by Rob Thurman
Covered liberally with coyote blood, shredded pieces of their intestines, and whatever green goop had sprayed explosively out of giant spiders when you put several large caliber rounds in their beach-ball-sized bodies, I faced the rusalka, the lamia, and the wendigo that I’d scented before we’d stepped into the building. I seriously considered killing them, but that was a change not yet necessary and one that would spread the word among the supernatural community. That we’d killed the skin-walker would make ripples of gossip enough. Adding more wouldn’t be a good thing.
I leaned against the door jamb and kept growling. I had every right.
They were rude.
Not one of them had a fruit basket to thank us for taking care of the skin-walker, which would’ve craved a midnight snack sooner or later. If one of his people wasn’t conveniently and immediately available, paien disappear much more easily than humans with friends and family. He’d have started with them first, although they probably weren’t bright enough to know it. There aren’t many true stories about skin-walkers as there aren’t more than a handful of species with ferocious enough fighters to live through the encounter. These three, predatory breeds or not, weren’t anywhere close to the type of paien capable of facing a skin-walker. The yee naaldlooshii weren’t at the top of the food chain, but they were past the halfway mark. These three couldn’t see the bottom of a skin-walker’s feet, he was that much higher than they were.
They were gazing past me at an apartment littered with body parts and walls that had the equivalent of a new paint job donated by Carrie’s prom committee.
Their own colors weren’t any sort of improvement over what was on the walls. There were eyes of stagnant green rivers paired with the dark tangled red hair of a week-old drowning victim, a gaze of a starless empty sky of no color at all but difficult to see through the floor-length cloak of the lamia’s own black hair, and then there was the decomposing cataract gray-white marbles, no hair but the distinct smell of Rogaine, as the three of them looked their fill, then shifted their attention from Niko and Cal’s home back to what both coated a good deal of me and was soaked into large swathes of my clothes. It also dripped off of me like a slow, unnaturally thick rain. What’s more was the fact that with my added years—Auphe maturity come finally—they, like the skin-walker, could sniff out that Auphe in me. That should’ve had them running until they hit New Jersey. It should not have them knocking at the door. But then again they were idiotic enough to live in a building with a skin-walker. Maybe they’d thought he had killed us and were going to interrupt his meal he’d made of us by trying to snipe our better apartment from beneath our cold, dead rent deposit. They had fingers crossed to snag the place with the killer view, the one they were hoping we’d died for. They were idiotic enough to do just that.
Some days it made me wonder why I bothered to carry a gun at all. I could easily beat them to death with my TV remote.
“Did you send your RSVPs?” I drawled, leaning toward them. All three muttered inhuman consonants under their breath as they looked away, sniffed again, and took a step back. “I didn’t think so.” I cocked my head slightly. “But, hey, the more the merrier. We love making new friends.”
I gave them the crazed, warped chasm of a grin I’d held in all day, more and more difficult with each hour to do; the same one I’d learned when I ran with the Auphe and played their games as gleefully as they did. It felt as if it split my face in half, and, hell, maybe it did. “I’d think about it though. Think hard.” Then I let my eyes bleed Auphe red. Niko was behind me and couldn’t see, so why not? The combination of the grin, the eau de Auphe, and the eyes made me the farthest thing from a poster child for moderation when it came to maiming, mutilation, and murder.
“Done thinking?” I took a step out into the hall toward them to equal the one they’d taken back away from me.
“Now tell me . . . is this a party you really want to crash?”
It wasn’t.
No surprise there on my part. They were gone as fast as if they hadn’t existed at all. “That’s what I thought,” I grumbled with savage bite. As I felt my eyes turn back to the human gray, the color this Niko was familiar with, I stepped back into the apartment, closed the door, and returned to the situation at hand.
“We need to talk,” I said. My foot hit a lump under the sand. I bent down and dug out my jacket along with my favorite knives tucked in the lining. “You and I, Niko, we need to have a long, serious as fuck talk. It’s one that Cal can’t hear and can’t know. Not now. If . . . when we fix things, you can tell him if you want. Just not now.”
I checked to make certain he was as soundly out of it as he should be. He was. “That’s why when I saw the snake I let it do what snakes do. I needed Cal down and out for this. I hadn’t thought of how to do it, didn’t know I’d need to do it until today. And then, like a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk, there it was. The snake.” Shaking the sand off my jacket, I slid another glance at him . . . him, me . . . this was one thing we were identical in. Eight extra years—hell, twenty years would make no difference. In this, we would be the same. That would never change.
“Our talk, it’s one Cal couldn’t be a part of without going off the rails, getting himself killed, or both.” It was the truth. I knew as it had happened to me today, just hours ago.
“And like I told you, with the bite I knew he’d be okay. That goes for anything else I might do. I hurt him and I hurt myself.” I bent over and pulled up the bottom of one leg of my jeans while pushing down the soft leather of a worn combat boot. Where the snake bite was on Cal’s leg, fresh and new, there were faded white scars in the same place on mine. Four indentations of whiter than white dense tissue. “I didn’t have that until fifteen minutes ago. Trust me, a little bite like this? I’ve had . . . he’ll have worse. We’re both your brother, Nik. You can trust me with him as much as my Niko trusted me with myself.”
“If I didn’t know you are my brother or who he’ll be someday, I wouldn’t have punched you for the snake. I would have killed you. If I didn’t feel it as solid as the ground under my feet that you are who you say, you’d be dead,” he bit off. It was a verbal bite but as sharp as any the dead snakes around us once had. “Do anything similar to this again and you’ll wish you were. I can’t kill you, but I can and will make you exceedingly sorry. As my brother, I’m certain you’d forgive me.” I felt the slice on that one. It drew blood, if mentally instead of physically. If I’d thought Niko’s edge had been any less cutting when we were babes in the woods, I was wrong.
“As for trusting you with him as your brother trusts you with yourself . . .” He didn’t show any relief. The opposite if I had to label it. “I’m not a fool now and I doubt I’m one in the years to come.” Resignation was seeping in to replace the anger that trickled out with the relaxation, finger by finger, of his fist. Snake sin aside, he’d said it: He knew I was his brother, or enough of him that he couldn’t aim his rage at me for much longer.
“I cannot trust you with him at all,” he finished. “As my brother, which means you as well, are both inherently suicidal.”
I shrugged. “You don’t really mean that, but funny you should say it.” At eighteen I’d been reckless, had everything to lose, which had me playing the game all in or all out, but I wouldn’t have run as long and fast as I had from the Auphe if I hadn’t wanted to live. Now I was wild, careless, running as fast as possible as I was finally the one doing the chasing, taking any and all risks with my life and having a helluva time doing it. What’s the point of having a life if you’re not going to live it to the last crazy second? From the outside or to those who didn’t know us, Cal’s desperation to survive and my eagerness to live anything and everything once I had survived, it might’ve looked like we were suicidal. But that wasn’t the case, not for Cal. And not for me.
Or it hadn’t been.
I tossed my jacket across the chair after
fishing a piece of paper clumsily folded several times from the pocket. Once more, I trudged through the sand across the apartment to boost up and sit on the end of the creaky rectangular-shaped kitchen table. It wobbled, but eventually stabilized to hold my weight as I sat cross-legged just as I’d seen Niko do a thousand times while doing yoga. “Whenever you’re ready,” I announced.
“It’s story time.”
• • •
“As in a ‘Once upon a time’ story?” Niko had taken the position opposite me at the other end of the table. As agile and lightly as he moved, I didn’t have to see him to feel the faint shiver beneath me. I was surprised the Dumpster scrounged piece of flimsy furniture managed to hold both our weight.
Once upon a time . . . a few hours ago and eight years technically yet to come. Turn the page and read the next two words that waited.
The End.
Two lines. It was a quick read. Who didn’t like that?
Fuck.
Giving in to the stabbing aches and complaint of every muscle in me, I slumped forward, letting my face rest in my hands, covered by my palms. The mess of thick hair I’d gotten from Sophia fell around my face to turn the weakly lit apartment into a place of complete shadow without a hint of light. Hiding me from the world. That was nothing but a good thing with what I felt rising inside.
Once upon a time.
I made a sound. I didn’t think there was a word for it. It wasn’t a laugh, not unless one could be a broken jumble of crazed choking and a strangled rasp that came from fighting back every molecule of air in my lungs wanting to escape in a frenzy of rage, hate, and despair. But letting out that kind of obvious clawing desperation might make Nik uncomfortable knowing I was neck deep in a mental breakdown, possibly panic the living shit out of him. I didn’t want that. Nope. I wanted, I needed him in top form if any of us, here or there, were going to survive. I needed him at his best. Someone had to be, and I had no difficulty accepting straight up that I was so far from my best that I couldn’t find it with a GPS tracker and a bloodhound.
So I held it back, all of it, behind gritted teeth, a locked jaw, and humorless barbwire tangle of my lips. I was lucky Niko couldn’t see my face. He wouldn’t believe that was a smile. No one in their right mind would. Swallowing thickly, I gave a shot at clearing my throat back to a voice more like my own.
“Once upon a time.” It came out hoarse, but not insane. I’d take that.
Keeping my face concealed by my hair, I rubbed at eyes that burned from the fire, the heat, pain, exhaustion, and fear. It was a fear deep and dark enough to smother any but the smallest scrap of hope. I couldn’t stop from admitting the last to myself, if not to this Niko or this Cal. I could lie to them, but about what had happened to my Nik, I couldn’t lie to myself. As much as I wanted to.
“No,” I finally answered him. I gave one last banishing swipe across my face. “It’s not really that kind of story.”
I straightened, sitting up to dig in the pocket of my jeans for a tie to pull my hair back into the ponytail I’d lost somewhere on the walk from the bar. If Nik had to hear this fairy tale that the Grimm brothers had nothing close to in competition, I should have to look him in the face when I told it.
“You never asked me, you know,” I said, calm now. Detached. I had to be if I had a chance of pulling off any of this. “Why did I come back? Why not you instead? You’re smarter. Quicker. Better at hand to hand or with any kind of blade. As good with guns as me too, as much as it kills me to admit it. And tactics, you memorized Sun Tzu’s Art of War before you were in junior high. My Nik and you together, what couldn’t you do?”
Not much. But there was one thing neither Nikos could do, but I could—as a last resort. That’s why I’d been batter up. But this Nik didn’t know about my Auphe gift for gating, traveling, and how it could be used as an escape or a weapon if worse came to worst and our backs were against the wall. As he didn’t have any idea about that and wouldn’t for a while, added to his massively overprotective complex when it came to brothers, one he’d never lose no matter how many years went back and forth, I’d been surprised he hadn’t asked.
Why me. Why not him?
“I wondered,” he admitted. “With the same temperament and methods, I would’ve found myself easier to work alongside.” He raised a judgmental eyebrow and added, “To not punch in the face.” He was untangling his hair from its twist and braiding it. It didn’t mean he wasn’t giving his all, listening to and analyzing every word, syllable, letter. It was just Niko, an action so automatic for most of his life, that half the time he was surprised to find a braid instead of a loose fall of hair at the end of our strategy and planning sessions for taking down the next monster payday.
“I am twenty-eight in your time. Ancient. I’m shocked you didn’t say I’d fallen in the bathtub and broken a hip,” he stated with a humor unseen but with the mildly punishing taste of hot pepper to the words. And it was something I would say . . . in different circumstances. Fingers moving faster, he asked, “Why then? Why not me? I would’ve argued for it, I know. I wouldn’t have been easy to convince I wasn’t the better choice. You are devious however. You’ve conned people since you were four. I’m a more difficult target, yet you’ve tricked me more than once to get your way, although your way was usually about helping me without letting me know it up front.”
He finished off his braid with a loud snap of the black elastic. He was frowning now and the humor was replaced with disapproval. “Did you fool me? Him? When it is Cal’s life on the line, my Cal, and your Niko would’ve been better suited, did you con him because you have come so far in skill and knowledge, I must admit, that you thought it would be simple. Did you think it would take you five minutes and the rest would be some sort of time travel joyride?”
I hadn’t thought things could be any worse than what I’d seen, how it had gone. I was wrong. If that was what Niko thought of me, this Niko, then he could save Cal on his own. If they died and I consequently never was, I wouldn’t be crying over it, you could bet your ass. Nik . . . mine . . . would never . . . he would never fucking think that. He would never—but that was a goddamn given. He would never do anything at all again. He was gone, and I was an idiot for not going with him.
I should’ve thrown Robin’s letter in the gutter and moved along with the bullet in the brain.
“No,” I spat, rage intense enough my vision blurred. My short nails dug into my palms until the comforting warmth of blood streaked my skin, cupped and hidden by my curled fingers. “Con my brother for the Mardi Gras that is saving that rude, careless, know-it-all, thankless piece of shit on the couch? What a fucking deal! Do you think I’d do that to my brother? Con him into his own coffin? Would your Cal do that to you? Do you think it’s any different for us now? That when one of us is kicked off this rock of a planet that the other won’t be far behind? That if I screwed up due to my ego and desire for a vacation, that my brother wouldn’t be on my heels into the grave—if you survived long enough to even be him? To be there eight years from when you saw two Cals die?”
It was a stupid question. Nik wasn’t there now. It was senseless and stupid. This Niko who’d once been my Niko didn’t trust me, and that was one of the few things in my life that could break me. Which is why this was utterly pointless. I was already broken. Worse than a past Niko not trusting me was that my Nik was dead. And none of this trust bullshit mattered. It couldn’t matter. This Niko was equally as dead. The explosion had been triggered. He was unknowingly biding his time, waiting eight years for the tsunami of flames to roll over him.
Unless Robin’s letter was right.
It could be changed.
“Stop. Caliban, stop. I shouldn’t have said it. You’re right. My Cal wouldn’t do that to me and no Cal he’ll become would do it either. I know no amount of time would change him that much. I’m sorry for being fool enough to want to hear you say the trut
h aloud when I already knew what the truth was. I wanted reassurance of what I already accepted as fact. It was stupid and weak.” He was prying open my hands and wiping off the blood with a ragged kitchen towel. “Buddha”—he let out an uneasy breath—“how did you do this with no nails to speak of?”
Motivation, I thought dully. The rage was gone as fast as it’d come. As angry as I’d been at this Niko, I was more angry with mine. How much fury I’d hidden away I hadn’t realized. It was useless and would do nothing but hold me back. It was also unfair. Niko wouldn’t have been angry with me if our positions had been reversed. But the resentment, raw and acidic, bubbled relentlessly under my skin. I couldn’t stop it.
“Why you then? What happened?” He ripped the towel lengthwise, wrapped and knotted a strip around each of my hands.
He meant, what happened that I had come instead of him. But that wasn’t the “what happened?” that I answered. The question I answered was bigger, the “What happened to you, them, the world? You acted considerably more in control and substantially less psychotic at Talley’s bar. What happened?”
“What happened, Nik?” I was calmer, but not near as rational as I wished I was. The sanity I’d shown at the bar was a mask I’d worn a few times in my life. To make the people around me more comfortable and sometimes less likely to shoot or stab me in the face. I’d known one day I’d wear it out. One day it would break.
The words of a long gone childhood came back. “What happened for real and for true?”
It’d been a long time since I’d said that. We can have a Christmas tree this year? For real and for true? We can have a turkey for Thanksgiving? For real and for true? I was four years old when I’d stopped asking for promises my brother ultimately couldn’t keep as much as he tried. Except for one. He wouldn’t leave me. Not ever. It was the one promise I hadn’t let go, the one I knew he wouldn’t break.
