Roadkill

1

I’d died six months ago.

Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? I’d died.

Only I hadn’t, not really.

I’d lain spread-eagle in our apartment in a pool of blood that no amount of rug cleaner would get out. My eyes were dull and blank as they stared at the ceiling. My gun was still in my hand, but it hadn’t done me much good, despite the dead monsters around me. I liked to think I’d taken a few with me.

I hadn’t seen it, of course, any of it, but it was what I imagined… with a little help of the rug that Niko, my brother, had ripped to shreds with his knife and thrown outside into the hall. And I’d seen my share of dead people, so it helped with the details. Yeah, I pictured it in great if not necessarily accurate detail even though I hadn’t actually seen it.

But Niko had.

Six months later and my brother still wouldn’t tell me if I was on the money with my description. I think telling me would’ve made the memory of the hypnosis- induced illusion worse, sharper. I knew it had seemed completely real to him then, and even now, half a year later, I caught him once in a while looking at me as if he couldn’t believe I was genuinely there, truly alive.

Too bad having little brothers with half monster genes didn’t come with mental health coverage. Pretty goddamn unfair to Niko, all things considered. And with the life we’d lived, those “all things” would make horror movies look like kiddie cartoons. Demon-driven deductibles-they were a bitch.

But since I hadn’t died in reality and Niko was faced every morning with half-dried toothpaste in the sink, wet towel on the floor, dirty dishes on the kitchen counters, and a trail of clothes from my bedroom to the bathroom, I think the memory faded bit by bit. And that must’ve been one helluva relief, because he didn’t bitch about my über- slobbiness. He simply washed out the sink, hung up the towel, did the dishes, and tossed my clothes back in my room and closed the door. So a relief for him, but kind of a worry for me, because that wasn’t Nik-not in any shape or form.

Niko had raised me from birth. And he’d been on my ass since birth as well. Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but close enough. Pick up your clothes, do your home-work, stop drawing cheat notes on your arm, eat your vegetables, quit trying to make out the porn through the scrambled gray zigzag lines. I was in my twenties now, so it was a little different. Run your five miles in the morning. Spar two hours in the afternoon. Study up on how to kill F through H in the Mythological Creature Compendium. Quit trying to make out the porn through the scrambled gray zigzag lines.

Well, some things never changed. And porn channels were expensive.

Niko had come a long way in those six months, although through all of them he would wake up in the middle of the night and stand in the doorway to my bedroom, making sure it wasn’t a dream; making sure I was alive. Not that I’d caught him doing it. I didn’t have to. I knew.

The illusion was my brother seeing me dead. The reality was that my brother would’ve torn the world apart if that illusion had been true.

So I wasn’t surprised he stood there night after night. He’d raised me, been with me my entire life. I knew him all right; knew where I would’ve stood if the reverse had been true. And then one morning I woke up and knew that night he hadn’t been in my doorway watching me sleep. How? The same way. I just knew.

And when I walked out into the hall, yawning and stretching to face his frown, that clinched it. “One:”-Niko held up a finger-“Pick up your clothes. I am not your maid. How do I know this? A maid cannot kill you with a tube sock. I can. Two:”-he raised yet another finger-“toothpaste, towel, dishes.”

“All that under ‘two’?” I muttered, bending to pick up a T-shirt off the floor.

“If I do them separately, we’ll be here all day. Some of us have better things to do,” he responded. “Three: I’ve disconnected the cable. You’ll eventually get eye-strain, and fighting creatures of the night while wearing Coke-bottle lenses tends to cut down on your aim and agility.”

“Not to mention my waves of sheer sexuality.” I grinned as I hid my socks probably less casually than I thought under the T-shirt. The sock threat was a familiar one, but it didn’t mean I wouldn’t end up strangled with one someday.

“Four: Stop making me borderline nauseated with what you imagine to be witty repartee.” He stood, dark blond hair pulled back tightly into a braid that hung several inches past his shoulders; it wasn’t the waist-length one that he’d once had, but it was slowly getting there. His olive-skinned arms were folded across a gray T-shirt-not a normal T-shirt of course, but one woven from the wool of the finest assassin-trained sheep, I was sure. Not that Nik was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He was a saber-toothed tiger in sheep’s clothing; a T-rex without that whole if-I-don’t-move-it-can’t-see-me thing. I was half of a creature so malignantly murderous that the entire supernatural world had feared it; yet my brother, who was fully human, could kick my ass ten times out of ten.

All hail Sparta.

“So, no number five?” I asked as I retrieved a pair of wadded-up jeans from the floor.

His eyes, gray, the same color as mine-our whiskey-adoring mother had at least given us that in common-narrowed. “Number five: You’ve been an absolute pain in the ass for the past six months.” The gray lightened and he gave that fleeting quirk of lips that passed for a Niko smile. “Thank you.”

In the past, I would’ve thought to myself that he would’ve been better off actually mourning me those six months; better off if the illusion had been real, if I had died. But not now. My brutally homicidal relatives were extinct-hopefully-after a lifetime of my running from them. They were gone. No more running. No more fear they would kill everyone I cared for. No more possibility that they would take me from this world again to another and do things to me that would make death seem as bright and happy a prospect as a pony at your sixth birthday party.

The past was gone. Now I had pretty much everything I’d been sure I’d never get. I had two jobs: one working at a bar and one kicking supernatural ass for fun and profit. I had friends. Me. Crowned Mr. Antisocial for at least three- fourths of my life. I was even getting semiregular sex. Life was as unshitty as it had ever been.

No, not unshitty. In fact, it was good. Life was good, believe it or not. I was a changed man-man-monster hybrid. Whatever. Definitely changed. No longer morose and sullen. Not angry and cynical. No more Prozac Poster Child. That wasn’t me anymore. I no longer thought the universe was out to get me. It was all good.

That had been this morning.

“Motherfucker.” I kicked the revenant in the ribs. Yeah, it was dead. I kicked it again. And yeah, it was the equivalent of beating a dead horse. I didn’t care, because it made me feel better. I couldn’t have been more goddamn wrong-the universe was out to get me, same as always. I was late to my bar job, I was having to kick supernatural ass without getting paid, and I’d probably get heartworms from my werewolf friend with benefits, Delilah.

Speaking of wolves, I kept my Glock pointed at the Wolf on the left and the Desert Eagle at the one in front of me. I couldn’t believe I was getting attacked in Central Park… even if it was night. That was boggle territory. Okay, revenants were stupid. They might look like humans on the decomposing side, nature’s camouflage, and they were about as bright as fifth grade bullies, although as hard to kill as your average cockroach. They were tenacious little suckers. But they were smart enough to steer clear of the boggles. Revenants were a few rungs-hell, half the ladder-down the food chain when compared to boggles.

“Who came up with this bright idea?” I snarled. “Too ghoul for school down there?” I kicked the body again. Not that revenants, or ghouls for that matter, had ever been human despite what mythology said, but it was a good line and I used it. “Or one of you mutts, because I think the Kin would know better about me and my brother by now.” As for boggles, a mutt couldn’t take one, but he could outrun one.

The Kin were the werewolf version of the Mafia; just insert “butt sniffing” instead of “ring kissing.” We’d had our run-ins with them once or twice. On the other hand, we’d hired a few for extra bodyguard help in the past. Then there was my dating one off and on, although that was not common knowledge. Some Alphas might keep the occasional succubus or incubus around for sex slaves, but no one was really good enough to actually date a werewolf, except another werewolf. They were Old Country orthodox that way and since I’d been born half sheep (human) and half Auphe (unclean nightmare from the beginning of time-try fitting that on a name tag), I didn’t qualify either way. And as Wolves-again, no matter what the mythology told you-were born, not made, I never would be good enough.

“I mean, you crotch sniffers know who I am, right?” I waggled my Glock at the one on the left. “You. Speak. Arf arf. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I wasn’t vain enough to think every Wolf in the city had my picture with a big heart drawn around it up on his wall. Far from it. In the toilet bowl to piss on, maybe. But while every Wolf might not have known what I looked like, they all knew what I smelled like. Lucky them. It was the rare creature that could pick up the Auphe taint to my scent: dogs, werewolves, and trolls. There wasn’t a Wolf in the city who wouldn’t know who I was at first smell: the half-Auphe freak.

Humans told their kids about the bogeyman under the bed. It might grab your foot in the middle of the night and say boo. The supernatural told their rugrats about the Auphe. It might grab your foot in the middle of the night, drag you under the bed, disembowel you with one clawed hand, and pluck out your eyes with the other. I might look human, but to a Wolf I smelled like the darkness under the bed.

The bogeyman times a hundred; a monster to monsters. So attacking me with one revenant and two Wolves? It was a good way to hump your last leg. Although no matter what they thought, that wasn’t because of my Auphe genes. Good guns and a pissy attitude were enough for that. I wasn’t the monster they smelled in me. Maybe I wasn’t all human, but I wasn’t a raving maniacal killer either.

Raving was a little too much work.

I tightened my finger on the trigger of the Glock. “I’m not hearing anything. I was in a good mood, too, one with the fucking universe, full of happiness and joy and all that crap, and now you’ve ruined it. Unless you want to find out how good my aim is by my neutering you, you’d better talk. Now.”

He was a high-breed Wolf, no recessive traits at all from what I could spot. No furry ears, no lupine eyes or misshapen jaw with trash compactor teeth. To your average human (blind, deaf, and dumb) that’s what he looked like… your average human-until he would turn. But he wasn’t. He could go from man to beast in a helluva lot less than sixty seconds. It didn’t make a difference to me. He could wear all the Abercrombie and Fitch he wanted, do the fake bed hair look, sport those retro preppy glasses. He could spray on a gallon of Axe. The commercials lied. He wasn’t being tackled by a crowd of horny women, and I could still smell the Wolf under it.

The Wolf scent was better, trust me. My half-Auphe sense of smell was fairly close to being as good as a wolf’s, Were or otherwise. This cologne was not my thing-so much so that as my finger was tightening on the Glock in a threat for info, my sneeze accidentally carried it through to a done deed.

Ouch.

“Goddamnit,” I swore. “Sorry about that.” Not sorry that I had to shoot him. He had attacked me-he had it coming. I was sorry that I’d shot him in the crotch, though. I had meant that as a bluff. I still would’ve shot him, but half monster or not, there were things even I wouldn’t do if I didn’t have to. Head, heart, sure-but in the block and tackle? You really had to work at earning a shot there. I winced in sympathy as he curled on his side, turned to a giant wolf in an instant, and howled his lungs out.

This meant, of course, I had to put his pal down with one to the brain. No partner-no good partner-is going to let that happen to his buddy and not do something about it.

He tried. He failed.

Great. Now I was stuck in the park with a dead revenant, a dead Wolf in human form missing a good chunk of his head, and another Wolf screaming for his mommy. That was if you were in the know. Nonhuman. Supernatural. Preternatural. Whatever you wanted to call it.

But for, say, your average cop who heard a screaming wolf and came into the depths of the park as opposed to patrolling the outer edges-to that cop, my little problem would look more like a half- rotted corpse, a freshly dead human, and a mutilated big-ass dog. That was a hat trick that would put me in the running for murderous nutjob perv of the year. Worse yet, the murderous nutjob perv of the year with two unlicensed guns equipped with illegal silencers, a matte black combat knife, three more knives, and a few other surprises hidden away.

One side of my heritage, the human Rom half, told me exactly what to do in a situation like this: run. My experience in the supernatural business world was of the same opinion-but one thing first. I knelt by the Wolf in a tangle of once purposely distressed clothing, now the real deal as claws had shredded it during the change. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me why the three of you jumped me, ball-less wonder?”

Foam-flecked jaws and bared teeth were all the answer I needed. “Your choice.” I shrugged. “You know they normally charge sixty bucks for neutering. I’m a bargain.” I doubted I’d have been in a talking mood in his situation either. I thought of putting him out of his misery, but, hell, he’d brought it on himself. He tried to kill me. Him and that cologne.

What kind of Wolf wore cologne? It was a wonder he wasn’t in the throes of a doggy asthma attack. Their sense of smell was better than my Auphe one. So why would he… shit. There was only one reason a Wolf would coat himself in something that strong. He was trying to cover up the scent of something-or some one else-and hadn’t taken the time or had the time to shower. I leaned back, out of the way of his snapping jaw, and took a deeper whiff.

Delilah.

My Wolf with benefits. She’d saved my life at least once in the past. I knew for a fact she’d saved my sanity by giving me that semiregular sex. Delilah was sterile. When you got to be the age of twenty-one, more or less, before you finally found someone you could sleep with and not run the risk of making babies even an Alien-Predator combo couldn’t love… well, you knew what true friendship was. It didn’t mean Delilah wasn’t trouble, though. Not that she particularly cared one way or the other. Delilah was Delilah-exotic, erotic, and predatory to her bones. That meant one thing: Delilah looked out for Delilah. Period. And if you couldn’t take care of yourself, then that was a damn shame.

For you.

Yeah, my furry fuck buddy. I’d never for a second thought I was her one and only hump day special. I was a lot of things, not all of them good, not all of them especially smart, but gullible? Ever have your mother spit at your feet when you were seven and tell you with drunken venom that there was a Hell, but you were an abomination so horrific that even it didn’t want you?

No? Huh. Just me then.

Regardless, that cured gullible pretty damn fast. I knew there was no way Delilah was faithful and true and brimming with Hallmark’s warm and fuzzy best: hugging bears and hearts and puffy silver balloons chock-full of Romeo and Juliet-style undying love. Why would she be? Friends with benefits tended to spread those benefits around. I knew if I weren’t carrying around sperm potentially toxic to the concept of continued human existence, I might have had my eyes open for the occasional opportunity. But “Hey, great band and are you sterile?” isn’t the best pickup line in the world.

So the cologne lover could’ve been just one of her other “friends.” A jealous one-or if he’d found out about what I was, a bigoted one. She had a special spray of her own, lacking the sneeze quality, that covered up my Auphe-tainted scent, but nobody’s perfect. She could’ve forgotten to hose down her den in the abandoned school once or twice. She didn’t give a damn who knew about us outside the Kin, but within the Kin she was careful. Delilah had ambition, and screwing around, in all senses of the word, with a half-breed Auphe wouldn’t help her at all.

And hanging around here wasn’t going to help me either. I’d have the cops after me for grave robbing and murder, and PETA after me for animal abuse.

I’d take the cops any day.

Despite it all, if this did involve her, it didn’t matter. I still liked her. Just… hell… liked her. Because she liked me. She wasn’t disgusted by my Auphe half or afraid. To her I was just a guy… one with shoulder-length black hair, skin a shade paler than your average human, lots of guns, and a foul mouth-your average New Yorker, in other words. And her treating me that way definitely made her worth liking.

I holstered the guns and ran on into the darkness. I veered off my original path. I had been making up for missing my run this morning. If I didn’t, Niko would make me run the five I’d missed, plus five more, and probably run backward ahead of me so he could mock my athletic failures to my face. Even though it wasn’t conveniently located to our new SoHo apartment, I’d been running in Central Park as usual because it kept me on my toes.

Some people sparred in the gym boxing ring. Some of us ran through the habitat of a nest of mud-wallowing humanoid alligators on massive steroids. A workout is a workout. But this time I’d already had a different type of workout. And now I was late-later than usual-which was saying something. If I waited around to catch a bus or cab, I’d set a new record.

Bartending didn’t pay much; the real money was in the supernatural ass kicking. At least usually, but this was the one bar where I could use the fire axe to take off the head of a drunk and rampaging homicidal lamia before dragging her body to the storage room, and no one would raise an eyebrow. Actually they’d probably be taking bets on who went down first, her or me, and although they knew better, they’d bet on her.

The bar patrons didn’t much like me. They didn’t like my human half, my pale-skinned Auphe half, or my sarcastic and heavily armed whole. Oddly enough, it didn’t much bother me. Maybe it had some at first. But now if you didn’t want to like me, I could not like you right back and with an enthusiasm you might not want to see. The job wasn’t a bad job, and I wanted to keep it. So I took a shortcut-my shortcut.

There are shortcuts and there are shortcuts.

My kind came courtesy of my Auphe father… sperm donor… sire. Whatever you call a thing that pays your mother to breed a bouncing baby interspecies bastard. I don’t know if it-he-was disappointed I looked human, but in the end it didn’t matter. I had enough Auphe on the inside, but I didn’t let it control me-much. I used it.

I just hoped like hell my brother didn’t find out.

Taking that shortcut consisted of ripping a hole in reality and stepping through. I called it traveling. Niko called them gates. Whatever you called them, you could cover miles in a split second-the entire country in the same-to another dimension that was the next best thing to Hell if you wanted.

Actually, radioactive Hell now, thanks to Niko, me, and a de rigueur secret society that had access to suitcase nukes instead of secret handshakes. And the Masons thought they were hot shit.

The gray light rippled before me in the night-gray, dirty, and wrong, but a tool, and a tool I could control and use. The sight of it even quieted the howling Wolf. “Hearing great things about prosthetics. Check it out,” I told him, then stepped through.

Right behind my boss, Ishiah, in the bar’s storage room. I don’t know if he heard me, saw the light from the corner of his eye, or just sensed it. But his wings sprang out of invisibility into a banner of gold-barred white feathers as he turned and was already swinging a fire axe. We had one mounted in every room-less for fire; more for beheading.

“Whoa, boss. I’m not that late,” I said with a grunt as I hit the floor hard to avoid a haircut that would’ve started about chest level.

“Do not do that in this establishment,” he snarled. “Do you understand me?”

Ishiah was my boss and he was a good boss, which meant he paid me and hadn’t killed me. But he had a temper like Moses seeing the Golden Calf and breaking the Ten Commandments. No, that was more like a temper tantrum. Okay, Ishiah had a temper like God taking out Sodom and Gomorrah for being the Vegas of biblical times and turning Lot ’s wife into a saltshaker just for wanting a look. Biblical references… Niko homeschooled me, and I knew a lot of obscure information when I bothered, which, according to everyone I knew, was rarely. But in this case it wasn’t applicable. Ishiah wasn’t an angel. There were no angels or demons, no Heaven or Hell. Fairy tales built on myths built on more myths, all built on the first caveman who refused to believe his kid, his brother, his mother, were gone for good. Who knew what the truth really was? Who wanted to know? Not me.

But here’s what it wasn’t. No angels. Ishiah was a peri, probably where the angel myth began… there and with all the Greek gods with wings. After all, the Auphe were where the elf myth had started and if you took away the hundreds of needle-fine metal teeth, the scarlet eyes, the black talons, shredding jaws, nearly transparent skin, and a raging desire to destroy humanity, then I guess you were close enough. The pointed ears were the same, right?

Thank God I hadn’t gotten the pointed ears. Who wants to pass as a Star Trek or Lord of the Rings fan boy for the rest of their natural-born lives?

A slight increase in the weight of the axe on the back of my neck redirected my attention to where it belonged. Peris, per the mythology book that Niko had swatted my head with on regular occasion, were supposedly half angels /half demons or something midway between the two. In other words, I had no idea what Ishiah was. It didn’t matter. Mythology was always wrong… like the whisper game. You started with one thing and by the time it was passed around the circle, it was something completely different. If you had even a seed of truth in mythology, you were doing damn good. Werewolves and vampires were born, not made, and were not all uncontrollable sex addicts, no matter what the local bookstore’s fantasy section might tell you. Puck, Pan, Robin Goodfellow were all one trickster race; all looked exactly alike; were all male; and they were all uncontrollable sex addicts. Revenants and ghouls had never been human. I could’ve gone on, ticking them off in my mind, but the axe blade was getting uncomfortable.

“Got it. No traveling in the bar. I’ll make a note.” I didn’t think he’d really chop my head off, but with Ishiah, you could never be sure. Can’t say I blamed him, because you couldn’t always be sure about me either… especially when I opened gates.

Why did I travel at all then? To avoid being late? Honestly? If it could bring out the worst in me and it wasn’t to escape imminent, messy, ugly death, then why did I do it?

Good question.

And no good answer. No answer at all, only the excuse that it hadn’t brought out the worst in me lately… not like before. So why not use it? I had control now, so it wasn’t that big of a chance. Not anymore, although getting anyone else to believe it, especially Nik, wasn’t something I looked forward to. But my brother wasn’t the problem at the moment; it was my boss.

“Can I get up and sling some beer or are you going to cut my head off?” I asked Ish. “Either way, I really need to take a piss. It’s been a long day.”

He thought about it, then grunted and lifted the axe. “I’m docking you two hours.”

It was better than having my head docked. I got to my feet and peeled off my jacket. It was summer in New York, which made it too hot for the leather jacket, but when you wore two guns in shoulder holsters, a cheerful smile wasn’t quite camouflage enough-if I could even pull off cheerful, which was doubtful. I didn’t need camouflage in the bar. Humans tended to avoid it like the plague-some instinct passed down from caveman ancestors who knew there were monsters in the world and a woolly mammoth wasn’t the only thing that could squash you flat. The few random humans who did walk through the front doors were predators themselves-arrogant ones who ignored their instinct because they thought they were the shit and no one was more of a badass than them. Those humans usually didn’t leave the bar… except in pieces. The bar didn’t serve food, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be found there once in a while.

I made my way to the bathroom, then out to the bar to toss the jacket under it and grab an apron. “Good crowd tonight,” Sammy commented. Samyel was another peri, dark to Ishiah’s light blond, with wings barred with gray. “Quiet.”

Quiet was good. We didn’t get it that often. I leaned on the bar and took in the small crowd. Vampires, lamias (kind of a combo between a vampire and a leech), three incubi, two vyodanoi (predatory, rubbery, man-shaped water creatures), but no Wolves. Not a one. While quiet was good, that was not… especially on top of what had happened in the park. There were always wolves in the bar.

I fished my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and called Delilah. Modern-day werewolves had modern-day accessories. I got her voice mail. I usually did. She had a busy life, between being a bouncer at a strip club and her Kin work, which could be anything from stealing to fighting rival Kin packs to things I might not want to know about. I had asked if she killed humans. She’d said no-she preferred real prey, real challenge, not bleating sheep. I thought she was telling the truth; she was all about the challenge. But I’d asked her that before I’d killed a few humans myself, so I wasn’t sure I was in the position to judge. Mine had been bad men, but wasn’t “bad” a matter of who was holding the gun and who was getting shot by it?

I left her a message that someone who smelled an awful lot like her had tried to kill me in the park and I hoped he wasn’t a regular hookup, because he had nothing left to hook up with now. I also asked what was up with all the missing Wolves.

Ishiah, wings now gone, came out of the back room with a beer keg and scowled at my making personal calls on my first five minutes of company time. “Two and a half hours,” he said.

Normally he would’ve made it three. I wasn’t the only one getting sex. A fire axe to the neck and docking my pay were actually mellow for him. That was the good part. The bad part was he was getting it from a friend, the only one I trusted besides my brother, and this friend and frequent fellow monster killer liked nothing better than to threaten me with the details… and that was worse than any axe.

When Robin Goodfellow, a puck, threatened you with sexual details, you didn’t need a porn channel and you didn’t need Hustler; when he claimed to have cowritten the Kama Sutra, you believed his bragging ass. And the last thing I needed was to have my boss see me looking at him and trying damn hard not to picture wings and legs and other things in positions you’d need Silly Putty for bones to achieve. That would make him lose his mellow real fast. Goodfellow would like nothing better than to see his adventures on IMAX, but Ishiah was probably more private.

And my twitching at the mental picture wouldn’t liven up the bar any.

I twitched anyway and turned my attention to wiping down the bar. It was clean, but it didn’t matter-anything to keep my thoughts from going down that road. I’d done the same twitching when Nik’s vampire girlfriend had once had some fun at my expense. There are some things about your family and friends you just don’t want to know.

There are also things that you don’t want them to know. Different things maybe, not that it mattered. Niko found out anyway. I didn’t know why I tried. He always did. I discovered that this particular time twenty minutes later when my brother walked through the door… the only human who came and went at the Ninth Circle and lived not to tell the tale. I looked up the instant I smelled him… when I smelled the annoyance on him. More than annoyed, he was completely and totally pissed off. And it took some doing to get my brother pissed off. That didn’t mean he’d hesitate in a fight to take the head off a boggle with his sword, but he wouldn’t be angry when he did it. A job was a job. No need to bring emotion into that equation.

There was plenty of emotion now.

He walked to the bar, flipped open the phone in his hand, and put it down in front of me. The small screen was open to the GPS tracker connected to my cell. “I thought we had an agreement. You don’t gate and I don’t beat you within an inch of your life. Wasn’t that it?” He leaned closer. “The agreement?”

“Shit.” I looked down at the phone blinking accusingly.

“I had a friend of mine at the university program it to alarm every time your signal disappears and reappears approximately four seconds or less later.” Which wouldn’t pick up on the dead zone of the subway. Traveling was a helluva lot quicker than the subway. My brother was smart, probably the smartest guy I’d ever known, but just once couldn’t he have taken a little more after me?

“Well? I’m listening. Were you in dire circumstances? Was it make a gate or die? I’ve always assumed if you escaped near death, you would give me a call afterward. Common courtesy.” He leaned farther. My calm and cool-as-ice brother had a temper too. You had to dig for it, had to push him, but it was there and it could rival Ishiah’s. Ice to fire, but when it was your butt in a sling, whether it was frozen or singed didn’t much matter.

“There were two Wolves and a revenant.” I reached over and snapped his phone shut, tired of the betraying beep. “They attacked me in the park…”

“And?”

I wasn’t going to lie to my brother. Don’t get me wrong; if I could’ve skipped telling him some things I would’ve, both to save him the worry and to save me the ass kicking. But lie to his face? He was my brother. No way.

“And I handled it, was late, and traveled to the bar,” I admitted.

His eyes narrowed. “Because lateness was life threatening?”

I could’ve half joked and said that with Ishiah it could be, but that would have been shitty of me. And while I had no problem being shitty with anyone else, I damn sure wasn’t going to be shitty with Nik. He was the sole reason I was alive, the sole reason I was sane.

In the face of that, how could I be shitty? How could I lie? I couldn’t, not to him. “No, but, hell, Nik, I need to stay in practice. How can I do that if I don’t open a gate once in a while? How can I save our lives if I can’t do it fast enough or if I start foaming at the mouth and become worse than what we’re running from? How do we know if the meditation works if we don’t test it?” I fingered the mala bracelet around my wrist as I asked. I’d gotten it from Nik-one of four that belonged to the Buddha-loving badass himself.

The bracelet was made of steel beads, each one a meditation mantra. It was supposed to keep me centered and in control of my nonhuman side, because in the past when I traveled, it wanted to come out and play. Meditation helped me push it back down. Control. It was all about control, because, believe it or not, they don’t make a pill or a patch for wanting to tear people apart thanks to over a million years of genetic tendencies.

His gaze didn’t shift a millimeter. “And that’s what you were thinking when you traveled from the park to here? Practicing?”

Yeah, in a sling big- time. “Sit down. You’ll need a good hour to ream me.” I sighed. “Beer or tea?”

He didn’t sit and he didn’t speak. I went and brought back both. Brewing the tea took a few minutes, an opportunity for Niko to become a little less furious. I brought the tea that I kept for him under the bar, some mix that cost a ridiculous twenty dollars an ounce, but desperate times called for criminally overpriced tea. Kind of like throwing a virgin on some old god’s altar in hopes he would cure that pesky leprosy. Probably wouldn’t work, but didn’t hurt to try.

I put down the tea. He looked at it, the beer, then me. “I can’t decide which would be the more effective lesson: a bottle smashed over your head or hot tea thrown in your face.”

Maybe it did hurt to try. I took the beer for myself. “I just… needed to. I feel like a hawk stuffed in a cage. I needed, I don’t know, out.”

“A hawk,” he snorted. “A parakeet on your best day.” But he sat down and wrapped his hands around the mug of tea. “You need to?”

“It’s like a rubber band in me, stretched tight enough to snap. If I travel, I feel normal again.”

Better than normal.

“And I haven’t foamed at the mouth or tried to eat anyone even once, swear. I think with the Auphe all dead and losing the mental connection with them, I’m okay. Either that or the meditation is kicking in, but either way, I’m good. I am. And I’ve only done it twice in the past six months.”

“Counting tonight?” he prodded.

“Three times,” I corrected, and glumly drank more of the beer.

“I should’ve had the phone reprogrammed sooner. Meditation works, but not that quickly and not for one of your skill level… virtually nonexistent,” he said darkly. “But we’ll discuss this later. We’re meeting a client here in a few minutes.”

“Who?” It’d been three weeks since our last job. I’d been getting bored. Niko and I, and sometimes Promise and Robin, made up what Niko called Preternatural Investigations. I was convinced he called it that because I could barely pronounce preternatural. My nice, simple Ass-kickers, Inc. had been voted down. “Someone Promise recommended?” I asked. Promise, Niko’s vampire girlfriend, sent the majority of our clients our way, although since they’d only recently reconciled, I didn’t expect it to have come from her. They were taking things slowly from what I could tell, feeling their way carefully. With her daughter, Cherish, having almost killed or made mental slaves of all of us, it was for the best. And with Niko having bypassed the “almost” in killing when it came to Cherish, you’d want to make sure the foundation of the relationship was solid first.

“Actually, someone called my cell and asked for the meet.” He decided drinking the tea instead of scalding me with it was the better plan and took a swallow. “He wouldn’t say anything more.”

That was weird. It wasn’t as if we wrote our number on bathroom walls or paid for subway ads. Monster Maimers, Inc. Call 555-5555. Our work tended to come by word of mouth… from either Promise or Robin. “He, huh? Did he say what he wanted?”

“No. Think of it as a surprise.”

It was a surprise. A helluva surprise.

One: It wasn’t a man.

Two: She was human… in the Ninth Circle and not afraid.

Three: We knew her. And maybe she was human, but she was also one of the scariest humans I’d come across. A hundred if she was a day and a greedy, manipulative, borderline psychotic witch… and I didn’t mean the Wizard of Oz kind. The only thing magical about her was the level of her pure vile nastiness. She liked me-I think because I’d been a little psychotic myself when I’d first met her.

Abelia-Roo.

Head of the Sarzo Clan. Rom. Toothless, wizened, maybe four foot ten, and didn’t give a rat’s ass who died as long as she got money out of it. She’d once sold us something we’d needed as ransom in a hostage situation and hadn’t bothered to mention that activating it took the blood of a gypsy. That blood had turned out to be Niko’s and that I definitely gave a rat’s ass about-a giant rat’s ass; big, furry, and pissed. It made me wonder how socially unacceptable it was to break the kneecaps of an old lady with her own intricately carved cane.

She leaned that cane against the bar, sat her tiny frame on the stool next to Niko, and arranged the red fringed shawl over her sacklike black dress. “Niko and Caliban Leandros of the Vayash Clan.” Her black eyes glittered. “You enjoyed our hospitality once. I expect to be as well treated.” She knotted her gnarled hands on the bar and rattled off something in Romany, which neither Niko nor I spoke. Sophia had never bothered to teach us the language. She had left her clan before we were born and when the clan had found out what she’d done to produce me… well, they hadn’t exactly welcomed us with open arms.

Abelia-Roo grinned, showing her gums. “But I forget. You do not speak your own tongue. A disgrace. I will have a glass of your best wine. And if it is not your best, I shall know.”

“I’ll have to get a wineglass and scoop some water out of the toilet. Give me a sec,” I growled, my eyes slits. “Or better yet, haul your wrinkled old ass back to Florida or wherever you’ve set up camp. And tell Branje hey.” I’d threatened to slice off the nose of Abelia-Roo’s main muscle man. Then again, when you had him on the ground, knee in his gut, the tip of your knife up a nostril and you fully intended to do it, I guessed it wasn’t a threat.

The gums showed again, this time specifically in my direction. “Still a real man. It’s difficult to believe the Vayash Clan ever produced one.” The Vayash Clan also hadn’t seen the need to spread around that they gave birth to a half-breed Auphe. The rest of the clans would’ve had serious words to say about that. She still didn’t know about me then. “If I were ten years younger, my boy, I’d give you the ride of your life.” She patted the white bun at the back of her head with a coy hand. It didn’t do anything to cover up the pink-brown skin that peeked through the strands covering her scalp.

It was hard to stay pissed when you were trying not to spew all over yourself and the bar. I managed. I liked to think of pissed as number one in the repertoire that made up my general crapfest of moods. I was really, really good at it. Pulling in at the last of that emotional list would be forgiveness. “That’d still put you at nine hundred,” I said with distaste. “No thanks. The only thing I want from you is to get the hell out of here. Thanks to your not telling us about the Calabassa, my brother almost died, you evil bitch.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Samyel blink at my laying the b- word on what looked like a sweet old granny. But this sweet old granny would’ve drugged Samyel and sold his feathered butt to a chicken farmer. As a poor egg producer, he would end up an extra-crispy wing and thigh with a side of coleslaw before he even knew what happened.

“A man you may be, but worthless as a Rom,” she scorned. “You buy an RV without looking at the engine and you come crying when it won’t run because it doesn’t have one? Pssssh.”

“You-” I had my finger up and was ready to poke her in her bony chest.

Niko caught my hand and slapped it lightly down on the bar. “Pistol-whipping elderly women isn’t precisely our mission statement, Cal.”

I hadn’t been going to pistol-whip her. Yell at her a little more, then pick her up and toss her out into the street. Some risk of a broken hip there, but that wasn’t pistol-whipping… unless she tried to come back in. “You almost died because of her,” I snapped, eyes still on her.

“Maybe I did not know,” she said, the canny expression on her face replaced with all the innocence of the witch stuffing Hansel in the oven.

“Know what?” Niko asked pointedly.

“Whatever it is you think I knew,” she answered promptly as she started pulling cloth bags out of the depths of her shawl-three of them and good sized. She placed them on the bar. “Now, I wish my wine and to discuss a business opportunity for you. Although, being that you are Vayash and half Vayash half gadje, I should spit at your feet.” Niko was pure Vayash as far as we knew. The clan had passed through Greece generations ago and intermarried with the Northern Greeks before moving on, which is where the occasional blond one popped up. That and the darker complexion gave Niko Vayash cred. My black hair was Rom enough, but the pale skin-that would never pass.

She went on. “But, no, I am here to give you a chance to earn money, although I could’ve found much better to do the task. Remember that. But I am sentimental in my old age.” She looked at me again and winked or had a ministroke; I wasn’t sure which. “But not too old.”

“Okay, Nik, you’ve got to let me pistol-whip her.” I glared at her as I spoke. A vodyanoi stumping past in its oversized trenchcoat caught the edge of my molten expression, moaned, and headed for the back of the room-as far away from me as he could get. Abelia-Roo? Her, it didn’t faze. Then again, I hadn’t once killed quite a few of her kind with a sword and guns and one unfortunate margarita incident. Vodyanoi take to salt pretty much like a garden slug does-not too damn well.

“ Cal.”

“You almost died,” I repeated, but with his tone I was in a losing argument. With Niko I usually was.

“But I didn’t, and I’m curious.” Niko tilted his gaze down by more than a foot to take her in. “You’d have to know, Abelia-Roo, that we’d have very little desire to deal with you after last time. You must be in quite a situation.”

“A little trouble.” She shrugged. “So tiny, it is too insignificant for one of my people to bother with.” She took one of the bags and emptied it in a semicircle around her stool. It was salt. That would keep the next vodyanoi at a distance.

“Tiny.” Niko didn’t have to lift an eyebrow or use any of the tones he used on me. He only said the word and it may as well have been carved out of doubt.

“Perhaps very small would be a better term, but still quite simply solved.” She clucked her tongue. “Strapping men and afraid of a little work. Your laziness puts all Rom to shame.” Opening the next bag, she pulled out a tranquilizer pistol. I recognized it because I’d once had one used on me. Turning on the stool, she selected a vampire at a table by himself, hefted the pistol capably in her gnarled hand, and fired.

The vampire exploded.

Okay, maybe not literally, but close enough to get the job done. Every orifice, every pore, they all poured out blood so fast and furiously that within seconds he was a blood-covered limp body draped over the table. “Heparin,” she said with wicked cheer. “Gadje magic.” She gave the incubi an eye and went for the third bag. From that came a large pair of silver scissors that she snapped at the incubi with enthusiasm. They crossed their legs hurriedly and hissed, showing their snakelike, curved fangs. That along with the occasional glitter of pearly scale with their blue and black hair was the only thing that gave them away as not your everyday, average male hooker.

“Heparin?” I asked Nik.

“Blood thinner,” he explained. “I didn’t know it would have that effect on vampires.”

“Is he dead?” I looked to see if he was breathing, because vampires did breathe, just like their hearts beat-although I wasn’t too sure about this guy anymore. “Only staff are allowed to kill the customers. And then the boss likes us to have a good reason.”

“He’ll live,” she said dismissively. “It was a light dose. He’s lost only half his blood volume. He’ll have to break into a blood bank when he wakes up. Those vitamins they take now won’t help him, but that’s not my concern. Keeping the gunoi in their rightful, fearful place is.”

“These ‘feces,’ as you call them, are my patrons,” Ishiah said from behind me. He spoke Rom and we didn’t. Then again, he knew Robin Goodfellow from thousands of years back. You’re going to pick up a few things along the way. Niko would know it himself; he knew a couple of languages, but Rom-he refused, with good reason.

“Do you think I don’t have a bag for you too, little birdy?” she snorted. “Or stories of your kind to tell?”

How she knew he was a peri I didn’t know. Both he and Samyel had their wings out of sight. Peris could do that. The wings came and went in a glitter of light. Where exactly they went, I didn’t have a clue. I did know Ishiah wouldn’t back down from a tiny withered woman. But it didn’t come to that. Suddenly Abelia- Roo was done playing. “Shoo, little birdy. I’m ready to talk business with these two, words not for your ears. Fetch my wine and I’ll be the sweetness and light of an angel itself.” She spread her hands above her head. “See my pure gold halo? See the bright sparkle?”

Ishiah scowled, the long scar on his jaw stretching to a gleaming white, then bit off, “See that you are.” He looked at me. “You owe me.” He was gone before I could say I’d be just as happy if he tossed her out-happier, in fact.

“So… this business,” Niko said, “that is too insignificant for you to be bothered with. What is it?”

“We have lost a thing.” She lifted a hand and waved it as if it were nothing. “An iron box. Six feet long. Wide, like so…” She held her hands apart, a little more than three feet.

“Funny, that’s about the size of a coffin,” I said. I took the glass of wine Samyel handed me and instead of passing it to her, I drank it myself-mainly to stick it to her, but also to see just how serious this “business” was. I was hoping she’d curse me and head for the door. But she didn’t, and that meant this was serious all right. Serious, dangerous as hell no doubt, and our client would be Abelia-Roo. The first two I was used to… but the last. no way. “Nik, did you remember coffin retrieval on our resume? Because I don’t.”

“No, but rubbing warm, scented oil all over your favorite puck is. I wrote it in myself.” Robin, our self-proclaimed favorite puck, draped an arm over Niko’s shoulders and his other one over Abelia-Roo’s narrow ones. I’d seen him come in the front, wavy brown hair windblown, green eyes bright with anticipation, and I didn’t think it was at seeing us. He was looking for Ishiah. He did that daily now… more than daily. It was a wonder either one had the strength to stand upright.

Scary thoughts. Scary, scary thoughts.

“Who’s your… ah… elderly friend… oh gamiseme tora.” The puck pulled his arm away so quickly, it was a wonder he didn’t yank it completely out of its socket. “The skila from the Sarzo piece of skata clan. Is this a nightmare? Zeus’s wandering prick, let it be a nightmare.” Goodfellow, as a puck, trickster, and used car salesman, had been put in charge of the previous bargaining with Abelia- Roo down in Florida. He claimed he was mentally scarred for life. I’d been there. I believed him.

“She wants us to find an iron coffin they seem to have ‘misplaced,’ ” Niko said dryly. “Perhaps they left it at a rest stop.”

“An iron coffin… an iron coffin? No. Suyolak? You’ve lost Suyolak? You have lost the Plague of the World?” Robin hissed. “You did not. You couldn’t have. You have one responsibility: to guard the evil you spawned, and you’ve let him escape?”

I looked curiously at Niko. He might not speak Rom, but if there was a monster, Rom or otherwise, he knew about it. He began speaking as casually as if he were telling a story about a well-known relative. The facts were at his fingertips and he did love to share those facts. “Suyolak, as legend goes, was a gypsy born almost a thousand years ago, one with a special gift. He had the knowledge of the cure for any illness, but he was chained to a rock. It was said should he break free, he would destroy the entire world. The Sarzo Clan wasn’t mentioned.”

“So he’s a healer. Why would a healer destroy the world? Why lock him up?” Admittedly, however, the coffin was more practical than a big rock; you never knew where the next condos would be going up.

Robin’s mouth curled with disgust. “The reason he has the knowledge of every cure is that he has the knowledge of every disease. Had, in his day, caused every disease. He’s an antihealer. You do recall something called the Black Death, do you not? Fleas may have spread it, but he was ground zero for the outbreak.”

Abelia-Roo’s black eyes didn’t blink as the truth came out. “It is so. He was a walking plague. Wherever he would go, people would sicken and die. He himself will not die; that cure he saves for himself. Age itself he tosses away.”

“And I’ll bet that was useful,” I said with scorn. “Send him to a town, make a couple of people sick, then come and cure them… for a price. I’m thinking like a Sarzo now, hey, Nik? Maybe I’m not Vayash after all.”

They still didn’t blink-like black marbles, those eyes. “It is said Suyolak grew to prefer killing over money or loyalty to the clan. He cured no longer. So, while he slept, exhausted by several of the prettiest girls of that day and drunk beyond oblivion, he was locked away beyond iron and zinc that his powers could not pass through. We carried him with us through the years, from country to country. He was our burden. All clans have one… a duty… a watch to carry out.”

I wondered if that made me the Vayash’s burden. Not that I was sure putting me in an iron box would do them any good. Healing was based on psychic talents, which were blocked by iron. Niko would be proud I remembered that. I didn’t have any idea if my traveling was based in the psychic realm, but I did know trying to put me in any kind of box was only going to end in my seeing how many Rom I could stuff in there… like clowns in a clown car-only with no way out.

“He is ours,” she went on, tucking the defensive bags away back under her shawl, “and now after all these years, hundreds, more, of bearing our burden without complaint, someone has taken him. Men with guns. Sarzo died to protect our duty. And if those who have taken him turn him loose… then Sara-la-Kali help us.” Her eyes pinned us. “Now, you, who owe us for the help we gave you in the past, must return him to us.”

Goodfellow protested immediately, his mobile face outraged, “We paid for that help and about ten times more than it was worth. I can’t hold my head up among the other tricksters for that.” Then, as inquisitive as he was angry, he asked, “How do you know he’s not dead? He could be bones in there. You haven’t opened it up to take a peek, have you?”

“And be struck blind, deaf, and dumb instantly, foolish puck? Or have my heart explode in my chest? No.” For the first time she seemed unsettled. “We heard him now and again. Through the iron, we would hear his screams of fury. His sly whispers of rewards for his release. His singing. The old songs… the ones for death. Dirges for any so suicidal as to try to look on his face.”

Her dried face shriveled further, cheeks hollowing. “Whoever took him, for whatever reason, it won’t matter. Once they set him free, birds will plummet from the sky. Fish will turn belly up. Every creature whose path he crosses will fall to a crumpled corpse.

“He will devour the world.”