Slashback

2

Cal

Present Day

“There’s a serial killer in the city.”

Yeah? Really?

And rain was wet, grass was green, the sun set in the west; also, reality shows caused brain tumors.

None of it was precisely fucking news.

“Thanks for the info, boss,” I drawled, bored as I mixed a mojito for Elegua, a dark skinned, cat-eyed African trickster, and slid it across the bar. Yes, a goddamn mojito. He used to drink straight rum while smoking his foul-smelling cigars, but once he started visiting Cuba, he became high maintenance. It was getting a little too fancy in the Ninth Circle lately. I missed the days when beer and whiskey were all we had and haul your furry, scaly, or prehensile tailed self elsewhere if you didn’t like it.

Auld Lang Syne.

“But guess what, Ish?” I wiped my hands on the black apron tied around my waist. “There are probably at least three serial killers in New York. That’s why there’s police. Let them deal with it. And why do you even care? It’s human business, not paien business.” Paien was the pagan world, the supernatural world, and half human or not, the world I’d chosen to live in for five or so years now.

It had been gradual, that. From thinking I was a human with a fraction of monster in him to knowing I was a monster with just a little human seasoning the soup.

I couldn’t say I’d changed sides either. Humans didn’t know monsters existed and damn sure didn’t know about the particular monster I was. If they did, they would run screaming, piss themselves, or be caught up in enough zombie apocalypse movies to try to grab an ax to fight back—the latter never ended well. Then there were the ninety-nine percent of the paien who hated me for the Auphe I carried in my blood. But I went with the paien anyway the majority of the time, despite the fact I could’ve pretended with humans and they wouldn’t have known.

But pretending every minute of every day can be tiring. And . . .

Boring.

With the other monsters I could be myself, no matter how much they oh-so-profoundly wished I wouldn’t be.

Sheep aren’t the only ones to piss themselves came the gleeful inner mutter.

I really had to stop thinking of humans as sheep. I’d picked up that bad habit in the past month or so, from the other monsters on the outside, yeah, but primarily the one on the inside. If I said it out loud, my brother would do more than kick my ass. He’d remind me I had human in me too by dunking me in the East River, holding me under for a good three minutes, and calling it negative reinforcement training instead of the overgrown swirly that it was.

Sheep versus human . . . yeah, that might very well point to an identity crisis on my part.

When it comes down to it, I’m a monster. There was some human in me, true, although less all the time. I’d tried to hold on, but life is life. Love it or leave it.

It’s simple. I am a monster.

And I kind of liked it—which is the definition of an identity crisis.

Oh Jesus. Was Ishiah still droning on and on?

Hell. Of course he was. Serial killer. Serial killer. The guy could not take a hint if they were giving them away free with a hooker and a six-pack.

“Because, Caliban, while this serial killer preys only on humans, from what I hear it is not human itself. Very much not human and is skinning people alive. The police will not know what it is, much less be able to catch it.” The peri’s gold-barred white wings flashed into view, disturbed, and then disappeared as he continued to stack glasses. “That makes it your business, doesn’t it?”

It did. If it was supernatural and you were willing to pay enough to make it dead—then go ahead and pick out the coffin. If there were some annoying issues of conscience to be assessed, I let Niko figure that out these days. Not that I didn’t have a conscience. I did. Smaller than average, okay, but there. Unfortunately for most, it tended to be as lazy and rebellious as the rest of me. It was better for everyone to let my brother handle the moral issues while I played to my strengths:

Violence, sarcasm, and a respectable collection of pornography.

“If there’s someone forking over the fee, sure.” I reached over the bar, grabbed a handful of passing fur, and slammed the Wolf’s head on the counter hard enough to hear something crack. It could’ve been the polished wood surface or a lupine skull. I wasn’t concerned which. “Leaving, Fido?” I asked cheerfully. “But you haven’t settled your tab yet. We don’t like that. It hurts our feelings.”

Long teeth bared at me in a spittle-spraying growl and snap, but the twisted combination of a hand and paw, a member of the All Wolf caught between wolf and human—neither nor, slid across the rumpled green. I counted with my free hand and frowned, all that cheer draining away. “Tips are not mandatory, but they are appreciated and guarantee you’ll be greeted with a sunny disposition next time you’re back.” I demonstrated said sunny disposition with a grin that wasn’t that different from his Nice-to-see-you, Grandma snarl—except more effective. Several more bills were shoved across. After an assessing glance, I grunted, and let him go. “Thank you, sir. Now get your cheating, cheap ass out of here, tail between your legs just the way I like.”

I watched the werewolf slink out of the door, smelling like the last-in-line Omega that he was. The other Wolves hunched over the scarred and stained tables in the bar grumbled, but let it go. We had an understanding of live and let live or, more accurately, if they fucked with me, I would goddamn bury them. “Puppies. They do try the patience, don’t they?”

“You make enough money with you and your brother’s true business. You could quit the bar.” As it was Ishiah’s bar—he’d been blackmailed into giving me a job—and I had a tendency to play rough with the clientele, he had to wholeheartedly wish that I would focus on my other higher-paying career.

“Nah. Nik says it’s good for me. Keeps me socialized.”

Apparently, just like with pit bulls rescued straight out of dog-fighting rings, socialization was job one when it came to me. I polished a glass with a towel and yawned. “And I still haven’t heard about a client willing to foot the bill for running this supernatural serial killing fuck-head to the ground.”

“Socialization. Of course. I see the improvement daily,” he muttered, fingers sheathed tightly in light blond hair. Maybe he had a headache; allergic to his own feathers. That had to be it. It couldn’t be me and my winning ways. “You and Niko have done free ‘exterminations’ before. You’ll be saving lives. What better time than now to do some charity work?”

“Yeah, we’ve done free . . . when Nik knew about the problem and as I don’t plan on telling him, there’s no need for him to know about this one.”

Nik had other worries right now and as usual they were thanks to me. I had no plans of adding to them. “Why don’t you hunt down whatever bogeyman this is in your spare time?” I goaded. “I’ve seen you with a sword.” It wasn’t a sight I’d be forgetting either. Conan the Barbarian would think twice about going up against Ish. “I think you can manage.”

Ish, massaging his temples, said absently, “Peris are discouraged against killing paien-kind . . . other paien-kind, I mean. We’re tolerated here in New York, but that could change if the others thought we rose above our station.”

“Station?” I snorted. “You have a station? You kick Wolf, vamp, and every other kind of supernatural butt in the bar on a daily basis. If you could wear your station on your foot, you’d have broken it off in someone’s ass a helluva long time ago.”

“Fighting is different than killing.” He let go of his head and pointed toward the door. “Go home. Your shift is close enough to being over and you are as bad for my mood as you are for business. I curse Goodfellow every day for convincing me to give you a job. Go.” He loved me like the brother he never had. I mean, didn’t everyone—when they weren’t trying to kill me?

I gave him an evil grin and drawled, “You do something to Goodfellow every day all right, but I don’t think cursing is it.” He grabbed the first thing at hand—an unopened bottle of whiskey—and threw it at my head. Déjà vu. I ducked easily, some childhood habits you never lose. I then tossed my apron under the bar, pulled on my jacket over my shoulder holster, and made for the door. I didn’t want to be around if he did bring out the sword.

Did I mention it was a flaming sword? Angels were a myth, but the seed that had started the myth, the peris, were close enough for shagging your ass toward the Promised Land without stopping to think maybe a map and a timetable would be good things to ask for first.

In this case, the Promised Land was a street shrouded by the cloying breath of dangerous night and the less poetic ammonia stench of were-cat urine sprayed on the curb. I didn’t care what anyone said. No one moved to New York for the ambience—except for monsters and they had considerably more leeway when it came to ambience.

I checked my watch. I had thirty minutes before the end of my shift. That meant I could do my brother a favor and try to keep his love life from going down in flames. Or at least toss him a fire extinguisher because he was already in the doghouse and that, too, was my fault. I walked toward the next block. Cabs didn’t come down this street, unless a monster shrouded in human clothes was driving one. You could call this street the point of no return, the edge of the earth like the old days, and it was for oblivious humans. Luckily, nature kept most humans from wandering onto a feeding ground. Some subconscious sense of ill-ease had them veering off to safer streets where shadows were only that.

But sometimes you run into something different. With monsters there was always something different, but with humans, open book—open, harmless pop-up kiddie book. Except for Nik, who fell in a category all his own, there were rarely any surprises with humans.

Tonight I was surprised.

They lined up on both sides of the street, barely an inch from where open season on sheep began. They knew. They were human and they knew and not just subconsciously. Not that the inch was more than a suggestion. Nearly any creature would kill a human anywhere in NYC, much less an inch or so off pure monster-ville territory. But, the fact these men knew there was a territory at all . . . huh. Suddenly I wasn’t quite as bored as I had been.

There were eight of them, four on each side until four walked over and it was eight on one side—my side. I smelled the youth on them. It made it past the stink of living on the streets: filth, and rotting food, cigarette smoke and decaying teeth, but oddly no alcohol. No scent of heroin, a sleepy smell, or meth, tinfoil and edgy. They were homeless, but not too old and not too young. In their twenties it looked like under the hoods of their identical white hooded sweatshirts and the scruff of beard. What kind of homeless managed to team up to wear white? That’s what it was under the patches of grime and it made no sense. Their world was a dirty one and white had no place in it. It was odd as was the fact that they were all in their prime, as much as the underfed and unsheltered could be.

It was interesting.

This wasn’t a mugging. I hadn’t had anyone try to mug me since I was sixteen. Pit vipers and me, we both gave off an unspoken, “You want to screw with me? Really? Because I would fucking love that.” We had the time and the tools and we were more than happy to put them to use. Muggers tended to veer off for easier-appearing targets.

No, this wasn’t like that. This was different entirely. For one, there were eight of them. Even for this city that was more than your usual dose of daily violence aimed at a single source.

I stopped and let them circle me, catching another smell as they came closer. Metal. On every one of them was the sharp, sweet singing whiff of a good chunk of metal. Knives or guns. I didn’t smell cordite or gun oil. Only knives then, but all armed, and that made them more interesting.

Interesting.

Fun.

Playtime.

No, no. I was bored, but there were other ways to entertain myself. None were coming to mind, but there had to be at least one or two. And these were humans, not sheep. Humans.

“You guys here for some exercise?” I checked my watch again. “You should probably look elsewhere. I’m having identity issues right now, which is frustrating, and I tend to express my emotions with bullets. It’s so much cheaper than therapy.”

I needed an outlet for my monster, a specific one. One that would challenge me and take all my effort to put down. I hadn’t had a distraction like that in a month now, which meant things tended to spill over in all directions. Then, wham, I was all “put the lotion in the basket” and no one, but no one was happy with that attitude.

I was doing my best, trying to hold back. I gave them one warning, which was one more than I usually gifted unto any jackass. All they had to do was take it . . . quickly, if they were smart, but they had an out.

Years ago I tried to avoid killing people if I could—whether they deserved it or not. It seemed like an important distinction. Monsters go down, humans go to the hospital. Sometimes I couldn’t get around it, but most of the time I managed to wound instead of kill. Recently I’d begun to wonder if that was bad decision making. There were human monsters that were every bit as bad as the real deal, some worse. I’d known that my whole life. Did they deserve a free ride?

Nope, I was thinking they did not.

Their genetic makeup didn’t come into it at all. I treated all monsters equally. After all, that was only fair, right?

I was one step off the Ninth Circle open buffet invitational, but the streetlights were out, the shadows dense. This was a human street, but it wasn’t a safe one by any means. One of the men, this one wearing the same white sweatshirt as the others with the hood up, almost like a monk, with filth-covered jeans, and ratty sneakers, stepped closer to me. He had reddish stubble, a pockmarked face, and remarkably clear eyes. Too clear. Eyes that focused, that bright, that shining usually meant there was one thought and one only in the gray matter behind them. When you have only one thought—a single unwavering incandescent unshakable goal—that made you generally ape-shit. The ape-shit could rarely be reasoned with.

People: can’t live with them. Can’t destroy them with the power of your mind.

Oh wait. I could.

“Heaven says you should pray.” His breath was what I expected and forevermore would the word “heaven” be linked to the rank stench of tooth decay in my mind. Joy. His knife was out now and swinging toward my throat. I took it from him with a simple block and twist, slammed it into his chest, punching through the bony crunch of sternum into his heart, and used his momentum to flip him over my shoulder. It’s an amazing world when a dead man can fly. I’d given him an out, and he’d chosen it. Too bad it was the wrong one. That left seven knives slashing at me and seven more foul-smelling huffs of exhaled air carrying the same word and then more of them.

“Last chance for the rest of you.” I looked around the circle. “I am both ethically and morally challenged at the best of times. And you annoying me with your festive little homicidal ways doesn’t come under the category of best of times.”

“Child of God, on your knees and pray.”

“Pray for deliverance.”

“Pray for mercy.”

“Pray.” “Pray.” “Pray.” “Pray.”

I was praying all right. Praying for a round of breath mints. Jesus Christ.

“I should pray, huh? Hate to tell you assholes, you should’ve prayed for better directions. This is not a part of town for a good churching up.” I grinned, sharp and gleeful. “Not a steeple in sight.”

Seven men, young but malnourished. No problem. Seven knives out and slashing if not with trained efficiency, then with wild enthusiasm. More of a problem, but it could be handled. Seven sets of eyes burning with the fire of the martyr. Seven psychos willing to die for something, who the hell knew what, willing to die like their buddy if they could take me with them. Seven knives against two guns and more rounds stashed on me than World War II would’ve needed. It was doable. Even as close as I’d let them get, to see—you know—just to see what could happen. Did that make me a bad boy? Yes, it did. But all in all, the entire situation still very doable. But eight bodies to clean up, and they were too close to me to be anything but bodies now, that was different.

Fun was in the execution of some easily justifiable violence. Fun was not in the cleanup. Not that I should think that. I shouldn’t.

Really, really shouldn’t.

I could leave. I could go—in the way the Auphe did—and leave them behind, but, entertainment aside, I needed to do more than exercise my skills. I needed to stretch them. I had someone after me who could do the same as I could, only better, quicker, years ahead of me in experience. If I was going to survive him, I needed to level the playing field. I had to catch up. I needed the practice. Practice made perfect. But did I need to use seven men . . . homicidal, but still men . . . as an exercise? Was that right?

Playtime. Playtime, playtime, playtime.

What the hell.

I sent them away. All of them.

Nice and tidy.

As I said—skills.

The world screamed, my attackers screamed along with it. Reality ripped as my gate opened, and the night itself came alive as ravenous gray light ate them. Eight hungry mouths made of lightning and death tore through the shadows turning them the purple of coagulated blood and took the men to where they could pray to their hearts’ content. Not that it would do them any good and not that they would last long, depending on how much time had passed in that particular hell and how much radiation lingered there. Then the mouths closed and the night was only the night again.

Well, shit.

Chances were you were supposed to be worried about identity crises, not embrace them. If I were the hugging type, I’d say I’d just given my slow and gradual defection to the monster side a big one.

I couldn’t say I hadn’t meant to do it. I didn’t know what I’d meant to do, but I had planned on thinking about it for at least another fraction of a second. Debating the right and wrong of it, the thousand shades of gray, the thousand hues of justification, as there was a chance . . . a small one . . . that I was wrong.

I sighed and brought them back.

It had only been a second, but they looked as if they’d been gone a while. Time ran oddly in the Auphe world. A day here could be two years there—I knew that all too well. The seven of them appeared a little thinner and were curled up in moaning, whimpering fetal balls on the street. I knew that feeling too. Tumulus wasn’t Hell—no, it was Hell’s big brother. Not a pleasant place to be. My best guess was they’d been there a few days in Tumulus time.

That was enough that I didn’t think they’d be attacking anyone else anytime soon. Someone official would eventually come scoop them up and stick them in the real world’s version of Arkham Asylum. After what they’d seen on the other side, they’d be lucky to regain enough coherence to use a spoon again, much less a butcher knife, in the next few months.

Now, though, it was time to get on with what I was doing before a bizarre street cult thought I didn’t look holy enough, that I needed to pray more. That was New York for you. Not many Jehovah’s Witnesses jumping you on the street, but Jehovah’s pseudo-ninjas willing to kill you to save your soul, those we had. Pretty presumptuous ones too. How did they know what I did or didn’t do? I could pray. I could be holy. They didn’t know.

My grin widened despite my uncertain conscience. It felt like a tangle of razor wire decorating my face. Yeah, I guess maybe they did know. Apparently my ability to blend in with your average, harmless humans wasn’t all it’d once been. Of course I wasn’t all I’d once been. I was more or I was less, depending on your point of view.

Either/or, I’d have to work on passing for a little more normal. I still had to shop. Beer and porn didn’t buy itself.

I checked my watch again. Still on schedule. For good or bad, right or wrong, eight wannabe psycho-killers had been taken care of in less than a minute. I had plenty of time left to deal with Nik.

Although I did wonder how they had known precisely where the theoretical line of the danger zone ran between monster versus human New York. Knew consciously instead of instinctually, unlike most humans, and knew to the inch. That was peculiar. But as none of them were remotely close to coherent, there was no point in asking. Plus, they were no longer my problem or the problem of any annoying innocent bystanders. As my curiosity on most situations was fairly nil once the potential violence was over, I let it go. Maybe I’d think about it later, maybe not. Psychos in my world were a dime a dozen. Who had the time to think about them all?

Besides, Nik came first.

Soon enough I was waiting at the third landing in the stairs of Promise’s building. A very rich and exclusive building it was with a condo board that would reject the queen of England for not keeping a low enough profile. They liked their privacy here, their quiet, and a certain appearance. I made it past the doorman only because Promise, who was Niko’s love life I was there to save, graciously slipped . . . I mean, tipped him two hundred bucks a month for me sullying the atmosphere.

Leaning against the wall I waited for Niko to climb down the twenty flights of stairs, which he would be doing, I knew for a fact. For the past four weeks he had shown up nearly every night I worked at the bar at closing to make sure I made it home in one piece. Sadly for his sex life, this was not new behavior for him. Not at all. My nearly getting killed inevitably turned him into a hybrid of babysitter/bodyguard/and human Terminator. It was past time to break that cycle. For his sake.

As for the walking instead of the elevator, it wasn’t all about the cardio. Never take the elevator. Ask anyone who’s killed someone in one of those steel boxes—yeah, that’d be me holding up my hand—they’re nifty death traps with limited opportunity of exit.

“You should be at work.”

I’d been waiting for him, but naturally I hadn’t heard him. Nik was too good for that, too good for me. I had smelled him though. The faint tang of oiled metal and the farm fresh smell of goat-milk soap. The man could slice out your heart and hold it in his hand before you even noticed he was there, but he was addicted to goat-milk soap because it was “all natural.” It was embarrassing as hell is what it was. The fact that I used it as I was too lazy to buy my own soap wasn’t embarrassing at all. That was just practical.

“Cyrano, it’s been a month now. Nothing’s happened. You need to take a break. I’m here to make sure you take it,” I said with exasperation as I looked up at him moving halfway down the stairs from the fourth floor and waited for him to join me. He did need a break, although I hadn’t had much luck convincing him of that. The guy deserved a life of his own that was more than rolling out of Promise’s warm bed at three a.m. to look after me, but once a big brother, always a big brother. That his little brother was a monster in his own right didn’t put a dent in his determination.

Promise had been patient about the protectiveness issue several times now, but everyone’s patience runs its course. Promise with her knowing eyes, fields of lavender under moonlight, and her ability to snap a neck as gracefully as the movement of any Renaissance dance, was good for Nik. She was a mirror of his calm and control, and being a vampire helped if our work spilled over into our private lives. Promise had no difficulty taking care of herself. I didn’t want him to lose the sanctuary he had in her because of me. The very reason he needed a sanctuary was thanks to me after all.

“Grimm waited twelve years to find you,” he pointed out, stopping beside me. “I doubt a month of laying low will be much of a strain for him.”

Grimm was the problem I’d gifted Niko with, the reason I’d blown off Ishiah and his serial killer. Grimm was actually my problem, the outlet for the worst part of me—he did double duty. He was not Nik’s trouble, but brothers, like company, loved misery. Or was that the other way around? Whatever. Grimm was half Auphe like me, the result of the same experiment in genetic engineering spawned by a race that had once ruled and ravaged the earth long before man had yet to be the next best thing to a tadpole. Now, thanks to Niko, some friends and myself, the Auphe were extinct, but part of their experiment remained. Grimm and me.

Grimm wanted to kill me and he wanted my help in fathering a new race to replace the Auphe. And being half Auphe he saw no reason he couldn’t have both things. It was something of a blind spot, but not a surprising one when the Auphe had been the worst of the worst when it came to monsters. They had lived only to murder and mutilate and do so as frequently as possible. Our childhood name for them, Grendels, had fallen damn short of the reality.

Now Grimm thought he had the balls to step into their jockstrap—and he was right.

As problems went, Grimm was a big one. I was a monster, no matter what Nik said to the contrary, but there were degrees of monster. Grimm was the better monster. A month ago I’d sent him packing with a chest full of bullets, but I’d been able to do it only because I’d set my human part to one side and let all my monster come out to play. A dangerous thing that.

A fun thing.

That too, but my kind of fun came with a price tag. Every time I let it off the leash, there was more to chain back up when I was done. More monster equaled less room for the human in me—the sanity in me. There were monsters and then there were monsters. I didn’t want to become the latter . . . if I had a choice . . . at least not this soon.

What I’d done to the eight killers on the street—that was nothing to what I could do. Nothing. I could have done so many things. . . .

Not the time nor the place.

No longer a member of the human race was the singsong rhyme in my head.

I snorted at the childishness of my own subconscious before shoving it down hard and slamming the lid on its box. I had once made a mental box when I was a kid to store bad thoughts, bad memories, bad desires. Now I had thousands of boxes. That was good, in my opinion. It meant that I was in control. I would fight to my last breath to keep it that way—identity crisis or not.

Not that it mattered now, because this was Niko time. I needed to make the most of it. Niko deserved a personal life that didn’t involve playing bodyguard to me and I wasn’t giving up on that.

“If Grimm shows up,” I said, “I’ll gate the hell away to parts unknown”—at least to Grimm—“and he’s screwed.”

Gating or traveling was a nice way of saying I’d tear a bleeding hole in reality, wounds of rippling tarnished light, and step through to end up a block away or a thousand miles away. My choice, although not to where I’d sent my eight attackers in questionably fashionable hoodies. I’d never go to that place. Never again.

The ability to gate came with the Auphe blood and though I hadn’t been able to use it well or often at one time, now I was cooking with gas. The Traveling King. All bow before me. Grimm could gate too, but as long as he didn’t know where I was going, he couldn’t follow.

“Ah yes, the gating,” Nik said with grim bite. “The gating that you think gives you an edge when we hunt the supernatural now. Fighters who think they have an edge often get sloppy.” A light smack to the back of my head accompanied each following word. “Do . . . not . . . get . . . sloppy.” He dropped his hand and added with a growl, “Especially with Grimm.”

There I stood, carrying the two guns I hadn’t used earlier, a fancy new garrote, and four knives concealed in various easily accessible locations—all of which I could wield as automatically as I could breathe, and yet I was being schooled like a three-year-old thrown into a mixed martial arts caged death match. Did Dirty Harry have to put up with that? Nope. Then again all Dirty Harry’s partners died on him. Nik stuck around and had all my life. That was worth a smack or two.

Plus as Nik was the one who’d taught me to use any and all weapons, he could and would kick my ass if I tried to smack back. Affectionately kick my ass of course . . . with brotherly love. Not that brotherly love made it sting any less. Which was not why I didn’t tell him what I’d done only a half an hour ago. I didn’t tell him because he already worried about my getting careless. He didn’t see that using the gates as often as possible helped me catch up with Grimm, whose experience in that was years and years longer than mine. Grimm—the better monster.

When it comes to living versus dying, you want to be the better monster. But . . .

Nik’s not always practical.

That wasn’t the voice of my inner Auphe. That was the voice of a much younger Cal who had learned at the age of four that being practical was better than behaving, because practical kept you alive. Behaving wasn’t as effective that way. Practical was a definition in a black bound dictionary, the words written in the scarlet red of fresh blood. Practical was the code I survived by.

Not that I brought that up either. Nik had worries enough now, and Nik was ruthlessly practical when he had to be.

That was the key: when he had to be. I didn’t mind being the practical one if it let him keep his hands clean. I didn’t have to think about it like he did. It was as natural as breathing to me. I was good at being a monster and Niko was good at being a man, the very best of them. I wanted him to have the chance to stay that way.

But, sooner or later, we would have to talk about the gates. Sooner, most likely. Niko was going to have to accept my practicality in this.

“Don’t get sloppy. Got it,” I said with a good nature I reserved for a very few. I didn’t smack, but I did aim an elbow at his ribs. He avoided it without seeming to move. “Now go back upstairs and bang”—his eyes narrowed and I immediately amended my sentiment—“and crochet passionately while drinking Metamucil or whatever you geezers do in bed. I’ll see you in the morning. Bring me a love-stained afghan.” These words would come back to bite me in the ass, because while I could deal with it when it was out of sight, out of mind at Promise’s place, the reverse was true when it was closer to home.

His eyes narrowed further to slits as he gave my out-of-luck elbow a disapproving glance. “You’re not inspiring faith in your fighting abilities or even your ability to bully on the playground.”

Fortunately, no one else other than Niko was standing on that landing waiting for inspiration or faith as neither of us proved much good at providing them in the next moment—the moment the body fell out of the sky.

All right, there was no sky, but it fell far—at least ten stories if not more. It plummeted to land on our feet . . . literally. Or it would have if Niko hadn’t jumped back up the stairs and I’d jumped back down, both of us with weapons drawn. The flash of descending red, gray, and white had had my Desert Eagle in my hand just as it hit. The fall hadn’t been silent. I’d heard the cacophony of bangs as it hit the metal handrails, bouncing its way down. The landing wasn’t quiet either. There was a wet, heavy thump. “Shit,” I breathed. “Where the hell did it come from?”

I hadn’t seen anything. It had come down out of thin fucking air as far as I could tell. It hadn’t been from one of Grimm’s gates. Those I could feel in my gut, twisting and adrenaline-packed, and invisible they were not. No, this wasn’t him. I’d already looked up to see nothing. Now I looked back down and saw why the impact had sounded as if the body had fallen into mud instead of on once-immaculate marble tile.

It had been skinned.

I hadn’t seen that before. I’d seen people gutted, their throats cut; I’d seen mutilated corpses and even dismembered remains. Parts of a meat puzzle. You could put those kinds of puzzles back together, but they weren’t ever the same. And neither were you. With every new horror, you thought that was the end. You’d seen enough. Nothing, no matter how new under the sun it was to you, would be able to rattle you again. You always thought it. And you were always wrong. I probably should’ve been grateful for that. That was the nature of being human. I was still human, some of me anyway, no matter what the depths of me said.

I moved back toward it and studied the god-awful mess at our feet, trying to feel gratitude for my spoonful of humanity. I tried and failed. Right then I would’ve preferred a monster’s indifference.

There was leaking red flesh, patches of rippling fat like small clumps of yellow grapes, the smooth shine of muscle in the stairwell light, dead veins and arteries the color of ash, and the pale flash of bone from surgically clean slashes over the chest between small scarlet mounds. The eyes weren’t gone, but they were burned to the black of charcoal. The lips, the only skin still intact, were the smooth pink of a woman’s lips. They were peeled back from the teeth in agony, showing she’d been alive when the skinning started.

No, no fucking gratitude in me at all.

Goddamn it. I kept the Eagle ready and used my other hand to run over my face, quick and hard. Coming to terms. All right. As much as we had on our plate already with Grimm planning to remake the world in His image—could I get a Hallelujah—I was forced to admit Ishiah was right. There was no way around it now. Something had to be done, especially as we were obviously subjects of special interest. Nothing says “Hi! Nice to meet ya!” like a dead, tortured woman crashing on top of you. A basket of muffins and a balloon bouquet couldn’t match that for the goddamn personal touch.

I exhaled and ignored the pungent smell of death with long practice. “Oh yeah. I forgot to mention: Ishiah says there’s a serial killer in town.” I checked the stairs rising up and up above us again. “And it’s not human.”

Niko wasn’t pleased I’d planned on holding that information back. He was less pleased about that than about being targeted by a supernatural serial killer for reasons unknown. To be fair to him, that wasn’t new. We’d been targeted by another supernatural serial killer a few years before—Sawney Beane. But we’d attracted his attention by chasing him first—a case for which we had been paid. Whatever this son of a bitch was, why he had a hard-on for us, I had no idea.

We’d checked with Promise to make sure she was all right. The body was too tall to be her, but on the inside I couldn’t tell vamp from human, except for the teeth and they retracted at death. I didn’t blame Niko for calling her. It was quicker than running back up twenty flights to make sure you weren’t off on the height by a few inches. She would also arrange for the police to be called as they already knew about the bodies and a killer, just not a supernatural one, but she’d give us a few minutes until we were done. With his katana still in one hand, he used his other to take pictures with his cell phone to better research what type of monster was into skinning people alive. He’d remarked on the three cuts in the chest. All three crossed each other, but whether it was supposed to be a mathematical shape or a letter, I had no idea. The murderous asshole must not have made it past kindergarten in monster school.

I left my phone in my pocket. I didn’t want pictures, I sucked at research, and if I had pulled it out, Niko would’ve most likely inserted it in a place I was saving for my colonoscopy when I turned fifty. My caution didn’t help. Once we were out of a cab and home, my plans for the whole Niko having a life having taken a nosedive, he used words instead. The second we made it through the door, it was all over for me.

“You somehow thought in your minuscule mind that it was a good idea to keep the fact to yourself that another Sawney Beane is turning the city into his hunting ground?” he demanded.

Although it had been only a lie of omission and an extremely short omission at that, I gave him the truth now. “It was for your own good.”

“My own good?” he echoed, not impressed with my logic. “That is what an adult tells a child, an impatient adult, and it’s certainly not what I told you when you were young.”

He was right. He’d always explained exactly why things were the way they were or why things had to be done. He hadn’t once brushed me off with an “it’s for your own good.” Even as a kid he’d been a better man than I was now. It didn’t bother me a bit. Watching out for Nik was more important than being a better man.

“You were a good big brother. Still are, which is why I wasn’t going to tell you. It really was for your own good.” I dumped my jacket on the battered couch. “If the dickhead hadn’t dumped a body on us”—less metaphorically than I’d have liked—“it would still be for your own good.”

“It would be for my own good to let people be slaughtered when we might be able to stop it?” His duster went neatly on a hook he’d hammered into the wall beside the door the day we’d moved in. He’d done the same at every place we’d lived since I could remember. I had an image flash through my brain of a solemn blond nine-year-old hitting a nail into a stained plaster wall, using the heel of a shoe for a hammer.

Everything in its place. I felt the corners of my lips quirk at the memory. We all developed coping mechanisms. Niko imposed order on chaos. I imposed chaos on those not fast enough to get out of my way. Whatever worked.

I flopped on the couch and propped my feet up on the cheap coffee table. “This is New York City. Someone is always being slaughtered. We’re in a big enough mess as it is. If our calendar was wide open, I’d have told you.”

Possibly, but I wouldn’t have dropped a fifty on that bet. It wasn’t exclusively the big brothers who leaned toward the overprotective range. Little brothers, we gave as good as we fucking got.

With the Wolves, revenants, boggles, lamias, succubae, incubi, and on and on in the city, slaughter was on the menu every day. Although they killed to eat. They just happened to eat people. What we called slaughter they called dinner. The paien serial killers were different. They might take a nibble here and there, they might play at having a snack, but when it came down to it—they killed because they liked it. It got their supernatural dicks hard. No other reason. That made them less predictable, which made them harder to catch. They also tended to be—at least Sawney had—batshit fucking crazy. And that had made him almost impossible to catch.

To me it didn’t make much difference. Slaughter for food, slaughter for fun—NYC was one giant combo buffet and toy shop and it was always open for business. We could work for free twenty-four/seven and that wouldn’t change. If it was selfish not to want my brother to join the body count, then I was fine with that. Selfish was good. Selfish was great. Stamp it on my forehead. God knew the Peace Corps wasn’t calling my name.

“But our calendar isn’t open thanks to Grimm and his Bae kiddies.” The new Auphe—if fully grown man-eaters could be called kiddies. “We’re full up. You’re full up. So, ream me out all you want. You’re not changing my mind: it was for your own good,” I emphasized with all the stubbornness I could scrape up. And that was a lot. “If we could whittle your conscience down to a normal size, you’d agree.”

My feet were pushed off the table with a light swat. “What about Ishiah’s conscience? Our two to your one.” He frowned down at me.

“Ishiah has enough conscience to tell me about it, but thanks to some peri rule that sounds like bullshit to me, he doesn’t have enough to do anything about it himself.” I took off my holster to lay it and the guns on the duct-taped cushion beside me. I raised my eyes to the narrowed ones fixed on me. We had the same gray eyes, but I hadn’t to this day managed to pull off that look of solar-flare-heated annoyance yet. I grumped and put up my hands to preempt a further teachable moment about consciences. “Hey, I get it. The asshole threw a body at us. That’s not random. Booked calendar or not, we’ve been called out. He’s after us for some reason or another. Grab the hip waders because we’re in the shit now. I’m on board, okay already?”

He was silent for a moment, arms folded, blond hair pulled back so tightly to fall in a braid down his back that it gave me a headache just looking at him. “The body . . . it was a woman.”

“I know.” I wasn’t blind. Sawney Beane had killed women too . . . pregnant women, young women, little girls. Being the more reasonable sex didn’t exclude you from an early death. And every one of their bodies had been a nightmare, the same as the body tonight. “Even though I’d like to keep your anal-retentive ass alive doesn’t mean I don’t feel when I see them.” Innocent bystanders weren’t always annoying. Sometimes they were slaughtered lambs, bleeding their lives away in crimson pain, horror, and despair.

“I know,” I repeated, picking at a corner of the duct tape. I wasn’t defensive. I knew my brother. That’s not what he was thinking.

“I realize that.” His jaw tightened. I wasn’t defensive, but he was. “That little girl Sawney killed. I remember that you found it . . . difficult, although you tried to hide it. Now on top of that, we have your gates making you overconfident combined with your pathological need to guard me like an entire pack of attack dogs against even the knowledge of a new supernatural serial killer.”

That wasn’t the pot calling the kettle black, not at all. I let it go as I summed it up for him. “Be careful?”

He relaxed. “Yes, Cal. Be careful.”

On two of the three, no problem, I’d go along with them. On the attack dog issue, that wasn’t going to change. Sawney hadn’t been that long ago. He had come close to killing all of us, Niko included. The memory had stuck with me. The little girl had stayed with me, too. I still had her sunshine-colored barrette tucked away in a drawer, I thought with a sharp pang.

It wasn’t a good idea. Sentiment for unknown victims either made you miserable or got you killed in our line of work. I should throw away that barrette. Yeah, I would.

Someday.

There was more of my lingering human. More of that identity crisis. Huh. I was kind of surprised. Maybe I needed a new T-shirt to join my banned supposedly offensive ones: 30% HUMAN. FDA APPROVED.

No sense in worrying about it either way. I yawned and levered up off the couch. After another jaw-cracking yawn, I said, “Bed. Make me a happy-face pancake for breakfast. Put me in the mood for serial killer hunting tomorrow.”

“I have one use for a spatula and you and it does not involve pancakes. Would you like me to explain it in detail?”

“I’m lazy, Cyrano, not stupid.” I grabbed my holster, left the jacket on the couch and automatically tugged Niko’s long braid as I circled him and headed past the kitchen on one side, the training area on the other and down the hall to my bedroom.

I heard the snort from a nose seen on many a Greek statue. Hawklike and noble in size. It came from a stray Northern Greek horn-dog who sweet-talked a girl from our Rom clan centuries ago. That’s also where Niko’s dark blond hair entered a dusky-skinned, black-haired gene pool. Just as my decidedly non-Rom pale skin came from the Auphe swimming in my blood.

The difference was Nik would be considered pure Rom to the Vayash clan—if he turned his back on me . . . or, as they’d said, preferably put me down like a rabid dog. Put me out of their misery, because I would never be Rom. They’d made that clear. I would never even be close to human, never anything less than an “abomination.”

Too bad they didn’t know sooner or later if Grimm had his way there’d be a new hybrid race of Auphe sweeping the earth, worse than the originals, and all wearing—if the universe had any sense of humor—T-shirts of their own that read ABOMINATION NATION.

One could hope.