Deathwish can-4

by Rob Thurman

  “It’s not about a car part,” Niko said. “Not this time. It’s something a little more . . . interesting.”

  “Interesting.” The round eyes took us in with sudden calculation. “That is new word from you, this interesting.”

  “Yeah, interesting.” I leaned against the cold metal hood of a totaled car. “Because you know what, Mickey? You sound bored. You probably are bored.” I thought about adding that he could get a nice big wheel to run around in, but didn’t figure that would help our cause. Maturity; it was no damn fun. “We’re here to help you with that. Wouldn’t you like to get out? See some trees. Frolic in nature. Good times.”

  “Frolic.” Another dead rat tumbled from above where Mickey had been perched. It was the size of a beagle, and it landed on my foot. Mickey clicked yellowed teeth in a rat smile. “But, as see, frolic fine here.”

  I eased my foot from under the heavy weight. The fur was spiky and stiff with dried blood, the mouth frozen in its last snarl. There was one poor damn bastard that wasn’t going to be working at any theme park. “Yeah, I’ll bet you do.” I wondered what would happen if Mickey were to meet Robin’s new cat. You wanted interesting—that would be interesting.

  Niko picked up the strand of persuasion since I didn’t seem to be accomplishing much. “This would be an entirely new endeavor for you. Spying versus procuring. It would pay well. Lunch every day for three months.” And while I had my suspicions that I’d be the one making that daily delivery, Niko went ahead and filled Mickey in on the details. Oshossi, the basics of what we wanted to know, the zoo . . . cadejos, ccoas, and who knew what else.

  Mickey had finished the tacos and started on the burritos, as Niko finished. “South America?” Whiskers slick with either blood or hot sauce bristled dismissively. “Tourists.” With his accent, that wasn’t quite fair—I doubted he had his green card. But either way, he didn’t seem impressed. It was a good sign. If we could get Mickey on the inside for a day or two, long enough to find out where Oshossi was—Central Park with his animals or elsewhere—we’d be ahead of the game. For once.

  Delilah had tried, but hadn’t been able to find Oshossi, and his creatures wouldn’t talk to her people—if they even could talk. Still, if Oshossi didn’t control it, he didn’t trust it, and his crew seemed to follow right along with that. And no wolf was going to bow his neck for a nonwolf. That put going undercover out for them. So what we needed was a spy, one who didn’t give a damn about pride and usually gave dollar for dollar value. You hired him; he’d come through. Mickey was as close as we had to that.

  If we went into the trees of Central Park ourselves looking for Oshossi, chances were we’d never come back out. There could be a hundred ccoas in there, for all we knew. They knew we were standing with Cherish, lucky us, but Mickey would be a new element—a local yokel to clue them in on the city. He’d been here at least the two years we’d known him; that put him up on them. They should see him as an asset. He might be able to find Oshossi. At the very least, he could get a head count.

  If they didn’t eat him first.

  The thought had occurred to him too. “Three months. Your humor, such wit.” He gave a chittering wheeze that was what passed for a rat laugh. “A year. Two meals a day. Every day.”

  And the negotiations began. It was too bad Goodfellow wasn’t here. The Rom lived to haggle, but somehow that gene had skipped us. Niko had cold silence and his sword. I had my temper and my fists. If those didn’t work, we were screwed. Wheedling and schmoozing didn’t come naturally to us.

  But Nik did his best and we ended up with six months, two meals a day.

  No way I was coming out here twice a day for half a year. Hell, there had to be delivery services that would do it. Leave the food at the gate. I didn’t know who ran the yard, but Mickey didn’t seem to worry that much about being spotted.

  Speaking of spotting, I saw something worse than the dead rat as the two of them hammered out the deal. In one of the cars one stack over, a hand was hanging out of the window. The fingernails were dirty, the skin gray as only a corpse can be. Mickey didn’t kill people—that we knew of—but the occasional bum did die in the yard of natural causes. Exposure, heart attack—it didn’t matter. Mickey liked his takeout, but when it wasn’t available, he made do with what was. And that wasn’t always rats.

  I turned away to ask, “You need a ride there? You gonna drive yourself? Or did you have a bad hair day when they took your driver’s license photo?” The bared teeth let me know Mickey’s lack of temper might not be all I thought it was.

  He rode with us in the back of Niko’s car . . . after retrieving a jar full of darkly sloshing fluid. The black eyes reflected in the rearview mirror when he lifted his head for the occasional look around. When he did, I could feel hot breath against my neck. Not a good day for wearing my hair in a ponytail. I also smelled things on his breath—tacos, rat . . . human. Digested human flesh; it was a smell you couldn’t forget. If I didn’t smell it again for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t matter. It was something that was with me for good. It smelled like raw pork, but just different enough to make your flesh crawl. It said “You are meat.” Whatever you wanted to think in your happily ignorant world, it all came down to that: You are meat.

  It was dark by the time we stopped by the park to let him off. He opened the jar and begin to rub the contents across his fur in sweeping strokes. “Is blood and oil,” he explained. “Smell scent of you on me.” He snapped his teeth together in demonstration. “Kill me, yes. In seconds. Meet here again. Two days.” Leaving the jar and large smears of the mixture on the vinyl seat, he slipped out the door and shadowed his way into the trees.

  I looked in the backseat one more time after he was gone. “I am not cleaning that up. I’m not even helping you clean that up. That is nasty.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if it were essence of pizza and hoagies. You’re a lazy son of a bitch and all the meditation in the world won’t change that,” Nik retorted.

  “Now, would Buddha have said that?” I asked with mock disappointment. “I don’t think so.”

  “Buddha never found your underwear in the kitchen sink.”

  I had an answer to that ready and waiting as Niko started the car, but my cell phone rang—the cell phone that now was only for emergencies. Gate-creating emergencies. I flipped it open, saw Seamus’s number, grabbed Nik by the arm, and took us. I could build a gate and walk through it, but I could also build one around me if there was no room for the alternative. It was more difficult, but I could do it. That’s what I did in this case. Niko and I were outlined in gray light, and in a fraction of a second we were gone. Then we were at Seamus’s loft, right in the path of a charging ccoa.

  It was so close I could smell its breath. It wasn’t as bad as Mickey’s, but it wasn’t exactly potpourri either. I could also see the dilated prey-seeking pupils and the piranha teeth. I could probably have seen its damn tonsils if I didn’t get my ass in gear and move. I dove one way while Nik went the other. In my quick drop and roll, I could see he was a muddy gray under his olive skin, but he wasn’t puking as Robin had when I’d once taken him through a gate, which was good. He also kept on his feet, which was even better. It looked like we needed all the help we could get.

  There was no Oshossi, but there were three ccoas. They were quick and had been predators since they weaned from their mama’s teat. They were dangerous as hell, and from the dripping saliva, also hungry. I saw the two at first; the third came from above. If they could climb a tree in the jungle, they could climb a fire escape here. And if they could leap from a rocky ledge onto their prey, they could do the same from the upper loft. It came down like an avalanche, as deadly and a whole lot faster. I’d switched back to the Glock .40 from the Desert Eagle, which hadn’t done as much good as I’d hoped it would. As he struck the floor, I put ten in the head just like I’d thought with the last one, and swear to God, I almost hated to do it even though the last one had nearly turned me into lunch.
It seemed more like an animal than a monster, a smart and beautiful animal. I didn’t like killing it, but I did. There was a scream of pain that sounded oddly human, and a tumbling of black and silver fur over a sleek line of muscle. Then there was nothing but a big, dead cat. I shook it off. If it had landed on me, I’d be one dead son of a bitch, my throat ripped out before I could’ve pulled the trigger. It might just be an animal, but it had been one damn deadly one.

  Robin was holding off another with his sword while Promise and Cherish did the same with the third. Promise’s crossbow bolts only enraged the one attacking them. The cat was quick enough that Cherish had only struck three blows that I could tell. They were deep blows, but not deep enough to stop it. Nik was with them in seconds. He took the cat from behind. It whirled before he managed to slice it, but that didn’t last long. From the corner of my eye, I saw him strike one paw aside, then evade the other, dodge the enormous snap of mouth, and impale it in the heart with his katana.

  That was impossibly quick.

  I knew Nik could fight. I knew he was better than I was, that he was better than nearly anything or anyone you could name. But sometimes when you saw him in action, you almost couldn’t believe it—that a human could be that fast and that lethal. He’d worked at being that way since he was twelve, but I honestly thought he was born that way as well. A genetically superior athlete who could’ve gone to the Olympics. Instead, for me he became a killer. Too bad for him that they didn’t hand out the gold, silver, or bronze for that.

  I turned toward Robin to see him just finishing off his as well. And there we were. . . . Three dead ccoas. It sucked. Monsters were one thing, but this was something else. Oshossi didn’t give a damn about his pets, and I’d sure as hell rather be killing him than them.

  So why wasn’t he here with them? He was smart, but that didn’t seem smart. If he wanted Cherish so badly and his ccoas had tracked her down, why hadn’t he come with them?

  Cherish’s teeth were bared as the ccoas’ had been, and her sword dripped blood onto the floor. She realized it and covered the fangs with lips painted as red as the silk top she wore. “You came.” It was said with a gratitude I wouldn’t have guessed she had in her. She was coming around. She might have more Promise in her than any of us thought. “Madre said that you would, and you did.” She gave a formal dip of her dark head. “My thanks.” Raising her eyes to Niko, she said with a trace of amazement, a fellow predator’s respect, “You are every bit the swordsman Madre said you were. I’ve seen nothing like it. Not in my life. Not ever.” The dimple appeared. “Perhaps you could give me lessons.”

  “If you’ve seen nothing like it, then obviously you weren’t watching me.” Robin frowned at the blood spatter across his pants. “And I do it with unparalleled panache and style, but of course that wouldn’t be noticed while you’re so occupied ogling your mother’s property.”

  So Robin wasn’t getting anywhere with Cherish. That had to sting. I didn’t think he’d not gotten anywhere with anyone he wanted except for Niko. Robin was lethal too, in a whole lot more ways than one. In the bedroom, out of the bedroom—he bragged about both. For a guy who practically excreted Rohypnol out of his pores, this had to be pissing him off like crazy. I gave him a grin to let him know I knew, and he gave me a silent snarl back. Moving over to Niko, I asked, “You okay? I know traveling isn’t such a hot feeling when you’re not an Auphe.” Which, I thought, was why it didn’t bother me.

  I might not have said it aloud, but he heard it anyway. “You are not an Auphe,” he said between clenched teeth, clenched probably to keep his lunch down, although the muddy color of his skin was fading and returning to normal. “And I’ll recuperate. Give me a few minutes.”

  “Yeah, okay.” It wasn’t a lot to ask considering he’d gotten a good feel of what was inside an Auphe, and, like it or not, what was inside me. It was an unnatural thing, ripping a hole in the fabric of reality. You knew that as soon as you saw it, but to pass through that rip, you felt the unnatural twist of it to your bones. It wasn’t right. It was unwholesome and awful and it wasn’t right.

  I’d used to feel that. . . . Like Robin had. Like Niko. The wrongness of it.

  I didn’t anymore.

  Whatever that meant, whatever it said, it wasn’t good.

  But you play with your Auphe half and you can’t expect it to stay buried. It wanted to play, a lot more than you did.

  Robin laid his sword on the dining room table, folded his arms, and sighed. “What now? Samuel and his happy-go-lucky band of game wardens? Or are we pushing our luck there, making them our personal janitorial team?”

  “I’ll take them.” We really didn’t want to push the Vigil into thinking we were their version of overt. That was all we needed on top of everything else. And if the Auphe could get rid of an eel the size of a truck, I could get rid of three panthers. “I’ll open a gate to the river. If it’s good enough for the Sopranos, it’s good enough for us.”

  I didn’t wait for Niko to object, and he would have. Risking sharpening the Vigil’s attention on us versus me playing with Auphe fire, he’d take the first any day. But that wasn’t the right thing to do. Everyone was already in danger from the Auphe because of me. I wasn’t going to add the Vigil to that. Who knew how long they’d listen to Samuel that we were okay, that we weren’t going to get noticed. I squatted down to study the nearest ccoa. Because, let’s face it, we did shit that had a damn good chance of getting noticed.

  And we did it a lot.

  “What do you think? Two hundred and fifty pounds? Three?” I opened the gate absently.

  That was a mistake, thinking it was as simple as the small amount of effort involved. Thinking that I didn’t need to pay attention. Forgetting how much my Auphe side did want to play.

  But it had gotten so easy. Once it had brought pounding headaches and unconsciousness. Two weeks ago it had brought blood gushing from my nose or ears. Now it was like turning a key in a lock. Normal. No pain. No exhaustion. Just the feeling of doing what I was meant to do.

  Maybe what I was meant to be.

  The last male Auphe.

  It was back . . . the cold touch, the slither of bloodthirsty satisfaction. I laid a hand on wet black fur, still warm, and lifted it back up to stare at my red palm and fingers. I had killed, I would kill again. And, hey, was that such a bad thing? Was that so wrong? To do what you were born to do . . . to follow the fire and ice that burned and seared your blood. To touch blood, to wear it, to spill it, to taste it . . .

  No.

  No. Absolutely fucking not.

  This was not going to happen. That’s not who . . . what I was going to be. I took all the control I had, made the massive effort, and shoved those alien thoughts out of my mind. They had to be alien . . . otherwise they were mine. All mine. And that couldn’t be. It couldn’t, damn it. Luckily, I pushed them out or down before Niko clocked me one. He’d been across the room; now he was kneeling beside me, looking grim. “Control,” he said.

  “I’ve got it. It’s gone.” I wiped the blood from my hand onto the black jeans.

  “Pay attention.” That was said with an edge, an edge that had every right to be there.

  “I know. Sorry.” Sorry didn’t quite get it for not treating opening a gate with the cautious respect it deserved. It was wild and feral. I wasn’t going to tame it, and if I weren’t careful, it would eat me alive. The best I could hope to do was control it and keep it on a short leash. And watch it—always watch it. Keep a wall up. I wasn’t what those bitches said I was. I was human, at least enough to stop the part of me that wasn’t.

  The gate was still open, the cold light spilling through the ragged gash. I sucked in a deep breath. I had it now; it didn’t have me. “Let’s get them through.”

  To the side I saw Cherish watching me with the clouded black eyes of a vampire ready for battle. “You are Auphe. I thought you were lying.”

  “Why the hell would I lie about something like that?” I bit off a
s Niko and Robin helped me heave the first dead weight through the light. “How’d you know?” I went on quietly for Nik’s ears only. But as usual, Robin couldn’t let anything be for someone else only, not if that someone wasn’t him.

  “You were speaking Auphe.” The fox face pulled into an expression of distaste.

  Those two years they’d had me—I must’ve learned the language then. I’d seen that when I understood the Auphe before—telling me I was the last male. But understanding it and speaking it, those were two different things. . . . And they were just two more things tying me to them.

  “What’d I say?” I didn’t remember, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. If it had been anything like what was going through my mind . . . Jesus.

  “I have no idea. I don’t understand Auphe, and I don’t want to. Imagine ground glass shoved into your ear canal. That’s what it sounds like, and it’s about that pleasurable to hear,” he grunted as we tossed the next cat through. “But your brother knew before you started with that. He was already moving.”

  “Nik?” The last ccoa slid into the gray. I closed the rip and ignored the disappointment of letting it go. Control. I had it. I did.

  “You opened that thing and you weren’t you. Before you touched the blood. Before you spoke that hell-spawn language. I knew the second you opened the gate and weren’t paying attention.”

  It was something Niko didn’t allow himself often—anger—and it was completely justifiable. I hadn’t paid attention and I’d nearly gotten lost. I’d gone from swearing not to open any more gates, to doing it to try to outthink the Auphe, to emergencies in case of attacks, and finally to just cleaning up around the house.

  Which is how the road to hell is paved with a little maid service.