by Rob Thurman
“Don’t give up on me, little brother.” Niko was unflinching. He always had been. In light of all this festive new evidence, he was the same. “I don’t give a damn what you look like now or might look like later. I’m not giving up on you no matter what a thousand healers say.”
“Because I’m your favorite brother?”
He gave me a glare that was the color of a perfect storm. “Because I’ll kick your ass if you do. We don’t give up. In our entire lives, we haven’t once given up when we had every reason to.”
No, we hadn’t. When anyone else would have, we hadn’t. “I still think it’s because I’m your favorite brother.” Giving your brother, your only brother, a hard time was the law. It was one of the few I obeyed. Besides, who needs to admit genuine emotion when you have sarcasm?
Niko didn’t keep up his half of the brother dynamic. He didn’t bitch back and he didn’t pretend to kick my ass, although he actually could kick my ass. Instead he leaned around the refrigerator and pushed me on my way into the hall toward the bedrooms.
“Grimm,” was all he said.
Yet again, he was right. If Grimm found out I couldn’t gate, I wouldn’t have a chance to worry about buying hoodies to cover unusually silver hair or sunglasses to cover equally unusual eyes, glowing the red of a crematorium’s flames.
I couldn’t ignore this problem. Hoodies and sunglasses wouldn’t cut it. If I couldn’t gate, I would be useless to Grimm. Worse, I wouldn’t be interesting to Grimm. I would be worthless and boring, and Grimm didn’t do well with either of those. Grimm faithfully followed the often-quoted philosophy, if slightly altered to suit him: If you can’t chase it, eat it, fuck it, or laugh at it . . . then kill it, piss on its body, and walk away.
If Grimm killed me because I was boring, not only would it piss me off, but no one would care if I looked human, Auphe, or like a mutated aardvark.
Gating. I could do that. I didn’t have much choice.
I’d had the traveling ability for years, gating with ease until the recent case of a lightning-induced knot tied in my brain. I now had drugs stolen in bulk from several pharmacies. I had an idea that Niko had theorized to test out. And, last but not least, when it came to Grimm, I had more motivation than the second-to-last member of the Donner Party.
Gating.
Piece of cake.
Hell, yeah.
* * *
Four hours, forty-five minutes, and one new silver hair later, I was trying to bury myself in a pile of leaves in the southern woods of Central Park while a second bullet slammed above me into the tree I was using as entirely inadequate cover.
There was no piece of cake. Not at all. Not unless the cake was microscopic and packed inside the first sniper round that missed my head by millimeters before I’d dived to the ground. That’s right, things were so damn dire that I was forced to convert to the metric system to indicate how fucking close my head came to exploding like a blood-filled cantaloupe.
I’d seen Niko leap up into a tree not far from me like a damn human jaguar. He was at the tree, up, and gone into the red-and-gold leaves before my eye could barely catch the movement. I wanted to whisper in an annoyed hiss at him what a great idea to avoid the boggles on the other end of the park only to be shot by some member of the NRA whose truck had gotten keyed, whose dog had died, whose girlfriend had dumped his ass on a picnic in the park, fixing this spot forever in his meth-addled mind, and who had finally catastrophically lost his shit. But the guns in his truck? Those he hadn’t lost.
I couldn’t do that, though, as it would give my position away . . . or more away than it already was, and this was not an out-of-town redneck looking for double-wide trailer, beer-soaked vengeance as much as I wished it were. This was a professional sniper. This guy had been to war, honed his skills, and learned to love them. He was not the kind of guy who put on too much female deer urine, passed out in a whiskey coma, and ended up humped to death by an eight-point buck while out hunting. This sniper was trained, alert, and probably had a kill list longer than my dick. I already had his attention. I didn’t want more of it.
When we’d arrived at the park and run a few miles into the woods to make sure no one would see, we tried out Niko’s idea to cure my gating problem. In the past, before I had picked up on how to gate whenever I wanted, it had taken a rush of adrenaline—the kind that often comes with the knowledge that if you don’t move now, you’re going to die the kind of gruesome death that would have Frank Miller himself hurling. That was how I’d made my very first gate and several later on. Since I wouldn’t believe Niko was about to kill me and it was risky to run around looking for something that could kill me and would kill me if my traveling didn’t come back online, Nik had come up with the next best thing. EpiPens Basically an instant shot of five hundred micrograms of adrenaline. I wouldn’t be facing death, but my heart and other systems would feel like they were. It seemed reasonable, imitating what your body would do in a potentially fatal situation.
It hadn’t worked.
I’d pulled down one side of my sweatpants to jam the delivery port against my outer thigh—Nik had read the instructions to me nearly two hundred times—and clicked the needle home. I waited for a full minute and tried to make a gate. Nothing. My heart rate picked up a little, but not much, and with the Auphe being immune to almost any poison, I shouldn’t have been surprised that artificial adrenaline wouldn’t do the trick. I’d been about to say so to Nik when the first bullet was fired. After that it had been hiding in leaves, cursing gun laws that didn’t understand that while I needed guns for fighting monsters, everyone else should be armed with nothing but a slingshot or maybe a good-sized stick.
Niko was still out of sight among the topaz, ruby, and amber billowing clouds that made up the autumn foliage. Knowing him, he was leaping from tree to tree like goddamn Tarzan, not caring if he got himself shot as long as he saved me. I wondered for a second if I could get an electric shock collar at the pet store for him for when he got that “no greater love hath a man than to lay down his life . . .” gleam in his eye and give him a healthy zap. It would be in his best interest, honestly. During that second, while I was also guesstimating the collar measurement of my brother’s neck, I had managed to get three more EpiPens out of the front pockets of my lightweight black jacket and injected all of them this time. For a moment my pulse pounded hard and fast and then staggered while my chest ached with sharp, stabbing pains. I thought I’d given myself a heart attack. I could see my death, facedown in the brown and yellow grass, foam spilling over my blue lips. Eyes fixed while hands froze clawing at the dirt.
Like I hadn’t faced worse images, real ones, than that in kindergarten. Someone would have to try a little harder than that to scare me. And the elephant sitting on my chest? That pain? Pain was good. Pain let you know you were still alive to feel it.
Wake up, I prodded mentally at the base of my brain. The lizard brain where all the survival emotions, all the truly nasty emotions lived. The truly entertaining ones.
My heart rhythm was steadying and my chest pain fading, but I felt something better than all that. I felt the prickle at the back of my neck, under my skin, slithering veins of fire up into my skull. It was there all right. Sleepy but awake for now and . . . curious.
Time to play?
I bared my teeth happily at the echo. That’s right. Time to fucking play.
Narrowing my eyes to slits, I scanned the area slice by visual slice beyond the trees, past a small clearing, and into the trees past that. There it was. There was the glitter of a sniper’s scope. I wormed my hand inside my jacket, my hand on the grip of my Desert Eagle, as I strained to see every detail . . . the scope, the leaves covering the shooter as mine had covered me, the dark brown watch cap pulled low over his ears to better blend into the trees around him . . .
And then I was gone.
I shot him in the head, just behi
nd his ear. I’d appeared behind him haloed with my gate—bruise purple, corpse gray, deadly lightning—surrounding me. It was quicker than building one to walk through. It hadn’t made a difference, though. He’d been almost as quick and I’d known there was no chance of hitting him in a nonlethal area as he’d started to whip over and off his stomach. There was no time for that or for asking who he was and why he’d tried to kill Niko and me. It wasn’t if I didn’t already know. The fact that he was too fast and too good, nearly as good as Niko, played a part too. Hesitation in that case is not your buddy.
I was impressed and maybe even a little unsettled. “A .375 CheyTac with subsonic rounds,” I said, prodding the gun respectfully with the toe of my sneaker. “That is a helluva lot more gun than he needed for us. I guess we should be flattered.” Niko was moving up to my side. He dropped down from a tree like I’d known he would. He could keep up with me most of the time, silver medal easily, whether I gated or not. The dead guy on the ground came in third, but a bronze medal was nothing to be ashamed of . . . unless you were buried with it.
I crouched down to check for ID, not that I needed it, but Nik had taught me to be thorough. I didn’t expect to find any, and I wasn’t disappointed. No wallet, brown hair, brown eyes that were dead and blank, already dimming. Average height, average weight, average jeans, shirt, and jacket. Even the tags had been cut from his clothing, his boxer briefs too. The most average man alive—well, not alive anymore. He’d have blended in anywhere. “Bastard,” I sighed. “If I have to stick my hand down your pants, I expect at least a Walmart tag for the trouble.”
“It worked.”
I looked up at Niko’s half question/half statement.
“The epinephrine.”
“Yeah, it did. You’re the genius you’re constantly telling me you are.” I slapped the side of his knee and stood, putting the Eagle back under my jacket out of sight as we jogged away from the body. “It took four maximum doses and my pulse is up there.” Nothing like a human’s would be, which was encouraging. “But it worked.”
“Four doses.”
I could see his ambivalence: satisfied it worked and not at all satisfied it had taken so much. He already had my wrist snared in an unbreakable grip and was monitoring my heart rate. He knew the side effects better than I did. “But we don’t know if it’ll keep working or you’ll have to inject yourself every morning or with every single gate.”
“We’ll find out. I’ll be a lab rat for a good cause.” And not getting killed by Grimm was a damn good cause. “If I do have to inject it every time, we’ll also have to find a better injection system, a needle long enough to go through my jeans. I can’t be pulling down my pants to stick it in my thigh in the middle of a fight. Goodfellow would find it fucking hilarious, but me, not so much.” Leaves fell around us as we ran, the rain of them gloriously bright and beautiful because of, not in spite of, their death.
“Who do you think that guy was?” I asked after several more long strides. It was a senseless question, the kind you ask when you know the truth but wish you didn’t. We both were perfectly aware of the only kind of ordinary yet incredibly skilled human who would want me dead. Hell, the only other human I associated with aside from the hot dog guy these days was Nik.
The hand stayed on my wrist, Niko still counting. “You know who he was.”
Yeah, I did.
“Un-fucking-lucky for one,” I muttered. “He was good with an even better gun.” But I’d been better. I kicked up enough of the bright-colored fallen foliage to imitate a phoenix as I ran faster. No one held a grudge like a paramilitary organization.
You might forget your fuckups, although saving Nik would never be a fuckup to me, but you can bet those who tally the fuckups never forgot them. . . .
Or you.
5
Goodfellow
“The Vigil is after Cal.”
I had a deep and abiding camaraderie, a friendship undeniable with Niko. In every one of his lives that I’d encountered him, I’d found him to be intelligent, loyal, noble, brave, an excellent fighter, the best possible human to have watching your back, and incredibly sexy even in only a slave’s loincloth. What was I thinking? Especially in only a loincloth. Yet there were times, rare as a virgin in a Roman whorehouse, true, but there did exist the uncommon occasion when I would’ve greatly enjoyed breaking an urn, a small piece of statuary, or, in these times, a chair over his head.
I slid farther down on my couch designed for twenty people or one puck and one possessive mummified dead cat. Salome rasped a purr, sounding as if she were choking on a pound of Egyptian sand, while draped over my knee. There was no heartbeat in her still chest, and after years, I had yet to get used to that. I rubbed tired eyes and then raised my best incredulous gaze to his stubborn one. I hated the stubborn one. It was akin to a stew of obstinacy and righteousness seasoned with a demand deadly enough it had you giving in when the first two wouldn’t have swayed you at all. Particularly when he had his sword out . . . as he did now. Curse my self-preservation instincts.
“You don’t possibly think this surprises me,” I said skeptically. “If you tell me that it surprises you, I will be forced to downgrade you from ‘the smart brother.’” Straightening from my weary sprawl, I put Salome on the floor to go find her fellow dead cat companion, Spartacus. Cal had gifted me with him after killing the murderous mummy that had made the both of them. I thought he was hoping for an unholy spawning and a litter of more zombie cats. That would be my luck.
Niko continued to loom, katana at his side, waiting. He knew words were my weapon, but they were also my weakness and, of all others, Niko best knew how to use that against me. Silence, I loathed it, and he knew it. “He gated in broad daylight when he was trying to save you from Spring Heeled Jack!” I snapped, spreading my arms wide to indicate all the unbelievable lunacy that act entailed. I had hundreds of informants in the city and I hadn’t needed to talk to one of them to know that the Vigil would come after Cal after that idiotic move he’d made. The Vigil had made their rules clear. Humanity, as a whole, could not know of paien of the supernatural—outside horrible reality shows. Neither were they wrong. If humanity knew of us, there were enough of them to kill us all or lead to a fear-based, on their side, war if nothing else.
“Broad daylight!” Yes, it was a repetition and I was more skilled with any language to make that unnecessary, but . . . by Menoetius, most reckless and crazed of the Titans, sometimes even Niko didn’t listen.
“It was more toward twilight actually and irrelevant.” Face smooth, eyes calm, he lifted the katana and tapped the point not quite idly on the thick slab of rock crystal that constituted my coffee table.
“Fine. It was dim. It was dusk. The fact remains it wasn’t dark. People could see, which leads us to another very unpalatable fact: He did it in front of at least twenty people!” I dropped my arms. Nothing could stretch far enough to show the amount of idiocy that went into that. This wasn’t ancient Greece. Mount Olympus wasn’t the current tourist attraction and gods and goddesses didn’t disappear into the ether on a daily basis in the sight of whoever they chose. Those days were gone.
“Much as it pains me to admit, I’m not quite capable of seducing those twenty witnesses and using my immeasurable stamina and infinity of sexual positions to put them all in orgasm-induced comas, catatonic at the knowledge nothing in this life will ever match a mere fifteen minutes with me.” I continued with little that could be construed as a good mood. “We were fortunate as it was that he was quick enough that no one caught it on their phone. Therefore it’s not at one million hits on YouTube. It wasn’t on television. There was the infinitely amusing hallucinogenic gas theory, as you couldn’t blame it on swamp gas in gamou New York City, so someone was doing their part in covering it up.” The Vigil at their best.
“But it remains, Cal lost control in public. No, that’s not true. Cal didn’t have a
ny control to begin with when he was searching for you and Jack and care he did not. And don’t for a moment underestimate me by assuming I don’t know about a basement full of partially disintegrated bodies that happened less than twenty minutes later,” I sniped, “which, I’m assuming, is how he did find Jack and you, the mandatory sacrifice in these overwrought scenarios, the helpless golden-haired ninja-in-need.” I’d pay for that description sooner or later, but it would be worth it. I went on to voice the obvious. “Even brainwashed people talk when other people around them begin to explode like one hundred and fifty pounds of raw meat wrapped around a stick of dynamite.”
“They were not good people. Bad things tend to happen to not good people.” There was a minute shift of his shoulders, the most dismissive of shrugs. “Also irrelevant.” The sword tapped against the stone again.
“I think the Vigil would agree with you there. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that they have found Caliban irrelevant to life and plan on relieving him of it altogether,” I said with bitter force. I couldn’t help it. Always . . . always they made it so difficult to keep them alive.
There was a nearly invisible flicker of fear behind Niko’s calm. Present, then vanished in the smallest fraction of a moment. No one would’ve seen it aside from me or Cal, but no one had known Niko for most of human history save the two of us.
Sighing, I waved a hand in his direction. “You are beyond fortunate I remember how you looked in a loincloth. Put away your toy and sit down while I get us both something to drink. Then we can play our little game I’ve become so fond of over the years.”
Rising to my feet, I went to my bar. I wavered between the truly hard liquor and wine. Achilles had grown up drinking wine as if it were water, as had Alexander as well. Arturus drank a piss-poor beer-ale mix the memory of which made me cringe to this day. Niko in this life didn’t drink often at all, but there were exceptions. This would qualify. I went with wine and handed him the glass. He had sat on the coffee table, katana sheathed, back ruler straight, appearing stoic as one could be yet cripplingly afraid, although he’d refuse to admit it to anyone, Cal and me included. Always had he been this way. The strong one—afraid to be afraid.
