by Rob Thurman
I wouldn’t kill for myself, but I would kill for my brother.
And I didn’t regret it, not for a moment. It didn’t make me a monster or a freak, saving my family. It made me what I’d wanted to be all along.
It made me human.
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Epilogue
Raynor did as I told him, if only to save his own life from Ariel’s work. He died two and a half days later. I checked the obituaries. He had a nice-looking picture and an Armani suit. I wasn’t surprised. Saul went back to Miami and if he blocked our numbers from now on, I wouldn’t blame him. We took our time in picking another town. It didn’t matter where it was really, only that it was home. We chose different names and jobs. I went with Wyatt, and Stefan was John Henry. Although Doc Holliday was rolling over in his grave at Stefan’s poker skills and I still didn’t care much about guns, my love of Westerns and Western aliases would never die. Instead of being a house painter, Stefan was a car salesman and surprisingly good at it despite his wolfish looks. Once he pounced on them in the car lot, I thought people were afraid to not buy a car from him. He was employee of the month more than once, which embarrassed the hell out of him. I had a copy of the picture made and hung it in the living room to give him shit. That’s what brothers do—give each other shit.
And we were brothers. What he knew and what I knew in the privacy of our own hearts didn’t change that.
I had two jobs. I worked at the library part-time and spent four days a week at what had to be the last video store left in America—what could be more perfect? I could both feed and entertain the mind. I’d moved movie night from Wednesday to Sunday, but I didn’t give it up. I loved the fantasy of movies, maybe more so now.
After all, what had reality done for me lately?
Stefan watched the movies with me now that Ariel was gone, provided he didn’t have a date. I’d gotten over that no woman was good enough for my brother and stopped giving the ones he asked out acid reflux on date night. He was surprised at how much easier dating was here than it had been in Cascade Falls. I didn’t clue him in. Of all the lies I’d told or truths I’d omitted, I could live with that last one. The brotherly ass kickings were still in full force after what I’d pulled on the dam at Cascade Falls. While they were deserved, taking it on myself to be a cure for my fellow chimeras when there was no other, I’d skip further punishment if Stefan found out what I’d done to his dates in Cascade. Besides, if he missed a movie or two with me, it wasn’t that bad. Godzilla took his spot and hogged his share of the popcorn. And if I missed someone who was a killer, a sociopath, and had a smile I’d not forget until the day I died, that was my right.
It was five months later that I finally admitted defeat, finishing what I’d started more than half a year ago, and was at my laptop, hacking into Lolcats, crashing the site, and removing any mention of it from the Net. It was evil. It had to go. My eye was caught by the sudden flash of a white IM box at the bottom of my screen as I typed. It flickered blankly for a second; then a question appeared in flowing pink and green script with a familiar winking mermaid as punctuation:
Hey, sexy, want to watch a movie?
About the Author
Rob Thurman lives in Indiana, land of cows, corn, and ravenous wild turkeys. Rob is the author of the Cal Leandros novels; the Trickster novels; the Korsak Brothers novels; and a story in the anthology Wolfbane and Mistletoe.
Besides wild, ravenous turkeys, Rob has a dog (if you don’t have a dog, how do you live?)—one hundred pounds of Lab/Dane mix. She has the bark of twenty German Shepherds, a head the size of a horse’s, teeth straight out of a Godzilla movie, and the ferocious habit of hiding under the kitchen table and peeing on herself when strangers come by. By the way, she was adopted from a shelter. She was fully grown, already house-trained, and grateful as hell. Think about it next time you’re looking for a Rover or Fluffy. Rob also has two other dogs who are slightly more invested in keeping their food source alive.
For updates, teasers, music videos, deleted scenes, social networking, and various other extras, visit the author at www.robthurman.net.
Read on for an exciting excerpt from the next Cal Leandros novel,
DOUBLETAKE
by Rob Thurman
Coming in March 2012 from Roc.
Family . . . it is a bitch.
The thought drifted out of nowhere.
Or maybe it didn’t, considering my current situation. There was no denying that it was true. Everyone thought it sooner or later, didn’t they? If there’s only you, you’re good—lonely maybe, but good. You can’t fight with yourself. If there are two of you, it can still be good. Your options are limited. You make do and appreciate what you have, unless it’s the stereotypical evil-twin scenario. Then you aim for the goatee and blow his ass back to the alternate dimension he popped out of.
A Kishi hit my back. I flipped him over and put a bullet in the back of his head.
Yeah, normally two was a doable number. It was when you hit three and higher that things started to go bad. That’s when the bitching and moaning started, the pitting of one against another, the slights that no one forgot. No one could tell me that Noah didn’t pitch a few of his relatives kicking and screaming off the ark long before the floodwaters receded. It was no familial Love Boat and I believed that to my core.
Which brought up the question: Did that wrathful Old Testament God kill the sharks? I don’t think he did. You can’t drown a shark. I think they were snacking on biblical in-laws right and left. Noah, Noah, Noah . . .
I swung around and kicked the next Kishi in the stomach as I slammed another clip home before putting three in his gaping, lethally fanged mouth as he jumped again. It sounded easy, but considering the one I also had attached to my other leg, it was a pain in the ass.
Family-wise, I had no pains in the ass. I was lucky. I had one brother and he was a damn good one. Once we were on our own, I’d escaped the curse of screaming Thanksgiving dinners—now I had a turkey pizza; Niko had a vegan one. No bitter arguments around a Christmas tree—each year Niko gave me a new gun; I gave him a new sword. Absent was the awkward discovery of first cousins shacking up at the summer family get-togethers at the lake. I didn’t have to wait for summer. I saw my brother every day when he winged my sopping towel off the bathroom floor at my head or I asked—after the fact—if I could use his priceless seventeenth-century copy of some boring book no one but him and the author had read to prop up a wobbling coffee table.
Summer vacations . . . if you thought about it, what kind of people actually gathered together at a lake with cabins and all that crap anyway? Hadn’t they ever watched Friday the 13th? Jason? Hockey masks? Machetes? A good time for me, yeah—oh hell yeah—but not as much for the members of your average Priusdriving middle-class family.
Stupidity is everywhere.
The rest of my life might be challenging in some areas—like at the moment, with an adolescent Kishi either trying to eat my leg or hump it to the bare bone—but family? I knew I had that under control, had no reason to worry about it or dwell on it. I watched my brother’s back; he watched mine. We were a Hallmark card dipped in blood and made of unbreakable steel. I’d never had a doubt about my family and I never would—no matter what the Kishi, who had brought the topic to mind to begin with, were doing to annoy me on the general subject.
No, it was all smooth sailing, rather like this current job, until my cell phone rang. “Niko,” I said, shooting another adult Kishi with jaws stretched wide enough to swallow my entire head. He had leaped downward at me from a fire escape of a condemned tenement building long crumpled in on itself—no demolition crew needed. Gravity worked for free. “Can you get this one off my leg before I need sexual-assault counseling?”
Niko said to not kill the babies, although at one hundred and fifty pounds, “baby” was pushing the definition, but I was doing my best, more or less, to be a good boy. Although it would’ve been much easier to
be a bad boy.
So very bad. So very fun.
For my brother, however, I reined in that part of me—that nonhuman half of me, choke-chaining it with a practiced grip. It was the price I paid to keep my brother satisfied. Bearing in mind that if it wasn’t for him, I’d be dead or sanity-challenged ten times over, I owed the man. I was also fond enough of his bossy anal-retentive ass to die for him.
More importantly, to kill for him.
And choose the darkest of roads to make that happen.
All that made ignoring a giant baby with an equally giant bite easy enough. As I fished for my cell, Niko was less than awed at my babysitting skills and said so. “If you can’t do a minimum of three tasks at once, I have failed you with all my training and instruction. I’d blame myself, but clearly it’s entirely your fault—your laziness, your total ineptitude.”
Not that we shared the fraternal fondness out loud. How manly would that be?
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard that all before. If adults heard lullabies when they slept, Niko’s admonishments would be mine. I shook my leg again, then shot another Kishi that was bounding down the side of the next building, which was equally as dilapidated as the first, putting three bullets between his blazing silver eyes. They shone brighter than any streetlights in this part of town . . . until the Kishi’s life seeped away and left only the dull gray of death. I felt bad for the Kishi—almost—but they had turned a block that had once hosted scavenging homeless, thriving drug dealers and sullen hookers into a desolate wasteland. I didn’t have a preference for one over the other, Kishi or human. The mayor wanted the city cleaned up. The Kishi Clan was doing the job one block at a time . . . even if it meant eating quite a few people.
Were those people good people? If I knew anything, I knew that these days I wasn’t in the position to make the call on whether certain people were worth saving or leaving to the predators. That I left up to Nik. I simply stepped over their bodies and went on with the job.
Regardless of whether they were good or evil, those people belonged, whether they knew it or not, to the Kin. The Kin, the werewolf mafia of New York City, weren’t pleased to be sharing their money or their snacks with Johnny-come-lately preternatural hyenas from the depths of . . . um . . . I should’ve paid attention to where those depths were—maybe Africa?—during the premission rundown, but Niko knew. That was enough. I didn’t think it mattered much. They were encroaching on Kin territory, and the wolves didn’t like that.
Unfortunately for the Kin, the Kishi, as a race, howled at a decibel level that would have any Kin wolf’s ears within ten blocks bleeding. Curled up in homicidal furry balls, moaning for their mommies, they hadn’t had much success in taking down the Kishi. Luckily for Niko, me, and our bank account, human ears couldn’t hear notes that high.
And although I wasn’t entirely human, my hearing was. That made us the go-to guys for this job. It had seemed easy from the hiring and from the half of our fee that was slapped into my palm—if it hadn’t been for Niko’s research, finding out the Kishi were highly intelligent, if extremely malevolent. That meant the adults were fair game, but the younger Kishi we had to pat on the head and then find a goddamn supernatural foster and rescue organization for murderous fur babies that would raise them right, socialize their asses, put rhinestone collars on them, and take them off our hands.
How many of those do you think were in the phone book? Nada? Good fucking call.
But the bottom line was, it was all about family. The adult Kishi were taking down prey for their young—which luckily only numbered one at this point—feeding him or her, setting up a nest, claiming this place for their own. They were doing what evolution had bred them to do. They were killers—predators to the bone. They would slaughter anything they thought they had a chance of bringing down—but to give them credit, they looked after their family.
That’s where family became a bitch in yet another way. You eat people for your family; you piss off the Kin for your family; you die for your family.
As a random bastard had once said to me when I was a kid in the fourth grade as he demanded my sneakers and backpack, life isn’t fair. I agreed with him by punching his annoying teeth down his equally annoying throat. If that’s what the world wanted to be, I’d go along. I didn’t make the rules. I only played by them.
Since when?
Since never.
This wasn’t a schizophrenic voice—at least I hoped not—this was just my subconscious, or half of one. It was the bad thoughts people think—normal people, too—that they shouldn’t, don’t like to admit to, and don’t act on. But as I wasn’t normal and wasn’t exactly the Webster’s Dictionary definition of a person, my bad thoughts were much more bad than most, and I did sometimes act on them. Sometimes or often or frequently or very frequently, depending on my mood . . . no judgment needed or wanted.
They were almost as much of a bitch as family could be, with the inner squabbling, but I’d learned to mostly tune them out. Slowly they were beginning to taper off. Not because any part of me had less to say, but because two halves were becoming a whole. Two genetic and mental halves melding into one. Out of the way, Sybil, there was a new nearly cured crazy in town. Many psychotherapists would be proud of my progress—the ones who hadn’t met me and, if they had any sense, wouldn’t care to.
Soon I wouldn’t be good or bad. I’d only be me.
They’d have to invent a new adjective for that.
I shook my leg futilely one more time and exhaled in irritation at the molten mercury eyes, the dark red coat dappled with silver spots, the milk-white teeth—as large as a German shepherd’s adult teeth—that continued to gnaw at my thigh. “Three seconds and he’s a rug under the coffee table. Your move, Cyrano.”
Did Niko have a proud, hawklike nose? Yes, he did. Did I give him hell over it? What do you think?
I answered my still-ringing cell phone as I shot the last Kishi that leaped through a boarded-up window. Wood split, glass shattered, and bone splintered. The combination made for one dead Kishi whose stomach was rounded and full with its last meal, which, I was guessing, had been the last occupant of this street. From the hypodermic needle the parahyena coughed up in its dying throes, that meal had most likely been a tweaker.
They say drugs kill, but does anyone ever listen?
“Yeah, Leandros,” I said into the phone. “Death and destruction by the dollar. The meter’s ticking. Go.”
I hadn’t had a chance to check the incoming number, not with Kishi Junior both seducing and making a meal of my leg. But it didn’t surprise me to hear a familiar voice. Five people total had my personal number. Our work came by referral only these days. “Kid, thank Bacchus,” I heard the relieved exhalation. “I need you and Niko at my place now.”
The three seconds was up and I had the muzzle of my Desert Eagle planted between toddler Kishi’s moon eyes as he gnawed harder at my lower thigh. I had a high pain tolerance—you learned to in this business, but to balance it out, my tolerance for nearly everything else in the universe was low. Damn low. Too bad for baby. It was night-night time. I might as well stop the pattern now. The same as his parents, he would grow up to be a killer anyway.
Like you did?
As if I didn’t know that.
But I was a done deal; the Kishi wasn’t, not quite yet. “Goodfellow? You in trouble?” I started to put pressure on the trigger and tried to ignore the shadow of guilt I felt. It was a kid. A killer kid, but a kid nonetheless. Couldn’t I relate? On every single level? Then again, did I care if I could relate? Was I Dr. Phil? Hell, no. I was, however, Niko’s brother. That had me yanking harder at my internal leash while frowning crossly at Niko as I gave him a few extra seconds to move over, slide his katana blade between my leg and the Kishi in order to pry the creature off in one efficient move.
“You owe me,” I grumbled at him.
While the last Kishi squealed, barked, yowled, and laughed hyena-crazy through a toothy muzzle, Niko thre
w him down and hog-tied his preteen fuzzy ass. My brother—he wasn’t a bleeding heart. There were more dead monsters and people in whatever version of hell you wanted to believe in who’d testify to that. He did like to give a break when he thought one was due, though—or when he thought their birthright shouldn’t automatically condemn them.
He’d learned that raising me and adjusting to my birthright—a lifetime of habits, right or wrong, was hard to break.
Robin’s voice was in my ear, catching my attention again. “Am I in trouble? Ah. Hmmm. It’s more like everyone else is in trouble with the exception of myself,” he hedged. “I’d rather explain it in person and give you the keys to the bar. Ishiah left them for you.”
Ishiah was my boss at my day job/afternoon job/ night job—whenever I wasn’t out doing what pulled in the real rent money: kicking monster ass. He owned a bar called the Ninth Circle, was a peri—a winged human-type creature that had spawned angel legends—and was generally neutral on whether he should kill me or crown me employee of the month for making it a week without icing a customer while serving up his or her liquor of choice.
Why would he want to kill me? We had a lot of unpaid tabs because I once hadn’t made that said employee of the month. But hand held to the empty, godless space that filled the sky, if I killed you, you usually had it coming. Or you just weren’t that quick. In my world, the two were practically the same.
“The keys? Why did he—Ah, hell with it. We’ll get the story when we get there.” I looked down at Niko crouching on the street, rhythmically rubbing the Kishi’s stomach. He crooned mournfully, my blood on his teeth, the silver of his eyes surrounded by the white of fear. “Fuck me,” I sighed. Before I let Goodfellow off the phone, I added, “By the way, do you know anywhere we could drop off a baby Kishi to be raised up all good with God? Religious, righteous, and true? Oh, and nonpeople eating?”
