Blackout

by Rob Thurman

  “Anything you’ve killed. I’ve actually seen you hesitate on a deathblow so you could deliver some sort of action movie tagline first.” He shook his head, giving me the same look he’d given the feather in his milk.

  “Then I’m a sarcastic idiot?” I grinned again. Brotherly resignation—that was fun too.

  The eyes that were my mirror suddenly weren’t anymore. They lightened and I saw amusement in the gray. Did I ever look like that? Content? At peace? The way I semi-avoided my own reflection, who knew? “Yes, you’re a sarcastic idiot, but you’re easier to keep alive than a fichus and you look good in the corner of the apartment.”

  “And I can water myself. Handy.” The bar where we were drinking, the Ninth Circle, was where I was a part-time bartender. It was also a “peri” bar. Peris, Leandros had told me, were rumored to be half angel, half demon, but they were simply supernatural creatures with wings and the source of most angel myths. Then he added that all myths were wrong in one way or the other and to never depend on them, assuming I remembered them. I should depend on him instead.

  For someone who had kidnapped me—no matter how he phrased it, claimed me as his brother, and made me run this morning until I’d hoped I’d cough up my lungs so I could die and end it all, he made me want to believe him. He had this air about him. If this were a movie, and it seemed more like it all the time, he’d be dead in the first fifteen minutes; it was just that kind of aura of too damn good and noble for this world. A Goose in a world full of Mavericks.

  On the other hand, he chopped the head off a revenant as if he were dicing a carrot for a salad. Honorable but deadly. I was lucky to be related to him and that he liked me. If he didn’t, it might’ve been my head bouncing down the hall. I frowned slightly at the thought. “You like me, right? I mean, you swore to find me to the ends of the earth with all sorts of angst in your great big noble basset hound heart, but that’s duty. That’s an obligation. Do you actually like me?” Okay, that didn’t make me sound like a girl at all. “Do you not hate me, I mean. Am I an okay coworker? Do a good job with the monster killing? Not cause too much trouble? Remember to get you a Christmas present, like extra hefty garbage bags for tossing out nonzombie bodies? Am I a not-too-crappy brother?” Oh shit, forgetting Christmas seemed like something I would do, considering the condition of my room. My brain was probably in the same condition—a crazed mess where not one dutiful holiday responsibility could be found until a month too late. “Fuck. Am I a bad brother?”

  Under all of that verbal diarrhea was the same thing I’d kept repeating in Nevah’s Landing—I’m not such a bad guy. Tell me I’m not a bad guy. Only this time, here was someone who actually knew for sure.

  This was stupid. It wasn’t as though he’d want to waste his time on someone who wasn’t halfway decent. His standards were high—up-in-the-atmosphere high. I could tell—anyone who was around him longer than two minutes could tell. That meant I couldn’t see him putting up with someone who wasn’t worth it. I didn’t know why I wanted the Leandros brothers’ seal of approval anyway. I was who I was. I’d worn a gingham apron without killing anyone over it. Really, how bad could I be?

  He studied me so intently that I instantly wished I’d kept my mouth shut. Unless I was eight years old and had a Barbie Diary, this wasn’t the kind of conversation I should be having. I was a guy. Guys were stoic and macho and we had three emotions: bored, angry, and horny. If there were more, they’d have sent around a memo. I slid down in my seat and concentrated on my beer. God knew I couldn’t fake a piss break. Godzilla himself would probably pop out of the goddamn toilet with the luck I’d been having in bathrooms.

  Leandros reached across to tap his soy milk glass against my beer bottle. “Aside from a rather excessive enthusiasm for your work, you are a good brother, yes. You’re certainly not a bad one.” He smiled. Though all his smiles seemed barely a reflection of a dictionary-defined one, this one was genuine. “You might have some impulse and sarcasm issues, but other than that, not a bad brother or a bad person. I’m proud to call you my brother.”

  That was something. When you didn’t know who you were other than you woke up in a nest of dead spiders and carried a large number of things that could kill an equally large number of people, to hear that from someone who did know you … It was … Damn. I went on the defensive. I had to. I had the reputation of my gonads to protect. “If it weren’t for the sword you carry, I’d tell you what a wuss you are. I’m embarrassed for you, Leandros, seriously.”

  “Love you too, little brother.” He kicked me under the table with meticulous precision, hitting some sort of nerve that made my ankle and foot go instantly numb. It wasn’t the first time either. How did he do that? “There’s Ishiah. I’ll be back.”

  He left the table and had one of the peris, a big blond one—light blond hair and skin compared to Niko’s darker version—up against a wall and was talking with him as I cursed and rubbed my ankle. When I looked closer, it wasn’t so much of a talk as Niko telling the peri something—forcefully. He didn’t have a finger planted in the guy’s chest, not physically anyway, but he was laying down the law somehow. As he did, the peri’s wings appeared.

  They came out of nowhere in a shimmer of light, a flash of brightness as if the sun had exploded. Not there, then there. It was like a magic trick. I felt as if I should applaud and send his feathered ass to Vegas for a new career. With gold-barred white feathers, he did look like an angel, a muscular, anger-me-not, scarred angel, but an angel all the same. I could see where the myths had come from. If this guy came after me with a flaming sword, I’d get my ass to temple quick. Cross a desert. Free a cheap source of labor. Whatever. Just say the word.

  Minutes later they were both back at the table. “Cal,” Leandros said in introduction, “this is your employer, Ishiah. He owns the bar. You’re the only nonperi to work here, so you can expect the patrons to give you somewhat of a hard time. When you come back to work, that is, which won’t be until this Ammut mess is cleared up.”

  I stood, trying not to favor the still-throbbing ankle. “You’re the boss, huh?” I didn’t offer to shake hands. That would be too surreal in this world, and I didn’t have an instinct to stick out a hand unless it had a weapon in it. A shaker I was not, it seemed. I went with the assumption that Niko had explained about my memory problem. “I made a pretty decent server at a diner. I think I’ll do okay as a bartender. Oh yeah, if I try to kill you, I’m sorry. Just a reflex. I’m having trouble getting it through my head that monsters … er … nonhumans aren’t always evil.”

  The peri switched focus from me to Leandros. “Robin told me, but I didn’t completely understand. This …” His wings spread to a span nearly twelve feet wide. Then they tucked back in before spreading wide again. If he’d been a hawk, I would’ve said he was unsettled. “Never mind. Take as long as you need.” He turned his attention back to me for the last part. “Take as much vacation time as you require until your memory returns. The Ninth Circle isn’t what you would call a tame drinking establishment. We tend to lose at least one customer weekly. I want you at your best when you come back.”

  “My old self. Gotcha.”

  The peri gripped my shoulder and somewhat harder than an employer-employee chat called for. “Let us just say whenever you’re ready.” Then he was gone with one last long look at Leandros before he was behind the bar with another peri, this one with dark hair.

  “You are a bunch of touchy-type people, I gotta tell you.” There was a trail of feathers from in front of me all the way back to the bar. As with the indecisive wings, that didn’t strike me as a good sign. Didn’t birds lose feathers when stressed? If I were a bird, I would. “Is he molting? Does he have some sort of giant-bird disease?”

  “Only if Goodfellow gave it to him.” Pointing back at my chair, he added, “You may as well settle in. We’ve a long meeting ahead of us. Promise, Robin …”

  He went on some more, but I blanked it out as I realized that my part-t
ime boss, who looked like an angel and shed like a dog with mange, was the other half of the monogamy special that the puck bragged about. I hoped Goodfellow hadn’t told him about the fork incidents. I’d hate for him to get pissed at me and have to put Polly-Want-a-Cracker down. I only killed bad monsters—I was coming to terms with that—and he didn’t seem bad.

  All monsters are. You know that. You’re born a monster, you die a monster, and there is nothing but slaughter between.

  “Cal? Are you listening?” Leandros’s hand pushed me into the chair. “Obviously not. I suppose it’s good to know some things don’t change, amnesia or not.”

  I was listening, but to myself, not to my newly discovered brother. There was no denying whose voice was in my head. It was mine and, although people lied to themselves all the time, I didn’t sound unsure on this. No tent-revival hellfire preacher was more absolute. I didn’t get it. The puck wasn’t human and he’d helped Leandros find me. The peri wasn’t human and he didn’t come across as a bad guy except for a little get-thee-sinning-asses-out-of-Eden grimness to him. Two nonhumans who were good enough not to try to kill me should balance the spiders and that revenant creature that had. It should prove what Leandros had told me. You took it on a case-by-case basis, because not all monsters were like people. Some were good and some were bad. They weren’t all evil. They all didn’t need to die.

  All monsters. All.

  I pushed it all aside for the moment. I had amnesia. Let’s face it: Who knew what else was screwed up in my skull? A half hour later and my scrambled brain had much more to distract it.

  The Wolves—there was no real reason to get sidetracked by the Wolves. So said Leandros. The fact that they smelled like a hundred and one wet dogs, I overlooked. I brought it up, don’t get me wrong, but Leandros said, whereas some people were born artists or musicians, I was born with a nose that could smell a meatball sub five miles away. I was talented. Stop complaining about it and stop asking Samyel, the peri bartender, to take them to the nearest groomer for a shampoo and toenail painting. Let them drink and play pool in peace without any “go fetch” jokes. The fact that they all stared at me—at length, every last one, with unblinking eyes, after sniffing in my direction—and then whispered and growled among themselves, I took to mean that I wasn’t their favorite server at the bar. A human—how disgusting. They’d probably hoped when I’d disappeared that it was for good. Whatever.

  As I said, I overlooked them … eventually. Then there was the cat. It was Goodfellow’s cat or Goodfellow was the cat’s puck. Probably Goodfellow being the cat’s puck was the right choice. It was bald, it had teeth that made a grizzly bear look like a still-nursing baby rabbit, and it was dead. Deader than dead. Mummified. Glowing empty eye sockets. That didn’t stop it from batting pretzels around the table or stalking one of the Wolves to the back alley. She, the cat Salome, was the only one to return from the alley, but that wasn’t my business. What the dead cat wanted, the dead cat could have. In my opinion, it was one less Wolf stinking up the place.

  And, let me repeat: walking, purring dead cat. Dead cat with attitude.

  Dead fucking cat. Holy shit.

  Following the cat in a general “tie my sanity to the tracks and let the train run over it” was Leandros’s … girlfriend? Lady friend? Vamp friend? Vamp tramp? No, I’d had enough sense not to say any of them or think that last one for more than a second. She didn’t look like a tramp anyway. She wasn’t pretty, beautiful, or hot. She was more of a marble statue under a cascade of moonlight, smelling like flowers and ivy—the glory of a weeping graveyard angel. She was solemn and silk and as much of a promise as her name.

  I expected not to like her. I was doing better at restraining the nonhuman twitch and all the Wolves, not to mention other things in the bar, had nearly overloaded it. You could only twitch so much before you either went into convulsions or acclimated. I was doing my best to avoid seizures, which meant acclimation it was. But I’d already made up my mind about this in particular in advance. Whether she was monster or only nonhuman, evil or not, she wasn’t good enough for my brother. It didn’t matter if I remembered his being my brother or not. The puck had said Wolves were for Wolves; humans weren’t good enough. I was all set to have the same opinion about humans and vamps. Keep to your own kind.

  First, while Wolves and vampires were born, not made, so sayeth that brother I was worried about, she still was a few hundred years older than he, which made her a cougar. Second, sooner or later she’d leave him when he got older, and he would. All humans did. If he was only screwing her, maybe it would be different, but he was a six-foot-tall ball of commitment. After only two days, I could see that. He would hurt. If I was lucky enough to have family, I didn’t want them hurt. Third, he had told me vampires didn’t drink blood anymore. They didn’t kill anymore—the majority of them. But how many people had she killed before modern vampire technology came up with a good old vitamin-B-for-blood shot, those secret vampire underground supplements you can’t buy online? They were on the wagon now, the vamps, and she could be remorseful as they came for what she’d done to survive in ye olden days. It didn’t matter.

  And why would a vamp want to be with a human anyway? What they used to eat? That was like getting horny for your hamburger. Farmer John cozying up to Bessie the cow. It was weird. Fuck not the food, that was my opinion. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t like the idea of it, and I wasn’t going to.

  That was that.

  Then came the moment she entered the bar, sat down, took off her cloak of violet wool, and extended her pale hand toward me with a concerned “Caliban, how are you feeling?”

  There she sat, with striped dark brown and pale blond hair pulled up in a twist that only women can manage. Simple yet somehow complex. I could’ve braided a lariat and taught myself how to rope a steer before coming up with that knot. She wore a dress that covered up too much to be sexy while still being snug enough to catch the eye, with knee-high boots to take the primand-proper down a notch but still look like a lady—a rich one. Her eyes, violet as her cloak, and her smooth face were as concerned as her tone. She looked nice. She sounded nice. It didn’t stop the twitch.

  You’re born a monster, you die a monster, and there’s nothing but murder in between.

  The same refrain as before and it felt as true as before, but I felt something else. She was sad, this vampire—damn sad and with good reason to be, although I had no idea what that reason was.

  There’s no such thing as the best. There’s good enough, though. Sometimes. She makes you happy, Nik. A happy brother’s not such a bad thing.

  My voice again, but this time it was a flash of memory crawling out of the past, my first real one. I didn’t remember when or why I’d said it, but it sounded as if I’d meant it.

  I looked at her hand. “Yeah … I’m sorry. I’m trying to be good, I am, but it’s probably best I don’t touch you just yet.” I might be forgiven for accidentally attacking my boss, but Leandros might not be so forgiving if I did the same to his girlfriend.

  She withdrew her hand, her ivory mouth, as pale as the rest of her, losing that reassuring smile she’d been giving me. “I don’t understand.”

  Goodfellow almost choked as he laughed around the last swallow of his drink and waved his hand at a peri for another bottle of scotch. Yes, not a glass—a bottle. The puck had some serious tolerance. “He’s telling the truth. He is trying to be good, difficult as that is to believe. And polite. What a change a few days down south can make. He’s become a Southern gentleman. It’s almost as amusing as when Venus became too fat to float on that shell. That’s what you get for eating nothing but honey cakes and mead.” He took the new bottle of scotch and poured himself a glass. “To be fair, however, anything the kid does that doesn’t involve him stabbing me with a fork goes in my entertaining column these days.”

  Her eyes glanced at the puck skeptically, then back at me. “You tried to stab Robin with a fork?”

  I held up thre
e fingers. “Sorry to say I don’t regret a one of them. Okay, strictly not true. I sort of regret the two that didn’t connect.”

  Niko intervened when Goodfellow began to look less amused. “Cal has some … difficulties, let’s say, with nonhumans. All nonhumans. He’s having trouble discerning between the good and the bad.”

  I shrugged. “Monsters are monsters, and monsters are bad, but I’m working on it.”

  Like Ishiah, the guy with the feathers, she said nearly the same thing: “You told me on the phone, but I hadn’t comprehended he’d be quite like … this.” The fingers touched the back of Leandros’s hand in what appeared to be support as the ocean of heather concentrated on me. “You’ll be yourself soon enough, Caliban. I can wait until then to touch your hand or kiss your cheek.”

  I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t expecting her to say that, and monsters’ mouths were made to eat you, maul you, tear you; there was no damn silverware on the table, but there were knives. I had knives. My hand was already going for one inside my jacket when Leandros’s hand clamped down on my wrist, not enough to hurt, but enough to shake me out of it.

  “Could you please,” he requested in a mild tone and with an unbreakable grip, “not attempt to stab Promise with one of your knives.”

  “Or a fork,” Goodfellow interjected.

  “Or a fork,” Leandros repeated with a patience that had to make him double as a saint. “Promise, if you could avoid startling Cal until he remembers that you do care for him and he for you, we might all survive this,” he said, and added with a wry tinge to the words, “He startles easily now.”

  I could say I did not startle easily, but it was hard to back up when I’d wanted to stab someone for threatening to kiss me on the damn cheek. I decided to ignore the entire thing. It had never happened. Pride saved. “So”—I shook off the hand and rested my own on the table—”let’s talk goddesses and what the fuck you do about them except pray at their altars or run far far away.”