by Rob Thurman
“Graváta glóssa mou kai mou fainontai tyflí gia tin ilithiótita tha káno.” He rested his forehead on the table. “No. I wouldn’t have missed the meaning of that. I was being a selfish bastard who thought of himself and no one else.”
“You think I’m surprised? You’re a puck. I know that, I know what you are.” I stretched and ruffled his hair, as he’d done to me when I’d been nineteen or so. “I don’t care if I have more Auphe flashbacks when I can have the human ones too. I can remember being human, and, right now I can’t help but think as a race they are on the puny and pathetic side, but I have the memories of a thousand other lives that tell me that’s not true. I can remember being like Niko, being able to think like him and act like him because I am like him. I’m not a born sociopathic predator.” I slapped the back of his head briskly. “It’s worth it. I don’t care who you did it for. To me, it’s worth it. And if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t take it back anyway.”
He raised his head. “You do know pucks.” This smile was less car salesman and more stiff, but he’d come around. Pucks did—without fail. “So . . . the other part, the first equally disturbing part?”
“Racial memory one oh one. Eat up.” I nudged the peanut bowl closer to him. “Feet. Why start with the feet when eating a Neanderthal? This was my first true Auphe racial memory by the way, and not just a flashback of being tortured in Tumulus in this life for two years.”
“Two years at their endless lack of mercy? No. It can’t be.” His face was back down on the table. “‘The beasts, which you saw, once were, now are not, and yet will come up out of the Abyss.’”
“Is Ishiah reading you Bible verses as bedtime stories before you fuck like rabbits? Never mind. You don’t know yet. Forget about Tumulus”—the Auphe hell I’d not completely forget but could now cope with—“you’ll have years and years to worry about that later. Now back to the feet.” Vengeance is mine and I was enjoying every minute of it.
“Feet? I’m not certain I wish to hear this.” He was back up again, shaking his head with complete conviction, and reaching frantically for his beer.
I glanced at the small window in the door of the bar. There was nothing. The reason we were at Talley’s drinking at 6:30 a.m. was in hopes Lazarus would show up. He knew Cal worked here, if that’s all he knew. It’d be nice if we had more to go on than he would have marks on his skin, face, hands, arms—some sort of medium – to large-sized blemishes. They didn’t know what color or what medium to large meant to the Vigil’s science geeks. I was hoping he wasn’t close to appearing human, that the paien DNA had mutated his ass but good. He’d be easier to track down as that than your average human in millions of them.
“It’s educational,” I insisted. One more small push and the bowl was all but in Robin’s lap with his hand automatically dropping in it. It wasn’t for my comfort, getting the distance between it and me, but to get a little revenge for all the relentlessly sneaky and wickedly sly tricks Goodfellow had played on me. I waited until he tossed back a handful of the snacks.
“You and Hob no doubt ate a few of the tough, gristly as hell too, guys yourself, but grilled them with mushrooms and tasty, tasty herbs as there were no chefs to do it for you then.” I swung my feet up to rest on the table, drumming my fingers along the blunt toe of one leather-clad boot before saying casually, “You start at the feet because whoever you’re eating lives longer, especially if you avoid the femoral arteries. There’s way too many gushers up top”—I circled a hand around my head in demonstration—“in the temple, neck, the arms. They go quick. Start at the bottom and they live three times as long, which is three times the screaming. The Auphe liked the screaming with their food. It was like A.1. Sauce.”
Half the nuts he spit across the table and half he choked on. I waited until he was able to finally swallow those. “That is . . . Why would you tell me that?”
“Revenge,” I answered promptly. “And it wasn’t me,” I clarified, not offended. All right, not too offended, but exasperated—and he had asked. “It wasn’t me. It was some douche Auphe ancestor.
“It’s not like I’ve been around long enough to have been personally snacking on raw Neanderthal. I’m twenty-six and I was human, nothing but, in all my other lives. But that is the gift of Auphe racial memory. Little movie trailers like that every few months. I have eight years of hard-goddamned-won control. I’ve lived through enough shit to be able to handle that kind of memory, tell myself it might feel like mine, but it’s not mine,” I emphasized.
“But Cal doesn’t have a year”—I went on to warn—“much less eight. If his racial Disney World ride kicks in too soon, he’ll lose himself. He’ll be that Auphe. It’ll be your feet he starts on.” A threat or a promise, both were true. “No pushing at the memory thing. It’s just seven and a half more years and then we’ll know, all of us.” I hoped. “I swear it on Ajax’s Clydesdale-sized balls.”
“They were impressive. Difficult to believe the man could walk carrying the equivalent of a bowling ball between his legs.” He exhaled. “Very well. No pushing. Go on then, tell me all that I must allow to happen.”
The door slammed open to admit the rush of the Wolf I’d put a knife through yesterday and two of his furry friends, hoodied up and hidden from human eyes, ready to put a booted paw up my ass and claw off my face. I wouldn’t have guessed he had the balls. “Holy shit,” I groaned. “How stupid are you?” I pulled out two of my guns I hadn’t wanted Cal to see yesterday if he couldn’t smell the metal and oil on them. Failing a test makes the lesson stick more than if you’d passed.
I laid them on the table. “But bullets aren’t that fun and I like my fun. With guns it’s over too quick.” I looked at the other two Wolves. “He didn’t tell you, did he? Who I am? What I am? Too bad.” I felt my eyes shift Auphe red.
“I’ll tell you the same as I told him yesterday. No guns. How about we play a different kind of game? My kind of game. My claws and teeth to your claws and teeth. My gates to gobble you up and spit you out as bloody fur and bone paste on the other side. Sound fair?” I had gone for my glove from its concealed slit in the jacket lining and slipped it on under the table. Lifting my hand, I tapped six-inch-long matte black metal claws on the wood surface. “Sound fun now?”
Yesterday, the one had pissed himself. This time all three did. The door slammed harder behind them than when they’d come in. The Three Pooches—Hairy, Curly, and Best of Show. “Idiots,” I complained. “They were why spay and neuter programs exist.”
“Can you do that? All of that?”
I, for a fleeting moment, wished I was thirteen again. Then I wouldn’t feel humiliated if I rolled my no longer red eyes at him as I took off the glove and holstered the guns. “Now? No. The eyes are good for making assholes piss themselves. That’s it. The teeth and claws—I had them once for about a week. They’re gone for good.” He was waiting for the other one, not budging. “Yeah, I can gate. Couldn’t always, then could, then couldn’t, then it made me—” I had the glove in my hand. I tucked it away.
“Look, we’re going to cover this, all of this, and it’s going to take fucking forever. I haven’t slept since, shit, long enough I don’t have the focus to do the math. Haven’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast bowl of Lucky Charms, my brother is dead, my best friend is dead. You’re both dead. Do you get that? And I am alone like I’ve never been in a thousand goddamn lives. I’d say I’m halfway to insane, but I’m already there, already fucking there, and I have been since I watched them die. Watched you die.” I took a breath to help clear it away, everything, so I could get this all out and move on to finding Lazarus.
“You’re in the right. I apologize.” He was humble as Robin never was or had been.
“Are you being less pushy than usual because you feel sorry for me?” I questioned, cynical in the face of behavior unnaturally polite for a puck. “Or are you trying to stay on the good side of my insa
nity?”
“Do I have to choose?” With a winning smile, he refilled my glass. “Tell your tale. I’ll hold all questions until the end.”
“Asshole,” I grumbled. “You are going to be so damn sorry you didn’t listen to yourself in that letter. Remember, no matter what you hear you can’t change anything. This is more than our lives. Once it was the lives of everyone on the fucking planet. If you do something, thinking that you’re helping us when it’s something that needs to happen, no matter how it looks at the time, you’ll . . .”
Words weren’t enough to describe what could happen. Instead I put my hands together fingertip to fingertip and spread them out in a visual explosion. “Boom.”
He was good-humored again, unable to stay serious or, worse, take this seriously for a full minute. “Calm yourself, Caliban. I’m certain you exaggerate. Stop channeling the wailing despair of your Shakespearean namesake. You said in the letter we became acquainted when you were nineteen. One more year—the smallest amount of time. How much could I alter? How much damage could I honestly do in a single additional year?”
My imagination failed me.
It was my turn to let my head fall onto the table, forehead hitting wood with an audible thunk louder than Goodfellow had come near. “We are so fucked,” I said flatly.
“Yes, yes. Fate of the world. Isn’t it always?” he said, dismissing the warnings with little enough thought that it would’ve been equally insulting to just go on, treat me like a nervous puppy, and pat me on the head. That humility of his hadn’t lasted long. I wasn’t surprised. He’d lived a long time, longer than man. He’d lived alongside a thousand Cals and the crazy shit we’d gotten up to. He’d thought he’d seen it all, everything of the world, everything in all the versions of me—he’d thought he’d seen the worst in this version with Tumulus and memories of prehistoric Auphe roiling around in my subconscious.
He was wrong.
He hadn’t seen a half-Auphe Cal. He hadn’t seen what a half-Auphe Cal could do, would do. He hadn’t seen that same half-Auphe Cal possessed by something even Auphe could pay but never command. He hadn’t fought the entire Auphe nation when it was bent on wiping out the human race. And he had never seen anything fucking close to what happened when you combined it all.
And that had been the fucking easy part.
“From your letter I assume we’re under some time constraints. That this Vigil assassin will be showing up sooner rather than later.”
“He was supposed to arrive last night late or early today from what my Goodfellow’s contacts were able to find out from a few of the last Vigil left. He flew some specialists in from Greece, said they were gifted when it came to being persuasive.” Asking pretty please using methods I didn’t try to guess. I knew how persuasive Robin and I both could be when the situation called for it. Given a desperate situation, I crossed lines like a kid jumping rope, and I don’t think Robin had a line. For him to call in a team he considered more expert than him, I didn’t try to guess what methods they had used. It wasn’t by asking pretty please.
“That had to be Nemesis, the Inescapable, the goddess of Revenge. She punishes crimes against the gods, particularly hubris, and there is nothing more prideful than mere humans thinking they could set rules for what few gods remain among the paien. And I wouldn’t have left out Alecto and Tisiphone.” The names rolled off his tongue with fond nostalgia, but Goodfellow was nostalgic about everyone, whether it was the memory of the sex or the memory of putting a sword through their guts.
“Two of the three Furies. The Implacable and Vengeance. Megaera wouldn’t have come. She despises me. Sleep with three sisters and there’s always one that ends up in the hell-hath-no-fury frame of mind. But considering she’s the divine personification of Jealousy, I should’ve seen that coming. That and the poison in my ambrosia, the dagger aimed at my back. Pathetic attempts for the Fury of Jealousy.” He winced. “Until the pack of hellhounds she set on me. I hadn’t known Cerberus had sired a litter of puppies. They would’ve been cute if not for being the size of elephants and determined to tear me to bite-size dog treats. You know how wickedly sharp puppy teeth are whether they’re a half inch or six feet long.”
“You lay down with the dogs of Hades, you get up with hell-spawned STIs.” I had no sympathy.
“But enough of my endless sexual adventures through history.” Breezy as if it had been his idea all along. Two packets of honey appeared and he put both in his beer. I didn’t ask. I’d seen it before. It was typically after he talked about the Mount Olympus days.
“It’s been hundreds of years since our last escapades.” He pushed his chair closer to the table to prop an elbow and rest his chin in one hand. Eyes gleaming the same as when he pulled off one of his unbelievably impossible cons, face animated and eager. He couldn’t wait. You’d think he’d forgotten at least half our previous lives. They’d been bloody battles, sickness, slavery, and worse a helluva lot more often than they were orgies and stealing harems.
“Tell me of these exhilarating eight years to come before this Lazarus shows up and swats you like a fly while you’re telling me what a bad boy I’ve been,” he demanded. “I have an on-call dominatrix for that. So stop dragging your feet, skata, and tell me.”
So much for cushioning the blow. All it got me was impatiently pissy demands. Tell him. Tell him.
And I did. No more warnings, no more preparation. I told him everything he’d asked to hear and more than he in reality wanted to know. I single-handedly did what no one else had. I killed a puck’s curiosity. I’d seen three-week-old roadkill as a kid that wasn’t this dead.
It was temporary, I hoped.
Or was hoping when three hours later I was punched in the face for a second time in as many days.
“Is there not one life, in all the thousands, is there not one single life where you couldn’t be a married, fat, happy pig farmer who dies at the age of ninety-eight sitting in a rocker with his great-great-granddaughter on his lap?” He shook out his hand with a pained expression. “Fate of the world, I said. I’ve always known the truth was a worthless bitch.”
He’d hit me with more force than Niko, who had confusing family feelings about me holding him back. There was the same taste of blood, but there was the warmth of blood trickling then running from my nose over my upper lip then lower and onto my chin to end up splattering my stolen shirt. I’d spent most of my life lying to outsiders, gadje, because this is what the truth would get you.
Dropping my feet from the table to the floor with a heavy thud, I grinned at him with blood-covered teeth, eyes I felt shining a brighter, glowing red, and became the third echo of those words, “‘Fate of the world. Isn’t it always?’ I gave you what you wanted and you took my blood as thanks. Not very nice when it was you who asked for it. The bad boy wanting a story. ‘Tellll me a story.’”
Licking a thick swipe of salt and copper from my upper lip, I swallowed it, and kept grinning. “And now I taste your lack of gratitude. Maybe I should’ve told it in Auphe. Hours of hearing that will make your ears bleed. I’ve seen it. From all the screaming I don’t think people liked it, but I could be wrong. We should see. We should.” I leaned across the table towards him. “Let’s do it for science. Let’s do it for the children. Let’s do it for love, for money, for the greater good, for our country. Let’s do it ‘because everything I do I do for you.’”
Angling back to the point he had to grab the chair to keep from falling backward, he produced the fakest smile I’d seen him wear yet, and took a second towel, holding it by the corner, the one he’d brought to the table with his new glass. He held it out to me while touching the smallest amount of that corner he possible could to keep the most distance between us. “This, I suspect, would be the insanity, then.”
“Everyone needs a hobby,” I drew a smiley face with sharp teeth out of my blood that had splattered on the table. “And the pa
st day and a half have been an equal bitch and a half. Insanity is the least in my bag of tricks.”
“It is quite impressive in its depth and scope, I must admit. It’s equally impressive in your ability to conceal that depth and scope.” He swallowed. “Could you, perhaps, as an incredibly generous personal favor to me repayable in any currency you like, conceal it again?”
I took the towel and told him the equivalent of “fuck off” in Auphe. While he winced at the sound, I wadded up the cloth and held it to my nose.
“Ah . . . ice. Let me get you some ice for my tragically mistaken, unforgivable—pardon, nearly but not entirely unforgivable—act of violence.” He hurried behind the bar and brought back another towel wrapped and tied around ice and a second wet towel to wipe off the blood.
Giving him a glare, I watched as he put both on the table in front of me as cautiously if they were grenades, but, me, I was a nuke. Our life, this one, had put the fear of choose-your-god into him. Horrified him beyond anything he could have imagined, all thanks to some Auphe sticking his dick in my whore of a mother. Of all the things that sliced at me, that was what cut the deepest. That she’d agreed to it. Taken gold for it. That when she made me, she made an experiment, not a baby, that it had been consensual.
None of it had been Robin’s fault. He’d saved the three of us and helped wipe out the Auphe and I knew he’d been afraid then. We all had been. But he’d done it, fear be damned. The true bravery of being afraid but kicking your fear in the nut sack and standing up to it. It couldn’t help that there was less to distract him now than before, no Auphe chasing me home, kidnapping me, the Unmaking of the World, a Niko, intense and on the same suicidal edge as I was here, or Goodfellow would’ve punched me within a week of meeting me the first time around.
And he was dead. My Robin was dead and that was on me. He died because he’d been my friend, my brother-in-arms. He’d died as he’d been unlucky enough to simply know me. A punch in the nose didn’t beat that, did it? I pushed the Auphe from my eyes, dropped the blood-soaked ball of terry cloth to the table and picked up the wet towel.
