Doubletake

They thought wrong.

Robin, though, had always been loyal, always had our backs. We’d be piss-poor friends if we didn’t do the same. I sat at the table and grabbed the sub, taking a large mouthful. “So what’s the job?” I asked as I chewed— the Miss Manners of the monster-maimer crew.

Niko agreed with me silently by sitting down and drinking the tea that they probably cleaned gutters with in China. Both of us looked expectantly at Goodfellow. He exhaled, folded his arms, shifted from one foot to another… nervous tics—all the things the ever-smooth, fast-talking puck didn’t do. This was looking worse and worse by the second. After several more twitches, he finally managed to get it out.

“It’s my family reunion.

“The whole of the puck race here in New York City.

“Tomorrow.”

I choked on the bite of meatball, feeling the suck of it into my airway, and halfway hoping it would do the favor of killing me before I could cough it out. Niko gave me an unconcerned smack on the back, which only had the hunk of meat lodging deeper, while murmuring, “We should have asked for more money.”

“You haven’t asked for any money yet,” Goodfellow pointed out.

“It doesn’t change the fact that we should have and will ask for more.” Niko slapped a hand between my shoulder blades again, saying, “One more cough and if that doesn’t do the trick, Robin gives you the Heimlich. The key concept in Heimlich being ‘from behind.’”

I promptly expelled the chunk of Gino’s finest onto the table and welcomed the darkness that had begun to slice across my vision. If it was dark, I couldn’t see. And I didn’t want to see…pucks, everywhere. All identical, wavy brown hair, sly green eyes, smug smirks, rampaging egos, and an appetite for sex that made Caligula seem like a hundred-year-old virginal nun. One puck had taken a few years to get used to. More than one? Hundreds? Maybe thousands? All exaggerating, lying, stealing, trying to screw anything that couldn’t outrun them…

The end of the world had come, and not with a bang…okay, yeah, with a bang. It could be lots of them—the largest planet-wide orgy to date. If that was true, I was eating my gun right then and there.

“How many of them?” I said hoarsely, taking the tea Niko passed me to soothe my abraded throat. It tasted like donkey piss. The way the night was going I wasn’t surprised.

The puck seesawed a hand back and forth. “It’s hard to say. That’s the point to the reunion. We count how many of our race are left. If the amount is too low, then we have a lottery and the schmucks with the unlucky numbers have to reproduce to make sure we don’t go the way so many other of the paien— the supernaturals’ word for their kind—races have. Extinction. We meet every thousand years. We all hate it, but it’s a necessary evil if we want to keep the magnificence that is Puck alive on earth.” He took the same hand and opened a drawer to fish out a checkbook. “My best guess: between seventy-five and a hundred will show. See? Not so bad. When you live pretty much forever you don’t need that many to keep a race intact. So? Fifteen thousand dollars? Does that sound good?”

“Thirty,” Niko corrected. If Robin was offering fifteen it was worth at least two to four times as much. “And you haven’t mentioned precisely what you want us to do.”

“Babysit mostly.” He handed over the check with a sharkish smile that said Niko should’ve asked for fifty thousand. “All our well-deserved high self-esteems”—unbearable egos from hell—“in one place tends to lead to disagreements… some verbal abuse… small fights… attempted murders…large riots. That sort of thing. You’ll be like bouncers, keeping everyone in check, the two of you alone. You’re the only two in the city who can do this. We’ll meet at the Ninth Circle, get it over with in one night, tomorrow night, and then everything can go back to normal.”

“What about everyone else in the bar? The Wolves, lamia, Amadan…the usual. We saw them running like bats out of hell on the way over here. I guess we don’t have to worry about them.” I shoved Niko’s poisonous tea back at him.

“Indeed. No worries there. No one else will be at the bar, as no one else will be in the city. No one but humans.” Robin’s smirk had turned into something darker—beyond old, from the impenetrable forests that swallowed travelers whole, and from under a sky where the stars were the blood-tinged eyes of mad gods. “Every living paien creature will flee this place. They feel it.”

“They know.”

“The Panic has come.”

3

“On the roof two blocks down, did you see it?”

He meant as we’d dumped the car several blocks away in a garage we couldn’t afford—there was blackmail involved—and walked the rest of the way home.

I’d seen it, but Niko didn’t stop testing me. It was his way of keeping me sharp, focused, and alive.

We’d left Robin’s over forty minutes ago and I was more exhausted from listening to him go on and on than from the fight with the kishi. Sitting on the edge of the tub in our bathroom, I continued to swab the puncture wounds on my thigh with peroxide. Then I’d move on to the antibiotic cream plus an antibiotic shot. You didn’t know what in the hell was living inside the mouths of half the monsters we came across, and I doubted the CDC did either. I had the immune system of my Auphe half, which was to say the best damn immune system around, but Niko was Niko. Big brothers were big brothers, and I took the same precautions a full human would, necessary or not.

There were a few advantages to not being human. More than I’d used to think, and more than I should think. But that’s who I was now and I was fine with that. Better than fine.

I answered Niko’s question, and it wasn’t an unusual one. Anything new in our world was to be immediately suspected and watched carefully. “I saw it. Five blocks back on the roof. You know I saw it or you would’ve picked me up by the scruff of my neck and shown it to me while swatting my ass with your katana.” I applied the cream and accepted the tape from my brother to secure the bandage around my leg. “Something metal. Steel maybe, and black too. It didn’t move and I couldn’t make out any details, but it wasn’t there this morning when we went by.”

Niko handed me the syringe and I injected my thigh muscle with the strongest antibiotic you could buy from a guy who had set up a pharmacy in his van. “I am as proud as if you’d actually graduated high school.”

He’d homeschooled me, the ass, and his graduation standards had been higher than any public or private school. I’d simply done my best to forget most of it. “Okay, a dark metal thing someone hauled up to the roof. Big deal. We’ll keep our eyes open, but I bet it’s just someone’s hideous idea of art, or a nerd making armor for the next big Ren Faire. I’m more concerned about the Panic.” “Concerned” was a good euphemism for metaphorically shitting my pants.

Goodfellow had been at our sides for three or four years now. He was the most loyal son of a bitch around, to us anyway, but every encounter with him put you one step closer to a mental hospital. I’d seen him naked three times, accidentally, and I didn’t give a shit which way the guy swung (he swung all ways…he swung in directions and dimensions scientists hadn’t plotted yet) as long as he didn’t hit on me.

And after seeing what he had a license to carry, I was kissing the ground, grateful he hadn’t made a move on me. Even if he hadn’t been rich, the man would need his own personal tailor to accommodate what he was hauling around. He did chase Niko in the beginning, but as much as I loved my brother, he was on his own there. And good luck. Every story Robin told was about himself, a threesome, a foursome, an orgy, and onward to things that would have jaded porn stars mystified if not terrified. The themes were pretty blatant—ego and sex.

I could take it, though, because he was a friend, a comrade in arms, and all that shit, but one hundred of him? If Niko wouldn’t have taken a picture with his phone, I’d have been curled up in the fetal position and sucked my thumb. Worse yet was how there were a hundred or so of them. Robin had always been evasive about how pucks procreated and I’d had no inclination whatsoever to push him on it. An all-male race who were completely identical to one another…a curious thing, but nowhere near curious enough to ask him or hear the answer. This time we got the answer whether we wanted it or not.

I absolutely did not.