Roadkill by Rob Thurman Page A

sucked.
    “Wet enough for you?” I commented, and ducked the water he kicked in my direction.
    “ Ai pidiksou ,” he spat, but continued after me.
    We were at the Flushing Airport, abandoned since before I was born. Thanks to Robin’s owning a car lot, we had access to whatever we needed . . . including a Jeep . . . if the subway and bus wouldn’t get us where we needed to go. “This is what happens when you build an airport on a swamp,” I grunted. Swamp was the non-fancy name for wetlands. Built in the twenties, closed in the eighties, and located on top of a damn swamp was the sum total of what I knew or cared to know about the place.
    That and it was home sweet home to a bunch of revenants who worked for the Kin. This was actually a sort of reward situation for them. If they’d done good and not messed up for several months, a long stretch for a revenant’s reasoning and willpower, you got hauled out in a party bus with several dead or mostly dead humans, twenty kegs or so, and left for a week or thereabouts to lie around, eat, drink, and do whatever revenants do to make little revenants. The last was yet another thing I didn’t need or want to know.
    There were two hangars and one smaller building. The blue sky reflected in the still water ahead of us and it was warm enough that I’d shed my jacket and left it in the Jeep. There was no one to see out here but revenants, and since I planned on their seeing my weapons up close and personal, there was no reason to hide them. Except for the mosquitoes, the mud in my shoes, and the stink of our prey, it was a nice day. Not that there weren’t other opinions on that.
    “Poseidon’s barnacle-ridden testicles,” Goodfellow snarled as he held the cat carrier up as I sloshed along. I sloshed. He moved through the water like a shark, soundless and with barely a wake. When you were possibly older than mankind itself, you were good at things like that. The temper hadn’t seemed to have improved over the years, though. “Pick a building. I’m hot, I’m surrounded by water and mud . . . mud without naked women or men wrestling in it, mind you, and I’m not pleased. And why isn’t Niko here? Surely he’s not avoiding his duty?”
    “Niko had to work, and the day it takes more than two of us to handle a bunch of drunk and passed-out revenants is the day we get a job stuffing teddy bears at the toy store. And speaking of naked mud-wrestling women, how is Ish handling your wild and woolly ways?” I grinned wickedly. “You talk him into the whole orgy scene?” Pucks loved a good orgy, or two, or a hundred. “Or do you just swing by his place afterward and cuddle?”
    “Do not go there,” he said with a grim set to his mouth.
    I picked one of the hangars and headed for it. The other ramshackle wooden building was too small and the stench was everywhere, but a little stronger toward one of the hangars. “Don’t get me wrong.” I held up my hands. “I don’t want details. I so don’t want even a single detail. I don’t even want to know that details exist. I’m just curious how it’s working out since he’s a little holier than thou and you’re . . . well, unholier than pretty much the whole world and all alternate dimensions. In the sex area anyway.”
    “I said, don’t . . . go . . . there ,” he gritted. “Or my sword will go someplace you think equally private. Are we clear?”
    It was a big change from Robin’s usual bragging ways. I’d once learned more in one hour from listening to him boast than I had from two solid years’ worth of porn mags. He’d been the one to first get me laid. Not with him. Even if I were into guys, and I wasn’t, but if I were . . . I’d once accidentally seen him naked. Walk softly and carry a big stick was one thing. Walk softly and carry the Washington Monument was another altogether.
    “Okay. Okay.” If Robin didn’t want to be his normal bragging self, it was weird, bizarre, and probably a sign of the