Roadkill (2 page)

But since I hadn’t died in reality and Niko was faced every morning with half-dried toothpaste in the sink, wet towel on the floor, dirty dishes on the kitchen counters, and a trail of clothes from my bedroom to the bathroom, I think the memory faded bit by bit. And that must’ve been one helluva relief, because he didn’t bitch about my über- slobbiness. He simply washed out the sink, hung up the towel, did the dishes, and tossed my clothes back in my room and closed the door. So a relief for him, but kind of a worry for me, because that wasn’t Nik—not in any shape or form.

Niko had raised me from birth. And he’d been on my ass since birth as well. Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but close enough. Pick up your clothes, do your home-work, stop drawing cheat notes on your arm, eat your vegetables, quit trying to make out the porn through the scrambled gray zigzag lines. I was in my twenties now, so it was a little different. Run your five miles in the morning. Spar two hours in the afternoon. Study up on how to kill
F
through
H
in the
Mythological Creature Compendium
. Quit trying to make out the porn through the scrambled gray zigzag lines.

Well, some things never changed. And porn channels were expensive.

Niko had come a long way in those six months, although through all of them he would wake up in the middle of the night and stand in the doorway to my bedroom, making sure it wasn’t a dream; making sure I was alive. Not that I’d caught him doing it. I didn’t have to. I knew.

The illusion was my brother seeing me dead. The reality was that my brother would’ve torn the world apart if that illusion had been true.

So I wasn’t surprised he stood there night after night. He’d raised me, been with me my entire life. I knew him all right; knew where I would’ve stood if the reverse had been true. And then one morning I woke up and knew that night he hadn’t been in my doorway watching me sleep. How? The same way. I just knew.

And when I walked out into the hall, yawning and stretching to face his frown, that clinched it. “One:”—Niko held up a finger—“Pick up your clothes. I am not your maid. How do I know this? A maid cannot kill you with a tube sock. I can. Two:”—he raised yet another finger—“toothpaste, towel, dishes.”

“All that under ‘two’?” I muttered, bending to pick up a T-shirt off the floor.

“If I do them separately, we’ll be here all day. Some of us have better things to do,” he responded. “Three: I’ve disconnected the cable. You’ll eventually get eye-strain, and fighting creatures of the night while wearing Coke-bottle lenses tends to cut down on your aim and agility.”

“Not to mention my waves of sheer sexuality.” I grinned as I hid my socks probably less casually than I thought under the T-shirt. The sock threat was a familiar one, but it didn’t mean I wouldn’t end up strangled with one someday.

“Four: Stop making me borderline nauseated with what you imagine to be witty repartee.” He stood, dark blond hair pulled back tightly into a braid that hung several inches past his shoulders; it wasn’t the waist-length one that he’d once had, but it was slowly getting there. His olive-skinned arms were folded across a gray T-shirt—not a normal T-shirt of course, but one woven from the wool of the finest assassin-trained sheep, I was sure. Not that Nik was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He was a saber-toothed tiger in sheep’s clothing; a T-rex without that whole if-I-don’t-move-it-can’t-see-me thing. I was half of a creature so malignantly murderous that the entire supernatural world had feared it; yet my brother, who was fully human, could kick my ass ten times out of ten.

All hail Sparta.

“So, no number five?” I asked as I retrieved a pair of wadded-up jeans from the floor.

His eyes, gray, the same color as mine—our whiskey-adoring mother had at least given us that in common—narrowed. “Number five: You’ve been an absolute pain in the ass for the past six months.” The gray lightened and he gave that fleeting quirk of lips that passed for a Niko smile. “Thank you.”

In the past, I would’ve thought to myself that he would’ve been better off actually mourning me those six months; better off if the illusion had been real, if I had died. But not now. My brutally homicidal relatives were extinct—hopefully—after a lifetime of my running from them. They were gone. No more running. No more fear they would kill everyone I cared for. No more possibility that they would take me from this world again to another and do things to me that would make death seem as bright and happy a prospect as a pony at your sixth birthday party.

The past was gone. Now I had pretty much everything I’d been sure I’d never get. I had two jobs: one working at a bar and one kicking supernatural ass for fun and profit. I had friends. Me. Crowned Mr. Antisocial for at least three- fourths of my life. I was even getting semiregular sex. Life was as unshitty as it had ever been.

No, not unshitty. In fact, it was
good
. Life was good, believe it or not. I was a changed man—man-monster hybrid. Whatever. Definitely changed. No longer morose and sullen. Not angry and cynical. No more Prozac Poster Child. That wasn’t me anymore. I no longer thought the universe was out to get me. It was all good.

That had been this morning.

 

“Motherfucker.” I kicked the revenant in the ribs. Yeah, it was dead. I kicked it again. And yeah, it was the equivalent of beating a dead horse. I didn’t care, because it made me feel better. I couldn’t have been more goddamn wrong—the universe
was
out to get me, same as always. I was late to my bar job, I was having to kick supernatural ass
without
getting paid, and I’d probably get heartworms from my werewolf friend with benefits, Delilah.

Speaking of wolves, I kept my Glock pointed at the Wolf on the left and the Desert Eagle at the one in front of me. I couldn’t believe I was getting attacked in Central Park . . . even if it was night. That was boggle territory. Okay, revenants were stupid. They might look like humans on the decomposing side, nature’s camouflage, and they were about as bright as fifth grade bullies, although as hard to kill as your average cockroach. They were tenacious little suckers. But they were smart enough to steer clear of the boggles. Revenants were a few rungs—hell, half the ladder—down the food chain when compared to boggles.

“Who came up with this bright idea?” I snarled. “Too ghoul for school down there?” I kicked the body again. Not that revenants, or ghouls for that matter, had ever been human despite what mythology said, but it was a good line and I used it. “Or one of you mutts, because I think the Kin would know better about me and my brother by now.” As for boggles, a mutt couldn’t take one, but he could outrun one.

The Kin were the werewolf version of the Mafia; just insert “butt sniffing” instead of “ring kissing.” We’d had our run-ins with them once or twice. On the other hand, we’d hired a few for extra bodyguard help in the past. Then there was my dating one off and on, although that was not common knowledge. Some Alphas might keep the occasional succubus or incubus around for sex slaves, but no one was really good enough to actually date a werewolf, except another werewolf. They were Old Country orthodox that way and since I’d been born half sheep (human) and half Auphe (unclean nightmare from the beginning of time—try fitting that on a name tag), I didn’t qualify either way. And as Wolves—again, no matter what the mythology told you—were born, not made, I never would be good enough.

“I mean, you crotch sniffers know who I am, right?” I waggled my Glock at the one on the left. “You. Speak. Arf arf. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I wasn’t vain enough to think every Wolf in the city had my picture with a big heart drawn around it up on his wall. Far from it. In the toilet bowl to piss on, maybe. But while every Wolf might not have known what I looked like, they all knew what I smelled like. Lucky them. It was the rare creature that could pick up the Auphe taint to my scent: dogs, werewolves, and trolls. There wasn’t a Wolf in the city who wouldn’t know who I was at first smell: the half-Auphe freak.

Humans told their kids about the bogeyman under the bed. It might grab your foot in the middle of the night and say boo. The supernatural told their rugrats about the Auphe. It might grab your foot in the middle of the night, drag you under the bed, disembowel you with one clawed hand, and pluck out your eyes with the other. I might look human, but to a Wolf I smelled like the darkness under the bed.

The bogeyman times a hundred; a monster to monsters. So attacking me with one revenant and two Wolves? It was a good way to hump your last leg. Although no matter what they thought, that wasn’t because of my Auphe genes. Good guns and a pissy attitude were enough for that. I wasn’t the monster they smelled in me. Maybe I wasn’t all human, but I wasn’t a raving maniacal killer either.

Raving was a little too much work.

I tightened my finger on the trigger of the Glock. “I’m not hearing anything. I was in a good mood, too, one with the fucking universe, full of happiness and joy and all that crap, and now you’ve ruined it. Unless you want to find out how good my aim is by my neutering you, you’d better talk. Now.”

He was a high-breed Wolf, no recessive traits at all from what I could spot. No furry ears, no lupine eyes or misshapen jaw with trash compactor teeth. To your average human (blind, deaf, and dumb) that’s what he looked like . . . your average human—until he would turn. But he wasn’t. He could go from man to beast in a helluva lot less than sixty seconds. It didn’t make a difference to me. He could wear all the Abercrombie and Fitch he wanted, do the fake bed hair look, sport those retro preppy glasses. He could spray on a gallon of Axe. The commercials lied. He wasn’t being tackled by a crowd of horny women, and I could still smell the Wolf under it.

The Wolf scent was better, trust me. My half-Auphe sense of smell was fairly close to being as good as a wolf’s, Were or otherwise. This cologne was not my thing—so much so that as my finger was tightening on the Glock in a threat for info, my sneeze accidentally carried it through to a done deed.

Ouch.

“Goddamnit,” I swore. “Sorry about that.” Not sorry that I had to shoot him. He had attacked me—he had it coming. I was sorry that I’d shot him in the crotch, though. I had meant that as a bluff. I still would’ve shot him, but half monster or not, there were things even I wouldn’t do if I didn’t have to. Head, heart, sure—but in the block and tackle? You really had to work at earning a shot there. I winced in sympathy as he curled on his side, turned to a giant wolf in an instant, and howled his lungs out.

This meant, of course, I had to put his pal down with one to the brain. No partner—no
good
partner—is going to let that happen to his buddy and not do something about it.

He tried. He failed.

Great. Now I was stuck in the park with a dead revenant, a dead Wolf in human form missing a good chunk of his head, and another Wolf screaming for his mommy. That was if you were in the know. Nonhuman. Supernatural. Preternatural. Whatever you wanted to call it.

But for, say, your average cop who heard a screaming wolf and came into the depths of the park as opposed to patrolling the outer edges—to that cop, my little problem would look more like a half- rotted corpse, a freshly dead human, and a mutilated big-ass dog. That was a hat trick that would put me in the running for murderous nutjob perv of the year. Worse yet, the murderous nutjob perv of the year with two unlicensed guns equipped with illegal silencers, a matte black combat knife, three more knives, and a few other surprises hidden away.

One side of my heritage, the human Rom half, told me exactly what to do in a situation like this: run. My experience in the supernatural business world was of the same opinion—but one thing first. I knelt by the Wolf in a tangle of once purposely distressed clothing, now the real deal as claws had shredded it during the change. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me why the three of you jumped me, ball-less wonder?”

Foam-flecked jaws and bared teeth were all the answer I needed. “Your choice.” I shrugged. “You know they normally charge sixty bucks for neutering. I’m a bargain.” I doubted I’d have been in a talking mood in his situation either. I thought of putting him out of his misery, but, hell, he’d brought it on himself. He tried to kill me. Him and that cologne.

What kind of Wolf wore cologne? It was a wonder he wasn’t in the throes of a doggy asthma attack. Their sense of smell
was
better than my Auphe one. So why would he . . . shit. There was only one reason a Wolf would coat himself in something that strong. He was trying to cover up the scent of something—or some
one
else—and hadn’t taken the time or had the time to shower. I leaned back, out of the way of his snapping jaw, and took a deeper whiff.

Delilah.

My Wolf with benefits. She’d saved my life at least once in the past. I knew for a fact she’d saved my sanity by giving me that semiregular sex. Delilah was sterile. When you got to be the age of twenty-one, more or less, before you finally found someone you could sleep with and not run the risk of making babies even an Alien-Predator combo couldn’t love . . . well, you knew what true friendship was. It didn’t mean Delilah wasn’t trouble, though. Not that she particularly cared one way or the other. Delilah was Delilah—exotic, erotic, and predatory to her bones. That meant one thing: Delilah looked out for Delilah. Period. And if you couldn’t take care of yourself, then that was a damn shame.

For you.

Yeah, my furry fuck buddy. I’d never for a second thought I was her one and only hump day special. I was a lot of things, not all of them good, not all of them especially smart, but gullible? Ever have your mother spit at your feet when you were seven and tell you with drunken venom that there was a Hell, but you were an abomination so horrific that even it didn’t want you?

No? Huh. Just me then.

Regardless, that cured gullible pretty damn fast. I knew there was no way Delilah was faithful and true and brimming with Hallmark’s warm and fuzzy best: hugging bears and hearts and puffy silver balloons chock-full of Romeo and Juliet
-
style undying love. Why would she be? Friends with benefits tended to spread those benefits around. I knew if I weren’t carrying around sperm potentially toxic to the concept of continued human existence, I might have had my eyes open for the occasional opportunity. But “Hey, great band and are you sterile?” isn’t the best pickup line in the world.