Rob Thurman - Blackout

And, let me repeat: walking, purring dead cat . Dead cat with attitude .

Dead fucking cat. Holy shit.

Following the cat in a general “tie my sanity to the tracks and let the train run over it” was Leandros’s … girlfriend? Lady friend? Vamp friend? Vamp tramp? No, I’d had enough sense not to say any of them or think that last one for more than a second. She didn’t look like a tramp anyway. She wasn’t pretty, beautiful, or hot. She was more of a marble statue under a cascade of moonlight, smelling like flowers and ivy—the glory of a weeping graveyard angel. She was solemn and silk and as much of a promise as her name.

I expected not to like her. I was doing better at restraining the nonhuman twitch and all the Wolves, not to mention other things in the bar, had nearly overloaded it. You could only twitch so much before you either went into convulsions or acclimated. I was doing my best to avoid seizures, which meant acclimation it was. But I’d already made up my mind about this in particular in advance. Whether she was monster or only nonhuman, evil or not, she wasn’t good enough for my brother. It didn’t matter if I remembered his being my brother or not. The puck had said Wolves were for Wolves; humans weren’t good enough. I was all set to have the same opinion about humans and vamps. Keep to your own kind.

First, while Wolves and vampires were born, not made, so sayeth that brother I was worried about, she still was a few hundred years older than he, which made her a cougar. Second, sooner or later she’d leave him when he got older, and he would. All humans did. If he was only screwing her, maybe it would be different, but he was a six-foot-tall ball of commitment. After only two days, I could see that. He would hurt. If I was lucky enough to have family, I didn’t want them hurt. Third, he had told me vampires didn’t drink blood anymore. They didn’t kill anymore—the majority of them. But how many people had she killed before modern vampire technology came up with a good old vitamin-B-for-blood shot, those secret vampire underground supplements you can’t buy online? They were on the wagon now, the vamps, and she could be remorseful as they came for what she’d done to survive in ye olden days. It didn’t matter.

And why would a vamp want to be with a human anyway? What they used to eat? That was like getting horny for your hamburger. Farmer John cozying up to Bessie the cow. It was weird. Fuck not the food, that was my opinion. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t like the idea of it, and I wasn’t going to.

That was that.

Then came the moment she entered the bar, sat down, took off her cloak of violet wool, and extended her pale hand toward me with a concerned “Caliban, how are you feeling?”

There she sat, with striped dark brown and pale blond hair pulled up in a twist that only women can manage. Simple yet somehow complex. I could’ve braided a lariat and taught myself how to rope a steer before coming up with that knot. She wore a dress that covered up too much to be sexy while still being snug enough to catch the eye, with knee-high boots to take the primand-proper down a notch but still look like a lady—a rich one. Her eyes, violet as her cloak, and her smooth face were as concerned as her tone. She looked nice. She sounded nice. It didn’t stop the twitch.

You’re born a monster, you die a monster, and there’s nothing but murder in between.

The same refrain as before and it felt as true as before, but I felt something else. She was sad, this vampire—damn sad and with good reason to be, although I had no idea what that reason was.

There’s no such thing as the best. There’s good enough, though. Sometimes. She makes you happy, Nik. A happy brother’s not such a bad thing.

My voice again, but this time it was a flash of memory crawling out of the past, my first real one. I didn’t remember when or why I’d said it, but it sounded as if I’d meant it.

I looked at her hand. “Yeah … I’m sorry. I’m trying to be good, I am, but it’s probably best I don’t touch you just yet.” I might be forgiven for accidentally attacking my boss, but Leandros might not be so forgiving if I did the same to his girlfriend.

She withdrew her hand, her ivory mouth, as pale as the rest of her, losing that reassuring smile she’d been giving me. “I don’t understand.”

Goodfellow almost choked as he laughed around the last swallow of his drink and waved his hand at a peri for another bottle of scotch. Yes, not a glass—a bottle. The puck had some serious tolerance. “He’s telling the truth. He is trying to be good, difficult as that is to believe. And polite. What a change a few days down south can make. He’s become a Southern gentleman. It’s almost as amusing as when Venus became too fat to float on that shell. That’s what you get for eating nothing but honey cakes and mead.” He took the new bottle of scotch and poured himself a glass. “To be fair, however, anything the kid does that doesn’t involve him stabbing me with a fork goes in my entertaining column these days.”

Her eyes glanced at the puck skeptically, then back at me. “You tried to stab Robin with a fork?”

I held up three fingers. “Sorry to say I don’t regret a one of them. Okay, strictly not true. I sort of regret the two that didn’t connect.”

Niko intervened when Goodfellow began to look less amused. “Cal has some … difficulties, let’s say, with nonhumans. All nonhumans. He’s having trouble discerning between the good and the bad.”

I shrugged. “Monsters are monsters, and monsters are bad, but I’m working on it.”

Like Ishiah, the guy with the feathers, she said nearly the same thing: “You told me on the phone, but I hadn’t comprehended he’d be quite like … this.” The fingers touched the back of Leandros’s hand in what appeared to be support as the ocean of heather concentrated on me. “You’ll be yourself soon enough, Caliban. I can wait until then to touch your hand or kiss your cheek.”

I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t expecting her to say that, and monsters’ mouths were made to eat you, maul you, tear you; there was no damn silverware on the table, but there were knives. I had knives. My hand was already going for one inside my jacket when Leandros’s hand clamped down on my wrist, not enough to hurt, but enough to shake me out of it.

“Could you please,” he requested in a mild tone and with an unbreakable grip, “not attempt to stab Promise with one of your knives.”

“Or a fork,” Goodfellow interjected.

“Or a fork,” Leandros repeated with a patience that had to make him double as a saint. “Promise, if you could avoid startling Cal until he remembers that you do care for him and he for you, we might all survive this,” he said, and added with a wry tinge to the words, “He startles easily now.”

I could say I did not startle easily, but it was hard to back up when I’d wanted to stab someone for threatening to kiss me on the damn cheek. I decided to ignore the entire thing. It had never happened. Pride saved. “So”—I shook off the hand and rested my own on the table—”let’s talk goddesses and what the fuck you do about them except pray at their altars or run far far away.”

Hours later Goodfellow was close to being buzzed, the bar had run out of scotch, and I knew Ammut, the Eater of Hearts, had been born of the Egyptian Nile; she was as old as Goodfellow, which was so old he couldn’t remember; and she wasn’t a goddess in truth.

Relieved? Yeah, a little bit.

“Everyone back then who could get more than two humans to worship them was claiming to be a god or a goddess. And why not? Free food. Vestal virgins … vestal horny virgins. Fertility rites. Good times. Very good times. If you could pass as one, why not claim it?” Goodfellow had said. While I marveled that there was nothing in his view of history that couldn’t be directly linked to some sort of orgy, he went on with the rest of it. Ammut thought hearts were a nice snack, but she really liked souls much better. Except nonhumans didn’t call them souls, because they weren’t souls. It was a creature’s life force she drained and consumed.