Doubletake

feathers all day from your dead ass isn’t my idea of a good time.”

Jackdaw stayed a bird, one that bowed his head to hide his eyes and the tears dripping from them. I didn’t know birds could cry. “This is what I am,” I said flatly to Kalakos. “Whether I try to back down from the paien’s insults and attacks or I am this, I am always treated the same once they know. Terror or attempted slaughter. I learned that a long time ago.”

Kalakos watched as Dodger rapidly turned the pages of the book. “How long since you were able to try to back down?”

“Sixteen. The day I escaped the Auphe.” The two years of captivity I didn’t know. I didn’t remember if I’d backed down or fought. I did know one thing: I might have backed down in the beginning, but I must have learned to fight. Or I wouldn’t have made it back with teeth coated in black Auphe blood.

The pages of Dodger’s book were flying faster and faster. It was a good indication that this wasn’t a conversation he wanted to be a part of and as soon as he was rid of us the happier he’d be. “Humans only notice once in a while that I’m not…right. But I don’t live in a human world anymore. It wouldn’t be safe for them. Eventually…” I shrugged.

“Everything is not eventual,” Niko refuted sharply.

“But eventually everything is,” Kalakos said. It wasn’t a counter to Niko. It was as if he were saying it to himself.

“There is nothing. There is no Janus.” The crappy cockney accent had disappeared and the voice was that of a bird, a harsh caw, but an improvement. “I am sorry. I am sorry. Please. Please.” The tears had slowed but not stopped. He’d been about to scream my identity to every monster in the place, and I recognized crocodile tears whether they came out of the eyes of a bird or not.

Sometimes I took off my mask and showed who I was, could be, would be.

There were times it was necessary…like with a giant screeching tattletale of a blackbird.

There were times it was purely instinctual.

And there were times I enjoyed it.

“Dodger.” I leaned closer and picked up a fallen black feather, ran my finger along it. “I’ve been looking into goose-down mattresses. Good for insomnia. But expensive as hell.” I considered him before smiling—a sociopathic shopper finding a bargain. “But you…you’d be free. And better than cable when I have you pluck your own feathers out one by one”—I let the one I was holding drift away—“…by one.”

Dodger dived his beak back into the book, turned a few more pages, and then: “Here. It says here. There are commands or spells or phrases, but none specific in a way they can be written down for the sake of history. They are…” He peered at the word, puzzled, as a last fake tear fell from the end of his beak. “Mutable? Indefinable? Erratic?” He hunched. “I am sorry, Lord Auphe. That is the best I can decipher.”

Lord Auphe. Now I did feel like shit, crocodile tears or not. He was afraid; I knew it was true. The tears were an act; the fear wasn’t. Almost everyone who knew the truth was afraid. I grabbed Robin’s wrist and took off his five-trillion-dollar watch, shiny and gleaming as they came, and tossed it on the book. “Sell it. Buy Mrs. Jackdaw something nice. And keep your mouth shut until we’re gone or a jackdaw mattress won’t have a chance to hock anything.”

As I was turning to leave, with Goodfellow bitching and snarling about his watch before demanding the location of other book stalls with more helpful information, I saw it, a black blot overhead. Bad things come from beneath, beside, and overhead. I didn’t skip a location and hadn’t since I was fourteen.

It hadn’t been there before. It had been brick shadowed in the gloom of torches and lanterns, but now it was pure black with the sheen of dirty oil. “Goodfellow, stop your bitching. What’s that?” I pointed up.

“Zeus’s pubic lice. We took up a collection. They were supposed to be exterminated three weeks ago or I never would’ve brought us here.” He already had his sword drawn. “The blood. The blood our clothes are soaked in. It woke them. They sleep in the side tunnels. It’s the manananggals.” It was the sound a cat would make coughing up a hairball or Salome would make coughing up a Great Dane, but apparently it was serious. Goodfellow was already moving back toward the entrance. “I’m going to eviscerate every last one of those lazy exterminators. Run. Run!”

Strange, twisted heads lifted from their bargaining to watch with suspicion and nervousness as we tore through the market, trusting that if Goodfellow thought it was bad after facing Hephaestus and his crew, it was plenty goddamn bad.

“Manananggals,” Niko said as we ran, his own sword out, “are descended from the ancestors of bats. An offshoot. They’re similar to vampires, although vampires are descended from Homo sapiens, humans. They suck blood through a hardened, long, tube-shaped tongue, sometimes even taking the blood directly from the heart if they strike deeply enough. They form in colonies as real bats do, but are much larger. They—”

A dark olive-skinned hand came up to smack the back of Niko’s head like the countless times my brother had smacked mine. Kalakos growled, “We are about to die. Could we do it without the enlightening voice-over? Khul!”

“I still hate you, Kalakos,” I said, “but that is a memory I’ll keep to my dying day.” Which might be this day.

I looked up to see the stream of silent wings in rippling motion, a river of night streaming over our heads. Niko’s general pissiness at having his lecture interrupted was apparent. “Fine. One last fact. They don’t attack one at a time or even two or three. The entire colony will swarm down on us the same as a school of piranha. They will blanket us. There’s no way from beneath that. They’ll suck us dry in seconds.”

Jesus. Could this day get any worse? And dying in a pink shirt was still in my future. Goddamn it.

We were halfway to the arch when I raised my eyes again. One of them hit the wall, tumbled, and, before it straightened, its flight let me see more than I wanted. What fresh hell was this? They were cut in half at the waist. No legs. Only a waist and a heavy sac of intestines that should be cascading out…but weren’t.

“Holy shit, why are they sliced in half? What keeps their guts from falling out? That is disgusting. Niko…”

“If we live, you can Google it when we get home. I don’t want to weigh you down with so much information that it slows your running.” If we lived…I was currently on Niko’s shit list, which made one not that invested in living.

“I was listening. I didn’t do anything. It was Kalakos. I marvel at every fact that falls from your lips, I swear.”

“You’d best hope and pray we do die.” One drop of vengeance in an ocean of head slaps I’d received over the years and Niko was holding a grudge. After the past two days, the calming effects of his meditation were taking a beating.

It didn’t matter. It looked as if my suggested hopes and prayers were coming true. Now I heard them, the rustle of their wings. They were coming down, the shroud to cover the dead—and we were the dead. The size of a medium beagle, they had pinpoint eyes of milky white, ears huge and pointed, snub muzzles pouring gray mucus, clawed hands at the juncture of the wings, and a curved dagger of a tongue plenty long enough to reach my heart. I lifted the Glock, but it was hopeless. I could take out ten Cyclops, but these were in the hundreds. Three swords and a fast reload and we were screwed all the same.

Until it came through the arch we’d been running for: a flying serpent with intensely blue scales, black wings, four taloned feet and legs curled under its belly, a sleek head with a sunburst of black spines, and eyes that rivaled the sun at noon.

It also breathed fire. We’d had some serious run-ins with fire today. We dived to the slime-covered floor as the flames of an entire forest fire turned the colony of bloodsuckers above into ash. It continued with its flight and smashed through the far wall, and here was hoping this was not the day for a scheduled tour or that ticket was going to be really worth the price.

“That was a dragon,” I told the puck accusingly. The blackened ash continued to fall.

“I’m aware.”

“You said there were no such things as dragons.”

“There aren’t.” He tried to wipe the ash from his face and hair, making it worse. “And don’t ask. Just embrace a little mystery in your life and that you have that life left to embrace anything at all.”

That wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t done.…I mean, shit, a dragon. Who as a kid doesn’t want to believe in dragons? But I didn’t get a chance to push it. Dodger, puppy-dog tears and a watch he could trade for a condo,