Rob Thurman - Blackout

“Later date? You mean from-beyond-the-grave later date? Because I have better plans for my afterlife than tossing rhinestones at a white-trash monster living in pigsty heaven instead of a double-wide. They’re going to kill us. They won’t bother to eat you as you’re made up of bean curd and soy, but I’m pure pizza, fried chicken, and burgers. They will eat my ass . Give her the damn bling.”

“You and common sense. I’m not sure I can get used to that combination. I suppose I may as well ask her if she’s heard anything.” He put a hand in his coat pocket and then tossed out a handful of pearls. They landed in the mud pit that Mama Boggle had climbed out of and where she now crouched on the edge. In a small clearing in the trees of Central Park, you didn’t need a moon to see. The sky was as orange as the eyes of the boggles. New York was a city so big that it sucked the darkness out of the night itself.

Some of the pearls stuck in wet mud while some rolled on the surface of more dry pieces. Whatever color they were in the daylight, they were all orange here. That didn’t stop the big boggle—Boggle with a capital B —from pulling her enormous dark claws out of yet another tree and squatting on muscled legs and rolling them around with a talon tip. “From the world of water. Fresh. Untouched by any human’s grubby baby paws but yours.” Her voice was so deep and loud, an auditory avalanche, I expected the ground to shake under our feet.

Leandros stepped out from behind his tree as I used the Eagle to swat the talons reaching for my head. If mommy was in a better mood, I didn’t want to change that by shooting her kid. That and it was a kid, a juvenile mega-alligator with a brain hanging up in that tree. If you walked into the Everglades and got your leg bitten off by a leftover prehistoric lizard, you had no one to blame but yourself. That was their territory, not yours, and this part of the park was the same as far as boggles were concerned.

“They eat muggers and sometimes joggers who stray from the common paths. Don’t feel too bad for them,” my companion suggested.

I ignored my brother. Goodfellow and the vampire had dropped us off in the limo at the park’s south entrance, and now I saw why. While they were sipping champagne and headed to an after-hours party, I was again smacking the claws of the boglet above me. “No. Bad boy. Bad. Behave or you’ll get a time-out.” They ate muggers and joggers. I didn’t have a problem with that. Muggers were rotten people and joggers who came this far out in the name of exercise had to be insane. Getting eaten was the best thing for them. It had to save a fortune in psych meds. As for the all-monsters-are-evil twitch, I told myself that it didn’t apply to baby monsters, and it grumbled but shut up. I was a softy for kids. Who knew?

“Boggle.” Leandros had walked forward, his sword in hand. “Ammut has come to the city. Do you know of Ammut?”

“No. No Ammut. I care not for strangers or the city. I care for home only,” she said, holding up one particularly large pearl before a large harvest moon eye, “and for my trinkets.” There was a rough, chain saw buzz in the air. She was purring … if boggles purred.

“Then you haven’t been attacked by Nepenthe spiders in the past two weeks.”

I turned my head to watch the exchange and felt a tongue lick the top of my head. “I am not kidding,” I warned the boglet, without taking my eyes from Leandros and Boggle. “Don’t make me shoot off the end of your tail. The other kids will make fun of you.”

“Spiders,” she said, the purr disappearing. “Disgusting pests. Boring vermin.” Letting the pearl fall back to lie with the others, she rammed her hand down into the mud up to her elbow joint. Pulling back, she yanked free a black articulated leg more than three feet long. I recognized it, from the beach and from a motel bathroom. It was the leg of a Nepenthe spider. “Many came, all died, but they are not good for eating. They smell unclean.” She threw the leg over her hulking shoulder. “They scuttled, full of poison. We did what you do with such things.”

“You squashed them,” I said.

Her grin, twice the size and voraciousness of her offspring, gleamed. “It was good hunting practice for my children. They could not eat them, but they could kill them. Yes, we squashed them and will do the same to any more that come here.”

“And Ammut?” Leandros asked.

“I do not know Ammut.” It was the same as she’d said before, which made her finished with our conversation. As she played with her pearls, the other boglets moved closer to us. They were up for another practice hunt if we didn’t move it.

“Where is it?” asked the boglet above me, its rumble a lighter reflection of its mother’s. “The Auphe in you, it is all but gone. You taste weak.” Again with the weak. Did I need to start pumping iron?

Leandros’s hand was on my arm. “We are done here. Let’s go before they try to store our limbs in the mud with that of the spiders.”

I let myself be moved along. “What did it say? Where did my ‘off’ go? My ‘off-fey?’ What—” My mouth shut abruptly, my teeth snapping together and barely missing the tip of my tongue, as Leandros gave me a particularly brisk yank that had me running to keep up. It was a good idea since the boglets had decided they might be in the mood after all whether we moved our asses or not. I put the gun away and drew one of my knives. Little monsters. Little seven-foot-tall monsters. Underage monsters then. It didn’t matter how big they were, only that killing them would be the equivalent of doing in a ‘tween, which would be wrong, no matter how annoying they were—baby monsters and ‘tweens.

One boglet raced up beside me as we hit another clearing. They could walk upright or go on all fours, and their speed setting was on all fours. I’d watched some TV last night while trying to readjust or remember home. Nothing good had been on—there was no porn channel—but I had caught some animal special. It would’ve been difficult to not catch as Leandros had tripped me when I’d tried to walk away—the several times that I’d tried to walk away. He had a move for everything. That meant that against my will, and I had a feeling it wasn’t the first thing he’d made me do against my will, I’d watched a show about Komodo dragons.

A Komodo could run a man to the ground in seconds. Seconds . These guys must’ve used that special as an exercise tape.

I saw the tooth-crammed grin, the light of the eyes, and the claws of one large hand slashing out to gut me. I dropped flat instantly. That boglet tried to stop, dirt and dead grass flying as he dug in, and the one behind me ran over the top of me and kept going. He was a dog chasing a ball that his master had only pretended to throw. He was the slow one in his class, but he seemed happy. Let him run to China and back if it kept him that way.

The one who’d made a try for me did manage to stop, flip head for tail, and lunge back at me where I lay on my stomach. I was up in a fraction of a second and his stopping skills improved as the surface of his luminous eye came to rest against the point of my knife. I could feel the slight give under the tip. A sixteenth of an inch and it would puncture, and that wouldn’t make his mama proud of his hunting skills at all.

“Weak?” I leaned in until my own grin made a clinking sound as it touched his. Teeth to teeth. Hunter to hunter. “I taste weak?” I heard hisses and growls from behind me. I reminded myself—baby monsters, emphasis on baby. No matter what my hand wanted to do, it was going to listen to me. “Kids. You’re so cute. I don’t have to want to kill you. To kill you I only have to be better than you.” The fetid breath mixed with mine, but his eyes were gleaming now, from pained moisture. “Junior, I’m better than you. Go home to Mommy.”