Slashback: A Cal Leandros Novel (CAL AND NIKO) Read online

  His eyes narrowed as he studied me. “You’re thinking. When you should be thinking, you don’t. When you shouldn’t be, you do. Research puts you in a virtual coma. There have been times I’d have been tempted to check your pulse if I couldn’t see your drool spreading over my antique books. And this”—his bare toe prodded the bottom of mine—“should be pure muscle memory by now, but your brain is bouncing so hard inside your skull that you ran into a wall simply because I stepped out of the way.”

  Flipping me over his shoulder—hell, nearly over his damn head—was not “stepping out of the way.” But in our version of a sparring routine it was close enough to the truth that I let it slide.

  Crouching next to me, he swatted the side of my head. I’d been thinking all right and as usual Nik knew what about. “Do not be an idiot, little brother. You’re still you. You told me you needed my help to keep you that way. I should’ve listened. I didn’t, not like you needed me to. Now I know. I’m not humoring you any longer and that means I’ll make damn certain you will stay Cal. Now and always.” His lips quirked fondly as he gave me a light pat to the chest. “The once and future king of smart-ass.”

  Knowing the truth and feeling exactly the same about me, wasn’t that better than denial? Hell, yes. It was the best. If you got that in your lifetime from anyone, you were damn lucky. Feeling an ugly knot of bristling barbed wire unwind itself in me, I grinned up at him. “You’re getting your feelings all over me. It’s disgusting.”

  “There are many times, uncountable really, that I’ve mentally replaced you in this scenario, Caliban. You can’t imagine.” Robin had drifted silently, as always, through our locked door to lean against the concrete wall and watch us.

  “You’re right. I can’t imagine. Don’t want to imagine. Your fantasies have to have been banned by the Geneva Conventions as psychological torture.” I sat up. “And even you can’t find being smacked and lectured a turn on.”

  The smirk was so rapacious I could see the neon XXX pop up over his head like in an old Acme cartoon . . . with an added huge dash of porn. “Do you think I’ve not been so naughty in my life that I didn’t deserve some discipline?”

  The images of Catholic uniforms, rulers, the principal’s office—basically every porno cliché I’d seen in my life with the addition of Goodfellow and my brother shut down my brain instantly. For my own protection. Minutes later when it rebooted or whatever computers do when you turn them off and then back on after kicking them viciously, I was still sitting on the mat and Niko and Robin were talking about Jack.

  “No,” the puck was saying. “I’ve had no luck. The paien community wants nothing to do with him. They’ve a good track record of they leave him alone and he sticks to humans for the entire skinning and horrific deaths situation. If they knew anything, which they don’t, they wouldn’t help. They’re quite big on survival instinct.”

  Niko had sat down on the couch to pull his socks back on. He made that simple action look deadly. Considering how many times he’d threatened to kill me with one of them, that wasn’t surprising. “Cal and I did find out some further information on his victims. They were all involved in behavior that the strictly moral with no shades of gray could find objectionable. There is no centralized location from where he chose them however.”

  Goodfellow frowned. At least he wasn’t looking at Nik’s feet. A foot fetish might’ve finished me off right there. “That will make him impossible to hunt down. Over eight million people in the city and call me cynical, but you can take it to the bank at least four million are doing something morally objectionable in Jack’s eyes. Even jaywalkers aren’t safe. Some hipster might dine and dash and be skinned before he had a chance to digest that stolen appetizer. There isn’t any possible way to anticipate where he might go and his next victim. There simply is no way to narrow it down.” Then a smile flashed across his face. It was more lascivious than the one he’d given while watching the aftermath of our workout.

  “I was wrong. There might be one place that would draw him in. I had my annual reminder in my e-mail this morning.” The smile widened far enough that I didn’t need to worry about Jack. My skin was ready to leap off my body and leave without me all on its own.

  “Oh God,” I said involuntarily.

  “Keep that thought. You’ll be saying it repeatedly over the next few hours. Get dressed.” He frowned. “There will be a pat down involved. Weapons might be a problem. And, Niko, any coat like your dusters that resemble trench coats well loved by flashers will probably be frowned on.”

  “Oh God,” I repeated. “Let Jack have New York. We’ll move.”

  Goodfellow slapped my shoulder. “Be brave. We’re going on a field trip.”

  * * *

  The Javits Convention Center was hardly a field trip, but what was inside was a different world, I’d give the puck that. We’d come to the sane conclusion that we’d need our weapons if Jack did show up. That meant getting into the center via a fire door locked from the outside and avoiding security while getting the badges necessary to wander around without paying for them.

  For a trickster that took less than ten minutes.

  That there was a storm system brewing above looked promising on the Jack front, but what was inside was so much more promising I may have forgotten about Jack temporarily.

  I moved through a not particularly busy crowd but a very enthusiastic one and did my best not to walk right over anyone who stopped in front of me because my attention was elsewhere. Too many elsewheres to keep track of.

  “What did you say this was called again?” Niko asked Robin as they walked beside me. That’s where it sounded like they were, best guess. I wasn’t going to waste any of my vision on them to confirm it. My vision was all booked up, thank you very much.

  “The Triple-Xpo. It’s a yearly event that applauds quality in the adult film industry and the sexual lifestyle industry that goes with it,” Goodfellow replied as smoothly as if he were president of it all. Hell, he probably was.

  “Ah,” Niko said at the same time I summed it up. “Porn stars.” And they were everywhere. This was a thousand times better and easier than trying to stake out ten thousand prostitutes, most of them in Brooklyn.

  There was no ducking the smack to the back of my head. I didn’t even try. “You are to respect these women and their career choices,” Nik told me firmly.

  “I have nothing but gratitude in my heart for each and every one of them,” I said truthfully. “Do you know how long it’s been since I broke it off with Delilah?” If that’s what you called threatening to shoot your sociopathic, murder-spree-bound werewolf friend-with-benefits—broke it off, gun to the head. To-mato, ta-mato. “These women have gotten me through a very difficult period in my life. God bless them, each and every one.”

  We were meandering through a maze of booths where actresses and models autographed pictures and nobody was naked, which was more than I could say about most of the people that I’d met through Goodfellow, especially in his premonogamous days when I’d make sure to call before I dropped by his place to prevent the awkwardness of walking in on an orgy. That had happened several times, more than it ever should to someone just wanting to hang out, watch a game, and have a beer.

  There were also booths that sold “toys.” Toys for adults and I left it at that. I had no interest in toys. Nature had given me all the toys I needed.

  “This reminds me of a time when the three of us were in Greece for the bacchanalia,” Robin mused with a lascivious grin, “and . . . ah, I meant when I was in Greece with some friends of mine. Fertility rites, drinking, festivals, plays. Of course this was before the modern miracle of silicone, but nonetheless, very good times.” He lifted a hand in a casual wave. “Ah. Savannah, lovely as ever,” Goodfellow addressed as we passed an autograph booth with a woman with dark hair, wry blue eyes, and a pixie smile.

  “Robin!” She waved enthusiastically.

  “Lisha,” he called at the next booth. She lifted her hea
d from the fantasy book with a dragon and a head on a pike decorating the cover that she was reading between autographs.

  “Robin!” She said his name like a four-year-old would say “Santa Claus.”

  “Miranda Lee.” That was the next booth. Blonde, freckles. The girl-next-door type who was about to eat her dinner. New York’s biggest cheeseburger.

  It went on like that for several minutes until it ended with a run of platinum blondes.

  “Robin!”

  “Amber.”

  “Robin!”

  “Amber.”

  “Robin!”

  “Amber!”

  “Robin!”

  “All right, enough.” Niko took Goodfellow’s collar and urged him at a faster speed while I marveled at how many Ambers there were in the business. “Yes, we’re very impressed. You know every woman—”

  “And man. Don’t be sexist,” Robin interrupted.

  “Fine. And man in the business,” Niko went on, “but we are here to find Jack. He wouldn’t attack someone in the middle of this exhibition hall. It would be beyond noticeable. We need to find a secluded spot where those he judges so harshly might pass while alone and unseen.” I heard the faint clank of metal in Niko’s coat as he moved. Whether he’d be mistaken for a flasher or not, he had to have the coat to cover his katana and cover up the various other blades on him.

  “Very well.” Robin pulled free and straightened his suit jacket. “Although it wouldn’t hurt you to learn to enjoy yourself while on the job. Shop for a gift for Promise. She’s hundreds of years old and has gone through five elderly husbands in the past fifteen of them. Do you think she might not want something to tuck away in the nightstand drawer for nights when you’re not there or for nights when you are—”

  Nik snared the handful of suit collar again and this time dragged the puck along. “This looks familiar,” I drawled. “Oh yeah, you’re usually doing that to me.”

  “I have two hands. Do not test me.” He moved faster yet and I had to pick up the pace as he and Goodfellow began to leave me behind. In minutes we’d left the color, noise, and milling people behind us and were down a hall Robin knew had an available bathroom only those familiar with the convention center would know of.

  “The guest stars are here every year. They’ve sussed out the nooks and crannies and where best to go and not be bothered by a persistent mouth-breather. There are occasionally those who aren’t as respectful as they should be. This is the most remote of those locations.” There’d been three such remote locations but with two hastily improvised OUT OF ORDER signs, we’d whittled it down to one. Goodfellow was keeping his distance from Nik while staring morosely at the wrinkles in his jacket.

  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 abou
t 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.