Rob Thurman - Blackout

“Up here.”

I turned away from the canal and followed Leandros up some broken concrete stairs to a squat corrugated metal building. There were no windows, only a light showing under and around the door. Weatherproofing was not their primary issue. He knocked once, said, “Leandros,” and opened the door. Our clients were waiting for us, all of them.

Also dead, every damn one.

This time it wasn’t the Lupa. This time I saw what I’d only heard about in my briefing at the bar to catch me up to preamnesiac speed. At a much less fancy table than at the conference room, they were gathered around what must have been a rickety poker table. Vampire, Wolf, succubus, incu … incub … the male version of succubus, and something I had no idea about, other than he was as dead as the rest now lying scattered around the large shack. All of them except one were curled into dried husks. Their eyes were sunken so far back into the sockets, only withered raisins remained. What skin I could see that showed outside their clothes was almost transparent and veined with dark blue and cancer-clot purple.

Leandros knelt beside the one client who hadn’t had his life force sucked out by Ammut. She’d done him in the more popular modern way—ripped him to pieces. He’d been halfway to turning, patches here and there of black fur, now slowly receding back under the skin, his dead eyes yellow but clouding to a human-appearing dull brown, and teeth still bared in a frozen snarl. She’d disemboweled him and used his blood to write on the back metal wall.

Give them to me. The letters were large; the medium used to write them sincere. You’re not screwing around when you make your demands painted with someone’s death.

“Give them to me?” I read out loud, confused. “Isn’t she doing a bang-up job of getting her victims herself? Not like she needs our help.”

Shaking his head, Leandros admitted, “I have no idea.” He stood and nudged the dead Wolf with his boot. “Vukasin. The Kin Alpha liaison. Not that high up in the order of things. The Kin wouldn’t show us that much respect.” The nudge turned his body over to show this side had no face. A few scraps of muscle and skin clinging to scored bone. Life force and just life, both brutally taken—Ammut didn’t limit herself to one way of killing. “Not Delilah’s work, but she would’ve been capable of it and I have little doubt she’ll claim it. The Kin will believe her and think taking out this Alpha a very bold move, despite her All Wolf cult breeding. I’m beginning to think we were right. Delilah may well end up running the entire Kin before long.”

He left Vukasin to study the other bodies and then headed toward the door. “Not that that’s our concern now. Ammut’s path of destruction is getting worse. To take out the council who hired us. That is true disdain and an escalation of feeding. We have to stop her before they form a council on dealing with inept subcontractors such as ourselves.”

I followed him. “We’re just going to leave them here? I know about monsters.” The sky is blue, what goes up must come down, and here there be monsters. “I remember knowing about them even if I don’t remember much else, but I also remember hardly anyone else knows. How do we keep that from happening?”

“We take care of our own bodies, and we leave the bigger messes for the Vigil. This is a bigger mess.”

Outside in the cold air, I asked, “Who’s the Vigil?”

“They keep humans from finding out about the supernatural. If that happened, there would be worldwide war. Their calling is to prevent that, which means they make things such as this disappear. You know how at night the garbage piles up and the street sweepers come through so in the morning, it’s all clean as if it were never there?”

I shut the door behind us, to hide the bodies from plain view in case this Vigil was slow on the uptake. “I guess that depends on your definition of clean, but yeah.”

“The Vigil are the street sweepers, and, on occasion when too noticeable, people like us can be considered garbage to be disposed of as well. So try to keep a low profile,” he said, starting along the canal at a faster pace. How the Vigil found out about these messes was a mystery he didn’t bother to explain, and I didn’t bother to ask. I had more than enough freaky shit on my plate as it was. That one could wait. “Ammut could still be here somewhere in the scrap yard. If you can smell her, we should search.”

If I couldn’t smell her, the place was too big to search, but we were out of luck. I took a few steps closer to the canal and hooked a thumb toward it. “Over that? I can’t smell anything over that god-awful …”

I didn’t get to finish the sentence as a loop of wet muscle thicker than a man’s waist erupted out of the water and wrapped around my chest and one arm to yank me into and under the water. It was unbelievably fast and the light bad. I hadn’t seen if it was scaled or not—if it was a giant snake or a tentacle, but it didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it was crushing the air out of my chest, what little air I’d had to begin with after the first tight squeeze expelled it from my lungs. It dragged me deeper into the water, moving almost as quickly through the water as outside of it, which meant even if Leandros could’ve helped me, we were leaving him behind.

I had the one arm free and I used it to fumble for my gun. I went by feel. I was afraid if I opened my eyes the chemicals in the water would blind me. Finding it instantly—true love couldn’t bring anything together as fast as my hand and the grip of my Eagle—I fired in the direction I was being dragged. I emptied the clip and the one I carried in the pipe to grow on. Nothing. I was losing my remaining air, my chest aching with oxygen loss and the pressure squeezing me until I felt as if I’d break in half. I went for my Glock next, but I was slow and clumsy, a pounding in my ears—I knew I wasn’t going to make it and if I did, why would it do any more good than the Eagle?

But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try. I let the Eagle go with the fuzzy, blood-drenched thought that all monsters were bad and why had I let anyone tell me different, and I went for the Glock with a hand now too weak to grasp anything, but trying … goddamn it, still trying. I expected to fail with my last semicoherent thought and I did. I expected to die, but I didn’t. Not thanks to Ammut or the first or second mouthful of water I finally couldn’t help but inhale and choke on. Nope, that was not how I went.

Instead, the world blew up.

Blue skies, pirate ships, flying children; they were there again as I woke up, soaked in freezing cold water—almost drowning brought them back every time. Only this time I didn’t think I’d almost drowned. “Almost” was kicked out of that sentence. There was a hand on my forehead tilting my head back, a mouth pressed hard against mine, air blown in inflating my chest, and I didn’t know what it meant—not quite. I couldn’t breathe—so wasn’t I dead? Hazy, sluggish thoughts, but logical. Dead and logical, that took talent.

There went another pirate ship sailing overhead, backlit by stars where there were no stars.

And didn’t I hear a waterfall?

“Cal, you son of a bitch. I’ve had enough this week. Do you hear me? Goddamn enough .”

More air was blown into my lungs, but they didn’t have any idea what to do with it. Lazy damn lungs. The ship disappeared, the sound of the cascading water faded away and panic set in. Jesus, I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t move; I couldn’t goddamn breathe … .

It did turn out that I could vomit. And I did so profusely, all over the front of the shadowed figure I saw bending over me as I opened my eyes. Efficient hands rolled me on my side where I kept emptying my stomach and lungs of canal water. It went on for what seemed a year or so—and not the best of years, although it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. As oxygen took the place of water, I dragged in breaths between the heaving and began to think a little more clearly. As in, what the fuck happened?