Blackout

by Rob Thurman

  I groaned. Brain damaged or not, I knew I didn’t want to see some dusty old relics or equally dusty and evil-minded mummies who hung about the place. Nonetheless, see them both, I did. The fact that the mummy ended up set on fire …

  Completely not my fault.

  Someone Leandros knew managed to sneak us past security at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art by the devious and cunning method of having someone walk us through the metal detectors and snap her fingers at the guard who moved toward us when the beep beep beep filled the air. Snap. Point. Bad dog. Go. Sit. Her name was Sangrida Odins-something. She was big, blond, and, had she been wearing a metal bra, she could’ve taken out a tank. She also was a monst—She wasn’t human. If I’d been pushed to the wall on it, I would’ve guessed Valkyrie. She looked like Thor from the comic books, only with breasts … and maybe more muscle.

  She aimed an annoyed flap of her hand at the detectors, explaining it was for an ancient gemstone and jewelry traveling exhibit. I understood her lack of enthusiasm for jewelry. She’d probably much rather have a nice gut-stabbing spear than a bracelet.

  Leandros introduced her as the director of the museum. I nodded and kept my eyes off her as much as possible while he asked in low tones as we walked if she’d had any trouble from Ammut or the spiders. If she caught any of what she considered inappropriate looks from me, I knew—in my bones I knew—she’d stomp me to death with her size-twelve sensible-heel shoe. And there was no way it would take more than one stomp.

  Sangrida said they had had no trouble at the museum nor had she had any at home, but she would alert us if she did. As she unlocked a door to the basement, she also stated she wanted to thank us again for handling the museum’s small difficulty before. I waited until the door shut behind us and Leandros and I had started down the stairs before I asked, “What kind of small difficulty did Wonder Woman there have that she couldn’t handle by herself?”

  “A cannibalistic serial killer with a body count of near seven hundred. He rose from his own fifteenth-century ashes to eat whomever he could find and hang dead bodies in trees,” he replied, as offhandedly as if we’d simply dropped by one time to shoo a homeless person out of the souvenir shop.

  “You do that on purpose, don’t you? You and that puck,” I accused with a growl. “You love screwing with my head and trying to scare the shit out of me.” I was tempted to give that blond braid of his a hard pull to let him know my leg was feeling just as pulled. “Making things sound worse than they are. Like Goodfellow freaking me out with that gods and goddesses thing when Ammut is just another monster. And you wonder why I tried to stab him with a fork. Now you’re doing the same damn thing.”

  “No. Goodfellow enjoys that, but as for me?” There was a glimmer of his serious gaze over his shoulder as he went down several more steps, pulling ahead of me. Longer legs, the bastard. “The truth is enough. I’m sure you’ve noticed the bite on your chest.”

  The bite? Holy shit. That enormous scar that looked like someone with a big mouth and a bigger appetite had tried to make me lunch? “That was him? He did that? He tried to turn me into a buffet?” I gritted my teeth. “Before he killed me? He couldn’t kill me first and then eat me? That’s just fucking rude. Tell me he’s dead and tell me he cried like a goddamn baby when he went.”

  “He’s dead. Permanently this time.” He took another step. “Very permanently.”

  “Good. I hope we got paid a shitload for that one. Because, you know, being eaten and all, I think we deserved a fat paycheck for that.”

  “Could we change the subject?” The demand was abrupt and sharply edged.

  Curious, I took the steps faster to keep up with him. “Why? What happened to that shared-past stuff? You know me, I know you. History. I thought we were bonded through blood, family, fighting side by side. All that. Follow me to the ends of the earth, hairy bare feet, ring, volcano. Mordor, here we come. Epic bromance.”

  He stopped, but he didn’t turn to look at me. He simply … stopped. After a few seconds I thought again about tugging on the braid. Ding-dong. Anyone home? But before I could, he said, “Blood doesn’t always mean family. Sometimes it only means blood. As in how much you lost, how you nearly died, and how it was by the barest chance we found a way to save you.”

  And we didn’t talk about that—watching a brother almost die on you. He’d nearly seen it again last night. Leandros was my brother before he was anything else in this world. If you knew where to look, you could see it in his pelting me with a candy bar and stealing pretzels for me from the dead cat. Or searching for me days without sleep because a brother did not lose a brother. Ever. If you had to go to Hell itself to bring him back, then that was what you would do. Memory or observation, either way, it was true about Leandros. Talking about it made him relive it and reliving it—that was obviously bad, and the canal thing last night couldn’t have helped. It hadn’t done me any good, I knew that. But another rule in the Good Brother Handbook—you don’t hurt your brother. Not sincerely. Not outside atomic wedgie range.

  “So … Wahanket’s a mummy, huh?”

  The stiff spine unlocked, the shoulders relaxed, and we were moving again. “A mummy, yes, but a mummy of a human? No, I don’t think so. And Robin won’t tell us, which means he doesn’t know either. He can keep a secret if he wants to, but—”

  “He never wants to?” I snorted.

  “Precisely.” The glance over the shoulder this time was more amused. “Sangrida would probably pay us to evict him from the museum basement, but the destruction wouldn’t be worth the payoff. Now, watch out for the cats. Salome might be the pick of the litter, but she wasn’t the only one in it.”

  Great. More dead cats. Salome’s compadres. If I had to take one of those out, assuming I could take one of those out, would the puck’s cat want revenge as the spider had? Damn. It was too bad Ms. Thor couldn’t have gotten me and a flamethrower past security.

  Past the basement there was another basement. Subbasement. Basement squared. Whatever you wanted to call it, it meant a lot of goddamn stairs. “I don’t like exercise,” I grumbled.

  “I know.”

  We were wending our way through stacks and boxes and glass cases so dusty you couldn’t see what they held. Treasure? Gold? Something sharp like an ancient dagger? That last thought had me stopping to rub at the grime to take a look. I didn’t like exercise, but I did like weapons. “It’s boring,” I went on, disappointed. Tiny carven bits of rock. No daggers.

  “So you’ve said many times. Many, many, many times.”

  Many, many times. Ninja-know-it-all. “Have I ever said,” I asked casually, “there’s a dead koala bear on the ceiling that’s about to bite your head off?”

  His head whipped back as he looked up, his sword out and ready, but I’d already nailed it in the chest as it plummeted down. The shot knocked it ahead of us into the shadows of boxes stacked eighteen feet high. “Winnie was gunning for your ass.” I chambered another round. I knew better than to think I’d killed it with one shot. It was already dead. Predead. Undead. Whatever. I’d most likely just pissed it off. “You should always look up. Even while you’re bitching at me. The worst things come from there, and people never fucking look.”

  Wolves, spiders, furry mummies—that was nothing. Bad things, worse things—the absolute fucking worst came from above; it didn’t matter if I couldn’t put a name or a memory to them right now. I still knew. You didn’t stick your hand into a fire, and you always looked up.

  Or be the one looking down.

  Living with one whispering voice in my head was bad enough, but two was getting to be too damn much.

  I shook my head, a sliver of worry spiking through me. “And you’re not just ‘people.’ You should know better.” He should. He did, but he was distracted—by me. That had to stop.

  “Whoops, here he comes again.” I aimed at the form lunging out of the darkness, sputtering candlelight eyes, tawny fur here and there in lonely tufts peeking throug
h its tightly bandaged frame. The ears, nose, and mouth full of non-koala bear fangs weren’t bandaged, though. “It’s kind of cute.” Except for the barracuda teeth implanted in its jaws. I lowered the Desert Eagle. “I’ll feel bad if we kill it. Piglet, Christopher Robin, they’d never get over it.”

  Niko skewered it with his katana in midleap. It hissed, snapped, and tried to pull itself closer using its much longer than average talons to grasp the metal and heave. What was it about mummification that made everything remotely lethal on the thing get so damn much bigger?

  I glanced down at the front of my jeans and considered. Nah. There were bound to be complications.

  “Except for incinerating it, I doubt we could kill it even if we wanted to.” He raised his voice. “Wahanket, we have business with you. Call off your pet before I dice it into a hundred pieces. They can bounce about all they want then, but I don’t think they’ll accomplish much.”

  “Pooh hater,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Winnie-the-Pooh was not a koala—why am I even arguing about this with you?” He pointed the blade at me as the impaled mummified guard bear continued to thrash and hiss. “This creature could kill you as easily as one of those spiders. Keep that in mind.”

  “You mean the six spiders I killed? Really. That easy, huh?” I grinned. “You’re pissed because you missed it, hanging up there. Big bad ninja missed it. Hey, do we keep tabs on things like this? Is that a brother thing? As in it’s my six spiders and one rabid undead Pooh to your … um … nothing? Nothing, right? Did I miscount?”

  I couldn’t see the exact color of them down here, the lights were dim—the bare minimum, but I could see the tug-of-war behind his eyes. One side was, best guess, hit your brother with the mummified killer koala bear. The other side, which I’d have laid money on pulling ahead, wasn’t nearly as forgiving as that.

  “Sooo … we don’t keep count?” I concluded.

  “Wahanket!”

  Damn, Leandros could get the volume up there when he wanted. Where had all that Zen gone?

  There was a long sigh, a hot breeze over distant sands, and finally, “I am here.”

  “Here” was two narrow corridors over and five rows down. There a space was cleared for what looked like a wooden Egyptian reclining couch—as far as I could tell. It had a King Tut look to it. That was what I apparently used to classify old Egyptian things, and I had no problem with that. It was a good system in my book, especially as it didn’t involve reading actual books about what ancient Egyptians used for furniture before IKEA came along. There was also a computer, a television nicer than the one we had, several mounds of smaller electronics scattered about, a fucking Wii, if you could believe that, and a metal table littered with sharp instruments and blood—old.

  But once it had been new.

  It was hideous. I could picture … I could remember … cats. Dead cats. Completely dead and being cut up. Couldn’t mummify without cutting, could you? The smell of it. The smell of fear and spilled urine and guts … Monsters kill, monsters murder, and, given the chance, some monsters do a great deal worse.

  Wahanket was a monster, no waivers for good behavior, and I hated him. The feeling was sharp and cold, and I knew it was right.

  Righteous. Both voices were a choir on that one.

  The growl in my chest rose up in my savage smile as I saw the claws of a great lizard where one hand should’ve been. “I did that, didn’t I? You pissed me off. You fucked with me, and I didn’t much like it.” The specifics I didn’t have yet, only the taste of the memory, but the fact was solid and true. Sometimes you didn’t have to remember to simply know. I took a step closer. I’d done that, and I wouldn’t mind doing it again. I took another step.

  No, I wouldn’t mind at all.

  A hand landed on my shoulder and held me back. “Wait, Cal. If he has information, we need it.”

  Wahanket wasn’t the mummy of a human being, but l couldn’t have told the difference, except for the scales and claws of his replaced hand. Resin-stained bandages cracked with his every movement. His nose was a dark cavity, his teeth stripped of gums and blackened, a scrap of leather revealed to be his tongue when those teeth parted. A mummy so disgusting and unnatural that Salome and the bear in comparison could be plucked off a toy store shelf. They all did share the same eyes, a wavering, undying glow.

  “Why do you come here?” He didn’t bother with my talk of his hand or how I’d been responsible. With his other hand he gestured, joints creaking, and the bear wriggled off Niko’s blade to land on the table where it had been made, turning to hiss and keep us in view. At least it had been long dead before Wahanket had gotten at it, not like the cats, dug up from some old boxed exhibit down here. One stuffed koala bear meant for educational purposes turned into a killer Teddy with no interest in eucalyptus leaves whatsoever. “And with nothing to offer in trade?”

  “One of the last times we traded, you tried to shoot my brother with his own gun. That covers our tab indefinitely, I’ve decided.” A hand swatted the back of my head, a daily event, I was learning. No wonder it had felt familiar when Miss Terrwyn had done the same, as it had its roots here. “As for you, little brother, trading guns to homicidal mummies for information is not a good idea. An obvious statement, but one that escaped you at the time.”

  As I rubbed the back of my head with one hand, my other was in my jacket searching for something appropriate for the situation—that situation making Wahanket unavailable for all future trading activities. He was a monster even among other monsters—strike one; Niko said he’d tried to shoot me sometime in the fuzzy past—strike two; and I didn’t like him in so many goddamn ways—strike three. Plenty of reasons, although the “not liking him” one was more than enough for me.

  The swat I’d gotten on the head was doubled to be felt through the leather of my jacket covering the back of my shoulder. I growled again but let my hand drop. Niko wanted information. I could wait. Once he had it, then I could kill Wahanket, and we’d both be happy. Win-win. I didn’t need the warning tickling the back of my skull.

  Monstermonstermonster.

  Blackened teeth snapped together, but Wahanket gave in without argument while laying a soothing claw on the back of the hissing Disney reject. “Very well. I can be generous when I wish. What is it you want to know?”

  “Of Ammut, and don’t claim you know nothing, you desiccated depravity. If anything, you are one and the same kind, only you are far weaker than she is. She is a god and you’re nothing more than a killer of cats hiding in a basement, the lowest of cockroaches fearing the light.” If this was Niko buttering up an informant, I wished I’d washed my own cereal bowl that morning.

  Wahanket … Hadn’t I once called him Hank? There’d been a stupid cowboy hat he’d worn. He’d seemed harmless then. He’d … I blinked and whatever I’d been thinking was gone. It slithered away into the corner of my mind, out of sight but waiting. It was coming back. The cats. The hand. Slowly and playing hide-and-seek, but it was all coming back, the memories. Me.

  “A god? She is no god. She can but steal life. I can give”—his claws stilled on the back of the ragged beast of his creation—”as well as take.” The light disappeared in the eye sockets of the bear and it fell stiffly onto his side. It was the same as it was before he had done his work on it—dead. Defaced and definitely less educational, but dead.

  “If you’re her equal, why aren’t you aboveground killing vampires, Wolves, lamia, and whatever else she can gather with her spiders?” Niko asked. I saw the yellow eyes of a cat crouched on the crates behind him, but Salome’s brother or sister in undeath was content to watch. Maybe it didn’t want to end up like the bear. Or maybe it liked Salome more than the mummy that had killed it before raising it from the dead.

  “I have spent more years than you can imagine taking and giving lives. I am older than the pharaohs, older than Egypt or any pyramid. I knew the Nile when it was only a trickle of water and I have existed long enough to kn
ow there is no thrill to be had any longer, none that I haven’t tasted. Save one.” The tendons of his neck stretched and split as he turned his head to take in the computer.

  “If you wish to know of Ammut, now she cares for higher nests as opposed to warm dens. She likes to view her kingdom, but I have my window into endless kingdoms. I do not need what she needs. I can sustain myself without feeding. I am beyond that. If she were as powerful as I, then she could do the same. If she does not feed, she will starve within a month. Pathetic. I have heard of deaths that could be caused by her, but if she is here, I cannot say for sure. We come from the same place, but we are not the same kind. We are not connected. We are not”—the claws of one hand curled tight—”sociable creatures, either of us.” It was funny how “sociable” could sound as if he’d like to skin her alive and reupholster his King Tut sofa. “She would not come here to me. I know not where in this world that she now perches.”

  “She likes to perch while you like to hide from your shadow like Punxsutawney Phil. Is that right?” I asked with a sneer that had a mind of its own.

  The distant glimmer in his skull switched its regard from the computer to me. The glow, hepatitis yellow, brightened. Sometimes bright means cheerful; sometimes it means a heightened interest—either good or bad; and sometimes it’s the blaze of sheer fury. His head jerked forward toward me with the same quick action of a striking snake. “What have you done?” His eyes were so bright, it was as painful to look at as staring into the sun. “What have you become? How have you let someone else steal what should be mine?” His teeth snapped and parted to let through a sound like nothing I’d ever heard. It damn sure put the hissing of a dead bear to shame. “I have bided my time, waiting for you to ripen, and now you are barely half of what you were, barely worth taking at all. What have you done?”

  Mummies could move faster than any spider when they wanted, faster than a half-grown boggle. Wahanket was a hurricane-force wind and I was the palm tree that went down before it. Long, thin fingers and a lizard’s talons wrapped around my neck, cutting off my air instantly. “It was mine, and you lost it, you worthless sack of skin. It was mine. Itwasmine. Itwasmine. Mineminemine.”