Doubletake

14

It was heading toward evening and as I’d gated us and Kalakos yesterday, all of us from home to Goodfellow’s penthouse to escape Janus this morning, that still left me with three days before I could build a new gate to take that thing out of this world. Janus’s waiting those days didn’t seem likely; neither did Niko’s letting me attempt the third death gate in the hopes it would move the titan. But no guarantee.

That meant we moved to the last idea Robin had: the black market. As it involved sewers and underground tunnels, Promise decided that in addition to demented gods and a leviathan of fire and metal that had almost destroyed us while nearly converting her to Catholicism, she had had enough for the day. She wished Niko thought the same, given the much more passionate kiss she shared with him by the cars. Both of them were usually more private in their affections.

We decided to clean up on the way. We couldn’t go back to Niko’s and my place, thanks to Janus, or Promise’s, thanks to the time limit. Same went for Goodfellow’s, thanks to Grimm.

Grimm, whose own timing was suspiciously coincidental when it came to Janus.

In the car, I made Robin sit in the back with Kalakos and hoped for one day that he could at least pretend to let the monogamy slide. Man hath no fear like a closed-minded Rom chased by a puck ready to tap that, knock some boots, bang some balls, whatever those puck kids were calling it these days. If I had cut Kalakos’s throat when he first showed up, as I’d been tempted to, it wouldn’t approach the punishment of a horny puck thinking you reminded him of Achilles.

We all threw down Tylenol as I drove back to the city. “I was thinking,” I said, fiddling with the radio, putting it off, as I didn’t want to say it at all, “Janus and Grimm showing up at the same time. Maybe it wasn’t a Rom family in the clan that passed down the frigging secret password to get Janus’s juice flowing. Grimm has been around thirty years, free twelve of them. The son of a bitch went to adult-education classes to get his GED. He knows how to research and problem-solve, not just slaughter. Probably reads Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, like Nik.” I added, “I hope he doesn’t sleep with them like Nik does. That’s not Auphe; that’s just sick.”

Niko snorted as he was cleaning the blood where he could, pulling up his pants legs and taking off his shirt. He was using surgical sterile scrubs from the first-aid kit he’d brought with us. We didn’t go much of anywhere without one. “I sleep with someone much warmer. Can you say the same?”

Not since I’d booted my ex, Delilah, out of my life and was waiting to put her down like a rabid dog. In a way she was. She was a Wolf, taking over the werewolf Mafia—the Kin—and had tried to kill me, Niko, and two other long-gone friends. The other Wolves, Alphas or not, feared her. She had no limits, no conscience—only ruthlessness and the certainty that no one counted in this world but her. Rabid in the mind and soul.

But in better days, she had been warm in bed.

Robin accepted the kit handed back to him. “You think Grimm is capable of that? Finding out how to wake up Janus and stealing him? Being what he is?”

I flipped down the visor and wished for sunglasses. The clouds were thinning, and the sun, lower in the sky or not, was directly in my eyes. The radio did say the rain had stopped in the city. That should keep Janus out of sight until nightfall.

“Grimm is me on crack with eighteen years of torture, locked naked in a cage, fed nothing but raw meat, and then escaping to twelve years of freedom. He hates the Auphe more than I did, and who the hell thought that was possible? Think what I would’ve been like if I’d lived his life. If I were more driven, smarter, so sociopathic that they need a new name for it, and not crazy.”

If he’d had the Auphe kind of crazy along with their skills and predation, that could’ve actually helped us. Arrogance and insanity—they had been their only weaknesses.

“You like him?” Robin decided he didn’t want to think about it and brushed it off with, “I wouldn’t have tried to sell you that first car. I promise you that.” He had taken off his coat and then his pants entirely, not bothering to roll them up like Nik, to scrub down the slashes and cuts on his legs. I could see in the rearview mirror that there was enough red splattered for an entire finger-painting class gone wild. My legs felt as his appeared as I drove, but since Niko had been pulled beneath the earth, scraping metal as he went, and Robin was about as bad off as I was, I’d rather have him tormenting Kalakos while I claimed the driver’s seat.

“You would be more driven, in a positive way, if you were less lazy,” Niko pointed out doggedly. “And you are intelligent. You lack some on occasion in the knowledge base of what we hunt, but again…”

“Lazy,” I grumped. “Well, you can take it to the bank Grimm is not. He’s motivated, obsessed, and since the Auphe aren’t here for vengeance, he’s decided the world will do instead.”

“Who is Grimm? Another Auphe?” asked Kalakos, who hadn’t been allowed in on the debriefing of my kidnapping, “and why isn’t this ¸tap wearing any underwear, his koro kani waving free in the breeze?”

“My dick is not blind nor a scrawny chicken, and if I was going to die fighting Hephaestus, I wanted its glory witnessed one last time,” Robin replied, offense lurking nastily behind the trickster facade. “And if I weren’t monogamous, arthida, you’d find that a Rom can’t run far or fast enough to escape what I’m carrying. But no worries, I do not sexually assault, in the traditional fashion. I’d strangle you instead with my nonblind, nonchicken dick. I have the reach to circle your neck and some to spare.”

From Kalakos’s saber suddenly lying across his lap, he believed him. I laughed, didn’t try not to. He had healed me and saved Niko, but trust is earned, and not in two actions or two days. “Your arm’s bleeding a good deal,” Niko commented, while still cleaning blood from his skin. He unbuttoned the sleeve at my wrist as I noticed the entire material starting six inches below my shoulder had gone from pink to solid red. It was worth it. I’d take red over pink and anything over those damn buttons, no matter how I had to get it. Goddamn Goodfellow.

He rolled up the sleeve until he revealed the cut. I took a quick look, then eyes back on the road. It was a keeper. Monsters…paien…whatever Robin wanted to call them, they respected scars. In our life we’d eventually come around to that way of thinking as well. Not as badges of honor, or attractive to the opposite sex, but signs you’d fought something big and bad and lived to show the proof. We didn’t care about the first two, or Niko didn’t; I kept the second one on call if needed, but the third…it was a warning that something nasty had fucked with me and not walked away. You’d best make certain you were bigger and badder and nastier than hell if you didn’t want to make their same mistake.

Bleeding in the gush of a slow waterfall, the wound was long and ugly, starting in the front of my biceps, curving to the back of my arm, and was about half an inch wide. A Cyclops’s talon isn’t as sharp or precise as a scalpel. One thing did relieve me. It was two inches below my tattoo. Messing that up would’ve pissed me off.

Kalakos, once Robin’s pants were back on, leaned up to see. “‘Fratres…’ Part of your tattoo says ‘brothers’ in Latin. What does the rest say?”

“It says, ‘If you’re close enough to read this, I’m going to pluck out your eyes and use them as Ping-Pong balls.’ Mind your own damned business.” I ducked instinctively as the first-aid kit came flying back over. Niko caught it. “You want your stitches while you’re driving or in a fast-food parking lot?”

I was hungry. That tipped the scales. While we were at McDonald’s, I ate a Big Mac with my other hand while Niko stitched my arm. Goodfellow refused the food, saying he’d seen pigs at troughs who dined better. Kalakos had brought back the Big Mac, fries, and chocolate shake for me, a salad for Niko, and two plain hamburgers for himself.

“You are stoic. Admirable.” Kalakos watched Niko’s precise work. “I’ve sewn myself up often enough and cursed most of the time. On the first and last occasion that I killed a werewolf, I may have screamed in finishing the stitching of the last of the seven claw marks.”

“I’m not stoic.” I reached for the shake wedged between my legs. “I’m used to it. Big difference. If I screamed or yelled every time I was cut up and Nik had to turn me into a craft project, I’d lose my voice.”

“We face Wolves every day. They don’t attack us often anymore, but for years it was almost a daily event. You, Emilian Kalakos”—it was the first time I’d heard Niko say his entire name—“are out of your league here. When Janus is dealt with, you should leave. The creatures that live in the city make Wolves seem as puppies.” Niko finished washing off the stitches with another surgical scrub.

“And I’m not wanted.”

“You may have saved Cal. You did save me. It’s appreciated, but it doesn’t wipe out the past. Your opportunity to make amends has long come and gone.” He slipped his shirt back on and put the first-aid kit back together and handed it to Kalakos in case he needed it. He didn’t want him around, didn’t want him at all, but Nik, contrary to what he was saying and unlike his father, did do what was right from the very beginning. Not a lifetime later.

Kalakos proved to be as stubborn as Niko. Genes do sometimes tell. “You have a tattoo as well. Same black and red, but a different language. I do not recognize it.” What does it say? went unspoken, as Niko wouldn’t threaten to make Ping-Pong balls of his eyes; he’d do it first, warn after the fact.

But Niko did answer. “‘Brothers Before Souls.’ Cal’s gift, albeit drunken, to me.”

When I had a choice at one point to revert to human, at least temporarily, or stay as I was born and far more able of keeping my brother alive, I’d made my decision and it needed no thought. I would do anything for Nik, whether it be light, gray, or the dark at the end of the road. Before the father of my half brother, before my friends, before my life, before the world itself, and, yeah, before my soul. It was my promise to Niko, and he might not have wanted it, but it was his and he knew what the tattoo meant.

Exactly what it said.

“Can you match that?” Niko asked.

“No.” Kalakos settled back as I checked the mirror again. He turned to face out the window. “No, I can’t.”

At least the bastard wasn’t making excuses anymore.

“There’s a tunnel under Atlantic Avenue?” I asked skeptically standing in the parking lot of a funeral home in Brooklyn. I felt out of place not wearing a heavy gold chain with a thick patch of chest hair showing. I knew I didn’t belong behind a funeral home. I was alive, and if I weren’t alive, my body would be scraps in some beast’s stomach, not laid out like a plastic doll in a coffin.

“More than a tunnel,” Robin answered with exasperation. “Niko, I know he can read. I’ve seen him do it. Can’t you deprive him of food or bathroom privileges until he learns one new thing a month?”

Niko was stiff and limping, but we all were. “I could, but then bathroom privileges would become the kitchen sink or the corner of the Dumpster outside. He’s an adult. I don’t like it, but that means he’s entitled to embrace his ignorance. Cal, beneath Atlantic Avenue…”

“Is a tunnel built in ye olden days. It was big enough for two locomotives to pass each other side by side. They closed it down before the nineteen hundreds. Now it’s a tourist attraction. You can go down a manhole back at the Court Street intersection on some guided tour.” I’d reloaded my Glock and tucked it in the back of my pants and pulled out my shirt, the blood on it now reddish brown, to cover it up. The xiphos I gave to Niko to tuck away in his coat. “So bite me. Who’s the genius now?”

Robin slapped his forehead. “I forgot. Ishiah has those crass ‘unknown facts of NYC’ bar napkins that were delivered by mistake. I saw them at the Panic.”

With an internal shudder, I wished that had been all I’d seen at the Panic.

“Yep, a mistake,” I said, pushing the Panic far from my thoughts, “but that doesn’t change the fact that I read them, because I’m not dense.” In reality I would’ve, as Niko said, embraced that lack of knowledge thoroughly, but bartending had its slow moments; a Wolf had thrown another Wolf through the TV and the wall behind it, and porn was not allowed in the Ninth Circle. Your boss and your best friend doing it was no problem, but no porn in the bar. I didn’t get it either. Ishiah had some weird rules.

Until the new TV arrived, I read napkins.

“Regardless of your newfound brilliant knack for trivia, not all of the tunnel is a tourist trap. At least half of it was walled off and that is where the market is.” Goodfellow walked us to the back of the funeral home and knocked.

A few moments later it was opened by a man in his fifties with a long, narrow face, eyes moist with unshed sympathetic tears, a charcoal suit, a deep, somber voice, and a box of Kleenex in one hand. “You’ve come to the wrong door, but how can I direct you in your time of sorrow?”

“Relax, Jackie boy. We just want to go downstairs,” Robin said.

The eyes overflowed with tears and Jackie snatched a Kleenex, which I’d thought was for distraught clients, to blow his nose. “Sorry, Rob. I’m trying out some contacts and they’re eating my goddamn eyes alive. I can barely see ya. Sure, get your asses in here before Pinky brings the police running with all that blood.”

Me being Pinky. Goodfellow and that damn shirt he’d forced on me would make sure that nickname stuck around for a year or so.

“How’s the wife? She up front?” We followed Goodfellow up the stairs and inside while he talked up Jack the Snot Machine.

“Yeah, snooty bitch.” He frowned. “She wants me to go by Jacques instead of Jackie while we’re working, so’s we seem fancier. Then we ran out of embalming fluid a week ago—a shortage on fricking embalming fluid, you ever heard of shit like that? And that’s when the bus wreck happened. Family reunion. Been coming to our funeral home to be stuffed in overpriced boxes since great-great-great-whoever. So’s I’m out raiding every grocery store in Brooklyn for that runny maple syrup. Almost like water, cheap-ass shit. But it runs through the embalming machine like a dream. And I’m thinking, Praise Jesus and halle-fucking-lujah, ’cause twenty of those suckers are stacking up in the morgue and starting to go off in a bad way.” He opened a door off the hall marked, JANITOR ONLY. DANGEROUS CLEANING SUPPLIES. FLAMMABLE. “But that ain’t the end of it. The next morning Grandma Nosy wants to know before the service why her father smells like a pancake breakfast.” He stepped back out as we stepped in. “Eh, what can you do? It’s always something.”

“That, Jackie, is truer than you know. Good luck with the wife and the waffles.” Robin gave him the Brooklyn aim of the finger and firing of the thumb before closing the door behind us.

“He’s human,” I said.

“That he is.” Robin unlocked another door on the other side of the room. It was double bolted and had a security pad for a password.

“He doesn’t know about Monster Mart?” I persisted.

“No. That would only mess with his tiny mind, and Jackie has far too little to endanger. Besides, a zombie or vampire running a funeral home? What a cliché,” he noted with disdain.

The door opened. “He thinks I’m a drug dealer or a gun runner or run a white slave ring. As long as I pay him something every month, he minds his own business.” There were more stairs and no light as the door shut behind us. Robin clapped his hands and half domes of plastic sprang to a soft white light. They sat on the stairs and up against the wall. “Pick up the pace. We have a few blocks to walk, and every once in a while I get blood leeches nesting down here. Fourteen feet long. Not something you want to get tangled up in because you’re too slow.”

All of us limped faster while Robin explained the marketplace was in the part of the tunnel walled off from tourists, civilians, and the homeless. Also all the monsters had their own ways in. Some species shared: the Wolves, the revenants, the vampires. Others, like Goodfellow, preferred their entrance private.

About two blocks later we walked through a massive brick arch that had to be as thick as a man was tall. The ceiling was brick too and about ten feet high. And beyond the arch were booths, tents, tables…anything you could imagine from an ancient bazaar to a white-trash yard sale was here.

“You…stained with blood. I see your past, right before me. I’ll tell it to you for a sip of fresh blood.” To my right, a creature crouched on the wet brick floor. He…I thought…he was stirring a spidery seven-jointed finger around a cracked plate of intestines. I didn’t have to think twice on that. I’d spilled enough that I knew what they looked like. Eyes of dark gold streaked with fungus green studied me, the slippery mass before him, and then me again. It could’ve been a salamander from its moist skin—if its mother mated with about twenty South American face-eating spiders at once and a snake to top it off for the mottled green-and-gray forked tongue.

“No, thanks, froggy. I’ve lived it once. I can do without the rerun.” I kept moving until the hand wrapped around my forearm twice over.

“For two sips I’ll tell your present and future. I see those as well,” came a needy, sibilant hiss. “Everyone wants to know what lies beyond and what lies within.”

He stood four feet tall and I could’ve bent down to his level, but I didn’t. I grabbed his neck and jerked him off the ground up to mine. I stared into his eyes—close enough that I could see a perfect reflection of myself in the black pupils. “You have no idea what lies within me,” I said, soft, smooth, and hungry. Not for food, but for fear. “Go back to your bowl of Campbell’s Cup o’ Guts before I let you see if you can read your own intestines with more fucking accuracy.”

To give me credit…it had been a long day.

I dropped him then with the unpleasant sound of a snail squashed under your shoe. “If that’s the best this place has, Goodfellow, we are wasting our time and I’m spending more of mine in a pink shirt.”

“Lighten up, Pinky.” Robin grinned. “All fairs, carnivals, markets, bazaars have their fakes. Be grateful he isn’t a real expert in extispicy and doesn’t have the true sight or he’d be screaming the ceiling down. We’d die in an avalanche of brick.”

“I focused on the one word that interested me. Extra spicy?” I stepped over the tentacle of the Bride of Cthulhu who was browsing a jewelry stand.

“No, Taco Bell. Back to the bar napkins for you. Extispicy…the ability to read omens and predict the future by reading entrails.”

“Cal calls that lunch and hasn’t delivered a prediction yet,” Niko said dryly. Kalakos stayed behind us, but not too far. He thought he’d seen and hunted the unclean. He was a babe in the woods. I didn’t recognize one-fourth of what was roaming around down here and I hoped I didn’t run into them upstairs.

Sometimes things are so nasty that you don’t want to get close enough to do your job. Carrying a gun in one hand and a barf bag in the other because their ugliness was beyond extreme wasn’t worth the money. But then I saw something else. There was a shimmer to one side. Not the love-at-first-sight idiocy shimmer, but a true shimmer of what I thought was a silver-blue light. But when I glanced over, there was no light. There was a woman.

As I stopped to get a closer look, she was already facing me. She, like Cthulhu’s main squeeze, was at a jewelry stall. A choker of polished black tears and garnets or rubies cut into star shapes hung from her hand. “It’s beautiful and it’s sad, isn’t it, sugar? But family is that way. I had it special-made to remind me. Life is shorter than we know and we’d best get our asses out there and kick up our heels.”

The choker looked nice on her when she held it to her throat. Her accent reminded me of my trip down to South Carolina, Southern, although not quite the same Southern, but neither of those things were what caught my attention most of all. Not close to it.

She looked like me.

Her skin was as pale as mine, and that was hard to find. Her eyes were the same exact gray, her hair the same black only with a slight wave to it. If we were together—not that we were, and where had that thought come out of in the middle of this mess? I felt a twitch below. Oh yeah. That’s where. If we were together, we’d look like one of those bizarre brother/sister-looking couples you see. Walking mirror images—she was close to my height too; not quite an Amazon, but definitely not fragile. Her smile, it was all me too. Wicked and wild, but without the shadows. “What’s the matter, sugar? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I started to get a scent off of her. She wasn’t human, not down here. So what was she? Goodfellow put an end to that quickly. “Ah, gamiseme tora. No, no, no. I can’t.…Trixa would kick my…No, no. I apologize, Ms.…?” He knew her, but he didn’t know her name? Or from the shifting from foot to foot was he waiting for the name she was using?

“Charla Tae-Lynn.” Despite the name, she was no countrified Alice down the rabbit hole, this chick. No way. “But this one”—her hand straightened the collar of my bloody, torn shirt—“he can call me Tae. Three names can be a mouthful and then some. And if I want a mouthful, there are lots more pleasurable mouthfuls to be had, ain’t there, sugar?” My brain fried at the double entendre. She winked, slapped my ass—which enjoyed it thoroughly—and disappeared into the milling crowd.

“Who…?”

“No.” Goodfellow shoved me along in the opposite direction.

“But…”

“No.” He kept shoving. “You think Delilah is hot shit? That one would eat Delilah alive and have room for the whole Lupa pack for dessert.”

“What is she?” Niko asked. “She has a…presence.”

“Presence? Presence? You’ve no idea. And we have enough trouble. Given another day, Cal won’t have a dick to insert anywhere anyway. He’ll be Janus mush or locked in with a pit of succubae that he wants nothing to do with and they want even less to do with him. Either way, his sex life is on hold. How about we get to work and try to do something about that…and save our lives, if that’s not too much to ask for?”

We ended up at the last stall next to the bricked-up wall. This place was unbelievable. It reminded me of the trade shows where, hand to God, the guns were all within the law, Officers, until five minutes later when the cops were gone and you were being shown the latest in the highly illegal, mean-as-rattlesnake-poison, newest design of machine gun to come out of Israel. So new you could feel the packing grease on the stock.

“This is, as I said, my last guess. We hit the black market to see if anyone had been asking about a nine-foot artifact of assassination, and there’s no one better to ask than my old friend the Artful Dodger.” He was trying to summon up the old Goodfellow energy, but the shape we were all in, none of us felt like being upright, much less bargaining with a thief. And if he went by the Artful Dodger, he was a thief. But so was Robin and he had no equal.

Dodger grunted, unimpressed with Goodfellow’s praise.

“Although it’s probably pointless, as Janus’s type are gone for all time or not for sale. But if someone needed Janus, whether he already possessed him or stole him, a Rom perhaps or someone more Grimmly inclined, that doesn’t mean we make the assumption he had the words to activate him. If they didn’t, and as Hephaestus isn’t talking—sanely—this would the only place to find them. Words sell for more than gold or anything else often enough.”

Dodger grunted in agreement on that one.

“And if a Rom did buy them, it would be here, as I doubt more and more that Hephaestus entrusted them to some of the Vayash; it would be like giving your car keys to a two-year-old and telling him to take a drive around the block. Disaster.” Robin leaned against the booth, yawning, exhausted as we all were. “If it were Grimm, on the other hand, he’d drive Janus like Andretti with a Viper.”

The Dodger grunted at him again—a “get off, you lazy bastard” one. I had to admire him. He could grunt with the best of them.

Hoping the stall was sturdy, I watched Robin lean harder, as equally unimpressed with Dodger as Dodger was with him. He yawned again before returning to his train of thought. “If those words were found here, then we might find the second set. The ones that put the Statue of Liberty’s boyfriend back to sleep. Dodger, can you point us in the right direction? I know you’re more about the glitter and shine than that boring reading and writing.”

“Money, lives, and blood no object?” The grunt became a question. “And I learnt me some lettering. If it makes money, I learn.”

“Good for you, and price no object? Who do you think you’re talking to? Who got you the Trojan horse while Troy fell? And it was on fire at the time. If my business wasn’t serious, I’d take it to Walmart.” He lifted a shoe off the damp black-green fungus creeping across the floor and the rivulets of sewer water that seeped into anything belowground in the city. “At least they mop at Walmart. I’ve heard people say so.”

“Lemme look, guvnor.” That he mixed with a grunt and grumble to keep his vocal cords in the game. He swept jewelry, silver and gold teeth, metallic nuggets—all that was shiny and covered the threadbare black velvet into a large Tupperware bin. Robin didn’t go to Walmart, but this guy did. Putting them away, he then pulled out and slammed down a book as thick as a NYC phone book but wider, bigger, and the cover was definitely made of tanned, dark brown human skin. It was the frigging Necronomicon, and if it wasn’t, it should’ve been. “I’ve expanded me business.” Dodger chortled slyly. “On my way to being a right proper gentleman now, I am. I am. Rich I’ll be, sitting up in some fancy roost like you.”

Goodfellow groaned. “Don’t start that again. Not that accent. If you can’t do it correctly, don’t do it at all. I cut your tongue out once. Don’t make me do it again.”

Cut it out, huh? It’d grown back nice, though, hadn’t it? Which meant…

The guy was short, had to be six inches under five feet, and he looked odd, as if the face of a ten- or twelve-year-old boy had aged while the rest of him, including his child-size hands, didn’t grow. He had a face that would substitute for a prune, mud brown hair cut in a bowl cut, and eyes that matched the mud of his hair. He looked human, but I’d bet Kalakos’s left nut, right one too, that he wasn’t. Down here Niko and the gypsy were the only humans walking around. As for me, there was no dual citizenship in monster–human land.

I leaned a few inches closer for a whiff to get a trace of what he really was. I narrowed my eyes. All I was getting was human, every last cell. I tried elsewhere, the last refuge of a human on the outside but a paien on the inside, their minds—that was always the difference. It took but one cell to get you in the club, and where better to hide it? And from the faintest trace I detected, it was one cell. One damn cell to have him crossing the line. That was a trick.

And developed into a bigger one than I thought, as Dodger was giving me the same once-over.

“Monster.”

This time I wasn’t the one saying it. Dodger was. He said it to me as he grew two feet taller, his arms became wings, his head narrowed, his mouth became a beak, and black feathers covered him. The irises of his now round eyes were a white full-moon shine. They made his feathers appear blacker. The night and the moon, as one.

“Monster,” he croaked. “Auphe!”

No one else had heard the “Auphe” over the loud bickering of the customers as Niko wrapped his hand around the beak, shutting it tightly. The wings flapped desperately as Robin did his best to calm him down. As he did, Niko said, “The Artful Dodger from Dickens. His real name in the book was Jack Dawkins. Jackdaw. A jackdaw is one of the known tricksters. Very clever. I wonder who fooled who? Did Dickens fool his readers or did Jackdaw fool Dickens?”

“He’s very…free…with his knowledge,” Kalakos said, eyes fixed on Jackdaw, but the comment was meant for Niko.

“And you just noticed?” I asked wryly.

Goodfellow wasn’t having any luck with the convincing or restraining until he snapped, “He is what he is. Do you want to annoy him enough that he tells us to let you go for him to handle your squawking death wish?”

I pulled out the Glock and slapped it down on the book. “I’ve never seen a trickster turn into a bird before, but Thanksgiving is only a few months away. I’ll bet you wouldn’t taste that different from turkey.” Then I picked up the gun and aimed it at one MoonPie eye, the muzzle a half an inch or less away. “So shut the fuck up, as plucking feathers all day from your dead ass isn’t my idea of a good time.”

Jackdaw stayed a bird, one that bowed his head to hide his eyes and the tears dripping from them. I didn’t know birds could cry. “This is what I am,” I said flatly to Kalakos. “Whether I try to back down from the paien’s insults and attacks or I am this, I am always treated the same once they know. Terror or attempted slaughter. I learned that a long time ago.”

Kalakos watched as Dodger rapidly turned the pages of the book. “How long since you were able to try to back down?”

“Sixteen. The day I escaped the Auphe.” The two years of captivity I didn’t know. I didn’t remember if I’d backed down or fought. I did know one thing: I might have backed down in the beginning, but I must have learned to fight. Or I wouldn’t have made it back with teeth coated in black Auphe blood.

The pages of Dodger’s book were flying faster and faster. It was a good indication that this wasn’t a conversation he wanted to be a part of and as soon as he was rid of us the happier he’d be. “Humans only notice once in a while that I’m not…right. But I don’t live in a human world anymore. It wouldn’t be safe for them. Eventually…” I shrugged.

“Everything is not eventual,” Niko refuted sharply.

“But eventually everything is,” Kalakos said. It wasn’t a counter to Niko. It was as if he were saying it to himself.

“There is nothing. There is no Janus.” The crappy cockney accent had disappeared and the voice was that of a bird, a harsh caw, but an improvement. “I am sorry. I am sorry. Please. Please.” The tears had slowed but not stopped. He’d been about to scream my identity to every monster in the place, and I recognized crocodile tears whether they came out of the eyes of a bird or not.

Sometimes I took off my mask and showed who I was, could be, would be.

There were times it was necessary…like with a giant screeching tattletale of a blackbird.

There were times it was purely instinctual.

And there were times I enjoyed it.

“Dodger.” I leaned closer and picked up a fallen black feather, ran my finger along it. “I’ve been looking into goose-down mattresses. Good for insomnia. But expensive as hell.” I considered him before smiling—a sociopathic shopper finding a bargain. “But you…you’d be free. And better than cable when I have you pluck your own feathers out one by one”—I let the one I was holding drift away—“…by one.”

Dodger dived his beak back into the book, turned a few more pages, and then: “Here. It says here. There are commands or spells or phrases, but none specific in a way they can be written down for the sake of history. They are…” He peered at the word, puzzled, as a last fake tear fell from the end of his beak. “Mutable? Indefinable? Erratic?” He hunched. “I am sorry, Lord Auphe. That is the best I can decipher.”

Lord Auphe. Now I did feel like shit, crocodile tears or not. He was afraid; I knew it was true. The tears were an act; the fear wasn’t. Almost everyone who knew the truth was afraid. I grabbed Robin’s wrist and took off his five-trillion-dollar watch, shiny and gleaming as they came, and tossed it on the book. “Sell it. Buy Mrs. Jackdaw something nice. And keep your mouth shut until we’re gone or a jackdaw mattress won’t have a chance to hock anything.”

As I was turning to leave, with Goodfellow bitching and snarling about his watch before demanding the location of other book stalls with more helpful information, I saw it, a black blot overhead. Bad things come from beneath, beside, and overhead. I didn’t skip a location and hadn’t since I was fourteen.

It hadn’t been there before. It had been brick shadowed in the gloom of torches and lanterns, but now it was pure black with the sheen of dirty oil. “Goodfellow, stop your bitching. What’s that?” I pointed up.

“Zeus’s pubic lice. We took up a collection. They were supposed to be exterminated three weeks ago or I never would’ve brought us here.” He already had his sword drawn. “The blood. The blood our clothes are soaked in. It woke them. They sleep in the side tunnels. It’s the manananggals.” It was the sound a cat would make coughing up a hairball or Salome would make coughing up a Great Dane, but apparently it was serious. Goodfellow was already moving back toward the entrance. “I’m going to eviscerate every last one of those lazy exterminators. Run. Run!”

Strange, twisted heads lifted from their bargaining to watch with suspicion and nervousness as we tore through the market, trusting that if Goodfellow thought it was bad after facing Hephaestus and his crew, it was plenty goddamn bad.

“Manananggals,” Niko said as we ran, his own sword out, “are descended from the ancestors of bats. An offshoot. They’re similar to vampires, although vampires are descended from Homo sapiens, humans. They suck blood through a hardened, long, tube-shaped tongue, sometimes even taking the blood directly from the heart if they strike deeply enough. They form in colonies as real bats do, but are much larger. They—”

A dark olive-skinned hand came up to smack the back of Niko’s head like the countless times my brother had smacked mine. Kalakos growled, “We are about to die. Could we do it without the enlightening voice-over? Khul!”

“I still hate you, Kalakos,” I said, “but that is a memory I’ll keep to my dying day.” Which might be this day.

I looked up to see the stream of silent wings in rippling motion, a river of night streaming over our heads. Niko’s general pissiness at having his lecture interrupted was apparent. “Fine. One last fact. They don’t attack one at a time or even two or three. The entire colony will swarm down on us the same as a school of piranha. They will blanket us. There’s no way from beneath that. They’ll suck us dry in seconds.”

Jesus. Could this day get any worse? And dying in a pink shirt was still in my future. Goddamn it.

We were halfway to the arch when I raised my eyes again. One of them hit the wall, tumbled, and, before it straightened, its flight let me see more than I wanted. What fresh hell was this? They were cut in half at the waist. No legs. Only a waist and a heavy sac of intestines that should be cascading out…but weren’t.

“Holy shit, why are they sliced in half? What keeps their guts from falling out? That is disgusting. Niko…”

“If we live, you can Google it when we get home. I don’t want to weigh you down with so much information that it slows your running.” If we lived…I was currently on Niko’s shit list, which made one not that invested in living.

“I was listening. I didn’t do anything. It was Kalakos. I marvel at every fact that falls from your lips, I swear.”

“You’d best hope and pray we do die.” One drop of vengeance in an ocean of head slaps I’d received over the years and Niko was holding a grudge. After the past two days, the calming effects of his meditation were taking a beating.

It didn’t matter. It looked as if my suggested hopes and prayers were coming true. Now I heard them, the rustle of their wings. They were coming down, the shroud to cover the dead—and we were the dead. The size of a medium beagle, they had pinpoint eyes of milky white, ears huge and pointed, snub muzzles pouring gray mucus, clawed hands at the juncture of the wings, and a curved dagger of a tongue plenty long enough to reach my heart. I lifted the Glock, but it was hopeless. I could take out ten Cyclops, but these were in the hundreds. Three swords and a fast reload and we were screwed all the same.

Until it came through the arch we’d been running for: a flying serpent with intensely blue scales, black wings, four taloned feet and legs curled under its belly, a sleek head with a sunburst of black spines, and eyes that rivaled the sun at noon.

It also breathed fire. We’d had some serious run-ins with fire today. We dived to the slime-covered floor as the flames of an entire forest fire turned the colony of bloodsuckers above into ash. It continued with its flight and smashed through the far wall, and here was hoping this was not the day for a scheduled tour or that ticket was going to be really worth the price.

“That was a dragon,” I told the puck accusingly. The blackened ash continued to fall.

“I’m aware.”

“You said there were no such things as dragons.”

“There aren’t.” He tried to wipe the ash from his face and hair, making it worse. “And don’t ask. Just embrace a little mystery in your life and that you have that life left to embrace anything at all.”

That wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t done.…I mean, shit, a dragon. Who as a kid doesn’t want to believe in dragons? But I didn’t get a chance to push it. Dodger, puppy-dog tears and a watch he could trade for a condo, started squawking loudly enough that the whole market heard this time. “Auphe!” A wing pointed. “Auphe! With the black hair! Auphe!”

I’d said there were creatures down here I hadn’t seen before topside. There were creatures I couldn’t have dreamed up or have made out of a squid, a vampire, a revenant, an entire pack of Wolves, a shark, a Sasquatch, a pig, a chain saw, and a hot-glue gun. “I think I want the bats back. At least that would’ve been quicker,” I muttered, holding out my left hand to have the xiphos slapped into it.

It would’ve been.

I’d told Kalakos at Dodger’s booth. This was my life. Massive unpopularity and/or fear. Anything between was as atypical as it came.

Vendors and customers both attacked. It wasn’t all of them. Some were too small and harmless for the weapons we were carrying. Some were too huge and gelatinous to move more than an inch every fifteen minutes. Some, led by Jackdaw, were watching from the side and taking bets. A trickster, a lying, betraying, crocodile tear–spurting trickster, could figure the odds with no problem.

“When have any of your informants ever once not ended up not trying to kill us?” I gritted.

The puck lifted his shoulders without a trace of guilt. “I warn you each time. I can give you the information, but I can’t make your brain absorb it or your ego swallow it.” He swung his sword and sliced a clump of those fourteen long blood leeches he’d talked about earlier on our way through the tunnel. They had reared up over his head, their tails knotted for a base of balance—a base that also tangled and wouldn’t let them separate to flee when Robin’s sword cut through rubbery flesh. Sucker mouths lined with a circle of teeth all made the sound of a fox-caught rabbit.

Ever heard a rabbit scream? It’s the sound of a burning house full of trapped children. I haven’t heard anything worse for fear and pain, and I hoped I didn’t.

I avoided the flopping of their death throes. I hoped it was their death throes and they weren’t like worms: Chop one in half and you suddenly have two. Niko took off two heads of a three-headed humanoid lizard with one stroke of his sword. A creature that was either a Turkish Karankoncolos or a down-home Sasquatch—I couldn’t keep them straight—was leaping toward Goodfellow and me as if it were a spring-loaded grizzly bear. I shot it in the chest three times, which knocked it sideways into Niko.

“Shit!”

I tossed aside monsters and planted the Glock in the bear-thing’s humanlike ear and put two more rounds in at the same time a silver blade came through its throat and out one slitted purple-black eye. You could say that took care of it. I pushed and helped roll its three hundred pounds off Nik, who staggered to his feet.

“’Kay?” I asked.

He nodded, somewhat out of breath with katana and xiphos in hand. He pointed to the arch, which was a good substitute for “run” when you didn’t have the air to say it. He went with me on his heels until another freak I’d yet to see rushed me. It was shaped like a woman, a wild tangle of black, brown, and gray hair. Her nails were corkscrews of years of growth. She was nude, not that that went into the positive column. Her teeth were perfect pointed triangles in her gaping mouth—all of her teeth and all of her mouths. She had one mouth on her chest, her stomach, each arm, each leg, and they all made the same mmmmm sound I made when I was extra hungry and smelled a chili cheese dog.

Today I was the chili cheese dog. I shot her in the one place, oddly enough, she didn’t have a mouth: her face. She tumbled backward into something that might have been…Hell, I didn’t have a clue. It was tentacles, a seven-foot-tall writhing mass of transparent tentacles, each tipped with a black seven-inch-long thorn and equipped with crimson suckers. It should’ve been a claw or a talon, but it was a thorn, and I could see the tears of dark red poison welling from the tips. Worse, I could see the poison pumping its way down the tentacle through the translucent flesh. It was like a thick vein, and beside it was a much larger tube of the same color that nothing was coursing through. It led to the suckers, and I imagined the flow of that vessel worked in the opposite direction—to suck up flesh from a paralyzed or dead victim. The poison might not be a poison; it could liquefy instead for easier consumption.

It could be both.

After this party, H. P. Lovecraft could suck my dick. This was one of his worst nightmares or wettest dreams. What had been wrong with that ass?

With no face. No mouth. No orifices at all that I could fall back on to aim a bullet up in a desperate time of need. I shot it in what was roughly its middle while chopping off the tentacles that flashed toward me with the xiphos. The bullets were swallowed into its mass with no effect. The sheared pieces of tentacles fell and didn’t move again. Relief, yeah, but when the thing had a hundred of them, tipped with poison, I couldn’t put a sword into a major organ, if I could find one, without getting close enough to get wrapped up like a mummy, all while being stabbed by toxic barbs.

I was part Auphe and resistant to many venoms, but this thing had gallons. If it worked fast and Sushi-zilla ate even faster, I could be sucked up like a milk shake in seconds, nothing left but bones and bad clothes. But not today. I’d had enough today. I’d had Janus nearly land on us, a tribe of Cyclops, bat-shit crazy gods, a monster of metal and fire too unreal to be believed. I was done for the day. Finito.

I holstered the Glock to fish in the pocket of those stupid pants Goodfellow had forced on me and closed my fingers around one of my favorite toys. “Nik, Robin, Kalakos! Go! The whole place is going to be covered in seafood stew in six seconds!”

We’d been close to the arch and I could see the three of them battling like hell. Heads were flying, limbs; monsters were taking them down right and left, but they didn’t fail to get back up again and again. I waited until they made it to the arch itself. And they weren’t doing it for themselves alone; they were clearing me a path, because I was going to have to run like a son of a bitch.

I chopped several more lashing tentacles with the xiphos while lifting the grenade. I hadn’t used it at the armory when the Cyclops and the fire giant had attacked. Throwing a grenade into a room filled with thousands of pieces, shards, and splinters of metal? The shrapnel from that would’ve killed us before Hephaestus’s creations had a chance.

I removed the safety clip and pulled the pin with my teeth. It looks great in movies. In real life it hurts like a mother and can screw the hell out of your teeth, which was why this was the first time I’d done it. With one hand swinging a sword, I didn’t have much choice. “I’ll think of you next time I’m drinking sake,” I said, then turned and ran. My path was paved with bodies of prejudiced paien, but that didn’t slow me down. Once I released the spoon on the grenade, I had about six seconds. I had enough left in me to be standing up on the street hailing a cab in six seconds.

Or that’s what I thought, until I checked behind me and saw how fast that thing was coming up behind me. Too fast and too close. In six seconds I’d be dinner and half-digested. I let go of the grenade’s spoon, counted to three, whirled, and threw a homer.

It hesitated at the blow of what had hit it and flew through several layers of tentacles to embed itself there. That’s what I hoped, that curiosity would kill the Kraken. I didn’t stop to check. But while three seconds was enough to stop the thing before it reached me—fingers crossed—it wasn’t long enough for me to reach the arch to hide behind its six-foot-thick walls. Niko was starting back, to throw his martyred self on top of me or to kick my ass for not exercising more, running more, running twice the hours every day to be faster. Robin grabbed him around the chest, yelled my name, and pointed to the side.

I blinked and thought, What the hell? If it didn’t work, it was that much more convenient.

One second later, the grenade blew. I tumbled over and over until I lost count. If I was in a wreck and the car rolled, it would feel like this, but without a seat belt. I had my hands over my ears, but I thought I heard the splat of exploding Jell-O. It was my imagination, more likely, as I heard nothing but ringing when I lifted my hands away.

Dizzy, I was trying to get enough equilibrium back to tell up from down when Niko threw open the lid of the coffin. He said something. I didn’t know what. I couldn’t hear a thing, but it would be along the lines of, “Are you all right?” “That was the bravest thing I’ve seen.” “You were Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and Batman combined.” “I’ll do the laundry for the next year.”

The ringing began to clear as he helped me out of the black steel coffin with its plush red-cushioned interior, and repeated what he’d said. It wasn’t what I’d thought. “You idiot. A three-legged turtle dying of leprosy could run faster than that.” He gripped a handful of my hair and gave my head the lightest possible of shakes. I had a headache already and he’d know that. “I’m going to run your lazy ass every day until I think there’s a remote hope you could make a preschool track team.”

“Jesus. Fine. I didn’t get eaten. Doesn’t that count?” I didn’t wait for him to give the inevitable no. “I thought vamps weren’t into the coffins these days?” I asked Goodfellow.

“The majority of them aren’t, but there’s the old-school. Too old and set in their ways to give them up. And the younger ones who are growing up now. They’re about fifty, the equivalent of a human fifteen-year-old. Some of them are into Voth—vampire Goth. Idiotic, isn’t it?” Goodfellow wasn’t waiting on us. He was leaving through the arch. Many bodies were still twitching and alive. It was a good decision. “Goths derive from death and vampires and now vampires have developed Voth from the human teenagers.”

“If they’re vampires wouldn’t they already be that way?” I knew I was talking too loudly, but my hearing wasn’t completely back. “Well, not now, but wouldn’t it be more retro than made-up?”

“Hades, no. Vampires never dressed like that. Capes and black makeup, huge fangs more likely to bite off your own tongue than anyone’s neck, long black nails. That’s no way to blend in with your prey. And if you don’t blend in with your prey, you don’t eat.” We were up the stairs now, Niko smashing the head of one last blood leech under his boot.

“Which reminds me,” the puck said, “I’m starving. Who’s up for Chinese?”