Blackout

11

  AbominationAbominationAbominationAbomination-AbominationAbominationAbomination.

  I wobbled for a second as I woke up or realized I was awake. It wasn’t that easy to tell the difference between the two. I was in bare feet, sweatpants, and a T-shirt. It was cold. We needed to get that window fixed. I hated the cold worse than I hated Niko’s tofu. The wall in front of me, the knife wall, was covered with that scarlet word, from as far up as I could reach down to the floor. My hand was cramping and I lifted it up to see the pen I was holding. The red was ink, not blood; that was something.

  “You’ve been at it for three hours. I gave up trying to wake you up after the first hour. This, naturally, means you will never drink again.”

  Sleepwriting; it was better than sleepwalking, I guessed. I dropped the pen as I turned. Niko was lying on my bed, which was neatly made with fresh sheets and a blanket—a pillow too. Fancy schmancy. “How’d we get home?”

  “Cab. You were upright, technically, but not especially coherent. You went to sleep on the sidewalk while I unlocked the door and then woke up, only to pass out again here on your floor, which, lucky for you, was as always padded with your dirty clothes. I thought it might be a good idea for one of us to be conscious in case the spiders returned. I made your bed and have been here since.” He sat up, indicating the gauze wrapped around his biceps. It showed about half an inch, the rest covered by his own T-shirt sleeve. Removing the tape and bandage and pulling up that sleeve, he revealed a black and red band similar to the one I had around my arm but written in a different language. “All of this following getting a tattoo I did not want or need because you insisted it was in something called The Good Brother Handbook.”

  “Yeah?” I studied it with interest. “What’s it say?”

  His eyes narrowed and there wasn’t a trace of the dry humor I’d seen once or twice when he wasn’t forcing himself to live a lie. “Don’t get my brand-new sheets there wedged up between your ninja-ass cheeks,” I said, providing all the humor and then some. “I remember what it says. Maybe I’ll tell you on Christmas. Don’t go researching ancient Aramaic and spoil the surprise trying to read it yourself.” I did remember too, and I didn’t have a hangover. For someone who didn’t drink often, I was still expert at it. A natural talent for fighting off toxins, the fun kind and the spider kind, that was me.

  Yesssss. Never weak.

  I moved back to my original position, facing the wall. No one was going to need any help reading that. Covering the entire thing was that one word. Abomination. My subconscious had a thing for that word when it came to monsters, a real obsession. First, it whispered it in my head and now it spelled it out in reality, covering every inch, every single inch.

  Except …

  Precisely in the middle of the wall were six different words in letters so much smaller than the others that they were barely noticeable. AbominationAbomination-Where are your brothers and sisters? Give them to me AbominationAbomination.Abomination. “I gotta say”—I scanned the entire wall—”I’m an industrious worker in my sleep.” Abomination, I ignored. My subconscious didn’t like monsters—or part of it didn’t; that was perfectly clear and had been from day one. And from day one when I thought monsters, I’d also thought automatically abomination. But the other thing written on the wall …

  Where are they? Your brothers and sisters? Give them to me.

  Selfish.

  Where?

  Where?

  Where?

  It was what she’d wanted in the park. That was what she’d said after demanding I give them to her. My brothers and sisters, and as far as I knew, I had only the one. Ammut, the bitch, making demands I couldn’t meet because I didn’t understand. I couldn’t wait to catch up with her. Goodfellow better have his socialite/cougar trap all but ready.

  Wait. When they’d brought me back from South Carolina, that had been scratched in the concrete in front of our place. Where are your brothers and sisters? She’d always wanted that from me, whatever that was, from day one.

  I reminded Niko of what was carved out front and said, “Now we know for sure what the ‘them’ is in the ‘give them to me’ love note she left yesterday. You’re positive we don’t have any other brothers or a sister hanging around? Maybe Mommy Dearest sold one in a Walmart parking lot for booze?” I groaned as I massaged my hand and sat down next to Niko on the bed, practically bouncing off the snug, hospital-corner-tight army blanket. “You going to tell me what happened in the park now? Before you sent me on my vacation down South? I told you what I remember. Why don’t you tell me?”

  He gave up on that particular deceit—liar, liar, pants on fire—and this time told the truth. “I don’t know.” What came after that sounded true too, but uneasy as if he didn’t know, but he’d started guessing and his guessing would be good. He was too smart for it not to be. He had his suspicions, but he wasn’t sharing them—a different type of deceit, but deceit all the same. “I don’t know what Ammut wants or what that means.” He rolled off the bed and stood abruptly, then gave me his back with the next words. “I’m the only brother you have.” I wonder if he knew that sounded more like a question than a fact. “And she has no reason to want me. I won’t taste any better than any other human.”

  I didn’t call him on it. Niko was so far over the edge in this mess that he was going to have to ride it all the way out. The lying and half-truths were nothing compared to what else he’d done, something completely outside his moral code.

  I’d seen that moral code this week or so. He’d walk back three blocks to give back change to someone who hadn’t charged him enough for a PowerBar. He was loyal to his friends, devoted to me, possibly pathologically so, loved a vampire—seeing past the outer monster to the core of the true woman beneath, and had given up vamp nookie to babysit me until the amnesia passed. He’d raised me from birth—what person did that if they weren’t functional parents? Not even brothers did that, but this one had. The guy had honor in a way that almost eclipsed the word itself.

  What he was doing now, not only lying, but doing— he’d be punishing himself so thoroughly on the inside that I didn’t need to add to it.

  One time had been enough for me to figure it out—one time and a spider in a box. New toothpaste plus memory relapse. That and the constant harping on my dental hygiene. Brush your teeth, brush your teeth. He was worse than any dentist. I didn’t have to be a genius to know where he was putting the Nepenthe venom. It was only enough to keep me from recovering any further memories. Keeping the status quo, thanks to the box o’ spider he’d FedExed to Robin—one of the few memories of that day I’d hung on to.

  If anyone would know how to make that ancient nepenthe potion of the pharaohs, or know someone else who did, it would be Goodfellow. He was the one who’d known of its existence in the first place and who knew its effects. He did that for Niko, and he’d given me enough of a clue in the bar for me to make my own decision. Under the cloak of talking about my mother’s alcoholism, he’d told me … Sometimes, genes or no genes, you simply had to accept who you were.

  I didn’t know personally if Cal was a good guy or a bad guy, but I did know he was a shadowed one. I also knew what Ishiah had told me, but that wasn’t anything I’d repeat. I also knew people reacted to me like a grenade that inexplicably didn’t go off. I know Wolves and boggles had lost respect for me, even though I could still kick their asses. I knew body-temple Niko wouldn’t have gotten a tattoo for his Cal unless he thought it would help the return of part of that Cal—some of him but not the part that remembered, not that unhappy part. No one who cared for his brother wanted him unhappy.

  Niko wasn’t the kind to make mistakes often, but with me … and with Cal, he had.

  I didn’t know Cal, that was true, but I knew myself. I wasn’t a murderer. I was a killer, but only if I had to be. I wasn’t an abusive shit like our mother was said to have been. But most of all, I wasn’t a thief. I wasn’t stealing Cal’s life or Niko’s brother. I’d t
hought it before: Niko Leandros was a born martyr, but now it was time for him to walk away just this once and let someone else take the stoning in his place. Cal wasn’t happier this way, because I wasn’t Cal; I was only a piece of him.

  Whoever Cal was didn’t make a difference. I wasn’t complete. I wasn’t the real deal, but real or not, illusion or the foundation of an actual person, I was a good guy. If you could have anything in the world, that was one of the better things to have. Tombstones crack and fall. Fortunes come and go. Legends fade. What you did with your life, no matter how short it was or how real it was, that counted.

  That lasted forever.

  “Did you fall asleep?” A sharp elbow stung me over my ribs.

  I let it all slide out of sight. It was a waiting game now. My memories would come back, but I couldn’t pick when. That was out of my hands, although using Niko’s vomit-worthy toothpaste instead of the minty-fresh venom-laced one would make sure it did happen and sooner rather than later. Sitting around thinking what a damn heroic guy I was wasn’t going to make anything happen on the Ammut front, though. I had to pay that rent.

  “Thinking how annoying it would’ve been to wake up to five or six Nikos instead of just the one. You’re damn annoying all on your own. More brothers? No way.” I elbowed him back. “Since we don’t know anything about what bat-shit-crazy Ammut wants from us, why don’t we dangle ourselves in front of her so she can ask us personally? Get Goodfellow to hold whatever rich shits of New York party he’s going to tonight.” The puck had said it would take days to do right and be believable. But if we put enough bait in the trap, it wouldn’t have to be believable—only too good to pass up. “Have him invite a crapload of vamps and Wolves and whatever else crawls out from under the beds along with humans. Stack the deck. It’ll be too juicy a temptation. Ammut will either try to eat the guests or jump us to ask us about the brothers-and-sisters thing.”

  The Peter Pan albino crocodile smiled in my head and that long grin … Oh, shit … It was made of metal. Every tooth was bared in that horrific grin, shining like a serial killer’s blade. Here we have left you presents. Here you have brothers and sisters.

  Or my mind could stop goddamn teasing me and tell me itself. I waited a second, but there wasn’t any more from the crocodile that seemed to know more about things than Niko and I combined. Lucky crocodile. Lucky me, because I didn’t want to see it anymore, not the gleam of one hideous fang.

  “You call him,” I said as I stood back up. “I’m scared shitless he might have it set to speakerphone and I’ll hear something that will make me jab my eye out with the closest sharp object.”

  “Where are you going?” he demanded—overprotective or on my ass to keep away the lazy. The result was the same.

  “To brush my teeth,” I said before he could. I couldn’t save him from the chain of deception, but I could save him from at least one link in it. It was all in that brother handbook.

  Whatever part of that brother I was.

  It was Delilah who led us one step closer to Ammut and a bigger step to the old me—hours before the party Goodfellow had managed to set up. She called us with the location of a brownstone with a basement full of bodies. That was a surprise; then again, maybe not. Niko had said she wanted to impress the Kin by killing or saying she’d killed Vukasin, but she’d impress them even more if she killed an Alpha and helped bring Ammut down—all while letting us do the heavy lifting.

  Ambitious and smart didn’t begin to do this chick justice. If I had one chance before this was all over … Ah, damn, she’d eat me alive. Literally. During the act probably. The real Cal, like me, was a killer, but unlike me, his moral judgment about it had to be more blurry than mine. He could run with the Wolves, while everyone else heard only baaing when I was around. I was nothing but a sheep in their eyes—a very badass sheep, but badass or not, a sheep was a sheep. Kill someone in the middle of sex? I couldn’t do that. But I didn’t doubt that Delilah would and Cal could. She would for the sheer fun of it. Trying to kill Vukasin and the council before Ammut beat her to it showed she loved her slaughter, and Cal would do it in self-defense. I hoped it would be self-defense.

  Niko missed his brother. Yeah, self-defense. That guy loved the hell out of his brother, and a stone cold killer—he wouldn’t have raised one of those. He was like frigging Gandhi with a katana and a boot in your ass—ethical but pragmatic. He wouldn’t have brought up a human version of a monster.

  The laughter in my head was twofold this time, one fold hysterically amused and one fold darkly bitter. What lived in Cal, good, bad, and in-between, made me not particularly sorry I was only part of him, the silhouette of him on the sidewalk fading more every hour as the sun moved across the sky.

  I wondered if I’d remain part of him, aware, or if I’d disappear completely.

  Now I lay me down to sleep …

  What of you would I possibly want to keep?

  Or maybe I’d be a voice in his head. I hope I said better things than I’d had to hear. But better yet, I wouldn’t be there at all. Better to sleep, locked in his subconscious, because I had a feeling he wouldn’t listen to much of what I had to say.

  “What are we doing here?” Goodfellow said as the taxi stopped. When he’d called us to tell us about the party, Niko had said we’d gotten wind of Ammut moments before his call and to grab his sword and pick us up at our place.

  “Delilah called,” I said as I opened the door and stepped out of the cab. “She said there were some leftovers here for us. Investigation, clues, all that crap.”

  Once he and Niko were out and the cab was pulling away, he said, “If Ammut shows up at the charity event”—which was what rich people called an excuse to get hammered—”this entire trip will have been a waste of time. I hate wasted time. It interferes with my wickedness and dissolution. Do you think becoming this degenerate comes without practice? I’ve invested millennia in becoming the magnificence that stands before you. But it takes time and upkeep to maintain these heights. Time not spent in what may well be a putrid pit of spiders and bodies.”

  I shrugged. “Hey, preaching to the choir, but Niko insisted. Said he’d paddle my ass with a sword if he had to.”

  “I already have someone to do that. Although once upon a time if Niko had said that to me …” Goodfellow didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Niko was already leaving us on the sidewalk as he headed up the brownstone’s stairs at a fast pace, quick as legs could move without it actually being labeled running. It was much better being on the other side of the Goodfellow personal-life TMI seizure for once.

  “That was fucking great.” I grinned. “Do it to him again.”

  And that request had Niko through the door and inside before Goodfellow had a chance to say or do anything. I knew I could pick a lock from my few days in the Landing. One night I’d forgotten the key to my room. I hadn’t felt like waiting for the guy at the motel desk to get out of the bathroom when he was done whacking off and since I could hear him whacking off, I hadn’t felt like looking around for a master key either. I’d gotten through my door in about three minutes. Niko went through the brownstone door in three seconds. Or so I thought until I reached the top of the stairs myself and saw the lock was busted out with claw marks and the smell of Wolf on the door. Delilah and her pack didn’t care about picking locks and bricks might save the Three Little Pigs from them, but it wouldn’t save anyone else.

  It was a one-residence brownstone. You didn’t see many of those anymore. The hallway was dusty enough to tell that no one had lived here for a while, but the path through that dust said someone did use the place now and again. The pictures on the wall were of an older woman and man. Ammut didn’t seem the domestic kind of monster, with the life sucking and all, which made it easy to guess this couple had owned the brownstone and Ammut had eaten them. It had most likely been when she’d first come into town before she got settled in a place of her own and started eating things tastier than human sheep.
r />   I heard a faint crackle under my shoe and crouched down to touch a finger to an all but invisible glitter on the floor. They were scales, the ones I hadn’t been able to see at the canal, but not crocodile scales. There was no Peter Pan villain here. These were more like snake scales. Smaller, finer, and they smelled like poison … of something rank and rotten—the Nile during a drought with dead fish and creeping putrefaction for miles. “Holy shit.” I half gagged and brushed it off my hand quickly. When she’d left the hearts at our place, she must have been in human form, or mostly, because I hadn’t caught a whiff of this.

  Straightening, I pulled out the Eagle. The smell was getting stronger. Farther down the hall, Niko already had his sword in one hand. With his other he made a gesture. It wasn’t the finger, which right now was one of the few gestures that meant anything to me. I had to know signs and be a monster killer too? Was there a merit badge for that at monster killer Scout meetings? Disemboweling revenants in your bathroom and hand signals for something that wanted to do the same to you? Then hot chocolate and cookies. Good time had by all.

  I gave Niko an expression that was universally recognized as “What the fuck?” by the memory challenged and nonmemory challenged alike. His sword hand gave a minute twitch that made the katana-paddling threat more genuine, but instead he gave a few more generic motions of his hand. He pointed up and then down. Okay, that I got. How anal-retentive one had to be to have hand signals for up and down that weren’t simply up and down, I didn’t get, but the rest I did. I was the bloodhound. Where was the hamburger? I took a deeper breath as behind me Goodfellow silently closed the door. After my pretty loud “holy shit” of moments ago, being quiet was most likely behind us, but you never knew.

  I tilted my head back, up toward the stairs, and took one more breath. Down—the stench was definitely stronger down. Delilah hadn’t been lying when she’d said a basement full of bodies. She hadn’t mentioned the maker was down there with them. Ammut couldn’t have been here when the Lupa were. The Wolves wouldn’t miss that stink and Ammut wouldn’t miss a chance at some furry num nums. Suck the life force, bypass hairballs and indigestion later. It was efficient. I had to give her that.