Slashback

by Rob Thurman

  “Shit.” Exhaling painfully, I avoided looking at Robin as I didn’t want to see whatever well-meaning emotion was aimed in my direction. Sometimes the smallest amount of empathy can break you if you let it. I kept my eyes fixed on the far wall and asked, “Can you get me up? I think I went from a cracked rib to a broken one when I tackled Nik.” If it was broken, and it felt that way, it was a simple break. I could breathe, somewhat, and I wasn’t coughing up blood, which meant there wasn’t a shard of bone embedded in my lung. No big deal. People walked around with a broken rib all the time—it just wasn’t much fun.

  An arm looped around my back and under my free arm to help me once I got my legs under me. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  I made the shrug evident in my words as I damn well wasn’t going to move my shoulders to make it. “He’s always thought it. Maybe it’s better that he said it. Keeping it inside obviously wasn’t helping, not with Jack in the picture.”

  “Humans, they take things so to heart. It is one of their truest—”

  I cut off Ishiah without a second thought. “Just shut up with the crap about the human heart, you asshole. If your kind had actually done something about their MIA angel instead of looking under a rock or two and then giving up, none of this would have happened. Jack wouldn’t have happened. Junior wouldn’t have happened and Nik wouldn’t be blaming himself for your mistake.”

  Ishiah was my boss and a former warrior of Heaven, but right then that didn’t mean a thing to me. Considering all the smiting done in the Bible by his kind, I had my doubts that messing up one human’s faith in himself would mean much to him. It meant the world to me though and left me in no mood for some failed pigeon’s philosophy about man.

  “I was only going to say it is one of the most noble things about them, to hold themselves accountable beyond any expectation I could have,” he finished somberly. “I’m sorry for what was done to you and Niko. I know that means nothing now, the damage is done, but I am sorry.”

  Making my way to the kitchen to fish in the drawer for the bottle of codeine, I let the anger run out of me. It wasn’t Ishiah’s fault. It wasn’t Heaven’s fault if I was forced to be truthful. It was Junior’s fault and he was beyond reach. It was Jack’s fault and until we discovered how to kill him he was beyond reach too. I swallowed two pills, chased them with a glass of water and said, “I need to talk to Nik. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  I made it down the hall at a speed an octogenarian with a walker would’ve mocked and knocked lightly on Nik’s door—something I’d never done. When you’ve spent nearly every day of your life together, aside from that first year Nik was at college, privacy was a nonsense word. It didn’t mean a thing. There were the puberty years, but that’s what bathroom locks were for.

  I had knocked, but I didn’t wait for an invitation. That would be too far out of the ordinary and Nik needed ordinary now more than ever. He was sitting on the side of his bed oiling his katana. If positions had been reversed I’d have been under the bed sucking my thumb like an infant, but that’s why Nik was Nik. He did what no one else could and then he blamed himself for not doing the impossible.

  “Hey, Cyrano.” I propped myself against his dresser to face him. I was afraid if I sat on the bed, I wouldn’t get back up . . . at least not with anything approaching grace. My ribs were the last thing Nik needed added to his plate. “Are you really going to make me be the emotionally stable one in the room? I’m not good at it. You know that.”

  He raised his eyes and what I saw in them . . . Jesus, I felt like shit. He’d been the emotionally stable one our entire lives, not a single day off. My even joking about it was a crappy thing to do. “You know what? I’m a dick. You be as unstable as you need to be. If you need to kick someone’s ass to feel better, I’ll go hold Robin back so you can put the beat-down on Ishiah. He doesn’t pay me worth a damn anyway. He deserves it.”

  I thought I saw a spark of amusement but it disappeared too quickly for me to be sure. He looked back down and continued to tend to the blade. “Nik, come on. So what if you didn’t believe me or want to believe me twelve frigging years ago? You were a kid. Hell, you were a kid raising a kid, dealing with Sophia, living in a world of monsters because of me. I don’t know how you weren’t a drooling mess or why you didn’t just take off. Anyone else would have. No one and I mean no one could’ve done what you did. No one could’ve kept me alive this long or would’ve even tempted to try. You gave up your life for me and you could’ve had a life. The best life.” He could have. That’s what made me want to put my fist through a wall.

  “You’re the fucking smartest man I know,” I continued. “You could be a college professor, married, have two point five kids and a picket fence. Or you could’ve been the world’s top mercenary living on a private island. You could have done anything and you gave it up for me. Now you’re blaming yourself . . . no, you’re blaming a fifteen-year-old kid who was doing it all for stumbling once when the weight went from overwhelming to impossible. How can you blame that kid when you won’t blame me, an adult, for doing things I know aren’t right and refusing to believe in the consequences? If you’re going to be like Jack and judge someone, judge me. I do know better, but it doesn’t stop me. You’re the one who does that. I’ve screwed up so many times and you’ve never thrown one of them back in my face. Treat my brother the same way. We’re a package deal.”

  Moving carefully, I nudged his foot with mine. “That fifteen-year-old kid was my hero and no one, not even you, gets to say shit about him, all right? He was a hero and there is nothing he did or didn’t do that will ever change that.”

  This time I saw it, not amusement, but the tension. It drained out of him and this time when he looked up, I saw Nik. My brother, not the torn up, despairing kid from twelve years ago. “Is this what I get for not letting you wallow in the past, moaning about what an abomination you were?”

  “I was fond of that word, wasn’t I?” I tilted my head down, letting the hair fall over my eyes so that I could stare through the veil with menace and malice. “Boogety.”

  The corners of his mouth quirked. “Yes. Terrifying.”

  “Damn straight.” I grinned. “Now stop picking on that kid. I loved him. He meant the world to me and he never let me down—I don’t care what you or he says about that. Got it?”

  “I believe I have it.” It was solemn and sincere.

  “Good. No more wallowing. If I don’t get to, neither do you. Now get back out there and help us come up with a way to kick Jack’s ass. I’m working with a horny goat and feather duster. I don’t have much confidence in.” Not true of course. I had a helluva lot of confidence in Goodfellow and a moderate amount in Ishiah, but nothing like I had in Nik.

  “Give me a moment and I’ll be there,” he promised. “I’m not looking forward to it after what they saw me do.”

  “Hate to tell you, Nik, but they already knew you were human. Granted this is the first time they saw actual proof, but they knew.”

  He looked down his long nose and snorted. “Go. I’ll be right there. I’d say do something annoying to distract them from my entrance, but that’s a given.”

  “Ass,” I said fondly. “Three minutes or I’ll tell them about the time you stared at my teacher’s breasts. The one that was a stripper? Remember her and how you—”

  “Out.” He pointed, but he was almost smiling now.

  I levered myself off the dresser and closed the door behind me, moving as if it didn’t feel as if my ribs were made of ground glass. I was proud of that.

  Back in the main room, I asked Ishiah and Robin, “Jack . . . what do we do now? How do we figure out how to kill him? How do we even find him? Does knowing he was an angel help us at all?”

  Ishiah, looking less like an angel with his wings tucked off wherever and dressed in a faded blue shirt and jeans, was already on his feet and had been long enough to start pacing. My question stopped him. “It does,” he said abruptly. “Of course
it does. How could I be so blind? Churches.” He swiveled to face me. “He’s trying to save sinners if in a very macabre and twisted manner. He’s gathering followers. He still believes in prayer and souls. He would be most at home in a church. Abandoned ones most likely or we’d have heard about congregations going missing.”

  That was good. That was goddamn excellent. There couldn’t be that many abandoned churches in New York. With real estate at a premium they wouldn’t be empty long before they were turned into a trendy pizza place with stained glass windows of the Virgin Mary.

  I was at Nik’s door fast this time and I didn’t think that was possible. Opening it, I said, “Nik, we know where to look for Jack. Grab your sword.”

  He didn’t have to, and he didn’t have to look for Jack. Jack had found him instead. Nik was gone.

  The room was empty.

  14

  Niko

  Twelve Years Ago

  When I woke up, I felt empty. My mind blank, my skull hollow. It was a long time before a distant and misty path woven out of confused thoughts appeared. For every step on it that I took toward consciousness, I took two back. It reminded me of the dreams where I could see my room around me, but I couldn’t move—the feeling of being stuck halfway between the dream world and the real one.

  This was the same. Or that’s what I thought, but what I was seeing wasn’t my room. It wasn’t any of the rooms I’d slept in, and there were many, in my life. There was the thickness of shadows and the slow swing of one dangling lightbulb. A cloud hung around the glow—a halo around a fogbound moon. It should’ve been peaceful. I’d spent many nights outside under the stars and moon when Sophia had worked a carnival. I’d liked that part, that feeling of floating up into the sky, the feeling of serenity.

  I didn’t feel serene now. I felt terrified. As one half of my mind was hypnotized by the swinging stand-in for the moon, the other half was screaming. I needed to move, I needed to go, I needed to stop him. But where and who, I didn’t know. The adrenaline spiked my heart into a rhythm so fast and desperate I could hardly breathe and I didn’t know why.

  My eyes drifted from the light to the wall. Concrete blocks with the sheen of moisture. Farther down was a cracked concrete floor. More than cracked—shattered. I could feel the damp in my lungs and I could smell . . . I jerked in a hard breath and spasmed, the floor scraping the cheek that rested on it.

  I’d been at home. I’d been with Cal.

  No.

  I’d been at home and Cal was gone.

  I smelled it. One corner that was darker than the others, but even in the dark I could see where the floor fell away into a deeper darkness.

  Cal was gone.

  I vomited. Not much, only a trickle, but it tasted sharply of chemicals.

  Homemade chloroform.

  This time I moved with more purpose. There was pain in my shoulders as I tried to inch across the floor. Stopping, I drew in several ragged breaths and tried to sit up. It took me several tries and nearly ten minutes, but I made it and by the time I did, I knew where I was.

  I was in a basement. Junior’s basement and through the pounding headache the stench was stronger, making the smell of vomit nothing. Death and decomposition. I could see the blurry outline of stacked bags of quicklime against another wall. It could do only so much this close to the pit dug in the corner. The haze across my vision was fading and I saw that too clearly, but not as clearly as the rot I choked on. If it smelled this tainted and wrong to me how badly had it smelled to Cal when I’d tried to tell him this maniac was a grocery store butcher?

  At that moment, choking on air that reeked of dead bodies and seeing that my hands were fastened with police-issue cuffs around a metal support pole, I realized big brothers don’t get to mess up.

  Not once.

  Not ever.

  Look what happened when you did.

  “I talk to the darkness and the darkness talks to me.” Junior’s voice drifted down from the stairs leading up. He would be sitting on the top stair as I could see his knees folded and his scuffed sneakers. One of those sneakers had a single drop of crimson blood on it. Small and as big as the sun all at the same time. “But he’s not all darkness, my master. At times he’s a light that blinds. A light that’s just for me when I give him an especially good offering.” He seemed genuinely pleased about it. Like a dog who’d done his trick just right and got a pat from his master. “I know what he wants. What he likes.”

  I knew what his schizoid delusion wanted too: death.

  “Sometimes he watches from above, when the lightning fills the sky.”

  Skylight. Attic, I thought with instant desperation.

  He stood and walked halfway down. He held Cal cradled in his arms as he would an overtired, sleeping child ready for bed. If it weren’t for his small chest moving, I would’ve thought he was already dead. His head was resting against Junior’s shoulder, his hair hanging in his face, his hand fisted in the man’s shirt, because he, at some level, thought it was me. He thought I’d come to save him . . . not hear him die above me while chained in a basement.

  God.

  “He’s such a scrap of a thing. I’ll bet in a year he’d have shot up like anything. Guess we’ll never know about that, will we? Feisty too. Tried to stab me with a kitchen knife. Kids.” Junior smiled fondly, his eyes bright, cheerful, and so happy.

  So very crazy.

  “I know you’re close,” he said with an approving tone that made my flesh try to creep off my bones. “Not all brothers are, but I’ve seen you watching out for him. Getting home before dark to check on him because your mama sure doesn’t. A thief and a whore and worst. She would’ve been on my list, you know, if we weren’t neighbors? You two weren’t. You’re innocents, but you were nosy and that’s that. Looking in my windows, following me in that old biddy’s giant green car. I saw you at the hospital too. They say you shouldn’t piss where you live, but you wouldn’t leave well enough alone. Nothing I could do for you then, nothing but this.”

  In all ways Junior was more than I’d thought and in the one way he was exactly what Cal had thought. “But for being innocents, for that I’ll give you a gift. When I’m done with him, I won’t clean the knife. I’ll cut you up with the same one. Your blood will mingle. It’ll be good, saving a family. Sending you on high. But first I’ll sign him. I like to sign my work.”

  Cal murmured in his chloroform-induced unconsciousness. Junior smoothed his hair and I wanted to vomit again, but there was no time. No damn time for anything. “I like family. You’ll be together always now, the two of you. It’ll make me proud, the work I do, when I see that.”

  He started up the rough wood stairs to the first floor. “Good.” He was whispering to himself or Cal now and I didn’t know which made me feel more sick. “It’ll be good.”

  I’d fucked up. I hadn’t believed Cal unconditionally. I thought he might have made a mistake. I wanted it to be a mistake. I wanted to find proof first. I hadn’t wanted to leave an anonymous tip and ruin a man’s reputation if Cal was wrong and I hadn’t wanted, more importantly, to get the police anywhere near us.

  Worst of all: I’d wanted a normal life. I’d been willing to close my eyes to anything to get that.

  But Cal hadn’t been wrong, and because of me we were going to die. My little brother was going to die. Sliced up, throat cut, chopped to pieces, God knew what, and his body would be thrown down that dry well already brimming with death and covered in quicklime. My little brother who’d trusted me. There was blood seeping over handcuffs that had me trapped around the iron column in front of me. I’d already started to pull and yank at the cuffs desperately while Junior had been on the stairs and I continued to rip flesh against the metal. Blood was good. It made things slippery and once I dislocated my thumb then I could slip a cuff. I’d read that in a book. I read most everything in a book because books were easier than real life, but look where I’d ended up. Nothing is as real in life as death.

  No
thinking of that now. I could . . . I would stop Junior because that was the only choice I had.

  This was not happening. I wouldn’t let it.

  Arms secured tight, I slammed my hand with brutal force against the pole because pain was nothing when that maniac had Cal. Pain was nothing. Pain was what I deserved. I repeated the motion again and again as blood splattered. It couldn’t be that difficult to dislocate your thumb or break your hand. It couldn’t be. It . . .

  That’s when I saw it.

  The red eyes of a Grendel were peering in the narrow crack between cardboard taped to the glass and the bottom metal sill. Curious eyes, sweeping side to side looking for Cal. Always following, always watching.

  They watched. They didn’t stop. And for once that was all right. For once it was hope and not fear that sent acid bubbling through my veins.

  “I don’t know what you want with Cal,” I said hoarsely. Junior was terrifyingly intelligent in his way and I hadn’t seen it. Smart enough that I could taste some sort of bleach solution he had sprayed down the back of my throat while I was unconscious to keep me from screaming. I knew the Grendel could hear me, ragged whisper or not. Tapered predatory ears were made to hear fearful breaths and screams far away.

  “I don’t know why you wanted him born and why you watch him, but that monster upstairs”—the Grendel showed an improbable stretch of metal teeth, laughing; it was laughing, at the word monster—“is going to kill him. He could be killing him right now.”

  No. No.

  “Whatever you want with Cal you’ll never get it now. Not if he dies”—not if he’s is slaughtered—” upstairs. Do you understand me?” I demanded desperately.

  The Grendel blinked slowly but the scarlet of its eyes flared like a rising sun and it faded into the sliver of night. How pathetic was I, how much of a failure that my best hope for saving my little brother depended on siccing one monster on another? I didn’t care. I’d take any hope I could get.