by Rob Thurman
“Look at that. Nice, huh?” I said, admiring my moves. If I didn’t, who would? “Listen to your brother when he says practice makes perfect. He’s irritating as he never shuts up about it, but he’s right. I’ve damned sure improved from the fetus-years.” Cal growled. I wondered if I growled that often and had gotten used to it enough to not notice.
“As for believing me”—I shrugged and shifted the blade to my other hand without pausing its whipping rotation—“what would you rather believe? That I am you eight years from the future or there is another half-Grendel running around. Or maybe twenty of them. Maybe a thousand.” There was a piece of the coming days he wasn’t going to be happy about, but he didn’t need to hear it. Deserved to hear it, but we had plans to make and no time to waste on revenge. Justifiable as it was.
“Besides”—I watched the silver of the blade and ignored the flicker of imaginary flames reflecting in it—“the only way I would look so much like you and have the eyes of you, Niko, and Sophia would be if Sophia whored herself to another Grendel years before Niko was born. And if she had, I don’t think she’d have repeated the experience with you . . . us. She hated us more than she loved money and that is saying something.”
I could see that one hit home, but he went on to another subject as he, like me at his age, didn’t want to think about the monstermonstermonster. “Give me that back, you thieving son of a bitch. It’s my favorite switchblade, you asshole, and you don’t get to keep it,” he growled, going back under the bar, for . . . what was left? Nothing that I remembered. That had been— Ah shit, the shotgun. Rusty, older than not only Cal but Sophia too, and bought off a guy missing three teeth. Not sawed-off, but smaller, for a thirteen-year-old ready to slaughter his first wild turkey. It worked though. We’d tested it.
“Don’t be a baby,” I advised. “Naughty toys aren’t for little boys. You tried to stab me in the head, you dick. If I see a fucking molecule of that shotgun show up in your hand, I’m taking your cute little knife here and I’m cutting off your trigger finger. And as I know us and guns and what we can use to pull a trigger, that’s ten fingers and ten toes. I’m here to save your life, so stop acting like the fucking Grendel you wish you weren’t.”
He flushed to a murderous red, a color I didn’t know existed under my pale skin, but I let it go and went on, not caring Niko had moved close enough to take us both down if he had to. “I know we slept with a knife under our mattress since we were six,” I announced flatly. “I also know we slept with a T-shirt under our pillow. It was one we stole out of Niko’s laundry when we were too old to sleep with him anymore. We slept with it because we could smell him on it. He might have only been a bed or a mattress away in the same room, but we slept with that shirt for years. We slept with it when we were fourteen and he went to college.
“Not convinced yet?” I alternated the knife again and practiced spinning it in the opposite direction. “I could tell the story of the first time we jacked off and which of Niko’s mythology books turned to the page of a mermaid with naked boobs was collateral damage.”
“No. No stories,” he denied instantly, knowing the price he’d pay if Niko found out which of his favorite books that had been. “No mermaid b— No, I believe you. You’re me . . . only old.”
Twenty-six was old? I had been such a punk. Still was, but it was less fun on the other side.
“Glad you’re caught up, Mini Me.” I slapped the knife down on the bar to be instantly snatched back by him. “Take back your poodle-sticker, no way it could take out a pig, and try not to stab me again. I get annoyed easily. You, of anyone else in the whole goddamn freaking world, should know that.” Know thyself, after all.
“We’ve established who you are, but why are you here? How are you here?” Niko would be the one with the smart questions.
“I’d like to hear why first,” Cal added. “Because right now you’re my own personal number one hell.”
I ran a finger across my T-shirt, underlining the message for the second time. “I told you. I’m you, Tiny Tim, from eight years in the future. You’ve seen the movie. Get a fucking clue. You’re Sarah Connor, someone’s out to terminate you, and I’m here to save your ass.”
Reaching for the petrified pretzels, I made no move to eat them, but I spun their bowl lazily in circles. “According to some information retrieved by G—” My hand jerked, knocking over the bowl, spilling pretzels far and wide. I stopped before the name escaped, tasting salt from a viciously bitten tongue. Goodfellow—shit, I hadn’t meant to think his name. Niko’s younger reflection was in my face, no escaping that, but Goodfellow I’d hoped to keep a blank as long as I could. It was my only option in trying to hold back part of the flood that threatened to drown me in a guilt and grief I couldn’t show anyone.
“Faster, sleeker, and improved, my ass,” Cal snorted. Niko remained silent, but from the lowering of his eyebrows and the faint dip between them that would one day become a hard-earned permanent line, he suspected something other than poor coordination had been the cause.
“According to a friend’s contacts,” I started over, with caution and care on each word, “the assassin is called Lazarus. He’s genetically altered. Pumped full of a mixed bag of monster blood. Fuck knows what he can do with that.” I shook my head. I couldn’t begin to guess and didn’t particularly want to.
“He was named for the Lazarus Project as it’s about raising the dead. Bringing an entire organization of corpses back. Resurrection. Is the title a little too fucking cute or what? I haven’t decided,” I commented with derision and spite heavy on my tongue. Flipping over the bowl, I started filling it back up with pretzels. There was nothing on the bar that was any more toxic than what had been living on the pretzels for months. “Lazarus is arriving late tonight or tomorrow. He was sent to kill Cal by the Vigil. They were—loving the past tense on that—a human organization that considered it their fucking calling to keep humans from finding out about the nonhumans. They’d thought, and probably correctly, that if the world found out the bogeyman was real, it would be all-out war.”
Bowl filled, I pushed it away. “Humans aren’t known for being open-minded about those who are different. And sharing the planet? They’d sooner nuke the entire thing to a cinder first. Niko, I know you remember the Cold War when there was one plan that topped the list on both sides and both sides were proud to have it. Mutually assured destruction. Everyone dies, but they die satisfied that no one else won either. If your country wasn’t even involved? They’d take you as well. Why waste all that hard work and leave what’s left to the peace-loving slackers? If we lose, the entire world loses. That’s humans for you.”
He didn’t deny it, and Cal’s face didn’t show any more surprise than mine had when I’d found that out. Humans. What wouldn’t they do if they could fabricate a shred of justification?
“Is the information reliable? How did your friend’s contacts obtain it?” Niko questioned.
“Stole it.”
If stole meant gained by imaginative questioning methods that gave every member of Amnesty International a simultaneous nosebleed of unknown origin that had the CDC in a panic. The two of them didn’t need to know that though. We stole to survive as kids. I’d stolen a motorcycle with a side order of blackmail when I was four years old. It was nothing new. Interrogation, to put a very polite name on actions that in no way deserved that name, different story. They—Niko more so than Cal—would’ve had a problem with it, and Nik suspected. How the hell had we been so young?
“Our lives never changed, did they?” he asked. He didn’t want to know, but he had to ask. Big brothers, taking one for the team.
But he was wrong there. Could not be more wrong.
I could’ve been worse if we’d taken one wrong turn.
So much damn worse.
Our lives had changed. The difference was that it was a choice now. We’d always been warriors, sol
diers, fighters, we always would be. Hell, we were paid to do it. It was our job, the perfect one for the adrenaline junkies a life of running would turn us into. Once the bogeymen chased us, now we chased them. It wasn’t as bad as he thought. Except for occasional cluster fucks like Lazarus, I couldn’t see doing anything else.
“That’s not true. They changed or it could be we changed. I like our lives. We both do. It’s not the perfect picket fences, golden retrievers, and PTA meetings. You didn’t expect that on a postcard from our future, did you?” I came close to laughing at the thought. “That isn’t us. It never was and it never will be. We’re Rom and I’m a little more than that. Could you imagine a life where you didn’t have a sword in your hand? It’s as much a part of you as the hand that holds it. Would you rather move to Jersey, mow your grass, and keep the pH in your pool at the perfect level?”
Niko blanched. It was subtle, but I caught it. “I wouldn’t want those things if I could have them. A Stepford life, no thanks.” I went with the bottom line. “You saved me, my life, and my sanity, Cyrano,” I reassured. “You always do. Give yourself credit I’m not wearing a jacket that ties in the back and, hell, I’m alive. Twenty-six and twenty-eight, did you really think we’d ever live that long?”
“I—”
“No, you damn well did not.” I answered for him. I knew my Nik, this Niko, and I knew neither would’ve wanted to tell the truth there.
And that was without knowing the hundreds of other species of monsters that roamed the earth. Thanks to the Vigil freak, Nik was going to get that cherry popped a little sooner, but only by a few months. This was when we’d been in New York a mere few weeks. It hadn’t taken long for the city to open our eyes to the fact we didn’t live in a single horror movie. We lived in all of them.
“But here I fucking am. We did good.” We had, too . . . up until Niko had been murdered, but that was a truth I didn’t want to and couldn’t tell. “Pat yourself on the back. You dragged us through some unholy, absolutely terrifying shit. You saved us. You saved me.”
“This is Hallmark as goddamn hell and all, but could we get back to the part where someone wants to kill me? And why?” The angry mask of Cal’s face tightened further. Sharing me with Niko, with his brother, was not number one on his Christmas list. “Methuselah the assassin? That ring a bell? Someone from the future? ‘Come with me if you want to live’ like the movie? You’re telling me the older I get the less taste I have? And I am not Sarah Connor.”
Big brother or not, Niko couldn’t keep a straight face at bitching of that epic proportion. It was a quickly smothered laugh, but it was there.
“Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat the assassin. Keep up.” I lied, as I invariably do, with a clear conscience. “And this is the most tasteful T-shirt I own, Junior, so prepare. And we’ve had monsters follow us our whole lives; you find a little time travel hard to believe?” I reached forward and flicked his forehead. “But you’re right about you and Sarah Connor. There isn’t a gym in the world that could give you her muscles.”
The switchblade came out again, and I promptly repossessed it to return to my jacket.
“You don’t look like you could take on any kind of Terminator, no matter how good you are with a knife. And don’t call me Junior, asshole.” Cal glared resentfully at me, then passed his palm down over his face and let his shoulders slouch, suddenly too tired to be eighteen. Realizing if he couldn’t take himself—that would be me, with several weapons—what were his chances with a genetically altered super-assassin? Reading my T-shirt one more time in a clear hope that the message had changed, he grimaced. “Come with me then? Like right now?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence on my own terminating skills.” I checked the cheap watch I’d bought off a street vendor as the stolen cell phone was either telling the time in New Zealand or had a glitch somewhere.
“As for right now, nah.” I leaned back on the stool, suddenly exhausted in every part of me. “Not this second anyway. The Vigil didn’t know your home address as Niko was smart enough to fake all our IDs, names, addresses, ages, pictures. That means Lazarus doesn’t know, but he does know the address of the bar. He knows you work here as this is where we first ran into the Vigil, so this is the last shift you can pull until we get things straightened out.” By killing the Vigil bastard.
“For today though, yeah, we’ve got some time. As long as we’re back to your place before midnight or later, we should be good,” I assured. “The information was no sooner than three a.m. but a few hours either way to be on the safe side.”
Tomorrow was when we’d have to begin watching for the shit to start going down. “Since you have a problem with Junior,” I added, “call me Caliban and I’ll call you pretty much whatever I feel like. It’ll be simpler in keeping things straight. And I know if I call you Caliban, Niko will punch me in the face.”
I couldn’t let myself forget that these were the bad old days when I wore my human suit and held on to enormous angst, enough to haul around in a tractor trailer, about being part monster. And Caliban equaled monster thanks to Shakespeare and our mother’s constant use of it—Caliban the monster and Caliban the demon. Cal didn’t care, not enough to count, but Niko cared enormously. Call his brother that and he’d either gut you, decapitate you, or both.
“Oh, and one more thing, Tiny Tim,” I remarked.
“Cal,” he gritted as I heard his jaw begin to grind in frustration. “If you’re Caliban, I’m Cal. Use that, because if you use Junior or Mini Me or anything else again, I’ll rip out your eyeballs and use them as cocktail olives, got it?”
“Fuck if I hadn’t been a goddamn adorable baby psychopath. ‘Eyes as cocktail olives.’ Cute as hell with the nasty temper and baby face. If I didn’t think you’d bite my hand off at the wrist, I’d be tempted to give you a pacifier.” I settled for pinching his cheek grandma-style. That, too, had him trying to bite off my hand. I wasn’t surprised.
“Now, Niko, Cujo,” I said, “back to the one more thing I wanted to tell you.”
I had the switchblade out yet again, it was developing into a twitch. I started carving shallowly into the surface of the bar. Laz.
“We’ve got the who. How about we finally get to the why someone wants to kill me bad enough to freaking time travel? What the hell did I . . . oh. Not me. You.” The question became sharper, grew teeth enough to try to eat me alive as Cal snapped out the accusation while planting a finger forcefully in my chest. “What did you do? And stop with the graffiti. I don’t get paid enough to have my under-the-table grubby cash docked or I’d already have tore the hell out of this stupid bar myself.”
Beat.
Huh. I was smarter than I remembered when it came to blaming me. But not smart enough to realize naturally I was going to ignore him ordering me to do . . . mmm . . . anything. Niko should’ve put me in day care rather than letting me run wild at eighteen. I had not been ready to play with the big kids. “Aw, you want to do it yourself. You’ve hit the ‘me do!’ stage. What an independent little shit you’ll be.” He hissed silently—completely without words or sound, but the air between us vibrated unnaturally—holy shit, that was an accomplishment for anyone to inflict on either of us. I freely admitted it.
You. I kept digging the point of the blade into wood.
“What did I do?” I contemplated. “Why is the more pertinent question, but, all right. We’ll go with yours: What did I do?
“I broke a rule. I broke the fucking hell out of it.” I bared my teeth with dark cheer, as predators do. “No one in over a thousand years has broken these assholes’ rule anywhere close to how I did.”
Here.
“I told you how the Vigil wanted to keep humans in the dark about nonhumans. They said they didn’t want war. They wanted to share the planet, buddies, pals, Best Fucking Friends Forever, kindergarten all over again. Not for us.” I grinned lazily and without any guilt, enti
rely guilt-free. “Not when we were biting the normal kids to see if they tasted like hot dogs. Better than the kosher beef kind.” Which they had. Even at five years old I wasn’t into false flattery. So I’d told them. I’d thought they’d be happy. You have pretty hair, you have a cool lunchbox, you taste like the really expensive hot dogs. I was wrong. They were not happy.
No one was happy.
“But you get my point.” I would’ve forgotten the hot dog incident except for my Nik; he wouldn’t let me. The first few times it’d been just as funny to me as to anyone listening. I wished once in a while after the tenth or twelfth time he told it, his eyes gleaming with retribution for the therapy sessions he had to take me to during his lunch period, that he’d let it go.
Instead, he let go and fell out of this life. It wasn’t the same, was it? Letting it go compared to letting yourself go.
Not. The. Goddamn. Same.
Stole. I dug the knife in deeper with careless force, the wood splintering.
“The Vigil had one rule. Do not be seen in the light of day as the most oblivious humans will notice. Stay hidden. But they were not my god and One Commandment or Ten, I didn’t have to bow down to them and their one shitty precious rule.” Pride. Spite. Venom. Hatehatehate. “If I had to break it, I would. And I did. I just wish they’d had nine more to break.”
It was the truth. I’d not only broken their rule, I’d shattered it. I’d opened a gate, ripping and tearing a wound in the fabric of reality that was more than obvious as it circled in midair flashing in the colors and shades of a bruise. There wasn’t a human alive blind enough not to see that. I had done it in the light of day, fading light—but day all the same. I also did it in front of an abandoned church in the sight of the people passing by on the sidewalk. I’d then walked through it and disappeared.
