by Rob Thurman
“Obviously you’re overdue a visit to a nymph. Pay me for the condoms this time or I’ll give you a box of Saran Wrap for your dick instead. And, no, you were back at our village. You must’ve escaped capture. There was a celebration when Robin and I came home, he said, and then shared far too much information about all the women whose heartfelt gratitude didn’t involve any clothing.” He shook his head, a Pavlovian instinct with Goodfellow. His braid began to slip over his shoulder into the sterile field and he flipped it back. “He said your name was Cullen.”
Cullen.
I felt my breath hitch and stop in my throat.
Cub.
The boy whose parents had died of the fever, but had his brother, grown tall and strong, to take care of him.
The brother who shouted my name . . . Cullen, Cullen . . . as strange men, big and dirty, flooded into our village.
The brother . . . my brother who told me to run to him, and I tried but he was far and my legs were short. I tried to call back before large, hard, hurting hands had snatched at me and harsh voices had jeered as I kicked desperately. He was far away but he was running. He ran faster than anyone in the village. I was proud and bragged about him at every race. My brother, it was my brother who ran faster than a stag. He would come for me and chase away these men. Stupid men.
I swung suddenly, the grass my heaven, the sky my ground. Everything was upside down, but I saw the bright copper shine of my brother’s hair, his face twisted and hurt like it had looked when Mum had died half a day after Dada. Scared, my brother was scared. But that was all right. He’d been scared before, but he still loved me and took care of me. This would be the same.
Something cold slid across my throat and there was no air. I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t cry out for help or say his name. I couldn’t see him anymore, but I heard him scream for me when a red river flowed over my face, hiding everything from sight. I heard him as all was red and red until I finally fell into it. I fell into that red river that had somehow shadowed into black.
I didn’t hear my brother after that.
I didn’t hear anything.
I coughed and managed to pull in air. That it tasted of blood was imagination or memory, maybe both. Putting the injector down with numb fingers, I saw the glimmer out of the corner of my eyes, both left and right. More silver hair. The Auphe had had a grab bag of predatory goodies: unstoppable immune system, gates, absence of conscience, and now great memories too, it seemed. Racial memories, no doubt, and I was a special mix of races. Wasn’t that the cherry on the damn top of it all? Whatever Great-great-great-great-homicidal-Grandpa had done, you would remember if you tried.
I stood. “You’re right. If he wants to help, we should let him.” If he’d offered to help after what had happened to Cullen, a little kid—if he could bear to keep helping us after that, who was I or anyone to say no or try to stop him?
“Now, about the Bakeneko we have to take out tonight? It doesn’t matter if the Vigil is out to get us if we can’t pay the rent. Play with your big-ass needles tomorrow. We should leave soon. Those pizza rolls aren’t going to tide me over all night long.” Circling around, I yanked at his braid. As a reward for not contaminating his precious sterile field, he stopped at the third autoinjector and went to take a shower before the hunt. When I heard the spray start and the sound of it hitting the sides of the shower as it scattered around when Niko stepped in, I stepped out. Outside the front door as the gloom of twilight began to creep in, I called Goodfellow.
“What is it, Caliban? I’m on the other line and I do not have time for this,” came Robin’s impatient snap.
Feeling more than snappish in turn, I snarled, “Cullen died.”
Little Cullen, five winters old, with a big brother he worshipped. Little Cullen who’d not lived to see a sixth winter.
“I died before they took Niko. There was no party back at the goddamn homestead. No clowns and balloons. No goddamn kegger to welcome the two of you back,” I challenged. “Why don’t you tell me what really happened when you set Nik free?”
I’d heard it on a hundred cop shows. Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a pattern.
We already had the once. Niko had been Achilles and had followed in my footsteps when I died as Patroclus.
I had a sick feeling now with Cullen that we went beyond chance. I felt what it had been like to be Cullen. I had been Cullen, and as Cullen I knew how my brother would react to watching my throat cut in front of him.
Not fucking well.
The voice on the other end of my phone went from harried to flat. “You remembered?”
“Not when he told me the story, because that was a lie, right? Only when he said my name was Cullen.” I rammed fingers into my hair and wanted viciously to rip it out, every silver strand. “I get a new white hair every time I turn around. I’m guessing that combined with the memory of Cullen means that Auphe have racial memories, which is a good indicator my human half has them too, but I don’t know or care. All I want to know is what happened to Nik. I was dead. Some bastards hung me upside down and bled me dry and he saw it. He saw them butcher me like a piece of meat. But later you found Nik. You bought him. I know you were lying about me waiting for him back home. What else did you lie about? He said you set him free. What happened then? What did he do?”
The air should’ve smelled of exhaust and hot dog fumes and the stench of too many people, but I smelled grass and trees and the smoke of a peat-fed bonfire. “What did he do, Robin?” I demanded again.
I had to know. This life was this life, and that was okay, because in other lives, Niko lived. If I died first, Nik lived on like normal people do. He survived. Whether it was fighting as a warrior or giving it up to marry, have kids, and be a farmer smelling of horse manure, I didn’t care. I just cared that he lived. I wasn’t the end of him. I wasn’t the inevitable fucking end of him. It wasn’t always my fault. It couldn’t always be my fault.
There was the sound of a long breath let out, as harsh as some death rattles I’d heard, and the answer so emotionless it had to be a cover for the exact opposite. “What do you think? What he always does,” he said without color or life. “What you always do.”
What we always did.
That skipped straight over coincidence to pattern.
I’d thought it was this life that had us so intertwined and tied to each other. The circumstances—abusive mother, monster father, the constant threat of capture, death, and fates worse than all those combined. I’d been wrong. It wasn’t because of the Auphe or Sophia or two years I’d lost to the Auphe hell that was Tumulus. It wasn’t the unnatural genes in me either. Nik and I had been this way through our entire cascade of lives Robin had hinted at to us. We’d been brothers, cousins, comrades-in-arms, but always we’d been one.
Flawed because we were unable to stand alone or whole as others weren’t because we were forever one.
I didn’t know if we were damaged or if we were complete.
I didn’t know.
I had to know.
“Shit.” I spat, banging the phone against the side of my head. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” I put the phone back to my ear and choked out, “I can’t . . . it can’t always be . . . me? Is it me that gets Niko killed? Is it me every time? Is it my fault?” No. Fuck, no. “Is it both of us? Do we take fucking turns? Robin, is it—”
His voice came back smooth and soothing, “Caliban, do you recall when we first met? When you were nineteen? How I hypnotized you to recall the two years you couldn’t remember when the Auphe had you prisoner? How badly it went and how I told you not to let anyone hypnotize you again? No one. No more hypnosis. Not even me? That it took you too far until you were all but gone and I very nearly couldn’t get you back? Do you remember?”
That was as apropos of nothing as you could fucking get. It made no sense. What was he talking about? What d
id that have to do with anything right now? “I remember.” The words were thick and wet, my legs were giving out beneath me, and I didn’t give a damn. “What does that have to do . . . Screw it. It never changes, does it?” Did I want to know that? Did I really? Wasn’t ignorance better? Despite my jumbled thoughts my mouth wouldn’t stop. “Niko and me? It never changes. We always die too goddamn soon. We never have real lives. You said you both came back. You said Cullen was alive and—”
He cut me off, soft and calm. “I lied as I do. About the hypnosis. I practiced. I thought I was the best, but I became better. Remember the nights months ago you came to my place to watch movies or come to my parties? When Niko was out with Promise? There were no movies and there were no parties. We talked instead. Or I talked, talked to make you safe. You don’t remember that part, I made certain of it, but you did listen then. You need to listen now. Caliban, obliviscaturque puer. Obliviscaturque Cullen. Forget that boy. Forget Cullen. Forget his life. Oblivisci omnia. Forget it all. Obedite custos. Do you understand?”
Obey my guardian.
Forget.
Obltus.
Obey.
Odiemus.
“Intellgeo. I understand.”
Someone’s voice—it sounded like mine in a weird way and yet not quite—startled me. I was standing outside—what the hell? My back was braced against the concrete next to our door. I was practically on my ass, and my face was wet. I wiped at it curiously as I straightened until I was upright and looking up at the sky. Was it raining?
“Cal? Are you there?”
Huh. No rain. I took the phone away from my ear and looked at the screen. MOTHERPUCKER floated on a pale blue background. That was another “huh.” Putting it back to my ear, I said, “Robin? Did I call you by accident?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he huffed as if he couldn’t decide to laugh or give me hell. “My number is only one digit away from 1-900-SXY-VRGN. I hope Niko doesn’t go through your phone bill. I’d teach you all about burner phones and fake credit cards, but I’m busy at the moment. By the way, if I did have a 1-900 number, you couldn’t afford it.”
“Hey,” I protested, not really sure what I was protesting, but it seemed the thing to do.
“Good night. And, Caliban? The truth is often highly overrated. Keep that in mind.”
What was that? The fortune cookie of the day?
Before I could ask, there was a click and the phone went silent. I switched it off automatically and thought how close Robin’s laugh sounded to jagged determination . . . and despair. But that made no sense. A third huh would’ve been too much for me to justify, even with my own low opinion of my IQ. I slid the phone back in my pocket and headed back inside, refusing to admit I didn’t remember coming outside at all.
We were on the clock. Niko and I had a Bakeneko to kill.
Standing in a rain I couldn’t see or feel on an outstretched hand wasn’t going to make that happen, was it?
* * *
Why you would build a cookie-cutter neighborhood full of kids next to a junkyard, garbage dump, whatever, I don’t know? But someone had done so. Or maybe the neighborhood came first, as brand-spanking-new as it looked, and the junkyard came second, bringing the Bakeneko with it.
It could be no one cared, that there were much worse places to live.
I knew how that felt.
When I was a kid, eleven, I thought—a year after Jack, our serial-killing neighbor—I’d have thought living in tiny gingerbread houses next to a junkyard would be paradise, much nicer than renting the dump across the street from the halfway house. Or Nik using the computer at school to check for sex offenders the first day every day we moved and once finding out ten out of fourteen houses on our block were marked. We’d caught the Greyhound bus after school that same day, stolen most of our mother’s money—Sophia could stash anything and make it nearly impossible to find, which was why it was most and not all her cash—and we left the state.
She caught up with us a week later; she always did. After a fight with Niko shouting that I was only eleven, I was not a monster able to fight off a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound molester no matter what Sophia thought, and then Jack, Jack, Jack. What Jack had done to me—what Nik refused to say out loud: that Jack had chloroformed me, sliced my chest open with a scalpel in the start of J for his initial, and that he would have killed me if two unexpected things hadn’t happened. I hadn’t thought that after all that, she’d give in. The fact that Nik’s fifteen-year-old face was blank and cold as he reached into the kitchen drawer to pull out a steak knife helped her make her decision. My brother who had rammed a knife into Jack’s heart and I hadn’t ever thought he regretted it. Sophia hadn’t known that, but she’d been street-wise enough to know you can only push people so far.
There was a line and she’d recognized she was precariously balanced on it.
She’d actually gave him a twenty for food, recognizing and afraid of what she saw of herself in him. But his reasons were about protecting his brother. Hers were about protecting herself. Nik had already paid the deposit for the place, under the table thanks to his age and the fact that the place should’ve been condemned, but it was all the money we had. We ended up living in that apartment for a while. It was crawling with mold and scuttling with cockroaches, but it got a clean sweep when it came to sexual offenders. There were no swings or slides, not a sliver of grass, but it was the best Nik could do.
In comparison, a junkyard was the next best thing to a playground . . . as long as you had your tetanus shot. You could explore, build tree houses that, forget the name, sat on the ground and were made of abandoned cars, but it would’ve been close enough. But I was eleven, Nik wasn’t much older, and there was no way Sophia would pay her hard-earned drinking, drug-buying cash for a small, brightly painted house not much bigger than the living room of the smallest apartment we’d once lived in. It could’ve been five hundred dollars more . . . two hundred dollars more; she wouldn’t have done it.
“Kids, huh?” I jumped up and started climbing the chain length, hoping they hadn’t gone all the way with the deluxe razor wire in the package. “It lives next to practically a Walmart full of them. All half off with a coupon for buy one, get the next one free.”
Niko was following me, passing me truth be told, but who needs truth? “I wonder if it lures them in. I can’t see that as possible. The fence is not your typical fence children would climb. It’s nearly twelve feet tall and . . .”
“There’s concertina wire,” I finished with a groan. Concertina wire was cylindrical loops of razor wire—razor wire times two. I could see it glittering in the bright white moonlight like an ice-covered guillotine. I did hate razor wire with a passion, concertina more so. It only showed up when I was wearing something I liked and did not want ripped to shreds, like my jacket tonight.
“The children or the Bakeneko could’ve dug a hole under the fence in a less visible area.” Niko reached into the pocket of his duster, hanging from the fence with one hand, tossed something to me, and then retrieved another for himself. They were wire cutters, the extremely expensive kind that even razor wire couldn’t stand up to. “Riiight. I was supposed to buy these a while back. Last month?” I started cutting and dodging the spang and slice of the wire in the air.
“Last year. But no worries. These are your next Christmas and birthday present and paycheck from the bar, assuming you ever get another one with your customer reviews.” Nik had gone through the wire a helluva lot more quickly than I had and was now climbing down the other side, then jumping.
I’d made my last cut, tucked the clippers away, and was about to swing over the top before I caught the smell. It wasn’t easy among the thousands of other scents in a junkyard, but I tried to stay familiar with the smell of those who hate me. “Nik, stop.” But it was too late. He’d already soared down to land crouched with one hand planted on the ground
. “Dogs.”
Another deep breath brought a new scent to me as I plunged down after him. “And either a lot of cats or one big-ass cat.”
Big-ass cat it was.
7
Caliban
The first thing a person should know when breaking into a junkyard is that (A) five Dobermans are overkill and (B) having their vocal cords severed so that they can’t bark to alert intruders is animal cruelty of the highest order, and it’s also cruelty to me when one buries his teeth in my leg because by the time I smelled and heard him coming, it was too late. His black coat soaked up the moonlight instead of reflecting it
I didn’t want to hurt it. I liked dogs. They didn’t like me, hated and were terrified of me depending on the dog and its aggression level. They smelled me, looked at me, and knew I was wrong. As far as I was concerned, that meant they had common sense. Cats, non-children-eating supernatural cats rather, liked me. But then cats liked to play with their food while it was still alive. Not the best recommendation or reference, but it is what it is.
I was about to swing my Desert Eagle to hopefully only knock the dog unconscious, as its grip on my leg changed from restraining me in place to having a snack. It chewed with enough enthusiasm that I had faith that it would make its way through flesh to bone in no time at all. I’d be doing a public service. There was nothing like gnawing on hard bone to keep teeth bright and tartar-free. Before I had a chance, it yanked its jaws away, teeth taking a little flesh as a souvenir, and lifted its head. Four more Dobermans had drifted out of the stacks of cars into a small opening of dead grass and an equally dead tree. They had been beginning to circle Nik. They weren’t a threat, but no one wants to kill a dog. Those four Dobermans lifted their heads as my Lassie had and then all five as one raced back toward the maze of cars.
They didn’t make it.
All five died in that peculiar and unnatural silence, clawed, bitten, set on fire, and all of them swallowed whole. It was disgusting. I’d killed too many monsters and some people as well, and none of it had made me feel as sick as this. The smell of burned dog hair, seared flesh, spreading blood . . . Jesus Christ, they were just dogs. No self-respecting monster had to kill a dog to survive.
