Nevermore

by Rob Thurman

  The shadow weasels on their own, the slinky bastards, had proved me wrong there. Then the lightning, and, yeah, that didn’t enter the category of simple or easy. What Lazarus himself would be, I might have to unveil my backup after all, gate the shithead into oblivion, and hope Cal’s mind didn’t explode and he ended up on the deck sucking his thumb or, better and better, he went Auphe early.

  The rough voice from the sewers abruptly split the air. “Death waits for no one.”

  Grade A megalomaniacal psychopath. Those were the ones that when you put them down and finally, finally, finally walked away, they’d have a chunk of your flesh clamped in their dead jaws. “Is it always like this?” Niko asked quietly. “A clichéd Old West gunslinger shootout, where you face each other, trade insults, and see who precisely is Doc Holliday and who is dead?”

  “Only when they’re bigger, badder, and crazier than us and like to play with their food,” I answered. “It’s not a good sign.”

  “Do not keep Death waiting.” It boomed, a voice you would hear across battlefields.

  At that the weasels stopped playing and lazing and came at us in the same pack style they’d used in the sewers. Goodfellow grin, sword out, “I’ve been looking forward to this, you sleazy evil porni gious.” He ran up the stairs with a bounce to his step that said he hadn’t seen a good fight in a long time. The sewer didn’t count. We hadn’t been armed for our particular opponents. We’d made some changes there.

  We followed him, Niko also with a sword, Cal with his Desert Eagle and me with mine. Isn’t it cute when people dress and arm their identical toddlers the same? The weasels were at our heels until we turned the high powered flashlights, nothing like we’d had in the sewer, on them over our shoulders and they squealed. Some faded back to a safer range and a few faded out of existence. We kept running and aimed the lights away. They were effective to a point, could even destroy a few weasels, but not all of them. There were uncertain whispers behind us, then a shrill razor-edged whistling, aggressive and predatory. They weren’t laughing now, not like before. Now they were mad, which made it more surprising we’d survived them in the tunnel and the sewer when we hadn’t known that they were merely playing then.

  Dodging them, neither Cal nor I fired; we’d told them how useless that was. The four of us were nearly to the center of the ship when we gathered back-to-back in a loose circle. We waited as the weasels surrounded us from all sides, the whistling getting higher and higher in pitch. Watching them until, shadows or not, we’d seen their hindquarters bunch in preparation to leap on us, a clan of hyenas rushing a wounded zebra calf to mound and wash over it, vanishing its body from sight as they tore it to pieces.

  But they weren’t hyenas and this wasn’t Animal Planet.

  “Now!” Goodfellow called. “Curtain is down! And the lights are on!” We’d all dropped our weapons already and put in the ear plugs. Now we put a hand in each pocket we’d turned into goody bags, pulled two pins with each hand and threw them out before throwing ourselves flat, closing our eyes, and covering our ears. A second and a half later someone bombed the Ever. With eyes closed, face pressed to the deck, hands covering ears and ear plugs, it was what I’d imagine being at ground zero would be when someone dropped a nuclear bomb. Flash bangs. Military grade light and noise stun grenades. They more than lived up to their name. The light that crept through the space between my face and the deck lit up my closed lids bright red. But the light itself, it was white, a pure intense white, nothing like flames and fire, nothing like a real explosion. I kept that repetition going in my mind. Not an explosion. Not the explosion. Not my explosion.

  I didn’t open my eyes until I felt a tap on my shoulder. Not my explosion. No one would be tapping me there. I cautiously opened my eyes, ears ringing despite our precautions and let Robin pull me to my feet. I did a quick turn and scan. There wasn’t a single shadow weasel left. Every last one wiped out. That’s what working with the proper tools did for you. Niko and Cal were up too and Cal was the least sullen and depressed I’d seen him in hours. He was grinning, not a huge one, but me grinning at that age was a miracle. “That was fucking fantastic,” he declared/shouted to be heard over our temporary semideafness.

  “Impressive, carrying the light of a storm in your hands to kill my pets. Pity for you I have more pets.”

  The figure stepped out of the shadows, a faint halo of lightning circling above him. It was enough to let us see without our flashlights and from what I knew, this bastard, who carried around an entire pet store as to not run out, could see in the dark.

  This was him. This was the Vigil’s last hope: Lazarus. He stood, still as a stone, as he stared at us—or at Cal rather. Killing me was too little and too fucking late for the Vigil, although he’d treated himself to a little entertainment by trying anyway. But that had been all it could be for an assassin, a distraction. He had a purpose and that, to an assassin, would always come first.

  It was Cal who was the true target.

  Over six and a half feet in height, six eight or six nine, I thought, and thickly muscled under his natural brown leather shirt and pants, medium-sized strangely familiar ivory tube shaped beads were scattered through his hair, grouping it all into at least fifty or sixty separate dangling long twists. It made it difficult to tell what color his hair was—brown, the darkest brown you could get without edging close to black. It was streaked with a deep rusty red, but the red didn’t look . . . right. There was something about it. The whole mass of it fell past his shoulders, unseen in length, except for a few stray pieces that fell midway to the front between his chest and lower abdomen. It was matted enough to be dreadlocks. Not from the texture but from dried substance mixed in it—blood. From the smell, it was fresh, no more than two days old. That explained the red streaks. There were beads, too . . . or tubes, they had their own distinct odor, one I didn’t recognize. I’d come across similar but nothing exactly the same. Some of them were whole, some cracked and twisted and the color was not old ivory, but fresh and dazzling white. Then I realized they weren’t beads. They were bones. Finger bones carefully stripped of flesh and polished. The chalky tang, a different odor of death, told me the remnants of life that lingered in them were fresh, no more than two days dead. With Cal alive beside me, the blood and bone pointed to nothing but bad.

  Random kill . . . for bones.

  A purposeful kill to take what he needed to look this way. What way this was or why he chose it, it had to do with the blood of one of the paien injected in him. Its DNA changing him as my DNA had once changed me.

  Holy shit. I was beginning to think the Vigil had gone further than they’d planned. This wasn’t the assassin they’d wanted, one with a single goal. This wasn’t an assassin. This was a murderer of anything and everything for no reason at all with several types of paien genes that had gone overboard and then some in doing their job in remaking him. They had given him abilities that could make him a killer without limitation. They had screwed up in the deadliest of manners. They, in wanting to put me down—remove what they thought I was from the world—had done the opposite and made something closer to what they’d labeled me.

  Monster.

  The Vigil had once rubber-stamped me a monster waiting to happen and then restamped me a monster scheduled for destruction. Yet at my very worst when I was twisted up into the mind and body of what the Auphe had half brainwashed me into being and let the other half, their genes, do the rest, I had blood-soaked, nightmare urges. I had cravings, for slaughter, murder, hunting prey that could speak but it was their screams I wanted. So many urges, so much blood to be had, so many kills I wanted to make, but not one of them had ever been for fucking fashion.

  As he took a step toward us, I could see that his eyes were a pale, pale blue; that if they’d been any lighter they would’ve been white . . . until they spiderwebbed with jagged veins red as blood. In the air around him was a faint whisper. It came an
d grew until it was the sound of men shouting, metal clashing against metal, and the call of crows, the ones that circled the battlefields that had been their banquets. They would wait for the fall of a blood-covered fighter, then instantly plummet down, perch on unmoving chests, and use their sharp beaks to pluck hungrily at dead eyes. That’s when they came. He had said he had more pets.

  Shadow crows flew out of his chest, through his skin and shirt without touching either with the pointed beaks, black claws, wings that were faintly outlined with the ripple of feathers. They kept coming, a river of them with no signs of stopping. Up they went, the new weasels, and I raised my eyes to follow. Above us and the size of a storm cloud, they wheeled, shades against the city’s light-polluted orange night sky. The circle of them was wide and thick enough for thousands of the scavengers, all waiting for that first single fall to descend and gorge.

  “He appears to be a Viking,” Niko said quietly, “if that wasn’t impossible as he’s paien now, not human any longer. The sound effects and show above us, however, are evidence he’s both.”

  “How does pumping a guy full of monster blood get you a Viking?” Cal asked, his Glock was already out and pointed at Lazarus. “Could someone tell me that? You know what, never mind. I don’t give a shit. And don’t bother playing Kevin Costner any of you. I can save myself.” He pulled the trigger and shot Lazarus several times in the face. Like Nik had always taught us, in a fight use every advantage. When you’re fighting for your life there’s no such thing as playing dirty, only playing to live.

  But I beat him by pulling the trigger of the AR-15 I’d obtained, along with a few extra magazines tucked in my jacket. I sent four hundred rounds a minute toward Lazarus and I hoped I’d have a chance to rub it in Mini Me’s face. If we got past him hating me, to where I could mock him a little without getting shot in the face myself. It could happen. If I came off as smug or conceited, it’d be all in good, wholesome fun.

  Well . . . maybe.

  Little bit.

  But it didn’t happen that way.

  What did happen was so fast that at first I didn’t know how I’d ended up on my ass. There’d been a blinding light, air choked again with ozone, the feel of being thrown. I rubbed at my eyes and staggered up to see a rain of liquid metal between Lazarus and us through the halos and streaks across my vision. Four hundred rounds were now a curtain of silver and copper falling to the ground. An unshot Lazarus rested a hand on the crackling white light that circled him after destroying every bullet Cal and I had fired . . . over four hundred. It was impossible, but impossible or not, Lazarus wrapped that eye-searing light around his arm and sent it back up to where it belonged—the sky. Wasn’t that where lightning lived—the sky? I thought so.

  It had been who knew how many bolts of lightning that had disarmed us. The asshole could control goddamn lightning, we were aware of that since this morning, but to melt four hundred bullets? Gotta love a challenge.

  Blinking again, I could see there were dark marks, different shapes and sizes, scattered on every part of his skin that was visible, his face, his arms in the sleeveless leather shirt, his hands, and they were moving. They coalesced into tattoos. Pure black, they were either an arrow or a spear was my closest guess. Starkly primitive, it was made of two lines—a vertical one, then the second line that topped it. They were all pointing upward. If not for the peak of the second line giving it a sharp point aimed up at the sky, they almost could be Ts. A memory hit me. Runes. It was some kind of rune. Niko had studied them as he’d studied everything. I’d caught a glance over his shoulder a few years ago at a page of them in a book he was reading. They had looked close to this.

  That’s all I had the chance to think when Lazarus extended both hands. He shifted his focus from Cal to me. “You began this. You, Caliban, fired the first shot.” I hadn’t expected much talking from an assassin, but I hadn’t expected the Vigil to screw up so profoundly with their Frankenstein creation and make a monster instead, one that could stand shoulder to shoulder with any Auphe. And if I didn’t expect talking, I didn’t expect the wide mocking grin, glacial as the hand of death in the cold stretch of it. He lifted both arms and the hands that had been empty now held nooses. Made of shadows naturally, but managing to show the coarse texture of a hangman’s rope.

  “But the first shot is nothing when I am the war.”

  Cal spat, the disgust blatant enough to fly through the air as heavy as a thrown rock, “You’re as far from human as I am. You let those hypocrites do that to you? Take away who you were to make you into a monster like me, the thing you Vigil bastards hate?”

  He took us all in now, his grin became more derisive. “The Vigil did not make me. I have always been. They guarded the human’s ignorance. They took one of their own, trained in the ways of weapons and the coward’s kill of assassination. They thought they had made an undefeatable soldier to fight for humans. But I am not a soldier. I am a warrior, the likes of which hasn’t been seen here since the Blood Eagle flew, and I care nothing for humans. With their mayfly lives, they do not live long enough to be counted as more than toys made to die for my amusement. The Vigil did not make a savior. They did not make a twisted unnatural creature with powers it did not deserve. They did not make anything new, nothing with a mind or a spirit. Instead, they created a vessel.

  “My vessel.”

  He lifted both arms above his head, hands wrapped with rope, the nooses raised high. I felt a sudden tightening around my throat. I touched my throat with fingers ready to rip away whatever was strangling me, but there was nothing—nothing but the nooses Lazarus still held. That wasn’t impossible, but it was unfriendly as fuck. I was choking for breath as beside me Cal was doing the same.

  “Do you not know me now? He who shares the title of The Hanged One. I bring Justice, but I am War.”

  He shouted it at the sky and I thought I felt the ground beneath me shake.

  “I am War. I am War. I AM WAR!”

  Oddly, for him, quiet until now, Goodfellow, who stood close behind us, gave a painfully hard yank on my hair that turned me around. He pulled me frantically into motion, and when he did, the pressure around my neck loosened before disappearing. He was also snapping at Niko and Cal to move their idiotic asses and run. When they hesitated, I emphasized his command while coughing out, “Options, Vanna says—hanging, eyes pecked out by crows, electrocuted, or run. Pick one!”

  No one else had self-preservation skills close to a puck’s who’d dodged the reaper for millions of years. I knew when to listen to him. I had full confidence in him—until I noticed we were running toward the other end of the ship. I didn’t know the name—bow, aft, rudder, the “I’m the King of the World” spot, the shrimp buffet bulwark and open bilge bar. I knew nothing about boats, what to call any of it, and I didn’t give a damn about guessing.

  I did know we were racing toward the end away from the dock, the end beyond which was nothing but water.

  He was cursing now and it wasn’t his usual bitching about getting boggle blood on his Armani shirt. This was the kind of cursing he saved for the times he thought it was likely to be the other way around: What was trying to kill us would get Robin’s blood on its nondesigner scales. “Forpoutanas gie! Tyr! He has the blood of Tyr in him. The tattoos. The nooses. The duplicity of his position when he was Justice, when all who he judged were judged guilty without exception, and he watched each hanging with his dick in hand.”

  He spat in disgust and kept moving and talking. Pucks excelled at doing both simultaneously. “The insatiable thirst for blood, brutality, and vengeance he disguises as victorious battles. The glory of wars that he rules honorable, declaring the other side to have twice the number of warriors he leads when in reality they have less than half. He lies his way to legend. His tongue tells nothing but lies, not that such a fact makes him any kind of trickster. He tells his lies for no other reason than senseless slaughter and an
y excuse for war. He says he is War. He wishes he was Death, the butchering bastard.”

  I threw myself down at the scent of ozone and lightning streaked over my head. Then I was back up and running again. It was a fair-sized boat? Ship? I was guessing, but the length to run from one end of the Titanic to the other couldn’t be this far.

  “But how did they get his blood? He cannot be dead. I would know. News of his death, the hypocritical, devious, genocidal kolotripa, would be more than a rumor. I’m a trickster. It’s my avocation to know all these things. Yet, where would the Vigil get the blood? What have I missed?” He hadn’t let go of my arm when I’d hit the floor, the deck, whatever, and was continuing to drag me, which I hated to admit was faster than I could run. The bastard was a fucking cheetah.

  As I was a lion and not a cheetah, I wasn’t surprised when I stumbled, but used the chance to check that Niko and Cal were behind us and keeping up. Robin ignored my near fall and kept going, keeping me upright and taking me with him. “The lightning and shadow could be dealt with. The lightning and a slave ship. It must be the blood of an impundulu, a South African Lightning Bird—the shade of what it was living within him. Fighting us on this ship, it is nothing but a pretense at vengeance for those long dead slaves as Tyr himself has slaves by the dozens. The shadows . . . I still haven’t pinpointed them yet. Whatever they are, they and the impundulu, they are shades within Tyr, not living but not dead. They’re weaker, capable of being defeated, but the majority of him is Tyr. But with two hands now instead of only one and two nooses to go with them,” he groaned. “Gamisou!”

  He was more or less talking to himself, but I was long familiar with that. When we were someplace safe enough he could speak slower, use smaller words, and give us the unthinkably bizarre free of charge explanation, we’d get filled in then.

  Without another word to me, he turned and pushed me with enough force I was actually off my feet as I was thrown to land hard—just as another bolt of lightning flew by exactly where I’d been while running. “Thanks.” I staggered back up and started to run again.