Doubletake can-7

by Rob Thurman

  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 overlook the shadow of guilt. It was a kid. A killer kid, but a kid. 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 and slide his katana blade between my leg and the kishi to pry it off with one efficient move.

  “You owe me,” I grumbled at him.

  While it squealed, barked, yowled, and laughed hyena-crazy through a toothy muzzle, Niko threw the last kishi down and hog-tied its 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/night job/afternoon job, whenever I wasn’t out doing what pulled in the real rent money—disposing of monster ass. He owned a nonhuman bar—not that humans knew the supernatural existed—called the Ninth Circle, was a peri, which was a winged humanish-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 their liquor of choice.

  Why would he want to kill me? We had a lot of unpaid tabs because I hadn’t once 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. It crooned mournfully, my blood on its teeth, the silver of its 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 non-people-eating?”

  “Your imitation of a Southern drawl is pathetic, and yes, drop him off here.” He rattled off an address. “They take in strays all the time. But you’d better do it in the next hour or they’ll be gone.”

  “Gone where?” I asked.

  “Who knows? It doesn’t matter. They’ll all be gone. Everyone. Now hurry the hell up. I’m paying your bill this time. I’m a puck, a trickster, and a used-car salesman. Don’t think I won’t squeeze every penny out of Niko’s well-shaped ass if you don’t perform this job to perfection.” His phone disconnected in my ear.

  “Who was that?”

  I grinned down at my brother. “Robin is hiring us for a job, and I’m thinking seriously about taking a dive in the fifth, because it’s your ass on the line if we screw up.”

  “Goodfellow will be a good client. He wouldn’t cheat us.” He’d cheat anyone else—man, woman, or child, but not us. Niko finished the knot on the rope and slitted his eyes at me. “And let us leave my ass out of it. Why I claim you as my blood, I will never know.”

  It wasn’t true. I didn’t know why he put up with me, but I took it on faith that Niko knew something that made me worth keeping around. Niko inherently knew extraordinary things that most others didn’t know and wouldn’t ever know. He was like that. Then again, very rarely, Niko screwed the hell up, wasn’t the infallible older brother—because no one was infallible. No one. I hadn’t kept count before, the times he was wrong, but if I’d known what was headed our way, I might’ve starting adding them up now.

  Number one was a little over sixty minutes away and headed for us like a freight train.

  Tick-tock.

  Robin Goodfellow, Pan, puck, trickster, car salesman, and more identities than I could memorize in a lifetime, lived off Central Park. That might have had something to do with his being rich and his kind having a history of spending a lot of time in the woods running around nude, which I didn’t once picture in my brain—not once, okay? It was a goddamn shame my booty-call werewolf, Delilah, or Puppy Le Screw, as Robin liked to call her, had tried to kill my family and friends, and was considering the same for me if she had the chance, because I really, really needed to get laid.

  Regardless of my pathetic condition, squatting on the outskirts of Central Park was Goodfellow’s best option in NYC—if he wanted to revert to the old days of forest flashing and if you could call a three-million-plus condo squatting. His condo board hated him…something to do with his wanting to install condom machines on every floor, and the thinly veiled orgies. Although in the last year, the orgies were a thing of the past. After nearly a hundred thousand years of debauchery and extreme horniness, he’d embraced monogamy. I suspected it was a puck brain tumor. Or it would pass in another few months. A monogamous Goodfellow was as if aliens came to Earth and didn’t want to hunt you, eat you, or screw your women.

  Extremely unlikely.

  We’d dropped off the kishi kit and now I stood pounding on Goodfellow’s door. “Porn and pizza. Asses and anchovies delivered in thirty minutes or it’s free.” The condo board didn’t care for that either, which is why I did it. Unless it was advertising our business, Niko had threatened to kill me in my sleep if I wore any more T-shirts with obscene, violence-encouraging, or just plain fun-with-chain-saw slogans on them. I had to get my entertainment somewhere else now. No big deal. I was versatile.

  I’d bandaged my leg, tying a thick gauze strip on the outside of my jeans and popping some Tylenol in the car as we drove the kishi to demonic day care. I’d do a real version when we eventually made it home. If I could help it, I kept my pants up around Goodfellow. A year of monogamy versus a hundred thousand years of frenzied pansexuality kept me cautious. I’d seen him talk a convention of ninety-year-old Catholic priests into a nudie bar. All right, thinking about it, maybe not that difficult to accomplish, but I didn’t want to be the next test subject. He did like a challenge.

  After dumping the baby, we left Niko’s junker on the curb in front of Robin’s building. The doormen were used to us by now and drove it to the nearest parking garage for seventy bucks, which was the first charge on Robin’s bill. On the way over we’d seen Wolves, vamps, revenants, vodyanoi, and more. They were in cabs heading toward LaGuardia or JFK, in their own cars, slamming their horns headed for the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. Many were so desperate they were going toward the George Washington Bridge. Jersey to escape the city? That told you right there something was going on and it was worse than the ten plagues of Egypt and Chernobyl combined. Some Wolves were just running, no vehicle necessary. People on the sidewalks were glaring around for the dog walker who’d screwed up. Robin hadn’t been exaggerating. Everything with claws and paws and fangs was getting the hell out of Dodge.

  I banged against the door again. “Pony play and pad thai. Get it while it’s hot.” I didn’t have to see Niko’s hand to know it was aiming for the back of my head. I ducked with the instinct of a thousand received swats and stumbled into Robin’s condo as he opened the door beneath my pounding fist.

  “You,” Robin said, catching me by the back of my shirt to keep me upright, “are going to spend months, nay, years of sleepless nights wishing you had never said that, not in this particular situation.” I expected him to sound amused, as that was the kind of joke he wo
uld make, but he looked nothing but deadly serious.

  Once steady on my feet again, I walked in. Same expensive rock-crystal coffee table, same buttery leather wraparound sofa—an identical replacement, rather, as I’d been indirectly responsible for destroying the last one—same enormous flat-screen television set hidden in a recess in the wall behind an original Waterhouse—Nik told me—painting. Same rich and expensive everything, although one addition was fairly new and a gift from me to Goodfellow, or rather from me to Goodfellow’s roommate, Salome. She was a Grim Reaper on four paws and I liked to stay on her good side. So a few months ago I brought her a boyfriend.

  “Spartacus,” I called, “how’s it hanging?” Probably not too well. Once you’re dead, had your organs removed, and are resurrected as an undead mummified cat, your testicles probably looked like old raisins that had rolled under the couch. Raisins didn’t tend to…hang. But it was the thought that counted. I caught him as he slithered out from under the couch and leaped through the air, a zombie feline missile. He looped around my neck and purred in my ear. And if his purr sounded like skulls being crushed under an iron boot, again, it was the thought that counted. His bandages were long gone, and I stroked the hairless black-and-white-spotted wrinkly skin. “You’re living under the couch? Is Salome giving you a hard time?”

  Another purr erupted from atop the massive refrigerator. Salome, unlike Spartacus, was gray with a small hoop earring in one pointed ear. They both had eye sockets that housed flickering lantern lights that reminded me of Halloween. Salome had followed Goodfellow home from the Museum of National History—against his will—and had lived here since, when she wasn’t out stalking senile, ancient pet Great Danes in the hallway. Salome had killed man and beast and probably hadn’t considered either one taxing. That was why I’d brought Spartacus to keep her company. I did not want to get on her bad side.

  A mummy, Wahanket, who’d lived in the sublevels of the museum, had made Salome and Spartacus. Although a sometime informant, he had tried to kill me twice and he did kill cats. I didn’t approve of either hobby. I made sure Wahanket didn’t get to play his King Tut games on anyone else, which Spartacus seemed to appreciate. Salome didn’t much appreciate anything, from what I’d seen. I gave the cat’s bony ass one last pat and plopped him on the floor. “Be a man,” I told him. “Show her who’s boss.” He gave me a dubious glance and disappeared under the couch again. Apparently being a man was overrated.

  Niko removed his duster, hot for late summer, but necessary for covering up katanas and various other swords. “You’re hiring us for a job, Goodfellow? That seems odd. You assist us so often you know we’d be more than willing to do you a favor for free.”

  Robin shrugged, his normally cat-that-ate-five-canaries green eyes glum, and waved a hand at the kitchen table on which rested a meatball sub with double cheese and a tea that stung my nose enough for me to know it must cost a hundred bucks a gram at least—the type of tea Niko loved above all others. “There are favors and then there is ripping your own heart out to tape to an extrarealistic Valentine’s card. This is the latter.”

  I moved closer to the table to catch the precise smell of the sub. “Gino’s? Gino’s extra-sauce, extra-cheese, extra-garlic meatball sub?” Gino’s, where the grease was so thick in the air that it contaminated the entire block and Robin refused to even drive down the street. That combined with the stink of a tea that was available only from one ninety-eight-year-old mean-as-a-snake woman in Chinatown. You had to walk across a path of nails to prove you were worthy of this damn tea, and I was not joking. He’d gone to serious trouble to tempt us, and Goodfellow didn’t go to serious trouble to do anything. He manipulated, deceived, lied, but not this. Honesty, money, and snacks?

  This was bad.

  “Shit. I don’t even want to know what the job is.” But I didn’t mean it.

  It was Goodfellow. Our first friend when we’d been on the run from the other half of me, a race called the Auphe. The first murderers born of this earth. All the other supernatural feared them, bowed before them, died under their teeth and claws. The Auphe were gone now, as was the handful of half-breeds like me, but I didn’t forget that Robin had been the first to help Niko and me.

  Even now…he was one of very few. The Auphe had been at the head of the supernatural food chain and they had large appetites, torture always being the cherry on top—which explained why I wasn’t too popular. Everyone had feared them and no one had missed them when we wiped them out. Although many didn’t know that they had been destroyed, that I was the last left, not that that would’ve made me any more popular. Quite a few had taken and still did take that unpopularity and hatred of Auphe up with me. They couldn’t kill an Auphe, but I was only half Auphe and half human. And humans were weak, nothing more than sheep. They thought that was worth a shot.

  They thought wrong.

  Robin, though, had always been loyal, always had our backs. We’d be piss-poor friends if we didn’t do the same. I sat at the table and grabbed the sub, taking a large mouthful. “So what’s the job?” I asked as I chewed—the Miss Manners of the monster-maimer crew.

  Niko agreed with me silently by sitting down and drinking the tea that they probably cleaned gutters with in China. Both of us looked expectantly at Goodfellow. He exhaled, folded his arms, shifted from one foot to another…nervous tics—all the things the ever-smooth, fast-talking puck didn’t do. This was looking worse and worse by the second. After several more twitches, he finally managed to get it out.

  “It’s my family reunion.

  “The whole of the puck race here in New York City.

  “Tomorrow.”

  I choked on the bite of meatball, feeling the suck of it into my airway, and halfway hoping it would do the favor of killing me before I could cough it out. Niko gave me an unconcerned smack on the back, which only had the hunk of meat lodging deeper, while murmuring, “We should have asked for more money.”

  “You haven’t asked for any money yet,” Goodfellow pointed out.

  “It doesn’t change the fact that we should have and will ask for more.” Niko slapped a hand between my shoulder blades again, saying, “One more cough and if that doesn’t do the trick, Robin gives you the Heimlich. The key concept in Heimlich being ‘from behind.’”

  I promptly expelled the chunk of Gino’s finest onto the table and welcomed the darkness that had begun to slice across my vision. If it was dark, I couldn’t see. And I didn’t want to see…pucks, everywhere. All identical, wavy brown hair, sly green eyes, smug smirks, rampaging egos, and an appetite for sex that made Caligula seem like a hundred-year-old virginal nun. One puck had taken a few years to get used to. More than one? Hundreds? Maybe thousands? All exaggerating, lying, stealing, trying to screw anything that couldn’t outrun them…

  The end of the world had come, and not with a bang…okay, yeah, with a bang. It could be lots of them—the largest planet-wide orgy to date. If that was true, I was eating my gun right then and there.

  “How many of them?” I said hoarsely, taking the tea Niko passed me to soothe my abraded throat. It tasted like donkey piss. The way the night was going I wasn’t surprised.

  The puck seesawed a hand back and forth. “It’s hard to say. That’s the point to the reunion. We count how many of our race are left. If the amount is too low, then we have a lottery and the schmucks with the unlucky numbers have to reproduce to make sure we don’t go the way so many other of the paien—the supernaturals’ word for their kind—races have. Extinction. We meet every thousand years. We all hate it, but it’s a necessary evil if we want to keep the magnificence that is Puck alive on earth.” He took the same hand and opened a drawer to fish out a checkbook. “My best guess: between seventy-five and a hundred will show. See? Not so bad. When you live pretty much forever you don’t need that many to keep a race intact. So? Fifteen thousand dollars? Does that sound good?”

  “Thirty,” Niko corrected. If Robin was offering fifteen it was worth at leas
t two to four times as much. “And you haven’t mentioned precisely what you want us to do.”

  “Babysit mostly.” He handed over the check with a sharkish smile that said Niko should’ve asked for fifty thousand. “All our well-deserved high self-esteems”—unbearable egos from hell—“in one place tends to lead to disagreements… some verbal abuse… small fights… attempted murders…large riots. That sort of thing. You’ll be like bouncers, keeping everyone in check, the two of you alone. You’re the only two in the city who can do this. We’ll meet at the Ninth Circle, get it over with in one night, tomorrow night, and then everything can go back to normal.”

  “What about everyone else in the bar? The Wolves, lamia, Amadan…the usual. We saw them running like bats out of hell on the way over here. I guess we don’t have to worry about them.” I shoved Niko’s poisonous tea back at him.

  “Indeed. No worries there. No one else will be at the bar, as no one else will be in the city. No one but humans.” Robin’s smirk had turned into something darker—beyond old, from the impenetrable forests that swallowed travelers whole, and from under a sky where the stars were the blood-tinged eyes of mad gods. “Every living paien creature will flee this place. They feel it.”

  “They know.”

  “The Panic has come.”

  3

  “On the roof two blocks down, did you see it?”

  He meant as we’d dumped the car several blocks away in a garage we couldn’t afford—there was blackmail involved—and walked the rest of the way home.