Now I knew where fish sticks came from.
I decided keeping my gaze on his eyes was the lesser of two evils despite their unblinking bulge. Guess you can't blink if you don't have eyelids. Round pupils took us in and the mouth opened to gurgle, "These are the demands. First—"
That's when I shot him.
My patience with kidnappers was long gone before I had even taken a step into the park. I put a bullet in his chest, which exploded like an overripe tomato and splattered fluid in a wide arc. With his impossibly wide mouth gaping, he teetered and began to fall. I stepped forward and slipped the paper from the fleshy claw as Mr. Fish Stick crumpled to the ground with a disturbingly wet slapping sound. "I can read, asshole," I muttered.
Niko said from behind me, "Really? When did you learn?" Raising his voice, he asked mildly, "Is there anyone here we could negotiate with that my brother would find less annoying?" Like me, he knew there was someone else in the trees. I smelled them and he heard them. Rustle one leaf, step on one frost-brittle piece of grass, and he would hear it. He was all human, Niko, like our mother, Sophia Leandros, but when he did things like that you had to wonder.
The smell I was picking up from a distance wasn't as bad as that of the fish. It was the scent of old things and attic must and hundreds of abandoned spiderwebs. In other words, it smelled like Niko's library of books. Knowing Niko would be watching its approach, I squinted at the paper in my hand, ignoring the damp slime on it. If the moon hadn't been so bright and plump in the sky, I wouldn't have been able to see anything. I might have monster smelling—whoopee…what a superpower—but I had human vision. As it was, I could make out only a few words. Money wasn't mentioned. I wasn't that surprised. Very few monsters were into the material world. Vampires, pucks, and werewolves liked to live high on the hog, but most of the nonhuman world was more interested in eating. Lots and lots of eating.
The ransom mentioned people. Nice, plump people. Nice, juicy children. The kids. Why was it always the kids?
Some kidnappers don't want to earn their money, and some don't want to catch their own dinner. Trade one lamia for a truckload of humans—what a deal. In the end they were all lazy psychotics and the one that finally came to Niko's call was no different. You could all but see the waves of craziness coming from her, shimmering like heat off a summer road.
"Black Annis." Niko sounded almost pleased. "I thought she was a myth."
She scuttled with the back and forth motion of a poisonous centipede. Part of the time she was on two feet, the rest on all fours. She looked like an old woman, but not a sad wraith in a nursing home or cheerful crocheting grandma—unless it was one who'd have no problem picking her teeth with a sliver of Hansel's gnawed leg bone.
Now, this was a little more disturbing than the fish. And it became more disturbing when six more of her appeared to race across the grass.
"You thought she was a myth. She. Singular. Is that what you were saying?" I dropped the paper to the ground. I still had my gun in my right hand and I drew my knife with the left from the double holster under my jacket. Ugly and serrated, the blade had been a constant and faithful companion for a while now. Niko did give damn fine Christmas presents.
"Apparently the myth is incorrect. It only makes things more interesting," he said blandly. "Surely a few old women don't concern you?"
Old women, my ass. The seven of them were covering the ground with freakish speed. Long, thick fingernails scored the ground, sending dirt and grass flying, and their teeth…let's just say they weren't the kind that got put in a glass on the bedside table. The Annises, Anni, Black Annies…whatever—they weren't identical, but they were so similar they may as well have been. They all wore the same ragged black shifts too. Torn to streamers in places, the cloth fluttered and tangled as they ran. I saw flesh through the holes, flesh I suspected was cyanotic blue although it appeared gray in the glow of the moon. Whatever color it was, I didn't want to see it.
"Fine. You play shuffleboard with the grannies and I'll cheer you on from the sidelines," I retorted. Not that I would have, but one of them made sure I didn't have the option. She went from scuttling to leaping. From nearly thirty feet away, she launched off the ground and propelled herself onto my chest with a force I didn't expect from her spidery frame. I hit the ground hard. Unable to get the gun between us, I buried the knife in her back. I was hoping to sever the spine or at least put a serious dent in it, but the blade practically bounced off the bony structure. "Goddamn it," I gritted, and went for another target instead. With her teeth snapping at my throat, I plunged the knife in the side of hers.