Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(12)
No sense in worrying about it either way. I yawned and levered up off the couch. After another jaw-cracking yawn, I said, “Bed. Make me a happy-face pancake for breakfast. Put me in the mood for serial killer hunting tomorrow.”
“I have one use for a spatula and you and it does not involve pancakes. Would you like me to explain it in detail?”
“I’m lazy, Cyrano, not stupid.” I grabbed my holster, left the jacket on the couch and automatically tugged Niko’s long braid as I circled him and headed past the kitchen on one side, the training area on the other and down the hall to my bedroom.
I heard the snort from a nose seen on many a Greek statue. Hawklike and noble in size. It came from a stray Northern Greek horn-dog who sweet-talked a girl from our Rom clan centuries ago. That’s also where Niko’s dark blond hair entered a dusky-skinned, black-haired gene pool. Just as my decidedly non-Rom pale skin came from the Auphe swimming in my blood.
The difference was Nik would be considered pure Rom to the Vayash clan—if he turned his back on me . . . or, as they’d said, preferably put me down like a rabid dog. Put me out of their misery, because I would never be Rom. They’d made that clear. I would never even be close to human, never anything less than an “abomination.”
Too bad they didn’t know sooner or later if Grimm had his way there’d be a new hybrid race of Auphe sweeping the earth, worse than the originals, and all wearing—if the universe had any sense of humor—Tshirts of their own that read ABOMINATION NATION.
One could hope.
3
Cal
Present Day
The next morning there were no smiley face pancakes waiting for me. There was only Niko wearing sweatpants and already finished up with his two-hour-long workout over in the gym-designated area of the space. As he toweled the sweat off his neck and chest, one of the heavy bags still swinging from what had probably been a roundhouse kick, I went to the kitchen cabinet to dig out a box of cereal. Ignoring the high stools, I boosted up to sit on the breakfast counter, my usual spot, and ate a handful of Captain Crunch dry. Cooking was for wusses who couldn’t fuel homicidal fury on pure sugar alone.
“Why aren’t you at the university?” I asked while chewing. Manners and me, we weren’t much on a speaking basis. “Don’t you have an eight a.m. class on Tuesdays to teach about boring dead guys?”
“Normally. I’m surprised you knew. It means so much to me that you take an interest in my work,” he said dryly, dumping his towel in the workout hamper.
“As often as you’ve kept me from being one of those boring dead guys, I feel I should give a little back.” I tossed down another handful of sugar. That was the great thing about the life span in our career: you rarely lived long enough to develop diabetes from poor nutrition. “So? What’s up then?”
“We have a business appointment, which naturally you’ve forgotten as your brain has all the retention qualities of a sieve. We’ve twenty minutes before we have to leave. I get the first shower since you’re still grazing your way through endless vistas of sugarcane.”
“You used to say I was smart.” Sieve, my ass, and what was wrong with Captain Crunch? It was the perfect food.
“You are smart when you can be bothered. You, little brother, can rarely be bothered,” he said with a Death Valley dryness to his voice.
He had me there. As the bathroom door closed behind him, I slid down, my feet hitting the floor, and moved to check the calendar, the note taped to my door, and then down at the neat marker writing across the box of cereal in my hand. Yeah, Nik tried to keep me updated on these things, but I was hopeless.
I finished up the half-full box of cereal and thought about it. There was Grimm, a jack-in-the-box you never knew when was going to pop up and spill your guts on the floor. There was this new serial killer who dropped bodies like kids dropped water balloons. Now a job too?
I checked the calendar and the notation again. Eh, what the hell? This wasn’t like me telling Ishiah to forget a freebie-of-the-week on Jack the Rippers. This was only the Kin. Granted, they could lick their own junk and run the supernatural crime in NYC at the same time, but they were still the Kin. The day we couldn’t handle the werewolf mafia with one hand while jacking off with the other was the day it was time to hang it up and get out the walker. Our multitasking beat theirs every time.
Twenty minutes and thirty seconds later—Niko loved his schedules; he’d have made a great fascist—we were moving down the sidewalk. He was looking for a cab. I was looking for something more important and I spotted mine first. The blessed hot dog cart. If Leonardo da Vinci had painted it, light would’ve spilled from the heavens to radiate around it in an ethereal luminous glow . . . and the guy hawking the dogs would’ve looked a little like a woman under his beard, but art was art.
That is to say, I didn’t give a crap about it. I just wanted my dog.
“More onions,” I told the man as he spooned them on top of the mustard and relish. “Seriously, dump them on there.” The guy huffed in annoyance but loaded it up with triple onions and handed it over.
As we walked on, I took a bite. New York may be low on ambience, but it knew how to do a dog right. As I took an enthusiastic second bite, Niko asked, “Why? I don’t have anything approaching your sense of smell and even I am offended.”