by Rob Thurman
“If I ever grow feelings some day, you are going to make me cry. You know that, right?” I drawled, crumping up the napkin with its two small drops of blood. I was ignored—as usual when Robin was on a roll.
“I don’t remember it happening that way, not with Loki begging to compete against Thor, not thinking ahead to drug you and ship you to some tiny village in Kazakhstan until the party was over, for the safety of all humanity and paien-kind. I wouldn’t have done any of that while in my right mind, but I did. Why do something so entirely and unnecessarily dangerous for no discernible reason that— Oh.”
He stopped and stayed unmoving with a sudden bizarrely bright glitter to his gaze, identical to the light reflecting from a lens of a microscope or telescope. It could’ve been a sign of a sight beyond the rest of us. If you believed in signs. I didn’t. I didn’t care if Loki begged or Robin blackmailed. I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know. I ran out of fucks the moment Nik said I was going to Goodfellow’s party if he had to tie me up and toss me through the door announcing me as a stripper who wore his bondage gear instead of carrying it.
One thing I did know that while we stood here that someone out in the party was eating the last of the sausage appetizers and that was torture. Sheer fucking torture.
Goodfellow blinked once and the unnatural shine was gone. “Ah . . . I see it now. I see all the ways and all the paths, the why and wherefore. That was one I didn’t see coming. Nor did I see it going.” He shook his head. “That is going to be extraordinarily . . .” He laughed. “No, that was extraordinarily fascinating.”
He briskly clapped his hands together once as he turned to Loki. “What is done is done, however it is done. Here’s a hint. It was done by me, therefore it was done brilliantly. Now, back to reality as we know it. Loki, I do know I had you sign a vow of no killing inside my penthouse. And you did sign it, with the blood of you and Fenrir, making it legally binding among your pantheon. Not that it matters. A simple nod from you would’ve been binding to me.”
“I did not break it.” The swirls had disappeared from the god’s skin and he had sounded much more calm, less violent, not as interested in animating my guts to eat me from the inside out. With a smooth face and that long hair twisted into a black braid, he stood motionless to the point of not breathing but with his body tense enough that he was coiled for action. If he’d had a goatee he would’ve vaguely reminded me of Nik’s evil and opposite-colored twin.
“To whom do you think you are speaking, Lie-smith? Tell me, can you be a lie-smith without a semibelievable lie ready on your tongue? I don’t think you can.” Robin sighed as if lamenting the unadulterated quantity of naiveté present in this existence that would have a trickster attempt to deceive the Trickster. Pivoting to his right, he lifted an entire bottle of wine from a server’s tray with a thief’s touch. Unnoticed and unseen by the waiter. He didn’t have to. It was his wine, but he said once you’re at your peak and lose your touch, you’ll never reach the top again.
Facing Loki again, he took a swallow straight from the bottle. Robin was richer than fucking God, but he’d lived a hundred thousand years before bottles were created. “Yes, I annoy you with my constant rampaging virility”—he passed the bottle to the Norse god who took a long drink after a resigned groan—“and my love of reminding all about it, sending you pictures of it with my phone now that humans eventually invented something worthwhile, irritating with my never-ending tales of adventure and war, and causing you rampant envy over the franchise of whorehouses I owned in early Rome. And it is a bright moment in a boring morning when I turn on the TV and discover you’re furious enough with me for sleeping with your ex-wife and your daughter in a very kinky threesome, enough so that you’re tearing down an entire mountain in one impossibly large avalanche.” He took the bottle back for another swallow. “That made up for the lightly underdone crepes I had for that breakfast. That cook has to go—out the door or to Salome and Spartacus as a cat toy. But, back on track, do keep that up, the bitching and destruction. But . . .
“Do not lie to this liar.”
The voice was inhuman. I couldn’t scrape up anything in my brain to compare it against. It simply wasn’t human, inhuman, animalistic. It came from a place that was not here, where gods above other gods above other gods played dice for the fate of the universe.
Robin was my height, a few inches under six feet, but I’d have sworn then he stood above us, a towering idol hungry for sacrifice. “You forget that I am the Trickster Second, born of Hob the Trickster First. You are a god with the power of chaos linking your existence into a tangible mass. You were born of chaos, you are living chaos, but you were not born a trickster. Trickery was not in you. You chose it. You wrestled with it, seized it, and finally humbled yourself and invited it into you.”
Taking one last swallow of the wine, a drop of crimson smudged his lower lip. He ran a finger over it, studied the dark scarlet streak, and then placed his finger to the middle joint in his mouth to suck his skin clean. It wasn’t sexual in any way, shape, or form, and Goodfellow is always sexual in any way, shape, or form. He could pass out drunk in a ditch wearing a clown costume and spooning a lipstick, fake eyelash wearing donkey and the son of a bitch would somehow, someway make it into Playgirl magazine as the Sexiest Man of the Decade centerfold with that precise picture in it.
That this wasn’t aimed at being sex incarnate was freaky as fuck. That it was the opposite—a god above Loki’s list of them—a god who craved sacrifice, blood, and lives was bizarrely atypical, too, I admit, but, knowing Goodfellow, the sex thing was actually more so.
“I won’t deny you’re an excellent trickster, little wolf, little snake, slippery fish,” Robin said, lazy and unsettling the shit out of me, with the boredom I hadn’t seen in him before. Naturally I’d seen him bored, normally bored the same as everyone can get, and I knew beneath his happy-go-orgy-it-up mask he wore, he had to be unbelievably bored at times as long as he’d lived. This, though, to not simply know it, but to see it. To witness what his life had been and the parts that lingered still when he was one of those among the first on the world—with nothing yet to do and no one yet any fun to trick.
And hundreds of thousands of years to wait for any of that.
How the hell he’d survived that, I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have.
Robin placed the empty bottle on the marble table. “You’re one of the best, of the self-made tricksters. You do your best to forget that, don’t you? But you, Silver-tongue, Sky-traveler, Lie-smith, were not birthed among our kind. And if you had been, it would make no difference. You still would not be me.” He didn’t say it with a vicious bite. He said it as an undisputed truth is said, plain and simple, and that made it worse. “Trickery is fickle.” He placed a firm finger in Loki’s chest. “Oh so very fickle. It’s your guest now. It lives within you as it finds you interesting, but it is not an innate part of you. More than merely that, as it is not part of you, not born within you, I can take it away.”
Holy shit. He could do that? I had then started thinking seriously of buying Robin a new bidet to replace the one I had shot . . . and maybe send an “I’m sorry. Please don’t rip my ability to piss out of me” Strip-o-gram.
“You would not.” Would not—not could not. That was the problem with being a liar. You couldn’t lie to yourself, Loki included.
“Hob is gone. I am First now. You would never have the desire to lie, steal, manipulate, con, or trick again. You’d still have chaos, which is its own kind of party, but once you’ve been a trickster, you have little desire to live as anything else. You know that. Don’t be an impossibly stubborn bastard. Let this go. I did it. It was essential. Believe that I would not have put Caliban and you face-to-face if it weren’t. No trick would be worth that.” Goodfellow exhaled and instantly he was himself again, smirking and losing the heavily laden presence that demanded you throw your firstborn at his wrathful feet.
“Look how long you hated me and now we coexist in blissful irritation and ire. If you survive me, you can survive Cal.”
He had removed his finger from Loki’s chest and patted it lightly. “Cal threw the first punch, but I know that was only because he was taught his entire life that self-defense has no timeline. If you fight fair, an oxymoron if ever there was one, if you wait for your turn, then you won’t survive. And I’ve no doubt it was self-defense with your temper and hatred of the Auphe reaching such heights that you’d risk breaking a blood oath to kill one.” He snatched another bottle of passing wine and emptied at least half before using it to point me out.
“I know as well you’re not blind enough to think he is a true Auphe. His father was one and his mother human. He is half of one and half the other, but neither at the same time. He is something old and something new and something unlike anything on this earth.” He flashed me a grin at the often repeated in-joke. “And he fears no gods, past, present, and future.” There was an odd emphasis on that last sentence. “Do you, Caliban?”
He didn’t give me a chance to answer although I thought having tried to kill Loki was a good enough answer. “He is more a victim of the Auphe than anyone else in history. He also destroyed the entire race . . . with a little assistance, but at the end of it all, with or without help, he was the only one who could end them. And he did,” he said with an awe none of us had lost to this day. We had defeated the Auphe Nation. “He ended them all.”
He waved both hands, but didn’t lose a single drop of his precious wine. “Loki, send Caliban a fruit basket for destroying those you hated most outside your own family. Now, go. Mingle. I invited an incredibly sexy kitsune with you in mind. She just earned her ninth tail, ascending to goddess status. A trickster god and goddess? Think of that sex. They’ll feel it all the way over in Japan. I’ve four bedrooms. Feel free to destroy them all.”
Loki hadn’t moved right away, instead looking at me, then through me. I felt it, a touch of crop-killing frost that radiated doubt . . . but a little curiosity too. “The Auphe, you killed them, to the last? And know as the god of lies, it’s a given I will know if you do not tell the truth.”
It had been as Robin had said . . . I had killed them all, but not alone. It had taken his and Niko’s help, but as I’d died twice to do it, it was truth enough right now. “I did. Like any beaten lab created mutt, I bit the hand that made me. However much you hated them, I hated them more. My only regret is they didn’t suffer a thousand times over, but they did suffer.” I had grinned at the memories. It was a grin too Auphe to be human, too human to be Auphe.
“So does that happy thought of my Auphe genocide melt the glacier up your ass?” I added with a curled mockery of a smile.
Loki’s high-class, superior accent had vanished to be replaced with one more appropriate for whatever con Robin mentioned that he was working in Vegas. It was deeper and a shade more touched with sandpaper. He suddenly smelled of the desert and crappy buffets too as he scowled at me, then transferred it to Goodfellow before trying for a bargain. “Let me kill him. The bastard has no sense of self-preservation. I’d be doing Darwin’s work. He’s a suicidal obnoxious shit. I’ll snatch the spear from Odin’s feeble, filthy, syphilitic hand and make you king. You’re conceited enough to think you’re one as it is. I’ll make it true. I’ll give you Valhalla as a vacation home and all the Valkyries your horny, groping self can handle. Just let me kill the son of a bitch.”
Robin’s smile was as sly as they all were. “Like I could not have all that if I wanted without your help. Yes, roll your eyes. Very befitting a god. One last thing. It’s the entire reason you’re here, both of you.” He seized one hand from both of us and slammed them together. “Clasp, grasp, shake, pick a time period. You are here to meet each other. Caliban, the Unmaker of the World and Reaper of the Firstborn, now he has become Death, destroyer of the Auphe, greet Loki, the Destroyer of All Worlds, the Alpha and Omega that is Ragnarok, now he has become Death, the destroyer of existence in its infinite forms. You’ve met. You will respect each other and remember, Loki, qualities you admire in Caliban, such as Auphe genocide and biologically inventive ways of killing, and, you, Caliban, with your enjoyment of widespread chaos and destruction the same as a toddler enjoys fingerpainting every square inch of freshly painted white walls. No one is better at chaos and destruction than Loki. You are now comrades-in-arms. This is not optional. If you forget this, I’ll make certain you have no arms left to be comrades with anyone. They are decent arms. I could get a good price for them.”
His grip on our hands that was holding them together was . . . yeah . . . painful as hell.
Squeezing tighter, for emphasis no doubt, he then let us go, took his phone out of his suit jacket, and snapped a picture of Loki and me basically holding hands as neither of us could decide between the clasp, grasp, or shake. Or unbend our fingers yet as Goodfellow had done his best to break them.
“Skata, could you be more adorable? Caliban with his shocked expression and nearly drooling air of catatonia. Loki with an absolutely blank expression as empty of thought that I’ve only previously seen its equal on Thor—and is that the trace of a tear? No? Watery eyes? I didn’t know gods had allergies. This will be my Saturnalia card this year. Check your e-mail. The two of you are cute as fluffy brain-dead puppies. But don’t forget. Fight again and I sell your arms on the black market.”
He’d then turned Loki and pushed him into motion in the opposite direction, muttering, “And we’re mingling. No killing. Mingling. Let’s find you that fox-spirit before Thor stumbles over her, gropes her tails, and puts her off gods forever, never mind she is one now.”
That had been the end of the party mostly, except for Thor puking on my shoes, gallons and gallons of it, too projectile to escape, and that was one time I did not exaggerate. Gods’ stomachs, unlike tanker trucks, had no limits. I did have limits though and that had been one. I’d decided then and there that gods were above my pay grade and I didn’t want to see one again as long as I lived.
The end except for one small, tiny issue.
Niko had crossed paths with Loki and it was a trashy talk show special of twin brothers separated at birth. They’d met when the kitsune couldn’t be found and ended up confiscating Goodfellow’s huge spread of coffee table, cleaning it to an immaculate empty space with a casually intimidating sweep of Nik’s katana. Sitting on the couch, they’d put their heads together in deep discussion while pointing at various points on the marble. Every time one of them did, a small spot of glowing color lit up . . . red, blue, green, purple . . . too many to count. I hadn’t been interested. I’d played this game with Niko before. My brother was having a good time, and it was my turn to find the same.
Going to clean my boots of whatever had been in Thor, internal organs included I didn’t doubt, I’d found the kitsune drying off her fox tails in one of the bedroom master baths—despite being a Japanese trickster spirit, she hadn’t had any idea about the bidet obsession either. And Goodfellow had been right: Sex with a trickster spirit turned goddess was . . . damn. What she could do with those tails . . . If I was capable of getting it up in the next year I’d be surprised.
Later, Robin had come up to me as I sat on the floor in a corner with an entire sliced sausage platter resting on my legs and my gun beside me to shoot anyone who was suicidal enough to try for a single sliver of one. He was paler than usual. “What’s up?” There was concern in my voice and the way I curved my arm protectively around my food platter, just not concern for him.
He’d crouched beside me and answered, “Your brother”—paused to massage his temples as if that aneurysm had finally burst—“your brother has strategized with Loki and come up with a battle plan that will allow Loki to be the victor at Ragnarok.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, looking around us with rapid glances to make sure he wasn’t overheard. “And it will work.”
I tried to laugh a
nd ended up choking on the appetizer or five I had in my mouth. After I’d managed to get it all down, I coughed, finally saying, “When I was a kid, Nik found some stupid ‘take over the known world’ board game at the Salvation Army from, shit, decades before we were born. He made me play it with him a thousand times. ‘To sharpen my strategy and tactics.’ I was in the fourth grade for Christ’s sake.” I dove for another piece of sausage. “But I’m twenty-six now and he still has that mold-covered piece of crap in our closet. He breaks it out every month. I’ve never won a single game in my life, not exactly a challenge for anyone much less Niko, but it’s his drug of choice.”
I had leaned backward, tilting my head back to rest my head against the wall. Looking up the necessary few inches for the perfect angle to see Robin’s expression. I had known it would be a good one and it was. “Niko was Achilles, Alexander the Great, Arturus, Hannibal, and more. You know. You were there. He didn’t ride along with history, he made it.”
I smirked. “And you invited him to this party. You let him know Loki was a guest. Loki who starts the battle of Ragnarok, so infamous that I’ve heard of it and we all know I can’t be bothered to read up on or remember shit. Then you turned your back on them for a second and didn’t expect this?”
I flicked his forehead, unable not to gloat some after the years of smug conceit I’d endured, laid on thick and deep the way only a puck could. “Not as smart as you imagine, are you? You were the one who told us the stories about the good old days. Of who we were, what we did. Of how Nik had a hobby of taking over the world. Repeatedly. Loki has a hobby of ending it . . . mostly. Put the two of them together and naturally they’d figure out how to have both the battle and keep the world in one piece to rule it. Some trickster you are.”
