by Rob Thurman
“He is gone. On the hunt. Following prey.” Delilah had pulled up on her motorcycle seconds ago and was now undoing her braid, the silver hair falling to her waist. She too was ready for the hunt. Despite the purple shadows of twilight, she was a brilliant flash of white. Her hair, the leathers; she was the moon come to Earth. “We follow.” She stepped close to thread her hand in my hair and kiss me with a heat and familiarity that made it hard to forget that I’d had this so short a time. It seemed like years. I returned it with enthusiasm, refusing to wonder if I tasted different to her now. An extra dollop of Auphe in all likelihood would only make me spicier to Delilah. And there I was thinking about it after all, but before I could push it out of my mind, I heard a clearing of a throat. Niko. He was right; it had gone on for a few minutes, but I didn’t have the ability to store up sexual pleasure like British rock stars with their freaky Tantric batteries. I had to take it when I could get it. There was a cough this time that would be promptly followed by a thwack of a sword to the back of my knees if I didn’t step back.
I stepped back.
Delilah gave me a smile ripe with anticipation of the chase before us. “In case we hunt no more.”
“Great for you two,” Robin complained. “But what if Niko and I end up ‘hunting no more’? Where’s our kiss of potential death? Or quickie of potential death? I’m open to all options.”
Both Delilah and Niko snorted and Robin did without. I knew he was serious about the kiss; I wasn’t as sure about the rest as I saw him finger his cell phone before hitting a number. Speed dial. This relationship could be more serious than I thought. Monogamy and ranking on Robin’s speed dial. He turned his back to us, but that didn’t keep wolf or human ears from hearing. “It’s me . . . of course. Who else would bother to call your cranky feathered ass?” He paused, listening. “No, everything’s fine. We’re about to wipe this walking, talking, antibiotic-resistant son of a bitch out of existence, and I should be back soon.” Goodfellow could lie like no one I’d seen in my life, except my mother, but this time, I wasn’t so sure he pulled it off. “I only wanted you to know that you are wholly responsible for the vow of the priesthood I took on this trip. And if by some completely unlikely chance I don’t survive, I fully expect you to pack your dick away in shipping foam and never use it again. Fair is fair.” He paused again, then said briskly, “No, I’m not saying that or implying that. I just wanted . . . oh Hades.” He flipped the phone shut. Good-bye was what I guessed that he refused to say and when the phone rang, he turned it off, sticking to his guns on the subject.
I didn’t blame him. Saying good-bye was an impossible thing sometimes; no matter how long you had to prepare yourself. Niko and I’d learned that a few times more than I wanted to count. And when you didn’t know in your heart precisely what you were saying good-bye to . . . that had to be worse.
Delilah turned out to be right about Rafferty. He was gone and Catcher had disappeared with him, but they weren’t far away. We caught up with them in a short matter of time, all of us: Niko, Robin, Delilah, Abelia-Roo and her four men, and lucky me watching our flank. Fortunately, it was Delilah’s flank I was watching and if I was going to die, that wasn’t a bad last image to take with me.
We moved quietly along wooden walkways surrounded by trees, some kind of pine or fir. Big though, whatever they were. More than a hundred feet tall, easily. The wind played through the needles, a song you couldn’t quite make out the words to, but a nice song. Peaceful—until the trees fell; hundreds of them, in slow motion, as roots gave way and they tore loose from the ground. The first one would’ve landed right in front of some of us and on top of the rest if we hadn’t heard the creak of wood and been hit with a cascade of now-silent needles, brown and dead from above.
No one said run. The situation was self- explanatory in that respect, and if it wasn’t, then Darwin was ready to take your hand and lead your oblivious ass to extinction. Delilah and I ran past Abelia and her men. I didn’t help little old ladies across the street. I should have, but I didn’t. And if I didn’t do that, I wasn’t going to play out the tale of the Frog and the Scorpion with Abelia- Roo. It was the scorpion’s nature to sting the frog. It would be Abelia’s pleasure to stab me in the back if I hoisted her up on it, only unlike the scorpion, she’d wait until I’d hauled her to safety first. I let her men deal with scooping her up and fleeing with her.
We caught up with Niko and Robin as the first tree crashed across the walkway behind us. It shook the ground hard enough that I felt my feet leave it for a split second. As the rest of the hundred or so fell, that shaking became a good imitation of an earthquake. We ran, we dodged, and in one spectacular, humanly impossible leap, Delilah sailed over the huge trunk of one already down. I started to look behind me once and Niko grabbed my jacket and yanked me along faster. Within minutes we raced out from the wooded area and stopped to see . . . just to see. A massive stretch of destruction lay behind us. The giant trees, dead but not gone. They lay across the pathway, every one a stand- in for a bullet through the head. Trunks piled upon trunks, branches bare as needles had dropped away—the death of nature itself.
With almost every step Suyolak had taken here before us, everything around was dying—or had already died. The trees, the grass I bent and felt break under my palm, the rabbit dessicated to nearly nothing by my foot. Once Suyolak had started his engine, he’d stopped the same in everything else he passed, holding back only enough that the death throes were timed to crush us flat. I nudged the rabbit corpse off the wooden path and onto the dead grass. Not much improvement for it, but it was the best I could do.
“Let’s keep going,” Niko said, turning back to move on. As we did, I caught a glimpse of one of Abelia’s men looking over his shoulder uneasily at the remains of what we’d barely escaped. Uneasy—holy hell, if he were smart, he would be fucking terrified. We were trailing after the actual embodiment of death; not the idea of it or the chance of it, but its purest distillation. Terminal cancer and every plague known to man crossed with a great white shark and we were chasing the bastard down. If that didn’t make you think twice, then you had nothing to think with. Suyolak was loose, the Plague of the World, and he was already killing that world around him.
We found Rafferty and Catcher just off the walkway by a sign that heralded the Midway Geyser Basin. Sounded scenic and me without my camera. No way to capture the memories. What a pity. Or what a pity if I were alive next month to worry about it. As it was, even if I had a photo album, I think I had only the one picture for it—my sixteen-year-old yellowed and curled-at-the-edges Santa photo, and Niko wouldn’t give that one back. My life didn’t much lend itself to pictures I cared to revisit. If we got to live, maybe I’d do something about that.
Rafferty had stopped with Catcher standing stolidly at his side, waiting for us. “He’s ahead,” he said, “past the Grand Prismatic Spring. Too bad it’s not daylight. Dark blue water, ringed by red bacterial mats. Colorful. Nice.” That was a lot of words for Rafferty and none of them curse words. I was impressed. If he could do it, maybe there was hope for me yet. I raised my eyebrows and Rafferty shrugged. “Catcher’s a tree hugger. We’ve been here before.”
“Wonderful. You’re an informative tour guide. Should we, by some slim chance, survive this, I’ll be sure to tip you generously.” Robin massaged his forehead as we ringed the healer and the wolf. “Are you absolutely positive this time? Because, honestly, he’s led you by the nose up until now and rarely in the right direction, not to mention he did just try to swat us with several acres of trees. On the other hand, that rather bears mentioning. He tried to kill us with trees. Extremely tall Christmas trees and how diabolical is that? To ruin a gift-giving holiday and celebration of the pagan winter solstice all in one.”
“Not kindly or succinctly put, but something we need to know. Rafferty?” Niko was carrying his sword and had discarded his coat when the wooden path had ended. There was no one and nothing to see us now; only the dead. “Yo
u do know where he is? If Suyolak is going to kill us, I’d prefer he do it from ahead and not behind. Granted deceased is deceased, but we’d have something more of a chance if we knew his position.”
“He’s ahead all right, more than ready and willing to play,” the healer replied impassively. “He’s in my head now. Talking, talking. Bastard won’t shut up. This is what he wants. He doesn’t think any of us is worth hiding from.”
Always fun hearing that. The big badasses were like that. It had been so long since they’d had an actual challenge that they’d forgotten one could exist. But in the past, we’d taken down everyone we ran up against. Sometimes it took only you and the fear of what the son of a bitch might do trumping the fear of dying. Sometimes it took a shitload of backup and weapons. Sometimes it took your entire lifetime to date. Whichever it was, Niko and I had never failed to get them in the end.
We’d also never come up against someone like Suyolak. He could kill with a thought, and guns weren’t much good if you were dead between aiming and pulling the trigger. True or not, I wasn’t going to admit it. The bastard might get my life, but he wasn’t going to get my fear. “Then let’s go show him how wrong his mummified ass is,” I said as I pulled my Eagle from the holster.
Moving again toward the spring Rafferty had—what did they call it?—“waxed poetic” about. I got the poetic part; where the wax came in had left me in the dark, and when Niko had explained it back in the homeschooling days, I would’ve zoned out immediately. How a language evolved throughout the centuries didn’t much interest me then . . . or now. I knew what the phrase meant and that was enough for me, although I’d guarantee Nik had smacked me in the back of the head or flicked my ear painfully at my lack of interest at the time.
As he did now. “Jesus,” I hissed in a low tone, and glared at him as he now walked silently beside me. “What was that for?” It was always for something. Niko had never outgrown the role of teacher—he never would. If we lived to be in our nineties, he’d still be force- feeding me yogurt, teaching me the new martial arts of our alien overlords, and jacking my brain directly into some long-winded documentary about the dung beetle and its place in history. On the day I was born, Nik became a big brother and until the day I died, he still would be.
“Don’t gate,” he warned me in the same near whisper, but no less authoritatively with the lack of volume, because that was Niko. Some, such as Goodfellow, radiated charisma rather like a supernova did light and deadly radiation, and some, like Nik, were that radiation. Whether it was a whisper or not, you listened. “Don’t think you can travel next to Suyolak and empty your clip into his head before he can kill you, because you can’t. Rafferty is here for a reason. Let him do what he’s meant to—heal the world of a pestilence.”
And if he can’t, I wanted to ask, but whisper or not, Rafferty would hear it. We were down to the wire now. It was time to shut up about his qualifications. Besides, if he couldn’t put down Suyolak like the rabid dog he was, traveling probably wouldn’t be an issue. Trying to shove the shredded lungs I’d coughed up into the dirt back down my throat and into my chest where they belonged might be. However, in all likelihood, traveling would be lower on the list. And weighing the risk of the Auphe in my progressing because of it would be at the very bottom.
“Cal.”
Niko was serious most of the time, but there was serious and then there was now. I didn’t push him on it. “Okay. No traveling.” This time I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. If Suyolak was in Rafferty’s head, a whisper wasn’t going to be an effective stealth tool. I was surprised the bastard hadn’t dropped us all in the parking lot the same as he’d taken down the mass of giant trees.
“That’s because I’m still protecting you,” Rafferty said as he stopped walking. Catcher’s eyes glowed in the purple light as he looked back at us.
“Great. I’ve had Suyolak in my brain,” I complained. “I don’t want you sneaking a look too.”
“It’s no goddamn picnic for me either,” he snapped, but absently, his main focus elsewhere. “If your customers knew what you put in their beer.” Before I could protest that I only thought about it, hadn’t actually done it, he added, “There it goes.”
By “it,” he meant the spring . . . or now a geyser. We, including Delilah, Abelia, and her men, were standing on hardened, ridged dirt that rose slightly at a fair distance in front of us, and that’s where the show was. I smelled it before I heard it and heard it before I saw it: sulfur, then the sound of boiling . . . as if something as big as the ocean itself were churning, and finally the explosion of water that hit the air and kept going up. Up. Up, and holy shit. I felt like Moses at the parting of the Red Sea. No, I felt more like an Egyptian soldier just there for the paycheck, wondering where it all had gone wrong as I drank the water down. “How the hell is he doing that?” I craned my head to see the water high above us shimmering with a light that was a pale purple reflection of the sky above it.
“The bacteria in the water,” Rafferty said. “He’s agitated them to a thousand times their normal activity. That light is them dying. He turned them into . . . hell, stars. But microbial stars don’t live long.”
“Is he going to boil us alive, because, quite frankly, that is the one near death I’ve avoided throughout the millennia, and I’ve no particular interest in it now.” Robin had his sword out too, but for the first time it looked useless and he, thanks to those millennia of experience, was Niko’s equal in swordsmanship . . . if he was sober. “Although at least these wretched clothes from that equally wretched, low-fashion and inedible food store are machine washable. If I do die, at least my corpse won’t reside in shrunken, wrinkled rags.”
“No. We’re not going to be boiled alive, but you just made me wish we would be,” Rafferty growled.
Rafferty was a lightweight when it came to surviving the puck experience, but he was also right. We weren’t boiled alive. A good portion of the water splashed down about two feet from us . . . a generous estimate. “Cutting it a little close, isn’t he?” I said it to Nik, because when it came to healing, fine, Rafferty was our guy . . . Wolf . . . both. But when it came to logistics in a battle, I trusted my brother over anyone and everyone.
And when it came to the abrupt smell of copper and calcium and the five piles of dust that appeared on the ground behind us, it looked like I didn’t have to worry about trusting or not trusting a certain someone ever again. Abelia-Roo and her men were gone. The scent and the flicker out of the corner of my eye had me whirling around, Eagle pointed—except there was nothing for it to do. A dust buster was the only thing that would be any good now. Niko bent down and ran his fingers through one heap. The residue flew off his fingers, finer than flour dust.
“It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah all over again,” Robin said in a hushed tone, finally impressed enough to be almost quiet.
“Shit,” I repeated, without the “holy” this time. There was nothing much holy about this. She’d been a bitch from Hell, Abelia, one so full of hate and loathing that every foot she put to the earth had most likely poisoned it . . . with just a slower poison than Suyolak’s version. That she could be gone so quickly and quietly, without a screech or a curse, was shocking and almost unbelievable. Like someone’s snapping the fingers at a town-destroying tornado and its simply disappearing. Poof. Gone.
“I couldn’t protect everyone.”
I looked back, but Rafferty hadn’t bothered to turn around. “They were the ones that caused this clusterfuck. They’re responsible for Suyolak’s escaping that coffin. If someone had to go . . .” He shrugged again. He did that a lot. It was not my favorite thing, especially under deadly circumstances where I had no control. I had issues with control. We’d all seen that, but tricking myself into believing I had control was something that had saved my sanity more than once. Tricks and wire stitching us together sometimes was all you had, and I was missing it badly now.
“We all make difficult decisions in battle. You are Solo
monic in your wisdom,” Goodfellow said to Rafferty smoothly, if hastily. There was nothing wrong with knowing which side of your bread was buttered, and as he’d been alive before bread or butter, Robin had mastered that maneuver.
“If you think your silver tongue will save you, goat, it will not.” It was Suyolak’s voice—a real voice this time, not manufactured in my brain. I heard it. I heard him. “To make it close to a fair contest, he will have to sacrifice more of you. All of you, and even then . . .” He stepped into sight.
It was darker now and I didn’t have the eyes of the three Wolves, but between the lingering twilight, the rising moon, and the flickering glow of dying bacteria, I could see him as he came around the left curve of the spring. He was human again with flesh, dark eyes, and black hair that touched the ground and that cheerful Rom smile from my dream. It was that damn-are-we-going-to-have-some-fun smile; the isn’t-the-world-one-big-party smile; a have- I-got-something-to-give-you grin. The last one was the one I believed. He had something to give us all right, a great big frigging present, and if it was what Abelia and her men had gotten, we’d be damn lucky piles of dust.
I hadn’t believed in luck since I was five.
“He used them to reconstitute himself,” Niko said. “Abelia and the others. He drained the life out of them to make himself whole.”
“Not only them, Vayash cousin.” He was closer, a little more than seventy-five feet away. Almost nude, he had only strips of faded cloth hanging from him. Hundreds of years in a coffin were rough on the wardrobe. He made a washing motion with his hands and the twisted, foot-long fingernails fell away. “I also took the trees, the grass, twenty-one elk, six bears, two mountain lions, several sheep, and numberless small vermin. Some creatures I didn’t know existed in my time. It’s always a pleasure to kill something new.” He stopped and pointed at me. “You are new.”
