Doubletake

the lion was roaring and then purring as his wings flared and he lifted them in the air, the puck’s legs clamping around the thickly muscled waist. The lili roared again and there was a sudden rain of russet-colored fluid that smelled of cinnamon and desert sand.

I hadn’t seen it, but I’d bet Brokeback Mountain wasn’t anything like this.

“I am so not cleaning that up,” I said, taking another swallow from my bottle of whiskey.

Robin wasn’t going to be forgiven for this, not until the day I died and was a year in the ground. Niko was fending off probably the twentieth puck of the night—they definitely liked blondes—with his sword. “Bartenders are off-limits,” he was repeating. “Tell your brothers. No means no. It also means I will remove a very different kind of sword from them if they don’t respect that.”

I looked up to see the air full of sequins that had fallen from tossed-off clothing. They glittered in the flashing lights. Money flew in gusts of wind caused by flapping wings. It was like being inside a giant kinky snow globe. The pucks weren’t interested in me, although from their dubious glances they didn’t know why, and I drank on. Another puck tackled one of the female dancers off a table and was already inside her by the time they landed on the floor. She laughed as his mouth closed over a dark golden nipple.

Okay, that I missed. “I need to get laid in the worst way,” I said mournfully.

“And that would be more than enough alcohol for you.” Niko plucked the bottle from my hand.

It passed, the “entertainment” part of the reunion. Rather like the bubonic plague passed: slowly and leaving madness and despair in its path.

Then came the puck version of after-sex. My definition was spooning with whispers in her ear of, “You were fucking hot as hell. You could kill a man with one of your blow jobs,” followed by an instant drop into unconsciousness while drooling on her shoulder. With who I screwed, you had to give to not get your throat clawed open in your sleep. I thought I did damn good. I told Niko about it when sparring one day, because two entire sentences before sleep were excessive in my mind. I was tired, damn it. I was hoping he could suggest how to pare it down to one sentence…maybe four or five words.

Niko, who had a love, not a homicidal friend with benefits, more experience in sex, and a degree in psychology, gave me a lecture on something called postcoital intimacy, affection, and mutual bonding. My way took ten to fifteen seconds; his took thirty minutes minimum. I’d searched our place for whatever romance novels he had stashed away—I was not enabling my brother’s pussified ways—but I hadn’t found any yet. No way he got it out of a psychology textbook. Men wrote some of those textbooks, and no man would write that. That was insane.

But it turned out that pucks did me one better. They didn’t go to sleep. While lili and lilitu curled on the floor in exhausted slumber, drowsy lions on the Serengeti, the pucks bragged and tried to murder one another, and sometimes they did both at once.

“Good Queen Bess, the Virgin Queen, my muscular ass!”

They’d all thrown off their clothes long ago and now were lunging for equally discarded weapons littering the floor between the sleeping lions. That had Niko and me sailing over the bar, as none of the other pucks had an interest in stopping fratricide. Clone-icide. Whatever you wanted to call it.

“She was no virgin, but I pierced that dusty hymen long before you!”

I had a gun in each hand, arms extended to press the muzzles against two puck foreheads. “Drop the swords and go sit the fuck down. This establishment is losing patience with its customers, and when it does, it doesn’t refuse them service. It refuses them life. Got it?” They grumbled but gave up the swords and wandered toward the bar in search of more alcohol.

This example cut down on the fighting some, but not the bragging.

“Rasputin? I bought his penis in a jar off eBay. It wasn’t nearly as large as I remembered.”

“Pity, but absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Or the penis larger.”

“Thor? You lie. Thor has never been sober enough to get it up, and he prefers blond women with breasts larger than their heads.”

“Hell, yes, I rode with Butch and Sundance, in all the ways there are to ride. It’s a forever shame about the Bolivian army. I almost choked up when I escaped out the back with the pesos. Sad times. Good times. This drink is for you, compadres.”

“Damn straight, I’m still taking bets on Jimmy Hoffa. For ten thousand you get one guess on where I planted that fat bastard. For fifteen thousand I’ll throw in the cannoli he was eating when I popped him one.”

“Cleopatra? Definitely a man. Barely looked like a woman even when you were wearing wine goggles. I couldn’t believe Caesar never caught on. The kid? That was actually a thirty-year-old toothless dwarf Cleo bought in the market. Caesar thought he had the ugliest baby in Egypt.”

“D’Artagnan’s best work was always done with his other sword, and size-wise, it was actually equal to the one he used for duels.”

Niko circled the next potential mass murder—five pucks squabbling—waiting to see if it got out of hand.

“Did I mention at the last reunion that I screwed Lady Godiva?”

“No, you credit-thieving maggot, I did.”

“No, I did, and I have a lock of her hair to prove it.”

“I didn’t care for her. Stuck-up bitch with the worst horsehair wig in the hemisphere. Now let’s talk Eve…”

“Eve? You are an idiot. I was there. That whole show was mine, all mine. It was hilarious. I kept pelting her with apples and shouting, ‘Eat it! Come on, you apple-hating nudist. Eat it!’ Then I’d hiss a few times from the bushes to throw suspicion elsewhere. I thought I was going to lose my pitching arm before I finally hit her in that incredibly empty head with the tenth one, but she at last took a bite. I know I gave her a fruit phobia for the rest of her life— not to mention death, menses, and painful childbirth, but, more important, that bet was won. I had Michael, Gabriel, Azrael, and Lucifer handing over their flaming swords and then their other flaming swords, if you get my drift and I know you do. Now, that was a party. I’ll bet their daddy paddled their asses good when they dragged themselves home a week later.”

And on and on it went. The fighting simmered down, though, until it was only reminiscing.

Niko and I returned to back behind the bar. It felt marginally safer, and why the hell weren’t they putting their clothes back on? “Suicide pact?” I said casually, wishing I’d remained half-drunk, but life’s not that easy.

“I’m thinking long and hard about it,” Niko confirmed. He continued to listen to the pucks, as if anyone had a choice, and looking both fascinated and appalled by turns. History was a sacred subject to him. But when only liars are telling the tales, what did you believe? Not the Garden of Eden guy, that I knew. There were no angels, only peris…the seed of the myth.

One of the pucks appeared in front of the bar directly before me as I was handing Niko a leftover hundred- dollar bill that a puck had tried to shove under his apron about an hour ago. As brotherly emotions went, he was less thankful than he could’ve been. When I was done, I smacked a glass down in front of the looming new puck. “What’ll it be?” But there was no drink order. This puck had something entirely different on his mind.

“There is something wrong with you.”

It was one of the pucks Robin had introduced…Pan. I remembered because of the tattoo on the side of his neck. Π—the Greek letter for P. He was old. I’d never considered Goodfellow old, as I’d never had anyone to measure against him but Hob, and I’d been too busy at the time trying to kill that bastard to make any comparisons. Now, though, with all of them gathered in one place, I could get a sense of the younger versus the older. They might be supernatural clones, but real, earned experience over cloned experience told. Their bragging was much less believable, and I’d have thought it impossible, but they were actually more annoying. Much louder too. Those made Robin seem subtle in comparison.

This one…staring at me…had hair so short it was nearly buzzed, leather wristbands, a scar that ran from his right eyebrow into his hair by three inches, already had a knuckle-duster knife in his hand, and he was old. He felt like Goodfellow felt—as if he’d known the world a thousand times over and conquered wide regions of it more than once before tossing them aside, bored. Old in the supernatural world didn’t mean feeble; it meant powerful and, in this case, aware.

Of me. And wasn’t that incredibly bad luck for him?

His eyes didn’t blink. “Wrong. Base. Vile.” He studied me. “I know you.” The green darkened to almost black in surprise and disgust as his pupils dilated. “I know.” He showed his teeth as he spit,