Rob Thurman - Blackout

I’d guessed killer for me. I thought now I’d guessed wrong.

“I don’t think I’m as empty as you thought.” I sniffed the air. “You smell Extra Crispy. I’d have taken you for an Original Recipe guy, but you never know.” Spartacus wrapped his paws around my wrist and proceeded to chew away mouthfuls of the rugged, water-stained black leather jacket and spit them on the floor. “You never goddamn know. Take another look at me, Wahanket, and tell me what I was and what I’m becoming again. Tell me or I’ll chop you into pieces so small you won’t be able to stitch yourself back together with your teeth, because I’ll pound them to dust. And whatever you have that passes for lips, I’ll rip off. Your gums … hmm. What the fuck. I’ll just pop your head in a box and toss it in the East River. See how that affects your sewing project. Home Ec. What a bitch, huh?”

Spartacus agreed by tearing off half my jacket sleeve. Oh yeah, this destructive little shit was going straight to Goodfellow. For all the torment he’d caused me, the puck deserved it. Salome might kill things and people; this guy would kill an apartment—more specifically Goodfellow’s penthouse.

Wahanket’s marsh-light eyes sharpened as they fixed on me. “You are correct. You are becoming again.” The teeth snapped in a satisfied smile … or mummy constipation; it was a hard expression to read. “You shall be you again, and if Ammut does not have you, one day I will.”

I tickled Spartacus’s stomach and the cat opened his mouth to show me a preview of Jaws 15 , the IMAX version. Luckily, it was a yawn. “Yeah, I’m bored too, buddy. Now where did I leave that axe?” I didn’t ask as a threat. I asked out of genuine curiosity. I was bored. I was done playing around with this barbecued son of a bitch. Playing with something that can’t run or even crawl—where was the challenge in that? “Who am I, Wahanket? And if you don’t cough up something in the next five seconds, you’ll have to write down the information I want, because I’m going to cut out your tongue.”

Wahanket pulled himself up onto the ancient bench, lying on his chest to watch me. He wasn’t bored at all. “Do not worry. I shall tell all you wish to know. The meat tastes sweeter when it knows why it was chosen, flavored with the disbelief that any could bring it down. Despair and disbelief, nothing teases the palate so much as those.” Gold flakes had transferred to the bench into the blackened flesh of his hand. I could see the spark of them, a starry night, when he pointed at me. “You … You are Auphe.”

That was what the boglet had said. I was off, that wasn’t news. I was absolutely off. But the word wasn’t completely that. It was somewhere in the middle of “Off” and “Ouph-fey.” A human tongue couldn’t exactly replicate it. But I could see the word in my head, dripping with black bile, smelling of blood, part of me. In every part of me.

I was Auphe.

Always had been, always would be. A word made of screams and slaughter, murder and madness, albino pale skin, red eyes, the shine of hypodermic-needle teeth—more needles than a hospital would need in a month. White, red, and metal, like my Peter Pan crocodile.

Here you have brothers and sisters. Baby boy, baby boy.

The shadows grew wider around me, but I didn’t stop. I did have a brother. Not one that a crocodile had given me, but a real one, and he needed the real Cal. And real or not, Cal or not … I kept my promises. I told Niko I’d be his brother and there was only one way to do that—by bringing Cal home. “Auphe,” I said with a distance so great that I may as well have been on the moon. “Who are the Auphe?”

“Were. Who were the Auphe?” One of the flakes of gold fell from his hand to the floor. A speck of the sun falling to Earth, a soul falling much farther. “They are all gone now, except for you, half-breed. But once they were the first.”

“The first what?”

“The first of anything. The first of everything. They were the first to walk this world. They were the first to kill simply for pleasure. They invented murder, created torture, conceived terror. This world was theirs for millions of years.” The yellow glow softened. “So very long ago, when Death itself bowed to its masters.”

“They set the gold star standard for nightmares like you. Great. How did I get to be one? Half of one?” Because one of them damn sure hadn’t been trolling for a good time and met up with Sophia. Easy or not, she had to have some limits.

The gold is gone, and you’re still here, brat. You’re still goddamn here.

Or not. Sometimes a whore is a whore to feed herself and her children. Sometimes it’s for drugs or rent or because it’s her body to do with as she pleases. And sometimes someone like my mother sets a gold star standard of her own. They’d paid her to make me … not to have me. You have babies; you make monsters. I’d been an experiment; I knew it. I knew it. I didn’t know why yet, why the Auphe would want a half-breed, but the hell with the how and the why of it. That was coming fast and furious on its own, clawing up through my subconscious. I’d know, whether I was ready or not, and I didn’t need this asshole to tell me that.

“I’m a monster then, like Ammut?”

Wahanket laughed. It sounded as if he were choking on his own mummified organs, if he hadn’t removed them. “No, you are not a monster like Ammut. Ammut will be a child in your shadow when you return. Ammut is simply a creature like any other creature, eating to live. Enjoying meals that taste especially finer than others, as you would taste. She kills to survive. You … Auphe … You are the only monster in the world. We all pale before you.” He clacked his teeth together. “Which is why you are a challenge; why your life will taste the most flavorful of all there is.”

This piece of shit was sewing himself back together for one reason only—to get his own chance of sucking me dry of Auphe. To make a meal of someone and something he should never have fucked with from day one. Informants are difficult to come by, eh? Then we’d have to try harder. This one had answered his last question, although he had told me what I required. Cal, the real one, could handle Ammut. It was all I needed to know.

I put the mummified cat down and I found that axe.

When I was finished, I didn’t need to put his head in a box. A hundred skull fragments weren’t going to knit a Christmas sweater or put themselves back together again. I dropped the axe in the midst of a pile of shattered bone, cracked resin, and one very ex-mummy. “The first,” I said to the remnants. “I’m one of the First of this world.” They invented murder, created torture, conceived terror, he’d said.

“Invent, create, conceive, and you wanted to screw with that. You should’ve thought about what the First would do to you instead of what you would do to it.” Bone crunched under my boot. “And you, mighty Wahanket, were barely worth the fucking time.”

When I turned to leave, I felt a weight thud onto my shoulder. Spartacus rubbed his bedraggled, bandaged head against mine with the same death-by-avalanche purr that Salome had. “I’m not leaving you, Kojak. I have a better home for you. In fact …” The eyes still glowed on top of the crates. Wahanket had made pets, but he hadn’t made any friends. Not one had interfered in his destruction. There were what looked like ten mummy cats watching me watching them. “Eh, why not? If Goodfellow is so oversexed that he can’t put his damn pants on to answer the door, he deserves what he gets. Come on, guys. Get your wrinkly King Tut tails in gear and let’s show a trickster what trickery and revenge are all about.”