Deathwish can-4

by Rob Thurman

  Perhaps . . .

  Perhaps she was correct there. Madness could take many forms. We’d seen that over the years. Although Oshossi didn’t seem that way, it was possible I could be wrong. And even if it weren’t a necklace that had inspired Oshossi to such radical methods, maybe it had been something else. Something . . .

  But was that really important? I shook off a sudden spell of light-headedness. Lingering effects of the concussion, no doubt. But that wasn’t important either. Wasn’t dealing with the problem now more important than anything else? Anything at all? The dizziness began to dissipate.

  Yes, it was much more clear now. With the Auphe gone we would be able to concentrate more on helping Cherish. Because whatever she’d done, she shouldn’t be hunted like an animal. She was Promise’s daughter. Helping her was simply the right thing to do. Hadn’t I thought nearly the same thing at the Harlem brownstone? There was no need to doubt now.

  We spent the rest of the day into the evening discussing Oshossi, plans to track him in Central Park—nearly impossible—and any other information Cherish had about him, what I’d gathered from mythology books, and what little more Robin had provided through acquaintances. Once or twice more the vertigo returned, but my train of thought would shift and the feeling would eventually vanish. The time passed quickly and it was nearly two a.m. before I was home. I’d taken the PATH train into the city and ran the rest of the way for the exercise. It was cold, but unlike Cal, I didn’t mind the cold. It scoured your lungs, made you feel alive, aware, calm, and free.

  And we were free.

  The pound of the pavement under my shoes, the chill air against my face, it was a return to normality. As close to normal as Cal and I would come, and it was good. Up to then we’d had to search for the good . . . the light, but it was here and now. No matter how long it lasted, it was here and now.

  I ran up the stairs in our building, the cold streaming away. Our hall was empty, and the walls were painted a battleship gray. The same as it always was. Normal.

  Until I saw our door, partially open.

  It was never unlocked and it was never open unless we were walking through it.

  I silently drew my sword and slid into the apartment, only to see Cal lying on the floor. For a second I was annoyed. He’d ignored our safety protocols, leaving the door open. He’d ignored some of the most important rules of our lives. Defeating the Auphe was no reason to ignore the rules. Besides, we had work to do, finding Oshossi, and my brother was taking a nap. He was always napping. Lazy as a cat, had been his whole life. This time he hadn’t even bothered to get on the couch. He just lay there in a pool of dark red, staring at the ceiling as if he hadn’t heard me come in.

  My breath burned my throat.

  As if I wouldn’t notice the mess.

  I felt the katana fall from my hand.

  As if I wouldn’t give him hell.

  As if I wouldn’t . . .

  Wouldn’t . . .

  “Cal?”

  The floor was hard beneath my knees. There was blood on my hands, soaking my shirt as the heavy weight of his head rested against my shoulder, black hair covering his face . . . except the eyes. They were half open, the gray dull. Not the cocky and sly eyes that looked at me across sparring swords. Not the ones I’d seen as I walked him to the first day of first grade—clear and solemn. Or the roll of them with his first glimpse of NYC, combined with the sarcastic drawl: “One helluva roach motel.”

  Not the terrified madness of them as I yanked the steering wheel under my hand to drive us away from the burned-out shell of our trailer—a teenage Cal curled in a fetal ball in the passenger’s seat, twitching whenever I spoke and pulling out of reach desperately if I unexpectedly tried to touch him. Months later I’d seen his first smile fleeting in the gray after being taken by the Auphe; a year later I saw his first laugh catch there. I saw his determined stare at his first gun, his grip uncertain. His first kill, a grip like iron and eyes just the same. I saw the ferocity in them the first time he’d saved my life; I saw defiance there the first time he had died.

  The first time he had died.

  This time, the very last time . . . I saw nothing.

  Nothing.

  The gray of gone.

  My brother was gone.

  Then I was in the hall, the katana I didn’t remember picking up back in my hand, my mala beads discarded. The blood seeped through my shirt, sticking it to my skin. My hands were covered with it. There had been ccoa around him . . . five dead. I knew who had sent them.

  I was the gray of gone as well, but I heard a familiar whisper. Cal telling me the same thing I would’ve told him.

  Wake up.

  Telling me that, because brothers know you can fight like this but you shouldn’t. But waking up wasn’t an option. Waking up to his surviving the Auphe but not a South American immortal. No. If I woke up, I wouldn’t be able to do what I had to do.

  Wake up and I’d know.

  I couldn’t know. Not now. Not yet.

  Not until every last one of them was a cooling corpse.

  I didn’t listen to any more whispers, and I didn’t know anything after that. I made sure of it. I didn’t know how I made it to Central Park, but I was there. I didn’t know how long I searched for them. I didn’t know if I found them or they found me. I didn’t know if it was cold. I didn’t know if there was snow or grass beneath me. I didn’t know anything. There was only a whiteness in my head, an emptiness with only one thought. One concept. One word.

  Death.

  There were cadejo, slippery black canine shapes. They lunged and retreated. Came and went. I sliced them to pieces. They couldn’t touch the white void in me. Nothing could.

  The ccoa were quicker, some on the ground, some leaping from the trees. They didn’t die as quickly, but they died. My hands, still covered with blood . . . now dried a red-brown, swung the katana and they died. Some with slit throats, some with open bellies. It didn’t matter . . . as long as they died.

  The Gualichu came—the spider with a thousand legs. A thousand to avoid. A thousand to cut.

  It was timeless in the void . . . the cadejo, the ccoa, the Gualichu. They were swallowed and gone in the whiteness. To note how long it took was to care. I didn’t care about anything anymore. Beyond death there was nothing.

  Only the white.

  Only the void.

  My blade cut through the spider’s bulbous body. Thick fluid poured free. I moved through it to chop the creature in half. It may have screamed. It may have not. Everything was muffled, wrapped in layers of cotton—sound was distant, the moon an amorphous haze, the lifeless bodies around me meaningless shadows.

  Only one thing was clear, one figure sharper than anything seen in my life.

  Oshossi.

  “All this for a thief.” He stood on the swell of a hill. “All this fury and rage over a common thief.”

  Words. Meaningless words.

  I walked toward him, unable to even feel the ground beneath me. Unable to feel the air in my lungs. I didn’t need air. I only needed this. Death. Vengeance.

  I’d said I’d keep him safe. I’d told him that before he even knew what the word meant, and then I’d turned my back and this piece of dead flesh standing before me had made a liar of me.

  A liar to my brother.

  A failure to him.

  A crack appeared in the void and the white filled with blood. My lips peeled back from my teeth. I had no words for Oshossi, because there were no words for what I would do to him. No way to express the agony in which he would die. There would be blood in my head, on my hands, and filling the air like a warm rain. After that, I thought that red-drenched void might then swallow me as it had swallowed everything else, and it would be a long, long time before I came out. If I ever came out.

  I’d lied to him, I’d failed him, and I’d lost him.

  I took another step, a double-handed grip on my katana. I met gold eyes and moved to extinguish them.

&
nbsp; “Nik?”

  It was the only thing as clear as Oshossi. The voice.

  His voice.

  I turned my head, so slowly—the air as thick as glue, and saw him. Impossibly solid, impossibly there, impossibly real.

  Caliban Leandros of the Vayash Clan.

  Cal.

  My brother.

  Whole. Not bloody. Not torn. Not dead.

  How could that be? It couldn’t. It was impossible. A trick. Just another shard of broken glass that sliced my brain.

  “Nik, what the hell are you doing here alone?” He had his gun in one hand and his cell phone in the other. The GPS tracker connected to mine. Beside him a white wolf whose back came as high as Cal’s waist snarled silently.

  A trick . . .

  I looked down. My hands were bloody but not with the dried blood of before, not Cal’s blood. This was fresh animal gore. My coat was streaked with it, too, but my shirt that had been stiffened and caked with the blood of his body held against mine, head cradled on my shoulder, it was clean cloth again.

  But which was the trick?

  “I came home. The door was wide open. Your mala beads were on the floor.” I had dropped them, hadn’t I? They’d held nothing for me anymore. He looked past me and growled, “What did this piece of shit do to get you here alone?”

  Only a goddamn trick.

  I fell to my knees, let the katana tumble from my hands, and pressed my eyes with the heels of my hands. Cal’s hands were instantly on my shoulders. I recognized the hard grip of them, recognized the urgency. “Come on, Cyrano. You’re starting to scare the shit out of me.” I looked up, seized his jacket, and pulled him against me in a rough hug, one hard enough I know his ribs groaned under the pressure. His eyes—worried, determined, fierce—and alive. Not the dead, dull gray. They were alive.

  “Nik?”

  I rested my forehead on the top of his shoulder and struggled to find my way out of my own Tumulus, my own private hell. He smelled like beer, wolf, and my herbal soap, since he could never be bothered to buy his own. He smelled like my brother. He smelled like one last chance at sanity. A hand cupped the back of my head. “Nik, what the hell did he do?”

  I pulled air into my lungs, breathed for what seemed like the first time since I’d seen him dead on the apartment floor. Straightening, I let him go but refused to release my one-handed grip on his jacket. If this was the trick, I didn’t care. I would take it and not look back. I turned my head to see Oshossi still standing on the hill, unmoving. “You said thief.” My voice was guttural and thick. It had been one of the few words to penetrate the void. “You said a common thief.”

  “You know nothing, do you? You truly do not know,” he said, gold eyes narrow with disdain. “You only spring to the defense of family, vampire family, take her word, no doubt, until she could have Xolo force you to take it, whether you wanted to or not.”

  “Xolo? What’s this have to do with that goat sucker?” Cal demanded, gun between Oshossi and us. Behind us the white wolf, Delilah, stood stiffly with head lowered and ears back.

  Oshossi whirled his machetes casually. “Nothing. You literally know nothing. It’s amazing. Criminally so.” He jammed one machete into the ground at least eight inches and kept the other one in movement. “Xolo is mine. He is special among his kind. Most chupacabras have mild telepathy, only enough to immobilize their simpleminded goat prey.” The pointed teeth smiled. “They are nearly as simpleminded as the goats themselves, but, ah, our equally simpleminded Xolo has much, much more mind control than his average brothers and sisters. He is a potent weapon, an idiot savant with a rare talent. Once he has time to study his new prey, to feel out the workings of their mind, he can push their thoughts here and there. And he can make anyone see anything. Put a picture, a memory in their head that is as real as any genuine one. All he needs is someone to pull on his leash and tell him to do it. You can see how valuable that would make him to me.”

  A picture . . . a portrait of my brother and blood and death. How easily I’d been persuaded to Cherish’s way of thinking today and earlier at the Harlem brownstone. As soon as a doubt would surface, so would the dizziness, and then they would both just as quickly disappear. The more I questioned, the further I’d been pushed into ignorance and compliance. Xolo. All Xolo. He hadn’t known us long enough to map out our minds until now, and as we’d previously agreed to help Cherish, she hadn’t needed to order him to manipulate us that much. Not until I started questioning. And then Cherish had him make a kamikaze of me.

  “Christ, I get it now,” Cal cursed. “That’s how she pumped my brain about Nik at Rafferty’s and the hospital—what a fighter you are. Were you the best of us? Were you my keeper? No wonder I’d talked so damn much. I never talk that much. Not about us. Not about family. And I never would’ve thought she was part of the family without that damn chupa. She was looking for the perfect weapon. And, shit, Niko, you are the perfect weapon.”

  That was it, then. My questioning earlier in the day might have hurried her plan a little, but it had been her plan all along. It was why she’d watched us spar so closely, watched us all fight. Robin, Cal, and I; she chose among us the one she thought best able to defeat Oshossi.

  She had also made the most fatal mistake of her life.

  “You can see how valuable that makes Xolo to me, the things he can do. You can also see why I could not allow him close to me with his new mistress. Why I depended on my creatures to dispose of her and bring him back. He is completely docile to whoever has him and feeds him.” Which was why Cherish had become so alarmed to see Cal trying to give blood to him in Rafferty’s kitchen. “And he knows well the workings of my mind. He could have me drown myself in the river, if so ordered, while thinking I’m but walking through the forest.” Which was why he could walk into the car lot but fled the brownstone where Xolo had been.

  He stopped the motion of the last machete and let it point down toward the ground. “I use him to save what forests I can. To save what belongs to me. I want him back. I need him back. He can move the minds of men . . . the will of governments.”

  “Then take him. If you have more creatures, find her, kill her, and take him,” I said, my voice empty and savage all at once. “We won’t stand in your way.” When I didn’t come back from Xolo’s illusion, she’d know either Oshossi had killed me or we’d killed each other. Either way, she wouldn’t stick around. In fact, I was positive she was gone already.

  “And if she were here now?” he said, dark face curious.

  “I’d kill her myself,” I responded flatly.

  Oshossi looked around at the death that surrounded us. “My pets.” His stony face set dangerously, then relaxed slightly. “Victims, all of us. Go. But stand in my way again and you’ll be my victims next time.”

  We went. I couldn’t feel my legs, but they still worked. Cal had come up from his crouch with my katana and wrapped my hand around its hilt. My other was still firmly fisted in his jacket. “Do you want to tell me what the son of a bitch Xolo made you see?” He had a good guess, I knew, but a guess wasn’t the same as details. Details I could not do.

  “No.” There was snow beneath us—I could see it now—white and pristine as the void had been . . . the void that had shattered into a thousand pieces of sharp-edged, blood-streaked milky glass inside my head.

  “You have interesting lives. Even Kin life not quite so interesting.” Delilah walked beside us in human form now, the change so quick it was a blur. Her bare feet walked through the snow without hesitation. “Pretty boy, give jacket now.”

  “I lose more jackets this way,” Cal grumbled, but his worried gaze was still on me. “And stop calling me pretty boy. Upgrade me to smoking-hot man-meat, at least.” Delilah laughed until she nearly howled . . . a genuine wolf howl. Cal waited with uncustomary patience as I managed to unlock my fingers from his coat. He passed it over to a still-laughing Delilah while I immediately grabbed a handful of the back of his shirt.

  “Wher
e were you?” I demanded, and shook him. Shook him hard. And he allowed it without complaint. “Where were you?”

  He didn’t bring up that I’d been gone only a half hour less than he had. He let it be. “I closed up the bar and met Delilah back at our place about two thirty. Like I said, the door was open, your malas were thrown down. I knew something was wrong.” His jaw tightened. “Really wrong. I used the GPS in our phones and tracked you to the park. I made a gate, Delilah came along for the ride, and we pinpointed your location.” He looked over his shoulder at what lay behind us. The Vigil would be busy tonight, if there was anything left that Boggle and her brood didn’t eat. “You killed everything, Nik. Everything.” He didn’t say it with awe—he said it for what it was. Fact. Cherish might have needed proof, but Cal had always known what I was capable of.

  “I’m not done yet. She almost got her way. That evil bitch almost got her way,” I said with an emotion so dark and jagged it cut more easily than all the blades I owned.

  “You want me to call Promise and tell her?” he asked. “Fuck it. That’s a stupid question. I’ll call her.”

  He did. I didn’t listen. I, who listened to everything, paid notice of the smallest detail, didn’t listen. I hadn’t listened to much since two a.m. I knew she would be hurt, even after Xolo’s effects had worn off and she remembered how she’d trusted her thief and liar of a daughter with such an unnatural ease, considering their history. I knew she would be shamed and guilty that Cherish had risked all our lives over a lie and a lust for power to equal the Auphe’s. I imagined she ached for me, although Cal couldn’t tell her exactly what Xolo had made me see. She would guess like Cal had guessed, and all the guesses in the world couldn’t equal what I’d seen. I’d seen Cal die twice in my life. Two failures to protect him; one real, one illusion, both as carved into my memory with the same sharp edges.

  Could a four-year-old be held to a promise?

  Yes.

  Could he do it justice?

  Not always.

  We were headed for the subway when Delilah began to peel off in another direction, the jacket making her barely legal. Her copper eyes looked through me, one roughened pad of her finger touched my forehead, then my chest. “Sick. Run it out. Hunt it out. Fight it out.” She shook her head. “Or go to the woods and never come out.”