Nevermore

by Rob Thurman

  “Not much in it. It’s mainly a ‘talk you or me down from the ledge’ note. Everything can be changed like we were planning before. Blah blah blah.” I handed him the letter. “There’s no actual useful information like where the shithead Lazarus is or will be, which means he didn’t know.” Although if I had changed him dying in the explosion with my own messages he might know now, but that didn’t do me any good, what with “now” being eight years away.

  “Sorry about the nude photo,” I added. “He printed it on the paper. Hell, it might be on all his stationery for all I know.” I smirked with petty vengeance and reversed my opinion. “You know what? I’m not sorry. I’ve had seven more years of that pornographic perv to put up with. No reason you can’t start your suffering along with me right now.”

  He thought he was ready, but his jaw dropped slightly before his mouth snapped shut. “Do tell me he manipulated the photo.”

  “Unfortunately, so goddamn unfortunately, and accidentally, important to know, I can tell you I saw the real deal and nope, the bastard did not.” I grimaced. “My masculinity took a hit that day, crawled under the bed, and is probably still there.”

  “And he’s always”—he waved a hand at the full-color photo-enhanced computer printed letter—“in a sharing mood?”

  “He is. He was. He will be.” I was pure determination on the last.

  “You can save him . . . and me. You have the time now,” he pointed out, his hand remaining on my shoulder. It hadn’t changed in the weirdness of who had once been my big brother now being six years younger than me, but at the same time he felt less a shadow of Nik and more a part of my brother. Only a part, but solid and real.

  “I know, don’t think I didn’t start making new plans the second I arrived here. I don’t have to be a trickster to have thought of that first thing.” The world might be destroyed as a consequence, but I couldn’t do everything. “Yeah, thanks to the Vigil and their two plans is better than one, I have the time to try to save my Nik and Goodfellow.”

  They had Operation Lazarus, but that hadn’t been enough for them. They’d had one more plan—either to make certain I went down before I went back after Lazarus or maybe Lazarus wasn’t as reliable as they hoped. Either way, they’d given me a second chance they’d be kicking themselves over if they weren’t dead. By fang or by fire, in my time, every Vigil member was dead or had fled the city. Personally, I was hoping for the dead option.

  I gave Niko a tight-lipped smile as another black blotch of a crow thumped against the window. NYC is friendly to rats and pigeons, but not much else. “Robin isn’t the only one who can send letters, e-mails, leave voice mails. I’ve drowned him in them.”

  That’s where I’d gone after arriving, hijacking the cab before eventually making my way to Talleywhacker’s bar and Cal. I’d been spreading the word . . . written and using the drug dealer’s phone. “Besides, every time travel movie I’ve seen is a how-to guide to fixing this kind of crap.” Not that movies took the paien version of physics and all the other science they and I didn’t have a hope of comprehending into consideration. Bottom line: It was a crapshoot.

  Movies. Life should be so easy. And although the one movie was made before I was born, I’d really wished the Kyntalash was a DeLorean. Near certain failure and death should have made the ride more entertaining.

  “I didn’t stop with Goodfellow either. The guy who will be my boss at the bar, the one that . . .” I could see the ball of fire, two, three, four stories high. How high had it gone and how far had it spread? I hadn’t stayed to see. I couldn’t have and kept the gun away from my head or my finger off the trigger. I’d left that subdivision of fiery hell as soon as I could stagger away.

  “Anyway, my future boss, I left him a shitload of messages too.” As well as Niko’s future lady friend. Promise had given me a vampire flash of fangs when I’d referred to her once as Nik’s “girlfriend,” saying she was not a thirteen-year-old waiting for a boy to notice she’d grown breasts over the summer. “When that day comes again, no one will be there. The place will be empty.”

  Not that I could know things wouldn’t change and the eddy and flow of time wouldn’t turn into a vicious riptide that would have the Vigil striking at us earlier, somewhere else . . . which is why I was banking on Goodfellow predicting their possible behavior in that note he’d left. Between his talent for out-thinking anyone else’s plan and my messages to him now that gave him eight years of planning time, we had a chance to save us all.

  I couldn’t know or have absolute faith, but I couldn’t think the worst either. Simply by sitting here on this ledge breathing, I was changing a thousand tiny events and who knew what that would lead to?

  “We only have to kill this assassin then and everything is taken care of.”

  “The assassin that the Vigil injected with several kinds of supernatural DNA in a serious case of hypocrisy. The assassin we have no idea what he looks like or what he can do, if he’s remotely human still? No problem.” That I did mean. I’d fought against monsters no one had defeated before. I’d fought Auphe and with Niko, Robin, and ironically the Vigil’s help, had wiped them out. I could do this in my sleep. If I ever slept again.

  Niko slid down from the table and opened the refrigerator. “Tell me more about the assassin and the Vigil. What is our situation?”

  “Operation Lazarus. The project is meant to raise the order from the dead.” I hopped off the table myself and fell into an equally flimsy kitchen chair. “As you can guess, original on names they are not. Calling themselves the Vigil in the first place probably gave that away. If you have a burning desire to call the assassin anything other than dead meat, call him Lazarus if you want, if you have time before I rip his goddamn head from his body.”

  “Why didn’t the Vigil, a large organization from the sounds of it, not kill you in your own time? It seems far simpler than ancient technology and time travel.” There was rattling from inside the fridge as Niko pushed around his tofu heaven.

  “They tried, trust me, enough times I lost count,” I said. “But when you have a friend who knows everyone and everything, not to mention has a few extra million in change under his couch cushions, he could hire better assassins than all the ones they sent after me. He could, if he wanted, decide an entire organization had been playing God too long to a pagan crowd, which meant no Hosannas were being sung in the Vigil’s name. They had one crime and one punishment—be revealed for what you are and you die for it. Robin decided, and all the paien backed him up, it was time for the humans who thought they could keep us in check to go.” Niko didn’t miss it, he wouldn’t, but he didn’t say anything when I included myself with the nonhuman paien. “One way or the other. They either left the city or they died. Lazarus is the only one left, whatever kind of lab-created killing machine he is. Robin’s contacts were never able to find that out.”

  “You said the Vigil didn’t know this address.”

  “No.” I glanced over at Cal. He was soundly out. He should be for several more hours. “But you can’t stay here forever. And you can’t be looking over your shoulder forever for Lazarus when you are already doing that with the Auphe.” He wasn’t going to like it, but I didn’t see another way. “We’re going to have to use Cal to chum the water. Have him back at the bar. Not inside it. That pathetic-sized closet is a kill box, if ever there was one. But if Cal walks around the area, Lazarus will spot him. We let him follow us to something more private and with more room to work. Lots of room, as we don’t know what he is or can do after the Vigil juiced him up. Then”—I shaped two fingers into a gun and let the “hammer” fall—“done.”

  “You want to use my brother as bait?” Niko reappeared with a Styrofoam container. “You referred to him as ‘chum’?”

  “Everything I say about him, I’m saying about myself. And you know it’s the only way. I’d act as bait myself and let you lock him in a bank vaul
t somewhere if I thought it would work. The Vigil wasn’t that sloppy though. They would have made certain Lazarus could recognize the younger me from the older me. I wish it had been less than eight years and we had a better hope of passing for each other. I’d be happy as hell to help you stuff him in that vault. I have years of fighting experience on Cal.” And I brought gating to the party with me, if worse came to worst. “If despite that, and Lazarus kills me anyway, your Cal won’t stop existing. You’ll have another shot at the asshole. But if Cal is killed, poof. Like a magic show, I’m gone. I never even was. This version of me won’t have happened. You’ll go from two Cals to none. I’d say if that happens that you could get Lazarus and take his Kyntalash”—I tapped mine through the long sleeve of my T-shirt—“go back an hour or so and warn us, giving us then two Nikos and two Cals at one time.” I wasn’t immune to a shudder at that thought. “But it’d be a lie. The moment Cal dies, Lazarus will be gone right along with me. If Cal doesn’t live at least several years longer, enough to break the Vigil’s top rule, there will be no reason for the Vigil to try to kill him, to make an assassin, and Lazarus, like me, will never be.”

  If that happened, it would be Niko’s turn by the metaphorical pizza place, his own weapon aimed at himself. We both knew it. There was no need to say it.

  “Then we’ll endeavor to keep that from occurring.” Niko opened the container. “You aren’t looking well. You’re paler than normal, which means you’re all but transparent. You haven’t eaten since you’ve been here, I know you wouldn’t consider it or remember food is a requirement for life after . . .” That halted him in his verbal tracks as he searched for words for my day that he thought I could bear to hear. He must have decided there weren’t any and let it go. “Cal has some leftover lechon asado from his, both of yours I suppose, favorite food truck, favorite this month at least. You should finish it for him. It’ll be five less miles I’ll make him run.”

  Lechon asado. Slow roasted pork.

  The back of my throat was instantly burning with bile. I swallowed, coughed against it, and fought not to breathe through my nose. It didn’t make a difference. The smell of the meat was unavoidable and everywhere. If Niko thought I had looked bad before, he was going to have more to worry about when I vomited on the floor. Sliding the chair away from the table as far as I could get before it stopped, trapped by the deeper sand. Hand over my nose and mouth, I rasped, “I can say for sure I doubt I’ll ever eat grilled or roasted meat again.” Or be around any cooking meat—shit, eat meat of any kind at all. “It’s your dream come true, Nik. I’m now a vegetarian.”

  The implication of it was instant. I’d been there, a block away while my brother and my friend burned. He knew my scenting abilities were equal to Cal’s if not grown sharper with age. He could guess what it had been like for me. Dumping the box of leftovers in the sink, he covered it with three-fourths of a bottle of dish soap and turned the water on full. When it was as thoroughly neutralized as anyone could make it, he carried the dripping box to the bathroom and flushed the leftovers. He tore the box to pieces and flushed them as well. He had to have since he came back empty-handed. He didn’t say word one about it. He knew, as he knew with the other Cal, it wouldn’t improve anything about the situation. God, it was weird as hell all what he knew about me, considering how much I’d changed in almost a decade. Or thought I’d changed.

  “I’m guessing tofu or yogurt is out of the question too.” He was right. Food of any sort wasn’t in the cards for me tonight. He did open the refrigerator again to give me four of the smaller bottles of Gatorade. “At least try to get these down. Collapsing from dehydration severely affects your aim,” he said dryly before taking in the condition of the apartment. “I’ll clean up here. I’ll get you clean clothes and you can shower, then sleep. Take Cal’s bed. You deserve it. As that garbage dump is your lifelong signature, I would be surprised if it’s not the same at twenty-six.”

  I didn’t deny the truth of that, but I shook my head. “You shower, leave me some clothes for when I do, and go to bed. Take Cal with you. You trust me mostly, but with that Cal”—I nodded toward the couch—“you don’t trust anyone but yourself.” And if Niko thought I looked bad, he needed a mirror. He’d had a series of shocks today with finding out his brother was the target of an assassin, the same brother but older came back from the future to save him, plus he’d fought his first skin-walker, which would freak the hell out of anyone who did that and lived. Lastly, he’d found out he was dead, which made me a suicide hotline’s wet dream. That banking on the fact it was possible to stop my brother from dying was the sole reason I stood here alive now. He’d lived two years now with that scenario with both him and Cal alternating in starring roles in the back of his mind. He couldn’t know how I felt, but he could imagine a hazy shape of it.

  “Go,” I reiterated. “I’ll sleep on the couch just in case your neighbors show up and try to break in to drink our blood or other bodily fluids you don’t want to know about. In the morning, Cal will be up and all three of us can clean up this petting zoo meets slasher movie.”

  He hesitated, but he knew his limitations. He knew when he should listen to them and when he couldn’t afford it. Nodding, he went to the couch, bent down, and slung Cal over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

  “You can’t tell him, remember. About the Vigil, the assassin, sure—but not about Goodfellow and not about my Nik. You’re different but you’re also the same. If he finds out about my Nik, he will lose his shit. It won’t matter that it’s eight years from now or that we might be able to stop it. He will still lose his shit all over the damn place because he’ll have your gravestone in his head, a gravestone with the year you die. That you leave him. Then he’ll do the only thing he can, be all over you like glitter and glue in a preschool art class. He won’t leave your side for a second, so get used to pissing with an audience for a while. All that is going to make him worse than useless against Lazarus. He’ll be like a live grenade someone tripped and dropped inside a tank full of soldiers. Bouncing back and forth, a potential messy death for everyone in the vicinity. Basically he’ll be as insane as I am right now, both of us trying to save our brothers any way we can.”

  Niko tried to meet my eyes, but couldn’t. I didn’t blame him. He knew what was behind them now. “I forgive you for the snake. I’ll tell Cal we simply missed it and he won’t kill you over breakfast.” He did raise his gaze enough to look at me. “Thank you. And stay with us, please, as long as you can.”

  Stay with us. Stay alive as long as you can bear it. What to say to that?

  As it turned out, nothing. He’d taken the pressure of replying off me by turning and hoisting Cal to Niko’s own, much cleaner, bedroom. If something made it past me, then they had Niko to face before they had a prayer of making it to Cal.

  I waited until the shower went on and off and Niko’s bedroom door closed. Taking my own shower, I didn’t care that the water was cold. It hadn’t been warm once the entire time we’d lived here. Scrubbing my skin free of blood, venom, spider juice, the scent of fertilizer and chemicals, of smoke and burned flesh, it was fine. If there hadn’t been water, I’d have used the scouring pads we had for our one pot. Removing a layer of skin would’ve been good as well. After drying off and dressing in Niko’s sparring sweats, I went back to the scene of crime, sneered at it, and then searched the kitchen for garbage bags. I found one small box with thin white bags two and a half feet tall. I tore a jagged hole in one by pulling it out of the box with too much enthusiasm. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. “How the hell did we survive without Costco?”

  10

  It was about 5:30 a.m. when Niko woke up. His normal wake-up time, but he’d gone to bed earlier by hours than usual last night. Skin-walkers did take it out of you. He was dragging a Cal with eyes three-fourths of the way shut. Shoving him into the bathroom, he said, “Shower. For a very long time. I put up with the dried co
yote blood on you last night out of consideration for your fragile state in reaction to an overgrown garter snake, but my selfless and giving nature has its limits. Go and scrub until you do not smell like dead dog any longer.” There was an incoherent snarl and the slam of the bathroom door. I sympathized. It was the same reaction I had to 5:30 a.m.

  “What . . .” Niko had come up to and then gone past the couch, swiveling his head back and forth to cover every inch. “You were supposed to be sleeping. What did you do? No, that’s obvious. Why did you do it? You said the three of us would clean up in the morning. And my Cal does not clean, making this highly suspicious behavior.”

  I snorted. “Your Cal has yet to live with the stench of leaving dead creepy-crawlies overnight to take care of the next day. The blood seeps between the tiles all night long and stays under there, stinking up the place more and more every day long after the bodies are gone. We learned our lesson the first time we had to rip up the entire floor and let it soak in bleach for a week before we could replace it with a new one. We like being lazy, he and I, but we like being able to breathe without choking or puking more.”

  Niko had gone from turning his head to pivoting his entire body. His eyebrows were raised so far that if you could sprain your forehead, he would’ve. “All the bodies, the blood, the venom, the—”

  He had to be thinking about the thick slime that had sprayed out of the ruptured, punctured, and squashed spiders. “Ick,” I supplied, slouching on the couch, my fingers rolling a long length between them, putting the finished product into a large Tupperware bowl old enough to qualify as an antique, and then starting on the next strip. “Just call it ick. You’ve used ichor enough times that the word is more repulsive than the actual gunk itself.”