Nevermore

by Rob Thurman

  Your.

  With that, I had announced to the ignorant and naive: Here there be monsters. The nightmare with bloody claws living under your bed is real. The fanged creature in your closet that called your name in a hungry whisper existed outside horror stories. I showed a crowd of humans they were not alone. I hadn’t meant to, but I hadn’t meant not to either. I had one thought and one goal and hiding from sheep wasn’t it. I basically just didn’t have it in me to care by then.

  Target.

  People in the city didn’t notice much, too busy minding their own business, but that was something, average New Yorker or not, none of them could miss seeing. The Vigil, forgiving of nighttime slipups, were less forgiving of the ones that took place under the sun. They weren’t at all forgiving of the ones that took place in front of twenty or more people. Not a one of them had missed that magic show. I should’ve tossed out cards, gotten little kid birthday gigs.

  When I broke a rule, I didn’t fuck around.

  Stole.

  “Why?” Cal challenged. “Why screw up by breaking a rule like that if you knew they’d want you, now me, dead over it?”

  Your.

  I could’ve said rules weren’t meant for lions, but that hadn’t been the reason. I let my eyes drift to a shadowy corner, deciding what to tell now and what to wait until later to reveal. There’d be more questions I couldn’t answer, but this one I could. Diverting my attention back to the younger me, I took in our differences. Physically we weren’t quite identical. Neither were we mentally, too many years of bad, bad experiences between us, but in this one thing, we were, without a doubt, the same. I turned half of my attention back to the switchblade and half to Cal.

  Moral mirror images.

  Toy.

  Our native tongue had always been practicality—with all its different dialects of lying, stealing, violence. Arson and blackmail before the age of eight as antibiotics were hard to come by when you had no money, no insurance, no identity, and no parent who gave enough of a shit to take your brother to the doctor. Whatever it took to help Nik and us survive childhood, we’d done without thought.

  What I had done several years from now was something he’d understand without any explanation required. “I broke it to save Niko’s life.”

  He stared into the eyes of a remorseless reflection, searching for the truth or searching for himself. He must have found both as he let his finger fall and folded his arms as a good chunk of aggression melted away. “Okay. Good reason. I have no problem with that. You were—”

  “Practical?” I finished before he could. He wasn’t a lion anymore, but he remembered, at least this once. I could see it.

  One corner of his mouth crooked upward. It was the closest thing to a smile you’d get out of me at that age. “Practical,” he confirmed.

  “The funny part is—funny, incredibly goddamn motherfucking funny.” I was tense with a rage I could barely control. After a few breaths to calm down, I started again. “The funny part is that I did it in front of around thirty people and not one of them believed it. They all thought it was a publicity stunt for some sci-fi or superhero movie. No one found out the big, bad monster secret, but the Vigil didn’t take chances. If I broke their rule once, I could again. They didn’t care about the reason—about Nik, I was stamped rabid and scheduled to be put down. For nothing. Which means the Vigil, they all died for nothing, with no one to blame but themselves. They were not practical.”

  YOU. I went back to the knife.

  Not care about Nik? No Cal would find that acceptable and every Cal would make you pay for thinking it. “No, they weren’t practical,” Cal agreed grimly. “And if they’re all dead, they deserve to be.”

  “I’m glad you two agree, although I wish you, Caliban, would be somewhat less of a homicidal influence on Cal. We’ll discuss that later as I have a few questions as well. Important ones to which I want answers,” Niko said, and his orders, whether he was younger or not, I would tend to listen to.

  “How did this organization send an assassin back in time? How did you come back after him? For that matter why didn’t they kill you in your own time?” Niko demanded, his habitual patience fading fast, evident by a jaw tight enough to grind molars to nothing. “And how many nonhumans are we speaking of that require an entire organization with access to science fiction such as time travel—” He closed his eyes. “Buddha, no. Tell me it’s not magic. I believe in too many unbelievable concepts as it is. I do not want any part of magic.”

  I could’ve yanked his chain, his rational and logical chain that had been yanked since the day of my birth, but I didn’t. “No. There’s no magic. The Kyntalash is an artifact, but a technological one. We’ll get to that later, but not in here.” I tilted my head toward the dead-drunk patron who was still blowing bubbles in his vomit, but I was less trustworthy now than I’d been at eighteen as impossible as that seemed.

  “Very well and don’t think I’ll forget. To repeat, then, why didn’t they kill you in your own time? And how many nonhumans are we speaking of that require an entire organization with access to technological artifacts capable of time travel when we only know of three?” At their ages, that was true. Vamps, Wolves, and Grendels. And with the exception of two Wolves, one a healer and no part of the Wolf mafia, they weren’t on speaking terms with any of them.

  LOSE.

  I laughed and if it sounded like the rasping bark of a feral junkyard dog, it was on the money. “They tried to kill me. They tried their gold-star, A-plus best. They tried enough times I lost goddamn count. But they never pulled it off. Meaning that now killing Cal is their only hope. In my time—hell, in this or any time—killing this me won’t repair the damage to the Vigil and we did an absolute shitload of damage.” If nothing else could make me smile, that did. Blackly satisfied, but a smile.

  MOTHER.

  “Resurrection, I said. Remember? Raising the Vigil’s dead because we wiped out every single one of those fascist fucking assholes except Lazarus. What they started, we finished. Lazarus could kill me a hundred times and they’d be just as dead and decomposing. Humans would win against nonhumans worldwide. But in this city we owned those bitches.”

  Even Cal took a step back at the bile in that last line. Niko looked at me as he hadn’t before, not once, not even when I had wholly deserved it. His expression was the cautious, alert one you gave something dangerous . . . poisonous.

  “Did we talk three minutes ago about humans being the only species capable of coming up with mutually assured destruction? I know you don’t want to hear the word, but this isn’t aimed at Cal. It’s for your kind, Niko. Not you, but your species. Some humans can be monsters worse than any others. Sophia, don’t tell me you think she wasn’t one. Being a monster was what she was born to do, and she was the best of the best.” I snorted, “Army Strong.”

  FUCKER. I finished my love letter to Lazarus with a last twist of the blade.

  Cal was getting it, I could see it in the sharper glint of his eyes—like glass that, if you had it coming, would cut you—human or not. But Niko . . . always ruthless when he had to be, always noble when there was an opportunity to be. He’d come around some day. Mine had. I cleared my throat and rubbed at tired eyes.

  “I’ll tell the tiny down and dirty details that no one but your ravenous brain cares about as soon as we’re someplace safer,” I promised. “Outside. No one will hear us with everyone squabbling and squawking while they go out to eat or have coffee, the weird human shit. We’ll leave in a few minutes. Midnight will be here in a few hours or our people might’ve screwed up and Lazarus will show up sooner. Our flux capacitors didn’t exactly come with down to the second instructions.” And I was almost done with my scratched and slashed graffiti.

  Done with the knife, I used my hand to gesture at the unconscious regular whose name I’d once known better than my own. “And I don’t trust the unco
nscious not to listen in and neither should either of you. You’d be amazed how many people can fake unconsciousness next to a puddle of their own vomit if they’re paid enough.”

  Satisfied, I looked over my message to Lazarus, the lab rat Vigil Frankenstein monster of a freak. Laz Beat You Here Stole Your Target Stole Your Toy YOU LOSE MOTHERFUCKER. Carving graffiti didn’t make for great punctuation, but I was satisfied.

  “Now,” I said, “I told Cal too damn long ago”—curious, they were so damn curious—“that I had one more thing to tell him.” Rapping the wood of the counter under my fist, I gave Cal the words that would determine the future. That would decide whether we, no games involved, lived or died.

  If my world lived or died.

  I tossed him a ten I’d had folded up in my hand to land on the bar and skitter toward him and gave him my hopefully perfectly human grin. Spreading my jacket, I gave him one last look at my T-shirt and hopefully his and our lifesaving motto written on it.

  “Give me a real beer,” I said.

  “And then come with me if you want your ass to live.”

  4

  After the beer, drinkable this time, Cal closed the bar early by about eight hours, leaving the unconscious patron inside with a casual shrug, and we went back to their apartment. Theirs, not what had once been mine. I had to separate it. Cal was not me, not yet. Niko was not my Niko, same reason—that and Cal would only get more pissed and possessive if he had to share. His behavior didn’t bother me. I could handle his asshole ways as they were after all my asshole ways.

  Or I could be wrong and we’d kill each other, annoying each other to the point of homicide. Asshole always looked better on me than anyone else—even if that anyone else had been me once. And my younger self, less patient with undeniably less self-control, would without question feel the same.

  That didn’t bother me either. It’d make a good distraction if our irritation did get physical. I needed one of any kind to take my mind off what did bother me. That was the fact I might go insane thinking this Nik was my Nik. This Niko had been mine but he wasn’t the brother I had left behind. Eight years of memories gone. This Nik . . . no, this Niko knew me, but only part of me. I needed the brother who knew all of me, all of what I might do, all of what I was. But he wasn’t here. So I took that step back, put distance between us, and didn’t show a single sign of how being gutted would be less painful.

  “Time travel,” Niko said, keeping his voice down enough to be as cautious as I’d asked him to be. Although, unless you were unlucky enough to pass the wrong person—a human one as the Vigil were alive now almost a decade before their massacre. I had no idea if Lazarus would involve them or not. I was leaning toward not considering how it had gone for them the first and only time they’d screwed with me.

  “No,” I assured him. “Ancient technology from a few thousand, ten thousand, I don’t know, a long time ago. Meet the Kyntalash.”

  I pulled up the sleeve of my jacket to show an arm brace of a black-and-red metal, a composition I didn’t recognize, couldn’t guess at if my life depended on it. Several strips looped my wrist and then braided upward to end in a band two inches below my elbow. The pattern had no logic to it I could see and less than a minute of looking it over would trigger the beginning of a headache. The longer I’d studied it the worse the headache became until it was a full-blown postconcussion migraine. To keep that company, following the intertwined path of the weaving made your stomach rebel and gifted you with the kind of dizziness you should have only when falling down drunk, and drained you until you were exhausted enough to want to keel over for a ten-hour nap. It drained you less when you didn’t see it, but it definitely fed on you. If you wore it, you were its battery. Whether you looked at it for a second or ten minutes, your brain was telling you nonstop that it was not for you. Whoever made it, their minds were nothing similar to ours. Didn’t function the same. They had lived in the same world as other paien and humans, but they hadn’t lived in the same reality.

  I didn’t look at it anymore.

  “Hike up your diaper, Tiny Tim.” That was for Cal who was far less interested in Niko and my discussion and was zeroing in on a kebab stand. I didn’t remember it, but eighteen had been an all-about-kebabs and seared-meat year for me. I barely held the gagging back by saying sharply, “This is time travel one oh one. Your life, guess what, fucking depends on it. So listen up.”

  He scowled but moved back over to our side, took one glance at the Kyntalash and gagged himself. “What the hell is that?” Jerking his gaze away instantly, he swallowed and then said flatly, “That is wrong. That is alien and unnaturally wrong, so phantasmagoric in its wrongness that it has to be Satan’s pinkie ring.”

  “Tell me about it and since I have to wear it until this is over and I can go home, you can invest some of your attention in the group effort of keeping your ass alive.” I switched my attention to Niko. “Sorry, I know your—have to say it—suspiciously strong fixation on obtaining knowledge, but keep looking at it and it’ll either melt your brain or make you wish that it had.” I tugged my sleeve back down, hiding the brace from sight.

  “There was technology thousands of years ago that can to this day accomplish time travel.” He was only repeating what I’d told him, but that was Niko. He didn’t want to know how. He wanted to know how, who, why, be given a copy of the schematics, understand the principles on which it worked, and could he make one himself? It didn’t matter to him that he was already rubbing his forehead with a Kyntalash-induced headache after barely a minute and a half in study of it.

  Niko was a need-to-know type in that anything he didn’t already know, he needed to with an impatient, frustrated hunger. I’d once made the mistake of labeling it as OCD. He’d told me I only wished it were OCD as they made pills for that, but they didn’t make anything for his appetite for the curious and unknown. I’d grumbled and kept following him around a dusty old bookstore run by a Druid who might’ve been human once, but wasn’t any longer. He was every bit as dusty and old as his books, but with the smell of fresh goat’s blood and mistletoe on his breath with fingernails that I knew were wood, grown from his flesh, not fake. I didn’t like him, but he wasn’t killing humans. That actually meant less to me than the fact he was killing goats. The majority of people I could take or leave. I didn’t mind goats. I’d never been provoked or pissed off by a goat. I did try not to chew on that fact as I’d continued carrying at least ten books for Nik. Heavy books.

  The road could lead to regrets. Niko’s regrets. While I wouldn’t have any on the issue, Niko would pass his on to me somehow. He was inventive.

  Two days later, which was one day longer than I thought I’d hold out, I’d killed the Druid. I’d gone for the goats, but I’d lucked out. There’d been a sci-fi convention in town that had a fair pick of virgins and the temptation had been too much. The Druid had probably pissed tree sap in his big-boy panties with glee. He’d decided worshipping trees and Mother Earth wasn’t getting him anywhere and moved up from goats to human sacrifice. He was right. It did get him something more tangible.

  A bullet in his brain.

  Then, being absolutely justified—a perk I had not expected—in shooting the asshole and burning down his creepy store, I’d “borrowed” Niko’s car to drop off a pimply fifteen-year-old at one of the hotels. I’d found him in the Druid’s basement, tied to an altar. The kid had a trident, a short blond wig, and was dressed in fish-scaled swim trunks and green boots. If that wasn’t the same as writing virgin across your narrow hairless chest in bright red marker, I didn’t know what was. I’d yelled after him as he bolted screaming out of the car to get laid or hide in his bedroom until puberty passed if he didn’t want to die really, really young.

  Considerate, caring, and a giver of knowledge, what else could anyone want from me?

  After that, I’d driven the three panicked but unharmed goats in the backseat upstate t
o a rescue farm. They were spares, I’d guessed, in case human offerings didn’t work out or became slim pickings once the convention packed up. Nik had bitched forever about the farm smell and had huffed, unimpressed, before he’d bought me a supersized Snickers when I’d complained about my unnoted heroism in saving Aquageek.

  A good memory, but not one I needed now. With the heel of my hand, I rubbed at painfully dry eyes. They didn’t ache any less from the flash burn of the second explosion.

  “Yep.” I dropped my hand before I tried to scrape off my corneas. “Technology same as time-travel tech in most of the movies, but less moving parts. In theory anyway. Do not ask me anything about physics and how it works. It just does.” I gave a shot at walking faster, but it didn’t happen. I was too damn tired. “It was the Namaru who made the Kyntalash,” I continued on, not that any of us much cared except for Niko.

  “Thousand of years ago, give or take, there was a race that built all sorts of technological crap people took as magic.” Nope, no magic. Just a caveman seeing his first TV. “The Namaru. They’re long dead, long enough that humans don’t remember them to be able to write up a myth or two. They lived in lava fields, active ones, can you believe that?” I pictured giant jellyfish made of living fire for some reason—floating and burning with hundreds of tentacles to use to build. “They created some serious skata”—as that unnamable friend would’ve said—“including this stone box thing, a mold, that could create any weapon. It created Thor’s Mjollnir, so they say, although probably by mistake.

  “Thor’s such an annoying dudebro—alcoholic frat asshole,” I sniped, going accidentally, but catastrophically regardless, off subject. “He was more likely asking for a mug of ale or mead or whatever alcoholic idiot Norse gods drink, but it couldn’t understand his drunken babbling. So, hammer instead.”