Rob Thurman - Blackout

The swat I’d gotten on the head was doubled to be felt through the leather of my jacket covering the back of my shoulder. I growled again but let my hand drop. Niko wanted information. I could wait. Once he had it, then I could kill Wahanket, and we’d both be happy. Win-win. I didn’t need the warning tickling the back of my skull.

Monstermonstermonster .

Blackened teeth snapped together, but Wahanket gave in without argument while laying a soothing claw on the back of the hissing Disney reject. “Very well. I can be generous when I wish. What is it you want to know?”

“Of Ammut, and don’t claim you know nothing, you desiccated depravity. If anything, you are one and the same kind, only you are far weaker than she is. She is a god and you’re nothing more than a killer of cats hiding in a basement, the lowest of cockroaches fearing the light.” If this was Niko buttering up an informant, I wished I’d washed my own cereal bowl that morning.

Wahanket … Hadn’t I once called him Hank? There’d been a stupid cowboy hat he’d worn. He’d seemed harmless then. He’d … I blinked and whatever I’d been thinking was gone. It slithered away into the corner of my mind, out of sight but waiting. It was coming back. The cats. The hand. Slowly and playing hide-and-seek, but it was all coming back, the memories. Me.

“A god? She is no god. She can but steal life. I can give”—his claws stilled on the back of the ragged beast of his creation—”as well as take.” The light disappeared in the eye sockets of the bear and it fell stiffly onto his side. It was the same as it was before he had done his work on it—dead. Defaced and definitely less educational, but dead.

“If you’re her equal, why aren’t you aboveground killing vampires, Wolves, lamia, and whatever else she can gather with her spiders?” Niko asked. I saw the yellow eyes of a cat crouched on the crates behind him, but Salome’s brother or sister in undeath was content to watch. Maybe it didn’t want to end up like the bear. Or maybe it liked Salome more than the mummy that had killed it before raising it from the dead.

“I have spent more years than you can imagine taking and giving lives. I am older than the pharaohs, older than Egypt or any pyramid. I knew the Nile when it was only a trickle of water and I have existed long enough to know there is no thrill to be had any longer, none that I haven’t tasted. Save one.” The tendons of his neck stretched and split as he turned his head to take in the computer.

“If you wish to know of Ammut, now she cares for higher nests as opposed to warm dens. She likes to view her kingdom, but I have my window into endless kingdoms. I do not need what she needs. I can sustain myself without feeding. I am beyond that. If she were as powerful as I, then she could do the same. If she does not feed, she will starve within a month. Pathetic. I have heard of deaths that could be caused by her, but if she is here, I cannot say for sure. We come from the same place, but we are not the same kind. We are not connected. We are not”—the claws of one hand curled tight—”sociable creatures, either of us.” It was funny how “sociable” could sound as if he’d like to skin her alive and reupholster his King Tut sofa. “She would not come here to me. I know not where in this world that she now perches.”

“She likes to perch while you like to hide from your shadow like Punxsutawney Phil. Is that right?” I asked with a sneer that had a mind of its own.

The distant glimmer in his skull switched its regard from the computer to me. The glow, hepatitis yellow, brightened. Sometimes bright means cheerful; sometimes it means a heightened interest—either good or bad; and sometimes it’s the blaze of sheer fury. His head jerked forward toward me with the same quick action of a striking snake. “What have you done?” His eyes were so bright, it was as painful to look at as staring into the sun. “What have you become? How have you let someone else steal what should be mine?” His teeth snapped and parted to let through a sound like nothing I’d ever heard. It damn sure put the hissing of a dead bear to shame. “I have bided my time, waiting for you to ripen, and now you are barely half of what you were, barely worth taking at all. What have you done ?”

Mummies could move faster than any spider when they wanted, faster than a half-grown boggle. Wahanket was a hurricane-force wind and I was the palm tree that went down before it. Long, thin fingers and a lizard’s talons wrapped around my neck, cutting off my air instantly. “It was mine, and you lost it, you worthless sack of skin. It was mine. Itwasmine. Itwasmine. Mineminemine.”

It was getting dark fast and I didn’t think that had anything to do with the natural gloom down here. You didn’t have to choke someone for minutes, unless you were an amateur. Less than fifteen seconds of pressure on the carotid arteries would have your victim out cold. Out cold and on a dissection table. Of all the memories I’d lost, that couldn’t have been one of them. Of course not.

The blackness spread and I couldn’t see Wahanket anymore, but I didn’t need to see to get a hand inside my jacket. My thoughts were getting hazy, but I didn’t need them to choose the right weapon. I only needed instinct, and instinct was all over this.

Monster.

Cat killer.

Motherfucking mummified asshole .

Instinct chose one of my backup Desert Eagles, the one having been lost in the canal. Instinct pulled the trigger. It was a few seconds later when blood made its way back to my brain and I could see again that I found out instinct had been cock-blocked. The round that should’ve shattered Wahanket’s skull had hit nothing. Niko must have kicked him off me, because the mummy was on his back several feet away with a katana skewering him to the floor. But to judge from his thrashing, strong for a pile of bones and jerky, the blade wasn’t going to hold Wahanket forever. The man who’d turned him into a temporary shish kebab didn’t strike me as that concerned. His hand disappeared inside his duster and reappeared with a can of lighter fluid. I hadn’t asked about it when we’d stopped and bought it on the way. If I asked about everything I didn’t know or understand right now, I would never shut up. I was going with a mostly wait-and-see policy until I was back to normal.

I had to say, I liked what I was seeing.

Niko sprayed the mummy from head to toe and with one flick of his thumb set him on fire. The flailing redoubled and the cursing started. I sat up. “What about your sword?”

There was a dismissive shrug. “It’s not one of my favorites. I came prepared. You never know when Wahanket will have useful information or not, the same as you never know if he’ll go from mildly cooperative to wildly homicidal.” He held down a hand to me and pulled me to my feet.

A lot of people seemed to be taking my amnesia personally—the Wolves, the boggles, and now this piece of shit. “What was he talking about? That I’m only half of what I was?” I rubbed at my throat, but it was in one piece other than the scabbed spider bite. I owed that to Leandros, who was as fast as he’d been when disarming me in Nevah’s Landing—as fast as I had the strong feeling that he always was.

“He can take life forces like Ammut, even if they’re not the same. Perhaps a meal for these kinds of predators includes it all: your life, your memories, your skills, your emotions. And you most definitely do not care for Wahanket, the same as he does not care for you.” That was fairly obvious, I thought as Niko went on. “He might have been waiting for your … dislike of him to peak before he tried to drain you.”

“The cherry on the top of a Cal sundae, huh?” Niko appeared to have no problem accepting that guess, and Wahanket was one of a kind—puzzling over it would probably be pointless, although it still didn’t explain the Wolves and boggles. I was about to bring that up when I was distracted by Wahanket—not by what he was doing, but by what he wasn’t doing.