Doubletake

by Rob Thurman

  We decided to clean up on the way. We couldn’t go back to Niko’s and my place, thanks to Janus, or Promise’s, thanks to the time limit. Same went for Goodfellow’s, thanks to Grimm.

  Grimm, whose own timing was suspiciously coincidental when it came to Janus.

  In the car, I made Robin sit in the back with Kalakos and hoped for one day that he could at least pretend to let the monogamy slide. Man hath no fear like a closed-minded Rom chased by a puck ready to tap that, knock some boots, bang some balls, whatever those puck kids were calling it these days. If I had cut Kalakos’s throat when he first showed up, as I’d been tempted to, it wouldn’t approach the punishment of a horny puck thinking you reminded him of Achilles.

  We all threw down Tylenol as I drove back to the city. “I was thinking,” I said, fiddling with the radio, putting it off, as I didn’t want to say it at all, “Janus and Grimm showing up at the same time. Maybe it wasn’t a Rom family in the clan that passed down the frigging secret password to get Janus’s juice flowing. Grimm has been around thirty years, free twelve of them. The son of a bitch went to adult-education classes to get his GED. He knows how to research and problem-solve, not just slaughter. Probably reads Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, like Nik.” I added, “I hope he doesn’t sleep with them like Nik does. That’s not Auphe; that’s just sick.”

  Niko snorted as he was cleaning the blood where he could, pulling up his pants legs and taking off his shirt. He was using surgical sterile scrubs from the first-aid kit he’d brought with us. We didn’t go much of anywhere without one. “I sleep with someone much warmer. Can you say the same?”

  Not since I’d booted my ex, Delilah, out of my life and was waiting to put her down like a rabid dog. In a way she was. She was a Wolf, taking over the werewolf Mafia—the Kin—and had tried to kill me, Niko, and two other long-gone friends. The other Wolves, Alphas or not, feared her. She had no limits, no conscience—only ruthlessness and the certainty that no one counted in this world but her. Rabid in the mind and soul.

  But in better days, she had been warm in bed.

  Robin accepted the kit handed back to him. “You think Grimm is capable of that? Finding out how to wake up Janus and stealing him? Being what he is?”

  I flipped down the visor and wished for sunglasses. The clouds were thinning, and the sun, lower in the sky or not, was directly in my eyes. The radio did say the rain had stopped in the city. That should keep Janus out of sight until nightfall.

  “Grimm is me on crack with eighteen years of torture, locked naked in a cage, fed nothing but raw meat, and then escaping to twelve years of freedom. He hates the Auphe more than I did, and who the hell thought that was possible? Think what I would’ve been like if I’d lived his life. If I were more driven, smarter, so sociopathic that they need a new name for it, and not crazy.”

  If he’d had the Auphe kind of crazy along with their skills and predation, that could’ve actually helped us. Arrogance and insanity—they had been their only weaknesses.

  “You like him?” Robin decided he didn’t want to think about it and brushed it off with, “I wouldn’t have tried to sell you that first car. I promise you that.” He had taken off his coat and then his pants entirely, not bothering to roll them up like Nik, to scrub down the slashes and cuts on his legs. I could see in the rearview mirror that there was enough red splattered for an entire finger-painting class gone wild. My legs felt as his appeared as I drove, but since Niko had been pulled beneath the earth, scraping metal as he went, and Robin was about as bad off as I was, I’d rather have him tormenting Kalakos while I claimed the driver’s seat.

  “You would be more driven, in a positive way, if you were less lazy,” Niko pointed out doggedly. “And you are intelligent. You lack some on occasion in the knowledge base of what we hunt, but again…”

  “Lazy,” I grumped. “Well, you can take it to the bank Grimm is not. He’s motivated, obsessed, and since the Auphe aren’t here for vengeance, he’s decided the world will do instead.”

  “Who is Grimm? Another Auphe?” asked Kalakos, who hadn’t been allowed in on the debriefing of my kidnapping, “and why isn’t this ¸tap wearing any underwear, his koro kani waving free in the breeze?”

  “My dick is not blind nor a scrawny chicken, and if I was going to die fighting Hephaestus, I wanted its glory witnessed one last time,” Robin replied, offense lurking nastily behind the trickster facade. “And if I weren’t monogamous, arthida, you’d find that a Rom can’t run far or fast enough to escape what I’m carrying. But no worries, I do not sexually assault, in the traditional fashion. I’d strangle you instead with my nonblind, nonchicken dick. I have the reach to circle your neck and some to spare.”

  From Kalakos’s saber suddenly lying across his lap, he believed him. I laughed, didn’t try not to. He had healed me and saved Niko, but trust is earned, and not in two actions or two days. “Your arm’s bleeding a good deal,” Niko commented, while still cleaning blood from his skin. He unbuttoned the sleeve at my wrist as I noticed the entire material starting six inches below my shoulder had gone from pink to solid red. It was worth it. I’d take red over pink and anything over those damn buttons, no matter how I had to get it. Goddamn Goodfellow.

  He rolled up the sleeve until he revealed the cut. I took a quick look, then eyes back on the road. It was a keeper. Monsters…paien…whatever Robin wanted to call them, they respected scars. In our life we’d eventually come around to that way of thinking as well. Not as badges of honor, or attractive to the opposite sex, but signs you’d fought something big and bad and lived to show the proof. We didn’t care about the first two, or Niko didn’t; I kept the second one on call if needed, but the third…it was a warning that something nasty had fucked with me and not walked away. You’d best make certain you were bigger and badder and nastier than hell if you didn’t want to make their same mistake.

  Bleeding in the gush of a slow waterfall, the wound was long and ugly, starting in the front of my biceps, curving to the back of my arm, and was about half an inch wide. A Cyclops’s talon isn’t as sharp or precise as a scalpel. One thing did relieve me. It was two inches below my tattoo. Messing that up would’ve pissed me off.

  Kalakos, once Robin’s pants were back on, leaned up to see. “‘Fratres…’ Part of your tattoo says ‘brothers’ in Latin. What does the rest say?”

  “It says, ‘If you’re close enough to read this, I’m going to pluck out your eyes and use them as Ping-Pong balls.’ Mind your own damned business.” I ducked instinctively as the first-aid kit came flying back over. Niko caught it. “You want your stitches while you’re driving or in a fast-food parking lot?”

  I was hungry. That tipped the scales. While we were at McDonald’s, I ate a Big Mac with my other hand while Niko stitched my arm. Goodfellow refused the food, saying he’d seen pigs at troughs who dined better. Kalakos had brought back the Big Mac, fries, and chocolate shake for me, a salad for Niko, and two plain hamburgers for himself.

  “You are stoic. Admirable.” Kalakos watched Niko’s precise work. “I’ve sewn myself up often enough and cursed most of the time. On the first and last occasion that I killed a werewolf, I may have screamed in finishing the stitching of the last of the seven claw marks.”

  “I’m not stoic.” I reached for the shake wedged between my legs. “I’m used to it. Big difference. If I screamed or yelled every time I was cut up and Nik had to turn me into a craft project, I’d lose my voice.”

  “We face Wolves every day. They don’t attack us often anymore, but for years it was almost a daily event. You, Emilian Kalakos”—it was the first time I’d heard Niko say his entire name—“are out of your league here. When Janus is dealt with, you should leave. The creatures that live in the city make Wolves seem as puppies.” Niko finished washing off the stitches with another surgical scrub.

  “And I’m not wanted.”

  “You may have saved Cal. You did save me. It’s appreciated, but it doesn’t wipe out the past. Your opport
unity to make amends has long come and gone.” He slipped his shirt back on and put the first-aid kit back together and handed it to Kalakos in case he needed it. He didn’t want him around, didn’t want him at all, but Nik, contrary to what he was saying and unlike his father, did do what was right from the very beginning. Not a lifetime later.

  Kalakos proved to be as stubborn as Niko. Genes do sometimes tell. “You have a tattoo as well. Same black and red, but a different language. I do not recognize it.” What does it say? went unspoken, as Niko wouldn’t threaten to make Ping-Pong balls of his eyes; he’d do it first, warn after the fact.

  But Niko did answer. “‘Brothers Before Souls.’ Cal’s gift, albeit drunken, to me.”

  When I had a choice at one point to revert to human, at least temporarily, or stay as I was born and far more able of keeping my brother alive, I’d made my decision and it needed no thought. I would do anything for Nik, whether it be light, gray, or the dark at the end of the road. Before the father of my half brother, before my friends, before my life, before the world itself, and, yeah, before my soul. It was my promise to Niko, and he might not have wanted it, but it was his and he knew what the tattoo meant.

  Exactly what it said.

  “Can you match that?” Niko asked.

  “No.” Kalakos settled back as I checked the mirror again. He turned to face out the window. “No, I can’t.”

  At least the bastard wasn’t making excuses anymore.

  “There’s a tunnel under Atlantic Avenue?” I asked skeptically standing in the parking lot of a funeral home in Brooklyn. I felt out of place not wearing a heavy gold chain with a thick patch of chest hair showing. I knew I didn’t belong behind a funeral home. I was alive, and if I weren’t alive, my body would be scraps in some beast’s stomach, not laid out like a plastic doll in a coffin.

  “More than a tunnel,” Robin answered with exasperation. “Niko, I know he can read. I’ve seen him do it. Can’t you deprive him of food or bathroom privileges until he learns one new thing a month?”

  Niko was stiff and limping, but we all were. “I could, but then bathroom privileges would become the kitchen sink or the corner of the Dumpster outside. He’s an adult. I don’t like it, but that means he’s entitled to embrace his ignorance. Cal, beneath Atlantic Avenue…”

  “Is a tunnel built in ye olden days. It was big enough for two locomotives to pass each other side by side. They closed it down before the nineteen hundreds. Now it’s a tourist attraction. You can go down a manhole back at the Court Street intersection on some guided tour.” I’d reloaded my Glock and tucked it in the back of my pants and pulled out my shirt, the blood on it now reddish brown, to cover it up. The xiphos I gave to Niko to tuck away in his coat. “So bite me. Who’s the genius now?”

  Robin slapped his forehead. “I forgot. Ishiah has those crass ‘unknown facts of NYC’ bar napkins that were delivered by mistake. I saw them at the Panic.”

  With an internal shudder, I wished that had been all I’d seen at the Panic.

  “Yep, a mistake,” I said, pushing the Panic far from my thoughts, “but that doesn’t change the fact that I read them, because I’m not dense.” In reality I would’ve, as Niko said, embraced that lack of knowledge thoroughly, but bartending had its slow moments; a Wolf had thrown another Wolf through the TV and the wall behind it, and porn was not allowed in the Ninth Circle. Your boss and your best friend doing it was no problem, but no porn in the bar. I didn’t get it either. Ishiah had some weird rules.

  Until the new TV arrived, I read napkins.

  “Regardless of your newfound brilliant knack for trivia, not all of the tunnel is a tourist trap. At least half of it was walled off and that is where the market is.” Goodfellow walked us to the back of the funeral home and knocked.

  A few moments later it was opened by a man in his fifties with a long, narrow face, eyes moist with unshed sympathetic tears, a charcoal suit, a deep, somber voice, and a box of Kleenex in one hand. “You’ve come to the wrong door, but how can I direct you in your time of sorrow?”

  “Relax, Jackie boy. We just want to go downstairs,” Robin said.

  The eyes overflowed with tears and Jackie snatched a Kleenex, which I’d thought was for distraught clients, to blow his nose. “Sorry, Rob. I’m trying out some contacts and they’re eating my goddamn eyes alive. I can barely see ya. Sure, get your asses in here before Pinky brings the police running with all that blood.”

  Me being Pinky. Goodfellow and that damn shirt he’d forced on me would make sure that nickname stuck around for a year or so.

  “How’s the wife? She up front?” We followed Goodfellow up the stairs and inside while he talked up Jack the Snot Machine.

  “Yeah, snooty bitch.” He frowned. “She wants me to go by Jacques instead of Jackie while we’re working, so’s we seem fancier. Then we ran out of embalming fluid a week ago—a shortage on fricking embalming fluid, you ever heard of shit like that? And that’s when the bus wreck happened. Family reunion. Been coming to our funeral home to be stuffed in overpriced boxes since great-great-great-whoever. So’s I’m out raiding every grocery store in Brooklyn for that runny maple syrup. Almost like water, cheap-ass shit. But it runs through the embalming machine like a dream. And I’m thinking, Praise Jesus and halle-fucking-lujah, ’cause twenty of those suckers are stacking up in the morgue and starting to go off in a bad way.” He opened a door off the hall marked, JANITOR ONLY. DANGEROUS CLEANING SUPPLIES. FLAMMABLE. “But that ain’t the end of it. The next morning Grandma Nosy wants to know before the service why her father smells like a pancake breakfast.” He stepped back out as we stepped in. “Eh, what can you do? It’s always something.”

  “That, Jackie, is truer than you know. Good luck with the wife and the waffles.” Robin gave him the Brooklyn aim of the finger and firing of the thumb before closing the door behind us.

  “He’s human,” I said.

  “That he is.” Robin unlocked another door on the other side of the room. It was double bolted and had a security pad for a password.

  “He doesn’t know about Monster Mart?” I persisted.

  “No. That would only mess with his tiny mind, and Jackie has far too little to endanger. Besides, a zombie or vampire running a funeral home? What a cliché,” he noted with disdain.

  The door opened. “He thinks I’m a drug dealer or a gun runner or run a white slave ring. As long as I pay him something every month, he minds his own business.” There were more stairs and no light as the door shut behind us. Robin clapped his hands and half domes of plastic sprang to a soft white light. They sat on the stairs and up against the wall. “Pick up the pace. We have a few blocks to walk, and every once in a while I get blood leeches nesting down here. Fourteen feet long. Not something you want to get tangled up in because you’re too slow.”

  All of us limped faster while Robin explained the marketplace was in the part of the tunnel walled off from tourists, civilians, and the homeless. Also all the monsters had their own ways in. Some species shared: the Wolves, the revenants, the vampires. Others, like Goodfellow, preferred their entrance private.

  About two blocks later we walked through a massive brick arch that had to be as thick as a man was tall. The ceiling was brick too and about ten feet high. And beyond the arch were booths, tents, tables…anything you could imagine from an ancient bazaar to a white-trash yard sale was here.

  “You…stained with blood. I see your past, right before me. I’ll tell it to you for a sip of fresh blood.” To my right, a creature crouched on the wet brick floor. He…I thought…he was stirring a spidery seven-jointed finger around a cracked plate of intestines. I didn’t have to think twice on that. I’d spilled enough that I knew what they looked like. Eyes of dark gold streaked with fungus green studied me, the slippery mass before him, and then me again. It could’ve been a salamander from its moist skin—if its mother mated with about twenty South American face-eating spiders at once and a snake to top it off for the mottled green
-and-gray forked tongue.

  “No, thanks, froggy. I’ve lived it once. I can do without the rerun.” I kept moving until the hand wrapped around my forearm twice over.

  “For two sips I’ll tell your present and future. I see those as well,” came a needy, sibilant hiss. “Everyone wants to know what lies beyond and what lies within.”

  He stood four feet tall and I could’ve bent down to his level, but I didn’t. I grabbed his neck and jerked him off the ground up to mine. I stared into his eyes—close enough that I could see a perfect reflection of myself in the black pupils. “You have no idea what lies within me,” I said, soft, smooth, and hungry. Not for food, but for fear. “Go back to your bowl of Campbell’s Cup o’ Guts before I let you see if you can read your own intestines with more fucking accuracy.”

  To give me credit…it had been a long day.

  I dropped him then with the unpleasant sound of a snail squashed under your shoe. “If that’s the best this place has, Goodfellow, we are wasting our time and I’m spending more of mine in a pink shirt.”