Blackout

  Hours later Goodfellow was close to being buzzed, the bar had run out of scotch, and I knew Ammut, the Eater of Hearts, had been born of the Egyptian Nile; she was as old as Goodfellow, which was so old he couldn’t remember; and she wasn’t a goddess in truth.

  Relieved? Yeah, a little bit.

  “Everyone back then who could get more than two humans to worship them was claiming to be a god or a goddess. And why not? Free food. Vestal virgins … vestal horny virgins. Fertility rites. Good times. Very good times. If you could pass as one, why not claim it?” Goodfellow had said. While I marveled that there was nothing in his view of history that couldn’t be directly linked to some sort of orgy, he went on with the rest of it. Ammut thought hearts were a nice snack, but she really liked souls much better. Except nonhumans didn’t call them souls, because they weren’t souls. It was a creature’s life force she drained and consumed.

  Ammut, in Egyptian legend, ate the heart of a dead person if they were found unworthy of passing on to the afterlife. If you did bad things, it weighted down your heart, much like fried pork chops weighted it down with cholesterol. Sin and fried pork chops—two of the best things in the world, and all they got you was an early death and acting as the dinner for a greedy Egyptian fake goddess.

  We’d gone through this all before, but I’d forgotten it. I didn’t think it would be that long before I started remembering things on my own again. Last night lying on a bed surrounded by enough rumpled clothes to stock a Salvation Army store, seeing the city lights through the windows high above, it had felt the way it should. Right. True. As if I recognized it with my body if not my mind. It was the same when I woke up this morning when Leandros had kicked lightly at the bottom of my mattress. I hadn’t thought about shooting him with the gun under my pillow once. I’d been tempted… . It was eight a.m. for Christ’s sake … but I hadn’t actually put any real thought into it. It had felt right too. Then there were the shadows and bits of thoughts I couldn’t connect to any solid memory, but that hadn’t stopped them from popping up today.

  “When she sucks out their life force, they die.” I started to take a pretzel out of the bowl, when the dead cat gave me a look. I let her have the pretzel. She didn’t eat it, but she wanted it and that was good enough for me. I feared no giant spider, but her … I was on the fence. “Are there souls? What if she did eat them? Does that mean no afterlife for the unlucky bastard? Is there an afterlife?” The cat didn’t count. She was still moving. She wasn’t so much after life as predeath. Halfway between.

  Goodfellow looked up at the ceiling and scratched the bald head of his pet. “That’s far too encompassing a topic for now. Philosophy can wait. Let’s focus on the part of her devouring their life force and they die. That’s enough to get the job done.”

  “On that note, I’ve got a job to get done. Be right back.” I got up and searched out the bathroom. Dick in hand, I was reading the graffiti, a lot of which was about me, go figure, and not in a “for a good time” kind of way, when I heard the door swing and smelled the Wolf. It was an accomplishment. The entire place smelled of the furry bastards. I’d be smelling Wolf for a week. Then came the growl, the breath reeking of rotting meat—not much on flossing—and the mangled words, “You are weak now.” He moved closer. “I smell it on you.” Closer still. “You are weak like a sheep.”

  Motherfucker.

  Could a guy literally not take a leak in this messed-up world without fighting for the goddamn privilege?

  I had no illusions about what normal wolves did to normal sheep, what Wolves did to human sheep, or what this Wolf wanted to do to me. I kept pissing and raised my other hand that held the Desert Eagle to ram the muzzle between his eyes as he started to snap his jaws at my throat. Yeah, I’d learned my lesson the past few days. I now held my dick in one hand and my gun in the other when nature called. Guns worked better than forks.

  I dug the muzzle harder into his flesh, the metal grating on the bone of his overhanging brow. He was one freaky-looking Wolf—not in entirely wolf or human form, like a cut-rate Halloween werewolf costume. Not a good look. He looked like a guy overdosing on steroids, Rogaine, and with teeth… . Okay, the teeth definitely couldn’t pass for human. “You’re not that bright, Rover. I don’t know or care why you think the rest of me is weak, but my trigger finger is Arnold-fucking-Schwarzenegger. Now back the fuck off or I’ll blow your empty skull apart and finish pissing on your body like a fire hydrant.” I grinned. “You won’t get a more appropriate memorial than that.”

  His skull wasn’t as empty as it seemed. He had at least one brain cell and he used it to back away and out of the bathroom. Puppies.

  Weak? I thought I’d proven I was anything but and had Nepenthe spiders to testify on that—if they weren’t dead, but maybe he smelled the amnesia on me and thought without memories I couldn’t kick furry tail and take ID and rabies tags while I did it. Who knew? A few minutes later I was back at the table with Goodfellow picking up the Ammut snooze blah blah right where he left off the second I sat down.

  “And the more powerful the nonhuman, the better Ammut likes it. She isn’t wasting much time sending her spiders after the revenants. They’re not worth her time, but the vampires, Wolves, boggles—they’ve been more to her taste, which is why the Kin has said they would cooperate until this is all over. We have yet to find her or her nest of spiders. Before you left for South Carolina, we were going to check Central Park and see if Mama Boggle and her brood were there or if Ammut had gotten to them yet.”

  Leandros braved an undead paw and put a pretzel in front of me. He did it automatically. I could see a lifetime of feeding the “little brother” behind it. It was so automatic, in fact, I guessed there’d been times we’d gone hungry as kids. Or Leandros had anyway. All his pretzels on hungry days, I’d bet, had gone to me. It was things like that that had made me believe his and Goodfellow’s story more than the words. “We can go there tonight. If I had a choice, I’d leave you here with Ishiah and Samyel, but I think you would be safer with the three of us. Too many old enemies know you work here.”

  “You’re worried about me?” I picked up the pretzel and saluted him with it. “I killed an eighty-pound spider with a fork—even if I missed Goodfellow twice. It looks like killing doesn’t require a memory.” A lesson I’d just taught Rover. “You can put away the diaper and bottle.”

  I proved that, again, when we stepped outside the bar into a seven o’clock gloom to head to Central Park. I took four steps, pulled the Desert Eagle, pointed it upward, and pulled the trigger. Then I took another step, this time back, as the body hit the pavement at my feet. It was a Wolf, female, and more wolf than human. Another half-and-half. All Wolf. The jaw was twisted and wide-open for my throat, the fangs bared. Her hands were more like elongated paws, her eyes open and staring pure gold. There wasn’t any blood to speak of, only a hole in her forehead. Shattered bone and burned flesh. The dead don’t bleed. She’d jumped from three stories up; that and the bad lighting made it a good shot. And that was all I felt—the satisfaction of a job well-done.

  At first.

  I was a not-so-bad brother. I saved people. And I was a killer. I didn’t feel bad about the last item. I only killed monsters, I killed only to save those who needed it. I counted myself on that list. If you were going to try to kill me—try hard. I could guarantee I was going to try my best to do the same back to you. If you were a werewolf perched three stories up, you shouldn’t make any noise when you jump, because any would be too much. It can seal your fate and it had hers. “A Wolf.” I didn’t mention the one in the bathroom. He was more braindamaged mutt than Wolf, drunk, and with delusions of fuzzy grandeur. If he was in the Kin, he probably was their equivalent of a janitor. He hadn’t had the intelligence for more.

  I chambered another round in the Eagle. “Not to mention the revenant-thing in the apartment. I thought you said the Furry Mafia was on our side on this one.”

  “Except for Delilah. Every pack but hers
agreed. The Lupa pack didn’t bother to send a reply.” Niko was resheathing his sword. He was the big killer looking out for the little killer. “Although I think this may be that response.”

  My ex’s pack, the Lupa, was named for the wolf that suckled the founders of ancient Rome. Leandros liked shoving those little factoids in your ear at every opportunity. He’d told me too that Wolves weren’t actually werewolves; they were were-people. They’d started out as wolves and evolved to being able to switch back and forth between wolf and human. Some Wolves wanted to go back to what they’d been before that Jurassic mutation. The cult of All Wolf. That had led to inbreeding and damn odd-looking people with pointed ears or jaws, stuck in between human and wolf, unable to be completely one or the other.

  My reaction to that lecture? Tell me I hadn’t been doing a chick with a hairy back. Dear God, tell me she hadn’t had a hairy back. I’d been relieved to find out that Delilah looked all human when she was human and all wolf when she was Wolf. Not like this one lying at my feet.

  The gold eyes were fogging over. They’d belonged in the forest, peering through the underbrush, not dead on a sidewalk outside a bar. Suddenly I wasn’t as proud of my perfect shot anymore. When killers had the eyes of an animal whose predatory temperament was nature and nature wasn’t meant to be the subject of punishment, it was harder to feel a hero. That was how I’d thought of it. I was a cop or a soldier on the front line between the innocent and the nightmares. But I saw it for what it was now. Take pride in whom you’re saving, but don’t take it in the killing. It was necessary, but it wasn’t something to glory in—especially when the creature you killed had thoughts and emotions the same as you, the only difference being a wild and free soul living as born instinct had taught her.

  Be good at your job, but don’t think your job is good.

  The road to Hell …

  I squatted down beside the dead Wolf and touched her hair. It was thick and black, like mine, but long. “We can’t leave her just lying here.” Killer or not, person or creature of the wild, asphalt was not a peaceful place for any body to find its rest.

  “Ishiah will take care of her. This street is nonhuman. It’ll be handled.” Niko’s hand landed on my back and grabbed a handful of my jacket to urge me up. “She’s playing with you. Delilah. She knows one of hers couldn’t take you, much less all of us. If Delilah wanted you dead, she would’ve come herself.”

  Delilah didn’t think a pack member could take me, but she thought she could. Since she had gotten her Alpha and pack killed off to the last Wolf, she might be right. I sure knew how to pick them. “If this is a game, I don’t want to play.” I stood up. “I’m a killer, but I don’t think I want to be if this is how it is. Protecting is one thing. Playing, using killing as a damn pastime, that’s wrong.”

  I remembered, in that moment, wings flapping behind my eyes. I was young, little—I had no idea how little, but enough that I remembered being surprised and shocked when a blackbird flew into a window at a house we were living in. I didn’t recall the house itself, but I thought it was grubby, dirty, old. I was sitting in grass and weeds, playing with a plastic truck that had three wheels. I was happy, content, until the sound of a stick breaking, but softer, more muffled. The bird had hit the window, and I looked up in time to see it fall to the ground without a single flutter of a feather. A blond boy was there. Six or seven, he was older than me. He picked up the bird gently, then carried it off to a deeper patch of weeds and laid it down. It was swallowed up by green and yellow. I asked why.

  Why, Nik? Why won’t it fly away?

  Because it’s dead, Cal. It broke its neck.

  But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the bird’s fault some stupid person had built a house in its way. It wasn’t right that birds died, because if birds died, then maybe everything died.

  They do, the other boy explained gravely. It’s the way things are, Cal.

  “It shouldn’t be,” I murmured to myself. “Blackbirds shouldn’t die and neither should Wolves or people. Not like this. Not for goddamn sport.” I put my gun away. It wasn’t reassuring anymore or to be drooled over the size of the hole it could put through something—or someone’s head. It was a necessary evil.

  “You remember?” Leandros asked. His hand hadn’t released my jacket and he gave me a light shake. “You remember that?”

  “I remember the blackbird. That’s all. But it’s enough to know that if I like what I do [an excessive enthusiasm for my work Leandros had said], then maybe I’m a dick.” I looked away from the Wolf and all that had roamed untamed and free in her. Wolves were wolves. They killed. I got that. They had evolved that way. You should stop them, but you shouldn’t blame them. If it runs, you chase it. If you catch it, you kill it. If you kill it, you eat it. That sounded familiar too, but if you’d ever seen a lion eating a zebra on the Discovery Channel, you knew that.

  Facts of life. Zebras didn’t die of old age as much as a little boy and a dead blackbird wished they did.

  I exhaled and let it all go. It was coming back, faster and faster now. Soon enough who I was now would be who I was then, and it’d all be the same as it ever was. There was no point in thinking about that. There were other things to do. “The park,” I said. “Someone said Central Park and boggles. Boggles, huh? I guess you’re not talking that game old people play.”

  6

  Boggle was not the game old people played, because wouldn’t that have been too easy?

  What it turned out to be was a nine-foot-tall mudencrusted, humanoid lizard that weighed about five hundred pounds, had pumpkin orange eyes full of fury, and about six cute little kiddies to make the whole thing a party.

  “You said she was a mom,” I hissed at Leandros from behind a tree. The boggle, Ms. Boggle, whatever name she went by, had just tossed another tree, a complete tree from roots to top that she pulled up out of the ground with no effort whatsoever, at us. She’d missed by inches. In this situation, as in all situations, inches mattered; they could embarrass you and they could make or break you. I was leaning toward embarrassment as the better choice.

  Leandros was unperturbed by the trees sailing through the air—another day at the office with staplers, copy machines, bad coffee, and trees almost crushing you. No big deal. That was nice for him. “She is a mother. See behind her? The boglets? Those are her children.”

  Her children. Her cute bundles of joy. The kiddies were only seven feet tall with grinning jaws, lashing tails, and teeth that curved inward shark-fashion. Yeah, they were so sweet and adorable that I wanted to tie ribbons around their necks and put them on the cover of a Humane Society calendar. “You said she liked us. If she likes us, why is she throwing maple trees at us?”

  “Oak. That’s an inexcusable mistake, whether it’s nighttime or not. Didn’t you see the shape of the dead leaves? The root pattern?” He gave up when I picked up a small rock and winged it at him. He dodged easily behind his shelter of another tree. “Never mind. I didn’t say she liked us. I said she didn’t necessarily hate us, depending on the present we brought her.”

  I heard the rustle of leaves above me and looked up to see eyes that spread their own lambent pumpkincolored light, letting me see the teeth, the scales, and claws of black that were about the size of your average butcher’s knife. “Then give her the damn present,” I said, pointing the Eagle up at Junior. I’d taken down a Wolf, but I wasn’t sure what a round would do against those layers of muddy scales, besides extremely pissing off their owner. “Before I ruin this boggle’s dream of making the basketball team at his junior high.”

  “Now that we’ve seen they’re all accounted for and thriving, which means they haven’t fallen victim to Ammut’s spiders, it would be a waste to give her what we might need to bribe her with at a later date.”

  It had been two, going on three days now since Leandros had appeared in his brotherly glory. Two and a half days combined with a couple of hazy memories that I couldn’t depend on. Was it any doubt I would th
ink I hallucinated half of what the guy said? His actions made me trust him. His words often made me want to beat him with a two-by-four.

  “Later date? You mean from-beyond-the-grave later date? Because I have better plans for my afterlife than tossing rhinestones at a white-trash monster living in pigsty heaven instead of a double-wide. They’re going to kill us. They won’t bother to eat you as you’re made up of bean curd and soy, but I’m pure pizza, fried chicken, and burgers. They will eat my ass. Give her the damn bling.”

  “You and common sense. I’m not sure I can get used to that combination. I suppose I may as well ask her if she’s heard anything.” He put a hand in his coat pocket and then tossed out a handful of pearls. They landed in the mud pit that Mama Boggle had climbed out of and where she now crouched on the edge. In a small clearing in the trees of Central Park, you didn’t need a moon to see. The sky was as orange as the eyes of the boggles. New York was a city so big that it sucked the darkness out of the night itself.

  Some of the pearls stuck in wet mud while some rolled on the surface of more dry pieces. Whatever color they were in the daylight, they were all orange here. That didn’t stop the big boggle—Boggle with a capital B—from pulling her enormous dark claws out of yet another tree and squatting on muscled legs and rolling them around with a talon tip. “From the world of water. Fresh. Untouched by any human’s grubby baby paws but yours.” Her voice was so deep and loud, an auditory avalanche, I expected the ground to shake under our feet.

  Leandros stepped out from behind his tree as I used the Eagle to swat the talons reaching for my head. If mommy was in a better mood, I didn’t want to change that by shooting her kid. That and it was a kid, a juvenile mega-alligator with a brain hanging up in that tree. If you walked into the Everglades and got your leg bitten off by a leftover prehistoric lizard, you had no one to blame but yourself. That was their territory, not yours, and this part of the park was the same as far as boggles were concerned.