Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(11)
“It would be for my own good to let people be slaughtered when we might be able to stop it?” His duster went neatly on a hook he’d hammered into the wall beside the door the day we’d moved in. He’d done the same at every place we’d lived since I could remember. I had an image flash through my brain of a solemn blond nine-year-old hitting a nail into a stained plaster wall, using the heel of a shoe for a hammer.
Everything in its place. I felt the corners of my lips quirk at the memory. We all developed coping mechanisms. Niko imposed order on chaos. I imposed chaos on those not fast enough to get out of my way. Whatever worked.
I flopped on the couch and propped my feet up on the cheap coffee table. “This is New York City. Someone is always being slaughtered. We’re in a big enough mess as it is. If our calendar was wide open, I’d have told you.”
Possibly, but I wouldn’t have dropped a fifty on that bet. It wasn’t exclusively the big brothers who leaned toward the overprotective range. Little brothers, we gave as good as we f*cking got.
With the Wolves, revenants, boggles, lamias, succubae, incubi, and on and on in the city, slaughter was on the menu every day. Although they killed to eat. They just happened to eat people. What we called slaughter they called dinner. The paien serial killers were different. They might take a nibble here and there, they might play at having a snack, but when it came down to it—they killed because they liked it. It got their supernatural dicks hard. No other reason. That made them less predictable, which made them harder to catch. They also tended to be—at least Sawney had—batshit f*cking crazy. And that had made him almost impossible to catch.
To me it didn’t make much difference. Slaughter for food, slaughter for fun—NYC was one giant combo buffet and toy shop and it was always open for business. We could work for free twenty-four/seven and that wouldn’t change. If it was selfish not to want my brother to join the body count, then I was fine with that. Selfish was good. Selfish was great. Stamp it on my forehead. God knew the Peace Corps wasn’t calling my name.
“But our calendar isn’t open thanks to Grimm and his Bae kiddies.” The new Auphe—if fully grown man-eaters could be called kiddies. “We’re full up. You’re full up. So, ream me out all you want. You’re not changing my mind: it was for your own good,” I emphasized with all the stubbornness I could scrape up. And that was a lot. “If we could whittle your conscience down to a normal size, you’d agree.”
My feet were pushed off the table with a light swat. “What about Ishiah’s conscience? Our two to your one.” He frowned down at me.
“Ishiah has enough conscience to tell me about it, but thanks to some peri rule that sounds like bullshit to me, he doesn’t have enough to do anything about it himself.” I took off my holster to lay it and the guns on the duct-taped cushion beside me. I raised my eyes to the narrowed ones fixed on me. We had the same gray eyes, but I hadn’t to this day managed to pull off that look of solar-flare-heated annoyance yet. I grumped and put up my hands to preempt a further teachable moment about consciences. “Hey, I get it. The * threw a body at us. That’s not random. Booked calendar or not, we’ve been called out. He’s after us for some reason or another. Grab the hip waders because we’re in the shit now. I’m on board, okay already?”
He was silent for a moment, arms folded, blond hair pulled back so tightly to fall in a braid down his back that it gave me a headache just looking at him. “The body . . . it was a woman.”
“I know.” I wasn’t blind. Sawney Beane had killed women too . . . pregnant women, young women, little girls. Being the more reasonable sex didn’t exclude you from an early death. And every one of their bodies had been a nightmare, the same as the body tonight. “Even though I’d like to keep your anal-retentive ass alive doesn’t mean I don’t feel when I see them.” Innocent bystanders weren’t always annoying. Sometimes they were slaughtered lambs, bleeding their lives away in crimson pain, horror, and despair.
“I know,” I repeated, picking at a corner of the duct tape. I wasn’t defensive. I knew my brother. That’s not what he was thinking.
“I realize that.” His jaw tightened. I wasn’t defensive, but he was. “That little girl Sawney killed. I remember that you found it . . . difficult, although you tried to hide it. Now on top of that, we have your gates making you overconfident combined with your pathological need to guard me like an entire pack of attack dogs against even the knowledge of a new supernatural serial killer.”
That wasn’t the pot calling the kettle black, not at all. I let it go as I summed it up for him. “Be careful?”
He relaxed. “Yes, Cal. Be careful.”
On two of the three, no problem, I’d go along with them. On the attack dog issue, that wasn’t going to change. Sawney hadn’t been that long ago. He had come close to killing all of us, Niko included. The memory had stuck with me. The little girl had stayed with me, too. I still had her sunshine-colored barrette tucked away in a drawer, I thought with a sharp pang.
It wasn’t a good idea. Sentiment for unknown victims either made you miserable or got you killed in our line of work. I should throw away that barrette. Yeah, I would.
Someday.
There was more of my lingering human. More of that identity crisis. Huh. I was kind of surprised. Maybe I needed a new T-shirt to join my banned supposedly offensive ones: 30% HUMAN. FDA APPROVED.