“The smell.” I shrugged. “Apparently that’s the one motivation my laziness can’t beat back down. How’s the leg?”
“Sore but bearable.” He was limping, but not too badly, which was good as we had a lot of dead spider ass to haul. “I’m going to take a shower.” There was a towel half in the bathroom and half in the hall. “My keen observational skills tell me you already have. Did you brush your teeth?”
“What are you?” I took another bite of a peanut butter and jelly bagel. We were out of bread. I chewed and propped my elbows on the breakfast bar. “The damn Tooth Fairy? My diaper days are over. Go on already.”
He gave me a look, a now easily recognizable “brother look,” picked up the towel off the floor, and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. I waited until I heard the water running, gave it several seconds, then put the bagel down and went into his room. I hadn’t forgotten which drawer the picture was in, but I hesitated before the dresser as if I had. “Suck it up,” I muttered under my breath. “It’s just a goddamn picture. It’s probably of Niko potty-training you. Suck it the hell up.” Suck it up I did and opened the drawer with a resolute hand. That same rock-steady hand reached inside and brought the picture out. I stared at it. I saw what I’d seen before. There was no flood of memories or the trickle of a single one, not yet, but I saw. I saw what I’d wanted to deny and never remember and embrace all in one.
I saw everything.
Destiny was easy. Choice was difficult and free will was for the fucked.
I was well and truly fucked.
10
“I am going to make Goodfellow rue the day he ever gave you that gift certificate. His Christmas present to me is years of aggravation from you. Tricksters—no wonder they’re the least popular supernatural creature alive,” Niko growled. We were at Goodfellow’s place to tell him the news about Ammut in person, discuss, plot, and all that shit. Why not just use the phone? Because he wouldn’t answer the damn thing or return voice mails. After two hours we gave up and made like Jehovah’s Witnesses, knocking on his door.
I blew air upward to clear the hair from my eyes. I could see why I’d had a ponytail. This was on my last nerve and that Goodfellow approved of it meant it was fashionable, and I didn’t want to be fashionable. That meant I tried. I didn’t want people to think I tried. Cool guys who kick monster ass do not try. Our coolness is inherent, goddamn it.
“It was the only clean thing I had left,” I grumbled as I pounded my fist against the puck’s apartment door for the third time. “I don’t think I like doing laundry.” The object of Niko’s exasperation was the T-shirt I was wearing under my jacket. It was black. When it came to me, I’d discovered this was the same as saying water is wet. It had cheerful yellow letters across the front: I LIKE PEOPLE! Below that were the words THEY TASTE LIKE CHICKEN!
“You didn’t actually say you think you don’t like doing laundry, did you? Because if you did, I may have to hurt you in ways the Spanish Inquisition itself couldn’t begin to imagine.” He was favoring his leg, but short of wrapping a pain pill in tofu in the hopes of shoving it down his throat as you would a cranky cat, there wasn’t anything I could do. He was one stubborn bastard.
“I told you to take a pain pill before we left,” I said unsympathetically, “or wait until the guy answered his phone instead of coming over here to kick down his door. Don’t be getting apocalyptic on my ass. It’s not my fault.”
“Apocalyptic on your ass?” The aggravation, not that genuine anyway, shifted into a more encouraged echo. The old Cal must snark more than I did. That made me wonder when he/I had time to breathe.
I grinned. It took some effort, but I did it. “Hey, medieval’s been done.”
Before I got a comeback on that one, the door finally opened and Goodfellow, in all his unclothed glory, snapped, “One knock, wait. Two knocks, leave. Three knocks, and I turn Salome loose on your testicles.”
“Oh, fuck me.” I covered my eyes as fast as possible with my hand. “No, wait—I didn’t mean that. I absolutely did not mean that. Just words. Bad words, very bad. I probably shouldn’t curse as much anyway. I blame Leand … Niko for not raising me better. Hell, I blame you too. When you answer the door, put on some goddamn clothes.”
“I’m a puck with normal puckish needs. You feel I can’t walk around in my own home as I please? As a puck and a homeowner, I’m offended.”
“As a person with eyes, I’m offended,” I shot back, offended eyes still shut.
“He’s not as secure in his masculinity as he could be,” Niko said, his tone indicating that while he was having a good time at my expense, he was also not entirely unfreaked-out himself. “Unfreaked-out” … Was that a word? At the moment, did I care? Hell, no. “Although to be fair,” he continued, “not many men would be in this position.”
“‘This position’ is why I didn’t want to answer the door. I obviously have better things to do.” I peered through the crack between two fingers to see Goodfellow wave a cranky hand to invite us in. I edged in, back to the first wall I could find, sealed my fingers again, and waited until I heard a distant bedroom or bathroom door shut. I was about to relax when I felt a touch against my thigh and promptly nearly shot Goodfellow’s mummy cat between her firefly yellow eyes.
“Holy shit.” I slid down the wall to crouch, gun dangling from my hand as Salome—yeah, that was her name, I was pretty sure—curled herself around my neck and purred in my ear. Of course, purring doesn’t often sound like gravel grinding or avalanches crushing hikers beneath them, but we weren’t all perfect.
“You’d better find a grip on the situation or Salome may eat your head. She likes fear. Fear is catnip to a mummified feline.”
I looked up, growling at Niko’s enjoyment of my, yep—I admit it, full-blown terror. We were in a marble foyer. There was a living area, a kitchen that probably came with a chef, through another door, a dining room, and directly across from us a hall that ran to bedrooms and whatever else the orgy king had going on. Rich. Goodfellow was rich. That wasn’t worth wasting a thought on. What would be were the two or three gold-barred white feathers I saw here and there down that hall. Ishiah’s feathers. “This is so not good for a working relationship with your boss.” I groaned. “That guy needs some Rogaine for birds or something. Christ.”
“Don’t be such an infant.” There came the increasingly familiar swat to the back of the head. “It’s sex. You’re a grown man. You’ve done it and with an incredibly psychotic Wolf to boot. More times than I could begin to count.”
“Then you have no problem with my seeing your vamp Promise parade around our place buck-ass naked?” Actually that was a mental picture I had no problem with. Definitely worth remembering more than a mummy in a museum basement, which was why I guess the visual of her was still spectacularly vivid, practically 3-D. She was pale, but she had all that hair and those clutch-of-violet eyes and probably some spectacular ti … The smack was to my forehead this time, banging the back of my head against the wall—a two-for-one special. “Ow. Jesus. What was that for?” I complained, rubbing my forehead, then the back of my head, then my forehead again.
“You know perfectly well what that was for.”
Yeah, okay, he did have me there.
By the time Goodfellow came back, leaving whoever left those feathers—yes, I told my mind, I know who, so shut up—hidden in the bedroom, I was sitting on his couch while trying to decide whether to shoot the cat, now humping my leg—I didn’t even know cats humped—shoot Niko, whose smirks might be invisible but still detectable, or shoot myself. The puck, wearing a dark green robe, flopped down on the wraparound contour couch and demanded, “Explain, and if this is not very, very good, I’ll let Salome hump the both of you to death.” I stopped trying to shake the cat off and gave Goodfellow my full attention, which was enough to let me see from his sprawled position what he was wearing under the robe.
Okay. Myself. I was shooting myself. There was no way a
round it. I pried the cat off my leg and tossed her into Niko’s lap. If he was so determined to put himself between me and bodily injury, here was his chance. “I’m hungry. I’m making a sandwich. You two … do … whatever. Discuss. Maps. Plan. Evil Egyptian snob. Me smart.” And I was past the enormous rock crystal coffee table and all but sprinting toward the kitchen.
“Some things never change,” Goodfellow commented caustically. “Mice ever cower beneath the shadow of the mighty hawk. Oh, and Cal? Your T-shirt isn’t accurate. They don’t taste like chicken. People. More like a cross between beef and pork. And don’t give me that holier-than-thou judgmental look, Niko. I get that enough in the bedroom. Either I ate with the natives or I joined Captain Cook on the spit. He was a bastard and a half anyway, already practically pickled in his own rum. He didn’t as much roast as ignite and explode.”
Thoughts of chowing down on a pickled and barbecued captain didn’t bother me half as much as a puck who didn’t own underwear. I started rooting around in his double-doored, Easter Island statue-sized refrigerator and grabbed whatever looked the least healthy. Luckily Goodfellow wasn’t like Niko. He liked his food expensive, but other than that, he didn’t give a rat’s ass, especially when it came to things like heart disease and diabetes. In that respect, at least, he was just like me. Exactly like me. Equal; I didn’t fall short in any way. In any way at all. I scowled as I dug through some drawers, then hovered my hand over a fork before regaining some self-control. I went for the knife and started to chop bread and brisket.
“Speaking of pickled, cut down a gallon or so on your cologne. Delilah said she smelled it all over me after we were at the bar.” That must’ve been before yesterday, because I remembered it fairly clearly. “Not the impression I want to be giving hot lady werewolves.” For Niko and my head, which was beginning to throb from all the smacks, I added, “The nonpsychotic, non-Mafia, nonkiller ones I might meet in the future, I mean.” I hadn’t smelled his cologne on me, but I hadn’t tried to either. I damn sure wasn’t going to try and smell him now or whatever or whoever else was on him. That thought didn’t quite end up in my thumb being the next thing chopped next to the brisket, but it was close.
I was never going to be able to work at that bar again.
“My cologne, that’s asking quite a lot of me to give up,” the puck said with such polished smoothness and without pause that it meant he was lying.
It also meant he wasn’t trying to do a good job of it. Pucks were professional tricksters, born and bred, both Niko and Goodfellow had said. Why he would bother to lie about cologne, I didn’t know or care. I wasn’t puzzling through his personal life like Sherlock goddamn Holmes. Monsters trying to kill us—now that was worth puzzling over.
Niko filled Robin in as I ate my sandwich with wasabi mayonnaise. He told it all: my relapse into fuzzy memory land. The puck exhaled at that, almost as if he expected it, but he didn’t say anything. He only listened to the rest of it. Our dead clients and Ammut trying to carry me upstream to spawn like a salmon, he already knew about. That just left the attack of the spiders, which didn’t really need telling. That seemed to be an endless loop playing in my life. And then Niko laid out my logic of Ammut being an uptown girl, living the high life, probably in a penthouse.
Perched … Hadn’t someone said she liked to perch? Who had said that? The mummy. I lost my appetite but kept eating automatically. That damn mummy … Wahanket … He was what had happened yesterday. He was what I hadn’t wanted to remember. It came into sharper focus—the small spider that had attacked me, Niko boxing it up to send to Goodfellow, the trip to the museum, then slices in the darkness: suffocation, fire, an axe, and a feeling—a feeling of taking my own hand and meeting myself face-to-face. Of finally knowing who I was.
Heeeere’s Cal.
Then the relapse. A very conveniently timed relapse combined with a photograph and one basset hound- sized spider led to only one conclusion. It turned out I was Sherlock Holmes after all. But I’d known hours ago when I’d seen the picture for the second time that I had a choice to make. Now I knew how to go about making it.
I’d had one relapse, but if I were a betting man, and, hey, maybe I’d find out I was, I’d lay money down that I wasn’t going to have another.
“You?” My thoughts and sandwich both were interrupted. “You figured that out about Ammut? You came up with that? Do you even know how to use a map?” Goodfellow asked with a helping of disbelief as large as the helping of green mayonnaise dripping off my sandwich onto the granite kitchen island.
“Okay. Enough already. What was I before? Someone with the brainpower of a poodle?” I took another bite as I glared at the two of them.
“I wouldn’t want to insult the poodle, but …” The puck held up his hands. “Jesting. Kidding. All in fun, I swear. No, you’re smart enough with or without your memory. Your priorities are simply different.” His eyes followed another dollop of mayonnaise to fall. “Not with regard to cleanliness or appetite—those remain the same—but … never mind. Fine. Ammut is camouflaged as a socialite or a cougar or one of the wealthy women who gobble boy toys instead of life forces. Between Promise and me, I’m sure one of us has come across her. And was fortunate enough not to be eaten by her.”
“Monogamy,” Niko said, regarding the bald cat batting at his braid with the caution one would use when trying to give a piranha a surprise proctology exam, “may have saved your life.”
“And the rest of the world’s sanity.” I finished the sandwich and headed back into the fridge for a second raid, not that I’d regained my appetite, but my body was overriding my brain. That was when I heard the sound of movement in one of the back bedrooms. “Shit, gotta go. Arrange something. Society thing maybe. Mix with the rich and the life force-sucking bitch. Kill her then. Good plan. Call us. Later.” I was in the living room, grabbing Niko’s arm and dragging him out of the condo with the door firmly slammed behind us, by me, before five seconds passed. I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty for throwing out Niko’s idea about the society crap without giving him any credit, which was the reason we’d come over to Goodfellow’s condo. Add that to the map inspiration and I’d come off a genius.
“You are the biggest coward when it comes to Goodfellow’s personal life. I’m almost ashamed to claim you as family.”
He was so full of himself, with that tiny flake of mummy cat skin on his black shirt. “You want we should go back in there and have some kind of clothing-optional round-robin Egyptian villain discussion with an underwear-free puck and my boss, the guy with wings and a flaming sword? By the way, we don’t know where that flaming sword has been.”
“I hate to agree with Robin, but you need therapy. You do. Staying a virgin until you were twenty has obviously done profound damage to your psyche.”
“Twenty?” I moaned. Twenty years old?
“Or maybe it was twenty-one,” he mused.
You didn’t tell people that, whether it was true or not. Bastard. I didn’t speak to him again until we hit the bar. By then it was eleven at night, but it could’ve been eleven in the morning. It didn’t matter. Sin is open twenty-four hours a day. That was why I liked New York … or so I thought. It was a good reason. This bar was considerably different from the peri one. First this was a Kin bar—all Wolves, all the time. There was a fur ball at every table.
By the way, ever had eight breasts bounced in your face at once? I can’t recommend it enough. I headed straight for the stage. “Don’t they hate us?” I said distractedly, digging for money in my pocket. “Especially after what’s-his-name, their liaison with us, was supposedly killed by the Lupa since Delilah is going to hog Ammut’s glory?”
“Vukasin. This is his bar. They may hate us, but they honor their word,” he said, following me. “And their deal with us. For now.”
Vukasin, the dead Wolf. Yeah, the neon vuk me in the window should’ve been a clue, but I’d gone with the breasts. Clues, at that moment, I didn’t care about. Who said I didn
’t have great priorities?
“We may hate the Lupa,” the stripper said as she crawled to the edge of the stage and sniffed my hair, “but we honor them now as our pack; Delilah as our Alpha.” Wolf hearing was damn good, as she’d demonstrated, but the breasts? Better. The octuplet breasts continued to shake in my face and I was having trouble deciding which set to slide the money between. This bar was much darker than the Ninth Circle, which was dim, but there were enough strobing red lights here to shine in the silver white reflection of wolf eyes and to emphasize those all-important breasts. The patrons didn’t bother to give Niko or me a sideways look, except for a sneer for being human … a sheep … even if a sheep in the know about the supernatural world. They didn’t look, but they did sniff. They caught the scent of metal, guns, and knives, then shrugged and continued to ignore us. Sheep, but armed sheep, smart sheep that their Alphas told them to leave alone until Ammut was taken care of, and wouldn’t it be easier to have a beer and watch the she-Wolves dance?
I totally agreed. “Row one, two, three, four, or the G-string—can you give me a hint?” I asked the stripper as I waved the bills in my hand.
Niko jerked me down to sit in a chair by the dance stage. “We’re looking for Vukasin’s Beta or his mate. Is one of them here?”
This Wolf had a full mane of wolf hair, wolf eyes, ears, everything Wolf except the human-sized breasts, ass, and arms and legs that allowed her to swing around the pole upside down. I’d seen that when we’d walked in the door and put it in a mental photo album to revisit in the future. It was weird, it was bizarre, but I wasn’t going to judge free porn—furry or not. Now she changed completely to human … except for feral yellow eyes. I missed the other six breasts.
She crouched on all fours, stopped sniffing me, and tossed back the wild mane of reddish brown hair that fell down to her hips. All the better to see you with. She was certainly no Wolf in a grandma suit. If she had a grandma suit, she’d left it at home. I searched my pocket for another bill. “Vukasin had no mate, but I was with him. I’m Nashika.” She ran a finger along my jaw and then tasted it as if I were cake batter she’d scooped out of a bowl. “I’m one of the few left of my pack. After Delilah killed Vukasin, she moved on to his pack. I was allowed to join the Lupa as I’m she-Wolf, not he-Wolf and not high breed. It is the same reason Vukasin would not make me his mate. I am All Wolf. My disgrace is my salvation.” She passed a hand in front of her eyes to demonstrate that. “The high breeds were not so lucky as to be invited.” The noninvitation sounded more like not-surviving. Delilah might not have actually been the one to take down Vukasin, but she’d taken down nearly all his pack. She probably owned the bar now too.