by Rob Thurman
“Two cars. No sweaters,” I stressed.
Then I leaned closer to Robin and did something I shouldn’t have, that made me feel like crap, but could be necessary. I murmured, “Hephaestus hates you, but what does he think of Hob?”
He feared him. He had to. Alive, dead, or halfway between, all feared Hob.
And no one except Niko, Robin, Promise, Georgina, and me knew Hob was dead. And not deadish, as Hephaestus was, but as dead as they came. Gone from this world for good. It was something to think about.
Until Goodfellow gave a low hiss back, inaudible to everyone but me. “What would he think of an Auphe? What would he think of you if you threw away your sanity, your ability to tell right from wrong, and lived only for every life you could extinguish, to ask him a question? All while knowing if you did, you couldn’t come back. No second chances like you’ve had before, not this time. You would never be Cal again. Never sane again. Never right again.” In that moment he wasn’t Robin. “The next time you speak of Hob is the last time we speak,” he added without emotion, but cold, hard promise.
I knew I shouldn’t have brought up the subject again. Unfortunately I knew too late.
The sly, snarky, patronizingly sarcastic, fast talking, horny, name-dropping Goodfellow was gone; this Robin I didn’t know. He wasn’t my friend, and as I had only the one besides my brother, I wasn’t going to risk losing him. I leaned back before the others noticed the exchange and gave the best and most honest apology I could. It was one my friend would recognize for what it was and hopefully come back.
“Okay. Shit.” I grimaced. “I’ll wear a goddamn sweater.”
It was ninety degrees in Bridgeport, Connecticut, unusually hot, the radio said—before I kicked it. It wasn’t the kind of weather you layered for, and I was wearing a bright green cashmere Lacoste cardigan over a pink polo shirt, pleated khaki pants, white socks, and loafers. I’d also been offered a holster for my Eagle and something called a Members Only jacket to cover that. I knew the names because Goodfellow had labeled each plastic bag in which they were immaculately folded, along with a catalogue page of some blond, blue-eyed, tanned, blindingly white-toothed man wearing the same outfit while standing by a boat. With a blond woman. A blond kid. A blond damn dog…wearing a matching damn sweater.
Douche bag.
It covered the catalogue dick and Robin both.
“What did you do to piss off Goodfellow this badly?” Niko asked, edging away from me as if I were color-contagious. He was dressed in the black-and-gray clothes the puck had smugly given him. Normal clothes. The kind that didn’t make you look like someone pulled the head off a Golfing Ken doll and stuck a catastrophically pissed-off serial killer’s head in its place, which was a look I was pulling off in spades. I let my black hair hang where it wanted. Still no ponytail for me, until Kalakos was gone despite what I’d talked to Niko about in the car.
“You don’t want to know,” I said glumly.
We stood by the rusted chain-link fence at the abandoned Remington Arms factory. Despite its being early afternoon, it wasn’t a safe place to be for most. It was the typical bad part of town, but it would be more peculiar if I were in a good part of town. An industrial area near the water, no shadows, no alleys, nothing green—not a blade of grass pushing up through the sidewalk. Or what was left of the sidewalk.
Nothing but our rusty fence the armory stretched far behind, a wide street with dilapidated houses on the other side. Nik and I were waiting for the others to get out of their car, parked by ours at an empty house across the road with a battered For Sale sign. Promise climbed out of the car, her gloved hands keeping her face well shadowed by the hood of her cloak. She wanted to see this through as much as we did, if only for Niko’s sake.
Following her out of the car was Kalakos, who, as Goodfellow had said, was like a terminal case of gonorrhea with a side order of herpes. You couldn’t get rid of him no matter how hard you tried.
As the three of them were crossing the street, I looked back down at the clothes that were my punishment for pissing off Robin. “Nik, if Hephaestus kills me, strip me, would you? I don’t want my corpse seen like this.” None of the clothes had been worn before. Robin had been waiting with this vengeance bomb for a while, and I’d been the one to set it off. He wouldn’t be caught dead in any of it himself. He dressed expensive and sharp always, but he leaned more toward James Bond than whatever this crime against humanity was. I scratched my stomach, then an arm. “I think it’s burning my skin. Like holy water. I thought that was only in the movies.” I scratched again. “I’m sweating like a pig. Jesus.”
“Stupid assholes. Shitheads. Give me your money or I will fuck you up so bad your mama won’t know you on the slab.”
Finally. I didn’t think he was ever going to make it down our way with that slow shamble.
He was a mugger, gangbanger, junkie, homicidal shit with a knife, probably all four. I’d seen him stumbling down the cracked and crumbling sidewalk as soon as we’d parked the car and hit pavement. He hadn’t been an issue then. If he’d had half a brain to look past me to Niko or to look at my face instead of the opposite of camouflage I was wearing, he wouldn’t be an issue now. But I’d been hoping, and when you wish on that kick-him-in-the-balls star twinkling high above at night, sometimes you get your wish.
Another douche bag, and I couldn’t wait.
“I’m not going to bother to ask. You need him more than I do,” Niko said. “Try not to kill him. We’re not one hundred percent certain he deserves it.”
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 distraction 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.
