by Rob Thurman
How Niko had resisted smothering me in my sleep for this particular chunk of years, I had no idea.
I had outgrown it, that was something to remember.
When the gate disappeared, leaving us here, Robin was no longer half-conscious. He was down and out. I’d gone from carrying most of his weight to all of it. He’d been talking before the traveling. That made me think this wasn’t a very positive sign. I was giving him a few minutes to come around before I put him down on the floor. If I had caused more damage, if he lost part of the brilliance, ego, and sly intelligence that made Robin Robin, that was something I couldn’t fix. It would be worse than if I’d left him to die.
One more thing I couldn’t live with. I’d add it to the list.
“Goodfellow,” I urged, “wake up. Gladiators wait for no man or puck.”
Nothing.
“Robin, Hercules says Zeus is your father and your mother was a donkey. The cock you’re so proud of is a donkey dick. That your sexual partners are literally sucking donkey dick.”
There was drool pooling over my collarbone, but that wasn’t the response I wanted. Drool is not as communicative as, say, words. Neither was the sewer slime, mud, blood, and a gallon of vomit we were both wearing. Robin did like a big breakfast. I exhaled and whipped out the big guns. “Do you remember this one? I don’t. Likely because Nik gave me a crack to the skull that makes yours a fucking fairy kiss. Do you remember how you got his ass so drunk in Rome that when he passed out, you hauled him to a tattooist and had MY LUST FOR PHILOSOPHY IS TEN TIMES MY SEXUAL DESIRE FOR MEN, WOMEN, OR THE STALLIONS OF CALIGULA’S STABLE inked on his ass? He wasn’t that interested in philosophy that time around either, hated it, making the insult worse. But you never cared about building the better mousetrap, only the more offensive insult.”
There was a questioning mumble and the chin resting on my shoulder moved, shifting his head with it. He was trying to get a less blurry look at me. After a blow to the head like that, you’re always half out of it in the beginning when you came around with no idea where you were, how you’d gotten there, or what had happened. That had been what happened in the sewer. I had no idea if the gate had knocked him back out or if whatever phobia he had was that bad. Considering the other time, he’d puked but not lost consciousness, I was going with the gate knocked him out. Being gate-sick on top of a concussion would do it. That he had shown and was again showing signs of waking up was reassuring. The sound I’d heard when he’d hit the concrete could easily have been the fracturing of a skull. Showing some signs of consciousness this soon for the second time was a relief.
I felt the nibble of lips and teeth on my ear and the mumble went from curious to enthusiastic.
That was not a relief.
I sighed and tightened my grip on his wrist, keeping his arm in place over my shoulder. “Less with the molesting and more with the walking. Try moving your feet. We have eight flights to climb, Goodfellow, and I am too worn-out to carry your ass.” He did move his feet, but not in a manner that facilitated walking. They were limp and aimless enough to snag on each step. How unlikely was it that he wouldn’t miss getting caught on at least one? That was a puck for you; defying all odds.
The mouth moved from my ear to my neck and the teeth became more involved. “Jesus fucking Christ. Goodfellow, wake up and get off of me. I am not above hitting an injured, barely conscious man. Normally I think of it as a bargain. Half the work’s already done for me. I will seriously beat you like a rug and brag about it afterward.” I kept progressing up the stairs, picking up the pace and putting in more effort and less care about bruised ankles. If I broke one, then I’d contemplate feeling remorse. I didn’t think I would feel it, but I’d mull it over—if I wasn’t too busy. If I broke both of them, I would give it some thought. I’d decide it was blaming the victim, me, and dismiss the remorse midthought, that was a given on my part. Know thyself, right? But thought would’ve been involved. What more could anyone want than that?
“Safeword . . . fanny pack. Wait. That was . . . last year. Now is . . . Velcro . . . means . . . hell . . . no.”
“My safeword is a kick in your face and I’m about to use it.” The warning was clipped, grimly serious, and completely useless.
“Toybox . . .”
“I don’t want to know.” God, I couldn’t think of anything I less wanted to know.
Less talk was fine by him and he was back on my throat, attached firmly enough for it to be his biological purpose in life—remora to my shark. He may have hit his head harder than I thought. He may have fractured his skull, have a bleed in his brain. It was possible he could have brain damage. He’d better have brain damage.
I lifted my hand from its grip on a fistful of his shirt and suit jacket, trying to push his head back with no luck other than nearly dropping him. One hand wasn’t going to do it. Two hands and a crowbar didn’t inspire faith in me either. It might take the Jaws of Life. I wrapped my arm back around his waist again.
The thump thump of his feet trailing along the stairs behind us hadn’t caused any complaints. I didn’t think I could go faster carrying all of his weight. Getting up each flight alone would’ve been a shock, being weary enough to have double vision. But somehow I was making it and if I didn’t actually lose one of his feet entirely to bounce down to the landing below, I’d give faster a shot.
I think Moses, did the guy not know east from west using—I don’t know—the freaking sun, led his people across the desert in less time than it took me to get the both of us up the stairs to the seventh floor using every ounce of energy left in me. It was ten minutes in reality, but it felt like the biblical forty years. Robin hit full consciousness between floors five and six and got his feet steady under him between six and seven. I hadn’t wondered how many bruises a puck could leave on your throat while half-conscious. It hadn’t been an issue, hadn’t imagined it would be an issue, might have gone ahead and said, fuck it; sorry, Nik, and shot myself at the pizza cart if I’d known it would be an issue.
When I was finally at the door and pounding at it furiously while picturing it as Robin’s face, he snatched a quick glance at me, looked away quickly as I jerked my head toward him, spearing him with a glare heated enough to melt his face with a swiftness and wrath that the Ark of the Covenant couldn’t begin to match. “It . . . it’s not—”
“It? It?” I started kicking the door in addition to beating my fist bloody against it.
“Um . . . ah . . . if we’re going for unnecessarily strict accuracy, I meant ‘they.’ They aren’t that noticeable.” He attempted to pacify my rage. My full justifiable edging toward homicidal rage. “With enough distance, no one will see them.”
“Distance? As in the distance from space? I’ve been attacked by a nest of giant demonic hazardous waste–marinated mutant lamprey eels that did less damage than you,” I hissed. “And they were a hundred times easier to pry off. If I hadn’t thought you were already brain-damaged from the fall in the sewer, I would’ve dragged you up the stairs by your ankles and let your head bounce off every single fucking step.”
“I was not at all aware, I promise you. I was confused. Head injuries are well-known for causing that, I’m sure you know. Safe and consensual have ever been my watchwords. My humble apologies.” He swayed, steadied himself against the wall, and gave me all the sincerity a puck could deliver.
As little as that was, thanks to the evolutionary development of their rapaciously scheming species, I didn’t feel very forgiving. “I was going to switch you to a fireman’s carry, over my shoulder, but I didn’t want your pit-bull jaws locked on to my ass doing to it what you did to my neck.”
The fact that he was picturing that precisely as I’d put the mental image out there like the idiot I was had my next blow at the door, which swung open abruptly, close to taking Cal’s head off. “Motherf—” He ducked and fell backward, managing to miss the broken nos
e Robin had also given me hours ago. A pace behind him, Niko braced him and kept him upright. “Jesus.” He put a hand over his nose and mouth the same as Goodfellow had in the tunnels. “You guys stink worse than a sewer.”
“No. We stink exactly like a sewer as that’s where we’ve been.” I pushed past him.
“What the hell? What happened? Your leg is a mess. My favorite jeans that you stole like an asshole are fucked. You’re giving me the cash to buy me another pair.” Cal, what a humanitarian—one quality that hadn’t changed in the long stretch between us. He had homed in on the blood-soaked jeans I was wearing first. I wish he’d stayed fixed on them, but that wasn’t my life. He’d moved on to my neck. “That is nasty. Did something try to strangle you? Something with suckers you see on a tentacle? That giant octopus in the weird Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea movie. How are you even able to breathe?”
Niko, unfortunately, was a little more observant and a great deal more intelligent. He tipped his head once, then twice for views at different angles. I said something to him that I hadn’t before at any age. Until this incident, I couldn’t have conceived of saying it, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I couldn’t pretend this was an exhaustion-induced hallucination if I had to hear another word on the subject—from anyone. I shoved a finger in his face, near enough he could’ve bitten it off if he was more like his brother, both versions. “Niko, shut it.”
His visual examination continued to take in the rest of me with a more sympathetic adding up of blatantly visible injuries, the blood I was tracking with one foot as it had run down my leg, into my combat boot, overflowed, and was leaving a crimson tread pattern behind. “Consider it most thoroughly shut,” he agreed mildly.
“If Goodfellow falls over, leave him in the hall for the wendigo to eat.” I went straight for the bathroom and locked the door behind me.
• • •
By the time I made it out of the tub equipped with shower head, taking both a bath and shower, I felt as filthy as when I’d first stepped in. I looked clean though. It was the dirt and shadows in my mind I couldn’t wash away. After brushing my teeth with Cal’s toothbrush, which made it mine, I bagged my clothes, stained in everyhing you wouldn’t want in your hemisphere, much less on you. I then dug into the tiny cabinet over the toilet. The first-aid kit was back but it was as woefully under stocked as last night. I yelled through the door, “Niko, where’s your stitches, needles, lidocaine. You know, the shit that keeps us alive?”
His answer, patient and quiet from the other side, didn’t improve my mood. “We don’t have stitches or lidocaine. I do have a needle from a kit I use to repair my sparring padding.”
Shit. If nothing else, that was a big enough needle. And the man flossed as a second religion. It’d have to do. “Needle,” I demanded, then added, “please.” It wasn’t his fault that while their lives were in daily danger from the Auphe that they hadn’t been wounded severely and often enough to play Martha Stewart and stitch up each other or themselves.
Moments later there was a knock and I unlocked the door with a freshly washed towel around my waist, did a careful Goodfellow check, and took three different-sized needles from Niko. “Thanks.”
He frowned, taking in the briskly bleeding cut, after a good while too, from the back of my knee to my heel. “What are you going to stitch it with? How are you going to stitch it without intensive contortionist training?”
“Dental floss. Glad you use the unflavored kind. The mint burns like a bitch.” I sat on the lid of the toilet and started threading the middle-sized needle. “And awkwardly, but not as awkwardly as if you offered, ended up with my leg hiked up on the edge of the tub and my junk in your face.”
The impatient look down his long nose was the same it would be in every year to come. “As if I have not seen your ‘junk’ since you were born. But if you’ve become that shy, you can lie on my bed with your towel and both of us will be spared the sight.”
It would simplify things some. Stitches from the angle I’d be coming at them with wouldn’t be neat or as effective, not that mine were that neat in spite of long experience. Niko’s would be neat, tight, but slow. That was the downside of lack of a considerable amount of wounds and the stitching that went with them. The lack of lidocaine sucked as well. The cut was in the muscle of my calf. When your brother makes you run ten miles a day, you don’t have extra flesh on your calves—only muscle, which was harder to get a needle through and, like mint dental floss, hurt like a bitch.
I shrugged, gathered the supplies including another towel, alcohol and a light bandage so it wouldn’t scrape against whatever pants I was able to steal later. “First time?” I knew it was. He’d bandaged me several times before, but stitches hadn’t been needed. He nodded just as I was grabbing the bathroom garbage can. “You might need this.”
“Why? I have one in my room. I can toss the leftover supplies in there before bagging them for the Dumpster.” I followed his blond braid to his bedroom. I’d have tugged it if I had an extra hand.
“This isn’t for leftovers,” I said blandly. “Not the kind you’re thinking of.”
• • •
I limped into the main room wearing another pair of Niko’s sweats. Cal looked past me. “Where’s Nik?” The sound of flushing and water running from the bathroom was muffled but audible.
“Taking a short time-out. Be thankful. The first time he stitches you up, he’ll have the vomiting out of his system.” It wasn’t that he had a problem with blood or a natural queasiness when it came to medical procedures. It was simply impossible to prepare for—sliding a needle through your brother’s skin and flesh, mainly as it didn’t actually slide. Flesh and skin are tougher than that. The first doesn’t give and the second stretches past where you would imagine it could. On occasion you have to punch the needle through and as long as my cut was, that had added up to over fifty stitches easy. That’s more spearing than you’d counted on through the meat of your brother’s leg.
Who had been your brother.
Heading for the chair, the only chair, I dropped carefully in it. Niko’s idea of pain killers was over the counter herbal crumbled leaves in a bottle that had the SAGE label peeled off and replaced with ORGANIC HERBAL PAIN RELIEF . . . SUCKER. The sucker was implied, but I knew it was there, because the pain relief I was receiving was good for seasoning a Thanksgiving turkey and accomplishing nothing else.
Robin was already showered, hand bandaged, scrape on his forehead cleaned and covered with a Band-Aid, hair shampooed with, hell, product in it. He had a faint floral odor around him and was wearing nothing but a rich ruby red sheet—a silk sheet. He sat on the couch, eyes closed, head resting on the back cushion and hands folded across his stomach. Looking far more comfortable and pain-free than before, he’d apparently also gotten much stronger medication than I had from the same location as the soap, shampoo, and sheet.
There was one bathroom in this apartment, and I knew bathing in the kitchen sink limb by limb wasn’t in the realm of possibility for him, but he was clean and bandaged before me. My stitches had taken longer, but I could see the bathroom from Niko’s room. He hadn’t been in there. The floral smell from a woman’s shampoo and soap and freaking product; the silk sheet in the color of passion for women and patriotism for older Russians.
“You went over to the rusalka’s,” I accused. “She cleaned and bandaged you up, fixed your hair, you vain son of a bitch, and gave you a sheet to wear? A goddamn sheet? How many people’s dead drowned bodies did she have over there?”
“You’re terribly quick to condemn,” he tsked. “She keeps her apartment immaculate, no dead bodies at all. She’s pleasant, attractive, and if we don’t all die, I, as thanks, plan on escorting her for dinner and an all-night festival of orgasms—also to return her sheet. And why not a sheet? It’s of excellent import, comfortable, and I couldn’t fit in any of her clothes. I wasn’
t about to wear any to be found in this . . . abode. Ah, I nearly forgot. She said to remind you that you owe her two cases of Costco heavy-duty garbage bags.”
“I have never tried so hard to not kill a handful of people in my life.” I paid no attention to the damp hair sticking to my face. “And for it to be people I know. People I sincerely give a shit about.” I narrowed my eyes. “Gave a shit about rather. It’s unbelievable. Someone give me a knife. I want to stab something. Anything.”
“You can’t kill me.” Mini Me was getting snarky and smug again. “Kill me, if you’re capable of it, and you’ll disappear. Eight years dead. So suck it.”
“It’s hysterical how you think that a) I can’t kill you with the TV remote if I wanted and b) that nonexistence right now would remotely be enough to stop me,” I said darkly.
“You’re worst than identical twins as neither of you are the good one.” Niko was out of the bathroom and examining the image on the couch. His face, wet from the splashing we’d heard from the bathroom, was blank as Niko’s tended to be when there were too many vexing emotions swirling around and he was choosing one to focus all his exasperation on. Disbelief. Disgust. Appalled. Shocked. Had enough of this day—time to put my katana to good use. “Goodfellow, you are wearing a sheet. No, I apologize for the misinformation. You are draped with a sheet, meaning your naked genitals and ass are kissing cousins, so to speak, with our couch cushions. Guests do not put portions of their anatomy where they don’t belong.”
The puck opened his eyes. “If I paid any attention to that rule, then I would never get laid,” he drawled. “In further refutation to that decree, Niko, was it? This piece of what you refer to as furniture is pleather or similar and that should not be put near the locations of portions of an innocent guest’s anatomy as it could cause chemical dye burns, and the peeling off of skin scalded by its faux hoggahyde upholstery—at least I hoped it was fake. If a hog like that had existed, I didn’t want to know about it. Then there is the once hearty will to live that is currently being siphoned from me down to between the cushions where Morlocks doubtless dwell. I await your apology, provided I am not drained to a husk by this monument to incredibly bad taste before hearing it.”
