Rob Thurman - Blackout

My reaction to that lecture? Tell me I hadn’t been doing a chick with a hairy back. Dear God, tell me she hadn’t had a hairy back. I’d been relieved to find out that Delilah looked all human when she was human and all wolf when she was Wolf. Not like this one lying at my feet.

The gold eyes were fogging over. They’d belonged in the forest, peering through the underbrush, not dead on a sidewalk outside a bar. Suddenly I wasn’t as proud of my perfect shot anymore. When killers had the eyes of an animal whose predatory temperament was nature and nature wasn’t meant to be the subject of punishment, it was harder to feel a hero. That was how I’d thought of it. I was a cop or a soldier on the front line between the innocent and the nightmares. But I saw it for what it was now. Take pride in whom you’re saving, but don’t take it in the killing. It was necessary, but it wasn’t something to glory in—especially when the creature you killed had thoughts and emotions the same as you, the only difference being a wild and free soul living as born instinct had taught her.

Be good at your job, but don’t think your job is good.

The road to Hell …

I squatted down beside the dead Wolf and touched her hair. It was thick and black, like mine, but long. “We can’t leave her just lying here.” Killer or not, person or creature of the wild, asphalt was not a peaceful place for any body to find its rest.

“Ishiah will take care of her. This street is nonhuman. It’ll be handled.” Niko’s hand landed on my back and grabbed a handful of my jacket to urge me up. “She’s playing with you. Delilah. She knows one of hers couldn’t take you, much less all of us. If Delilah wanted you dead, she would’ve come herself.”

Delilah didn’t think a pack member could take me, but she thought she could. Since she had gotten her Alpha and pack killed off to the last Wolf, she might be right. I sure knew how to pick them. “If this is a game, I don’t want to play.” I stood up. “I’m a killer, but I don’t think I want to be if this is how it is. Protecting is one thing. Playing, using killing as a damn pastime, that’s wrong.”

I remembered, in that moment, wings flapping behind my eyes. I was young, little—I had no idea how little, but enough that I remembered being surprised and shocked when a blackbird flew into a window at a house we were living in. I didn’t recall the house itself, but I thought it was grubby, dirty, old. I was sitting in grass and weeds, playing with a plastic truck that had three wheels. I was happy, content, until the sound of a stick breaking, but softer, more muffled. The bird had hit the window, and I looked up in time to see it fall to the ground without a single flutter of a feather. A blond boy was there. Six or seven, he was older than me. He picked up the bird gently, then carried it off to a deeper patch of weeds and laid it down. It was swallowed up by green and yellow. I asked why.

Why, Nik? Why won’t it fly away?

Because it’s dead, Cal. It broke its neck.

But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the bird’s fault some stupid person had built a house in its way. It wasn’t right that birds died, because if birds died, then maybe everything died.

They do , the other boy explained gravely. It’s the way things are, Cal.

“It shouldn’t be,” I murmured to myself. “Blackbirds shouldn’t die and neither should Wolves or people. Not like this. Not for goddamn sport.” I put my gun away. It wasn’t reassuring anymore or to be drooled over the size of the hole it could put through something—or someone’s head. It was a necessary evil.

“You remember?” Leandros asked. His hand hadn’t released my jacket and he gave me a light shake. “You remember that?”

“I remember the blackbird. That’s all. But it’s enough to know that if I like what I do [an excessive enthusiasm for my work Leandros had said], then maybe I’m a dick.” I looked away from the Wolf and all that had roamed untamed and free in her. Wolves were wolves. They killed. I got that. They had evolved that way. You should stop them, but you shouldn’t blame them. If it runs, you chase it. If you catch it, you kill it. If you kill it, you eat it. That sounded familiar too, but if you’d ever seen a lion eating a zebra on the Discovery Channel, you knew that.

Facts of life. Zebras didn’t die of old age as much as a little boy and a dead blackbird wished they did.

I exhaled and let it all go. It was coming back, faster and faster now. Soon enough who I was now would be who I was then, and it’d all be the same as it ever was. There was no point in thinking about that. There were other things to do. “The park,” I said. “Someone said Central Park and boggles. Boggles, huh? I guess you’re not talking that game old people play.”

Boggle was not the game old people played, because wouldn’t that have been too easy?

What it turned out to be was a nine-foot-tall mudencrusted, humanoid lizard that weighed about five hundred pounds, had pumpkin orange eyes full of fury, and about six cute little kiddies to make the whole thing a party.

“You said she was a mom,” I hissed at Leandros from behind a tree. The boggle, Ms. Boggle, whatever name she went by, had just tossed another tree, a complete tree from roots to top that she pulled up out of the ground with no effort whatsoever, at us. She’d missed by inches. In this situation, as in all situations, inches mattered; they could embarrass you and they could make or break you. I was leaning toward embarrassment as the better choice.

Leandros was unperturbed by the trees sailing through the air—another day at the office with staplers, copy machines, bad coffee, and trees almost crushing you. No big deal. That was nice for him. “She is a mother. See behind her? The boglets? Those are her children.”

Her children. Her cute bundles of joy. The kiddies were only seven feet tall with grinning jaws, lashing tails, and teeth that curved inward shark-fashion. Yeah, they were so sweet and adorable that I wanted to tie ribbons around their necks and put them on the cover of a Humane Society calendar. “You said she liked us. If she likes us, why is she throwing maple trees at us?”

“Oak. That’s an inexcusable mistake, whether it’s nighttime or not. Didn’t you see the shape of the dead leaves? The root pattern?” He gave up when I picked up a small rock and winged it at him. He dodged easily behind his shelter of another tree. “Never mind. I didn’t say she liked us. I said she didn’t necessarily hate us, depending on the present we brought her.”

I heard the rustle of leaves above me and looked up to see eyes that spread their own lambent pumpkincolored light, letting me see the teeth, the scales, and claws of black that were about the size of your average butcher’s knife. “Then give her the damn present,” I said, pointing the Eagle up at Junior. I’d taken down a Wolf, but I wasn’t sure what a round would do against those layers of muddy scales, besides extremely pissing off their owner. “Before I ruin this boggle’s dream of making the basketball team at his junior high.”

“Now that we’ve seen they’re all accounted for and thriving, which means they haven’t fallen victim to Ammut’s spiders, it would be a waste to give her what we might need to bribe her with at a later date.”

It had been two, going on three days now since Leandros had appeared in his brotherly glory. Two and a half days combined with a couple of hazy memories that I couldn’t depend on. Was it any doubt I would think I hallucinated half of what the guy said? His actions made me trust him. His words often made me want to beat him with a two-by-four.