Another douche bag, and I couldn’t wait.
“I’m not going to bother to ask. You need him more than I do,” Niko said. “Try not to kill him. We’re not one hundred percent certain he deserves it.”
I was already stripping off that stupid jacket. It was lightweight, though, and that could be useful at times. “Today my percentage on the curve has dropped from one hundred to twenty-five. Maybe fifteen.”
I couldn’t tell if he was white, biracial, Hispanic, young, or middle-aged, as he was so covered in filth, hair matted for years, teeth all but gone from meth, clothes layered rags, but what did it matter? I did know he was a son of a bitch with no bark or bite and he’d crossed me on the wrong day.
Any day would’ve been a wrong day, but with his knife—a kitchen butcher knife, pitiful—I would’ve given him the less humiliating “go away.” I would’ve used a round to his leg from one of my guns or put my own knife, the kind you don’t steal from your grandmother, through his hand to make sure I cut enough tendons that he’d not carry a weapon again. But today…today wasn’t any day.
I strangled him unconscious with the Members Only jacket.
It rolled up nice and tight. It wasn’t a wire garrote, but it did get the job done.
Better yet, he had a friend, a buddy, a compadre, otherwise known as the dumb ass who came over the fence to help cut us up. This one was wired on meth or crack. That meant he was snake-mean, gave him the sad illusion that he was immortal, and made him a cheetah in speed compared to his friend, who’d done a believable imitation of the living dead from an old zombie movie. My opinion about those movies had been formed from minute one: If you could trot or even speed-walk, there was no excuse for your not surviving that apocalypse.
“Give! Give it! Fuckers! Give it over before I cut your goddamn head off!” This one had a switchblade he stabbed in my direction with frenzied, wild motions. I shrugged off my holster and tossed it over my shoulder, knowing Niko would catch it. Then off came the sweater, which surprised me by rolling up as nicely as the jacket. Cashmere, huh? Shelling out the dough on expensive fancy douche-bag clothes was worth it. Who would’ve believed it?
I dodged the stab of the switchblade. Yeah, he was a cheetah next to the other guy, all right, but Niko had taught me to be the actual article, with lessons starting when I was about eight. I snared the guy’s arm with my new weapon, broke his wrist in a particularly nasty way that would never heal right, and then strangled him with the sweater until he was down and out to match his partner. That improved my mood enough that I kept going, kicking off a loafer and beating Mr. Switchblade in the head with it. It wasn’t as effective as the other pieces of clothing, but it was still entertaining.
Imitating my shoe-beating squat, Niko crouched across from me, gazed down at the drooling mugger and then at me. “You didn’t kill them. That’s something,” he said with a noticeable lack of conviction. “Should I be concerned or is this a new type of crime-fighting superpower hitherto undiscovered in those comic books you read as a kid?”
“I still read ’em.” I gave a wicked grin, able to forget about Janus and Grimm—better than me on my best day—long enough that I could enjoy myself for a minute. “Find me five more. I still have a shirt, pants, two socks, and one shoe left.”
There was a flash out of the corner of my eye. I looked up to see Robin considering the picture on his phone. “I have the shot of the infamous Leandros penis—infamous like the Loch Ness monster: Most thought it a rumor. I have a preppy demon spawn armed by Nordstrom assaulting criminals. It’s a start to a porn site. I just need a theme.”
Kalakos spit on the sidewalk; the Vayash clan did love their saliva and sharing it. We didn’t know how Janus tracked us. Kalakos and Niko both thought it was likely the genetic signature of Vayash blood. I had a different theory: the unique chemical makeup of Vayash spittle. It had been exercised fiercely enough over the generations that it was better, stronger, faster. Steve Austin couldn’t hope to deliver the loogie that a Vayash could.
“We are wasting time,” Kalakos said with frustration boiling over the stoicism he’d worn, head to toe, since he’d arrived. “The burden needs to be returned to sleep or destroyed, and you are playing games like…” There he was stuck. Like a child? Hardly. Like a monster? Not if he wanted that apology from the basement to stick.
Goodfellow didn’t wait for him to sort it out. “The wannabe Achilles is right.” He put the phone away and tossed me the black combat boots he held in his other hand. “Time to go. You’re without a shred of doubt going to have to run for your life in there. You can’t do that in loafers.”
I caught the boots and snarled at the smirk that had been thrown with them. It was a halfhearted snarl, though. Robin was back and that made all this worth it. Almost.
“In there” was the thirteenth building of the Remington Arms factory. All thirteen were identical and connected by a massive bridge that matched the brick outside of the buildings. It loomed, the entire structure. It was only four stories high, but somehow it loomed. That this was a place that had made weapons didn’t surprise me. They sure as hell hadn’t been turning out toys. It had been built in the early nineteen hundreds to make guns, all kinds, from handguns to machine guns. Equal-opportunity methods of death and destruction.
The thirteenth building was hugely cavernous inside. Some of it was divided into four floors, but in some areas—the metalworking ones, from the equipment left behind—you could see straight up from the ground floor to the underside of the roof. In those large spaces light trickled from the small windows from what would’ve been one wall of the fourth floor. It was a dim light spilled from a thickly overcast sky, but Promise was cautious, pulling the hood of her silk cloak farther forward to shade her face. A stray hit of daylight wouldn’t cause her to combust, although it would go a long way toward explaining the urban legend of spontaneous “human” combustion. What it would give her was the vamp equivalent of a third-degree burn. While vamps were quick to heal from any other wound, those took months to heal, and aloe didn’t do a thing for that level of crispy.
Robin stopped to take the room in, eyes closed in concentration. “No, not here. Ah, I feel him now.” He indicated a hallway that ran the length of the building. “Not far, and asleep, I think, or we wouldn’t have made it this far without some difficulties.” I didn’t wonder how the dead or deadish slept. When I’d discovered there were undead mummified cats that followed pucks home and made themselves queen of the condo, I stopped questioning dead right then and there as too complicated for me.
He took out his sword from beneath a coat, the same long duster style as the one Nik always wore and was wearing now, thanks to Robin’s owning several. He didn’t carry a sword every day as my brother did, but enough that he needed the spares. Kalakos had his own. They were all virtually identical. Give them sunglasses and they’d be supernatural Men in Black.
Niko was carrying his xiphos and he handed me the second from inside his coat. Hephaestus hadn’t built Janus. Someone from a race older and more skilled had. If the Janus metal that formed the xiphos made the automaton stop and think, it might do worse to Hephaestus if he went off the deep end. Turn him from deadish to deader than dead. I had my holster back on and already had the Eagle out. I switched it to my left hand and carried the xiphos with my right. “Let’s go find out how to take out the batteries on that thing.”