Slashback: A Cal Leandros Novel (CAL AND NIKO)

by Rob Thurman

  Promise turned her head from where she sat on the couch and gave me a glance as opaque as they came. It didn’t help her. I knew what she was thinking. I was wearing sweatpants but was shirtless. That made it easy to see that I had more than my share of scars, some of them uglier than others. I also had a line of stitches across my stomach and a dark garden of bruises blooming up like black roses over my ribs. I thought Promise could make her peace with scars, more specifically Niko’s. He had fewer than I did; he was the better fighter, but he still had a few. But when a job ended in spilled blood, and as she was a vampire I knew she could smell mine, and cracked ribs—that was new, wasn’t it? Not old scar tissue you could write off to “he was younger then. He’s better now. Undefeatable, human or not.”

  If a half Auphe like me was this mortal, what did that say about the true mortal?

  I knew what Promise was thinking and who she was thinking it about because I thought the same thing. Nik, oblivious to his mortality while others brooded over it, glared at my discarded towel. “If it weren’t for your ribs, I would rub your nose in that.”

  “You wouldn’t do that to a puppy.” I grinned. There was something wrong in enjoying injury as a license to bad behavior, but I’d never claimed there was anything particularly right with me.

  “A puppy is capable of learning. A puppy doesn’t devote his life to seeing how far he can push me before I break mentally. A puppy does not order pizza and expect me to pay for it because he’s out of money.” Promise laughed at his seething outrage and rested her shoulder against his on the couch.

  “Children can be such a blessing,” she said with mocking good humor as she continued to braid his wet hair, the bastard having beat me to the shower.

  “Hardly,” Niko retorted. “I have done that tour of duty and have the post-traumatic stress disorder to prove it. The sex talk alone . . .” He gave a minute shudder.

  The memory hit me and I rubbed my ribs with an absent, cautious touch. “Oh yeah. Isn’t that when I asked you what doggy style meant and did we need to borrow our neighbor’s poodle for a demonstration?” My grin transmuted into a smirk. “I think you foamed at the mouth a little. Good times, huh?”

  “I don’t care about your ribs any longer,” he said. “I don’t care if they are broken and shards of bone are slicing your lungs to shreds. Pick. Up. The. Towel.”

  Playing my “get out of brotherly violence” injury card, I ignored him and sat down very slowly in our beat-up recliner. Once in a comfortable position, I relaxed and waited for the warm wave of codeine to wash over me. “It is funny . . . not funny like the poodle thing . . . but funny weird how Goodfellow and Promise both insist there aren’t any such things as zombies, but they were there. If Robin hasn’t seen any and he’s literally old as dirt, the dirt T. rexes walked around on, then what the hell?”

  Promise finished Niko’s braid and curled the end around one slender finger, her heather-shadowed eyes thoughtful. “I cannot think of an explanation. From Niko’s description of his appearance, Jack does sound like a typical storm spirit, but storm spirits, that I know of, don’t use skinning as a manner of killing.”

  “And he is all about the skinning.” I yawned. “He was still going on about that at the bridge: wanting to save people’s skin. He’s like the world’s most homicidal stamp collector—he has to murder to do it and he just freaking won’t stop talking about it. I miss the monsters that just try to kill you, not tell you about their hobbies.”

  “How are the legs?” Niko had leaned down to snag the towel and was folding it in his tragically OCD way.

  “Not bad at all. That cloud he floats around in, it acted like a buffer. I’ve a few scrapes. Nothing major.”

  “The pain pills working yet for your ribs?” He was a good brother: asking about my health, picking up my towel. I could probably get him to order that pizza for me if I looked pathetic enough.

  “Feeling no pain,” I answered honestly.

  “Good.” I was promptly hit in the face with my wet towel.

  Of course, good brothers know tough love inside and out.

  * * *

  That night Promise stayed. Normally Niko and I would’ve switched off on watch, but Promise had no problem staying awake all night to wait for Jack to appear. Somehow I still managed to pull a two-hour watch. I say somehow because as much as Niko didn’t want to remember giving me the sex talk when I was a kid, I didn’t want to think about him and Promise doing the things I’d asked about back then.

  Really didn’t want to think about it.

  When I was a kid, I used to love giving Niko shit about sex. It drove him nuts. It was better than cable. But not now. If Niko hadn’t raised me in addition to being my brother, it could be different. I’d have bumped fists, blown it up, slapped his back, whatever the hell the wild and crazy kids did when their brother got laid. I didn’t know. Between the spine-shivering sensation other people had at the thought of their parents having sex and knowing my best friend was doing it with my boss, probably on the same bar where I served drinks, I was surrounded by a whole shitload of “I don’t wanna know.”

  I spent those two hours simultaneously watching for Jack and telling myself that Niko and Promise were either practicing the lost, deadly art of flower arranging, or sharpening their already incredibly sharp blades. I hung grimly to those images, then slammed into my bedroom faster than I should have with my ribs when Promise appeared out of the darkened hallway with her elaborate coil of soft brown hair loose and spilling around her hips. Her feet were also bare, but bare feet were essential for flower arranging and sword care and no one could tell me differently.

  The fact that she whispered as I passed her, “Who’s your daddy?” made her a stone-cold bitch and had me popping an extra pain pill. If Jack killed me in my sleep, I couldn’t say I’d be that sorry to go.

  In the morning, if five thirty a.m. could be called morning, when Nik and I were walking through East River Park, I hadn’t stopped twitching at random moments. We were headed for the river itself. Goodfellow had said that if Bastet hadn’t known anything about Jack no one would, but Bastet had been afraid. She’d said it herself; Jack left the paien alone unless they pissed him off. She wasn’t willing to risk it. Neither had the Kin, they’d made that clear.

  That didn’t mean I was ready to give up asking around. Bastet was afraid, the Kin were cautious, but there were some that were too stupid to be either of those. Jack had started off with a mad on for Niko and me for whatever unknown reason, so it wasn’t as if we could back off. He wanted Nik and I’d gotten in the way enough that he wanted me dead—Flock-worthy or not.

  That meant we hit up our last informational option because off the top of my head I couldn’t think of anything else to burn down that wouldn’t kill people in the process. Once we would’ve gone to our top informant, Boggle, but we’d accidentally gotten two of her children killed by Grimm and it’d be a long time before she was over that. If ever. Boggle would kill anything and everything that moved, but she loved her litter of man-eaters.

  But there was a vyodanoi that lived in the East River. I’d never used him . . . her . . . it—I had no idea about their reproduction or genders and I didn’t want to—but he came around the Ninth Circle on a weekly basis and was a helluva lot more chatty than his fellow vyodanoi. He seemed to have a rubbery leechlike extension on the pulse of the paien world in NYC. He knew things that would no doubt get him killed someday, but for now, he talked. And the more he drank, the more he talked, which was why I was carrying a jumbo-sized plastic bottle of vodka in each hand. Niko had commented the family-sized vodka was a truly classy five a.m. purchase. I told him they were out of grape-flavored condoms and beef jerky or I’d have thrown them in just to see the look on the clerk’s face at how I wined and dined my dates. Niko’s reply that that was actually a step up was uncalled for.

  The bastard.

  There was a reason the vodka was the cheap stuff. I doubted any vyodanoi I saw at the bar ha
d ever seen Mother Russia because I hadn’t once seen one of them drinking the top-shelf vodka.

  “You’re unusually tolerable this morning,” Niko observed as we walked through trampled grass and mud under a sky that was clinging tightly to the darkness of night, stubbornly refusing the dawn.

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Promise is the devil,” I added darkly. “But other than that, I don’t want to talk about it.” Life was much easier when he was spending nights at her place. Thanks to Grimm and now Jack, I foresaw a good deal more twitching in my future.

  “I’d say I feel sorry for you, but I’d be lying. After what you put me through when you were a kid on that subject, turnabout is fair play.” We’d reached the shore and I slid garbage—the seashells of NYC—out of the way while Niko spread two large garbage bags for us to sit on. We were likely to be here a good while. Boris, I didn’t know his real name . . . I didn’t know if vyodanoi had names . . . so I went with Boris. The vyodanoi species originated in Russia, so Boris was good enough, which made Niko and me Bullwinkle and Rocky. Joy. Regardless, Boris had his traditions.

  He’d talk and he’d talk for free—the vodka didn’t count. Seven ninety-nine was practically free. What Boris did demand is you keep him company. He didn’t like to drink alone. When it came to passing along information, that wasn’t a preference. It was a rule. It was some Russian tradition, Goodfellow once mentioned when I brought it up. In Russia, if you were comfortable enough to get shit-faced with someone, that made you family.

  I didn’t want to be Boris’s family, but sometimes you had to take one for the team.

  “I am not at all fond of this plan,” Niko commented, sitting on the plastic he’d laid out. He assumed a lotus position that made my knees hurt just seeing it.

  “It’s not my favorite either, but it’s how it works with Boris.” I sat on my own plastic and felt the mud beneath it give and slide in a wholly disgusting way. I slapped the water twice. Hey, it’d always worked on Flipper. “Boris. Hey, Boris, I have a present for you. Wake up and come play.”

  I liked to think Boris was asleep and not finishing up gnoshing down on the leg of someone he’d dragged into his underwater larder. I’d like to think that but I’d likely be fooling myself. I waited a few more minutes and slapped the water again. “Come on, Boris. We don’t have all day. Keep us waiting and we’ll drink all the vodka ourselves.” I wasn’t too worried. There was nothing Boris liked more than company and vodka. He could be a few miles up or down the river. Vyodanoi were incredibly fast in the water. He surfaced in front of us in the next moment proving my point . . . about speed or love of vodka. Take your pick.

  “Boris, buddy. The Ninth Circle is starting Two for Tuesday shots. You should stop by. Bring a date or a spore or whatever you’ve got going on in your social life.” I nudged Nik, who went ahead and dipped into his coat pockets for two shot glasses and a large glass tumbler for Boris. A vyodanoi’s tolerance for vodka was unbelievable.

  Boris raised up to settle on what would be knees if he had bones. A vyodanoi looked like nothing more than a giant six- to seven-foot leech in humanoid form, a very blurry, caricature of a humanoid form. It had arms, but no hands or fingers. They tended to be brownish-gray with a sloping mudslide of a head, a sucker for a mouth, and a coloration sketched on its face in black lines to mimic a human’s nose, eyes, and brow. For a second in the dark or the shadows you might mistake them for human—only for a second, but with vyodanoi a second was all it took.

  “Sobaka.” The sound of Boris’s voice wasn’t easy on the ears. It was a peculiar whistle, the sound of a drowned man whistling a dirge from underwater.

  I opened the first, let’s be honest, vat of vodka as Niko murmured, “Sobaka? Russian for dog?”

  “It’s short for beshenaya sobaka. Mad dog.” Goodfellow had also filled me in on that as he liked delivering bad news as well as random cultural facts. “It’s my nickname from that time Hob hired a ton of them.” And I hadn’t played so nice with them then. “Of all the things I’ve been called I can live with that one.”

  Boris wrapped rubbery flesh around his glass and tossed the entire thing back in one swallow. “You’ve come to talk. So be not rude.” That was Niko and my cue to toss our own shot back. I didn’t drink much and Niko didn’t drink at all. It wasn’t a good idea when your mom had been an alcoholic or in our business when you had to stay sharp always. It didn’t make a difference how much I drank though or if I’d had a liver the size of Kansas: what we were drinking would still have tasted like a shot of turpentine. I should’ve sprung for the good stuff, if for Niko and my sake. The hell with Boris and his lack of taste buds.

  “We want to know about Jack,” I said, filling up our glasses again. The faster my tongue went numb, the better. “He’s in town skinning people like the good old days in Jolly Old England. God Save the Queen and all that good crap. What do you know about that?”

  “Jack mayashnik. Jack the Butcher. I know of him. Little, but I know of him.” The water sloshed around him. It smelled like cold metal. Boris smelled cold, period. The water washed away the blood he lived on and only left the cold.

  He drank again and waited until we did the same. “I should’ve let you come alone. I’ll have to do a juice cleansing for a month to repair this damage,” Nik said.

  “It might loosen you up,” I needled. “Turn you into Goodfellow or anyone who doesn’t think trimming bonsai trees is a wild and crazy Friday night.”

  “If I did loosen up, I might start swatting the back of your head and not stop until your skull and what little contents it contains is crushed to a fine paste.” He turned his attention to Boris. We did need to wrap this up before morning light and the people that came with it. Vyodanoi were shy in the daylight. They’d eat a human—snack of choice—but they were shy outside the river even with coats and hats to help them blend in. “Boris, where is Jack in the city? How can we find him?”

  “How can you find a single drop of rain in a storm?” Boris didn’t have shoulders to shrug with, but the tilting back and forth of his glass had the same effect.

  “Hey, if I wanted a bad fortune cookie cliché, I’d take my vodka to a Chinese restaurant. Niko has more than glasses tucked away in his coat. He has a gallon jug full of salt. Happy fucking birthday to you, Boris. So talk sense or we take you out like a garden slug.” You serve the wrong drink to the wrong customer at work, in this case a margarita with salt, and you find out new and interesting ways to kill certain species. That unfortunate vyodanoi had ended up a river of ooze down the unisex/species bathroom drain at the Ninth Circle. I had no problem doing the same to Boris if I thought he was holding shit back.

  Niko tried a less homicidal approach. “We know you like to talk, Boris. So simply talk. That’s all we want.”

  “No one knows where Jack hides.” He drank and waited until we followed suit. “The revenants in the sewers have not seen him. The Kin in their warehouses have not seen him. Boggle in her forest has not seen him. Vampires with their love of high places and fancy penthouses have not seen him. We vyodanoi in the rivers have not seen him. We see the bodies he leaves but we do not see him. Jack is paien but he refutes his own kind. Never have I heard of him associating with any of us.”

  “Great. Even paien serial killers have to be the stereotypical loner. He’s probably a white male between his late twenties and early thirties too with a dislike of government authority,” I groused. All three of us drank this time. “Do you at least know what type of paien he is? Goodfellow, you know Goodfellow. He’s the puck who stole your wallet two weeks ago. He said Jack fits the description of a storm spirit.”

  “But all well-known and strong storm spirits are accounted for elsewhere,” Niko said. “And Jack would have to be strong from what we’ve seen.”

  “And experienced,” I added glumly.

  Boris waited until more vodka had been poured and consumed. I’d lost count how many shots we were on . . . five . . . six maybe . . . all in l
ess than twenty or so minutes. I was starting to feel like Boris was a good guy. He might not know shit and he ate people, but were any of us perfect? I shouldn’t have threatened to salt him. That was rude. Funny, too, the way the other one had melted like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, which I’ve never seen and did not have a horrific fear of flying monkeys until I was ten no matter what Nik said.

  Now . . . what were we talking about again?

  I was either leaning heavily against Nik or he was leaning heavily against me. I didn’t drink a lot, but I did drink some. With Niko’s body-temple philosophy his tolerance would be zero. I was surprised he wasn’t facedown in the mud. Mind over matter. Mind over alcohol. Figured.

  “The river has been turbulent. They do that when storm spirits are around. It is possible, but I cannot say for certain.” Boris’s whistle was getting sluggish, and as he bathed in vodka I knew it wasn’t from overdoing in the drinking department. “The morning is here. Time for me to sleep at the river bottom. Wrapped in the mud. Peaceful. Would you like to see?” The line drawing of a human face was inches from mine, the large sucker mouthing hungrily at the air. It was so abrupt and fast that with half my blood replaced by vodka it was practically a 3-D special effect out of a slasher movie—aimed to surprise and terrify.

  Which was what Boris was shooting for: terrifying. I fell over backward to get space between me and that round mass of pulsing blood-hungry flesh. Leeches . . . I wasn’t terrified as Boris had hoped, but I was disgusted to the power of ten. “Why do all our informants try to kill us? Is it my breath? I was liking you, too, Boris. I really was. You’re a good customer. Great tipper. Still a homicidal fiend though,” I slurred. “Salt the son of a bitch, Nik.”

  Whatever his tolerance, he made with the salt like Paula Deen in her prediabetic days. Seconds later I was wearing what was left of Boris with no convenient bathroom drain for this vyodanoi to slime his way down this time.