Rob Thurman - Blackout

Leandros reached across to tap his soy milk glass against my beer bottle. “Aside from a rather excessive enthusiasm for your work, you are a good brother, yes. You’re certainly not a bad one.” He smiled. Though all his smiles seemed barely a reflection of a dictionary-defined one, this one was genuine. “You might have some impulse and sarcasm issues, but other than that, not a bad brother or a bad person. I’m proud to call you my brother.”

That was something. When you didn’t know who you were other than you woke up in a nest of dead spiders and carried a large number of things that could kill an equally large number of people, to hear that from someone who did know you … It was … Damn. I went on the defensive. I had to. I had the reputation of my gonads to protect. “If it weren’t for the sword you carry, I’d tell you what a wuss you are. I’m embarrassed for you, Leandros, seriously.”

“Love you too, little brother.” He kicked me under the table with meticulous precision, hitting some sort of nerve that made my ankle and foot go instantly numb. It wasn’t the first time either. How did he do that? “There’s Ishiah. I’ll be back.”

He left the table and had one of the peris, a big blond one—light blond hair and skin compared to Niko’s darker version—up against a wall and was talking with him as I cursed and rubbed my ankle. When I looked closer, it wasn’t so much of a talk as Niko telling the peri something—forcefully. He didn’t have a finger planted in the guy’s chest, not physically anyway, but he was laying down the law somehow. As he did, the peri’s wings appeared.

They came out of nowhere in a shimmer of light, a flash of brightness as if the sun had exploded. Not there, then there. It was like a magic trick. I felt as if I should applaud and send his feathered ass to Vegas for a new career. With gold-barred white feathers, he did look like an angel, a muscular, anger-me-not, scarred angel, but an angel all the same. I could see where the myths had come from. If this guy came after me with a flaming sword, I’d get my ass to temple quick. Cross a desert. Free a cheap source of labor. Whatever. Just say the word.

Minutes later they were both back at the table. “Cal,” Leandros said in introduction, “this is your employer, Ishiah. He owns the bar. You’re the only nonperi to work here, so you can expect the patrons to give you somewhat of a hard time. When you come back to work, that is, which won’t be until this Ammut mess is cleared up.”

I stood, trying not to favor the still-throbbing ankle. “You’re the boss, huh?” I didn’t offer to shake hands. That would be too surreal in this world, and I didn’t have an instinct to stick out a hand unless it had a weapon in it. A shaker I was not, it seemed. I went with the assumption that Niko had explained about my memory problem. “I made a pretty decent server at a diner. I think I’ll do okay as a bartender. Oh yeah, if I try to kill you, I’m sorry. Just a reflex. I’m having trouble getting it through my head that monsters … er … nonhumans aren’t always evil.”

The peri switched focus from me to Leandros. “Robin told me, but I didn’t completely understand. This …” His wings spread to a span nearly twelve feet wide. Then they tucked back in before spreading wide again. If he’d been a hawk, I would’ve said he was unsettled. “Never mind. Take as long as you need.” He turned his attention back to me for the last part. “Take as much vacation time as you require until your memory returns. The Ninth Circle isn’t what you would call a tame drinking establishment. We tend to lose at least one customer weekly. I want you at your best when you come back.”

“My old self. Gotcha.”

The peri gripped my shoulder and somewhat harder than an employer-employee chat called for. “Let us just say whenever you’re ready.” Then he was gone with one last long look at Leandros before he was behind the bar with another peri, this one with dark hair.

“You are a bunch of touchy-type people, I gotta tell you.” There was a trail of feathers from in front of me all the way back to the bar. As with the indecisive wings, that didn’t strike me as a good sign. Didn’t birds lose feathers when stressed? If I were a bird, I would. “Is he molting? Does he have some sort of giant-bird disease?”

“Only if Goodfellow gave it to him.” Pointing back at my chair, he added, “You may as well settle in. We’ve a long meeting ahead of us. Promise, Robin …”

He went on some more, but I blanked it out as I realized that my part-time boss, who looked like an angel and shed like a dog with mange, was the other half of the monogamy special that the puck bragged about. I hoped Goodfellow hadn’t told him about the fork incidents. I’d hate for him to get pissed at me and have to put Polly-Want-a-Cracker down. I only killed bad monsters—I was coming to terms with that—and he didn’t seem bad.

All monsters are. You know that. You’re born a monster, you die a monster, and there is nothing but slaughter between.

“Cal? Are you listening?” Leandros’s hand pushed me into the chair. “Obviously not. I suppose it’s good to know some things don’t change, amnesia or not.”

I was listening, but to myself, not to my newly discovered brother. There was no denying whose voice was in my head. It was mine and, although people lied to themselves all the time, I didn’t sound unsure on this. No tent-revival hellfire preacher was more absolute. I didn’t get it. The puck wasn’t human and he’d helped Leandros find me. The peri wasn’t human and he didn’t come across as a bad guy except for a little get-thee-sinning-asses-out-of-Eden grimness to him. Two nonhumans who were good enough not to try to kill me should balance the spiders and that revenant creature that had. It should prove what Leandros had told me. You took it on a case-by-case basis, because not all monsters were like people. Some were good and some were bad. They weren’t all evil. They all didn’t need to die.

All monsters. All.

I pushed it all aside for the moment. I had amnesia. Let’s face it: Who knew what else was screwed up in my skull? A half hour later and my scrambled brain had much more to distract it.

The Wolves—there was no real reason to get sidetracked by the Wolves. So said Leandros. The fact that they smelled like a hundred and one wet dogs, I overlooked. I brought it up, don’t get me wrong, but Leandros said, whereas some people were born artists or musicians, I was born with a nose that could smell a meatball sub five miles away. I was talented. Stop complaining about it and stop asking Samyel, the peri bartender, to take them to the nearest groomer for a shampoo and toenail painting. Let them drink and play pool in peace without any “go fetch” jokes. The fact that they all stared at me—at length, every last one, with unblinking eyes, after sniffing in my direction—and then whispered and growled among themselves, I took to mean that I wasn’t their favorite server at the bar. A human—how disgusting. They’d probably hoped when I’d disappeared that it was for good. Whatever.

As I said, I overlooked them … eventually. Then there was the cat. It was Goodfellow’s cat or Goodfellow was the cat’s puck. Probably Goodfellow being the cat’s puck was the right choice. It was bald, it had teeth that made a grizzly bear look like a still-nursing baby rabbit, and it was dead. Deader than dead. Mummified. Glowing empty eye sockets. That didn’t stop it from batting pretzels around the table or stalking one of the Wolves to the back alley. She, the cat Salome, was the only one to return from the alley, but that wasn’t my business. What the dead cat wanted, the dead cat could have. In my opinion, it was one less Wolf stinking up the place.