Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(88)
Besides wild, ravenous turkeys, Rob has a dog (if you don’t have a dog, how do you live?)—one hundred pounds of Lab/Dane mix. She has the bark of twenty German Shepherds, a head the size of a horse’s, teeth straight out of a Godzilla movie, and the ferocious habit of hiding under the kitchen table and peeing on herself when strangers come by. By the way, she was adopted from a shelter. She was fully grown, already house-trained, and grateful as hell. Think about it next time you’re looking for a Rover or Fluffy. Rob also has two other dogs who are slightly more invested in keeping their food source alive.
For updates, teasers, music videos, deleted scenes, social networking, and various other extras, visit the author at www.robthurman.net.
Read on for an exciting excerpt from the next Cal Leandros novel,
DOUBLETAKE
by Rob Thurman
Coming in March 2012 from Roc.
Family . . . it is a bitch.
The thought drifted out of nowhere.
Or maybe it didn’t, considering my current situation. There was no denying that it was true. Everyone thought it sooner or later, didn’t they? If there’s only you, you’re good—lonely maybe, but good. You can’t fight with yourself. If there are two of you, it can still be good. Your options are limited. You make do and appreciate what you have, unless it’s the stereotypical evil-twin scenario. Then you aim for the goatee and blow his ass back to the alternate dimension he popped out of.
A Kishi hit my back. I flipped him over and put a bullet in the back of his head.
Yeah, normally two was a doable number. It was when you hit three and higher that things started to go bad. That’s when the bitching and moaning started, the pitting of one against another, the slights that no one forgot. No one could tell me that Noah didn’t pitch a few of his relatives kicking and screaming off the ark long before the floodwaters receded. It was no familial Love Boat and I believed that to my core.
Which brought up the question: Did that wrathful Old Testament God kill the sharks? I don’t think he did. You can’t drown a shark. I think they were snacking on biblical in-laws right and left. Noah, Noah, Noah . . .
I swung around and kicked the next Kishi in the stomach as I slammed another clip home before putting three in his gaping, lethally fanged mouth as he jumped again. It sounded easy, but considering the one I also had attached to my other leg, it was a pain in the ass.
Family-wise, I had no pains in the ass. I was lucky. I had one brother and he was a damn good one. Once we were on our own, I’d escaped the curse of screaming Thanksgiving dinners—now I had a turkey pizza; Niko had a vegan one. No bitter arguments around a Christmas tree—each year Niko gave me a new gun; I gave him a new sword. Absent was the awkward discovery of first cousins shacking up at the summer family get-togethers at the lake. I didn’t have to wait for summer. I saw my brother every day when he winged my sopping towel off the bathroom floor at my head or I asked—after the fact—if I could use his priceless seventeenth-century copy of some boring book no one but him and the author had read to prop up a wobbling coffee table.
Summer vacations . . . if you thought about it, what kind of people actually gathered together at a lake with cabins and all that crap anyway? Hadn’t they ever watched Friday the 13th? Jason? Hockey masks? Machetes? A good time for me, yeah—oh hell yeah—but not as much for the members of your average Priusdriving middle-class family.
Stupidity is everywhere.
The rest of my life might be challenging in some areas—like at the moment, with an adolescent Kishi either trying to eat my leg or hump it to the bare bone—but family? I knew I had that under control, had no reason to worry about it or dwell on it. I watched my brother’s back; he watched mine. We were a Hallmark card dipped in blood and made of unbreakable steel. I’d never had a doubt about my family and I never would—no matter what the Kishi, who had brought the topic to mind to begin with, were doing to annoy me on the general subject.
No, it was all smooth sailing, rather like this current job, until my cell phone rang. “Niko,” I said, shooting another adult Kishi with jaws stretched wide enough to swallow my entire head. He had leaped downward at me from a fire escape of a condemned tenement building long crumpled in on itself—no demolition crew needed. Gravity worked for free. “Can you get this one off my leg before I need sexual-assault counseling?”
Niko said to not kill the babies, although at one hundred and fifty pounds, “baby” was pushing the definition, but I was doing my best, more or less, to be a good boy. Although it would’ve been much easier to be a bad boy.
So very bad. So very fun.
For my brother, however, I reined in that part of me—that nonhuman half of me, choke-chaining it with a practiced grip. It was the price I paid to keep my brother satisfied. Bearing in mind that if it wasn’t for him, I’d be dead or sanity-challenged ten times over, I owed the man. I was also fond enough of his bossy anal-retentive ass to die for him.
More importantly, to kill for him.
And choose the darkest of roads to make that happen.
All that made ignoring a giant baby with an equally giant bite easy enough. As I fished for my cell, Niko was less than awed at my babysitting skills and said so. “If you can’t do a minimum of three tasks at once, I have failed you with all my training and instruction. I’d blame myself, but clearly it’s entirely your fault—your laziness, your total ineptitude.”