Present Day
“There’s a serial killer in the city.”
Yeah? Really?
And rain was wet, grass was green, the sun set in the west; also, reality shows caused brain tumors.
None of it was precisely fucking news.
“Thanks for the info, boss,” I drawled, bored as I mixed a mojito for Elegua, a dark skinned, cat-eyed African trickster, and slid it across the bar. Yes, a goddamn mojito. He used to drink straight rum while smoking his foul-smelling cigars, but once he started visiting Cuba, he became high maintenance. It was getting a little too fancy in the Ninth Circle lately. I missed the days when beer and whiskey were all we had and haul your furry, scaly, or prehensile tailed self elsewhere if you didn’t like it.
Auld Lang Syne.
“But guess what, Ish?” I wiped my hands on the black apron tied around my waist. “There are probably at least three serial killers in New York. That’s why there’s police. Let them deal with it. And why do you even care? It’s human business, not paien business.” Paien was the pagan world, the supernatural world, and half human or not, the world I’d chosen to live in for five or so years now.
It had been gradual, that. From thinking I was a human with a fraction of monster in him to knowing I was a monster with just a little human seasoning the soup.
I couldn’t say I’d changed sides either. Humans didn’t know monsters existed and damn sure didn’t know about the particular monster I was. If they did, they would run screaming, piss themselves, or be caught up in enough zombie apocalypse movies to try to grab an ax to fight back—the latter never ended well. Then there were the ninety-nine percent of the paien who hated me for the Auphe I carried in my blood. But I went with the paien anyway the majority of the time, despite the fact I could’ve pretended with humans and they wouldn’t have known.
But pretending every minute of every day can be tiring. And . . .
Boring.
With the other monsters I could be myself, no matter how much they oh-so-profoundly wished I wouldn’t be.
Sheep aren’t the only ones to piss themselves came the gleeful inner mutter.
I really had to stop thinking of humans as sheep. I’d picked up that bad habit in the past month or so, from the other monsters on the outside, yeah, but primarily the one on the inside. If I said it out loud, my brother would do more than kick my ass. He’d remind me I had human in me too by dunking me in the East River, holding me under for a good three minutes, and calling it negative reinforcement training instead of the overgrown swirly that it was.
Sheep versus human . . . yeah, that might very well point to an identity crisis on my part.
When it comes down to it, I’m a monster. There was some human in me, true, although less all the time. I’d tried to hold on, but life is life. Love it or leave it.
It’s simple. I am a monster.
And I kind of liked it—which is the definition of an identity crisis.
Oh Jesus. Was Ishiah still droning on and on?
Hell. Of course he was. Serial killer. Serial killer. The guy could not take a hint if they were giving them away free with a hooker and a six-pack.
“Because, Caliban, while this serial killer preys only on humans, from what I hear it is not human itself. Very much not human and is skinning people alive. The police will not know what it is, much less be able to catch it.” The peri’s gold-barred white wings flashed into view, disturbed, and then disappeared as he continued to stack glasses. “That makes it your business, doesn’t it?”
It did. If it was supernatural and you were willing to pay enough to make it dead—then go ahead and pick out the coffin. If there were some annoying issues of conscience to be assessed, I let Niko figure that out these days. Not that I didn’t have a conscience. I did. Smaller than average, okay, but there. Unfortunately for most, it tended to be as lazy and rebellious as the rest of me. It was better for everyone to let my brother handle the moral issues while I played to my strengths:
Violence, sarcasm, and a respectable collection of pornography.