Downfall

by Rob Thurman

  Grimm would kill Cal without hesitation if he thought Cal had become somehow lesser—such as losing his gating ability.

  Grimm might kill himself as well, out of boredom and lack of competition.

  Grimm was fifty gold ingots of crazy in a five-gold-ingot bag.

  I left the computer and wandered into the kitchen, checking the refrigerator for whatever my new, less murderous housekeeper had left me the afternoon before. Ah, feta cheese, raspberries, blackberries, and grilled chicken on a spinach salad. With the plate and a fork I’d taken from a drawer, I settled in at the granite kitchen island. “Cal is stable, yes? When he first started gating, just one would knock him out for hours. He’s basically starting over again. I’m not surprised he won’t wake up yet. Give him a few hours before panicking.”

  My fork hovered over the salad as I thought, for the first time, I wasn’t telling all I knew—what if Niko was doing the same? Me lying was a given, but what of Niko? He could lie. I’d seen him do it. He’d learned well from his con artist mother. He didn’t like doing it, but he was quite, quite good at it when he had to be. What if this was a “had to” situation?

  What if Niko was lying and I hadn’t thought to listen, actually listen to him? What if he was buying time on his way to kill me or to kill himself because Cal was . . . gone?

  “He is stable, isn’t he? You would take him to the hospital if he was otherwise. Penny-pinching Charon, he’s not dead, is he?” I didn’t care that that would mean Niko was coming for me with vengeance in his heart and hands ready to bathe in blood. It made no difference in this life that Niko might hold on to a fraction more sanity than Achilles, enough to avenge. I cared simply that if Cal was dead, then Cal was dead. And Niko would soon follow him, and I’d sworn that wouldn’t happen this time.

  Not this soon.

  Not again.

  “Niko.” I’d lunged to my feet, the breakfast plate gone sliding and spinning off the granite to shatter on the floor. “No. No. Put him on the phone. Hades, he’s not awake, you said. He can’t speak. You’re lying. You’re lying. Niko, tell me. Tell me he is alive. That he’s not . . . tell me!”

  My panic was enough to have Niko’s restraint solidifying, returning to normal. What I lost, he regained in equal measure. “Robin, he’s all right. He’s asleep, but he’s not bleeding and his vital signs are normal. Here, listen.” Niko’s voice vanished and for several seconds I heard the soft in-and-out pattern . . . the inhalation and exhalation of someone sound asleep. Cal.

  “Robin?” It was Niko again, sounding considerably more worried than he had before.

  I sat with a clumsy stumble, none of my customary grace, on the floor, berries flattened and smeared beneath my bare feet. “He wasn’t in your armor.” It was randomly said. I didn’t mean to say it, but I couldn’t stop. It appeared to be the day for reliving Troy . . . the nightmare war and cursed city. I could not let that one life go, much as I’d tried; I couldn’t be at peace with it.

  “That part of the story wasn’t true,” I continued dully. “You had matching armor or not quite, but close enough. Matching armor for the cousins.” Matching armor that had been a gift from me. That sort of irony was a blade sharp enough to slice into your gut all the days of your very long life.

  “But the Trojans didn’t know that. They thought he was you. There was a plan. We all knew it. So he went, but he went too far.” Patroclus then as Cal now inevitably went too far. Older than Achilles, he was a man with the heart of a boy, wildly impetuous with no grasp of his own mortality. “He was supposed to pull back when the ships were protected, but he didn’t. He chased them all the way back to the gates of Troy, and that’s where they killed him.” Stupid, stupid boy. “I was following him, trying to catch up, but I wasn’t soon enough. You and I were with him when he died, and his words were blood.” I was numb, but the memory was sharp. “He spoke in blood.”

  “Goodfellow.” The name buzzed in my ear, but it had no meaning.

  Air that bubbled through thick scarlet. What had he tried to say? I never knew. The floor was cold beneath me, but all I saw, all I felt was red-soaked sand and an unforgiving white sun in a painfully blue sky.

  “You wouldn’t let anyone take his body. Not our men. Not me. You said he wasn’t dead, and killed two of our own soldiers when they tried to pry him from your arms. He couldn’t be dead, you swore. It was all lies, lies, lies, but he was. You fought us off for an entire day. Finally you let us take him. You cut off your hair to mourn.”

  How unlucky was I to have seen that tradition twice in my life now?

  “You helped us build the pyre to burn him.” His eyes had been a gray as empty as the dead ones of his cousin as he watched him burn. Cousins with the matching eyes and matching armor and legends in their own time, but now they were gone.

  “The funeral games lasted days.” And he didn’t say a word to me or acknowledge me again. The only words I heard him speak after fighting off those who came to prepare Patroclus’s body for funeral rites were when someone asked couldn’t our patron god Pan, he who fought by the cousins’ side, bring Patroclus back from Hades and the Elysium Fields? His response had been cold and flat.

  “Pan? There is no god Pan. Gods do not exist.”

  He was right. When it came to me, that was the truth and nothing but.

  “All those days and you wouldn’t speak or eat. I pushed you and I goaded and I begged. I told you Patroclus wouldn’t want this. I knew you would fight. To fight and die in battle was an honor then, but you didn’t choose honor. You didn’t choose to fight. You chose only to slaughter and die, taking every man, woman, and child of Troy that crossed the path of your sword with you.”

  “Robin, stop this. Stop it now.”

  Patroclus died and so did Achilles without once thinking of how they left me behind. It was the one end of days I hadn’t let myself wallow in or give in to self-pity over. I didn’t deserve that release, as their deaths in that life had been entirely my fault. I should’ve known what Patroclus would do. I knew him, knew him perhaps best in all the lives I’d known him, and knew how reckless he could be.

  Resting my forehead on one knee, I saw a blue sky cloud with smoke and thought of how I’d stayed until the ashes of Achilles were mixed with those of Patroclus. Then I left. I hadn’t returned to the site of Troy again. I never would.

  The Great God Pan.

  I’d been such a fool.

  “Goodfellow? Robin?” Niko said it sharply and with a worry that indicated it wasn’t the first time he had been calling my name.

  I jerked my head up at the strong voice in my ear, leaving the haze of sand, salt, and smoke behind. “Niko?”

  “Cal is fine. He’s asleep and once in a while the brat even snores. Here. I’m sending you a picture.” There was a click and thirty seconds later on my phone was a picture of Cal with a small bandage on his temple, his mouth hanging slightly open, and a definite darker, damp area of drool on the pillow. There were still pale strands of Auphe-silver in his dark hair, but it was Cal. Breathing, drooling, alive.

  I touched a finger to it. Bewildering how in these modern times you could keep what you lost. There and ready at the press of a button. I thought, considering all those I’d lost, it made it all worse. It made forgetting impossible.

  But Cal wasn’t lost yet and I could see that for myself. He’d looked nearly identical to this before in Pompeii other than his eyes being dark brown. He’d painted then. Frescoes. When he wasn’t brawling at any and every House of Bacchus.

  “It’s like the one time we went to a lupanarium, a whorehouse, in Pompeii and he had forgotten his coins. I told him they’d make him work it off in trade with whatever disease-ridden gladiator that slimed in off the streets. I laughed so hard it took three of the ladies of the house to get me back on my feet. He . . . Never mind.” I shut up. No more memories today, not even good ones.


  Plus, Cal was fine. But Cal might not stay fine if I had to keep hypnotizing him whenever I told the harmless part of a story from a former life and the Auphe racial memory kicked in to let him recall it. Including the bitter and bloody endings that he wouldn’t appreciate any more than I did. The stories I did tell would have to be very carefully chosen.

  “Goodfellow?”

  “Cal is fine.” I repeated his words, in control again. If we were going to survive, I didn’t have a choice there. “Good . . . that’s good. Come home when you can.” I hastily added, “Don’t tell him what I said about Achilles and Patroclus. Troy is a memory that won’t fade for me. It’s always there. It was not . . . it wasn’t pleasant and I wish I hadn’t told you. You didn’t need to hear that and he doesn’t either. You know Cal. Chronos curse us all, it was a different lifetime, but martyr that he is, he’d find a way to blame himself.” I was desperate enough to use a word incredibly rare for me to voice. “Please do not tell him.” I swore silently to myself at the truth that was. Neither of them needed to hear it, especially after having lived it, but I’d spilled the nightmare of it over Niko nonetheless.

  “I won’t and we will be home whenever he wakes up.” Niko hesitated and added, “Robin, are you all right?”

  It struck me then, for the first time.

  After Troy, I had not been all right again. I didn’t think I could be. A handful of years out of a million, and those few years had changed me forever.

  Wasn’t that strange?

  Was I all right? I laughed. What a funny thing to worry about. And, worse, the wrong time to worry about it. I laughed again and it hurt my throat in a fashion laughter wasn’t meant to. Turning off my phone, I kept laughing—laughing was a better word than for what it actually was—until I slammed my arm against the cabinet I leaned against, knocking a butcher’s block of knives to the floor. The blades scattered like a school of sleek silver fish in a shallow creek. Seizing one, I laid on my side, the floor colder yet, and vegetables, fruit, and pieces of plate scattered all around me. Continuing to laugh, I carved the polished wooden floor until it read in wide letters with the painfully jagged teeth formed of bloodstained splinters. “Synchoreste me. Forgive me,” I had no expectation of it happening, but I had to ask all the same. The problem was that I was asking it of the wrong person. Achilles was gone and if he wasn’t, there hadn’t been absolution there. I should be requesting it of myself, forgive myself. I let the knife fall. I was less likely to do so than Achilles at his most insane. My arm tired from the inscribing of my guilt, the memories that refused to fade thousands of years later weighing me with exhaustion, I slept on the floor. Unconsciousness was the place where I could be more honest about the sounds I made when I dreamed.

  And what those sounds really were.

  * * *

  Delilah was nude and ordinarily I would’ve enjoyed that . . . for hours or longer. I’d have used my phone to record the image for posterity. I might have excused myself to their bathroom for an exceptionally inspired time-out.

  This was not ordinarily, however.

  And I was not, inconceivable as it might be, in the mood.

  “I am not paying two point five million dollars for you to let a Vigil assassin shoot Cal before eating said assassin, see clause B, subsection twelve. This is exceedingly clear in the contract. Eating the assassin comes first, and Cal does not get shot at all,” I snarled. Snarling, growling, and violence were all the Kin understood. Luckily I had a sword I’d stolen from a museum in Russia in one hand and a 9mm I’d stolen from Cal in the other. I couldn’t decide which to use first. I was angry enough to bring out the man-made weapons instead of my words. The last time that had happened Rome fell. Not all my work, but I had lit the fire.

  Unimpressed with my weapons or my words, Delilah sprawled on the wine-colored sofa with a wall of glass behind her to show the skyline to best effect. Her place was enormous with marble and large silk pillows spread in piles on the floor for the Wolves to curl on. Silken dens. I could barely see her kitchen from where we sat, but I did see the size of the refrigerator. It was large enough for three people to comfortably fit inside, six if you didn’t care about their elbow room, and I had not a doubt that if I took a look there would be at least one person hanging in there. Delilah had wasted no time in spending the Kin’s money and didn’t seem inclined to keep an office at the docks or the falling-apart Kin warehouses. The other Alphas had. They’d gone home to luxury, but they toiled in the filth with the pack—most likely as they didn’t trust their pack. There’s only one way to become an Alpha, and that’s by killing one. Keeping your eyes open paid off.

  On the other hand, there had never been an Alpha such as Delilah. She was a criminal ruler, a political ruler, and a religious ruler all in one. She’d started with one pack, her Alpha, killed them all, and hadn’t stopped. Her Wolves worshipped her for it. She was the unforgiving teeth of female rage at being denied their chance to lead. She was nature’s jaws ripping out the throat of the Wolf with pure genes—the ones that thought they were superior as they could be both entirely Wolf and entirely human. Delilah hated them: the ones who chose to live as human, as sheep, instead of trying to find a way back to their first form.

  The perfect form.

  Delilah had also risen in the ranks by a common method in ancient royal families: assassination. She’d started the Wolf way by taking out Alphas, but she’d moved on to high breeds and males. You didn’t have to be an Alpha to die. She’d destroyed the Kin as it had been and remade it to her liking. She had come at them from three different directions and three different ideologies. She started a revolution and she brought a crusade to their doorstep. It had been a thing of beauty, the entirety of her manipulations. She was brilliant, cunning, and her strategies were exquisitely bloody and effective. No other Wolf could’ve done it and they all knew it. I could see why she didn’t run her empire from all-but-collapsing places of filth. Delilah had nothing to fear from any of her Wolves.

  She was their goddess.

  That didn’t imply that admiring her flawless exhibition of Machiavellian warfare didn’t make me any less furious. I could be impressed and enraged, both at once. As I was now.

  She extended her right leg to examine her boot. It was all she was wearing: a pair of knee-high, dark-cider-tinted leather boots. “Heels or no heels. Cannot decide.”

  “Heel height slows down speed unless you entirely shifted to Wolf and lost the boots altogether. Lower heel height increases number of prey brought down without loss of footwear. Stay with the low heels. It’s more true to your heritage.” I leaned back against the couch, chocolate brown, that I’d claimed and wondered how anyone in the whole of the world, save me, survived with what little brain power they had. Running quickly, away from or toward, depending on your need, was the top skill to possess. Then again, the past had shown Delilah had nothing to fear.

  Nothing save me.

  Curving her lips, wild and wanton, Delilah stripped off the boots, waved a hand at her Kin second standing between us to continue our business, and turned into a white Wolf. The amber skin and eyes with the glorious Asian tilt were gone and the Wolf rolled on her back to shove her muzzle between the couch cushions. With paws drooping over her fur-covered chest, she was either asleep or ignoring me or both. Wonderful. You get so much bang for your buck when dealing with the cream of the criminal element these days.

  “The Lupa Alpha,” her second began, her straight black hair a waterfall to her hips.

  Lupas were what Delilah had called her female pack before taking down the Kin. Lupa had meant she-wolf in Greece and Rome long before Delilah was around. She could read; that was a point in her favor. Most Alphas in the past had thought books were drink coasters.

  Still . . . how patronizing on her part, turning into a form that couldn’t physically speak to me at all, whether either of us wanted her to or not.

  Pa
tronizing and not subtly so either.

  “The Lupa Alpha,” I interrupted. “She took over the Kin, a male-dominated organization, not to mention a high-breed organization, not one All Wolf allowed in a position of power. She killed every high breed she could find. She slaughtered every male Kin Wolf who didn’t run his furry nuts out of the city and she needs a special title too? Just ‘Alpha’ doesn’t express all she’s done, the fact that you have a furry Amazonian hold over millions in the city, although you’re up a sperm-free waterway when it comes time to have a cub? ‘Alpha Delilah’ simply doesn’t get that all across? You had to add to it?”

  “Lupa-Alpha Delilah,” her second continued serenely, moon-round eyes blue pale enough to almost be silver and fixed on me with nothing but hunger in their depths. If it weren’t for them, she could’ve passed for human. She had a nice business suit with short skirt and heels that were the same shade as her eyes. “Lupa-Alpha Delilah is aware of your concerns and finds them both boring and tedious.” She examined her nails, pale blue to match, demonstrating her boredom and tedium as well. I wondered if she had them done each time she shifted. The upkeep on her mani-pedis must be a boring and, oh yes, a tedious strain. It must be destroying her life.

  What a pity.

  That was it. I didn’t care that this was a penthouse more exclusive and overpriced than mine. Or that there were Kin Lupas everywhere in here and in the outside hall. I was shooting Delilah between her eyes or chopping off her head, depending on what hand I decided to use. Crime was crime and I understood that, but this was business and to any puck, business was sacred.

  We had a contract and it would look ideal framed in her white fur and hanging on my wall. I knew a cleaning service that could get blood out of anything. “She’ll find it massively more boring”—the sword, without a doubt, I was using the sword—“and infinitely more tedious when I stop payment on the check or, worse, let it go through and have my banker deal with you if you default.” I put the gun away, hefted the sword, and stood.