by Rob Thurman
I moved down the hall next to Niko and pointed toward the floor. Decomposition, adrenaline, fear, Wolves, urine, and Ammut; it was all under our feet. Since I also didn’t know the sign for “The bitch is right here,” I used my free hand to squeeze his wrist hard. He nodded. Monsters in daylight were nothing for him, but to me it was wrong and Ammut was a monster; no some are good and some are bad here. Her invisible trail had unnatural and, yeah, abomination, all but embedded in it. Her, I had no problem killing.
There was a flicker of motion—dark, light, dark—at the door we’d just walked through. Behind Goodfellow appeared white blond hair, amber skin, a tattooed choker of wolf eyes, and a sly smile. Our own Delilah had shown up for the party.
The gun in my hand was aimed and the trigger was on three pounds of pressure and holding before I had a single thought. When that thought finally showed up, it was to forget Ammut. This was the bitch I would enjoy killing. What I’d felt for her at the missed massacre of our clients had been a happy, curious mix of dangerous, hot, and damn straight I’d nail that.
That was what it was like to be human. To have violence not be your first instinct. Huh. Who fucking knew?
Well, I’d been happy then when it came to Delilah, but I wasn’t happy anymore.
She’d betrayed me, but I was past that. I’d expected that. We were predators. We did what we did best. Kill to live, kill to protect our own and, in Delilah’s case, she was her own. Her self-interest was the only thing that mattered to her. And if she played a game or two with someone or something outside Wolves, that was all it was—a game. I’d known that all along, but I’d liked the game and I’d liked her. I’d expected her to go after me eventually. That was part of the game and I knew her rules. But she knew mine too. Going after my family or my friends broke every goddamn one of them. I should’ve blown her away days ago when I saw her for the very first time since she’d pulled that shit.
It was an easy mistake to fix.
“Not the time.” Goodfellow moved next to me, out of the way—no one said his sense of self-interest wasn’t finely honed as well—and pushing the Eagle down. “Very much not the time,” he hissed, barely audible. “Throw her at Ammut first if you want. She makes good cannon fodder.”
True. Then there was shooting her in front of Nik… . Wasn’t that why I hadn’t shot her when she’d stabbed us in the back last year? I hadn’t wanted him to see me do the chick I was screwing—do in a way that ended up with a bullet in her head and my Auphe out instead of in. Wasn’t that it?
Then a pain hit and hit hard. Jesus, what hurt? What inside me felt ragged and ripped, torn, and trashed?
There it stopped, the flood of cold rage and the memories, the pain—all of it. I blinked and it was gone. I remembered vaguely Delilah about to shoot a healer and a friend sometime in the past. I couldn’t remember why I hadn’t killed her—whether it was due to Niko or some lingering affection for her wild ways. The wild ways themselves were a blank too. No mental sex shots for me. Wasn’t that the way? Wondering about nonsense words like Auphe or about being human made no sense, and I didn’t have the time to stand pondering the philosophical nature of humanity now. What made a man a man? Who cared? There was a killer in the basement and a killer flanking us, and this place stank worse than a slaughterhouse. Time to go to work. I’d handled Ammut’s spiders. I’d do the same to her … only without the fork.
I turned my back, depending on Goodfellow to watch it, and moved past Niko to stand behind the door to the basement. A rug beneath my feet puffed up dust and the smell of death as I pushed at the door carefully with the gun muzzle. Ajar, the heavy wood swung with ease and no haunted house screech of rusted hinges. Too bad. That would’ve given an excuse to flip on the lights, if the power was still on, and go pounding down the stairs shooting anything I could see—”see” being the key word.
Niko’s hand on my shoulder stopped me from edging down the first step. I waited and, as my eyes adjusted, a small amount of light became visible. A street-level window was somewhere down there, a small and filthy one from the amount of light it let in, but when you’re old and have bad hips, you don’t come down to your basement to clean the windows in case someone needs to come to kill the monster that ate you. They couldn’t have had a housekeeper?
The first foot on the step wasn’t mine. No surprise. Spanking boglets and sending them running back to mommy kept me from being benched, but lacking my entire mind didn’t make me MVP. I did make sure mine was the second foot, and Goodfellow and Delilah didn’t fight me for the honor. I couldn’t see what color the stairs were, but I could tell they were painted. Brown, gray, some color that wasn’t impossible to see in the gloom, but neither were they easy.
The body was.
It was … I had no idea what it was. It had wings but not feathered, more like that of a bat. It had a child’s face, sharp teeth in a small gaping mouth, and large eye sockets. The closest thing I could come up with was a flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz. The eyes that had been in those sockets were desiccated to the size of raisins and the wings looked brittle enough to disintegrate with a touch. Dark blue or purple veined every inch of the skin I could see as it had the victims in the scrap metal shed. The rest of it was wrapped in a spiderweb cocoon, which was apt as it looked as if it had been sucked dry—a fly in a spider’s web. Ammut had her pet spiders storing food for her here in her emergency freezer. This one hadn’t made it all the way down to the pantry. She’d eaten it on her way out.
That last Oreo on the go. It happened to us all.
I edged around it, following Niko’s lead, and kept moving down the stairs, one slow, cautious tread at a time, and stayed grateful the body didn’t have a vest and fez. That would have been beyond my weirdness threshold, assuming I had a weirdness threshold that didn’t involve undead cats and naked pucks. Swiveling my head, I tried to cover both sides of the basement around the stairs until Niko’s painless but pointed jab in my gut combined with pointing to the right had me focusing on that. He’d cover the left, I’d cover the right, and nothing would be lost in the seconds it took to watch both on your own.
Killing monsters for a living was not for the loner, not for a long-lived one at any rate. We reached the bottom of the stairs, and I could barely see the paler color of Niko’s hair at all. The rest of him bled into the darkness. The man wore way too much black. As if I could talk, I amended to myself, and checked over my shoulder. Delilah, whose almost-white hair stood out in the gloom, a moth wing pressed against a night’s window, was behind me and Goodfellow behind her. It was good planning on the puck’s part. With the partial new opinion I had of her—knowing implicitly what she was capable of caused very confused emotions—trusting her to guard all our asses wasn’t an option. It didn’t matter that I could see how that amused her, a spark of reflected light in amber eyes. She could be amused all she wanted as long as Goodfellow put that sword through her if something looked off or if she breathed wrong.
At the bottom I automatically moved to stand back to back with Niko. I couldn’t tell where Ammut was more specifically than the basement. I smelled her everywhere, the pungent odor rolling at me from all sides. I could smell too much and couldn’t see enough. I felt something against my foot, a shadowed heap. I used my toe to flip it part of the way over … slow, silent, careful. It was a Wolf—male, not a Lupa. It had human features except for the mouth crammed with wolf teeth and tufted ears. It too was mapped with dark veins and cocooned. The veining would be part of whatever process Ammut used to pull the life out of her victims. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t fresh hearts pooling blood on your countertop either.
As Delilah came to the last step with Goodfellow right behind her, I stepped away from Niko and farther into the deepening shadows to make room for the two. Blind was no way to work, not and stay alive, but Niko took care of that and finding Ammut all in one fell swoop. It wasn’t ninja magic. It was good old mundane road flares; one tossed past me and one on his side of Am
mut’s cookie jar. They lit up the space like two small bloody suns. There were at least seven bodies I could see before me. All were cocooned. Here were some of the missing victims we hadn’t been able to track down, spider-delivered from the parts of the city where Ammut was too snooty to go herself. Fortunately, the basement was damp with one pool of moisture by the heap of bodies. That moisture kept them from bursting into flame as the flare was close enough to touch them. I scanned the area. Cracked concrete walls that revealed the old brick beneath, bodies, puddles; that was it. I even checked above my head. If a spider was going to jump you … If anything was going to jump you, that was where it would be in this place. Seeing nothing there or under the stairs, the flare banished shadows there as well, I turned to take in Niko’s half of the space.
More bodies; almost twenty in a pile reached to the exposed aged beams above us. The basement was bigger than I’d imagined before Niko played God and lo, there was light, but it wasn’t so big that I could see there was no sign of Ammut. I smelled her, but I didn’t see her. Either she’d left two seconds before our cab dropped us off or she was under that mound of bodies. It was big enough for a monster to burrow beneath.
I was already moving toward it when I discovered there was a third option that I hadn’t considered.
While it was large enough to hide Ammut, it was also big enough for six spiders to leap out of while Ammut, on the petite side for a monster, came boiling out from under the seven bodies behind me. All in one moment, I saw the thrash of long black jointed legs, cocooned bodies tumbling; Delilah literally ripping off her clothes—I heard the material shred under her hands—and becoming a large white Wolf that fell to all fours to jump; Niko’s and Goodfellow’s swords swinging, and Ammut.
It was one moment of ivory fur, claws, and fangs, silver slicing quickly enough that the air itself should’ve been cut. It was one moment of yellow eyes and dripping venom with legs scrabbling too fast for nature to have intended—a hideous, inescapable speed.
It was a lot to take in and I didn’t bother. I had Ammut on my ass and that took priority. I was firing as I swiveled. When something is that close to you and moving that damn fast, equally quick as her spiders, aiming is a luxury. If you’ve got a full clip, pull the trigger and keep firing. You’ll hit it, one way or the other—hopefully before it hits you.
I hit Ammut with three hollow points. It gave me enough breathing room to get a split-second look at what I was shooting at rather than just a greenish blur. Mythology sketched on a bar napkin said she was part lion, part alligator, part hippo, and that would have been a lie because mythology was always a lie. Deduction told us she had to look human part of the time. That time wasn’t now. No, now she faced me, a glittering coil of green and bronze scales, the same coil that had yanked me into the canal. There were arms, appearing disturbingly boneless, and the face was almost lionlike, a blunt muzzle only finely scaled. The scales on the sleek head were almost all copper and bronze compared to mixing with the deep green below. I could see how it might seem like a lion’s mane, a shining cascade of tawny glitter, because her eyes were almost all cat too.
Round and gold but with no discernible pupil, they were clear and luminous as the moon had been in the night sky of Nevah’s Landing. Despite her death-inwater stench, despite her being a monster, she wasn’t repugnant. She was … natural, a creature you’d see in the jungle or slipping into the waters of the Nile. I hadn’t expected that. The spiders were repulsive, because, let’s face it, spiders suck. They’re creepy and nasty even when small, and they need smashing with your boot, but Ammut didn’t give off that feeling. If she’d had wings, she would’ve been a dragon, and I’d just shot that dragon.
Not that she seemed to care. I’d burned through one clip—three rounds in her and the rest in the wall. She was so quick I’d barely seen her at all, much less how she slithered, diving and striking out of the way of the bullets. Her last move had been the quickest, her tail wrapping around my legs. As I pulled at my Glock in its holster with my other hand, she said softly, “Where are your brothers and sisters?” A human voice—a woman’s voice; musical and husky, it was almost sexy.
Softer still. Her face was close enough to mine that I could smell her breath. It smelled of flowers, sweetness overlying the rest of her foul scent. “I will not devour you or your companions. You have only to tell me.” Closer. “Where are you brothers and sisters, half-breed?”
The last words were uttered in a voice not human in the slightest. It was the voice of the Eden serpent. But it wasn’t cajoling Eve into taking a bite; it was flat-out telling her to get her naked ass in gear toward that apple tree before he ripped off a mouthful of her nude flesh and shoved it down her throat. That was the snake on me now, and the hypnotic speed and breath drenching the air with a gallon of overwhelming perfume/pheromones was not distracting anymore. It was a sign I’d screwed up. The weight heavy on my legs was a sign too. The sign of my changing all that was the muzzle of the Glock I jammed in one of those round eyes and the trigger I pulled with it.
I didn’t get her, not completely. She was that goddamn fast, but I winged the side of her muzzle, bright gold blood spattering. The coils wrapped around my lower legs tightened until I felt the bone seconds from snapping. That I, somewhere from my past, already knew what that felt like didn’t make me any happier. I was about to shoot her again, only this time I was smarter. I shot at the one part of her that wasn’t moving—her length crushing my legs. I aimed for the edge of the coil. I’d seen—or not seen actually—that impossible speed in action. The last thing I wanted to do was shoot myself in the leg when her snaky self disappeared. Good thing too, because she did disappear and I hit the floor instead of my foot. That didn’t mean I stayed on my feet. She hadn’t broken my legs, but she’d bruised them and then some. I fell as they gave out beneath me, but that didn’t stop me. Four spiders on a beach, even more in my apartment, a boglet too big for his britches; I’d be damned if an overgrown garter snake was going to get the best of me whether I could walk or not.
She streaked past me, seeing all her spiders but one dead, and decided discretion was the better part of valor against a puck, a Wolf, and two highly pissed-off sheep. Smart move. I nailed her in the tip of her twitchy tail with my combat knife, through the flesh, and into the wood of the bottom stair as she slithered up. Smarter move, I smugly congratulated myself … until she ripped off the stair and kept going. Motherfu—
Get ahead of her.
Sure. When I could fly.
You know how. Open the door. Your door. It’s easy. Easy-peasy pudding and pie. Stomp the snake and watch her die.
I didn’t listen to the crazy. I was getting expert at that now, lots of practice. Not to mention the basement door already was open, which was how she was getting away. Instead, I started after her the only way I did know how. Yeah, I was crawling, but I was crawling with a gun, another knife, and one badass attitude. My time wasn’t of the Olympic variety but the never-give-up mind-set was. Already at the top of the stairs, she turned and spit. It wasn’t the usual villain spitting in disgust at the feet of his enemies. That would’ve been B movie over-the-top and disgusting, but not as bad as this. This was a spray of something venomous. It wasn’t the Nepenthe poison—as the last spider squealed and died impaled on Goodfellow’s sword while Delilah, still in wolf form, was tearing the legs off an already-dead one. This was something else. Niko immediately started vomiting as he’d been lunging after Ammut and me. He managed to vomit all over the back of my nonfunctioning legs. I didn’t hold a grudge. He owed me one from the canal incident. Delilah spit a spider leg out of her white muzzle and yakked up something best not thought about. Goodfellow turned green and bent over to gag, but managed to hold it back.
Me? I wiped the mist off my face, over my hair, and said, in perhaps not my kindest moment, “Pussies.”
Better parts of me surfaced, and I struggled to turn over and pat Niko gingerly on the back, as he’d done for me at the
canal and, unfortunately, he suffered the same result I had. Half of me was glad I wasn’t a sympathy puker and the other half was getting worried. Niko was my brother, my family. He was all I fucking had. “Hey.” I squeezed his upper arm instead of the back thing this time. “You need a doctor. I know you said when the spider clawed you that we don’t do hospitals—no spreading the supernatural word, but you and I are human. And right now, that’s good for you. A hospital can handle an unknown poison.” At least they’d better be able to handle it or some white coats would be damn, damn sorry.
Whatever I’d said caused Delilah the Wolf to nearly choke on her next yak, and I wasn’t sorry at all on that one. Goodfellow straightened, the green in his face still there, but he was upright and that was something. “No, no hospital needed. Ammut’s venom isn’t like Nepenthe venom. It’s more a defensive mechanism as opposed to an offensive one. It’s not lethal, not even to humans. It’ll wear off in about fifteen to thirty minutes.” And some creatures were more affected than others. Goodfellow somewhat, Delilah somewhat more, humans … It was the aftermath of a New Year’s Eve party. Puke, breathe, then puke some more.
I couldn’t walk, Niko and Delilah were not in prime fighting condition, and Goodfellow looked as if he had a case of the flu. He could’ve gone after her, but he wouldn’t have caught her. She was too quick and if he had—one person against Ammut wasn’t the best way to keep your friends alive.
So we sat in the basement while Ammut either ran out of the house in her human form—buck-ass naked, I assumed, or maybe she wore scales even in human form—or sped up to the fourth floor of this place, burst through a top window, and snaked off across the rooftop. I’d take the rooftop if I were her. One more spider slunk out behind Ammut’s seven-victim pile, but it was small and I took care of it with one round. My legs slowly regained feeling. I stripped off my jacket, then my shirt—apathy means never having to … eh, fuck the rest—and sacrificed it to Niko’s occasional eruptions of tofu, health shakes, and faux food that didn’t belong in the body anyway. I held his braid out of the way, very prom date of me, rested a hand on his back, and trusted Goodfellow. The expression I shot the puck said if that trust wasn’t earned, I’d be strangling him next with a fluid-stained snarky T-shirt that wasn’t that clean to begin with.
