Blackout

by Rob Thurman

  “I think she may be,” he said as he started running up the rest of the stairs.

  But the boardroom he charged into was empty except for a card with neatly written letters, Fourth Alternate Location, resting in the middle of the table. The blood was from a dead security guard at the end of the hall. He wasn’t human. He looked human … until I lifted his upper lip to see small fangs, right before they slid out of sight, the gums sealing over them. Nature—keeping the vamp’s secret for them. I checked his vitals just in case, although I wasn’t precisely sure what made a vampire dead. “No heartbeat,” I was informed. Born, not made—live, not undead. They were the same as humans that way with the same vital signs or lack of them after a she-Wolf Alpha took one down. And they even bled red like humans. Made sense. They used to drain humans. You wouldn’t eat what you couldn’t digest. I hadn’t seen a scratch on Delilah, and Leandros said vamps were fast and strong—very fast, very strong. She was something all right.

  “They must’ve suspected the Lupa were coming for them,” Leandros said, tapping the card against his palm. “They took precautions and moved the meet.”

  Precautions. In other words, you did not fuck with the Lupa, but, damn, they would fuck with you if they felt like it. If you wanted to be noticed you had to make a big bang—such as taking out an unprecedented council of the supernatural joined to fight Ammut. Delilah was ambitious and hot. She was also a matter-of-fact killer, but we couldn’t all be perfect.

  “So …,” I said casually as I straightened, “that was Delilah, huh?”

  Leandros already knew where this was going. I could tell by the twitch of his jaw. “Yes, that was Delilah as the conversation on the stairs and the index card I gave you made perfectly clear.”

  “And I nailed that?”

  The roll of his eyes indicated I was beyond immature.

  I gave a smug grin. “Damn, I’m good.”

  We ended up at not the first, second, or even third, but the fourth alternate location, which had to be Leandros’s idea. Who else would have four? Two days and I’d seen enough of his ways to know that. I was surprised he could stand up without a chair sticking to his ass, the gravitational pull of his anal-retentive nature too strong to be overcome by mere furniture.

  We’d taken another cab up until about a twenty-minute walk away. Leandros wanted either to determine if the Lupa were following us or to simply kill my tired ass, one of the two. I missed the Landing with its twelve streets where everyone walked slow and in a hurry meant not stopping to sit on your neighbor’s porch to “chat a spell.” All right, an exaggeration about the porch thing, but I damn sure missed the twelve streets.

  “And the fourth alternate location would be?” I asked as I hunched in my jacket, tired of the cold, the endless walking and running, and not too happy with the smell.

  “Brooklyn. Gowanus Canal.”

  “I liked the Central Park place better,” I grunted. “It didn’t stink.” I didn’t know if the water stank to him, but it did to me—like a chemical-coated rotting body. “And there were hot Wolf chicks.”

  There weren’t many … Correction, there weren’t any people I could see hanging around, ready to jump in for a swim as we moved through several rusted-through tanks to a scrap metal yard. As for Gowanus Canal, an up-close look said they should’ve called it Gowanus Ditch. Encased in concrete forever as far as I could tell from the lights reflecting off the dank, fetid black water, it wasn’t close to being a tourist attraction. You weren’t going to see any gondolas with singing guys in striped shirts around here. If they fell in, they’d crawl out a mutated creature with superpowers that involved killing you with a massive wave of stench.

  “Up here.”

  I turned away from the canal and followed Leandros up some broken concrete stairs to a squat corrugated metal building. There were no windows, only a light showing under and around the door. Weatherproofing was not their primary issue. He knocked once, said, “Leandros,” and opened the door. Our clients were waiting for us, all of them.

  Also dead, every damn one.

  This time it wasn’t the Lupa. This time I saw what I’d only heard about in my briefing at the bar to catch me up to preamnesiac speed. At a much less fancy table than at the conference room, they were gathered around what must have been a rickety poker table. Vampire, Wolf, succubus, incu … incub … the male version of succubus, and something I had no idea about, other than he was as dead as the rest now lying scattered around the large shack. All of them except one were curled into dried husks. Their eyes were sunken so far back into the sockets, only withered raisins remained. What skin I could see that showed outside their clothes was almost transparent and veined with dark blue and cancer-clot purple.

  Leandros knelt beside the one client who hadn’t had his life force sucked out by Ammut. She’d done him in the more popular modern way—ripped him to pieces. He’d been halfway to turning, patches here and there of black fur, now slowly receding back under the skin, his dead eyes yellow but clouding to a human-appearing dull brown, and teeth still bared in a frozen snarl. She’d disemboweled him and used his blood to write on the back metal wall.

  Give them to me. The letters were large; the medium used to write them sincere. You’re not screwing around when you make your demands painted with someone’s death.

  “Give them to me?” I read out loud, confused. “Isn’t she doing a bang-up job of getting her victims herself? Not like she needs our help.”

  Shaking his head, Leandros admitted, “I have no idea.” He stood and nudged the dead Wolf with his boot. “Vukasin. The Kin Alpha liaison. Not that high up in the order of things. The Kin wouldn’t show us that much respect.” The nudge turned his body over to show this side had no face. A few scraps of muscle and skin clinging to scored bone. Life force and just life, both brutally taken—Ammut didn’t limit herself to one way of killing. “Not Delilah’s work, but she would’ve been capable of it and I have little doubt she’ll claim it. The Kin will believe her and think taking out this Alpha a very bold move, despite her All Wolf cult breeding. I’m beginning to think we were right. Delilah may well end up running the entire Kin before long.”

  He left Vukasin to study the other bodies and then headed toward the door. “Not that that’s our concern now. Ammut’s path of destruction is getting worse. To take out the council who hired us. That is true disdain and an escalation of feeding. We have to stop her before they form a council on dealing with inept subcontractors such as ourselves.”

  I followed him. “We’re just going to leave them here? I know about monsters.” The sky is blue, what goes up must come down, and here there be monsters. “I remember knowing about them even if I don’t remember much else, but I also remember hardly anyone else knows. How do we keep that from happening?”

  “We take care of our own bodies, and we leave the bigger messes for the Vigil. This is a bigger mess.”

  Outside in the cold air, I asked, “Who’s the Vigil?”

  “They keep humans from finding out about the supernatural. If that happened, there would be worldwide war. Their calling is to prevent that, which means they make things such as this disappear. You know how at night the garbage piles up and the street sweepers come through so in the morning, it’s all clean as if it were never there?”

  I shut the door behind us, to hide the bodies from plain view in case this Vigil was slow on the uptake. “I guess that depends on your definition of clean, but yeah.”

  “The Vigil are the street sweepers, and, on occasion when too noticeable, people like us can be considered garbage to be disposed of as well. So try to keep a low profile,” he said, starting along the canal at a faster pace. How the Vigil found out about these messes was a mystery he didn’t bother to explain, and I didn’t bother to ask. I had more than enough freaky shit on my plate as it was. That one could wait. “Ammut could still be here somewhere in the scrap yard. If you can smell her, we should search.”

  If I couldn’t smell he
r, the place was too big to search, but we were out of luck. I took a few steps closer to the canal and hooked a thumb toward it. “Over that? I can’t smell anything over that god-awful …”

  I didn’t get to finish the sentence as a loop of wet muscle thicker than a man’s waist erupted out of the water and wrapped around my chest and one arm to yank me into and under the water. It was unbelievably fast and the light bad. I hadn’t seen if it was scaled or not—if it was a giant snake or a tentacle, but it didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it was crushing the air out of my chest, what little air I’d had to begin with after the first tight squeeze expelled it from my lungs. It dragged me deeper into the water, moving almost as quickly through the water as outside of it, which meant even if Leandros could’ve helped me, we were leaving him behind.

  I had the one arm free and I used it to fumble for my gun. I went by feel. I was afraid if I opened my eyes the chemicals in the water would blind me. Finding it instantly—true love couldn’t bring anything together as fast as my hand and the grip of my Eagle—I fired in the direction I was being dragged. I emptied the clip and the one I carried in the pipe to grow on. Nothing. I was losing my remaining air, my chest aching with oxygen loss and the pressure squeezing me until I felt as if I’d break in half. I went for my Glock next, but I was slow and clumsy, a pounding in my ears—I knew I wasn’t going to make it and if I did, why would it do any more good than the Eagle?

  But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try. I let the Eagle go with the fuzzy, blood-drenched thought that all monsters were bad and why had I let anyone tell me different, and I went for the Glock with a hand now too weak to grasp anything, but trying … goddamn it, still trying. I expected to fail with my last semicoherent thought and I did. I expected to die, but I didn’t. Not thanks to Ammut or the first or second mouthful of water I finally couldn’t help but inhale and choke on. Nope, that was not how I went.

  Instead, the world blew up.

  Blue skies, pirate ships, flying children; they were there again as I woke up, soaked in freezing cold water—almost drowning brought them back every time. Only this time I didn’t think I’d almost drowned. “Almost” was kicked out of that sentence. There was a hand on my forehead tilting my head back, a mouth pressed hard against mine, air blown in inflating my chest, and I didn’t know what it meant—not quite. I couldn’t breathe—so wasn’t I dead? Hazy, sluggish thoughts, but logical. Dead and logical, that took talent.

  There went another pirate ship sailing overhead, backlit by stars where there were no stars.

  And didn’t I hear a waterfall?

  “Cal, you son of a bitch. I’ve had enough this week. Do you hear me? Goddamn enough.”

  More air was blown into my lungs, but they didn’t have any idea what to do with it. Lazy damn lungs. The ship disappeared, the sound of the cascading water faded away and panic set in. Jesus, I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t move; I couldn’t goddamn breathe… .

  It did turn out that I could vomit. And I did so profusely, all over the front of the shadowed figure I saw bending over me as I opened my eyes. Efficient hands rolled me on my side where I kept emptying my stomach and lungs of canal water. It went on for what seemed a year or so—and not the best of years, although it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. As oxygen took the place of water, I dragged in breaths between the heaving and began to think a little more clearly. As in, what the fuck happened?

  Was that CPR?

  Was that Goodfellow giving me CPR? Please God no. It’d been a rough day already. Mouth to mouth from the puck would never be lived down.

  The same hands were slapping my back firmly, only making me barf more. I appreciated the effort. Puking wasn’t great, but I didn’t want any of that putrid, tainted water left in me, not a damn drop of it. I didn’t know how chemicals could taste like death, but they did. I doubled up, knees to chest, and went from vomiting to coughing, which hurt worse.

  “Cal? Can you hear me? Damn it, little brother, can you hear me?”

  Actually, I could barely hear the words. The pounding in my ears underwater had gone to a ringing so loud that I was surprised I heard anything at all. I kept coughing and slanted my eyes up to see a blurry Leandros kneeling over me, hands keeping me on my side. On his shirt, coat, and braid, he was wearing the chili dog I’d eaten at the bar since he’d starved me at his tofu diner, and I was dimly pleased I’d found the time to sneak it in.

  “What?” I coughed again, vomited again, then glared at him. “What … you … do?”

  He held up something I recognized—a grenade with a smirking smiley face on it. This one was red with devil horns. Have a not so nice day! That would explain the ringing in my ears. “I borrowed a few from you. Inelegant but effective.” It disappeared and a hand wiped at my mouth as I kept coughing. Good for him. I was too weak to do it myself and he deserved more puke. “She had you. Ammut. I could see the wake where she was pulling you through the water, too fast for me to stop her. I threw a grenade in front of her. It was the only thing left to do.” He sounded apologetic, despite the fact I’d driven him to more cursing. The man didn’t swear much, I’d noticed, even in situations when he should’ve been whipping them out nonstop. Swearing or not, he should sound sorry. Damn, damn sorry. Boggles, homicidal Wolves, dead clients, Ammut nearly drowning me, and my brother blowing me up to finish the job. As workdays went, not a good beginning.

  “I almost lost you. Again.” He was blurry, yeah, and his voice faint, but I heard. He meant what he said. The blame was as solid as the concrete beneath me and as dark as the water he’d pulled me from—and it was aimed in one direction. “Ammut. This fucking bitch is going to be sorry the universe ever spit her into existence.”

  The f-bomb. Now we were cooking. Forget the other cursing, this was serious language from an equally seriously upset, vengeance-bound brother … who had almost lost me twice in a week. He did deserve more than barf. Any brother who’d gone through that would. I was getting back the finer movements of my arms and legs, and I managed to lift my hand to snag it in his coat. “Leandros …” I coughed spastically, grabbed what air I could, then tried for the most annoyed, pissy little-brother-worthy expression I could manage. As I didn’t remember what that looked like, I hoped I got it right.

  He bent closer to catch my hoarse words. “I’m here, Cal.”

  Sucker.

  “Worst … fucking … first … day … ever.” Then I threw up on him again.

  As punctuation went, it was perfect.

  7

  “What do I do for fun?”

  This time it was me waking Leandros up too damn early in the morning. Not that I hadn’t already woken him up walking into his room in socked feet. I didn’t hear any noise of my own making, but while I’d heard a killer she-Wolf above, I was learning my brother heard almost everything. If a squirrel burped in Central Park, this guy heard it half a city away. He was sleeping on his stomach, one arm hidden under the covers.

  My well-intentioned last puke by the canal hadn’t distracted him from thoughts of lost brothers as much as I’d hoped. He’d had a long night, what with checking on me every hour to make sure I didn’t die of secondary drowning. I’d asked what that was and he told me if I did die of it, then he’d tell me. Until then it wasn’t pertinent knowledge for me and might interfere with my sleep. Considering we’d run—I’d staggered—to get away before the cops arrived to investigate an explosion and it had been the longest day of my life, I did need the sleep. Unfortunately, the grenade hadn’t injured Ammut as we didn’t spot any unrecognizable chunks of whatever she looked like floating in the water. If we had, I’d have slept a lot sounder.

  Good thing I hadn’t.

  “Betcha have a sword under your mattress and you sleep holding on to the hilt.” I grinned as an eye slitted at me, fully aware. “That’s what I would do if I were a sword guy.” But a pillow and a gun were what helped me sleep at night. Warm milk didn’t cut it in this business.

  �
�You’re extremely observant of people’s behavior and the general area around you or you’re remembering more.” He sat up and laid the sword on the bed as he swung his legs to the ground. He wore black cotton pajama pants but was bare chested. He had a scar there that wasn’t as deep and ugly as mine. It was plenty odd, though—a round circle of silvery scar tissue as big as a dinner plate as if someone had drawn a giant O on his chest. I guessed they had, only they’d used a knife instead of a crayon to do it. “How are you feeling? Any more coughing?”

  “No more coughing and no more remembering, but things are more … eh … deja vu-ish.” His room was as clean, feng shui-ed out the ass, painted in a calm, serene silver green with not a single dust mote daring to rear its fuzzy head. Same as yesterday and the day before. He had a low bed and an equally low and discreet dresser. No mirror, though. There was one mirror in the place—in the bathroom, and it was a small one with a towel rolled up and propped on top of it. The towel was to wipe off the mirror if the shower steamed it up or to cover up the mirror for no good reason at all, which I did before I went to bed last night after showering twice to sluice the canal taint off me.

  Leandros hadn’t mentioned the mirror; I followed right along in his nonverbal footsteps. I didn’t like monsters and I wasn’t that fond of mirrors. I’d work on the monster thing first. I imagined the mirror thing, if I brought it up, would only embarrass me or make me look like a phobia-ridden nut job—maybe both. All humiliation in its own time.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I pointed out. “What do I do for fun?”

  “Why are you up so early?” he countered. “One of the primary extracurricular activities of your life is sleeping, not to mention running, fighting boggles, Wolves, and doing your best to die yesterday. I’d expect you to sleep extra late today.”

  Oh, as if it were my fault, almost dying. That made me enjoy what was coming next all the more.