Downfall

by Rob Thurman

  “Kill Grimm. What a concept. All that time I spent stabbing him and shooting him, that never crossed my mind. Thanks for the tip.” Cal was attempting to pretend he didn’t enjoy the whipped cream while I casually leaned forward, slid my phone over quietly, lifted it quickly, and took a picture.

  “I like this one.” I showed it to Niko. “The cream on his nose is highly suggestive. I may have Ishiah hang this in the Ninth Circle as ‘Pervert of the Month.’”

  There was some squabbling after that, but always had that been their way since, Zeus, since beyond when I could remember. Back to the time when the two of them bickered over which fleas belonged to which of them. It was reassuring in its own manner. While it went on, I considered the actual problems, not that Grimm wasn’t an actual problem, but not exactly as I’d told the brothers. I needed more information on him before coming to a conclusion. I had another problem located, so to speak, and en route to not being a problem. Then I had the problem that interlocked with that problem and damn Canada for being so large. I had my entire network on it, tricksters and nontricksters. I had psychics, but when your problem is on the move and quickly, most psychics aren’t that gifted or that helpful. If I could get that in order, then most should be solved or as solved as they could get in my world.

  I did need that one piece of information from Ishiah. He said he could get assistance from those he’d spent time with a long time ago, but I hated to depend on that. Peris I could handle, but angels—full-on, still holier-than-thou, still willing to smite anything that wasn’t good and right with Heaven, which was everyone I knew and everything I did . . . those angels I had problems with to say the least.

  While I was on that thought, self-righteous angel bastards, I called Ishiah. When he finally answered, making me wonder how high he was flying, I exhaled harshly. I did have worries that the angels now would not want to have anything to do with former angels, or worse, want to smite them for their desertion of Heaven. They wouldn’t bear goodwill toward former angels who had learned free will after their long time on earth.

  “Ish,” I said, relieved, “any word yet? Grimm has shown up here and things are in motion. It would be good to know how much in motion that would be.”

  As luck would have it, he and several hundred angels, who had despite my expectations put aside their prejudices to hunt a common enemy, had found the Bae hidey-hole out West in a desert string of caverns. Not that the location mattered, as they gated here, there, and everywhere. I was certain they wouldn’t be stuck in one spot as a sitting target. Ishiah gave me the information, his grim worry, his sorrow, his affection, and his promise to be home soon.

  He was afraid—for me, the once warrior angel and yet still a warrior. He had reason to be. He knew from watching over several thousand years that I didn’t ever keep to my own business no matter what versions of Cal and Niko I found in whatever centuries I found them. I wouldn’t leave them, and he knew better than to ask me to do so.

  I stared blankly at the phone. Finally I hit DISCONNECT and put it down very carefully. If I hadn’t, I would be tempted to shatter it against a wall.

  “You had Ishiah looking for something about Grimm?” Niko asked, doing his best to hide his own concern at what I’d said to Ishiah. He wasn’t successful.

  Running my hand over my face, I said slowly, “One might say that. Remember when Grimm and his Bae first showed up? How we guessed that Grimm probably had fifty or so Bae considering he’d been free for twelve years and the rate at which succubae reproduce and with one egg at a time?” I repeated it. “Fifty Bae. It seemed logical, but I thought it best to check, as logic isn’t, well, as logical as it should be at times.”

  “And he found them?” Cal questioned, putting down the coffee, which was probably an excellent choice right now. Cal’s tendency to throw things was much worse than mine.

  “With assistance, he did,” I said distantly, caught up in the overwhelming now and the long-gone past where I’d had this moment time and time again, life after life, when I finally opened blind eyes and saw the end rushing toward us. But not us, them, and wasn’t that the problem? I was forever left behind. “Not that they’ll stay there, the Bae,” I added, “I would think. Grimm is too intelligent for that.”

  This was how it most often started—heading into war without the full information or knowing full well we faced overwhelming odds. Neither one gave us pause, careless fools we were.

  It reminded me of one life and one war in particular, so much it did.

  * * *

  “Pan.” The arm slung over my shoulder. It had been night then, the stars as numerous as pebbles on a beach. There were skies more beautiful than that of Greece, but none I worshipped more. “Some asshole prince stole some other asshole king’s wife. We’re off to Troy to burn it to the ground for the insult. Like we give a giant goat’s crap, but the pay is good. And it sounds like a banquet of blood, guts, and an entire promised shipload of whores. Want to come?”

  When I’d pointed out I was already in a whorehouse, I was promptly dragged out of it by a laughing Cal . . . Patroclus.

  “You can get whores anywhere, especially as you’re a god,” he’d pointed out without stopping with the laughter. The single time I’d seen Patroclus not laughing was when he was dying. “With this you get gold, battles, and whores.” His arm tightened around me and shook me roughly with good cheer and excitement. “Achilles is coming. I’ve seen you looking at his ass too many times to count. He’s bound to get drunk enough sooner or later during a war to get a little curious. You might get your chance.” Patroclus had been one of the more devious humans I’d known. The most devious of the Cals to be sure.

  Until Troy killed him.

  * * *

  “How many Bae, then?” Niko appeared worried. I could hardly see him in the here and now—Grecian stars and the uncontainable joy of Patroclus at the thought of battle—but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t be worried. He should.

  And damn Patroclus, who’d dragged me along to that death-in-the-sand. Not once during the Trojan War had Achilles gotten as drunk or bicurious as Patroclus had hinted he might. But drunk was a good word for this moment, this life, with Troy long, long gone. I got to my feet, walked around the rock crystal table, and returned with six bottles of wine and a corkscrew.

  “It’s only two apiece to start with, but I have more, and yes, we’ll need more.” I sat back down and began opening the bottles. I passed the first two to Cal. It was fair. Patroclus had died first then and he most likely would do his best to achieve the same here. Between Grimm and the Bae, Cal would be in front, leading the way. “You used to drink like a fish,” I told him solemnly, “and every whore knew your name in the old days. Drink now and remind me of better days.”

  Before he drowned in his own blood by the gates of a city thanks to politics he hadn’t given a damn about.

  His eyes flickered scarlet and returned to gray. He moved over until he was next to me, leaning against me in an uncommon lapse of Caliban’s normal personal space. It had grieved me for years now, what I saw in him—he didn’t touch for fear of being hurt and for the equal fear of being the one to inflict the hurt. He took the bottles and put one between his legs and drank half of the other one before he lowered it. “It’ll be all right, Robin.”

  So unlike this Cal to say that—as I’d thought days ago, this Cal differed a great deal from all the others. He used to be the optimist of the three of us, at least seventy-five percent of the time. Biting and sarcastic, that was a constant, but with more humor and far less of the bitter streak that fed it now. And he laughed; whether he was cheerful, savage, mocking, horny, drunken, with his teeth painted in blood, loud with adrenaline, or uncontrolled with the thrill of the ordinary act of living, he’d laughed.

  This Cal didn’t laugh like that. When this Cal laughed, blood would definitely be involved. In those lives Niko had sometimes . . . often,
now that I thought on it . . . implied it was as he’d been dropped on his head as a baby. I missed that about him. I wanted the old Cal back, the one who got us into more trouble than even I could manage, but entertaining trouble. I hated this black and grim life of theirs, and as much as I tried to change it for them, I couldn’t change Auphe genes to human ones. This life next to Troy’s end often seemed the worst of all. But it was all I had for now and I didn’t want to relinquish it. I wouldn’t. I gave Cal a faked curve of a smile and then opened two more bottles to pass to Niko.

  Niko took them but asked without more than holding them, “How many Bae?”

  I ignored him and opened my bottles. “Robin, how many?” he demanded again.

  “Drink,” I ordered, and drained half a bottle myself.

  Sighing, Niko raised a bottle and swallowed a third. Very notable for Niko, who in this life barely drank at all. In appreciation I clinked one of my bottles against his and then against Cal’s almost empty bottle now. Good for him. For this life, I was impressed indeed.

  “Now,” Niko said, leaving his chair and sitting beside me on the couch. With one bottle on the table and one in his hand, he laid an arm across my shoulders . . . as Patroclus once had. Immediately Cal slung his arm on top of his brother’s, and the weight and warmth of them both resting on me gave me the courage to say it.

  “Tell us,” Niko coaxed. “How many?”

  “A thousand.”

  I drank again, then bowed my head. “A thousand Bae, more or less. A thousand for which Grimm has to play his game. A thousand when we thought there could be fifty of them at the most, and we’d thought defeating the hundred Auphe in the past with a nuclear bomb was a feat unheard-of. And the Vigil won’t be offering us any suitcase nukes for our use any longer, will they?”

  This time when I bowed my head, I let it go all the way to rest on my knees. I cursed in over a hundred languages, vicious and hateful, curses capable of killing entire fields of crops or forests of trees if I meant it. When I gave in to the ugly, jagged choking that passed as weeping in a creature who after the gates and pyres of Troy had forgotten how, Niko’s and Cal’s arms tightened over me.

  I wouldn’t have been ashamed if I could remember how. If I could taste the salt in shed tears, as there was no copper-drenched blood to spill as a substitute.

  I’d wept when Patroclus died and then when Achilles died. I had tried when Caiy and then Arturus died . . . when Hephaestion and Alexander died . . . when Phelan died and I’d mourned even for Cullen, although I had never met him and hadn’t seen his blood rush free. I mourned, but Troy had broken me in several ways. I would not feel the dampness of despair on my skin again. Those were only four—now five—lives and there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, more in which they were human, save this one, and in all they had died while I lived on. When I had them left to give, I would’ve killed the man who thought a single tear was wasted on any of the lives and deaths of these brothers . . . these cousins . . . these comrades in arms.

  I would kill the man.

  I had done so before.

  And I’d enjoyed it.

  * * *

  After drinking all the alcohol I had in the condo, which was a great deal, and they let me have the lion’s share, I’d told stories of their . . . our past. I no doubt shouldn’t have for fear of waking more of Cal’s past selves, but at least I’d been alert enough to leave Cullen and Phelan out of the stories. Cullen was in Cal’s subconscious at the mere slip of a tongue already. I didn’t want to bring him out to play. When I wavered near unconsciousness, they had supported me to my bed, stripped me to my boxer-briefs, and let me sleep. Let me escape into a darkness thick and muffling—in which I could’ve stayed forever if I’d been allowed. For thousands of lives I’d had my companions, but for thousands of following years I’d been left alone in the dark.

  * * *

  When was enough enough?

  Morpheus knew how long later, I clawed my way out of sleep and I heard them. They had left my door open, either accidentally or to be able to hear if I choked to death on my own vomit in an alcoholic stupor. That wasn’t heroic but more often true.

  Once I’d thought Cal had also put that death to the test after we’d ridden war elephants over several mountain ranges, causing widespread motion sickness and prayers for death from all, to finally reach Italy. The celebration when we eventually arrived before the fighting there had begun was extensive. None of us had cared to see an elephant or a mountain again, drinking the memory of the sickening and wholly unhygienic journey away. When I had staggered awake the next day, it was to find the body of Canno—Cal—in the dirt outside our tent, surrounded by vomit while yet clutching an empty amphora stained the purple-red of the cheapest wine. His eyes half open, fixed and dull—I could not believe it. All the lives I scrambled to keep his scrawny, malnourished ass from death’s ever-waiting grip and he did this to himself? He did this?

  Regardless of his idiocy, I would’ve shouted down the sky at his passing . . . eventually, but I indulged myself . . . for the first and only time. “I do all that can be done to keep you alive, you ignorant, self-destructive son of a pox-ridden whore and a blind, one-balled donkey.” I kicked his body. “I endure your flatulence whenever you devour cheese as the milk of goats is too much for your delicate organs.” The second kick was as swift and hard. “I laugh at your inane and filthy humor.” Which I had to admit to myself I enjoyed thoroughly as mine was the same. It simply made me kick him repeatedly and more furiously at the pure idiocy of him dying in such a manner.

  It was on the fourth kick that he had bitten my ankle as viciously as a rabid wolf but with far worse breath drifting up to my nose. A night of bad wine and worse pork. “You are a demon to bring this morning upon us.” He’d snarled up at me in Phoenician, a magnificent language for insults. “And you sucked the cock of the donkey that mounted my mother.” Then he was gone again, sound asleep and content in his bed of dirt and vomit with his eyes closed this time against the sunlight.

  One cannot pick their family or, despite the saying, often cannot pick their friends when fate is involved, and one definitely cannot pick their karmic-bonded idiots.

  The proof was in my living room.

  “Arturus and Caiy?” From there Cal sounded tired as well as if he too had only woken up with enough alcohol in his blood system to regret it.

  “King Arthur and Sir Kay. It wasn’t as legend and movies have you think. There was much more horse manure and body odor than gold and legendary swords. Arthur was no more than an illiterate chieftain and Kay a soldier and foster sibling with a noted acid tongue. Yes, that would be you, Cal. Your heroic death was probably closer to being kicked to death by a cow. A Roman cow, maybe, to keep you British and ‘noble.’ Caiy died fighting a Roman conqueror, bovine conqueror. I’m guessing they left out the bovine part of the tale. There was also a Myrddynne who could do things that men found to be ‘witchery.’ That would be Merlin and Robin, I’m quite certain. He could pass off pulling rabbits out of hats and coins behind ears as ‘witchery’ in those days.” Niko sounded equally exhausted.

  It hadn’t been rabbits. It had been frogs and the occasional hedgehog I’d made magically appear in that stupid hat. And for the maidens, it was a given, it was my cock that materialized within. It wasn’t as if I wore that ridiculous hat, which was not pointed or be-starred as idiot fiction would claim, for the things it did for my hair.

  “Then there was Alexander and Hephaestion,” Niko went on. “They died months apart. For all that we seem to have what most would call an unhealthy attachment to each other and cannot live an entire year alone, we don’t seem to do any service to Robin, who does go on alone and who knows for how many hundreds of years before he sees us again. You heard him. He has spent thousands of lives with us and yet we keep leaving him, which might not be so bad if we were old and withered and he’d be glad to see us depart in
our decrepit stage. He could find others to drink with if that happened and stop paying village women to change our medieval diapers, but if that has been the case but once, he hasn’t mentioned it.”

  “Phelan and Cullen,” Cal said, low and not meant, I don’t think, to be said in a place here or now.

  “What did you say?” Niko asked, with the same weariness, but, praise Mnemosyne, no genuine comprehension of what Cal had said.

  Cal’s voice went on as if Phelan and Cullen had not been said aloud, had not happened, and I kept hoping Cal wouldn’t know, not consciously. Subconscious was a lost cause. “Achilles and Patroclus. Alexander and Hephaestion. I didn’t give a crap about history or any of the other subjects you homeschooled me in, but I remember that those two pairs were close. Like, really close. As in closer than brothers and more into . . . you know. Oh, shit. I think I need to put my head between my knees.” Ah, poor Cal . . . if he remembered what he’d done in other lives, including orgies that offered men, women and, not to forget, hermaphrodites . . . would combust.

  “I imagine . . . no, I know . . . that Robin spread those rumors and laughed while he did so.” Niko was right to say that. I had lied, I had spread rumors, and if it was because Achilles wouldn’t give me the time of day, in a sexual sense, and Patroclus had given me false hope, the bastard, of his cousin to drag me into a long, drunken war. They deserved the rumors.

  I tossed aside one of my pillows and thought of the foul-tongued Persian mercenary who’d made malicious comments when I clawed the ground until blood stained my fingers at Patroclus’s funeral pyre and then he had laughed outright, saying I wasn’t a god—I wasn’t even a man, when I’d knelt at Achilles’ own pyre and begged his forgiveness. Of course the dead can’t grant forgiveness.

  The Persian had laughed, yes, but only once. He had no time for a second as I’d instantly taken him to the ground with a vicious slice that opened his guts. Knee on his chest pinning the thrashing, screaming garbage in place, I considered what gift he could make to the pyre in apology for his disrespect. It was an easy decision. He thought I wasn’t a man for mourning my comrade, my family. I knew without a doubt what he’d prize the most in proving himself a man. I relieved him of them, and I did not do it quickly or mercifully. When done, I let him continue to scream and struggle for a while. Why wouldn’t I? Surely a man could take a little pain.