Slashback

  Hell’s own geometry.

  There were shards upon shards stabbing out from the core, each two to three feet long. Hundreds of pieces of volcanic glass come to life. Jagged pieces of . . . what? How had my knife missed him, a hunchbacked creature practically made of primitive blades?

  Then there was a hint of movement, a shadow growing within the shadow, as if the crystalline daggers shifted in unison, spread, and fanned out above me like wings. There was a sound that set my teeth on edge, the hollow chime of shattered glass pieces scraping and breaking as they ground ominously against one another. It had me gripping my own useless knife even tighter against the threat of the phantom blades articulating in the murk above me.

  A clot of the shadowed mist came up and electric blue-white eyes flared to life, studying the blood, my blood, that dripped out of the sharp-edged darkness. There was a hiss and if hisses could be disappointed, this one was. “You are not mine to save. Not of my keeping. You are not of the Flock.”

  I was a lot of things, but this shithead was right—part of a flock wasn’t one of them. Not a sheep for a monster to prey on and damn sure not a pelt to be saved and nailed to a supernatural whackjob’s wall.

  I couldn’t gate him away. Hell, we were a little too attached at the moment for that. I was about to gate myself out to the hall instead and hope not to take the most dangerous part of him with me when I heard the explosion of my door being kicked open. The weight disappeared from on top of me, taking its sharp blade or talon and what felt like a handful of my hair. I was out of bed in an instant to see Niko knocked backward out of the doorway and against the hallway wall with his katana flung to one side but remaining in his grip. My brother didn’t lose his weapons. But what happened next was quick enough that he didn’t have a chance to use his sword. It was also quick enough that I barely saw it.

  There was an impression of a long-fingered hand . . . no . . . the shadow of an impression wrapped around my brother’s neck, a ripple of the darkest of shades and then nothing. It was gone. If I wasn’t bleeding, head aching from the vicious jerking of my hair and mild whiplash, and Nik didn’t have a bright red handprint around his neck, I wouldn’t have been able to swear anything had been there at all.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  The cut, a familiarly clean surgical slice, the same kind Niko had pictures of on his phone from the body that had fallen into the stairwell, was about six inches long. It started a good four to five inches to the left side and barely above my navel and ran in a perfectly straight line to the right. And, yeah, it was bleeding, but it wasn’t gushing. That meant it wasn’t too deep, which was a good thing. That was the area I kept my guts and they tended to work better on the inside than out. “Some,” I dismissed, wiping a hand over it. All that did was smear the blood to cover my stomach. The new blood that welled out of the slice was steady but fairly slow. “It’s not bad. Whatever it used, knife, talon, extra-sharp press-on nail, it didn’t go any more than half an inch deep, I don’t think.”

  “Not deep enough to skin you,” Nik said. “But enough for a start.”

  “There is that, the asshole.” I covered the wound with my hand. It’d do for the moment. “What the hell did it do to your neck? I can see its handprint.” Long, knifelike fingers etched in red.

  “It’s a burn.” Niko touched it lightly. The smell of ozone, the crackle of lightning in its eyes. If all Niko had was a burn, he was lucky. “Between first and second degree, I think.” He’d already started to check out the rest of our converted garage, but neither of us had seen which way it had gone. Back out the window that sat almost two stories high among the steel beams? Through the front door, locking it behind it? Down the damn kitchen sink drain? It had moved so fast I had no idea where it had gone or what it looked like, other than impressions. There was only the sense of a black wraith hovering around a mass of smoky glass knives appearing and disappearing out of the corner of my eye. That couldn’t be right. I’d been attacked by many monsters in my life, but nothing that looked so . . . inorganic . . . inorganic and maybe with wings. That was some crazy shit indeed.

  Nik was scowling up at the window. It had been a problem in the past and we’d probably put iron bars on this time, but that would have to wait for the glass replacement people to wake up and get to work. As often as this happened, we might want to invest in a two-story-tall ladder.

  There wasn’t anything to be done about it now and Niko gave my shoulder a light shove. “You’re dripping on the floor. Stitches. Go.” As I turned toward my room to give him something to bitch about—that always cheered him up—he nudged me again. “To the room without the bubonic plague–ridden mounds of filthy clothing on the floor.”

  I stood in Nik’s sterile room of Zen and did my best not to bleed on his equally sterile floor. I didn’t lie on his bed and wait. I’d ruined enough of his bedding over the years to actually feel guilty when I did now. “Everything in its place” wasn’t a motto that worked as well for your brother when your bloodstains were on his sheets. When Niko, arms filled with supplies, walked in two minutes later he frowned. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  “I’m waiting for the plastic. I told you last time to get a plastic mattress cover. You spent half your teacher’s salary on sheets this year alone.” Not that part-time teaching at NYU paid much.

  “Idiot. Get on the damned bed,” he ordered as he deposited the medical supplies on his spare and Spartan dresser. “I’ll invest in red sheets if you’re that concerned.”

  I gave up on the plastic and on trying to be considerate. I wasn’t much good at it anyway. Once I was flat on the bed, a gloved hand pulled my bloody one away from my stomach and wrapped it around a damp towel. I used it to wipe the blood from my palm, fingers, knuckle creases, pretty much every millimeter of skin. It didn’t distract me from hissing at the cold swipe of Betadine across the cut. Six inches long. Lots of stitches, but Niko was quick. It wouldn’t take too long. I glanced down at the sliced flesh. It was in a different spot from long ago, a lifetime ago, and longer and deeper, but similar enough that it reminded me . . .

  “You remember when—”

  “We don’t talk about that,” he cut me off instantly, a little more sharply than I thought he meant to. That was a sign that he was certainly remembering it too. Hell, how could he forget? But talking about it?

  No, we didn’t. There are life-changing events and life-ruining events and sometimes there is something that falls between. Twelve years since it had happened and we still didn’t talk about it. For two entirely different but equally valid reasons, but the result was the same. I blamed the disorientation of having a fairly decent sex dream interrupted by a monster who’d tried to skin me, was impervious to hollow-point rounds, and so fast as to be almost invisible for having let the comment slip at all. Nik was right.

  We definitely did not talk about it.

  “He was right on top of me, the son of a bitch, and I hardly saw him,” I said, changing the subject. “I shot him. There was no way I could miss, and nothing. He didn’t flinch. I didn’t even see him when he hit you. It was just . . . shadows of something already gone. Shadows and knives. He was that goddamn fast.”

  Niko had already injected the area with lidocaine and was using a probe to see how deep the incision actually was. He looked up at me, face somber. “I’m sorry.”

  “No big deal. I’m not feeling a thing.” Probing the cut wasn’t why he was apologizing. We both knew it and we both let it go. I didn’t want to talk about it either. The past was the past. Neither one of us wanted to dig up that mental childhood grave. It was ancient history and it was best to stay that way, especially for Nik.

  If not for the reasons he thought.

  He gave a faint but thankful curve of his lips, then went back to work. “It’s barely half an inch deep. If it wasn’t so long, I wouldn’t bother with stitches. But with your . . . energetic lifestyle”—kicking ass any chance I got—“you’ll constantly be ripping it open if I
don’t.” He applied more Betadine. “Whatever he is, you were correct, he wasn’t serious. Not this time. He was simply playing.” He began stitching. “The ones that like to play are never the easy kills. Still numb?”

  “Yes, Mom. Still numb,” I snorted. “And I’m not sure it was play. He looked at my blood. Just, hell, looked at it and said basically I wasn’t his to take. I don’t know if I wasn’t good enough a specimen. Too many scars to make a nice rug or if it’s because I’m not human.”

  Niko gave me the look, the one I’d lived with my whole life. I changed it up a bit. “Not completely human. Ishiah did say it was only killing humans and Edward Scissorhands said I wasn’t a sheep. But playing or not playing, bullets, knife, sword, and neither of us touched him. He could’ve had us on a silver platter with a frigging caviar garnish if he’d wanted.” Hard to say if it was for real or just a dry run. I gave in to the inevitable. “I never thought I’d say this with your giant brain, but you might need help with the research. The next time he comes back and is serious he’ll have his choice of which of us he wants to wear as his summer jacket and which his winter coat. We need the info on this thing now. Or preferably a half hour ago.”

  “My cell is on the table beside you. Call Goodfellow.” Robin Goodfellow was our go-to guy on all things paien. What he didn’t know, chances were you didn’t want to know. Niko kept stitching while I called. He’d trained for this when we lost our last healer back to the home country. Niko could go to the hospital if worse came to worst. He was human inside and out. I wasn’t. One scan, one blood test, and that was something else not worth talking or thinking about. Nik had been taught by the best healing spirit around. He could handle most serious trauma. If it was critical . . . with ventilators, heart-lung bypass machines, lacerated livers, kidneys, a nicked heart—then, hey, nobody lived forever.

  By the time Goodfellow arrived Niko had finished with me and had rubbed ointment on his neck. The burn looked painful, but not serious. That had me in a slightly better mood when Robin picked our lock, walked in, and dumped a Styrofoam container on the sand-colored kitchen counter. Nice kitchen, big apartment, flat-screen TV, and all the weapons money could buy. We’d moved up in the world since the bad old days. “As requested,” he said. “Why such a request, I don’t want to know.”

  I lifted the lid immediately and grinned. He had brought me a smiley face pancake. “That puts you one up on Nik.” Hell, it even had “Cal” incised across the happy, syrup-drenched forehead.

  “He’s an actual adult?” the puck asked Nik with a large helping of disbelief in his snake-oil smooth voice. “You’re quite sure about that?” It was five in the morning, but as always Goodfellow was dressed like he was heading for a photo shoot at GQ.

  In sweats of his own, although considerably newer and less bleach stained than mine, Niko shrugged. “Some jump developmental hurdles. Some scale them slowly but with determination and success. And then some, like Cal, are laziness incarnate and run around them. I consider it a miracle he doesn’t eat with his hands.” All this was said at the same time he set a bottle of Tylenol on the counter by me and tapped it meaningfully. Lidocaine doesn’t numb forever and he knew it would be wearing off about now.

  I took a closer look at the pancake and scowled. “What exactly is that hanging from the bottom? Right under the smile?”

  “Sausage link,” Robin answered promptly. “Smallest they had for authenticity. I toothpicked it there myself. You can thank me at any time.” I would’ve thanked him by throwing it at his head, but I was hungry. Sometimes pride takes a backseat to an empty stomach.

  While I ate, Niko described the skinned body, showed Robin the pictures, told him about the attack on me and then him, the speed involved, the smell of a lightning strike—my cut and his burn in the shape of a hand. Goodfellow listened, studied the pictures, the handprint, and gave a speculative hum. The entire thing had taken three minutes total. Pucks were not known for being slow or bringing up the rear—unless it was in a sexual context. He knew, I could tell. Already, he knew.

  He’d taken off his suit jacket and now slouched on our beat-up sofa that I refused to give up as it was shaped perfectly over the years to my lazy ass. There was an unhappy look in the usually sly green eyes. He was a fox faced with an empty henhouse. A barn cat who’d already eaten all the mice and had nothing left to entertain him. “It appears to be . . . but no, it couldn’t be him. He’s been absent for over a hundred years. The real one anyway. I doubt seriously it could be him.”

  “Who? Who the hell can’t it be?” Finished with breakfast, I sat on the coffee table to face both of them. Robin was a puck. Pucks lived long lives. Thousands of years, hundreds of thousands, some even more. Robin Goodfellow, as far as we knew, was the oldest puck alive. If anyone knew everything about absolutely anything, it was him.

  “Did he say anything about your hair?” he asked abruptly. “Cal, did he say anything about that shaggy mop of yours?”

  Absently, I pushed my hand through the mess. Thick, black, and straight, it hung almost to my shoulders. I could get it into a ponytail, barely, to keep it out of my face for fighting. “How’d you know that? He said he liked the color. That it was black. Something about it meaning I was wicked and he wanted it. Hell, I think he took a good hunk of it with him.” Lucky it was thick. I didn’t care about my hair, not like Robin with his six-hundred-dollar haircuts to keep those Great God Pan brown curls just as they’d been drawn on temple walls. But I didn’t want a bald spot over my ear either.

  “Ah, skata.” He ran a hand over that expensive haircut and turned it into a tumbleweed. “Dark hair. He likes dark hair. More importantly he likes to kill or ‘save’ people with dark hair. He thinks it’s a sign of evil. Wickedness. At least goes the rumor. If it’s him.” He shook his head. “I’m not certain. It could be or it could be other things. This is a diagnosis I do not want to commit to without more information. Truthfully, I’d rather not commit to it at all.”

  He was looking less and less happy by the moment. “Niko? Did he mention your hair? The rumor also goes that he tends to associate blond hair with whores and whores also with wickedness. Red hair too. Whores, whores everywhere. It’s a theme with him. He is a judgmental bastard. He cannot abide wickedness. Odd in a killer, isn’t it?”

  Niko gave a forbidding frown. “You wish to know if he called me a whore? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Yes, yes. Don’t be so sensitive. There was a time when next to Caesar that was the highest position in the land. I myself had a franchise of fertility temples—” Niko’s expression darkened and Robin returned to the point. “In deference to your prejudicial ways, let me rephrase: did he mention the color of your hair or call you immoral?”

  “We will go with immoral. Yes, he may have mentioned it.” Niko folded his arms. “What of brown hair like yours? Would he consider you free of corruption, as pure as the driven snow?”

  “No, wicked as well, only slightly less so. He’d still kill me, but I wouldn’t be his first choice like the darkly depraved and the wickedly wanton.” He glanced at both of us, but the usual humor was lacking in the barbs. “But with what Cal has said and his victims in the past, apparently it’s only full-blooded humans he’s after—if it’s him. Being me has always had its advantages, even with serial killers.” He gave a grin, but it also wasn’t the same, not his customary con-man special. He made the effort though. Robin was worried, but Robin was also still Robin. If he had but one finger out of the grave he’d still be using it to yank our chains.

  “If this creature is what I think he is, he’s killed before. Paien history says almost forty people, in the eighteen hundreds in England. All human. History rounded down by about a hundred. Someone, no doubt the Vigil, did an excellent job of covering up the murders and the skinnings from the populace. It was passed off as a few high-strung people startled by an obvious prankster leaping about in the manner of a seven-foot-tall frog while spitting blue flames.” He curled his lip.
“Intentionally described to be ridiculous. Supposedly nothing damaged but dignities. This monster became a mere idiotic urban myth to them after the fact. Now it seems the lethal truth he’s always been is back for more. It’s too early for news this bad.” The disdain for bad storytelling was gone. He rubbed the heels of his hands over his closed eyes. “Offhand, I know of no way to stop him as he wasn’t stopped. He simply disappeared. Oh, and those slices to the bone of the victim in your cell phone picture? That’s a J. He likes to sign his work.”

  “Who then?” Niko demanded. “Who is he?”

  “Spring-heeled Jack. Spring-hell Jack.” He gave a laugh, but I didn’t hear any amusement in it. “One and the same. Either way if it is Jack, then he has brought Hell to New York. And I don’t know if there is anything we can do about it.”

  4

  Niko

  Twelve Years Ago

  Hell.

  I’d wondered off and on if the monsters came from Hell. But I didn’t believe in Hell. I never had. It seemed too easy. Do whatever you want, say you’re sorry, and then you’re lifted unto Heaven. Do whatever you want, don’t say you’re sorry, and be cast down into Hell. The people in Hell probably didn’t think it was easy, but I had more problems with the Heaven part. If you did wrong, no matter how sorry you were, you still should pay . . . not burning in hellfire. That was over the top.

  But you should pay somehow. Learn your lesson and learn it well. That’s why I leaned toward Buddhism. I borrowed books about it from the library. If you did the crime, you still did the time, but you learned from it and in another life you’d be a better person. Then better and better again in each new life—if you were capable of learning. That made sense—the same as physics made sense. There was a balance to it. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As energy is never lost, you are never lost . . . only improved.