Slashback

  Smells like blood.

  Home and then out of this town. It would be all right. Junior wouldn’t even suspect why we left. It would be all right. It would.

  I kept running.

  And my mind kept telling me no matter how true it was, I would always be stained a coward and a liar from this day on.

  By the time I ran the ten miles home I was drenched in sweat, my lungs raw, and my legs cramping from a speed I’d not pushed them to before. I jammed the key with a fatigued shaking hand into the lock and threw open the door.

  “Cal?” I slammed the door behind me and locked it. “Start packing. Hurry! We’re going. Now.”

  I heard the sound of a comic book being thrown against the wall and fluttering to the floor from our bedroom. “We don’t have time for this! Don’t pretend like you’re upset. You’ve been saying we should go for days.” Cal rarely threw temper tantrums or showed physical anger of any kind. Not since he’d found out he was half-Grendel. He was afraid what might happen if he did, that he’d start and not be able to stop.

  Grendels didn’t have the teeth they did only to play peekaboo through the windows.

  “Did something happen? Next door? Cal, seriously, we have to go. I looked up that prostitute. . . .” I stepped into the bedroom and two prongs hit me in the side of the neck. I fell, convulsing. Every muscle locked, the pain hot and unrelenting through every nerve I had.

  “Something did happen next door, neighbor.” Junior grinned down at me with dull yellow teeth. “And a fuck’s sight more is going to.”

  I hadn’t expected him to be in our house. It didn’t cross my mind. It should’ve. Every instructor I’d had told me the people who go down in attacks, the people who sometimes die, they weren’t watching. You watch every second and you don’t stop that, not for any reason.

  The prongs and wire retracted into the boxy shape in Junior’s hand. “Your kid brother didn’t much like this either. He’s pretty small. I thought for a minute I’d killed him and that would’ve been a damn shame. I have big plans for him and for you, so don’t you feel left out.” A hand covered my mouth with a folded cloth as I tried to get up, but I couldn’t do more than twitch. “It’s chloroform, but it’s homemade. I’m afraid it’ll give you one helluva headache when you wake up or if I mixed it wrong you might not wake up at all. You’d probably prefer that, but I wouldn’t. Keep your fingers crossed for me.”

  Yellow and black pools of hazardous waste began to puddle across my vision. It was almost dark outside. He had to wait fifteen or twenty minutes; then he’d be able to drag me over to his house and no one would see. I used all the energy I could gather to reach up a hand and claw at the rag across my face.

  “Now, Niko, that’s the name your brother screamed when I was waiting for him like I waited for you. That must make you Niko. Don’t be that way, Nicky. Don’t you want to see your little brother again? Whole anyway? It’s harder to make them out once they’re in pieces, the bodies. You have to blur your eyes, you know, like at those crazy posters with the hidden spaceships.”

  The hand across my face was unmovable. I thought Junior was fat and sloppy, but there was hard muscle under it. It was one more thing I hadn’t seen. I’d thought he was dim and slow. I hadn’t seen the cunning predator in his eyes or heard the lie in his words. And now . . . now I couldn’t see anything. I could still hear the mumble of his voice, dribbling on, but that too faded. I faded with it with five words echoing over and over in my mind.

  Your little brother.

  In pieces.

  13

  Cal

  Present Day

  Pieces of eight.

  I’d wanted to be a pirate when I was a kid—after cowboy and before race car driver. I would rather have told a story about that kind of pieces of eight than the one I did have to tell. Eight men—eight pieces in a game—eight possible pawns.

  I told Niko about the other men by the Ninth Circle, members of the same prayer circle as the ones in East River Park, and I told him exactly what I’d done with them—how I’d sent them away, how I’d brought them back. I was honest though—about how near a thing it had been to leaving them gone for good. All he had to say was we’d had this discussion and while unfortunately it had been after the fact, he wasn’t going to insult me by repeating the lecture. He also said that while I had done it, I’d also fixed it. I should give myself credit for that. I’d overcome a bad impulse when it would’ve been easier not to. He was proud.

  Back in the recliner resting my ribs and my growing hangover, I thought about replying that he always enjoyed both insulting me and lecturing me, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to turn that pride into a smack to the back of my head. And he could be right. At the park I had asked Nik what the right thing to do was. I was trying. That I was trying less for my sake or the world’s sake and more for my brother’s sake, that didn’t matter. I was trying and the reason I chose to try was Niko. That counted. To me.

  Considering Niko brought me a Mountain Dew to keep me from getting it myself and forcing me into another swipe at the codeine, which he would promptly confiscate as it didn’t mix well with alcohol, made me think it counted to him too. My boss, Ishiah—they didn’t come too much holier-than-thou than him—had once told me Niko was a good man, among the best of men, but his fatal flaw was that he’d burn down the world to save me.

  That he was the sole reason that I wouldn’t burn down the world said something . . . we were the flip side of a coin. That kind of balance was something the Buddha-loving badass that was my brother could understand. It didn’t matter what you’d rather have or that things would be easier another way—the world was about balance. I didn’t give a crap about Buddha and yet I knew that.

  Nik disappeared down the hall and returned without his coat. He shrugged out of the harness that held his katana and placed it on the kitchen counter. Normally he would’ve left it in the bedroom with his duster, but with Jack popping in and out, he’d want his preferred blade close. He had more than enough practice and nonpractice blades in the gym area, but your favorite was your favorite. If you were going to be prepared, you may as well be prepared with the best.

  “Goodfellow should be here by now,” I grumped, “with my pizza.” We’d called him to come talk about this new development, if it was one. I knew coincidences were rare, but I wasn’t looking forward to admitting I’d been jumped by a bunch of homeless men in white who wanted me to pray to Heaven while they killed me and I’d casually chalked it up to that Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs New York experience every tourist campaign told you didn’t exist.

  I would have stuck to coincidence, too, if it hadn’t been for the second attack. Jack working with his prey didn’t make sense and I wasn’t sure I believed that’s what was happening here. Didn’t believe one hundred percent, which was important. I wasn’t a gambling man. It was ridiculous to pin a theory on Niko’s estimated eighty-nine percent. He was throwing numbers around and if I had to hear one more time how he scored first in his college statistics class . . .

  “I have arrived.” The door was wide, soundlessly picked and opened as always. “Where are the flower petals beneath my feet? Where are the virgins to feed me honey and grapes? At the very least where is my theme song? Some Barry White would be astoundingly appropriate.” The puck was grinning cheerfully, haloed by the weak sunlight. Ten hours away from Jack had either done him good or . . . shit, he’d gotten laid too.

  Goddamn it, I remembered those days. I had to get back out there. Unfortunately the Auphe weren’t popular with paien just for a chat. Screwing was almost always a no go. Humans were completely out of the question. I couldn’t risk getting someone pregnant. I couldn’t risk making another Auphe mix-breed like me.

  “Where’s my pizza?” I demanded flatly.

  “I brought you pancakes the other morning. Once a year is my limit for taking pity on the celibate.” He clapped his hands together and kicked the door shut behind him. “What’s the lead on Jack? The sooner
we put him down like a pack of plague-ridden squirrels, wretched rodents, the sooner I can stop babysitting you two and get back to the debauchery that is my life.”

  “Monogamous debauchery?” I tapped fingers on the arm of the recliner. “Is that possible? And what about Ish stealing all your cards from the bad old days of whoring, whoring, and a little more whoring?”

  “He made that all better. Kissed it better, isn’t that the saying?” The grin was all debauchery now, monogamous or not. “Would you like to know where he kissed it?”

  “Nik,” I said desperately, “how about you fill him in on my massive fuckup.” Forget the hundred percent bar. I would own that fuckup, propose to that fuckup, and marry that fuckup if it would stop Goodfellow.

  Niko, whose face was more impassive than usual, meaning his hangover was epic, was leaning against the wall while Goodfellow sprawled on the couch. I didn’t blame him. The wall looked safer. “We already told you about Jack’s victims being what he could consider wicked.”

  “Not that that explains why Jack first went after Niko and kept on him once he dumped me like bad chicken salad,” I interjected.

  “You have much in common with bad chicken salad. I’d not thought of that. Nausea inducing, occasionally deadly. A smell that is decidedly off . . .”

  “Hey!” I protested. “I shower every day. Ask Nik. He keeps trying to charge me for that Amish soap of his I steal.”

  Robin waved it off, having accomplished his goal of pissing me off for the day. “Back to Jack. It is still true about Niko. He shouldn’t be wicked in Jack’s eyes,” Robin mused. “Wholesome and noble as a nun knitting socks for orphans, that is your brother. He is a warrior but not a murderer.”

  “Then there is the fact we have now run into two groups of humans. They’re obviously homeless, but they dress in white sweatshirts, don’t drink or do drugs, but they are very insistent that we pray to Heaven and God and they have large knives to force the issue,” Niko went on. “It seems unlikely Jack who is concerned with the wicked and these humans who are concerned with sending souls to Heaven would appear at the same time and not in some way be connected.”

  “And once again, they don’t give a damn about me, just Niko,” I said. “How would they know I wasn’t human unless Jack told them? They called me a Godless creature, which I’m guessing means paien and especially Auphe aren’t welcome into their Heaven.”

  They had been concerned about my soul at first and were now concerned about Niko’s. They wanted to save his soul for Heaven—just like Jack wanted to save the skin of the wicked. But Niko wasn’t wicked, not immoral, not . . .

  Sinful.

  “Shit,” I said. “A sinner. That son of a bitch Jack thinks he’s saving sinners. He kept saying saving and I thought he meant it as in saving the skin of the wicked as trophies. He didn’t. He meant save as in save us from our sins. Save our . . . what? Souls?”

  Did it matter? There were a thousand types of crazy. Religious crazy was one pretzel in a jumbo-sized bag of them. How or why it got Jack’s rocks off was irrelevant to the fact that it did and what he would do to make it happen.

  “It would explain why he kills by skinning,” Robin said with an uneasy edge. There was something peculiar in his voice, swimming in the depths. Something more than what we were now guessing. “‘And the priest who offers any man’s burnt offering, that priest shall have for himself the skin of the burnt offering which he has offered.’ Leviticus 7:7–9.”

  I wasn’t surprised the puck knew his Bible. If there was a commandment he hadn’t broken, he’d take it as a personal challenge. As he’d once said, Christians love to take the sin out of “sinsational.”

  “Jack bases his pathology in religion—many do. He even has followers who want to be his apprentices. It’s not that uncommon for religious cult figures. You led your own religion in the past not to forget,” Niko pointed out to Goodfellow, “but that doesn’t explain why he has zeroed in on us to begin with.”

  Nik was right—why Jack had fixed on us was still up in the air. The big question. How had we come on his radar?

  “I’m bringing Ishiah in on this. He might be able to contribute . . . something.” Robin had his phone out and was sending a text, the uneasy air about him thickening with every moment that passed. “And truly you are the unluckiest bastards I’ve ever come to know. First the Auphe race and what they did to you, the fact your career has you testicles deep in the worst predators in the city on a near daily basis, and then comes the serial killers. This is your second now in your mayfly-short human lives. That should be unheard of.”

  “What’s Ish going to know? And actually this is the third,” I corrected without much thinking about it. I should have. I should have thought about it with extreme and excruciating care.

  Niko turned the color of mud under his dark skin and I gave my tongue a savage punishing bite. We didn’t talk about it. I wouldn’t put him through that again, not in word or thought. I knew better.

  However, I didn’t get the reaction I expected. His hands were suddenly on my shoulders, shaking me hard in the recliner, harder than he ever would have with my cracked ribs, control of his own strength abruptly gone. “In Connecticut, in New London, what was his real name? His last name? I never knew. I didn’t find out afterward. I didn’t try. I didn’t want to know. Cal, what was it?”

  At eleven there wouldn’t be much reason I would’ve known. Kids aren’t interested in things like that and after all of it, as Nik said, after all that happened I didn’t want to know. But I had also been an eleven-year-old period. Niko had idealized me, as good big brothers do, in a way that blurred certain memories now and certain knowledge then.

  At eleven, I stole shit like a motherfucker.

  He never knew. It was only little things. Candy, loose change, skateboards, and just once a porno magazine from our serial-killing next-door neighbor. I’d taken it from his mailbox, scanned it, and trashed it far from home one day before Niko had gotten back from work. This was before I guessed about the killings, but I remembered his name from the address label on the cover—after what had happened, after the basement, the bodies, the attic . . . Jesus Christ, after the attic, as much as I wanted to, tried to, how could I forget?

  “Hammersmith,” I said, throat oddly dry from such a blood-soaked past. “James Hammersmith.” Junior. Junior Hammersmith.

  Junior who liked to kill drug dealers, thieves, and prostitutes the same as Jack.

  Both with no tolerance for wickedness or sinners in any form.

  Robin was staring at us, paused in midtext. “Spring-heeled Jack murdered several in Hammersmith, England. It was one of his favorite hunting grounds. What happened? Who is this James H—”

  Niko cut him off with a fierce ruthlessness I could feel in the grip that remained on my shoulders, his fingers biting down to press on bone. I don’t think he was seeing me anymore. “His worshipper. His murdering bastard of an apprentice.” Like the men in the park who were waiting to become just that. “Junior who said his master liked to watch from above when lightning was in the sky. Junior who liked to sign his work just like Jack.”

  He was right. It was the only explanation. That’s why Jack wanted us—for what we’d done to his apprentice. And while Nik had never told me twelve years ago that slice on my chest was Junior’s start to “signing” me with a J for Junior or for his Jack, I had noticed the similarity in the slashes from Jack’s first attack on me in my bedroom. But in our lives a slash is a slash and very easy to come by. The only reason I’d noticed is that they were both especially neat and straight, but out of as many as I’d had, nothing to get excited about. There wouldn’t have been reason then for Nik to make the connection, not with that single clue, particularly not when we’d both done our best together and separately to bury those memories of Junior.

  Jack drifted from town to town, city to city, country to country. When he came to New York, we were just lucky enough he hadn’t forgotten Junior or us. Ain’t i
t the fucking way?

  Peeling his fingers off of me, Niko took one breath, another, and then was in the gym destroying everything in his path. Weapons were thrown with savage force to shatter at the wall. The mat was being cut to ribbons.

  I scrambled out of the chair, fuck the ribs, and pushed Goodfellow back when he would’ve followed. I’d seen Nik lose his shit only one other time. That had been bad. There weren’t words for the level of bad that had been. But that had been internal with his lethal control intact on the outside to leave him somewhat functional—to leave the world itself somewhat functional. This . . . this was not functional. Not for Nik.

  This was not Nik at all—not the Nik of now.

  “What is wrong with him? He’s gone mad. But Niko isn’t mad. Niko is, malaka, the sanest of us all.” Goodfellow sounded shocked. He’d seen only Niko’s meticulously controlled outer shell. He didn’t know what was under it. No one knew: not the puck, not Promise. No one but me and having lived through it with him, I wished neither of us had to know.

  It could be a flashback, a genuine one. It could be finally dealing with what he hadn’t let himself process then. I didn’t know which, but it didn’t matter. Getting Niko back from this was the important thing. I’d swear to anyone I hadn’t read a psychology book in my life, but I had. I’d read a fuck ton of them as a teenager when I’d finally comprehended Nik’s unforgiving life in a way that I couldn’t at eleven. Even a few years older I couldn’t protect him like he protected me, but at least I could understand him and what he was doing to himself for me. I read Nik’s books when he was at work or school, when he couldn’t see me. I’d read them for precisely this. I didn’t know it would come, but I didn’t know that it wouldn’t either.

  Now I knew.

  No matter how deep you bury things, they always dig their way to the surface, more malignant and rotten than when you’d shoved them under in the beginning. No one would guess it and I wished I could deny it, but on the inside, Niko was every bit as fractured and fucked-up as I was. The leash on his issues was sturdier than mine, but eventually every leash breaks.