Downfall

by Rob Thurman

  He was rolling him back now and trying to stop the bleeding from the crease on Cal’s right temple. Head wounds—they bled an ocean and at times you didn’t know if they were barely anything or the swipe of Death’s scythe itself. I pushed Niko’s hands aside and held the gauze in place myself as he tunneled scarlet fingers into his tightly bound hair. Strands of the dark blond braid fell loose and turned the same red that stained his hands. “It was a Bakeneko—it was nothing. Relatively easy except for his stupid, idiotic jacket and I’d factored in the destruction of that. I was hopeful at least.” He paced beside his bed. “But someone shot Cal. It had to be the Vigil. It was dark. There was only the moonlight to use to see. He . . . they had to have night scopes. I heard two of them scream, a man and a woman, when I heard Wolves take them down after they shot Cal. They attacked and ate the assassins. I could hear that too. Why would they when Wolves hate us . . . ? I have no damn idea of their motive. Fuck.”

  I wondered if Cal had any idea the cursing his brother was up to when he wasn’t conscious to hear it and yet butter wouldn’t melt in Niko’s mouth when Cal could know what he was saying. I used to think that he was trying to be a good influence, but now I thought Niko had a bit of trickster in him. He didn’t curse when Cal would hear, because Cal would enjoy it. It was the smallest of evils, but I approved nonetheless.

  Neither Niko nor Cal was enjoying anything at the moment unfortunately. “Let me.” Niko sat on the side of the bed and replaced my hands with his. I didn’t fight him. We both needed something to do and I was already doing my part whether I was the only one who knew or not. He lifted the gauze, frowned at the still-pulsing blood, and reapplied pressure. “I am telling you, Goodfellow, it was the Kin. Several of Delilah’s own took out two members of the Vigil to save Cal.”

  That’s when Cal woke up and offered a more realistic if not necessarily more accurate commentary on what had happened. I wanted to smirk at words that were so very Cal—not sexy reasons indeed—but I couldn’t. He looked . . . he didn’t appear right. I knew if he didn’t seem right to me, it was worse to Niko. Cal’s black hair was streaked in several locations with strands of silver and his eyes were gray hosting a rattlesnake pattern of scarlet. It was enough to lose hope at the sight, but Cal, his words, his actions . . .

  He was the same. For now.

  I’d seen him give in to his Auphe side before, more than once. I’d seen what it was when he went feral and rabid and was lost to his humanity. I’d seen Cal at his worst.

  This wasn’t it. He looked more Auphe, yes, but inside, he was as Cal as he’d ever been. And when he said Grimm’s name, that Grimm had come, he said it with anger, not anticipation. When he said Grimm . . . cousin/brother/Auphe . . . he was saying stop him, keep him away, not bring him to me, not let us fight/join/flip a coin on the fate of the world.

  Cal didn’t want any part of Grimm and that said it all.

  He remained Cal.

  I gently touched the dried blood on Cal’s upper lip that had come from gating too much with too little. Our cub. With the next gate the blood might come out of his ears. Zeus, I hoped not, but we didn’t have a choice. I bent down and whispered calmly in his ear too low for Niko to hear, “Cal.” Niko did not need to know this. Niko would make me incredibly sorry if he knew I’d hypnotically conditioned his brother, whether it was for emergencies or not. I was sorry, but emergencies didn’t come much worse than Grimm.

  “Take Niko and you to where you lived when you were thirteen years old.” It was an age plucked at random but before the Auphe had taken him. Bound to be safer than what was happening now. “Now. Do not come back until tomorrow at the very soonest. Odiemus.” Obey.

  He lifted his eyes to mine blankly and did what I’d taught him over this past year. “Cal, odiemus. Ego enim iam parere.”

  His lips framed the words that didn’t have the breath behind them to say aloud as I’d taught him. A secret wouldn’t stay that way long if Niko heard his lazy baby brother speaking Latin. But I didn’t have to hear the words. I read his lips and knew them all the same. Zeus, I was screwed. Never such a mess as I had made. It wasn’t this Cal who’d spoken. It wasn’t this Cal that made it clear I wasn’t in charge forever.

  I’d conditioned Cal to the hypnosis, but what had I missed? All the other Cals of all his other lives should be long gone, sleeping deep down that I couldn’t reach them. But who had recently appeared out of the past, whole and intact, because of a lying piece of skata of a story I’d told Niko? Who obviously wasn’t going to let himself be forgotten regardless of what I’d told Cal to do so at his panicked call when he’d remembered earlier?

  Cullen. Cullen who was Cal before Cal himself was.

  Ego enim iam parere.

  Cullen obeyed, but only for now.

  Whatever I might command, whatever amount of hypnosis I laid upon Cal would have to get by Cullen first from now on. And as Cullen was Cal once upon a time and Cal was Cal period—stubborn as Hades, neither bowed before anyone, not even me, unless I tricked him. I’d tricked Cal into hypnosis. Cullen hadn’t been an issue, not a cloud on the horizon of this past year, not until I made him one with that damn story.

  “Ego enim iam parere.”

  He obeyed . . . but for now, not forever.

  “You won’t have to,” I promised as quietly as before. “It’s coming to an end, and this time around, in this life we all win. I swear it. Three times three.” Three times three, a bond even a puck won’t break.

  This time I said in English and loud enough for Niko to hear me, “Cal, gate!”

  The combination of Cullen/Cal must’ve believed in my oath, and I hoped he kept believing it or life would get more difficult, if that were possible. The purple and black and gray swallowed him, his brother, and most of the bed. They were gone, far from here. I had no idea where. That lack of knowledge was best for all of us.

  Hopefully both Niko and Cal would assume Cal had gated wildly, barely conscious, and taken them randomly to a place from their childhood, which meant far from here. Whatever their reaction, I could hold on to the satisfaction that I’d been right, little good that it did me. If any situation called for hypnotic-forced gating, Grimm was it. Not that he’d been all I’d thought of months ago when I started this: Grimm, Delilah and the Lupa, the Vigil. If there was a worst-case scenario, a puck had long ago thought of it, written it up, and submitted it as a screenplay. I’d come up with fifteen more scenarios in which hypnosis could be a saving grace, such as Cal beginning to remember Tumulus on his own and his two years there and the insanity or catatonia that would follow. I hadn’t ranked the scenarios correctly or guessed who’d be fighting me on the other side, but I’d known eventually someone undefeatable would.

  Something or someone always did and always had done so.

  Gods, this had better be worth it, as I was done. I was pulling every underhanded trick out of my jockstrap this time. This was going to go my way and no one was going to stop me.

  There were many times in the past that I’d known what was coming but refused to admit it as I’d thought I couldn’t stop it. I wasn’t doing that any longer. I was older and wiser. Once I’d respected my friendship with Niko and Cal enough to let them make their own decisions about their lives and about their deaths. If you love something, set it free . . . yes, well, if the cliché of that didn’t make one vomit, then the added incredible idiocy, naïveté, and sheer laziness of that saying impressed me not at all. I’d seen how letting Niko and Cal make their own decisions had worked out for them in the past.

  If free will had ever had a manual, the two of them had thrown it away.

  I’d seen death come far sooner than necessary again and again. Achilles and Patroclus. Alexander and Hephaestus. Arturus and Caiy. Phelan and Cullen. That had been only four lives among a thousand. I could name them for hours, a graveyard of death before its time. Cal had been right in his pissed-off an
d panicked call to me, half of it. They were karmic gamou dominoes. When one died, the other either immediately or very soon after followed. It wasn’t always Cal, as he feared, though. Niko had gone first many a time himself with Cal following as swiftly as he could.

  That meant two things. The first, I was tired, so very tired of it all. This in turn led to the second conclusion: Their major-decision-making days were over. They were humans, mostly. Humans. Why had I ever thought them capable of thinking anything through? I was a puck. I was a trickster and there was no more denying that. Fate was dealing the cards to Cal and Niko, but I would be the one playing their hand. I was born and bred for this. Whether the brothers knew it or not, they were sitting this one out and I was doing what came as naturally as the beat of my heart.

  I watched what was left of the bed collapse onto the floor. It was a mess. But that was not my problem. I had no plans of cleaning it up.

  “Grimm,” I said, leaning back in my chair with hands locked behind my head. Beyond the bedroom door, the hall was dark . . . except for a pair of bright red eyes.

  I gave my best salesman smile.

  It was the same one that had Eve picking Eden’s apple tree bare to give them all to me. “Here. Have a bite of the fruit of knowledge,” I’d offered with an appropriately devious smile as I tipped her with the last one. She had needed knowledge with her body—the beta version always leaves vast realms for improvement. With that knowledge, I’d heard a few angels gossip, would come shame at her nudity. She needed a little shame . . . let’s not lie, a great deal of shame. I was doing her a favor. She needed to be covered up, and the sooner the better. She made the Neanderthal female downstream munching on her own lice look like a vision of beauty and desire.

  My grin widened as the crimson eyes drifted closer down the hallway, now with the sheen of metal claws sparking in the halo of the bedroom light. Getting the customer in the door was the difficult part. After that, it was all over. That car was sold. “Come on in. Sit a spell.” I ran my tongue over my teeth. Slick. Full of predatory shine.

  Smiling like the shark I was.

  “Let’s make a deal.”

  * * *

  It was three days, not one, before I saw Cal and Niko again. What with being shot, superficially or no, concussed, and having gated too many times on too little epinephrine, Cal hadn’t been in the best of shape. Or as Niko had put it when he’d called me extremely early the next morning after the shooting from some dive motel in Arkansas:

  “Be armed when we arrive home. I want to kill you with a clean conscience.”

  I didn’t fail to smile fondly whenever Niko threatened me with bodily harm.

  He’d seen me fight Auphe, the last troll, revenants, boggles, goddesses, zombies of two different types, and much more. I’d convinced him on occasion to spar with me as well and he generally agreed if I swore a solemn oath to keep at least my pants on. He’d given up on the shirt and refused to listen to my lecture on the history of naked Greco-Roman wrestling.

  Clothed or unclothed, he knew who the better fighter was. Niko was one of the best, if not the best, human fighters alive today, but I was me. In my first fight I’d been armed with a rock. Yes, the rock was the first weapon. When the spear was first invented, I was ecstatic. I was vastly tired of wielding granite and getting blood and brain tissue splashing back on me during battles. Say what you want about preverbal man, he loved to fight. The paien around at the time weren’t any different.

  Niko knew what I could do. That didn’t mean he would back down. That had been true before he was a nearly undefeatable warrior. Stubborn nothos.

  He hadn’t always been the best among humans, and wouldn’t that make him, highly offended, choke on his protein drink? It was true, as thoroughly he would deny it. Niko, a grim child with little in the way of choice, had learned and relearned to fight in this life for Cal. As he grew, he also worked to be the honorable man. Every day he embraced it. Honor and conceit, he would say, do not go together.

  Yet, know it or not, he was so very conceited regarding his fighting skills that when I defeated him sparring, his face would go blank, his lips pressed tight against each other, all holding back his enormous annoyance. He’d glare at his sword as if it were the one at fault then take it to the rack of twenty-four swords mounted on the sparring area wall and place it at the bottom in a sheath with a deliberate misquote of Sun Tzu painted upon it: Even the finest sword will fail you.

  The first time it happened I’d turned to Cal who, as usual, was slouched on the sofa. “The sheath of shame,” he drawled. “It’ll be punished until it rotates back to the top before it’s forgiven.” He’d flipped a page in a comic book . . . pardon, graphic novel. “Niko’s kind of nuts about his weapons”—he gave me a quick smirk as Niko’s back was to us—“and batshit about losing.”

  Ah, Niko, enjoy your conceit. You’ve earned it. Punishing your swords might be somewhat odd, but your personal life is your own.

  Defamed swords or no, sparring with him to subtly train him out of adequate dojo-taught habits into far more successful ones came with incredible ease. That hadn’t been the case long ago when Niko carried a pointed stick meant to be a spear and Cal a torch to set the attackers on fire. I’d first come to realize that these two particular humans kept appearing in my life, from decades to hundreds of years apart, sometimes looking similar, sometimes not, but forever with the same somewhat irritating personality, Cal, and unbreakable nature, Niko.

  I do admit humans didn’t get interesting until they developed into an upright form, lost that matted fur, and eventually gained a primitive culture and language. They had known less words than your current treat-trained Pomeranian, but it was an improvement nonetheless. It still had taken me another thousand years or so to recognize the two humans following me from life to life and another five hundred years before I decided what to do about it.

  The first time I had approached these peculiar humans who followed me from death to life and back again, it was pure curiosity. This was before war and cities. This was a time a stranger could be cautiously welcomed provided he brought food. I’d not interacted with humans before, but I’d observed their customs. I brought a great deal of food and was instantly the most popular person in the camp. It had taken me about two hours to become fluent in their language, surprisingly complex as it had come to be from that of their ancestors. I also brought them alcohol, the first they’d tasted. It was fermented mare’s milk, no favorite of mine, but there were no grapes in this region and I made do. It was a success. Cal—Kree as he was called then—became my new best friend right as he toppled over and passed out across my lap as we sat in the dirt. I laughed and patted him on the back.

  I’d lied to myself. It hadn’t been curiosity that had brought me to meet them.

  It was loneliness.

  I had lived more years than I thought could exist, and it seemed I would keep living through them. If there was an end in sight, I could not see it. I didn’t want to live them alone.

  Patting Kree’s limp form one last time, I leaned against the shoulder of the man/boy who went everywhere with him. I leaned and felt the warmth of another person in more years than I knew. “You are a good brother to watch and protect Kree as you do.” Kree had a temper and no fear, which could be a problem that some people didn’t care for. That would be nothing new in all the future days to come.

  Val shrugged. He was big for the younger age that sat smoothly on his face. His hair could’ve been dark blonde, light brown, or dark brown. With not enough water to keep them all alive, the people of the tribe didn’t waste it on bathing. Their hair in matted twists tied back with cords of more goat skin, it was impossible to guess anyone’s hair color . . . except Kree. His was black, a dusty, filthy black, but black all the same.

  “I don’t know that he is my brother.” He ate another bite of the food I’d brought, face lightening at the taste
of dates I’d picked far from here. “Everyone lies with everyone. We are too few to take one mate only. We need to grow.”

  I could see that, but I could see what I had since I’d come into their camp. Val watched Kree as if he were a child of four summers rather than the same age that Val appeared to be. Fifteen summers for each of them, perhaps sixteen. If they lived to be twenty, that would make them legends in this part of the desert.

  Four or five more years and I would be alone again.

  They’d come again—I’d seen that—puzzling from a distance or retreating if they approached me, but their rebirths didn’t fall in a pattern. Sometimes a hundred years, sometimes a thousand right before I forgot they’d existed. That wasn’t acceptable, four or five years. I needed longer with them. I might grow bored of them or loathe them, but I first needed that chance to know for certain.

  “Val,” I said, carefully moving an unconscious Kree off my lap and onto more dirt for a nice nap. I did a quick check of his movements and eyes. Val had drunk the mare’s milk as all the others had, but not as much. I had seen when he felt the intoxicating effect on him and passed the still two-thirds-full skin to Kree. He wanted to stay alert. If no one else in the camp felt that responsibility, he did. It was a good sign for what I had in mind.

  “Val,” I repeated. “How would you like to learn to fight and fight well?”

  “Fighting is but waste. Waste of blood and lives when all the people could join together, share what we have.” From his dark expression I could tell he thought that’s how it should be, but not how it would be.

  “You’re correct, but, Val, there are too few of you in this land to make that a reality. It would be a long time before that has a hope of happening. I can teach you though. Teach you to defeat any enemies you might have here. You could live longer; you could keep Kree alive longer. You could live long enough to join the tribes, to force a peace, that no more children die fending off attackers with sticks.” It was manipulative, but not a trick. Val did want that, all of it, and if I received what I wanted as well, where was the harm?