Roadkill (26 page)

“And Suyolak did keep his word, more or less. It all went away. Unfortunately, Branje went with it.” Niko slid his katana into the sheath on his back and shucked off the lightweight duster that covered it. I knew it was hot when he was admitting it.

The man
had
been tough. I hadn’t much liked him the first time I met him; I liked him less the second time—on this job, but he’d had a pair, and I wasn’t going to deny him that now that he was dead.

I pulled out my cell phone. No reception. Big surprise. No communication in Satan’s sweaty armpit. Niko had mentioned on the drive that it was unseasonably hot by at least thirty degrees. I never understood why people said unseasonably. Hot is hot. Cold is cold. Screwed is screwed. “Then we walk back to that bitch’s RV. It’s not much more than a mile.” Nik raised an eyebrow, and I amended, “I mean we run back to the RV. No big loss of time.” It wasn’t as if we could go back to the house and use the landline.
Hey, could you send a cab, pickup truck, tractor, mule, whatever. Just look for the house with the multiple fires and dead couple inside. Can’t miss it.

We ran.

Naturally the RV was gone. There we were in the middle of nowhere—a place where distance wasn’t measured in blocks, but acres and sometimes miles. Fields as far as the eye could see. Big Sky country. The death house had been freshly painted, clean and neat, the interior and exterior up-to-date, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been built on the bones of what had once been a much older house. Some people, rich couples tired of the city life, liked their privacy. They’d buy up old ranches and either redo or build a new house. And the thing about old ranches? They were fucking big. It had been at least twenty miles since I’d seen the last house before Suyolak’s homestead of horrors.

“I suppose we have more running to do,” Nik commented as he regarded the empty stretch of gravel, the slightest twitch of annoyance at the corner of his mouth. “We passed another house approximately twenty miles on the way. We can borrow their phone or transportation.”

“Twenty-some odd miles. You’re fucking with me, right?” I bent over and rested my hands on my knees. Half a mile normally wasn’t too bad; Niko typically had me run five miles every day. But it was scorching hot . . . unseasonably, of course, not to forget . . . and it wasn’t air we were breathing but pure pollen. I didn’t know what it was from—grass, weeds, occasional trees—I didn’t care. It was all right when cruising along in the car even with the top down, but running more than twenty miles in blistering heat while trying to keep the heart pumping with pollen instead of oxygen did not seem to put a fun time in my future. The Auphe might have had a pumped-up immune system when it came to viruses, colds, diseases of all sorts, but simple pollen? Apparently they’d sneezed their murderous asses off the same as their good old human cattle. There was no way, though, that I was going to ask Rafferty for a quick laying of the Holy Claritin on me or whatever healing equivalent he’d come up with. Branje had suffered through frigging schizophrenia. I wasn’t going to bring up snuffling, snot, and scratchy eyes after that.

“Would I do that to my only brother?” Niko asked, mock solemn. “Lie? Never.”

“Oh hell,” I replied morosely. “It’s like a frying pan out here.”

“You don’t like the heat, I’m aware. You also don’t like the cold or running or any other form of physical exercise that doesn’t involve your penis, but Suyolak set us back with one mentally deranged man. One . . . against the five of us. Pardon me, Salome—the six of us. Therefore we will run until we can find a car to buy, borrow, or steal, and then we will catch this monster and make him sorry he was once a cluster of cells in a woman’s womb, much less born.” He looked up at the sun. Nik wasn’t one for watches. He didn’t need one. “And we’ll do it in two hours, arriving at that house around dark.”

Two hours? A seasoned marathon runner could do it in two hours. Niko could easily. Pucks could probably do it in two hours, though I sincerely doubted Robin would want to. Wolves could do it in less than two hours. Me? An everyday runner who hated it with a passion and who did not have Nik’s Olympic potential—three hours. Three hours and that wasn’t counting puke breaks. “If you want to keep me alive so much, I don’t know why you’re trying to kill me,” I grumbled. “Why not let the furries run ahead and come back and pick us up?”

“I think the fact Rafferty would be nude while trying to negotiate for a car might be a drawback,” Goodfellow said dryly, stroking Salome who was looped around his neck. “Or, considering his personality, it might actually be a plus.”

“He could carry his clothes in his mouth,” I pointed out, reasonably, I thought. “Dress behind a clump of whatever is turning the air piss yellow.” I sneezed. “Problem solved. Or I could make a ga—” I stopped suddenly before the entire word “gate” made it out of my mouth. Niko was giving me a look and it wasn’t a good one. It reminded me that while we didn’t know where Abelia and the remaining four of her men were or what condition they were in, Suyolak was doing a nice ring around the rosy with us—the original version from the Black Death days with flowers to cover the smell of sickness, ashes from burning the corpses, and falling down because you were dead—reminding me that despite all of that, he didn’t trust my traveling and its effect on me. Even if I thought he was wrong, I listened to my brother. The fact that he’d never been wrong before made things more difficult, but I was trying my hardest.

“Okay,” I said, exhaling, “we run.”

It took three hours and ten minutes. One vomiting episode . . . me. One stripping off all his clothes except underwear—don’t ask; don’t tell; don’t look—and folding them over his arm so not to wrinkle or stain them with sweat. The half- nude Goodfellow wasn’t what made me puke . . . I’d seen more of him than that once, accidentally. It had mainly made me feel inadequate. It probably would’ve made a stallion at stud feel inadequate. No, this was the heat, the spores sprouting a new field of weeds in my respiratory system most likely equipped with grazing rabbits, and a run twice as long as I’d ever done.

When we reached the house and I pulled on my jacket to cover the holster and gun, I didn’t mind the sniff Catcher gave me. I offended even myself and I couldn’t smell the half Auphe that went with it. You can’t smell your own genes.

I hadn’t paid too much attention when we’d passed the house earlier. Tired and droopy, small, once painted chocolate brown but now the color of mud, one story, three windows and a door in front, two windows on each side, and a reddish-colored pit bull lying on its side on the porch. That was enough details as far as I was concerned—house, points of entry and exit, and a possible threat sleeping on the porch, but Niko could’ve told you if the dog was male or female, the classification of scrubby grass in the yard, how many shingles were missing from the roof, and if the wind chimes hanging from the one tree were made of wood, metal, or glass.

There was one spindly tree in the front yard—I didn’t care what classification it was—and I leaned against it. Waves of sweat rolled down every inch of skin I had. The red dog had been still lying in the same position as when we passed it hours ago. It had lifted its cone-shaped head when we’d come down the road and grinned at us broadly. A happy dog, it liked Catcher and Rafferty instantly, cheerful almond eyes on them. Then it paid attention to me. A lazy, sleepy dog, too, or it would’ve caught a whiff of me long before I came into view. Dogs can smell that far and much farther. White bloomed around its eyes and its ears went back as it began to foam at the mouth, not in aggression, but in fear. It inched backward across the dirt and brown grass for several feet, then turned and ran, disappearing behind the house.

Dogs didn’t like me. Never had. Never would. One drop of Auphe blood was one drop too much. Wolves were the same, with the occasional exception—Catcher, Rafferty . . . Delilah. It was not the time for thinking about that; it was time for breathing and not puking again. The second didn’t do much for my rep as cranky monster-slayer.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, especially when it affects me, but I don’t see a car or a garage,” Goodfellow pointed out. “However, I suppose we could use their phone.”

“It wouldn’t hurt the situation if you put your clothes back on,” I said as I wiped yellow-tinged sweat from my face.

“It depends. It might actually help to have the physical embodiment of a living sex god standing on their porch, revealed in all his magnificent glory,” Robin retorted, but began dressing as Salome jumped down to investigate the scraggly yard with a tail twitch of curiosity. Niko was already at the door. He knocked once while I was still depending on the twig of a tree to hold me up. “You should’ve let me travel. Open a gate for us all. We could’ve been here in sec—” I shut up in mid-word as Niko turned a dark gaze on me. “But running is good. Cardio and all that. Glad we did it.”

The look only became darker as my brother waited five seconds, knocked again, and then kicked in the door. It was too bad for the lazy son of a bitch who couldn’t get his ass off the couch fast enough. He yelped as the door flew open, barely missing him. It was a lesson for the kiddies. No car didn’t always equal no one at home, and if someone knocked at your door, you should answer it promptly.

“What the fuck?” the guy demanded. He was a tall man in a dirty white T-shirt and boxers that hung on what had probably once been a large frame. Now he was skinny, all bones, bad teeth, and hair that would’ve been blond, but now was so greasy and lank that it was brownish gray.

“Excuse me,” Niko said smoothly as he walked over the remains of the flattened door. “You should be quicker about answering your door. We need to use your phone.”

I concentrated on getting my ragged breathing under control and heaved myself upright to follow him into the gloom of the house. No bright and sunny windows here—just blinds and heavy drapes. There were shapes of furniture—a sagging couch, a fake leather recliner with a perfectly preserved ass imprint, and a shotgun propped up in one corner, which our proud home owner was lunging for. “Hey,” I said with satisfaction as I jammed an elbow into his side to block him, sending him tumbling back onto the couch that had been his downfall. “A shotgun? For me? You shouldn’t have.” As I’d lost several of my old toys in the car fire, I thought I deserved it. I grabbed it as the guy nursed his ribs, then cracked it open to discover it was even loaded with slugs. Buckshot was okay, but slugs did the kind of damage I was into. I went searching for more ammunition.

Niko did a quick check of the place, sparing little sympathy for the man moaning on the decrepit couch. We spent most of our work chasing down or working with monsters, the criminal kind. It wasn’t hard to spot a bent human as well. This guy didn’t smell right and it had nothing to do with his hygiene. It didn’t take long to find out why. Nik was quick with his search and the house was about a thousand square feet—a good size by your average New Yorker’s standards, but small and cheap by the local ones. “Meth lab in the bathroom,” he said as he headed for the phone.

“An entrepreneur,” Goodfellow commented as Niko picked up the phone on a table by the recliner. “I’ll wait outside. I have no desire to be involved in two explosions in one day, especially in a domicile I haven’t seen the likes of since I lunched with some Neanderthals.” He went back out the front door. Rafferty and Catcher hadn’t bothered to come in.

“Bastards. What the fuck do you want? You keep away from my stuff, you got it? Stay the fuck away.” His breath was far more nerve- racking than his threat, and as the threat wasn’t nerve-racking at all, it didn’t truly emphasize the rankness of his breath.

I tapped our friendly meth- head on the shoulder with the barrel of the shotgun when it looked as if he’d gathered enough courage together to get back up. “What do we want? You don’t listen, do you? The phone. Just the phone . . . oh, and the gun. Or if you have a problem with that, we might also want to bang your head against the floor until it splits like a melon. Up to you. I’m flexible. You choose.”

He picked not having his head treated like a basketball. Some guys are no fun. Seemingly. But he pleasantly surprised me by yanking a bowie knife, or an el cheapo knock-off version he’d picked up at a swap meet, from beneath the couch cushion. Niko had taught me many disciplines of thought when it came to knife fighting, and there were many, although they all seemed to come down to two options: “You’re going to get cut, but suck it up and take the bastard down” versus “I will not be cut and dispose of my opponent like a child armed with a plastic picnic knife.” The second option was mostly held by those living in a fantasy world where they whacked off to martial arts magazines and Chuck Norris movies.

But there were times your opponent was so pathetic that you could actually get away without a nick. Our meth buddy was one of those. He may as well have been a poodle with a switchblade—a hyped-up poodle, but still a poodle. He wasn’t worth it. He definitely wouldn’t provide any entertainment or further my education in knife fighting. Instead, I kept my distance from his desperately jagged slashes and smacked him with the barrel of the shotgun again, this time on top of his head. He went facedown into some truly nasty carpet or the flat nap that was left of it.

Over the next forty minutes he occasionally got to his hands and knees, felt around with a floppy, uncoordinated hand for the knife while dripping a good dose of drool. I’d wait until he got the knife in his hand—he looked so proud at the accomplishment, like a kid graduating from kindergarten—and then I’d whack him over the head again. After two times, Rafferty stuck his head inside the door and told me to stop playing with my food and either fish or cut bait.

I almost protested that’s not what I was doing, but it would have been pointless. On the subject of food and playing with it, a Wolf would know.

Niko, while he wasn’t cutting the phone line, didn’t step up to defend me, which meant I probably
was
in the wrong and enjoying playing Whac-A-Mole a little too much. It was a boring forty minutes, the guy was stubborn, and I . . . I enjoyed my work. Just because he was human didn’t mean he wasn’t a monster that preyed on the weak. He deserved a whack or three, but to keep the peace with Niko and not annoy Rafferty, which more and more seemed like a bad idea, I hit the guy extra hard the last time. He’d stay down until long after we left.