Rob Thurman - Blackout

“He’s my brother too?” I asked, mildly panicked.

Mr. Touchy-feely answered for himself. “No, you’re not that fortunate. You’re not as endowed, not as fashion conscious, not as rakishly charming, not as … Malaka! ” he yelped as I stabbed him in the leg with the fork I’d had up my other sleeve. I had two sleeves. I wasn’t only arming one of them. I’d slipped a knife up one and a fork up the other before I left my table in the diner.

“I’m not as crazy about being touched either.” I stood up, pulling the fork out of his leg as I did, to face “my brother.” All that smart, careful, and safe I’d been so smug about a moment ago had disappeared. That was interesting. As for the not-a-bad-guy thing … I knew I shouldn’t kill people, but I didn’t think good guys stabbed people with forks either. These two were bringing out the worst in me or they were bringing out the me in me. I hoped it was the first. “If you think I’m going to swallow whatever crap you two are throwing at me without some questions, lots of goddamn questions, and without some proof, then brother or not, you don’t know me at fucking all.”

But maybe it wasn’t them at all. Maybe it was just him doing it, the one I’d stabbed, because I smelled it now. I smelled him.

Three drops of blood fell from the tines of the fork to make a trinity of scarlet on the sidewalk. The smell grew even stronger. My subconscious had known what my conscious hadn’t. I should’ve smelled the difference, noticed the difference sooner. If they were telling the truth, though, they knew me and I knew them, which meant I was used to them, used to the green-eyed one’s smell. He wasn’t human. He didn’t smell like Lew or Terrwyn or anyone else in this town. He smelled of grass and trees, the musk of bucks in rut, the dew on a meadow blanketed by a morning mist. He also smelled of a fox in the henhouse.

Sneaky.

“You’re one of them.” I changed my grip on the fork, a less respect-my-space hold and more of one suited to puncturing a carotid artery. Thank God I hadn’t grabbed a spork. “You’re a monster.”

Why I could smell that and no one else could was something I didn’t have time to think about. I had to decide whether to take out a monster in broad daylight in front of the diner patrons watching through the window and the sheriff who’d be showing up soon. Or should I back away from this all? Let these two explain themselves. Do the sensible thing like I had since I’d washed up here.

Fuck that.

He was a monster .

Abomination.

I slashed at his throat with the fork; then something happened. I had no idea what. It was that abrupt, as if I were watching a movie and the power went out. No people. No light. Nothing at all. When I woke up in the backseat of a car, “the something that had happened” was driving and I could see the hair was in a braid, not a ponytail. Not that it mattered, but it was always nice to get things cleared up. I sat up slowly and rubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand. It hurt—my head not my hand. Not much, but there was a definite mild ache.

I’d dreamed when I’d been out. I’d been in a car, old and junky, looking through the back window at the road unspooling behind. With every beat of my heart I’d thought they were coming. They were coming. They would always be coming. I’d been young in the dream; too damn young to know what to do. A kid, early teens maybe. That was all I could remember of it. That and that there was someone with me. He was the only hope I had that whatever was coming might not find me, and he had blond hair—the same color as the guy driving this car.

Not that that meant anything. Dreams were dreams. I had reality to deal with now.

“You. Blond guy. What did you do to me?” I asked, hoarse enough to know it had been several hours for my throat to be that dry. Without slow-motion replay in my brain, as I didn’t remember seeing one damn thing before the darkness had sucked me down, I was genuinely curious to hear the answer. He was the one who had taken me down, that I knew. The other one had been in front of me when I attacked. The monster, the one who’d said he was my brother, had been behind me. Lesson learned: Don’t turn your back on anyone, not even your brother.

“I hit you,” he said matter-of-factly, eyes still on the road. “But it was for your own good.”

Isn’t that what they all say? And I hadn’t seen him move, not even a flicker out of the corner of my eye. Either he was that incredibly fast or I was that utterly focused on bleeding a monster dry. Maybe both. “That’s not very brotherly of you.” Neither were the handcuffs I was wearing. I rattled the links. “You going to sell me overseas into the sex trade?”

“Like we could give your ungrateful, utensil-waving, frenzied fork-stabbing self away. We’d have to pay them, give them frequent-flier miles, not to mention a ten-year free warranty, and then change our addresses,” continued the familiar fox-in-the-henhouse complaining. “I’m Robin Goodfellow, by the way. In case you were curious who you attacked besides a good and faithful friend who has spent days worrying about you and watching your brother worry as well. His name, as you haven’t asked, is Niko, and he should’ve hit you harder.”

That one, Goodfellow, was in the passenger’s seat. Despite the fact that I had stabbed him with a fork and had then tried to kill him with the same, he didn’t appear as pissed off as I would’ve been. Then again, aside from being a monster, he was also mouthy enough that probably everyone he met tried to kill him with the first thing that came to hand. Fork, keys, chair, Pomeranian—whatever they had.

“I didn’t know monsters had names.” I studied the glass of the the back window as he muttered more about my ingratitude and general lack of anything desirable in a sentient being. I could kick out the glass, but I couldn’t kick it out and escape before Niko stopped me. He was apparently some sort of ninja/samurai frigging Jedi Knight who probably didn’t bend the fucking grass he walked on, and he didn’t need a T-shirt saying EAT ME to reassure himself about his general badassness. I was suddenly glad I was wearing my new blue shirt that didn’t label me as something I hadn’t been able to back up. Miss Terrwyn had given me that reprieve with plain blue cotton. She was gone now, though. I was gone too—in the wind. In a week I’d be only a memory to her, her brother, and everyone else who’d met me at the diner.

I was going to miss them. It was stupid. I hadn’t been there even a week, but there you go. They’d given me a free haircut, shirt, and the stamp of approval on my soul. Cal-the-not-so-bad-guy. I was guessing from the handcuffs that my brother and his monster partner had spun some tale of escaped convict … wanted by the feds … blah blah. And now Cal-the-not-so-bad-guy was Cal, a guy bad enough he had to be dragged out of town unconscious by some mysterious authorities. That sucked. My good reputation, all four days of it, was shot. It shouldn’t have mattered that much, but it did. They’d given me more than I’d given them, although I had cleared up their monster problem. That was something.

I saw a sign as I looked out the window and squinted quickly to read it as it receded in the distance. It said nothing about Nevah’s Landing. Yeah, I was long in the wind. “Where’s the Landing? My weapons are there.”

My apron was gone too but that wasn’t the important thing. There was something in the Landing for me besides slinging hash and winning the approval of the locals. There was something that I hadn’t gotten around to yet. Something that needed doing. Something that felt more familiar than these two guys. Something that only I … No. No.