Rob Thurman - Blackout

I was coming home, all the way this time, I thought, foggy and dim.

For better or worse? I didn’t know. I’d find out soon enough.

The next time I opened my eyes, I’d know.

The next time I opened my eyes …

I opened my eyes and had no fucking clue where I was.

There were twilight shadows spilling around me. They came from windows almost two stories up. Damn. Too high. Dropping my gaze, I faced a wall full of holes where Screw you was spelled out, connect-the-dot style. There was a flash of pain behind my eyes and I grunted, sucking in a breath. Don’t panic. Think it out. Okay, okay, what was all this? What … Leandros. I exhaled harshly in relief. That was right. Leandros, my brother. He’d found me at the diner in Nevah’s Landing and had brought me back. I was in his apartment. My apartment too, he’d said. We’d gotten here yesterday, or had it been the day before, two days before? I wasn’t sure. Goddamn it, I couldn’t remember. Shit, keep it together. Let it go and concentrate on something you are sure of.

Monsters.

There’d been monsters, a shitload of monsters. We fought monsters for a living. Giant lizards in Central Park, a Wolf who’d jumped me from the top of a building—a beautiful predator and gone now. Hopefully to a place that welcomed the wild when they died. Then there’d been a mummy. It was mostly clearing up until the mummy part—that memory cut out almost instantly to the smallest of bits and pieces. There’d been someone choking me, a fire, and an axe. That was all mixed up. Fuzzy and distant.

I was leaving it that way. Whatever memory I was not having, I was completely happy to not be having it. It felt wrong, as if something best locked in a box and shoved under the bed. The smell of burning frankincense, myrrh, and wine—I could forget that too, because I didn’t know what frankincense and myrrh smelled like, did I? How would I know that?

Oh. The cat. The damn dead mummy cat from the bar. She’d smelled like the world’s most expensive deodorizer. Leandros had used her as a tool to bore me with a lesson in how mummies were made and what ingredients were used in the process. He’d said it was the fourth time he’d told me and I could blame only one of those times on amnesia.

The mummy in the basement and the mummy cat smelled the same—if you took away the smell of burned flesh, which I did. Or tried and failed. All right then, the smell I couldn’t forget, but everything else I could. We’d been in a museum basement. There was a talking mummy and somewhere along the way a fire. I could’ve tried to push past that, but I didn’t want to. If I didn’t want to, then I probably had a good reason.

“Cal, are you feeling better?”

My hand started automatically for the gun under the pillow. I managed to stop it halfway. It was Leandros. Niko. My brother. At the diner, he’d disarmed me. I stabbed a guy with a fork… . Goodfellow; all monsters weren’t bad; NYC; peris; vamps; Wolves—it all ran through my head. It was faded, not nearly as sharp as I thought it should’ve been, but it was all there—a little muddled, but not gone. I moved my hand back from the gun, although I knew the shadowed figure standing in my doorway had seen the movement. I ran the gun hand through my hair instead. It flopped into my eyes, making me feel like a predator peering through the grass on the plains waiting for its next meal to pass by. Or I could be an ill-groomed Shetland pony. I was going to get that barber one day.

“Cal?”

I tried again with the hair and this time succeeded in actual sight. “Not bad. Why?”

“You said you felt sick before you went to bed and slept through the afternoon and all night. Are you running a fever?” The figure formed from shadows into my brother, braid and sparring sweats, as he stepped into my room. I didn’t know if he was going to go for the mom’s-hand-on-the-forehead TV commercial, whip out a thermometer, or wave a hand around me to judge the ambient temperature of the air in my immediate area. All sounded as if they would kick me several slots down the list of most macho badasses in the city.

I slid out of bed on the other side, keeping it between us. “No, no fever. I’m not sick.” I barely remembered going to bed. Only a bad feeling … dread—good old hokey Edgar Allan Poe type of black houses, withered graveyard trees, ravens-at-your-door dread, and pain. Hadn’t there been pain? I couldn’t remember. There had been the darkness of sleep, and now I was up and I felt okay. Not fantastic, but all right. “I think,” I said, hesitating, but he was my brother. If anyone had a right to know, he did—my primary babysitter. A babysitter. Jesus, how embarrassing. “I think I might’ve had some kind of relapse with the spider venom. When I woke up, things were foggy. They cleared up for the most part. I remember you finding me in South Carolina, bringing me back. I remember this place and going to a bar where a Wolf tried to kill me. I remember nearly everything trying to kill me, including Ammut. And then I remember the museum and that there was a talking mummy, but that’s about it. Once I hit the mummy, things are gone. I don’t remember much of any of that or after that. There are a lot of gaps. I don’t remember what the mummy said. I don’t remember leaving the museum. I remember getting back here … a little. I think Goodfellow was here.” I shook my head. “And then I went to bed.”

Because it had all been coming back. Coming in your sleep. The best place to keep hidden treasures.

The best place to lock up the worst nightmares.

I was within seconds of grabbing the gun and smacking my own head with the butt. Amnesia was enough. I was tired unto death of dealing with squabbling inner voices too, especially when it was literally my own voice I was hearing. I was actually beginning to hate the sound of my voice. Enough was enough.

“Come here.” A hand reached over my bed to pull me around it and across the hall into the bathroom. “Sit.”

I put the toilet lid down and sat. That, at least, ruled out one less-manly place to get my temperature taken. Niko’s hand pushed my head with care to one side as he examined the puncture with gloved fingers. Whoa. “Um … Where’d the surgical gloves come from?”

“Goodfellow. He’s a proctologist on the weekends.” Before I could comment on how wrong that was, how very, very wrong, he continued. “Amnesia and gullibility, I didn’t know they went hand in hand. We have gloves because we have many medical supplies as our on-thejob injuries are frequently the kind the hospitals rarely see, which would lead to questions we can’t answer. We make do with our own medical skills.” Now there was the cool feel of ointment being rubbed on the bite, as casually as he’d done it a thousand times before. The question he asked was less casual. It should’ve sounded casual… . It was only hair, but that wasn’t the vibe I was getting. “Why did you cut your hair?”

Could they come more out of the blue than that one? “To get the Goodfellow seal of approval?” I snorted. I already knew there was something wrong with my haircut if the puck liked it. “It’s just hair. What’s the big deal?”

“Our clan, the Vayash, some intermingled a time or two with the Northern Greek centuries ago. We picked up a custom of theirs—when someone dies, you cut your hair to mourn their passing.” That … That was yet less casual than before. But before when? When no answer was forthcoming in my memories, I let it go.

I could see his point, why it was important to him and not casual at all. In a way someone had died when I’d first woken up—me. But that person would be back. Resurrected, although it was taking longer than three days. I ran a hand over the mop of jaw-length hair. “I had spider goop stuck in it. I couldn’t get it out for anything. That stuff is worse than superglue. I had to chop it off. Nobody died but a bunch of spiders, and I think those bastards had it coming.