by Rob Thurman
I’d learned about reality, poverty, alcoholism, too and, oh yeah, crazy nightmare monsters before I learned to read. But I had Niko’s promise and it made the rest of it, monsters included, bearable.
For real and for true.
“You lied to me. I guess that makes you the one with the con, huh?” It was said matter-of-fact and came from a face as blank as I could make it. Another mask to replace the shattered one. Under it, I could feel the cracked shards of what had once been me, burnt and blackened as the glass buried in the debris of a building baked to coals. What I would’ve seen if I’d hung around long enough.
“That’s what happened, Nik.
“You lied to me.
“You left me.
“You died.”
Then I told him how.
9
I’d forgotten the pizzas.
It was the second time I’d thought that, stupid everyday words I’d never forget, but that was where this nightmare had begun. I had to tell it in order. I needed Niko to know some of it, not all, but part of the story of my world’s personal end. It was necessary that he knew saving Cal wasn’t enough. If we did take out the Vigil assassin and I disappeared home to my time, Nik would have eight years of annual anonymous warning letters to send to Ishiah, his future lover Promise, and a year and a half before he warned Goodfellow personally with the promise not to tell him anything more or ask him anything else. Change for the better could be difficult, but I knew the universe was bastard enough to make change for the worse easy as it came. We had to save the others, but that wasn’t enough. While doing that, Niko had to try to not alter anything else. Hopefully, as I wasn’t going to tell him anything else about my past/his future, it would work. His discipline was unbreakable as I’d known, but his and his Cal’s future was full of shit horrifying enough to tempt that discipline—if solely for his brother’s sake and not his.
That’s why I began there, with the pizzas, even if it was déjà vu for me.
That’s how it had started.
For goddamned real and for goddamned true.
• • •
I’d forgotten the pizzas for the celebration/good-bye/come back soon/hope you don’t get sucked into a wormhole by accident party and gated out of the bar a block to the usual place. There was a time months ago I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to gate again. When the ability had slowly returned, I was relieved. I’d missed it. Not having it back with me long enough to take it for granted, I used it frequently. It felt good, like the stretch of a recovering muscle.
I left out the gating portion of the story and told the younger Niko instead that I’d exited the alley door. He and Cal not only didn’t need to know, they couldn’t know about that biological roller-coaster ride given to me by Auphe genes. If they did, saving the world from being remade by the Auphe in another year or so likely wouldn’t happen. I didn’t care about that now, but if I could stop The Ninth Circle massacre, get them back, my people, it was possible I’d care again.
What-ifs are the deadliest of all weapons.
That wasn’t a thought I needed now if I wanted to be capable of telling this to the end.
I’d waved to my Nik and mouthed the word pizza in the bar’s deafening noise. Opening a circular ring of killer-storm gray and the velvety black-purple of the bruises around a hanged man’s neck, I had stepped through to appear at the pizza truck. The guy working it hadn’t blinked. He wasn’t any more human than I was, and he’d seen the show before. I came here weekly if not more often. It was the best pizza for the supernatural crowd with some special toppings that humans wouldn’t recognize or if they did, like living, moving tentacles, would have them running for their lives. For a hefty tip I’d leave my spot behind the bar and run down to pick up a pizza. I didn’t take a curious look under the lid after the first time when a squirming tentacle had poked me in the eye. Some things are better left a mystery.
The balaur that worked it was my size with only three reptilian heads—probably a teen to be that small and to have several scales bubbling up and oozing around each set of slit-pupilled eyes. He’d crouched under the cover of his extra large hooded raincoat to hide his hydralike nature and held out a scaled hand for the money. I had paid, and, as it was our pizza, tipped extra—hell, even I had some sympathy for an adolescent lizard with a bad case of zits selling pizza. Teen snakes needed a social life the same as any other kid. That was my humanitarian—okay, herpetarian—thought for the month. I could be an asshole the rest of the time.
I’d had two boxes of pizza in my hands, warm and smelling strongly enough of garlic, cheese, tomato, sausage, and pepperoni to make my stomach growl, when I heard metal crunch and scream. Car wreck. Happened all the time in the city, but not on a nonhuman paien street where humans subconsciously sensed not to trespass with an instinct left over from the days of living in caves. No car should’ve been there. The sound of it had come from the direction of Ishiah’s place. Jerking my head around, I’d seen the panel truck half embedded in the bar where I worked, smashed into the front wall of The Ninth Circle, obliterating the door but blocking the space where it had been. Limited by the cramped street, it hadn’t been able to build up the speed to go all the way through the brick. I’d had a quick flash of dark amusement at what this drunk driver would find when he fell out of the car. Wolves, lamias, revenants . . . all blood drinking and flesh eating, and worse than any DWI.
That had been when the flash had come, and it hadn’t been a mental one this time. No humor in it either, none at all. The Ninth Circle had erupted in an eye-searing blast as bright and horrifyingly unfathomable as if the sun had plunged from the sky to crash on top of it. I’d thought numbly as the boxes slid and fell from my hands that we were all on fire. It was night but we were on fire. The entire world was on fire.
It wasn’t.
That had been shock and despair clawing my brain to shreds. The fire had grown while a backwash of incredible heat and a concussive wave knocked me almost flat. So much fire; Hell couldn’t have claimed it all. It hadn’t been a simple explosion like C4 would’ve done. No, it would have had to been something like ANFO, a fertilizer bomb, to do that type of damage. It would’ve been loaded in packed metal barrels in the back of the truck and that truck would end up targeting the Circle. A fraction of a second after it hit had come the massive fireball, instantaneously incinerating the bar and everyone inside it. Burning with the kind of rage, flame, and heat I hadn’t seen a single time in my life.
Not that I had determined all that at the time. That had come after my jump to the past when I was killing a murderous junkie and delivering warnings before chasing down the younger me. That’s when I’d figured out the truck and the diesel fertilizer bomb as C4 wouldn’t have done the trick, the fact that the truck had hit the building less than a second after I gated out to get the pizza I’d forgotten. That the bomb had been meant for me, that the truck had hit the place moments after I had walked inside because the driver, a Vigil bastard, had no idea I’d gated two blocks away to be the most unwilling audience to exist. But when it had happened, when there was a tower of fire, asphalt under my hands, I’d had only one thought.
I’d thought, Niko is dead.
My brother is dead.
My brother who had been the first and only one to hold me the moment I was born. My brother who had saved my life too many times to count. My brother who’d saved my sanity as many times.
My brother who had sworn not to leave me in this life without him.
My only family was dead.
He wasn’t alone.
Goodfellow, my single friend, gone. Dead and no more.
My brother, my friend, my boss, the regular customers—the few that didn’t fear me . . .
Gone.
“Then what did you do?” Niko asked, eight years younger but as curious about every damn thing as he’d been to the day he was murdered. To
day. He’d been murdered today. It seemed like minutes ago and decades both. Neither hurt any less.
I shifted and felt the table rock under us. Past his shoulder I could see part of the enormous arch of window. The lights on the buildings outside were the only stars we saw in the city. I’d seen real stars too many times to be impressed, but something caught my attention. An impossibly large black hand passed between the apartment window and all the fake stars. What the hell could that . . . it roiled and separated, one bird, black—a crow, hitting the window with a thump. Nothing more than a flock of birds had me seeing horror story nightmares. No, thanks. I’d seen enough of that for the day.
Looking back down at the stupid scraps of towel looped around my hands. All for a little torn meat and a spoonful of blood. We’d be lucky not to see a river of the latter before we killed the Lazarus assassin.
“Caliban?” he prodded.
Then what had I done, he wanted to know. That was not anything that this Niko needed to hear. My brother, younger and older, but either way I’d protect him from the truth. When did the truth help anyone? Never. I lifted my eyes back to the distant lights and hummed lazily as if the question was too unimportant to answer. I let the answer spin, a tornado wind, through my mind, but I didn’t say it aloud.
I’d thought, while watching the fire, that I couldn’t deal with losing my brother, losing my friend.
I couldn’t survive any of this.
I couldn’t handle knowing Robin was gone.
He’d been over a million years old, but was charcoal now thanks to me.
And the last of the enemy had burned with them. The two who’d been left. I hadn’t seen anyone running from the truck that carried the explosives. They’d burned as everyone in the bar had. I had been left with nothing. No target for vengeance. I’d once thought I’d tear the world down if Nik died. I thought I’d go insane with grief, that there’d be nothing but madness to spill out on everything and everyone. But there wasn’t. I thought I’d go Auphe, but that option had been stolen from me. I hadn’t thought it mattered though. If I’d been able to keep that rising genetic flood in me, I’d known I wouldn’t do anything differently. Apparently even an Auphe could be broken if you tried hard enough. I’d had no will left to burn down the world anymore. Had no reason to take one more breath.
Pointless.
Everything.
Fucking pointless.
They’d been fuzzy, those thoughts, as they’d circled through my mind, faster and faster, pulling me down into an inescapable whirlpool that didn’t drown with despair but tore and ripped everything from me with teeth and a devouring maw that left me completely hollow. Left me with one choice. It hadn’t been until I’d felt the comforting cool touch of metal under my chin and realized vaguely that the muzzle of the Desert Eagle was pressed there with my finger on the trigger, that the thoughts had become more clear.
It had only made my finger tighten.
That was when the pizza guy, whom I’d forgotten with a totality when the bar exploded that I was numbly surprised it hadn’t wiped him from existence altogether, had hissed at me. There had been two names and several other words to get my attention. The first name had been mine. “Caliban.” I’d barely recognized it as my own. My finger’s tension on the metal increased. My name meant nothing now. But then had come the second name added to mine and the words of a dead puck following them both had snared my attention and snared it thoroughly. “Goodfellow.” All the words spoken by three different tongues in three different mouths but precisely at the same time. “He left this for you.” All three heads had stopped whipping about and all came to rest against one another to stare at me as one long multifingered hand extended toward me. I’d had to lower the gun to take and rip at the green-and-gold envelope that had dropped through the air into my lap. What was inside read short and to the point.
If the Vigil is more intelligent and wily than I would guess them to be—unlikely, but a true trickster never rules out anything, including the luck of idiots—this is for you. If they pulled off a coup de main and one of you brothers survive, I know you will be planning to follow the other into oblivion as you egoegoistikíistikí gioi tou skýles aways have and always will. Don’t. Not this time. Do not exceed the idiocy of the Vigil. If there is a trap and you are the one left, Niko, you already know what to do as you possess a brain. If you survive, Cal, you couldn’t find that oblivion you seek with a map, a llama, and a Sherpa. You’ve proven it in the past. Niko, Cal, neither of you are cowards. Suicidally codependent, but not cowards. If one of you is left, you stay. You stay and you fix this. I know that you can. Of course if we all die in some Vigil mousetrap, the pizza balaur is eating our food and enjoying nude perfection while he does so. A fitting end to my long life—porn and pizza? No, it is not. Whoever is left, and I refuse to believe no one would survive, you get up, put down your gun or katana and do what has to be done. Addendum: If nothing happens, balaur, do not eat our pizzas. I’ll be out for them any moment.
He’d been right, Robin, as he’d always claimed he was. We’d been planning to stop a catastrophe before it had to be fixed. I could still do that, little that I cared about it any longer, but I could do much more. I could undo this catastrophe, a larger catastrophe, before the fact. Robin had said it. That meant it was possible.
Failure, that was the only impossible.
“Caliban?” Niko flicked my forehead. The sting was familiar—a hundred times so. “Are you catatonic?” he demanded, trying for impatience, but I heard the worry. “Come back and tell me what happened.”
I stopped humming and let the lights blur away behind eyes dry and vision smeared from the lack of blinking. “What happened?” I repeated his question. “Robin happened.
“The pizza guy gave me an envelope from Goodfellow.” I scraped my thumbnail, the edge lined brown with dried blood, against the plastic top of the table. “Don’t, whatever you do, go looking for Robin. Don’t even try to find his address or where he works, thinking it’s harmless because you won’t actually contact him. Don’t do any of that. Forget all the geek babble about timelines and worlds being wiped out. If you meet Goodfellow before you should, the entire universe will implode. And that’s if you’re lucky. You’ll meet him when you’re meant to. Mess around with that . . .” I shook my head, almost capable of a smile at the thought of it. My brain couldn’t begin to hold the smallest fraction of lies, trickery, chaos, and cataclysms that could happen. “Lovecraft couldn’t come up with the kind of nightmare you’d unleash—but if he did there’d be massive amounts of pornography added to his work.
“So promise me, Niko,” I insisted. “And that means not telling Cal anything, as we like trouble. Disasters, Acts of Malevolent Gods, any of that just screams adult only amusement park to us. We’d break in a day. Two days at most before we tried sniffing him out. Promise me you won’t tell and you won’t look for him yourself.” I tacked on a bitter addition no Niko deserved, especially not this one, but I was exhausted and it slipped out. “And make it a promise you keep this time.”
He reached over to move my hand back to my knee. There was a fresh drop of blood on the table’s surface where my nail had dug into the plastic extra deep. “I promise.” He was collected and cooperative with no offense at receiving a heaping helping of bitter blame he didn’t deserve. Take a Niko anywhere in a thousand points in history, in a million alternate dimensions, give him a fucked-up brother as a present with shiny bow and all, and he becomes an instant physical and emotional guardian. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do to keep that brother safe. And all of it was unconditional.
If I’d shown my true fucked-up colors sooner, he wouldn’t have punched me. Hindsight, she is a bitch and a half.
“The balaur didn’t know you, but he helped you—rather, helped this Robin Goodfellow to help you. That’s encouraging for our future. It’s a probable sign that Goodfellow did receive your
warnings. Also the balaur assisting is encouraging for interspecies cooperation,” Niko pointed out.
Fuck me, he was so innocent. I’d never thought that in my life, but he was. Now, in any case.
“Not necessarily. Goodfellow is the oldest trickster alive.” I knew Niko would’ve already recognized the name, the version that had been made over into something the same and different both by Shakespeare. “He wouldn’t have needed messages from the past. He assumed the Vigil might not put all their grenades in one basket. If he was going to kill someone, he wouldn’t depend on one trap or one weapon. While he thinks no one is as smart as him, his plans always include the possibility that there’s a small chance they could be. That’s why he never loses . . . never lost.”
No, it took me to make that happen.
“There’s a good chance he planted notes for weeks near every place we hung out. As for cooperation?” I laughed. It was split between mourning and mockery. “Robin paid him. The bastard even came out and ate our pizzas while I read the note. You and Robin were dead. I had a gun in my—” I cut myself off. Taking in a deep breath, I went on as if I’d said nothing. “Nothing is free, Niko. Not back when we were kids, not here and now, not in the days to come.” The laugh hit me as hard as a kick in the gut and I leaned back with the force of it.
A hand rested on my shoulder carefully, easing me forward a few inches. This Niko didn’t know yet. Didn’t know that falling off a table would be funny, that falling off the roof of a twenty story building wouldn’t kill me, wouldn’t even hurt me, not unless I was unconscious before I fell.
Or if I was awake and wanted it enough.
But there was no time for pity parties now.
“Goodfellow sounds as impressively sly as the Bard painted him when it comes to planning and prediction. May I see the letter?” he requested, treating me with the same careful caution you would a bomb. I didn’t blame him. I was a bomb. He knew only about the emotional type that topped my list. I had other skills, I’d kept to myself, that made me as physically explosive as the Vigil’s bomb had been.
