Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(55)
Being attacked by the dead will do that. A few years ago I would’ve been yakking my guts up over it, but you can, as they say, get used to anything. We’d fought enough things that while weren’t dead, they did smell that way or worse. It turned out the real thing wasn’t quite as bad as some of those. It wasn’t enjoyable, hell no, but at least I could fight now without taking a time-out to puke on the feet of whatever I was shooting or carving up at the time.
We did keep an all-but-industrial-strength soap on hand for these occasions though, as Niko’s hippy-churned natural crap wasn’t going to do the job—unless the job was making me smell like a bowl of zombie cereal with a healthy serving of goat milk over the top.
The cuts on my legs weren’t as bad as I expected. Whatever type of mist hid Jack’s inner jagged self, it had been enough of a barrier to keep me from impaling myself when I’d gated on top of him. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t thought about it, but a little impaling—the kind you survived, if not walked away from—was worth it to take out Jack. I’d have happily crawled away from the scene of the deed if it meant putting down that son of a bitch. But, as it was, the cuts were superficial. Some antibiotic ointment and I was good to go, no bandages required. I did have at least one cracked rib though, maybe two from where Jack had fallen on me as shockingly as if the moon had fallen from the sky. But I’d had cracked ribs before—and I’d have them again if we could get Jack out of the picture. Move carefully, don’t breathe too deeply, eat pain pills like M&M’s, and I’d be fine.
Bending my head down to scrub my wet hair with a towel, I stepped into the main room in time to hear Promise say, “But there are no such creatures as zombies.”
“You’re ruining a lot of fantasies by saying that,” I pointed out as I straightened and dropped the towel on the floor. “Don’t get between a geek and a good apocalypse. They’ll probably kill you quicker than Jack would.”
Promise turned her head from where she sat on the couch and gave me a glance as opaque as they came. It didn’t help her. I knew what she was thinking. I was wearing sweatpants but was shirtless. That made it easy to see that I had more than my share of scars, some of them uglier than others. I also had a line of stitches across my stomach and a dark garden of bruises blooming up like black roses over my ribs. I thought Promise could make her peace with scars, more specifically Niko’s. He had fewer than I did; he was the better fighter, but he still had a few. But when a job ended in spilled blood, and as she was a vampire I knew she could smell mine, and cracked ribs—that was new, wasn’t it? Not old scar tissue you could write off to “he was younger then. He’s better now. Undefeatable, human or not.”
If a half Auphe like me was this mortal, what did that say about the true mortal?
I knew what Promise was thinking and who she was thinking it about because I thought the same thing. Nik, oblivious to his mortality while others brooded over it, glared at my discarded towel. “If it weren’t for your ribs, I would rub your nose in that.”
“You wouldn’t do that to a puppy.” I grinned. There was something wrong in enjoying injury as a license to bad behavior, but I’d never claimed there was anything particularly right with me.
“A puppy is capable of learning. A puppy doesn’t devote his life to seeing how far he can push me before I break mentally. A puppy does not order pizza and expect me to pay for it because he’s out of money.” Promise laughed at his seething outrage and rested her shoulder against his on the couch.
“Children can be such a blessing,” she said with mocking good humor as she continued to braid his wet hair, the bastard having beat me to the shower.
“Hardly,” Niko retorted. “I have done that tour of duty and have the post-traumatic stress disorder to prove it. The sex talk alone . . .” He gave a minute shudder.
The memory hit me and I rubbed my ribs with an absent, cautious touch. “Oh yeah. Isn’t that when I asked you what doggy style meant and did we need to borrow our neighbor’s poodle for a demonstration?” My grin transmuted into a smirk. “I think you foamed at the mouth a little. Good times, huh?”
“I don’t care about your ribs any longer,” he said. “I don’t care if they are broken and shards of bone are slicing your lungs to shreds. Pick. Up. The. Towel.”
Playing my “get out of brotherly violence” injury card, I ignored him and sat down very slowly in our beat-up recliner. Once in a comfortable position, I relaxed and waited for the warm wave of codeine to wash over me. “It is funny . . . not funny like the poodle thing . . . but funny weird how Goodfellow and Promise both insist there aren’t any such things as zombies, but they were there. If Robin hasn’t seen any and he’s literally old as dirt, the dirt T. rexes walked around on, then what the hell?”
Promise finished Niko’s braid and curled the end around one slender finger, her heather-shadowed eyes thoughtful. “I cannot think of an explanation. From Niko’s description of his appearance, Jack does sound like a typical storm spirit, but storm spirits, that I know of, don’t use skinning as a manner of killing.”
“And he is all about the skinning.” I yawned. “He was still going on about that at the bridge: wanting to save people’s skin. He’s like the world’s most homicidal stamp collector—he has to murder to do it and he just freaking won’t stop talking about it. I miss the monsters that just try to kill you, not tell you about their hobbies.”