Downfall

by Rob Thurman

  “Buy Robin a fruit basket. It’ll be forgive and forget, and Grimm has been gating for twelve years, since he was eighteen.” My knives weren’t as pretty to look at. They were KABARs, combat knives, large and thick, black matte, and serrated to slice flesh from bones. “I couldn’t gate at all five years ago, and then I learned.” Slowly. “When I finally picked up on it, I became psychotic as hell when I started gating all the time. You remember.” Psychotic barely covered it. That’s when Niko had Rafferty dial me down, let me gate twice a day with the third one giving me a burst vessel in my brain.

  An explosion in your brain is the ultimate deterrent. Rafferty was the healer who had now twice tried his best to heal his cousin Catcher and to heal me and to end up doing us both worse in the end.

  “After that, when Grimm came along I couldn’t afford to be limited in any way.” I cured myself of gate limitations with the balm of an ancient healer, who no one had equaled present or past, not even Rafferty. Niko’s father, what a homicidal dick, had carried it with him until he died. As I was the one to make certain he was dead, seconds ahead of Niko doing it himself, I wasn’t sorry about the balm-stealing.

  It had worked and, until Jack toasted my brain, all was good. As good as it could be. Lots of gates, minor amounts of psychosis but controllable. “In all those times,” I said hurriedly, “when I started gating, I could detect a gate from a block away, two blocks, and finally after a few years at my best I would’ve known if a gate opened anywhere in the city.” At my best. At the end. That had all been before daily shots of epinephrine as if I were a combination of diabetic, anaphylactic, and junkie. I had no idea how far I could feel them now.

  “Yes, Grimm has more experience in gating—some anyway—than you,” Nik admitted with more concern than impatience. “What does that mean?”

  I finished tying my boots by feel as I sat on the edge of the bed to stare at Nik. Incredulous . . . incredulous and disturbed as shit, because I knew what this meant if no one else did. For all that I hated him, no one knew Grimm as I did.

  That was the bitch about relatives. As much as you hated them, you also knew them. And that I’d have given anything for Grimm to not be related to me, he was. DNA does not lie.

  “A year or two, that’s what it took me to pick up a gate in the city,” I emphasized. “Grimm has been gating for twelve years. Twelve. He could probably detect a gate anywhere in the world.” I bent over and unsheathed both knives from my boots, one for each hand.

  “There is no place I can gate that he couldn’t find us. We—Auphe, I mean . . . Bae too, I guess—have to see or know intimately where we’re going when we gate—except when we mature to a nice grown-up predator, when we perfect the skill, and then we can follow someone else’s gate. The Bae are too young, but Grimm could open gates for them and he did. Grimm followed us here, and he can follow us anywhere. Anywhere at fucking all.”

  Even Tumulus, there was a good chance, but I didn’t want to test my sanity on that one. “I think he always could. When he first appeared in New York to mess with us last year, I think he could easily have followed us to wherever I gated.” To the places I’d thought safe, because I’d underestimated Grimm. Mistake. Big mistake. “I’m guessing he let me think I could escape him because he liked playing the game too much to make it easy for him. He wanted it to last.” I shrugged. “After all, I am the only one left to play it with him. Once I’m gone, he’ll be one bored son of a bitch.”

  I stood, wished I had a shirt, but let it go. We were doing this B-movie action hero–style. When you’re the furthest thing from a hero, it’s almost funny. I’d once played a drinking game with Robin, who wasn’t a Star Trek fan but knew William Shatner personally—who was this century’s cover identity of Bacchus, patron god of wine and theater. Wasn’t that fucking ironic? Whenever his shirt was ripped or torn off completely in an episode, which was a damn lot, we drank.

  I wished like hell we were playing it now.

  “At least Grimm only sent a few Bae after us,” I added. “He didn’t come himself.” Grimm was the type who’d fold a winning hand to keep the game going as long as possible. It wasn’t the pot that he cared about; it was the game itself.

  Grimm wanted to see me bleed. Grimm who was lonely. Grimm wanted to see me scream.

  Grimm who wanted a brother or cousin or any family who was like him. Grim who wanted to see me burn and beg.

  Grimm who wanted me at his side. Grimm who wanted me to join him in taking back the world, because games aren’t as fun with the boring, the subservient, the humble Bae children who would lick his feet in gratitude.

  I’d told him, but Grimm wouldn’t admit it. His Bae offspring, his new hybrid Auphe race, they were nothing compared to the real deal no matter that he bragged they were more evolved, better in all ways. Grimm was lying to himself. A pure Auphe would’ve kept them as pets on leashes, as they weren’t even worthy enough to slaughter.

  Grimm wanted me, the last of the half Auphe—the last like him. But if Grimm couldn’t have me, and he couldn’t, he’d see me die in the most terrible manner there was to die. Grimm didn’t like rejection. For now he stayed in the courting/killing as a compliment stage. Sooner or later, though, he’d figure out I wanted nothing to do with him. It wasn’t because I didn’t know him inside and out that I rejected him; it was because I knew him too well.

  If I’d spent eighteen years in a cage, feral and tortured daily, like Grimm had before he’d escaped, I would be Grimm . . . or Grimm to the tenth power . . . and that was why I understood him as much as I did. I knew him, because I knew what I would be.

  I twirled the knives in each hand and gave Niko a sharkish grin. “Two or three Bae at the most. One of us can handle them while the other one sits in a lawn chair and drinks a six-pack. Which do you want to be?”

  Niko, the dick, flipped his poniards up in the air a bare half inch from the ceiling, spinning at least ten times, and then caught them on their way down without even glancing at their progress once. “Let’s be nice and share. One for you and two for me.”

  In case my concussion or the two days of near coma from gating or unknown origin slowed me down, that’s what he was thinking. “You’re no fun,” I grumbled as I headed for the door. “It’s daylight, you know. If someone sees us, the Vigil will be more cutthroat than they were before, and that is a shitload of throat-cutting.” As the door opened, I spotted a truck that must belong to the motel’s maintenance man. “Fuck me running with a smile on my face, that’s a shovel.”

  “I have no desire to know what expression you would have if someone were to fuck you while you were running.” Niko, at my shoulder, peered out the door, and confirmed it questionably. “But yes, that is a shovel. And that means what exactly?” Niko with his precise language, planned maneuvers, and knives he could flip ten times with such skill that he didn’t have to pay attention at all—Niko needed a shovel in his life like he didn’t know. I was happy to demonstrate.

  I grinned and sprinted toward the truck. “That’s right. You played soccer in school.” Before he’d had to get a very off-the-books job at twelve, twelve, to keep us fed, Sophia included. It was wrong and unfair, but right now it was going to pay off at least once. “Let me be the first to tell you,” I offered with fond recollection from when I was nine years old, before I’d been kicked out of gym. “Big brother, ‘Batter’s up.’”

  Wherever the maintenance man was, as difficult as it was to believe from our room that they had one, he wasn’t hanging around his truck. I tucked one knife back in my boot, wrapped my hand around the wooden handle of the shovel to pull it free of the rest of the junk in the truck bed, and headed around the dingy motel at a dead run into the field Nik had told me about. The one behind the motel, the stretch of nearly shoulder-tall grass where we’d once lived in a carnival. I remembered, but it was faded enough that it barely qualified as a memory. We’d lived in at least ten carn
ivals as kids. This one didn’t stand out.

  Except maybe for that asshole guy.

  Yeah, the guy. Suddenly I remembered him.

  I’d forgotten about him, forgotten about that night at the carnival, until I was running through the same field. Then it was there, the sharp smell of the grass and that dead oak tree that looked as if it gobbled up kids there at the back, same as when we’d set up the tents and rides.

  I’d worked a booth in the carnival. Everyone worked in the carnival. Unless you were too young to know how to walk yet, they had you doing something. One of my jobs was running the dart and balloon con. I didn’t remember if business was slow that particular night, but it had to have been for me to rip him off without thinking twice. Hell, he’d ripped himself off. Without any prompting from me he’d bet me fifty bucks, under the table naturally, that he could pop all five balloons with only five darts. The game was rigged—they all were—and I was a thirteen-year-old who’d been swindling for years. I knew how to take care of business.

  The guy had missed not one, but all the balloons, which, rigged or not, was odd, but he’d smiled, a little sadly, I’d thought, but if losing fifty bucks was going to throw you into a pit of depression, don’t bet. Simple as that. He forked over the fifty bucks as promised, eagerly enough that I thought that he wasn’t as glummed and bummed as he acted. I’d talked to him some—that was part of conning, talk the talk. I didn’t remember much of that autumn, but for some reason this had stuck with me, although I hadn’t known it until I was in the same field . . . with the same smells . . . the same creepy tree. He hadn’t said much, no way was a con man despite the big bet. I could spot one of Sophia’s kind quick, and he wasn’t one of them. He hadn’t talked the talk. Not a con man, so what was he? He didn’t seem to be a perv . . . and the carnivals were full of those. I could zero in on one a mile away. This guy hadn’t looked like the type to be in a carnival at all. Too high and mighty. Too clean. Too wary of getting sticky cotton fingers wiped on him by kids who’d pound past. He looked like, I hadn’t known, something. A soldier, not from the way he dressed, a blue silk T-shirt and brand-new jeans, or his hair, but he was big, had the muscle, stood straight, and walked with his shoulders back. There were lines of wariness and tension in him, the kind you get when you’re watching for the enemy. I knew that because both Nik and I had them. The wariness and the enemy.

  But this guy couldn’t have been a soldier. His hair, light blond, had been longer, to his shoulders—definitely not a military cut. It had looked strange, the pale color combined with his dark eyebrows. His eyes . . . hell if I knew. Those were the days I’d checked eyes for molestation potential and homicidal serial killing urges. That’s all I cared about then. Color didn’t register. He might’ve had a scar on his face, seemed like he had, but it was too long ago. Who knew?

  He’d handed over the fifty dollars discreetly so I could shove it in my pocket and no one would know I had it, which meant no one would try to take it from me. “You lost on purpose,” I’d told him, frank once the money was safe in my pocket. “Why? You’re not pinging on my perv radar, but it’s still weird as shit.” And at thirteen my perv radar never failed.

  Wincing a bit at my cussing, he’d shrugged. “We have the same . . . acquaintance. Robin. He doesn’t have any idea I know about you, I don’t think. He didn’t ask me to keep an eye on you. He’d never ask me for anything at all, I don’t think. He doesn’t trust me.” He dropped his gaze to the ground, not happy from what I could tell, and seconds later his eyes were aimed at the sky and then finally back at me. “But this acquaintance of ours would be pleased to know that I gave you assistance when I could.” He looked back up at the sky, uneasy if the way he was shifting from foot to foot said anything. “And I still like to do God’s work now and again, retired or not. But sometimes I’m uncertain that I know what God’s work is.”

  I didn’t know any Robin and I didn’t care to know any God that had given me this life, but money was money. My brother, Nik, would’ve been offended at that—at the thought of charity. He hated it. Niko was too proud for our lives. I knew better. Charity was a few steps above me waiting in the back of an alley with a broken beer bottle to get our rent or food money any way I could. Charity was fantastic. No one had to spill blood for charity.

  “Then . . .” I’d lined up the darts on the counter and given the intentional loser a smile that felt dark and curdled before it made it to my mouth. “You aren’t doing it for me.” I’d switched the darts around to make a circle with all points in the center. “You aren’t doing it because you care that kind of money will let me and my brother eat actual food, and not just the spoiled hot dogs and barbecue that stinks of food poisoning, all that’s left at the end of the day.” I’d picked up a dart and nailed a balloon head-on. The game was fixed, but I was the one who fixed it. That made winning easy for me.

  “You gave me the money for you. For your acquaintance, which, yeah, we all know what that means. Get out of the closet already.” I’d rolled my eyes. “He doesn’t know, but you’re hoping he finds out, aren’t you?” I was wrong there. He blanched at the thought. Anonymous do-gooder, but why anonymous if he could score points with his generosity, such as it was? I wasn’t going to let that rest. “You aren’t getting any now, but you do want to get some of that. And look, you gave me fifty dollars, right?”

  My smile split into an abyss, and like Niko read to me at night: Do not look into the abyss, lest it look into you. I was an abyss of hunger, homelessness, fear, terror, rage, the target of human monsters with cold grasping fingers and nonhuman monsters with claws, red eyes, and a thousand metal teeth. This guy had given me fifty dollars and thought he was a humanitarian. I’d laughed and thrown the other four darts, each popping a balloon.

  “Go on and tell your friend what a great guy you are. Or get someone else to tell him since you lack the sac, and it’ll look better that you weren’t bragging on yourself. You know, a little less like the self-centered dick wad you are.” There is no one more caustic and hateful than a bitter thirteen-year-old; that is a guarantee.

  “Tell him how you gave a kid fifty bucks and didn’t ask him to suck your cock.” He’d flushed an angry red. I’d guessed he wasn’t around a lot of pissed-off thirteen-year-olds. “You’re a fucking saint, aren’t you?” I hissed. Niko was due to cut my hair and it was long enough to hang far past my eyes when I dipped my head forward, strange and wild, as if I’d been raised by wolves. I might have been more social if I had been raised by wolves and not Sophia.

  Sophia could raise rattlesnakes and they’d end up needing therapy.

  Thank God for Nik—what would I have been without him?—but this asshole hadn’t needed to know that. “Fifty bucks should take care of me and my brother for a month.”

  I’d straightened, tucked my hair behind my ears, and leaned to grab a tiny yellow teddy bear from the wall. “A whole month of eating real food. I hope that warm and fuzzy feeling lasts you as long.” I’d studied the bear cradled in my hands, small hands. It seemed I’d never grow sometimes, always be small and slender like the father who’d spawned me. Not birthed me, but sired me. “There you go. We don’t have a stuffed animal that means self-righteous dick, but the yellow is all you.”

  I’d tossed the bear at him. “You know what yellow means, don’t you?”

  He’d caught the toy without meaning to, I thought. His reflexes were too good to not snatch it out of the air. “Coward,” he said, so low and ill that I barely heard him.

  “Too right!” I’d grinned blackly. “But don’t feel bad. You fed me and my brother for almost a month. What a hero you are! Once your ‘acquaintance’ finds out what you did for the needy, starving boys who pick their next year’s school clothing out of garbage cans, I’m sure he’ll hop in bed with you. You’re a miracle waiting to happen, aren’t you?” I’d snorted. “And if it doesn’t work out for you, my mom charges twenty-five bucks for
a BJ. Fifty bucks for the weird stuff. I could hook you up.”

  He bent a bit at the waist as if he might toss his cookies then and there. “No. No. That’s not what I meant to . . .” He’d swallowed and I remembered the scar then, thick and running along his jaw. “I might be able to save you. I don’t know, not for certain. Your mother would be simple to go around, but your father and the rest of them . . . they would try to kill us. They would probably succeed.” Hands clenching the bear tight enough to rip it open and his shoulders slumped. The weight of the world or just two boys. It’d been too much and his tune changed. “And where I live, I’m not allowed to kill them. It’s against the law for my kind. We can’t have a hope of beating them if we can’t kill them. They’re too strong. They never give up.” This time when he met my eyes I didn’t remember the color again. I was too goddamn pissed to register it. “I hope that you can kill them. I wish you good fortune. I swear that I do.”

  Cold and full of disgust, because he knew—I hadn’t known how—he was probably another supernatural creature. Our personal monsters weren’t the only ones we’d seen, especially in the past few years. I stared at him. “You’re no different from them. They’ll do anything they can to get what they want. You’ll do anything you can to get what or who you want. Wait—you are different because you won’t get involved. Good fortune to me? That’s what you said earlier, right? You know, but you won’t commit. You’d leave us sitting ducks because you’re even more afraid of them than we are. You hope I’m strong enough to fight them when you aren’t? I’m a fucking thirteen-year-old kid. I hope your ‘acquaintance’ knows that, because he wouldn’t give you the time of fucking day if he did. You leaving kids to run from monsters. You, a guy five times my size, says he can’t fight them but good luck to me. As for God’s work, either your God sucks or you’re not doing him much damn justice.”