A/N: I do not own anyone from the Cal Leandros series. I do not own the song lyrics used to start this piece!

Woot! A super special thanks to SensiblyTainted for the first review! Thanks also to halesgirl101, Kin-outcast101, Comuterale, and Parnassus for reviewing!


Chapter Two: Life and Death


I don't find it funny right now
I want my mo-mo-mo-money right now
I'm on my way to the party right now

I can't wait for you to shut me up
To make me hip like bad-ass
I can't wait for you to shut me up
Shut it up!
-"Shut Me Up," Mindless Self-Indulgence


Lamiae (correct Greek plural, thank you Niko, lamias is easier), in case you were wondering, are a kind of oversized humanoid leech. Lamia was this Greek queen who became a child-eating demon, says myth. Well, myth gets it wrong more than half the time. So, lamias. Human-sized, woman-shaped, with long black curtains of hair that shroud most of their bodies, round owl-golden unblinking eyes, and little round leech-mouths with tiny transparent teeth. They have a poison in their bite that paralyzes you while they suck your blood out, which can take days. They're not fast feeders. Slow agonizing death...sure, that's my dream girl. Bring her on.

Apparently, the friend of Promise's was another vampire, and the lamia in question was his mistress. Lover. Girlfriend. Drinking buddy. What the hell ever they called it these days.

Apparently vampires had worked it out that they didn't actually need to go around slaughtering humans; a hefty dose of iron and some other supplements, along with a little food, and they were good to go. Promise had told me that. Lamias weren't looking to change. It made me feel slightly less inclined for sympathy. I didn't like things that might eat me.

I followed Niko down the trail and into the depths of Central Park. Monsters liked Central Park. It was big, it was the closest thing to untamed in the middle of the city, and it was old. The park had been here nearly as long as the city itself, and most of it had never been built on. It was old land, wild land, and in the depths of the woods and the ponds, old and wild things lived. The occasional mugger, rapist, or murderer that vanished into the shadows here went unmissed as they sought to hide and got eaten instead. Niko and I knew a lot of the creatures that lived here, actually. We did a lot of running and sparring in the hidden places, and we had an informant here. Boggle lived in a mudhole only a little north of our destination tonight.

Too bad we weren't visiting him. I liked Boggle, what for all he was lazy, ate humans, and would have eaten me and Niko if he'd thought he could get away with it. He never would, because Niko and I were too good at fighting, but I knew how he felt about it.

We arrived at the appointed place early, thanks to Niko's need for promptness, and while Niko leaned on a tree I sat down on the ground to wait. The air was cool and crisp, fall flirting with winter, but the earth was still warm from the day's sunshine. I got comfy and fingered the hilt of the knife at my belt.

"So, why would anyone want a lamia back?" I asked Niko, idly. "They're not great talkers."

"I'm not sure, but it's neither here nor there. The important thing is getting paid," Niko returned, with cool and undeniable logic.

He had me there. "Yeah, so...while we're on the topic, how'd your breakup go?"

Niko's latest bobblehead girlfriend was now an ex-girlfriend. Cindy had been nice enough, but Niko never kept his girls for long. Niko rolled his eyes at my change of subject, but answered. "She threw her shoe at my head and left me with the bill. She also threatened to key up my car."

"Ah, so you pissed her off." I snorted, because Niko never let them cry if he could help it.

"Best way to do it. Then instead of moping they burn you in effigy and feel justified." Niko looked amused by the prospect. He would.

I caught a whiff of something and got to my feet again. "Ugh." It reeked; dank and stagnant water with the ripe and rancid taint of day-old dead fish beneath it. "They're coming, and they reek like you wouldn't believe. Something from the water." I put a hand over my nose. Yuck!

"Something from the water. That only narrows it down to several hundred among the paien. Thank you," Niko muttered, pushing away from his tree.

"Hey, I tried." I was also trying not to gag. Ugh. I hoped I'd get used to it in a minute. I drew one of my gns as the figure appeared from among the trees. Pale and humanoid, check. Alarming? Well, not really...

"Bishop-fish," Niko sighed. "Nothing extraordinary, easy to kill." He sounded disappointed. I was too. We could both eat fish-boy here for lunch and no trouble.

Dappled here and there with the ghost of scales over nearly transparent pale skin, the bishop fish had the shape of a human. Sort of. The shape of his head was a little off. Hairless and lightly scaled, it was oddly flattened and the mouth had tiny triangular teeth behind thick rubbery lips. No kelp eater, this one. He wasn't wearing a stitch - not a damn thing, which told me he didn't rub shoulders with the local New Yorkers much. I glanced down. Even they would give that a glance. Yeah, that.

Now I knew where fish sticks came from. And I was never eating another one as long as I lived.

I decided keeping my gaze on his round unblinking eyes was the lesser of two evils. Guess you can't blink without eyelids. Round pupils took us in and the mouth opened to gurgle, "These are the demands. First-"

That was when I shot him.

I didn't have any patience to listen to that drowned-man's voice, and I was tired of smelling him. So I put a bullet right through his chest, which exploded like an overripe tomato and spattered fluid in a wide arc. With his impossibly wide mouth gaping, he teetered and began to fall. I reached out and swiped the paper from his fleshy hand as he crumpled to the ground with a disturbingly wet slapping sound.

Niko peered over my shoulder. "The usual?"

"The usual."

People. Nice, plump juicy people...and kids. Why was it always the kids? Most monsters didn't care about money; no, most of the nonhuman world cared about eating, and why work for your meals when you can have them delivered? One lamia for a truckload of people. Sure. Damn fine deal. Except we were here to put a serious wrench in the works. I didn't like things that ate humans; mostly on account of Niko being human and the fact that I was half, and therefore looked it on the outside. Have I mentioned I really don't like things that might eat me? Yeah, no. Besides, people were people and deserved living. Most of them. Some were worse monsters than the things that ever went bump in the night, yours truly included.

Niko tipped his head. I smelled it, Niko heard it: the bishop-fish wasn't alone. "Well, let's hope we find this one less annoying to negotiate with."

I doubted it. The smell I was getting was of old things, attic must and hundreds of abandoned spiderwebs. In general, the older it smelled, the trickier it was going to be; nonhumans lived for years longer than humans, mostly, if they weren't outright immortal. I was pretty sure Robin was one of those 'outright immortal' ones. And he was tricky as all fuck.

This one was tricky and also very crazy. You could all but see it, shimmering off her in waves like heat off a summer road. Fuck my luck.

"Black Annis." Niko sounded pleased. "So much for that myth."

She scuttled with the back-and-forth motion of a poisonous centipede. Part of the time she was on two feet, the rest of the time on all fours. She looked like an old woman, but not a sad wraith in a nursing home or a cheerful crocheting grandma - unless it was one who'd have no problem picking her teeth with Hansel's gnawed shinbone. 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.

"Black Annis. Singular, plural?" I tossed at Nik, drawing my other gun and taking aim with both.

"Singular in traditional legend," Niko returned, airily, as he drew his katana. "Plural for our fun. A few old women shouldn't be trouble."

Old women, my ass. The seven of them were covering the ground with freakish speed. Long thick fingernails scored the ground, sending dirt flying, and their teeth...let's just say they weren't the kind that got put in a glass on the bedside table, unless she was a diehard Twisted Sister fan. The Annises, Anni, Black Annies...whatever - they weren't identical, but they were so similar they might as well have been. They all wore the same ragged black shifts; torn to streamers in places, the flesh beneath was grey under the moonlight but I suspected it was a dark cyanotic blue.

"Alright, you play shuffleboard with the grannies and I'll cheer you on from the sidelines," I retorted, but we both knew it was a lie. I wasn't going to let Niko have all the fun. No way in hell. And as one leaped for me, I took aim and shot her through the throat. I was expecting the fleshy explosion - I wasn't expecting the ricochet. "The fuck?"

Niko had ducked at the warning sound. I was startled long enough that a second hag got the jump on me; from nearly thirty feet away she launched herself off the ground and propelled herself into my chest with a force I hadn't suspected from her spidery frame. I hit the ground hard and with sharp pointed teeth snapping in my face. Really not my favorite landing.

I didn't lose my guns. I probably wouldn't have lost them even if I'd been dead. I jammed the muzzle of one right up in those pointy teeth and pulled the trigger. I didn't get the explosion of blood and brain matter I expected; I got the peculiar sound of a bullet pinging off an impervious spine and shooting out at an angle. Damn! I got a mouthful of blood as the exiting bullet took out half her throat. I kicked off the wriggling corpse and shot to my feet, gagging. That was vile.

And then I smelled it. "Oh hell, Nik, we are so not getting paid." I scrambled to my feet, and spat. "They ate her." I could smell it in the one I'd just killed. In her blood, in her breath, hell, leaking out her damn pores. I had one left; Niko, who'd moved some distance away to get elbow room, had four of them, two already bleeding black blood.

I could just see, in the dim moonlight, the paler slash of his death's-head-grin against his darker skin. His voice had the burr of laughter in it when he answered back, "Well, then, no need to hold back." Oh, he was having fun.

He lunged with deceptive speed; Niko was fast as lightning when he wanted to be. He blurred under the moonlight, a fatal shadow, and his katana glittered as he drove about nine inches of it into the Annis's single eye. He turned to present his side to her and lashed out with a foot to propel her off the blade and into another Annis.

No need to worry about him. Time to worry about that last one, the one that feinted once, twice, then plunged in from the side. Shit shit shit. I got an arm up, rammed an elbow in her throat, shot her twice in the gut, and got knocked down. Sharp teeth latched into my forearm and I shot her again on reflex. Hey, it's a good reflex to have. And then I was down on the ground, there was something with sharp teeth biting me, and guts...slithering...down my legs okay what the fuck?!

I went from pissed to panicked in one jolt, and promptly gated.

See, my monster family has this little trick called gating. Tearing a hole in reality to move. I can do it. And I did it; wrapped the energy around me in one instinctive flash and ended up on my knees right behind Niko. He nearly kicked me in the head; again, those good reflexes. We both had them. Last second he realized it was me and his foot snapped past so close it ruffled my hair. I would have sat still, except apparently I'd managed to bring some of the slithery things along for the ride. So I jumped to my feet and did a spastic dance. Snakes, tentacles, what the fuck ever, I wanted it off and I wanted it off now.

It wasn't snakes. Not that it wouldn't have been bad enough, snakes falling out of someone's gut, but I couldn't be that lucky. Oh no. What I got was a crawling combination of worms and intestines with a little barracuda tossed in. They undulated slow and sure like the worm, were ropy and dripping with intestinal fluids, and had the bear trap mouth of a barracuda. I didn't scream, but it was a near thing. Thank anything that was listening that it hadn't gotten down my boot. Or worse yet, up my pants leg.

While I was inventing a brand new dance, Niko was entertaining himself with two of the remaining Annis. And by entertaining, I mean he had one handcuffed and down, and was taking the other apart in sharp thin slices with the katana. The handcuffed one was writhing, hissing, and biting the ground like a rabid dog. The one Niko was...playing with...was mostly just screaming in a thin whistling hoarse voice of a crushed larynx. It was a tossup whether or not it would suffocate before it bled out, or before Niko got bored and killed it. He did get bored, sometimes. Right now, with a contented smile on his face and his eyes gone cold, hard, and flame-bright with cruelty, I didn't think he was likely to get bored. I shrugged off my jacket and examined my bitten arm. The Annis has gotten more leather than skin; I had some ragged puncture marks but no chunks missing. It was bleeding pretty well, though.

"Hmm. They don't last long, do they?" Niko commented, idly, and there was that spine-shuddering satisfaction in his voice. I looked up. He was standing tall, staring down at the dead mess, severed limbs and peeled skin and flayed muscle, guts wriggling free of the body through the great rents in the abdomen. Niko was liberally coated in sprays of blood; there was even some on his face. He glanced at me, and smiled bright as a child with a favorite toy. "Well. It was fun while it lasted." He turned toward me, and pulled a handkerchief from a pocket as he walked. He wiped down his katana first, then his face, then stopped in front of me, bent, and wiped my face, too.

I scrunched my eyes shut and let him. To be honest, he scared the shit out of me when he was like this, in a hell of a mood. He'd never hurt me, no, but there was just something sick about it. When he was done I nodded to my arm. "It got me."

"Clumsy," he scolded, but gently, and magicked a clean handkerchief from his pocket. He pressed it over the bites. I reached up and held pressure, and he stepped away. He toed the bile-dripping wriggling thing that had wrapped around my leg. "Do you want a pet? One would fit nicely in a terrarium."

"Yeah, and I'm just one giant snack on the other side of the glass. No." I pulled a repulsed face. Besides, they stank.

" 'All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small,' " he quoted, smiling at me.

"You sure God made these?" I asked, doubtfully, and shrugged my jacket back on. I put the bloody handkerchief back in my pocket.

"Well," Niko said, thoughtfully, with affection warm in his voice, "He made you, didn't He?"

He meant it kindly. I knew that. Still didn't stop me from grimacing. "No, the Auphe made me. Remember?"

"No, they bred you, but they didn't make you the person you are." He paused. "Monster? Individual, there, that's appropriately neutral phrasing."

"Fuck you and your mother with your semantics," I told him. He laughed, because she'd been my mother too. Yeah, it wasn't very funny, but we had to get our laughs in somewhere. I laughed too, and we went to get the Annis.

Transporting her without getting bitten was tough work. She was not interested in being nice and still, either. And she kicked. Fortunately not too hard, but after she nailed me right in the nuts I had to sit on the ground and pant for a minute. Niko had the kindness not to laugh or make a snide comment. A man's balls should be sacred territory, because fuck that hurts. We finally got her to where our client was waiting. Niko had put in a call, earlier, while I'd been nursing my personal injury, and explained that there was no lamia to be had, but at least we had the party responsible for that lack. The vampire stepped out of the trees to meet us: dark hair, dark eyes, dark very expensive-looking suit... Typical. We dumped the snarling, spitting Annis at his feet.

"They suffered?" the vampire asked, staring down at the Annis. His voice was cool and empty. At least with rage you'd go quickly, but the icy retribution his tone promised... Yeah. Like Niko's fun, only more personal. Niko didn't hate the things he played with; he just...okay, hell if I knew why he did it. Sadism, maybe. But he didn't hate them. Hate was maybe the worst, I thought.

"They did," I answered, but knowing Niko's fun would be very different from this. "They suffered."

Surprisingly, even though we hadn't delivered the requested lamia, we got paid. A nice fat wad of cash in an envelope was passed over to Niko. As we walked away, he pulled it out and started counting it under his breath. Behind us, short sharp staccato screams rose on the cool night air. Torture. I grimaced and trailed along after Niko. It just...struck a wrong chord in me. Creeped me out. And that was saying something, given my Auphe relatives enjoyed torturing things. They had it down to a damn art. For fuck's sake, they had poetry about it. Okay, so it was less Edgar Allen Poe and more like shitty drunk freeform beatnik rap, but it was poetry. Oral tradition, Niko called it, and was pretty damn fascinated by it, which meant a lot of hard mental gymnastics for me, because I was the only Auphe-speaking member of the entire race that would actually attempt to translate it into English for him instead of eating his face off first. Which sucked because like a lot of other primitive languages and cultures, Auphe had words that you really couldn't translate into English because there was no English word for it.

Like this one insult. It's a little curling snarl, growl, and flick of the head. The Auphe only use it on eachother, a familial thing because they're all related. Cousin isn't a term of endearment, it's a fact, because incestuous-sister-mother-of-my-children just doesn't roll off the tongue so snappily. Anyway, I used it on Niko once right after a nightmare, and when he tried to get me to translate it, we ran into some issues. It...kinda translates into 'gonna shank ya, bitch-cuz, and eat yo sheep-self,' except there's all this disdain, arrogance, and platonic hate that just doesn't get translated.

Platonic hate and linguistic gymnastics.

My life sucks sometimes. God. Really.

Niko shoved the envelope into a pocket, and tossed me a little pleased smile. That was definitely going to keep us in groceries for a bit. I walked a little closer and crunched leaves underfoot with complete disregard for predator-like silence. Niko's smile lingered, and he walked in utter silence. Show-off bastard. Well, I'd have fun with the fallen leaves, at least. It was a perfect fall night, now that we'd left the screams behind. Chill and crisp and the musty-spicy-richness of fallen leaves everywhere.

Then we saw what was hanging in the last line of the trees, pale in the moonlight. Heavy and ripe like fruit, the colour of a nectarine...pale salmon blooming with red. Lots and lots of red. Bodies. In the trees.

We both stopped short.

Five bodies, in the trees, ripped and torn. Two men, three women. Splayed in the branches, and not very old, either, with blood still dripping in a gentle rain against the fallen leaves, pat-pat-pat. One of the women was young, barely sixteen, with long, long hair hanging down like a banner. The wind shifted and I got a faceful of iron and the sour-sweet beginnings of rot. I gagged, for a moment tasting it and my stomach roiled with the memory of raw human flesh.

Niko grabbed me by an arm and spun me around, fingers clenched painfully on my arm, digging into the bone. He was trying to help but anger flared and I wrenched away from him. I was shaken but not triggered, I was fine. "Shit, Nik, I'm fine, okay? Just a lot of blood all at once." It was strong and I turned to stare up into the trees again, against the uneasy churn in my gut, against the chill that said getting triggered into a panic attack or a flashback was closer than I wanted it to be. The aching start of a bruise where Niko had grabbed me kept me grounded firmly in the present. "Think the Annis did it?"

Niko stepped closer and put a hand gently on either of my upper arms. I could feel his breath warm in my hair as he bowed his head over mine. "I'm not sure," he said, very softly, deep voice a quiet rumble for my ears only. "Come away, Cal."

I realized I had a hand pressed over my mouth.

Maybe Niko was right.

When I turned to move, I was shivering. And it wasn't from the cold. It was actually really damn hard to just turn around. There's something really fucking creepy about a corpse at your back, especially if it's human. Niko was right behind me, though, an arm across my shoulders, hand cupped around my arm, and that made it easier. Niko had always been there, and he would keep me safe. Yeah, childish of me, I know, but...

...it was the truth.

We walked away, and Niko drove us home.

Only when we got home, we had company. Company that had parked his gorgeous 1966 cherry-red Mustang in our garage.

"Oh fffffuuuuuck," I said.

"Looks like he got tired of waiting for you to come to him," said Niko. "Get out and open the door, Cal. And man the fuck up."

I answered that with a phrase in Rom I'd learned from Sophia. Our mother had been a great one for the foul, vulgar, and downright nasty insults. Niko snorted, smirking, and I went and opened the other huge rolling door so Niko could park our El Camino. Robin had at least finished my sweeping job, which was nice of him. We climbed up the stairs, Niko scratching at the drying blood on his face, and found Robin had finished sweeping inside, too. The lights were on, and Robin was sitting on the clean, naked floor on a pillow. I had a feeling it was probably Niko's, from the bedroom. He was reading one of Niko's mythology books, too, and looked up at us with solemn green eyes.

It always creeped me out when Robin went serious, because most of the time was was smiling, laughing, and shallow as a puddle in the Sahara. Except when he wasn't. He did offer a faint smile though. "There's takeout."

Niko snorted, and sat down in the doorway to take off his boots. "I said lock up, not move in, Robin," he teased, and there was a warm familiarity in his tone I really wasn't used to hearing him use. On other people...well, no. That definitely wasn't the way he teased me, and that was why it was weird. "Cal. Boots. Then we'll go take care of your arm. Before infection sets in."

That was a blatant excuse for me to not be alone with Robin, because I never got infections. Hell, I never even got sick. So I bent to my boots, grateful. Niko wasn't going to let me do this alone, just like I'd asked. He'd never gone back on a promise to me, and I knew that, but this was me and my anxiety being all illogical. Hurrah.

As Niko herded me to the bathroom with a hand on my shoulder, I could feel Robin watching us go.