Roadkill (3 page)

So the cologne lover could’ve been just one of her other “friends.” A jealous one—or if he’d found out about what I was, a bigoted one. She had a special spray of her own, lacking the sneeze quality, that covered up my Auphe-tainted scent, but nobody’s perfect. She could’ve forgotten to hose down her den in the abandoned school once or twice. She didn’t give a damn who knew about us outside the Kin, but within the Kin she was careful. Delilah had ambition, and screwing around, in all senses of the word, with a half-breed Auphe wouldn’t help her at all.

And hanging around here wasn’t going to help me either. I’d have the cops after me for grave robbing and murder, and PETA after me for animal abuse.

I’d take the cops any day.

Despite it all, if this did involve her, it didn’t matter. I still liked her. Just . . . hell . . . liked her. Because she liked me. She wasn’t disgusted by my Auphe half or afraid. To her I was just a guy . . . one with shoulder-length black hair, skin a shade paler than your average human, lots of guns, and a foul mouth—your average New Yorker, in other words. And her treating me that way definitely made her worth liking.

I holstered the guns and ran on into the darkness. I veered off my original path. I had been making up for missing my run this morning. If I didn’t, Niko would make me run the five I’d missed, plus five more, and probably run backward ahead of me so he could mock my athletic failures to my face. Even though it wasn’t conveniently located to our new SoHo apartment, I’d been running in Central Park as usual because it kept me on my toes.

Some people sparred in the gym boxing ring. Some of us ran through the habitat of a nest of mud-wallowing humanoid alligators on massive steroids. A workout is a workout. But this time I’d already had a different type of workout. And now I was late—later than usual—which was saying something. If I waited around to catch a bus or cab, I’d set a new record.

Bartending didn’t pay much; the real money was in the supernatural ass kicking. At least usually, but this was the one bar where I could use the fire axe to take off the head of a drunk and rampaging homicidal lamia before dragging her body to the storage room, and no one would raise an eyebrow. Actually they’d probably be taking bets on who went down first, her or me, and although they knew better, they’d bet on her.

The bar patrons didn’t much like me. They didn’t like my human half, my pale-skinned Auphe half, or my sarcastic and heavily armed whole. Oddly enough, it didn’t much bother me. Maybe it had some at first. But now if you didn’t want to like me, I could not like you right back and with an enthusiasm you might not want to see. The job wasn’t a bad job, and I wanted to keep it. So I took a shortcut—my shortcut.

There are shortcuts and there are shortcuts.

My kind came courtesy of my Auphe father . . . sperm donor . . . sire. Whatever you call a thing that pays your mother to breed a bouncing baby interspecies bastard. I don’t know if it—he—was disappointed I looked human, but in the end it didn’t matter. I had enough Auphe on the inside, but I didn’t let it control me—much. I used it.

I just hoped like hell my brother didn’t find out.

Taking that shortcut consisted of ripping a hole in reality and stepping through. I called it traveling. Niko called them gates. Whatever you called them, you could cover miles in a split second—the entire country in the same—to another dimension that was the next best thing to Hell if you wanted.

Actually, radioactive Hell now, thanks to Niko, me, and a de rigueur secret society that had access to suitcase nukes instead of secret handshakes. And the Masons thought
they
were hot shit.

The gray light rippled before me in the night—gray, dirty, and wrong, but a tool, and a tool I could control and use. The sight of it even quieted the howling Wolf. “Hearing great things about prosthetics. Check it out,” I told him, then stepped through.

Right behind my boss, Ishiah, in the bar’s storage room. I don’t know if he heard me, saw the light from the corner of his eye, or just sensed it. But his wings sprang out of invisibility into a banner of gold-barred white feathers as he turned and was already swinging a fire axe. We had one mounted in every room—less for fire; more for beheading.

“Whoa, boss. I’m not that late,” I said with a grunt as I hit the floor hard to avoid a haircut that would’ve started about chest level.

“Do not do
that
in this establishment,” he snarled. “Do you understand me?”

Ishiah was my boss and he was a good boss, which meant he paid me and hadn’t killed me. But he had a temper like Moses seeing the Golden Calf and breaking the Ten Commandments. No, that was more like a temper tantrum. Okay, Ishiah had a temper like God taking out Sodom and Gomorrah for being the Vegas of biblical times and turning Lot’s wife into a saltshaker just for wanting a look. Biblical references . . . Niko homeschooled me, and I knew a lot of obscure information when I bothered, which, according to everyone I knew, was rarely. But in this case it wasn’t applicable. Ishiah wasn’t an angel. There were no angels or demons, no Heaven or Hell. Fairy tales built on myths built on more myths, all built on the first caveman who refused to believe his kid, his brother, his mother, were gone for good. Who knew what the truth really was? Who wanted to know? Not me.

But here’s what it wasn’t. No angels. Ishiah was a peri, probably where the angel myth began . . . there and with all the Greek gods with wings. After all, the Auphe were where the elf myth had started and if you took away the hundreds of needle-fine metal teeth, the scarlet eyes, the black talons, shredding jaws, nearly transparent skin, and a raging desire to destroy humanity, then I guess you were close enough. The pointed ears were the same, right?

Thank God I hadn’t gotten the pointed ears. Who wants to pass as a
Star Trek
or
Lord of the Rings
fan boy for the rest of their natural-born lives?

A slight increase in the weight of the axe on the back of my neck redirected my attention to where it belonged. Peris, per the mythology book that Niko had swatted my head with on regular occasion, were supposedly half angels /half demons or something midway between the two. In other words, I had no idea what Ishiah was. It didn’t matter. Mythology was always wrong . . . like the whisper game. You started with one thing and by the time it was passed around the circle, it was something completely different. If you had even a seed of truth in mythology, you were doing damn good. Werewolves and vampires were born, not made, and were not all uncontrollable sex addicts, no matter what the local bookstore’s fantasy section might tell you. Puck, Pan, Robin Goodfellow were all one trickster race; all looked exactly alike; were all male; and they
were
all uncontrollable sex addicts. Revenants and ghouls had never been human. I could’ve gone on, ticking them off in my mind, but the axe blade was getting uncomfortable.

“Got it. No traveling in the bar. I’ll make a note.” I didn’t think he’d really chop my head off, but with Ishiah, you could never be sure. Can’t say I blamed him, because you couldn’t always be sure about me either . . . especially when I opened gates.

Why did I travel at all then? To avoid being late? Honestly? If it could bring out the worst in me and it wasn’t to escape imminent, messy, ugly death, then why did I do it?

Good question.

And no good answer. No answer at all, only the excuse that it
hadn’t
brought out the worst in me lately . . . not like before. So why not use it? I had control now, so it wasn’t that big of a chance. Not anymore, although getting anyone else to believe it, especially Nik, wasn’t something I looked forward to. But my brother wasn’t the problem at the moment; it was my boss.

“Can I get up and sling some beer or are you going to cut my head off?” I asked Ish. “Either way, I really need to take a piss. It’s been a long day.”

He thought about it, then grunted and lifted the axe. “I’m docking you two hours.”

It was better than having my head docked. I got to my feet and peeled off my jacket. It was summer in New York, which made it too hot for the leather jacket, but when you wore two guns in shoulder holsters, a cheerful smile wasn’t quite camouflage enough—if I could even pull off cheerful, which was doubtful. I didn’t need camouflage in the bar. Humans tended to avoid it like the plague—some instinct passed down from caveman ancestors who knew there were monsters in the world and a woolly mammoth wasn’t the only thing that could squash you flat. The few random humans who did walk through the front doors were predators themselves—arrogant ones who ignored their instinct because they thought they were the shit and no one was more of a badass than them. Those humans usually didn’t leave the bar . . . except in pieces. The bar didn’t serve food, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be found there once in a while.

I made my way to the bathroom, then out to the bar to toss the jacket under it and grab an apron. “Good crowd tonight,” Sammy commented. Samyel was another peri, dark to Ishiah’s light blond, with wings barred with gray. “Quiet.”

Quiet was good. We didn’t get it that often. I leaned on the bar and took in the small crowd. Vampires, lamias (kind of a combo between a vampire and a leech), three incubi, two
vyodanoi
(predatory, rubbery, man-shaped water creatures), but no Wolves. Not a one. While quiet was good, that was not . . . especially on top of what had happened in the park. There were always wolves in the bar.

I fished my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and called Delilah. Modern-day werewolves had modern-day accessories. I got her voice mail. I usually did. She had a busy life, between being a bouncer at a strip club and her Kin work, which could be anything from stealing to fighting rival Kin packs to things I might not want to know about. I had asked if she killed humans. She’d said no—she preferred real prey, real challenge, not bleating sheep. I thought she was telling the truth; she was all about the challenge. But I’d asked her that before I’d killed a few humans myself, so I wasn’t sure I was in the position to judge. Mine had been bad men, but wasn’t “bad” a matter of who was holding the gun and who was getting shot by it?

I left her a message that someone who smelled an awful lot like her had tried to kill me in the park and I hoped he wasn’t a regular hookup, because he had nothing left to hook up with now. I also asked what was up with all the missing Wolves.

Ishiah, wings now gone, came out of the back room with a beer keg and scowled at my making personal calls on my first five minutes of company time. “Two and a half hours,” he said.

Normally he would’ve made it three. I wasn’t the only one getting sex. A fire axe to the neck and docking my pay were actually mellow for him. That was the good part. The bad part was he was getting it from a friend, the only one I trusted besides my brother, and this friend and frequent fellow monster killer liked nothing better than to threaten me with the details . . . and that was worse than any axe.

When Robin Goodfellow, a puck, threatened you with sexual details, you didn’t need a porn channel and you didn’t need
Hustler
; when he claimed to have cowritten the Kama Sutra, you believed his bragging ass. And the last thing I needed was to have my boss see me looking at him and trying damn hard not to picture wings and legs and other things in positions you’d need Silly Putty for bones to achieve. That would make him lose his mellow real fast. Goodfellow would like nothing better than to see his adventures on IMAX, but Ishiah was probably more private.

And my twitching at the mental picture wouldn’t liven up the bar any.

I twitched anyway and turned my attention to wiping down the bar. It was clean, but it didn’t matter—anything to keep my thoughts from going down that road. I’d done the same twitching when Nik’s vampire girlfriend had once had some fun at my expense. There are some things about your family and friends you just don’t want to know.

There are also things that
you
don’t want
them
to know. Different things maybe, not that it mattered. Niko found out anyway. I didn’t know why I tried. He always did. I discovered that this particular time twenty minutes later when my brother walked through the door . . . the only human who came and went at the Ninth Circle and lived not to tell the tale. I looked up the instant I smelled him . . . when I smelled the annoyance on him. More than annoyed, he was completely and totally pissed off. And it took some doing to get my brother pissed off. That didn’t mean he’d hesitate in a fight to take the head off a boggle with his sword, but he wouldn’t be angry when he did it. A job was a job. No need to bring emotion into that equation.

There was plenty of emotion now.

He walked to the bar, flipped open the phone in his hand, and put it down in front of me. The small screen was open to the GPS tracker connected to my cell. “I thought we had an agreement. You don’t gate and I don’t beat you within an inch of your life. Wasn’t that it?” He leaned closer. “The
agreement
?”

“Shit.” I looked down at the phone blinking accusingly.

“I had a friend of mine at the university program it to alarm every time your signal disappears and reappears approximately four seconds or less later.” Which wouldn’t pick up on the dead zone of the subway. Traveling was a helluva lot quicker than the subway. My brother was smart, probably the smartest guy I’d ever known, but just once couldn’t he have taken a little more after me?

“Well? I’m listening. Were you in dire circumstances? Was it make a gate or die? I’ve always assumed if you escaped near death, you would give me a call afterward. Common courtesy.” He leaned farther. My calm and cool-as-ice brother had a temper too. You had to dig for it, had to push him, but it was there and it could rival Ishiah’s. Ice to fire, but when it was your butt in a sling, whether it was frozen or singed didn’t much matter.

“There were two Wolves and a revenant.” I reached over and snapped his phone shut, tired of the betraying beep. “They attacked me in the park. . . .”