Rob Thurman - Blackout

Round and gold but with no discernible pupil, they were clear and luminous as the moon had been in the night sky of Nevah’s Landing. Despite her death-inwater stench, despite her being a monster, she wasn’t repugnant. She was … natural, a creature you’d see in the jungle or slipping into the waters of the Nile. I hadn’t expected that. The spiders were repulsive, because, let’s face it, spiders suck. They’re creepy and nasty even when small, and they need smashing with your boot, but Ammut didn’t give off that feeling. If she’d had wings, she would’ve been a dragon, and I’d just shot that dragon.

Not that she seemed to care. I’d burned through one clip—three rounds in her and the rest in the wall. She was so quick I’d barely seen her at all, much less how she slithered, diving and striking out of the way of the bullets. Her last move had been the quickest, her tail wrapping around my legs. As I pulled at my Glock in its holster with my other hand, she said softly, “Where are your brothers and sisters?” A human voice—a woman’s voice; musical and husky, it was almost sexy.

Softer still. Her face was close enough to mine that I could smell her breath. It smelled of flowers, sweetness overlying the rest of her foul scent. “I will not devour you or your companions. You have only to tell me.” Closer. “Where are you brothers and sisters, half-breed?”

The last words were uttered in a voice not human in the slightest. It was the voice of the Eden serpent. But it wasn’t cajoling Eve into taking a bite; it was flat-out telling her to get her naked ass in gear toward that apple tree before he ripped off a mouthful of her nude flesh and shoved it down her throat. That was the snake on me now, and the hypnotic speed and breath drenching the air with a gallon of overwhelming perfume/pheromones was not distracting anymore. It was a sign I’d screwed up. The weight heavy on my legs was a sign too. The sign of my changing all that was the muzzle of the Glock I jammed in one of those round eyes and the trigger I pulled with it.

I didn’t get her, not completely. She was that goddamn fast, but I winged the side of her muzzle, bright gold blood spattering. The coils wrapped around my lower legs tightened until I felt the bone seconds from snapping. That I, somewhere from my past, already knew what that felt like didn’t make me any happier. I was about to shoot her again, only this time I was smarter. I shot at the one part of her that wasn’t moving—her length crushing my legs. I aimed for the edge of the coil. I’d seen—or not seen actually—that impossible speed in action. The last thing I wanted to do was shoot myself in the leg when her snaky self disappeared. Good thing too, because she did disappear and I hit the floor instead of my foot. That didn’t mean I stayed on my feet. She hadn’t broken my legs, but she’d bruised them and then some. I fell as they gave out beneath me, but that didn’t stop me. Four spiders on a beach, even more in my apartment, a boglet too big for his britches; I’d be damned if an overgrown garter snake was going to get the best of me whether I could walk or not.

She streaked past me, seeing all her spiders but one dead, and decided discretion was the better part of valor against a puck, a Wolf, and two highly pissed-off sheep. Smart move. I nailed her in the tip of her twitchy tail with my combat knife, through the flesh, and into the wood of the bottom stair as she slithered up. Smarter move, I smugly congratulated myself … until she ripped off the stair and kept going. Motherfu—

Get ahead of her.

Sure. When I could fly.

You know how. Open the door. Your door. It’s easy. Easy-peasy pudding and pie. Stomp the snake and watch her die.

I didn’t listen to the crazy. I was getting expert at that now, lots of practice. Not to mention the basement door already was open, which was how she was getting away. Instead, I started after her the only way I did know how. Yeah, I was crawling, but I was crawling with a gun, another knife, and one badass attitude. My time wasn’t of the Olympic variety but the never-give-up mind-set was. Already at the top of the stairs, she turned and spit. It wasn’t the usual villain spitting in disgust at the feet of his enemies. That would’ve been B movie over-the-top and disgusting, but not as bad as this. This was a spray of something venomous. It wasn’t the Nepenthe poison—as the last spider squealed and died impaled on Goodfellow’s sword while Delilah, still in wolf form, was tearing the legs off an already-dead one. This was something else. Niko immediately started vomiting as he’d been lunging after Ammut and me. He managed to vomit all over the back of my nonfunctioning legs. I didn’t hold a grudge. He owed me one from the canal incident. Delilah spit a spider leg out of her white muzzle and yakked up something best not thought about. Goodfellow turned green and bent over to gag, but managed to hold it back.

Me? I wiped the mist off my face, over my hair, and said, in perhaps not my kindest moment, “Pussies.”

Better parts of me surfaced, and I struggled to turn over and pat Niko gingerly on the back, as he’d done for me at the canal and, unfortunately, he suffered the same result I had. Half of me was glad I wasn’t a sympathy puker and the other half was getting worried. Niko was my brother, my family. He was all I fucking had. “Hey.” I squeezed his upper arm instead of the back thing this time. “You need a doctor. I know you said when the spider clawed you that we don’t do hospitals—no spreading the supernatural word, but you and I are human. And right now, that’s good for you. A hospital can handle an unknown poison.” At least they’d better be able to handle it or some white coats would be damn, damn sorry.

Whatever I’d said caused Delilah the Wolf to nearly choke on her next yak, and I wasn’t sorry at all on that one. Goodfellow straightened, the green in his face still there, but he was upright and that was something. “No, no hospital needed. Ammut’s venom isn’t like Nepenthe venom. It’s more a defensive mechanism as opposed to an offensive one. It’s not lethal, not even to humans. It’ll wear off in about fifteen to thirty minutes.” And some creatures were more affected than others. Goodfellow somewhat, Delilah somewhat more, humans … It was the aftermath of a New Year’s Eve party. Puke, breathe, then puke some more.

I couldn’t walk, Niko and Delilah were not in prime fighting condition, and Goodfellow looked as if he had a case of the flu. He could’ve gone after her, but he wouldn’t have caught her. She was too quick and if he had—one person against Ammut wasn’t the best way to keep your friends alive.

So we sat in the basement while Ammut either ran out of the house in her human form—buck-ass naked, I assumed, or maybe she wore scales even in human form—or sped up to the fourth floor of this place, burst through a top window, and snaked off across the rooftop. I’d take the rooftop if I were her. One more spider slunk out behind Ammut’s seven-victim pile, but it was small and I took care of it with one round. My legs slowly regained feeling. I stripped off my jacket, then my shirt—apathy means never having to … eh, fuck the rest—and sacrificed it to Niko’s occasional eruptions of tofu, health shakes, and faux food that didn’t belong in the body anyway. I held his braid out of the way, very prom date of me, rested a hand on his back, and trusted Goodfellow. The expression I shot the puck said if that trust wasn’t earned, I’d be strangling him next with a fluid-stained snarky T-shirt that wasn’t that clean to begin with.

Delilah emptied her stomach only twice. Wolves were tough. Then in a fluid movement of skin and fur, she was human again, crouching close by—close enough that I had my gun pointed at her. She didn’t notice she was nude or didn’t care. Didn’t care, I’d say. She looked proud—as proud as she had as an enormous white wolf straight out of the Arctic. “You are not.” Her eyes were as amber when she was human as when she was wolf, but intriguing with their oval tilt. She could’ve had Japanese Wolf in her, with those eyes and that same amber skin, but the snow blond hair was a trick. Who could say who she was? No one had that right. And who was I to care? She was unique and stunning, as implacably deadly as the edge of my knife, and I wanted nothing to do with her—nothing good.