Slashback: A Cal Leandros Novel (CAL AND NIKO)

by Rob Thurman

  The air was saturated with the scent of blood. Old, recent, fresh. I’d thought Junior’s house had smelled—I’d had no idea what bad truly was. I’d fought enough over the years that the coppery tang of fresh blood had long stopped bothering me, but this wasn’t the same. Old blood was a horror I couldn’t explain to someone who couldn’t experience it. It was something I wouldn’t be rid of for at least a week. And here . . . there was an ocean of rotting blood. Jack had more victims than the police had ever found. I couldn’t smell anything over what they had spilled here. I couldn’t smell Nik.

  “Nik!” I shouted as I limped forward. The ribs were beyond codeine now. “Niko!” I shouted again. I wasn’t trying to be subtle. I wasn’t looking to hide. I wanted Jack to find me. I couldn’t lead him away if he didn’t know I was there. I also couldn’t forget how fast he was. I wasn’t that fast, but for Jack I’d have to be. Whipping my head back and forth, I scanned the church and saw nothing. The basement then. I’d go . . . wait. Up. There was a paler glimmer . . . blond hair, Nik’s hair in the balcony above. Through the ornate carved wood rail I could see him, a shadowed fall crowned with that rare recessive blond Leandros hair.

  Above, like Junior’s attic. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Junior had said his master liked to watch from the sky. That could be true or it might be that Jack wanted to be either closer to what he remembered of Heaven or just free of Earth when he did his work. Angels must have wings for a reason.

  Niko’s form didn’t move and I instantly ran to the back where the stairs would lead up because he was not dead. I could smell nothing but what soaked this place inside and out, not even Nik’s normal scent, but my brother’s freshly spilt blood, that I would know . . . over anything at all. Jack hadn’t shown up, but he had to be here and I’d be ready for him. I reached for the handle of the door that should lead to the stairs when the blot of gloom under the balcony became something else. Knit out of the shadows, the reaped souls, and the desertion of faith that now filled this place, Jack became.

  The killing gate I had planned for him took only a thought. I didn’t have time for even that. A grip of ice sank into both of my temples, through flesh and bone, and I was the storm. I was the lightning that passed through my brain. The floor disappeared beneath me as I hung in midair, arms and legs splayed as I convulsed. Jack’s incandescent glow of white-blue eyes gazed into mine. “We both come and we both go, you said.” Thick with clots of flesh and blood, the phantom of them if not the actual things themselves, the words fought through. “Now I think you, Wolf-in-the-Flock, Auphe-in-the-Flock, you will go nowhere.” He must have dropped me as I was now looking up at the ceiling, unable to move, unable to understand what he said next although I could hear it.

  “Pray for deliverance. Pray for mercy. But they will be prayers unheard for I will not let them pass, half a soul or not.”

  He hovered over me, but I couldn’t distinguish between the lightning-shot blackness and the electricity misfiring in the darkness of my brain. Was there a difference? I couldn’t . . . think. There was the smell of freshly mown grass, the taste of metal and butterscotch, the warm sensation of Delilah’s skin under my hands. I floated on it all. It seemed strange. It seemed right. It seemed . . .

  I was tired.

  A wolf among the sheep. Half wolf, half sheep.

  There was something I needed. . . . It was on the tip of my . . . what? What was . . . now there was the smell of Oreos. Mrs. Spoonmaker’s Oreos. I smiled and closed my eyes. I was so tired.

  With the taste of burned butterscotch in my mouth, I slept.

  * * *

  DIY electroshock therapy is not an Auphe’s best friend.

  It was a while before I could link enough words and images in my head to come to that conclusion.

  Before that I drifted. It could’ve been minutes. It could’ve been days. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. There was darkness around me and dancing lights, few and distant as the stars of a post-apocalyptic sky. That was all right, came the muzzy feeling. The world had to die sometime. It wasn’t anything as complicated as a thought—it was a feeling, warm and reassuring in the futility of it all. Best to go along. Ride the light to a world better than this. Let it all go. . . .

  Including Niko.

  That was a thought, fully formed and capable of dissipating the fog in my brain with the force of a high noon, summertime Death Valley sun. Nik. Where was Nik? I sat up, pushing against the floor beneath me. It felt like polished wood, smooth and perfect. My muscles didn’t mirror that feeling. Every single one in my body ached as if I’d run for my life for several hours, was hit by a bus, another bus, and then hit by a train before deciding to top it off with the New York City Marathon for kicks. Tiny shivers and spasms twitched . . . Jesus . . . everywhere as I curled into a ball, resting my forehead on my knees until it passed.

  I remembered in the fuzziest of ways cold hands, one on each side of my head, and then a lightning storm inside of it. Jack, friend and pal that he was, had given me a free shock treatment. He’d zapped my brain, and the rest of me incidentally, quickly but thoroughly. The seizures that would cause were what had my muscles tied in what felt like unbreakable knots.

  After a minute, all I had time to spare, I looked up and around me. My muscles continued to howl, but I told them to talk to my broken rib and get back to me. I was in a basement from the looks of it, a fancy one. The floor was wood, stained and polished to a high gloss that reflected the flickering lights of the four candles Jack had left me.

  I thought it was to see the chains. Feeling them around my wrists wasn’t enough. He wanted me to see how helpless I was as well. That was the kind of dick he was. My hands were in front of me, the wrists wrapped in several tight loops of thick chain that in turn was chained around a wooden column that would be theoretically holding up the ceiling. The chain wasn’t padlocked. That would be too easy and not Jack’s style. The ends were melted into one tangled whole. Lightning, good for so much more than scrambling a brain.

  The basement.

  The imprisonment.

  The symmetry of the chains.

  I get it, Jack. Funny fucking ha-ha. Just like the good old days twelve years ago.

  I hadn’t seen what Junior had done to Niko while I was in the attic and Niko hadn’t told me. He’d only said that he’d killed Junior and we were safe. I was safe. But he didn’t have to tell me he’d been chained and he didn’t have to tell me where. He’d had the smell on him as we sat in our own bathroom and he washed the blood from my chest and from around his wrists. He’d been with the dead . . . in the basement. I didn’t know how Jack knew about that. He hadn’t been there for that particular show or had and found a reason not to interfere. It could’ve been Junior’s routine. Chain his victims in the basement, kill them later in the attic. Jack would definitely know that about his apprentice. He’d obviously known about two neighbor kids next door who’d disappeared after Junior’s death. Had guessed why we’d vanished.

  Jack knew more than he should.

  I tried flipping that switch in my brain, starting small, a tiny gate to eat away at the chains and set me free. Nothing. There was only the creeping return of the muzzy sensation around the edge of my thoughts. If I couldn’t do something so small, gating myself was impossible. Jack had seen me moving like him, if not as quickly. Jack had taken a leap of faith . . . wasn’t that hilarious . . . that frying my brain would put a stop to that, temporarily. Permanently. Either one suited Jack.

  Yeah, Jack knew way more than he should, but Jack didn’t know me.

  Gating didn’t make me who I was. It was a part of me, but with or without gates, I’d always be half of something that could take him out if I had to use my last breath to do it. I remember the torn flesh weeping blood that had circled Nik’s wrists from his stay in Junior’s basement. I’d seen him pop a dislocated thumb back into place, with a towel clamped in his mouth to keep from screaming. If my brother had the balls to do that for me when h
e’d been a kid, there wasn’t anything that would stop me from doing the same for him as an adult.

  Junior must have used handcuffs on Nik. Dislocating a thumb wouldn’t help with chains. A willingness to give Jack his pound of flesh would. Or half a pound. Nik had been right. Thinking you’re invulnerable makes you sloppy.

  Jack had gotten sloppy.

  He’d seen human weapons were nothing compared to him. They couldn’t hurt him, and he hadn’t bothered to take mine. He’d also left me that slack, not too bright of him either. I loved the arrogant ones. I was thinking all that when I maneuvered my hands and pulled the Mossberg Tactical shotgun out of Nik’s coat. I thought on it harder than I had to. If I hadn’t, I’d think about what Jack was doing to my brother right now.

  I couldn’t think about that. God, I . . . no. Just no.

  This had happened to him when he was fifteen. When he was unarmed and had no experience with the evil in the world, other than the kind that then he had only watched. Trapped in a basement filled with the dead while Junior had been offering me to his master upstairs, he’d thought it was his fault for not believing me. The wonder wasn’t that he’d had a time bomb in him. The wonder was that he hadn’t given up on life then and there. The wonder was Nik himself who did not give up on me, no matter the odds, who saved my ass every last time.

  I wasn’t going to be any different. I was getting him out of this. Somehow. And I was going to make him goddamn proud as I did it.

  If that meant that I had to take on Jack with no gating ability and no weapon that could touch him, I’d fucking come up with something. Step one: the chains. If I’d known Jack was going to turn this into a psycho high school reunion of sorts I’d have brought bolt cutters. Now, I tucked the shotgun under my arm, pressed the muzzle against the chain and fired. I then switched hands and did the same several inches over.

  My hands and face burned as I reloaded and ran up the stairs.

  Cuts and embedded metal fragments from the shattering of the chain in two places when I hit it with a couple of steel slugs were responsible for that. There were ugly powder burns on my hands as well to accent the blood that made me look as if I were wearing black and red gloves. I’d had to aim close to where the chain wrapped around my wrist. If the chain didn’t shatter completely, I’d still have to pull my hands free of metal that wasn’t completely intact, looser but still snug, and would be the new equivalent of razor wire.

  That was what had happened, and that’s what I’d done. I’d yanked my hands free, losing large patches of skin down to meat. Nothing I couldn’t live without. Nothing I gave a damn about.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  Nik, wait for me, goddamn it. You’d better fucking wait.

  I kept running, limping, moving up any way I could. It was hard to breathe and if a piece of bone in your lung felt worse than this, I pitied the bastard that had that. I hit the first floor, didn’t slow down as I ran for the door to the balcony and went up those too. As I staggered out onto the balcony, I was surrounded by color. Subtle but true. Moonlight washed through the stained glass of the giant window I’d seen walking into the church. The soft light wafted in a quiet drift of blue, purple, and the deep green of grass on a night shadowed grave.

  This time, this close, I could smell Niko’s blood and I jerked my head to the left. He was standing with his katana between him and Jack. He knew he didn’t have a chance, but he was buying time, hoping I could get away and would have the sense to run.

  He knew better than that, but he still tried. Nik was incapable of giving up on me, no matter how bleak the odds. Who did he think I’d learned it from? And Jack had picked up on that, was playing with him. “I left him his weapons,” came the thick flow. “His human toys. He had knives. If he’s the soulless animal I know him to be, he’ll do as they do when caught in a trap. I am kind however. He won’t have to gnaw his way free. He can use a knife to cut off his hand. I did chain both hands. Cutting off the second hand will be more of a puzzle without another to cut with, but Auphe are nothing if not persistent.”

  I leaned in the corner between wall and rail. “Nik, get down.” He jerked his head toward me. I think it was the first time in my life I’d managed to appear and him not see me coming, not counting gates. But we were both caught in a past nightmare now and we were both less sharp and more desperate than we’d ever been.

  There was blood on his face that started at his hairline, followed closely in front of his right ear, and ended at the tip of his chin. Superficial but messy and as Nik had told me in the beginning of this, a game, but also a start to being skinned alive if that’s what Jack wanted.

  Reloading on my run up the stairs, I didn’t think the shotgun would work and thanks to ECT for Dummies, Jack had taken gates out of the picture. Chances were that both Nik and I were going to die here, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for Jack. When he looked back on taking us down, if it couldn’t be with fear, then I’d settle for vast annoyance. “Nik, down!” I repeated as I fired the first slug into the swirling mass of every nightmare come to life that coiled between us and instantly pumped the shotgun for the next round.

  Nik didn’t get down, because Nik knew I had no plan. He would fight the same as I would and if we survived, kick my ass for suggesting he wouldn’t.

  “I neutered your mutt of an Auphe. I filled his head with the light of the storm. He can’t leave. He can’t walk through doors not meant for him. He can’t save himself and he can’t save you either,” Jack gloated, the slug having disappeared in the shadows around him before it dropped to the floor coated in ice. “He cannot do anything. He may as well be human now, weak and ready for judgment, but he still won’t have it. Death is all that’s for him. Redemption is beyond him, neutered or not.” The glitter of his eyes focused on me, disappeared—toward Nik, and then back to me. “But who shall first give up his skin to the priest that is Jack? Who is the first offering?”

  Nick slashed with his katana in a movement as quicksilver fast as Jack’s lightning. He was aiming for the eyes, but it was the same as with anything we’d tried. The blade bounced back and Jack laughed. The son of a bitch laughed. “You then, with a skinning tool of your own. I think I shall use it on you and then use your skin to choke your soulless sibling to death. A fitting end for the talented apprentice you took from me. Hammersmith gave me many of the wicked. Now you die in my pet’s name.”

  Not happening.

  This was fucking not happening.

  I was about to fire again, then take on Jack with my hands and teeth when I saw them.

  Through those squares of color, I saw, blurry and lit only by streetlights, but it was enough. This time when I shouted, “Niko, get the fuck down!” he listened.

  The stained glass window exploded behind him. As glass flew through the air, Ishiah, Samyel, and four other peris from the Ninth Circle hung in the air, white and gray and copper wings beating the air into a storm that rivaled the one that was Jack.

  “You are sick, brother,” Ishiah said as they circled him. “Pyriel, you are Fallen and this cannot go on.”

  Jack’s eyes faded to the barest glimmer for a moment. “Brothers.” He sounded confused. “No, no, I am not with you any longer. I am my own creation. I am judgment and redemption. I am not of you but I am sanctioned or I would’ve been punished long ago.”

  “This,” Ishiah said with a grim twist to his mouth. Sadness. Resignation. It was time to put the rabid wolf down. “This is your punishment and it is long overdue.” He arrowed in, a hawk stopping on a rabbit. Samyel and the others followed. They covered Jack and buried hands in the blue and white flaring mist around him. Immediately a lightning storm exploded on the balcony, at least fifty bolts. I had gone down as quickly as Nik when the window had burst and I was grateful for that now. Ishiah and the others were thrown back, glowing and burning. But as quickly as they’d been tossed aside, they were back and every time the lightning threw them away they returned. Jack tired and the lightning
became jagged and intermittent. The peris were on him then and stayed on. They began to peel back pieces of . . . something—ragged chunks of darkness that bled in the sizzle of faint bolts of electricity. They were removing the storm spirit from Jack—Pyriel—tearing it to pieces to free what it had latched on to hundreds of years ago.

  They were peris, retired angels with limited powers, but it was enough to kill a parasitic storm spirit and without that spirit, Pyriel was frozen. He might not want to fight his brothers. He might be all but powerless himself now that the spirit that had fed on him and channeled his life force all those years was gone.

  I didn’t give a rat’s ass either way.

  The peris, each trailing a limp drapery of dead or dying storm spirit with them, soared higher. They’d done their part, nothing I’d expected, nothing I’d hoped, but now it was my turn. Jack, when the darkness had flowed away like the outgoing tide, was revealed to be a glass statue, one that had been shattered and glued back together by a senile, blind man. Angles, knife-sharp edges, jagged shards that cut not only skin but the air itself solidified. You could almost picture that there had once been wings that could lift him into flight, but now were melted together into a crippled caricature—layered with the same fractured glass that made up the rest of him.

  Yet . . . I could see what he once had been before he changed. Something awe-inspiring. Something beautiful.

  Crystal and cut glass, each feather on his wings a knife blade of diamond made to slash and fly. He would’ve been something. Hell, a glory. Now he was the ice over a winter lake and if I looked hard enough I thought I might see the eyes and mouths of his victims wide open with terror as they drowned trapped beneath the frozen barrier.

  The parasite was gone, but what had been beneath it, the angel, his eyes, the same blue-white, were as insane as they’d ever been while he’d been Jack. Angels went mad too. It wasn’t as much a surprise as I’d thought. All that power, all that judgment—there’d be no Hell if angels hadn’t gone mad or bad in the first place, would there?