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chez_jae
Roadkill by Rob ThurmanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I cracked and picked up Roadkill on Friday evening and finished it this morning. It's the fifth book in Rob Thurman's "Cal Leandros" urban fantasy series. Once again told in alternating first-person points of view, although this time, aside from Cal, there were some chapters written in Catcher's pov. Catcher is the werewolf cousin of healer Rafferty and he is stuck in his wolf form.
Cal is horrified and dismayed when his brother Niko agrees to meet with the Rom queen whose machinations nearly got Nik killed once before. It seems Abelia Roo needs a favor--someone has stolen a coffin from her clan, one that contains an anti-healer who makes the Pestilence version of the Four Horsemen seem like a mutton-bustin' toddler. Reluctantly, the brothers take the case, but it involves hitting the road to track down the thief who stole Suyolak, coffin and all. Coming along for the ride: Robin (whose main squeeze, Ishiah, wants him to try monogamy for a change), Salome (Robin's lethal, mummified cat), Delilah (Cal's main squeeze, who may or may not be planning to kill him), healer Rafferty (who saved Cal's life when Niko tried to kill him), and Catcher (Rafferty's all-wolf cousin). Only Promise (Niko's main squeeze) seems to have had the sense to sit this one out.
On a race against the clock, Cal and company are desperately trying to catch up to Suyolak. The seals on the coffin are failing, unleashing death and destruction in his wake. There are also some monsters to deal with along the way, not the least of which is Cal himself. The ease with which he can now open gates and travel through them is bringing his Auphe half to the fore, and as far as Cal is concerned, it feels good.
Mercy. Okay. To begin with, I can safely say this has been my least favorite book in the series so far. Fight scenes were not as prevalent, and I didn't like seeing Cal go off the rails. At his lowest point, he seriously contemplated killing his brother--the only person in the world he loves and trusts. I suppose that's what addiction can do to you, however, and Cal was definitely getting addicted to the high of being (half)Auphe. Catcher's pov seemed an odd choice, but it helped to get his perspective on his situation. He knew he was losing his human self to the wolf and that Rafferty couldn't fix him. In a way, it mirrored Cal's descent into his demonic half. This time, I really would have liked to get Niko's pov. What torture it must have been for him to see and feel Cal slipping through his fingers--the brother he's spent nearly his entire life protecting. It was a melancholy and at times depressing read. Rafferty was wallowing in self-recrimination as he blamed himself for Catcher's state, Robin was wallowing in woe as he sought to remain faithful to Ish, Niko was growing despondent as he watched Cal unravel, Catcher was fighting to hang on to his humanity for Rafferty, not for himself, while Cal (and Delilah to some extent) watched the world burn. I think only Salome had a good time.
♦ Too bad having little brothers with half monster genes didn't come with mental health coverage. Demon-driven deductibles--they were a bitch.
♦ Niko had raised me from birth. And he'd been on my ass since birth as well. Pick up your clothes, do your homework, stop drawing cheat notes on your arm, eat your vegetables, quit trying to make out the porn through the scrambled gray zigzag lines. I was in my twenties now so it was a little different. Run your five miles in the morning. Spar two hours in the afternoon. Study up on how to kill F through H in the Mythological Creature Compendium. Quit trying to make out the porn through the scrambled gray zigzag lines. Well, some things never changed. And porn channels were expensive.
♦ "Pick up your clothes. I am not your maid. How do I know this? A maid cannot kill you with a tube sock. I can." // The sock threat was a familiar one, but it didn't mean I wouldn't end up strangled with one someday.
♦ He stood, dark blond hair pulled back tightly into a braid that hung several inches past his shoulders; it wasn't the waist-length one he'd once had, but it was slowly getting there. His olive-skinned arms were folded across a gray T-shirt--not a normal T-shirt of course, but one woven from the wool of the finest assassin-trained sheep, I was sure. Not that Nik was a wolf in sheep's clothing. He was a saber-toothed tiger in sheep's clothing; a T-rex without that whole if-I-don't-move-it-can't-see-me thing. I was half a creature so malignantly murderous that the entire supernatural world had feared it; yet my brother, who was fully human, could kick my ass ten times out of ten. All hail Sparta.
♦ I had been making up for missing my run this morning. If I didn't, Niko would make me run the five I'd missed, plus five more, and probably run backward ahead of me so he could mock my athletic failures to my face.
♦ "You. Speak. Arf arf."
♦ Ishiah was my boss and he was a good boss, which meant he paid me and hadn't killed me. But he had a temper like Moses seeing the Golden Calf and breaking the Ten Commandments. No, that was more like a temper tantrum. Okay, Ishiah had a temper like God taking out Sodom and Gomorrah for being the Vegas of biblical times and turning Lot's wife into a saltshaker just for wanting a look.
♦ "I've always assumed if you escaped near death, you would give me a call afterward. Common courtesy."
♦ My calm and cool-as-ice brother had a temper too. You had to dig for it, had to push him, but it was there and it could rival Ishiah's. Ice to fire, but when it was your butt in a sling, whether it was frozen or singed didn't much matter.
♦ Niko and I, and sometimes Promise and Robin, made up what Niko called Preternatural Investigations. I was convinced he called it that because I could barely pronounce preternatural. My nice, simple Ass-kickers, Inc had been voted down.
♦ It made me wonder how socially unacceptable it was to break the kneecaps of an old lady with her own intricately carved cane.
♦ "Why is it always the world?" I tossed at the wall one of the Nerf ninja stars I'd given Niko as a joke and watched it bounce. "Why is it never just half a block? Or New Jersey? You know, something we could live without?" // Niko snatched the star from midair and tossed it himself. This time the foam imitation of a weapon actually embedded itself in the moss green wall. Don't ask me how. I don't know. Niko not only defied belief, but physics too.
♦ "Maybe he'll hit American Idol and that asshole Brit will humiliate him to death."
♦ Niko looked at me with as much disappointment as if I'd admitted to eating puppies for a late-night snack.
♦ "You know, when I was a kid and didn't want to do something, you made me s'mores and talked to me about it." // "Fine. I'll make you s'mores and we'll discuss this like rational adults."
♦ I rolled out of bed and gazed blearily at the piles of clothes on my floor, trying to remember which were clean, which were dirty, and which, just like Johnny Cash, walked the line.
♦ I found a note in the kitchen from Nik. He'd taped it to the Lucky Charms cereal box so I wouldn't miss it. Gone to work. Back for meet. Gate and I'll baptize you face-first in the toilet. Short and to the point, my brother.
♦ Robin had managed to get the equivalent of "followed home" by a mummified cat during our last..."adventure" wasn't the right word. More like our last FUBAR. Whatever you called it, it didn't matter. What did matter was that shaking a mummy cat off your tail was a lot harder than shaking off a normal feline.
♦ A hairless paw, with perfectly normal-looking claws that obviously weren't, came through the bars followed by a dry-as-dust mrrrrp. "There, there. Who's a good kitty?" I said, taking a step back. I didn't pull a gun, though. In my eyes, that gave me balls of steel. In Salome's eyes, steel would just make them easier to roll across the condo floor.
♦ Salome, finding herself in and surrounded by water, picked up a wet paw and looked at it, then back at Robin with woeful betrayal in those glowing eyes. Then her hairless ears perked as her head turned back, the whiskerless muzzle opened to scent the air and she was gone--like a streak of lightning....wrinkled, bald, undead lightning.
♦ Damn, she really was a tiny patch of living hell in a rhinestone collar. And I thought I had monster cred.
♦ He did manage to call me every equivalent of jackass he could think of, keeping it all in English so a nonbilingual moron like me could understand each one. I nodded, snorted, and gave him the occasional "good job" when it was a really filthy one.
♦ "Who the hell is Air Supply and why do they hate me so much?"
♦ It was too bad for me and too bad for my ass, which would receive a kicking requiring an organ donor with an Auphe/human-compatible gluteus maximus.
♦ When he was smarter than I was and capable of picking me up off the ground by my neck a la Darth Vader without the asthma--not that he would, but he could--that meant I rarely won an argument.
♦ He sighed. "Ten minutes. I'll go ahead and start regretting my decision now and get that out of the way, but in ten minutes to the second I am coming in for you."
♦ Catholic nuns had their rulers; Niko had his one hundred seventy-six ways of making you regret you had nerve endings.
♦ I was the salmon heading up the falls and Niko was the grizzly bear waiting for me at the top.
♦ Once again I was running on little sleep, about half what I'd gotten the night before. Three hours put my thinking skills at about the level of a highly inbred hamster or a former kiddie star turned pop singer, although that was insulting the hamster.
♦ Niko looked at me through opaque dark sunglasses. "We're on a mission from Buddha," he said matter-of-factly.
♦ "Forget the hundreds of reincarnated lives one usually must pass through. It's a wonder I didn't become enlightened and reached nirvana before you hit puberty for my righteousness in the face of incomprehensible suffering."
♦ "The first, caveman grunting followed by foul language, and the second, a body that would've made Michelangelo's chisel salute north. The Leandros brothers have arrived." // "Tell me he's not naked," I groaned. "I'll pay a hundred bucks to tell me he's not naked." // "I'm the one who makes chisels rise. You tell me."
♦ "You get bored about thirty seconds on the road and start flashing ninety-year-old women drivers." // "Someone needs to verify they're taking their heart medication."
♦ He hesitated, groaned, and then said, "Monogamy." // "Monogamous? You and Ish? You?" My mouth opened, closed, and opened again as I heard Niko, infallible warrior born and bred with nerves of titanium steel, fumble wildly at the M word and drop his bag. "I mean...you?" Robin? The horniest puck in a race that all but defined themselves by their level of horny. Wouldn't other pucks rush to form an intervention? Momogamous Anonymous? They'd tell him they'd have him off his feet and onto his back again in no time. Or his front. Or all fours--whichever he'd prefer. That Robin?
♦ "You're looking at me, aren't you?" // "I am." His voice was definitely not rough velvet, but unyielding granite. // "Is it a sympathetic look full of brotherly love? You know, the kind that says I have your back? Behind you all the way?" I asked without much optimism. // "No, it is not."
♦ When Niko was pleasant, it was a good idea to look for a safe place to ride out his irritation. I wondered whether they still had bomb shelters.
♦ "Work on stamina, then we see. And dirty talk." She shook her head with a disappointed clicking of her tongue. "Like Mormon with the dirty talk." // Goodfellow choked on a bite of waffle. "You?" he coughed. "You're bad at dirty talk? You said 'Goddamn it to hell' in front of that Catholic priest and the two nuns in the restaurant the other day. And you are bad at dirty talk?" // There was a big difference between cursing like five shiploads of sailors and actual sexual dirty talk. "Just choke on the waffle and die already, okay?" I snapped.
♦ "As fascinating as I find all my own lectures to be, I'm more concerned with your building gates in your sleep."
♦ "So? Is that what you guys really think? That I'm never in a good mood?" // Niko said, "Goodfellow, hold his head. I'll check his pupils." // I guess that answered that.
♦ "We should've brought the flamethrower." // "Be realistic," Niko reasoned. "How often do we honestly need a flamethrower?"
♦ Nik and his damn memory; he couldn't pass a sign with some mildly pertinent knowledge without committing it to a brain cell.
♦ "If the Kin find you, they find my brother. I would prefer we showed a united front in that case." // Robin woke up at that--part of him anyway. A puck mind could sense this type of opportunity at any level of consciousness. "A foursome should be united front enough," he mumbled. He was climbing out of the car and his eyes hadn't quite opened yet, but he was unbuttoning his shirt. "Prepare for the pucking of your life."
♦ Robin might be living the ultimate puck terror of monogamy, but Niko was a big fan of the "Trust no one" philosophy. He had his exceptions. He trusted me, and he trusted Robin as well. He trusted him to watch his back in a fight and to step up whenever we needed help. He trusted him in any situation that could go south fast. But he'd also been chased ruthlessly by Robin before the puck's reconnection, in every sense of the word, with Ishiah. Niko had an infallibly long memory and an extremely sharp sense of survival. Whether it was a sudden catastrophic monogamy failure and things going south in an entirely different way than how the phrase was normally used, Niko would be prepared for any eventuality.
♦ "It's just Cal. Half-Auphe. Possessed. So annoying his own brother stabbed him. No big deal."
♦ I leaned against the car. "You survived the night," I said to Nik. // "Barely." He continued eating a sandwich of sprouts, sprouts, sprouts, and some liquid slop to keep them on the bread--well, slop and a tangibly foul mood. "Robin and Ishiah had phone sex last night...until I cut the line. Then Goodfellow used his cell phone. I broke it quite, quite thoroughly. When he finally went to bed, in less than five minutes he was asleep and having what I guessed from the moaning to be a dream of the nocturnal emissions kind. I slept in the bathtub with a knife wedging the bathroom door closed." // "Gotta walk it off, Nik," I grinned. "It's a dangerous world." I bit my tongue at his glare and didn't go any further with it, not having much of a desire to be wearing that sprout sandwich. // "Ass," he said without any surprise at the fact.
♦ "Five bucks on the dead cat."
♦ "Our good friend Caliban was of the opinion that it would be fine entertainment to let her come along so that we might play a game of 'Does Cal get screwed tonight or does Cal get screwed tonight'?"
♦ It was getting embarrassing that the one with the highest body count on this job was a mummified cat.
♦ Niko slid the katana into the sheath on his back and shucked off the lightweight duster that covered it. I knew it was hot when he was admitting it.
♦ Someday someone or something would kill me. Fact. But I wanted them to see the scars of that encounter every time they looked in a mirror. Hugs and kisses from Cal Leandros, shithead.
♦ "Never send a samurai to do a street punk's job," I grumbled.
♦ No one said run. The situation was self-explanatory in that respect, and if it wasn't, then Darwin was ready to take your hand and lead your oblivious ass to extinction.
This one earns a four. Don't get me wrong, I loved it; I just didn't enjoy it as much as the others in the series.
Banner found on Pinterest; will credit artist if I find out who it is
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Date: 2021-08-29 10:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-30 01:03 am (UTC):/