“Eh, there was this thing.”
Yeah, there had been this thing all right, and it was getting more and more annoying.
“And I was hungry anyway. Ate some cereal. Knew we had some shit to do early and then I thought, hey, what’s a guy like me—when I don’t have amnesia—do for fun? I’m curious,” I said, then added, “Wouldn’t you be?”
He took the ponytail holder out of his hair, then pulled it back again, straightening the sleep fuzz. “I work as a TA teaching history at NYU part-time and part-time at a dojo as an instructor. I train you so that you can fight off a toddler should one escape the local preschool. I meditate. Read. Research. Spend time with Promise.”
That was all fascinating. The life of Niko Leandros, multitasking modern samurai. He was stalling. If this guy valued perfection, and he did, he valued it in all things, including excruciatingly accurate (and long) answers to easy questions. That made me wonder why he’d stall at all, much less over such a simple question. “But I’m not you,” I said, boosting myself up to sit on one end of the dresser. “What do I do?” Slouching, elbow on knee and chin resting in hand, I waited for the answer.
He watched the impatient swing of my foot, or the dirty bottom thereof invading his oasis of sterile tranquility. “You like to … hmm … watch TV.” He paused. “You enjoy browsing gun shops, although of course we obtain our weapons in a less legal fashion. You like your job at the bar.” There was a longer pause before he said triumphantly, “Ah, sometimes you like to read.”
He grabbed on to that one as if it were a life preserver. Brothers who worked together, lived together, weren’t at each other’s throat, but that didn’t necessarily mean we were close. Then again, there was that lie-down-and-die-for-me attitude he’d been spouting on the drive from South Carolina. Willing to spend his life looking for me, willing to die for me, but as for knowing what I did in my spare time, he was drawing a blank. Lots of people needed their personal space? Right? That was normal, especially as we did work and live together. He could not have a clue as to what I got up to on my own time.
Yeah. I wasn’t buying it.
“I read. What? Porn?” I was a guy. Sue me if the important literary works rose to the top.
“Mostly, but the occasional book that has a paragraph or two to give the porn context isn’t completely out of the question.” The end of his katana smacked against my foot smartly. It stung, but it was a baby tap compared to what the weapon could’ve done and I stopped swinging the clearly irritating foot. “You like to shoot.”
As if the world’s largest weapon store shoved under my bed hadn’t told me that much. That and how very quick I’d been to kill the Wolf outside the bar last night. I wasn’t quite right with that yet, and I didn’t know when I would be.
I could’ve shot to wound—why didn’t I? A good guy would have, but it was a surprise, quick, and over before my thoughts caught up to my trigger finger. If I’d had time to think, I would’ve shot to hurt, not kill. I knew it. Good guys don’t kill if they don’t have to … now that I was slowly accepting monsters as people, sort of.
Lies. You’re lying to yourself. You know what monsters are.
I returned to the conversation, leaving uncomfortable thoughts behind. “Shooting. Gotcha. One-track-mind me. Porn. Guns. Sleeping with chicks who want to kill me. Nothing else? No, I don’t know, movies? Bars and not just to work in, but to do more interesting things, such as get laid by someone who doesn’t want to kill me? Sports? Parties?”
Leandros jumped on the last item quickly enough that it smacked of desperation. “Parties. Yes. You went to a … You like parties.” He stood, moved to the dresser, and opened the bottom drawer farthest from me and my unclean, heathen foot. “Here.” He handed me a photo, computer printed but on glossy paper, the extra white neatly trimmed away. It was headed for framing one day. A w w w, wasn’t that sweet?
I stared at it and raised my eyebrows at him. “A party? What kind of party?”
“Halloween. Ishiah hosted it at the Ninth Circle. Whatever you must say about the preternatural, they do like their celebrations. Pagan creatures did invent them, after all.”
Looking back at the picture again, I saw Leandros, dressed in, as I’d only seen since he found me, black and gray, including his weapon-concealing duster. Promise was made up as something fancy from the days when men wore tights and enjoyed it. It was a wonder there was a nonovercooked sperm in those days. I had no idea how the human race had survived. Ishiah was dressed normally as Niko had been, but with his wings out. Goodfellow stood behind the bar. I could see him only from the waist up. He was bare chested. “What’s the puck dressed up as?”
There was a sigh and the sound of the drawer shutting. “He thought it would be entertaining to have his costume complement Ishiah’s. Ishiah went as an angel and Goodfellow went as”—you can’t hear eyes roll, but you can imagine that you can—”the Baby Jesus.”
I grimaced. “That means he’s wearing a diaper… .” I didn’t get to finish.
“Preswaddled.”
Preswaddled. That meant he was naked behind that bar. Holy shit, why did he ever bitch about me ruining his clothes when from his talk and the illustrations to go with them he rarely fucking wore any? I moved my eyes quickly to the last one left: me. I was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, two guns in a dual shoulder holster, and had a black apron tied around my waist. I was working, not partying. And my costume? The T-shirt said it all: This is my costume. Now fuck off.
That, as festive as my EAT ME T-shirt had been, didn’t tell the whole story. My hair, half of which was now gone, was in a shoulder-length ponytail, and my expression—it wasn’t an expression. It was a lack of one. It was the same as the expression on the panthers you see in the zoo. They weren’t hungry. And they didn’t give one good goddamn shit about you one way or the other, but if you stuck your arm between the bars, they would rip it off in a second. Why? That was what panthers did, hungry or not. My eyes … They were not the eyes of a not-so-bad guy or a good brother. I’d say they belonged to a very motherfucking bad guy indeed. I’d semi-avoided mirrors since I’d woken up on the beach, but I knew I hadn’t seen that face or those eyes since I’d been spitting salt water.
I’d thought I was badass.
Mama Boggle knew she was badass.
I didn’t think either one of us wanted to meet that guy in the picture.
I tried not to assume. It could’ve been a bad day. A Wolf could’ve marked my sneakers as his territory … while I was wearing them. That werewolf chick Delilah could’ve jumped me, put a collar and leash on me, and tied me to the nearest fire hydrant. Goodfellow might’ve trapped me in a corner and told me more stories that Hustler itself wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, which I’m positive he’d claim to be hauling around in his pants—when he wore any. There were tons of reasons I could’ve been in a bad mood—so catastrophically pissed that the black ice behind my eyes alone would have serial killers writing me love letters from prison instead of vice versa.
Or there was the truth: This guy shot Wolves in the head and didn’t once consider only wounding them.
“Yeah, I’m the life of the party all right. I’m surprised balloons don’t pop out of my ass and streamers fall wherever I go.” I shoved the photo back at him, then thought belatedly about asking what his costume was. I didn’t bother. I knew. Lived with that guy in the picture. Worked with him. Willing to sacrifice his life to find him. Martyr-in-the-making—that was his costume and his reality.
“This is really me? This is the guy you’re waiting to wake up in a few days? He … I … We look like a nuclear bomb with a timer clicking over zero and fast into the negative numbers. And you want him back?” Look at him… . Look at me, I finished silently. If I saw him in a well-lit alley, I’d run like hell. If I saw him in a dark alley, I’d piss myself.
“You are him. Sometimes you have a bad day, but we have a shared history. You have a reason for an occasional bad day, and I have a reason t
o miss you with your memories. You know me just as I know you.” I could understand that.
Context, he’d said before. I gave him context to his world. I knew that because nothing gave me context to mine right now. “I am who I am because of you,” he added. “You were the making of me and that’s a good thing. I miss you knowing that, knowing what I know, our whole life, good and bad.” He accepted the picture and laid it carefully on top of the dresser.
“Leandros … Niko, you might want to take a closer look at that picture and buy a cattle prod for when I’m all the way back, because that guy is not happy and that guy is not right. I don’t want to be that guy. I really don’t. But, hey, just my opinion … of myself. Since you told me our mom didn’t remember him, maybe my dad was Ted Bundy. Charles Manson on a furlough. Genetics and memories are weird stuff. Take what you want from it all and think hard about getting that cattle prod.”
I didn’t look for his reaction, because I didn’t want to see it. Truth is truth, but sometimes it hurts. Realistically, most of the time it hurt. Instead, I moved on. I had other business, and I preferred not thinking about what I might be under the amnesia, who the real me was.
But how could I not be the real me, amnesia or not? With the same personality formed by genetics and memories, “weird stuff” that they were. I didn’t recall those memories, but they’d already molded my brain and personality. Losing them wouldn’t make me someone else. I couldn’t be that different from the me in the picture, right?
How do monster genetics work? This time that inner voice sounded amused. This was a voice that had no problem with monsters.
Who knew? Who cared? I was human, and that was the only genetics that concerned me now. The picture—it was a bad day, bad day, he—me, the both of us, were just having a bad day. Had to be. Why would these people, even my own brother, want me back if that weren’t true?
I felt somewhat reassured by that train of thought. “Before we start the big Ammut scavenger hunt of the day,” I said, heading out his door, “there’s a spider in my room. Put it in the Dumpster or cut it up and flush it down the toilet again. I don’t mind clogging a motel toilet, but I don’t want to sit down tonight and feel something biting my ass because we didn’t flush hard enough.”
The dead spider was a small one—barely the size of a beagle. Leandros sent it, wrapped in two garbage bags, boxed, then taped securely, by an express-delivery service to the puck. When I asked him why, he asked if I wanted to see the Halloween picture of Robin again. It was a good point. The puck had it coming. But then he went on to say Goodfellow knew a forest nymph who subcontracted for a CSI lab, all about the bugs and leaves, and might be able to find any clues as to where this particular spider had been in the past twenty-four hours. When he finished that, he went out for an hour to get a better lock to replace the spare he’d installed last night. Yep, we kept spare locks, and, yep, we were running low. That didn’t make you think twice, no, not at all.
That he didn’t make me go along did make me think. The boggle and Wolf had shown I could take care of myself, but you rarely saw just one bug. Then there was Ammut, but maybe she stuck to the canal or was recuperating from the explosion. Could be Leandros had a black market secret lock guy who would deal with no one but Leandros. Who knew?
Then again, he was pissed. Or disturbed, annoyed— something in the pissed-off area. With Leandros it was hard to tell simply by looking at him, but he was feeling something all right. That I could tell from the moment he’d walked into the diner. I guessed it was a brother thing. It could’ve been that he hadn’t woken up when I’d killed the spider. He’d been making hourly checks, heard my socked feet, the Central Park squirrel burp, but a killer arachnid he missed? To be fair, it dropped down from the metal ceiling on a silken chain as thick as my finger. Soundless. I hadn’t heard it either. But I’d smelled it. Sour venom, silk that had a sticky sweet scent for wrapping up prey. I’d let it get close enough to see the chitin shine of its legs in the city light through the dirt-coated high windows and impaled it on a sword I’d found under my bed with everything else. I was a gun person, but I kept around a sword or two just in case. I also had a flamethrower.
Of all the things I’d found out so far … I think I liked that about myself the most. Gotta love a flamethrower.
I took a shower while Niko was off FedExing Charlotte’s asocial big brother. When I was done, I wiped the mist from the mirror and took a long look—the longest since I’d come to on that beach. I exhaled in relief and covered the mirror back up. It wasn’t me. The Cal in the picture had had his worst day ever when that picture had been taken because that wasn’t me. Eyes, face—it was as if a shadowy film had been peeled away. I still had a mild thing for wanting to kill monsters and a fondness for forks in all their destructive power, but I’d let a bad photo make me think I was something a helluva lot darker than I was.
I’d also told Leandros his brother sucked, which could have been another reason his mouth was a tight slash of irritation when he came back. It didn’t matter if that brother was the same one making with the insults. I shouldn’t have said it. I’d been wrong, and, worse, I’d told him the brother he would die for was a freak. I’d compared him to a bomb, one in mid-explosion.
Not the behavior of a good brother, and I was a good brother. Leandros said so. The mirror said so. I fucking said so.
Good brother. Not-so-bad guy. I repeated it in my head like a … mantra, yeah. Mantra. Niko was bound to know about those since he said he meditated for fun. Who meditates for fun? For your blood pressure, okay, but for fun? It must kick-start his soy-and-yogurt morning. Meditation and soy all in one day; he was such a daredevil.
By the time he was back with the lock, I was dressed, armed, and ready to kick some ass. I regretted the Wolf, but I didn’t regret the spider. Some are wild, some are bad, and some are evil meant to die. Fighting the boggles I’d enjoyed, because it hadn’t involved killing, but it did have a whole lot of running and fighting and kicking scaly butt. That I liked. I wouldn’t have minded doing some more of that. I’d been wrong on the trip back from South Carolina. This did beat serving up hash and waffles … except the drowning part, but other than that—I liked this shit. Look at me, the adrenaline junkie. Another brick slid into place to help rebuild the old me. “Where to?”
Leandros’s mood hadn’t improved. He could hold a grudge. I wouldn’t have thought that about him. It wasn’t very karmic. Next time I’d throw the spider, still living, over the wall at him, and I wouldn’t insult the me I couldn’t remember. Lesson learned.
“Wahanket,” he replied. “He made Salome, and he’s a mummy himself.” And why wouldn’t he be? Keep dishing out the insanity. At least I wasn’t bored. “If he knows how to infuse a dead cat with some form of life force,” he continued, “then he and Ammut may have crossed paths. Plus, they’re both ancient and of Egyptian origin.” He was in the kitchen washing a bowl and spoon I’d used to eat the Lucky Charms I’d found in the cabinet. I’d left the dishes there on purpose. Cleaning was one hobby he hadn’t mentioned, but come on. Except for my room, you could operate in here. Hopefully, scrubbing in the sink would distract him from the high levels of grimness he was radiating. Being a good brother and being lazy could go hand in hand, I was pleased to discover.
“Maybe they dated,” I offered. “Two wild and crazy kids who both liked screwing around with life forces. Can’t get a match that good online.”
“Of it all, the sarcasm was one thing you couldn’t forget.” He scrubbed harder.
I grinned. “That’s amnesia-proof.” Not to mention, the thicker I laid it on, the easier it was to convince him and the others and myself that I wasn’t as lost as I’d been—and I wasn’t. Some things were slightly familiar, the little things that squatted on one brain cell, the people-only dreams—the two genuine memories of which I’d caught the barest fragment. I didn’t have myself or my life back yet. I had found one or two bread crumbs, but the forest was thick and the path
turned out of sight.
Lost, but trying my best to get back home, and trying not to let it show how being lost felt—like falling and falling and seeing glimpses as you went. All the stories Leandros and Goodfellow told me … I couldn’t connect with them. The flashes of memory I’d had, that I felt. I knew them—knew they were real. What people were telling me, though, didn’t trigger any further memories as I’d hoped. The stories seemed as if they were missing something. They were off or wrong, or maybe I was the one who was off, but when I heard them, they didn’t feel like anything other than something that had happened to someone else. Not to me.
“Maybe your mummy can tell me why the spiders like me so much,” I offered. “That one was number six. Pretty good for someone not in the exterminating business, especially if you count them by pounds.”
“You did kill a nest of four of them. The fifth could’ve been part of the nest and followed you.” He put the bowl and spoon away, slamming the drawer. The washing and drying hadn’t been enough to let him swim out of that mood yet. I should’ve eaten five more bowls. “This spider no doubt wanted payback. It’s a frequent complication. Those who have killed anything that crosses their path can become inconveniently vengeful when something kills one of their own.” Much like Leandros himself did.
“They don’t get that occupational hazard deal?”
“No, they do not. Irksome, I know.” He moved from the kitchen and tossed me my jacket from the couch. “And this is neither a closet nor a coatrack, nor has it ever been.”
“I have amnesia. Cut me some slack,” I protested as I slipped the jacket on, feeling the comfortable weight of metal fall into place. I’d scrubbed the leather down when we’d gotten home to get rid of the canal smell. It didn’t hurt it any. The leather had been plenty distressed long before that wipe down.
“Laziness and sarcasm—now two things Nepenthe venom cannot affect.” He was already wearing his own weapon-concealing long coat. “Zip up your jacket. It’s a fair trip to the museum.”