Rob Thurman - Slashback

I heard the snort from a nose seen on many a Greek statue. Hawklike and noble in size. It came from a stray Northern Greek horn-dog who sweet-talked a girl from our Rom clan centuries ago. That’s also where Niko’s dark blond hair entered a dusky-skinned, black-haired gene pool. Just as my decidedly non-Rom pale skin came from the Auphe swimming in my blood.

The difference was Nik would be considered pure Rom to the Vayash clan-if he turned his back on me. . or, as they’d said, preferably put me down like a rabid dog. Put me out of their misery, because I would never be Rom. They’d made that clear. I would never even be close to human, never anything less than an “abomination.”

Too bad they didn’t know sooner or later if Grimm had his way there’d be a new hybrid race of Auphe sweeping the earth, worse than the originals, and all wearing-if the universe had any sense of humor-T-shirts of their own that read ABOMINATION NATION.

One could hope.

Cal

Present Day

The next morning there were no smiley face pancakes waiting for me. There was only Niko wearing sweatpants and already finished up with his two-hour-long workout over in the gym-designated area of the space. As he toweled the sweat off his neck and chest, one of the heavy bags still swinging from what had probably been a roundhouse kick, I went to the kitchen cabinet to dig out a box of cereal. Ignoring the high stools, I boosted up to sit on the breakfast counter, my usual spot, and ate a handful of Captain Crunch dry. Cooking was for wusses who couldn’t fuel homicidal fury on pure sugar alone.

“Why aren’t you at the university?” I asked while chewing. Manners and me, we weren’t much on a speaking basis. “Don’t you have an eight a.m. class on Tuesdays to teach about boring dead guys?”

“Normally. I’m surprised you knew. It means so much to me that you take an interest in my work,” he said dryly, dumping his towel in the workout hamper.

“As often as you’ve kept me from being one of those boring dead guys, I feel I should give a little back.” I tossed down another handful of sugar. That was the great thing about the life span in our career: you rarely lived long enough to develop diabetes from poor nutrition. “So? What’s up then?”

“We have a business appointment, which naturally you’ve forgotten as your brain has all the retention qualities of a sieve. We’ve twenty minutes before we have to leave. I get the first shower since you’re still grazing your way through endless vistas of sugarcane.”

“You used to say I was smart.” Sieve, my ass, and what was wrong with Captain Crunch? It was the perfect food.

“You are smart when you can be bothered. You, little brother, can rarely be bothered,” he said with a Death Valley dryness to his voice.

He had me there. As the bathroom door closed behind him, I slid down, my feet hitting the floor, and moved to check the calendar, the note taped to my door, and then down at the neat marker writing across the box of cereal in my hand. Yeah, Nik tried to keep me updated on these things, but I was hopeless.

I finished up the half-full box of cereal and thought about it. There was Grimm, a jack-in-the-box you never knew when was going to pop up and spill your guts on the floor. There was this new serial killer who dropped bodies like kids dropped water balloons. Now a job too?

I checked the calendar and the notation again. Eh, what the hell? This wasn’t like me telling Ishiah to forget a freebie-of-the-week on Jack the Rippers. This was only the Kin. Granted, they could lick their own junk and run the supernatural crime in NYC at the same time, but they were still the Kin. The day we couldn’t handle the werewolf mafia with one hand while jacking off with the other was the day it was time to hang it up and get out the walker. Our multitasking beat theirs every time.

Twenty minutes and thirty seconds later-Niko loved his schedules; he’d have made a great fascist-we were moving down the sidewalk. He was looking for a cab. I was looking for something more important and I spotted mine first. The blessed hot dog cart. If Leonardo da Vinci had painted it, light would’ve spilled from the heavens to radiate around it in an ethereal luminous glow. . and the guy hawking the dogs would’ve looked a little like a woman under his beard, but art was art.

That is to say, I didn’t give a crap about it. I just wanted my dog.

“More onions,” I told the man as he spooned them on top of the mustard and relish. “Seriously, dump them on there.” The guy huffed in annoyance but loaded it up with triple onions and handed it over.

As we walked on, I took a bite. New York may be low on ambience, but it knew how to do a dog right. As I took an enthusiastic second bite, Niko asked, “Why? I don’t have anything approaching your sense of smell and even I am offended.”

I loved onions enough that my enhanced scenting abilities had accustomed themselves to the smell over the years. They didn’t bother me at all now. “First, I like onions. Second, it pisses off Wolves. Third, I like pissing off Wolves.”

Almost as much as killing them.

I tightened the choke chain on my inner darkness, gave it a mental smack, and a “naughty bastard” with my usual resignation-maybe even fond resignation. It was the same reaction you’d show your pet great white when he brought back half of a surfer instead of the beach ball you’d thrown into the water. He was a bad boy, true, but he was also only doing as he was created to do. How could you hold that against him?

Just keep your grip tight on that leash and make sure it didn’t happen for real.

I took a third bite of the hot dog and it was as amazing as the first two. “Tastes good and pisses off Wolves. There is no downside.”

And I proved that when we arrived at the office of the Beta Ivar. Alphas were too high up to muddy their paws with Niko, a human sheep, or me, a sheep deep-fried in Auphe Hell with his own bogeyman squatting in his brain. That meant poor Ivar, icy blue eyes watering copiously from my onion breath, had to deal with hiring us. When it came to Wolves, I was used to the lack of respect and the occasional yellow squirt of fear from the ones who’d actually seen an Auphe before they were erased from the earth. Except for my pale skin, I didn’t look anything but human-slate eyes, black hair-but I smelled like Auphe to those who had the noses sharp enough to tell.

Even under the onions, to a Wolf it would come through as easily as a scalpel slicing flesh. Fortunately for Ivar, he, like many Wolves, had never come across a true full-bred Auphe. He’d only heard the legends and he only knew my smell was wrong. I saw it in his face twisting in disgust. Wrong . Didn’t belong in this world. . didn’t belong in any world. It was a battlefield scent-a legion of marching grim reapers shoved into one body, and Ivar didn’t care for it, didn’t care for any of this at all.

But you had to be smart to be Beta in your pack, especially if your pack was Kin, and that had him concentrating on other things-things that were annoying. Things that he could react to while he ignored the rest and did as his Alpha ordered.

He growled, “A sheep who grazes in an onion field is not a very smart sheep.”

Ivar sat behind a battered desk in the office of what I liked to think of as a CAW-conveniently abandoned warehouse. Movies were full of them. Reality was as well. . except they weren’t genuinely abandoned; they only appeared to be. The Kin bought up the ones on the edge of being condemned and used them for various purposes. Members of the pack not high up enough to have their own place slept in them. Drugs and prostitutes from other cities sometimes were unloaded there. A location to hire non-Kin sheep that weren’t good enough to see where Ivar or his Alpha actually lived-another good use. And sometimes the Kin used them to store food. Fresh food. The kind that was still capable of screaming.