Downfall

by Rob Thurman

  This time was the worst of them all. In other lives, I’d seen ways out before, not always, but fifty percent of the time at least. They involved cowardice, desertion, backstabbing, and a wholly self-centered sense of self—all good things to pucks—but all things Niko refused to be a part of, and where Niko went, Cal never failed to follow. That had been before. Now the battle was coming to them, not vice versa. They could run forever and still might not escape it. And they wouldn’t run. When they were boys they had, when they hadn’t known what they were running from, but they were men now. They’d decided their running days were over. No matter how it all ended.

  Selfish bastards. Running wouldn’t work this time, but could they not at least try?

  Although there had been the one time Cal had been chosen to be a eunuch for Queen Jezebel’s harem, and he had no qualms about running then, the ass.

  Niko and I had been on horses when we rescued him from the palace guard. He’d started running and hadn’t stopped until we were half a mile outside the city before swinging up on the horse to settle behind Niko. I’d laughed harder than I had in ten years. The crazed son of a bitch who backed down from nothing and no one, yet at several points he had out-run our horses who were at a full gallop.

  This from the man who’d once told David regarding Goliath, “Hey, Jewish kid, I’m bored. You want me to take this asshole for you?”

  Perhaps if I hired someone to threaten to castrate him now, he would run. I sighed. No, he would merely shoot them. Things weren’t so simple these days.

  The warm weight of Ishiah’s hand slid down to the middle of my back. Without my noticing, he’d moved around the bar to stand behind me. “But Niko and Cal, they never knew before—that death wasn’t the end. That they came back. Time and time again. That you would be waiting for them. That you miss them when they’re gone, questionable taste aside. That they need to do right by you. Perhaps that can be the difference. Perhaps this time you can convince them they need more than someone fighting at their side. They need planning, plotting, scheming. They need what you do best.”

  Angels of the Lord—not mine, but regardless—were made to be convincing with voices that rang with faith and truth. Unfortunately I’d been born with feelings of a devious nature that I was forced to admit would’ve filled me with cold chills at that faith and truth, if they hadn’t warred with and lost against how unbelievable the sex was with Ishiah. Not to mention the lust, the blatantly carnal desire . . .

  The new handcuffs we’d just used last night.

  “It’s your orgy face again.” He grimaced.

  “No, that face was for you and you alone.” I gave him a sharp-edged grin.

  He returned it with enthusiasm. I was proud. It wasn’t everyone who could tempt an angel and then corrupt him thoroughly after he retired. “Smug bastard,” he grumbled, sitting on the stool beside me, shoulder to shoulder. “What is coming for them, then? Who is it?” he asked. “I can guess, but I do hate the mockery that inspires in a trickster if I guess wrong.”

  I tapped one finger against the bar. “Grimm and the Bae.” Caliban’s utterly insane half Auphe cousin and his offspring he’d created to replace the now extinct Auphe. He’d been out of sight for months now. He’d had time to heal from our last battle and was more than past due back to torture Cal some more. I was surprised he’d waited this long

  My second finger tapped down. “The Vigil, which by the way is where I obtained the rocket launcher.” I’d left the sniper rifle. It was garbage. The Mossad would’ve turned up their noses at it. “One of them was on the roof across the way about an hour ago waiting for Cal to leave.” Since Iahiah had sent him home early, the Vigil had missed him. Luck . . . ever a lady for me. I nudged the weapon with my foot. “Boys and their big bad toys. He had more than this and was, as they say, armed for bear.” I’d disposed of him. As big and bad as he’d thought he was with his portable armory, he wasn’t close to being as bad as I was. “Oddly, he was going commando.”

  “Carrying that, it isn’t a stretch to think he was in commando mode,” Ishiah replied, handing the weapon over the bar to one of his fellow peris to hide from sight.

  “Hm? Oh no. I meant he was going commando as in no briefs or boxers. Curious, that. If you’re going into battle, one would think you’d desire to keep your package of goods tightly secured and safe,” I contemplated.

  “You mean he was . . . Why did you even look?” Ishiah demanded, face flushing with embarrassment or anger. With an ex-angel, who knew which emotion it was?

  “Curiosity mainly.” What a bizarre question . . . to a puck at any rate. “Also I was searching for hidden ID. Did you know that I once smuggled over the border Gabriel’s Trumpet in my—” Ishiah’s hand slapped over my mouth. As if that wouldn’t be ludicrous if true. I did need to invest huge amounts more time toward developing his sense of humor.

  That was currently beside the point, however. As the man on the roof had been human, and the only humans who knew about paien or the Auphe were the Vigil and the Rom. The Rom, all of them now, were aware of Cal and Niko and thanks to a decimated Sarzo Clan. They knew to stay away from them. It was easy enough to guess, ID or no—that meant he was Vigil.

  Cal’s understandable, but very real, fuckup, of flashing an especially nasty piece of the supernatural world in broad daylight on a sidewalk of humans. And humans, aside from the rare exception, didn’t know about us. They couldn’t know. If they did, they would kill us. They would try to kill all of us, every last paien on this world. That was how man was. If you didn’t understand it, kill it. If they were more powerful than you, build even more horrible weapons and absolutely kill it. But the war would be bloody and the humans wouldn’t escape unscathed, not from us or from their shiny new instruments of hell.

  Unscathed or not, win they still would by sheer numbers alone.

  The Vigil existed to prevent all of that: discovery and the most likely ensuing war. Naturally, if it came down to war, they were an all-human thousand-year organization with more information, and actually accurate information, on paien than paien themselves probably had, which would not be in our best interest. Preventing a war was in everyone’s best interest, however, but ours most of all. They had not ever been happy with Cal, but he’d proved useful in wiping out the Auphe and he kept under the radar, so they were satisfied.

  I wondered if they knew about Grimm and his Bae offspring. Unlikely. Grimm was clever. If he took over the world, it would be done before anyone knew it had happened.

  Cal wasn’t like Grimm. Nik had been in danger and if Cal had thought anything at all before gating in front of those people, it would’ve been “watch the light show and fuck you and the three-legged donkey you staggered in on.” I understood it. I knew saving Niko was all that mattered to him at that moment, but the Vigil would not understand or care. They wouldn’t be happy with Cal now. They would conclude that he had to go. They weren’t entirely wrong that Cal had been foolish and reckless, but, same as Cal, I didn’t care. It had been to save Niko. The Vigil could kiss my superb ass.

  Cal was my friend and I would do anything to keep him. It wouldn’t be the first war I’d fought in. It wouldn’t even break the top two hundred.

  Before I could tell Ishiah about threat number three, a wave of terrified howling erupted, filling the bar and the night air outside. Perfect timing. That one I’d expected, and expected now or yesterday, but close enough to the same. Every Wolf was headed for the door in a panic, clawing at the wood to escape, smashing through the small window to run, to flee the city before it was too late. They were the packless ones. The subcontractors for the Kin, better known as the werewolf Mafia, and now, from the citywide howls, they were nothing. The hunted. Prey. The new Alpha had risen.

  Caliban’s ex-homicidal fiend with benefits had finally forced all the Kin to submit. Or die. The kid truly did know how to pick the chicks.

  My t
hird finger hit the bar by Ishiah. “And Delilah.” I had informants, but I also had a sense for a rise of power—the smell of it, the taste of it, the recognition of the perfect time for it—all those and more. All had told me the same.

  I’d seen this coming as well. Tricksters aren’t too successful if they don’t keep their eyes open to squirrel away nuggets of information to use for cons, for blackmail, or to sell. I’d noticed the bitter infighting in the Kin, I knew who the cause of it was, and I knew who I’d put my money on coming out on top . . . and when. The ruthless, the crazed sociopath, they win every time.

  I knew because I’d done the same before many times, long ago.

  Sat on a hundred thrones.

  “Wonderful. I’m thinking my Kin protection money just doubled.” Ishiah already had a shot glass of tequila in his hand, and he tapped it to my glass. He threw it back, then grunted, “I hate to say it, but what a bitch.”

  That she was.

  But to give credit where credit was due . . . she did excel at it.

  All hail the new queen.

  4

  Caliban

  Around three a.m., an hour or so after the Kin howl of triumph, Nik found me as I was tying knots in the top of garbage bags and growling with a furry tail popped out of one weak seam. Stuffing it back in, I reached for the duct tape on the floor beside where I crouched and sealed the heavy-duty—my ass—garbage bag full of werewolf. “Hey, Cyrano,” I said absently, not bothering to look up as yet another seam split. Goddammit. I waved a hand toward the kitchen breakfast bar. “I made you breakfast.”

  He closed the door and locked it behind him, no asking how I knew it was him and not some random flesh eater. My brother knew I could smell him a block away in the city—five miles away in the countryside. The Auphe gift that keeps on giving. A predator’s sense of smell was the least of it.

  Glancing down at the two bagged but not tagged Wolves I was wrapping up, he raised his eyebrows. “I suppose I do not have to ask if you heard the Howl.” The call passed from Wolf to Wolf to Wolf, traveling miles, to cities, states, then the entire country, carrying the news. The Kin belonged to Delilah now, and Delilah was a stone-cold killer. Stay out of NYC. That was the Howl.

  Howl with a capital H because it was like that Disney movie with all the Dalmatians. Hundred and one, right? I paused a second and concentrated on the hazy childhood memory of that.

  Good old Disney, who lied psychotically about nearly every supernatural creature they stuck in a movie. Set the bar high when you were a kid and then swung that same bar at your skull when you grew up and faced the real deal. Like mermaids. Cute on TV. In real life they have miniature shark teeth, drown you, tuck your body into an underwater nook, and when you’re good and decomposed, they eat you.

  Thank you, Disney, for the scar of that mermaid bite mark on my back.

  The Howl seemed to be fairly accurate so far, and that was something. “Yeah, the ‘Twilight Howl,’ or was it Bark?” I grinned up at him this time. “I think it’s a little more homicidal with Mafia werewolves than cute and fluffy spotted dogs.” I finished taping the last bag.

  Delilah and I, while we’d once been fiends with benefits, had been on the lookout for an opportunity to kill each other for a while now. I, because she’d tried to slaughter my friends and brother. Delilah, as she was the single Wolf who didn’t mind screwing an Auphe. Rather liked it, I was pretty sure, as it was dangerous and Delilah loved danger. None of the other Wolves approved, though, including her now all-female Mafia. They worshipped her for taking down the top male Alpha and for being All Wolf, but they had their limits. Fucking an Auphe was one of them. Nobody loved the Auphe. If this was a Lifetime made-for-TV movie, the sobbing would abound.

  Delilah would try to kill me. Sooner or later. We’d both been working on killing each other for months now. She’d get around to it personally one day. She’d taken over the entire werewolf Mafia of NYC and she had things to do. Killing me was one of them, without question, but down the list some. Instead she settled for sending me three newly anointed female Kin to do it for her. She knew it wouldn’t work, didn’t want it to work, as she wanted to do it herself. It would be seen as an effort on her part until then.

  And Delilah, hell, she might be able to pull that off. I was good, but so was she.

  * * *

  I’d always known how good she was and smart, but it hit home with what happened before Niko had come home. I knew she’d suggested it. No other Wolf would’ve thought of it.

  What had caught me off guard was it didn’t happen that way. It didn’t. They don’t knock on the door. They’d have broken in through the second-floor window to slink in. They’d have tried to surprise me outside before I got through the door. They hadn’t done those things, the normal things . . . in our world. They’d showed up half an hour later and knocked.

  Me? I’d been stupid. I hadn’t bothered to inhale their scent when I’d opened the door, because monsters? Monsters don’t knock. Or so I was under the impression.

  I’d opened the door, Glock in hand. I was perplexed at what stood there, then caught on, and couldn’t have been less in the mood for this shit. Fur and round gold eyes that belonged in the forest instead was hovering above a sidewalk. Yeah, I’d been stupid, no lying to myself about that, but not completely idiotic. I’d been prepared. A human knocking at your door can kill you if he’s armed well enough.

  The three of them, in varied stages of wolf, had rushed through and taken me to the floor. There were claws, fangs, and growling—it reminded me of some absolutely unbelievable sex Delilah and I had had more than once. You can have good memories whether the person involved is a psycho killing nightmare or not. Strange, but true. I’d been relieved none of the Wolves were silver-blond like Delilah. When I put her down, I’d do it because it needed to be done. I didn’t want substitutes that I could pretend were her. When I ended her life, I wanted to see it in her eyes, no one else’s. She’d tried to kill people who mattered to me, everyone who mattered to me, to gain points with the Kin. Forget what we’d had before, I wanted to see the realization, fear, and haze of death in the red-gold of her setting sun eyes—clouding as I watched. The other Wolves didn’t, wouldn’t matter.

  The first one who had been on me had dark-brown hair, to her waist, a filmy down of it on her face that crept down her entire body, which was easy to see as her clothes were in tatters and rags on the floor as she’d shifted further into Wolf. She had spring grass green eyes and claws longer than her fingers. She was beautiful in the way nature alone can create beauty. The fact that she’d been trying to bury her claws in my throat was too bad. I shot her in the head, between those amazing pale green eyes.

  Dark dishwater blond had been the second one. Another All Wolf, capable of only partial shifting, most of them. She didn’t have claws, but her fangs angled toward me would’ve made a shark piss the Atlantic. I’d shot her in the mouth three times and finished her with a coup de grace to the back of her head when she’d turned to either run or crawl inch by inch to breathe her last. Wolves weren’t my favorite monsters, but leaving one to skulk off to die in a corner, I wouldn’t do that.

  Monsters of almost any kind don’t deserve that.

  The last had hair the color of the darkest ink, eyes round and pale blue as barely bloomed flax. Except for her eyes, you’d have thought her human, not a Wolf or a member of the All Wolf cult at all. Nails, neat and tidy, the same color as her eyes, grew eight inches at least and had stabbed toward my own eyes. I’d kicked her back and aimed my gun at her chest. Her small but perfect breasts were covered by a silk shirt the same blue that she coveted elsewhere . . . as were her pants and her boots spangled with sky-colored topaz stones, and then there was her gun. It wasn’t every day you saw a Wolf with a gun. Even her gun had been blue. I knew some guns came in sunshine yellow or bright pink, Rugers, Walthers, Mossbergs, Colts, and Tauruses, but li
ght blue? Not available. Custom job, I’d swear on it.

  “That must’ve cost big bucks,” I’d said to her as she stood over me while I lay on my back where the first Wolf had knocked me flat.

  “Money is money, but style is much more. How one represents one’s self.”

  I suppose that was why she hadn’t shifted any further. This chick loved her clothes, and destroying them if she didn’t have to . . . as in having a gun . . . wasn’t going to happen. That gun, by the way, was a Ruger. I’d recognized it in less time than she’d taken to aim at my chest.

  Mine, not as colorful, was aimed at her head—same as the first two. Practice, practice, practice. “Style doesn’t mean much to me.” I tightened my finger on the trigger. “And I represent myself with my aim, which means more than blue boots, shiny stones, and a custom-painted gun.”

  She could have shot me in the chest and I might have died; chances are I would’ve died, but not necessarily instantly depending on her aim. I also could have fired simultaneously, as practice was my life. That practice would’ve put a bullet in her brain. She’d die, no way out of that. I might live. I might not, but she wouldn’t know one way or the other—she wouldn’t have known if she’d done her Alpha Delilah proud or not, as she’d be dead.

  Disappointing Delilah was one thing. Disappointing Delilah and not living to inform her of the situation was worse. Delilah would want to know. Poor Delilah, too busy taking over the Kin and killing those she didn’t trust or think worthwhile, that wasn’t leaving her time to kill me herself. Just yet.

  “If I get you first,” I asked casually, “can I have your boots? My neighbor loves all that sparkly crap like that.”

  She snarled, a bizarrely upper-class snarl—I’d not seen an upper-class Wolf before, and I’d thought it was more over the thought of me looting her boots from her dead body than killing her.