Rob Thurman - Blackout

I turned away. I was looking for my past and it was here in the car with me. I didn’t need the Landing anymore, despite the lingering feeling of a hooked finger that tugged in my gut, a whisper that said, Come back. Come play . I didn’t even know why I’d been there to begin with. Maybe my past and present knew.

“You … um … Niko. You’re supposed to be my brother. Why was I in Nevah’s Landing fighting monsters?” I settled back against the seat and began scanning the floorboards for something to pick the handcuff lock.

“I am not supposed to be your brother. I am your brother. Although there could be a certain sense of destiny to it.” He pulled off the exit we’d been approaching and into the parking lot of a motel almost exactly like the one I had stayed in, where my weapons still were. I was going to miss them, not that I remembered using them. But their cold metal in my hands was comforting. It beat a teddy bear hands down. “I am your brother. I was supposed to be your brother since before either of us was born. Karmic debt. It appears I was Vlad the Impaler or Genghis Khan in a past life.” He parked the car. “As for Nevah’s Landing, you were there because of Peter Pan.”

I’d been about to comment on all that mystical destiny crap, but I choked on it instead, coughing out, “Peter Pan? You’re shitting me, right?”

“I cannot shit you,” solemn as a proverbial judge, “it is not in my nature.”

Uh huh. It hadn’t been long since he’d kidnapped me, but I already knew better than that.

Goodfellow, ignoring the exchange, said, “I do not want to hear how a tale that appropriated the name of a member of my mighty race led Cal to wearing a girly apron in a diner in the quaint and culturally deprived town of Nevah’s Landing. I’ll check us in.” He opened the door and climbed out with only a small limp. I should’ve stabbed deeper. A monster in human form was still a monster. And monsters were wrong, evil, alien, unclean . Abominations. I knew that. Oceans were made of water, forest fires were made of a thousand flickering flames, and monsters were made of murder. I knew it.

But I didn’t know about Peter Pan and Nevah’s Landing. I shifted my attention from picturing a target on Goodfellow’s back as he limped away to Niko, now turned to face me. “You were seven years old and I was eleven when we passed through Nevah’s Landing,” he started, holding out the handcuff key to me. I took it after a brief hesitation and didn’t take my eyes off him as I unlocked the cuffs. He was faster than I was and better than I was. That didn’t make me at all comfortable, whether he was my brother or not.

“We stayed about a week. Our mother, Sophia, did some fortune-telling, tarot readings, and other things.” He glossed over “other things” so quickly I almost didn’t catch it. Whatever those other things had been, he wasn’t going to make that part of the story. “It was cold, like it is now, too cold for swimming. You were bored.” I didn’t know how he did it, but with the tiniest movement of an eyebrow he made me feel as if at seven I had been bored frequently and not afraid to nag an older brother about it. “So I told you the story of Peter Pan and Never Land. Nevah’s Landing. Never Land. It wasn’t that much of a stretch. The real Nevah of Nevah’s Landing was actually the matriarch of a family who settled …”

I groaned and let my head flop back against the seat. My two captors weren’t familiar, but this feeling—a frustrated weight of boring knowledge I didn’t need or want—was surprisingly so. “At least you remember something,” Niko observed, looking pleased with himself, even though the emotion wasn’t plastered across his face. Pleased and relieved, and while I couldn’t point out specific physical clues to that, I knew it all the same. “Very well. Historical education aside, I told you the story of Peter Pan. I even took you to the library there so you could look at the pictures in the book. You always were about the pictures. You called Nevah’s Landing Never Land for months after we left. I think you saw it as it was in the book, a sanctuary for lost boys.”

I ignored the jab at my not being well read unless the books came with lots of pictures and big print—hey, I’d known Shakespeare, hadn’t I? Instead, I concentrated on the first moments that I could remember. When I’d woken up on the beach, the second before as I’d drifted in and out of consciousness, what had I seen in the darkness?

Pirate ships. Princesses. Waterfalls. Tree houses. A safe place. You couldn’t get there if you couldn’t fly, and the pirates were ridiculously easy to defeat. The crocodile, though, that white crocodile—it whispered to me, with an unbelievably wide stretch of toothy smile and jack-o’-lantern eyes. They were only whispers, but it could do other things if it wanted. What those things were a seven-year-old boy couldn’t imagine, and it told me things; things I didn’t remember. But it also said it was my friend. Who’s going to tell a phantom crocodile no when he tells you that? No seven-year-old I could think of. That was one scary damn thing to put in a kid’s book, that ghost of a crocodile.

“My own personal safe place. That’s why I, what? Trucked in some eight-legged monsters so I could fight in a place that was comfy-cozy? Or I went there for another reason and happened to find giant spiders splashing around in the surf without their water wings? No one knew me there. I hadn’t been staying there. Did I track the monsters there and decide because I had so much fun in Never Land as a kid I’d give them a free exterminator job?” Although I didn’t mind the thought of killing monsters for free—a community service—I had a damn lot of weapons, and those cost. I couldn’t have bought them on diner tips. “And what about the amnesia? Care to explain that one? Did I catch a cliche virus and just kept killing because deep down I wanted to be monster killer of the month?” My lips flattened. “Peter fucking Pan doesn’t answer a single one of those questions.” I could see Goodfellow on his way back to the car. “And what about him? He’s not human. If you’re my brother, if you know about the monsters, why are you hanging out with him?”

“Because, as he said, he’s a friend and a good one.”

I grunted, “He’s a monster. Not only is he a monster, but he’s one that never shuts up. What’s good about that?”

“He grows on you.”

“Like a fungus?” I snorted.

“More like a sexually transmitted disease.” He opened the door and swung a leg out. “Now, let’s get in the room, eat, and I’ll tell you the rest of the story, amnesia and all. You’ll get your memory back, Cal. This isn’t permanent. You’ll remember. I promise.” Strangely, it didn’t sound like a promise he was one hundred percent sure about. Maybe it was only hope. Hope and monsters, what a mix.

The room was practically a carbon copy of the one I’d had back in the Landing, except this one had two beds instead of the one, but two still weren’t enough. “I’m not sleeping in a bed with either of you.” I folded my arms. “I don’t care if we were all Siamese triplets separated at birth. It’s not happening.”

“Conjoined, not Siamese, you politically incorrect Neanderthal.” Goodfellow sat at the table and rubbed at his leg while giving me a pointed glare. “And, when you’re returned to your normal state of mind—not that I ever considered it normal until now—you owe me twelve hundred dollars for these pants. Tine puncture marks don’t go well with fine couture.” I had some thoughts on his “couture,” but he chose that moment to pull a sword out of his long brown coat, rotate it with a deceptively lazy speed, and slap it across the table. “Also, I don’t accept checks or plastic, especially not yours, as I faked most of them myself.”