Downfall

by Rob Thurman

  “They are me or rather I was once them. You do trust me.” He’d hidden his wings and now stood straight and tall, the ex-soldier he was.

  “Yes, yes, I trust you.” I grimaced as he tried and failed to not look as if I’d given him the keys to ten absolutely street-illegal Lamborghinis with that one simple word. But in a way, I had. Pucks didn’t have a word for trust in our mother tongue; it was that foreign a concept. We had to coopt the term from other languages. Trust from a puck meant . . . it was . . . I couldn’t. I didn’t have the luxury to think about that, not now when I least could afford being distracted. And Ishiah was the very definition of distraction.

  “But I don’t trust them, whether you were once them and whether they are uncannily good at locating people.” And of that we were in desperate need as my earthbound informants weren’t as effective as those who could fly. “And you shouldn’t either.”

  I held up an imperious hand—I’d taught that to Caesar—as he started to speak. “You think that you know them, but you don’t. You knew them a long time ago. Do not assume all will be the same. They aren’t your kind any longer. Try to be prepared for it, that’s all I ask.” For now, that’s all I asked. When he returned, I’d ask for removal of clothing and a vigorous round of Kama Sutra bingo, but at present a healthy sense of suspicion and caution to keep him unharmed was all I required.

  “What you want is in everyone’s best interest. Heaven’s as well. They’ll see the positive side of cooperation,” Ishiah promised. He promised it with a defiant glare that didn’t bode well for our potential allies if they disagreed with him. He was young, to think logic made such a difference. I forgot that at times. He was four thousand years old, give or take, but I was millions of years and I knew what he did not. Logic was a fantasy. Reason and common sense were the unicorns of the thinking world. Glorious and wonderful for the most naïve to imagine, but did they exist?

  It depended on who you asked.

  Virgins didn’t count.

  I hoped he was correct, because if we couldn’t find this particularly talented individual that Niko, Cal, and I all knew, none of this counted for anything. I followed Ishiah to the door, where he suddenly stopped, turned, and leaned forward to rest his forehead against mine. As he closed his eyes, one hand came up to tightly cup the back of my neck. We stayed that way for minutes, maybe longer. His breath was warm against my ear, steady and even, until it finally hitched slightly. “So . . . time for your best lie?” My breezy and casual attitude when he’d woken me up hadn’t fooled him as much as I’d hoped.

  “I can do this. All of it,” I promised. Including the schemes he knew nothing of yet, which was for the best if he hoped to concentrate on his own mission. “Everyone has a weak spot.

  “Everyone is a sucker, one way or the other, and I haven’t met a sucker I couldn’t take since day one,” I added with the unshakeable arrogance and cold confidence of Hob the Elder and the Younger, the first and second trickster to walk the earth. “I can do this.”

  It was true. I could . . . or I would die trying. That wasn’t a lie unless it was a white one. I hid any doubts using all my skill from the time when rivers were far more often made of lava than water. No one would see them, including those who knew more of me than most.

  He nodded with visible relief, reassured and full of faith. The faith wasn’t my fault. That came from Above. By no means would I teach anyone such a disastrously simplistic and deluded concept—not if I wanted them to survive for very long. I’d been working on that with him, trying to shove him into reality, but he was stubborn. Hopefully there would be a future to work on it more. I kissed him again, slapped his ass one more time for luck—and because it truly was one fine ass—and he left.

  He left, shutting the door behind him, without seeing the feather I’d plucked from wings of invisibility to have it turn to gold-dusted ivory resting in my hand. Ridiculous. Sentimental. All the things pucks were not. I tucked it down inside my shirt, pulled in a deep breath, and switched gears. I ruthlessly forced myself back to my birthright—the engineer of deserved downfalls. Scourge of any sucker who crossed my path. And was there anyone who wasn’t a sucker? To me? No. I was Goodfellow. There was no trick I hadn’t pulled, no lie I hadn’t invented. Grimm thought the Auphe played games. I had learned to cheat before games existed. It was time to remember that. I smiled to myself, tasting the past victories—sweet and sharp like blood—of those games on my tongue, before moving my thoughts to the next step.

  Now . . . what did I have next on my list?

  Ah yes.

  RV parks.

  6

  Caliban

  “Shit, okay, that’s a big needle.”

  Niko’s sideways glance at me was full of long-suffering patience stretched to a saint’s limits and ten times beyond. It was the look that had me all but hearing the Vatican knocking at our door to give my brother the thumbs-up on miracles confirmed—canonizing is a go—and I folded instantly. “Hey, not that big. Sorry. It must be low blood sugar affecting my eyesight. . . . I’ll eat something. Some pizza rolls maybe while you work with those completely, absolutely normal-sized needles. Perfect for the job.”

  “Hmm.” Nik continued working on upgrading the epinephrine injectors to ones that could pierce denim and flesh in one go, which, I didn’t care what his expression said, meant one big fucking needle. He was settled in a sterile drape-covered area on the floor between the couch and our sparring gym mats. I didn’t know why he bothered with sterility, as my boosted Auphe immune system hadn’t once found an ordinary, human-style infection it couldn’t beat.

  That was bullshit. I knew why he was fixated on controlling the things that he could, as thanks to me, there were so many he couldn’t control that we’d both lost count. His brother was turning into an Auphe and they don’t make a pill for that, do they? No, they do not. Instead he’d work on improving the adrenaline injection system because longer needles are easy to obtain if you’re willing to go into the dark and nasty parts of the city. And while his brother might not have had any type of infection in his life, that didn’t mean we couldn’t take precautions and keep that one hundred percent resistance at . . . one hundred percent.

  If Nik couldn’t do anything else, he could do those things. He knew more about coping mechanisms than four out of five psychiatrists.

  And if he was able to scare the shit out of me with a giant freaking needle, that was a bonus I didn’t begrudge him.

  Much.

  I loaded the microwave as I watched him take apart the autoinjectors. If I could’ve thought of anything to say to make him feel better, I would have . . . but what? I’m turning into an Auphe, more of one than I already am, but no worries. I only killed one person today. You can’t beat that, can you?

  That wasn’t going to improve his mood.

  The gating was still working at least. I’d gated three times since the park. I’d felt a little strain at the fourth one. Hopefully that would hold and I might only have to shoot up once in the morning and be a gating madman all day. Neither of us brought up the fact that if I grew immune to the epinephrine and this adrenaline-gating experiment didn’t keep working, Grimm would kill me. On the other hand, if it did keep working, there was a chance I could become more and more homicidal like I’d done in the past, until I killed Grimm, solving all our problems . . . unless I decided to kill Grimm and everyone else in the tristate area. Psychotic killing sprees were not as predictable as you’d like.

  Not good. That’s all I could think when mentally running through any of the scenarios and conversations Niko and I had gone over in covering them. Catastrophic, wrath of nature, acts of God not covered by insurance. These were the levels of “not good” I was anticipating.

  The truest thing I could say would be if I managed to kill Grimm, then kill me. Save the world. Save yourself. Save everyone from what I might do. Let Promise and Robin carry yo
u through the aftermath and live your life. Don’t throw it away if I’m already gone. The truest thing . . . and if I said it, Niko would lose his mind. It would be on the inside where none of us could see. Quiet, hidden, and unrevealed to the rest of us. He’d do it, though, and follow me to my death anyway. Whatever I said or begged for on my knees would have less meaning than if he were deaf and blind. He did everything and anything for me, always had and always would, and it made me feel like an unshakable goddamn burden at times.

  Other times, like now when the microwave dinged and I wondered if Niko would be shocked if I threw a plate of pizza rolls in his face, I felt as if he was the burden. He was the heavy weight that whispered in my ear that he had a lover, he had friends, he had an actual career teaching, and a life to live, but if I tripped up once and Grimm or bad genes or a crazed human militia group took me down, I was condemning him along with me. Couldn’t he live for himself like normal selfish people?

  I opened the microwave door, choking on the resentment and guilt, stared at the steaming pizza rolls, then at Niko as he tore apart medical apparatus. For me naturally. Always for goddamn me. I glowered back at the sizzling rolls again. They would decorate his face in a napalm equivalent of tomato sauce and pepperoni perfection if only I’d pick up the plate and . . .

  “Problem?”

  I laughed at Nik’s question. It was full of the irritation, fatalism, and unfailing affection of a big brother. The remorse and bitterness stewing in me were gone as quickly as the first pizza roll I swallowed. I was an idiot. We had talked about this too many times in the past to bother mentally bitching to myself about it. I went first; he would come after me. So what? Did I think it would be different if the opposite were to happen? If Niko left me, was I capable of burying him, mourning, and moving on? Fuck, no. I couldn’t begin to believe that.

  We’d known this since we’d known anything at all. As kids and then teenagers and early twentysomethings, we’d had no one but each other. We’d locked into each other like puzzle pieces. A few years later, we did have more and that was . . . good. Something I’d not dreamed of and something incredibly amazing. We had a life. It was dangerous and usually crazy as hell, but it was a real life. Who’d have pictured that? Not me, but, real life or not, we’d had it for four or five years at the most and that didn’t compare to the earlier twenty-odd years when we were the solitary certainty in each other’s life.

  That had set around us more solid than stone. When people and situations had come along in our path to change that, it was too late. We were whole in ourselves, stronger than anything outside us, and we wouldn’t be changed. Not for any reason, no matter how convincing and valid that reason could be.

  Sometimes nothing can be done. We are who we are. It’s no one’s fault.

  Thanks to Robin I knew there were other lives. Different lives. That meant that back in ye olden times if my drunk ass had fallen off a horse and broken his neck, because that was absolutely how I’d shuffle off at least one mortal coil, then Nik would’ve had Goodfellow, probably a wife, and some little ninjas running around. He’d have had reason to go on. We wouldn’t have had the cluster fuck of sociopath mother, packs of Auphe chasing us, and my monster genes to make our codependency stronger than gravity. I wanted Niko to have that chance, past or future lives to come. I couldn’t imagine it for myself—then again my imagination wasn’t the best, and that was the last problem I needed to worry about.

  Past and future lives were covered. That let us give all our attention to this one. It wasn’t a lap dance, but I’d take it anyway.

  “No, no problem,” I answered. “Want some commercially inedible food source before we go out on the job tonight?” I removed the plate from the microwave and waved it in his general direction in offering.

  “I’ll survive without. The thought is appreciated nonetheless.” His face reflected polite dismissal, but the apology was semigenuine. And the day kept getting better and better. I wasn’t dead yet and more pizza rolls for me—there was no downside. As I popped one in my mouth and hissed at the lava-temperature heat of the filling, Niko completed one EpiPen and set it aside. “Robin said he would help us with the Vigil.”

  I swallowed the nuclear meltdown that was the second pizza roll, and it started a raging wildfire in my stomach. It wasn’t close to being a new sensation for me, and I picked up a third one that singed my fingertips. “Why?”

  Niko had gone to Robin’s to ask for his assistance with the Vigil; that wasn’t news. The Vigil, however, were powerful and based in many of the larger worldwide cities. They were highly armed and trained humans who were determined that humanity and the supernatural should not meet, not shake hands, not party and not ever limbo together. I understood their point. At least half of the paien thought of humans as free-range, pluck-it-yourself chickens. That might seem harsh, but there weren’t a fraction as many paien compared to humans, and most of them had been here first. I thought of them as lions . . . or tigers; there weren’t many, this world belonged to them too, and with billions of humans, which side could afford to miss a few? It didn’t hurt that most grazed on dopers, muggers, the types that lurked in places that no one would be if they didn’t have reasons, bad reasons, to be there.

  And if no one hired me to take out the ones that were the equivalent of rabid and munching on more wholesome folk, I wasn’t that interested. There was a food chain, and if not paid to think otherwise, I respected it—unless the killing was done merely for sport and not survival. That wasn’t in anyone’s best interest. Otherwise, everything worked out fine as long as the paien used common sense and didn’t reveal themselves to humans. Didn’t let humanity know that, shocker, they weren’t the top rung on evolution’s ladder. Didn’t take their blanket of obliviousness, shred it apart, and show the bloody teeth and claws that hid behind it.

  Like I had done.

  “Why?” Niko, sitting on the floor with legs crossed, repeated my question, and that was not a sign of pleasant things to come. I’d first heard it as a kid when I set a neighbor’s trailer on fire. They weren’t in it at the time and it had to be done. It wasn’t as if arson was my hobby. But the bitching had gone on for weeks after and it all started with the same tone of “You have brain cells for a reason. Use them.” “Did you say ‘why’?”

  I put the plate down with one hand before tossing the pizza roll from one to another in hopes of cooling it down. I only succeeded in burning the fingers of both hands instead of just the one. “The Vigil is right. I screwed up in the biggest, baddest way I could. I’m not sorry about what I did. You’re alive and you might not have been if I hadn’t broken the rules.” Broken my brain, broken it all.

  “But you’re not their brother and you don’t mean to them what you mean to me.” I gave up and discarded the blazing roll back on the plate. “I get why they think I’m a risk. When it comes to you, I am. I always will be.” I slammed the microwave door shut and leaned against the breakfast counter. “Robin knows that too, and he knows that getting in the crosshairs of the Vigil is not worth his life. It’s my problem, not his.”

  My problem. Just once in my life I was going to get someone to believe that. Not Nik, I knew, but someone. It’s my nightmare, not yours, stay away. Save yourself. I had one friend. I’d like him to live.

  Just once . . . was it that much to fucking ask?

  Niko had lowered his eyes to start working on the second EpiPen. “While I was at Robin’s requesting help with the Vigil, he told me how he met us in one of our previous lives. I’d been a slave captured from another tribe in Ireland. He bought me, gave me my freedom. He hadn’t thought for a moment whether or not to do it. I could see that,” he said, hands working faster with repetition.

  “He has been at our sides too many times we can’t remember, and that won’t change. The Vigil or Grimm or the entire Auphe race, he won’t abandon us. You don’t doubt me. You shouldn’t doubt him.” His gloved hand
s reassembled the second device. “And we annihilated the entire Auphe race—twice—or did you forget?”

  I knelt opposite him on the edge of the blue paper cloth spread on the floor. I didn’t bother trying to explain it wasn’t about doubt. He knew. I’d done the same before and dragged Robin into our mess when it was Niko who was in trouble. Yeah, I was hypocrite enough to expect people to have self-preservation when it came to helping me, to recognize who I was, what I was, and that it wasn’t worth gambling their lives. At the same time I would risk others for Niko . . . whether they volunteered or not. They could kick and scream all they wanted; I’d chalk up to A-plus enthusiasm and toss them under that bus if it would save my brother’s life.

  Nik wasn’t me. He was good and, in his own way despite all the lives he’d taken and his lethal abilities, pure. I was not. But there was a common exclusive selfishness we shared. Niko was good, the best man I knew. It didn’t change the fact that Niko would sacrifice anyone for me if it came to that. Anyone at all. Friend or lover.

  I didn’t much care that I wasn’t good. I didn’t agonize over the state of my conscience . . . or the lack of the largest part of it. Not until long after I’d drowned it in blood, when it was far too late to make other choices. That was the difference that kept me quiet. If my brother could scratch out any scrap of denial for himself, I wouldn’t take it away from him. How could I when I was the reason he’d compromise himself?

  We’d both toss you under the bus—facts were facts—but Nik was the only one of us who’d feel bad about it.

  Visually examining, but not touching, one of the completed autoinjectors with four times the normal dose and with the unfortunately necessary extra-long needle, I said, “Ireland? Green beer and leprechauns. If you were taken as a slave, where was I? Packed with enough muscle and rivers of ginger testosterone they had me standing at stud?”