Doubletake

  “You’d best hope and pray we do die.” One drop of vengeance in an ocean of head slaps I’d received over the years and Niko was holding a grudge. After the past two days, the calming effects of his meditation were taking a beating.

  It didn’t matter. It looked as if my suggested hopes and prayers were coming true. Now I heard them, the rustle of their wings. They were coming down, the shroud to cover the dead—and we were the dead. The size of a medium beagle, they had pinpoint eyes of milky white, ears huge and pointed, snub muzzles pouring gray mucus, clawed hands at the juncture of the wings, and a curved dagger of a tongue plenty long enough to reach my heart. I lifted the Glock, but it was hopeless. I could take out ten Cyclops, but these were in the hundreds. Three swords and a fast reload and we were screwed all the same.

  Until it came through the arch we’d been running for: a flying serpent with intensely blue scales, black wings, four taloned feet and legs curled under its belly, a sleek head with a sunburst of black spines, and eyes that rivaled the sun at noon.

  It also breathed fire. We’d had some serious run-ins with fire today. We dived to the slime-covered floor as the flames of an entire forest fire turned the colony of bloodsuckers above into ash. It continued with its flight and smashed through the far wall, and here was hoping this was not the day for a scheduled tour or that ticket was going to be really worth the price.

  “That was a dragon,” I told the puck accusingly. The blackened ash continued to fall.

  “I’m aware.”

  “You said there were no such things as dragons.”

  “There aren’t.” He tried to wipe the ash from his face and hair, making it worse. “And don’t ask. Just embrace a little mystery in your life and that you have that life left to embrace anything at all.”

  That wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t done.…I mean, shit, a dragon. Who as a kid doesn’t want to believe in dragons? But I didn’t get a chance to push it. Dodger, puppy-dog tears and a watch he could trade for a condo, started squawking loudly enough that the whole market heard this time. “Auphe!” A wing pointed. “Auphe! With the black hair! Auphe!”

  I’d said there were creatures down here I hadn’t seen before topside. There were creatures I couldn’t have dreamed up or have made out of a squid, a vampire, a revenant, an entire pack of Wolves, a shark, a Sasquatch, a pig, a chain saw, and a hot-glue gun. “I think I want the bats back. At least that would’ve been quicker,” I muttered, holding out my left hand to have the xiphos slapped into it.

  It would’ve been.

  I’d told Kalakos at Dodger’s booth. This was my life. Massive unpopularity and/or fear. Anything between was as atypical as it came.

  Vendors and customers both attacked. It wasn’t all of them. Some were too small and harmless for the weapons we were carrying. Some were too huge and gelatinous to move more than an inch every fifteen minutes. Some, led by Jackdaw, were watching from the side and taking bets. A trickster, a lying, betraying, crocodile tear–spurting trickster, could figure the odds with no problem.

  “When have any of your informants ever once not ended up not trying to kill us?” I gritted.

  The puck lifted his shoulders without a trace of guilt. “I warn you each time. I can give you the information, but I can’t make your brain absorb it or your ego swallow it.” He swung his sword and sliced a clump of those fourteen long blood leeches he’d talked about earlier on our way through the tunnel. They had reared up over his head, their tails knotted for a base of balance—a base that also tangled and wouldn’t let them separate to flee when Robin’s sword cut through rubbery flesh. Sucker mouths lined with a circle of teeth all made the sound of a fox-caught rabbit.

  Ever heard a rabbit scream? It’s the sound of a burning house full of trapped children. I haven’t heard anything worse for fear and pain, and I hoped I didn’t.

  I avoided the flopping of their death throes. I hoped it was their death throes and they weren’t like worms: Chop one in half and you suddenly have two. Niko took off two heads of a three-headed humanoid lizard with one stroke of his sword. A creature that was either a Turkish Karankoncolos or a down-home Sasquatch—I couldn’t keep them straight—was leaping toward Goodfellow and me as if it were a spring-loaded grizzly bear. I shot it in the chest three times, which knocked it sideways into Niko.

  “Shit!”

  I tossed aside monsters and planted the Glock in the bear-thing’s humanlike ear and put two more rounds in at the same time a silver blade came through its throat and out one slitted purple-black eye. You could say that took care of it. I pushed and helped roll its three hundred pounds off Nik, who staggered to his feet.

  “’Kay?” I asked.

  He nodded, somewhat out of breath with katana and xiphos in hand. He pointed to the arch, which was a good substitute for “run” when you didn’t have the air to say it. He went with me on his heels until another freak I’d yet to see rushed me. It was shaped like a woman, a wild tangle of black, brown, and gray hair. Her nails were corkscrews of years of growth. She was nude, not that that went into the positive column. Her teeth were perfect pointed triangles in her gaping mouth—all of her teeth and all of her mouths. She had one mouth on her chest, her stomach, each arm, each leg, and they all made the same mmmmm sound I made when I was extra hungry and smelled a chili cheese dog.

  Today I was the chili cheese dog. I shot her in the one place, oddly enough, she didn’t have a mouth: her face. She tumbled backward into something that might have been…Hell, I didn’t have a clue. It was tentacles, a seven-foot-tall writhing mass of transparent tentacles, each tipped with a black seven-inch-long thorn and equipped with crimson suckers. It should’ve been a claw or a talon, but it was a thorn, and I could see the tears of dark red poison welling from the tips. Worse, I could see the poison pumping its way down the tentacle through the translucent flesh. It was like a thick vein, and beside it was a much larger tube of the same color that nothing was coursing through. It led to the suckers, and I imagined the flow of that vessel worked in the opposite direction—to suck up flesh from a paralyzed or dead victim. The poison might not be a poison; it could liquefy instead for easier consumption.

  It could be both.

  After this party, H. P. Lovecraft could suck my dick. This was one of his worst nightmares or wettest dreams. What had been wrong with that ass?

  With no face. No mouth. No orifices at all that I could fall back on to aim a bullet up in a desperate time of need. I shot it in what was roughly its middle while chopping off the tentacles that flashed toward me with the xiphos. The bullets were swallowed into its mass with no effect. The sheared pieces of tentacles fell and didn’t move again. Relief, yeah, but when the thing had a hundred of them, tipped with poison, I couldn’t put a sword into a major organ, if I could find one, without getting close enough to get wrapped up like a mummy, all while being stabbed by toxic barbs.

  I was part Auphe and resistant to many venoms, but this thing had gallons. If it worked fast and Sushi-zilla ate even faster, I could be sucked up like a milk shake in seconds, nothing left but bones and bad clothes. But not today. I’d had enough today. I’d had Janus nearly land on us, a tribe of Cyclops, bat-shit crazy gods, a monster of metal and fire too unreal to be believed. I was done for the day. Finito.

  I holstered the Glock to fish in the pocket of those stupid pants Goodfellow had forced on me and closed my fingers around one of my favorite toys. “Nik, Robin, Kalakos! Go! The whole place is going to be covered in seafood stew in six seconds!”

  We’d been close to the arch and I could see the three of them battling like hell. Heads were flying, limbs; monsters were taking them down right and left, but they didn’t fail to get back up again and again. I waited until they made it to the arch itself. And they weren’t doing it for themselves alone; they were clearing me a path, because I was going to have to run like a son of a bitch.

  I chopped several more lashing tentacles with the xiphos while lifting the grenade. I hadn??
?t used it at the armory when the Cyclops and the fire giant had attacked. Throwing a grenade into a room filled with thousands of pieces, shards, and splinters of metal? The shrapnel from that would’ve killed us before Hephaestus’s creations had a chance.

  I removed the safety clip and pulled the pin with my teeth. It looks great in movies. In real life it hurts like a mother and can screw the hell out of your teeth, which was why this was the first time I’d done it. With one hand swinging a sword, I didn’t have much choice. “I’ll think of you next time I’m drinking sake,” I said, then turned and ran. My path was paved with bodies of prejudiced paien, but that didn’t slow me down. Once I released the spoon on the grenade, I had about six seconds. I had enough left in me to be standing up on the street hailing a cab in six seconds.

  Or that’s what I thought, until I checked behind me and saw how fast that thing was coming up behind me. Too fast and too close. In six seconds I’d be dinner and half-digested. I let go of the grenade’s spoon, counted to three, whirled, and threw a homer.

  It hesitated at the blow of what had hit it and flew through several layers of tentacles to embed itself there. That’s what I hoped, that curiosity would kill the Kraken. I didn’t stop to check. But while three seconds was enough to stop the thing before it reached me—fingers crossed—it wasn’t long enough for me to reach the arch to hide behind its six-foot-thick walls. Niko was starting back, to throw his martyred self on top of me or to kick my ass for not exercising more, running more, running twice the hours every day to be faster. Robin grabbed him around the chest, yelled my name, and pointed to the side.

  I blinked and thought, What the hell? If it didn’t work, it was that much more convenient.

  One second later, the grenade blew. I tumbled over and over until I lost count. If I was in a wreck and the car rolled, it would feel like this, but without a seat belt. I had my hands over my ears, but I thought I heard the splat of exploding Jell-O. It was my imagination, more likely, as I heard nothing but ringing when I lifted my hands away.

  Dizzy, I was trying to get enough equilibrium back to tell up from down when Niko threw open the lid of the coffin. He said something. I didn’t know what. I couldn’t hear a thing, but it would be along the lines of, “Are you all right?” “That was the bravest thing I’ve seen.” “You were Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and Batman combined.” “I’ll do the laundry for the next year.”

  The ringing began to clear as he helped me out of the black steel coffin with its plush red-cushioned interior, and repeated what he’d said. It wasn’t what I’d thought. “You idiot. A three-legged turtle dying of leprosy could run faster than that.” He gripped a handful of my hair and gave my head the lightest possible of shakes. I had a headache already and he’d know that. “I’m going to run your lazy ass every day until I think there’s a remote hope you could make a preschool track team.”

  “Jesus. Fine. I didn’t get eaten. Doesn’t that count?” I didn’t wait for him to give the inevitable no. “I thought vamps weren’t into the coffins these days?” I asked Goodfellow.

  “The majority of them aren’t, but there’s the old-school. Too old and set in their ways to give them up. And the younger ones who are growing up now. They’re about fifty, the equivalent of a human fifteen-year-old. Some of them are into Voth—vampire Goth. Idiotic, isn’t it?” Goodfellow wasn’t waiting on us. He was leaving through the arch. Many bodies were still twitching and alive. It was a good decision. “Goths derive from death and vampires and now vampires have developed Voth from the human teenagers.”

  “If they’re vampires wouldn’t they already be that way?” I knew I was talking too loudly, but my hearing wasn’t completely back. “Well, not now, but wouldn’t it be more retro than made-up?”

  “Hades, no. Vampires never dressed like that. Capes and black makeup, huge fangs more likely to bite off your own tongue than anyone’s neck, long black nails. That’s no way to blend in with your prey. And if you don’t blend in with your prey, you don’t eat.” We were up the stairs now, Niko smashing the head of one last blood leech under his boot.

  “Which reminds me,” the puck said, “I’m starving. Who’s up for Chinese?”

  15

  Goodfellow had been serious about the Chinese. We had a cab drop us off at Canal Street, right in the middle of Chinatown. It left us standing in front of a small greengrocer with a red-and-green awning as the sky darkened to night. Fruits and vegetables were piled in bins for people on the sidewalk to pick up and examine. An orange and white cat stared at us from inside through the window of the store itself. It knew what cats dragged in and that it would look much better than we did.

  “I don’t cook. Unless they sell corn dogs in there, there’s no food here,” I grumbled.

  A fiftyish small man with slicked-back black hair and a wide grin of white teeth except for one silver one that flashed cheerfully greeted us. “Luō bīn xiansheng, wǒ hěn gaoxìng zàicì jiàn dào nīǒ. Nín zuò wǒmen de róngxìng yuǒ nín de guanglín. Nīǒ shentīǒ haǒo ma?”

  The smile disappeared and the brown eyes drooped as he took in our scratches and cuts, and my shirt covered in dried blood. “A, wǒ kàn yěxuǒ bùshì.”

  “He is asking about my well-being. Something that would’ve been nice to hear from the two of you after I faced a god that hates my guts.” Goodfellow answered the man in Chinese. “Zhè shì yīgè feicháng jiannán de yītian, Liú xiansheng. Wǒ shì lái yòng le yīduàn shíjian wǒ de fángjian, rúguǒ zhè shì nīǒ méiyǒu bùbiàn.”

  The owner responded in English for politeness’ sake. “Of course, your room is prepared as always, Mr. Fellows. Come inside. Welcome, welcome.” He led us to the door, through the tiny store and the door at the back. We went down the stairs, passed through a room where knockoff designer bags were being produced among giggling and impossibly fast chatter, to another door, more stairs, and finally a subbasement. He took us to the largest room, which still qualified as small, but with expensive, comfortable furniture, a computer, and a TV squeezed into it. “I will have my great-grandmother bring you food, medicine, hot tea.”

  Robin collapsed on the overstuffed couch. “And, Mr. Chen, alcohol, please. A great deal of Baijiu. You know what I like.”

  The man bobbed his head. “Of course. Only the best for our friend and benefactor.”

  “You’re genuinely going to send your great-grandmother down those stairs? You still don’t trust me with your daughters?” Goodfellow drawled.

  “I will help her, and no, Mr. Fellows, I do not trust you with my daughters.” The sad eyes brightened again, the skin wrinkling around them in a laugh. “I also do not trust you with my wife, my grandmother, or my lucky cat that sits in the window to watch for the police.”

  The great-grandmother must’ve mainlined ginseng, because she and the owner were back by the time we had all picked out a place to collapse. She looked a hundred and fifty years old, but her feet moved at the speed of light as she balanced a tray on either hand. “I will ring the buzzer if the police come,” Mr. Chen said. “Haters of capitalism that they swear by, tsk, but I fear there is no way out down here.”

  “You can say that again.” The puck sighed, referring to our situation rather than a lack of a basement door. “Thank you. You are a true friend.”

  Mr. Chen had carried a large box loaded with clothes, bandages, and ointments, as well as a more modern first-aid kit, and balanced on top of all that was a tray with six small ceramic bottles and smaller cups that reminded me of the kind you served sake in, but shaped differently. Goodfellow lifted the tray out and placed it on a low, black lacquered table and started pouring. “That’s a lot of alcohol?” I snorted. “If we had a teddy bear we could have a tea party.”

  “They’ll bring more when we finish,” Robin promised. “Here. Try it. It’s honey fragrance. It will help with the pain until more Tylenol takes effect. Oh, and it’s not like sake. You shoot it. No sipping. Treat it as a shot. It enhances the flavor.”
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  I should’ve known by his offering me the first one. But I was tired, hurting, and if this took the edge off, I’d take that. I tossed it back and promptly choked, positive that kindly Mr. Chen had put diesel fuel in that innocent bottle. My throat was liquid lava and for a moment I thought I saw a tunnel and a bright light. “Honey fragrance?” I coughed several times before gasping. “Then their bees must be flying around sipping paint thinner instead of nectar.”

  “But it’s such a small amount.” Robin grinned, pouring one of his own and throwing it down as if it were mother’s milk. “I’ll be sure to tell Chen how disappointed you were. He’s a good host. He’ll hurry with more and stand there until you drink it to make sure all is satisfactory.” He gave up taunting me long enough to point to a small dark alcove in the back of the room. “There’s a shower. It’s not much, but finding underground facilities bearable to use as an emergency bolt-hole isn’t easy. However, I learned a long time ago that it pays to keep them. I’m hoping that in whatever manner Janus senses Vayash, buildings on top of buildings on top of the ground and us beneath it might slow him down.”