Roadkill (8 page)

“Good. I’d hate to think I had to kill a kindergarten class of revenants and see a vagina large enough to drive a Volkswagen through for nothing.” He used the back of my shirt to clean his sword. I didn’t complain. I deserved it, leaving him as the world’s most unlucky birthing coach. “Perhaps I should shove you up there. Expand your sexual horizons.” Now that, nobody deserved. I stood and put away my blade.

An “I hunger” drifted mournfully from the back of the warehouse. He’d killed the revenants, but mom—which to be fair, you couldn’t kill without a rocket launcher—was still good to go, which had me good to go as well.

“Well?” he said, beckoning for the information with impatient fingers. “What did it say?”

“It wanted to know where your cat got that rhinestone collar. Said it was tacky as hell.” I headed for the opening to the outside, leaving our Venus out of sight, out of mind, and hopefully out of horribly disgusting dreams as well.

“It’s rubies, not rhinestones, you fashion heathen, and I know you didn’t drag me out here in New York City’s version of the Everglades, ruin my shoes, my pants, my ability to function with anything female for the foreseeable future, and my entire morning to
not
tell me what you found out,” he demanded.

“Pucks, you can’t stand it when someone knows something you don’t, can you?” I commented as I passed into the sun and headed for the Jeep. “Where’s Salome?” Robin had picked up the carrier at the door, but it was empty.

He didn’t answer me any more than I’d answered him. He did manage to call me every equivalent of jackass he could think of, keeping it all in English so a nonbilingual moron like me could understand each one. I nodded, snorted, and gave him the occasional “good job” when it was a really filthy one. When we got back to the Jeep, Robin still didn’t have his answer, but I had mine. It turned out Salome had beaten us back to the Jeep. She was batting a revenant head around the floorboards with waning enthusiasm. To a cat, it was no fun when they didn’t wriggle and squirm. She yawned when she saw us, her teeth suddenly much bigger with the gray furless lips peeled back, then went to her usual grin.

“No, no. Absolutely not,” Goodfellow told her. “You are not taking that home and rolling it across my finely crafted floors. Do you realize how hard it is to remove blood from marble grouting? I thought not.” He tossed the head into the water as he slid behind the wheel while holding the carrier. He picked up Salome whose Egyptian dusk eyes narrowed. “Yes, very fearful. You’re the feline fatale. Take a nap.” She was deftly popped in the carrier and it was placed on the backseat.

“Do dead cats nap?” I asked, although at the moment I wasn’t particularly curious, but I was hoping to distract Robin. I should’ve known there wasn’t much chance of that, and there wasn’t.

“So obviously you feel this is a need-to-know situation. I and my ruined wardrobe can both assure you that I need to know.” He started the Jeep as I settled into the passenger seat.

“Oh, I know you need to know. Can’t stand not knowing. Are flat-out dying to know.” I closed my eyes and crossed my arms. I didn’t know if dead cats napped or not, but I did. “But guess what? You’re not getting to know.” I ignored him as his cursing escalated and I closed my eyes tighter against the bright daylight.

Hell, I wished I didn’t know.

But in the end I did tell him. He was right. He deserved to know. It was safer for him if he did. After I told him, the swearing stopped and he squeezed my shoulder sympathetically. “I am sorry, but I would be lying if I said I hadn’t seen it coming.”

I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit the same thing. I’d learned in the past where lying to myself got me . . . in a world of hurt. Instead, this time I kept my eyes shut and did everything I could not to think about anything. No lies, no truth—nothing at all. As most things tended to do when you needed them the most . . .

It didn’t work.

Abelia-Roo and her clan were at a campground in the Catskills. They would be tucked away in a less scenic and more private corner of the RV park where they could avoid any contact with outsiders,
gadje
. That wasn’t to say they weren’t running some cons, doing a little tarot or palm reading; Abelia- Roo wasn’t the best role model or leader, but they’d be more likely to do that in the nearest town. Wouldn’t want the natives having a map to the front door of your Batcave, or considering Abelia-Roo, to your volcano hideout complete with lasers for toasting the genitals of your luckless hero.

It was a two-and-a-half-hour trip late that same afternoon and Niko actually let me do the driving. We retrieved his car from where Robin let us park it at his lot, although in the back, far separated from the other cars like the old days of leper colonies. To give Goodfellow credit, it
did
look contagious: patches of different-colored paint, older than either Niko or me; no MP3 player; no disk player, cassette player; not even an eight track player. I wasn’t exactly sure what that last was, but it would have to be better than the AM radio, which is all we managed to get. And with that luxury option, the big brown and maroon monstrosity was slightly better than his last car, which had bit the dust six months ago.

I was still surprised my brother let me drive his latest shitmobile. This one was a Cadillac Eldorado convertible back from the days when they were apparently made to double as tanks in case war broke out on the Jersey turnpike. He was possessive of each and every one of his massive, beat-up babies, although he’d yet to clue me in on why he kept his weapons, his clothes, his routine, his bedroom, his
life
immaculate, but the cars—they were the opposite. When I asked, he always said with a faint trace of condescension, “One day you’ll understand, Grasshopper.”

There were many
one day
s. I just chalked up the car one with the others and was grateful I actually made it in the big-boy seat. Granted, my window didn’t roll down and the air conditioner . . . There was no air conditioner. I sat and sweltered in the heat, which had climbed since morning. “Jesus”—I mopped sweat from my face—“let me break the window. Come on, Nik, I’m begging you.”

“And won’t that be refreshing when January arrives?” He gave the rearview mirror an annoyed look at the bright red cubes that swung back and forth as I swatted them his way. “And what did I tell you about the fuzzy dice?”

“Hey, they’re from Goodfellow. You’ll take it up with him. Besides, if you drive a car that looks like fuzzy dice were in the option package, you’re going to get fuzzy dice.” I slammed the heel of my hand against the radio to shut it off. It stayed on. It always did. “Who the hell is Air Supply and why do they hate me so much?”

“Did you tell him what you learned from the revenant? And it’s a band from the seventies.”

Music before we were born and an evil that made revenants look like fuzzy puppies fighting over a chew toy. “How do you
know
that? You couldn’t possibly listen to that crap.”

“Because I know everything,” he said as if it were the most simple of conclusions. And with Niko, yeah, it was. “And Robin?” he said, pushing.

“I told him. Better safe than sorry when dealing with the Kin.” I trusted Robin with my life and he’d come through every time. That kind of trust was a huge step for me, and Goodfellow had never made me doubt he deserved it . . . at least not since the first time he’d saved Nik and me. Trust didn’t have anything to do with why I almost hadn’t told him, changing my mind only at the last minute. The reason was simple enough: I just hadn’t wanted to talk about it. I had thinking to do. I also didn’t want to do that. Not yet. My Zen, one-with-the-universe, happy-frigging-lucky mood had disappeared in that hangar—no getting it back, but it didn’t mean I wanted to dwell on it.

It was hard to lose something that was almost impossible to find to begin with.

But I had told him all the same. The revenant had said the Kin had found out about Delilah and me,
all
of the Kin—not just her former screw du jour that I’d neutered in the park. “I didn’t have to tell you though, did I?” I asked Nik.

And I hadn’t. I’d walked into the apartment and he’d seen it, what I’d learned, behind my blank eyes and blanker face. He’d known, because he could read me like a book. He had asked what the revenant had said the Kin were going to do about it, though. But, that, the revenant hadn’t known. It was easy enough to guess. They’d either kill Delilah or give Delilah the opportunity to redeem herself by killing me. Simple. To the point. The Kin weren’t much on Machiavellian-style schemes. Hump it, eat it, or kill it—that was good enough for them.

Niko didn’t dwell on it after the short discussion, which was what I needed. He let me drive the car too, which I’d thought I’d needed, but now I was wishing for his side with the window that worked. Cooking in a sauna was a distraction, but not the most entertaining one. I’d switched to short sleeves and left the Eagle and Glock at home. This time I was carrying my SIG Sauer. I had to rotate my toys so they all got action. My jacket was in the backseat in case we were pulled over or had to stop at a public place and I needed to cover up the holster. The bandage taped over my forearm did the same for the revenant bite. I wouldn’t have bothered hiding it behind a bandage after cleaning it; it had stopped bleeding early on, but people tended to notice what looked like a human bite mark on your arm. Oddly enough, that kind of thing didn’t label me friendly, cheerful, and trustworthy to the world at large.

“It is unfortunate,” he began, deciding the subject needed more discussing after all. “I’m only surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” he said, echoing Robin’s earlier comment and my own thoughts. In sympathy, I guessed, he hit the radio with a much lighter tap of his hand and this time it immediately shut off. “When are you going to talk to Delilah about this?”

“You’ve had this car six months and you couldn’t do that before now? And when I absolutely can’t avoid it,” I griped, annoyed at the months of horrific excuse for music I’d suffered through. I was scarred. My eardrums were scarred. From what I could tell, the seventies had been a time of singers whose balls hadn’t dropped yet. Voices so high I couldn’t believe they hadn’t shattered every window in the
Titanic
’s rusty cousin we were cruising in. Although at the moment that would’ve been a good thing, since even with the top down the heat was god-awful. I mopped at the sweat again dripping along my hairline, thankful I’d pulled the now-damp strands back into a short ponytail.

“What fun would that be—not torturing my little brother?” He eased his seat back. “And avoiding it only makes the uncertainty last longer. This is something I would think you wouldn’t want to be uncertain about.” He closed his eyes, lecture over. “I’m going to meditate. If you see a Sasquatch looking for a ride on the side of the road, keep going. There’s not enough legroom in the back.”

I didn’t bother asking if Bigfoot was real. I’d stopped asking questions like that when I was eighteen. Sooner or later you’d find out one way or the other. Why spoil the surprise? In other words, my brain couldn’t begin to store all that was real, all that wasn’t, and the rest no one had a clue about one way or the other. I left that to Nik. It was easier than getting a pocket encyclopedia entitled
When to Shoot, When Not to Shoot, and When to Run Away Like a Little Girl in Pigtails
. Not to say a little girl in pigtails couldn’t be scary in her own right, especially if her teeth were pointed and her eyes glowed green in the dark. And you could bet your ass there were some out there like that. I might not have known the name or have seen one before, but the world was full of nightmares I hadn’t seen yet. It didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

Diversity: It made the world go round.

“Meditate away, Cyrano.” I tried to put my seat back. Naturally it was frozen completely upright and made for the comfort of the anal-retentive driver, stick up the ass a luxury option. “If I go through a drive-through, I’ll ask for a bag full of grass and oats for you. Maybe a lactose-free, chemical-free, flavor-free shake to go with.”

“You do that.” He folded his hands across his stomach, linking fingers. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten our discussion about gates. I’ll give you a break for now, because of the unpleasant day you’ve had.” The eyes, opened for a sideways gaze, steely and implacable, had me giving an internal wince. That was too bad, considering what I had planned for the rest of the day. It was too bad for me and too bad for my ass, which would receive a kicking requiring an organ donor with an Auphe/ human-compatible gluteus maximus. And those were hard to come by.

“But sooner or later,” he went on, “we
will
talk about it.”

Sooner would be my bet, and those, unfortunately, were always the bets I won.

I drove on while Niko meditated. I didn’t see Bigfoot, not until we arrived at the RV park, and then I saw them everywhere. Campers with their shirts off and backs hairier than any Sasquatch, Yeti, or woolly mammoth combined. My trigger finger twitched because, honestly, was someone with a carpet on his back, plaid shorts, socks and sandals, any less of a threat to the world—at least visually? But I drove past them and didn’t shoot a single one. I wished for a Weedwacker or a little temporary blindness, but I didn’t shoot, and that got chalked in the success column.

I followed Abelia- Roo’s directions via Nik, who’d gotten them from her when he’d spoken with her on the phone. He’d written them down for me in his neat, precise handwriting. “Hey, we’re here. Nap’s over.”

“Meditation isn’t a nap and if you think it is, maybe once an hour isn’t enough for you.” Niko nodded toward a gravel road to the right.

Hourly was doable. Five, ten minutes and I zipped right through the mantras counted on my mala, but zipping through them probably wasn’t the point. But flying through them or not, it was obviously working, or the meditation combined with the death of the Auphe was working. I’d made those three gates in the past six months without any of the Auphe side effects of the past. It was simple. I didn’t lose myself to it or to something buried in me. I owned it now. It didn’t own me. Only getting Niko to see that was going to be a trick, because he had seen the times it
had
owned me. And the memory of an Auphe-hissing brother, teeth stained with blood, and sanity on a temporary vacation, stuck with a person. It had stuck with Nik; that was for sure.