by Rob Thurman
Cherish sighed, a self-deprecating downward curve to her lips. “No matter how much they glitter, the things I ‘borrow’ tend to bore me quickly. I did try to make up for it. I gave Oshossi the name of who I sold it to, but either he can’t find them or he’d rather have his revenge instead.”
“Or maybe,” I said, “you really pissed him off at, I don’t know, the worst possible time for everyone in this whole goddamn room. You think maybe that’s it?” I didn’t care if I sounded bitter—I was. Uncle Seamus. Step-daddy Seamus. A full-grown daughter out of nowhere. An entire family. What the hell had Promise done to my brother?
That had some color returning to her face as she said frostily, “And what did you do to piss off the Auphe, hijo de puta?”
“I missed the family reunion.” I bared my teeth in a humorless grin. “And, yeah, Mom was a whore. Thanks for the reminder.”
It was true. I existed solely because Sophia had taken gold to screw an Auphe. I existed because not only had Sophia whored herself out to anyone, but also to anything. Like Cherish herself had said, everyone needed a hobby. And despite what Niko had thought . . .
It looked like Promise’s hobby was lying.
6
Niko
“She didn’t know about your mother. She didn’t mean it, not that way. She’s one hundred and sixty-five, but in human terms that makes her barely eighteen.”
I didn’t care about Cherish’s age, and I barely heard Promise’s words.
Samuel and his colleagues had come and gone. They’d taken the cadejos with them as well as the rug that was ruined beyond repair. They hadn’t said a word other than a murmured “careful of the teeth” amongst themselves as they rolled the bodies in tarps. They were knowledgeable; Samuel hadn’t been wrong about that. He didn’t ask any questions when he arrived or when he left. He simply did the work, paying his debt.
If he thought he was done, he was mistaken. He may have helped to save Cal, but he had helped to betray him first. Seeing him made me remember things I’d sooner not. The sensation of my sword’s blade sliding into Cal’s abdomen. The absolute certainty that I was going to have to kill my brother to save his soul. That I had failed him. Knowing I chose to die with him hadn’t changed what had twisted my gut, had frozen my brain . . . the feeling of . . .
There were no words.
I, who had read so many of them in my life, had no words for it. The blade slipping through the resistance of his flesh. The blood. On me, Cal’s blood, warm and flowing. Dripping from my hands to the floor. Red with a quick patter like rain. Images and sensations; I had those. So many. But no words. Words were for defining, capturing. I didn’t want that moment defined. I only wanted it gone. Over a year later and I still just wanted it gone.
Samuel could clean up every dead body in the city if he desired. I didn’t know that it would ever be enough.
I leaned my forehead against the glass and watched the lights below, the nearly empty street. Promise’s bedroom was large, her apartment spacious, but now it felt tight and small. I wanted to be down there running. Running was like meditating. It stilled your mind, sank your thoughts in a pool of calm until there were no thoughts at all. There were only light and peace and the ground thudding beneath your feet. Clarity.
Sometimes.
It should’ve put Promise’s deception in perspective, the dark memory of my brother dying in my hands . . . by my hand. Yet somehow it didn’t.
“She didn’t know.” Hands rested on my shoulders and a warm weight leaned into me from behind. “I promise you, Niko. She didn’t.”
“I know.” But Cal didn’t. He thought it was written on his forehead. Son of a whore. Gypsy trash. Monster. All the lies Sophia had told him for fourteen years were always waiting for the opportunity to whisper: They know. They look at you and they know. Everyone knows. No one was quicker to think the worst of my brother than he himself.
But he dealt with it. He always had; he always would. He was strong. Promise knew that and she knew this wasn’t the conversation I was going to have. Not now.
“But Cal doesn’t know.” The breath at my ear was touched with regret. “I’ll have her apologize.”
“Promise,” I said coolly as I straightened. “Stop.”
When she’d asked in the past—most often among tangled sheets, I’d told her about my life, childhood, and time on the run. I told her about Sophia, amorality made flesh, a woman who’d tarnished our lives as equally as the Auphe. The reason I required absolute trust, the reason Cal thought everyone but me lied. I talked more about Cal, the things he wouldn’t have minded her knowing. She’d already inadvertently learned the worst. I told her all. From the beginning of our relationship, I had given her only the truth. And when I asked her about her past . . . I received quick snapshots. The Great Plague of London in the 1600s. How blood was hard to come by then. It was the only time she’d ever mentioned feeding. How you drank to survive and tried not to kill. “Dead cows don’t give milk, do they?” she’d said with a sadly bleak smile. Yes, you tried not to kill, but trying wasn’t always succeeding.
Ugly truth, but truth.
She told me how she had come to America following the Civil War, how vampires blended into the larger cities. Her parents were long dead, or so she’d heard. Vampires didn’t stay together long in large groups. They didn’t crave the contact of their own kind the way humans do. Nature’s way of keeping the predators from outbreeding their food source. She didn’t talk much of her lovers. The hundreds of years she’d lived, I didn’t expect to hear of every one. She hadn’t mentioned Seamus.
She did tell stories of her five human husbands. Elderly and wealthy, but she’d been fond of each one. She’d lived through the Great Plague. I didn’t blame her for wanting to be surrounded by beauty and life after that. I could understand her wanting to feel safe no matter what might arise. And if it took millions for her to feel that way, I didn’t judge. I understood and I trusted—me, who, like Cal so very rarely trusted anyone.
Cherish might have shattered more than a window tonight. I didn’t know. Not yet.
We all had our needs. Promise needed safety. I needed trust. Complete trust. No daughters swept under the rug. No lovers so close that she’d considered them uncle or father to that daughter. She had an entire family and hadn’t told me. Had us work for the vampire who’d once been her mate and hadn’t felt the need to mention it. I had always been honest with her, and it seemed now she had been anything but.
I moved from beneath her and took my sword from the bed. “It’s my watch.”
“Wait.” Regret was still there, stronger than ever, but so was temper. The ivory sheath of a nightgown rippled as she turned over to face me. Waves of hair were twisted into a loose braid for sleep, and a rainbow-chased black pearl choker was fastened around her neck. She slept in pearls. She always slept in pearls . . . even when she slept in nothing else. A slim nude form and pearls—proof that poetry could live and breathe. And keep secrets.
Like Sophia.
She took a handful of my shirt to hold me still. She was strong enough that she might succeed if I put it to the test. “You should’ve told me,” I said without compromise. Because wasn’t that who I was? Niko Leandros, who had his brother and his honor. You fell between the two or you fell outside. It sounded inflexible and it was, but Cal and I had shared that same lying, manipulative mother. We both had survived her in different ways. I doubted I could change my ways now.
“I should have but . . .” She took a deep breath. “You, Niko. You raised a good man. Despite all that he had against him, you did that with Cal. I raised a thief, one who has little care for anyone but herself. I raised a predator who was reluctant to give up drinking when the rest of us did. I raised a liar, who would say anything to get what she wanted.” Her hand released the cloth and flattened on my chest as she went on somberly, “She’s also charming and bright and loves me . . . I hope.” Her eyes clouded. “I didn’t do well. It shames me. I keep h
oping she’ll mature. She was loved, and yet right and wrong are only words to her. My failure, and it’s hard to live with, much less tell.”
Cherish wasn’t so different from Goodfellow, then. But that wasn’t true. Robin did have a care. They were few and far between, but he did care for us and stood with us when we needed him. And if we needed him to stand away, he would do that as well. Cherish didn’t seem inclined to go anywhere. She feared the Auphe, but they were legend to her. She’d not ever seen one, and consequently, in her mind, this Oshossi was as much of a threat. Survival—it was pass or fail. She’d thrown herself decisively on what might be the failing side—and was dragging our chances ever further down.
I waited as she looked away and then back, eyes blacker than the night outside. “And Seamus . . . Seamus, Cherish, and me, we lived in the time of blood. We were a family of predators. We took blood wherever we found it. Sometimes we didn’t kill, but sometimes we did. Three take so much more blood to nourish than just one. I endured it. Cherish wasn’t old enough to know it was wrong, and Seamus . . . Seamus enjoyed it. I didn’t see it in him at first, but more and more he showed it. He had a passion for killing, far more than he had for his art or for me. And because of that, I left him, but not as soon as I should have. I was fond of him. Cherish and I were safer with him than alone, so I closed my eyes when I should’ve been running.”
“But you did leave,” I said, “finally.” There was judgment in that last word. There was no denying it.
“Finally.” Her voice hardened slightly. “And I heard he changed. I saw him again, and he seemed to have genuinely altered his ways. I wouldn’t have involved us with him otherwise, never, but tell you about him and my past?” Her lips tightened. “You don’t know the time we lived in. What we had to do to survive. What the humans would’ve done to the three of us if we’d been caught. You have no idea.”
“No, I don’t, because you didn’t tell me.” Not once as we lay there with sheets twisted around our bodies.
“No, I didn’t, did I?” Her temper spiked. “Maybe I didn’t want to see how you would look at me when I told you in detail the killer that I used to be. That my family was no more than a trio of monsters, living no matter the cost to the innocent.” The temper, the regret—it faded, to be replaced with puzzlement. “You’re difficult to live up to, Niko. You are not quite twenty-three years old. You’re a child in comparison to me, but you live this life, this black-and-white life. You have this unbreakable core.” Her hand rose to my cheek, then fell away. “Honor. It’s a wonder. It’s a curse.” The hand went back to my chest and she pushed me away. “You have your watch. Go.”
I didn’t. I needed trust, but I needed Promise as well. She hadn’t lied. I held on to that. She hadn’t actually lied. But neither had she told the truth—and it was a great deal of truth not to tell.
And that was something I couldn’t pretend hadn’t happened. I couldn’t close my eyes and pretend she hadn’t held back a major part of her life, that she had hidden the knowledge of her family from me. And more.
“You met him while Cal and I were fighting on the beach. He smelled him on you.” I stared, unblinking, at her. “A business meeting or reminiscing about that past you don’t want to talk about?”
“Business, although it is honestly none of yours.” The heat was back, but she reined it in and tried again when I didn’t move, saying, “Except for Seamus and Cherish, I’ve been honest with you since we’ve been together, Niko.”
Except for my family, my mate, my life. Except for all that.
“Except” . . . a small word to do so much damage. This time I did go. Silently. Leaving her behind.
And I felt . . . nothing. I walked to the living room, hollowed out—an empty shell called honor. I didn’t believe in ghosts, not even in our world, yet at that moment I was one.
So be it.
If I was a cold ideal, with every bit of compromise stripped away, then that was survival. If I were an abstract, that’s how it had to be. Never mind the things it made me wonder. As in, Had Sophia won? As in, Outside honor, did I truly exist at all?
Then Cal punched me in the nose and, as a starburst of pain flared behind my eyes and I tasted blood, I decided that I did. I wasn’t precisely happy about it at the moment, but I did exist. “Better?” he asked, shaking out the ache in his hand.
I wiped at the trickle of blood on my upper lip and replied honestly, “Actually, yes.”
“I didn’t break it. Hell, I’d need a baseball bat to take out something that big.” He went to the kitchen and returned with a hand towel full of ice. “Here.” He was the one I was relieving. During his watch, he’d finished taping up the window with black plastic. The Vigil, ever efficient, had removed all the blood and glass with the bodies. If not for the missing window and rug, you wouldn’t have known what had taken place. “And since you let me hit you,” he added, “I figured you needed it.”
I had let him and I had needed it. An odd thing to need, pain. A smaller one to set a much larger one free. If it’s not free, you can’t acknowledge it, you can’t see it. And if you can’t see it, you can’t fight it.
I hadn’t known, but Cal had. Cal wasn’t black-and-white like me. Cal was all shades of gray. He knew right from wrong, unlike Cherish, but that didn’t mean the end result was any different. He never let that knowing stop him from making the necessary choice. He had a care for some, and such a ferocious carelessness for others that the contrast was . . . stark. Cal wasn’t the good man Promise labeled him, but he was a man. He struggled every day to be one—to be that and not the monster he suspected was ready to crawl out at any second. Endlessly stubborn, utterly loyal, and could throw a fairly decent punch when needed. Compared to that, good was highly overrated.
With black hair shoved behind his ears, he wiped a blood smear from his knuckles onto his jeans and offered, “You know, I’ve never had a problem with hitting a girl.”
Promise was correct: I really had raised him right.
I pulled the ice pack away from my nose and felt the bridge—straight and unmarred. As he’d said, unbroken. “A girl might be one thing,” I said, the taste of salt still on my tongue. “You’d be hitting a woman who would then paddle your ass like the Whiffle-ball-bat wielding child that you are.”
“Ye of little faith.” There was a dark tone under the flippant words that had me shaking my head.
I cuffed his head lightly. I did have one person to depend on always. It was well worth remembering. I filled him in on what Promise had told me. Seamus’s agenda had more history behind it than we suspected. It made his brutal jealousy easier to understand.
“In all honesty, I’m not sure who’s to blame, Promise or me.” Everyone else—Robin, Cherish, and her companion—had gone to bed. Cal and I stood alone in the living room. The lights were low but I could still see my breath form in the cold air leaking around the plastic. “Sophia made sure you and I both have our issues.”
“Issues?” he echoed incredulously. “Jesus, Nik. People on Dr. Phil have issues. We have atomic-powered, demonic-flavored, fresh-from-the-pits-of-hell, full-blown fucking neuroses. Freud would’ve been in a corner sucking his thumb after one session with us. And don’t ever think our bitch of a mother did worse by me than you. She stole your childhood, she was the reason you had to stand between me and her again and again, she made you the one that had to tell the truth, because all she could do was lie. Thanks to her, we both have walls around us like steel. If she ever taught us anything, it was that the only one we can trust is each other.”
He looked at me and winced. “Black eyes. Sorry.” Pushing my hand with the ice pack back toward my nose, he continued, “We learned differently with Robin. He lies for fun. He doesn’t mean it. He’s so full of shit with us we wouldn’t believe him for a second.” Which was true, and a puck’s way of being honest. “But Promise . . .” Cal shrugged.
I waited for him to say “I told you so.” He was the one who had smelled Seamus’
s scent transferred from her to me. I expected him to tell me to cut her loose immediately. But he didn’t. Not quite.
“She didn’t tell you the truth,” he went on. “Maybe she didn’t lie outright, but she didn’t tell you she has a kid, about Seamus, that they were a family. That’s a big deal. Huge. If she’s not telling you that, what else isn’t she telling you?”
“You think I should give her up, then?” That freed pain wasn’t going anywhere. It simmered and swelled like the ache of a broken bone. It wasn’t alone. There was anger there as well—anger and betrayal.
His lips turned downward at the corners. “What do I think? Let’s see. I have a woman who loved me but I couldn’t be with because—forget truth—she wouldn’t tell me any damn thing at all. And I’m sleeping with a wolf who if she wants an after-sex snack might decide that’s me, but I still like her anyway.”
I hadn’t known that . . . that there might be the potential for more than sex between Delilah and him. I should have. Delilah wasn’t afraid of Cal. That was rare among the supernatural community, and I knew how incredible that must’ve felt to him—to be accepted. How could he not want more of that?
“What do I think?” He mused as he bent to pick up his gun from the coffee table. “I think you deserve the best,” he murmured, studiously not looking at me as he turned away to absently eject the clip from his Glock and slam it home again. “But there’s no such thing as the best. There’s good enough, though. Sometimes. Can you trust her for good enough?” He started for the hall, pausing only to say, “She made you happy, Nik. A happy brother’s not such a bad thing. And, Nik? I don’t have a problem being suspicious enough for both of us.”
