolved to being able to switch back and forth between wolf and human. Some Wolves wanted to go back to what they’d been before that Jurassic mutation. The cult of All Wolf. That had led to inbreeding and damn odd-looking people with pointed ears or jaws, stuck in between human and wolf, unable to be completely one or the other.

My reaction to that lecture? Tell me I hadn’t been doing a chick with a hairy back. Dear God, tell me she hadn’t had a hairy back. I’d been relieved to find out that Delilah looked all human when she was human and all wolf when she was Wolf. Not like this one lying at my feet.

The gold eyes were fogging over. They’d belonged in the forest, peering through the underbrush, not dead on a sidewalk outside a bar. Suddenly I wasn’t as proud of my perfect shot anymore. When killers had the eyes of an animal whose predatory temperament was nature and nature wasn’t meant to be the subject of punishment, it was harder to feel a hero. That was how I’d thought of it. I was a cop or a soldier on the front line between the innocent and the nightmares. But I saw it for what it was now. Take pride in whom you’re saving, but don’t take it in the killing. It was necessary, but it wasn’t something to glory in—especially when the creature you killed had thoughts and emotions the same as you, the only difference being a wild and free soul living as born instinct had taught her.

Be good at your job, but don’t think your job is good.

The road to Hell …

I squatted down beside the dead Wolf and touched her hair. It was thick and black, like mine, but long. “We can’t leave her just lying here.” Killer or not, person or creature of the wild, asphalt was not a peaceful place for any body to find its rest.

“Ishiah will take care of her. This street is nonhuman. It’ll be handled.” Niko’s hand landed on my back and grabbed a handful of my jacket to urge me up. “She’s playing with you. Delilah. She knows one of hers couldn’t take you, much less all of us. If Delilah wanted you dead, she would’ve come herself.”

Delilah didn’t think a pack member could take me, but she thought she could. Since she had gotten her Alpha and pack killed off to the last Wolf, she might be right. I sure knew how to pick them. “If this is a game, I don’t want to play.” I stood up. “I’m a killer, but I don’t think I want to be if this is how it is. Protecting is one thing. Playing, using killing as a damn pastime, that’s wrong.”

I remembered, in that moment, wings flapping behind my eyes. I was young, little—I had no idea how little, but enough that I remembered being surprised and shocked when a blackbird flew into a window at a house we were living in. I didn’t recall the house itself, but I thought it was grubby, dirty, old. I was sitting in grass and weeds, playing with a plastic truck that had three wheels. I was happy, content, until the sound of a stick breaking, but softer, more muffled. The bird had hit the window, and I looked up in time to see it fall to the ground without a single flutter of a feather. A blond boy was there. Six or seven, he was older than me. He picked up the bird gently, then carried it off to a deeper patch of weeds and laid it down. It was swallowed up by green and yellow. I asked why.

Why, Nik? Why won’t it fly away?

Because it’s dead, Cal. It broke its neck.

But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the bird’s fault some stupid person had built a house in its way. It wasn’t right that birds died, because if birds died, then maybe everything died.

They do, the other boy explained gravely. It’s the way things are, Cal.

“It shouldn’t be,” I murmured to myself. “Blackbirds shouldn’t die and neither should Wolves or people. Not like this. Not for goddamn sport.” I put my gun away. It wasn’t reassuring anymore or to be drooled over the size of the hole it could put through something—or someone’s head. It was a necessary evil.

“You remember?” Leandros asked. His hand hadn’t released my jacket and he gave me a light shake. “You remember that?”

“I remember the blackbird. That’s all. But it’s enough to know that if I like what I do [an excessive enthusiasm for my work Leandros had said], then maybe I’m a dick.” I looked away from the Wolf and all that had roamed untamed and free in her. Wolves were wolves. They killed. I got that. They had evolved that way. You should stop them, but you shouldn’t blame them. If it runs, you chase it. If you catch it, you kill it. If you kill it, you eat it. That sounded familiar too, but if you’d ever seen a lion eating a zebra on the Discovery Channel, you knew that.

Facts of life. Zebras didn’t die of old age as much as a little boy and a dead blackbird wished they did.

I exhaled and let it all go. It was coming back, faster and faster now. Soon enough who I was now would be who I was then, and it’d all be the same as it ever was. There was no point in thinking about that. There were other things to do. “The park,” I said. “Someone said Central Park and boggles. Boggles, huh? I guess you’re not talking that game old people play.”