Rob Thurman - Blackout

“I know.”

We were wending our way through stacks and boxes and glass cases so dusty you couldn’t see what they held. Treasure? Gold? Something sharp like an ancient dagger? That last thought had me stopping to rub at the grime to take a look. I didn’t like exercise, but I did like weapons. “It’s boring,” I went on, disappointed. Tiny carven bits of rock. No daggers.

“So you’ve said many times. Many, many, many times.”

Many, many times. Ninja-know-it-all. “Have I ever said,” I asked casually, “there’s a dead koala bear on the ceiling that’s about to bite your head off?”

His head whipped back as he looked up, his sword out and ready, but I’d already nailed it in the chest as it plummeted down. The shot knocked it ahead of us into the shadows of boxes stacked eighteen feet high. “Winnie was gunning for your ass.” I chambered another round. I knew better than to think I’d killed it with one shot. It was already dead. Predead. Undead. Whatever. I’d most likely just pissed it off. “You should always look up. Even while you’re bitching at me. The worst things come from there, and people never fucking look.”

Wolves, spiders, furry mummies—that was nothing. Bad things, worse things—the absolute fucking worst came from above; it didn’t matter if I couldn’t put a name or a memory to them right now. I still knew. You didn’t stick your hand into a fire, and you always looked up.

Or be the one looking down.

Living with one whispering voice in my head was bad enough, but two was getting to be too damn much.

I shook my head, a sliver of worry spiking through me. “And you’re not just ‘people.’ You should know better.” He should. He did, but he was distracted—by me. That had to stop.

“Whoops, here he comes again.” I aimed at the form lunging out of the darkness, sputtering candlelight eyes, tawny fur here and there in lonely tufts peeking through its tightly bandaged frame. The ears, nose, and mouth full of non-koala bear fangs weren’t bandaged, though. “It’s kind of cute.” Except for the barracuda teeth implanted in its jaws. I lowered the Desert Eagle. “I’ll feel bad if we kill it. Piglet, Christopher Robin, they’d never get over it.”

Niko skewered it with his katana in midleap. It hissed, snapped, and tried to pull itself closer using its much longer than average talons to grasp the metal and heave. What was it about mummification that made everything remotely lethal on the thing get so damn much bigger?

I glanced down at the front of my jeans and considered. Nah. There were bound to be complications.

“Except for incinerating it, I doubt we could kill it even if we wanted to.” He raised his voice. “Wahanket, we have business with you. Call off your pet before I dice it into a hundred pieces. They can bounce about all they want then, but I don’t think they’ll accomplish much.”

“Pooh hater,” I muttered under my breath.

“Winnie-the-Pooh was not a koala—why am I even arguing about this with you?” He pointed the blade at me as the impaled mummified guard bear continued to thrash and hiss. “This creature could kill you as easily as one of those spiders. Keep that in mind.”

“You mean the six spiders I killed? Really. That easy, huh?” I grinned. “You’re pissed because you missed it, hanging up there. Big bad ninja missed it. Hey, do we keep tabs on things like this? Is that a brother thing? As in it’s my six spiders and one rabid undead Pooh to your … um … nothing? Nothing, right? Did I miscount?”

I couldn’t see the exact color of them down here, the lights were dim—the bare minimum, but I could see the tug-of-war behind his eyes. One side was, best guess, hit your brother with the mummified killer koala bear. The other side, which I’d have laid money on pulling ahead, wasn’t nearly as forgiving as that.

“Sooo … we don’t keep count?” I concluded.

“Wahanket!”

Damn, Leandros could get the volume up there when he wanted. Where had all that Zen gone?

There was a long sigh, a hot breeze over distant sands, and finally, “I am here.”

“Here” was two narrow corridors over and five rows down. There a space was cleared for what looked like a wooden Egyptian reclining couch—as far as I could tell. It had a King Tut look to it. That was what I apparently used to classify old Egyptian things, and I had no problem with that. It was a good system in my book, especially as it didn’t involve reading actual books about what ancient Egyptians used for furniture before IKEA came along. There was also a computer, a television nicer than the one we had, several mounds of smaller electronics scattered about, a fucking Wii, if you could believe that, and a metal table littered with sharp instruments and blood—old.

But once it had been new.

It was hideous. I could picture … I could remember … cats. Dead cats. Completely dead and being cut up. Couldn’t mummify without cutting, could you? The smell of it. The smell of fear and spilled urine and guts … Monsters kill, monsters murder, and, given the chance, some monsters do a great deal worse.

Wahanket was a monster, no waivers for good behavior, and I hated him. The feeling was sharp and cold, and I knew it was right.

Righteous . Both voices were a choir on that one.

The growl in my chest rose up in my savage smile as I saw the claws of a great lizard where one hand should’ve been. “I did that, didn’t I? You pissed me off. You fucked with me, and I didn’t much like it.” The specifics I didn’t have yet, only the taste of the memory, but the fact was solid and true. Sometimes you didn’t have to remember to simply know . I took a step closer. I’d done that, and I wouldn’t mind doing it again. I took another step.

No, I wouldn’t mind at all.

A hand landed on my shoulder and held me back. “Wait, Cal. If he has information, we need it.”

Wahanket wasn’t the mummy of a human being, but l couldn’t have told the difference, except for the scales and claws of his replaced hand. Resin-stained bandages cracked with his every movement. His nose was a dark cavity, his teeth stripped of gums and blackened, a scrap of leather revealed to be his tongue when those teeth parted. A mummy so disgusting and unnatural that Salome and the bear in comparison could be plucked off a toy store shelf. They all did share the same eyes, a wavering, undying glow.

“Why do you come here?” He didn’t bother with my talk of his hand or how I’d been responsible. With his other hand he gestured, joints creaking, and the bear wriggled off Niko’s blade to land on the table where it had been made, turning to hiss and keep us in view. At least it had been long dead before Wahanket had gotten at it, not like the cats, dug up from some old boxed exhibit down here. One stuffed koala bear meant for educational purposes turned into a killer Teddy with no interest in eucalyptus leaves whatsoever. “And with nothing to offer in trade?”

“One of the last times we traded, you tried to shoot my brother with his own gun. That covers our tab indefinitely, I’ve decided.” A hand swatted the back of my head, a daily event, I was learning. No wonder it had felt familiar when Miss Terrwyn had done the same, as it had its roots here. “As for you, little brother, trading guns to homicidal mummies for information is not a good idea. An obvious statement, but one that escaped you at the time.”

As I rubbed the back of my head with one hand, my other was in my jacket searching for something appropriate for the situation—that situation making Wahanket unavailable for all future trading activities. He was a monster even among other monsters—strike one; Niko said he’d tried to shoot me sometime in the fuzzy past—strike two; and I didn’t like him in so many goddamn ways—strike three. Plenty of reasons, although the “not liking him” one was more than enough for me.