Rob Thurman - Blackout

Ammut, in Egyptian legend, ate the heart of a dead person if they were found unworthy of passing on to the afterlife. If you did bad things, it weighted down your heart, much like fried pork chops weighted it down with cholesterol. Sin and fried pork chops—two of the best things in the world, and all they got you was an early death and acting as the dinner for a greedy Egyptian fake goddess.

We’d gone through this all before, but I’d forgotten it. I didn’t think it would be that long before I started remembering things on my own again. Last night lying on a bed surrounded by enough rumpled clothes to stock a Salvation Army store, seeing the city lights through the windows high above, it had felt the way it should. Right. True. As if I recognized it with my body if not my mind. It was the same when I woke up this morning when Leandros had kicked lightly at the bottom of my mattress. I hadn’t thought about shooting him with the gun under my pillow once. I’d been tempted… . It was eight a.m. for Christ’s sake … but I hadn’t actually put any real thought into it. It had felt right too. Then there were the shadows and bits of thoughts I couldn’t connect to any solid memory, but that hadn’t stopped them from popping up today.

“When she sucks out their life force, they die.” I started to take a pretzel out of the bowl, when the dead cat gave me a look. I let her have the pretzel. She didn’t eat it, but she wanted it and that was good enough for me. I feared no giant spider, but her … I was on the fence. “Are there souls? What if she did eat them? Does that mean no afterlife for the unlucky bastard? Is there an afterlife?” The cat didn’t count. She was still moving. She wasn’t so much after life as predeath. Halfway between.

Goodfellow looked up at the ceiling and scratched the bald head of his pet. “That’s far too encompassing a topic for now. Philosophy can wait. Let’s focus on the part of her devouring their life force and they die. That’s enough to get the job done.”

“On that note, I’ve got a job to get done. Be right back.” I got up and searched out the bathroom. Dick in hand, I was reading the graffiti, a lot of which was about me, go figure, and not in a “for a good time” kind of way, when I heard the door swing and smelled the Wolf. It was an accomplishment. The entire place smelled of the furry bastards. I’d be smelling Wolf for a week. Then came the growl, the breath reeking of rotting meat—not much on flossing—and the mangled words, “You are weak now.” He moved closer. “I smell it on you.” Closer still. “You are weak like a sheep.”

Mother fucker .

Could a guy literally not take a leak in this messed-up world without fighting for the goddamn privilege?

I had no illusions about what normal wolves did to normal sheep, what Wolves did to human sheep, or what this Wolf wanted to do to me. I kept pissing and raised my other hand that held the Desert Eagle to ram the muzzle between his eyes as he started to snap his jaws at my throat. Yeah, I’d learned my lesson the past few days. I now held my dick in one hand and my gun in the other when nature called. Guns worked better than forks.

I dug the muzzle harder into his flesh, the metal grating on the bone of his overhanging brow. He was one freaky-looking Wolf—not in entirely wolf or human form, like a cut-rate Halloween werewolf costume. Not a good look. He looked like a guy overdosing on steroids, Rogaine, and with teeth… . Okay, the teeth definitely couldn’t pass for human. “You’re not that bright, Rover. I don’t know or care why you think the rest of me is weak, but my trigger finger is Arnold-fucking-Schwarzenegger. Now back the fuck off or I’ll blow your empty skull apart and finish pissing on your body like a fire hydrant.” I grinned. “You won’t get a more appropriate memorial than that.”

His skull wasn’t as empty as it seemed. He had at least one brain cell and he used it to back away and out of the bathroom. Puppies.

Weak? I thought I’d proven I was anything but and had Nepenthe spiders to testify on that—if they weren’t dead, but maybe he smelled the amnesia on me and thought without memories I couldn’t kick furry tail and take ID and rabies tags while I did it. Who knew? A few minutes later I was back at the table with Goodfellow picking up the Ammut snooze blah blah right where he left off the second I sat down.

“And the more powerful the nonhuman, the better Ammut likes it. She isn’t wasting much time sending her spiders after the revenants. They’re not worth her time, but the vampires, Wolves, boggles—they’ve been more to her taste, which is why the Kin has said they would cooperate until this is all over. We have yet to find her or her nest of spiders. Before you left for South Carolina, we were going to check Central Park and see if Mama Boggle and her brood were there or if Ammut had gotten to them yet.”

Leandros braved an undead paw and put a pretzel in front of me. He did it automatically. I could see a lifetime of feeding the “little brother” behind it. It was so automatic, in fact, I guessed there’d been times we’d gone hungry as kids. Or Leandros had anyway. All his pretzels on hungry days, I’d bet, had gone to me. It was things like that that had made me believe his and Goodfellow’s story more than the words. “We can go there tonight. If I had a choice, I’d leave you here with Ishiah and Samyel, but I think you would be safer with the three of us. Too many old enemies know you work here.”

“You’re worried about me?” I picked up the pretzel and saluted him with it. “I killed an eighty-pound spider with a fork—even if I missed Goodfellow twice. It looks like killing doesn’t require a memory.” A lesson I’d just taught Rover. “You can put away the diaper and bottle.”

I proved that, again, when we stepped outside the bar into a seven o’clock gloom to head to Central Park. I took four steps, pulled the Desert Eagle, pointed it upward, and pulled the trigger. Then I took another step, this time back, as the body hit the pavement at my feet. It was a Wolf, female, and more wolf than human. Another half-and-half. All Wolf. The jaw was twisted and wide-open for my throat, the fangs bared. Her hands were more like elongated paws, her eyes open and staring pure gold. There wasn’t any blood to speak of, only a hole in her forehead. Shattered bone and burned flesh. The dead don’t bleed. She’d jumped from three stories up; that and the bad lighting made it a good shot. And that was all I felt—the satisfaction of a job well-done.

At first.

I was a not-so-bad brother. I saved people. And I was a killer. I didn’t feel bad about the last item. I only killed monsters, I killed only to save those who needed it. I counted myself on that list. If you were going to try to kill me—try hard. I could guarantee I was going to try my best to do the same back to you. If you were a werewolf perched three stories up, you shouldn’t make any noise when you jump, because any would be too much. It can seal your fate and it had hers. “A Wolf.” I didn’t mention the one in the bathroom. He was more braindamaged mutt than Wolf, drunk, and with delusions of fuzzy grandeur. If he was in the Kin, he probably was their equivalent of a janitor. He hadn’t had the intelligence for more.

I chambered another round in the Eagle. “Not to mention the revenant-thing in the apartment. I thought you said the Furry Mafia was on our side on this one.”

“Except for Delilah. Every pack but hers agreed. The Lupa pack didn’t bother to send a reply.” Niko was resheathing his sword. He was the big killer looking out for the little killer. “Although I think this may be that response.”

My ex’s pack, the Lupa, was named for the wolf that suckled the founders of ancient Rome. Leandros liked shoving those little factoids in your ear at every opportunity. He’d told me too that Wolves weren’t actually werewolves; they were were-people. They’d started out as wolves and evolved to being able to switch back and forth between wolf and human. Some Wolves wanted to go back to what they’d been before that Jurassic mutation. The cult of All Wolf. That had led to inbreeding and damn odd-looking people with pointed ears or jaws, stuck in between human and wolf, unable to be completely one or the other.