by Rob Thurman
One round punched through the front door and then the stairs, about ten inches from Robin’s nose where he was flattened on the floor. He didn’t notice. “My clothes. My suits. The Kiton, the Brioni, the Luigi. Gods, not the Caraceni. Someone is going to pay. Someone is going to die.” He glared at me. “And if this is Delilah taking advantage of Suyolak’s distraction, it will be you.”
Delilah . . . I couldn’t lie to myself there. It could be her. Let Suyolak do half the work while she finished a job he hadn’t been smart enough to complete, that very well could be Delilah. It had her street smarts all over it. When I’d slept with her, before the Kin found out and after, I never knew if the moment would come . . . if she would genuinely try to kill me. I’d tried to anticipate how that would feel. It was impossible. If it was Delilah now, I wouldn’t have to guess anymore.
Niko was already slithering on his stomach toward the back of the living room where another large window was supposed to let in the light of the sun. Now it was a framework to flames about thirty feet from the house—until a bullet shattered it too. Then it was a frame to flames and an entrance for wind stinking of gasoline. Nik went over the sill and disappeared. I followed him and heard Catcher, Rafferty, and Robin going through the kitchen.
“I will never let you pack your own gear again,” Niko said as he moved through more of those blue-purple flowers. “You’re a menace to anyone without his own bomb shelter.”
I was right behind him, rounding the back corner of the house. “You can’t honestly expect me to anticipate your car’s blowing up. If you don’t get that thing serviced, it’s not my fault. And I’m a menace, period.” But I still had my Desert Eagle, not to mention my backup—the Sig—and both were up and ready. Cars rarely committed suicide or spontaneously combusted, and especially not in groups like lemmings. They usually had help. We came in sight of the front yard and of the blackened frame of Nik’s car caught in glimpses through the flames. The trunk had been blown open thanks to my explosive rounds.
No Delilah yet, and I couldn’t detect her distinctive scent over the scorched metal.
There was motion on the other side of the house, Catcher and Rafferty . . . and Robin pulling up the rear with a sword and an expression of cold rage. The man took his clothes seriously, but he took attempts on his and our lives as much so. After the quick look that equaled ours, they and Niko and I pressed against the respective sides of the house for a few minutes until the bullets stopped splitting the air. The others did the same, and when we finally moved out front, we all moved as one. Raff and Catcher might not be Kin, but they were Wolves and, whether in wolf or human form, they moved like mercury sliding along glass. Quick. Quiet. Potentially deadly.
Now where was the bitch or son of one who’d done this? Suyolak was an antihealer, not a pyromaniac. If this wasn’t Delilah, then someone had to have done this for Suyolak. A lit twist of cloth in the gas tank would’ve accomplished it easily. It couldn’t be his driver. He needed him. It wasn’t the others who’d helped steal the coffin—they were all dead. And I didn’t want it to be Delilah, no matter how foolish that was. So who . . .
Fuck.
Branje. It was Branje. Dead. His body was sprawled on its stomach in the dirt about fifteen feet from the burning car with his face turned to the side, facing us, the chin tucked down. He had some burns on his jaw and on his arms, but I didn’t think that’s what had done him in.
Salome sat on the dead man’s back, licking blood from her furless paw with a dried suede scrap of tongue. She spotted us, yawned, and curled up in a ball, basking with a sawmill purr in the heat of the burning Eldorado. The dirt had soaked up the blood around Branje’s head and neck. I didn’t have to lift up that head to know his throat had been ripped out.
I didn’t think the spray-bottle punishment was working as well as Goodfellow thought it was, but with Branje being responsible for toasting our ride, I gave Robin’s disciplinary methods and Salome’s hunting a pass, although it was getting embarrassing that the one with the highest body count on this job was a mummified cat. I squatted beside them, giving Salome a gingerly pat on the wrinkled bald head. “Good kitty. Nice kitty.” I scowled at the dead Rom. “I knew I should’ve cut your nose off when I had the chance.”
“Branje must have run from where the Rom RV stopped half a mile back.” We were doing the heavy lifting while Abelia was watching Judge Judy in air-conditioned comfort. Niko crouched beside me. “But why? If he were under Suyolak’s control, he would’ve let him out of the coffin before it was ever stolen. And so far Suyolak has shown no ability to control anyone. Visit you with dreams or nightmares, but actually control? A healer . . . even an antihealer can’t do that, can they, Jeftichew?”
Kneeling on the other side of the body, Rafferty shook his head. “No.” Okay, that was simple and to the point. “But . . .” Damn. Life would be so much better if the human race had never come up with the concept of “but.” It got you every damn time. Resting his hand on Branje’s singed hair, the healer’s face showed disgust in the twist of his lips and the lowering of his brows at what he felt. “This is the sickest bastard who ever roamed the face of the earth. Why they didn’t find a volcano to drag his ass to and dump him, coffin and all, into it, I’ll never goddamn know.”
“Guess all the hobbits were getting the hair on their feet permed.” I moved to the other side with him. The flames were superheating air that hadn’t been that cool to begin with.
“What did the son of a bitch do now?” Robin demanded, staying several steps away from the blackened and bloody body, preserving the condition of the only clothes he had left. The world needed saving, but so did his wardrobe. A puck had to have his priorities.
“This one. He must’ve been one of Suyolak’s regular guards.” That made sense. Branje was one of Abelia-Roo’s most trusted. “Long-term exposure. The seals didn’t have to be that weak at all. Just a pinhole of an opening and years to work.” Rafferty stood up and wiped his hand on his jeans. “Schizophrenia. Suyolak screwed with the chemistry of this guy’s brain six damn ways to Sunday. He would’ve been hearing voices, hallucinating, easy to influence, for months, maybe years. Tough guy to hold it together and keep it secret. At the end Suyolak was just one more voice in a hundred, probably telling him if he did this, he’d make all the rest go away. And this poor dead bastard was far enough gone to believe it. Not far along enough to open the coffin. He had a lifetime of knowing what that would mean, but burning a few cars to get the voices to go away, that he could do.”
“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. S
ome 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.
