Rob Thurman - Deathwish

In the end, after a lot of squabbling—that would be bitching on my side and calm, forceful logic on his—we compromised. He took one of the pills and I took the pillowcase from the next bed, wadded it into a ball and took a deep whiff whenever the other smells, smells straight out of a slaughterhouse, got to be too much. Niko finally slept after making sure I was hanging in there, and I think I ended up slightly buzzed from the bleach.

It definitely kept me awake and alert, which was good because when Niko woke up at about seven a.m., he wanted every detail I could dredge up about Oshossi and the battle. Other than almost killing my brother, I hadn’t been concentrating on those little personal details that make monsters so gosh-darn interesting. Like acid spitting, leeches for intestines, liquefying your internal organs and drinking them like Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup—fun stuff like that. When it came to Oshossi, I’d been preoccupied with my brother sprawled and bleeding in the snow, so I didn’t pick up much new from what I’d noticed at the car lot.

“I hit him several times with the Glock, I know that,” I said as I swiped his blueberry muffin from his breakfast tray. He’d been upgraded to food for people with teeth by the day-shift nurse. Nurse Tiger-Stripe Thong/See-through White Pants Combo. I called her Tigger for short. For that and for her bouncy nature. You know the wonderful thing about Tiggers? Nothing. Not a damn thing. They’re annoying as hell with all that bouncing and good cheer.

“He flinched but he didn’t go down,” I added before chewing and swallowing. “As a matter of fact, he grinned.” I picked out a blueberry—it smelled a whole lot better than bleach—and fiddled with it. “Good teeth. Just as sharp as before. His dentist would be proud. Bet he flosses like crazy.” Yeah, flossed pieces of punks like me out of those back molars like nobody’s business. “Cyrano,” I said seriously. “He is bad fucking news.”

“Because he rolled, then flipped our car?” He regarded the fake scrambled eggs and hockey-puck sausage with the same distaste he showed flesh-eating revenants. “It would take serious strength and physical framework to do something like that.”

“Yeah, but”—absently I gave him the last half of the muffin—“more that, hell, Nik, he wasn’t even trying that hard. It was like at the car lot. Like he was fishing, caught us, and thought, Nah, too small. Not worth my time. And tossed us back. You were down. My gun wasn’t putting him away. He didn’t even draw his bow on me. He just took the bullets, smiled with those freaky teeth, and disappeared. We might’ve killed his cadejos and ccoas, but he doesn’t think we’re much of a threat. I think he’s telling us to mind our own business.”

“From what you say, it wasn’t our best showing, and he is a hunter. Has been one for thousands of years. He might consider us unworthy prey.” He considered the muffin, sighed, and ate it. “I think I’m embarrassed for us.”

“I think I’m glad I’m not a head mounted on his wall somewhere.” I focused on the smell of the blueberry muffin and nothing else and managed to keep it down. “You want to get cleaned up? There’s a shower in the bathroom. If Promise sees you like that . . .” Bloodstained hair, Betadine, a bruise spreading across his forehead to match the fading black eyes I’d given him.

“No good?” he asked. “I’ll definitely enjoy being clean, but I hardly think it would matter to Promise. I never claimed to be as vain as Robin.”

He missed it. Niko, who hardly ever missed anything. “You look human, Nik,” I said bluntly. “You look way too human right now.” Blood, bruises, faint lines of pain. Human. Vulnerable. Promise had seen it before, but not to this degree and not in a hospital. It was a reminder that couldn’t do anything but hurt her. I knew I wasn’t enjoying it.

He could’ve died. Could’ve bled to death in the snow. My family, my only damn family.

Which led to something I was far better at than meditation. Denial. Very big, very bad denial. I took the tray and started in on the leathery eggs. One bite was enough. Jesus. That was physician-assisted suicide right there. “There’s shampoo and crap in there. Try not to flash me on the way.”

Fifteen minutes later he was back with clean damp hair, the Betadine scrubbed away from the stitches, and wearing scrubs instead of the hospital gown. He was still bruised, but he was steady on his feet, which was a good thing, because Promise was there, having walked past a scolding Nurse Tigger like she didn’t exist. They really were fascist with their visiting hours there.

She walked past me the same way she had Tig, so I took the tray out to the hall to give them quality vamp-human time. Cherish was waiting out there in black-on-black with a collar of gold, pearls, and onyx. She liked the shiny stuff, no way around it. She and Robin, they would always be thieves, but there were worse things to be. As long as the thieves were on my side when the chips were down, their private lives were none of my business. Hair swept up into a smooth coil pinned with more pearls, she held the hand of Xolo. He was in a parka, new from the sheen of it, with a hood that kept anyone from seeing anything but large shadowed eyes.

“You saw him again, then? Oshossi?” Her leather-gloved hand tightened on Xolo’s.

“You could say that.” I dumped the tray on a metal cart loaded with other dirty ones. “You could also say you owe us a car.” I folded my arms and leaned against the wall beside her. “I’m hoping you’ve never seen this guy fight, because I’d like to think you’d have mentioned he invented ass kicking and has a black belt in taking names.”

“No, I never saw him fight.” Her mouth, painted the color of poppies today, tried for a smile but didn’t pull it off. “I saw other sides to him. I do know he has never lost prey once he’s started the hunt. He’s very proud of that. Too proud, I thought. Arrogant, perhaps even foolishly so. But I was the fool. This is it, then?” she said more to herself than to me. “You and the others have faced him and barely escaped with your lives. I am a fighter.” The blackness fogged her eyes, and I saw her fangs, if only for a second. “An excellent fighter, but I’ve seen you and your brother . . . with the cadejos and the ccoas. You’re hunters, just as Oshossi is. If you can’t take him, neither can I.”

“Hey.” I wasn’t sure if I was insulted or felt bad for her. I rolled a meditation bead against my wrist and had a flash of that insight everyone’s always talking about. Know thyself.

Yeah . . . I was insulted.

Okay, okay, I felt a little bad for her too. “It’s not just you, remember? It’s all of us. Robin’s been around longer than Oshossi, you can bet that. When he has to, he can fight like hell. He might not like it, but he can do it. And if it hadn’t been for the car thing, I think Niko would’ve given Oshossi something to think about.”

I touched another bead. “Niko’s human, but . . .” I stopped and thought about it. “He’s a Caesar, an Alexander, a Genghis, a Minamoto no Yorimasa.” And he’d always said I never paid attention to the history books he’d used to teach me. “Some people are born warriors. He’s one of them. What it takes some creatures hundreds of years to learn, Nik was born knowing. Every once in a while the world comes up with a natural-born predator. We’re lucky nature screwed up and gave Cyrano a conscience along with it, or it’d be Alexander all over again.”

Huh. I’d gone through the entire mala, bead by bead, and hadn’t noticed. And I’d talked more than I usually did about personal things, and what the hell was up with that? So what if Cherish was Promise’s daughter, and Promise was with Niko. So what if that sort of made her family. So what if . . . damn, I was getting soft in my old age. Twenty—who knew you went to instant pudding then.