Roadkill

2

“Why is it always the world?” I tossed at the wall one of the Nerf ninja stars I’d given Niko as a joke and watched it bounce. “Why is it never just half a block? Or Jersey? You know, something we could live without?” It was after work and almost four a.m., but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to see my bed any time soon unless I gave in.

I wasn’t giving in.

“Because life is a lesson to be learned, not recess for lazy-minded little boys.” Niko snatched the star from midair and tossed it himself. This time the foam imitation of a weapon actually embedded itself in the moss green wall. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. Niko not only defied belief, but physics too. “Have you heard back from Delilah regarding the park attack?”

“No. Either she’s busy on a job or sniffing around”-I grinned-“so to speak. To see what’s up.”

“And you’re sure they were Kin Wolves?” he persisted.

“Definitely. They brought a revenant.” Only werewolves in the Kin would be hanging around with a revenant. They used them as pure dumb muscle-usually for things the Kin found too boring or disgusting to do themselves and because they considered them completely expendable. I had to agree with them there.

“Since Delilah’s a wash for now,” I went on, “what about this job… this job we are so not going to take, right?” I crossed my arms across my chest from where I was reclined on our apartment couch. The apartment was a nice loft in SoHo thanks to a big payday we hadn’t expected… much nicer than anything we’d ever had. Up until then, we’d lived in anything from rat holes to trailers to not-quite-converted warehouses. But the sofa was the same one from our first days in New York almost three years ago. It was battle battered, repaired several times over, and perfectly hollowed out to the weight of my back and slothful ass. It took a long time to get furniture to fit the pickiest parts of my body.

“Plague of the World. A walking, talking, most likely extremely annoyed grim reaper out to destroy anything in his path. He also apparently lives forever. And you feel we should let this one pass?”

“You forgot he likes to sing,” I grumbled. “Maybe he’ll hit American Idol and that asshole Brit will humiliate him to death.” I didn’t watch reality TV. I was victimized by it. They turned it on in the bar. It was so hideous, you couldn’t ignore it and if I shot the TV, it’d come out of my pay-like everything else.

Niko looked at me with as much disappointment as if I’d admitted to eating puppies for a late- night snack. “You watch-”

“No,” I said, cutting him off. “I don’t. And I don’t work for Abelia-Roo either. She’s a liar. She almost got you killed. And she’s hornier than Robin, which scares the living shit out of me. Let her find someone else.”

He considered it for a moment, slipped the sneaker off one of my feet dangling over the sofa’s arm, and then beaned me in the forehead with it. “That, in case you were curious,” he said, “was social responsibility knocking at your door.”

“Ow!” I glared at him and rubbed my forehead. “Since when? We always looked out for ourselves and nobody else.” Except for Promise and Robin who had managed to slide in when we weren’t looking.

“Since the Auphe are gone and we’re free. With freedom comes responsibility.” He drummed his fingers on the shoe still on my other foot.

“Well, in this case, responsibility can go fu-” The second shoe hit me in exactly the same spot. “Will you quit it, damn it!”

“That was civic duty,” he said patiently. This time his fingers were tapping on the TV remote on the end table. “Would you care to discuss further the philosophy of living in a civilized society?”

“Jesus, no thanks.” I sat up hurriedly. “You know, when I was a kid and didn’t want to do something, you made me s’mores and talked to me about it. You didn’t hit me with a shoe.”

Making s’mores then had meant Nik begging a Hershey’s bar off a neighbor in a neighborhood where no kid should live, much less walk alone, melting it for two seconds in our rickety microwave, and squashing it between two saltine crackers. In reality they’d probably sucked. To a five-year-old who’d never had the real thing, it was bliss. “You didn’t throw shoes at me,” I repeated with a grumble.

“You were five and good.” He quirked his lips, but his eyes said it wasn’t with humor-nostalgia either. Only regret. I knew what he was thinking: too good to be five years old. Too quiet. Too careful. You had to be around Sophia or you’d be sorry. Well, the days of quiet and careful were long gone, but it turned out the s’mores had stuck around. “Fine. I’ll make you s’mores and we’ll discuss this like rational adults.”

He was really going to make s’mores? This I had to see. It had been years… since I was thirteen maybe, and he’d been going away to college, after skipping a year of high school-no surprise. “And if I still don’t want to do it?” I demanded.

“We’ll see.” He passed me on the way to the kitchen area, the TV remote still in his hand. Bargain, but have backup. It was a good rule to live by.

Ten minutes later I regarded the gluten-free crackers, soy chocolate, and a blob of tofu masquerading as marshmallow. “Just like the good old days,” I said glumly, straddling the kitchen chair. “Not.” Of course the good old days had also included fish sticks dipped in yogurt for tartar sauce.

Food had been a big part of our childhood. Getting it for one thing; it wasn’t that easy. Nik had been born smarter than anyone had a right to be, honorable through and through although he thought-wrongly-taking care of me had something to do with that, but he’d also been born proud. Genetics are funny things, because he hadn’t gotten any of that from Sophia… except the smarts. She’d been plenty damn smart when ripping off a mark, but damn stingy about sharing the money. I’d been in the third grade before I figured out Niko had had to go to the principal and tell him we needed free lunches. When I’d gone to first grade, they gave me free food, and I thought that’s the way it was for everybody.

If it hadn’t been for me, Niko would’ve gone without. Like I said, proud. He probably had gone without for his first four years of school or brought whatever could be scrounged in our mostly empty kitchen. Sophia wasn’t much on grocery shopping, but everyone at the liquor store knew her by name. Some memories you didn’t need a scrapbook for; a burning knot in the pit of your stomach got the job done.

She taught us one thing, though: When you didn’t take food for granted, it could figure in all sorts of occasions-convincing, consoling, even celebrating. I’d grown up, technically anyway, but I hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to know the only reason I wasn’t hungry was because of my brother. And I hadn’t forgotten to appreciate food.

But sometimes it was hard as hell to appreciate Niko’s adult food. It didn’t change the fact I picked up the s’more that would make even a hard-core vegan head for the nearest McDonald’s and took a bite. It was every bit as god-awful as I knew it’d be. “Great.” I chewed with the best imitation of enthusiasm I could whip up as I crunched cardboard, soy chocolate like muddy asphalt, and fake marshmallow that… Hell, I couldn’t even think of anything to compare it to.

The taste might not have been anything like when I was a kid, but Niko was the same, keeping tradition alive. When the only ones you had were the ones you made up, they mattered. They mattered a helluva lot.

“Okay, convince me.” I sighed. The first time I’d needed Niko’s special brand of convincing was when I was five and I wanted my own bed. All grown up and wanting my own bed-same tiny bedroom, but different bed-because I hadn’t known then… hadn’t known there were monsters in the night. But Niko had known; he had seen it two years before and kept it a secret. Being in the same room wasn’t enough for him after that. You never forget your first kiss, and you never forget your first leering package of death grinning at you through a kitchen window.

So, we had our version of s’mores back then and he’d said the one thing I couldn’t say no to… not even as a little kid. “I’d be lonely,” he’d told me, nine and solemn. “One more year, Cal. Okay? Just one more. When you’re six and I’m ten and we’re all grown up.”

Five-year-old Cal never would deny his big brother anything. A twenty-one-year-old Cal wouldn’t either, but I didn’t have to make it as easy these days. This Cal would never be anything like that long-ago one. It was too bad; that had been a much better Cal. Ignorance was bliss and sometimes made for a much better person. But ignorance hadn’t been an option for me for long. The few years I’d been lucky enough to be that way had been all due to Nik.

Once there had been an innocent, quiet, and good kid. Now there was me. I wasn’t innocent; I wasn’t good. I was quiet, but that was usually as I stood behind you a split second before I slit your throat. But that didn’t mean I didn’t remember. I did, and I remembered who’d kept me innocent as long as he could.

“Never mind with the convincing,” I said around another mouthful. I might not have been the same, but Nik was. And I still couldn’t tell him no. “I’ll do it.”

The absence of my usual stubbornness took my typically unflappable brother off guard for a split second. “That simple?”

I shrugged. “Next year, when ‘we’re all grown up,’ I won’t help save the world. How about that?”

“I think ‘all grown up’ won’t hit you until your mid-eighties, but, yes, it’s a deal.” He handed me another s’more and, God help me, I took it.

“One thing, though,” I said. “This time I get to negotiate with Abelia-Roo.”

He paused in cleaning up, wiping the counter with typical Niko antiseptic zeal. “Robin certainly won’t fight you for it, but why are you so eager to be cheated and molested to the point of post-traumatic stress disorder?”

Because Niko could have died because of her. Because I don’t forget things like that… not ever. Because I wanted a little payback and I wasn’t talking about the money.

For those she’d cheated in the past.

For those she’d cheat in the future.

For what she’d allowed to happen to my brother.

For good old-fashioned revenge.

I grinned with the same dark cheer Abelia-Roo had shown in the bar when bleeding the vampire half dead and added the last, equally valid, reason out loud.

“For fun.”

Niko called Abelia-Roo to let her know we’d take the job and would be upstate that evening to talk terms. By the time Niko disconnected, her voice had gotten shrill enough I could hear it across the room. “In a hurry, huh?” I yawned.

“The entire devouring of the world, destruction of all living things, it seems to disturb her,” he said dryly. “But obviously not you.”

Destroy the world? I’d once nearly unmade the world. Not my fault… mostly… but it had rearranged my priorities some. Destruction of the world versus nap: Nap won. Since I couldn’t get a full night’s sleep thanks to the Kin and Abelia, a nap would have to do. Besides, as there was no way we’d catch whoever stole the gypsy grim reaper in a matter of hours, it didn’t make much difference. I checked my watch. Five a.m. Groaning, I headed for the bedroom, losing a sock along the way, fell onto my bed, and instantly into dark, utterly empty sleep.

I woke up, who knew how many hours later, to that same lost sock stuffed halfway in my mouth. I spat it out and counted myself lucky it wasn’t another of Nik’s s’mores. I’d take the taste of a dirty sock over that any day. With cotton fuzz on my tongue, I flailed around for the alarm clock. It was eleven a.m. I’d had about six hours’ sleep. Just about half of what I usually went for, but what could you do?

I rolled out of bed and gazed blearily at the piles of clothes on my floor, trying to remember which were clean, which were dirty, and which, just like Johnny Cash, walked the line. I took a sniff, made the determination, and grabbed a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. I probably wouldn’t hit up any wolves for info about last night’s attack… They might not all know about me and Delilah yet. It might have been just those two. But if the others did know, then that could get back to the Kin, which would be bad news for Delilah. Plus, all werewolves weren’t Kin. Some were just living their lives: lawyers, waitresses, accountants, healers…

Revenants, on the other hand, were a different story. I’d never met a revenant who didn’t eat people. That’s what they did. That’s who they were. They were sharks, and people were walking, talking chum. And that meant there was no such thing as a revenant that wasn’t better off dead… not in my book.

After the shower, I found a note in the kitchen from Nik. He’d taped it to the Lucky Charms cereal box so I wouldn’t miss it. Gone to work. Back for meet. Gate and I’ll baptize you face-first in the toilet. Short and to the point, my brother.

It was Tuesday, so that meant he was kicking ass, taking names, and being paid for the pleasure at the dojo on West Twenty-fifth. Most other days he taught as a TA at NYU. Mythology, history, fencing, all while supposedly pursuing his master’s-or was it a doctorate? Hell, I could never remember. Never mind, the Auphe had put an end to his early college days quick. Robin Goodfellow had friends… philosophical friends from the good old days of orgies and gladiators… who still taught even today and pulled some strings to provide Nik with a degree from a Greek university.

Good for him. He more than deserved it. I, on the other hand, already knew more about the world than I cared to. The back of the cereal box was good enough for me-that and the weight of the guns in my holsters and my knives. Many knives… and then there was the occasional explosive round. I liked to think that made me easy to please, not paranoid and homicidal. You couldn’t be paranoid if they were not only out to get you, but had gotten you. And homicidal? I took a bite of cereal and crunched. In my world even the beauty queens were homicidal. I just passed on the tiara.

I hit the street, checked my voice mail-still no Delilah-and decided which revenant hangout to hit. During the night they walked the streets, the human clothes and gloom enough camouflage against all but the closest looks. During the day, if they kept their sweat-shirt hoods up and heads down, and slimy hands in their pockets, they could get by. But it was a risk. But just as peris had bars, so did revenants-if you took away the other customers, the bathrooms, and the whole sanitation issue. In other words, they drank alcohol in pools of their own filth.

Festive.

Revenants were sewer rats mainly. They were either too stupid or too lazy to get jobs unless it was for the Kin, and the only meal that really turned them on was human, so they would find a deserted place to take over and congregate. There were probably about twenty places like that scattered around the city. I’d been to only two in the past and that had been enough. No matter where they were, above or below, you could bet on one thing: They would be rank. Revenants were all about slaughter and nice, ripe gobbets of flesh, but hygiene? They weren’t lining up for deodorant, that was for damn sure.

But this time I wasn’t going down into the sewers. I’d had my share of those on a previous case and trying to track down revenants there by stench was a losing battle. Natural versus supernatural stink-I wasn’t that good. I was still going to get wet, though, which is why when I knocked at Robin’s door, I was surprised he was holding a cat carrier. I’d called him to see if he was up for a hunting trip and he’d been oddly enthusiastic. Now I saw why.

“Um…,” I said, hesitating as eyes made up of what looked like yellow candlelight peered at me through the metal bars. “Why? Cats don’t like water. I don’t think mummy cats would be much different.” In addition to the eyes, there was a mouthful of fangs that showed when she grinned-and she always grinned.

Robin had managed to get the equivalent of “followed home” by a mummified cat during our last… “adventure” wasn’t the right word. More like our last FUBAR. Whatever you called it, it didn’t matter. What did matter was that shaking a mummy cat off your trail was a lot harder than shaking off a normal feline.

“Look, kid, I didn’t say I’d go with you for this little interrogation/extermination project simply because the car lot offices are being painted. The Hair Club for Cats here needs some exercise. She’s getting antsy and you remember what happened last time she got antsy. She arranged some playtime on her own.”

She-Salome-had gotten out of Goodfellow’s condo, killed a neighbor’s old, senile Great Dane that was using the hall for exercise, and then left the carcass on Robin’s pillow as a present like a good little mummified kitty. Mummy cats didn’t eat, but they did like to play the same as live cats. And if no neighbors had any big-ass dogs left to play with, she might decide the neighbor himself would do just fine.

A hairless paw, with perfectly normal-looking claws that obviously weren’t, came through the bars, followed by a dry-as-dust mrrrrp. “There, there. Who’s a good kitty?” I said, taking a step back. I didn’t pull a gun, though. In my eyes that gave me balls of steel. In Salome’s eyes, steel would just make them all the easier to roll across the condo floor.

“You love her, don’t you, Goodfellow?” I said, taking another step back. “Admit it. She’s your pookie bear.”

“She’s a boil on the cheek of my finely toned ass,” he grumbled, but he let the paw hook around his finger. Robin, from what we knew, was hundreds of thousands of years old… if not older. Friends came and went quickly from his perspective, especially human ones, but mummy cats-who knew how long they could live? Wahanket, the mummy who’d made her, was older than the pyramids. She could hang around for a long while. When friends were mayflies in comparison to you, a mummy cat wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “So, I’m in my casual clothes.” By that he meant his non-Armani slacks, shirt, and long duster, which was good for concealing swords. It was when he concealed his sword without a duster that I started worrying. “Where are we going hunting?”

I grinned. “How do you feel about nature hikes? Wetlands? Save the yellow spotted leech?”

From the spitting of Greek curses an hour later as we splashed through the calf-high muddy water, surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes, he thought about the same of it as I did. It sucked.

“Wet enough for you?” I commented, and ducked the water he kicked in my direction.

“Ai pidiksou,” he spat, but continued after me.

We were at the Flushing Airport, abandoned since before I was born. Thanks to Robin’s owning a car lot, we had access to whatever we needed… including a Jeep… if the subway and bus wouldn’t get us where we needed to go. “This is what happens when you build an airport on a swamp,” I grunted. Swamp was the non-fancy name for wetlands. Built in the twenties, closed in the eighties, and located on top of a damn swamp was the sum total of what I knew or cared to know about the place.

That and it was home sweet home to a bunch of revenants who worked for the Kin. This was actually a sort of reward situation for them. If they’d done good and not messed up for several months, a long stretch for a revenant’s reasoning and willpower, you got hauled out in a party bus with several dead or mostly dead humans, twenty kegs or so, and left for a week or thereabouts to lie around, eat, drink, and do whatever revenants do to make little revenants. The last was yet another thing I didn’t need or want to know.

There were two hangars and one smaller building. The blue sky reflected in the still water ahead of us and it was warm enough that I’d shed my jacket and left it in the Jeep. There was no one to see out here but revenants, and since I planned on their seeing my weapons up close and personal, there was no reason to hide them. Except for the mosquitoes, the mud in my shoes, and the stink of our prey, it was a nice day. Not that there weren’t other opinions on that.

“Poseidon’s barnacle-ridden testicles,” Goodfellow snarled as he held the cat carrier up as I sloshed along. I sloshed. He moved through the water like a shark, soundless and with barely a wake. When you were possibly older than mankind itself, you were good at things like that. The temper hadn’t seemed to have improved over the years, though. “Pick a building. I’m hot, I’m surrounded by water and mud… mud without naked women or men wrestling in it, mind you, and I’m not pleased. And why isn’t Niko here? Surely he’s not avoiding his duty?”

“Niko had to work, and the day it takes more than two of us to handle a bunch of drunk and passed-out revenants is the day we get a job stuffing teddy bears at the toy store. And speaking of naked mud-wrestling women, how is Ish handling your wild and woolly ways?” I grinned wickedly. “You talk him into the whole orgy scene?” Pucks loved a good orgy, or two, or a hundred. “Or do you just swing by his place afterward and cuddle?”

“Do not go there,” he said with a grim set to his mouth.

I picked one of the hangars and headed for it. The other ramshackle wooden building was too small and the stench was everywhere, but a little stronger toward one of the hangars. “Don’t get me wrong.” I held up my hands. “I don’t want details. I so don’t want even a single detail. I don’t even want to know that details exist. I’m just curious how it’s working out since he’s a little holier than thou and you’re… well, unholier than pretty much the whole world and all alternate dimensions. In the sex area anyway.”

“I said, don’t… go… there,” he gritted. “Or my sword will go someplace you think equally private. Are we clear?”

It was a big change from Robin’s usual bragging ways. I’d once learned more in one hour from listening to him boast than I had from two solid years’ worth of porn mags. He’d been the one to first get me laid. Not with him. Even if I were into guys, and I wasn’t, but if I were… I’d once accidentally seen him naked. Walk softly and carry a big stick was one thing. Walk softly and carry the Washington Monument was another altogether.

“Okay. Okay.” If Robin didn’t want to be his normal bragging self, it was weird, bizarre, and probably a sign of the end of days, but it wasn’t the time to yank his chain about it. It was time to slice and dice some revenants. And that, more than the sun and the blue sky, was what made this a nice day. As we approached the chosen hangar, I pulled my Desert Eagle, matte black, and my serrated combat knife, same color.

“You realize black really isn’t very adroit camouflage in broad daylight,” Robin drawled.

“Believe it or not, the Eagle doesn’t come in sunshine yellow,” I grunted before pausing at the partially askew huge metal doors. “Looks like a good place to turn her loose. You know they’re waiting inside, right? She’ll have to be quick.”

“What? You think they heard the splashing of a tsunami crossed with a beached whale that is you walking through water? Surely you jest,” he snorted.

“And I suppose you just walked on it in your day?” I snorted back as he opened the door to the cat carrier to let Salome bound out.

“Rumors. Lots and lots of wine and rumors. And the tide was extremely low.”

Salome, finding herself in and surrounded by water, picked up a wet paw and looked at it, then back at Robin with woeful betrayal in those glowing eyes. Then her hairless ears perked as her head turned back, the whiskerless muzzle opened to scent the air, and she was gone-like a streak of lightning… wrinkled, bald, undead lightning. Okay, that wasn’t exactly poetry, but she was fast as shit. I heard the ring of the hoop earrings in the tips of her ears and then I heard outraged screams. No way I was letting her have all the fun. I slipped through the crack of the two slightly agape doors and shot the revenant that immediately attacked me. I shot him in the face, which was good for killing a lot of creatures… and movie zombies… but for a revenant, it was just another hole in the head, literally. Granted, with a Desert Eagle.50, it was one almighty big hole, but it didn’t take him down; it only slowed him down for half a second. Sometimes half a second was all you needed.

He staggered back from the force of the shot and I tackled him, taking him the rest of the way down, switching hands to saw through his neck and spinal column. It was the only way for revenants. Chop off an arm or a leg and they’d just grow it back in a month or two. Blow a hole in their brain-hell, they didn’t use them that often anyway. Cut one in half at the torso-they’d die, but it would take weeks, and chain saws, props to Bruce Campbell, are goddamn heavy to carry around. Entertaining, yeah, but not very practical. Too bad.

Through the spinal column of the neck was the only way to put them down permanently and quickly. And fighting them is rather monotonous. You might have one trying to gnaw through your throat while another tries to beat you to death with the arm you just chopped off him. Or you might have one trying to break your neck while one beats you with the leg you just blew away. From what I could tell, the slimy shitheads never sat around strategizing a whole lot or watching old kung fu movies and taking notes.

Off to the left in a spill of light from a hole in the ceiling, I saw Robin swinging his sword and heads flying. Salome I didn’t see, but from the howling from farther in the darkened recesses of the hangar, she sounded like she was having fun. I finished with my first revenant and turned to the next. “You,” it hissed. “You dare come here. We know you. The Kin know you. You think you’ll leave here without one of us tasting your defiled flesh?”

“Defiled? Big word for you. Big word for me too; I won’t lie.” He was smarter than most of his fellow flesh eaters. That made him the one I wanted to talk to. “Wait here, would you?” I tossed the knife into his chest just to distract him before pulling at the broad axe I had strapped to my back and swinging it one handed. Its head was three times the size of a normal axe… Viking stamp of approval all the way. I could use a sword and was good enough to get by, thanks to Nik’s training, but I’d never be a sword person. And there was that heavy chain saw issue, but an axe… If there wasn’t anyone human around to see it, that didn’t work too badly either.

I swung and cut him in half at the waist like a magician with his assistant, only there was no putting this one back together again. “Abra-fucking-cadabra.” The milky white eyes widened, and mottled yellow and brown teeth, stained with blood and rot, bared in a silent scream as he separated and both halves tumbled into the shallow water. The lingering smell of a dead woman’s perfume on his breath didn’t make me too sympathetic. “Don’t go anywhere.” Then I gave him a savage smile. “What the hell, if you can go somewhere, give it your best shot.”

Retrieving my knife and sheathing it, I moved on. I took on three more revenants with gun and axe, reloaded, and went after two more. I tried not to look at the floating body parts that drifted here and there, but I was used to seeing things like that and going on with the fight. It was what you did. Or you slipped up and you died, and I’d done a damn lot in my day not to die.

Then there were the times in my life I had wanted to die.

But that was then and this was now. Things were different-a world of different. The only way I planned on dying now was if I screwed up, and I wasn’t planning to screw up. A weight tackled me from behind. I hit the water, rolled over onto my back, losing a few deep stripes of flesh on my shoulders to revenant claws trying to hold me down. Niko had taught me to break a hold like that and this revenant was no Niko. I dropped the axe, shoved the Eagle under his chin, and put two through the top of his bald head, the color of a toad’s skin. The skull shattered, which staggered it slightly. It was when I put the muzzle of the automatic to its neck and emptied half the clip into it, destroying the spine, that it was blown backward, never to get back up.

I surged to my feet, taking the axe with me, and headed toward about ten of them rushing Robin. Robin tended to have that effect on anyone who crossed his path. They either rushed him to molest him-I was sure that if it was for molesting, he was happy to have it-or to kill him. At least I knew he did have a problem with that last one.

“Why is it when I’m with you,” he remarked calmly as he took two heads in one stroke, “I’m given the tour of New York ’s most odiferous locations? Never are your enemies running perfumeries or fine gourmet chocolate shops. No. Sewers, troll caverns, abandoned asylums full of decomposing corpses, your building’s basement on your laundry day. I still debate to myself which has been the worst.”

“Think of your cat. It’s all for your cat,” I said as I took a head of my own with the axe and finished the clip off on my Eagle into another revenant. I didn’t take the spine out, but I did take both arms. If it wanted to kick me to death or take me out like the world’s biggest snapping turtle, it could go right ahead. And naturally it did. I didn’t have much respect for revenants, and compared to other predators in the city, they weren’t quite as efficient in their murderous ways. But that didn’t mean they weren’t killers or weren’t stubborn enough to come after you if all they were was a torso with one arm left to pull it along.

This time I passed the axe blade through his neck and his head flew into the darkness. All his stubbornness disappeared with it. I waited for more to come boiling out of the darkness in the rear of the hangar, but none did. But I heard something-hissing, groaning, and splashing, and quite a lot of all three. Followed by Robin, I headed into the dark. It was instinctual for people to stay out of the dark; that’s where the bad things were. My human half had outgrown that core of self-preservation a long time ago. Now the dark was where the money was. With the axe in one hand, I pulled my gun back out and used the rest of the clip to fill the roof of the hangar with holes. Daylight streamed in, letting us see better than any flashlight. If it was something we wanted to see.

It wasn’t.

It absolutely, completely was not.

Once… what was I thinking… a thousand times when I was being homeschooled by Niko, he dragged me to museums. If they didn’t have weapons or dinosaurs, I wasn’t much interested. But sometimes things stuck with me, like when your brother lectured you about fertility figures. The combination of horror and boredom etched itself into your brain. One museum statue he’d used had been a Venus. Not the good one, not the naked marble Venus with no arms, but nice breasts. No, he chose a small figure that would fit in your hand. Found in Germany or Austria or someplace with beer, it had a head but no face, and enormous pendulous breasts that hung over an equally enormous and pendulous stomach. The legs were tiny, the arms almost nonexistent. It barely looked human. In fact, it looked like Jabba the Hutt’s girlfriend. It was enough to put off a seventeen-year-old me from trying to get the newstand guy to sell me nudie mags for a week or two.

That little piece of BC art bore one hell of a resemblance to what was squatting in the back of the warehouse… except she had three rows of those huge breasts. She really was the size of Jabba, times two, and she was expelling fully formed and grown revenants through her giant-oh jeez. Okay, now I wasn’t off nudie mags for a week; I was off sex, and that was a much bigger loss.

I’d specifically not wondered where baby revenants came from when we’d gotten out of the Jeep. And here I was, finding out anyway. Ain’t that life? Life and pained eyeballs I suddenly didn’t want anymore. The new revenants would slide out and land in the water, splash feebly for a few seconds, then get to their hands and knees and crawl up the massive form that birthed it and, voilà, baby’s first swallow. Breast feeding, it was a beautiful thing.

Mommy had no legs from what I could tell, and small arms ended in flippers that she flailed around as she hissed at us, then gurgled slowly, “I hunger. Mother hungers.” The milky eyes were fixed on us, the mouth big enough to swallow one of us whole. “So very huuuuungry.” All the new revenants turned toward us, including the one that just plopped out with gnashing teeth and swiping claws, and wet with more than water. Green and black, mucus or slime-whichever, it flew through the air. The smell that went with it was equally as appetizing.

“Yeah. Okay. The miracle of birth.” I slammed a new clip home and tried not to gag. “You take care of this one, Goodfellow. I have some… ah…” Another one came gushing out. Plop. Splash. That was it. Celibacy. The priesthood. That was for me. “Interrogation. I have some interrogation to do. Have fun.”

“What?” Robin sputtered. “You bastard. You’d best not take a single step…”

I’d taken thirty of them before he even said the word. Dashing past me in the opposite direction was Salome. Apparently she liked what she saw a lot more than I had, because I heard her loud and raucous purr all the way back at the front of the hangar where I’d left my Einstein revenant. I’d never heard a happier sound in my life. Damn, she really was a tiny patch of living hell in a rhinestone collar. And I thought I had monster cred.

The extra smart revenant wasn’t where I’d left him. Brains and motivation. Too bad he hadn’t gone to business school. He’d have a corner office by now. It still didn’t take long to find him, though. You could only go so far when you were nothing but a torso and arms. He’d pulled his upper half into a patch of blackness, but I could still smell that distant hint of perfume. A woman had put that on one night, for her husband, her boyfriend, her girlfriend or just for herself, and probably thought for a moment that she was pretty and ready for the night. But it had been the night that had been ready for her.

I reached into the darkness for him, ignored the savage bite on my forearm, and yanked him into the dim light. Once I got him there, I used the barrel of my gun to pry his jaws open and remove my arm more or less intact. Blood probably stained the long-sleeved T-shirt, but that was the great thing about black. It didn’t show blood and it was slimming-a must-own for pudgy serial killers everywhere.

I planted a mud-covered combat boot on the revenant’s chest. “All right, Professor, I was in a damn good mood yesterday. Now tell me why two Kin Wolves and one of your kind cared to blow it to shit.”

It snarled, a show of teeth now broken from the metal of the Desert Eagle, but said nothing. And really it had nothing to lose. It was dead. It might take weeks to get there but even a revenant couldn’t regenerate an entire lower body. So nothing to lose… but something to gain. Pain. Nobody liked pain, not even revenants. Sometimes the threat was enough; other times it wasn’t. I think the woman who’d died in her favorite perfume, the perfume on its breath, would understand that I didn’t give a shit which way this bastard went in that regard. I unsheathed the combat knife, its serrated smile as unrelenting as my own. “Let’s try this again. Who is fucking with my Zen?”

It was tough. I had to give it that, but in the end no one is tough enough. Everyone talks. Everyone. But sometimes the carrot worked better than the stick. I believed in equal opportunity. I used both. Weeks dying of starvation wasn’t a good way to go. Neither were your fellow revenants or Mommy eating you alive. I promised it a quick death and I gave it a taste of what it’d be like not to have one. And when it talked, I gave it that quick death. Not because it deserved it… It didn’t; not because I gave my word… A thing like it didn’t merit my word. I did it because that’s what exterminators did. Got rid of the nest of poisonous spiders in the closet. I didn’t leave them half alive and waiting around for someone to stumble into.

“Did it talk?”

I turned my head as I wiped the blade against my jeans. “Yeah, it did,” I said absently to Robin, who, as usual, had managed to do a nice tidy slaughter without getting one drop of blood on himself or messing up his hair. Only the wet bottom half of his pant legs was ruined. I, on the other hand, was soaked, muddy, bloody; the usual. If only there were lobster bibs big enough for monster hunting.

“Good. I’d hate to think I had to kill a kindergarten class of revenants and see a vagina large enough to drive a Volkswagen through for nothing.” He used the back of my shirt to clean his sword. I didn’t complain. I deserved it, leaving him as the world’s most unlucky birthing coach. “Perhaps I should shove you up there. Expand your sexual horizons.” Now that, nobody deserved. I stood and put away my blade.

An “I hunger” drifted mournfully from the back of the warehouse. He’d killed the revenants, but mom-which to be fair, you couldn’t kill without a rocket launcher-was still good to go, which had me good to go as well.

“Well?” he said, beckoning for the information with impatient fingers. “What did it say?”

“It wanted to know where your cat got that rhinestone collar. Said it was tacky as hell.” I headed for the opening to the outside, leaving our Venus out of sight, out of mind, and hopefully out of horribly disgusting dreams as well.

“It’s rubies, not rhinestones, you fashion heathen, and I know you didn’t drag me out here in New York City ’s version of the Everglades, ruin my shoes, my pants, my ability to function with anything female for the foreseeable future, and my entire morning to not tell me what you found out,” he demanded.

“Pucks, you can’t stand it when someone knows something you don’t, can you?” I commented as I passed into the sun and headed for the Jeep. “Where’s Salome?” Robin had picked up the carrier at the door, but it was empty.

He didn’t answer me any more than I’d answered him. He did manage to call me every equivalent of jackass he could think of, keeping it all in English so a nonbilingual moron like me could understand each one. I nodded, snorted, and gave him the occasional “good job” when it was a really filthy one. When we got back to the Jeep, Robin still didn’t have his answer, but I had mine. It turned out Salome had beaten us back to the Jeep. She was batting a revenant head around the floorboards with waning enthusiasm. To a cat, it was no fun when they didn’t wriggle and squirm. She yawned when she saw us, her teeth suddenly much bigger with the gray furless lips peeled back, then went to her usual grin.

“No, no. Absolutely not,” Goodfellow told her. “You are not taking that home and rolling it across my finely crafted floors. Do you realize how hard it is to remove blood from marble grouting? I thought not.” He tossed the head into the water as he slid behind the wheel while holding the carrier. He picked up Salome whose Egyptian dusk eyes narrowed. “Yes, very fearful. You’re the feline fatale. Take a nap.” She was deftly popped in the carrier and it was placed on the backseat.

“Do dead cats nap?” I asked, although at the moment I wasn’t particularly curious, but I was hoping to distract Robin. I should’ve known there wasn’t much chance of that, and there wasn’t.

“So obviously you feel this is a need-to-know situation. I and my ruined wardrobe can both assure you that I need to know.” He started the Jeep as I settled into the passenger seat.

“Oh, I know you need to know. Can’t stand not knowing. Are flat-out dying to know.” I closed my eyes and crossed my arms. I didn’t know if dead cats napped or not, but I did. “But guess what? You’re not getting to know.” I ignored him as his cursing escalated and I closed my eyes tighter against the bright daylight.

Hell, I wished I didn’t know.

But in the end I did tell him. He was right. He deserved to know. It was safer for him if he did. After I told him, the swearing stopped and he squeezed my shoulder sympathetically. “I am sorry, but I would be lying if I said I hadn’t seen it coming.”

I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit the same thing. I’d learned in the past where lying to myself got me… in a world of hurt. Instead, this time I kept my eyes shut and did everything I could not to think about anything. No lies, no truth-nothing at all. As most things tended to do when you needed them the most…

It didn’t work.