by Rob Thurman
Keeping it close enough to blend in to the black of my shirt and my own jacket, I flipped it again, forward, backward, forward again. Then grip first, I handed it back to Cal, his jaw tightened in a mixture of anger and reluctant vigilant caution. Except for his brother, it’d been two years since anyone had disarmed him. Lips tight and silent . . . for once, he holstered it in a subtle, close to invisible move that avoided the attention of the crowd milling at a fast pace around us.
“Aside from the assassin, there are plenty of other things out there that can kill you, Junior. And, unlike me, they will be happy as fucking hell to do it.”
I gave him a Cheshire-crazed grin. Everyone knew that cat was crazy as hell and ate Alice before she ever made it out of Wonderland. Down to the bones and cracking them to suck out the marrow.
As fortune would have it, that lesson was about to be proven in minutes.
7
He had his gun back, but Cal was struggling, caught between the obvious desire to break my nose or come up with an excuse to wipe the expression of unholy biblical wrath from Niko’s face. Niko hadn’t been pleased at all by what I’d spilled about Cal’s slacking, suicidally sloppy ways. Cal made the best decision and went with the greater threat. “Nik, I . . .” He grimaced as he obviously scrambled for an excuse. I’d have felt bad for him if I hadn’t been the one to throw him in the alligator pit to begin with. “The bar’s mirror is crappy as hell. I’m lucky to tell if it’s a human being or the Loch Ness goddamn Monster in that thing. Security measure, my ass.”
“You’re telling me that you couldn’t spend three dollars on a new mirror to save your life? Is that what I’m to understand?” Nik’s voice was smooth, the slippery silk I knew from the many times I’d screwed up with what he cared about most—his little brother’s life. My life.
“Didn’t smell the gun oil either,” I added in the true giving spirit for which I was known. Completely constructive criticism, not a small revenge for my douche bag younger self’s shitty attitude and lack of appreciation that I’d traveled eight damn years to save his life. That it was my life as well . . . not the point.
“You shithe—”
Niko rode over the top of him without pause. “Cal, why am I training you to survive if—”
I ignored them both. There was something else to concentrate on. The door to the apartment building was broken as I recalled. I pushed it aside, the metallic screech more of a scream, and stepped inside. The building itself was a helluva lot more dilapidated and filthy. It wasn’t surprising I hadn’t wasted brain cells remembering that. Up until about two more years, dilapidated and filthy was the standard curbside-appeal description of every place we’d ever lived, from childhood on. It didn’t matter. Nik had always done his best to keep the inside of where we lived as clean as humanly possible. I could live with dirt and despair that leaked out of the hallway beyond the door. I’d survived worse. I’d survived this same building in fact. I could live in it again for a few days if I had to.
What I didn’t want to live with was the lamia and her rusalka roommate one flight up—you could have your blood drained or you could be drowned in a half-inch puddle of NYC dank gathered on the floor, choose carefully. There was also a wendigo in the basement and the yee naaldlooshii four floors up. I rubbed a hand roughly across my face, but I knew it didn’t wipe away the disappointment that I aimed at both Cal and Niko, interrupting their squabbling. “I don’t remember us being this stupid, but the both of you are plenty damn naive, that’s for damn sure.”
It wasn’t fair of me, not really. At eighteen I’d had the scenting abilities of an Auphe, partially—I didn’t hit Auphe full-on puberty until nineteen and despite that it had taken a few more years to get the full package. It also didn’t help that at eighteen I knew only Auphe/Grendels, Wolves, and vampires by scent. I hadn’t run into any lamias, rusalkas, the rest—that I knew of—to store in my memory. I hadn’t known they existed, much less lived in my building. Yeah, the building smelled funky, but most buildings in New York I had business in weren’t anywhere close to swimming in perfume. We should’ve recognized a general nonhuman taint to the air, true, but . . . it was over and done. For me anyway, but I’d managed to screw that up for him. I let the irritation melt away. He was a kid and I’d been a kid, neither of us with the information we’d needed at the time.
“Lamia, rusalka, wendigo.” I pointed the general location of the less-than-humans out for them without leaving the stairs I’d hit after covering the few feet of hall and kept heading up them flight by flight to the apartment I’d once lived in. “And best of all, a yee naaldlooshii. Normally I’d say leave them alone as they didn’t notice us before, not at eighteen. Your blood, Cal, can still pass for human to anyone without a nose that’d put a bloodhound to shame, like a Wolf.” However, the older I’d become the sharper my own Auphe signature became—in my blood, skin, every part of me—to paien who depended on their own scenting skills to hunt.
Auphe late puberty—it had been a bitch. “But I can’t. They’ll know I’m here, if they don’t already. You can threaten or kill them later.” Rusalka were usually reasonable enough, particularly if you treated them to fresh fish once a month. “It’s your choice on those three. But we don’t have the time for minnows when we have a shark to catch.”
“Yee naaldlooshii, ‘he who goes on all fours,’ they are real? Lamia, rusalka, and wendigos are real?” Niko already had a hand on his katana to draw it from its sheath strapped to his back and hidden under his long leather coat.
God, how had we ever survived to even this age?
“Niko, if Norse gods are real, what in the whole fucking wide world wouldn’t be?” Me. The voice of reason. It was so wrong. “And you’re getting a little repetitive.”
“What’s a yee naaldlooshii?” Cal demanded. He mutilated the pronunciation as much as I had the first time we’d encountered one. And the second time. After the fourth one, I’d gotten the hang of it.
“A yee naaldlooshii became the legend of a skin-walker, but the legend is off. Way the fuck off. They’re three or four monsters for the price of one. The very least of the problems with them is that they have excellent vision and a better sense of smell. It probably caught my scent when we were still a block away.”
“I’m guessing they don’t like Grendels,” Cal said without much surprise, a little winded, but not much. Niko’s exercise program at work.
“Ninety-nine percent of paien don’t like Grendels,” I said, the wicked smirk in my words if not on my face. “But seventy-five percent are scared shitless of them. We’ve had a lot of fun with the shitless part, I promise.”
“And the yee naaldlooshii?” Niko, forever the voice of reason.
“You can’t have it all, Cyrano.” The nickname was out before I could stop it, but I pretended not to notice the slip and kept moving.
The three of us rushed up the last several flights of stairs until we hit the seventh and top apartment of the converted warehouse. Cal was pulling out four keys to the apartment door. He didn’t need them. It was open, the slightest crack, but enough to let us know. We could back off and let it come to us, but there was less room to fight in the hall than the place we’d gotten cheap for its size. Unfinished except for unreliable plumbing, the size, and the huge round window that nearly covered one entire wall had the lack of anything else that made apartments livable more than worth it.
In a year we’d find out how much of a mistake that window was.
But for me that was over and done. I was better off surviving the waiting skin-walker. “It’s inside,” I said, unnecessarily, not bothering to lower my voice. There was no point. He heard me probably before I’d entered the building. I knew he could hear me breathing through a half-open door. We all moved through the doorway, one at a time, fast and agile enough that to a human it would’ve appeared all three of us entered at one time—but cautious enough to have a hope
of avoiding anything waiting just inside. The kids were somewhat impressive there, but what was more impressive was they didn’t look shaken that the yee naaldlooshii was already there waiting for us, not out of breath, acting bored we’d taken so long. They were fast. I always forgot how unbelievably quick, but I’d seen them before. This Cal and Niko hadn’t . . . or hadn’t known what it was or viewed it in action.
He was the landlord. Another thing I’d forgotten. You didn’t tend to remember random people in the city. You saw too many humans and humans . . . hated to break the news, they weren’t a threat, except for the Vigil. If you weren’t a threat, you weren’t worth paying attention to. This one though, he should’ve been an exception, memorable if we’d been lucky enough for him to be nothing but human. I hadn’t known he was a skin-walker then, but he was one helluva big guy. Huge. A massive figure, practically a tank covered with flesh, dark reddish bronze skin, and perfectly white, square teeth a little too large to be normal. I could’ve written them off as oversize dentures. I honestly didn’t remember, had never suspected a thing. Hell, I’d even brought the guy leftover half-full pony kegs of beer from the bar to knock a few bucks off our rent.
If we didn’t have a good chance of dying at the claws, fangs, and venom of the skin-walker, I would’ve taken the time to knee my younger self in the balls for being so oblivious. But then I’d have to let him do the same to me. At this particular age, he and I had been one in the same—I couldn’t blame him without blaming myself. And the dying, claws, fangs, and venom, it did put a cramp in all that. Too bad as he and I both undeniably deserved it.
The skin-walker was about six-eight, six-nine, looked around forty-five in human years but with the wide physique and thick musculature of a man fifteen years younger. Not that guessing in human years did any good. He could be a thousand years old for all I knew. He had two shoulder-length iron gray braids, glittering dark eyes, and a deeply sun scarred face as creased and furrowed as a dry river bed. Dangling a loop of nearly sixty keys from his right hand, including the keys to this apartment—he was the landlord after all—he grunted, taking one more whiff of the air in my direction from where we had spread out, and then exhaled it with a snort steeped in disgust.
“I did not know, not on the younger one.” His voice was desert sand blowing storm-hard over barren rock. Harshly unforgiving. “He is an impure mutt. Half predator, half prey, but an unripe thing, too, not yet grown. Not yet the hungry tooth, nor the eager claw. Not yet the eager taste for death, and blood. It confused, his smell too weak, too different.” The dark eyes that were slowly reshaping to inhuman narrow ovals were fixed on me. “Not like this one.”
That wasn’t strictly true. Cal had been all those things once, in Tumulus when he’d run with the Auphe, but that was mentally. To the Auphe he’d been far from adult, five years at least. As they lived thousands of years, he was lucky it wasn’t five hundred. But here was one positive thing about completely forgetting two years in that hell, about faking being human so well that you believed it. You made a skin-walker believe it too. Cal and I, we’d acted human at eighteen. Surly and grim, but human enough to fool ourselves and a skin-walker. Around people, we moved like a human, not too fast, not like the strike of a snake. We didn’t bare our teeth in a threat to tear and bite. We smiled, not goddamn often, but if we had to. We didn’t stab the hand of Meredith, the chick who worked at the bar with us, when she stole french fries from my take-out container. Our human suit was near perfect, couldn’t even see the zipper. How we behaved around the Wolves and vamps was a different story, but with humans or who we thought were human, we pulled it off without fail.
Until now. I’d come backward in time in all my glory, late Auphe puberty come and gone. I was an adult, more or less, and while I wasn’t an Auphe or a human, I had enough of the one ingredient strong enough for a yee naaldlooshii to think he knew what I was. In the end he wouldn’t have cared if I had a single drop of Auphe blood in me. Skin-walkers are all about an excuse, any excuse, the judgmental psychopaths. That gave me the same thing . . . an excuse to kick his multitude of asses.
If only skin-walkers weren’t such tricky bastards. If I was in top form, he’d still be a chore with the weapons I was limiting myself to. And I was tired, bruised, emotionally un-fucking-sound as they came and I didn’t want to play. Not now. Top form was way out of reach.
Too bad for me.
Bare feet, dressed in loose, faded sweats, good for fighting, the yee naaldlooshii slithered, too broad-shouldered in build to be so lithe in movement as he was, past Cal and Niko with the speed of a rattlesnake. He used that speed to slam and lock the door behind us.
He turned then to face us again before Cal and Niko had made it more than halfway around, Cal pulling out a Glock and a Desert Eagle as he moved. The skin-walker was fast as hell, I gave him that, but I’d learned and progressed considerably since my first yee naaldlooshii and so was just as quick. He hissed, and not the human version of the sound, when he saw I wasn’t like Niko and Cal. I was ready and facing him. The second membrane on his eyes flickered, unsettled, as I stared him in the face with challenge and exhaustion. Anger was too much trouble. “You sure we couldn’t do this another time? I’ve got more important jackasses to deal with than a walking, talking zoo right now.”
Uncertainty disappeared in the face of my smart mouth. I wasn’t surprised. It had that effect often enough my tongue had been nicknamed Deathwish by Goodfellow when we’d gone on jobs. At least it gave Niko and Cal time to get in position with sword and guns drawn. Measuring me with scorn and disgust, the skin-walker mixed the high-whine buzz of a chilling rattle in dry grass with the sound of scales sliding over rock and dirt. “The younger is but a fetus. He needs to die, even if he knows not why, but I have time for that.” The eyes of a pit viper focused on me. “But you—on you, I smell it. I see it. I hear it. I taste it.” His tongue, forked, darted out to taste the air. He spat on the floor. “There is no mercy for you. You are Auphe. The first to walk this earth. The first to kill but not for food. The first to murder, not for sustenance, but for perverse pleasure alone.”
“First of the perverse. Yeah, yeah. Like I haven’t heard that more times than I could count,” I responded, too familiar with the words to be offended anymore. “Give me time and I’ll put it on a T-shirt.”
Of the first, yes, but I hadn’t been there millions of years ago. My ancestors, partially my genetics, but not me. I wasn’t responsible for what they did. I wasn’t Auphe as long and as ruthlessly as they’d tried to shape me into their image, mentally and physically. Not human, no, but not Auphe either—that assumption got annoying after a while. I was something altogether different.
Not that it mattered. Skin-walkers proclaim far and wide and proudly about their fierce sense of guardianship of who they considered their people. You found skin-walkers in many cultures, not solely Native American ones. That meant “their people” isn’t necessarily a tribe, they could have come from across the ocean or up through South America and left those particular people behind hundreds of years ago. That didn’t stop them from choosing new people wherever they settled. It had nothing to do with a skin-walker’s pride or duty—they needed those people, any people. They weren’t protecting their chosen ones.
They were defending their refrigerator.
If you had a skin-walker watching over you that meant you were part of their herd. A roaming pantry of goodies. There was enough for frequent if not daily fresh meals depending on where the walker set up shop and the people, a group of some sort to make it easier to keep an eye on if they clustered. They had enough in every case I’d seen to share with other walkers, but they wouldn’t. They’d sooner fight to the death. It was one of those “I can eat you, but no one else can” romantic relationships. This skin-walker cared less that he thought I was Auphe and more that he thought I’d steal his living breathing snacks “grazing” on this block or five blocks. Only he knew.
>
“Auphe?” Cal asked. “What’s an Auphe?”
Everything was going sideways. Fine. I’d tell them now instead of Goodfellow a year later. Shakespeare himself said it: What’s in a name? “Grendels. Paien call Grendels Auphe. It’s their real name.”
Niko didn’t have any interest in names currently. With his katana between him and the skin-walker, he slid sideways to get close enough to kick me sharply in the shin to get my attention. “He’s nearly seven feet tall and broad as a barn, but not enough to hide a bear. A mountain lion?”
I laughed. I couldn’t stop myself. “Remember ten seconds ago when I said the legend was way the fuck off?” I had crossed my wrists and tucked my hands inside of my jacket but hadn’t pulled the guns out of their holsters yet. I wanted at least one surprise on our side to equal the two minimum the skin-walker was going to throw at us. He thought I was Auphe enough to fight their way, a thousand teeth and bladelike talons. He thought wrong. I wasn’t equipped like that any longer. And the other good stuff, I couldn’t show Nik and Cal. They would lose their shit, their minds, and any hope of taking this bastard down. “A mountain lion most likely, a bear is a long shot at best, but whatever it is, that will be only the first layer.”
“First?” Nik said sharply. These were the days when we’d first begun to learn mythology books were ninety-nine point nine percent bullshit and gleefully wrong gossip spread by the supernatural, the paien, themselves. Why would they tell humans the truth, any truth, about them?
“First, yeah. You take it, Niko. What do you want, Mini Me? The rabid and fanged or the poisonous multitudes?”
Cal made a face, so goddamn young, at the last word: multitudes. I didn’t blame him. It was more work, and no Cal, in any time period, liked work. “Rabid and fanged.”
