Book 76, 2021 (Hugs and kisses from Cal Leandros, shithead.)

[chez_jae]

Blackout by Rob Thurman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I spent my day off knocking back Blackout, which is book # 6 in the Cal Leandros series by Rob Thurman. I'd been a tad reluctant to read it, because I knew it involved Cal losing his memory, and I have to say, ye olde "amnesia trope" is one I do not care for. At all.

When Cal wakes up alone on a beach, surrounded by the dead bodies of monsters, he has no idea where he is nor who he is. From the evidence surrounding him (and the weapons he's carrying), he can tell he's a monster hunter, but beyond that...nada. Cal hoofs it into town and does his best to assimilate as he tries to remember. Four days later, a man claiming to be his brother comes for him and takes Cal back to NYC. There, Cal learns that he and his brother are both monster hunters, which suits him just fine. Monsters are evil and need to be killed, right? In the meantime, some of the monsters he encounters seem confused by him, leading Cal to believe that people are keeping secrets from him. What Cal doesn't yet realize is that the biggest secret is his own monster heritage, and that it may be the only thing that can save the city when a would-be goddess arrives to drain the local Wolves and vampires.

As mentioned, I really don't like amnesia as a plot-device. It's far too soap-opera-y. However, the author made it work in this book. We get to see what Cal might have been like, had he been born fully human. Worse, Niko gets to see what Cal would have been like, and it leads to him making some less-than-honorable decisions where Cal is concerned. While Nik is desperate to have his brother back, he's also reluctant to burst this new Cal's happy little bubble. Of course, Niko's machinations are no match for Cal's Auphe half, which begins to reassert itself as time goes on. The story did have some humor in it, from Cal getting drunk (which he never would have done in his right mind) and singing with Robin in a bar, to him dragging Niko next door to the bar and insisting his brother get a tattoo. Niko, bless him, allowed it, although he nixed Cal's first suggestion of a "Bros before Hos" tat. Ha ha! A fun, fast read that managed to be melancholy and uplifting both.


♦ If you forgot who you were, were you still who you were?
♦ It didn't do the same for my damn hair, though. It had been in a ponytail, shoulder length. I'd pulled the tie free, but there was something in it...sticky and stubborn as gum or tar. It could actually be gum. Maybe I fought bubble-gum-smacking preteens from Hell too.
♦ "Get up and get in there and start slinging the hash. And don't you have anything but black to wear? You look like the Grim Reaper himself moping around. You think anyone wants Death serving him up pancakes? No, for a fact they don't."
♦ That was another thing I learned about the South. The tea came already sweet, the kind of sweet where they tossed a tea bag in a pitcher of sugar and there you go. They called it sweet tea--a nice innocent name for something I would've called a glass of diabetic death.
♦ While I might have the haircut of a sheepdog, I was one badass motherfucking sheepdog.
♦ "Cal, I'm going to take the knife. Don't be alarmed." // Don't be alarmed. He had balls, I had to give him that. He could fight me for the knife and, from the way he moved, he might give me a run for my money, shark to shark, but to tell me up front that he was going to disarm me and think that I was just going to let that happen. He could kiss my... // Holy shit. // The knife was gone and my hand was empty.
♦ Could you roll your eyes at your own idiotic ego?
♦ "Where have you been? Have you been here all this time? The days and days we searched without sleep, with barely a hope to keep us going, and, Zeus, what are you wearing? Is that gingham? Tell me that's not a gingham apron. I'm not sure I care to go on in this vale of tears knowing that you are actually wearing a gingham apron. Why are you wearing a gingham apron?"
♦ "That's not very brotherly of you." Neither were the handcuffs I was wearing. "You going to sell me overseas into the sex trade?" // "Like we could give your ungrateful, utensil-waving, frenzied fork-stabbing self away. We'd have to pay them, give them frequent flier miles, not to mention a ten-year free warranty, and then change our addresses."
♦ That one, Goodfellow, was in the passenger's seat. Despite the fact that I had stabbed him with a fork and had then tried to kill him with the same, he didn't appear as pissed off as I would've been. Then again, aside from being a monster, he was also mouthy enough that probably everyone he met tried to kill him with the first thing that came to hand. Fork, keys, chair, Pomeranian--whatever they had.
♦ "I cannot shit you," solemn as a proverbial judge, "it is not in my nature."
♦ "We need only two beds, because Robin and I will take turns keeping watch. Besides, you didn't mind sleeping with me when you were four and were afraid of the neighbor's dachshund," Niko said as he stripped off his own coat. // "Keep watch? You're afraid I'll try and run or...I was not!" I said with automatic outrage when I caught up to the important part of the conversation.
♦ "Come here, Cal." // I unfolded my arms just so I could fold them again stubbornly. "Why?" // He exhaled. "Just come here." // "Why?" I repeated. // "Cal." One patient word. My name...my real name. // I cocked my head with attitude and skepticism. "If there's no why, there's no Cal." // Niko rubbed his face again and said for what would be the last time, "Cal, I need you to come here." He didn't sound irritated. He only sounded more tired. // Without any orders from my brain, I took the few steps between us. Stopping, I asked warily, "So, what do you want?" // Niko pulled me down in one quick motion to rest my forehead on the top of his blond head. "Missed you, little brother." That I didn't immediately pull away was a thought I did think and promptly tried but failed to unthink.
♦ The puck could probably sell vibrating panties to nuns.
♦ Concussions, evil Egyptian spiders, a brother whose code of honor was so deep he'd consider the Knights of the Round Table drunken and corrupt frat boys; it'd been an eventful day.
♦ "That's it?" I demanded. "I grew up, ran around, saw some monsters, came to New York, and am now part of the Leandros Brothers and Monogamy Boy Monster Killers Incorporated?"
♦ "Great, I get amnesia, attacked by a spider in the john, and robbed. It just keeps getting better and better."
♦ The torso on the floor twitched, convulsed, and for a gruesome and nearly pants-wetting moment I was positive it was going to get to its feet and keep going, decapitated or not. Head? Who needed that? I was damn grateful Goodfellow wasn't here to answer that question for me.
♦ Guys were stoic and macho and we had three emotions: bored, angry and horny. If there were more, they'd have sent around a memo.
♦ Leandros' favorite place had turned out not to be vegetarian, but vegan, which was for people who preferred their suicide slow. Starving yourself to death via bean curd took commitment.
♦ "Who doesn't love sarcasm?" // "Anything you've killed. I've actually seen you hesitate on a deathblow so you could deliver some sort of action movie tagline first."
♦ "Yes, you're a sarcastic idiot, but you're easier to keep alive than a fichus and you look good in the corner of the apartment."
♦ For someone who had kidnapped me--no matter how he phrased it, claimed me as his brother, and made me run this morning until I'd hoped I'd cough up my lungs so I could die and end it all, he made me want to believe him. He had this air about him. If this were a movie, and it seemed more like it all the time, he'd be dead in the first fifteen minutes; it was just that kind of aura of too damn good and noble for this world. A Goose in a world full of Mavericks.
♦ I didn't know why I wanted the Leandros brothers' seal of approval anyway. I was who I was. I'd worn a gingham apron without killing anyone over it. Really, how bad could I be?
♦ You could only twitch so much before you went into convulsions or acclimated. I was doing my best to avoid seizures, which meant acclimation it was.
♦ Leandros braved an undead paw and put a pretzel in front of me. He did it automatically. I could see a lifetime of feeding the "little brother" behind it. It was so automatic, in fact, I guessed there were times we'd gone hungry as kids.
♦ His actions made me trust him. His words often made me want to beat him with a two-by-four.
♦ "They're going to kill us. They won't bother to eat you as you're made up of bean curd and soy, but I'm pure pizza, fried chicken and burgers. They will eat my ass."
♦ Niko was an expert in everything he did, mental or physical. He was the kind of man the world saw only every few centuries. Born to rule and gifted by nature beyond all others. But nature does hate perfection. The guy couldn't draw his ass out of a wet paper bag. I'd thumbed through my stack of cards on the subway to the Ninth Circle. The first had been a stick figure with circles for breasts, long blond hair indicated by two swoopy lines, a fluffy dog tail, and a fang-filled smile. Delilah (bad) was written in machine-perfect calligraphy at the top of the card. There'd been stick men with angel wings Ishiah (good) Samyel (good), a stick woman with vampire fangs Promise (good), a round thing with Mickey Mouse ears and a skinny tail marked Mickey (debatable). Then there'd been one stick figure with curly hair and three legs. I didn't need the Robin Goodfellow (run for your life) to ball it up and throw it at Leandros, which I had.
Can I just say that Niko making flash cards for Cal is the funniest thing ever?
♦ "So..." I said casually as I straightened, "that was Delilah, huh?" // Leandros already knew where this was going, I could tell by the twitch of his jaw. "Yes, that was Delilah as the conversation on the stairs and the index card I gave you made perfectly clear." // "And I nailed that?" // The roll of his eyes indicated I was beyond immature. // I gave a smug grin. "Damn, I'm good."
♦ I was surprised he could stand up without a chair sticking to his ass, the gravitational pull of his anal-retentive nature too strong to be overcome by mere furniture.
♦ I'd watched some TV last night while trying to readjust or remember home. Nothing good had been on--there was no porn channel--but I had caught some animal special. It would have been difficult not to catch it as Leandros had tripped me when I'd tried to walk away--the several times that I'd tried to walk away. He had a move for everything. That meant that against my will, and I had a feeling it wasn't the first thing he'd made me do against my will, I'd watched a show about Komodo dragons.
♦ "Cal, you son of a bitch, I've had a enough this week. Do you hear me? Goddamn enough."
♦ He'd had a long night, what with checking on me every hour to make sure I didn't die of secondary drowning. I'd asked him what that was and he told me if I did die of it, then he'd tell me.
♦ "Betcha have a sword under your mattress and you sleep holding on to the hilt." I grinned as an eye slitted at me, fully aware. He sat up and laid the sword on the bed as he swung his legs to the ground.
♦ Mantra. Niko was bound to know about those since he said he meditated for fun. Who meditates for fun? For your blood pressure, okay, but for fun? It must kick-start his soy-and-yogurt morning. Meditation and soy all in one day; he was such a daredevil.
♦ He was in the kitchen washing a bowl and spoon I'd used to eat the Lucky Charms I'd found in the cabinet. I'd left the dishes there on purpose. Cleaning was one hobby he hadn't mentioned, but come on. Except for my room, you could operate in here. Hopefully, scrubbing in the sink would distract him from the high levels of grimness he was radiating.
♦ I was tempted to give that blond braid of his a hard pull to let him know my leg was feeling just as pulled.
♦ "That was him? He did that? He tried to turn me into a buffet?" I gritted my teeth. "Before he killed me? He couldn't kill me first and then eat me? That's just fucking rude."
♦ And we didn't talk about that--watching a brother almost die on you. He'd nearly seen it again last night. Leandros was my brother before he was anything else in this world. If you knew where to look, you could see it in his pelting me with a candy bar and stealing pretzels for me from the dead cat. Or searching for me for days without sleep because a brother did not lose a brother. Ever.
♦ "Pooh hater," I muttered under my breath. // "Winnie-the-Pooh was not a koala--why am I even arguing about this with you?" He pointed the blade at me as the impaled mummified guard bear continued to thrash and hiss. "This creature could kill you as easily as one of those spiders. Keep that in mind." // "You mean the six spiders I killed? Really. That easy, huh?" I grinned. "You're pissed because you missed it, hanging up there. Big bad ninja missed it. Hey, do we keep tabs on things like this? Is that a brother thing? As in, it's my six spiders and one rabid undead Pooh to your...um...nothing? Nothing, right? Did I miscount?" // I couldn't see the exact color of them down here, the lights were dim--the bare minimum, but I could see the tug-of-war behind his eyes. One side was, best guess, hit your brother with the mummified killer koala bear. The other side, which I would have laid money on pulling ahead, wasn't nearly as forgiving as that. // "Sooo...we don't keep count?" I concluded. // "Wahanket!" // Damn, Leandros could get the volume up there when he wanted. Where had all that Zen gone?
♦ "I have places to go, things to do, peris to puck."
♦ "You don't think Goodfellow and my boss have done it on the bar, do you? Where I serve drinks? Gah. I think I need a nap to wash my brain."
♦ I wasn't afraid of my brother, but I was aware of his limits--none that I knew of.
♦ Niko's hand pushed my head with care to one side as he examined the puncture with gloved fingers. Whoa. "Um...Where'd the surgical gloves come from?" // "Goodfellow. He's a proctologist on the weekends." Before I could comment on how wrong that was, how very, very wrong, he continued. "Amnesia and gullibility, I didn't know they went hand in hand."
Niko actually cracked a joke?!
♦ "Yes, you live to exasperate, irritate, piss off, and at times enrage others, but only those you think deserve it. You were a born smart-ass, Cal. Trust me, I was there when it happened, and that will never change."
♦ What I was looking for took two hours to find as I tore through the garage apartment like a tornado. I kept moving, leaving weapons, food, furniture, clothes, anything I could lift in my wake. What I was looking for, well, was pretty simple--I was looking for a break. Yeah, two hours, but I finally got it. I finally got that break. I broke Niko Leandros. // I was beginning to paw through an Oriental lacquered chest against one wall in the living room when a hand grabbed my shirt and lifted me up to my toes. With his face in mine, he was looking much less stoic than he had since I'd first seen him. Met him. Seen him again after losing my memory and missing for days. Whatever. // "What...are...you...looking...for?" He enunciated each word with an angry pause between each one. The patience was all gone, which meant we might get somewhere. His darker skin was reddened, his eyes were slits, and he smelled how I imagined a charging rhino would smell. Rage--sheer out-of-its-cage fury. // Why had I been looking for this? One pissy super-ninja who could kill you with a pickle, resuscitate you, make you eat it, and then kill you again? Because Leandros was off his game. He was off his game because he'd lost his brother, and when you fight monsters, you can't be off your game. I was hoping that, as with lots of things in this world, I could fix him with one good swift kick--and two hours of destroying his obsessively clean world was just that.
♦ His forehead furrowed as if he weren't used to me backing him in a corner. That was the great thing about control. You rarely lose a little. You usually lose it all. I smacked the side of his head just as he caught my wrist a fraction of a second too late. With his speed, "too late" meant a definite loss of control. I'd kicked the hell out of his toaster all right.
♦ "You know, pissing me off to force me to release a little tension, that is very much my brother all over."
♦ Spider vengeance? Did I live in a world where spider vengeance was an actual concept? I had so fucked up in my former life.
♦ I wasn't arachnophobic. That was before I discovered there was a line between nonphobic and holy-fucking-shit-I-think-I-wet-my-pants--and that line sat firmly on one hundred and fifty pounds of a big black, venom-dripping, six-eyed demon from Hell. And not the biblical Hell either, but some alien, unknowable Hell from a distant dimension that would drive you insane with one glimpse. One hundred and forty-nine pounds and maybe I would have been fine. But one hundred and fifty pounds equaled full-blown arachnophobia right out of nowhere.
♦ It was over, and through it all, the worst thing that could've happened didn't happen. Not one of those bastards touched the TV on the wall--that damn magnificent TV.
♦ Niko was lying on his stomach on his bed. His pants were off, his underwear was...you know, let's not go there. "You seriously want me to bandage that?" I asked warily. // "It'll be difficult to reach myself." // "Yeah," I commented dubiously. "But you're...you know...a guy." // "I'm your brother. We discussed this so thoroughly before the spiders attacked that even my attention span was challenged."
♦ Eventually pain pills were passed out; one was accepted and one sent back. You can't nobly overcome suffering if you're not suffering to begin with.
♦ He was favoring his leg, but short of wrapping a pain pill in tofu in the hopes of shoving it down his throat as you would a cranky cat, there wasn't anything I could do.
♦ The door finally opened and Goodfellow, in all his unclothed glory, snapped, "One knock, wait. Two knocks, leave. Three knocks and I turn Salome loose on your testicles." // "Oh, fuck me." I covered my eyes as fast as possible with my hand. "No, wait--I didn't mean that. I absolutely did not mean that. Just words. Bad words, very bad. I probably shouldn't curse as much anyway."
♦ "Don't be such an infant." There came the increasingly familiar swat to the back of the head. "It's sex. You're a grown man." // "Then you have no problem with my seeing your vamp Promise parade around our place buck-ass naked?" // The smack was to my forehead this time, banging the back of my head against the wall--a two-for-one special. "Ow. Jesus. What was that for?" I complained, rubbing my forehead, then the back of my head, then my forehead again. // "You know perfectly well what that was for." // Yeah, okay, he did have me there.
♦ "Explain, and if this is not very, very good, I'll let Salome hump the both of you to death."
♦ "Don't give me that holier-than-thou judgmental look, Niko. I get that enough in the bedroom."
Do tell, Robin. Heh.
♦ "Monogamy," Niko said, regarding the bald cat batting at his braid with the caution one would use when trying to give a piranha a surprise proctology exam, "may have saved your life."
♦ Niko didn't have a matching tattoo that I knew of, pussy, but if he had one at all, I was sure it would say Massively Overprotective Brother from Kick-Ass-Hell. I doubted they could put that in Latin, but that is what it would say, punctuated with a ninja star or two crossed soybeans, depending on his mood, and announcing his mission to the world.
♦ "Niko's flaw--and it is a fatal one--is that if it came down to saving the world or saving you...he would save you."
♦ I hated the cold worse than I hated Niko's tofu.
♦ "Hey, preaching to the choir, but Niko insisted. Said he'd paddle my ass with a sword if he had to." // "I already have someone to do that. Although once upon a time if Niko had said that to me..." Goodfellow didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. Niko was already leaving us on the sidewalk as he headed up the brownstone's stairs at a fast pace, quick as legs could move without it actually being labeled running. It was much better being on the other side of the Goodfellow personal-life TMI seizure for once. // "That was fucking great." I grinned. "Do it to him again." // And that request had Niko through the door and inside before Goodfellow had a chance to say or do anything.
You can't escape fate, Niko!
♦ I stripped off my jacket, then my shirt--apathy means never having to...eh, fuck the rest--and sacrificed it to Niko's occasional eruptions of tofu, health shakes, and faux food that didn't belong in the human body anyway. I held his braid out of the way, very prom date of me, rested a hand on his back, and trusted Goodfellow.
♦ Part of me felt every bit like the monster he was, part of me didn't give a damn, and another part of me felt as if the cats were cheering me on.
♦ "Eh, why not? If Goodfellow is so oversexed that he can't put his damn pants on to answer the door, he deserves what he gets. Come on, guys. Get your wrinkly King Tut tails in gear and let's show a trickster what trickery and revenge are all about." // One of the best things about NYC. An ex-but-soon-to-be-again monster can walk down the sidewalk surrounded by a bunch of loping dead cats, catch a cab with an extra fifty thrown in by calling himself a vet student with some patients in dire need of bandage changing, make an extra stop, and not long after that be back home.
♦ "Oh, hey, Robin. You'd better shut off your phone and get your ass back home. I left you a present." // He brightened, a magpie at the sight of a shiny coin. "A present? I love presents. I can't believe you, especially you, actually got me...Oh skata. What am I thinking?" He jammed his phone in his pocket, grabbed his coat, and was out the door.
♦ "He tried to shoot me, strangle me, wanted to eat me, and he was a cat killer. The first three I could deal with. Cat killer, no."
♦ "If Robin does cause you to blind yourself with anything from an antique hairpin to a banana, I will have no sympathy."
♦ "Do you have a deep, hidden desire to rub my stomach?"
♦ "Open those baby grays, Cyrano. I did all the work. At least you could live through it."
♦ I tugged his braid, for the first time since I'd disappeared. I didn't know if he missed that, but I'd missed doing it. I'd been doing it as long as he had one.
♦ "You're the most goddamn stubborn man I know. Goddamn it, I missed you, you asshole." Three curse words in two sentences--that was more big-time emotion for Nik.



Now, this is certainly an instance where I would have loved to get some of the story in Niko's point of view. I felt bad for him, dealing with a Cal who wasn't quite his Cal, but I don't think it excused what he did to keep his brother happy and Auphe-free. I would have liked to get his reasoning, first-hand. Again, not a fan of amnesia-trope, but it certainly made for a different story in this series. Five stars.


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