Slashback (17 page)

As for Junior, my new friend Dr. Linda Wilner said he was a nice enough guy, gave big portions and rarely sneezed on the food, was religious as he’d seen him praying over his own lunch, and with what he ate could use some roughage to help out with regularity. I decided I likely didn’t want to be a proctologist after all.

I thanked her and was leaving the cafeteria when I saw Junior not concentrating on the stewed cabbage as I’d planned, but gone and a security guard at the entrance to the cafeteria staring at me. It was a toss-up whether Junior had spotted me and called security or the first doctor I’d talked to had. I was betting the doctor. If Junior saw me, he’d assume I was here looking for a job as I’d told him I’d planned to. The doctor—he could not like unescorted minors taking up tables that Heaven itself had set aside for him or not believed I had a parent here at all. Hospitals are great places for thieves. Everyone’s worried about their sick or dying family member, no one’s watching their purse or wallet. It was a pickpocket’s dream. Our second week in New London, Sophia had gone to Lawrence Memorial with the intention of being a one-woman crime spree. Unfortunately for her, it had already been picked clean several times over in the past months by thieves who had the same idea as Sophia. After that kind of pattern, it made sense they’d be on alert. I should’ve thought about that.

I thought about it when the security guard started walking, then running, my way. I thought about it more than once as I ran through halls, up and down stairs, went up to the roof and memorably all the way down to the morgue. In a cold metal drawer lying on my side next to a gray and blue man with a missing leg below the knee and a stench I didn’t have to be Cal to smell, I wondered irritably what made this security guard this dogged? He was in his forties. How much were they paying him to be this devoted to his job? Where did he get all that energy?

Not getting laid by his wife,
Cal whispered in my mind.
But at least that’ll keep him safe from the serial killer.

If he were here, that was what he’d say—how could an eleven-year-old get a foul mouth so quickly without my noticing it was on the horizon? But he and his smart mouth weren’t here. He was waiting for me outside and I was now an hour overdue. If he stayed on the bench, it would be all right. He would know better than to come to try to find me. I was the oldest. This was my job. I would get out of here and he would stay where I’d told him. He’d listen, he’d obey, he wouldn’t come in this place. I’d get out of this damn morgue and I’d see for myself. Cal knew better than to try to save me, not here.

*  *  *

Of course “here” was where I found him.

He’d made it as far as the automatic sliding glass doors of the ER before collapsing. I could see the people running toward him as he convulsed and vomited on the cheap tile floor. The cavalry had come to rescue me and I meant that without an ounce of sarcasm. He’d risked his life over this and he knew it. Cal, who looked all human on the outside, but we had no idea what he looked like on the inside and I couldn’t take a chance.

I’d lost the security guard, but I didn’t make any new friends when I hit a doctor with one shoulder knocking him flat, and then did the same to a nurse on the other side. Scooping Cal up, I kept running through the still open doors. It was dark outside now and none of the ER staff were the runners the security guard had been. Even carrying Cal, I lost them after several blocks of twists and turns.

I had him up with his head over my shoulder. I didn’t enjoy the warmth of his vomit spilling down my back, but that was much better than him choking on it. The convulsing turned to squirming, and then he was gasping in my ear, “Nik, get away from me. Nik, get away!” That might not have halted my running, but his fists pounding as hard as they could against my back did. I stopped in an alley between a long out-of-business store and a church and gently put him on his feet. He fell instantly, scrambling backward on all fours, horrified eyes on me.

“Cal?” Confusion and a flash of panic wrapped dual hands around my lungs and gripped tightly. I took a step toward him.

“No.”
He moved farther away, then lunged to his feet and toward the nearest garbage can, digging through it until he found a can of Coke that was not quite empty. He poured what was left over his hand, then covered up his nose and mouth.

That’s when I got it. For an hour and a half I’d been in the hospital soaking up the stench of illness and dying that had had Cal on the floor flailing in his own sick. Worse, I’d been in a drawer with a corpse, who from the whiff I’d gotten, had died of gangrene. I was making Cal as sick as the hospital could. I backed away. “Tell me when I’m far enough,” I asked as if it were an ordinary question. Right now we both needed to believe things were ordinary if we had to lie to ourselves to do it.

After several more steps he nodded, still keeping his mouth and nose covered. I’d have to write a thank-you note to the Coca-Cola company, I thought with only a slight edge of relieved hysteria.

“Where’d you go?” he asked, accusing words muffled by his hand. “You said a half hour. You were gone an hour and a half. You were gone forever. I thought he got you.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Cal. I am. A security guard chased me through the entire place. I had to hide. . . .” He didn’t need to know where I had to hide. “We forgot Sophia said that place had been picked clean. They’re still watching for anyone who looks suspicious.” A wandering teenager alone in a place that had been repeatedly robbed would look suspicious.

He was only half listening to my answer. The rest of his attention was taken with jerking his gaze from my feet up to my face, back down, and then over again. “You don’t smell like you. You smell like that mouse in the wall. You smell like you’re rotting. I can’t smell you at all. You’re not you.” He took a sliding step back, the unsteadiness better but not gone.

Cal was the same as any ordinary person in having only five senses, but he was different in that one of them was incredibly heightened. With my normal nose I could detect the nauseating taint of gangrene that clung to me. For Cal it covered everything else, including the way that I had always smelled to him. I hadn’t known until this moment the extent it factored into how he perceived people. For him to not be able to smell the usual me at all would be the same as if I’d suddenly gone blind and couldn’t see him. I’d be able to hear him and touch him, but a huge part of what made him Cal to me would be gone.

“But it is me,” I assured. “Same hair.” I tugged at the short ponytail. “Same voice, same willingness to not yell at you although I’m half covered in your vomit. It’s me, Cal, and as soon as we get home and I wash, I’ll smell the same as always.” The clothes, I’d have to throw away. No, burn.

“It’s you?” His other foot was hovering in the air about to take him yet another step away. He looked at me searchingly up and down one last time and let his shoulders slump and his foot drop. “I’m stupid. I know it’s you. You’re just not . . .” He shook his head.

“Just not all of me. Not that you can smell. I know. Let’s go home and I’ll fix it, all right?”

He nodded, hand firmly in place between me and my new smell. “Okay. But could you walk ahead of me? Really far ahead of me?”

“Behind you,” I amended, to watch for the same type that had tried to rob us the night before. “But far behind. I’ll wash out back with the hose and soap.” That would keep the smell out of the house. “You can go tell Mrs. Spoonmaker since you already lied about me being seventeen. She might get a thrill.”

That made him smile. I could see the dimple beside his covering hand. “It’s cold. The water’s going to be colder.” He held up his free hand, the index finger and thumb about half an inch apart. “That’s not going to impress anybody. She goes to mass though. She might pray for you.”

“You know more than you should for your age and way too much than is good for me at any age.” I shook my head in mock despair. “Home. Move it. Even I don’t like the way I smell right now. Your puke isn’t like rose petals and baking apple pie either.”

We started walking. Home would be good. I could get clean and not think about how if I hadn’t had to hide in the morgue, the plan would’ve worked in a different way than I’d thought. If I’d walked out of the hospital smelling like death after only being in the cafeteria that would let Junior off the hook. It took only one goal-oriented security guard and one dead man who’d liked sugar more than his leg and life to throw that all out the window.

“Walk slower,” Cal said from in front of me as he plodded, steps tired and occasionally wobbly. “I can still smell you.”

By the time we were home, Cal had recovered and took a quick shower before coming out back. I kept as far away as our tiny backyard would allow as he threw me the soap. He uncurled the hose while I stripped and dumped my clothes in the garbage can for later burning. For once I was thankful we couldn’t afford to live in a neighborhood that had streetlights. If any of our neighbors saw me as anything other than a smear paler than the night, then they were trying too much. Cal would be happy to go paint a giant P for pervert on their doors if they did.

“Ready?” he asked. But he didn’t wait for my answer. How would that be fun for him? A stream of ice-cold water hit me in the face. I grimaced but began soaping up as Cal hosed me down like an elephant on a hot day at the zoo.

I scrubbed every inch thoroughly before waving my arms. “Cal, all right, stop. I think I’m fine now.” Except that I expected my skin had turned blue and I was freezing. Cal was right. Mrs. Spoonmaker would have to pray for me.

Cal took an experimental sniff, then shook his head. Part of the decision, I thought, was driven by how much he was enjoying himself. Little brothers and water hoses are deadly combinations. “One more time. To make sure it doesn’t get in the house. You really, really stank.”

I couldn’t disagree with that.

11

Cal

Present Day

I absolutely stank.

Being attacked by the dead will do that. A few years ago I would’ve been yakking my guts up over it, but you can, as they say, get used to anything. We’d fought enough things that while weren’t dead, they did smell that way or worse. It turned out the real thing wasn’t quite as bad as some of those. It wasn’t enjoyable, hell no, but at least I could fight now without taking a time-out to puke on the feet of whatever I was shooting or carving up at the time.

We did keep an all-but-industrial-strength soap on hand for these occasions though, as Niko’s hippy-churned natural crap wasn’t going to do the job—unless the job was making me smell like a bowl of zombie cereal with a healthy serving of goat milk over the top.

The cuts on my legs weren’t as bad as I expected. Whatever type of mist hid Jack’s inner jagged self, it had been enough of a barrier to keep me from impaling myself when I’d gated on top of him. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t thought about it, but a little impaling—the kind you survived, if not walked away from—was worth it to take out Jack. I’d have happily crawled away from the scene of the deed if it meant putting down that son of a bitch. But, as it was, the cuts were superficial. Some antibiotic ointment and I was good to go, no bandages required. I did have at least one cracked rib though, maybe two from where Jack had fallen on me as shockingly as if the moon had fallen from the sky. But I’d had cracked ribs before—and I’d have them again if we could get Jack out of the picture. Move carefully, don’t breathe too deeply, eat pain pills like M&M’s, and I’d be fine.

Bending my head down to scrub my wet hair with a towel, I stepped into the main room in time to hear Promise say, “But there are no such creatures as zombies.”

“You’re ruining a lot of fantasies by saying that,” I pointed out as I straightened and dropped the towel on the floor. “Don’t get between a geek and a good apocalypse. They’ll probably kill you quicker than Jack would.”

Promise turned her head from where she sat on the couch and gave me a glance as opaque as they came. It didn’t help her. I knew what she was thinking. I was wearing sweatpants but was shirtless. That made it easy to see that I had more than my share of scars, some of them uglier than others. I also had a line of stitches across my stomach and a dark garden of bruises blooming up like black roses over my ribs. I thought Promise could make her peace with scars, more specifically Niko’s. He had fewer than I did; he was the better fighter, but he still had a few. But when a job ended in spilled blood, and as she was a vampire I knew she could smell mine, and cracked ribs—that was new, wasn’t it? Not old scar tissue you could write off to “he was younger then. He’s better now. Undefeatable, human or not.”

If a half Auphe like me was this mortal, what did that say about the true mortal?

I knew what Promise was thinking and who she was thinking it about because I thought the same thing. Nik, oblivious to his mortality while others brooded over it, glared at my discarded towel. “If it weren’t for your ribs, I would rub your nose in that.”

“You wouldn’t do that to a puppy.” I grinned. There was something wrong in enjoying injury as a license to bad behavior, but I’d never claimed there was anything particularly right with me.

“A puppy is capable of learning. A puppy doesn’t devote his life to seeing how far he can push me before I break mentally. A puppy does not order pizza and expect me to pay for it because he’s out of money.” Promise laughed at his seething outrage and rested her shoulder against his on the couch.

“Children can be such a blessing,” she said with mocking good humor as she continued to braid his wet hair, the bastard having beat me to the shower.

“Hardly,” Niko retorted. “I have done that tour of duty and have the post-traumatic stress disorder to prove it. The sex talk alone . . .” He gave a minute shudder.

The memory hit me and I rubbed my ribs with an absent, cautious touch. “Oh yeah. Isn’t that when I asked you what doggy style meant and did we need to borrow our neighbor’s poodle for a demonstration?” My grin transmuted into a smirk. “I think you foamed at the mouth a little. Good times, huh?”

“I don’t care about your ribs any longer,” he said. “I don’t care if they are broken and shards of bone are slicing your lungs to shreds. Pick. Up. The. Towel.”

Playing my “get out of brotherly violence” injury card, I ignored him and sat down very slowly in our beat-up recliner. Once in a comfortable position, I relaxed and waited for the warm wave of codeine to wash over me. “It is funny . . . not funny like the poodle thing . . . but funny weird how Goodfellow and Promise both insist there aren’t any such things as zombies, but they were there. If Robin hasn’t seen any and he’s literally old as dirt, the dirt T. rexes walked around on, then what the hell?”

Promise finished Niko’s braid and curled the end around one slender finger, her heather-shadowed eyes thoughtful. “I cannot think of an explanation. From Niko’s description of his appearance, Jack does sound like a typical storm spirit, but storm spirits, that I know of, don’t use skinning as a manner of killing.”

“And he is all about the skinning.” I yawned. “He was still going on about that at the bridge: wanting to save people’s skin. He’s like the world’s most homicidal stamp collector—he has to murder to do it and he just freaking won’t stop talking about it. I miss the monsters that just try to kill you, not tell you about their hobbies.”

“How are the legs?” Niko had leaned down to snag the towel and was folding it in his tragically OCD way.

“Not bad at all. That cloud he floats around in, it acted like a buffer. I’ve a few scrapes. Nothing major.”

“The pain pills working yet for your ribs?” He was a good brother: asking about my health, picking up my towel. I could probably get him to order that pizza for me if I looked pathetic enough.

“Feeling no pain,” I answered honestly.

“Good.” I was promptly hit in the face with my wet towel.

Of course, good brothers know tough love inside and out.

*  *  *

That night Promise stayed. Normally Niko and I would’ve switched off on watch, but Promise had no problem staying awake all night to wait for Jack to appear. Somehow I still managed to pull a two-hour watch. I say somehow because as much as Niko didn’t want to remember giving me the sex talk when I was a kid, I didn’t want to think about him and Promise doing the things I’d asked about back then.

Really
didn’t want to think about it.

When I was a kid, I used to love giving Niko shit about sex. It drove him nuts. It was better than cable. But not now. If Niko hadn’t raised me in addition to being my brother, it could be different. I’d have bumped fists, blown it up, slapped his back, whatever the hell the wild and crazy kids did when their brother got laid. I didn’t know. Between the spine-shivering sensation other people had at the thought of their parents having sex and knowing my best friend was doing it with my boss, probably on the same bar where I served drinks, I was surrounded by a whole shitload of “I don’t wanna know.”

I spent those two hours simultaneously watching for Jack and telling myself that Niko and Promise were either practicing the lost, deadly art of flower arranging, or sharpening their already incredibly sharp blades. I hung grimly to those images, then slammed into my bedroom faster than I should have with my ribs when Promise appeared out of the darkened hallway with her elaborate coil of soft brown hair loose and spilling around her hips. Her feet were also bare, but bare feet were essential for flower arranging and sword care and no one could tell me differently.

The fact that she whispered as I passed her, “Who’s your daddy?” made her a stone-cold bitch and had me popping an extra pain pill. If Jack killed me in my sleep, I couldn’t say I’d be that sorry to go.

In the morning, if five thirty a.m. could be called morning, when Nik and I were walking through East River Park, I hadn’t stopped twitching at random moments. We were headed for the river itself. Goodfellow had said that if Bastet hadn’t known anything about Jack no one would, but Bastet had been afraid. She’d said it herself; Jack left the
paien
alone unless they pissed him off. She wasn’t willing to risk it. Neither had the Kin, they’d made that clear.

That didn’t mean I was ready to give up asking around. Bastet was afraid, the Kin were cautious, but there were some that were too stupid to be either of those. Jack had started off with a mad on for Niko and me for whatever unknown reason, so it wasn’t as if we could back off. He wanted Nik and I’d gotten in the way enough that he wanted me dead—Flock-worthy or not.

That meant we hit up our last informational option because off the top of my head I couldn’t think of anything else to burn down that wouldn’t kill people in the process. Once we would’ve gone to our top informant, Boggle, but we’d accidentally gotten two of her children killed by Grimm and it’d be a long time before she was over that. If ever. Boggle would kill anything and everything that moved, but she loved her litter of man-eaters.

But there was a
vyodanoi
that lived in the East River. I’d never used him . . . her . . . it—I had no idea about their reproduction or genders and I didn’t want to—but he came around the Ninth Circle on a weekly basis and was a helluva lot more chatty than his fellow
vyodanoi
. He seemed to have a rubbery leechlike extension on the pulse of the
paien
world in NYC. He knew things that would no doubt get him killed someday, but for now, he talked. And the more he drank, the more he talked, which was why I was carrying a jumbo-sized plastic bottle of vodka in each hand. Niko had commented the family-sized vodka was a truly classy five a.m. purchase. I told him they were out of grape-flavored condoms and beef jerky or I’d have thrown them in just to see the look on the clerk’s face at how I wined and dined my dates. Niko’s reply that that was actually a step up was uncalled for.

The bastard.

There was a reason the vodka was the cheap stuff. I doubted any
vyodanoi
I saw at the bar had ever seen Mother Russia because I hadn’t once seen one of them drinking the top-shelf vodka.

“You’re unusually tolerable this morning,” Niko observed as we walked through trampled grass and mud under a sky that was clinging tightly to the darkness of night, stubbornly refusing the dawn.

“I don’t want to talk about it. Promise is the devil,” I added darkly. “But other than that, I don’t want to talk about it.” Life was much easier when he was spending nights at her place. Thanks to Grimm and now Jack, I foresaw a good deal more twitching in my future.

“I’d say I feel sorry for you, but I’d be lying. After what you put me through when you were a kid on that subject, turnabout is fair play.” We’d reached the shore and I slid garbage—the seashells of NYC—out of the way while Niko spread two large garbage bags for us to sit on. We were likely to be here a good while. Boris, I didn’t know his real name . . . I didn’t know if
vyodanoi
had names . . . so I went with Boris. The
vyodanoi
species originated in Russia, so Boris was good enough, which made Niko and me Bullwinkle and Rocky. Joy. Regardless, Boris had his traditions.

He’d talk and he’d talk for free—the vodka didn’t count. Seven ninety-nine was practically free. What Boris did demand is you keep him company. He didn’t like to drink alone. When it came to passing along information, that wasn’t a preference. It was a rule. It was some Russian tradition, Goodfellow once mentioned when I brought it up. In Russia, if you were comfortable enough to get shit-faced with someone, that made you family.

I didn’t want to be Boris’s family, but sometimes you had to take one for the team.

“I am not at all fond of this plan,” Niko commented, sitting on the plastic he’d laid out. He assumed a lotus position that made my knees hurt just seeing it.

“It’s not my favorite either, but it’s how it works with Boris.” I sat on my own plastic and felt the mud beneath it give and slide in a wholly disgusting way. I slapped the water twice. Hey, it’d always worked on Flipper. “Boris. Hey, Boris, I have a present for you. Wake up and come play.”

I liked to think Boris was asleep and not finishing up gnoshing down on the leg of someone he’d dragged into his underwater larder. I’d like to think that but I’d likely be fooling myself. I waited a few more minutes and slapped the water again. “Come on, Boris. We don’t have all day. Keep us waiting and we’ll drink all the vodka ourselves.” I wasn’t too worried. There was nothing Boris liked more than company and vodka. He could be a few miles up or down the river.
Vyodanoi
were incredibly fast in the water. He surfaced in front of us in the next moment proving my point . . . about speed or love of vodka. Take your pick.

“Boris, buddy. The Ninth Circle is starting Two for Tuesday shots. You should stop by. Bring a date or a spore or whatever you’ve got going on in your social life.” I nudged Nik, who went ahead and dipped into his coat pockets for two shot glasses and a large glass tumbler for Boris. A
vyodanoi
’s tolerance for vodka was unbelievable.

Boris raised up to settle on what would be knees if he had bones. A
vyodanoi
looked like nothing more than a giant six- to seven-foot leech in humanoid form, a very blurry, caricature of a humanoid form. It had arms, but no hands or fingers. They tended to be brownish-gray with a sloping mudslide of a head, a sucker for a mouth, and a coloration sketched on its face in black lines to mimic a human’s nose, eyes, and brow. For a second in the dark or the shadows you might mistake them for human—only for a second, but with
vyodanoi
a second was all it took.

“Sobaka.”
The sound of Boris’s voice wasn’t easy on the ears. It was a peculiar whistle, the sound of a drowned man whistling a dirge from underwater.

I opened the first, let’s be honest, vat of vodka as Niko murmured, “
Sobaka
? Russian for dog?”

“It’s short for
beshenaya
sobaka
. Mad dog.” Goodfellow had also filled me in on that as he liked delivering bad news as well as random cultural facts. “It’s my nickname from that time Hob hired a ton of them.” And I hadn’t played so nice with them then. “Of all the things I’ve been called I can live with that one.”