Nevermore

by Rob Thurman

  I saw something else: an inch and a half of metal showing below the bottom of his jacket. There were nicks and a ragged look to what was one of the worst sawed-off shotguns I’d had the misfortune to see. If that was the best he could do, I had no reservations that my younger self could handle it. Hell, I could’ve handled it when I was thirteen, much less eighteen. But it would be a complication to what was going to be complicated enough. I didn’t have the patience for this kind of shit. Not today.

  “You’re goddamn kidding me with this,” I growled, harsh toward the back of the throat. My ex was a Wolf. She’d taught me how to throw a measure of lupine threat in any growls or snarls I might want to hand out. It wasn’t speaking his native tongue, but it let him know I was familiar with it in a manner that meant I’d picked it up by running with Wolves.

  And Wolves did not run with just anyone.

  “I know Wolves who could do more damage with one fang and half a claw than that piece of shit sawed-off will do. But you’re not that kind of Wolf. Can’t run with the real ones. An omega who’s licked the boots of every other Wolf in the Kin, so weak you need a gun.” I lifted my upper lip in a display of scorn. “The weapon of a sheep.” Wolves did love throwing the word sheep around. If you were human, you were sheep, prey. I ratcheted up my growl. It was shading into something else, less and less Wolf. “But I shouldn’t be an ass. I like guns too. What do you think of mine?” I spread my jacket open to let him see the Desert Eagle and the Sig Sauer in my holster and the eight knives that practically covered the lining.

  “No comment?” I took a step nearer to him. “Then how about this?” I stopped growling, but my voice wasn’t any more human now than the growl had been. I spoke the language of broken shards, crushed metal, avalanche shattered rock. “I smell you, dog. Why don’t you do the same and take a whiff of me?”

  He did, his already wide nostrils flaring. All his fangs were showing now, but that was the type of instinct that was a lie, a bluff. The sharp tang of urine filled the air as the crotch of his faded jeans darkened. That was another instinct, but one that told the truth. He didn’t know me, but he thought he did. He knew what had made me, and while we weren’t identical, our scent was to most.

  “My kind doesn’t play well with yours. You’re boring. You’re too easy. It’s over too soon. You taste like crap, like you live on rats. And coughing up hairballs for days is an absolute fucking bitch.” I took another step. “But you are still standing here boring me. Annoying me. I guess I can make an exception.” I moved to take another step and he fell, all Wolf grace lost. He did crawl up the stairs with impressive speed to disappear, leaving only the stench of piss behind.

  That taken care of, I rezipped my jacket partially as it had been before and headed for the door. No more overthinking. No more waiting.

  It was showtime.

  Pushing the door open, I walked in while rubbing my palm on my jeans. I was liberal with my disgust. “Jesus, that is the most goddamn disgusting sticky door I’ve touched in my life. You can get 409 by the gallons you know. Or soap. Soap works. Steal it from the bathroom.”

  I’d forgotten that too, the filth. Inside the place it was dim, if you wanted to be generous with the word. Too cheap for lightbulbs could be one excuse. Another could be that the gloom conveniently concealed the very worst of the grime, the Talleywhacker’s sharp business sense hard at work.

  It didn’t surprise me he didn’t recognize my voice. Whoever does in similar situations?

  I walked across to the bar and picked a stool directly across from the bartender and plopped down, casual as they came. I grinned, trying for friendly, but I’d lost the ability for the genuine article around when I was five or so—unless I slapped on my best imitation. And I could imitate the fucking hell out of the real deal normally, but not to him. He, if anyone, would know the falseness of it immediately. Not that he was looking. His back had been to the door when I came in, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been aware and alert—he had once been a lion, too, before the Auphe had taken us, and habits lingered. Were they skillful as they had been? No. They did linger and that was something.

  I had seen him glance up at a dingy fragment of mirror duct taped high up on the wall. That was Talley’s idea of security, letting you watch your back, get a look at who came in the door if you were busy washing glasses, see if they already had a weapon out to rob the place. I didn’t miss Talley at all, the cheap, sleazy bastard. The kid had finished checking my cloudy, fly-specked reflection, not seen a shotgun in sight—which was nearly all the visual accuracy the DIY security system was good for—and silently finished up drying the glass in his hands while dismissing me without a second look.

  He was a rude little asshole.

  Made me kind of proud.

  He was also careless as hell.

  Made me rather embarrassed.

  Most of all, it made me think how easy it would be to put a bullet in the back of his head. Sloppy and young as he was, he wouldn’t see it coming. He’d drop instantly, a painless death. I would disappear, as I wouldn’t have existed those eight years from eighteen to twenty-six. The Vigil wouldn’t have crossed my path and never would have created Lazarus to end what never had begun. Everyone who had died in the bar would live. Goodfellow would live. Niko . . . Niko would not. He’d use a different method, but the result would be the same as my finger pulling the trigger while surrounded by fire and death.

  When one went, the other followed. Always. In every life we’d lived.

  No committing a suicide bizarre enough to make Guinness, then. I released the grip of my gun and slid my hand silently back out of my jacket. He still didn’t notice that or what a wide-open target he’d made of himself. Maybe that wasn’t fair. I’d come a long way in eight years, walked a long, more than human, path.

  “So, hey, Junior, what’s on tap?” I asked, letting go of the failure of the buddy-buddy tone. I did keep the grin, but this one was a neutral and narrow baring of teeth. I was genuinely distracted with my own view of the mirror. He’d given my reflection a quick and disinterested look for blatantly visible weapons, hadn’t seen any, and then ignored me.

  Sloppy. Considering how many weapons I did have—not just in hand for but a moment, but more than enough in my jacket, and one still lingering with the faint smell of blood—very sloppy. I went with moderately humiliated instead of merely embarrassed. I hadn’t gone with the same quick glimpse in the mirror that he had. I’d scrutinized his likeness when he’d looked up at the dirty silvered glass. Having only the short length of assessment he’d spent on his visual weapons check, I was lucky I’d learned in my business that facing down misbehaving paien mean each second counts. Use that second or two to examine every detail as closely as possible.

  We weren’t twins.

  I hadn’t expected us to be. I’d known that eight years can make a difference, sometimes big, sometimes small. It depends on how you age. Do you look younger than you are? Older? Do you look almost precisely the same but with more scars? I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought about it before. Why would I have? Rewatching old sci-fi movies I’d seen as a kid to be braced and ready for time travel wasn’t something that had crossed my mind as being prepared for potentially dangerous situations that could jump out at you.

  Until it did.

  Leaving fuckup number three hundred and ten behind, I was now thinking, with morbid curiosity, what a person’s reaction would be to seeing themselves sitting on a stool three feet across the bar from them.

  What would I have done in his place, what if I’d seen what he was going to see? I had a good guess and it was—the thought was cut off as he finally turned around, ready to tell me what was on tap. It would be watered-down piss if I remembered right, but that hardly mattered as I found out about this particular person’s response to facing themselves. This copy of me . . . no, not a copy.

  This was me.

&nb
sp; A particular puck had been right days ago when giving me the usual hard time. I hadn’t been bad-looking, barely legal baby face and all.

  How the hell had I not gotten laid sooner?

  He, the kid, had frozen, still and unblinking but that didn’t last long. The eyes that had fixed on me narrowed to slits. The mouth that had gone fractionally slack with surprise, tightened to a hard line, then bared teeth in a snarl, and the baby face disappeared beneath the cold menace of a predator. He didn’t know. He really didn’t know. He had no idea that I was him, and he was me.

  What he thought I was could only be someone else—something else he hadn’t imagined existed—until he wrongly guessed he was facing it. And there had been someone else—several, in fact, but only one that was functional. Cal and I, when we were one instead of two, we’d been blind and conceited to think we were the single half-breed born of the Auphe. I’d learned differently, and Cal was assuming differently now. And he was shocked as hell. I knew that, as I had been surprised myself when I’d met my genetic “cousin.” I shouldn’t have been. I’d known a long time I was an Auphe experiment, made with a purpose. No good experiment has only one subject. I should’ve known better.

  This younger me thought I was that kind of family, linked by DNA only, not the family you’d ever claim. It was a reasonable guess, as technically it could’ve been true.

  “Don’t get your panties in a bunch, kid,” I drawled. “I’m not what you think.” And I also didn’t have much time to convince him of that, as my prediction minutes ago of what he’d do when he saw me for the first time was on the money. There went the hand reaching under the bar for either a weapon or a cell phone.

  Which would I have reached for eight years ago?

  Both.

  Drumming all ten fingers on the bar, I leaned back and tried not to smirk, but it was hard to hold back. It was no less than he deserved. I’d screwed with everyone I knew my whole life, delivered sarcasm and snark to anyone who crossed my path, family and friends more than most. You torture the ones you love, else how would they know you gave a shit about them? That was my code through and through. This was the opportunity to fuck with myself and I couldn’t pass that up for anything.

  I knew I had it coming.

  But as I thought that, I thought something else. Did I sincerely deserve it? I’d forgotten this was also the me who was barely two and a half years back from being kidnapped by the Auphe. They’d snatched him/me through the explosion of glass that had been a trailer window and told me they were taking us home. My brother, trapped in a burning trailer, couldn’t stop them, and Sophia, giving them the entertainment they suddenly couldn’t get enough of, lit up like a torch and burned to death in the frame of the door.

  We’d seen it, the two Cals that then had been one, before we were pulled through a hole in the world, a rip in the air itself to a place outside this reality, a place that would put Hell to shame. Two or so years later I’d torn open my own ragged doorway that I’d instantly forgot how to make and crawled through it back home, back to my brother. Two years, but not. My brother had guessed that for me, now taller by several inches and hair longer by at least a foot, that it had been approximately two years. For him it had been not quite two days. Time ran different in Auphe-Land, where it’s all-you-can-eat so long as you can catch it, and the screaming is free!

  When I’d returned, I’d spent my time alternating between acting as predatory and feral as the monsters who’d taken me or too terrified to crawl out from under the bed while clutching a knife twenty-four seven. I had reason for both behaviors, as in the beginning I’d remembered the years with the Auphe. Tried not to—what had been done to me, worse yet, the things I’d been forced to do. Tried to bury it, tried to wipe it clean.

  Like I’d ever thought I’d be clean again.

  But when I’d slowly realized the feral side, vicious side of me made my brother fear for me more than the horror that kept me shaking and hiding under beds in the safe dark under sagging box springs, inhaling the must of cheap motel carpet, I’d shed the savage side of me little by little for him. My brother needed me back, needed me sane, needed me to be more human to blend in as now we were on the run from the Auphe, the monsters. He needed, for him as much as for me, to keep me safe—this time.

  I’d suffered, but my brother had suffered too—fear I was gone forever, guilt that I could smell on him. Guilt that he hadn’t been able to stop them from taking me. Guilt that he hadn’t kept me safe. Guilt that he couldn’t get me back. Guilt that I’d never talk again instead of growling, clawing, or screaming, much less wear shoes or recognize a fork. Guilt that I might never stop trying to stab strangers. And then the worse guilt of all: that what for him had been close to two days in this world had been two years for me in their world. Taken at fourteen and returned approximately at sixteen, all in less than two days.

  That type of thing tends to fuck up everyone in the vicinity.

  I’d told myself it wasn’t any different from a Halloween costume, pretending to be something you weren’t for one night a year, except my costume was a human one and I wore mine and pretended every minute of every hour of every day, all three hundred and sixty-five of them for several years. I’d worn that human suit so thoroughly that I’d brainwashed myself into believing that I was something I was not.

  Human.

  Human with bad, bad genes, but human.

  Tame.

  Until fourteen I hadn’t thought I was an Auphe. I knew I had part of them in me, but that didn’t make me one of them. It made me only something new. I had no problem with knowing that I was as far from being human as I was from being an Auphe. Niko had told me I was a lion. Lions weren’t human, lions were hunters, but there was nothing wrong with being a lion. Nature made us how we were meant to be.

  If that meant taking a bite out of a kid’s ear in a competitive game of dodgeball, so what? If the gym teacher told me to play to win, then I played to win and screw the rules. Lions don’t have rules. That was who and what I was.

  And I’d liked it.

  But what is “like” compared to “love”? And I loved my brother. He’d protected me my entire life until the monsters snatched me. I couldn’t bitch that it had been my turn to do the same to help him in any way I could. I stopped trying to eat people in the McDonald’s bathroom. I learned about shoes and forks and words, English ones at least, again. I was what my brother needed me to be if we were going to outrun the Auphe who hadn’t let my escape go lightly. No regrets.

  I was lion no more.

  The tall grass I’d lived in hadn’t been my home any longer.

  Besides, in the end it had made no difference. Eventually I’d learned to enjoy my life again, to take pride in who I truly was inside. It took years, but I’d rediscovered a self-esteem sketched in blood and violence, had remembered how to laugh my ass off while scaring the shit out of customers, clients, and targets. I tore off my human suit in strips and handfuls and went back into the grass. I remembered how to be a lion.

  This Cal, though, still thought he was a layer of human holding down the other half, a monster made of mayhem and murder. He believed he was a bad guy, the bad guy, the monster Sophia had always labeled me and, worse, he was kind of a little emo bitch, too.

  I’d brainwashed myself a little too well.

  Sitting in front of this baby Cal I was a lion again.

  And lions are not little emo bitches. Mind made up, I had no problem teaching my younger self that, whether I should or not. If I changed the years to come or I didn’t.

  A lion had to have some fun.

  “I only asked for a beer,” I pointed out with a mocking innocence that did nothing to cover up the potential for violence painted in black and red violent strokes that rode along my voice.

  “Hell, card me if you want. No need to pull out the . . .” Crap, what had I stored under the bar when I w
as eighteen? I concentrated. Hmmm. Oh, yeah. Baseball bat, yep. The one Cal whipped out and didn’t call his shot, but swung for the wall all the same. I leaned back rapidly enough to be missed having my skull crushed by an inch, then wrapped my hands above his grip around the scarred wood and then tore it from his hold. Letting it fall to the floor, I sucked at a drop of blood on my thumb. “You’re a rude son of a bitch. I told you I’m not who you think I am.”

  “If you’re not what I think you are,” he snarled, “then you wouldn’t know what the fuck that is.”

  “Yeah, we’re wrong there. We were wrong a lot these days.” I didn’t expect to convince him. I was biding my time, basically, waiting for the one that I could convince. Not that I was biding without the expectation that Cal would settle for one attempt at homicide. I could check off the bat. What else did I keep under . . . ? Christ, a thirty-eight.

  “A thirty-eight?” I grimaced at that particular memory. His eyes widened at the mention of it, quickly enough most would’ve missed it before they narrowed again. He didn’t know how I was aware of the gun and he wasn’t going to ask.

  “The baseball bat I can semirespect”—especially when it was wrapped with barbed wire, which was how I’d received the drop of blood while grabbing it—“but a thirty-eight?” I said with a large dose of disgust. “What the hell had I—damn it—what the hell are you thinking with a thirty-eight? You can’t even kill a cockroach with that. You’ve got better shit at home by miles and you’re letting your life here depend on a gun too lame and small for Bodyguard Barbie to carry? I’m embarrassed for you, Cal.”

  With the words and knowledge I shouldn’t have hanging in the air, and the name I shouldn’t have known, he twitched and his hands froze under the scarred wood of the counter. He was pale in the indistinct light—but we were pale in any light, and he stared. His black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, the same color and style as mine if a few inches shorter. He wore a black T-shirt and a bar apron. I wore a black T-shirt as well. I unzipped the jacket as the time for hiding weapons was over, but my shirt wasn’t a plain black like his. It said, (more or less), in steel gray letters COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE.