Rob Thurman - Blackout

I turned my back, depending on Goodfellow to watch it, and moved past Niko to stand behind the door to the basement. A rug beneath my feet puffed up dust and the smell of death as I pushed at the door carefully with the gun muzzle. Ajar, the heavy wood swung with ease and no haunted house screech of rusted hinges. Too bad. That would’ve given an excuse to flip on the lights, if the power was still on, and go pounding down the stairs shooting anything I could see—”see” being the key word.

Niko’s hand on my shoulder stopped me from edging down the first step. I waited and, as my eyes adjusted, a small amount of light became visible. A street-level window was somewhere down there, a small and filthy one from the amount of light it let in, but when you’re old and have bad hips, you don’t come down to your basement to clean the windows in case someone needs to come to kill the monster that ate you. They couldn’t have had a housekeeper?

The first foot on the step wasn’t mine. No surprise. Spanking boglets and sending them running back to mommy kept me from being benched, but lacking my entire mind didn’t make me MVP. I did make sure mine was the second foot, and Goodfellow and Delilah didn’t fight me for the honor. I couldn’t see what color the stairs were, but I could tell they were painted. Brown, gray, some color that wasn’t impossible to see in the gloom, but neither were they easy.

The body was.

It was … I had no idea what it was. It had wings but not feathered, more like that of a bat. It had a child’s face, sharp teeth in a small gaping mouth, and large eye sockets. The closest thing I could come up with was a flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz . The eyes that had been in those sockets were desiccated to the size of raisins and the wings looked brittle enough to disintegrate with a touch. Dark blue or purple veined every inch of the skin I could see as it had the victims in the scrap metal shed. The rest of it was wrapped in a spiderweb cocoon, which was apt as it looked as if it had been sucked dry—a fly in a spider’s web. Ammut had her pet spiders storing food for her here in her emergency freezer. This one hadn’t made it all the way down to the pantry. She’d eaten it on her way out.

That last Oreo on the go. It happened to us all.

I edged around it, following Niko’s lead, and kept moving down the stairs, one slow, cautious tread at a time, and stayed grateful the body didn’t have a vest and fez. That would have been beyond my weirdness threshold, assuming I had a weirdness threshold that didn’t involve undead cats and naked pucks. Swiveling my head, I tried to cover both sides of the basement around the stairs until Niko’s painless but pointed jab in my gut combined with pointing to the right had me focusing on that. He’d cover the left, I’d cover the right, and nothing would be lost in the seconds it took to watch both on your own.

Killing monsters for a living was not for the loner, not for a long-lived one at any rate. We reached the bottom of the stairs, and I could barely see the paler color of Niko’s hair at all. The rest of him bled into the darkness. The man wore way too much black. As if I could talk, I amended to myself, and checked over my shoulder. Delilah, whose almost-white hair stood out in the gloom, a moth wing pressed against a night’s window, was behind me and Goodfellow behind her. It was good planning on the puck’s part. With the partial new opinion I had of her—knowing implicitly what she was capable of caused very confused emotions—trusting her to guard all our asses wasn’t an option. It didn’t matter that I could see how that amused her, a spark of reflected light in amber eyes. She could be amused all she wanted as long as Goodfellow put that sword through her if something looked off or if she breathed wrong.

At the bottom I automatically moved to stand back to back with Niko. I couldn’t tell where Ammut was more specifically than the basement. I smelled her everywhere, the pungent odor rolling at me from all sides. I could smell too much and couldn’t see enough. I felt something against my foot, a shadowed heap. I used my toe to flip it part of the way over … slow, silent, careful. It was a Wolf—male, not a Lupa. It had human features except for the mouth crammed with wolf teeth and tufted ears. It too was mapped with dark veins and cocooned. The veining would be part of whatever process Ammut used to pull the life out of her victims. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t fresh hearts pooling blood on your countertop either.

As Delilah came to the last step with Goodfellow right behind her, I stepped away from Niko and farther into the deepening shadows to make room for the two. Blind was no way to work, not and stay alive, but Niko took care of that and finding Ammut all in one fell swoop. It wasn’t ninja magic. It was good old mundane road flares; one tossed past me and one on his side of Ammut’s cookie jar. They lit up the space like two small bloody suns. There were at least seven bodies I could see before me. All were cocooned. Here were some of the missing victims we hadn’t been able to track down, spider-delivered from the parts of the city where Ammut was too snooty to go herself. Fortunately, the basement was damp with one pool of moisture by the heap of bodies. That moisture kept them from bursting into flame as the flare was close enough to touch them. I scanned the area. Cracked concrete walls that revealed the old brick beneath, bodies, puddles; that was it. I even checked above my head. If a spider was going to jump you … If anything was going to jump you, that was where it would be in this place. Seeing nothing there or under the stairs, the flare banished shadows there as well, I turned to take in Niko’s half of the space.

More bodies; almost twenty in a pile reached to the exposed aged beams above us. The basement was bigger than I’d imagined before Niko played God and lo, there was light, but it wasn’t so big that I could see there was no sign of Ammut. I smelled her, but I didn’t see her. Either she’d left two seconds before our cab dropped us off or she was under that mound of bodies. It was big enough for a monster to burrow beneath.

I was already moving toward it when I discovered there was a third option that I hadn’t considered.

While it was large enough to hide Ammut, it was also big enough for six spiders to leap out of while Ammut, on the petite side for a monster, came boiling out from under the seven bodies behind me. All in one moment, I saw the thrash of long black jointed legs, cocooned bodies tumbling; Delilah literally ripping off her clothes—I heard the material shred under her hands—and becoming a large white Wolf that fell to all fours to jump; Niko’s and Goodfellow’s swords swinging, and Ammut.

It was one moment of ivory fur, claws, and fangs, silver slicing quickly enough that the air itself should’ve been cut. It was one moment of yellow eyes and dripping venom with legs scrabbling too fast for nature to have intended—a hideous, inescapable speed.

It was a lot to take in and I didn’t bother. I had Ammut on my ass and that took priority. I was firing as I swiveled. When something is that close to you and moving that damn fast, equally quick as her spiders, aiming is a luxury. If you’ve got a full clip, pull the trigger and keep firing. You’ll hit it, one way or the other—hopefully before it hits you.

I hit Ammut with three hollow points. It gave me enough breathing room to get a split-second look at what I was shooting at rather than just a greenish blur. Mythology sketched on a bar napkin said she was part lion, part alligator, part hippo, and that would have been a lie because mythology was always a lie. Deduction told us she had to look human part of the time. That time wasn’t now. No, now she faced me, a glittering coil of green and bronze scales, the same coil that had yanked me into the canal. There were arms, appearing disturbingly boneless, and the face was almost lionlike, a blunt muzzle only finely scaled. The scales on the sleek head were almost all copper and bronze compared to mixing with the deep green below. I could see how it might seem like a lion’s mane, a shining cascade of tawny glitter, because her eyes were almost all cat too.