Rob Thurman - Blackout

I shrugged. “Hey, preaching to the choir, but Niko insisted. Said he’d paddle my ass with a sword if he had to.”

“I already have someone to do that. Although once upon a time if Niko had said that to me …” Goodfellow didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Niko was already leaving us on the sidewalk as he headed up the brownstone’s stairs at a fast pace, quick as legs could move without it actually being labeled running. It was much better being on the other side of the Goodfellow personal-life TMI seizure for once.

“That was fucking great.” I grinned. “Do it to him again.”

And that request had Niko through the door and inside before Goodfellow had a chance to say or do anything. I knew I could pick a lock from my few days in the Landing. One night I’d forgotten the key to my room. I hadn’t felt like waiting for the guy at the motel desk to get out of the bathroom when he was done whacking off and since I could hear him whacking off, I hadn’t felt like looking around for a master key either. I’d gotten through my door in about three minutes. Niko went through the brownstone door in three seconds. Or so I thought until I reached the top of the stairs myself and saw the lock was busted out with claw marks and the smell of Wolf on the door. Delilah and her pack didn’t care about picking locks and bricks might save the Three Little Pigs from them, but it wouldn’t save anyone else.

It was a one-residence brownstone. You didn’t see many of those anymore. The hallway was dusty enough to tell that no one had lived here for a while, but the path through that dust said someone did use the place now and again. The pictures on the wall were of an older woman and man. Ammut didn’t seem the domestic kind of monster, with the life sucking and all, which made it easy to guess this couple had owned the brownstone and Ammut had eaten them. It had most likely been when she’d first come into town before she got settled in a place of her own and started eating things tastier than human sheep.

I heard a faint crackle under my shoe and crouched down to touch a finger to an all but invisible glitter on the floor. They were scales, the ones I hadn’t been able to see at the canal, but not crocodile scales. There was no Peter Pan villain here. These were more like snake scales. Smaller, finer, and they smelled like poison … of something rank and rotten—the Nile during a drought with dead fish and creeping putrefaction for miles. “Holy shit.” I half gagged and brushed it off my hand quickly. When she’d left the hearts at our place, she must have been in human form, or mostly, because I hadn’t caught a whiff of this.

Straightening, I pulled out the Eagle. The smell was getting stronger. Farther down the hall, Niko already had his sword in one hand. With his other he made a gesture. It wasn’t the finger, which right now was one of the few gestures that meant anything to me. I had to know signs and be a monster killer too? Was there a merit badge for that at monster killer Scout meetings? Disemboweling revenants in your bathroom and hand signals for something that wanted to do the same to you? Then hot chocolate and cookies. Good time had by all.

I gave Niko an expression that was universally recognized as “What the fuck?” by the memory challenged and nonmemory challenged alike. His sword hand gave a minute twitch that made the katana-paddling threat more genuine, but instead he gave a few more generic motions of his hand. He pointed up and then down. Okay, that I got. How anal-retentive one had to be to have hand signals for up and down that weren’t simply up and down, I didn’t get, but the rest I did. I was the bloodhound. Where was the hamburger? I took a deeper breath as behind me Goodfellow silently closed the door. After my pretty loud “holy shit” of moments ago, being quiet was most likely behind us, but you never knew.

I tilted my head back, up toward the stairs, and took one more breath. Down—the stench was definitely stronger down. Delilah hadn’t been lying when she’d said a basement full of bodies. She hadn’t mentioned the maker was down there with them. Ammut couldn’t have been here when the Lupa were. The Wolves wouldn’t miss that stink and Ammut wouldn’t miss a chance at some furry num nums. Suck the life force, bypass hairballs and indigestion later. It was efficient. I had to give her that.

I moved down the hall next to Niko and pointed toward the floor. Decomposition, adrenaline, fear, Wolves, urine, and Ammut; it was all under our feet. Since I also didn’t know the sign for “The bitch is right here,” I used my free hand to squeeze his wrist hard. He nodded. Monsters in daylight were nothing for him, but to me it was wrong and Ammut was a monster; no some are good and some are bad here. Her invisible trail had unnatural and, yeah, abomination, all but embedded in it. Her, I had no problem killing.

There was a flicker of motion—dark, light, dark—at the door we’d just walked through. Behind Goodfellow appeared white blond hair, amber skin, a tattooed choker of wolf eyes, and a sly smile. Our own Delilah had shown up for the party.

The gun in my hand was aimed and the trigger was on three pounds of pressure and holding before I had a single thought. When that thought finally showed up, it was to forget Ammut. This was the bitch I would enjoy killing. What I’d felt for her at the missed massacre of our clients had been a happy, curious mix of dangerous, hot, and damn straight I’d nail that.

That was what it was like to be human. To have violence not be your first instinct. Huh. Who fucking knew?

Well, I’d been happy then when it came to Delilah, but I wasn’t happy anymore.

She’d betrayed me, but I was past that. I’d expected that. We were predators. We did what we did best. Kill to live, kill to protect our own and, in Delilah’s case, she was her own. Her self-interest was the only thing that mattered to her. And if she played a game or two with someone or something outside Wolves, that was all it was—a game. I’d known that all along, but I’d liked the game and I’d liked her. I’d expected her to go after me eventually. That was part of the game and I knew her rules. But she knew mine too. Going after my family or my friends broke every goddamn one of them. I should’ve blown her away days ago when I saw her for the very first time since she’d pulled that shit.

It was an easy mistake to fix.

“Not the time.” Goodfellow moved next to me, out of the way—no one said his sense of self-interest wasn’t finely honed as well—and pushing the Eagle down. “Very much not the time,” he hissed, barely audible. “Throw her at Ammut first if you want. She makes good cannon fodder.”

True. Then there was shooting her in front of Nik… . Wasn’t that why I hadn’t shot her when she’d stabbed us in the back last year? I hadn’t wanted him to see me do the chick I was screwing—do in a way that ended up with a bullet in her head and my Auphe out instead of in. Wasn’t that it?

Then a pain hit and hit hard. Jesus, what hurt? What inside me felt ragged and ripped, torn, and trashed?

There it stopped, the flood of cold rage and the memories, the pain—all of it. I blinked and it was gone. I remembered vaguely Delilah about to shoot a healer and a friend sometime in the past. I couldn’t remember why I hadn’t killed her—whether it was due to Niko or some lingering affection for her wild ways. The wild ways themselves were a blank too. No mental sex shots for me. Wasn’t that the way? Wondering about nonsense words like Auphe or about being human made no sense, and I didn’t have the time to stand pondering the philosophical nature of humanity now. What made a man a man? Who cared? There was a killer in the basement and a killer flanking us, and this place stank worse than a slaughterhouse. Time to go to work. I’d handled Ammut’s spiders. I’d do the same to her … only without the fork.