Grimrose Path (38 page)

“From one leopard to another?” I asked, skimming fingers through a fall of hair suddenly full of black feathers.

“From one leopard to another,” he confirmed before kissing me.

It wasn’t sun and warmth. It was dark and cool, shadows and tricks, the echo of the end of the world, and the potential for the same locked deep inside. Locks can be broken and trust was nearly a fairy tale to me, but I knew if Leo’s lock ever did break, it wouldn’t matter. My trust in him never would, whether I was trickster or human.

And I did like being human, vulnerabilities and all. It made seizing victory and grabbing that gold ring more difficult, but all the more satisfying for it. Yes, I definitely liked this human life. I might come to love it. Only time would tell there, but for today? For this moment, drowned in feathers, silver silk, and the faintest scent of honeysuckle from a Tennessee summer night?

Life was sweet all right.

Sweet as it came.

Rob
—short for Robyn (yes, he is really a she)—
Thurman
lives in Indiana, land of rolling hills and cows, deer, and wild turkeys. Many, many turkeys. She is also the author of the Cal Leandros series:
Nightlife
,
Moonshine
,
Madhouse
,
Deathwish
, and
Roadkill
; a stand-alone novel,
Chimera
; and a story in the anthology
Wolfsbane and Mistletoe
. She is also the author of
Trick of the Light
, the first book in the Trickster Novels series.

Besides wild, ravenous turkeys, the velociraptors of Indiana, she has a dog (if you don’t have a dog, how do you live?)—one hundred pounds of Siberian husky. He looks like a wolf, has paws the size of a person’s hand, ice blue eyes, teeth out of a Godzilla movie, and the ferocious habit of hiding under the kitchen table and peeing on himself when strangers come by. Fortunately, she has another dog that is a little more invested in keeping the food source alive. By the way, the dogs were adopted from shelters. They were fully grown, already house-trained, and grateful as hell. Think about it next time you’re looking for a Rover or Fluffy.

For updates, teasers, deleted scenes, and various other extras, visit the author at
www.robthurman.net
and at her LiveJournal.

 

 

I was a killer. I woke up knowing that before I knew anything else.

There was a moment between sleeping and waking where I swung lazily. The dark was my hammock, moving back and forth. One way was a deeper darkness, a longer sleep. But there was more than darkness there. There were trees past the black, hundreds and thousands of trees.

And an ocean, blue as a crayon fresh from a brand-new box. A ship rode on its waves with sails white as a seagull’s wings, flying a flag as black as the seabird’s eyes.

There were dark-eyed princesses named after lilies.

Waterfalls that fell forever.

Flying.

Tree houses.

It was a place where no one could find you. A safe place. Of it all, vibrant and amazing, the one thing I wanted to sink my fingers into and hang on to for my life was that last: a safe place.

Sanctuary.

But all that disappeared when I swung the other way, where there were sibilant whispers, an unpleasant clicking—insectile and ominous—and a cold, bone deep and embedded in every part of me. If I’d had a choice, I would’ve gone with sleep, safe in the trees. Who wouldn’t? But I didn’t have that warm and comforting option. Instead I was slapped in the face with icy water. That did the trick of swinging me hard in the wrong direction and keeping me there. I opened my eyes, blinked several times, and licked the taste of salt from my lips. It was still dark, but not nearly as dark as when my eyes had been shut. There was a scattering of stars overhead and a bright full moon. The white light reflected as shattered shards in the water washing over my legs and up to my chest. It looked like splinters of ice. It felt cold enough to be. There was the smell of seaweed and dead fish in the air. More seaweed was tangled around my hand when I lifted it, the same hand that held a gun. A big gun.

A priest, a rabbi, and a killer walk into a bar . . .

A killer woke up on that beach, and that killer was me. How did I know that? It wasn’t difficult. I slowly propped myself up on my elbows, my hand refusing to drop the gun it held, and I took a look around me to see a stretch of water and sand littered with bodies, bodies with bullet holes in them. The gun in my hand was lighter than it should’ve been. That meant an empty clip. It didn’t take an Einstein to work out that calculation. The fact that the bodies weren’t my first concern—it was pissing and food actually, in that order—helped too. Killers have different priorities.

I could piss here. I wasn’t a frigging Rodeo Drive princess. There were only the night, the ocean, and me. I could whip it out and let fly. But the food? Where would I get the food? Where was the nearest restaurant or take-out place? Where was I? Because this wasn’t right. This wasn’t home. I dragged my feet up through the wet sand, bent my knees, and pushed up to stagger to my feet to get my bearings. I might have been lost. I
felt
lost, but I only needed to look closer, to recognize some landmarks and I’d be fine. But I didn’t. I didn’t recognize shit. I had no idea where I was, and I was not fine.

I was the furthest from fine as those bodies on the sand were.

That’s when the killer realized something: I knew
what
I was, all right, but I didn’t have a goddamn idea who.

I reached for me and I wasn’t there. I took a step into my own head and fell. There was nothing there to hold me up. There was no home and there was no me. Nothing to grab or ground me—no memories, only one big gaping hole filled with a cliché. And that—being a cliché? It bothered me more than the killer part. That part I took so much in stride that I’d automatically used my free hand to start dragging the bodies further out into the water, where they’d be carried away. Out of sight, out of mind. The killer in me needed no direction. It knew it wasn’t Joe Average, law-abiding citizen. It knew it couldn’t be caught with bodies and definitely not these bodies.

They weren’t human.

There were monsters in the world, and that didn’t surprise the killer or the cliché in me one damn bit either. They both knew why I carried that gun. Monsters weren’t very fucking nice.

I looked down at the one I was currently dragging through the surf. It looked like an ape crossed with a spider, which isn’t a good look for anyone. It weighed a ton, was hairy with several eyes on a flattened skull, and had even more legs sprouting below. The mouth was simian, but there were no teeth. Instead there were two sets of mandibles, upper and lower. Both were dripping with something other than water, something thicker. At the sight, the base of my neck began to throb, red spikes of pain that flared behind my eyelids every time I blinked. I released Harry—hairy, Harry, close enough—into the waist-deep water I’d pulled it into and swiped my hand at the nape of my neck. I felt two puncture marks about three inches apart, then held my hand up to the moon. There was blood, not much, and a clear viscous fluid on my palm. It looked like good old dead Harry had gotten one in me before I’d gotten one in him.

The venom couldn’t be too poisonous. I was alive and aside from my neck hurting and a massive headache from hell, I wasn’t too impaired. I went on to prove it by wiping my hand on my jeans and going back for Harry’s friends. Larry, Barry, and Gary—monsters that I took in stride as much as I did the moon up in the sky. Just part of the world. I’d forgotten myself, but the world didn’t go that easily. The world I did know, it seemed, so I kept doing what kept you alive in this particular world. I towed all the bodies out into the freezing water—Christ, it couldn’t have been more than fifty degrees—and sent them on their way. So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen . . .

Goodbye.

I didn’t wave.

When it was done, I slogged back to the beach and stood, shivering hard from the cold. I watched as the last body disappeared past the distant moon-spangled waves—they were nice, those waves. Scenic, too much so for monsters. After they were gone, I spun around slowly, taking in every foot, every inch of the beach and the empty dunes behind me with suspicion. Seeing nothing moving besides me, I holstered the gun . . . in a shoulder holster my hand knew very well was there. As I did, my skin brushed more metal. I pulled my jacket open wide to see three knives strapped to the inside, right and left, six total. I felt an itch and weight around my ankle, but I didn’t bother to check for what kind of death-dealing device it was.

A priest, a rabbi, and a killer walk into a bar . . . no.

Four monsters and a killer walk into a bar . . . that wasn’t right either.

A killer wakes up on a beach . . . the monsters don’t wake up at all.

I was wearing a leather jacket, sodden and ruined. Something was weighing down the right pocket of it more heavily than the left. I put my hand in and closed it around something oval shaped. I was vaguely hoping it was a wayward clam that had climbed in while I was snoozing in the tide. That hope choked and fell, dead as the floating monsters. In the moonlight I’d opened my fingers to see a grenade resting against my palm. There was a cheerful yellow smiley face on the side. The hand-painted, slightly sloppy circle smirked at me.

Have a nice day!

I looked up at the sky, the beaming moon, and said my first words, the first words I could remember anyway. Baby’s first words in his brand-new life.

“What the
fuck
?”

 

A killer walked into a motel. Okay, that was getting old fast.
I
walked into the motel, still damp, but at least I wasn’t sloshing with every step anymore. It had been a twenty-minute walk from that beach. There had been houses that were closer, but they weren’t vacation houses abandoned in cold weather. People were living in them, which meant I couldn’t break in, my first instinct, and squat long enough to get dry and—shit—get dry. I wasn’t ready to think beyond that point right now. There were other things that needed to be done. Important things, and while they gnawed at me with tiny sharp teeth to do them, they weren’t willing to say what exactly they were. Do. Go. Run. Hide. Tell. But there was no “what” for the do, no “where” for the go or the run, and no “who” for the tell.

It was a thousand itches that couldn’t be scratched. Annoying didn’t begin to cover a fraction of how it felt. It did cover the no-tell-motel clerk however. Annoying covered him hunky-frigging-dory. Wide nose, big ears, enough acne to say puberty was going to last through his nineties, and frizzy blond hair that wanted to be long but ended up being wide instead. He was reading a porn mag with a hand covering his mouth and a finger jammed halfway up one nostril. That wasn’t where your hand should be when looking at porn, but whatever. How he got his rocks off was the least of my concerns.

“Room,” I said, slapping down four ten-dollar bills on the countertop. Fresh from a wet wallet, which was equally fresh from my wet jeans, the money quickly made a puddle around itself.

The finger descended from its perch and idly poked at the bills. “They’re wet.”

True that and not requiring a comment. “Room,” I repeated. “Now.”

He looked past me at the door. “I didn’t hear you come in. How come I didn’t hear you come in? We got a bell.”

Correction, they had a bell. Bells made noise, and noise wasn’t good. Any cat sneaking around in the shadows would tell you that. It’d probably also tell you talking to a booger-picking brick wall was pointless. I reached past the clerk and grabbed a key hanging on the wall. Lucky number thirteen. I turned and walked back towards the door.

“ID,” the guy called after me. “Hey, dude, I need some ID.”

I gave him an extra ten. It was all the ID he needed. Zit cream is pretty cheap at any local drugstore, and he forgot about the ID. But it was the first thing on my mind when I opened the warped wooden door to room thirteen, walked through chips of peeling paint that had fallen on the cracked asphalt of the small parking lot, and went into my new home. Hell, the only home I’d known as of this moment as far as my brain cells were concerned. I pulled the blinds shut, flipped the light on the table beside the bed, and opened the wallet. The clerk might not need it, but ID would be helpful as shit to me right now. Let’s see what we had.

No, not we. There was no we . . . what I had. Because it was me, only me. And I didn’t know my life was any different from that. The clerk hadn’t considered me too social, and I didn’t feel especially social, friendly, or full of love for my fellow fucking man. I had a sliver of feeling that it wasn’t entirely due to my current situation. If you forgot who you were, were you still who you were? I didn’t know, but I thought it might be safe to say that I usually didn’t have an entourage of partying friends in tow.

Other than the monsters from the beach.

So . . . time to see who exactly the nonexistent entourage wasn’t swarming around.

I pulled out the driver’s license from the worn black wallet and scanned it. New York City. 375 Hudson Street. I was . . . well, shit—I didn’t know what year it was exactly, so I didn’t know how old I was, but the picture that I checked against my reflection in the cracked mirror on the bureau across the room looked right. Early twenties probably. Black hair, gray eyes, flatly opaque expression—it would’ve been a mug shot through and through if there hadn’t been the tiniest curl to his . . . my mouth. One that said “I have a boot, and I’m just looking for an ass to put it up.” Okay, social was out the window. I focused on the important thing—my name, printed clear and bold beside the picture. My identity. Me.