Rob Thurman - Roadkill

I’d taken thirty of them before he even said the word. Dashing past me in the opposite direction was Salome. Apparently she liked what she saw a lot more than I had, because I heard her loud and raucous purr all the way back at the front of the hangar where I’d left my Einstein revenant. I’d never heard a happier sound in my life. Damn, she really was a tiny patch of living hell in a rhinestone collar. And I thought I had monster cred.

The extra smart revenant wasn’t where I’d left him. Brains and motivation. Too bad he hadn’t gone to business school. He’d have a corner office by now. It still didn’t take long to find him, though. You could only go so far when you were nothing but a torso and arms. He’d pulled his upper half into a patch of blackness, but I could still smell that distant hint of perfume. A woman had put that on one night, for her husband, her boyfriend, her girlfriend or just for herself, and probably thought for a moment that she was pretty and ready for the night. But it had been the night that had been ready for her.

I reached into the darkness for him, ignored the savage bite on my forearm, and yanked him into the dim light. Once I got him there, I used the barrel of my gun to pry his jaws open and remove my arm more or less intact. Blood probably stained the long-sleeved T-shirt, but that was the great thing about black. It didn’t show blood and it was slimming-a must-own for pudgy serial killers everywhere.

I planted a mud-covered combat boot on the revenant’s chest. “All right, Professor, I was in a damn good mood yesterday. Now tell me why two Kin Wolves and one of your kind cared to blow it to shit.”

It snarled, a show of teeth now broken from the metal of the Desert Eagle, but said nothing. And really it had nothing to lose. It was dead. It might take weeks to get there but even a revenant couldn’t regenerate an entire lower body. So nothing to lose… but something to gain. Pain. Nobody liked pain, not even revenants. Sometimes the threat was enough; other times it wasn’t. I think the woman who’d died in her favorite perfume, the perfume on its breath, would understand that I didn’t give a shit which way this bastard went in that regard. I unsheathed the combat knife, its serrated smile as unrelenting as my own. “Let’s try this again. Who is fucking with my Zen?”

It was tough. I had to give it that, but in the end no one is tough enough. Everyone talks. Everyone. But sometimes the carrot worked better than the stick. I believed in equal opportunity. I used both. Weeks dying of starvation wasn’t a good way to go. Neither were your fellow revenants or Mommy eating you alive. I promised it a quick death and I gave it a taste of what it’d be like not to have one. And when it talked, I gave it that quick death. Not because it deserved it… It didn’t; not because I gave my word… A thing like it didn’t merit my word. I did it because that’s what exterminators did. Got rid of the nest of poisonous spiders in the closet. I didn’t leave them half alive and waiting around for someone to stumble into.

“Did it talk?”

I turned my head as I wiped the blade against my jeans. “Yeah, it did,” I said absently to Robin, who, as usual, had managed to do a nice tidy slaughter without getting one drop of blood on himself or messing up his hair. Only the wet bottom half of his pant legs was ruined. I, on the other hand, was soaked, muddy, bloody; the usual. If only there were lobster bibs big enough for monster hunting.

“Good. I’d hate to think I had to kill a kindergarten class of revenants and see a vagina large enough to drive a Volkswagen through for nothing.” He used the back of my shirt to clean his sword. I didn’t complain. I deserved it, leaving him as the world’s most unlucky birthing coach. “Perhaps I should shove you up there. Expand your sexual horizons.” Now that, nobody deserved. I stood and put away my blade.

An “I hunger” drifted mournfully from the back of the warehouse. He’d killed the revenants, but mom-which to be fair, you couldn’t kill without a rocket launcher-was still good to go, which had me good to go as well.

“Well?” he said, beckoning for the information with impatient fingers. “What did it say?”

“It wanted to know where your cat got that rhinestone collar. Said it was tacky as hell.” I headed for the opening to the outside, leaving our Venus out of sight, out of mind, and hopefully out of horribly disgusting dreams as well.

“It’s rubies, not rhinestones, you fashion heathen, and I know you didn’t drag me out here in New York City ’s version of the Everglades, ruin my shoes, my pants, my ability to function with anything female for the foreseeable future, and my entire morning to not tell me what you found out,” he demanded.

“Pucks, you can’t stand it when someone knows something you don’t, can you?” I commented as I passed into the sun and headed for the Jeep. “Where’s Salome?” Robin had picked up the carrier at the door, but it was empty.

He didn’t answer me any more than I’d answered him. He did manage to call me every equivalent of jackass he could think of, keeping it all in English so a nonbilingual moron like me could understand each one. I nodded, snorted, and gave him the occasional “good job” when it was a really filthy one. When we got back to the Jeep, Robin still didn’t have his answer, but I had mine. It turned out Salome had beaten us back to the Jeep. She was batting a revenant head around the floorboards with waning enthusiasm. To a cat, it was no fun when they didn’t wriggle and squirm. She yawned when she saw us, her teeth suddenly much bigger with the gray furless lips peeled back, then went to her usual grin.

“No, no. Absolutely not,” Goodfellow told her. “You are not taking that home and rolling it across my finely crafted floors. Do you realize how hard it is to remove blood from marble grouting? I thought not.” He tossed the head into the water as he slid behind the wheel while holding the carrier. He picked up Salome whose Egyptian dusk eyes narrowed. “Yes, very fearful. You’re the feline fatale. Take a nap.” She was deftly popped in the carrier and it was placed on the backseat.

“Do dead cats nap?” I asked, although at the moment I wasn’t particularly curious, but I was hoping to distract Robin. I should’ve known there wasn’t much chance of that, and there wasn’t.

“So obviously you feel this is a need-to-know situation. I and my ruined wardrobe can both assure you that I need to know.” He started the Jeep as I settled into the passenger seat.

“Oh, I know you need to know. Can’t stand not knowing. Are flat-out dying to know.” I closed my eyes and crossed my arms. I didn’t know if dead cats napped or not, but I did. “But guess what? You’re not getting to know.” I ignored him as his cursing escalated and I closed my eyes tighter against the bright daylight.

Hell, I wished I didn’t know.

But in the end I did tell him. He was right. He deserved to know. It was safer for him if he did. After I told him, the swearing stopped and he squeezed my shoulder sympathetically. “I am sorry, but I would be lying if I said I hadn’t seen it coming.”

I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit the same thing. I’d learned in the past where lying to myself got me… in a world of hurt. Instead, this time I kept my eyes shut and did everything I could not to think about anything. No lies, no truth-nothing at all. As most things tended to do when you needed them the most…

It didn’t work.

Abelia-Roo and her clan were at a campground in the Catskills. They would be tucked away in a less scenic and more private corner of the RV park where they could avoid any contact with outsiders, gadje . That wasn’t to say they weren’t running some cons, doing a little tarot or palm reading; Abelia- Roo wasn’t the best role model or leader, but they’d be more likely to do that in the nearest town. Wouldn’t want the natives having a map to the front door of your Batcave, or considering Abelia-Roo, to your volcano hideout complete with lasers for toasting the genitals of your luckless hero.