Downfall

by Rob Thurman

  My living room was more than large enough that I could sit on the couch without invading his personal space, and I did. I dropped down opposite him and clinked my glass against his. He took a swallow and questioned with one raised eyebrow, “Game? What game?”

  Tossing back half my glass, no decorous swallows for me, I answered impatiently, “The game we so often play. You ask, ‘Robin, will you help us on this utterly doomed and certainly suicidal quest?’ And I say, ‘You’re mad. Insane. A demon resides in your head and we must find a physician to do a nice trepanning, drill a hole in your skull and let it out. Now, go away and leave me to drink and whore in peace.’”

  I drained my glass with my next swallow and then pointed the crystal goblet at him. “Whereupon you prevail on honor that I do not possess and accuse me of an inherent courage I would consider worse than a venereal disease and eventually say that you cannot do it without me. You cannot do it without your friend.”

  I’d brought the bottle of wine with me and poured myself another glass. “Of course I’m not able to resist that. I never have been. The ‘cannot do it without me’ part, yes. That I can resist. I’m brilliant. Naturally there are many things that cannot be done without me.” I watched the liquid in my glass swirl as I tilted it from side to side. “But when you say ‘friend,’ I am defenseless.” I put the now empty bottle down on the couch beside me and concentrated on drinking my wine more slowly this time. “I’ll assist with the Vigil. You knew that before you walked through my door.” With a key I was beginning to regret having given him.

  A hand touched my knee, heavy and comforting. “I have never meant it like that, Robin, I swear. I have never meant to use your friendship.” His gaze was steady on mine. “I depend on you like Cal depends on me. Sometimes, like now, I am lost and you’re the only one I know who might have a map. And if you didn’t or couldn’t help, you’d still be my friend. Our friend. That will never depend on what you can do for us. It depends solely on you being you.”

  He leaned back, removing his hand, and giving me one of his smiles that occurred so infrequently. “Not to mention, who else can drive Cal into hiding simply by threatening nudity?” I drank my wine, for the first time in eight hundred years or so speechless. Niko went on easily, blatantly giving me a chance to recover. “And when did you ever see me in a loincloth?”

  “A slave auction in the southern part of Britain,” I said promptly, the taste of grape on my tongue. “You’d been captured probably in what is Ireland now. Tribes fighting tribes. Whoever was captured alive ended up as a slave. Unfortunately that was the way of the world then. But you were apparently not agreeable to being a slave.” No, Niko didn’t have it in him to give in, to not make them earn every single inch they dragged him along. “Barely seventeen at the most, you were fighting your captors every step of the way. You had reddish blond hair and skin much more pale than yours is now. You did have the same nose, however.”

  I smiled at the memory, the first flare of excitement at finding him again. “I’d learned to recognize you both by then, no matter the color of your hair or skin. Your temperaments oddly rarely change”—this life was the most dramatic change I’d seen by far . . . thanks to the Auphe genes in Cal—“and are wholly unmistakable. I bought you and gave you your freedom.”

  “What about Cal?” Niko questioned, rolling the wineglass between both hands. “Did you buy him too or did I go back home to find him?”

  There was the end of the pleasant part of that recollection, too many lifetimes for me to barely recall. Niko wouldn’t remember at all. That was how his particular rebirth worked.

  As I was not reincarnated, I was not as fortunate as Nik in losing those memories, the good ones or the ones that made for sleepless nights. I’d been around before the spoken word existed. When they developed one by one, language after language, I had learned them all. I hadn’t only seen what Niko of that incarnation had done then, I’d also understood what he’d said. Paying the slaver, who I would get back at some day for putting a man such as Niko in chains, I’d unlocked those same chains and told Niko he was free.

  He hadn’t known I was there. His eyes had been wild as his head whipped about, looking . . . searching. He found it in a nearby gawking tribesman. He had then called out a name in a voice ragged and torn before lunging at the tribesman, seizing the knife from his belt, and cutting his own throat all in one swift continuous movement. It happened so fast that no one could stop it—not Zeus, not God, Odin, or Allah, certainly not me.

  He had crumpled at my feet and bled to death in seconds. With my hands wrapped around his neck trying in vain to stop the flood, I’d learned my lesson. If one brother was found, watch him until the other is in sight. The name he had said with black guilt and blacker despair, it would be that of his brother—the Cal of this time.

  Kneeling in the mud, hands and arms up to my elbows coated in scarlet, I’d bent my head and buried my face in dirty red hair. I stayed that way until he was as cold as the ground beneath us and the blood on me dried to a maroon crust. It had been a hundred and ten years since I’d seen him last, and to lose him in a matter of minutes . . . well . . . I wasn’t going to let that go, was I?

  I’d done what I did best, brushing off the death by claiming to be a sentimental fool who hated to see a pet die. I’d talked and drunk and laughed and sucked information out of every man in that tribe until I’d narrowed it down to the three possible men who had killed a five-year-old Cullen during the raid. They’d all gathered around while one swooped down to grab him as he ran toward his brother, who was shouting for him across the field. The one, whichever one it had been, had held the little boy upside down by his legs and cut his throat. Slaughtered him like a pig in the very same way Niko, with remorse-driven purpose, had slaughtered himself.

  I hadn’t been able to find which of the three held the blade that took that Cal’s life and, for all intents and purposes, had taken Niko’s as well. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know, because I’d killed all three. One had held the knife, but the other two had watched and laughed. They all deserved what I gave them. It wasn’t quick as say the slitting of a child’s throat was. It wasn’t like that at all. Once they’d drunk enough to pass out, I stole a horse and cart to take them out of the village far enough that there would be no interruptions, and then I took my time. I couldn’t remember if it was two days or three, but in vengeance of a five-year-old child and a seventeen-year-old young man, neither of whom I would be able to rejoin this time, I doubted it had been long enough.

  Not nearly.

  “Robin?”

  I left the past where it belonged and finished my wine before giving Niko’s expression of concern a brightly wicked smile. “Yes. You went home to him and took me along with you. Cullen was his name then.” That was true. It was the last thing Niko had said before drowning in his own blood. I didn’t know what his own name had been, but Cullen meant cub and so I’d thought of Niko as Phelan—wolf—when I returned those three days later to bury him.

  Phelan and Cullen, another two I hadn’t been able to save.

  “There was a grand celebration.” I saw it that way sometimes, imagining laughter, firelight, the smell of roasting chickens, and that terrible ale. I pictured a small boy who threw himself into my lap and gave me a handful of sticky honeycomb for bringing his brother home to him. Everyone knows pucks lie. Few know why we lie. They don’t know that the truth can be so unbearable that you’d rather lie to anyone, yourself most of all. I stretched my smile wider. “Dancing and drinking all night and well into the next day. If human females were fertile with pucks, I would no doubt have impregnated half your village.”

  Niko snorted, convinced, and why wouldn’t he be? I hadn’t invented the lie, but I’d been second in line behind the one who had. “Thank you.”

  I leered. “For not impregnating half—”

  “For helping with the Vigil,” he interr
upted, trying for annoyed, but you didn’t have to be a puck to hear the affectionate humor in his voice. “Delilah and the Kin are after Cal as well. She sent a few Wolves after him the night of the Howl, but I think we can handle them.”

  Yawning—it had been a long day already—I dismissed with “I’ve taken care of that as well. You don’t have to worry about Delilah and her puppies anymore, not for a while. A few weeks, a month—I’ll let you know.”

  “Why? And how would you know this?” His fingers wrapped around the edge of the rock table that was his seat. Not in a suspicious clench, but in a hopeful and loose grip.

  “Trust me. The Kin is handled for a time and when Delilah and they are back on Cal’s trail, I will let you know.”

  He nodded and gave me that emotion pucks hardly ever receive. Faith. “Very well.” Curiously, it was now he who looked as if he needed a little faith of his own. “I need to get back home. We might have found a solution for Cal’s gating problem today, but last night he noticed he had gotten a little more . . .” He hesitated. “Auphe. A few white hairs. Specks of red that come and go in his eyes. So far it has nothing to do with him gating. It started the night before that and he’s handling it well. No rages. No massacres, but I’d like to keep an eye on him.”

  He stood, took his glass to the kitchen to carefully rinse it out as the most polite of guests do, thanked me again, and was out the door before I was able to close my mouth. Speechless now for the second time in eight hundred years. It could not be fathomed. Yes, my brother was physically turning into the most murderous creature spawned in the mists of time and I should check to make certain he consumed his microwave meal instead of our neighbors. What? Pardon? Should I have mentioned that sooner? Was the “no massacres” comment not reassuring?

  I let myself twist sideways and then fall backward on the couch, vaguely hoping Salome and Spartacus might eat me and put me out of my misery. Not that they ate, being dead and all, but they weren’t above killing large mammals, Great Dane–sized mammals. Puck-sized mammals. At least I didn’t have to concern myself with the Vigil as much as Cal had brought it on himself. It was rather insulting that Niko thought I’d wait for him to ask for my aid. As I’d told Ishiah last night, I’d known the Vigil was a threat, and I’d known about the shooting in the park this morning five minutes after it had happened. The hundreds of my informants had come in handy then. I was a trickster. I knew almost everything there was to know . . . in this city, if not the majority of the world.

  “Help with the Vigil,” he’d requested.

  I laughed, perhaps a little deranged and more than a little arrogant.

  Zeus on High.

  I’d taken care of the Vigil hours ago.

  * * *

  Fingers woke me from my nap, wandering their way through my hair, tracing their way lightly across my scalp, before pulling free and flicking my earlobe with stinging force. Loving, I’m certain, but stinging as well. “Ganbay llebaa, it’s time for me to go.”

  It wasn’t Aramaic that Ishiah spoke, but it was a close enough variation for anyone to gather the gist of what he said when he bothered to speak at all. I did like them laconic and mysterious. Denying you have a type is the same as lying about your favorite sexual position or particularly naughty kink: You’re the only one who loses out in the end.

  “Ish.” I scowled in sleep-soaked recognition while rubbing my ear before I snapped to a hyper state of vigilance I’d learned over too many battles. It was a lesson well learned long before I’d fought in history’s first genuine war. One should always be alert. Now, in particular, was a time to keep that in mind. I had many irons in the fire and only two hands to juggle them. Readiness was all. Relax for one heartbeat alone and death could be upon you or upon those more important than you.

  I opened my eyes, released my ear, and rolled over onto my back to offer a comfortably loose and forgivingly drowsy grin to him as he leaned, resting his folded arms on the back of the couch. Although the lack of anxiety was a lie and the comfortable ease was false, it was the best intentioned of deceptions. A gift better than the truth. Ishiah knew part of my plans, but not all of them, not yet. Nor did he know quite how risky they were, how dependent on every single thing falling perfectly into place. Let him keep his peace of mind a little longer.

  “Ganbay llebaa,” I echoed with a more salacious flavor to the words. “Thief of your heart.” A closer approximation would be “heart thief” with the implication that the theft had been devious, not entirely desired, yet unexpectedly welcome. It was a complex and ancient language. Ishiah knew that his version would be even more appreciated and closer to a puck’s first love: our ego.

  “Do you tell the other peris that’s what you call me? Do they know the romantic and poetic soul that lurks behind their boss’s sour expression and foul temper?” I asked, reaching up to seize a strand of his hair that had fallen loose around his scarred face. I liked it that way. It reminded me of the first time I’d seen Ishiah, in some nameless battle, smiting demons or those who’d partaken of shellfish or pork or they who had labored on the Sabbath. I couldn’t remember the insignificant details of it all having concentrated rather obsessively on him, who had then been an angel.

  The light blond hair had been wild in the wind created by the thrashing of his muscular white-and-gold wings. Or I’d guessed at the time that was the color of the feathers under the ubiquitous layer of desert sand. That combined with what very little angels had worn in those days—to call it a loincloth would be generous—with the contrast of dark eyebrows and a pugnacious jaw ridged by scar tissue was positively created to catch my attention. Lust at first sight, I was quite used to by then and more than willing to admit it to him once the smiting was done. And admit it quickly I had.

  It you do not ask, you do not receive. I knew Ishiah had plagiarized that from me and put his own twist on it before passing it on to a scribbling monkey named Luke or Matthew or Roscoe. Whoever.

  It was too bad plagiarism was the least annoying result of that situation. Ishiah had been my first angel. I’d heard of them for years, of course, yet not crossed paths with one. Ishiah had managed to replace my happy-go-lucky lust with fury in one sentence. He was gifted in that manner.

  “Or,” I continued, “do you tell them you call me an oversexed, disease-ridden, humping, sinning goat who would burn in Hell for all eternity while forced to consume my own flaming intestines if only you had the jurisdiction? You remember? As you told me when we first met?” I released his hair to take a handful of his shirt and pull him over the back of the couch and on top of me. From a distance his eyes were blue-gray, a rainstorm on the horizon, but up close they were blue. Clear blue but for a single large speck of gray next to the pupil of his right one. I ran my thumb along his stubborn chin. I couldn’t see the bristle, but I could feel the invisible prick of it against my skin. A hundred years as an ex-angel and he still forgot to shave some days.

  With an impatient huff, he moved in for a kiss, warm and with enough hungry bite to it to banish that fragment of desert-worn history running through my mind. After a year, the slide of tongue, the teeth nipping just short of painful, the unique taste of rain and ozone. He’d left Heaven, but the sky he’d flown in and its more dangerous moods still burned in him. The taste and feel were familiar enough to revel in with the added comfort of knowing I had all the time in the world. It was also thoroughly addicting and left me craving more. Now. Immediately. Perhaps never to stop.

  Sadly, what I wanted and what the world was delivering at my doorstep were poles apart. I had all the time in the world, but others did not.

  I licked a stripe across the slightly salty skin of his throat before slapping him firmly on his ass, not as awe-inspiring as mine naturally, but as close as one could come without being me. “Yes, time for you to go. We don’t have long.” His frown was darkly resigned. The gray-and-blue that studied me was clouded with hesitation and
worry. But other things as well . . . better things . . . things meant only for me and not for the dangerous circumstances that surrounded us. My lips curved. “Aren’t you thankful I taught you tongues are for more than talking, aetos-mou?”

  My eagle. He pretended that the name meant nothing, but he had yet to fail to smile when I called him that . . . as opposed to the time he cut me off from sex for a week when I called my turtledove—in front of Niko, who understood Greek. Niko, despite his not especially vast sense of humor, had found it rather amusing, enough so to choke on his tea. Niko had been more entertained and me not at all when Ishiah stood firm on the no sex punishment. A hard lesson learned.

  Unfortunately not the type of hard lesson for which I had a great deal of enthusiasm, a greater amount of equipment, and a safe word.

  Pity.

  “Ass.” He kissed me, quickly this time, and then sat up. “They don’t ask what I call you, the other peris. They see it in my eyes whenever I watch you walk into the bar.”

  Words such as that should heat you from within, not make you feel as if you’re tempting fate. I hid them away that I alone and not the fickle finger could find them. With that, I shoved Ishiah to his feet. “If you can’t get this done, if someone wants to take issue with you over this”—brutal and violent issue—“tell me now. We’ll find another way.” Sitting up, I ran a hand over my hair, smoothing down what Ishiah’s fingers no doubt had teased into a mess of which only Einstein would’ve approved. “I don’t trust them.”