Doubletake Read Free

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 Prius-driving middle class.
    Stupidity is everywhere.
    But for me, right now, things were good. My brotherand I kicked supernatural ass for fun and profit. I had a shirt that said that with our phone number. Humans wouldn’t take it seriously. Humans didn’t know what the world really hosted. But the kind that hired us—nonhuman—they knew a walking billboard when they saw it. Running your own business is a bitch. You have to advertise. Promo. Market. Niko did that. I couldn’t be bothered with that crap—unless it resulted in my offensive T-shirt slogan. He and I had been doing this for four years now. Before that we’d done the same, but it had been a hobby, not a career.
    Okay, I say hobby, but it was self-defense, pure and simple. When you’re half human and half of the worst monster to walk the earth—a creature that ate the supernatural for appetizers without putting hardly any effort into it—you weren’t popular with the other monster types. And there were thousands of different kinds. Some immediately attacked me, sensing the half human in me and assuming it would make me weaker—they were wrong. Some ran—they were smart. And some didn’t care either way—we hung out and had a beer.
    Good family. Interesting and well-paying career. Half monster…well, everything couldn’t be perfect, but otherwise right now things were good. I was hoping they stayed that way. Except for Niko. I didn’t have to hope when it came to family.
    The rest of my life might be challenging in some other areas, like at the moment as an adolescent kishi was either trying to eat my leg or hump it to the bare bone, but family? I knew I had that under control. 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 tomind 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. It had leaped downward at me from a fire escape of a condemned tenement apartment building long crumbled in on itself—no demolition crew needed. Gravity worked for free. “Can you get this one off of 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 weren’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 important, to kill for him.
    And to have chosen 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, that would be mine. I shook my leg again, shot another kishi bounding down the side of the next building, equally as dilapidated as the first, putting