Doubletake

  I banged against the door again. “Pony play and pad thai. Get it while it’s hot.” I didn’t have to see Niko’s hand to know it was aiming for the back of my head. I ducked with the instinct of a thousand received swats and stumbled into Robin’s condo as he opened the door beneath my pounding fist.

  “You,” Robin said, catching me by the back of my shirt to keep me upright, “are going to spend months, nay, years of sleepless nights wishing you had never said that, not in this particular situation.” I expected him to sound amused, as that was the kind of joke he would make, but he looked nothing but deadly serious.

  Once steady on my feet again, I walked in. Same expensive rock-crystal coffee table, same buttery leather wraparound sofa—an identical replacement, rather, as I’d been indirectly responsible for destroying the last one—same enormous flat-screen television set hidden in a recess in the wall behind an original Waterhouse—Nik told me—painting. Same rich and expensive everything, although one addition was fairly new and a gift from me to Goodfellow, or rather from me to Goodfellow’s roommate, Salome. She was a Grim Reaper on four paws and I liked to stay on her good side. So a few months ago I brought her a boyfriend.

  “Spartacus,” I called, “how’s it hanging?” Probably not too well. Once you’re dead, had your organs removed, and are resurrected as an undead mummified cat, your testicles probably looked like old raisins that had rolled under the couch. Raisins didn’t tend to…hang. But it was the thought that counted. I caught him as he slithered out from under the couch and leaped through the air, a zombie feline missile. He looped around my neck and purred in my ear. And if his purr sounded like skulls being crushed under an iron boot, again, it was the thought that counted. His bandages were long gone, and I stroked the hairless black-and-white-spotted wrinkly skin. “You’re living under the couch? Is Salome giving you a hard time?”

  Another purr erupted from atop the massive refrigerator. Salome, unlike Spartacus, was gray with a small hoop earring in one pointed ear. They both had eye sockets that housed flickering lantern lights that reminded me of Halloween. Salome had followed Goodfellow home from the Museum of National History—against his will—and had lived here since, when she wasn’t out stalking senile, ancient pet Great Danes in the hallway. Salome had killed man and beast and probably hadn’t considered either one taxing. That was why I’d brought Spartacus to keep her company. I did not want to get on her bad side.

  A mummy, Wahanket, who’d lived in the sublevels of the museum, had made Salome and Spartacus. Although a sometime informant, he had tried to kill me twice and he did kill cats. I didn’t approve of either hobby. I made sure Wahanket didn’t get to play his King Tut games on anyone else, which Spartacus seemed to appreciate. Salome didn’t much appreciate anything, from what I’d seen. I gave the cat’s bony ass one last pat and plopped him on the floor. “Be a man,” I told him. “Show her who’s boss.” He gave me a dubious glance and disappeared under the couch again. Apparently being a man was overrated.

  Niko removed his duster, hot for late summer, but necessary for covering up katanas and various other swords. “You’re hiring us for a job, Goodfellow? That seems odd. You assist us so often you know we’d be more than willing to do you a favor for free.”

  Robin shrugged, his normally cat-that-ate-five-canaries green eyes glum, and waved a hand at the kitchen table on which rested a meatball sub with double cheese and a tea that stung my nose enough for me to know it must cost a hundred bucks a gram at least—the type of tea Niko loved above all others. “There are favors and then there is ripping your own heart out to tape to an extrarealistic Valentine’s card. This is the latter.”

  I moved closer to the table to catch the precise smell of the sub. “Gino’s? Gino’s extra-sauce, extra-cheese, extra-garlic meatball sub?” Gino’s, where the grease was so thick in the air that it contaminated the entire block and Robin refused to even drive down the street. That combined with the stink of a tea that was available only from one ninety-eight-year-old mean-as-a-snake woman in Chinatown. You had to walk across a path of nails to prove you were worthy of this damn tea, and I was not joking. He’d gone to serious trouble to tempt us, and Goodfellow didn’t go to serious trouble to do anything. He manipulated, deceived, lied, but not this. Honesty, money, and snacks?

  This was bad.

  “Shit. I don’t even want to know what the job is.” But I didn’t mean it.

  It was Goodfellow. Our first friend when we’d been on the run from the other half of me, a race called the Auphe. The first murderers born of this earth. All the other supernatural feared them, bowed before them, died under their teeth and claws. The Auphe were gone now, as was the handful of half-breeds like me, but I didn’t forget that Robin had been the first to help Niko and me.

  Even now…he was one of very few. The Auphe had been at the head of the supernatural food chain and they had large appetites, torture always being the cherry on top—which explained why I wasn’t too popular. Everyone had feared them and no one had missed them when we wiped them out. Although many didn’t know that they had been destroyed, that I was the last left, not that that would’ve made me any more popular. Quite a few had taken and still did take that unpopularity and hatred of Auphe up with me. They couldn’t kill an Auphe, but I was only half Auphe and half human. And humans were weak, nothing more than sheep. They thought that was worth a shot.

  They thought wrong.

  Robin, though, had always been loyal, always had our backs. We’d be piss-poor friends if we didn’t do the same. I sat at the table and grabbed the sub, taking a large mouthful. “So what’s the job?” I asked as I chewed—the Miss Manners of the monster-maimer crew.

  Niko agreed with me silently by sitting down and drinking the tea that they probably cleaned gutters with in China. Both of us looked expectantly at Goodfellow. He exhaled, folded his arms, shifted from one foot to another…nervous tics—all the things the ever-smooth, fast-talking puck didn’t do. This was looking worse and worse by the second. After several more twitches, he finally managed to get it out.

  “It’s my family reunion.

  “The whole of the puck race here in New York City.

  “Tomorrow.”

  I choked on the bite of meatball, feeling the suck of it into my airway, and halfway hoping it would do the favor of killing me before I could cough it out. Niko gave me an unconcerned smack on the back, which only had the hunk of meat lodging deeper, while murmuring, “We should have asked for more money.”

  “You haven’t asked for any money yet,” Goodfellow pointed out.

  “It doesn’t change the fact that we should have and will ask for more.” Niko slapped a hand between my shoulder blades again, saying, “One more cough and if that doesn’t do the trick, Robin gives you the Heimlich. The key concept in Heimlich being ‘from behind.’”

  I promptly expelled the chunk of Gino’s finest onto the table and welcomed the darkness that had begun to slice across my vision. If it was dark, I couldn’t see. And I didn’t want to see…pucks, everywhere. All identical, wavy brown hair, sly green eyes, smug smirks, rampaging egos, and an appetite for sex that made Caligula seem like a hundred-year-old virginal nun. One puck had taken a few years to get used to. More than one? Hundreds? Maybe thousands? All exaggerating, lying, stealing, trying to screw anything that couldn’t outrun them…

  The end of the world had come, and not with a bang…okay, yeah, with a bang. It could be lots of them—the largest planet-wide orgy to date. If that was true, I was eating my gun right then and there.

  “How many of them?” I said hoarsely, taking the tea Niko passed me to soothe my abraded throat. It tasted like donkey piss. The way the night was going I wasn’t surprised.

  The puck seesawed a hand back and forth. “It’s hard to say. That’s the point to the reunion. We count how many of our race are left. If the amount is too low, then we have a lottery and the schmucks with the unlucky numbers have to reproduce to make sure we don’t go the way
so many other of the paien—the supernaturals’ word for their kind—races have. Extinction. We meet every thousand years. We all hate it, but it’s a necessary evil if we want to keep the magnificence that is Puck alive on earth.” He took the same hand and opened a drawer to fish out a checkbook. “My best guess: between seventy-five and a hundred will show. See? Not so bad. When you live pretty much forever you don’t need that many to keep a race intact. So? Fifteen thousand dollars? Does that sound good?”

  “Thirty,” Niko corrected. If Robin was offering fifteen it was worth at least two to four times as much. “And you haven’t mentioned precisely what you want us to do.”

  “Babysit mostly.” He handed over the check with a sharkish smile that said Niko should’ve asked for fifty thousand. “All our well-deserved high self-esteems”—unbearable egos from hell—“in one place tends to lead to disagreements… some verbal abuse… small fights… attempted murders…large riots. That sort of thing. You’ll be like bouncers, keeping everyone in check, the two of you alone. You’re the only two in the city who can do this. We’ll meet at the Ninth Circle, get it over with in one night, tomorrow night, and then everything can go back to normal.”

  “What about everyone else in the bar? The Wolves, lamia, Amadan…the usual. We saw them running like bats out of hell on the way over here. I guess we don’t have to worry about them.” I shoved Niko’s poisonous tea back at him.

  “Indeed. No worries there. No one else will be at the bar, as no one else will be in the city. No one but humans.” Robin’s smirk had turned into something darker—beyond old, from the impenetrable forests that swallowed travelers whole, and from under a sky where the stars were the blood-tinged eyes of mad gods. “Every living paien creature will flee this place. They feel it.”

  “They know.”

  “The Panic has come.”

  3

  “On the roof two blocks down, did you see it?”

  He meant as we’d dumped the car several blocks away in a garage we couldn’t afford—there was blackmail involved—and walked the rest of the way home.

  I’d seen it, but Niko didn’t stop testing me. It was his way of keeping me sharp, focused, and alive.

  We’d left Robin’s over forty minutes ago and I was more exhausted from listening to him go on and on than from the fight with the kishi. Sitting on the edge of the tub in our bathroom, I continued to swab the puncture wounds on my thigh with peroxide. Then I’d move on to the antibiotic cream plus an antibiotic shot. You didn’t know what in the hell was living inside the mouths of half the monsters we came across, and I doubted the CDC did either. I had the immune system of my Auphe half, which was to say the best damn immune system around, but Niko was Niko. Big brothers were big brothers, and I took the same precautions a full human would, necessary or not.

  There were a few advantages to not being human. More than I’d used to think, and more than I should think. But that’s who I was now and I was fine with that. Better than fine.

  I answered Niko’s question, and it wasn’t an unusual one. Anything new in our world was to be immediately suspected and watched carefully. “I saw it. Five blocks back on the roof. You know I saw it or you would’ve picked me up by the scruff of my neck and shown it to me while swatting my ass with your katana.” I applied the cream and accepted the tape from my brother to secure the bandage around my leg. “Something metal. Steel maybe, and black too. It didn’t move and I couldn’t make out any details, but it wasn’t there this morning when we went by.”

  Niko handed me the syringe and I injected my thigh muscle with the strongest antibiotic you could buy from a guy who had set up a pharmacy in his van. “I am as proud as if you’d actually graduated high school.”

  He’d homeschooled me, the ass, and his graduation standards had been higher than any public or private school. I’d simply done my best to forget most of it. “Okay, a dark metal thing someone hauled up to the roof. Big deal. We’ll keep our eyes open, but I bet it’s just someone’s hideous idea of art, or a nerd making armor for the next big Ren Faire. I’m more concerned about the Panic.” “Concerned” was a good euphemism for metaphorically shitting my pants.

  Goodfellow had been at our sides for three or four years now. He was the most loyal son of a bitch around, to us anyway, but every encounter with him put you one step closer to a mental hospital. I’d seen him naked three times, accidentally, and I didn’t give a shit which way the guy swung (he swung all ways…he swung in directions and dimensions scientists hadn’t plotted yet) as long as he didn’t hit on me.

  And after seeing what he had a license to carry, I was kissing the ground, grateful he hadn’t made a move on me. Even if he hadn’t been rich, the man would need his own personal tailor to accommodate what he was hauling around. He did chase Niko in the beginning, but as much as I loved my brother, he was on his own there. And good luck. Every story Robin told was about himself, a threesome, a foursome, an orgy, and onward to things that would have jaded porn stars mystified if not terrified. The themes were pretty blatant—ego and sex.

  I could take it, though, because he was a friend, a comrade in arms, and all that shit, but one hundred of him? If Niko wouldn’t have taken a picture with his phone, I’d have been curled up in the fetal position and sucked my thumb. Worse yet was how there were a hundred or so of them. Robin had always been evasive about how pucks procreated and I’d had no inclination whatsoever to push him on it. An all-male race who were completely identical to one another…a curious thing, but nowhere near curious enough to ask him or hear the answer. This time we got the answer whether we wanted it or not.

  I absolutely did not.

  Apparently there was no equivalent in nonsupernatural biology, although Niko tried his best to come up with a close comparison. Apogamy, androgenesis, adventitious embryony…all terms I’m sure I knew at one time, when Niko had been shoving biology into my brain with a crowbar seven or eight years ago. But I’d done my best to forget them, and my best was damn good.

  “Male apoximes?” had been his last guess.

  Robin had scowled. “Yes, Niko. Pucks reproduce exactly like Saharan cypress trees. In fact, we’re kissing cousins. Shall I show you my impressively large trunk?”

  “Just tell me we don’t have to buy you maternity clothes if you lose the lottery,” I’d asked at that point during the briefing, pushing the meatball sub far away at the thought of a hormonal puck. “Jesus, I’m going to barf.”

  “Gods.” He stared at me, disbelief dripping from the word. “How do you function when the hamster on the wheel between your ears takes his lunch break? Never mind. Just…here. Wrap your tiny brains around zygotes. It’s far more complex than that, as we are far more complex than you, but one puck essentially splits in two. The new puck will also have all the memories, personality, and skills of the original, which is another reason we hate one another so much. We yearn to be unique when in essence we all started out the same as someone else. We immediately part ways and the new puck will start developing memories of his own. As he does, his personality changes slowly as well. We all become different sooner or later.”

  “Except for the ego, sex drive, trickery, lying, stealing, et cetera,” I said.

  “Well, naturally. Why would we want to change the best of our race’s qualities?”

  “You actually are family. In fact, you’re closer than family,” Niko had mused. “You’re supernatural clones.”

  “All born of Hob,” the puck said quietly. As the three of us had nearly died at the hands of Hob before delivering him up to a well-deserved death, we skipped over talking more about the first puck to be whelped by the earth.

  “How long does it take?” I’d asked, curious despite myself. “Is there a cocoon involved? Is it like Alien? Because that would be nasty as hell. Dripping fluids everywhere. Gah. Good luck finding a maid to clean that up.”

  “Armani does not make a cocoon,” Goodfellow had replied with a sharp frost edging his voice, and fun time
was over. He then went on to tell us about the Panic.

  Capital P…for the capital R in “Run for your life.”

  In ye olden times, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient who gave a crap, people had thought that panic was caused by Pan, pucks, whatever, unseen and rotten as hell, rustling and shaking the bushes off the paths to basically scare the living shit out of travelers. Not true. The word was still around today, but that definition wasn’t any more true than it had been in the beginning.

  What was true about the Panic, Goodfellow had said, was that pucks produced pheromones by the buckets. Normally the chemical led their fellow supernatural creatures, not humans—it didn’t affect humans—to trust them. It made it all the easier for the pucks to steal from their fellow supernatural races and for them to believe the pucks when they said they were off for a romantic bottle of wine while in actuality they were shagging their thieving asses to safety, hauling gold, jewels, whatever they could steal. The pheromone also led the preternatural to lust after them—all the easier to get laid and…yeah, well, that was more than enough benefit there.