by Rob Thurman
“Okay, I have to hurl.” Not from the bill or his obsession with his pants, but from the smell of the food. It looked as though I’d bought myself a slight concussion after all. I made it to the bathroom, slammed the door behind me, and vomited into the toilet. It wasn’t much. I’d had but half of my lunch, no supper yesterday, and not much of breakfast today before having my world—and my stomach—turned inside out.
I had straightened and grabbed the towel to wipe my mouth when the window about five feet up the wall exploded. It was frosted glass for privacy and fair sized, about two feet by two feet. It was the perfect size for the Nepenthe spider that came barging in. Double pincers in simian jaws were opening and closing rapidly, eight black legs were supporting it on the wall and reaching for me, six eyes were fixed on me as its bulbous body finished sliding through the window. It was the size of a big dog, exactly the same size as the German shepherd across from the Oleander Diner that had fled at the sight of me, leaving piss in its wake. The spider’s eyes were the same color as that piss, bright, cheer, middle-of-the-daisy yellow.
I jammed the waffle fork that I still had in my hand right in the middle of all six of those eyes. “Hello, Sunshine.”
Here was the fact I’d let myself forget across the street minutes ago—what I was. I hadn’t been completely serious with my attack on Goodfellow. I was serious now. I kept my arm up and barely out of reach of the pincers as the spider thrashed and screamed. I didn’t know spiders could scream, but this kind was doing a damn good job of it. I pushed the fork in farther until the heel of my hand hit eye and flesh before I rotated the metal, scrambling whatever it was using for a brain. Behind me the door flew open as the spider screeched one last time, twitched violently, and then went seventy-five pounds of dead on the floor. I let go of the remaining five inches of metal and wiped eye goo off my hand and onto my jeans.
“You … You killed a Nepenthe spider with a fork?” Goodfellow said in a strangled croak over my shoulder.
“Yeah.” I snorted and returned to flushing the toilet. I wanted to be a tidy killer for the maid’s sake. “Now imagine what I could’ve done to you at breakfast if I’d really tried.” I gave him a dark grin and added, “Sunshine.”
Goodfellow was less talkative—say “Hallelujah”—as we once again climbed into the car and headed north. Despite what I said about not wanting to go back to New York, I didn’t see I had much choice with spiders either following the two of them or following me. I was guessing me. I’d racked up five to my name so far, and if that didn’t make me the most popular target for the eight-legged crowd, I didn’t know what did. I could try to bail anytime I wanted before we reached the city, but I’d have to start carrying forks by the bucketful if I did.
Speaking of which, I watched as the puck picked up from the floor a clear plastic Baggie containing a plastic fork and knife typical of fast-food “silverware” and then cracked open the car window enough to shove it out.
“That’s called littering,” I commented with the smirk of a mean-spirited ten-year-old bully, which was very close to how I felt. Not pretty, but honest. I wasn’t a bad guy, repeat-repeat, if a damn good monster killer, but I had a headache. I’d been kidnapped—sort of. I was finding out about a weird and creepy world, and I had a job that no one with an ounce of self-preservation would want, where the customers were as freaky as your targets, and you could bet your ass no one tipped—or gave you a free shirt. Being an okay guy was different from being a hero. How long did monster-fighting heroes live in this shadowed world?
“Littering or self-survival,” Leandros added. “Cal, behave and tell Robin you won’t kill him with a fork if he drops his guard.”
Behave? Leandros could claim to be my older brother all he wanted, but I didn’t ever see a moment in the future where his telling me to behave would have any impact on what I did. If that was the brother I had been before, well, best plant a cross in the dirt, because that brother was dead and dust. I was my own man. “No,” I replied, amiably enough. There was no need to be too rotten. I’d already proved my point with the spider. They’d scooped me up like a toddler out of a playpen at Nevah’s Landing, but I knew what I was dealing with now. So did they.
“No?”
“You sound like the Grand Canyon. Every time I say something you don’t want to hear, you repeat it right back. It’s rather unninja of you. Do you get a ninja silence-in-crisis merit badge taken away for that? Do they slice it off with a shuriken from a hundred feet away?” I was wearing one of Leandros’s shirts, black—which led to all the ninja bashing. “And that’s right. I said no. I will collect as many forks as I can and the puckster here will never know when one is headed for his monogamy-loving ass. I don’t know you. Either of you, and all the talk in the world isn’t going to change that.” I leaned back against the seat to watch the scenery pass. “Since I don’t know you, I don’t know what you might do. And since I don’t know that, I don’t know how I’ll react. That’s just honesty. I’m good with forks, but I’m not psychic.”
There was an immediate stinging flick to my ear, not to my head, which was sporting an asphalt headache. He was that considerate at least. “Ow! Shit.” I cupped the ear that burned like fire. He was as bad as Miss Terrwyn had been with a swat.
“Now you know what I, personally, will do if you don’t show respect for your elders.” This time I had seen him move, but he was quick, this brother of mine—cheetah double take quick. “As for Robin, he may just forget about his newly found monogamy and show you a rerun of what you’ve forgotten. He comes by his reputation honestly, from what you told me.”
Jesus. An event I couldn’t remember, but I was doomed to hear about it on a daily basis. “You play dirty.” I sulked, dropping my hand.
“Yes, I do. You taught me how.” Leandros kept driving, seemingly unperturbed at the thought of any reprisal from me. “Since you don’t know us, we’ll tell you anything and everything you want until your memory comes back.”
“Great,” I interrupted before he could say anything further. “I have a shitload of questions for you.” Now that I’d found out about the number of nasties in the world, a list so long, the rain forest would have to be entirely razed to make the paper for it, I could focus on more personal questions. “The puck said one of those spider bites would make someone forget everything, forget how to move, how to fucking breathe.” Jesus. “Even if none of them was left alive to eat me, why didn’t I suffocate on that beach?”
Goodfellow answered that one without thinking twice, which meant he had thought twice or more than twice. The henhouse, I reminded myself. Always remember the henhouse and the fox with a mouthful of feathers. “The only thing I can think is the spider bit something or someone else before you. Like a rattlesnake, it didn’t have a full dose of venom—you received enough that you lost part of your memory, but you kept everything else. You managed to get the ancient pharaoh Prozac, only double or triple the amount. You didn’t forget a recent sorrow. You forgot your entire life. But it does wear off. Have faith.” It was a very smooth explanation, but before I had a chance to comment on how smooth, he’d already changed subjects. “Also, have faith that if you do kill me with a fork, someone will avenge me. Someone with wings, a sword, and a temper to drown the world in fire instead of water.”
“Robin,” Leandros warned.
“What? I’m simply saying. He wanted information. I want to make sure he has the entire picture,” the puck defended himself. He went on to give me more information, not waiting for me to ask for it. Niko and I were brothers. Niko was full Rom with a handful of centuriesold North Greek thrown in, which explained the blond hair. I was half Rom, half gadje—a combination frowned on by the gypsy clans, but not by our mother who had taken off on her own when she was a teenager. She had no prejudices when it came to bed partners, gypsy or non. He put that very carefully. He did not say Sophia didn’t care whom she screwed, but as he went on to say that Niko and I had no other family, that neither of us
knew who our father was, it was easy to connect the dots. Mom got around—and around and around and around. That was a good reason that Niko wasn’t telling me this himself. Who would want to tell his brother that his mom was a slut?
Mom was also dead. She’d died in a fire, the result of bad trailer wiring. I waited to feel something on hearing that. Fine, she never met a mattress she didn’t like, but she’d been my mom. She could’ve had good qualities. She could’ve made cupcakes for my birthday or played with me on a beach that wasn’t freezing. There are worse things than liking to screw around. I had to feel something knowing she was dead, knowing she’d burned to death. Goodfellow hadn’t said that; she could’ve died of smoke inhalation, but I knew better. I didn’t remember, but I knew.
She’d burned.
But I felt … nothing. There was nothing but a bitter taste in the back of my throat. I gave up. Why would I want to remember something that horrible if I didn’t have to? I shrugged for Goodfellow to go on. He did, winding it up quickly. She’d died, leaving Niko and me on our own when we were in our teens. We traveled a lot before and after her death, ran into some monsters eventually, and had our eyes opened in a big way. We ended up in New York, met Goodfellow, started a business, and here we were.
For someone who didn’t know how to shut up, he was succinct as a one-line fortune cookie when he wanted to be. “That’s it?” I demanded. “I grew up, ran around, saw some monsters, came to New York, and am now part of the Leandros Brothers and Monogamy Boy Monster Killers Incorporated?”
“And you work at a bar part-time,” he added. “Oh, you were sexing it up with a Wolf, Delilah, for a while, but she tried to kill a friend of yours, thought about killing you, and things haven’t been the same since. The usual drama that goes along with sex. She’s now the first female pack leader in the Kin—that would be the werewolf Mafia to you—as she managed to get her Alpha and entire pack killed. It was quite clever, how she did that, clever in an inexcusably evil way. of course.” He coughed—a fake cough, I thought, to cover up his jealousy of just how clever she’d been. Pucks, I was learning or slowly remembering, were tricksters through and through.
After clearing his throat—uh huh—he continued. “It’s an all-female pack she started too, another first in the Kin. They’ve been kicking furry ass and pissing on names for several months now. It’s quite impressive. She might one day rule the entire leg-humping enchilada. Which is only fair—equal rights for all, regardless of gender.” He tossed a candy bar back to me. “As for monogamy boy, I’ve never been a boy.” His grin gave me crocodile flashbacks. “I was born a man, more than a man. Do you want to hear a little about my history? It’s far more entertaining than yours, I promise you.”
I ripped at the candy bar wrapper carelessly, tossing pieces of it onto the seat around me. “Jesus Christ, no. I don’t want to hear about your history, not a single second of it. Wait a minute. I was dating a werewolf?”
“No, you were screwing a werewolf. Wolves don’t have relationships outside their own kind. Wolf is for Wolf. You two were simply fornicating, fucking, whatever you wish to call it, although you certainly seemed to enjoy it. Your mood improved enormously. Your complexion cleared up, and the hair on the palms of your hands fell off. Naturally you owe all that to me as I was the one to help you lose your virginity. There wouldn’t have been any furry fornication for you if I hadn’t shown you the way, so to speak.” His smirk was as evil as mine had ever hoped to be when I’d commented on his newly found fork phobia. “Do you want to hear that story? I’ve told it to every single creature I know and sent it in to Penthouse Forum. I may as well tell it to the person it actually happened to.”
If we hadn’t been on the interstate, I would’ve thrown myself out of the car. I didn’t think it, I knew it. If this car weren’t so old, Leandros would’ve hit the child safety locks the minute the puck had ever opened his mouth. Instead, he’d reached back and slammed the lock down with his hand. I’d lost my memory, but he hadn’t lost his.
“Goodfellow, if he doesn’t kill you with a fork, I may. Stop taunting him. He’s been through enough.” Finally, Leandros cut in, looking out for little brother. I could see the upside to having a brother—for as long as I was trapped in a car with the puck anyway. “It was with a nymph, Cal. Your first time was with a meadow nymph in Central Park. I think you said her name was Charm. As for Delilah, yes, she’s a Wolf, and off-limits now, considering that she did try to kill a friend and would’ve killed you in his place if it would’ve gotten her what she wanted. I myself have an arrangement with a vampire named Promise. I told you, nonhuman does not mean monster. It only means be careful.”
I’d been doing a werewolf. My brother had an “arrangement” with a vampire. The puck was monogamous with something with wings and a sword and had been nonmonogamous with anything that moved in the past. “Thanks, guys. Way to go with putting my whole monsters-are-evil thing in perspective. Mom’s dead. I don’t have a father because getting a guy’s name when you screw him is so boring. And I did her great example one better by sleeping with someone who wanted to kill me or use me in some bizarre furry Mafia power play. Life is less a horror movie and more of a goth soap opera. Again, thanks so much for saving me from that god-awful normal life I had working in the diner back in Nevah’s Landing. You’re real pals.” I shifted my ass to a corner between seat and door, ate my candy bar, and tried to ignore them. They didn’t make it easy.
Goodfellow explained how there’d been a rumor of an Ammut priestess doing some very bad things for her goddess down in South Carolina, but it was barely a hint of supernatural gossip. We’d known it would most likely end up as nothing, so I’d gone alone. I’d called and said there was no priestess but a nest of spiders—nothing I couldn’t handle, especially with the grenade I’d taken with me. Apparently I’d never had the chance to use it. They didn’t know what had happened—whether the spiders had gotten the jump on me or I’d had a bad day when I took them on—but I hadn’t called back. They hadn’t been able to track me down with the GPS of my phone, the one I’d lost in the water. I hadn’t even been supposed to be in the Landing. I’d been several towns over when I’d called. How had I ended up there? Other than a childhood longing for Never Land, it was a mystery.
I grunted and kept working on the candy bar.
Leandros said they hadn’t found my car, borrowed from Goodfellow’s used-car lot. He was a used-car salesman—didn’t that figure? The puck could probably sell vibrating panties to nuns. The two of them hadn’t known whether the spiders had chased me to the Landing or I had chased them. They’d been depending on me to fill them in once they found me, because not finding me had never been an option. Leandros was very clear about that. He’d let Goodfellow do most of the talking, ninety-nine point nine percent of the never-ending talking, but of this he personally wanted to make absolutely sure I knew I hadn’t been deserted. I was his brother. He was finding me and bringing me back. Nothing and no one would stop him. He’d hunt until he found me or dropped dead of old age still in search of my bleached bones. It was all very Inigo Montoya of him. My identity was buried in black clouds, but movies I knew. Stupid goddamn spider.
“You’re loyal and faithful, like … um … a basset hound,” I offered Leandros in reply as I swallowed the last bite of chocolate. It was lame, no doubt about it, but I had to say something. His knuckles were whitening on the steering wheel. He wanted or needed some sort of acknowledgment. I tried again. “That’s good to know, especially in the monster-killing business.” There. I’d done my duty. On to other things. “Are there more candy bars?”
“You’re my only family, Cal.” He sounded more determined, if possible, to get his point across. “I will not let you down. Ever.” I was half afraid he’d pull over to write that vow in blood. He appeared impassive to the casual eye, but there was a mass of emotion under that outer stoicism. Look at me with the big words. Being impressed with my mental literary skills was a good distraction from a
dmitting to myself that I knew what Leandros was hiding on the inside.
Too fast, all this was too damn fast. It was like meeting a woman’s parents on the first date. It was too much, too soon, and the cherry on top of all the strange and weird I’d woken up to less than a week ago.
“Yeah, that’s great.” I went for casual. There was nothing wrong with casual. “We’re close. Work together. You don’t let your vampire chick eat me. I’m grateful. About those candy bars …”
Goodfellow interrupted me and this time the smug, salacious, mocking voice was anything but. “Do not. Do not joke about this. Niko won’t say or do anything about it, but I will. You respect this and you respect that you are the luckiest man living to have the family you do, to have the brother you have.”
Just like that, casual was gone and I felt a complete and utter dick. I’d been so damn appreciative of what the people of the Landing had done for me, a haircut and a job, and here Leandros was telling me he practically would’ve spent the rest of his life hunting for me if that was what it took. What did I do? Asked for more candy bars. Called him a basset hound—not that there was anything wrong with basset hounds, but this was my brother. I didn’t remember it yet, but he was, and I was an idiot if I didn’t count myself lucky to have any family at all, much less family that refused to give up on me. Granted, he had kidnapped me, but, technically, it was for my own good. I’d wondered that first day in the Landing if I had friends, and I was all but spitting on a brother.
“Leandros, Christ, I’m sorry about the loyal and faithful thing. I’m sure you’re a better brother than a basset hound.” I grimaced. As apologies went, that was a concoction of frigging beauty. “Sorry about being a shit.” I could’ve said more, but, let’s face it, if he was my brother—the kind that evidently swore blood oaths and would battle armies single-handedly to make sure I got regular dental care or a yearly flu shot—then he knew what was under my outer candy-coated shell too.
