Doubletake

  Their eyes and full-lipped mouths were so large, you almost didn’t notice—that there was only smooth skin between. No noses.

  Puckstein was right: Puck pheromones wouldn’t bother them at all. Hard to smell when you’re lacking noses.

  Everywhere else they looked mostly human—human with the bare minimum of sequined stripper wear to be taken off for money, and lion fur billowing where most women waxed or shaved and some men manscaped. I was half monster, but, yeah, I knew the word “manscape” and if I hadn’t, seeing enough fur escape a bulging G-string that it crept down to knee level, I would’ve invented the term.

  The music started, the lights lowered and began to pulse in wild colors, and a wall-covering sheet I hadn’t given a single thought of going near was ripped down to reveal the entire contents of a porn warehouse. There were sex toys I’d seen, sex toys I hadn’t seen but was aware existed, and then there were things I hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard of, and couldn’t begin to guess what in the hell they did.

  “I’m surprised Goodfellow didn’t go all out and bring in chandeliers from which they could swing,” Niko said.

  I pointed to a corner where a leather swing was being set up to hang from the ceiling. “Ah.” Niko exhaled, to center himself—I’d seen him do it many times before. “You’re fascinated with the porn channel. Now you get the three-dimensional version. I’d think you’d be enjoying yourself.”

  “I like a candy bar once in a while too. This is being stuck in Willy Wonka’s Perverted Sex Factory.” I started pouring drinks. It was a job. Muscle through it.

  Niko began pouring as well, as a wall of impatient hands waved frantically in our faces. “The lili, male, and lilitu, female, were born under the sands of Assyria in ancient times. If you’re born under the sand, often live in sandstorms, I understand nature deciding you didn’t need a nose. They’re known to be ravenously sexually predatory, more so than—difficult as it is to imagine—pucks, I’ve heard.”

  A naked puck slammed and bent an equally naked male lion over the end of the counter—my end—and I commented in resignation as the bar, glasses, and bottles began to shake furiously, “I think you heard wrong.”

  I moved around to the other side of Niko, which was tight to be pouring drinks, so I started handing out bottles instead. Whiskey, scotch, tequila…whatever I could grab the quickest. Pucks had a tolerance that made a case of forty-ounces seem like a thimbleful to them anyway. I also started drinking myself. Heavily, which I rarely did in a business where you needed to stay alert to stay alive. But if I had to see what I was seeing, I preferred to see it with blurry vision.

  The bar was packed, less than inches to spare. Seventy or so pucks, which was equal to about seventy thousand egos, plus seventy horny lions—the Ninth Circle wasn’t built for a crowd half this size. But everyone seemed willing to share their personal space in helpful ways such as wrapping their legs around someone else’s waist or hips, from the front or the back or upside down. There was also a tangled pile of heaving bodies—I didn’t count—in each available corner, skin-to-skin, not a millimeter of space between. Anything to keep the fire marshal away.

  Wasn’t that obliging?

  There were also those who hadn’t gotten past the strip shows yet. They were probably the equivalent of pucks with sexual dysfunction. It took them at least two to three minutes to get warmed up for a full-on ménage à whatever the French word for “twenty” was.

  The dancers were gyrating on tables, chairs, and an agile two impressively on top of one of the thrusting and groaning mounds of sweating flesh. Female lions’—lilitu’s—breasts were bouncing, which I approved of, although the wish on the shaving or waxing issue hadn’t changed. The male lions had bouncing going on as well, but it had nothing to do with breasts.

  I groaned myself, but there was nothing sexual about it. I looked in another direction quickly, but unfortunately it was where I’d been ready to serve drinks earlier. How’d I forget that? The puck and the male lion hadn’t stopped shaking the bar yet. The puck was nuzzling through the lili mane to bite the back of his neck, and the lion was roaring and then purring as his wings flared and he lifted them in the air, the puck’s legs clamping around the thickly muscled waist. The lili roared again and there was a sudden rain of russet-colored fluid that smelled of cinnamon and desert sand.

  I hadn’t seen it, but I’d bet Brokeback Mountain wasn’t anything like this.

  “I am so not cleaning that up,” I said, taking another swallow from my bottle of whiskey.

  Robin wasn’t going to be forgiven for this, not until the day I died and was a year in the ground. Niko was fending off probably the twentieth puck of the night—they definitely liked blondes—with his sword. “Bartenders are off-limits,” he was repeating. “Tell your brothers. No means no. It also means I will remove a very different kind of sword from them if they don’t respect that.”

  I looked up to see the air full of sequins that had fallen from tossed-off clothing. They glittered in the flashing lights. Money flew in gusts of wind caused by flapping wings. It was like being inside a giant kinky snow globe. The pucks weren’t interested in me, although from their dubious glances they didn’t know why, and I drank on. Another puck tackled one of the female dancers off a table and was already inside her by the time they landed on the floor. She laughed as his mouth closed over a dark golden nipple.

  Okay, that I missed. “I need to get laid in the worst way,” I said mournfully.

  “And that would be more than enough alcohol for you.” Niko plucked the bottle from my hand.

  It passed, the “entertainment” part of the reunion. Rather like the bubonic plague passed: slowly and leaving madness and despair in its path.

  Then came the puck version of after-sex. My definition was spooning with whispers in her ear of, “You were fucking hot as hell. You could kill a man with one of your blow jobs,” followed by an instant drop into unconsciousness while drooling on her shoulder. With who I screwed, you had to give to not get your throat clawed open in your sleep. I thought I did damn good. I told Niko about it when sparring one day, because two entire sentences before sleep were excessive in my mind. I was tired, damn it. I was hoping he could suggest how to pare it down to one sentence…maybe four or five words.

  Niko, who had a love, not a homicidal friend with benefits, more experience in sex, and a degree in psychology, gave me a lecture on something called postcoital intimacy, affection, and mutual bonding. My way took ten to fifteen seconds; his took thirty minutes minimum. I’d searched our place for whatever romance novels he had stashed away—I was not enabling my brother’s pussified ways—but I hadn’t found any yet. No way he got it out of a psychology textbook. Men wrote some of those textbooks, and no man would write that. That was insane.

  But it turned out that pucks did me one better. They didn’t go to sleep. While lili and lilitu curled on the floor in exhausted slumber, drowsy lions on the Serengeti, the pucks bragged and tried to murder one another, and sometimes they did both at once.

  “Good Queen Bess, the Virgin Queen, my muscular ass!”

  They’d all thrown off their clothes long ago and now were lunging for equally discarded weapons littering the floor between the sleeping lions. That had Niko and me sailing over the bar, as none of the other pucks had an interest in stopping fratricide. Clone-icide. Whatever you wanted to call it.

  “She was no virgin, but I pierced that dusty hymen long before you!”

  I had a gun in each hand, arms extended to press the muzzles against two puck foreheads. “Drop the swords and go sit the fuck down. This establishment is losing patience with its customers, and when it does, it doesn’t refuse them service. It refuses them life. Got it?” They grumbled but gave up the swords and wandered toward the bar in search of more alcohol.

  This example cut down on the fighting some, but not the bragging.

  “Rasputin? I bought his penis in a jar off eBay. It wasn’t nearly as large as I remembered.”
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  “Pity, but absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

  “Or the penis larger.”

  “Thor? You lie. Thor has never been sober enough to get it up, and he prefers blond women with breasts larger than their heads.”

  “Hell, yes, I rode with Butch and Sundance, in all the ways there are to ride. It’s a forever shame about the Bolivian army. I almost choked up when I escaped out the back with the pesos. Sad times. Good times. This drink is for you, compadres.”

  “Damn straight, I’m still taking bets on Jimmy Hoffa. For ten thousand you get one guess on where I planted that fat bastard. For fifteen thousand I’ll throw in the cannoli he was eating when I popped him one.”

  “Cleopatra? Definitely a man. Barely looked like a woman even when you were wearing wine goggles. I couldn’t believe Caesar never caught on. The kid? That was actually a thirty-year-old toothless dwarf Cleo bought in the market. Caesar thought he had the ugliest baby in Egypt.”

  “D’Artagnan’s best work was always done with his other sword, and size-wise, it was actually equal to the one he used for duels.”

  Niko circled the next potential mass murder—five pucks squabbling—waiting to see if it got out of hand.

  “Did I mention at the last reunion that I screwed Lady Godiva?”

  “No, you credit-thieving maggot, I did.”

  “No, I did, and I have a lock of her hair to prove it.”

  “I didn’t care for her. Stuck-up bitch with the worst horsehair wig in the hemisphere. Now let’s talk Eve…”

  “Eve? You are an idiot. I was there. That whole show was mine, all mine. It was hilarious. I kept pelting her with apples and shouting, ‘Eat it! Come on, you apple-hating nudist. Eat it!’ Then I’d hiss a few times from the bushes to throw suspicion elsewhere. I thought I was going to lose my pitching arm before I finally hit her in that incredibly empty head with the tenth one, but she at last took a bite. I know I gave her a fruit phobia for the rest of her life—not to mention death, menses, and painful childbirth, but, more important, that bet was won. I had Michael, Gabriel, Azrael, and Lucifer handing over their flaming swords and then their other flaming swords, if you get my drift and I know you do. Now, that was a party. I’ll bet their daddy paddled their asses good when they dragged themselves home a week later.”

  And on and on it went. The fighting simmered down, though, until it was only reminiscing.

  Niko and I returned to back behind the bar. It felt marginally safer, and why the hell weren’t they putting their clothes back on? “Suicide pact?” I said casually, wishing I’d remained half-drunk, but life’s not that easy.

  “I’m thinking long and hard about it,” Niko confirmed. He continued to listen to the pucks, as if anyone had a choice, and looking both fascinated and appalled by turns. History was a sacred subject to him. But when only liars are telling the tales, what did you believe? Not the Garden of Eden guy, that I knew. There were no angels, only peris…the seed of the myth.

  One of the pucks appeared in front of the bar directly before me as I was handing Niko a leftover hundred-dollar bill that a puck had tried to shove under his apron about an hour ago. As brotherly emotions went, he was less thankful than he could’ve been. When I was done, I smacked a glass down in front of the looming new puck. “What’ll it be?” But there was no drink order. This puck had something entirely different on his mind.

  “There is something wrong with you.”

  It was one of the pucks Robin had introduced…Pan. I remembered because of the tattoo on the side of his neck. Π—the Greek letter for P. He was old. I’d never considered Goodfellow old, as I’d never had anyone to measure against him but Hob, and I’d been too busy at the time trying to kill that bastard to make any comparisons. Now, though, with all of them gathered in one place, I could get a sense of the younger versus the older. They might be supernatural clones, but real, earned experience over cloned experience told. Their bragging was much less believable, and I’d have thought it impossible, but they were actually more annoying. Much louder too. Those made Robin seem subtle in comparison.

  This one…staring at me…had hair so short it was nearly buzzed, leather wristbands, a scar that ran from his right eyebrow into his hair by three inches, already had a knuckle-duster knife in his hand, and he was old. He felt like Goodfellow felt—as if he’d known the world a thousand times over and conquered wide regions of it more than once before tossing them aside, bored. Old in the supernatural world didn’t mean feeble; it meant powerful and, in this case, aware.

  Of me. And wasn’t that incredibly bad luck for him?

  His eyes didn’t blink. “Wrong. Base. Vile.” He studied me. “I know you.” The green darkened to almost black in surprise and disgust as his pupils dilated. “I know.” He showed his teeth as he spit, “Impossible wretched thing.”

  It hadn’t taken Goodfellow more than fifteen minutes after meeting me to know what I was. This one had taken an hour or three, but it didn’t make a difference. He knew and, unlike Robin, he seemed to hold my extinct race’s crimes against me. If he did, who was to say how the rest of the Panic would react? This one had completely no reservations about what he would and did attempt to do. He came across the bar at me blade ready with a swiftness that would make the kishi from last night seem as if they were running in mud.

  Then again, the kishi had been as challenging as fighting off a pack of Chihuahuas. And this puck was no baby to be socialized and adopted. There was no free ride for him. No shred of conscience to hold me back.

  It was the high point of the night for me.

  I buried Robin’s poniard that Niko had tucked underneath with the glasses into one green eye. I felt the point scraping the back of the inner skull before I flipped him over the counter to land dead and heavy on the floor. Niko tipped over a pile of stacked black aprons and towels on the shelf behind us to cover the body and it was as if it had never happened. In a room full of now-drunk tricksters, it was a magic trick all its own. Pan had been there. Pan was gone. No one noticed where, when, how, or who. Oblivious, they kept drinking and shouting over one another for their bullshit to be heard.

  Except for our puck.

  Goodfellow, recognized by the RG on his forehead and being the only puck wearing clothes, appeared in the precise spot where a second before a wannabe assassin had stood. Not a wannabe in his day or against others, but here and now? He should’ve paid attention to what he labeled me—because he hadn’t been that far off base. “What happened?” he demanded.

  “Pan happened,” Niko answered flatly. “You didn’t say they might know about Cal, or what they would do if they did.”

  I reached down, jerked the Spanish dagger free from its flesh-and-bone sheath, wiped it on my bar apron, and slid it across the counter to Robin. “‘Wrong. Base. Vile.’” My hair hung forward—still no ponytail for me, thanks to Niko’s father—and I grinned blackly. “‘Impossible wretched thing.’ Practically compliments. He didn’t know me half as well as he thought he did.”

  He took his poniard and put it away. “Pan is…was one of the oldest. If any would recognize your partial heritage, he would be the only one. I should’ve watched him more closely. I apologize.” Swiveling, he took in the crowd and sighed. “Thank Zeus it’s nearly over. I’ve never been at a reunion sober and monogamous. They’re somewhat tedious in this state.” He sounded relieved when he said, “But they are all finally intoxicated enough to suffer through the lottery. We’ll end this now. Again, I am sorry—for what he said and what he tried to do. You know none of it is true, kid.” He turned back to give an insistent and reassuring poke of his finger to my chest before he was gone again into the crowd, handing out coins that were each stamped with a number.

  None of it? No. I didn’t fool myself. Some of it was true—most of it was true, in fact—but we all have our character flaws. You learn to deal with them. I had. I dropped another apron down to cover Pan’s head. That was one dealt with right there: covering up the evide
nce that was the result of an impossible wretched thing. “It was self-defense,” Niko said, low—not that any of the pucks could hear anything above themselves. “I know except for the scar, hair, and tattoo, he looked exactly like Robin, but he wasn’t. However connected they might be thousands of years ago genetically, he wasn’t Goodfellow. He was nothing like him.”

  He was singing to the choir. I had no qualms about what I’d done. Pan had been an asshole. “No, he wasn’t like Robin,” I agreed without a shred of guilt. He was more like me, although not enough or he might still be alive, but that wouldn’t be something that would ease Niko’s mind to hear, so I didn’t say it. Instead, I rested my chin in my hand and proceeded to watch the lottery. “Wanna take bets on whether or not Robin gets knocked up?”

  He didn’t. But from the outraged howls that all but shook the walls, the numbers of about twenty-five pucks came up. Picked out of a large intricate and ancient bronze bowl, Goodfellow held each duplicate coin up to be seen. As the livid shouts continued, I asked, “Does it make your brain hurt? Seeing so many of them so much alike?”