Rob Thurman - Slashback

“And once again, they don’t give a damn about me, just Niko,” I said. “How would they know I wasn’t human unless Jack told them? They called me a Godless creature, which I’m guessing means paien and especially Auphe aren’t welcome into their Heaven.”

They had been concerned about my soul at first and were now concerned about Niko’s. They wanted to save his soul for Heaven-just like Jack wanted to save the skin of the wicked. But Niko wasn’t wicked, not immoral, not. .

Sinful.

“Shit,” I said. “A s inner . That son of a bitch Jack thinks he’s saving sinners. He kept saying saving and I thought he meant it as in saving the skin of the wicked as trophies. He didn’t. He meant save as in save us from our sins. Save our. . what? Souls?”

Did it matter? There were a thousand types of crazy. Religious crazy was one pretzel in a jumbo-sized bag of them. How or why it got Jack’s rocks off was irrelevant to the fact that it did and what he would do to make it happen.

“It would explain why he kills by skinning,” Robin said with an uneasy edge. There was something peculiar in his voice, swimming in the depths. Something more than what we were now guessing. “‘And the priest who offers any man’s burnt offering, that priest shall have for himself the skin of the burnt offering which he has offered.’ Leviticus 7:7–9.”

I wasn’t surprised the puck knew his Bible. If there was a commandment he hadn’t broken, he’d take it as a personal challenge. As he’d once said, Christians love to take the sin out of “sinsational.”

“Jack bases his pathology in religion-many do. He even has followers who want to be his apprentices. It’s not that uncommon for religious cult figures. You led your own religion in the past not to forget,” Niko pointed out to Goodfellow, “but that doesn’t explain why he has zeroed in on us to begin with.”

Nik was right-why Jack had fixed on us was still up in the air. The big question. How had we come on his radar?

“I’m bringing Ishiah in on this. He might be able to contribute. . something.” Robin had his phone out and was sending a text, the uneasy air about him thickening with every moment that passed. “And truly you are the unluckiest bastards I’ve ever come to know. First the Auphe race and what they did to you, the fact your career has you testicles deep in the worst predators in the city on a near daily basis, and then comes the serial killers. This is your second now in your mayfly-short human lives. That should be unheard of.”

“What’s Ish going to know? And actually this is the third,” I corrected without much thinking about it. I should have. I should have thought about it with extreme and excruciating care.

Niko turned the color of mud under his dark skin and I gave my tongue a savage punishing bite. We didn’t talk about it. I wouldn’t put him through that again, not in word or thought. I knew better.

However, I didn’t get the reaction I expected. His hands were suddenly on my shoulders, shaking me hard in the recliner, harder than he ever would have with my cracked ribs, control of his own strength abruptly gone. “In Connecticut, in New London, what was his real name? His last name? I never knew. I didn’t find out afterward. I didn’t try. I didn’t want to know. Cal, what was it?”

At eleven there wouldn’t be much reason I would’ve known. Kids aren’t interested in things like that and after all of it, as Nik said, after all that happened I didn’t want to know. But I had also been an eleven-year-old period. Niko had idealized me, as good big brothers do, in a way that blurred certain memories now and certain knowledge then.

At eleven, I stole shit like a motherfucker.

He never knew. It was only little things. Candy, loose change, skateboards, and just once a porno magazine from our serial-killing next-door neighbor. I’d taken it from his mailbox, scanned it, and trashed it far from home one day before Niko had gotten back from work. This was before I guessed about the killings, but I remembered his name from the address label on the cover-after what had happened, after the basement, the bodies, the attic. . Jesus Christ, after the attic, as much as I wanted to, tried to, how could I forget?

“Hammersmith,” I said, throat oddly dry from such a blood-soaked past. “James Hammersmith.” Junior. Junior Hammersmith.

Junior who liked to kill drug dealers, thieves, and prostitutes the same as Jack.

Both with no tolerance for wickedness or sinners in any form.

Robin was staring at us, paused in midtext. “Spring-heeled Jack murdered several in Hammersmith, England. It was one of his favorite hunting grounds. What happened? Who is this James H-”

Niko cut him off with a fierce ruthlessness I could feel in the grip that remained on my shoulders, his fingers biting down to press on bone. I don’t think he was seeing me anymore. “His worshipper. His murdering bastard of an apprentice .” Like the men in the park who were waiting to become just that. “Junior who said his master liked to watch from above when lightning was in the sky. Junior who liked to sign his work just like Jack.”

He was right. It was the only explanation. That’s why Jack wanted us-for what we’d done to his apprentice. And while Nik had never told me twelve years ago that slice on my chest was Junior’s start to “signing” me with a J for Junior or for his Jack, I had noticed the similarity in the slashes from Jack’s first attack on me in my bedroom. But in our lives a slash is a slash and very easy to come by. The only reason I’d noticed is that they were both especially neat and straight, but out of as many as I’d had, nothing to get excited about. There wouldn’t have been reason then for Nik to make the connection, not with that single clue, particularly not when we’d both done our best together and separately to bury those memories of Junior.

Jack drifted from town to town, city to city, country to country. When he came to New York, we were just lucky enough he hadn’t forgotten Junior or us. Ain’t it the fucking way?

Peeling his fingers off of me, Niko took one breath, another, and then was in the gym destroying everything in his path. Weapons were thrown with savage force to shatter at the wall. The mat was being cut to ribbons.

I scrambled out of the chair, fuck the ribs, and pushed Goodfellow back when he would’ve followed. I’d seen Nik lose his shit only one other time. That had been bad. There weren’t words for the level of bad that had been. But that had been internal with his lethal control intact on the outside to leave him somewhat functional-to leave the world itself somewhat functional. This. . this was not functional. Not for Nik.

This was not Nik at all-not the Nik of now.

“What is wrong with him? He’s gone mad. But Niko isn’t mad. Niko is, malaka , the sanest of us all.” Goodfellow sounded shocked. He’d seen only Niko’s meticulously controlled outer shell. He didn’t know what was under it. No one knew: not the puck, not Promise. No one but me and having lived through it with him, I wished neither of us had to know.

It could be a flashback, a genuine one. It could be finally dealing with what he hadn’t let himself process then. I didn’t know which, but it didn’t matter. Getting Niko back from this was the important thing. I’d swear to anyone I hadn’t read a psychology book in my life, but I had. I’d read a fuck ton of them as a teenager when I’d finally comprehended Nik’s unforgiving life in a way that I couldn’t at eleven. Even a few years older I couldn’t protect him like he protected me, but at least I could understand him and what he was doing to himself for me. I read Nik’s books when he was at work or school, when he couldn’t see me. I’d read them for precisely this. I didn’t know it would come, but I didn’t know that it wouldn’t either.