Blackout can-6 Read online

  “And you work at a bar part-time,” he added. “Oh, you were sexing it up with a Wolf, Delilah, for a while, but she tried to kill a friend of yours, thought about killing you, and things haven’t been the same since. The usual drama that goes along with sex. She’s now the first female pack leader in the Kin—that would be the werewolf Mafia to you—as she managed to get her Alpha and entire pack killed. It was quite clever, how she did that, clever in an inexcusably evil way. of course.” He coughed—a fake cough, I thought, to cover up his jealousy of just how clever she’d been. Pucks, I was learning or slowly remembering, were tricksters through and through.

  After clearing his throat—uh huh—he continued. “It’s an all-female pack she started too, another first in the Kin. They’ve been kicking furry ass and pissing on names for several months now. It’s quite impressive. She might one day rule the entire leg-humping enchilada. Which is only fair—equal rights for all, regardless of gender.” He tossed a candy bar back to me. “As for monogamy boy, I’ve never been a boy.” His grin gave me crocodile flashbacks. “I was born a man, more than a man. Do you want to hear a little about my history? It’s far more entertaining than yours, I promise you.”

  I ripped at the candy bar wrapper carelessly, tossing pieces of it onto the seat around me. “Jesus Christ, no. I don’t want to hear about your history, not a single second of it. Wait a minute. I was dating a werewolf?”

  “No, you were screwing a werewolf. Wolves don’t have relationships outside their own kind. Wolf is for Wolf. You two were simply fornicating, fucking, whatever you wish to call it, although you certainly seemed to enjoy it. Your mood improved enormously. Your complexion cleared up, and the hair on the palms of your hands fell off. Naturally you owe all that to me as I was the one to help you lose your virginity. There wouldn’t have been any furry fornication for you if I hadn’t shown you the way, so to speak.” His smirk was as evil as mine had ever hoped to be when I’d commented on his newly found fork phobia. “Do you want to hear that story? I’ve told it to every single creature I know and sent it in to Penthouse Forum. I may as well tell it to the person it actually happened to.”

  If we hadn’t been on the interstate, I would’ve thrown myself out of the car. I didn’t think it, I knew it. If this car weren’t so old, Leandros would’ve hit the child safety locks the minute the puck had ever opened his mouth. Instead, he’d reached back and slammed the lock down with his hand. I’d lost my memory, but he hadn’t lost his.

  “Goodfellow, if he doesn’t kill you with a fork, I may. Stop taunting him. He’s been through enough.” Finally, Leandros cut in, looking out for little brother. I could see the upside to having a brother—for as long as I was trapped in a car with the puck anyway. “It was with a nymph, Cal. Your first time was with a meadow nymph in Central Park. I think you said her name was Charm. As for Delilah, yes, she’s a Wolf, and off-limits now, considering that she did try to kill a friend and would’ve killed you in his place if it would’ve gotten her what she wanted. I myself have an arrangement with a vampire named Promise. I told you, nonhuman does not mean monster. It only means be careful.”

  I’d been doing a werewolf. My brother had an “arrangement” with a vampire. The puck was monogamous with something with wings and a sword and had been nonmonogamous with anything that moved in the past. “Thanks, guys. Way to go with putting my whole monsters-are-evil thing in perspective. Mom’s dead. I don’t have a father because getting a guy’s name when you screw him is so boring. And I did her great example one better by sleeping with someone who wanted to kill me or use me in some bizarre furry Mafia power play. Life is less a horror movie and more of a goth soap opera. Again, thanks so much for saving me from that god-awful normal life I had working in the diner back in Nevah’s Landing. You’re real pals.” I shifted my ass to a corner between seat and door, ate my candy bar, and tried to ignore them. They didn’t make it easy.

  Goodfellow explained how there’d been a rumor of an Ammut priestess doing some very bad things for her goddess down in South Carolina, but it was barely a hint of supernatural gossip. We’d known it would most likely end up as nothing, so I’d gone alone. I’d called and said there was no priestess but a nest of spiders—nothing I couldn’t handle, especially with the grenade I’d taken with me. Apparently I’d never had the chance to use it. They didn’t know what had happened—whether the spiders had gotten the jump on me or I’d had a bad day when I took them on—but I hadn’t called back. They hadn’t been able to track me down with the GPS of my phone, the one I’d lost in the water. I hadn’t even been supposed to be in the Landing. I’d been several towns over when I’d called. How had I ended up there? Other than a childhood longing for Never Land, it was a mystery.

  I grunted and kept working on the candy bar.

  Leandros said they hadn’t found my car, borrowed from Goodfellow’s used-car lot. He was a used-car salesman—didn’t that figure? The puck could probably sell vibrating panties to nuns. The two of them hadn’t known whether the spiders had chased me to the Landing or I had chased them. They’d been depending on me to fill them in once they found me, because not finding me had never been an option. Leandros was very clear about that. He’d let Goodfellow do most of the talking, ninety-nine point nine percent of the never-ending talking, but of this he personally wanted to make absolutely sure I knew I hadn’t been deserted. I was his brother. He was finding me and bringing me back. Nothing and no one would stop him. He’d hunt until he found me or dropped dead of old age still in search of my bleached bones. It was all very Inigo Montoya of him. My identity was buried in black clouds, but movies I knew. Stupid goddamn spider.

  “You’re loyal and faithful, like … um … a basset hound,” I offered Leandros in reply as I swallowed the last bite of chocolate. It was lame, no doubt about it, but I had to say something. His knuckles were whitening on the steering wheel. He wanted or needed some sort of acknowledgment. I tried again. “That’s good to know, especially in the monster-killing business.” There. I’d done my duty. On to other things. “Are there more candy bars?”

  “You’re my only family, Cal.” He sounded more determined, if possible, to get his point across. “I will not let you down. Ever.” I was half afraid he’d pull over to write that vow in blood. He appeared impassive to the casual eye, but there was a mass of emotion under that outer stoicism. Look at me with the big words. Being impressed with my mental literary skills was a good distraction from admitting to myself that I knew what Leandros was hiding on the inside.

  Too fast, all this was too damn fast. It was like meeting a woman’s parents on the first date. It was too much, too soon, and the cherry on top of all the strange and weird I’d woken up to less than a week ago.

  “Yeah, that’s great.” I went for casual. There was nothing wrong with casual. “We’re close. Work together. You don’t let your vampire chick eat me. I’m grateful. About those candy bars …”

  Goodfellow interrupted me and this time the smug, salacious, mocking voice was anything but. “Do not. Do not joke about this. Niko won’t say or do anything about it, but I will. You respect this and you respect that you are the luckiest man living to have the family you do, to have the brother you have.”

  Just like that, casual was gone and I felt a complete and utter dick. I’d been so damn appreciative of what the people of the Landing had done for me, a haircut and a job, and here Leandros was telling me he practically would’ve spent the rest of his life hunting for me if that was what it took. What did I do? Asked for more candy bars. Called him a basset hound—not that there was anything wrong with basset hounds, but this was my brother. I didn’t remember it yet, but he was, and I was an idiot if I didn’t count myself lucky to have any family at all, much less family that refused to give up on me. Granted, he had kidnapped me, but, technically, it was for my own good. I’d wondered that first day in the Landing if I had friends, and I was all but spitting on a brother.

  “Leandros, Christ, I’m so
rry about the loyal and faithful thing. I’m sure you’re a better brother than a basset hound.” I grimaced. As apologies went, that was a concoction of frigging beauty. “Sorry about being a shit.” I could’ve said more, but, let’s face it, if he was my brother—the kind that evidently swore blood oaths and would battle armies single-handedly to make sure I got regular dental care or a yearly flu shot—then he knew what was under my outer candy-coated shell too.

  The tense lines of his shoulders relaxed a fraction. “You don’t have to say that. In fact, it could start a precedent that would have you apologizing every minute of every day, and your time-management skills aren’t that impressive to begin with. Only know that you’re not alone. That’s enough.”

  I was off the hook for being an ass, but more than that, I knew I wasn’t alone in the world. Not too many people could say that. It was humbling to know someone always had your back. It honestly was. I sat and “humbled” for a while before asking one more time. “I hate to bring it up again, but after cutting up that spider and flushing the pieces down the toilet, I didn’t get a chance to finish my breakf—”

  A candy bar hit me in the forehead. Not particularly offended, I ate it and then napped. Concussions, evil Egyptian spiders, a brother whose code of honor was so deep he’d consider the Knights of the Round Table drunken and corrupt frat boys; it’d been an eventful day. Amnesia-man needed his rest.

  When I woke up, we were in New York City, and Leandros and Goodfellow had switched positions. I straightened for a better look. Cars were bumper-to-bumper on all sides, a mighty herd of rush-hour bison headed for the cliff’s edge, too tightly packed to know their fate. I looked past them at the people on the sidewalks. People rushed along, streams of them, crabby and impatient cockroaches muttering and pushing. Late, late, for a very important date. Rude and obnoxious and everywhere.

  This was a good place to hide—if you had to.

  The Landing would always have a part of me for some indefinable reason, but this—this was home. I knew this city. I knew its heart and its whole, if not the details. I knew Central Park and the subway. I knew the rich places and the less than; the places you could walk alone and the places you shouldn’t. I knew graffiti and garbage-filled stairwells. I didn’t know any specific club or bagel shop, but I highly doubted I ate bagels anyway. I was hot dogs and relish down to my bones. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know where to go to get that hot dog yet. I took it all in.

  “Home.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from agreeing with Leandros on that one. “Yeah, it is.”

  Finally we reached a smaller street and Goodfellow pulled the car halfway up on the curb. “Welcome to the Lower East Side, if you don’t recall, a very exclusive part.”

  Leandros was already out of the car as I opened my door. “What’s so exclusive about it?” It wasn’t as nice as some of the other streets we’d gone down. The buildings here were more “old garage” than nice converted apartments.

  He nodded for me to get out as well. He didn’t touch me, which was considerate of him. I was trying to go with the flow, but having space to think and time to do it in helped. “The privacy element,” he answered for the puck. “Promise has a deceased husband or two… .”

  “Five,” Goodfellow corrected in a manner he didn’t try to pass off as remotely helpful.

  “Regardless of the number,” said Leandros, able to grind his teeth with the best of them, “one owned a good deal of real estate. We moved from our last place a few months ago when it became difficult to smuggle out the bodies and more difficult to explain why the “thieves” that kept breaking into our apartment through the window did it by scaling four stories. Here it’s considerably easier to go about the business of our business, and Promise keeps the rent reasonable.”

  Goodfellow opened his mouth, noted Leandros’s blanker-than-blank face, then addressed me instead. “See you soon, kid,” he called through the open window. “I’d slap you on the shoulder and say something witty and movingly eloquent, but as you’d only stab me with a fork, I’ll save it for another time.” He raised a hand and the car bounced off the curb and back into the street almost before Leandros finished closing the trunk after retrieving his duffel bag. The shirt I was wearing had come out of that bag. From the heft and clank of it, that shirt was the only nonlethal thing in there.

  “I live here?” I asked. The building we stood by had a definite old-garage feel. There were flyers on the metal advertising a hundred different things. There were no garbage-filled stairwells or a homeless guy pissing on a potted bush, but that was probably because there was no potted bush. It was inside living, though, which meant monster killing paid, because I knew that no part-time bartender could afford anything but a cardboard box with wall-to-wall scrap carpeting.

  There was some graffiti on the sidewalk, less graffiti maybe than long scratches scraped with something hard like metal. It read, Where are your brothers and sisters? A religious nut had been by recently, it appeared, as the scratches looked fresh. It was along the same line as “Am I not my brother’s keeper?” only more gender friendly. Gotta watch out for the sisters too.

  “You live here,” Leandros confirmed. I walked across the letters to the door that had been placed off center into the corrugated metal that fronted the building. Battleship gray, the door opened without a key. You didn’t need a key when someone had taken a crowbar to the lock sometime in the past.

  “Okay, that’s not right. I don’t need a memory to know that,” I said. “Great. I get amnesia, attacked by a spider in the john, and robbed. It just keeps getting better and better.”

  “Hmm. It happens. It is New York.” Niko went in first and I followed, seeing that I had no neighbors. The entire building was one big space with the metal ceiling two stories high. There were windows up there to see the daylight beginning to dim. To the right was an area devoted to living. I noted a coffee table that looked cheap but brand-new, a couch that was about fifteen years past its prime with only prayer and duct tape holding it together, and beside it a small kitchen area with a bar separating the two spaces. You could eat there too and still swivel to see the TV hanging on the wall … and it was a great TV—big and flat with what I knew had to be one frigging amazing picture. I was in love with that TV.

  So I hadn’t been robbed. No one would’ve left that TV. More and more weird.

  The other half of the room was devoted to living in another way—keeping yourself alive. There were weights, a punching bag, mats on the floor, and untouched targets on the walls. Fresh paper, black silhouettes of human bodies intact. I liked that too. If you plan on surviving giant spiders, it’s nice to have a home gym to train in. Only one thing was off.

  It was pristine, despite the couch carcass. Immaculate with a place for everything and everything in its place. The new targets were the worst, like hotels that fold your toilet paper into a neat point. Who wants their toilet paper practically folded into an airplane? I didn’t know me, not all of me, only five going on six days of me if you wanted to count, but I compared the condition of my motel room on my last day in the Landing with this. “This isn’t right,” I said, walking to the coffee table and nudging the remote control out of its perfectly parallel alignment with the table’s edge. Leandros reached past me and nudged it right back, then started to give me a similar nudge toward a six-foot-long hall. Whoever had converted this place had put up a wall that stopped about nine feet up. You had the open space above you, but you had privacy as well. The hall was dead center of that wall. This time Niko moved past me to lead the way and open the door on the right. I followed him and peered into the room.

  There was no floor; only piles of clothes. Chances were that Einstein in his day could’ve theorized there was a floor under all that dirty laundry, but I wouldn’t bet a Nobel Prize on it. The bed was unmade with dark blue sheets and a cover so tangled they were almost one giant complex knot, the kind kids who go to Boy Scout camp learn to make. One pillow was at the head of t
he bed and one at the foot with a petrified piece of pizza resting on it. The wall you would face while you were in that bed was scarred with hundreds of slashes. The knife that had made them was still embedded in the plasterboard. A black marker had been used to connect all the marks to spell out Screw you. Under the bed I could see the gleam of metal and lots of it. If the bogeyman showed up under there, good luck finding a place to wedge itself amidst that arsenal. It was a disaster area. You could get federal funds to airlift people out of this biohazard nightmare.

  I grinned. I didn’t mean to, but this was right. This was the room of a guy who didn’t know what the word pristine meant. “Now this I get.”

  Leandros snorted, and the guy had plenty of nose to snort with. “There are some places men aren’t meant to go. This room is five steps above the Bermuda Triangle on that list. I pretend it doesn’t exist and you do what you can to confine your chaos here lest it escape the apartment and gobble up the neighbors. That is the bathroom.” He pointed to the closed door across from my room and then indicated the last room, the one at the end of the hall. “And that is my room.”

  His room. His room? “We live together?” Hell, no. Family, brothers, sacred oaths sealed with a bar of chocolate smacking you in the face; I was doing all I could to accept that. But living together? “What if you want to bring your vamp over and do … I don’t know … whatever you do? Bite each other, talk about how sexy losing a pint of blood is, and how iron deficiency is so hot? Do you leave a blood bank brochure taped to the door to warn me? What did I do when I brought over Lassie? Hang a chew toy on the doorknob? Aren’t we a little old to be bunking together as if this were sleep-away camp?”

  He could’ve given me reasons. It took two to pay the rent, especially on a place this huge, even with a good deal on that rent. It was also convenient if your roommate was in the same business as you so you didn’t have to explain the spider guts on your clothes and the knives in the dishwasher—the kind of knives you aren’t using on toast unless you planned to gut and field-dress it. The stalest toast didn’t deserve that treatment.