Slashback

5

Cal

Present Day

“Why me?”

The faux leather/duct tape combo squeaked as Goodfellow leaned back and covered his eyes with an olive-skinned hand. “I have a limitless number of people to lie to, cheat, and rob. I’m a trickster. I have a calling and no time for this. Sweet Fortuna, goddess of luck, tell me, why me?”

Let me fucking count the times I’d heard this song stuck on the radio. But, on the other hand, it was nice having a constant in a world of chaos. The brash ego, the bravery in the face of imminent death, and the accompanying bitching during the bravery in the face of imminent death, never changed. Which was good. Change was rarely for the better.

I tossed the now empty pancake container in the garbage. “Why you? Why us? Why Niko and me? What’d we do to him? Damn straight no one hired us to put him down. Hell, Niko didn’t know he existed until a body fell out of the frigging sky. What’s any of that have to do with you?”

“What’s that have to do with me? Are you senile? When have the two of you not dragged my wit, wisdom, charisma, and impeccably formed ass along in the wake of your bloody misfortune?” he demanded.

He had a point.

“Lifetime after lifetime,” he moaned on. “It never ends.”

“Are you measuring months as lifetimes now?” Niko asked, deadpan, as always when it came to Goodfellow’s exaggerations.

“I may as well,” Robin complained. “It certainly does feel that way.”

“Then since you know history repeats itself, try for a more positive attitude,” Niko suggested, not bothering to hide his amusement when Robin dropped his hand from his eyes to glare at us.

“Positive attitude? Let me tell you about my opinion regarding certain death and a positive attitude. It’s the same thing I told Dickens over ale and who despite his view on workhouses was a horrible tipper.” He sat up. “I hate Tiny Tim. I hate his chirpy optimism. I hate his purity and goodness in the face of grinding adversity. The nerve of the little bastard. It’s unnatural. There. My personal view of a positive attitude.”

Niko wasn’t impressed. “When Cal was three he shot Tiny Tim on the TV screen with his finger. Six imaginary rounds if I recall. You are barely in the running on attitude. Now, why is this Jack concerned with wickedness and immorality? Those are not concepts with which the paien usually bother themselves. That is closer to a human judgment.”

He groaned and dug in his jacket for a gold-chased silver flask. “Absinthe. It doesn’t make the heart grow fonder, but it can make the frustration grow fainter. Sometimes.” Draining the alcohol to the last drop in three swallows, he reached for a second flask and did the same. Looking marginally less annoyed, he rang the two containers together, an alcoholic cowbell. The silver note hung in the air as he said, “First, we don’t know that it’s Jack for certain. I said I wasn’t committing to that until we have further proof and I meant it. He is that much of a nightmare.” He gazed at the empty second flask mournfully. “Second, rarely, very rarely, mind you, a paien can become attached to a human or a certain subset of humans. Relate to them. Embrace them. Take them on as family or worshippers. That, in turn, can have human habits and prejudices rubbing off on them.”

Something Robin had done in the past—except for the prejudices. He’d set himself up as a god. It hadn’t ended well, but he hadn’t given up on humans, which is why he hung around Niko and me. And humans long before us. He’d almost married one in Pompeii before the volcano blew. He was one of the few paien who considered humans worthy company.

“It most definitely wasn’t you,” Niko said, “or another puck. Besides you, vampires, and peris, I don’t know any paien that associate with humans. What kind of paien is Spring-heeled Jack exactly?”

“Not me?” Goodfellow put away both flasks and gave a predatory grin. “Are you sure? I do have a preoccupation with licking the velvet-skinned throats of blond women and blond men. Blond anything really.”

“Put it back in your pants.” I snorted. “And even you couldn’t leave a hickey the size of a hand.”

Apparently I was wrong as he continued to grin. Niko frowned impatiently. “Goodfellow, we have a vicious paien serial killer roaming free skinning people alive. Focus. And if you continue with your lecherous behavior, I’ll tell Ishiah.”

Goodfellow stretched his arms, spread his fingers, then linked them to put his hands behind his head. “Feel free. He accepted me as I am and although I am giving monogamy a try, it wasn’t a requirement. And I still talk the talk and look the look.” The grin grew wider. “I’d have to be dead for that to stop. As for what Jack is”—the grin disappeared—“I don’t know. I wasn’t in England then. I’ve not seen him. Let me think on it.” Rolling eyes in my direction, he continued, “I will need more alcohol. It’s far too early to be thinking. Morning mounting is mostly muscle memory and a nice alliteration, but thinking . . . for that I’ll have to bribe my brain.”

I raided the fridge for two six-packs: one for him and one for me. Yeah, nice alliteration and one I was going to do my best to scrub from my own brain cells. As he looked down his nose at anything as common as beer, I was pouring Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper into a glass with the beer on top of that. Beer for the amnesia, the rest for caffeinated coherence. I wasn’t good with mornings either. I considered one or two p.m. still morning. I considered five thirty a.m. an abomination. If Hell had existed, it would always be five thirty there.

“Seriously?” Goodfellow asked dubiously as he watched me mixing the brew with the combat knife that had proved useless against Jacky-boy or what might be Jacky-boy as Robin remained on the fence there. At least the puck was distracted from his own horrifyingly domestic brew.

“Dr. Dew. Good for what ails you and a barrelful will decompose a body if you’re out of sulfuric acid.” I had no idea if that was true, but it sounded true. It also felt true as the first swallow hit my stomach and became a miniature nuclear explosion. I was back on the couch and guzzling. When I felt my eyes begin to burn and my nerves do a convulsive dance, I said, “Okay, I’m awake. For about forty minutes. Jack—our monster of the month. Maybe. Go.”

Robin had finished his first, second—hell, he was on his fifth beer in less than a minute. “Black, fog or mist, possible wings, the ozone smell you said, I’m thinking some sort of storm paien. Too bad it’s not a parasite, looking only to drain energy. They’re more pests than anything. This one, however, sounds far above the pest category. Hopefully it’s a creature or spirit and not a god.” Yeah, we’d fought pseudo-gods before. Not fun. “Perhaps in earlier days he associated with uptight humans. Your people are quite good at that, labeling anything such as sex, gambling, and drinking as being depraved.” All of which happened to be the puck’s favorite activities. “Insanity beyond the pale. You said Ishiah was certain all the victims were human, yes? That would make sense if he clung to humankind for a pace. We hate what we love and love what we hate. Let me consider this for a moment longer.”

All human victims. Or at least partly human when it came to me. Then once tasted, I was off the menu. That hurt my feelings.

As Goodfellow closed his eyes to concentrate, I finished my Dr. Dew. When I came back with a second one, my knife that had been on the coffee table was gone. I glared at Niko, who was drinking soy milk with the obvious delusion there was some sort of taste to it.

“When you stop twitching like a lab rat with electrodes in his brain, you’ll get it back,” he responded calmly. “Stir your poisonous concoction with your finger and if it eats the flesh from your bone don’t come crying to me.”

I stirred, drank, and growled. My finger turned slightly red but that was probably psychosomatic. When I said so, Niko told me I didn’t have the depth of imagination for a psychosomatic disorder. I poured half of the Dr. Dew in his grass milk. He poured all his milk over my head. Normally he would’ve flipped me over the couch, but this was his way of being considerate of my stitches.

“This is what you do while I think?” Robin’s eyes were now open. “Squabble like children in a sandbox?”

“No, usually I kill something when I’m bored, but there’s nothing here to kill except you,” I complained halfheartedly. “And Niko hid my knife.” I tried to wring the milk out of my sopping hair.

“Lack of an immediately convenient weapon. Never was there a truer sign of friendship.” He got to his feet. “I have an idea or two and someone to verify them. Fortunately, her business is open twenty-four hours a day. She’ll be awake. Let us go.”

“How about a shower first?” I complained.

“No, leave the milk.” His lips curved in a way I long recognized as being at my expense. “She’ll like you better for it. Apollo knows, you need all the brightening of your personality that you can get.”

“But . . . milk?”

“Milk,” he confirmed at the door before pausing.

“Oh. And a dead rat if you happen to have one.”

“A cathouse? You brought us to a whorehouse?” Niko, arms folded and eyebrows furrowed, looked up at the face of the four-story brownstone built of warm-colored stone and accented with creamy white. Nice. Expensive. Classy. This wasn’t the place if you wanted a quick fifty-buck suck-and-fuck.

“Now you sound as judgmental as Jack-the-skinner-Sprat, if that’s who it is. And it’s not a cathouse. It is the Cathouse. It has existed for well over four thousand years in different locations. I have stock in it. It’s quite profitable . . . except for the kilos of catnip they go through monthly. That does eat into the profit. But we all have our vices.”

It had been a twenty-minute cab ride here and I now smelled like sour milk. I had two guns under my jacket and Niko had given me my KA-BAR knife back, but my mood was not good. There was the caffeine crash combined with the itch of new stitches and it was still too goddamn early for anyone or anything to be upright and viable for life.

Sometimes I hated my job.

I ignored the doorbell, a softly glowing button surrounded by a curved brass sleeping mouse, and pounded on the door. “We’re three little kittens who’ve lost our mittens. Ah, the hell with it. It’s a whorehouse.” I pounded on the door again. “Kits who need tits. Open up.”

“I wish I could believe he was drunk. But I know his Auphe metabolism better,” Robin grumbled as he nudged me aside to press the bell. “Are you certain you raised him or did you let Hannibal Lecter babysit him? Genghis Khan? Attila the Hun? Please, enlighten me.”

Niko was undisturbed per usual. “Cal is his own person. I learned at a young age to accept that or step in front of a bus and move on to my next incarnation.”

Goodfellow gave a peculiar hum. “You always have been a glutton for punishment. Over and over and over again.” It sounded, best guess, half smug and half melancholy and entirely more specific than his usual random comments on Niko’s Buddhist philosophy. My general annoyance factor needed no extra commentary, apparently, but before I could ask him anything he was already ringing the bell again.

“Why are we here? You wanted proof. How are we going to find proof here?” I asked.

“A den of iniquity—Zeus, how I love them—is a prime source of every rumor in the wind. I plan on speaking with my good and formerly intimate friend to see if she’s heard any such of certain paien being in the city.” He held up a finger. “Their presence could rule out Jack. For example, Taranis.”

“Celtic god of thunder. Usually associated with a wheel,” Niko supplied.

“He didn’t slice me open with a goddamn wheel. I’d have noticed that. And no more gods. We fought one god, that’s enough,” I countered.

“Lei Kung.” Goodfellow held up a second finger.

“A Chinese spirit known as the Duke of Thunder. He supposedly punishes mortals guilty of concealed crimes and carries a drum, mallet, and chisel.” Niko started to elbow me, remembered the stitches and accused, “You should know this. We discussed Chinese supernatural creatures three months ago.”

“You might have discussed. It’s safe to say I just nodded and watched whatever game was on TV. And neither of us was beaten, sculpted, or assaulted with a drum solo. You can probably cross off the Duke of Earl.” I yawned and fished in my pocket for a lukewarm can of the last Mountain Dew I’d had in the fridge.

Robin already had his third finger up. Our back and forth was probably like white noise to him now or, as usual, he was more interested in listening to himself. “As much as I dislike talking trash about my own kind, there is also the Lakota trickster, Heyoka, the spirit of thunder and lightning. He—” The opening of the door cut him off. That was damn lucky for us because no matter what he said, talking trash about other tricksters and how they didn’t measure up to his wild and wicked ways was one of Goodfellow’s favorite pastimes.

I recognized the species of paien in the doorway although I’d not come across one in person until now. The air from inside the house that flowed around it carried the smell of oranges, honey, cinnamon, and some interesting spices I didn’t recognize offhand. Oh, and sex. I smelled so much sex I was surprised the intense musk of it, as strong as a natural gas leak, didn’t cause the brownstone to explode. Then there was the smell of our friend the doorman. Doorwoman. Doorperson. Blood and flesh and decomposition rank on her breath. Someone hadn’t brushed since their last meal. The exhalation of a scavenger, the kind who made certain you were clinging to life when they started to eat you. Where would the pleasure be if you were already dead?

She stood well over seven feet tall, bending down to see us, and had eight arms, seven of which held swords. Wearing something consisting of numerous leather straps, she also had a split skirt of silk that fell to bare brown feet. Thick black hair fell nearly as far, black eyes with pinpoint white pupils, and the triangular teeth of a voodoo statue from B-movie hell in a mouth almost as wide as a bear trap. In addition, there were claws on the hands that held the blades—long, lethally curved and as black as the hair and eyes. No surprise in that. There were days the entire world was made of bloody claws and tearing fangs.

Just not today. It was way too damn early for that.

“Need appointment and card.” The single unarmed hand with the ebony talons was held out palm up. The voice was surprisingly understandable considering the freakish size of the mouth and the equally freakish number of teeth, although she didn’t have much to say. Couldn’t blame her attitude there as I understood it. I wasn’t doling out advice to the sad and lonely at my job, bartender or not. The less I had to talk to what passed for clients at work, the better.

“Ah, yes.” Robin reached inside his jacket for a wallet, gave it a brief glance and returned it before fishing out a second one. “Actually I don’t need an appointment and how you fail to recognize me time and again, I will never know.”

“This puck, that puck, all fucks. Who can tell the difference?” Robin was told with bored indifference.

He stiffened. “You could not be further from the truth if you were the drooling picture of sub-intelligence—which you are. I have no difficulty seeing why you’re working the door instead of upstairs as you have so little personality to work with, despite what you could do with eight hands.” Flipping open the apparently extra-special wallet, Goodfellow had his mouth open for more insults, barely warmed up, when he said something else instead.

“Where’s my card? I have a lifelong platinum-class come-and-go-as-I-please membership card. Wait . . . where’s my card for Aphrodite’s Pleasure Palace—best strippers in Greece? Godiva’s Clothing Optional Hair Salon?” Replacement cards were pulled out, read in the light spilling from inside the house, and discarded as if they burned to the touch. “The Salvation Army? Big Brothers, Big Sisters? Soup Kitchen? Humanitarian aid in a trickster’s wallet? My wallet?” The horror was clear and true in his voice. “I am tainted beyond redemption.”

Niko squeezed his shoulder with false comfort and commented smoothly, “As you said, it’s inspirational when your sexual partner accepts you for who you truly are.”

“No hair salon, huh?” I popped the top on my soda. “It’ll be hard to be a pretentious ass with an eight-dollar Supercuts’ special.”

“That pigeon will rue the day his mother laid that rotting, spoiled egg that hatched him,” Robin gritted before pushing past the guardian, his sword in his hand so improbably fast that I barely saw his hand move. “Tell Bastet that I am here and don’t pretend you don’t know who and what I am. Tell her now. You can do that as you are or with my sword through your heart. That choice I leave up to you. Are you listening to me, you misbegotten vulture? That glazed look of insipid boredom, believe it or not, is not inspiring me with reams of confidence. Go.”

She gave him a look that was anything but bored. It was seething with the metal-edge of rage and the red haze of hunger. Her kind was always hungry. It didn’t stop for them. For a moment I thought she’d act on it, but she turned, and moved toward the stairs, suddenly all but drenched in disinterest. To the eye. I pulled in and sampled a deep breath of the adrenaline leaking out into the air before asking with casual curiosity, “How attached is your friend to the help? She a big fan of her pet peymakilir?”

“Of one such as this? Not likely. Rudeness to the clients wouldn’t be tolerated if she knew about it.” Sword still in hand, Robin deposited his woefully charitable wallet into a small trash can that looked to be made of gold. Idly, I wondered if it would fit under my jacket. “And, believe me, she’ll know the very moment I see her.”

The peymakilir was halfway up the stairs now, as slow as if every step was weighed down by chains. Slow and not worth a second glance, you would’ve thought. Yeah, and if you had that thought in our world, you wouldn’t have many more of them.

Because here she came.

In a heartbeat the Hindu scavenger of war’s battlefields had turned and leaped into fluid motion over the banister. She almost flew. Like a bird following a propeller of whirling steel, she soared toward us . . . nearly beautiful even knowing what she was. One who stripped the meat from the bones of the dying, consuming their flesh and life gleefully all in one. An inexplicably cruel part of nature. Yet, still impossibly beautiful—an angel of death with every sword a flash of quicksilver.

Then she was nothing more than meat. That tends to happen when I open a gate inside of someone rather than around them. In midair she disintegrated in an explosion of tarnished gray light, followed by the billowing stench of burned flesh, the spray of blood and long, cauterized limbs scattered everywhere. What was left of her fell, a tangle of parts, swords, and snuffed-out wildness.

Bambi’s mom goes down. And stays down.

Not that Disney ever showed you that part.

I had ducked a tumbling sword that had flown overhead, nearly taking off my head. I should’ve thought more about the swords. Eh, water under the bridge. I took another swallow of Mountain Dew. The caffeine was just not kicking in. “You’re right, Robin. She was one rude bitch.” Most murderers, male or female, were. The foyer was now somewhat of a mess, but it had been a little uptown for me anyway.

Goodfellow let the tip of his sword hit the marble floor, which wasn’t the way to treat your weapons. “What did you do?”

“I’m having an identity crisis.” I shifted my shoulders without much concern. “And there’s the fact that she was trying to kill us, then eat us. Hopefully in that order. I did what I do.”

“It seems as if the now ex-doorman liked her job and didn’t want to lose it over your complaints,” Niko said. He wanted to say more and he would say more, but not until we were alone. He trusted Robin, we both did, but there were things he said only to me—the things that I hated about myself. The monster in me that would never let me be right or clean. The darkness that waited and not at all patiently for its turn.

All that wasn’t true anymore.

Niko hadn’t quite gotten it in the past months. I wasn’t shamed by what I was. I didn’t hate it, not any longer; I was confused, some, yes, but not ashamed. Or more likely, Nik being Nik, he did know and that made it all the more important that the coming conversation be private. He didn’t want anyone else, even Robin, to realize the half Auphe wasn’t half these days. No . . . I was farther along the road than that now. He trusted me, but he wasn’t the only one in my world and not all of them would feel the same.

Instead when he commented, he was as studiously detached as only he could be. “So . . . you know what a peymakilir is. Studying behind my back?”

“Goodfellow has one painted on his guest bathroom wall behind the toilet. It’s screwing a satyr and the whole thing is labeled in hellish detail in gold paint. Hard knowledge to avoid when you’ve got a full bladder.”

Robin, meanwhile, hadn’t caught on to the fact that the peymakilir disposal conversation was over. “You blew her up. You opened a gate inside her like you did with Suyolak.” Suyolak, the antihealer who’d started the Black Death. Suyolak, the Plague of the World. Suyolak, the asshole who’d totally had it coming.

Goodfellow moved his shoe so the remnants of a peymakilir hand slid off that fine Corinthian leather. “But Suyolak was desperate measures.”

“Then,” I agreed.

“You’re wasting gates on something you could’ve easily shot. Gates are for emergencies,” he continued, mouth twisted in distaste. No one liked a gate or the way it looked, the way it tore apart the world and made it scream, the way seeing it twisted the brain and stomach. No one liked them—except Auphe. “Emergencies,” he emphasized.

“Then,” I repeated with a dark grin. “And emergency is a relative term.”

I wasn’t a morning person, nope. I hadn’t had more than two hours’ sleep. I was fuzzy headed and irritable. I smelled like milk gone off and was sick of the taste of Mountain Dew. None of it was excuse enough. It wasn’t an excuse at all. I’d done it because I wanted to—simple as that. She was far more of a killer than the men I’d sent away by the Ninth Circle, and she wasn’t human. There was no thought needed on her before or after the fact.

Robin had been our friend since we’d met him six years ago at his car lot. He was the first we’d had, the first we’d trusted. But Nik had protected me from . . . hell, the entire world basically . . . for so damn long that he simply couldn’t stop, whether I needed it or not. He hadn’t mentioned anything to Robin and he wouldn’t. But I would. The puck deserved to know that things had changed. That I had changed over the past months and more radically than he’d no doubt already guessed. He knew I’d been more shadowed. He knew that in the past weeks I’d regained my gating ability, but he hadn’t known to what extent. The way of the gun was all right—I still loved my babies, but the Auphe way was a new toy. And I wanted to play with that toy.

And now Robin did know.

Goodfellow was a trickster. He lied, but not to us. I wasn’t going to lie to him.

“Goodfellow, what havoc have you wrought now?” A smooth voice came from the top of the stairs as jade green cat eyes blinked at the carnage decorating her foyer. “This reminds me of when you were mourning the fall of the Sacred Band of Thebes. You ravaged and eventually burned down my establishment in Greece.”

“But every lady and gentleman on the premises fled the flames in a state of complete sexual satisfaction,” Robin countered promptly.

Above the eyes was an elaborate arrangement of amber-fire hair . . . or a mane that would cover feline ears if she had them. Her face was smooth skinned and without fur, but there was a split in her lush upper lip and ivory fangs when she smiled. She was a cat, in some aspects at least, and who better to run a cathouse after all? She lifted a hand and beckoned. If she was furred in other areas, her green silk dress kept that a mystery. “You may as well come up. I don’t care for peymakilirs, but they are excellent guardians. I assume you had good reason to kill her?”

“Don’t I always have good reason for my kills?” he challenged, willing to take the heat for this one. Keeping the Auphe swept under the rug for the moment.

“These days, perhaps.” An eyebrow arched. “You have mellowed. But you will have to pay the cleaning service’s bill. I am most certainly not running a charity here. Now come along and introduce your friends. One of them smells absolutely delicious.”

We spent the next hour in a room full of expensive furniture and more expensive cats, male and female. Our hostess—she preferred it to madam—was Bastet, the original Egyptian goddess of fertility and sexuality. After tiring of being worshipped she took her avocation, so to speak, on the road nearly four thousand years ago and now owned fourteen of the best houses of the most ill repute around the globe. She was a proud business-woman and only incidentally a former lover of Goodfellow’s. Of course, who over the age of two hundred and didn’t mind pucks wasn’t a former sexual partner of his? Only those with quick minds and quicker running skills.

Surrounded by silk cushions, he asked her about all the storm spirits and gods while stunning humanoid felines tried to feed Niko peeled grapes and tiny dead shrew from a golden bowl. He didn’t seem pleased. I, who was having the milk thoroughly licked out of my hair by four of Bastet’s purring employees, wasn’t exactly weeping with sympathy for him. Robin had been right about the milk. They couldn’t get enough of it. Loved it. Four rough tongues scratching my scalp and drenching every strand of hair I had in paien cat saliva, I, conversely, loved not at all.

Although the bare breasts were nice, even if covered in silky fur.

“I am sorry, my precious goatling,” Bastet sighed as she lounged on a massive sofa with sapphire silk cushions large enough that each one was designed to substitute as a bed. She had a bare foot in Robin’s lap and was using it to massage his crotch lightly. Ishiah wasn’t going to care for that at all, no matter what he said about accepting the puck in all his ways. “No storm spirits have come our way and no rumors of them either.”

“And what about Jack?” he asked grimly. “Have you heard any rumors of Jack?”

Her slit pupil eyes widened. There seemed to be only one Jack in the paien community and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper. Bastet stared at us with the unblinking wariness of a cat cornered by a coyote before looking away. “Now is not a good time to be human in New York. Nor is it ever a good time to get in the way of Spring-heel himself.” She removed her foot from its perch. “Go. I want no part of this. You know he prefers humans, but if he thinks one of us is carrying tales, he’ll kill us just the same. More quickly, but we’ll be dead nonetheless. Now go.”

“He’s here then. You’re certain?” Niko asked, pushing away the bowl of grapes with its fur-covered garnishes.

This time Bastet bared an impressive brace of pointed teeth, survival instinct triumphing over fear, and pointed at the door. “Go.”

That was a yes if ever I heard one.

Goodfellow’s face was more grim than his voice had been. He had his confirmation and he wasn’t happy about it. Some things in life you’d rather not know. Not believe. Life didn’t care about that though. Once you’re stuck with something, especially when that something is known to be unstoppable, you’re screwed. That was the truth of it. And it appeared as if we were stuck.

Whether we wanted to believe it or not.