Doubletake

by Rob Thurman

  Stupidity is everywhere.

  But for me, right now, things were good. My brother and I kicked supernatural ass for fun and profit. I had a shirt that said that with our phone number. Humans wouldn’t take it seriously. Humans didn’t know what the world really hosted. But the kind that hired us—nonhuman—they knew a walking billboard when they saw it. Running your own business is a bitch. You have to advertise. Promo. Market. Niko did that. I couldn’t be bothered with that crap—unless it resulted in my offensive T-shirt slogan. He and I had been doing this for four years now. Before that we’d done the same, but it had been a hobby, not a career.

  Okay, I say hobby, but it was self-defense, pure and simple. When you’re half human and half of the worst monster to walk the earth—a creature that ate the supernatural for appetizers without putting hardly any effort into it—you weren’t popular with the other monster types. And there were thousands of different kinds. Some immediately attacked me, sensing the half human in me and assuming it would make me weaker—they were wrong. Some ran—they were smart. And some didn’t care either way—we hung out and had a beer.

  Good family. Interesting and well-paying career. Half monster…well, everything couldn’t be perfect, but otherwise right now things were good. I was hoping they stayed that way. Except for Niko. I didn’t have to hope when it came to family.

  The rest of my life might be challenging in some other areas, like at the moment as an adolescent kishi was either trying to eat my leg or hump it to the bare bone, but family? I knew I had that under control. 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. It had leaped downward at me from a fire escape of a condemned tenement apartment building long crumbled in on itself—no demolition crew needed. Gravity worked for free. “Can you get this one off of 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 weren’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 important, to kill for him.

  And to have chosen 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, that would be mine. I shook my leg again, shot another kishi bounding down the side of the next building, equally as dilapidated as the first, putting three bullets between its blazing silver eyes. They shone brighter than any streetlights in this part of town…until their life seeped away and left only the dull gray of death. I felt bad for them—almost—but they had turned a block that had once hosted scavenging homeless, thriving drug dealers, and sullen hookers into a desolate wasteland. In my opinion, 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, starting four months ago, 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 NYC, weren’t pleased to be sharing their money or their snacks with Johnny-come-lately supernatural hyenas from the depths of…um…I should’ve paid attention to where those depths were during the premission rundown—maybe Africa, 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 bleeding ten blocks away. 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 the half our fee slapped into my palm—if it hadn’t been for Niko’s research, finding out the kishi were highly intelligent preternatural hyenas, if extremely malevolent. That meant the adults were fair game, but the younger kishi we had to pat on the head and find a goddamn supernatural foster and rescue organization for murderous fur babies to 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, which had to be where that thought had originated. The adult kishi taking down prey for their young, which luckily was only 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 in them to do. Evolution worked the same for nonhumans as for humans. Kishi were predators to their bones. 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 bully 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 the way 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, my new subconscious. Since I’d let a small piece of me wither and die months ago to save my family, the swamp in my mind that made up the subliminal me was considerably more shadowed. It was more prone to 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 badder than most and I wanted to act on them. Sometimes or often or frequently or very frequently, depending on my mood…no judgment needed or wanted. If I thought it, I absolutely wanted to do it.

  But I didn’t.

  The voices/thoughts were almost as much a bitch as family could be, the squabbling, but I’d learned to mostly tune them out. 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.

  I wasn’t good or bad. I was only me, and I was neither.

  They’d have to invent a new bizarrely long German psychological description for what I was. How did
the German say, “To see him is to piss your pants in fear”? Freud would’ve known.

  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 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 the para-hyena 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 business number was an untraceable phone with voice mail lying on the floor of an otherwise empty storage locker. Niko and I’d been sorry before—we went with safe now. “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 it 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 remotely irritable in the universe was low. Damn low. Contaminating part of your soul will do that…if you believed in souls. I hadn’t made up my mind, but either way it was too bad for baby. It was night-night time. I might as well stop the pattern now. The same as its parents, it 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 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, vio
lence-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.