by Rob Thurman
Delilah emptied her stomach only twice. Wolves were tough. Then in a fluid movement of skin and fur, she was human again, crouching close by—close enough that I had my gun pointed at her. She didn’t notice she was nude or didn’t care. Didn’t care, I’d say. She looked proud—as proud as she had as an enormous white wolf straight out of the Arctic. “You are not.” Her eyes were as amber when she was human as when she was wolf, but intriguing with their oval tilt. She could’ve had Japanese Wolf in her, with those eyes and that same amber skin, but the snow blond hair was a trick. Who could say who she was? No one had that right. And who was I to care? She was unique and stunning, as implacably deadly as the edge of my knife, and I wanted nothing to do with her—nothing good.
“You are not. Yet you are. And you know nothing,” she said, her voice almost as husky as Ammut’s.
A predator. A murderer. A manipulative liar. A killer through and through. I hated her. I did.
But, goddamn, she had the most amazing breasts ever. She put that little red Wolf at the strip club to shame. With the tattooed choker of wolf eyes and Celtic swirls that circled her neck, the vicious scars across her stomach, she twisted me inside and I couldn’t say why.
She smiled, her teeth white and even, human, but they’d worn blood in their time, I knew. “Baa baa, little boy lost in the woods. Are you a sheep in killer clothing or a killer in sheep clothing? Find out. Soon. Or I will.” She was gone almost as quickly as Ammut, snatching up her clothes and taking the stairs three at a time. And, yes, her ass was as amazing as her breasts.
Sometimes it’s either shit or go blind. This was one of those times. Horny and hate—two sides of one coin.
Goodfellow and I continued to wait and, when Niko could finally sit up, my legs were sore but functional, and he was a much lighter green than before. He hadn’t puked in at least ten minutes. I gripped his shoulder. “You with us, Nik?” I asked. If I sounded concerned, shit, I was. It would be hard to drag a half-dead brother to a hospital while choking the life out of a puck who’d lied to you.
“Cyrano?” My grip tightened. It hadn’t been enjoyable watching him struggle against the poison and it had been less enjoyable not knowing what to do about it. Not knowing what I’d do without him, my family—a family I’d gotten attached to way too soon, but some things you couldn’t control. I’d looked over my shoulder in Nevah’s Landing often enough to know that someone should be there, standing with me. Now that I knew who that was, he was staying there. I didn’t care what I had to do to make that happen.
The truth isn’t pretty, but it is what it is. And questioning it is a waste of time.
He’d fed me when the woman who whelped me hadn’t. He’d clothed me. He’d made me go to school… . Okay, that had doubtless sucked. He searched for me when I was lost. He kept me alive when I was drunk and Wolves wanted to eat me. He gave me a home. He hired metaphorical buses so he could not so metaphorically throw himself under them for me. He did all of that for me.
Brothers—it went both ways.
He slowly wiped his mouth on my shirt, then coughed. Finally, he raised his head and rubbed at his bloodshot eyes. “It was nearly worth it to get rid of this offensive T-shirt of yours.” He tossed it over the top of the tofu special on the floor. Tofu did not make for fragrant vomit. “I have had much better days than this.” More of a graygreen now, he said, “You called me Nik. Then you called me Cyrano.” Uneasy, pleased, and then both emotions vanished under a set expression. “Did she hurt you?”
“Drain a little life out of you?” Goodfellow added, sitting on the stairs above me where he’d moved about fifteen minutes ago out of Niko’s immediate range, his voice drifting down from behind. “Although you’ve more than enough to spare. It might improve your attitude. Mellow you somewhat. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
I reached up and smacked his leg hard as I answered Niko. “No. She choked me with a few gallons of perfume, which slowed me down some. It was strong”—almost impossibly so, close to hypnotic—”and after, it was the same old, same old. ‘Where are they? Give them to me. Where are your brothers and sisters?’”
Behind, I heard Goodfellow make a noise, unidentifiable, but when I glanced back, he was smooth faced and innocent as a babe again. Right. I gave my attention back to Niko, who had been looking at Robin as well with what was my best guess of puzzlement and dread, but trying to read emotions under green nausea was difficult. “How about we go home? Because I am done with basements. This one or any future ones.” We made it up, neither one too steady, but Goodfellow helped and, despite aching legs on my part and a rebelling stomach on Nik’s part, we made it upstairs, down the hall, and out the door. I zipped up my jacket to conceal the missing shirt and to keep from freezing my ass off as Goodfellow flagged down a taxi.
Niko was alive, Goodfellow was alive, I was alive, and Delilah was gone. As things went, that put us on the plus side of the scoreboard. The fact that no one was curious why I hadn’t gotten sick wasn’t discussed. They also hadn’t commented—very cautiously hadn’t commented—on my not being curious as to why Ammut’s poison hadn’t made me all but vomit my stomach then intestines up … as it had Niko, as it would a human. I didn’t bring it up either. They didn’t want to have to answer, and I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to hear Niko have to make up another lie—that her perfume had protected me by canceling out the poison and that being bitten by her spider had inoculated me against other poisons of the Ammut kind. He would’ve come up with something. No, I didn’t want to ask.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Listen to Wolves such as Delilah who don’t always lie.
Stop lying to yourself.
Half-breed, Ammut had whispered. Twice now, she’d said that. Half-breed, and that made me important to her, a monster that thought people weren’t worth eating. She needed me to find others like me, those half-breed brothers and sisters—whoever they were, wherever they might be. Brothers and sisters Niko, I was positive, knew nothing about. The look he had given Goodfellow had said as much.
Half-breed.
I was half human. I was Niko’s brother, so I must be.
Had to be.
But, Jesus, what was the other half?
12
I didn’t want to leave Niko alone, not until he was one hundred percent, so I asked Goodfellow to stay with him. The puck had calls to make, the rest of that party to set up. Niko could recover and, between calls, Goodfellow could bore the crap out of him by discussing the origins of Roman vomitoriums, because he’d yet to shut up about it. Show the guy some puke and it was nostalgia time for the wild and crazy days of a crumbling empire.
Niko was all about history, though. He might enjoy it … until the part where men were gladiators, body oil was cheap, and if there was a hole, someone’s dick was shoved in it. It reminded me of pictures in the news where deer would get their heads stuck in plastic Halloween pumpkins. I could visualize oiled-up gladiators running around in a drunken, panicked frenzy with their dicks stuck in ancient Roman wine bottles.
“Amphorae,” Robin said, punching in another number on his cell while Niko moved through some katas on the exercise mats, his way of recuperating—working the poison out of his system. “Ancient Roman wine vessels were called amphorae.”
“Shit, did I say that out loud?” The fact I had was only half the reason I was getting out of our place, but it was reason enough. I’d already popped some Tylenol for the residual ache in my legs. “But, hey, whatever. Fun, new knowledge … about the correct name of where gladiators could put their dicks if they were out of other options.”
“In Rome, you always had options.” His wicked smile was enough to have me bolting for the door as he started talking on the phone again.
“Cal, I told you I didn’t want you going out alone, not when Ammut obviously knows who you are and where to watch for you.” Niko stopped his workout. He was still paler than someone with his darker skin should be and the blond hair was almos
t brown from sweat. He looked sick, better, but still sick, and I kept that in mind.
“It’s broad daylight,” I protested. I’d showered—for a vegetarian, Niko could vomit with the best of them—and now I was back in fresh jeans and a black T-shirt. Just black. I’d run through all my clean and barely passable as clean T-shirts with nasty sayings that came courtesy of Goodfellow’s gift certificate, and had borrowed one of Nik’s shirts. Or stolen it, let’s be honest.
“And we were only just attacked in broad daylight,” he said, extra slowly in case I’d missed that fact.
“Inside. I plan on staying outside where all the world can see. I have a hunch about Ammut I want to check out. You need to get better and you have only hours to do it. I’ll be back in no time.” From the sweat he ignored running down his face, he wasn’t convinced. He squinted his eyes at the flow, like Clint Eastwood … damn macho. The sweat did not exist; only me and my idiocy did. “I’ll even bring back some Pepto. Have you in the pink in no time.” I grinned and was out the door before his poison-weakened body could lay a beat-down on me … or a sit-down. That was more likely. He’d tackle me and sit on my back until I came to my senses.
Unfortunately, the senses I was coming to weren’t what he wanted, and I slammed the door behind me, sprinting down the block as fast as my sore legs could carry me. Neither he nor Robin came after me. I’d trusted them in the past week, more than I’d have guessed I could trust anyone when I’d woken up in Nevah’s Landing. Now it was their turn, and they came through. Without trust, in our world—my world now—you had nothing. It made me feel kind of bad that I’d lied like a dog to them and lied better than Niko had to me since he’d shown up in my lost life. That answered that question. It definitely made him the better brother.
I had no plans on staying outside and I had no hunches, gut feelings, nothing like that about Ammut. I did have them about someone else, which was why I went back to the museum to see the mummy … Wahanket? I’d done something to him, something bad, something that kept trying to claw its way out of the pit in my memory that Niko’s nepenthe potion had shoved it into. And it wasn’t only that, with every new hour I had more and more memories leaking into my brain; dirty dishwater into a sponge. Dirty, because shadowed Cal in that shadowed photo wasn’t clean, but that wasn’t my judgment call to make. That wasn’t my job; being a brother was. Here was hoping Wahanket didn’t hold a grudge.
Sangrida—I remembered her name, which was helpful—was equally helpful in walking me past security again and escorting me to the correct basement door. I thought I was done with basements after Ammut, but they weren’t done with me. “Why is your brother not with you?” Her blond hair was pulled back into a tight, elaborate braid that looped around her head. She was Princess Leia—with a bleach job and a bucketful of steroids.
“Ammut,” I explained. “Nik’s okay, but he needs to stick close to the toilet. Hurling issues.”
Apparently Goodfellow wasn’t the only one with Too Much Information syndrome. She sighed, her massive bosom heaving. On other women it would’ve been breasts, melons, tits, whatever, but on her, it was bosom. If I forgot that—of all the things I’d forgotten from the last museum memory, this was a thought that still echoed—I was positive a size-eleven Valkyrie boot would end up in my ass. It was a bosom, to be respected, not stared at, and, yeah, maybe I’d go on down the stairs while she was studying me, contemplating God or Odin knew what. I did know that I did not want to end up as Thor’s bitch in Valhalla. “Thanks, ma’am,” I said hurriedly, and went down the steps faster. A mummy versus a Valkyrie—I’d take the first any day.
There was a basement, then a subbasement, and it was somewhat familiar. Unfortunately, the familiar was of the where-the-fuck-is-he kind. Wahanket liked his privacy and that made finding him difficult; I remembered that—I did, a genuine flash of recalled annoyance. This time I worked on sniffing him out. Although there were quite a few things down there that smelled mummified, the largest one was the one I tracked down. It was a strong scent of mummy and … barbecue.
He hadn’t moved from last time. I remembered that too—the large space. The computers mixed with Egyptian artifacts. The mummified cats perched on surrounding crates towering high. Salomes wherever you looked. Pooh … the koala bear, I meant, was still dead on a metal table. Long dead and no longer undead and that was good. Then I got a look at Wahanket and figured out why he hadn’t moved to a new undiscovered location.
He was a torso.
Granted, a torso with a head and one arm, but, basically, a torso.
Yeah, now I remembered. I remembered the axe.
The other arm and two legs were neatly stacked in a pile on the floor and beside that was a large curved needle strung with wire, the same wire that was holding that one arm on with neat stitching at the shoulder. As soon as Wahanket saw me, the arm dragged the body behind an Egyptian bench of some kind and blackened teeth bared as the mummy hissed at me. I’d done a bad thing to him all right. Part of me felt every bit like the monster he was, part of me didn’t give a damn, and another part of me felt as if the cats were cheering me on.
And yet another part of me chose to ignore the shadows that grew around me. They were my shadows, and I was done denying or refusing that.
“Hank, it looks like a helluva craft project you’ve got going on.” I pulled up a chair, gold with smooth pieces of inlaid blue, red, and black stone. Sitting, I spread my legs some, took out a knife in one hand—I didn’t see a gun doing much good—and patted my knee with the other. In seconds a mummified cat was draped across the denim, making a grinding, grumbling growl of pure bliss. Where Salome was gray and hairless, had lost all her bandages, and was sporting a small gold and ruby hoop earring, this guy—and it was a tomcat with shriveled, mummified balls—was mostly wrapped. But between the yellowed bandages, the skin was paler in spots and almost black in others. It was spotted like a piebald pony.
“How you doing there, Spartacus?” The first to step forward, he got the name—so sayeth the movie. I rubbed between his ears. Goodfellow knew everything and everyone—Captain Cook, Ramses, the Pied Piper, and even Caligula, he’d once said. I couldn’t quite hear the echo of that particular memory, but I knew it. Chances were he’d known Spartacus in the day too … and had that movie cued up on his DVR and ready to go at all times. Plus, Salome might be less inclined to bite off my head if I brought her a friend.
“You did this. You did this to me, you empty vessel. Worthless and weak.” The mouthy mummy remained pretty crispy too. Niko … Niko had set him on fire. That was what had happened. It wouldn’t destroy him, he’d said. It wouldn’t hurt either, only slow him down. Good informants were hard to find; he’d said that too. Wahanket would survive it, and he had. Then I’d come along—me and a convenient fire axe. He’d survived that as well, but that impression … It would be a little more lasting.
That was the first time I’d seen the shadows and felt the pain inside. That was the first time my brother had drugged me. Niko had also said the mummy had once tried to shoot me and before I’d made with the axe, he had tried to strangle me as I’d deprived him of something. Wahanket had been clear. I’d had something he’d wanted, but I’d lost it. But what was that something? The same thing Ammut wanted? The same quality the boggles and Wolves thought I was missing? Creep, creep, came the memories, but not fast enough—not as fast as Ammut was moving.
Now was the time to find out the why of all those things. That was why I’d come back to Wahanket. He knew who I was—what I was—and he was going to tell me. I wasn’t waiting on the Nepenthe venom to wear off on this. This was something I might not want to know, but I needed to know. Ammut had proved too dangerous to the others to let things take their natural course.
Wahanket, professional disperser of information, was going to tell me all those things I didn’t want to hear about Cal, but I needed to, because Cal was far more likely to be able to handle Ammut than I was. Cal would be able to protect his family
and friend when I might not be able to. The first night in Nevah’s Landing, I’d turned out the light and slept in the darkness, because, while monsters lived in darkness, so did killers.
I’d guessed killer for me. I thought now I’d guessed wrong.
“I don’t think I’m as empty as you thought.” I sniffed the air. “You smell Extra Crispy. I’d have taken you for an Original Recipe guy, but you never know.” Spartacus wrapped his paws around my wrist and proceeded to chew away mouthfuls of the rugged, water-stained black leather jacket and spit them on the floor. “You never goddamn know. Take another look at me, Wahanket, and tell me what I was and what I’m becoming again. Tell me or I’ll chop you into pieces so small you won’t be able to stitch yourself back together with your teeth, because I’ll pound them to dust. And whatever you have that passes for lips, I’ll rip off. Your gums … hmm. What the fuck. I’ll just pop your head in a box and toss it in the East River. See how that affects your sewing project. Home Ec. What a bitch, huh?”
Spartacus agreed by tearing off half my jacket sleeve. Oh yeah, this destructive little shit was going straight to Goodfellow. For all the torment he’d caused me, the puck deserved it. Salome might kill things and people; this guy would kill an apartment—more specifically Goodfellow’s penthouse.
Wahanket’s marsh-light eyes sharpened as they fixed on me. “You are correct. You are becoming again.” The teeth snapped in a satisfied smile … or mummy constipation; it was a hard expression to read. “You shall be you again, and if Ammut does not have you, one day I will.”
