by Rob Thurman
I was already stripping off that stupid jacket. It was lightweight, though, and that could be useful at times. “Today my percentage on the curve has dropped from one hundred to twenty-five. Maybe fifteen.”
I couldn’t tell if he was white, biracial, Hispanic, young, or middle-aged, as he was so covered in filth, hair matted for years, teeth all but gone from meth, clothes layered rags, but what did it matter? I did know he was a son of a bitch with no bark or bite and he’d crossed me on the wrong day.
Any day would’ve been a wrong day, but with his knife—a kitchen butcher knife, pitiful—I would’ve given him the less humiliating “go away.” I would’ve used a round to his leg from one of my guns or put my own knife, the kind you don’t steal from your grandmother, through his hand to make sure I cut enough tendons that he’d not carry a weapon again. But today…today wasn’t any day.
I strangled him unconscious with the Members Only jacket.
It rolled up nice and tight. It wasn’t a wire garrote, but it did get the job done.
Better yet, he had a friend, a buddy, a compadre, otherwise known as the dumb ass who came over the fence to help cut us up. This one was wired on meth or crack. That meant he was snake-mean, gave him the sad illusion that he was immortal, and made him a cheetah in speed compared to his friend, who’d done a believable imitation of the living dead from an old zombie movie. My opinion about those movies had been formed from minute one: If you could trot or even speed-walk, there was no excuse for your not surviving that apocalypse.
“Give! Give it! Fuckers! Give it over before I cut your goddamn head off!” This one had a switchblade he stabbed in my direction with frenzied, wild motions. I shrugged off my holster and tossed it over my shoulder, knowing Niko would catch it. Then off came the sweater, which surprised me by rolling up as nicely as the jacket. Cashmere, huh? Shelling out the dough on expensive fancy douche-bag clothes was worth it. Who would’ve believed it?
I dodged the stab of the switchblade. Yeah, he was a cheetah next to the other guy, all right, but Niko had taught me to be the actual article, with lessons starting when I was about eight. I snared the guy’s arm with my new weapon, broke his wrist in a particularly nasty way that would never heal right, and then strangled him with the sweater until he was down and out to match his partner. That improved my mood enough that I kept going, kicking off a loafer and beating Mr. Switchblade in the head with it. It wasn’t as effective as the other pieces of clothing, but it was still entertaining.
Imitating my shoe-beating squat, Niko crouched across from me, gazed down at the drooling mugger and then at me. “You didn’t kill them. That’s something,” he said with a noticeable lack of conviction. “Should I be concerned or is this a new type of crime-fighting superpower hitherto undiscovered in those comic books you read as a kid?”
“I still read ’em.” I gave a wicked grin, able to forget about Janus and Grimm—better than me on my best day—long enough that I could enjoy myself for a minute. “Find me five more. I still have a shirt, pants, two socks, and one shoe left.”
There was a flash out of the corner of my eye. I looked up to see Robin considering the picture on his phone. “I have the shot of the infamous Leandros penis—infamous like the Loch Ness monster: Most thought it a rumor. I have a preppy demon spawn armed by Nordstrom assaulting criminals. It’s a start to a porn site. I just need a theme.”
Kalakos spit on the sidewalk; the Vayash clan did love their saliva and sharing it. We didn’t know how Janus tracked us. Kalakos and Niko both thought it was likely the genetic signature of Vayash blood. I had a different theory: the unique chemical makeup of Vayash spittle. It had been exercised fiercely enough over the generations that it was better, stronger, faster. Steve Austin couldn’t hope to deliver the loogie that a Vayash could.
“We are wasting time,” Kalakos said with frustration boiling over the stoicism he’d worn, head to toe, since he’d arrived. “The burden needs to be returned to sleep or destroyed, and you are playing games like…” There he was stuck. Like a child? Hardly. Like a monster? Not if he wanted that apology from the basement to stick.
Goodfellow didn’t wait for him to sort it out. “The wannabe Achilles is right.” He put the phone away and tossed me the black combat boots he held in his other hand. “Time to go. You’re without a shred of doubt going to have to run for your life in there. You can’t do that in loafers.”
I caught the boots and snarled at the smirk that had been thrown with them. It was a halfhearted snarl, though. Robin was back and that made all this worth it. Almost.
“In there” was the thirteenth building of the Remington Arms factory. All thirteen were identical and connected by a massive bridge that matched the brick outside of the buildings. It loomed, the entire structure. It was only four stories high, but somehow it loomed. That this was a place that had made weapons didn’t surprise me. They sure as hell hadn’t been turning out toys. It had been built in the early nineteen hundreds to make guns, all kinds, from handguns to machine guns. Equal-opportunity methods of death and destruction.
The thirteenth building was hugely cavernous inside. Some of it was divided into four floors, but in some areas—the metalworking ones, from the equipment left behind—you could see straight up from the ground floor to the underside of the roof. In those large spaces light trickled from the small windows from what would’ve been one wall of the fourth floor. It was a dim light spilled from a thickly overcast sky, but Promise was cautious, pulling the hood of her silk cloak farther forward to shade her face. A stray hit of daylight wouldn’t cause her to combust, although it would go a long way toward explaining the urban legend of spontaneous “human” combustion. What it would give her was the vamp equivalent of a third-degree burn. While vamps were quick to heal from any other wound, those took months to heal, and aloe didn’t do a thing for that level of crispy.
Robin stopped to take the room in, eyes closed in concentration. “No, not here. Ah, I feel him now.” He indicated a hallway that ran the length of the building. “Not far, and asleep, I think, or we wouldn’t have made it this far without some difficulties.” I didn’t wonder how the dead or deadish slept. When I’d discovered there were undead mummified cats that followed pucks home and made themselves queen of the condo, I stopped questioning dead right then and there as too complicated for me.
He took out his sword from beneath a coat, the same long duster style as the one Nik always wore and was wearing now, thanks to Robin’s owning several. He didn’t carry a sword every day as my brother did, but enough that he needed the spares. Kalakos had his own. They were all virtually identical. Give them sunglasses and they’d be supernatural Men in Black.
Niko was carrying his xiphos and he handed me the second from inside his coat. Hephaestus hadn’t built Janus. Someone from a race older and more skilled had. If the Janus metal that formed the xiphos made the automaton stop and think, it might do worse to Hephaestus if he went off the deep end. Turn him from deadish to deader than dead. I had my holster back on and already had the Eagle out. I switched it to my left hand and carried the xiphos with my right. “Let’s go find out how to take out the batteries on that thing.”
“Yes, yes. Running toward imminent death rather than away like a sane person would. Your hobby, I know. Wait a moment.” He looked past me to Promise. “You can’t come, not yet.”
“Why not?” she demanded coolly. “I know you don’t doubt my abilities in a fight.” She didn’t have a collection of revenant heads she’d removed in the past, but she could have…if she was into that sort of thing. I know I didn’t doubt her or her abilities; after seeing her in action I knew for a fact that a revenant made the worst kind of Pez dispenser.
“Doubt? Hardly. And if I were ignorant enough to question the matter, I wouldn’t say so,” Robin said dryly. “I like my dick attached to my body. No, it’s Hephaestus. The sight of a woman, any woman at all, ups his insanity level considerably. But we will need you to come in as a di
straction if we’re on the verge of a hideously painful death, which I strongly anticipate. I need you to stay here until you hear the screaming and the dripping of blood start. When you come in, say something idiotically syrupy, such as, ‘I am here, cherished of my heart, the sweet spring air that gives me breath. It is your beloved Aphrodite.’ Yes, that’s perfect. Her to the letter, not that she could read. A more vacant-brained person I’ve yet to meet.”
“Aphrodite?” Promise said with a suspicion I could hear if not read under her shadowed hood. “Wasn’t that his wife? Wasn’t her cheating on him with the god of war why he went insane?”
“Do we need to go into this or can we draw the usual conclusions?” Robin responded irritably. “And anyone can wear gold armor and pass himself off as a god of war, especially when the real one is off at war, as anyone with a brain cell would know. It’s not as if she asked to see any ID. Besides, I told all of you that he hated me beyond all things, yet here I am.” He started toward the dark hall. “Risking my life, as always. Brave and self-sacrificing. Noble and…”
I stopped listening, as Robin wouldn’t stop talking until Hephaestus was choking the air and life out of him. “Where do you think he keeps his little black book?” I murmured to Niko.
“In chapters, and they require approximately a thousand semis to haul from place to place.” He jerked his head, indicating to Kalakos that he should move ahead of us. Just in case. If he had to be at someone’s back, we wanted someone watching him, despite my elevated status in his eyes from monster to “not that bad.” That was practically a gold medal from the Vayash, the status of “eh, he could be worse.”
“Your exercise outside has improved your mood,” Nik went on to note.
He wanted to talk about Grimm. I’d given over everything I knew…when it came to facts. My emotions I’d kept to myself, locked down tight, and not from everyone else, but from Nik too. He knew it and he didn’t like it. I shook my head. “Later.”
His eyebrows lowered. He wasn’t happy. No matter how old you are, big brothers, at least the good ones, never stop thinking it’s their job to look out for you and to watch your back. I knew if I lived to be eighty and Nik eighty-two, sharing a room at the nursing home, he’d be asking why I sent back my tapioca pudding and beating the nurse’s aide with his walker for losing my dentures. And I would be damn lucky.
I didn’t have to try to find the words he wanted. They were already there, ugly and useless. “Grimm is me, Nik. He is me.” My palms sweated against the grip of my weapons, and not because of what we were about to face. “Only without whatever conscience you managed to shove down my throat.” And that I managed to hang on to—an extra-small portion for the healthy monster on the go. “If things had been different and the Auphe found out about him first and locked me away in that cage, I would be him. I would think the same thoughts. I would be doing the same things.”
Although Grimm had six years on me, which meant I might not be doing them as efficiently. “Shit, our sense of humor is even the same.” Bloody and sarcastic to the bone.
I lifted my hand holding the xiphos and had a vision of Grimm’s black glove hosting curved metal claws. I’d liked them. Me, the gun guy, was wondering where I could get a set made. Jesus. “I can’t tell you how I feel because I don’t know. I do want him dead. That isn’t going to change. I gutted the son of a bitch the first chance I had. It didn’t faze him much, but I did it and I enjoyed it. Don’t worry. I know how I feel about him.” I wanted him six feet under or in pieces.
“What I don’t know,” I concluded, “is how I feel about me. As soon as I’ve decided if I’m scared as shit or pissed as hell or both, I’ll tell you.”
I could’ve been Grimm and I could still be—someday. The first I accepted. The second…it was harder to deal with when it was in my face and not the occasional nasty thought whispering in my ear. The mental prodding was a potential. Seeing myself in Grimm was the reality, and I wasn’t ready for it.
Liar.
Niko started to open his mouth. He was going to tell me it wasn’t true. That the other half Auphe and I were nothing alike. If worse had come to worst in the past, caged or not, I wouldn’t have grown to be him. The things brothers are supposed to say. I shook my head again. “Later,” I repeated, “okay?” The “okay” was my version of “please.” Nik would recognize it, but no one else would. Goodfellow already had a picture of me beating a man with a frigging loafer. He didn’t need soppy dialogue to put on his planned Web site to go with it.
“All right,” he agreed, bumping my shoulder with his. “But the clock is ticking.” That small push meant that he needed to know what Grimm was going to do to my head as much as I did. Because he was my brother, but also because he needed to know how I’d handle the next battle with Grimm. It didn’t matter how ready your body was for the fight. It was a given: If your head was up your ass and your brain didn’t know up from down or what that smell was, you were dead.
We came to the end of the hall; the weak light from the room beyond was all that had helped us pick our way through jagged pieces of metal and garbage littering the floor. Stepping out into it, I saw it wasn’t a room; it was almost the twin of the echoing space we’d left behind. Open all the way up to the roof, it contained rusted beams and a floor where every step would have to be cautious or you’d step on a shard of metal, flip it up, and slice your leg open or off completely.
Robin’s list of his heroic traits finally came to a pause; there was never an end. “We’re here. The foundry,” he said quietly. “I told you Hephaestus was a fraud and could hardly build anything when you compare his work to Janus. Tinkertoys would practically puzzle him.”
“There’s a ‘but’ coming, isn’t there?” I asked. “I hear a ‘but.’ Why is there always a ‘but’?”
“I hear a ‘yet’ or a ‘however,’” Niko corrected, “but I’m more gifted in the vocabulary skills than you. Goodfellow?”
“That doesn’t mean he couldn’t make something that could kill you,” the puck answered grimly. “A sword is simple compared to the inner workings of a gun, but it can be equally as deadly. Don’t underestimate whatever he might throw at us. As they say, it’s not what’s on the outside that counts; it’s how many arms and legs something’s inside tells its outside to remove from our bodies.”
“I don’t remember the saying going like that and I think I would’ve remembered that version. Nik?” I said.
“It might not be accurate, but I’d argue it has merit.” He took several impossibly silent steps to the side. There wasn’t a single sliver of metal that rang out. Kalakos, as impossibly silent, followed his lead but in the opposite direction.
Goodfellow had one more piece of advice for us. “Besides toys he might have an employee or several hanging about. I’d tell you that the eye is the best place to hit them, but if that’s not self-explanatory on sight then you need to go back to preschool.”
Then he raised his voice in a shout that rang all of the metal in the room. It was like standing in a Buddhist temple while every monk gathered around to smack you in the head with four-foot-long wind chimes. Despite that I heard Robin’s voice plain as day over it all. “Hephaestus! You humpbacked bastard! Wake up! You have a visitor—it’s Goodfellow and I’ve come to apologize!”
When he quit shouting, the metal slowly fell into silence and I heard him mutter quietly, “Although I shouldn’t have to. It was the best thing to happen to him. The woman was so empty-headed that if your ear was close enough to hers, she would literally suck thoughts out of your head to fill hers. Where most have minds, she had a miniature black hole inside her skull. What she could do with her tongue, which was absolutely unbelievable, wasn’t worth having to listen to her go on and on about butterflies and flowers and how she wanted to spend a month doing nothing but smelling the milk breath of puppies…”
Hephaestus woke up.
I was thankful. I’d already pissed off Robin once today. I didn’t want to do it agai
n by pistol-whipping him into blissfully silent unconsciousness. Hephaestus made that unnecessary by shoving himself to the front of the line.
“Puck.”
Hey, he’d picked up English from the long-dead workers that had toiled over and around him nearly a hundred years before the factory was abandoned. That was convenient. I wouldn’t have to listen to Goodfellow and him insult each other in the seven-thousand-plus past and present languages Robin claimed to know. I had picked up some good Greek curse words from him, though, for the times I was craving a gyro from the shortchanging jackass street vendor who set his food truck up on the sidewalk ten blocks down from our place.
“That’s me,” Robin said with a manic and reckless cheer that didn’t bode of good things to come. “I’ve come to apologize for soiling your wife. I was in the wrong. I’m deeply sorry. I now can admit to my illness and am seeking help through Sex Addicts Anonymous. I am here to make amends, offer you a stale doughnut from one of the meetings if you’d like, and, oh, coincidentally”—as if it were the most casual of thoughts to pop up—“I have a question for you about Janus. You must remember Janus. I’ll bet you sold it for more gold than you could carry. An incredible piece of work. Staggering in its brilliance. Unparalleled in its mixture of art and efficiency.” Giving credit and flattery where it wasn’t due—it was a trickster’s best weapon, according to Robin. “Now, how do we turn it off?”
“Puck…”
The rumble faded into nothing. He wasn’t a morning person, was slow to wake. I related. And he was dead, deadish, whatever. The combination could make no time a good time to wake up. I was thinking we should’ve brought several gallons of caffeine when he spoke again. This time he almost brought a few of the beams far above us down. I dodged a rain of smaller pieces of falling metal while avoiding impaling a foot on those already on the floor around me.
“Aphrodite. Where is Aphrodite? Virgin to my bed, petals of the rose, she who owns my loins and heart. Come home. Come home. Come home. You …Puck…Goodfellow, good—fellow. Good…But where is the good? Where? Nowherenowherenowhere. Wife stealer. Life stealer. Liar. Wretched thief in the night, tainter of all that is pure, death awaiting its day. This day. This day. This day. My day. Puckpuckpuckpuckpuck.”
