Blackout

by Rob Thurman

  “Very much so. Verbally abusive, emotionally abusive, especially towards you, which would explain Niko being as much of a guardian in addition to brother when it involves you. Sophia had quite the pitching arm as well when it came to bottles and glasses.” He poured himself a third glass. “She was also a thief, a liar, and a whore—three qualities I usually favor, but in her case, combined with the maternal instinct of a wolf spider, she gives the rest of us liars and thieves a bad name. As for whoring, I’ve often been offered money for my brilliant performances, but I never took it.” He grinned and poured a second glass. “But it’s good to know I have a career to fall back on if the thieving and lying fail me one day.”

  “Except …” The prompt had a threatening tone.

  Goodfellow handed the second glass to Ishiah, who’d drifted up, no wings or feathers this time. “If it’s for money, it’s not cheating. It’s a righteous occupation of long standing. If one dies penniless in a ditch, monogamy becomes difficult … or far more easy, depending on your outlook.”

  At Ishiah’s outlook, a fierce glower, the puck sighed. “Just remember the Good Samaritan story from that book you’re so very fond of. Picking someone who’s been mugged out of a ditch and carrying them home to oil them up? I know they were big on oiling people in those days, feet and all, but when you’ve been beaten and mugged, oil isn’t what you’re looking for. Trust me, there’s more to that story than anyone knows.” Ishiah’s glower went to nova-heat proportions. “Fine. Fine. I’ll wander off to a table then. Wave when you’re done discussing things of great import, and I’ll be back with something of far greater import in my pants. Dusty and unused for almost five hours now. Ah, sirens at table six. Perhaps they can sing sad lamentations of a warrior retired from battle.”

  When he was gone and handing out his monogamy cards to the sirens, beautiful women with a green tint to their skin, Ishiah picked up the wineglass and drained it. After the two swallows that it took, I asked him, “Why? Man to bird, why? Why Goodfellow? Are you that hard up to be laid? How does he ever stop talking long enough to actually screw anyone?”

  He instantly fisted my hair and smacked my face against the bar. He was nice enough not to do it hard enough to break my nose, and I was nice enough not to pull the trigger on the gun I had shoved against his throat.

  “Show him the respect he deserves. He is your closest friend. He knows you.” That had to be true, because Goodfellow wasn’t rushing over to break this up. He knew his … mmm … Wingnificant Other wasn’t going to smash my brains out on the bar and that I wasn’t going to shoot him for trying. Niko, lurking somewhere outside the bar, hadn’t come in either … to prevent violence or avenge the fact my beer hadn’t been served to me in a baby bottle. Ishiah wasn’t a threat—or a monster. He was just my sometimes boss.

  I straightened, put my gun away, and pushed the hair back so I could see. If it didn’t grow and fast, I was going for a buzz cut. “He knows me. He’s my closest friend. Everyone says so, but how do I know for sure?” Now was a time for facts. Considering the decision I’d made based on a brother’s need and in spite of a picture I, still to this minute, wish I’d never seen, I wanted facts to go with it. That was why I was here. Ishiah knew Cal … and knew me, but as an employer, not a friend. He’d be more likely to tell the truth and not soften the blow.

  “What he told you about your mother,” the eavesdropper said, “do you think you told him that? All of that? You and Niko are secretive—anyone raised the way you were would be—so despite Robin’s being your friend, would you have told him that?”

  No. Friend or not … no. That kind of past abuse … The rest of it was one thing, but to know two kids, kids I didn’t remember although I was one of them, had lived through that. I wouldn’t be throwing those details around. You shouldn’t be ashamed, but you were. You shouldn’t feel guilty and tainted, but you did. Niko had carefully edged around that information, blurring it, but Goodfellow had given me the real deal and, although I recalled none of what he’d told me happening to Niko or me, I felt it the same as if he’d kicked me in the stomach. It wasn’t a good feeling, which was why Niko hadn’t told me … and why Goodfellow had. Goodfellow was my friend, but he was Niko’s friend too.

  Robin knew what Niko was doing to me—for me. After all, he was the supplier, the dealer in the dirty deed, but he also knew what Niko was doing to himself. He wasn’t going to choose between us. He gave me a hint about my past self through the truth about my mother, but the rest was up to me. Niko, unlike me, had walked through that past, whole and unshadowed, but how long would he stay that way if he lost his one anchor? If he lost his real brother?

  The choice to claim the past and the old Cal that went with it was one Goodfellow was letting me decide for myself. He didn’t know I’d already made it.

  But I still wanted to know it was the right choice.

  “Then how did he know?” I asked as I heard a Wolf pass behind me and laugh. It wasn’t a nice laugh, gloating and gleeful with the whisper of sheep behind it. I let it go. It was happening more and more now in the hour I’d been in here. From that, I gathered that pigeons like Ishiah rated above sheep, but Wolves rated above both—in their furry little minds.

  “Because it’s what he does. He’s a trickster that has lived longer than I can remember, and I’ve lived a very long time.” There were the wings, not in disturbance this time, though. Spread and lifted high, they made you think of eagles proudly surveying their domain. “I’ve seen man take his first step. Robin has been around long enough to have probably stepped on one of man’s slippery ancestors crawling from the ooze. He can take the smallest fact and spin an entire tapestry from it. But you gave him that one small fact at some time or another and you never would have if he weren’t your friend.”

  I was getting so much truth now that I was surprised they didn’t charge extra for it. Abusive whore of a mother. No wonder Niko had to raise me. A horny puck that never shut up as a best friend, but, considering the T-shirt slogans I picked out, it was a wonder I had a friend at all.

  I finished my beer and got another from Samyael. Good old Sammy was quick with the beer. “Can I ask you something, boss?”

  “‘Boss’?” He took my empty and disposed of it under the bar. He was doing my job tonight. “You usually only call me boss when I have an axe against your neck.”

  “An axe, huh? I must call in sick a lot.” I drank half of the second beer. As Goodfellow said, fate was fate; genes were genes. I wasn’t an alcoholic yet or I’d have gone into DTs in the Landing as I hadn’t touched the stuff there. But that didn’t change the fact he was trying to tell me something about who I’d been—he simply wouldn’t do it outright. Ishiah might. “So can I? Ask you something?” He paused, already looking as if he regretted it, but nodded.

  “Is Cal a good guy?” Not me, but Cal, because there was still a difference. I didn’t watch his face for the response. I drank some more and waited.

  When he finally answered, I accepted the single-word reply with a slight tip of my head in thanks. This time I was the one who had to take a while to think. When I was done, I asked him one more question. “If Niko had to choose between me and a burning orphanage full of big-eyed kids hugging fluffy kittens, which would he choose?” It was facetious as hell, but it got the point across.

  Ishiah took the beer from me and drank it himself. “Irish courage … in a way. I picked that up from Robin. What it took you barely months to find out about him, it took me thousands of years. I was such a pretentious ass and full of dangerous, even deadly conviction. I judged him. It was only when I judged myself that I saw the truth. Now I won’t deny any truth.” He replaced my bottle with two more—one for me and one for him.

  “Niko’s flaw—and it is a fatal one—is that if it came down to saving the world or saving you … he would save you.”

  Fatal to the world and big-eyed orphans, I could see that, but to me it meant one thing:

  How could I do anything
less?

  I didn’t know if it was my sheepness that offended the Wolves or my singing. But finally the last sounds that had kept them howling and hiding under their tables wasn’t enough to hold one of them back. He was too drunk to care about our Kin agreement or too tone-deaf to appreciate the song. While the rest of the Wolves covered their ears and kicked in agony instead of trying to kill me, this guy had had enough.

  One or two or seven or twelve had been giving me the eye—blue, yellow, orange, brown, green, take your pick—and muttering among themselves. The more I drank, the more they muttered and the less their loyalty to the Kin word mattered. Then again, the more I drank, the less putting a bullet in a fuzzy ass bothered me, which made us even. I couldn’t say if that bullet would be lethal or not as my double vision was getting worse. I was matching Goodfellow drink for drink, which made me some sort of superhero with a mutant gene for consuming oceans of alcohol. And with mass quantities of alcohol comes singing.

  The puck had started and I had followed. From the startled looks the peris gave me, that was not me, but considering this particular me was probably going away, screw it. I’d party while I was here. As for the singing itself, we weren’t bad. A karaoke machine would’ve helped me with the lyrics if not my kick-ass sheep rep, but I had a good voice, go figure, and of course pucks were great at everything, so said Goodfellow.

  But while American Idol might’ve thought we could shoot gold records out our asses, the Wolves didn’t care for the higher notes of the song and “Danny Boy” was not their thing. I thought their pained howling added to the song, which was sad, or so Goodfellow told me. The peris took it in stride. Ishiah had said he’d given up his judgmental ways. That didn’t leave him much room to bitch.

  But when the one Wolf broke, there was more than enough bitching to go around. I was sitting in a chair, singing my lungs out while Robin did his wailing standing on top of our table. Whether he was drunk or not didn’t make a difference. I was grateful he’d kept his clothes on. Get a person up on a table and it’s a given. Clothes start flying off—the same way the Wolf flew toward me. I saw them—wait, just the one—damn double vision headed toward me like a fur-covered Scud missile. He was young, an All Wolf, a mixture of human teenager and wolf, even when he changed. He lost his clothes, but he still had dark blue human eyes and thickly callused human hands with wolf nails. I knew because I felt them around my throat.

  I tipped the chair over, landed on my back, jammed a foot in his fur-covered stomach, and tossed him over my head. Goodfellow dodged him neatly, kept singing, and, yep, the shirt came off. He was whipping it around, dancing some sort of Irish jig, holding a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and the son of a bitch continued singing as if a homicidal Lassie hadn’t that second flown by.

  It was impressive. I was impressed, no denying it, as I lay on the floor and drank my beer. I’d have been more impressed if he’d put his shirt back on. Well, shit, the Wolf was back. This time he landed on my chest and stomach with enough weight and pressure to have me spewing beer into his face. Coughing, I waved a hand at the Budweiser foam now dripping off his snarling muzzle. “Cujo. Old Yeller.” I waved a hand. “Someone give me a gun to put the poor rabid bastard out of his misery. Wait. I have a gun. I think I have two.”

  I wasn’t serious. I’d learned my lesson. You don’t bring a gun to a dogfight and you definitely don’t bring one to a puppy fight. This guy barely qualified as a puppy. One of those Lupa Wolves would’ve swallowed him whole. I broke my beer bottle over his shiny black nose. Moist shiny black nose—that meant he was healthy. If he left me alone, he might stay that way.

  He didn’t—leave me alone or stay that way.

  Now the rest of the Wolves were getting caught up in the fight. The growls had tripled and when Old Yeller, who had tumbled backward yelping at the pain in his nose, started back toward me again, he had a friend. This guy was not young; he was twice the size and five times the Wolf. He had scars running thick and gray through his black fur, fangs that were made for tearing flesh, half of one ear missing, and from the abrupt silence of howls in the bar, he was one badass son of a bitch.

  Goodfellow hadn’t stopped singing, although the Wolves had, but the choice of songs was too close to home now. This one—he could’ve been mistaken for a small black bear in the woods but with the temper of a grizzly. He was a fighter, a killer, and he knew what he was doing.

  Him, I shot. Teen Wolf, eh, not worth it. I peppersprayed him. Mailmen and monster killers of the world, unite. The black Wolf I put a round in didn’t make a sound. He went down, crawled a few feet away to settle in a pool of his own blood and watched me with enraged eyes. Wolves healed fast. He was biding his time. The kid, the Wolf version of Benji, had changed back to curl naked on the floor, his swelled-shut eyes flowing with tears, and his nose pouring snot. But they were both alive … and it didn’t have to be that way. Neither one looked the least bit grateful, though. Bastards. Someone else wasn’t grateful for my restraint either.

  Leandros came through the front door, walked through the quiet Wolves muttering in confusion, the sirens who were applauding Goodfellow’s talent, before grabbing my shirtfront to drag me up off the floor and out of the bar.

  “Hey,” I protested, “don’t take it out on me if your ass froze out here for two hours. I didn’t ask you to follow me. And the Wolves started the bar fight. It was hardly a bar fight anyway. Barely counted. I didn’t kill anybody, did I?”

  He did wait until I managed to get my feet under me before continuing to drag me, this time not as silently. “Maybe you should have. Maicoh, the one you shot, holds grudges. Or instead of killing him, perhaps you should have tried thinking instead. If you are intoxicated, especially this intoxicated, which you’ve had the sense to never be in the past, you run the risk of someone better than Maicoh killing you. Someone besides me. And pepper spray? Are you suicidal? You are not a mailman.” I was about to say that was what I’d been thinking, except more pro-mailman, when he gave me a not-so-gentle shake—ninja punctuation to equal my vomit punctuation from last night. “And why were you singing? You don’t sing.”

  “It’s a wake, and ‘Danny Boy’ is what you sing when someone dies. It turns out I cut my hair for the right reason after all.”

  He stopped again. “Who died?”

  “No one you know.” This time I was the one moving him. I shoved him or he allowed himself to be shoved. I saved my ego and didn’t guess. “Look. A tattoo place. Ishiah said it opened yesterday. Run by some ancient Mayan guy. Acat. Another one of those, ‘Yeah, I’m a god, okay, maybe not, but I live forever’ things. Good for business. Keeping the street monster-eclectic and human free.”

  “Are you feeling the victim of discrimination?” He had immediately stopped yet one more time the moment I’d said tattoo, balancing with ease on the curb. It looked effortless, and apparently it was, because when I shoved harder, he was concrete—a mountain.

  “Nah, I have sheep solidarity with you. At least I can say there are two humans in the city. Good to know.” He tensed under my hand as I said that, but I was too drunk to know why and too drunk to care that I didn’t know why. And too drunk to care that I didn’t care. It was a very Zen thought process. Good for me. Good for drunk-off-his-ass me. “And, Niko, you’re getting a tattoo. I have one.” I waved the arm it was on. I was proud that I didn’t stagger. I was a mountain too. Look at me. “Brothers-in-arms, right? It’s a brother thing. In the fucking handbook, I know it—if I could ever find the fucking handbook. Now it’s your turn.”

  So he’d understand.

  When the time came, I wanted him to understand. The tattoo would tell him then what I couldn’t tell him now.

  “And what tattoo am I getting?” The mountain was shifting, minutely, under my hands.

  “Bros before Hos.” I got him off the curb and across the street, where he stopped for the last time.

  “My body is a temple. I may let you deface it with graffiti if it means that much
to you that I reciprocate your brotherly brand, but that phrase is not an option.” Ah, there was a limit to all that family do-or-die after all.

  “It’s not that exactly. Christ. It’s just sort of the same sentiment, but without the hos and with the same sort of rhyming… . Just shut up and get the goddamn tattoo, would you?”

  He did. In the tiny shop that was spotlessly clean, he did it because I asked, maybe to get more of the brotherhood back that a spider had stolen. Or maybe he was just too damn tired to fight about it. Mourning one brother, adopting a new one—because Cal and I weren’t the same, as much as Niko was trying to tell himself that we were. Trying to tell himself I was the old Cal, only with a creamy icing of happy-go-lucky contentment on top.

  It was hard work, adoption and lying to yourself. It would make anyone tired, this superninja included. I handed the wrinkled napkin to a red guy with earlobes down to his shoulders and four arms—or that might’ve been that annoying double vision. Niko, in the chair with his shirt off and his upper arm bared for the needle, frowned at the writing on the stained paper. “What is that? I don’t recognize it.”

  “Aramaic.” I sat down on the one small plastic chair provided for those who wanted to wait. Yawning, I finished the thought. “Ishiah wrote it for me. Figured it was the one language you probably didn’t know.” And wouldn’t be able to read until he was ready to hear it and I was ready to tell it.

  “There are many dialects incorporated through other languages, regions, time periods… .”

  I dozed off, and I couldn’t blame the alcohol. Faced with death by boredom, my brain took the only other way out—unconsciousness. When I woke up, it was morning and I was in my bedroom at home. I wasn’t in bed, though, and my knife-practicing wall no longer said Screw you.

  It said something worse.

  Something that was getting damn familiar.