by Rob Thurman
As much effort they’d put into talking me out of it, it became clear that I’d have to crawl out myself. But Robin kept his promises when he made them to us. He told me I wouldn’t be alone and if I couldn’t hear or understand him to know that I wasn’t, he’d shown me in the only way left. No matter how viciously hard I’d shoved at him, or clawed my hand from his, he was right back, his grip as solid and tight each time. Trying and hoping I would know he was there somewhere in the screams. Not alone. You’re not alone. When I’d finally come back and was getting ready to head for the shower, I’d shaken my hand to regain the circulation and let one corner of my mouth quirk. “This was not a first date, Goodfellow, I don’t care what you tell your friends.” His smile at my effort was bigger than mine, but, beyond relieved, not any more genuine.
“Caliban, stop.”
The shower was enormous with a water flow like Niagara Falls, but through that I heard the yelling that devolved into twice-the-volume, full-on drill-sergeant shouting, the kind of red-faced screaming that preceded many second-degree, fit-of-rage murders. I kept scrubbing off the sweat and fear. It was not my problem. It was kind of a pity Goodfellow couldn’t kill him as I’d cease to be, pop like a soap bubble, and vanish into the neverwas. But if he could’ve snapped Cal’s neck with no consequences to me, it still wouldn’t have been my problem.
When I’d come out of the shower, wet hair jerked back into an elastic tie at the base of my neck, I was dressed in new less sweat drenched clothes, a new Caliban-friendly shirt—THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL ME HAS MASSIVELY FUCKED UP. He’d had it made while I slept as under the letters was a small cartoon weasel on its back, with X’s for eyes, a lolling tongue, and four feet in the air to demonstrate how dead it was. It was a black shirt with the letters and weasel, except for the deep red X’s and tongue, a dark gray. Personalized and good for night work when you wore dark colors or you ended up as a cartoon weasel.
Niko had this look, not on his face, but on all of him. It was everywhere. In his expression, in the tense lines of his body, in his eyes a shade empty and his eyes weren’t that. He could hide any emotion behind them when he had to, but even then, they weren’t empty. They were the lid to Pandora’s box and you could see the potential in them, if not what it was the potential of that was inside them. He wasn’t hiding anything now. He wore his disappointment, invisible chains wrapped around him, the weight of them changing how he stood, how he moved, and what it did do to his face did show as disappointment, but more, it changed it to someone else’s face. He had Niko’s features, complexion, eyes, but it wasn’t the Niko I’d known every day—until two days ago. He hadn’t looked like this—ever, not at the height of my seriously fucked-up Auphe shit.
“Caliban, wait.”
Robin was armed, I assumed—there was no nonmentally scarring way to check, ready to go, and carved from ice. He had his back turned to Cal and that I had seen before. Not aimed at me or Niko, but at the puck’s enemies or those he didn’t consider worthy enough to be an enemy. As far as he was concerned, Cal didn’t exist. That, despite my opinion in the shower . . . that was my problem. Shit. It was another impossible thing no one could imagine. Goodfellow was family and he would always choose Niko and me over anyone else. He wouldn’t know how to consider differently. He would be mentally incapable of thinking that it was a choice. But when he was faced with two Cals, he could have a different thought. If one of us injured the other, then only one of us was his brother, since his brother wouldn’t do anything to hurt Robin purposely. And hurting Robin’s brother-in-blood was more of a wound than hurting Robin himself.
Cal would’ve been better off if he’d stabbed Robin in the kidneys as threatened. Instead he’d hurt me in a way that had me preferring a stabbing myself. It would’ve been less painful. If Robin could’ve killed him, if he’d been anyone but what he was, he would have. As he couldn’t, he wrote him off. He wasn’t his family, wasn’t his. I was. Robin had a choice and he chose me. I didn’t blame him. He didn’t know this Cal yet, and while technically only knowing me for several hours, he knew me for thousands of years and I knew him the same. For the first time, I knew all the lives, all the Calibans and the same Robin they had known time after time. Thousands of years of every exciting, amazing, horrifying, crazy, stupid thing we’d done. Compare that to a few hours of knowing a sullen asshole kid who’d stabbed us both in the back. Had done the same to Niko, Robin’s other family. It was a logic knot even a trickster could unknowingly tie in his own brain.
“Would you just wait, damn it?”
Cal had hurt us, the three of us, but it hadn’t been purposely—or not purposely enough to be considered premeditated. He’d been careless, didn’t give a shit about me, hated me, but . . . Niko would forgive him. Niko had no choice in that. What Cal had done, Niko would think . . . thought it was wrong. Dishonorable. Spiteful. Not simply amoral, but over the edge into something darker. It was something Sophia would’ve done and that had to hit the hardest, but Niko wouldn’t have thought that if Cal had been that careless with someone else. A stranger. Someone we didn’t know or trust. Pretty much anyone outside the circle of Niko-and-Cal. It was that Cal had done it to someone who would be Niko’s brother that had him looking at, then away from, him with disappointment and disbelief. In the end though, Cal was Niko’s brother. I was only the potential of his brother. Cal had to come first. He’d forgive, he’d try harder to forget, but they’d be all right again. It might take a few days or a week, but Cal was Cal and Cal was his. There was nothing he couldn’t forgive him.
But I’d be gone sooner or later and while that’d be better for Niko and Cal, what the fuck would happen with Robin? Without him, both of them would be dead in a year. If he stayed that long, to save them out of obligation, and then walked away . . . well, we’d be dead a few more times.
More than that though, Cal without Robin to teach him, yes, life was dead set on killing him personally, but all the more reason not to take it so seriously. Laugh. Have some fun. You’re a virgin because you don’t want to make more baby Auphe to eat the maternity ward nurses? I know this meadow nymph. She can have kids only by pollination. I’ll set you up. You’re a monster? Ha! You wish, Damien. Go down five blocks to the Goth club and emo it up with them. Whine about no one understanding how evil you are. Get that goat’s head pentacle tattooed on your ass, stock up on eyeliner. You’re a four-month-old puppy thinking his spiked collar makes him badder than all the big dogs who’d swallow you whole, spiked collar and all. Stop your moaning, a Spielberg Gremlin could kick your ass, and serve me some decent wine for a change.
“Caliban, you asshole, don’t make me shoot you in the leg.”
Niko had to think I wasn’t a monster. He was my brother. But Robin, long before he’d ever told us about reincarnation, someone not my brother telling me that? Wanting to be a friend? Proving, and we’d made him prove it more times than anyone else would’ve tolerated, that we could trust him? Showing me life was dark, but sometimes the best parties happen when the lights go down. Getting me laid? Without Robin doing all that, being that friend, showing me shit I never wanted to see but had made me laugh it was so disgusting. Without Robin there would be no Caliban. No me. I don’t know what I would’ve been, a self-fulfilling prophecy of the dark, the grim, the monstrous—someone with less humor and faith in me to fight the Auphe tendencies when they came. Turning his back on Cal was the same as doing what I had. Taking my gun and putting it to my head, but this time the trigger would be pulled, it would just be Robin who was doing it.
And he didn’t know.
Fuck. Try to stop an assassin, resurrect your family, and you ended up in a goddamn soap opera.
We’d left Bridge and Broad Street and were now turning on Pearl. Then it would be Wall Street, South Street, and Lazarus. We’d kill his ass, with extreme prejudice, and finally I’d go home. I’d find out if my letters worked, if the ones Robin said he’d continue to send, h
ad a service set up to continue to send if something happened to him, and of course his sly and sneaky self, better than any letter, if just one thing had worked. If I’d fixed it.
Or if I’d go back to the beginning. Stand by the rubble, blackened and cold by the time I returned, pay my respects. Put Niko’s hand-sized statue of Buddha on the street in front of it, throw a handful of the tackiest brightest colored glitter speckled condoms on the burnt mountain of bricks, say see you soon and so long for good. Buy a slice of cheese pizza, no meat, eat it, and then put the Desert Eagle’s muzzle back under my chin and blow out my brains.
It’d be one of the two.
Guess I’d see.
“Stop! Caliban, Jesus Christ, please, just fucking stop!”
A hand grabbed my arm and halted me in my tracks. He was lucky I’d heard him behind me, asking me to stop, and had been ignoring it. If I hadn’t, I’d have put a knife in his gut. On edge didn’t cover my emotional state right now. I glanced at his hand and he let go of me instantly. “What.” I said it flatly. I didn’t ask it. It wasn’t a question as if there was an answer I didn’t care about knowing.
“I’m sorry.” He bent his head to carefully study the asphalt beneath our feet. We didn’t say that too often, either of us. Cal’s own ponytail was losing strands and sat a little lopsided on the nape of his neck. “I didn’t know that would happen. I just thought . . . nightmares. We both had them. We both slept under hotel beds and had nightmares every night when we came back from”—he looked back up at me and swallowed—“that place. So I slacked off, what with hating you like the world’s worst case of crotch rot. I sat with you, but I didn’t watch you.” He gripped the bottom of his leather jacket and straightened it or, as it was already straight, made it crooked. Now it matched the rest of his unbalanced look. Wrinkled T-shirt from repeated yanking of cloth by fisted hands. Jeans with a half-undone zipper. A streak of gun oil along his jaw.
Behind him by at least a block I could see Niko and Robin arguing. Niko for giving Cal a chance to make it right, and Robin for keeping him the hell away from me. I could take care of myself against almost anyone after the eight years I’d told him about and Goodfellow knew it. But I couldn’t do anything to Cal without doing it to myself and he knew that too.
I’d learned to use sarcasm before I’d learned to use a knife. I could depend on doing verbal damage. I didn’t need to physically hurt him.
“I didn’t know that . . . whatever that was would . . . shit, I didn’t know. And I am sorry and not because Niko . . . because my big brother is disappointed in me. Or because that puck you know is pissed enough that he would’ve already cut out my heart and shoved it down the garbage disposal if that wouldn’t make you, alakazam . . . poof, disappear, never existed those eight years to be this you,” he said. “I’m sorry as no one should have to go through that, whatever that was, besides terrifying as shit.”
“That’s a lie. Mostly a lie.” I gave him a grim smile, the odd grimmer than grim as the corners of your mouth turn down, not up, but somehow it’s still a smile. “You are sorry that you made Niko ashamed of you. Disappointment falls pretty short of how he looks at you now.” Pull of the trigger and bull’s-eye. He actually staggered back a step. “You aren’t sorry about Robin; that’s true since you know he can’t do anything to you. Physically.” Cal didn’t know Robin well enough to imagine the damage he could do with his words.
“For the rest of it, I liked the phrasing. No one should have to go through that. Not that you, Caliban, shouldn’t have had to go through that. Lie by omission but a lie all the same. What you meant was you shouldn’t have to go through that. Uncontrollable screaming, panic, horror, insanity, that doesn’t look that fun when you realize they’re making one in your size, that it’s coming for you. But you let it happen and now it will. It’ll be rap, rap, rapping at your chamber door. That’s why you’re sorry. Now you know seriously bad shit is going to hit you in eight years. Shit so horrific that it’ll make those nightmares of two years in Auphe hell, for real and for true, not that bad.” He flinched, at the truth of that or at our old childhood saying of for real and for true, or both.
“You’ll get to relive that bad shit because a hateful, spiteful bastard of your younger self lets you. And you don’t even know half of it. You saw the screaming and mental breakdown, you have no idea what was under that. What I felt. What I feel. You think it couldn’t be worse, what you saw, right? But it was. It still is. Now. We’re talking blah blah and I’m feeling it. I never stopped feeling it. I just stopped screaming. You know what the best part is?” I jammed a thumb into the lowest part of his stomach right about the waist of his jeans where the bladder’s located. I didn’t do it with enough force to hurt. It was just sufficient pressure to remind him for a block or two. “I pissed myself.” I smiled, sharper . . . to cut. “Have fun with that.”
Robin and Niko, neither had said anything about it. Cal had been too far from the couch and me to notice. I hadn’t pissed myself during the Tumulus dreams and I’d been sixteen and feral. I was twenty-six and insane now and, considering everything, I’d have been surprised if I hadn’t emptied my bladder, ruining a hellaciously tacky but expensive sofa in the bargain.
“Try telling me you’re sorry when you’re sorry for the right reason. If you ever are sorry. Hell, if you ever fucking know the reason.” I started to walk away, then paused to add, “You and me, we’re not the same and in some way, I don’t know how, I don’t think we ever were. I’m not a monster. I know that. But you? You are.”
I left him frozen, his mouth open. I’d killed a junkie in self-defense, but I’d let him die slow, drop by crimson drop. He’d murdered kids. He deserved it. Some people would agree that he had death coming, but the slow part, that was torture and that was wrong. I thought it was punishment, well earned. I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt over it. I was a predator. We didn’t do guilt. But even I, twenty-six and not only a lion, but a man-eating one, wouldn’t have done what Cal had. I wouldn’t have hurt one of our own.
That’s what monsters did.
17
Of course it took the rest of the walk to the Ever before it struck me that I was doing what I was afraid Robin was going to do: fucking this kid up. He and I had our monster issues off and on for a long time, but eventually outgrew them. Learned the truth of what we were and what we weren’t. We weren’t human, but we weren’t monsters either. That’s how it had gone.
How would it go when your future self, and who would know you better, tells you that you are a monster? It was safe to say it could possibly put a damper on outgrowing that fear or recognizing the truth if it bit you in the ass. I, future I, thinks I, present-day I, am a monster therefore I am one. I think therefore I am. Puto me ergo monstrum monstrum. Just as I’d been telling myself for two years now.
Cal wasn’t the Cal I’d been at eighteen. But at eighteen I hadn’t had future Cals popping in, telling my brother things he then wouldn’t tell me. My brother who told me everything and always had, he was now listening to someone else over me. Then strange pucks are dumped on my couch, when I wouldn’t have known pucks were real, and this other Cal is saying here’s your new best friend. You’ve at least nine years to bond, party, and kill things together. Enjoy.
This asshole Cal, because it’s not me—I wouldn’t steal my younger self’s brother, shake my life up and down like a snow globe, push people I didn’t know or trust in my home—is saying, sorry if you have an opinion, don’t care, and this is how it’s going to be. And the one person I’d had in my life, the one and only person that cared if I lived or died, the one who was my mother, father, brother, and all I ever had, all I’d always known I ever would have, he was suddenly split between three people. Everyone knew something I didn’t. And the one person who was the only person in my life was still the only person in my life, but I wasn’t the only one in his, not anymore.
I wouldn’t have behaved a
ny better.
I might have behaved worse.
But that was thoughts for when shadow weasels weren’t chasing us across the deck of the Ever.
We’d came across one security guard, choked him out, handcuffed, gagged, and hidden him in the trunk of his own car. They really needed two guards to get good coverage by the ship, but I presumed number two was the unfortunate son of a bitch who had been hanging in Niko and Cal’s hall. Niko had informed me that, yes, he had removed the body. Had he lost the use of half his brain in the future that would make me think that of him now? Then came the great awkward moment when he realized he’d spoken before he thought, and that he’d lost all the use of his brain when he had died in a massive explosion in front of his brother’s eyes.
The Ever had dock lines—that’s what Goodfellow called them—securing her to the dock, but she also had a wide sweep of shallow wooden stairs built for tourists that led straight up to the deck. Handy. We didn’t bother to sneak or hide. Weasels were already slithering up and down the far sides of the stairs, some curled up like sleepy cats. There should’ve been lights around, up high, keeping the ship fairly light whether it was night or not. They had gone dark. From the smell of ozone in the air, that had been a simple trick for our favorite assassin. I sighed. I wanted it to be simple. I’d expected it to be. Inject three to a hundred different paien DNA samples in a human member of the Vigil and it could be impressive . . . if you gave him a decade or two to work with the mess roiling around inside him. My Robin’s contacts said at most he’d had a week, the Vigil had been that desperate, the experiment never tested, no one had any idea what the results would be. I’d been surprised their guinea pig hadn’t melted into a puddle of goo. Simple had been the game plan . . . before the explosion. Afterward nothing was simple, but I did expect Lazarus to go down quick and easy and be the least of my problems.
