Using one hand to push the hair back out of his face, he twisted it tightly enough it wouldn’t dare unravel when he flipped it over his shoulder to fall down his back. “Mentally unstable?” he accused. “A fucking suicidal idiot? Why didn’t you tell us to run?”
“Let me stab him in the face, Nik. I think that’d even things up.” Cal’s offer rang with sincerity and an unblinking stare dark with the pure potential for violence. That was typical me at all ages.
“Kids. So cute with the attempted assault and murder,” I said with mock nostalgia. “They grow up too fast. Be sure Niko frames your first mug shot.”
Cal, it went without saying, was no surprise. Nik cursing however, I’d heard it, but not when he was twenty. It had been years and years later that I’d driven him to that. “You can’t run from a skin-walker,” I explained. “They never lose your trail. And, hate to break the news, but this one wasn’t the toughest we’ve faced by far,” I went on. “Our first skin-walker before was on a barge in the middle of the Hudson and its outer layer was a bear.” Grizzly of course. You could not get a break when it came to skin-walkers. “And out of that came the mountain lion, then the coyotes, the—”
There was the flicker again, there and gone, under the edge of the couch.
I see you. Yes, I do.
Raising his hand, the one without the katana, Niko cut me off. “This was a walk in the park. A piece of cake. Fine. I’ll take your word for it.”
“And the barge was on fire,” I added to help him flesh out the mental image. Pure evil, yes, but I could use all the diversion I could get. “Before it started sinking.”
“Fine,” he repeated with more emphasis than was strictly necessary. “Enough. I believe you.” He was about to say something else, but he didn’t get the chance.
There was something left. Something the two of them had missed. I hadn’t. Years on the job had taught me the distinction between looking over a postbattle area in general and looking over a postbattle area if you planned on actually surviving. I hadn’t given any warning when I’d seen the corpse-white eyes under the shadowed edge of the couch. I knew what waited there and I knew it wouldn’t wait long. I was right.
It didn’t wait long. It didn’t wait at all. The rattler lunged out of the shadows, streaking from beneath the couch, kept going, and buried its fangs into Cal’s extended leg.
The last snake had seen his opportunity and taken it.
Just as I’d seen and taken mine.
8
The fangs made it through Cal’s jeans and beat-up combat boots, and into flesh. Cal’s eyes rolling back as he slumped sideways into instantaneous oblivion was a dead giveaway that the rattler had gotten past skin and into meat to inject a load of venom. A third of the toxic delivery system, I guessed, was imbedded, but no more. Why didn’t it get any deeper than that? It was dead, and death slows you down. I had kept out my Sig Sauer for a reason. The bullet I’d put through its head was not a comfort to Niko, who was throwing himself at the couch. He couldn’t know if the poison sacs were intact and still pumping venom. Odds were, slug or not, they probably were.
Dropping his katana carelessly, he hurled himself toward Cal. He was halfway to the couch and then right there in less than a quarter of a heartbeat as he reached to pull the shattered remains of the snake’s head out of his brother’s leg. Desperation gives you speed that can sometimes equal or surpass the supernatural kind.
I knew as I grabbed his hand with a stomach churning scant fraction of time to spare. Holding it in a vise of a grip, I felt bones shift as I laid my gun on the floor. “No, Niko. Don’t.” With one hand freed up, I used it to pry the pulped spade shaped head loose, careful to follow the path of the curved fangs through Cal’s leg muscle as I did. Clenching his hand with the same force, I told him, “Don’t touch his leg, his jeans, his boot, nothing. If he drools, don’t touch that. No bodily fluids.” They were as contaminated as Cal’s blood now. “Not until I wipe him off. The venom can kill a human if they’re bitten. I don’t know what it’ll do if you get it on your skin.” At those words, Nik’s hand twisted with violent strength in mine, his face tainted with a hint of gray. “Human,” I stressed. “But not Auphe. Not Grendels. I’ve been bitten before. It’ll knock him out for about four or five hours. That’s it. I swear. He won’t even have a headache when he wakes up.”
“He’s only half Grendel. Auphe. Call them what you want, he’s still only half,” he argued.
“Nik, I’m him. I know this shit because I’ve lived this shit.” I had been bitten before, once five times in one fight. It’d been two days before I woke up, but I did wake up. One bite was nothing. Cal would live, and he’d get in a nice nap. That was more than I could say for me. “Chances are, a full Auphe wouldn’t feel a thing. It’d walk it off while eating the rattler as a snack. Like I said, I’ve been bitten before. Half is enough.”
I released him cautiously, ready to seize his hand again if he made a move toward Cal’s leg. “Can you get me some soap and water, towels, alcohol, a bandage, and some tape?”
He wanted to be the one who fixed up Cal, but he knew I was more familiar with this poisonous bite, if I’d been unconscious through them all or not. He knew my Nik would’ve told me what to do for the sake of the knowledge alone. He would do the same. “Yes.” That was short and succinct. More than usual for him. That wasn’t a good sign for me. There were occasions he hoarded words as a dragon hoarded gold—but with better security. Occasions such as his brother being injured. But I thought it was more than worry or tension.
His face was entirely neutral, his emotions hidden deep enough to be unfathomable, but I suspected something was going on behind that cover. He stood from his crouch, avoiding his brother’s leg, but moving close enough to curl a hand around the side of his neck, bared as his head tilted to the side. “Cal, are you . . .” In there? With us? His eyes were now shut and his chest rose and fell in the slow rhythm of sleep or unconsciousness. Nik hesitated on finishing his question as the answer was clearly a big fat no.
“Hey, Cal.” I slapped his other leg lightly. “You coherent? Alert? Remotely conscious? No? I didn’t think so. Enjoy the nap. You know how we love them.” Again, I was offering assistance that Niko didn’t welcome, if his slit-eyed glare was anything to go by.
“Niko,” I urged, “he’s out and will be out for hours. I need the supplies if you want to shave a few hours off that, all right?”
He rested his forehead for a moment against the top of Cal’s head, dark blond hair mixing with black. “I’ll be back in a minute, little brother.” He didn’t glance my way again as he vaulted over the back of the couch and headed for the bathroom and our first-aid kit.
I’d never thought about it, thinking of all the times I’d been out for the count, if my Niko had talked to me. Now I knew he must have. I didn’t know if he’d thought on some level I heard him or it had made him feel that he was doing everything he could to pull me back. He’d been like that. Doing everything possible wasn’t enough. He’d done everything possible and more.
I felt my throat and chest tighten and knew it was time to do something useful and stop thinking before I crawled, like that snake, to hide under the couch, and stay there until I died. I reached for one of the knives I kept in my boot. My jacket was where I kept the majority of them, but it remained MIA under a sand dune somewhere. There was a silver lining. The sand cascading out of the dead mountain lion was now barely a trickle. We had a beach but we wouldn’t suffocate, which was a concern if it had kept on channeling the Sahara in here.
When Niko returned, it was with all I’d asked for and more. There was a tub, not a container or jar, but a tub of antibiotic cream. It’s funny the things you forget. These were the days before we’d known precisely how much having half Auphe roaming around in my blood made me less susceptible to getting sick or to being affected by infections, poisons, toxin, venoms. You name i
t. I wasn’t immune by any stretch of the imagination, but I would likely survive and recover in hours from what would kill a human instantly.
I’d already pulled off Cal’s boot and sock, and used my knife to cut off part of his jeans at midcalf. Dark crimson venom was seeping from four puncture wounds a few inches above his ankle. I was using both hands to squeeze his leg with enough force to expel more of the poison mixed with blood to run down his bare foot.
Setting the medical supplies beside me including several pairs of surgical gloves, Niko returned to behind the couch. He placed two fingers on Cal’s neck to check his pulse, counted, moved it down to his upper chest to do the same for his respiratory rates, lifted an eyelid to test his pupillary response, and circled back around to crouch beside me. He was near enough to see everything I did closely but not crowding enough to accidentally encounter any of the few random small puddles of venom being soaked up by the sand. I opened my mouth, but he beat me to it with brittle sarcasm. “Yes, do not touch the venom. I’m aware. I’m a delicate human.” I snorted at the thought of Niko and delicate in the same sentence. I didn’t comment though. If his bruised pride kept him from keeling over from just looking at that evil shit wrong, that worked for me. Speaking of work, I got down to it.
I’d done enough first aid over the years that my hands worked automatically as I pulled on a pair of the gloves and scrubbed away the excess poison with the bowl of warm water and soap, wiped down the wounds with alcohol, dried it all, and applied the antibiotic cream to satisfy Niko for all that it was the same as a placebo for your average half Auphe. Next I wrapped the bandage one-two-three times around the leg before taping it securely. Taking off the blood-marred gloves, I let them fall in my mentally designated hazardous area. Taking two of the three leftover clean towels, I used one to cover up the foot-and-a-half-wide area that was host to splattered spots and streaks of venom until that could be cleaned up. I soaked a small part of the second towel in the alcohol to use on Cal’s face. Cupping his chin firmly, I tilted his listing head upright. I didn’t see anything, no drool—not that that would be caused by the snake bite. It was how we rolled when we slept, that’s all. If the pillow wasn’t completely soaked when we woke up, we hadn’t slept long enough.
This was different. I didn’t care if there was an Atlantic Ocean of saliva, I cared what color it was. This was something we’d, or Niko rather, had learned to look for after one fight with a skin-walker. I hadn’t learned anything until later since I was flat on my face after being bitten. The venom of one bastard of a snake had been directly injected into a vein in my left arm with a lucky strike a surgeon couldn’t have hit at that distance in the next to no light. Of course being venous blood, it was headed back to my heart and lungs for the usual recycle, and it was carrying the venom with it, which then was sent back out through my entire body via my arteries. That time I’d gone down, unlike Retro Teen’s Goth Cousin Cal, I’d drooled dark pink foaming saliva.
Nik had been smart enough to notice and to not touch it. When I’d finally woken up, I was no worse off than with previous bites, other than probably becoming temporarily venomous myself, until it either flushed its way out of my system or aggressive Auphe cells gobbled it up like apple pie. The problem had been and still was that we didn’t know if it could pass through a human’s skin or what would happen if it did.
I had known one thing. We weren’t using Niko as a guinea pig to find out. He’d suggested—the rare you’ll do as I say, little brother suggestion—that solution over my usual extra-large pineapple-and-spam Hawaiian pizza I treated myself to after a post-snake-poison nap. I’d had an opinion about his little planned science experiment. It had been a strong enough opinion I’d actually put down my piece of pizza, gone to the sparring area for his favorite katana and had thrown it out of the window, across the street, and directly into the open Dumpster of Titsy VonTrapp’s Jizzy Lube sex supply shop. Expired gallons of lube had to be hell to get off the metal blade of a sword. I’d counted that was a win in my communication skills Niko had always been hounding me about until two seconds later when my brother had me wearing my pizza instead of eating it. The place had smelled of spam and expired strawberry lube for days.
That wouldn’t happen to this Cal or Niko, not if I didn’t get my ass in gear.
Despite the lack of excess saliva, I wiped the entire bottom half of his face thoroughly with the alcohol drenched towel, rolled and tied it in a tight knot to toss on my growing pile of medical waste, and then opened his mouth with both hands, used the one to keep it open and stuck two fingers inside until I could’ve felt his tonsils if we’d been born with any.
“What are you doing? And why aren’t you wearing gloves while you do it?” The edge in the demand was sharper than a few of my knives. He had snapped out of his crouch and was on the verge of choking me out. It was a bracing of the shoulders and set to his jaw I’d witnessed often enough when he was facing someone else that by the age of thirteen I recognized it as quickly. As, at the same age, I could also do it to someone else. Nik had been a good teacher then. Patient. He wasn’t patient now.
“No choking me out.” I tried to sound patient myself, but too tired to be a threat was the best I could do. “I’m almost done. And the venom when mixed in saliva makes both twice as slippery. Slides right off gloves back into the mouth. So you told me. Or will tell me.”
I removed my fingers. They were covered in saliva, but it was clear, not a pink tinge to be seen. “I think to get a sample of the yummy poison-flavored spit from my mouth you ended up using a turkey baster you borrowed from our lesbian neighbors. The pregnant ones. You told me you boiled it first, but I’m pretty sure you were lying.” Pouring the rest of the alcohol liberally over my hands, I took the last towel and dried them roughly enough to both dry and take a thin layer of cells off . . . just in case. When I was done, I let it fall on the pile of others, the cherry on top of the biohazard sundae. “And we’re done. He’s clean. If he accidentally spits, vomits, or pisses on you, you won’t die.”
“You said you didn’t know what would happen if the venom touched human skin. I assume you do know what happens when it touches your skin.”
“It stings some. I can hardly feel it. But that I can feel it at all makes it a big risk to think it might be harmless to you. Don’t worry. You’re still the king. Love child of Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee. You could kill me with a hangnail before I could spit any rattler poison on you.”
I started to place my hands on Cal’s shoulders. Niko shook his head and nudged me aside before arranging Cal’s slumped, limp body to curl up flat on the couch. His head ended up on the armrest as a pillow, and his legs bent at the knees in a very loose imitation of the fetal position at the other end. As Nik ran his hand over the still tightly bound black hair unlike the tangled mass that hung around my face, I felt a weird twist in my stomach . . . as if Cal weren’t who I’d once been, but another brother, one like Nik if much younger than either of us. Or maybe it was that he didn’t know all I now knew. The lack of knowledge had him coming off as naive next to me. No, that wasn’t quite it. Neither of us had been naive a day in our lives. He wasn’t innocent either—he knew that whether he wanted to or not. It made him seem younger than I remembered feeling at eighteen.
We don’t ever remember exactly right, every detail, none of us.
“You’re quite efficient at that,” Niko remarked. “The first aid.”
Damn straight I was. It had taken me less time with Cal than to microwave a corn dog. “It’s what I told Cal with the knife. Practice. And that was all you, Mussolini. Born to be a fascist teacher no matter the subject.” The word subject tasted of blood from a bitten tongue. It tended to happen, that flavor, when you were hit in the face.
That’s what Niko had done. He’d punched me solidly and with not one sign of regret. “You knew it was there, the snake,” he accused, his fury hot instead of his usual colder than an upstate
winter. “You saw it and you knew. Yet you didn’t tell us. You let it bite him on purpose.”
He waited for my denial, anger growing if the tighter clenching of his fist was anything to go by. But I wasn’t going to lie. I had kept quiet although I’d seen the serpent. I hadn’t let it bite Cal, but I hoped it would. I thought the likelihood was high that’s what would happen. And I had my reasons for it. “You were always so damn smart.” I spat blood onto the thin layer of sand that had made it this far. “It’s annoying as hell sometimes.”
“Why? Why did you do it? He’s you. Not figuratively but factually. It’s the same as if you did it to yourself. Tell me why you let this happen.” Angry and suspicious, that was a Niko no one wanted to go up against.
“I didn’t plan it. I didn’t know one had escaped until I saw its beady eyes under the couch when Cal flopped his careless ass on it. I don’t speak rattler, and I’m not some sort of psychic snake whisperer. I didn’t tell it to bite Cal. It was luck.” I defied. It sounded true because it was true. “I got lucky, pure and simple. That and I’m bright enough not to sit on furniture that slithery, scuttling creatures can hide under before we’d checked that the battle area was clear. But you’re right. I spotted it and I didn’t warn Cal. I saw a break and I took it. And I’m not one damn bit sorry.”
The second punch I dodged. As I did, there came a nearly simultaneous knock at the door. Fuck me. Would this day never end?
Keeping a wary eye on a Niko who was as furious as he’d been with the first punch, I turned, slogged to the door through knee-high sand, flipped the one lock the skin-walker had slammed into place and opened it. From the hall there was a strong drift of air that pushed its way inside. It carried with it the signature of dank water, rot, and old blood scent. All of which I’d encountered before.
I didn’t bother to bite back the snarl vibrating up through my throat. It had been the longest, worst day of my life and I wasn’t in the mood.