by Rob Thurman
Exasperated, I tightened my grip until my knuckles were bone white. I’d added muscle and Nik had taught me how to use it more effectively in those eight years. The knife was going nowhere unless I wanted it to. But none of us were getting anywhere either. We needed to talk about Lazarus.
It was time to settle out of court.
Under my breath for only Cal to hear, I said, “If you pull out from behind your back a gun, a knife, or an empty cardboard toilet paper tube, I’m going to hurt you. I’d actually, considering my mood, which is not fucking good, like to cut off one of your toes. No empty threat like at the bar. I will cut it off and regret it not one iota. One of the smaller ones I wouldn’t miss. It’d keep you out of my face for a while and wouldn’t hurt me at all. Eight years and time heals all wounds they say. But Niko wouldn’t like it. He’d stop me. Then we’d likely all three kill one another making this Lazarus shit fucking moot. So back off, stop screwing with me, I’ll stop baiting you, and we’ll catch an assassin. The sooner we do, the sooner I’m gone. I know we both want that.”
He hesitated, then dropped his hand to his side. It was empty. No weapon in sight. “I’m not sharing my brother,” he responded, his voice as quiet as mine had been. “Not with you, I don’t care if I will be you someday. That day isn’t today. And I’m not sharing him for one day, much less eight damned years with some horny, conceited, rich asshole. He’s mine. He’s the only family I have, the only person I trust. If anyone knows that, you should. The puck has to go. If he won’t on his own, I’ll make him.”
I’d be gone soon, one way or another. He’d be fine there. But when it came to Robin? Robin had to go? And Cal, my toddler-self thought he could make him? The same Robin I’d tried to kill, for a good cause, on the second day we’d met, when on the first day I’d threatened to have Nik slit his throat in the office of his car lot? And he turned back up on the third day with a “bad start with you trying to murder me, it was a good cause, but you can ask next time, still forgive and forget, let’s go drinking”? I turned borderline hysterical laughter into a fit of coughing, rubbing my throat as if the “strangulation” was responsible. I’d laughed in my life before, not often, but I had. I had never laughed at anything approaching that level of hilarity. When I saw my Nik again, and I would, I couldn’t wait to tell him that one.
Recovering, slowly, but shoving it back down, I advised solemnly, “For a con man and trickster, he’s a reasonable guy.” Add “least” before reasonable and “in the history of time” after guy and it was the truth and nothing but the truth. “Talk to him. He’ll understand you needing space for family and family only. I would give him the year to save your life, but after that? Free as a bird. And he’s rich. He can travel anywhere, buy anything, has all those orgies. He’ll forget about the two of you in an hour, maybe two. It’ll work out.”
Or he’d buy people-sized plastic hamster balls and seal Niko and Cal in them—for their own protection, of course, and his own entertainment as they wouldn’t fit back out his penthouse door once drugged and trapped in the balls constructed around them as they slept.
“Pax?” Goodfellow asked as he swiveled on the couch to recline, being nonchalant enough with his sheet placement that Cal went from wanting to put a knife in some sensitive part of me to wanting to put it in any part of the puck except the most sensitive part.
“Pax,” I confirmed. “Now cover up, you pervert, before Cal throws over the couch, traps you under it, and starts stabbing you through it.”
Niko hadn’t interfered with the hushed conversation between Cal and me. I hoped he would’ve interfered some if Cal had gone through with bringing another weapon to the game, but as Cal hadn’t, it was over and done. “Now that peace is upon the land,” he said dryly, “care to finish?”
“Why not? I stole Cal’s keys. I know that lock. I remember it. It was halfway to impossible to open the door with a key. Ever try to pick a lock that old or that rusted? That’s halfway past impossible. It’s easier to kick in the door, but I didn’t think the boss would be too happy about that.
“Wolves showed up to rob the place”—more or less. “We scared them off. The rest of the morning was like I told you. We avoided being eaten by Lazarus’s minion weasels of death. How he had enough time to scoop up evil worker bees to do his bidding, I’ve no idea. What would you pay a shadow weasel? But—” I let my eyes unfocus as I thought on all the monsters, true monsters, we’d faced. They’d all had one thing in common. “The down and dirty, narcissistically lethal, ‘My name is Legion’ shits do love their minions though.” I shrugged and kept my smirk to myself. “We saw Lazarus himself in the sewer with the weasels, but just an outline. It was too dark.”
“Do not forget the light show,” Robin reminded me. “I was not all there, to be certain, but that made an impression I didn’t need much consciousness to hold on to. From behind him, a continuous halo of lightning as large as the sewer would fit. They weren’t strikes. Not one of them stopped the entire time we attempted not to soil our pants.” He narrowed his eyes as if recalling only now how we had escaped. There was one way and one way only. “I told you not—”
“No,” I cut him off before I gave him a matching necklace of bruises, but I’d be using my hands or a garrote. Niko was bound to have one around here somewhere. “Those are two things that I do not want to talk about yet. I’m, what do they call it? Processing. I’m processing and pissed. You’ll have to wait and you’d be fucking wise to get over thinking you have any right to give me crap about any of it. They are also two things you know, but Niko and Cal don’t. It stays that way. You follow your script, don’t start making up what you think are improvements on the fly or . . .” I cupped my hands and then spread my fingers in the shape of a large ball then spread them wide, the same as I had earlier.
He held up an imperious hand. “Yes, I have it. Boom.” While the gesture was pure arrogance, the face behind it was apologetic, deeply so, the likes of which I’d not seen Robin show often. “I can wait, and I know how little right I do have, believe it or not, but I swear it had nothing to do with you.”
“Loving the cryptic shit less and less,” Cal growled. “But getting hit in the face with more and more of it. If you can’t tell, stop hinting around like gossiping old women.”
“I have to agree with Cal. It is annoying. And why did you take Goodfellow with you and not us if you were waiting for Lazarus, to see if he’d show up? You could’ve told him whatever it was you can’t tell us.” Niko’s inquisitive nature had taken a blow there. “You could’ve gone someplace other than Talley’s bar, and when you were done, called us. Three or four, whatever it would’ve been, against one is improved odds over what you faced. That is something we not only can know, but need to know.”
“Two birds with one stone?” I shrugged in apology as Niko deserved one, but I wasn’t that sorry. “To try to keep you both safe until I knew what Lazarus even is?” We didn’t yet either, other than he was bad-fucking-news and deserving of an MVP trophy for Monstrously Vicious Prodigy for doing the Vigil proud, hopefully to be posthumously given. “Plus I’ve seen Goodfellow fight for almost a decade now and he could take all three of us with his sheet alone.” Take away my gating abilities and that would be true. “But I fucked up and we lost Lazarus and his subcontractors. Next time it’s all four of us. It’ll be a field trip.” If the bus was idling down the highway to Hell.
“With the sheet? It’s not a lie?” Niko gave the puck a reevaluating look over for signs of his fighting skills. Goodfellow enjoyed it for other reasons. After all the time I’d known him, I didn’t need to see his grin to know.
“You trust him to be your backup? You trust him as much as Niko?” Cal questioned. “I don’t trust anyone but Niko. When did I get soft?”
Short truce.
I slid down in the chair, half an inch away from being too low to call it a slouch, and closed my eyes. If they were crimson n
ow, that wasn’t Auphe. It was the weight of fatigue crushing me to the point that it made breathing itself a challenge equal to having eight hundred pounds sitting on my chest. “Goodfellow is conceited, arrogant, more sarcastic than we are and we hate that competition; is a more skilled swordsman than Niko who won’t admit it but also hates competition. He knows everyone, knows at least something about everything, has been everywhere and loves to rub it in your face even as he’s using it to help you. He never stops talking—never goddamn ever—is cocky, which wouldn’t be that bad if he hadn’t earned the right to be more cocky than he actually is. He tells ridiculous stories of ancient Roman orgies he attended that are obvious lies, then proves they’re true, throws orgies to this damn day but tells you Niko’s been asking to see his antique weapon collection—bring him and the popcorn. His penthouse door has an automatic electronic lock with an algorithmic code that changes hourly, meaning once you realize it is an orgy, no weapon-collection viewing, you panic and you should panic because you can’t get out.” That was a PTSD-level recollection that had my eyes opening instantly as I let the full-on body shudder go on as long as it wanted.
“He lies, steals, and cons and, thanks to being a born trickster, expects a Hallmark congratulations card from you despite the fact you were the one he lied to, stole from, and conned. He’s horny twenty-four hours a day and would hump a ficus plant if it said yes, will one day have a camera planted in the locker room at Niko’s dojo, give the tape to Michelangelo—the Michelangelo as he’s alive, some type of vampire, and owed Goodfellow a favor. It ends up—that joke will never stop being funny—ends up as a marble sculpture of Niko’s ass displayed on a pedestal in the penthouse foyer and Niko will never notice whose ass it is, much less that it’s his. Worst of all, eventually, when you accidentally see Robin naked, he will remind you every fucking day how you’re the Vienna to his Polish sausage.”
I picked at a bleach spot on the leg of Niko’s sparring sweats. “But he’s loyal. He won’t fail you. He’ll risk dying for you,” which he had when he’d come for me in the castle. It wasn’t his fault he’d been too late. “And that’s something considering how long he’s lived. If it came down to it, he would die for you and no one in our lives, no one outside Nik and I did that or had done that. He had to teach us how to trust outside the two of us because we had no idea. We’d never learned. No one ever taught us. It wasn’t easy either. I’d have given up on us a hundred times in the first week. Hell, I never would’ve tried at all.”
“But you did.” Goodfellow tossed a pillow to me and pointed to my sliced and diced leg. I slid it carefully under it. It helped. Morphine would’ve helped more, but it helped. He smiled, sincere and a little sly with a touch of we both know something no one else knows. “If you hadn’t tried, in eight years you’d eventually have gotten a lucky shot and tossed me in the Dumpster behind Goodwill”—it was his turn to shudder—“to be able to kick me in the balls even after death.”
Cal crouched down to say something in quiet privacy to me. Anyone else would know what he was saying and thinking. Everything I’d said about Robin, how he was more like us than you’d imagine, his absolute determination to watch out for us, do anything he could to keep us alive, who would trust us and teach us to trust as no one else had bothered. That he’d die for us. Cal would be a little dubious that he couldn’t see something in Goodfellow, something that wasn’t friendship or trust now, but a seed had been planted and someday a possibility could be born. . . .
Anyone could see that. Anyone would know Cal would know this was a chance he’d never had with anyone but his brother. Anyone would know he’d want it for his brother even more than for himself. Anyone could sense the hope.
Anyone else would be wrong.
Except me. I knew exactly what he was going to say.
“You couldn’t see me when I was behind the couch. Seriously, how’d you know I was going to stab him?” he asked, quizzical and a little sly himself. It was important knowledge to gather. One day soon he might want to stab me. He’d need to be prepared, and luck does not favor the fucked.
“It’s what I would’ve done.”
I snorted after I said it, but back then? Back in the now at eighteen? I would’ve tried like hell. Then Robin would’ve kicked my ass. And the next day he would’ve shown up and said the same as before.
“Forgive and forget.”
14
The Chinese food was delivered in an hour and a half.
Inventively.
I wasn’t asleep and I wasn’t awake. Drifting without reflection, a large chunk of brain was shut down producing nothing, and the rest was aware of the syrupy, surreal quality of the air. I had a vague wisp of amusement wind in and out of my brain at the thinnest streamer of a thought. I wasn’t hallucinating yet, but when I did, how would I know? Lightning . . . shadows that were weasels or were they weasels that were shadows. I followed the trailing end of that. What came first? The chicken or the egg? The weasels or the shadows? Did it matter? They were shadows now, ones that hadn’t feared the beams of our flashlights, losing only parts of themselves to grow more, but they hadn’t liked the flashlight glows either. They had to be painful, but they hadn’t shown any pain, hadn’t screamed or cried out. I knew they could have because they were laughing it the fuck up toward the end of our frolic in the sewer.
The beam of light hadn’t hurt them.
It had disintegrated a piece of them if you were close enough to ram it into their muzzles or heads. Black mist flying out and vanishing as their new head began to extend from the long length of the body, making it leaner, but whole. Reforming using shadow from its own body. The shadow was destroyed by the light. It didn’t scatter then join back together, reattach to the whole or make a new weasel. It wasn’t making anything new. It was using what was left.
It had to build from what was left, but what if there was nothing left?
“We need flash bangs.” I jerked up out of my slouch, my leg and pillow falling off the footrest of the recliner. “Now. Today. Shitloads of them.”
“Yes.” Robin sat up as suddenly as I had and pointed at me.
“Caliban, if you don’t sleep, I will choke you out. I don’t want to, but it would be for your own good.” Niko was picking up the pillow with one hand and wrapping the other around my foot to put both back in place. He had a case of the guilts that Robin had noticed that a guest and Niko’s Once and Future Brother, rolled into one, had been lying with his weight directly on half a leg’s worth of stitches that were holding together a painful and deep cut.
“No, he is”—Robin paused—“then again, yes, it’s true that rest, any rest, would do him well. But unfortunately now is not the time.” His finger remained pointing in my direction and he snapped his fingers. “Flashbangs. That is brilliant, in more than one way.” He grinned. “I saw, but I did not see.”
Cal was lying spread-eagle on the kitchen table, flipping a butterfly knife up in the air. It would rotate the necessary amount of times to land back in his hands closed and concealing the blade. “I can’t decide whether that cryptic crap makes me want to stab you for being too dramatic to inflict on the world or you’re dick enough to sound like a fortune cookie while I’m starving to death and our Chinese food is late.”
There was an enormous thud in the hall outside the door. It kept us from hearing Goodfellow’s response although safe to say it would’ve gone along the lines of “sit on my lap, cookie, and I’ll show you what enough dick is,” which would have had Cal attempting to stab him in the eye, Niko disarming his brother while stepping on Robin’s sheet and accidentally stripping him naked—which would have resulted in harm to everyone’s eyes. That was the closest thing to running a day care center from the bowels of hell that I could imagine. And I wanted the least amount to do with it that I could. I was up as quickly as I could move and headed for the door, but Niko beat me there.
He did the autom
atic peephole check and dodge. “It’s dark,” he said. “The hall lights are out.”
“They couldn’t have followed us.” That was an absolute. They couldn’t have followed us from the sewers. The gates were mine, no one could hitch a ride when I built them around me or who I was taking with me. If I opened it as a door to walk through, they could try to follow, but all that would get them was cut into two pieces when I closed it as they were halfway between one side and the other.
Goodfellow had the sheet tied in a neat and secure toga. If he had to run, tripping on a silk sheet while escaping weasels isn’t the worst obit. It wasn’t even bad. In our underground world, it was the equivalent of slipped in the shower and broke his neck, but that didn’t mean Robin didn’t already have his ending written: died by orgy, this sex god the likes of which the world has witnessed but once and never shall again took one hundred grateful souls with him. All expired from an excess of sexual pleasure their bodies could not withstand but their souls could not live without. Praise he who was Pan. In lieu of flowers, have wild, uninhibited sex in the streets while condoms fall in a rain of color, glitter, and different flavors as you scream his name in one last prayer.
That was an image I didn’t want in my brain again. “We need lights. The brightest you have.”
Cal vaulted off the table and followed Niko back to their bedrooms to dig through supplies. “How did you guys get away from Lazarus again?” Cal, out of sight in his room, called back. “There was the running through the sewers, offshoots, grates, places too small for him to follow you—big guy—but the weasels should’ve been small enough to follow you anywhere. And you said as shadows they just went through shit, walls and doors, like they weren’t there.”
“I have a concussion, and I was not conscious most of the time.” Slick and prompt, Goodfellow had had that one on tap, waiting to pull it out if backed into a corner.
I elbowed him hard, thought about taking a look myself, but if the hall was dark, I wasn’t going to see anything more than Niko had. “Let’s see,” I started. “I was trying to use the flashlight to keep the weasels back and at the same time to see where we were going and not end up face-first in a pile of concrete rubble. Decide whether the weasels were whispering and laughing or I was dying from methane gas on the floor of the sewer and that was what I got at the end. No meadows or bright lights calling my name. I got carnivorous shadow weasels laughing at me. I was also carrying Robin who kept asking where the naked gladiators were when he wasn’t spraying enough vomit on me that he could double as a fire hose in emergencies. Then there was the lightning, a big son of a bitch who wanted to sacrifice Goodfellow as a goat and eat me as mutt stew.”
