Roadkill (15 page)

And that’s what made it disturbing when that smile widened. “And when we leave that farm, Mama, Papa, and their three little ones will be dead. Cholera. In minutes they’ll be rolling on the floor, clawing at their throats while bucketfuls of vomit gush from their mouths. Masses of it until they choke on it. I’ll let their dog live, though. I like dogs. Not that they like me.” He swayed with the horse and rested his hands on his knees. “They don’t like you either, eh, my friend? Because they know who you are, what you are, just as
I
know what you are.” The horse stopped and the man leaned slightly toward me. “I can cure you.”

That’s when he changed. The shoulder-length hair, its waves turned to tangled clumps, fell to his corpse- raddled feet. The clothes were rags and the body beneath them a skin-covered skeleton. The face was the same: a skull with skin; dingy teeth framed by shriveled lips. The hands that had been resting on his knees were now resting on mine. His nails were at least a foot long—thickened and yellow. They were twisted and corkscrewed, a graveyard party favor. The eyes were blank white orbs. There was nothing to see in a pitch-black coffin, was there? He’d kept himself alive . . . barely . . . all these years, devouring himself, but there was no point in wasting energy in keeping your vision if there was nothing to see.

“Suyolak.” I jammed a hand against his bony sternum and pushed him away from me. The horse was a skeleton now too, one covered with a dusty hide and a slow swish of a matted tail.

The living skull grinned. “The Plague of the World”—one perverted spiral of a nail touched my own chest—“meets the Unmaker of the World. What good Rom doesn’t like a little competition?” The nail was touching my chest, but I
felt
it in my head. “I could remake the Unmaker, Caliban. I could kill those worthless parts of you and let the better take over. You could be whole. For the first time in your life. One. Complete.”

There was an ache in my brain that sharpened to a stabbing pain. “You can’t make me human,” I gritted. “No one can.”

“Human?” The skull flew back and the laughter spiked the pain in my head to the nearly unbearable. “No,
bar
. No, my brother. I said cure, not castrate.” The white eyes glowed like the moon. “I’ll make you what you were meant to be all along. Auphe.” The nail flicked up as the palm of the desiccated hand moved to take its place on my chest. “So easy it would be, brother. You’re human on the outside only. Let me put you right. Let me
cure
you.”

For a second I saw myself as if I were separate from my body. I saw albino skin, jaggedly sharp angled joints, pointed chin, a legion of metal teeth, an acid rainfall of pallid hair, and eyes that were a blazing red inferno that would eat you alive.

If you didn’t already live there.

If it weren’t already home.

I woke up on the living room couch, trying to back my way through it. I’d already pulled my gun from its holster and was a millimeter of force away from shooting our front door. With my other hand I was feeling desperately at my face. It was all I could do not to try to rip it off. But it was the same as it had always been. Human. No matter what that bastard said, I was at least half human. It didn’t seem like much, but it was. I wasn’t an Auphe in a cheap polyester human Halloween costume. No fucking way. I put the Eagle back in the holster, grip sweaty and tight, and drew in ragged lungfuls of air. Human—human enough. That was all that mattered—never mind how I ended up on the couch; never mind the pure-Auphe trick.

My cell phone rang. Not a big surprise. You went to sleep in a car somewhere in Ohio and woke up in your loft back in New York and that was going to make anyone’s sphincter pucker, even Niko’s. I ran a quick hand over my face again, just to make sure, and answered it. “It’s not my fault,” I said as soon as I flipped the phone open.

“Somehow I doubt that,” Niko said grimly. “Where are you?”

“Back at the loft. I had”—Jesus, how humiliating—“a bad dream. Either that or Suyolak paid me a visit. If I get to pick, I think I’ll take the dream.”

There was a pause. It was either Niko thinking, un-puckering, or both. Finally he said, “We can’t rule out that he did speak to you. Healers ‘talk’ to your body while they mend it. They tell the blood when to clot or when to thin, tumors to shrink. It’s a combination of telepathy, telekinesis, and skills as yet uncategorized. Your brain is part of your body. He well could have spoken to you while you slept and your conscious defenses were down. But as fascinating as I find all my own lectures to be, I’m more concerned with
your building gates in your sleep
.” I heard him take a deep breath and go on more evenly. “And how you’re going to get back here.”

It couldn’t have been the most entertaining event to be driving down the highway and without any warning see your sleeping brother glow gray, then pop out of existence—the same brother he’d thought dead months ago. It was enough to strain even Niko’s legendary calm. “Do you think you could pull over into the emergency lane?” I asked.

“Do you imagine I’m still driving down the road looking for a new third to chip in on gas money?” he snapped. “I’ve already pulled off and backed up to where you disappeared.”

Definitely strained. I closed my eyes and felt for the car. It was like following a path in my mind, gray and winding . . . cold . . . silver and mist. “Can you find us?” Niko’s voice echoed distantly in my ear. He knew I couldn’t travel to a place I hadn’t been to before at some time in the past. I had to know the way. I’d never left a moving car before though, but . . .

“I know the way,” I said confidently. And because I knew the opportunistic bitch had made her move, I added, “Toss Salome in the back and I’m there.” I built the gate around me instead of in front of me—didn’t want to dissolve the dashboard, and then, as I’d told Nik . . .

I was there.

Suyolak’s leaving mental landmines for us, which meant he knew or felt us following him, or Niko’s smacking the back of my head; I didn’t know which was responsible for the headache, but it didn’t matter. What did was that I needed some Tylenol. Suyolak in our heads, using that mixture of telepathy, telekinesis, and whatever else Niko had said—okay, I was going with that as the cause of my aching head. Niko’s swats I was used to.

We’d pulled into a gas station at the first exit after I traveled back to the car. We needed to fill up the tank anyway, and getting about a gallon of coffee to keep ancient Rom antihealers from paying any of us another visit wasn’t a bad idea either. I could also raid the first aid kit we kept in the trunk. It didn’t fit in the glove compartment. If we needed first aid, we needed a hospital in a box—but besides morphine, codeine, staples and stitches, occlusive pressure bandages, and other advanced medical supplies, it also had your run-of-the-mill Tylenol.

I downed two with the coffee, although other than the headache, I didn’t feel bad. I wasn’t that wild about Suyolak poking around in my dreams . . . Mengele/ Freddy Krueger—not a good mix. But aside from that and an annoyed, worried brother, I kind of felt good—revved up, as if I’d already drunk that gallon of coffee. It seemed clear now that Suyolak couldn’t have my Auphe half gobble up the human part. If that were true, the last time I’d seen our healer Rafferty, when he’d repaired a near-fatal stab wound to my abdomen, he would’ve done the opposite. He would’ve gotten rid of my Auphe genes, and he wouldn’t have waited for me to ask either.

Suyolak was like most power- hungry monsters: He liked to mess with your mind, because to someone like him—
something
like him—fear was as tasty a meal as that stew he’d talked about. He was full of shit and as long as we met up with Rafferty before we came across Suyolak in the dehydrated flesh, we’d be fine—except for some nightmares.

I deftly dodged the third or so swat Niko aimed at the back of my head, as if he could behavior modify me into controlling my subconscious to not let me travel, and asked, “Heard from Dr. Sassafras or that boring guy yet?”

He took revenge by reversing the motion of his hand and flicking me briskly in the forehead. “Yes, while you were in the gas station stocking up on sugar, trans fat, and various other undigestibles, I called them both. Dr. Penjani has yet to find out anything, and he’s not boring; simply evolved beyond the Homo Pornographus that is you. Dr. Jones, however, has had better luck. There are two anthropology professors, one in Seattle, one in San Diego. Both have family members who are critically ill; both fit Abelia’s description of older men with gray hair. One has a wife with a brain tumor who has a week to live, perhaps two at best, and one has a son who was in a car accident. Multiple injuries, brain damage. Both are too unstable to be moved, which is why our thief didn’t take the easier route of bringing Mohammed to the mountain, instead of vice versa. The professor in San Diego tends to concentrate on Australian aborigines. The one in Seattle obtained his PhD twenty years ago in the varying levels of Rom assimilation from country to country. I would say he is our better possibility.”

“Which one is he? The one with the sick son or the wife?” I asked, tapping my fingers on my leg. This music on the radio; maybe it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. The not being able to tell if the singer was a man or a woman was like a mythological time before testosterone was introduced into the gene pool.

“Does it matter?” Niko asked.

“No, guess not. Depressing either way.” Although I didn’t feel depressed or empathetic or any other of those big words Niko half believed he’d never genuinely pounded them into my head. I should have—I mean, dying wife . . . dying kid. Jesus. That was sad, right? They had support groups for that sort of thing, so it must be sad. But I didn’t particularly feel that way. That up feeling was still with me. What the hell—I’d feel bad for them later.

I turned the radio up a little and opened a bag of Cheetos. I offered one to Niko. He refused, of course, with a look of distaste for the food and disgust for my hopeless eating habits. I then turned to offer the bag to Robin in the backseat. “You know, for what it’s worth, this whole monogamy thing with Ish? I think you should give it a try. In your lifetime you’ve screwed your way through half the world population, if not more. Not to mention Ishiah can take your shit. And believe me, that’s a lot of shit to take. A
lot
,” I emphasized. “Give it a chance. Listen to the radio. There wouldn’t be a twenty-four-hour love song station if there wasn’t some truth behind that whole hearts and flowers crap, right?” I patted his shoulder with a dusty orange hand. And why not? Ish was a good guy, a good boss—trying to chop my head off with an axe wasn’t that far out of line. Forgive and forget. And Goodfellow had been a better friend than I deserved. If he could find happiness, why not?

God, I sounded like such a girl. I’d grown some ovaries without noticing. The breasts couldn’t be far behind. Yet that didn’t particularly bother me either.

Robin carefully removed my hand from his shoulder and leaned back out of reach. “I’m not sure which of the three is more frightening: that Suyolak can go highdef in your head, therefore I’m assuming
our
heads, for sport; that if we get too close he could give us a venereal disease that would turn us into giant, walking pus boils—also merely for his entertainment; or your new mood.”

“Me?” I asked, distracted by the taste of the Cheetos. I’d always liked them. You didn’t have to cook them, they were readily available at any store in the country, and they had no nutritional value whatsoever, but kept you alive anyway. They were the Great American Food. We should’ve been shipping them to Third World countries. It would solve all their problems—well, foodwise.

“Yes, you. You and your bizarrely altered mood.” He dusted every orange particle off his shoulder with exquisite care.

“What’s wrong with my mood?” I protested.

“It’s good.” Salome jumped on his now-clean shoulder and they both studied me with identical, unblinking stares. “I expected an improvement over your usual gloom, doom, despair, and suicidal moaning and groaning when you killed the last of the Auphe, but this?” He waved a hand at me. “And
now
? The Kin know about you and Delilah. That’s if not almost certain death, then certainly a huge inconvenience and probable loss of furry booty. Then Suyolak played with your mind as if it were a Rubik’s Cube—before your time, I know, not to mention a thousand times more complex than your mind, but the analogy stands.” He shook his head. “And I can’t imagine what horrific things a creature such as he could whisper in your ear.”

“That he’d turn me into an Auphe. Full Auphe.” I finished the bag and dusted my hands free of orange. “Strain my human bits out like seeds from freshly squeezed orange juice. Can’t buy that off an infomercial.”

Now he did blink. “And you’re taking that quite well. You’re as happy as those Mormons Delilah compared you to. You could even say you’re cheerful. Caliban Leandros,
cheerful
. It’s not only wrong; it’s unimaginable. Inconceivable. Confess. Have you gotten religion? Drugs? A lobotomy? Because this is not you, not remotely.”

“He feels good after he gates,” Niko said. “Don’t you, Cal?” While Robin had leaned away, Nik leaned in close to take me in—every breath, every beat of my pulse at my carotid artery, a scrutiny closer than any microscope.

“I noticed last time,” he went on, “but this time . . . This time it’s more pronounced. Isn’t that right? You said you needed to fly. Back at the bar, that’s what you compared it to. Being let out of a cage. Being free.”

“Maybe it is the traveling, but so what? If it makes me feel good, it’s no different than your getting that adrenaline high after running, which, by the way,
I’ve
never gotten. Just a desire to puke. I think I’m due. You get it from running. I get it from traveling, and that’s only if you assume I’m never in a good mood.” I looked between the two of them. “So? Is that what you guys really think? That I’m never in a good mood?”