Rob Thurman - Roadkill

“I guess we’re having that talk now?” I asked, looking down at the gravel beneath the car.

“Why not? Talking to this end of you”-his voice came from behind me, “behind” functioning in a dual sense here-“isn’t any different than speaking with the other end and is about as effective.”

I set my hands on the sun- hot door and pushed my way back in the car. Sliding back into the seat, I took the lap belt from the days when the highest quality of safety technicians thought that crushing your skull against the dashboard was just swell and wondered whether to fasten it or try to strangle myself with it. Asphyxiation would be less painful than one of Niko’s “talks.” This time, though, I knew I was right. All the other times, admittedly, I’d been wrong. I knew I was wrong and didn’t bother to deny how very wrong I was. That made this unfamiliar territory.

He got behind the wheel and closed his door with a muffled click, carefully… quietly. It was Nik at his most annoyed. When you could do what my brother could, when you could kill as easily as most people could breathe, it paid to have control-the same kind of control he doubted I had. And to have that control in less than six months with what the gates had done to me before that, I didn’t blame him for the doubt. I did have the gates in check, though, but getting Nik to believe-that was going to be a trick.

“I take it you have the payback you wanted.”

His voice was as quiet and self-possessed as the rest of him as he stared straight ahead, although he hadn’t started the car yet. I gave the bag of money he’d set in the floorboard a dismissive nudge with my shoe. It hadn’t been about the money. It had been about making her feel at least a tenth as terrified as I’d felt when I thought my brother was gone. “I got some, yeah.”

“I think you obtained more than ‘some.’ And there’s only one way you could’ve frightened her that much.” Now he looked at me, almost as though he didn’t know me. That, oddly enough, scared me probably more than I had scared Abelia-Roo. “You did the very thing I told you not to do, and now here we are.”

I opened my mouth, ready to defend myself-in a very real way, desperate to defend myself. Nik was my only family. I’d spent my whole life knowing without a doubt he was always there for me. If my ass needed saving, he would save it. If I was a screwup, which I was some of the time-hell, most of the time-he didn’t care. He corrected me or accepted me. He was my brother. He knew me inside and out and that couldn’t change. I might have control, but “Know thyself”? I didn’t have a goddamn clue. From day to day, minute to minute, my opinion shifted. Man, monster, an ice-cream twist of the two? I didn’t know. The bottom line was I didn’t know who I was, but Nik did, and that was more than good enough for me.

“Nik…,” I started.

He shook his head, cutting me off. “You have control? You swear it?”

“Yes,” I replied. I might not know who or what I was at my core, but the gates, that I was sure about. Absolutely positive.

“All right, then.” He started the car.

“All right?” I frowned and smacked aside a fuzzy dice that swung and hit me in the face as the car backed up. “Just like that? No talk? No kicking my ass? No telling me I’m being a dangerous idiot?”

“I saw you born, Cal.” He braked, cranked the steering wheel to turn the car around, and used the moment to give me the same look, but I saw it for what it was now. It wasn’t that he didn’t know me; it was that he was seeing something new. “I saw you grow up. Now I see the end product. I see the man, and you can’t be a man if I don’t let you be.”

I exhaled and folded my arms across my chest in relief and a little disbelief. “I’m a man? Yeah? Do I get a bar mitzvah?”

“The bris comes first. Do you want to borrow my tanto? I sharpened it this past weekend.”

This time it was my legs I folded and in a fairly unmanly fashion. “Funny. Funny stuff there.” Home deliveries and a doctor/hospital-averse mother left me as nature made me and it was a little late to be changing that now. “I’ve been trying to cut back on do- it-yourself circumcisions.”

He had driven us almost out of the park before he spoke again. “As a full-fledged adult, you will experience consequences to your actions, you realize.”

“There have always been consequences.” Bad ones usually.

“Yes, but in the past I was willing to let some of your idiocy slide. You are now wholly responsible for any and all of your decisions, no matter how catastrophic.”

The sun was falling in the sky, spearing me directly in the eyes. I put on my sunglasses and groaned, “All of them? Is that even possible?” I meant it too. I might have made it to adulthood in Niko’s eyes, but being an adult didn’t mean I was a competent one. I was a gate-building architect extraordinaire and the Traveling King, but that didn’t mean I still wasn’t a screwup in a few other areas of my life. “Cyrano, can’t we sort of ease into the responsibility part? One screwup at a time maybe?”

The Roman profile didn’t shift from its serious set. “You’re an adult, Cal. Embrace it. All little monster killers grow up. I saw it six months ago. I see it now. You can handle it. I have faith.”

Niko’s faith was different from my faith and a little less faith might be good. Killing, tending bar, trying to decide if I was more monster than human, and giving a shitload of bad attitude-that I was good at. Everything outside that was a different story, but if Nik thought I could handle the fallout of my occasionally wildly massive mistakes, then I’d give it my best shot. I’d make him proud-or do my best not to make him regret it.

“You’re right. I’m old enough to kill for my country, die for my country, vote for president, and to be drunk while doing all three.” I leaned back in the chair that worked, enjoying the air through the open window. Damn right I was ready.

“Yes, the very definition of responsibility,” he commented dryly.

Maybe not, but considering my past record, it was a start.

When we made it back to the loft it was almost dark. Niko had already put his university contacts to work as we rode back to the city, starting the calls before we had made it out of the Rom camp. It seemed he had one contact in the anthropology department in whom he had special confidence. If anyone had a chance of knowing the foremost experts in Rom culture, this guy, Dr. Penjani, would know about it. Next was a tiny woman I’d met once who taught mythology. Her name was Sassafras Jones, Dr. Sassy Jones, and she was sassy too. Loud, big, fond of pink… lots and lots of pink, but it looked better on her than on Abelia-Roo. I was surprised there wasn’t a tinge of pink to her wild halo of silver curls and in the icing on the horrible diet cardboard cookies she shoved on me. Not only did she know all the big mythology, anthropology, any-kind-of-ology experts in the country who’d have come across Suyolak in their studies, but she’d also be able to find out if any of them had terminally ill relatives. When it came to academia, Niko said, she was the equivalent of the neighborhood gossip… for the entire country.

“So what do we do when we find him?” I demanded, flopping on the couch and turning on the remote. Or rather pressing buttons in thin air as the remote disappeared from my hand more quickly than Houdini could’ve managed on his best day. Niko laid it on one end table. “Fine,” I grumped. “No TV. Doesn’t change the fact that if we find him and whoever took him has let him out, we’re just a puddle of hemorrhagic fever goo on the ground. Or he might be nice and only explode our hearts or melt our brains, all before we get within a hundred feet of him. Even if I manage to shoot him before I go down or travel closer and break his neck, I still think he’ll have time to take us all with him.”