Rob Thurman - Slashback

If a half Auphe like me was this mortal, what did that say about the true mortal?

I knew what Promise was thinking and who she was thinking it about because I thought the same thing. Nik, oblivious to his mortality while others brooded over it, glared at my discarded towel. “If it weren’t for your ribs, I would rub your nose in that.”

“You wouldn’t do that to a puppy.” I grinned. There was something wrong in enjoying injury as a license to bad behavior, but I’d never claimed there was anything particularly right with me.

“A puppy is capable of learning. A puppy doesn’t devote his life to seeing how far he can push me before I break mentally. A puppy does not order pizza and expect me to pay for it because he’s out of money.” Promise laughed at his seething outrage and rested her shoulder against his on the couch.

“Children can be such a blessing,” she said with mocking good humor as she continued to braid his wet hair, the bastard having beat me to the shower.

“Hardly,” Niko retorted. “I have done that tour of duty and have the post-traumatic stress disorder to prove it. The sex talk alone. .” He gave a minute shudder.

The memory hit me and I rubbed my ribs with an absent, cautious touch. “Oh yeah. Isn’t that when I asked you what doggy style meant and did we need to borrow our neighbor’s poodle for a demonstration?” My grin transmuted into a smirk. “I think you foamed at the mouth a little. Good times, huh?”

“I don’t care about your ribs any longer,” he said. “I don’t care if they are broken and shards of bone are slicing your lungs to shreds. Pick. Up. The. Towel.”

Playing my “get out of brotherly violence” injury card, I ignored him and sat down very slowly in our beat-up recliner. Once in a comfortable position, I relaxed and waited for the warm wave of codeine to wash over me. “It is funny. . not funny like the poodle thing. . but funny weird how Goodfellow and Promise both insist there aren’t any such things as zombies, but they were there. If Robin hasn’t seen any and he’s literally old as dirt, the dirt T. rexes walked around on, then what the hell?”

Promise finished Niko’s braid and curled the end around one slender finger, her heather-shadowed eyes thoughtful. “I cannot think of an explanation. From Niko’s description of his appearance, Jack does sound like a typical storm spirit, but storm spirits, that I know of, don’t use skinning as a manner of killing.”

“And he is all about the skinning.” I yawned. “He was still going on about that at the bridge: wanting to save people’s skin. He’s like the world’s most homicidal stamp collector-he has to murder to do it and he just freaking won’t stop talking about it. I miss the monsters that just try to kill you, not tell you about their hobbies.”

“How are the legs?” Niko had leaned down to snag the towel and was folding it in his tragically OCD way.

“Not bad at all. That cloud he floats around in, it acted like a buffer. I’ve a few scrapes. Nothing major.”

“The pain pills working yet for your ribs?” He was a good brother: asking about my health, picking up my towel. I could probably get him to order that pizza for me if I looked pathetic enough.

“Feeling no pain,” I answered honestly.

“Good.” I was promptly hit in the face with my wet towel.

Of course, good brothers know tough love inside and out.

That night Promise stayed. Normally Niko and I would’ve switched off on watch, but Promise had no problem staying awake all night to wait for Jack to appear. Somehow I still managed to pull a two-hour watch. I say somehow because as much as Niko didn’t want to remember giving me the sex talk when I was a kid, I didn’t want to think about him and Promise doing the things I’d asked about back then.

Really didn’t want to think about it.

When I was a kid, I used to love giving Niko shit about sex. It drove him nuts. It was better than cable. But not now. If Niko hadn’t raised me in addition to being my brother, it could be different. I’d have bumped fists, blown it up, slapped his back, whatever the hell the wild and crazy kids did when their brother got laid. I didn’t know. Between the spine-shivering sensation other people had at the thought of their parents having sex and knowing my best friend was doing it with my boss, probably on the same bar where I served drinks, I was surrounded by a whole shitload of “I don’t wanna know.”

I spent those two hours simultaneously watching for Jack and telling myself that Niko and Promise were either practicing the lost, deadly art of flower arranging, or sharpening their already incredibly sharp blades. I hung grimly to those images, then slammed into my bedroom faster than I should have with my ribs when Promise appeared out of the darkened hallway with her elaborate coil of soft brown hair loose and spilling around her hips. Her feet were also bare, but bare feet were essential for flower arranging and sword care and no one could tell me differently.

The fact that she whispered as I passed her, “Who’s your daddy?” made her a stone-cold bitch and had me popping an extra pain pill. If Jack killed me in my sleep, I couldn’t say I’d be that sorry to go.

In the morning, if five thirty a.m. could be called morning, when Nik and I were walking through East River Park, I hadn’t stopped twitching at random moments. We were headed for the river itself. Goodfellow had said that if Bastet hadn’t known anything about Jack no one would, but Bastet had been afraid. She’d said it herself; Jack left the paien alone unless they pissed him off. She wasn’t willing to risk it. Neither had the Kin, they’d made that clear.

That didn’t mean I was ready to give up asking around. Bastet was afraid, the Kin were cautious, but there were some that were too stupid to be either of those. Jack had started off with a mad on for Niko and me for whatever unknown reason, so it wasn’t as if we could back off. He wanted Nik and I’d gotten in the way enough that he wanted me dead-Flock-worthy or not.

That meant we hit up our last informational option because off the top of my head I couldn’t think of anything else to burn down that wouldn’t kill people in the process. Once we would’ve gone to our top informant, Boggle, but we’d accidentally gotten two of her children killed by Grimm and it’d be a long time before she was over that. If ever. Boggle would kill anything and everything that moved, but she loved her litter of man-eaters.

But there was a vyodanoi that lived in the East River. I’d never used him. . her. . it-I had no idea about their reproduction or genders and I didn’t want to-but he came around the Ninth Circle on a weekly basis and was a helluva lot more chatty than his fellow vyodanoi . He seemed to have a rubbery leechlike extension on the pulse of the paien world in NYC. He knew things that would no doubt get him killed someday, but for now, he talked. And the more he drank, the more he talked, which was why I was carrying a jumbo-sized plastic bottle of vodka in each hand. Niko had commented the family-sized vodka was a truly classy five a.m. purchase. I told him they were out of grape-flavored condoms and beef jerky or I’d have thrown them in just to see the look on the clerk’s face at how I wined and dined my dates. Niko’s reply that that was actually a step up was uncalled for.

The bastard.

There was a reason the vodka was the cheap stuff. I doubted any vyodanoi I saw at the bar had ever seen Mother Russia because I hadn’t once seen one of them drinking the top-shelf vodka.

“You’re unusually tolerable this morning,” Niko observed as we walked through trampled grass and mud under a sky that was clinging tightly to the darkness of night, stubbornly refusing the dawn.