Doubletake

2

Family…it is a bitch.

The thought came out of nowhere.

Or maybe not, considering my current situation. There was no denying that it was true. Everyone thought it sooner or later, didn’t they? If there’s only you, you’re good—lonely maybe, but good. You can’t fight with yourself. If there’re two of you, it can still be good. Your options are limited. You make do and appreciate what you have, unless it’s the stereotypical evil-twin scenario. Then you aim for the goatee and blow his ass back to the alternate dimension he popped out of.

A kishi—better known as my paycheck in the form of a supernatural hyena—hit my back with staggering force. I flipped it over my shoulder and put a bullet between its eyes.

Yeah, normally two was a doable number for family. It was when you hit three and higher that things started to go bad. That was when the bitching and moaning started, the pitting of one against another, the slights that no one forgot. No one could tell me that Noah didn’t pitch a few of his relatives kicking and screaming off the Ark long before the floodwaters receded. It was no familial Love Boat, and I believed that to my core.

Which brought up the question: Did that wrathful Old Testament God kill the sharks? I don’t think he did. You can’t drown a shark. I think they were snacking on biblical in-laws right and left. Noah, Noah, Noah…

I swung around and kicked the next kishi in the stomach as I slammed another clip home before putting three in its gaping, lethally fanged mouth as it jumped again. It sounded easy, but considering the one I also had attached to my other leg…it was a pain in the ass.

Family-wise, I had no pain in the asses. I was lucky. I had one brother and he was a damn good one. Once we were on our own, I’d escaped the curse of screaming Thanksgiving dinners.…I had a turkey pizza; Niko had a vegan one. No bitter arguments around a Christmas tree…Niko gave me a new gun; I gave him a new sword. Absent was the awkward discovery of first cousins shacking up at the summer vacation get-togethers at the lake. I didn’t have to wait for summer. I saw my brother every day when he winged my sopping towel off the bathroom floor at my head or I asked—after the fact—if I could use his priceless seventeenth-century copy of some boring book no one but him and the author had read to prop up a wobbling coffee table.

Summer vacations…if you thought about it, what kind of people actually gathered together at a lake with cabins and all that crap anyway? Hadn’t they ever watched Friday the 13th? Jason? Hockey masks? Machetes? A good time for me, yeah—oh hell, yeah—but not as much for the members of your average Prius-driving middle class.

Stupidity is everywhere.

But for me, right now, things were good. My brother and I kicked supernatural ass for fun and profit. I had a shirt that said that with our phone number. Humans wouldn’t take it seriously. Humans didn’t know what the world really hosted. But the kind that hired us—nonhuman—they knew a walking billboard when they saw it. Running your own business is a bitch. You have to advertise. Promo. Market. Niko did that. I couldn’t be bothered with that crap—unless it resulted in my offensive T-shirt slogan. He and I had been doing this for four years now. Before that we’d done the same, but it had been a hobby, not a career.

Okay, I say hobby, but it was self-defense, pure and simple. When you’re half human and half of the worst monster to walk the earth—a creature that ate the supernatural for appetizers without putting hardly any effort into it—you weren’t popular with the other monster types. And there were thousands of different kinds. Some immediately attacked me, sensing the half human in me and assuming it would make me weaker—they were wrong. Some ran—they were smart. And some didn’t care either way—we hung out and had a beer.

Good family. Interesting and well-paying career. Half monster…well, everything couldn’t be perfect, but otherwise right now things were good. I was hoping they stayed that way. Except for Niko. I didn’t have to hope when it came to family.

The rest of my life might be challenging in some other areas, like at the moment as an adolescent kishi was either trying to eat my leg or hump it to the bare bone, but family? I knew I had that under control. I watched my brother’s back; he watched mine. We were a Hallmark card dipped in blood and made of unbreakable steel. I’d never had a doubt about my family and I never would—no matter what the kishi, who had brought the topic to mind to begin with, were doing to annoy me on the general subject.

No, it was all smooth sailing, rather like this current job, until my cell phone rang. “Niko,” I said, shooting another adult kishi with jaws stretched wide enough to swallow my entire head. It had leaped downward at me from a fire escape of a condemned tenement apartment building long crumbled in on itself—no demolition crew needed. Gravity worked for free. “Can you get this one off of my leg before I need sexual assault counseling?”

Niko said to not kill the babies, although at one hundred and fifty pounds “baby” was pushing the definition, but I was doing my best, more or less, to be a good boy. Although it would’ve been much easier to be a bad boy.

So very bad. So very fun.

For my brother, however, I reined in that part of me—that nonhuman half of me, choke-chaining it with a practiced grip. It was the price I paid to keep my brother satisfied. Bearing in mind that if it weren’t for him I’d be dead or sanity-challenged ten times over, I owed the man. I was also fond enough of his bossy, anal-retentive ass to die for him.

More important, to kill for him.

And to have chosen the darkest of roads to make that happen.

All that made ignoring a giant baby with an equally giant bite easy enough. As I fished for my cell, Niko was less than awed at my babysitting skills and said so: “If you can’t do a minimum of three tasks at once, I have failed you with all my training and instruction. I’d blame myself, but clearly it’s entirely your fault, your laziness, your total ineptitude.”

Not that we shared the fraternal fondness out loud. How manly would that be?

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard that all before. If adults heard lullabies when they slept, that would be mine. I shook my leg again, shot another kishi bounding down the side of the next building, equally as dilapidated as the first, putting three bullets between its blazing silver eyes. They shone brighter than any streetlights in this part of town…until their life seeped away and left only the dull gray of death. I felt bad for them—almost—but they had turned a block that had once hosted scavenging homeless, thriving drug dealers, and sullen hookers into a desolate wasteland. In my opinion, I didn’t have a preference for one over the other, kishi or human. The mayor wanted the city cleaned up. The kishi clan was doing the job one block at a time…even if it meant eating quite a few people.

Were those people good people? If I knew anything, I knew that these days, starting four months ago, I wasn’t in the position to make the call on whether certain people were worth saving or leaving to the predators. That I left up to Nik. I simply stepped over their bodies and went on with the job.

Regardless of whether they were good or evil, those people belonged, whether they knew it or not, to the Kin. The Kin, the werewolf Mafia of NYC, weren’t pleased to be sharing their money or their snacks with Johnny-come-lately supernatural hyenas from the depths of…um…I should’ve paid attention to where those depths were during the premission rundown—maybe Africa, but Niko knew. That was enough. I didn’t think it mattered much. They were encroaching on Kin territory, and the Wolves didn’t like that.

Unfortunately for the Kin, the kishi, as a race, howled at a decibel level that would have any Kin Wolf’s ears bleeding ten blocks away. Curled up in homicidal furry balls, moaning for their mommies, they hadn’t had much success in taking down the kishi. Luckily for Niko, me, and our bank account, human ears couldn’t hear notes that high.

And although I wasn’t entirely human, my hearing was. That made us the go-to guys for this job. It had seemed easy from the hiring and the half our fee slapped into my palm—if it hadn’t been for Niko’s research, finding out the kishi were highly intelligent preternatural hyenas, if extremely malevolent. That meant the adults were fair game, but the younger kishi we had to pat on the head and find a goddamn supernatural foster and rescue organization for murderous fur babies to raise them right, socialize their asses, put rhinestone collars on them, and take them off our hands.

How many of those do you think were in the phone book? Nada? Good fucking call.

But the bottom line was, it was all about family, which had to be where that thought had originated. The adult kishi taking down prey for their young, which luckily was only one at this point, feeding him or her, setting up a nest, claiming this place for their own. They were doing what evolution had bred in them to do. Evolution worked the same for nonhumans as for humans. Kishi were predators to their bones. They would slaughter anything they thought they had a chance of bringing down, but to give them credit, they looked after their family.

That’s where family became a bitch in yet another way. You eat people for your family, you piss off the Kin for your family, you die for your family.

As a random bully had once said to me when I was a kid in the fourth grade as he demanded my sneakers and backpack, life isn’t fair. I agreed with him by punching his annoying teeth down his equally annoying throat. If that’s the way the world wanted to be, I’d go along. I didn’t make the rules. I only played by them.

Since when?

Since never.

This wasn’t a schizophrenic voice; at least, I hoped not. This was just my subconscious, my new subconscious. Since I’d let a small piece of me wither and die months ago to save my family, the swamp in my mind that made up the subliminal me was considerably more shadowed. It was more prone to the bad thoughts people think, normal people too, that they shouldn’t, don’t like to admit to, and don’t act on. But as I wasn’t normal and wasn’t exactly the Webster’s dictionary definition of a person, my bad thoughts were much badder than most and I wanted to act on them. Sometimes or often or frequently or very frequently, depending on my mood…no judgment needed or wanted. If I thought it, I absolutely wanted to do it.

But I didn’t.

The voices/thoughts were almost as much a bitch as family could be, the squabbling, but I’d learned to mostly tune them out. Many psychotherapists would be proud of my progress—the ones who hadn’t met me and, if they had any sense, wouldn’t care to.

I wasn’t good or bad. I was only me, and I was neither.

They’d have to invent a new bizarrely long German psychological description for what I was. How did the German say, “To see him is to piss your pants in fear”? Freud would’ve known.

I shook my leg futilely one more time and exhaled in irritation at the molten mercury eyes, the dark red coat dappled with silver spots, the milk teeth—as large as a German shepherd’s adult teeth—that continued to gnaw at my thigh. “Three seconds and he’s a rug under the coffee table. Your move, Cyrano.”

Did Niko have a proud, hawklike nose? Yes, he did. Did I give him hell over it? What do you think?

I answered my still-ringing cell phone as I shot the last kishi that leaped through a boarded-up window. Wood split, glass shattered, and bone splintered. The combination made for one dead kishi whose stomach was rounded and full with its last meal, which, I was guessing, had been the last occupant of this street. From the hypodermic the para-hyena coughed up in its dying throes, that meal had most likely been a tweaker.

They say drugs kill, but does anyone ever listen?

“Yeah, Leandros,” I said into the phone. “Death and destruction by the dollar. The meter’s ticking. Go.”

I hadn’t had a chance to check the incoming number, not with Kishi Junior both seducing and making a meal of my leg. But it didn’t surprise me to hear a familiar voice. Five people total had my personal number. Our business number was an untraceable phone with voice mail lying on the floor of an otherwise empty storage locker. Niko and I’d been sorry before—we went with safe now. “Kid, thank Bacchus.” I heard the relieved exhalation. “I need you and Niko at my place now.”

The three seconds was up, and I had the muzzle of my Desert Eagle planted between toddler kishi’s moon eyes as it gnawed harder at my lower thigh. I had a high pain tolerance—you learned to in this business—but to balance it out, my tolerance for nearly everything else remotely irritable in the universe was low. Damn low. Contaminating part of your soul will do that…if you believed in souls. I hadn’t made up my mind, but either way it was too bad for baby. It was night-night time. I might as well stop the pattern now. The same as its parents, it would grow up to be a killer anyway.

Like you did?

As if I didn’t know that.

But I was a done deal; the kishi wasn’t, not quite yet. “Goodfellow? You in trouble?” I started to put pressure on the trigger and tried to overlook the shadow of guilt. It was a kid. A killer kid, but a kid. Couldn’t I relate? On every single level? Then again, did I care if I could relate? Was I Dr. Phil? Hell, no. I was, however, Niko’s brother. That had me yanking harder at my internal leash while frowning crossly at Niko as I gave him a few extra seconds to move over and slide his katana blade between my leg and the kishi to pry it off with one efficient move.

“You owe me,” I grumbled at him.

While it squealed, barked, yowled, and laughed hyena-crazy through a toothy muzzle, Niko threw the last kishi down and hog-tied its preteen fuzzy ass. My brother—he wasn’t a bleeding heart. There were more dead monsters and people in whatever version of hell you wanted to believe in who’d testify to that. He did like to give a break when he thought one was due, though—or when he thought their birthright shouldn’t automatically condemn them.

He’d learned that raising me and adjusting to my birthright—a lifetime of habits, right or wrong, was hard to break.

Robin’s voice was in my ear, catching my attention again. “Am I in trouble? Ah. Hmmm. It’s more like everyone else is in trouble with the exception of myself,” he hedged. “I’d rather explain it in person and give you the keys to the bar. Ishiah left them for you.”

Ishiah was my boss at my day job/night job/afternoon job, whenever I wasn’t out doing what pulled in the real rent money—disposing of monster ass. He owned a nonhuman bar—not that humans knew the supernatural existed—called the Ninth Circle, was a peri, which was a winged humanish-type creature that had spawned angel legends, and was generally neutral on whether he should kill me or crown me employee of the month for making it a week without icing a customer while serving up their liquor of choice.

Why would he want to kill me? We had a lot of unpaid tabs because I hadn’t once made that said employee of the month. But hand held to the empty, godless space that filled the sky, if I killed you, you usually had it coming. Or you just weren’t that quick. In my world, the two were practically the same.

“The keys? Why did he…Ah, hell with it. We’ll get the story when we get there.” I looked down at Niko crouching on the street, rhythmically rubbing the kishi’s stomach. It crooned mournfully, my blood on its teeth, the silver of its eyes surrounded by the white of fear. “Fuck me.” I sighed. Before I let Goodfellow off the phone, I added, “By the way, do you know anywhere we could drop off a baby kishi to be raised up all good with God? Religious, righteous, and true? Oh, and non-people-eating?”

“Your imitation of a Southern drawl is pathetic, and yes, drop him off here.” He rattled off an address. “They take in strays all the time. But you’d better do it in the next hour or they’ll be gone.”

“Gone where?” I asked.

“Who knows? It doesn’t matter. They’ll all be gone. Everyone. Now hurry the hell up. I’m paying your bill this time. I’m a puck, a trickster, and a used-car salesman. Don’t think I won’t squeeze every penny out of Niko’s well-shaped ass if you don’t perform this job to perfection.” His phone disconnected in my ear.

“Who was that?”

I grinned down at my brother. “Robin is hiring us for a job, and I’m thinking seriously about taking a dive in the fifth, because it’s your ass on the line if we screw up.”

“Goodfellow will be a good client. He wouldn’t cheat us.” He’d cheat anyone else—man, woman, or child, but not us. Niko finished the knot on the rope and slitted his eyes at me. “And let us leave my ass out of it. Why I claim you as my blood, I will never know.”

It wasn’t true. I didn’t know why he put up with me, but I took it on faith that Niko knew something that made me worth keeping around. Niko inherently knew extraordinary things that most others didn’t know and wouldn’t ever know. He was like that. Then again, very rarely, Niko screwed the hell up, wasn’t the infallible older brother—because no one was infallible. No one. I hadn’t kept count before, the times he was wrong, but if I’d known what was headed our way, I might’ve starting adding them up now.

Number one was a little over sixty minutes away and headed for us like a freight train.

Tick-tock.

Robin Goodfellow, Pan, puck, trickster, car salesman, and more identities than I could memorize in a lifetime, lived off Central Park. That might have had something to do with his being rich and his kind having a history of spending a lot of time in the woods running around nude, which I didn’t once picture in my brain—not once, okay? It was a goddamn shame my booty-call werewolf, Delilah, or Puppy Le Screw, as Robin liked to call her, had tried to kill my family and friends, and was considering the same for me if she had the chance, because I really, really needed to get laid.

Regardless of my pathetic condition, squatting on the outskirts of Central Park was Goodfellow’s best option in NYC—if he wanted to revert to the old days of forest flashing and if you could call a three-million-plus condo squatting. His condo board hated him…something to do with his wanting to install condom machines on every floor, and the thinly veiled orgies. Although in the last year, the orgies were a thing of the past. After nearly a hundred thousand years of debauchery and extreme horniness, he’d embraced monogamy. I suspected it was a puck brain tumor. Or it would pass in another few months. A monogamous Goodfellow was as if aliens came to Earth and didn’t want to hunt you, eat you, or screw your women.

Extremely unlikely.

We’d dropped off the kishi kit and now I stood pounding on Goodfellow’s door. “Porn and pizza. Asses and anchovies delivered in thirty minutes or it’s free.” The condo board didn’t care for that either, which is why I did it. Unless it was advertising our business, Niko had threatened to kill me in my sleep if I wore any more T-shirts with obscene, violence-encouraging, or just plain fun-with-chain-saw slogans on them. I had to get my entertainment somewhere else now. No big deal. I was versatile.

I’d bandaged my leg, tying a thick gauze strip on the outside of my jeans and popping some Tylenol in the car as we drove the kishi to demonic day care. I’d do a real version when we eventually made it home. If I could help it, I kept my pants up around Goodfellow. A year of monogamy versus a hundred thousand years of frenzied pansexuality kept me cautious. I’d seen him talk a convention of ninety-year-old Catholic priests into a nudie bar. All right, thinking about it, maybe not that difficult to accomplish, but I didn’t want to be the next test subject. He did like a challenge.

After dumping the baby, we left Niko’s junker on the curb in front of Robin’s building. The doormen were used to us by now and drove it to the nearest parking garage for seventy bucks, which was the first charge on Robin’s bill. On the way over we’d seen Wolves, vamps, revenants, vodyanoi, and more. They were in cabs heading toward LaGuardia or JFK, in their own cars, slamming their horns headed for the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. Many were so desperate they were going toward the George Washington Bridge. Jersey to escape the city? That told you right there something was going on and it was worse than the ten plagues of Egypt and Chernobyl combined. Some Wolves were just running, no vehicle necessary. People on the sidewalks were glaring around for the dog walker who’d screwed up. Robin hadn’t been exaggerating. Everything with claws and paws and fangs was getting the hell out of Dodge.

I banged against the door again. “Pony play and pad thai. Get it while it’s hot.” I didn’t have to see Niko’s hand to know it was aiming for the back of my head. I ducked with the instinct of a thousand received swats and stumbled into Robin’s condo as he opened the door beneath my pounding fist.

“You,” Robin said, catching me by the back of my shirt to keep me upright, “are going to spend months, nay, years of sleepless nights wishing you had never said that, not in this particular situation.” I expected him to sound amused, as that was the kind of joke he would make, but he looked nothing but deadly serious.

Once steady on my feet again, I walked in. Same expensive rock-crystal coffee table, same buttery leather wraparound sofa—an identical replacement, rather, as I’d been indirectly responsible for destroying the last one—same enormous flat-screen television set hidden in a recess in the wall behind an original Waterhouse—Nik told me—painting. Same rich and expensive everything, although one addition was fairly new and a gift from me to Goodfellow, or rather from me to Goodfellow’s roommate, Salome. She was a Grim Reaper on four paws and I liked to stay on her good side. So a few months ago I brought her a boyfriend.

“Spartacus,” I called, “how’s it hanging?” Probably not too well. Once you’re dead, had your organs removed, and are resurrected as an undead mummified cat, your testicles probably looked like old raisins that had rolled under the couch. Raisins didn’t tend to…hang. But it was the thought that counted. I caught him as he slithered out from under the couch and leaped through the air, a zombie feline missile. He looped around my neck and purred in my ear. And if his purr sounded like skulls being crushed under an iron boot, again, it was the thought that counted. His bandages were long gone, and I stroked the hairless black-and-white-spotted wrinkly skin. “You’re living under the couch? Is Salome giving you a hard time?”

Another purr erupted from atop the massive refrigerator. Salome, unlike Spartacus, was gray with a small hoop earring in one pointed ear. They both had eye sockets that housed flickering lantern lights that reminded me of Halloween. Salome had followed Goodfellow home from the Museum of National History—against his will—and had lived here since, when she wasn’t out stalking senile, ancient pet Great Danes in the hallway. Salome had killed man and beast and probably hadn’t considered either one taxing. That was why I’d brought Spartacus to keep her company. I did not want to get on her bad side.

A mummy, Wahanket, who’d lived in the sublevels of the museum, had made Salome and Spartacus. Although a sometime informant, he had tried to kill me twice and he did kill cats. I didn’t approve of either hobby. I made sure Wahanket didn’t get to play his King Tut games on anyone else, which Spartacus seemed to appreciate. Salome didn’t much appreciate anything, from what I’d seen. I gave the cat’s bony ass one last pat and plopped him on the floor. “Be a man,” I told him. “Show her who’s boss.” He gave me a dubious glance and disappeared under the couch again. Apparently being a man was overrated.

Niko removed his duster, hot for late summer, but necessary for covering up katanas and various other swords. “You’re hiring us for a job, Goodfellow? That seems odd. You assist us so often you know we’d be more than willing to do you a favor for free.”

Robin shrugged, his normally cat-that-ate-five-canaries green eyes glum, and waved a hand at the kitchen table on which rested a meatball sub with double cheese and a tea that stung my nose enough for me to know it must cost a hundred bucks a gram at least—the type of tea Niko loved above all others. “There are favors and then there is ripping your own heart out to tape to an extrarealistic Valentine’s card. This is the latter.”

I moved closer to the table to catch the precise smell of the sub. “Gino’s? Gino’s extra-sauce, extra-cheese, extra-garlic meatball sub?” Gino’s, where the grease was so thick in the air that it contaminated the entire block and Robin refused to even drive down the street. That combined with the stink of a tea that was available only from one ninety-eight-year-old mean-as-a-snake woman in Chinatown. You had to walk across a path of nails to prove you were worthy of this damn tea, and I was not joking. He’d gone to serious trouble to tempt us, and Goodfellow didn’t go to serious trouble to do anything. He manipulated, deceived, lied, but not this. Honesty, money, and snacks?

This was bad.

“Shit. I don’t even want to know what the job is.” But I didn’t mean it.

It was Goodfellow. Our first friend when we’d been on the run from the other half of me, a race called the Auphe. The first murderers born of this earth. All the other supernatural feared them, bowed before them, died under their teeth and claws. The Auphe were gone now, as was the handful of half-breeds like me, but I didn’t forget that Robin had been the first to help Niko and me.

Even now…he was one of very few. The Auphe had been at the head of the supernatural food chain and they had large appetites, torture always being the cherry on top—which explained why I wasn’t too popular. Everyone had feared them and no one had missed them when we wiped them out. Although many didn’t know that they had been destroyed, that I was the last left, not that that would’ve made me any more popular. Quite a few had taken and still did take that unpopularity and hatred of Auphe up with me. They couldn’t kill an Auphe, but I was only half Auphe and half human. And humans were weak, nothing more than sheep. They thought that was worth a shot.

They thought wrong.

Robin, though, had always been loyal, always had our backs. We’d be piss-poor friends if we didn’t do the same. I sat at the table and grabbed the sub, taking a large mouthful. “So what’s the job?” I asked as I chewed—the Miss Manners of the monster-maimer crew.

Niko agreed with me silently by sitting down and drinking the tea that they probably cleaned gutters with in China. Both of us looked expectantly at Goodfellow. He exhaled, folded his arms, shifted from one foot to another…nervous tics—all the things the ever-smooth, fast-talking puck didn’t do. This was looking worse and worse by the second. After several more twitches, he finally managed to get it out.

“It’s my family reunion.

“The whole of the puck race here in New York City.

“Tomorrow.”

I choked on the bite of meatball, feeling the suck of it into my airway, and halfway hoping it would do the favor of killing me before I could cough it out. Niko gave me an unconcerned smack on the back, which only had the hunk of meat lodging deeper, while murmuring, “We should have asked for more money.”

“You haven’t asked for any money yet,” Goodfellow pointed out.

“It doesn’t change the fact that we should have and will ask for more.” Niko slapped a hand between my shoulder blades again, saying, “One more cough and if that doesn’t do the trick, Robin gives you the Heimlich. The key concept in Heimlich being ‘from behind.’”

I promptly expelled the chunk of Gino’s finest onto the table and welcomed the darkness that had begun to slice across my vision. If it was dark, I couldn’t see. And I didn’t want to see…pucks, everywhere. All identical, wavy brown hair, sly green eyes, smug smirks, rampaging egos, and an appetite for sex that made Caligula seem like a hundred-year-old virginal nun. One puck had taken a few years to get used to. More than one? Hundreds? Maybe thousands? All exaggerating, lying, stealing, trying to screw anything that couldn’t outrun them…

The end of the world had come, and not with a bang…okay, yeah, with a bang. It could be lots of them—the largest planet-wide orgy to date. If that was true, I was eating my gun right then and there.

“How many of them?” I said hoarsely, taking the tea Niko passed me to soothe my abraded throat. It tasted like donkey piss. The way the night was going I wasn’t surprised.

The puck seesawed a hand back and forth. “It’s hard to say. That’s the point to the reunion. We count how many of our race are left. If the amount is too low, then we have a lottery and the schmucks with the unlucky numbers have to reproduce to make sure we don’t go the way so many other of the paien—the supernaturals’ word for their kind—races have. Extinction. We meet every thousand years. We all hate it, but it’s a necessary evil if we want to keep the magnificence that is Puck alive on earth.” He took the same hand and opened a drawer to fish out a checkbook. “My best guess: between seventy-five and a hundred will show. See? Not so bad. When you live pretty much forever you don’t need that many to keep a race intact. So? Fifteen thousand dollars? Does that sound good?”

“Thirty,” Niko corrected. If Robin was offering fifteen it was worth at least two to four times as much. “And you haven’t mentioned precisely what you want us to do.”

“Babysit mostly.” He handed over the check with a sharkish smile that said Niko should’ve asked for fifty thousand. “All our well-deserved high self-esteems”—unbearable egos from hell—“in one place tends to lead to disagreements… some verbal abuse… small fights… attempted murders…large riots. That sort of thing. You’ll be like bouncers, keeping everyone in check, the two of you alone. You’re the only two in the city who can do this. We’ll meet at the Ninth Circle, get it over with in one night, tomorrow night, and then everything can go back to normal.”

“What about everyone else in the bar? The Wolves, lamia, Amadan…the usual. We saw them running like bats out of hell on the way over here. I guess we don’t have to worry about them.” I shoved Niko’s poisonous tea back at him.

“Indeed. No worries there. No one else will be at the bar, as no one else will be in the city. No one but humans.” Robin’s smirk had turned into something darker—beyond old, from the impenetrable forests that swallowed travelers whole, and from under a sky where the stars were the blood-tinged eyes of mad gods. “Every living paien creature will flee this place. They feel it.”

“They know.”

“The Panic has come.”