Rob Thurman - Doubletake

Until it came through the arch we’d been running for: a flying serpent with intensely blue scales, black wings, four taloned feet and legs curled under its belly, a sleek head with a sunburst of black spines, and eyes that rivaled the sun at noon.

It also breathed fire. We’d had some serious run-ins with fire today. We dived to the slime-covered floor as the flames of an entire forest fire turned the colony of bloodsuckers above into ash. It continued with its flight and smashed through the far wall, and here was hoping this was not the day for a scheduled tour or that ticket was going to be really worth the price.

“That was a dragon,” I told the puck accusingly. The blackened ash continued to fall.

“I’m aware.”

“You said there were no such things as dragons.”

“There aren’t.” He tried to wipe the ash from his face and hair, making it worse. “And don’t ask. Just embrace a little mystery in your life and that you have that life left to embrace anything at all.”

That wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t done.…I mean, shit, a dragon. Who as a kid doesn’t want to believe in dragons? But I didn’t get a chance to push it. Dodger, puppy-dog tears and a watch he could trade for a condo, started squawking loudly enough that the whole market heard this time. “Auphe!” A wing pointed. “Auphe! With the black hair! Auphe!”

I’d said there were creatures down here I hadn’t seen before topside. There were creatures I couldn’t have dreamed up or have made out of a squid, a vampire, a revenant, an entire pack of Wolves, a shark, a Sasquatch, a pig, a chain saw, and a hot-glue gun. “I think I want the bats back. At least that would’ve been quicker,” I muttered, holding out my left hand to have the xiphos slapped into it.

It would’ve been.

I’d told Kalakos at Dodger’s booth. This was my life. Massive unpopularity and/or fear. Anything between was as atypical as it came.

Vendors and customers both attacked. It wasn’t all of them. Some were too small and harmless for the weapons we were carrying. Some were too huge and gelatinous to move more than an inch every fifteen minutes. Some, led by Jackdaw, were watching from the side and taking bets. A trickster, a lying, betraying, crocodile tear–spurting trickster, could figure the odds with no problem.

“When have any of your informants ever once not ended up not trying to kill us?” I gritted.

The puck lifted his shoulders without a trace of guilt. “I warn you each time. I can give you the information, but I can’t make your brain absorb it or your ego swallow it.” He swung his sword and sliced a clump of those fourteen long blood leeches he’d talked about earlier on our way through the tunnel. They had reared up over his head, their tails knotted for a base of balance—a base that also tangled and wouldn’t let them separate to flee when Robin’s sword cut through rubbery flesh. Sucker mouths lined with a circle of teeth all made the sound of a fox-caught rabbit.

Ever heard a rabbit scream? It’s the sound of a burning house full of trapped children. I haven’t heard anything worse for fear and pain, and I hoped I didn’t.

I avoided the flopping of their death throes. I hoped it was their death throes and they weren’t like worms: Chop one in half and you suddenly have two. Niko took off two heads of a three-headed humanoid lizard with one stroke of his sword. A creature that was either a Turkish Karankoncolos or a down-home Sasquatch—I couldn’t keep them straight—was leaping toward Goodfellow and me as if it were a spring-loaded grizzly bear. I shot it in the chest three times, which knocked it sideways into Niko.

“ Shit! ”

I tossed aside monsters and planted the Glock in the bear-thing’s humanlike ear and put two more rounds in at the same time a silver blade came through its throat and out one slitted purple-black eye. You could say that took care of it. I pushed and helped roll its three hundred pounds off Nik, who staggered to his feet.

“’Kay?” I asked.

He nodded, somewhat out of breath with katana and xiphos in hand. He pointed to the arch, which was a good substitute for “run” when you didn’t have the air to say it. He went with me on his heels until another freak I’d yet to see rushed me. It was shaped like a woman, a wild tangle of black, brown, and gray hair. Her nails were corkscrews of years of growth. She was nude, not that that went into the positive column. Her teeth were perfect pointed triangles in her gaping mouth—all of her teeth and all of her mouths. She had one mouth on her chest, her stomach, each arm, each leg, and they all made the same mmmmm sound I made when I was extra hungry and smelled a chili cheese dog.

Today I was the chili cheese dog. I shot her in the one place, oddly enough, she didn’t have a mouth: her face. She tumbled backward into something that might have been…Hell, I didn’t have a clue. It was tentacles, a seven-foot-tall writhing mass of transparent tentacles, each tipped with a black seven-inch-long thorn and equipped with crimson suckers. It should’ve been a claw or a talon, but it was a thorn, and I could see the tears of dark red poison welling from the tips. Worse, I could see the poison pumping its way down the tentacle through the translucent flesh. It was like a thick vein, and beside it was a much larger tube of the same color that nothing was coursing through. It led to the suckers, and I imagined the flow of that vessel worked in the opposite direction—to suck up flesh from a paralyzed or dead victim. The poison might not be a poison; it could liquefy instead for easier consumption.

It could be both.

After this party, H. P. Lovecraft could suck my dick. This was one of his worst nightmares or wettest dreams. What had been wrong with that ass?

With no face. No mouth. No orifices at all that I could fall back on to aim a bullet up in a desperate time of need. I shot it in what was roughly its middle while chopping off the tentacles that flashed toward me with the xiphos. The bullets were swallowed into its mass with no effect. The sheared pieces of tentacles fell and didn’t move again. Relief, yeah, but when the thing had a hundred of them, tipped with poison, I couldn’t put a sword into a major organ, if I could find one, without getting close enough to get wrapped up like a mummy, all while being stabbed by toxic barbs.

I was part Auphe and resistant to many venoms, but this thing had gallons. If it worked fast and Sushi-zilla ate even faster, I could be sucked up like a milk shake in seconds, nothing left but bones and bad clothes. But not today. I’d had enough today. I’d had Janus nearly land on us, a tribe of Cyclops, bat-shit crazy gods, a monster of metal and fire too unreal to be believed. I was done for the day. Finito .

I holstered the Glock to fish in the pocket of those stupid pants Goodfellow had forced on me and closed my fingers around one of my favorite toys. “Nik, Robin, Kalakos! Go! The whole place is going to be covered in seafood stew in six seconds!”

We’d been close to the arch and I could see the three of them battling like hell. Heads were flying, limbs; monsters were taking them down right and left, but they didn’t fail to get back up again and again. I waited until they made it to the arch itself. And they weren’t doing it for themselves alone; they were clearing me a path, because I was going to have to run like a son of a bitch.

I chopped several more lashing tentacles with the xiphos while lifting the grenade. I hadn’t used it at the armory when the Cyclops and the fire giant had attacked. Throwing a grenade into a room filled with thousands of pieces, shards, and splinters of metal? The shrapnel from that would’ve killed us before Hephaestus’s creations had a chance.