“Impossible wretched
It hadn’t taken Goodfellow more than fifteen minutes after meeting me to know what I was. This one had taken an hour or three, but it didn’t make a difference. He knew and, unlike Robin, he seemed to hold my extinct race’s crimes against me. If he did, who was to say how the rest of the Panic would react? This one had completely no reservations about what he would and did attempt to do. He came across the bar at me blade ready with a swiftness that would make the kishi from last night seem as if they were running in mud.
Then again, the kishi had been as challenging as fighting off a pack of Chihuahuas. And this puck was no baby to be socialized and adopted. There was no free ride for him. No shred of conscience to hold me back.
It was the high point of the night for me.
I buried Robin’s poniard that Niko had tucked underneath with the glasses into one green eye. I felt the point scraping the back of the inner skull before I flipped him over the counter to land dead and heavy on the floor. Niko tipped over a pile of stacked black aprons and towels on the shelf behind us to cover the body and it was as if it had never happened. In a room full of now-drunk tricksters, it was a magic trick all its own. Pan had been there. Pan was gone. No one noticed where, when, how, or who. Oblivious, they kept drinking and shouting over one another for their bullshit to be heard.
Except for our puck.
Goodfellow, recognized by the
“Pan happened,” Niko answered flatly. “You didn’t say they might know about Cal, or what they would do if they did.”
I reached down, jerked the Spanish dagger free from its flesh-and-bone sheath, wiped it on my bar apron, and slid it across the counter to Robin. “‘Wrong. Base. Vile.’” My hair hung forward—still no ponytail for me, thanks to Niko’s father—and I grinned blackly. “‘Impossible wretched thing.’ Practically compliments. He didn’t know me half as well as he thought he did.”
He took his poniard and put it away. “Pan is…was one of the oldest. If any would recognize your partial heritage, he would be the only one. I should’ve watched him more closely. I apologize.” Swiveling, he took in the crowd and sighed. “Thank Zeus it’s nearly over. I’ve never been at a reunion sober and monogamous. They’re somewhat tedious in this state.” He sounded relieved when he said, “But they are all finally intoxicated enough to suffer through the lottery. We’ll end this now. Again, I am sorry—for what he said and what he tried to do. You know none of it is true, kid.” He turned back to give an insistent and reassuring poke of his finger to my chest before he was gone again into the crowd, handing out coins that were each stamped with a number.
None of it? No. I didn’t fool myself. Some of it was true—most of it was true, in fact—but we all have our character flaws. You learn to deal with them. I had. I dropped another apron down to cover Pan’s head. That was one dealt with right there: covering up the evidence that was the result of an impossible wretched thing. “It was self-defense,” Niko said, low—not that any of the pucks could hear anything above themselves. “I know except for the scar, hair, and tattoo, he looked exactly like Robin, but he wasn’t. However connected they might be thousands of years ago genetically, he wasn’t Goodfellow. He was nothing like him.”
He was singing to the choir. I had no qualms about what I’d done. Pan had been an asshole. “No, he wasn’t like Robin,” I agreed without a shred of guilt. He was more like me, although not enough or he might still be alive, but that wouldn’t be something that would ease Niko’s mind to hear, so I didn’t say it. Instead, I rested my chin in my hand and proceeded to watch the lottery. “Wanna take bets on whether or not Robin gets knocked up?”
He didn’t. But from the outraged howls that all but shook the walls, the numbers of about twenty-five pucks came up. Picked out of a large intricate and ancient bronze bowl, Goodfellow held each duplicate coin up to be seen. As the livid shouts continued, I asked, “Does it make your brain hurt? Seeing so many of them so much alike?”
“It does. It’s not meant for the human eye to see. Identical twins and triplets are startling, but this? If there were only fifty of them, you could call them pentacontuplets or demihectuplets or, if going by the Latin, quinquagintuplets. But seventy, that curious to search my brain for the term I’m not.” For Niko that indicated a weariness usually unseen in him. An unknown father, the Panic, serving drinks while standing on a dead puck—I think we’d both had our fill of this day.
But it was over. The pucks were dressing and leaving, some glum at their reproduction duty, other celebrating at dodging the bullet. The lili and lilitu were doing the same with their raincoats. We’d broken up only ten fights in all throughout the night and killed one puck. Taking into account the situation, I realized it could’ve gone much worse. I’d told Nik I needed to get laid, but looking back on the entire reunion, I might go the other way and never need to get laid again.
Goodfellow joined us to watch them go. “If they avoid their obligation to reproduce, what punishment do they receive?” Niko asked.
Robin finished off a last glass of scotch. “Oh, we hunt them down and kill them. If they don’t do their duty to keep the race alive, they’re not much good to us. It’s the only puck crime punishable by death. Now that I think about it, it’s the only crime we have at all. The first, last, and single law.”
“How many times have you lost the lottery and doubled the pleasure, doubled the fun?” I asked with caustic curiosity.
Robin was equally amused and insulted by the question. “Never. There are tricksters and there are tricksters and then there is me. Losing the lottery isn’t in my future. Now, thank you for the assistance and, as a token of appreciation, I’ll take care of disposing of Pan and calling in three or four cleaning crews for the rest of it—the kind the cops call in to clean up sites of multiple murders, as there aren’t enough mops in the building to handle what’s on that floor.” He set his phone on the bar, ready. “Consider it a tip for Pan. He always was a bastard. Loved watching the lions eating the Christians in the Coliseum. A definite prick, and not the good kind that makes you want to whip out your measuring tape.” He waved a hand. “Go, and, Niko, feel free to keep all the dollar bills they stuffed down your apron.” There were wads of them. All pucks, not only Goodfellow, had a thing for my brother.
But that was a discussion for, well, not now. I took the opportunity offered and was out the door with Nik on my heels before Goodfellow had a chance to change his mind, which he frequently did when it came to physical labor. “You are splitting those tips with me, though, right?” I asked Niko as the door slammed behind us.
“As frequently as I was groped tonight, all for the greater good and continuance of the puck race…no. You don’t get a dime. I’m donating it to the spay-and-neuter program at the local shelter. It seems appropriate.”
We were still on the block where the Ninth Circle was located—a decidedly nonhuman block. It was rare that one wandered down this way. What they didn’t know, they sensed: Here there be monsters. And with all the other supernatural creatures gone, it was empty as I’d ever seen it. “You are such a greedy bast…
I’d seen the glitter of metal and the flicker of movement all at once, leaping straight down from the top of the building we were walking past. I threw myself to one side, Nik to the other, and it landed directly between us. The concrete of the street cracked into pieces beneath it.
The force and the weight to cause that…I was already unloading my Desert Eagle’s normal hollow-points to replace them with explosive rounds especially made for my gun and especially made for this situation. I landed on my hip just as I jammed the new clip home and then was I loaded but locked? Hell, no. I was ready to fire. It had taken barely a second, and I thought that would give me time to get a good aim on what was pissed off that it hadn’t been invited to the party.
I was wrong. A second wasn’t long enough. It was already lunging through the air and about to drop on top of me. All I still saw was the sheen of metal, but, frankly, I didn’t care what it was made of except for what I could best use against it. I rolled flat on my back, aimed the Eagle straight up, and emptied the clip, all eight rounds. I closed my eyes. At that close proximity, I had no desire to be blinded by the small explosions. The only way I knew it had worked was that nothing landed on me to squash me to a thin paste on the concrete.
My face was burned; I could feel the hot, tight pain of it, but that fell into the column of “shit that can wait.” I opened my eyes, sat up, and saw it, for the first time, really saw it as it stood. It was shaped like a man, more or less, but it was metal, and not any kind I’d seen. There were scales shaped like the head of a spear but at least two feet long and one foot wide, and they looked to be encrusted with dried blood, and in the thin cracks between the metal plates there was a red-hot substance that I’d swear was lava. There was the faintest smell of sulfur to it, but
