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Leaning against the wall by a very sad plastic potted tree, I asked, “We’re staking out a bathroom for a monster? I read
Dracula
and I remember Van Helsing doing some impressive shit, but that wasn’t one of them,” I snorted. Niko lifted an eyebrow at the statement and I revised it. “Okay, I
watched
Dracula
, the old one with that guy from
The Matrix
, and I don’t remember anyone in that looming outside a bathroom either.”

“I despair of you. I honestly do. I didn’t make you read
Dracula
, a classic, while homeschooling you because you said it made you uncomfortable. That it reminded you of the Auphe.”

I grinned. “Lying to get out of homework. I feel bad, Cyrano. No teenager would do that. What was I thinking?”

“Eighteen was far too soon to let you graduate. I don’t know what I was doing all those years ago. I should still be assigning you research papers on a weekly basis and hiding your guns until you complete them.” He leaned against the wall with arms crossed, but feet planted and spread slightly for balance. Always ready—on bathroom duty or not. After all these years it still didn’t fail to impress. I was wondering when a copy of
Dracula
would appear on my pillow when I had a chance to be impressed further.

There was a scream, a banging of the door at the end of the hall, and a woman with long brown hair came running past us, her face gray with terror. She was blind with it. She didn’t see the three of us as she ran between us. The only thing that registered was escape, the end of the hall, the people she’d left behind for a quiet moment to herself. Whatever was after her was horrifying enough that three people would be no help to her. She needed the three thousand in the exhibition hall.

“Jack,” I said, pulling my Glock with a silencer in deference to the crowd several hallways away.

Jack it was. He came boiling through the door, ripping it free, buckling the metal and tossing it across the hall to bounce off the wall and then slam onto the floor. The hall wasn’t as well lit as the rest of the place, but it became less so as half the lights fried from the electrical discharge that simmered in the air around the storm that was Jack.

“Where flees the adulteress?” His voice was all that I remembered it being—disgusting and spine-chilling for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on. “Where goes the wicked one?”

“That was Mandy,” Goodfellow said as he unsheathed his sword from his own long coat that hung over his suit Nik had traumatized him by creasing. “She is married, but her husband is in the business, and is it adultery if it involves your occupation and the party of the first and the party of the second both consent to said parameters of the relationship?”

“Be grateful he doesn’t know Shakespeare,” Niko grunted, his own katana already in hand. “‘First kill all the lawyers.’”

“Every trickster, pucks or others, has a law degree. It’s the perfect con.” Robin was trying for cheerful, but seeing Jack for the first time and having heard our story of failure of all our weapons against him, the cheer was strained.

Jack filled the back of the hall entirely. The destroyed lights and his own inherent darkness made him the same form impossible to pin down. Mist, fog, shadows, sparks that circled like a whirlwind within him and two oval-shaped eyes that were the last color you’d see if you were an unlucky bastard standing outside when a bolt of lightning struck you from an overcast sky. He was everything and he was nothing, all in one, and that was a problem. You can’t fight everything and you can’t fight nothing.

“What the fuck.” I just shot him seven times. Shooting him hadn’t worked when he’d attacked me in my room, but I liked to think two of my best qualities were persistence and the ability to hold on to resentment to my dying day. And I did resent Jack for showing up at one of the least convenient times in my life—especially when I’d been ready to give him a pass and ignore his existence.

The bullets disappeared into the tempest and Jack didn’t react, same as before. Niko was on him then, katana moving in an arc of sheer quicksilver beauty. It struck Jack and the force of whatever it hit threw Nik back several feet. He managed to land on his feet, growled, and attacked again.

“This is not your time. This is not your turn,” Jack said thickly . . . so thickly it sounded as if he had a mouthful of shit, blood . . . or the skin he was so fond of taking. That’s what bothered me. A storm spirit should sound like the wind or the rushing train of an incoming tornado, not as if he had a mouthful of fresh, blood-soaked flesh.

“I am coming for you, but now the wickedness of the adulteress.” The rest of the lights exploded but there was enough drifting in from the entrance of the hall to see that Jack hadn’t gone. His electric-chair eyes were bright and hovering in the blackness.

“You were right. He is quite annoying.” Goodfellow was at Niko’s side now, both swinging blades at Jack.

“Go right and get down,” I shouted. Over the strike of metal against God knew what and the rising sound of wind and the sizzle of electricity, it was getting loud. We wouldn’t be alone here much longer. As Niko and Robin went flat on the floor, I raised my other gun. I had the explosive rounds custom-made by naughty people for the Desert Eagle. Time to see if they worked any better on Jack than normal rounds did. I fired high and to the left. I waited for the explosion—when it came to explosive rounds you didn’t worry about a silencer. You shot and you ran like hell before the cops showed up.

I knew the round had hit Jack and I waited, but I heard nothing. Not a muffled thud, positively no explosion. I fired again, and again nothing. I’d have heard more if I’d chugged a marshmallow at him.

Then it was Jack’s turn. He turned the hall into . . . hell. I was struck by something. I didn’t know if it was Jack himself or the force of a hurricane, but I was slammed from wall to wall, up to the ceiling, then back down to the floor. It hurt, distantly, because what I was thinking over all that was that I couldn’t breathe. All of the oxygen, all of the air itself was sucked out of the hall and my lungs did more than burn. I felt them almost collapse from the negative pressure. It couldn’t have been a complete negative pressure or they would have, but it was close enough to leave me sprawled on the floor, half believing I was dying and wholeheartedly wishing I would. It would be less painful.

After moments or minutes, I couldn’t tell, my lungs were slowly beginning to cooperate again. Bit by bit. It was a long time before I was breathing anything close to normal and it would’ve been longer before I remotely thought about trying to get up, but Goodfellow was slapping my face hard and yanking at my arm. “Humans,” he muttered. “You depend far too much on breathing as often as you do. Cal, up. We need to go before Mandy brings back every man, woman, and security guard who swings a mean dildo.”

Niko appeared on the other side of me, took that arm, and between them, they had me on my feet. “All right, little brother?”

I wasn’t going to get into it with Nik over how meditation taught him control over his breathing and therefore he could recover faster than I could. I’d let him have this one, no argument. “Anyone . . . else . . . hit . . . the . . . ceiling?” I gasped as they hurried me along down a different set of halls toward yet another exit only Robin knew about.

“Yes, that was unpleasant,” Niko replied, tucking my Eagle back into my holster as he and Goodfellow slung one of my arms over each of their shoulders in order to move more quickly.

“Rather like I imagine clothing would feel in a dryer—if I were poverty stricken and didn’t have everything I own including my Armani socks dry cleaned.” Robin gave me a concerned glance as we exited into the night. “Did you get that, Cal? I’m incredibly wealthy and snobbish to boot. Aren’t you going to comment?”

It was nice when people cared enough to rub your nose in their high-and-mighty lifestyle in an effort to provoke you and determine you’re not brain damaged from hitting the ceiling. “Fuck you,” I mumbled, my legs working better now that my breathing kept improving.

His lips curved upward in relief. “There’s the ass we know and barely tolerate. Of course there’s no need to believe a mere ceiling would make an impression on your brother, Achilles reborn.”

“Jack will have moved on,” Niko said. “We’ve spoiled his one opportunity to take someone unseen. There is much light and too many people currently rushing about looking for a mysterious attacker for him to be able to accomplish anything further here. This hunting ground is ruined for him. We may as well go home and try again tomorrow.”

“Great.” I tried standing while Goodfellow hailed a cab. “Maybe we should get some oxygen tanks.”

Or, as I’d thought before, move the hell out of New York.

*  *  *

The next afternoon I felt surprisingly not too bad. Niko and I both had plenty of bruises, but nothing broken. That was the good news. The bad news was Goodfellow was back and we were having the same conversation we’d had yesterday before the clusterfuck with Jack. Considering where we’d been while having it, clusterfuck could have several meanings, but I wasn’t about to say that aloud and have Niko threaten to spar political correctness in me if it took him and my aching muscles the rest of both our lives.

“That was the last day of the convention,” Robin sighed, playing with one of Niko’s knives in the workout area. He was uncannily talented in hitting the crotch on the silhouette printed on the paper targets. “There is nothing else in the city like that right now. Nothing I could think of large enough that it would be guaranteed to draw in Mr. Judgmental.”

“He does seem to have some unknown problem with us or me now that Cal is off his menu,” Niko reminded. “And he did say my turn—or our turn, as Cal has annoyed him greatly and he’ll kill him for that alone—was yet to come. But we can’t depend on that to have him show up anytime soon. He could commit unlimited more murders before he decides to pay another visit. We can’t wait.”

I was sprawled on the couch and reaching for the TV remote when I had a tickle in the base of my brain—the lizard hindbrain where violence and fun are one and the same. “I have an idea.”

Niko blanched, visibly as he hadn’t done at Goodfellow’s plan. To be fair, he’d heard and gone along with more of my ideas over the years. His recovery, as they say, was ongoing. “I’d prefer you didn’t.”

“Have some faith.” This could be good. “He doesn’t like the ethically challenged or the morally conflicted, right?” It was a shame he didn’t want me as I had all of that with a cherry bomb on top. “Fine. Since we can’t narrow down crime, let’s go
make
some crime. A big one, one he can’t possibly ignore.”

“Please do not tell me what you have in mind.” Nik pinched the bridge of his nose. “I am not a begging man, but, Cal, please.”

My grin was so wicked I was almost disappointed Jack didn’t appear and promptly skin it right off my face. “Let’s burn some shit down. A whole lot of shit.”

I didn’t often come up with the plans, too lazy, but when I did, they were frigging spectacular. When it came to devastation and destruction . . .

I was a genius.

8

Niko

Twelve Years
Ago

“I’ve got an idea,” Cal announced.

“No. We are not searching that man’s basement for dead bodies. No. Now do your homework.”

“You don’t know I was going to say that.” He carefully folded one page of his English textbook into half of a paper airplane. “But if I was going to say that, it’s totally genius.” He then folded the opposite page the same way for one complete bound and grounded paper aircraft. Where were Orville and Wilbur Wright when you needed them?

There was no doubt he was a genius.

Genius at avoiding homework. Genius at taking a bite of an idea, clamping down his jaws, and never letting go. Genius at making me want to bang my forehead repeatedly against the kitchen table where we sat.

I glared at him. It wasn’t a painless or guilt-free effort, not after checking the bottle-inflicted bruise on his chest fifteen minutes ago, but I did it. “I do know that’s what you were going to say. I know how your ball bounces. I also know that is not how we treat books. Are you trying to be difficult?”

He shook his head, shaggy hair flying, the grin shameless. “Nope. Not trying. Don’t have to. It’s really pretty easy.”

I pushed the sandwich on the plate toward him. Two pieces of bologna, three of cheese, sweet-and-sour pickles, mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard, it was his current favorite. Mystery meat and lard, but we’d gone to the grocery to spend some of the money the rich guy had given me for changing his tire. That deserved a celebration, for at least a few days, of whatever we wanted. We’d already had two pizzas instead of the usual one and now Cal was making his way through whatever the janitors swept off the slaughterhouse floor.

It was a good day—when I managed not to see bruises blotting the pages of my own textbooks when my attention wandered. Closing my eyes momentarily, then watching Cal work his way through his first sandwich with the manners of a starving pig tended to make the black-and-purple blotches disappear. Lack of table manners and Cal were linked to reassuring and normal in my brain. That let me say, yes, today was mostly a good day. Sunday, our last day before we had to be back at school, and I would’ve liked it serial killer free. But with Cal and his bulldog teeth firmly embedded in his theory, that wasn’t going to happen.

I did trust Cal’s instincts on the majority of things, but he was eleven. He’d seen monsters, the genuine horror movie article. He’d seen people behave in ways most average adults couldn’t comprehend, knew things most adults saw only on the news or on after-school specials. That was our life. We were a walking, talking PSA filmed by Wes Craven. Through it all, though, he’d stayed a triumph of sanity over endless shit.

Sometimes life did deserve a curse word or two.

But . . . the bottom line remained, he was eleven. Paranoid and cynical and with every right to be, yet still eleven. Once in a while eleven-year-olds jumped to wild conclusions. I’d talked to Junior. I didn’t automatically think he was innocent. It’d been years since I’d made that assumption about anyone from a casual hey-how-are-you? He might be innocent, he might not. He might be innocent of murder, but less innocent of other things. He certainly didn’t seem very bright. Calling the police on him because Cal thought his house smelled bad? It didn’t seem right.

And I did want to do what was right. Right thinking. Right action. Right speaking. Just as many of the sensei and masters of the dojos and gyms taught. It wouldn’t be right to tarnish the reputation of an innocent man and it was hard to do what was right in our world. If I didn’t try, every day, then one day it would become too hard to do right and very easy to do wrong. What kind of role model would I be then to Cal?

With Sophia the lines of wrong had already blurred drastically. I wanted, needed to hang on to keeping all the right I could in my life to balance that out. Even the smallest of good acts helped, each from a pebble to a massive stone that built the wall that kept me clean from the world we lived in now. Our world, Cal’s and mine, was not clean. We both were dealing the best we could. He bounced back, no matter what, and I built walls.

Then there was the police. If our neighbor was guilty of something lesser such as drugs or having three wives who didn’t leave the house, because I couldn’t buy uncatchable serial killer in the muddy dimness of his eyes, the police would come. It wouldn’t matter that the call was anonymous—they’d knock on all the doors, question everyone. I didn’t like to lie, Cal didn’t care either way, but through sheer osmosis from sharing the deceit-heavy air she breathed we’d both learned to do it well from Sophia.

But cops were all different. Some were indifferent, some polite and easy to fool, but some were razor sharp and they’d slice though the paper tower of lies we lived in. There would be a ruin of confetti the color of ashes at our feet before we knew it if we ran into one of those. They were rare, but there were cops who could take one look at the two of us or worse, if Sophia was around, the three of us and know at first glance how dysfunctional our “family” was. They would know we were left alone for weeks at a time no matter how clean we were and well behaved Cal pretended to be. They’d seen it before a thousand times, and maybe, like Cal, they could actually
smell
it on us. Taste the unbreakable codependency in the air—the kind that happened when it was only the two of you against everything else including your own mother.

There were teachers like that too and four years ago one had a social worker on the way to Cal’s school on his first day in the new town. She’d been moving across the parking lot toward him at the same time I’d showed up to walk him home.

I’d grabbed Cal’s hand, yanked him into motion and we ran. The teacher was sharp, the social worker was sharp, but neither were nearly as experienced as we were at running. Sophia was as eager to go. She had the same amount of desire to spend time in jail for neglect as Cal and I wanted to spend separated in foster homes. None.

I didn’t know what Junior was doing in his house. I doubted anything—he barely had the brainpower to tie his bathrobe, but even if he was up to something, the police were a last resort. Only if our backs were to a metaphorical bloodstained wall. It was too risky. We were good runners and disappearing came as second nature to us now, but it takes only one time. One mistake. One trip over your own feet. If that happened, I might not see Cal again, no matter how long I looked, how hard I tried.

Grendels . . . monsters outside our window, that I could handle. They only watched so far. The police—the state—the government, there was nothing I’d learned in a dojo that would make the fear of them any less.

“Nik, it’s a good idea. It is. We can wait until he’s gone, break in through one of the windows, drag a body out on the front sidewalk and let someone else call the cops on him. Genius.”

I sighed and reached across the table to wipe the mayonnaise/mustard mustache off his upper lip. “Cops . . . policemen, I mean . . . aren’t good.” I backtracked. “They are good, but . . .”

Cal gave me the look again. I’d gotten it so often in the past few days I was going to start assuming anything that came out of my mouth was so utterly ignorant that it made Cal’s very brain cells melt under the vast stupidity of it all. And what I’d been about to say was stupid. He knew as much as I did how badly things could go if the police looked too closely at us.

I held up both hands. “Sorry. I underestimated your enormous brain. You can have an extra cookie for dessert.”

Mollified, Cal started wiping mustard off his plate, licking it off his finger, and rocking back and forth on the back two legs of his chair. Multitalented, that was my brother. “We should move. Now. You have that nut job’s money. Sophia can find us when she comes back.” He shrugged. “Or not.”

I wished “or not,” but she’d already made it clear to us both if I left with Cal she would find us and she would involve social services, do jail time, whatever it took. Cal was an investment. If I wanted him, I was going to have to pay for him. Cal knew, he remembered, but memories were the twilight of lost hopes. In the bright of the day, they could be banished . . . for a while.

“How about this: we’ll go to the library”—because we weren’t going to have a computer of our own unless we stole it—“and research the victims. We’ll see if there’s a pattern to where they’ve been taken.” There. That had to satisfy him. It made it clear I wasn’t dismissing him and it kept him from breaking into our neighbor’s house. This was all Kithser’s fault. If he hadn’t disappeared, Cal would’ve stayed on his live and let live as long as the serial killer’s not killing you personally policy. But Kithser was too close. If he had only run off with his drug dealing loser friends, I’d be tempted to kill him myself for putting me in this situation.

“Boring.” His chair finally tipped too far and began to topple backward. I’d been waiting for it. I hooked an ankle around one wooden leg and caught it. After fifty plus times it was pure instinct now. Cal, who knew I wouldn’t let him fall, had never let him fall, kept talking, unfazed. “Let’s follow him.”

“Research,” I contradicted firmly. I’d disproved a hundred things in papers for school over the years with it. I could disprove a serial killer too.

“Following him would tell us for sure. You said we need to be sure.”

“I know what I said and I know what I’m saying now.” I settled his chair upright. “Research, grasshopper. Absolutely no following.”

*  *  *

“How did this happen?” I hissed out loud as my hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. If I’d kept the question mental, I thought the stress and humiliation of being outthought by an eleven-year-old might trigger some sort of psychotic split. I’d read some advanced psychology books. They hadn’t said that could happen, but it was an imperfect science at best. They didn’t know everything.

“I lied to Mrs. Spoonmaker about your age and you offered to get her oil changed. You were right there, Nik.” Cal was digging in the ancient glove compartment looking for candy bars or cookies in what was a habit so ingrained I didn’t remember when it started. Dogs humped legs. Cal sought sugar. Two universal laws. “How do you get straight As? You can’t remember anything.

“Cool!” He popped up with a petrified package of Ho Hos. “Besides, your research sucked. We didn’t find out anything except people at the public library are doing things in the bathroom they should do at home.”

“I told you to wait for me on the bathroom trips,” I said—a little more loudly than it needed to be said, but that good day I’d been savoring this morning was gone. Cal had driven a stake through its bright and sunny heart.

“You were glued to the computer, like, literally, superglue between your eyeballs and the screen and I had to go. So I went to the women’s just in case. Women can be perverts too. Who knew?”

That was a discussion for . . . not now. My knuckles turned whiter, if possible, under my darker skin as I tried to tail Junior’s beat-up pickup truck with a grimly dark camper, the serial killer–mobile as Cal was calling it, without being made in a giant metallic green Cadillac born long before I was. “And the research did not fail. It showed the people are disappearing from an area approximately fifteen miles in radius and no bodies have been found.”

“Yeah, you showed me the map with all the colors and miles and stuff. It was a big blob. On TV they’re a perfect circle, like a bull’s-eye, and the killer’s house is right in the center.” I heard a distinct crunch as he bit into a Ho Ho, the kind of crunch icing and cake aren’t supposed to make.

“Now you see why I tell you to stop watching so much TV.” I sighed and wove around a BMW. I’d learned to drive when I was twelve. It was a useful skill for picking up passed-out mothers at bars before the police came sniffing around. “But”—as much as I hated to admit it and I honestly did—“Junior’s house is inside ‘the blob.’ The outer part of it, but it’s there.” But so were a lot of very bad people, cheap and unsafe, how we always lived. “Which is why I let you talk me into following him.” And at night, making this area more risky if possible.

Along the rooftops of the cinder block–style apartment buildings I saw a Grendel racing along, our pale shadow. I wondered if it was curious. I wondered for the thousandth time why they watched. And I thought, with the denial of all that is wrong in the world, that it might be better not knowing.

I looked away and back at the street. “Now finish cracking your teeth on what used to be food and let me concentrate.” Then because I felt bad about letting Cal lie to Mrs. Spoonmaker, I muttered under my breath, “I think I’ll get her car washed too.”

Cal knew the signs of my guilt. In knowing me there wasn’t much Cal didn’t pick up on instantly. “Isn’t lying to borrow her car better than letting a murderer kill somebody?”

He wasn’t wrong. Cal had grasped the gray shades of morality before he grasped potty training. I was different. But I was learning. Too late and too slow, but I’d get there.

“Look! He stopped.” Cal bounced in the seat as if we were two rogue cops about to make a bust. I was throwing out the TV when we got home. In the trash. I rolled, yes,
rolled
down the window for a better look. The car’s windows were permanently cloudy from age. Cal followed my action because when it came to things not involving work that’s what Cal and most little brothers did. “He’s picking up a whore.”

I reached over and flicked his ear lightly. “Not a good word.” But I was also watching Junior talking out the window to a woman selling it for what looked like a harsh drug habit. Even in the night and where only one out of three streetlights worked, that was easy to see. She had a long black Goth wig, short leather dress with fishnet hose and skin yellow with hepatitis.

“Ow. Hooker?”

I flicked again.

“Prostitute?”

“Better. Not too great for her, but better vocabulary wise.”

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and a gun was in my face as a snarling twist of a mouth and mad dog eyes demanded my money. Beside me Cal sounded as if he were choking on his Ho Ho. “This,” I told him, “is not funny.”