Family-wise, I had no pains in the ass. I was lucky. I had one brother and he was a damn good one. Once we were on our own, I’d escaped the curse of screaming Thanksgiving dinners—now I had a turkey pizza; Niko had a vegan one. No bitter arguments around a Christmas tree—each year Niko gave me a new gun; I gave him a new sword. Absent was the awkward discovery of first cousins shacking up at the summer family get-togethers at the lake. I didn’t have to wait for summer. I saw my brother every day when he winged my sopping towel off the bathroom floor at my head or I asked—after the fact—if I could use his priceless seventeenth-century copy of some boring book no one but him and the author had read to prop up a wobbling coffee table.
Summer vacations . . . if you thought about it, what kind of people actually gathered together at a lake with cabins and all that crap anyway? Hadn’t they ever watched Friday the 13th? Jason? Hockey masks? Machetes? A good time for me, yeah—oh hell yeah—but not as much for the members of your average Priusdriving middle-class family.
Stupidity is everywhere.
The rest of my life might be challenging in some areas—like at the moment, with an adolescent Kishi either trying to eat my leg or hump it to the bare bone—but family? I knew I had that under control, had no reason to worry about it or dwell on it. I watched my brother’s back; he watched mine. We were a Hallmark card dipped in blood and made of unbreakable steel. I’d never had a doubt about my family and I never would—no matter what the Kishi, who had brought the topic to mind to begin with, were doing to annoy me on the general subject.
No, it was all smooth sailing, rather like this current job, until my cell phone rang. “Niko,” I said, shooting another adult Kishi with jaws stretched wide enough to swallow my entire head. He had leaped downward at me from a fire escape of a condemned tenement building long crumpled in on itself—no demolition crew needed. Gravity worked for free. “Can you get this one off my leg before I need sexual-assault counseling?”
Niko said to not kill the babies, although at one hundred and fifty pounds, “baby” was pushing the definition, but I was doing my best, more or less, to be a good boy. Although it would’ve been much easier to be a bad boy.
So very bad. So very fun.
For my brother, however, I reined in that part of me—that nonhuman half of me, choke-chaining it with a practiced grip. It was the price I paid to keep my brother satisfied. Bearing in mind that if it wasn’t for him, I’d be dead or sanity-challenged ten times over, I owed the man. I was also fond enough of his bossy anal-retentive ass to die for him.
More importantly, to kill for him.
And choose the darkest of roads to make that happen.
All that made ignoring a giant baby with an equally giant bite easy enough. As I fished for my cell, Niko was less than awed at my babysitting skills and said so. “If you can’t do a minimum of three tasks at once, I have failed you with all my training and instruction. I’d blame myself, but clearly it’s entirely your fault—your laziness, your total ineptitude.”
Not that we shared the fraternal fondness out loud. How manly would that be?
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard that all before. If adults heard lullabies when they slept, Niko’s admonishments would be mine. I shook my leg again, then shot another Kishi that was bounding down the side of the next building, which was equally as dilapidated as the first, putting three bullets between his blazing silver eyes. They shone brighter than any streetlights in this part of town . . . until the Kishi’s life seeped away and left only the dull gray of death. I felt bad for the Kishi—almost—but they had turned a block that had once hosted scavenging homeless, thriving drug dealers and sullen hookers into a desolate wasteland. I didn’t have a preference for one over the other, Kishi or human. The mayor wanted the city cleaned up. The Kishi Clan was doing the job one block at a time . . . even if it meant eating quite a few people.
Were those people good people? If I knew anything, I knew that these days I wasn’t in the position to make the call on whether certain people were worth saving or leaving to the predators. That I left up to Nik. I simply stepped over their bodies and went on with the job.
Regardless of whether they were good or evil, those people belonged, whether they knew it or not, to the Kin. The Kin, the werewolf mafia of New York City, weren’t pleased to be sharing their money or their snacks with Johnny-come-lately preternatural hyenas from the depths of . . . um . . . I should’ve paid attention to where those depths were—maybe Africa?—during the premission rundown, but Niko knew. That was enough. I didn’t think it mattered much. They were encroaching on Kin territory, and the wolves didn’t like that.