Nevermore

by Rob Thurman

  Goodfellow shook his head with enough force I wouldn’t have been that surprised if it had snapped. “No. I’d rather be eaten. What I said before, about doubting there were things worse than death, I’d forgotten the exception. I would truly rather be dead. I mean that and as you pointed out, technically, I already am dead. I’m already lost. So respect my wishes. Do not do—that thing. Just don’t.”

  “Why?” I frowned, puzzled. I did get that the vomiting wasn’t much of a recommendation for gating, but it was less of a pain in the ass that certain agonizing death. And after a few trips, he’d gotten used to it and made it past the puking. He didn’t stop turning green, but he had toughed it out. “I’ve gated you before around twenty times at least, and you didn’t say anything. You didn’t say anything the very first time, which would’ve been the occasion for speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  When had that been? If he was saying something about it now, he would’ve said something then. He was not a hold your peace type by any stretch of the imagination. What had . . . Ah. I had it.

  “I remember. I didn’t give you any warning as I didn’t have any warning. A Babylonian sirrush tried to bite you in two, poisoned you, and, as I was dragging you away from it, it jumped us. It was fly or die time. There were no luxuries then, like thinking, when you were three-fourths dead on the floor and there were jaws about to snap around my head. Hey, you’re the information broker of the, hell, world. Here’s an interesting fact I picked up as I was half swallowed. The sirrush not only has tonsils, it has six of them.” I caught an ambitious weasel wriggling behind a mound of rubble close to one wall and used the flashlight beam to slice through its body in front of its back legs and tail. That was a big chunk to regenerate. Hopefully it would take it longer.

  Being thrown in the deep end without knowing prior to the push must have gotten him past this death-before-gating philosophy. He’d continued to survive gating if not to like it, but no one liked it—no one but the Auphe. He hadn’t, though, said why or what had happened who knew how long ago to make him like that. He hadn’t hinted that he was or had been like that. Sooner die than gate? That was a double scoop of profound phobia.

  “I’m not three-fourths dead now and I am saying no gating. Leave me if you have to, but gate me and one day, years from now when you’ve forgotten this festive discussion, I’ll break into your place and cut off your testicles.” His face was set and unyielding as marble.

  “You’re serious? I’ve thought you were a crapshoot of borderline genius and borderline insane, but I didn’t think you were an idiot,” I snapped. “I’m not leaving you to die.”

  “I gather then you’re not particularly fond of or attached to your balls. You unquestionably won’t be attached to them if you go against my wishes.” Damn, the weasels were on the move. He gave me a hard push. “Run!” He followed his own advice as we raced through across the platform, then jumped down and back into the tunnel in the opposite direction.

  We raced as fast as we could force our legs to pump. Our lights bounced and scattered as we tripped or vaulted over rubble. I couldn’t resist a glance over my shoulder as the scuttle of claws followed us. I couldn’t tell how far back they were. I didn’t have time to turn the light on them and keep running without falling on my face.

  “The Vigil turned Lazarus, normal human asshole, into some sort of unkillable pack of shadow weasels? I get the unkillable part is a benefit, a bonus package for being their guinea pig, but it doesn’t quite equal out to having to live as a pack of supernatural shadow weasels.” I felt teeth bury themselves in the back of the top of my knee and rip all the way down to the bottom of my heel—combat boot and all, a switchblade through butter. Slick as you please. “Son of a bitch.” I swiveled, impaled an inky neck with my flashlight and felt it vanish.

  I hadn’t stopped to face it. I’d struck while still turning and let the momentum carry me around back to where I started and worked on running faster. There’s nothing like a little incentive and I had all I needed snapping at my heels.

  “No. I saw him for a fraction—less than a fraction of a second actually. A fraction of a fraction. I couldn’t make out any details except that he was human in shape. Perhaps these shadows are pure unadulterated stench brought to unholy life.” Beside me, Goodfellow was keeping up easily. He was in good condition. Too good. He was arrogant as shit about his clothes, face, hair, but particularly his body. Yet I’d never seen him do anything resembling exercise.

  He knew paien monsters, but he didn’t chase after them. Why would he? He hadn’t had a reason to until Niko and I had made a business out of it. He did the weekly orgy workout. That much sex could equal the ten miles I ran and the hours of sparring I’d both done daily, but I doubted it. If he could run like the Boston marathon was a stroll without regular exercise, what did it matter other than to hoard simmering resentment that he was an undeserving lucky bastard?

  “Since we are going to die embarrassing deaths by shadow rodents—”

  “Weasels aren’t rodents,” he corrected as automatically as Niko would have, but he tossed a handful of smug on top of that educational serving.

  “Death by weasel isn’t less humiliating than death by rodent. Trust me, the loser quotient is equal.” I tripped on a wide crack hidden in the darkness, bounced off the wall, and kept running. If I’d learned one lesson in life that topped all others, it was if something already plans on eating you and is on your heels with a fork in one paw and a knife in the other—keep running. “I’ll be taking it to my grave anyway. Tell me why this gate phobia? Auphe phobia I get. Everyone gets that. But phobia versus death? Gates separate from the Auphe part”—although they never were—“how’d that happen?

  “And it would be my gate,” I added, confident. Why wouldn’t I be? I hadn’t doubted myself in a while now. “Not an Auphe and its gate. You trust me with my own, don’t you?”

  There was a telltale silence, airless and still. It would be what you heard when you woke up in a coffin after being buried alive. The uncomfortable sound of a lonely and imminent death by suffocation. Robin’s silence wasn’t as uncomfortable as that, but it stung. He knew me, not yet this time around, but he’d known me a thousand other times, and I’d never turned against him. “You don’t. You don’t trust me. Niko doesn’t trust me and he was my brother. I can’t say ‘is’ my brother. My brother is eight years from now” and likely dead. “Either/or, this Niko had been my brother once and he doesn’t trust me. Cal hates me.” That I could live with. I wasn’t too fond of the little shit myself. But this, this I couldn’t deal with. Not on top of this Niko. They were shadows of what I’d lost, but shadows, sometimes, can let you fool yourself into pseudo-sanity long enough to remake your own world. “You think I’m Auphe,” I said neutrally. “You think that because half of my blood is theirs that I’d, what? Eat you? Like the weasels?”

  I turned and clenched my hands in my hair, banging my forehead on the sewer wall. “I should’ve thrown your letter in the gutter. I should’ve gone through with what I wanted, shot myself, followed my real brother the same as in every life. But the goddamn letter ruined everything.” I laughed hard enough to taste the salt of a scored throat. “I didn’t know there was anything left to ruin; I was as fucking wrong as it gets on that, wasn’t I? I came back because you told me it could be done, and because I trusted you, I believed it. I gave up my ticket out of this nightmare since you own my trust. You and Nik and no one else. I gave it to Niko and you, every scrap I ever had. I should’ve thought. I should’ve known that I’d come back and you’d still be dead. You aren’t Goodfellow. You aren’t Robin. Niko isn’t Nik. You’re memories, not people, and memories can’t give a damn about anyone. Can’t trust anyone. Can’t do shit for me.”

  “No, that’s not how it is.” He was trying to pull me away from the wall despite the fact that I was simply leaning against it now, forehead to cold concrete. He could talk all he
wanted. I wasn’t buying it. There were reasons not to like gates. There weren’t any that included “sooner die” than gate. A gate was a tool, a gun, and a gun was nothing but a paperweight without a hand to aim it and a finger to pull the trigger. He thought I was the hand and I was aiming at him with lethal intent. There was no excuse to prefer dying over letting me get us the hell out of here.

  “That’s exactly how it is. You always trusted me before, but now I’m Auphe. Now I’m a monster, and you’d sooner die that trust me, you son of a bitch?” My Goodfellow hadn’t been like that, not once, and that was before I had known shit about the whole thousand lives past. “Hell, are you even real? Is any of this real? Or is it memories and nothing else? You can’t change memories or the future with them.

  “If you are real, more than a shadow, then you know that in all those other lives, all through history, I never once betrayed you,” I snapped. “Never. And, believe me, asshole, there were certain centuries when life was brutal as fucking hell, where everyone, including three-year-olds, were ruthlessly amoral enough to slit your throat to steal everything on you and yank out your teeth to make jewelry for the rich. And there was me in that god-awful life, who wasn’t moral in the best of lives. I would’ve cheerfully beat the shit out of a nun for a slice of moldy cheese. And the price on your head was higher than I could even count. If ever there was a fucking occasion to not have faith in me, it would’ve been then, but you knew better.”

  I would have kicked the crap out of the nun, too, without thinking twice about it. When you’re straddling the line between hunger and starvation, there’s not much you won’t do. With each life, the world changed, people changed, morals changed. “You do remember that life, right? What I did and didn’t do when it came to you, despite the daily goddamn misery that was survival. But you don’t trust me now?

  “Half starving in the woods, no shelter, with a sociopathic madman who planned on hanging us all at once—one drop and seven broken necks. He and his men searching the forest every single day and night, knowing if he caught just one of us . . . one of us starving, sleepless luckless bastards who followed you, who believed in you”—Robin who’d be a better king than the one who deserted us and the one who was stealing and starving the country blind—“well, that one luckless bastard would tell them everything.

  “But when they caught me”—we’d separated, the easier to lead those chasing us into circles—“when the edge of the hill collapsed and I fell”—fell forever—“landing on the rocks by the stream and breaking my leg”—I’d seen the snapped bone and a shard of it spearing through the meat of my calf and my threadbare trousers—“they were there, and I said nothing.” I’d screamed when one had kicked my brutalized leg viciously, but screams weren’t words. “When they’d tied my wrists, yanked them up over my head, knotted the rope around a horse’s saddle, and dragged me back”—along the ground, aiming my leg at any good-sized rock or broken branch, laughing as I shredded my bottom lip to a bloody pulp when every step of the horse felt like it was tearing off that leg, piece by piece—“I said nothing.”

  There had been a castle five or six miles outside the forest, a small and blocky building, not the kind I’d picture now and the dungeon wasn’t underground. It wasn’t a dungeon at all. It didn’t have a single chain. It was just a room with a window high by the ceiling, no bigger than one foot by one foot. No way to get out of that if you’d had two working legs, but you could see the sky. It was gray every day I was there. I thought it had been three days then five, but after the first day, I didn’t know. It could’ve been a day, a month, or a year. I did know one thing.

  I didn’t see the sun again.

  My leg had gone bad in hours. The cloth below my knees frayed to nothing and let the open wound and bone crust with dirt. It smelled so strongly of infection that some of those holding knives for cutting and knives heated until they glowed red hot and a heavy poker for shattering bones had gagged, staggering out. I’d laughed, lying tied stripped naked on a rough wooden table scrounged from the kitchen along with the rest of their makeshift torture devices. Wasn’t that a sight? Torturers with weak stomachs. And I could laugh. The pain of my leg had gone past agony to a place I couldn’t feel it anymore. I was cold, the cold that seeps into you and holds you down when you fall through the rotted pond ice in early spring. It was a cold that numbed you to anything, even to the pain of fiery blades that had me screaming after the first ten burns despite swearing I wouldn’t give them that. I wouldn’t give them anything: words, screams, nothing.

  My laughing brought more sliced and seared flesh but I didn’t feel it. The sheriff, a man who would’ve done his sworn duty for free when it included this, wasn’t one to give up. He pulled out two fingernails before the blacksmith’s tongs broke. He’d hurled it across the room. If he was trying to hit the wall, he was too angry to aim. It slammed into the forehead of one of his men, who swayed, a dent deeper than my thumb in his forehead, then fell to the floor. Deader than the doornail that had been hammered into the back of my left hand. If he hadn’t been mad before, the sheriff was now, flecks of foam and the glassy sheen of insanity in his eyes.

  He burned Robin’s name on my chest. If I was that stupidly loyal to an enemy of the crown, I could wear my stupidity for the rest of my life. That joke was on him when he was the one who gave me the key out of that life. After that it had been a fog, heavy inside my chest. It had me coughing, but it passed. There was a morning mist that if you’d had a small cottage and a blanket or two, you could’ve lain on a pallet of straw and watched it through the window. I’d never had a home like that, but I could imagine it. The mist and sprinkle of rain that covered up any voices shouting to tell them now or they’d pour boiling water meant for their dinner broth on my arms until the skin peeled off in long pieces like the ribbons in a girl’s hair. Screaming at me to breathe, you worthless son of a whore. Breathe and say where he was, where he would be, one word, tell them or I’d boil. I let the rain turn the shouts into whispers too far away to make out.

  I didn’t think they’d gone through with it. I knew they would have if they’d had the time, if I’d still been there. But I wasn’t. The weight in my lungs was gone and the air was fresh with the smell of wet grass. Getting up, I’d wrapped the blanket around me. I left the cottage on two strong, whole legs, with skin whole and unmarked, no pain—none anywhere, and I walked into the mist. When I left the cottage that never was, I left the room that shouldn’t have been.

  I had moved on.

  “They tied me to a table in some random room they decided would be the dungeon. They had to raid the kitchen for whatever they could find for the interrogation. The sheriff was purple he was that furious. He finally gets to torture someone with real information, something he wanted more than anything he’d wanted before and he had to depend on the Betty Crocker Line of Torture and Interrogation Devices.” They had worked just as well. Humiliated as he’d been, I thought he’d gone the extra mile and made them work with greater efficiency.

  I checked behind us again for the weasels. “I died on a fucking kitchen table waiting for John and . . . for Niko and you to come for me, but you didn’t.”

  “Don’t. Zeus, please don’t say that.” The appeal came out with the same pained grunt as a kick in the gut would cause. “Don’t think that.”

  “I’m an Auphe. Isn’t that right? We think things you couldn’t in your darkest nightmares.” It was stated blandly and without emotion as there are occasions a lack of emotion inflicts a hurt sharper than the slice of the malicious ones. “I don’t think even an Auphe could come up with slow torturous death by kitchen utensils though.

  “I hope you didn’t tell anyone the humiliating truth about that. Where I died.” I went on to snort bitterly, “Those were the days no one sang heroic songs about that kind of shit.” Tortured with heated spoons and dull knives, had several bones in both feet broken with a metal poker and that had been t
he first few hours. Necessity is the mother of invention and Betty Crocker was a bitch and a half.

  “We found you,” Robin talked over my last few regrets about no heroic songs for me with enough agitated denial to drown me out. “We came for you. We shouted at his men to tell him I waited for him outside, and they laughed. They didn’t believe I’d risk certain death to save a peasant boy who followed me with the others. I was a would-be king and they thought you were nothing. Kings don’t give up their lives for common trash who were as wannabe as I was, but wannabe soldiers. They didn’t believe and they didn’t tell him. It took us two days to kill enough of them ringing the castle that the rest barricaded themselves inside. We surrounded the place with the straw we’d gathered and set it on fire. Cutting down a tree and using it as a battering ram to break through the door. We searched through the smoke and we”—his jaw worked—“we found you in a room on the second level. Two days and you were already cold. Colder than the room. Cold as the night before. Two days fighting and killing without stopping. Using anything as a weapon when our swords shattered and we ran out of arrows. Smashing men’s heads in with stones. Pushing their heads under the water of the pond and drowning them. Our bare hands strangling the life from them. Anything we could make work. The morning of the second day we had fought our way close enough that you might hear us.”

  He looked behind us, too, but I didn’t think it was for the weasels. “We shouted your name. We told you that we were coming for you. Screaming and swearing again and again at you from sunup to sunset when we finally broke through. We’re here. Don’t give up, Will. Don’t give up. But we were shouting at ourselves. You were gone. You’d been gone since the end of the first day. You’d died in the night and you didn’t hear us. Weren’t there to hear us. You thought, Gods Above.” He struggled and tried again, “You thought you were alone. You weren’t. Even when you couldn’t hear us, we were there. You were never alone.”