Roadkill (6 page)

So, we had our version of s’mores back then and he’d said the one thing I couldn’t say no to . . . not even as a little kid. “I’d be lonely,” he’d told me, nine and solemn. “One more year, Cal. Okay? Just one more. When you’re six and I’m ten and we’re all grown up.”

Five-year-old Cal never would deny his big brother anything. A twenty-one-year-old Cal wouldn’t either, but I didn’t have to make it as easy these days. This Cal would never be anything like that long-ago one. It was too bad; that had been a much better Cal. Ignorance was bliss and sometimes made for a much better person. But ignorance hadn’t been an option for me for long. The few years I’d been lucky enough to be that way had been all due to Nik.

Once there had been an innocent, quiet, and good kid. Now there was me. I wasn’t innocent; I wasn’t good. I was quiet, but that was usually as I stood behind you a split second before I slit your throat. But that didn’t mean I didn’t remember. I did, and I remembered who’d kept me innocent as long as he could.

“Never mind with the convincing,” I said around another mouthful. I might not have been the same, but Nik was. And I still couldn’t tell him no. “I’ll do it.”

The absence of my usual stubbornness took my typically unflappable brother off guard for a split second. “That simple?”

I shrugged. “Next year, when ‘we’re all grown up,’ I won’t help save the world. How about that?”

“I think ‘all grown up’ won’t hit you until your mid-eighties, but, yes, it’s a deal.” He handed me another s’more and, God help me, I took it.

“One thing, though,” I said. “This time I get to negotiate with Abelia-Roo.”

He paused in cleaning up, wiping the counter with typical Niko antiseptic zeal. “Robin certainly won’t fight you for it, but why are you so eager to be cheated and molested to the point of post-traumatic stress disorder?”

Because Niko could have died because of her. Because I don’t forget things like that . . . not ever. Because I wanted a little payback and I wasn’t talking about the money.

For those she’d cheated in the past.

For those she’d cheat in the future.

For what she’d allowed to happen to my brother.

For good old-fashioned revenge.

I grinned with the same dark cheer Abelia-Roo had shown in the bar when bleeding the vampire half dead and added the last, equally valid, reason out loud.

“For fun.”

 

Niko called Abelia-Roo to let her know we’d take the job and would be upstate that evening to talk terms. By the time Niko disconnected, her voice had gotten shrill enough I could hear it across the room. “In a hurry, huh?” I yawned.

“The entire devouring of the world, destruction of all living things, it seems to disturb her,” he said dryly. “But obviously not you.”

Destroy the world? I’d once nearly
unmade
the world. Not my fault . . . mostly . . . but it had rearranged my priorities some. Destruction of the world versus nap: Nap won. Since I couldn’t get a full night’s sleep thanks to the Kin and Abelia, a nap would have to do. Besides, as there was no way we’d catch whoever stole the gypsy grim reaper in a matter of hours, it didn’t make much difference. I checked my watch. Five a.m. Groaning, I headed for the bedroom, losing a sock along the way, fell onto my bed, and instantly into dark, utterly empty sleep.

I woke up, who knew how many hours later, to that same lost sock stuffed halfway in my mouth. I spat it out and counted myself lucky it wasn’t another of Nik’s s’mores. I’d take the taste of a dirty sock over that any day. With cotton fuzz on my tongue, I flailed around for the alarm clock. It was eleven a.m. I’d had about six hours’ sleep. Just about half of what I usually went for, but what could you do?

I rolled out of bed and gazed blearily at the piles of clothes on my floor, trying to remember which were clean, which were dirty, and which, just like Johnny Cash, walked the line. I took a sniff, made the determination, and grabbed a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. I probably wouldn’t hit up any wolves for info about last night’s attack. . . . They might not all know about me and Delilah yet. It might have been just those two. But if the others did know, then that could get back to the Kin, which would be bad news for Delilah. Plus, all werewolves weren’t Kin. Some were just living their lives: lawyers, waitresses, accountants, healers. . . .

Revenants, on the other hand, were a different story. I’d never met a revenant who didn’t eat people. That’s what they did. That’s who they were. They were sharks, and people were walking, talking chum. And that meant there was no such thing as a revenant that wasn’t better off dead . . . not in my book.

After the shower, I found a note in the kitchen from Nik. He’d taped it to the Lucky Charms cereal box so I wouldn’t miss it.
Gone to work. Back for meet. Gate and I’ll baptize you face-first in the toilet
. Short and to the point, my brother.

It was Tuesday, so that meant he was kicking ass, taking names, and being paid for the pleasure at the dojo on West Twenty-fifth. Most other days he taught as a TA at NYU. Mythology, history, fencing, all while supposedly pursuing his master’s—or was it a doctorate? Hell, I could never remember. Never mind, the Auphe had put an end to his early college days quick. Robin Goodfellow had friends . . . philosophical friends from the good old days of orgies and gladiators . . . who still taught even today and pulled some strings to provide Nik with a degree from a Greek university.

Good for him. He more than deserved it. I, on the other hand, already knew more about the world than I cared to. The back of the cereal box was good enough for me—that and the weight of the guns in my holsters and my knives. Many knives . . . and then there was the occasional explosive round. I liked to think that made me easy to please, not paranoid and homicidal. You couldn’t be paranoid if they were not only out to get you, but
had
gotten you. And homicidal? I took a bite of cereal and crunched. In my world even the beauty queens were homicidal. I just passed on the tiara.

I hit the street, checked my voice mail—still no Delilah—and decided which revenant hangout to hit. During the night they walked the streets, the human clothes and gloom enough camouflage against all but the closest looks. During the day, if they kept their sweat-shirt hoods up and heads down, and slimy hands in their pockets, they could get by. But it was a risk. But just as peris had bars, so did revenants—if you took away the other customers, the bathrooms, and the whole sanitation issue. In other words, they drank alcohol in pools of their own filth.

Festive.

Revenants were sewer rats mainly. They were either too stupid or too lazy to get jobs unless it was for the Kin, and the only meal that really turned them on was human, so they would find a deserted place to take over and congregate. There were probably about twenty places like that scattered around the city. I’d been to only two in the past and that had been enough. No matter where they were, above or below, you could bet on one thing: They would be rank. Revenants were all about slaughter and nice, ripe gobbets of flesh, but hygiene? They weren’t lining up for deodorant, that was for damn sure.

But this time I wasn’t going down into the sewers. I’d had my share of those on a previous case and trying to track down revenants there by stench was a losing battle. Natural versus supernatural stink—I wasn’t that good. I was still going to get wet, though, which is why when I knocked at Robin’s door, I was surprised he was holding a cat carrier. I’d called him to see if he was up for a hunting trip and he’d been oddly enthusiastic. Now I saw why.

“Um . . . ,” I said, hesitating as eyes made up of what looked like yellow candlelight peered at me through the metal bars. “Why? Cats don’t like water. I don’t think mummy cats would be much different.” In addition to the eyes, there was a mouthful of fangs that showed when she grinned—and she always grinned.

Robin had managed to get the equivalent of “followed home” by a mummified cat during our last . . . “adventure” wasn’t the right word. More like our last FUBAR. Whatever you called it, it didn’t matter. What did matter was that shaking a mummy cat off your trail was a lot harder than shaking off a normal feline.

“Look, kid, I didn’t say I’d go with you for this little interrogation/extermination project simply because the car lot offices are being painted. The Hair Club for Cats here needs some exercise. She’s getting antsy and you remember what happened last time she got antsy. She arranged some playtime on her own.”

She—Salome—had gotten out of Goodfellow’s condo, killed a neighbor’s old, senile Great Dane that was using the hall for exercise, and then left the carcass on Robin’s pillow as a present like a good little mummified kitty. Mummy cats didn’t eat, but they did like to play the same as live cats. And if no neighbors had any big-ass dogs left to play with, she might decide the neighbor himself would do just fine.

A hairless paw, with perfectly normal-looking claws that obviously weren’t, came through the bars, followed by a dry-as-dust mrrrrp. “There, there. Who’s a good kitty?” I said, taking a step back. I didn’t pull a gun, though. In my eyes that gave me balls of steel. In Salome’s eyes, steel would just make them all the easier to roll across the condo floor.

“You love her, don’t you, Goodfellow?” I said, taking another step back. “Admit it. She’s your pookie bear.”

“She’s a boil on the cheek of my finely toned ass,” he grumbled, but he let the paw hook around his finger. Robin, from what we knew, was hundreds of thousands of years old . . . if not older. Friends came and went quickly from his perspective, especially human ones, but mummy cats—who knew how long they could live? Wahanket, the mummy who’d made her, was older than the pyramids. She could hang around for a long while. When friends were mayflies in comparison to you, a mummy cat wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “So, I’m in my casual clothes.” By that he meant his non-Armani slacks, shirt, and long duster, which was good for concealing swords. It was when he concealed his sword without a duster that I started worrying. “Where are we going hunting?”

I grinned. “How do you feel about nature hikes? Wetlands? Save the yellow spotted leech?”

From the spitting of Greek curses an hour later as we splashed through the calf-high muddy water, surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes, he thought about the same of it as I did. It sucked.

“Wet enough for you?” I commented, and ducked the water he kicked in my direction.

“
Ai pidiksou
,” he spat, but continued after me.

We were at the Flushing Airport, abandoned since before I was born. Thanks to Robin’s owning a car lot, we had access to whatever we needed . . . including a Jeep . . . if the subway and bus wouldn’t get us where we needed to go. “This is what happens when you build an airport on a swamp,” I grunted. Swamp was the non-fancy name for wetlands. Built in the twenties, closed in the eighties, and located on top of a damn swamp was the sum total of what I knew or cared to know about the place.

That and it was home sweet home to a bunch of revenants who worked for the Kin. This was actually a sort of reward situation for them. If they’d done good and not messed up for several months, a long stretch for a revenant’s reasoning and willpower, you got hauled out in a party bus with several dead or mostly dead humans, twenty kegs or so, and left for a week or thereabouts to lie around, eat, drink, and do whatever revenants do to make little revenants. The last was yet another thing I didn’t need or want to know.

There were two hangars and one smaller building. The blue sky reflected in the still water ahead of us and it was warm enough that I’d shed my jacket and left it in the Jeep. There was no one to see out here but revenants, and since I planned on their seeing my weapons up close and personal, there was no reason to hide them. Except for the mosquitoes, the mud in my shoes, and the stink of our prey, it was a nice day. Not that there weren’t other opinions on that.

“Poseidon’s barnacle-ridden testicles,” Goodfellow snarled as he held the cat carrier up as I sloshed along. I sloshed. He moved through the water like a shark, soundless and with barely a wake. When you were possibly older than mankind itself, you were good at things like that. The temper hadn’t seemed to have improved over the years, though. “Pick a building. I’m hot, I’m surrounded by water and mud . . . mud
without
naked women or men wrestling in it, mind you, and I’m not pleased. And why isn’t Niko here? Surely he’s not avoiding his duty?”

“Niko had to work, and the day it takes more than two of us to handle a bunch of drunk and passed-out revenants is the day we get a job stuffing teddy bears at the toy store. And speaking of naked mud-wrestling women, how is Ish handling your wild and woolly ways?” I grinned wickedly. “You talk him into the whole orgy scene?” Pucks loved a good orgy, or two, or a hundred. “Or do you just swing by his place afterward and cuddle?”

“Do not go there,” he said with a grim set to his mouth.

I picked one of the hangars and headed for it. The other ramshackle wooden building was too small and the stench was everywhere, but a little stronger toward one of the hangars. “Don’t get me wrong.” I held up my hands. “I don’t want details. I so don’t want even a single detail. I don’t even want to know that details exist. I’m just curious how it’s working out since he’s a little holier than thou and you’re . . . well, unholier than pretty much the whole world and all alternate dimensions. In the sex area anyway.”

“I said,
don’t
. . .
go
. . .
there
,” he gritted. “Or my sword will go someplace you think equally private. Are we clear?”

It was a big change from Robin’s usual bragging ways. I’d once learned more in one hour from listening to him boast than I had from two solid years’ worth of porn mags. He’d been the one to first get me laid. Not with him. Even if I were into guys, and I wasn’t, but if I were . . . I’d once accidentally seen him naked. Walk softly and carry a big stick was one thing. Walk softly and carry the Washington Monument was another altogether.