by Rob Thurman
Because that’s what a sick wolf would do—go to the woods, whether the woods were trees or a jumble of empty buildings, and wait to die.
As far as I could tell, it was better than that hospital bed I’d spent that night in. The wolves weren’t wrong. Cal had been listening to Delilah, because he had us off the subway ten blocks from home and had us running it. Ten blocks was nothing compared to my normal regimen, but after the battle I barely remembered, it tired me.
But not too much. The moment we entered the apartment, I pulled my tanto knife out and savagely slashed the rug in front of the coffee table to shreds before tossing it into the hall. It was where I’d seen Cal, seen the circle of blood. I still saw it, not with my eyes, but I still saw it. I couldn’t have that thing in here. Not with me.
Cal closed the door behind the flying cloth and gave a light shrug. “Never liked it anyway. Too Pier 1.”
I stood in the center of the floor, with no idea where I should go or what I should do. “You keep dying,” I finally said. I didn’t mean for it to sound accusatory, but I thought that it did. So much for my lifelong vaunted self-control. “You keep dying, and I keep breaking my promise.”
“I’m still here, so you haven’t broken it yet.” He moved in and peeled off my coat. Stained in blood and fluids, it probably wasn’t salvageable, but he tossed it in the sink anyway. “But, yeah, I can see how it’d seem that way.” He took my arm and moved me toward the bathroom. “You were supposed to let me carry the weight this time, Nik, remember?” He turned on the shower. “And I did. At the last second, I figure out how to get rid of the Auphe. And guess what? You still get screwed.” Once possessed by a creature that had lived in mirrors, he’d had a fierce phobia of the reflective surfaces for nearly a year. Fighting the fading but still-lingering effects of it now, he looked at himself in the simple square of glass bolted to the wall. “I don’t look like so much to be such a huge damn Achilles heel, do I?”
I wondered how long it had been since he’d actually seen himself full-on, not just in quick snatches. His hair had grown since the phobia had started, but he kept it cut at shoulder length, so no change there. His face had become more lean, his brows darker and thicker, but his eyes . . . Once you’re no longer a small child, the color of your eyes doesn’t change, but what’s behind that color does. Whatever lurked there had gone darker in Cal. And then I looked at myself to see the same thing. After this week . . . after this night, I’d gone darker as well.
“I think I need a haircut.” His faint grin faded as he went on. “I’m probably going to die before you, Nik.” His eyes locked with mine in the reflection. “I’m not as good as you are. I’m not as smart. And it won’t be your fault. It’ll just be life and death and all the fuckups in between. You made a promise to yourself eighteen years ago when you should’ve been playing with Legos. Well, you did it. You kept me alive. Despite Sophia and the Auphe, you managed to keep my ass alive. Now let it go. It’s my responsibility from now on.” He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Keep watching my back, yeah, and I’ll keep watching yours, but bottom line . . . you’ve put your time in. If I go, it’s not because you failed. It’s because whoever I was taking on was better or luckier than me or, shit, I was just having a bad day. And, hell yeah, still kill the son of a bitch who took me out, make it hurt too, but . . .” The smile was dark, worried. “Just try to do it with a little less suicidal fury. Homicidal fury is good. Suicidal, bad. Got it?”
“And you’ll do the same if it goes the other way?” I already knew the answer to that. I’d seen him dive headfirst into death twice in the past year to save me. He’d do the same to follow me.
“Yeah.” He hung his head for at least a minute, then shook it ruefully. “We’re screwed, aren’t we? Okay.” He exhaled, straightened, and accepted it. I couldn’t do any less for him than he would do for me. “So we go out together, then. Just like with the Auphe. Sounds like a plan.” He pushed me toward the streaming water. “You’re a bloody mess. I doubt you want any souvenirs of tonight, much less spider intestinal goop on your leg.”
He left and I showered. When I was done, we sat side by side on my bed, his shoulder resting against mine to remind me what was true. I couldn’t even go in the living room without seeing the lie in vivid detail—an afterimage on the floor that was as bright and real to me as any camera’s flash. Like the night before, we watched the sky lighten. This time it wasn’t celebrating our freedom. This time it was me not being able to close my eyes for more than a minute without seeing Xolo’s handiwork, and it was Cal not letting me spend that time alone.
The sun came up on a new day.
I hoped it was Cherish’s last.
15
Cal
We ran our asses off in the next week. Literally. My jeans were getting a little looser. But if that’s what it took. I followed Delilah’s recipe—run, hunt, fight. Because she was right—Niko was sick. If I’d come home to find his dead body on the floor I’d have been sick too. Way past sick. Homicidal/suicidal—just opposite sides of the same coin.
And although Nik hadn’t said, my body had to have been on the floor, apparently with a lot of blood soaked into the rug around it. As the rug had been eight-by-six and he’d slashed it all to pieces, that illusionary pool of blood must’ve been pretty damn large. Pretty damn horrific.
When I’d seen him in the park, he’d been gone. What was left was a Niko-shaped weapon, a human killing machine. No emotion, no thought, no soul. Whatever he had seen on that floor couldn’t be erased by destroying a rug, but if it made him feel better, I was happy I’d held the door open for him to throw it through.
He didn’t talk much in the days after, not that Nik was ever one for running off at the mouth. So I did the talking for both of us. Considering my conversation skills—pretty damn lacking—he probably wished I’d died after all, but it kept him occupied. Occupied, annoyed—they were close, right? At the end of the week, finally . . . finally I got a swat to the back of my head when I asked whether werewolf sex or vampire sex deserved the most porno points.
We also hunted that week—revenants, mostly. They were easy to find, only moderately difficult to kill, and so disgustingly fond of eating human flesh that chopping the head off one didn’t bother me at all.
We fought too. We sparred in Washington Square Park, me cursing the cold. We sparred in dojos. We sparred anywhere you could swing a wooden sword or throw a human body, but not at the apartment. We didn’t spend much time there at all. I was already checking Craigslist for a new place. Nik would never be able to walk into that apartment again without seeing me dead at his feet.
Toward the middle of the week I scooped up the mala beads that were lying carelessly on the coffee table and handed them to him. His lips had tightened. “I’m not sure those are for me anymore.”
“They better be, because you have to teach me more about this meditation crap.” I held back one bracelet for myself. “Now that the Auphe are gone, I need to deal with this gate shit. I need to be at peace and one with the whatever. You know, less of the creepy blood-licking homicidal monster thing.” I half grinned, half grimaced. “It seems to put people off.”
“You didn’t lick the ccoa blood off your hand,” he pointed out.
No, but I’d damned sure thought about it when I’d opened the gate to the river. “I did worse in the warehouse,” I responded honestly. And I had. The Auphe weren’t gone, no matter what I said or what the Vigil thought. As long as I was around, the race lived on. There was a different race going on inside me, and right now the human half wasn’t too damn far in the lead. By a nose, maybe, and I was hoping for better than a photo finish. I might not want to rain on my own parade, but denial takes you only so far.
So we meditated. He might not have been moved to do it for himself, but he did it for me. I only fell asleep fifty percent of the time, which put me in the A-for-effort column. We also did the meditating in the park. Talk about being at one with the world. Sit on th
e frozen ground long enough and you’ll be one all right—practically need a crowbar to separate your icy butt from the packed snow.
Niko talked to Promise daily on the phone, but she didn’t come to our place and he didn’t go to hers. I didn’t know if it was just understood or they’d talked about it. As Nik had thought, Cherish had disappeared nearly thirty minutes after he’d left the New Jersey house. Gave her confused mother a malicious smile and spat at her feet, saying, “Seamus was a better parent and a better vampire than you. And I was a far better lover to him than you ever were.” Death, vengeance, and betrayal weren’t enough—she had to toss in a gothic soap opera too. Then with gloating laughter, she had taken Xolo into the night. Gone. And with Xolo holding her back, Promise hadn’t been able to do a thing to stop her. Although Cherish had manipulated us so well that she’d barely needed the chupa up until the end. Robin was humiliated he hadn’t spotted it, and jealous that he might not have been able to pull it off half as well.
I only heard snatches of those phone conversations, but I could tell Promise was ashamed. . . . No, that wasn’t the right word. It was worse than that. She felt disgraced by her daughter. Ashamed, dishonored, guilty—as guilty, I thought, as if she’d been the one to shred Nik’s mind herself. It wasn’t her fault, though—as much as I’d wanted to think it was.
Because her I could reach. Cherish was gone.
But Promise had warned us in the beginning about her bitch of a daughter. It hadn’t mattered. We’d been pulled in by our ties to Promise, and the fact Cherish had apparently changed. Our loyalty to her mother had led us into the trap, and Xolo had closed the door on it. Not intentional on Promise’s part, no, but it had happened all the same. Sucks, but there you go.
Then at the end of the week I’d come back from the deli, counting myself lucky Nik let me out after dark by myself, and stopped at the top of our stairwell to see them standing in our doorway. Niko had taken her hand. I slid back out of sight to give them privacy.
“I think,” I heard him say after a brief hesitation, “that I can’t be with you for a while.” There was nothing but solemn silence from Promise. “When I see you,” he continued, “I see her. And when I see her, I see Cal. I see him dead.” The calm in his voice sheered sideways—an earthquake sliding the side of a mountain into fragments far below. “More than that,” he managed roughly, “I see him butchered like a piece of meat. I feel his head on my shoulder as I pull him up, trying to hold him together. I could barely hold him together, Promise. He was all but in pieces.”
I leaned against the wall of the landing and didn’t slam my fist into the concrete block wall. I didn’t, but God, I wanted to. I wanted to. Over and over again.
The mountain firmed. The ground settled as he went on. I don’t know how he went on, but he did. “When the memory fades some. When I don’t see it every time I close my eyes to sleep or when I open our apartment door.” Fuck finding a no-fee apartment. Robin’s pricey real estate friends could get us a new place. Next week. Tomorrow.
“I don’t expect you to wait,” he added somberly. “It could be weeks or months.”
Or never.
“I will.” I heard the sad smile in the next words. “Who knew after the lies there could come something so much worse? I told you she was a liar and a thief with a care for no one—and so charming she made us forget that, I think, even without Xolo’s help.”
“You had to help her. From what you knew at the time, you had to help your daughter.”
“No,” she answered Niko. “I could’ve remembered a hundred times in the past. I could’ve remembered that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. But I didn’t. I trusted her and I trusted Seamus. I was such a fool. Niko . . .” Tears don’t have to be tangible to be real. They could be something you hear rather than salt and water you can touch. I went back downstairs and came back fifteen minutes later. Good-byes, permanent or temporary, shouldn’t be said in front of others, especially those sneaking in the stairwell.
That weekend we moved. Unheard of in New York, right? Found a place in a day. Where there’s a will . . . or where there’s a will, a handful of pearls, and one of Robin’s more unscrupulous pals, and we had a new place. It reminded me a little of the one we’d had the year before, only fit for human beings this time—half-human ones too. A SoHo loft with a wall full of windows, a polished wood floor, and a bathroom you could actually turn around in. Amazing what a difference having money makes in your life. The one job that had actually made us successful, and the Auphe had done it for us. I shook my head.
“What?” Niko asked as he dropped a box on the floor and took a look around at walls painted an oddly, some might say hideously, butterscotch yellow-orange. Very trendy, though, I’d bet.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Some place, huh?
Still eyeing the orange, he gave a nod. “It will do.”
“Do? We never had it so good. That one place we lived in when we first moved here didn’t even have a stove.”
“Cooking food robs them of most of their nutrients anyway,” he said, unperturbed.
I opened the refrigerator door. It was bright, shiny, and new. Unbelievable. “And the fridge didn’t work, not to mention the homeless guy that was living in there.”
“We paid him fifty bucks to leave, I made you fix the refrigerator, and all was well.” He looked at me, mildly smug. “It took you only one DIY book and three months. It was a learning experience and a trade to fall back on when you forget to practice.”
Yep, this was home. From crappy to better than we’d ever had, the snark moved with us.
We painted the walls a cool, restful green—Zen green, knowing Nik. I eventually stopped looking for giant mutated roaches in the toilet and learned ice came from refrigerators. Water, too. Who knew?
I’d also been staggering to the bathroom early Saturday morning when I passed Nik’s bedroom. I heard him suck in a harsh breath and lurch up to a sitting position. That’s when it hit me: every morning he woke up thinking I was dead—with that vision the first thing in his mind. I didn’t know how many seconds it took for his memory to reset to reality, but however long was way too long.
Cherish had done this. Of the three of us, she’d picked him. I was obviously a little unstable, what with the uncontrollable gates and spouting Auphe while finger painting with blood—no way to know which way I’d crack. And she couldn’t get a grip on what would drive Robin to a suicidal rage, homicidal maybe, but facing Oshossi required both. Nik was the perfect fighter and the perfect choice. I was the switch and she’d flipped it. Now he lived with that every day, and every morning I was dead—at least to him.
That night after he’d gone to bed, I went in to his room and taped a picture to his low, spare headboard. “What could you possibly be doing?” he asked in the darkness. I knew better than to think he wouldn’t wake up when I crossed the threshold.
“I’m making like the Tooth Fairy.” I snorted before ordering, “Wait til morning. You’re always giving me chore lists. Here’s yours.”
Niko tended to sleep on his stomach, hand on the hilt of the sword under his mattress or on the knife under his pillow, and I knew when he woke up Sunday morning, the first thing he saw was the picture. It was the cheap instant kind they took when you were posing with Santa. And I was posing with Santa, hopping up and down on his balls for never bringing Niko and me any presents for Christmas. And five-year-old feet can make a real dent in a department store Santa’s balls, from the pained expression on the chubby face. I’d scribbled across the bottom of the picture: Cal’s alive. Now get off your ass and fix him breakfast. I didn’t know if the alive part helped or not, if it beat or canceled out the false memory, but he did make me waffles, so it couldn’t have hurt.
As I ate them, he studied me before looking back toward his room, back in the direction of the picture. “How did you know the presents were from me and not Santa Claus?”
“Because you didn’t get any. And if any ki
d deserved to be on the Good Little Boy list, it was you.” I leaned back and patted my stomach. Real, non-soy food was so amazing.
“And if anyone deserved to be on the Bad Little Boy list?” he asked, eyes lightening just a little.
I grinned. “Ask that department store Santa. Bet he couldn’t walk for a week.”
That Monday, Nik went back to teaching at NYU. I met him on his lunch break. As he moved through the crowd, I left the corner vendor with my hot dog and a lemonade for him. I handed it to him, and as he opened it, I said, “I was just talking to this guy on the corner. See him over there?” I pointed. “I know I’m a moody, whiny, sometimes possessed, killer genetic monster freak with mommy issues, but do you think Scientology could honestly be the answer to all that?”
Glass bottle held in front of his lips, Nik froze, then laughed. Yep, the Buddha-loving bad-ass actually cracked a smile and laughed.
I smiled to myself and took a bite of my hot dog. Things were going to be okay. They really were. It might be months before Niko was completely his old self again, or as close as this life would let him be, but we’d get there. I doubted a lot of things in this world, but I didn’t doubt that.
That night I went back to work too. It was the first time I’d been back since Robin and Ishiah had exited in a storm of feathers and angry, sexually charged words. Ishiah wasn’t there, which was a good thing. I would’ve had to say something, then he would’ve had to kill me, which would make finding another job a bitch.
Robin did show up, though, and I sat down with him on my break and had a beer. Before he could open his mouth, I held up a hand. “No details. I don’t want even a hint of a detail, okay? I have to work with this guy. If he looks over and sees me picturing you, him, and a feather duster, he’ll ram a beer tap into my neck and serve me up until I run dry.”
