Deathwish can-4 Read online

  “Information per usual,” Robin replied, rocking back on his heels and smothering a yawn. It could’ve been a hangover remnant or his deal-making bullshit extraordinaire. “Remember the good old days, Hank, before you tried to kill us? VCRs, DVD players—who showed you how to connect to the Internet? To the really good porn? At the very least, you owe me, if not them. You are a scholar—when not on a killing rampage. I made life down here bearable for you. And I doubt you can find a replacement for me.” He cocked his head toward a gaunt, furless cat that had clawed its way, slithering like a snake, up to the top of a nearby crate. The same yellow light that dwelled in Wahanket’s eye hollows were in its as well. “Mummifying piss pots for entertainment is going to get old after a while.”

  “Or if you don’t want to play ball, asshole, we can start chopping off other parts until you have to stitch yourself together like a goddamn quilt.” I patted the sword against my knee suggestively.

  Niko sighed, “Your lack of diplomatic skills are appalling.” He then said to Wahanket, “The sooner you tell us what we want, the sooner we’ll leave you in peace.” He drew his own blade, only more diplomatically, naturally. “And I won’t dismember you and toss the pieces in the river for trying to kill my brother. A reasonable option, don’t you think?”

  I really didn’t see how that was any different than what I said, minus my trademark colorful language, but apparently the “in peace” worked. That or the fact that if he hadn’t been a match for me, he wasn’t going to be one for all three of us. Plus, Wahanket seemed to be as tired of looking at us as we were of him. Taking his hand might’ve taken some of the spirit out of him, but I doubted it. The son of a bitch was probably just biding his time. “Very well. Ask and begone.”

  Niko described Seamus’s problem, our failure to do much about that problem, and the man he’d tangled with. “He was utterly average. Purposely so, I believe, except for the scar behind his ear. An inch in size, half-moon shape, it was so regular and even that I believe it was self-inflicted.”

  “Or inflicted by someone else,” the mummy grunted, curling his one set of claws in demonstration. “I believe I know of what you seek.”

  Considering we’d had next to nothing to go on, I was surprised he knew so quickly of what it might be. . . . A remote possibility, he said, the rumor of two-thousand-plus years, but it could be what we’d come across. “I’ve heard of men with this scar before. There is an order called the Vigil. Human. They have existed since several hundred years B.C. Barely.” He dismissed the age with the superiority of a creature that had walked the earth when the first pyramid was built. “I have heard they follow the inhuman, unhuman, the monsters among the world. They seem to have no other desire than to watch on occasion, or so it seems. As to why they do this thing . . .” The hardened upper lip cracked as it revealed the blackened maw in a sneer. “Bring one to me and I shall make him speak the truth.” The claws swiped the air in a decisive, eviscerating curl. “I could do with a companion. One would be amazed at how removing internal organs leads to the most interesting of conversations. Information does flow.” The flesh-encased skull turned toward me, as what passed for his eyes flared with a harsh light. “Perhaps you will be on my table one day. My knife in you, cutting you away. Your liver, stomach, intestines. I will save your heart for last to see how long I can coax it to beat. Perhaps minutes, perhaps an hour. Bound to an agony so total and savage that it will strip you of sanity itself.”

  Oh, sure.

  Now, who wouldn’t love that?

  “Right,” I drawled. “I’ll call and make an appointment for that. Be sure to wait by the phone.”

  That was all we got out of Wahanket, and a little more than I wanted to know, because I didn’t have any doubt one day he’d try to make good on his threat.

  Get in line.

  As we made our way out at about the halfway point, I heard a skittering behind. I didn’t smell anything, but I heard it. And if I heard it, then Niko and Robin had probably heard it before me. “What now?” I asked, starting to turn.

  Niko shook his head and gave a dismissive shrug. “Just one of the cats.”

  Oh, sure. Just one of the undead mummified cats. No big deal. I grimaced as I heard the croaking cry. That Wahanket was one sick bastard. As we walked on, the croaking got closer until finally Robin jerked and cursed in the gloom between the dim bulbs, “Bast’s bountiful breasts,” and shook his leg. That skinny, zombie-gray, wrinkly fleshed cat from Wahanket’s lair had leapt, hooked its claws into Goodfellow’s pants, and it wasn’t letting go. Flickering jack-o’-lantern eyes looked upward and it croaked again.

  “Do something,” Robin demanded, shaking his leg again.

  “What would you have us do?” Niko asked blandly. “It’s already dead.”

  “And it’s just a cat,” I observed, hiding the grimace this time. Just a cat. Just an undead, walking, croaking, creepy-as-hell cat.

  “Monster killers, my immortal ass. Fine. I’ll take care of it myself,” he muttered as he tried to yank it off. It didn’t budge; it had to be strong as hell. Robin then drew out a blade as long as my forearm from within his long brown leather coat. He tried, without luck, to slide the blade between his leg and its body. It was clamped on too tightly. “All right, then,” he said with determination. “If that’s the way it has to be.” He angled the blade under its chin, and that’s when we heard it. Loud and clear.

  The purr from beyond the grave.

  It was like the rattle of bones, but that’s what it was, all right. Rough and coarse and rapturous.

  “No.” Robin shook his head. “Absolutely not.” The blade fell away. “Absolutely not.”

  As Niko had said last night: Repetition didn’t change a thing.

  By the time we reached the stairs it had climbed Robin’s leg, slithered under the coat, and wedged itself under his arm. And Goodfellow, who always had an answer for anything—whether you asked for it or not—had an expression of disgust and despair on his face. “I don’t like cats. Even live ones. They’re demanding and annoying, they imagine themselves to be so very superior, and they shed.”

  “That one won’t shed,” I grinned. “As for the rest . . . sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” I ignored his snarl and turned to Nik to say, “Think we should tell Sangrida? Before there’s a mummified security guard walking around here too?”

  “I already passed that message along through Promise once Wahanket went rogue.” Niko had had his sword in hand, wary of any traps the mummy might have set. Bad things happened down here. We’d seen that on a previous visit. Now he sheathed it as we reached the top. “No one comes down here now without Sangrida, and she is capable of handling Wahanket.”

  Maybe. She could break him like a twig if she could catch him, but he was cunning as hell. Still, her museum, her problem. Hell, we had more than enough of our own to worry about at the moment.

  We parted ways with Robin and his new best friend at the front entrance as Niko dragged me to the main branch of the New York Public Library. I wasn’t a fan. Not that I didn’t read. I read—and not comic books, as Niko claimed. And not porno mags—well, yeah, okay, I did look at porno mags on occasion. What twenty-year-old didn’t? But I read mysteries and sci-fi once in a while too, which I picked up in used bookstores. I liked older books. These days, the space suits on the front of books aren’t made to showcase the proud Double D astronaut. And you couldn’t tell me Spandex couldn’t keep out the vacuum of space. NASA had no idea what they were doing.

  Despite my perfectly valid literary choices, Nik had made sure I knew my way around the library the first week we’d moved to New York. The mythology section was home base for months. I had to give credit where it was due: My brother had done all he could to shove the knowledge in my head, and some stuck. But mostly? Mostly, I read a sentence and forgot it the second I hit the period. Having the knowledge of the Auphe in my head was monster news plenty. I didn’t want to study the other kinds hanging around. Enough . . . he
ll, enough was just enough. I picked up the info I needed on the streets and during fights—Nik was the only person who’d give you a lecture on the monster you were fighting during the fight itself.

  “. . . and is well-known for the barbed poisonous tail.” Duck and slice said tail from body. “It also builds a nest of mud and clay, and lays eggs in the chest cavity of its dead victim as a means of procreation.” A thrust of steel and a jet of dark blue blood comes spurting from its heart. “Are you paying attention, Cal?”

  Honestly, wasn’t that enough studying?

  This time as I trudged through the main lobby, about to call Internet shotgun while Nik dealt with the books, is when I saw it. “Hey, look.” I nudged Niko in the ribs and nodded my head toward a guy sprawled in one of the chairs reading the Post. On the front page in the bottom corner read the headline: NAKED ALBINO MENTAL PATIENT GOES BUS SURFING.

  Had that naked albino mental patient not been a creature bent on the torture and murder of my family, friends, and me, it might’ve been funny. As it was, the lack of humor I was feeling had me snarling at the man, who started to protest when I moved over and yanked the paper out of his hand. He then took one look at my face and backed away slowly.

  “I apologize for the rudeness,” Niko said. “He’s off his medications and consequently more himself than usual.” He handed the man a couple of dollars for the paper. I ignored the guy as he slid carefully past me with the money and worked at putting a lot of space between himself and me.

  “If I hear voices, it’s because of whatever freaky-ass vitamin you put in my morning coffee when I’m not looking,” I muttered as I scanned the short article.

  “If you hear voices, it’s because you only eat irradiated nitrates and have grown a microwave-spawned tumor in your frontal lobe.” He took the paper from me. “Assuming you have a frontal lobe or a lobe of any kind. My latest theory is your skull hosts a hamster running in a wheel that keeps you upright and less coherent.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘more or less coherent’?” I snorted and continued reading over his shoulder.

  “No.”

  I thought about a light punch to his kidney, thought about the elbow I’d get jammed in my diaphragm before I got halfway through the punch, and decided to finish the article instead. It wasn’t much. A few people had spotted something on top of a bus that had looked pretty abnormal, and somebody in the police department had filled them in on the melanin- and clothing-challenged mental patient, but he’d been captured and returned to the hospital. All was well. These aren’t the ’droids you’re looking for and all that. No, of course, the name of the hospital or patient couldn’t be revealed. Confidentiality rules. Blah, blah.

  “Somebody actually covered it up,” I said, surprised. This wasn’t a random reporter spotting a boggle in Central Park and doing a Bigfoot-hits-the-big-city story on it. This was a genuine cover-up with an authority figure involved and everything.

  “That they did. But who are they and why did they do it?” He folded the paper. “How is a good question as well.”

  They were all good questions, but . . . “We don’t really have time for any more mysteries right now. Hell, we don’t have time for Seamus’s,” I pointed out. I thought it was too bad the spear had gone through Niko’s coat instead of Seamus’s heart. It would’ve solved at least one of our problems, because, truthfully, I didn’t give a damn if the guys shadowing Seamus were a threat to him or not. “Screw the mysteries and let’s go have a hot dog.”

  Niko looked at me and shook his head. “Where did I go wrong?”

  I flopped in the chair the guy with the paper had just vacated. “Okay, Cyrano. Spoon-feed it to me. Bruce Willis was a ghost. Darth is Luke’s father. The Crying Game chick is packing sausage and it’s not for a picnic.” I raised my eyebrows and made a come-on gesture with my hand. “And?”

  “If an organization that follows and watches supernatural creatures has existed for thousands of years and we have proof that someone is covering up the existence of these creatures, doesn’t it seem logical that they might be connected? Or even the same entity?”

  He was so smug. “Not necessarily,” I said, just to be contrary.

  Sighing, he swatted me with the paper. “Bad dog. Go and research. And if I find you playing Mine-sweeper or looking at pornographic sites—”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’ll kick my ass.”

  “See? You can be logical when you want,” he said as I heaved out of the chair and headed for the computer section.

  I didn’t find anything, and I looked, but other than a thousand sites for candlelight vigils, and one paramilitary skinhead group out in Wyoming, I was out of luck. No super secret organizations mentioned, and they definitely didn’t have their own Web site. What a crock, considering this was the Internet age. How’d they recruit? Hang around haunted houses on Halloween and say, “Hey, wanna see something really cool?”

  Niko didn’t have any luck either, which made me feel somewhat better, until he took over my computer. Then he found something. A year ago, most of the Auphe had died in a collapsing warehouse. Thanks to the wild energy of an impossible gate I’d created, it went down so quickly that apparently only a few had a chance to gate their own way out. Lucky us.

  The archived newspaper article called it a gas explosion. When Nik and George had been kidnapped months ago, we’d left a church littered with dead vodyanoi , man-shaped, oversized leech creatures that were big and heavy enough to be damn hard to dispose of. The church had burned to the ground. Arson, the police said. Someone had cleaned up two very big messes of ours. Maybe there was a Vigil; maybe not, but there was something going on out there. And weeks ago when Sawney Beane, our least favorite mass-murdering monster, had left a tree full of dead bodies in Central Park . . . those bodies had disappeared. They hadn’t made the news at all.

  Mysteries on top of mysteries. I didn’t like mysteries. Mysteries only meant trouble.

  Like I’d thought earlier at the museum about Sangrida and Wahanket, we had trouble enough without looking for more.

  Or so I’d hoped anyway . . . until Nik’s cell phone rang.

  Enough was never enough, was it? Seamus wasn’t enough, and now this. One thing we’d learned over the past few months: Work doesn’t stop when things turn bad. Our lives were, in a word, complicated as shit. Okay, three words, but “complicated” didn’t really get the point across. Family, serial killers, allies who were anything but . . . day to day, it seemed like a miracle if I lived long enough to eat my lunchtime chili cheese dog. So, when you got the karmic swat, as Nik would probably call it, we kept going. We kept living. We kept working, because if we didn’t, Christ, we would never work. And Nik’s teacher’s assistant salary from the university combined with my bartender pay was about enough to pay our utilities. It was our other work, our real job, that paid the bills. And while it was more interesting than serving drinks to the frequently inebriated and the occasionally incontinent, it was also a damn sight more gory.

  We did it all. Ransom deliveries, de-bodaching carnivals, exterminations. Whatever someone was willing to pay us for that didn’t involve compromising too much of our souls. Which is how we ended up freezing our asses off under the pier at Coney Island later that evening. Promise had found us another client, because a Scottish vampire wasn’t enough of a pain. I sat cross-legged in the sand, waves colored the purple-gray of the twilight sky nearly reaching my shoes, and sifted absently for a rock. Over the three hours we’d been sitting there, I heard one set of footsteps above us over the sound of the waves, and the occasional shout and laughter from the boardwalk, but that was it. The wind off the water had a vicious bite, and if I didn’t have to be there, my ass would’ve been someplace warm like everyone else’s.

  But it wasn’t the frigid air that I was thinking of. Or whatever client we had, what they wanted. I wasn’t thinking of the Vigil either. Did they exist? Did they not exist? Did I care? Nope.

  Right now I was thinking the same thing
that had come to me yesterday morning as I’d lain on my back in Washington Square Park, surprised that the world hadn’t ended then and there. It was something more important than cold, clients, and mystery organizations combined. Something that had to do with our problem. Our lives . . . or deaths. I was thinking of something that actually mattered. I couldn’t picture doing it, not really, and that didn’t say too much about me. Not at all. Because it might be the best thing to do—if I had the guts. In fact, it might be the only thing that would work, and it didn’t have to be permanent. If I survived.

  “You know,” I started diffidently, flinging the pebble I’d found into the water, “I was thinking . . . if I—”

  “I’d find you,” Niko said, watching the water. He had his hair pulled back in a short ponytail, and was in a long black coat, gray shirt, and black pants, and had his sword lying across his lap. He looked every bit as deadly as he was and every bit as confident. I missed his long braid. It had hung to his waist and been good for annoying him with a tug. It had also been a sign of simpler days. Days when we’d been totally in the dark about why the Auphe had wanted me, days when they’d wanted only me. Ignorance/bliss, all that. I wished I really were as ignorant as Niko had accused me of being when he’d homeschooled me when I was sixteen. Ignorance can get you killed, but at least you’d be happy up until the hammer fell and shattered your clueless skull to bone fragments.

  Nik turned his view from the water to look at me and emphasized, “Wherever you went. I’d find you, little brother.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted, not surprised he knew what I was thinking. A lifetime of familiarity will do that. “You would.”

  No, running wasn’t the answer. Even if there were a chance the Auphe would follow me if I left the others—after all, where was the fun in mentally torturing your prey if he wasn’t around to see it? Yeah, even if . . . Niko wouldn’t let me. I could run and disappear as well as any fox, or any Rom, for that matter, but Niko was the one who had taught me. Anywhere I could think of, he could do the same. Probably beat me there.