Downfall (Cal Leandros, Band 9) - Softcover

Thurman, Rob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451465296 ISBN 13: 9780451465290

Verlag: Ace, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

I let it go—all of it. Everything I’d been saving up all my life, building and growing inside me, too much to hold in one half-human body. It pushed and fought to be free with a force that turned me into a bomb with a timer vibrating on zero. I was free.

But so was everything I’d fought so hard not to be....

Brothers Cal and Niko Leandros know trouble when they see it—and then proceed to wipe the floor with it. But now it seems their whole world is falling to pieces. Cal’s nightmarish monster side is growing ever stronger, changing Cal physically as well as mentally. Which is exactly what Grimm—Cal’s savage doppelgänger—wants. And when a covert supernatural organization decides that it’s time to put Cal down before he threatens pretty much everything else in existence, the brothers find themselves in a fight they actually might lose. But the dark temptations Cal has denied all his life may prove to be exactly what can save them.

Even if he must fall forever…

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rob Thurman lives in Indiana, land of cows, corn, and ravenous wild turkeys. Rob is the author of the Cal Leandros novels, the Trickster novels, the Korsak Brothers novels, and several stories in various anthologies.

Besides ravenous wild turkeys, Rob has three rescue dogs (if you don’t have a dog, how do you live?)—one of which is a Great Dane–Lab mix that weighs well over one hundred pounds, barks at strangers like Cujo times ten, then runs to hide under the kitchen table and pee on herself. Burglars tend to find this a mixed message. The other two dogs, however, are more invested in keeping their food source alive. All were adopted from the pound (one on his last day on death row). They were all fully grown, already house-trained, and grateful as hell. Think about it the next time you’re looking for a Rover or a Fluffy.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

(Rescheduled due to unforeseen circumstances.)

Goodfellow

Ten days ago

There’s a sucker born every minute.

Engrave that on every brain cell. Write it on every neuron firing in your . . . Wait.

Was that a sniper on the roof? Across the street from the bar where I was reaching for the door handle, what was that I saw in the deepest of shadows? A sniper with a gun that could destroy a tank? Yes, it was. Ares, God of War, save me from human idiots who’d kill a newly born rabbit with a nuclear warhead to overcompensate for their one-inch dick and the shriveled raisins that made up their testicles. It was beyond annoying.

And the night had only begun. I had drinking ahead of me, along with a gloriously dire internal monologue that I’d been planning for days. One that had it been external rather than internal would make all those about me fall to their knees at the glory and the tragedy of it. I’d taken the precaution of writing some of it down to prevent what would be a catastrophic loss to history if I somehow lost the future opportunity to speak it aloud.

Gamou.

Nonetheless, it seemed there were other things to take care of first. I’d return to the bar and my soliloquy . . . now that I considered it, some would think that sounded somewhat conceited even for me. Soliloquy . . . hmmm. My thoughts, then, for the judgmental, I meant, and they were barely self-centered thoughts at that. No, not egocentric and narcissistic at all. Thus, I merely had to do away with the sniper while keeping the opening line of my fateful and earth-shaking contemplations prepared in my mind. . . .

There’s a sucker born every . . .

Hephaestus’s sweaty pits and fiery forge, did the streetlights deceive me? Was that a rocket launcher propped up beside the roof-dwelling idiot sniper?

I let go of the doorknob and made my way across the street, loved and hidden by the dark as I ever was when I wished to be. Obviously this train of thought would have to be continued later. Although suckers and idiots . . . They weren’t all that different, were they?

I didn’t have to memorize that.

(Goodfellow: the rest of the chapter has been rescheduled due to oblivious Cal’s irritating and unforeseen circumstances and my solution of them—as always.)

2

Caliban

Ten days ago

It’s what’s on the inside that counts.

Remember that.

It’ll come up later. Pop quizzes aren’t out of the question.

Not that I was thinking that now. I had other things on my mind. Someone trying to kill me was one of them.

It wasn’t that someone was trying to kill me was anything to get excited about, not really. That had been happening half of my life. Most of the supernatural world didn’t like me—or didn’t like my kind. To them we were one and the same and were treated as such. Attempted murder, mutilation, or a one-Cal massacre, it was part of life. Truthfully, it was hard to scrape up any actual annoyance, much less get pissed off about it anymore. It was the same as complaining about rush-hour traffic: pointless and likely to make things worse when your cabdriver lost his shit and tried to stab you in the eye.

As someone was already doing their best to stab me in the eye or close enough, I didn’t need to add to that particular theoretical scenario. Yeah, it wasn’t the homicidal mayhem aimed at me that had my temper exploding. It was the large shard of mirror thrown at my face that disturbed me—disturbed me enough in fact that while I’d only planned on using the axe I was carrying for a threat or two, I’d now changed my mind. If they wanted to play “Here’s Johnny!” then who the hell was I to deny their scaly little bitch hearts?

If they weren’t Stephen King fans, I’d be damned disappointed.

Here’s a fun fact about me: I wasn’t into mirrors, whether they were bolted to the wall, mounted on an oversexed puck’s ceiling, or broken in a bathroom with a large triangular-shaped piece of it flying toward me like a quicksilver blade.

Mirrors. Not a fan.

Nothing ever good could came of one. For that matter nothing good came in one or out of one.

But this was my luck we were talking about, and it always took a nosedive at the Ninth Circle, a supernatural bar where I worked. The place put the fight in bar fight; that had been a fact from day fucking one. I had things thrown at me and my face in particular all the damn time. Occupational hazard. It was usually beer bottles, chairs, or even other patrons—you never knew. So, normally, having anything, knives included, tossed at me with vicious accuracy wouldn’t faze me.

The fragment of mirror did.

What I thought I saw reflected in it was worse.

Shit.

One moment I was investigating—otherwise known as hoping to break up a fight and kick ass—in the bathroom, and the next I was dodging impalement. We only had the one bathroom. Paien—monsters—didn’t care about separation of gender when it came to dumping bodily fluids, and as many species had more than two genders anyway, you couldn’t please everyone. One bathroom would have to do.

I walked in with the fire axe, the one used frequently but never for fires, which we kept behind the bar, and ended up in a four-way bitch-fest between two succubae, one lamia—better known as a leech on two legs in my book, and one wildly grinning shirtless puck. I didn’t care he was bare from the waist up. I counted myself lucky he had pants. I’d unwillingly—so very unwillingly—seen more than my fair share of naked pucks in my life. Only half-naked, like this one, that was a gift from above.

I was guessing from the trickster’s grin, the succubae’s bared snake fangs, and the lamia’s pulsating . . . You know what? Here’s an interesting evolutionary fact that most natural creatures and supernatural creatures have evolved from the same blob of cells before taking different forks in Darwin’s path. A swamp leech is distantly related to the paien humanoid leech masquerading as a woman, at least in how they both feed. Wide-open circular mouths ringed all the way around with teeth and a blood-seeking, hungering pulsation behind those teeth that would make you think more than twice about swimming in anything but a perfectly clear pool with an incredibly high saline content . . . and with a spear gun.

Or like me, who’d seen far too many mouths of lamia attached to their victims and sucking them dry, I didn’t swim at all. Trust me, I didn’t miss it.

Back to what I’d been thinking when I first walked in: The succubae wanted payment for services rendered to the puck. The lamia had been taking a bathroom break and simply wanted to eat the puck, as they are uncommon and the uncommon are generally considered a delicacy; and the puck was doing as all pucks do. He was skipping out on his bill, wreaking fucking havoc, and enjoying the hell out of himself.

The two succubae, covered in glittering midnight blue snake scales with storm-cloud black and silver hair, grabbed the lamia and tossed her into the large rectangular mirror on the wall—some paien are vain, but mostly they like to know what’s sneaking up behind them. Hence the mirror. As the lamia was thrown through the air to hit and hit goddamn hard, the mirror shattered explosively. I ducked, the puck—pucks always know the better part of valor is watching their own ass—hid in a stall, and the lamia ended up lying crumpled on the floor. “Ladies,” I drawled. “You know the rules: Charging clients or eating...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ace
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0451465296
• ISBN 13: 9780451465290
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: ACE; https://www.penguin.com/; ; Bachstelzenweg 10; Ibbenb?ren; 49479; Deutschland