Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(89)
Not that we shared the fraternal fondness out loud. How manly would that be?
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard that all before. If adults heard lullabies when they slept, Niko’s admonishments would be mine. I shook my leg again, then shot another Kishi that was bounding down the side of the next building, which was equally as dilapidated as the first, putting three bullets between his blazing silver eyes. They shone brighter than any streetlights in this part of town . . . until the Kishi’s life seeped away and left only the dull gray of death. I felt bad for the Kishi—almost—but they had turned a block that had once hosted scavenging homeless, thriving drug dealers and sullen hookers into a desolate wasteland. I didn’t have a preference for one over the other, Kishi or human. The mayor wanted the city cleaned up. The Kishi Clan was doing the job one block at a time . . . even if it meant eating quite a few people.
Were those people good people? If I knew anything, I knew that these days I wasn’t in the position to make the call on whether certain people were worth saving or leaving to the predators. That I left up to Nik. I simply stepped over their bodies and went on with the job.
Regardless of whether they were good or evil, those people belonged, whether they knew it or not, to the Kin. The Kin, the werewolf mafia of New York City, weren’t pleased to be sharing their money or their snacks with Johnny-come-lately preternatural hyenas from the depths of . . . um . . . I should’ve paid attention to where those depths were—maybe Africa?—during the premission rundown, but Niko knew. That was enough. I didn’t think it mattered much. They were encroaching on Kin territory, and the wolves didn’t like that.
Unfortunately for the Kin, the Kishi, as a race, howled at a decibel level that would have any Kin wolf’s ears within ten blocks bleeding. Curled up in homicidal furry balls, moaning for their mommies, they hadn’t had much success in taking down the Kishi. Luckily for Niko, me, and our bank account, human ears couldn’t hear notes that high.
And although I wasn’t entirely human, my hearing was. That made us the go-to guys for this job. It had seemed easy from the hiring and from the half of our fee that was slapped into my palm—if it hadn’t been for Niko’s research, finding out the Kishi were highly intelligent, if extremely malevolent. That meant the adults were fair game, but the younger Kishi we had to pat on the head and then find a goddamn supernatural foster and rescue organization for murderous fur babies that would raise them right, socialize their asses, put rhinestone collars on them, and take them off our hands.
How many of those do you think were in the phone book? Nada? Good f*cking call.
But the bottom line was, it was all about family. The adult Kishi were taking down prey for their young—which luckily only numbered one at this point—feeding him or her, setting up a nest, claiming this place for their own. They were doing what evolution had bred them to do. They were killers—predators to the bone. They would slaughter anything they thought they had a chance of bringing down—but to give them credit, they looked after their family.
That’s where family became a bitch in yet another way. You eat people for your family; you piss off the Kin for your family; you die for your family.
As a random bastard had once said to me when I was a kid in the fourth grade as he demanded my sneakers and backpack, life isn’t fair. I agreed with him by punching his annoying teeth down his equally annoying throat. If that’s what the world wanted to be, I’d go along. I didn’t make the rules. I only played by them.
Since when?
Since never.
This wasn’t a schizophrenic voice—at least I hoped not—this was just my subconscious, or half of one. It was the bad thoughts people think—normal people, too—that they shouldn’t, don’t like to admit to, and don’t act on. But as I wasn’t normal and wasn’t exactly the Webster’s Dictionary definition of a person, my bad thoughts were much more bad than most, and I did sometimes act on them. Sometimes or often or frequently or very frequently, depending on my mood . . . no judgment needed or wanted.
They were almost as much of a bitch as family could be, with the inner squabbling, but I’d learned to mostly tune them out. Slowly they were beginning to taper off. Not because any part of me had less to say, but because two halves were becoming a whole. Two genetic and mental halves melding into one. Out of the way, Sybil, there was a new nearly cured crazy in town. Many psychotherapists would be proud of my progress—the ones who hadn’t met me and, if they had any sense, wouldn’t care to.
Soon I wouldn’t be good or bad. I’d only be me.
They’d have to invent a new adjective for that.
I shook my leg futilely one more time and exhaled in irritation at the molten mercury eyes, the dark red coat dappled with silver spots, the milk-white teeth—as large as a German shepherd’s adult teeth—that continued to gnaw at my thigh. “Three seconds and he’s a rug under the coffee table. Your move, Cyrano.”
Did Niko have a proud, hawklike nose? Yes, he did. Did I give him hell over it? What do you think?
I answered my still-ringing cell phone as I shot the last Kishi that leaped through a boarded-up window. Wood split, glass shattered, and bone splintered. The combination made for one dead Kishi whose stomach was rounded and full with its last meal, which, I was guessing, had been the last occupant of this street. From the hypodermic needle the parahyena coughed up in its dying throes, that meal had most likely been a tweaker.