Rob Thurman - Blackout

Okay. Myself. I was shooting myself. There was no way around it. I pried the cat off my leg and tossed her into Niko’s lap. If he was so determined to put himself between me and bodily injury, here was his chance. “I’m hungry. I’m making a sandwich. You two … do … whatever. Discuss. Maps. Plan. Evil Egyptian snob. Me smart.” And I was past the enormous rock crystal coffee table and all but sprinting toward the kitchen.

“Some things never change,” Goodfellow commented caustically. “Mice ever cower beneath the shadow of the mighty hawk. Oh, and Cal? Your T-shirt isn’t accurate. They don’t taste like chicken. People. More like a cross between beef and pork. And don’t give me that holier-than-thou judgmental look, Niko. I get that enough in the bedroom. Either I ate with the natives or I joined Captain Cook on the spit. He was a bastard and a half anyway, already practically pickled in his own rum. He didn’t as much roast as ignite and explode.”

Thoughts of chowing down on a pickled and barbecued captain didn’t bother me half as much as a puck who didn’t own underwear. I started rooting around in his double-doored, Easter Island statue-sized refrigerator and grabbed whatever looked the least healthy. Luckily Goodfellow wasn’t like Niko. He liked his food expensive, but other than that, he didn’t give a rat’s ass, especially when it came to things like heart disease and diabetes. In that respect, at least, he was just like me. Exactly like me. Equal; I didn’t fall short in any way. In any way at all. I scowled as I dug through some drawers, then hovered my hand over a fork before regaining some self-control. I went for the knife and started to chop bread and brisket.

“Speaking of pickled, cut down a gallon or so on your cologne. Delilah said she smelled it all over me after we were at the bar.” That must’ve been before yesterday, because I remembered it fairly clearly. “Not the impression I want to be giving hot lady werewolves.” For Niko and my head, which was beginning to throb from all the smacks, I added, “The nonpsychotic, non-Mafia, nonkiller ones I might meet in the future, I mean.” I hadn’t smelled his cologne on me, but I hadn’t tried to either. I damn sure wasn’t going to try and smell him now or whatever or whoever else was on him. That thought didn’t quite end up in my thumb being the next thing chopped next to the brisket, but it was close.

I was never going to be able to work at that bar again.

“My cologne, that’s asking quite a lot of me to give up,” the puck said with such polished smoothness and without pause that it meant he was lying.

It also meant he wasn’t trying to do a good job of it. Pucks were professional tricksters, born and bred, both Niko and Goodfellow had said. Why he would bother to lie about cologne, I didn’t know or care. I wasn’t puzzling through his personal life like Sherlock goddamn Holmes. Monsters trying to kill us—now that was worth puzzling over.

Niko filled Robin in as I ate my sandwich with wasabi mayonnaise. He told it all: my relapse into fuzzy memory land. The puck exhaled at that, almost as if he expected it, but he didn’t say anything. He only listened to the rest of it. Our dead clients and Ammut trying to carry me upstream to spawn like a salmon, he already knew about. That just left the attack of the spiders, which didn’t really need telling. That seemed to be an endless loop playing in my life. And then Niko laid out my logic of Ammut being an uptown girl, living the high life, probably in a penthouse.

Perched … Hadn’t someone said she liked to perch? Who had said that? The mummy. I lost my appetite but kept eating automatically. That damn mummy … Wahanket … He was what had happened yesterday. He was what I hadn’t wanted to remember. It came into sharper focus—the small spider that had attacked me, Niko boxing it up to send to Goodfellow, the trip to the museum, then slices in the darkness: suffocation, fire, an axe, and a feeling—a feeling of taking my own hand and meeting myself face-to-face. Of finally knowing who I was.

Heeeere’s Cal .

Then the relapse. A very conveniently timed relapse combined with a photograph and one basset hound- sized spider led to only one conclusion. It turned out I was Sherlock Holmes after all. But I’d known hours ago when I’d seen the picture for the second time that I had a choice to make. Now I knew how to go about making it.

I’d had one relapse, but if I were a betting man, and, hey, maybe I’d find out I was, I’d lay money down that I wasn’t going to have another.

“You?” My thoughts and sandwich both were interrupted. “You figured that out about Ammut? You came up with that? Do you even know how to use a map?” Goodfellow asked with a helping of disbelief as large as the helping of green mayonnaise dripping off my sandwich onto the granite kitchen island.

“Okay. Enough already. What was I before? Someone with the brainpower of a poodle?” I took another bite as I glared at the two of them.

“I wouldn’t want to insult the poodle, but …” The puck held up his hands. “Jesting. Kidding. All in fun, I swear. No, you’re smart enough with or without your memory. Your priorities are simply different.” His eyes followed another dollop of mayonnaise to fall. “Not with regard to cleanliness or appetite—those remain the same—but … never mind. Fine. Ammut is camouflaged as a socialite or a cougar or one of the wealthy women who gobble boy toys instead of life forces. Between Promise and me, I’m sure one of us has come across her. And was fortunate enough not to be eaten by her.”

“Monogamy,” Niko said, regarding the bald cat batting at his braid with the caution one would use when trying to give a piranha a surprise proctology exam, “may have saved your life.”

“And the rest of the world’s sanity.” I finished the sandwich and headed back into the fridge for a second raid, not that I’d regained my appetite, but my body was overriding my brain. That was when I heard the sound of movement in one of the back bedrooms. “Shit, gotta go. Arrange something. Society thing maybe. Mix with the rich and the life force-sucking bitch. Kill her then. Good plan. Call us. Later.” I was in the living room, grabbing Niko’s arm and dragging him out of the condo with the door firmly slammed behind us, by me, before five seconds passed. I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty for throwing out Niko’s idea about the society crap without giving him any credit, which was the reason we’d come over to Goodfellow’s condo. Add that to the map inspiration and I’d come off a genius.

“You are the biggest coward when it comes to Goodfellow’s personal life. I’m almost ashamed to claim you as family.”

He was so full of himself, with that tiny flake of mummy cat skin on his black shirt. “You want we should go back in there and have some kind of clothing-optional round-robin Egyptian villain discussion with an underwear-free puck and my boss, the guy with wings and a flaming sword? By the way, we don’t know where that flaming sword has been.”

“I hate to agree with Robin, but you need therapy. You do. Staying a virgin until you were twenty has obviously done profound damage to your psyche.”

“Twenty?” I moaned. Twenty years old?

“Or maybe it was twenty-one,” he mused.

You didn’t tell people that, whether it was true or not. Bastard. I didn’t speak to him again until we hit the bar. By then it was eleven at night, but it could’ve been eleven in the morning. It didn’t matter. Sin is open twenty-four hours a day. That was why I liked New York … or so I thought. It was a good reason. This bar was considerably different from the peri one. First this was a Kin bar—all Wolves, all the time. There was a fur ball at every table.