Rob Thurman - Blackout

Only one way to find out.

I put aside the fantasies of ninja elbow destruction for the moment and followed him in, closing the door quietly behind us. The blood smell was stronger, but it wasn’t rank. There wasn’t much blood. There doesn’t tend to be in hearts that are ripped out of chests. The blood tends to stay with the body. And then carrying them over in a bag left behind—from Nordstrom, classy—let more leak out, until you’re left with a few tablespoons of blood and the smell of raw meat. That was what was left of eight people—the smell of raw meat. It hadn’t been spiders, and they hadn’t come through the glass. She—and it had been a she, I could all but taste the perfume—had picked the lock and distributed the hearts around the place. One was even on the kitchen bar in a rectangular Japanese-style glass vase I didn’t know we had.

Not that I knew much. Not now … not yet.

Soon.

I stared at the heart swimming in the water of the vase. It was small; a child’s heart. It was February; one of the first things I’d found out when orienting myself in Nevah’s Landing. It was February, but was it a particular holiday? One that featured, among other things, hearts?

Fucking soon, all right. I’d have those memories soon, so I’d know what to do about things like this. Where to put these feelings, because I didn’t want to have them. If you lived this life, you had to have a mental box for moments like this, to shut them away. And you needed thick chains to wrap around the box and sink it to the bottom of the ocean. I needed to find that goddamn box.

“Is it Valentine’s Day?” I asked. It wasn’t my voice and it wasn’t the old Cal’s voice either, because Leandros gave me an assessing glance—one of those looks that said, “Hang in there, little brother, while I break out the straitjacket.”

I ignored it and him. I woke up on a beach with four giant goddamn spiders that I killed. Me. I’d done that. It had been me and monsters and nothing else. No big brothers to keep reality from me, and I’d survived anyway. In fact, I’d excelled for a man with half a brain. I hadn’t lost my shit then; I wasn’t losing it now. “Hearts and flowers. So where are the flowers?” And where was the Eater of Hearts? Where was Ammut?

On the pale gray counter were letters drawn in what little blood there had been left. For a murderer, she had nice handwriting. Neat. Legible. Written in death, same as in the shed where the dead counsel had lain, but you can’t have it all. She’d written four words: Give them to me. Again, the same as in the shed where she’d written it on the wall. At least it wasn’t in hieroglyphics. Niko would’ve had to break out a book or, hell, the guy already knew how to read them.

“Give them to me.” Niko had already searched the place. I hadn’t bothered. After the revenant-in-the-bathroom test, I made sure I could tell if it was only us or someone else still around. Except for the flowerchoking perfume and death she’d left behind, she was long gone. He read the words over my shoulder. “Give them … Give her what?” he questioned. “She’s already taken and is still taking what she wants. What do we have to give her? Why does she keep repeating this?”

In the Park.

Give them to me.

The trees, the grass, spiders all around.

Give them to me. You know. Only you would now with the true ones past and gone. Where they are? How selfish you are, half-breed. Keeping them all to yourself.

The spiders coming closer, more than four. Twenty at least.

Give them to me.

Maybe it had been Valentine’s Day then. It would explain the echo in my head, though not the truly crappy grade school poetry.

Roses are red, violets are blue.

The sound of two guns firing followed by …

I’m not giving you a goddamn thing, bitch, so fuck you.

It was so nice when a brand-new voice made room for itself in your head. I had me, two more preamnesia mes with radically different opinions on things, and now this Ammut bitch. The joy and the general party atmosphere of it all were too damn good to be true.

I shot the vase. I didn’t hit the heart. I didn’t want to. I just wanted the creepy fucking post-Valentine’s weirdness gone. The death of a child gone. The letters … the words … gone. The water didn’t wash them away. They were too dried for that, but it made mopping them up with a wad of paper towels easier.

“Cal.” He said my name as if he wanted to say that it was all right, but he knew it wasn’t all right. He was the big brother, though, and he couldn’t not say anything even when there was nothing to say. I didn’t look up from scrubbing the letters away, paying attention only to the letters and not to the broken glass. When I cut myself, he found more words to say. “Cal. Stop. Now.”

“Why? Because a little of my blood is worse than a bunch of hearts lying around the place?” Eight people—maybe nine if I found one under my pillow—were dead because of us. People. Kids. Fucking kids. All right. I was losing my shit after all—a little. I was entitled. You couldn’t ignore that much death when it was your fault.

The short sliver of recall that had flashed through was something I felt even more. “I remembered something.” I exhaled, then mumbled as I wiped. “A little. I was in a park. Central Park, I think. There were spiders and I remember a woman’s voice telling me to give them to her. Give them to her. I have no idea what she was talking about, what she looked like, or how I managed to get away from twenty-some damn Nepenthe spiders. I’m good, but a Chuck Norris Samuel Jackson fucking parfait of kick-ass isn’t that good.” I threw the soaked paper towels over the counter into the sink. Shit. The only way I’d know the word parfait was Goodfellow. I’d have to thank him for that later with my foot up his ass. Hopefully he’d be wearing pants by then.

“If I remember that, if that happened, I don’t see me surviving it, but since I somehow did, I don’t see me not telling you about it before I took off on my priestess-hunting sabbatical down south.”

He took another mass of paper towels I’d snatched up but hadn’t needed in my scrubbing fest. Folding them into a neat square, he offered them to me. “Your hand is bleeding.” I pressed the white to the oozing glass cut and watched it turn red. “And perhaps I thought you were safer on a wild-goose chase in South Carolina after some fictional priestess until we found out what Ammut wanted so badly from you, because you didn’t know then either. ‘Give them to me’ means nothing, to you—to any of us.”

“And off I went, but spiders followed me. Turned out I wasn’t that safe after all?” The cut didn’t hurt. The deep ones never did at first. “I was bitten looking for something that didn’t exist, lost my memories, and it still took you four days to find me in Nevah’s Landing where I happened to wander because my subconscious remembered the good old days when we were kids and Peter Pan was around? And that’s me believing I would’ve even gone to begin with. What about the twenty spiders and an Egyptian fake goddess? How’d I get away from them? Fucking fly?” I let the bloodstained towel fall to the ground. “That’s the worst bullshit I have ever heard and I don’t need a memory to know that. It’s not even a lie. Jesus, it’s barely half a lie and zero explanation. Didn’t we grow up on the run with our mom moving from mark to mark? That’s what you and Goodfellow said. Well, you, Leandros, didn’t learn a damn thing from her.”

“I can lie.” He didn’t sound defensive at the accusation, only at the use of our last name instead of Niko.