Roadkill (10 page)

Niko said, “He needs someone healed then.” I nodded in agreement. Whoever it was hadn’t been trying to hide that.

“It would seem.” Abelia had spilled a small mound of gray powder on the table and was stirring it randomly with a sticklike finger. “We gathered the rest of our men and drove the roads searching for them, but found nothing. The Plague of the World was gone.”

By now she’d drawn an elaborate figure in the powder, one piece of it pointed at me like a spear. I snorted and passed my hand over it, wiping it out and leaving a clean surface of powder. I drew a tic-tac-toe design in the middle. The letters to “screw you” fit perfectly—it even left a nice neat space between the two words.

“Unless that’s anthrax and you’ve gotten Ebola-infected flying monkeys waiting outside for me, you’re out of luck,” I responded. “I know you fool the marks, but didn’t your mommy tell you there was no such thing as magic?” The Calabassa she’d sold us had been a thing of technology made by a race long extinct. Iron and zinc were proven to block psychics . . . by science. I knew that because Nik had made me watch some long, boring documentary on it. And mummy cats? Wahanket infused them with a tiny portion of his own life force. . . . I absolutely did not want to know how.

But magic? Spells and fairy dust? Fall into the piranha pool at the local zoo and try tossing your magic powder at them. See what happens—beyond seasoning the human soup, doubtfully much. To believe in magic, you had to have faith. I saved my faith, what faith I had, for lead and steel, guns and blades. They worked. Even monsters laughed at the idea of magic.

She swept the powder back into the bag. “I and five of my best will follow you in your search. We will need to be there to escort the coffin back to the clan.”

True. We’d need one of their RVs. People are going to give you a second look when you’re driving down the interstate with a coffin strapped to the top of your car. Then again, I’d sooner ride on top of that coffin buck naked, eating nachos and waving a Yankees foam finger, than have Abelia-Roo tagging along.

“We can rent a truck,” I said dismissively, “when we find it. Or just use the one we find it in.”

“You will also need me to make sure the seals are intact on the coffin.”

“We’ll get a padlock. There are Home Depots everywhere.” I nudged Niko with my shoulder to move the situation along. “Hand over the money. We’ll call you when we have what’s-his-name back.”

Niko didn’t cooperate. “She may be right. It might be a good idea to have along those who’ve been responsible for Suyolak for so long. They know more about him than we can find out in weeks of research. Weeks we don’t have. If he gets free before we find him, they could be helpful. They are his people, after all.”

“Who locked him in a box for hundreds of years,” I pointed out. “The only help they could give us then is that they’d be the first people he’d go after.” I thought about that for a moment. “You’re right. It’s a good idea.”

Niko’s lips twitched in a way that let me know I was both incorrigible, as he’d say, and on the money, as I’d say. “The money, Abelia- Roo, and we’ll leave in the morning. By then I plan to have a direction, at least, to head toward.”

She studied us both, although when she looked at me, it was with the revulsion of someone finding a black widow spider at her bare feet and no house shoe or book to smash it. Not that Abelia-Roo couldn’t strike one dead with one second of her hemlock glare. She probably could and did at regular intervals, but it didn’t work with me. I gave her a sunny smile with not one drop of venom to be seen. “The money,” I repeated. The “I win” I didn’t have to say. The price alone said it.

She twisted her features into one of those old dried apple doll faces you saw people selling by the road in Appalachia. It’d been a long time since we’d been that way . . . since I was eleven . . . but I remembered them. Most kids would’ve thought they were creepy, as if they’d come to life in the middle of the night and shove their apple heads down your throat to choke you before you had a chance to scream. But most kids didn’t have a remote clue what creepy really was.

Creepy or not, Abelia would have those dolls winning beauty contests. She slid from behind the table and shook out her dusty crimson and dull black skirts. She definitely hadn’t gone the Martha Stewart route in the clothing department. Abelia- Roo in a pink sweater tied around her narrow shoulders and matching slacks: It was enough to make your brain spasm at the improbability of it all, not to mention the added picture of her passing out holiday brownies . . . topped with cherries and just a hint of arsenic, of course.

And she was afraid of me. Didn’t that put me in the big-boy category or what?

Rustling back toward the sleeping quarters of the RV, she passed through layers of scarves that hung from the ceiling, none of which were pink—Martha Stewart ended there—and disappeared into a gloom no stray ray of sunshine could penetrate. It took her a few minutes, which was not too good for me. Niko seemed to grow larger with each passing second until I felt about the size of that eleven-year-old boy who’d fed one of those apple dolls to a cow hanging her head over the fence by the road (she spit it out, by the way). Yeah, I was the salmon heading up the falls and Niko was the grizzly bear waiting for me at the top.

Finally we heard the sound of one of those cheap accordion doors closing and Abelia- Roo returned with a paper bag. She put it on the table before Niko, who opened it and counted it with quick and efficient fingers. He might be pissed at me, but that didn’t distract him from the fact that trusting the old woman was a mistake only a fool would make; my brother was no fool. The fact that all fifty was there and not half now, half on delivery, told me something. If this Suyolak guy did get out, Abelia didn’t see a future where money mattered.

“He is a monster,” she said sharply to Niko, “this thing you call a brother, but perhaps you are worse. You are his keeper. We keep our monster under lock and key and you let yours run, free to kill and destroy as he sees fit. Everything he does, the responsibility is shared equally with you.”

“Of everything he does, I’m proud to claim half.” Niko rose to his feet. “We will see you in the morning.” I followed him out the door and back to the car. I started to get back in the driver’s seat, when a hand snagged the back of my shirt and jeans and helped me all the way through to the passenger side of the bench seat and halfway out the open window.

“I guess we’re having that talk now?” I asked, looking down at the gravel beneath the car.

“Why not? Talking to this end of you”—his voice came from behind me, “behind” functioning in a dual sense here—“isn’t any different than speaking with the other end and is about as effective.”

I set my hands on the sun- hot door and pushed my way back in the car. Sliding back into the seat, I took the lap belt from the days when the highest quality of safety technicians thought that crushing your skull against the dashboard was just swell and wondered whether to fasten it or try to strangle myself with it. Asphyxiation would be less painful than one of Niko’s “talks.” This time, though, I knew I was right. All the other times, admittedly, I’d been wrong. I knew I was wrong and didn’t bother to deny how very wrong I was. That made this unfamiliar territory.

He got behind the wheel and closed his door with a muffled click, carefully . . . quietly. It was Nik at his most annoyed. When you could do what my brother could, when you could kill as easily as most people could breathe, it paid to have control—the same kind of control he doubted I had. And to have that control in less than six months with what the gates had done to me before that, I didn’t blame him for the doubt. I did have the gates in check, though, but getting Nik to believe—that was going to be a trick.

“I take it you have the payback you wanted.”

His voice was as quiet and self-possessed as the rest of him as he stared straight ahead, although he hadn’t started the car yet. I gave the bag of money he’d set in the floorboard a dismissive nudge with my shoe. It hadn’t been about the money. It had been about making her feel at least a tenth as terrified as I’d felt when I thought my brother was gone. “I got some, yeah.”

“I think you obtained more than ‘some.’ And there’s only one way you could’ve frightened her that much.” Now he looked at me, almost as though he didn’t know me. That, oddly enough, scared me probably more than I had scared Abelia-Roo. “You did the very thing I told you not to do, and now here we are.”

I opened my mouth, ready to defend myself—in a very real way, desperate to defend myself. Nik was my only family. I’d spent my whole life knowing without a doubt he was always there for me. If my ass needed saving, he would save it. If I was a screwup, which I was some of the time—hell, most of the time—he didn’t care. He corrected me or accepted me. He was my brother. He knew me inside and out and that couldn’t change. I might have control, but “Know thyself”? I didn’t have a goddamn clue. From day to day, minute to minute, my opinion shifted. Man, monster, an ice-cream twist of the two? I didn’t know. The bottom line was I didn’t know who I was, but Nik did, and that was more than good enough for me.

“Nik . . . ,” I started.

He shook his head, cutting me off. “You have control? You swear it?”

“Yes,” I replied. I might not know who or what I was at my core, but the gates, that I was sure about. Absolutely positive.

“All right, then.” He started the car.

“All right?” I frowned and smacked aside a fuzzy dice that swung and hit me in the face as the car backed up. “Just like that? No talk? No kicking my ass? No telling me I’m being a dangerous idiot?”

“I saw you born, Cal.” He braked, cranked the steering wheel to turn the car around, and used the moment to give me the same look, but I saw it for what it was now. It wasn’t that he didn’t know me; it was that he was seeing something new. “I saw you grow up. Now I see the end product. I see the man, and you can’t be a man if I don’t let you be.”

I exhaled and folded my arms across my chest in relief and a little disbelief. “I’m a man? Yeah? Do I get a bar mitzvah?”

“The bris comes first. Do you want to borrow my tanto? I sharpened it this past weekend.”

This time it was my legs I folded and in a fairly unmanly fashion. “Funny. Funny stuff there.” Home deliveries and a doctor/hospital-averse mother left me as nature made me and it was a little late to be changing that now. “I’ve been trying to cut back on do- it-yourself circumcisions.”

He had driven us almost out of the park before he spoke again. “As a full-fledged adult, you will experience consequences to your actions, you realize.”

“There have always been consequences.” Bad ones usually.

“Yes, but in the past I was willing to let some of your idiocy slide. You are now wholly responsible for any and all of your decisions, no matter how catastrophic.”

The sun was falling in the sky, spearing me directly in the eyes. I put on my sunglasses and groaned, “All of them? Is that even possible?” I meant it too. I might have made it to adulthood in Niko’s eyes, but being an adult didn’t mean I was a competent one. I was a gate-building architect extraordinaire and the Traveling King, but that didn’t mean I still wasn’t a screwup in a few other areas of my life. “Cyrano, can’t we sort of ease into the responsibility part? One screwup at a time maybe?”

The Roman profile didn’t shift from its serious set. “You’re an adult, Cal. Embrace it. All little monster killers grow up. I saw it six months ago. I see it now. You can handle it. I have faith.”

Niko’s faith was different from my faith and a little less faith might be good. Killing, tending bar, trying to decide if I was more monster than human, and giving a shitload of bad attitude—that I was good at. Everything outside that was a different story, but if Nik thought I could handle the fallout of my occasionally wildly massive mistakes, then I’d give it my best shot. I’d make him proud—or do my best not to make him regret it.

“You’re right. I’m old enough to kill for my country, die for my country, vote for president, and to be drunk while doing all three.” I leaned back in the chair that worked, enjoying the air through the open window. Damn right I was ready.

“Yes, the very definition of responsibility,” he commented dryly.

Maybe not, but considering my past record, it was a start.

When we made it back to the loft it was almost dark. Niko had already put his university contacts to work as we rode back to the city, starting the calls before we had made it out of the Rom camp. It seemed he had one contact in the anthropology department in whom he had special confidence. If anyone had a chance of knowing the foremost experts in Rom culture, this guy, Dr. Penjani, would know about it. Next was a tiny woman I’d met once who taught mythology. Her name was Sassafras Jones, Dr. Sassy Jones, and she was sassy too. Loud, big, fond of pink . . . lots and lots of pink, but it looked better on her than on Abelia-Roo. I was surprised there wasn’t a tinge of pink to her wild halo of silver curls and in the icing on the horrible diet cardboard cookies she shoved on me. Not only did she know all the big mythology, anthropology, any-kind-of-ology experts in the country who’d have come across Suyolak in their studies, but she’d also be able to find out if any of them had terminally ill relatives. When it came to academia, Niko said, she was the equivalent of the neighborhood gossip . . . for the entire country.