Downfall

by Rob Thurman

  I had done this. The Cal he’d known with the black hair and eyes the same as his was gone, and the image of an Auphe was in his place. Anyone else would’ve already killed me. Would’ve been justified in killing me when the words of an Auphe came out of the mouth of one, but I expected Robin and him to not be afraid? To know I was pretending when all the times in the past there had been no pretense.

  Idiot me.

  An hour later I’d cleaned up the puke, although the stain would stay, I thought, for eternity. Salome and Spartacus the zombie cats regarded it with feline disgust, and if they’d had working bladders, no doubt would’ve pissed on it. I was sitting on the couch. Niko had forced me to. After a bottle of wine, he’d ended up with his head in my lap. He hadn’t passed out; he wasn’t that much of a lightweight. No, he’d gone to sleep, exhausted. I was too, but every time I closed my eyes I saw myself as I must’ve looked to Nik and Robin while I’d stood with Grimm, threatened them, and now I understood. To see two Auphe, one your brother but maybe not any longer when you see the way he’d killed with metal teeth and claws, how would you know what to think? I’d kept my promise. I said I wouldn’t go Auphe, and I didn’t. But I hadn’t entirely been Cal either, tearing Bae apart like an animal would. Like an Auphe would. I couldn’t sleep when I relived that each time I started to doze.

  Robin came out finally. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t come out for days. He was clean of the head-to-toe blood, wearing a long dark green bathrobe of some material so expensive whoever made it had to charge by the inch. He had his sword and a tranquilizer gun with him.

  Dropping into the chair, he took in his stained rug, the empty wine bottle, a comatose Nik, and spoke with utter disinterest, which was wrong. Robin always had an interest, in one direction or another—always had an opinion for or against. This . . . lack . . . wasn’t the Goodfellow I knew.

  “You’ve destroyed my life, my belongings, my ability to get an erection . . . at least for another hour . . . and my relationship temporarily, as I had to send Ishiah away, as chances are high that you might eat him for drinking the last of the orange juice.” He tapped the oddly shaped muzzle of the gun against the arm of the chair. “Your work is done, Cal. You have done what no other creature could claim. You’ve driven me to the edge of insanity and removed all willingness to live from me entirely. Bravo. If I had two free hands, I would applaud you.”

  But he didn’t have a free hand, as both held a weapon specifically for me. If I hadn’t broken him, I’d done a damn good imitation.

  I didn’t say I was sorry. That would be one helluva insult in view of what I’d done. All the things I’d done. I didn’t say I’d make it up to him, as, if I lived to be ninety, I couldn’t, and I wasn’t going to live to be ninety. I’d be lucky to live ninety more hours, much less years. “You deserve better.” That I could say, because that was true.

  He deserved better and Niko deserved better. “Next life toss me in a volcano the minute I pop out. Make sure Nik never sees me. Force-feed my mother birth control.” But that was all impossible, of course. He didn’t find us that young, didn’t find us when we were still cooking in the oven. Didn’t find us in time to save Nik. “Hell, Robin, at least save yourself. Don’t try to find us anymore. And if you do accidentally, walk away. I’m a curse. I might as well be your and Niko’s personal fucking curse. All our lives sound as if they end in blades and blood. You have only one life. Just . . . walk away. Walk away and enjoy your life, because it would fucking kill me if you died thanks to me. And unlike Nik and me, you wouldn’t come back.”

  He sighed, deep and full of the sound of resignation, and with that he was back. Not a Robin-shaped manikin, but the genuine deal—real, if ruefully that way. “I couldn’t. I’m a hopeless case, kid. Damn you for reminding me.” Propping the sword against his chair, he offered, “And you wouldn’t say that if you remembered the good times. Try. Think about the time you were Patroclus and we were in that one chamaitypeion that had a statue of me depicting me as far less endowed than I actually am. You were so offended on my behalf . . . and drunk . . . that you—”

  “Pushed it over and shattered it, then set the whorehouse on fire,” I finished, because chamaitypeion was Greek for whorehouse or brothel, and I knew that although I’d never learned it. I knew it because I’d lived it.

  “Or when you were Caiy and that one chieftain caught us with his daughters.”

  “And I stole all his horses,” I said, the memory suddenly so clear. The twenty shaggy horses, the white crescents that shone in the rolling of their eyes, the aggressive stomping of large hooves, the annoyed bugle that came from velvet muzzles as we moved them into a gallop.

  “After setting his tent on fire. Of course you were nice enough to clear everyone out first,” he said. “That was considerate of you. And when you were a musketeer . . .”

  “I tried to set Paris on fire,” I said with horror and, all right, a little pride in having high goals. That was nothing but a blur. If Robin had spent a decade in a drunken state, I’d been right there with him.

  “You can see why I’m not surprised by your love for a flamethrower these days,” he responded with a fond forgiveness I didn’t think I could’ve managed in his position.

  “I don’t want to know where I was for all of this. Tell me and I’ll destroy you both,” Niko said with his eyes still shut.

  I yanked lightly at his braid. “Paying bail? Breaking us out of prison, the gaol, stopping the execution, whatever they did to . . . um . . . high-spirited people back then?”

  “High-spirited,” he repeated with palpable scorn. “My entire existence spent as a babysitter.”

  With a snort he sat up. I thought about that: how he’d rested his head in my lap without a thought for metal teeth, silver hair, crimson eyes, and flashes of homicidal mania. It was an unbelievable trust and an equally unbelievable lack of survival skills when it came to me.

  My brother, and there was nothing more that could be thought or said to encompass that.

  Robin laughed; it wasn’t his usual one, but it was a laugh and that counted. “I love how you assume you were some sort of Mother Teresa with a sword. You helped burn down that brothel and then disappeared with three of the whores. We didn’t see you for a week. You’ve always been an excellent warrior, but you do not get to be Achilles or Alexander or Arturus by wiping the foreheads of the sick and delivering food to the hungry. In many lives you were rather power-hungry and ruthless . . . nobly, of course.” Goodfellow’s straight face did nothing to hide the mockery beneath. “As nobly as you can be when visiting whorehouses before washing your enemy’s blood off you. Oh, and Arturus didn’t get his sword from a stone. He pulled it out of the gut of his primary rival, but with a very noble flourish as he did so, if that makes you feel more principled and honorable.”

  “You should’ve left the vomit on his rug,” Nik growled. “And I know my history. Allow me my illusions if you please. And while we speak of illusions, what are we to do about Grimm?”

  “I know.” The shadowed blight on the rug didn’t shatter any of my illusions as I focused on it, but then again I hadn’t had any. It was a confirmation of what had to be done. “I’ve known for a while what to do about Grimm and all his Bae, every last one.”

  Niko wouldn’t like it, but he would see the necessity of it and the inevitability of it. Robin wouldn’t care for it at all, as much effort as he’d put into keeping us safe and alive in the past week or so. It would’ve been better if he hadn’t begun to forgive me for the gamou metal gamou teeth incident barely an hour ago. I hid a mental smile, rueful and tasting of regret. I should’ve left him fearing for his true love: his dick. He might not object to my plan if I had. He most likely would’ve packed us a lunch and taken a nap or called Ishiah back to make up for all the screwing he was missing thanks to trying to take care of us. Money, sex, and almost his life—Goodfellow had pulled out
all the stops on this. I wished he hadn’t.

  In the end, it would be a waste.

  “Pine Barrens. New Jersey. Delilah dragged me out there once in the sexing days to look for the Jersey Devil or Cthulhu, I don’t remember. But there’s a fire tower on Apple Pie Hill that’s high and isolated enough for a thousand and one Bae to swarm and no people to see them.” Or get eaten by them, which I thought those hypothetical people would appreciate that.

  Robin’s mild leer let me in on the fact that he knew what Delilah and I had been doing out there and it wasn’t looking for the Jersey Devil. “It’s been an incredibly wet fall. The fire tower would be unmanned. That is a positive. What do you plan on doing with Grimm and the Bae when or if they show up?”

  “Gate them away, someplace they can’t come back from. With all that epinephrine you had delivered, I can make the biggest gate the world has seen.”

  “And where will you send them from which they can’t return? You can only gate to places you’ve been to or seen,” Niko said. He was suspicious and it showed in deepened lines beside his mouth and the millimeter narrowing of his eyes. “Any of those including Tumulus they could make their way back.”

  I pointed up.

  * * *

  They didn’t like it. I told them I could gate all the Bae for certain into the sun and with a chance I’d survive. It wasn’t a substantial chance, I noted, but it was one. Grimm was the problem. Grimm could gate like nothing I’d seen. He might escape my gate, but he wouldn’t be able to take all the Bae with him, four or five at the most. That was something I, and my box of epinephrine, was sure of. And a handful of Bae he could save, we could kill easily enough. Grimm himself should still be weak enough from the gutting I’d given him, if given a few days or not to duct-tape himself back together, that we’d have good odds of taking him out as well.

  They still didn’t like it. Niko, because he knew I was lying, but he knew the same as I did that the time had come and this time there’d be no escape. Robin took my word that I’d survive. His problem was I didn’t want him there. There was nothing I could do about Niko. I hated it and I hated that I was fucking cowardly enough to be comforted that I wouldn’t be alone. But this was a lifetime of eventuality in motion. It was our time and that couldn’t be changed, thanks to Grimm, and we’d be back . . . someday. If Robin didn’t make it, he wouldn’t. I didn’t know what paien paradise he had picked out. He said there were hundreds upon thousands, but he had a good life here. He wasn’t ready to die and I wasn’t ready to know that when Niko and I eventually did come back in fifty or a hundred years, he wouldn’t be here. He’d tell me I was an idiot and that I wouldn’t know he wasn’t there with the new set of memories I’d make.

  But I knew he was wrong.

  Getting my brother killed with me was . . . fuck . . . it was enough. I wasn’t letting my friend die with us. That was why I called Ishiah. I wasn’t any more happy with him than I had been, but when death is half a breath away, you gain priority. What he’d done, he’d done. He couldn’t undo it, couldn’t go back in time and change who he’d been then. But since I’d known him in New York, he’d backed us up every time, he’d saved our lives, especially Nik’s, risking his own to do all of it, and he’d saved Robin’s life. The last was most important, as I needed him to do that again. I let my anger go—there was a first—and told him my plan and when and where I needed him to be then forced a promise from him to not tell Goodfellow. That was the easiest part. If he told him, Robin would die and Ish didn’t want that any more than I did. He wished me good luck and sounded sincere, which was ironic, as I was going off to die, but angels, ex or not, they were weird.

  And then it was a waiting game. I had gotten Grimm with a good shot, but he was tough, he healed fast, and he would duct-tape his gut together before backing down from this kind of invitation to play—that hadn’t been an exaggeration. I called him with the place and the time. “I’ll give you five days to find the place and teach your Bae to either follow your gate there or take them in field trips of fifty to get it fixed in their mind.” I was lying on the guest bed and staring at the ceiling. Robin’s condo was like the Sistine Chapel. All the ceilings were painted but with far less biblical images . . . unless you counted the one in the corner of this room where Eve and the Serpent were doing some pretty unspeakable and hopefully illegal things with each other under an apple tree. “It’ll also give you time to scoop your guts back into your belly and staple it shut. I think me killing all one thousand of your Bae snakes should make up for how pathetic your own performance will be. You didn’t even touch me yesterday. That, you Auphe-fucking-wannabe, is pretty goddamn pathetic.”

  “I touched you.” Auphe wannabe or Auphe wannabe better, he had their voice. The screech of metal and shattering of glass that come from the most catastrophic of car wrecks, where blood turns the paint job red and no one walks away. They’re pulled out in pieces. Whenever an Auphe had spoken, whenever Grimm did, that was what you heard . . . or worse.

  “I saw your teeth. I didn’t put a hand on you, Caliban, but since I first saw you, I’ve touched you every single day. Haven’t you looked at yourself? You and I, our first game, I triggered this in you. I turned you from a member of the herd into the Second Coming. No more grazing with the cattle for you, brother. Only eating them.” He laughed, an avalanche screaming down on you to sweep you away. “I saw that my Bae you killed were missing a few mouthfuls of flesh. Did you really spit them all out or did you savor one or two bites? Do you think your friends, your so-called cattle family, will taste any different? More meaty? I’ll bet you’re wondering right now, aren’t—”

  “Five days,” I interrupted, shut off the phone, and threw it against the wall. I hadn’t eaten any of the Bae. The blood, yeah, I’d licked that off my teeth and it was probably a good thing I was going to die because I wouldn’t fucking forget that otherwise. But I hadn’t eaten any of them. I didn’t believe it. I refused to because it had not happened.

  Your Honor, I bit but I did not swallow.

  I turned over and buried the less than sane laughter in the pillows. Behind and above me, Eve, her thoughts as reluctantly dark and twisted as mine, rained commiseration on me and the Serpent sneered and smirked, welcoming me to the Big Time.

  * * *

  The five days passed and I don’t know how they did or what we’d done. We couldn’t clean out our apartment and give everything to the Salvation Army. Robin would’ve known what the true plan was if we had done so.

  Niko spent the nights with Promise, and I couldn’t bear to ask what he told her. I knew he didn’t tell her good-bye, as she’d have told Goodfellow within seconds and double-teamed us in an effort to stop us. I’d taken that away from my brother as well as his life—the chance to say good-bye to the woman he loved. The days he spent with me. We didn’t say much, I don’t think, as we’d had our entire lives to say it all. But if I sat on the couch, he sat beside me shoulder to shoulder. At breakfast at the kitchen island, he did the same, although he had to move the chair over by nearly a foot. Robin had started to say something about that, but at the last minute didn’t.

  Instead he told us more stories of our numerous pasts, but only the funny ones and the happy ones. I was a little surprised at how many of those there were. I was not surprised to learn that Robin as Myrddynn/Merlin pulled his dick out of his hat instead of a rabbit. At Robin’s goading, I did remember, on first seeing him do it as Caiy that I’d tried to beat the giant serpent to death with an axe handle, then fallen on the dirt floor of the hovel we were in laughing myself sick over it, followed by sulking the rest of the night at how I did not measure up. Caiy, I was thinking, drank a great deal, more than all the rest of my incarnations combined.

  I did practice a little with the epinephrine, measuring the rise of my heart rate, which grew less and less each time I injected myself, the Auphe immune system at work. I had hoped it would work that way
; otherwise the epinephrine could kill me before the gate did. Good to know that I was going to die and take a thousand monsters with me and not just shoot up to drop dead of a heart attack while the Bae and Grimm finished off Niko. That was not a heroic way to go. Not that I counted what I was doing as heroic either. It was a last resort, as I wasn’t smart enough or good enough to do anything differently, as Grimm had been smarter and created an army. He who disdained the Auphe and had been right in all he told me. He was a smarter, more efficiently lethal monster than the Auphe. The Bae fell short, but sheer numbers couldn’t be beaten. He’d make more and more and more until he ruled the world and drenched it in blood, just as the Auphe had tried to use me to do. He was the better monster and I could compete with that only by being the more insane one.

  That would be my obituary. Caliban Leandros, Crazy beats smart every time. Free porn collection at this location if a puck doesn’t steal it first. See ya, would’ve liked to be ya.

  But monsters didn’t get to pick who or what they would be.

  However we passed those days, they did pass, and finally we were in the Pine Barrens after a silent drive and a long trek though trees and grass-covered muck masquerading as ground. The fire tower was easy to find, right where I’d remembered it being. I hadn’t gated us, as I wanted to save all that up. We climbed the stairs and took a look around at our last stand. It was nice, brisk, cool breeze, and the smell of pine needles sharp and astringent. Taking a last glance around at the world, I turned to the small duffel bag I’d carried with me. I’d been injecting epinephrine the entire ride, and once we were up in the tower I had several last of the horse-sized syringes to go. I unzipped the bag and reached for the first one.