by Rob Thurman
Yeah, that kind of thing made it hard to forget just what you were.
“Stubborn.” It wasn’t said under her breath; it wasn’t even a whisper. And it was accompanied by the sharp sound of her heel hitting the floor as she turned on it and whirled away. Georgie in a temper—there was a first, and despite the unsettling turn to the situation I felt my lips twitch. Then the half-born smile faded. She knew. She knew and she didn’t seem to care. What that might mean to me I couldn’t even begin to wrap my mind around.
Several hours later Mr. Geever returned early from his sister’s and I made my escape, giving George a hasty and stiffly casual wave. She was sitting at a small table in the corner with one of a never-ending stream of petitioners, but that didn’t slow my pace any. By the time I hit the door I was going at a clip quick enough to have the bells jangling frantically overhead. I’d spent a good period of my life running. Why change my ways now? As defense mechanisms went, I had this one down pat.
The rest of the day was spent very carefully not thinking about what had happened that morning. I did the dishes, put up clothes, even scrubbed the tub . . . things I rarely if ever got off my lazy ass to do. By the time Niko came home, I was so desperate for a distraction that I said something that literally stopped him in his tracks.
“Hey,” I said the moment he opened the door. “Good day? Learn a lot? Wanna spar?”
He stood still in the doorway with keys dangling from his hand to regard me with bemusement. “Wrong apartment or pod person. I’m not quite sure where to place my bet.”
“Yeah, yeah, smart-ass.” I was sitting on the coffee table, and I crossed one ankle over the other. “When you’re loaded with natural talent, you don’t have to practice. I’m just making an exception to help you out.” Never mind that last time he’d wiped the floor with my butt and then for an encore did it again, this time using the ceiling.
“You are quite the philanthropist.” Shutting the door behind him, he moved closer and with folded arms looked down at me for a long moment, seeing probably more than I wanted him to. “Bare hands or blades?” he asked finally. “It’s the humiliation of your choice.”
I chose bare hands. I was many things, but stupid I was not. That’s not to say I wouldn’t get my ass kicked. If history was any indication, chances were high that I would. But nothing stung quite like the slap of the broad side of a blade, even the wooden ones Niko kept for practice. We could’ve gone to the gym or Niko’s old dojo, but the few times we had we’d attracted too much attention. Crowds at the gym were split between chanting for blood and calling 911, and the dojo was thick with disapproval over our technique. Mine was nonexistent and Niko’s was a mixture of many methods. We didn’t fight by certain rules; we fought to live. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was effective.
Now we fought either in the apartment—and didn’t our neighbors love that?—or in more secluded areas of Central Park. Washington Square Park was closer, but there weren’t too many private areas there and cops tended to frown on sword waving in public. This time we chose the apartment. Pushing the furniture against the walls, we cleared the center of the room. I gave the couch one last shove and straightened. His back half-turned to me, Niko had lifted his hands automatically to pull back his hair out of the way into a ponytail . . . hair that was no longer there. As his self-exasperated exhalation reached my ears, I was already taking him down. My foot hit the small of his back, knocking him several feet through the air and onto the floor. I would’ve landed on my stomach and probably promptly barfed up my lunch. Niko, of course, alighted catlike on his hands and knees. Looking over his shoulder, he offered, looking pleased, “Devious and without compunction. Nicely done indeed.” The fact that he’d deliberately given me the opening didn’t change his appreciation of my performance.
Then he was up and on me as inexorable as the tide. Lashing out, one blow from the heel of his hand hit my chest and knocked me backward. Despite our precautions, I took out a lamp. Hula skirt and generous hips shattered beneath me to gyrate no more. It was my favorite lamp, one I’d picked up at a secondhand store in the Village. “You did that on purpose, you son of a bitch.” I glared.
“It’s conceivable,” Niko admitted mockingly and without remorse. The bastard had never shared my taste for the classier things in life. He didn’t wait for me to get back to my feet; he only kept coming. Just like real life.
I aimed a blow at his knee, hoping to crumple his leg beneath him, but he knocked my foot aside before it reached its target. I lunged past him only to receive a roundhouse kick to my hip that had me flying through the air . . . and not with the greatest of ease. The wall broke the first part of my fall and the couch finished up the job. It was a familiar feeling, the give of the cushions under my back. It was where I usually ended up during our practice sessions. And that had given me an idea the last time it had happened. Normally I came up with a groan and mumbled curse. This time I came up with a shotgun. Tucked behind the cushions for a week now, awaiting the perfect moment.
This moment.
Swinging the muzzle his way, I pulled the trigger on the first barrel and then the second. Click. Click. Snarling, I said, “Bang, bang, Professor. Your ass is grass.”
He blinked at me and then the corners of his mouth curled slightly, for him a wide smile. Placing a hand to his chest, he then held it up to show imaginary blood. “You got me.”
“First time ever.” I grinned, dropping the weapon’s muzzle toward the floor. “Is there some sort of prize? Weekend in Maui? Year’s supply of veggie burgers?”
“I can now let you out without a leash.” He sat on the couch. “Trust me, that’s prize enough.”
I sat beside him and laid the gun on the floor. “Kind of weird . . . pointing a gun at you again.” When Darkling had taken me over, I’d done my level best to kill Niko . . . our level best, rather. It had gone down in Central Park. I’d been armed with a gun and a boggle, Niko with a sword and a happy little surprise. It wasn’t precisely a fair fight, and I’d still lost. Best loss of my life.
“I know.” His hand tugged at the dark tail of hair gathered at the nape of my neck. There was a comfortable silence for a few minutes and then he asked quietly, “You want to talk about it?”
Only a brother would know he wasn’t referring to the time that the only thing that saved him from a bullet from my gun had been a pricey piece of body armor. No, Niko was all too aware that there was something else on my mind that had prompted my request for a workout. I hesitated, then groaned, “George.”
His lips twitched. “My little boy, all grown-up.”
“I knew I should’ve kept my mouth shut,” I griped, leaning back into a boneless slouch.
Sobering, he tilted his head toward me. “She’s been chasing you for nearly a year now, Cal, and she’s as stubborn as you. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“What?” I asked with more dread than curiosity.
“That sooner or later she’s going to catch you.” Gray eyes lit with amusement, he went on. “And would that be so terrible?”
Yeah, it would, but Niko wouldn’t be able to see that, no more than George herself could. My brother wanted things to work out for me; he wanted that so damn bad. One of the most aware people in the world teamed with a psychic, and both of them were blind as bats. Utterly. But did I call him on it? No. My day was already ruined; I had no desire to trash his too. I shook my head noncommittally and changed the subject. “We have time for supper before we meet Rover. You want to grab a pizza?”
“The meeting’s tonight?”
“Yeah, Promise left a message on the machine. Seven at the accountant’s office.” I gave the word the sarcastic emphasis it deserved. “Apparently Cerberus treats the ‘business’ like an actual business. Go figure. Are we sure we want to get into the middle of some Kin mess? Whether it’s self-defense on his part or not, he is still Kin. He’s still a crook. I can live with it, but I know you, Nik. You like things a little more black-and-
white.”
“I’m that predictable, then?” Not offended, he slapped my shoulder lightly and then got to his feet. “At the very least, we can hear his flunky out. If we find his rival isn’t planning anything nefarious, then we prevent a possible war within the Kin. That can only be to the good.”
“If you say so,” I said skeptically. Leg-humping, crotch-sniffing mutts with a license to steal—it was a strain to see the good there. But as long as we were paid, it didn’t make much difference to me what the fleabags did to each other. “Pizza?” I repeated hopefully. “It’s the least you could do for breaking the almighty hula lamp.”
“The least I can do. Really?” Dark blond eyebrows lifted. “How very wrong you are.”
4
With a stomach comfortably stretched with vegetarian Chinese, I shifted impatiently in the overstuffed chair. We’d gone to Niko’s favorite place on Sixteenth Street and despite its being meatless they served a nice plate. George had seemed to like it. That’s right; she had shown up, had been waiting for us by the door. Trying to avoid a psychic—talk about an exercise in futility. Christ.
She had wielded her chopsticks with aplomb, stolen food from my plate, and said it was a shame Niko had felt the need to tag along on our very first date. That had immediately led to me choking on a piece of broccoli while Niko poured her a fresh cup of green tea and apologized gravely for his intrusion. As her hand patted me helpfully on the back, I had finally managed to swallow. But while I’d been able to dislodge the broccoli, I had less luck dislodging George. She’d stuck around for the whole meal despite my pointed remarks about curfews and pissed-off mothers and then waved a cheerful good-bye as we had walked away to our meeting. I’d looked over my shoulder once to see her give me a smile so bright and warm . . . funny how it felt exactly like a bear trap snapping shut on my leg.
Shifting again, I tried not to think about the logistics of gnawing through a leg made purely of emotion, and checked my watch. “How long is he going to keep us cooling our heels out here?”
“Patience, Grasshopper.”
I rolled a jaundiced eye in Niko’s direction. He and Promise sat side by side, a matched set in cool composure. “So, you two got a late-night financial-planning session later?”
That shut him up . . . for the moment, anyway. But Promise regarded me with the same amusement with which one would look at a puppy that had piddled on the carpet. I was a bad boy, but I was just so darn cute she couldn’t bear to smack me with a rolled-up paper. She had met us outside of the building, her driver dropping her off. It was a business meeting, she had pointed out firmly, and as such all the partners attended. Her hair pulled back into a sleek twist, she wore an outfit in the deepest violet that managed to be both businesslike and subtly provocative. Don’t ask me how she pulled that off, because I didn’t have a clue.
The three of us were cooling our heels in the waiting area of the accountant’s office in the Flatiron District. And it really was an office. I’d been picturing the back of a bar with the stink of alcohol, cigars, and wet dog in the air. I couldn’t have been further off the mark. I didn’t know what the inside of the sanctum sanctorum looked like, but our tiny bit of it was pretty nice. I was sure Cerberus’s would be far more plush, but this was passable. It reminded me of an insurance office, a ritzy one, but nonetheless . . . there were chairs of deep blue and wine, and what looked to be a genuine Persian rug on the wood floor. Sedate prints, walls of pale ivory, and subdued lighting—it was all more than I expected. And it held my attention for an entire minute. I checked my watch again. A quarter of an hour this guy had kept us waiting. Despite what Promise had said earlier, this guy wasn’t impressing me much with his manners. He must have missed that day in obedience school. “Fido,” I drawled, “are you sure he’s actually back there and not out watering a fire hydrant somewhere?”
As Niko raised his eyes upward and Promise pressed fingers to her forehead, the albino wolf guarding the connecting door fixed me with a baleful ruby stare. Apparently, Cerberus was helping out his fellow nonconformists. Yeah, he was all about the civil rights of the differently abled wolf. It didn’t make this guy’s stare any less rude. Unbroken direct eye contact was a sign of aggression and dominance in both canines and lupines. How did I take it? Pretty much the same way. And this version of it was beginning to piss me off. I leaned forward and watched as the movement caused the wolf’s broad nose to wrinkle distastefully. Apparently, the smell of Auphe wasn’t exactly sweet as roses to this guy’s nose. He was one of the wolves stuck with a paw in both worlds. He had a mostly human face, with the exception of round wolf eyes colored blood-rage red, a wicked wedge of forehead, and very slightly tapered ears. A shock of white hair fell to his shoulders in a wolfish ruff and crept silky fingers onto his transparently pale jaw. That hair he kept trimmed to long pointed sideburns. From a distance, he could pass. From a few feet—no way. Even your average clueless citizen would think him exotic, unusual, oddly beautiful, and nowhere near human. Especially when he opened his mouth to reveal a brace of fangs that would make any orthodontist lose his lunch. They were also bound to make speech difficult. Despite his subtle wolf features he stood upright and with the body of a man. However, the cold intelligence behind those eyes was anything but human.
“No? You don’t speak?” I said when he remained silent with a snarl locked onto his pointed face. I patted my pockets. “Maybe I have a nummy-num here somewhere. Lemme check.”
A hard swat on the back of my head put an end to my antics. “Stop playing,” Niko ordered. “This is business, not pleasure.”
“Right now it doesn’t seem to be either one,” I groused, sliding down in the chair and tapping an impatient foot.
Suddenly, Snowball turned his head toward the door and, hearing something we couldn’t, gave a nod before laying a hand on the handle to push it open. The wicked punch of claws painted black weren’t exactly human either, but they’d be good for opening the occasional brewski. I noticed he was exceedingly careful not to scratch the finish on the shiny brass. “Go.” Fixing those alien eyes on us, he repeated, “Go. In.” As I’d thought, the words sounded like chunks of glass vomited forth to shatter in the air. As I started to get to my feet, his throat moved convulsively to produce one more. “Now.”
“Yeah, right. Now you’re in a hurry,” I snorted, but picked up the pace as Niko moved up beside me. Snowball I could deal with. I had no such illusions regarding my brother. The doorway was actually large enough for all of us to have walked through side by side—this really was some place—but I hung back and let Niko and Promise pass through before me. We might hold equal partnerships in this new business, but I was aware of my interpersonal-relationship skills. I didn’t have any and I couldn’t be bothered to pretend. We all have our talents, some darker than others. Niko was a leader, through and through. And Promise had obvious string-pulling abilities. Me? I was a loner, who by some miracle of fate wasn’t alone. I was also a smart-ass, and oddly enough that didn’t seem to pay the bills.
The inside office matched the outside. Expensive, but not especially memorable . . . a lot like the guy behind the desk. Promise hadn’t mentioned that he wasn’t a wolf and I gave her a sideways look and received a dainty shrug in return. Yeah, I was surprised by Caleb, but then again, with Cerberus’s mysterious “difference” making him more receptive to wolves like Snowball, who’s to say it wouldn’t bleed over onto different races? He was the Albert Schweitzer of monsters, all right, good old Cerberus.
For whatever reason, the accountant wasn’t a wolf. In fact, I didn’t know what he was. He looked human, even smelled human. He was in his late twenties, early thirties. What with his short dark brown hair and amiable blue eyes, lean face, fair complexion, and suit and tie, you would’ve passed him on the street without a thought. Until he smiled.
Bingo. Membership card in the nonhuman club if ever I’d seen one.
It was the teeth. They weren’t anything like Snowball’s, not a wolfish a
rray crammed into a small primate mouth. No, numbers boy had the regular amount; they were simply pointed. All of them. He looked like a cheerful piranha, albeit one with an MBA. It was weird, but on the scale that I measured my life against, it barely registered. There were more monsters in the world than could be counted. I had better things to waste my time on and not enough fingers and toes to make the attempt.
“Brothers Leandros, Madame Promise, please, have a seat. I’m Caleb,” the piranha said pleasantly, straightening a stack of folders on the desk. “Would you care for coffee? Drinks? Blood? Drugs? No? Very well.” He laid his hands flat on the desk and gave us his undivided attention. “Your lovely colleague here has said that you can assist us.”
Taking a seat in one of the three chairs facing the desk, I leaned back as Niko seated Promise. “We may,” he said noncommittally, settling in the center chair. “However, we’d like to hear more details before we commit.”
“Details?” Caleb leaned back as well and picked up a pen to tap it thoughtfully on the desk. “That’s certainly fair enough. I thought I’d given all I knew to your ever-gracious partner, but feel free to ask away.” He was so goddamn polite and earnest it made my teeth hurt. The Kin were really lowering their standards. Sure, this guy had the teeth and a fast calculator, but where was his homicidal mania? Where was his bloodlust? It was unnatural.
“There can never be enough details, not in a situation such as this,” Niko said firmly. “To begin with, we want to know precisely what the result of our actions will be. We certainly won’t be involved in setting up an innocent, rival of your employer or no. Our services are for sale, not our souls.”
