by Rob Thurman
I had already heard Nik’s katana come out and was pissed as shit someone had taken off my holster with my guns or that I thought I couldn’t eat a goddamn bologna sandwich without being armed with claws. “Are we going to get down to the business of killing each other or what?” I snarled. “Because that would be infinitely less painful than listening to your shit.”
But at least someone, or a few someones, was excessively armed, as no fewer than five knives were slicing through the air toward Grimm. All disappeared with the faintest of dark shimmers before they reached him and he paid no attention to the attempt. Why would he, something so easy that he hadn’t needed to think about it? I’d killed people with gates and a thought . . . but it had taken at the very least that one thought. With Grimm it was as automatic as breathing.
Holy shit.
It was true. A thought I’d considered, but I hadn’t let myself believe it. Not wanting to believe didn’t change what I was seeing. Denial couldn’t defeat the truth, and the truth was right there.
“Getting down to business. Is that what you want?” Grimm sounded mockingly doubtful but agreed. “Then we will. One of us will die. Maybe both. That was always meant to be. But will that be now or a hundred years from now when we tire of chasing herds of humans in a world once ours again?” He shrugged and I swear to God I recognized the dismissive, bored sentiment as a mirror image of mine come back to bite me in the ass.
“We will fight, however. For fun first, and you know how fun it will be, and to prove yourself worthwhile, because you are far from showing that. Definitely. We will fight. Anytime, anyplace. You name it, Caliban, but only between you and me. Understand? The first rule of Auphe Club.” He made a movie reference. His grin, metal ripping through gums to drop over his human teeth, was so destructively elated that I could see his own blood coating his teeth; he cared that little about death and life that he’d made a movie reference. I didn’t know if that was more disturbing or the fact that he was a monster and could make movie references. “Call me.” He held up his other hand and made the universal sign to go with the words and that was somehow worse than the blood dripping from his mouth. Such a casual human gesture. My control between human and Auphe was sketchy, but Grimm’s . . . his was ironclad on both sides. His bloody grin widened as he tossed me the cell phone and was gone the moment it left his hand.
I caught the phone, furious, full of adrenaline that had nowhere to go because it was now clear that while Grimm could follow my gates, his gates were far beyond my abilities. Worse, I was more than a little confused. He was much easier to deal with when I was full-blown Auphe who didn’t know doubt or fear. This . . . I dropped the phone on the granite kitchen counter as if it were a face-eating Amazonian spider. “He left us baby pictures and quoted Fight Club.” And he’d bled while he did it, showing his teeth, thinking nothing about it. Blood to Auphe, whether of others or even your own, was to be savored, never feared.
“You’re not fighting him alone,” Nik said adamantly.
I sat on the island and put my head down after picking up the phone again to toss to him. “Here. Look at some baby pictures. I’m going to think about how Auphe I need to be to survive this fight and how much Auphe will have Robin cutting my throat. Complicated balance. Oh yeah, and a plan to get Grimm and all his little fucking snakes together to take them all out at once, because if we do it one by one, we’ll be drowning in them in five years.”
“His gates seem much more advanced now. From an eye toward scientific observation only.” Robin sounded speculative, not accusing, but I couldn’t let that go all the same.
“His gating is a fucking sight more advanced, thanks, Mr. Spock. I think he was holding back on me last time. Getting me to underestimate him. He still hasn’t decided if he wants me dead or not, at least not immediately. Then there’s the fact that he has been gating about twelve more years than me, and no matter what I tell him about being less than an Auphe, he isn’t. I thought . . . but shit, he isn’t less. He’s more. He’s better than them, better than he even thinks he is. Evolution. I lose sight of that when I go . . . you know . . . insane, because to an Auphe ego there can be no one better. But we wiped out their asses, a human, a half human, and a puck, so they were wrong, weren’t they? And when I’m all Auphe all the time I’m wrong too. I think like them. I forget my weaknesses. Don’t accept I have any.”
Ishiah had taken a step back. “Better than an Auphe? More? That cannot be.”
Goodfellow wrapped one hand around the peri’s wrist and squeezed. “Faith. You had it once. Remember it again.” He’d stolen the phone from Nik with his other hand. “He does have one number in here. Apparently he was serious about you calling.” He quickly copied the number into his own phone.
“What are you doing?” I sat up. “Don’t fuck around with him, Robin.”
“I have never fucked around, as you so tastefully put it”—like he hadn’t said more than four hundred synonyms for fuck one night on a stakeout to prove he could and to drive Nik onto the verge of a stroke—“with an Auphe yet, but perhaps we can share movie reviews as he seems to be a fan.” He continued to fiddle with the cell. “Who doesn’t love Fight Club?”
“Yeah, he’s a triple threat. Killing, gating, and movie watching.” I put my head back down on the counter and growled. “Go ahead and call him. Tell him I’ll meet him in four hours where Ishiah located his nursery of man-eating monster snakes.” I wouldn’t be alone, but Robin would know better than to say that. “Nik, could you print out the location on Google Maps, as magnified as you can get, so I can see it and get us there?”
I stayed down on the counter, exhausted. It’d been a long day.
Mumbling, I added, “And, Christ, someone call for pizza.”
* * *
The pizza was naturally delivered by a member of the Vigil.
How he—as a pizza guy, not an assassin—got past the front desk slash security of Goodfellow’s building, I didn’t know. They had a strict list with descriptions and photos of who was allowed up, and pizza men were not on it, although Robin’s more illegal delivery people were. Nope, they left the pizza at the front desk where the building’s occupants were so intensely wealthy that they paid the salaries of not one, not two, but five runners to be there at all times for occasions such as food delivery among hundreds of other deliveries a plebe like me couldn’t begin to think of.
That meant when I opened the front door at the soft and respectful knock and saw a pizza uniform, a shiny plastic name tag that read Gerry Martin, I knew better. Hell, the Wolves knocking last time had taught me better for life.
“Pizza guy!” I shouted; it was warning enough. I had my guns back after Grimm’s visit and shot the guy before he could shoot me. Unfortunately I went for a center-of-mass shot, much easier to hide from your neighbors than brains splattered on the wall, which knocked the guy down, but he was right back up . . . fucking Kevlar vest . . . with a full-auto AR-15, finger on the trigger, that might have killed at least one or two of us before I could get him with a head shot.
Then he didn’t have a trigger finger to use any longer. He had a bloody stump, a ripped-out throat, and a large plastic-lined suitcase he was bundled into with the efficiently vicious breaking of bones before the lid was snapped shut. “Thank Fenris you have the basest common sense to use a silencer,” was delivered in a bored, familiar voice. The woman who had achieved all this in less than twenty seconds calmly licked the blood off her claws as she checked up and down the hall. As Robin was one of only two occupants on the floor and the other was a deaf old lady who hadn’t noticed when Salome slaughtered her equally old and feeble Great Dane to leave on Robin’s pillow, we were probably good.
Claws cleaned, they reverted to human nails. “I suspected that type of work would be hell on your mani-pedis,” Robin said cheerfully, handing several hundred dollar bills past me. “Accept my condolences, as it was an excellent na
il job”—he glanced down at the suitcase—“in all senses of the word. Allow me to cover the replacement, Roma.”
She had hip-length straight black hair and eyes as inhumanly round and pale blue as the mythically named moon. Same as when I’d seen her before. “Not to be pissy, but she tried to kill me a few days ago.”
She gave me the look given to most idiots. “But I did not try very hard, did I?” Looking down at the suitcase that contained an assassin she’d killed in seconds, I saw she had a point. “It was a test. Lupa-Alpha Delilah wanted to know if you’re still worth her personal touch in your death . . . after the contract is completed, of course.
“I did not tell you my name,” she then countered with suspicion aimed in Robin’s direction, but she took the money despite it. She must really enjoy manicures . . . a Wolf. Jesus, who knew?
“You are Delilah’s Beta, her second. Of course I know your name. But I also know the names of each and every Lupa in the city. Isn’t that what they’re starting to call it all over the city instead of the Kin—the Lupa? It was only a matter of time. It seems prudent on my part regardless, especially as I hear Delilah is moving into other cities and their Kin may soon be Lupa as well. She’s quite the furry female Robespierre. Liberté, égalité, sororité.”
He clapped his hands once to get things in motion. “But enough gossip. Kudos on an execution well executed, although it would’ve been somewhat nicer had you gotten to him before he obtained access to the building. On the other hand, Demeter of Grain and Harvest smiles on us, as we have pizza.” He bent and picked up the three boxes the man had been carrying, miraculously unspilled. “Thank you, Roma, for your impeccable service. Good day.” With that, he closed the door.
“I am famished. There is only so much death and destruction in one day I can be expected to handle without sustenance.” He placed the boxes on the coffee table, opened the top one, and started to dig in. “Hmm. I wonder if poison was a backup plan, should shooting you fail.” He handed the piece to me. “You try. You have all that Auphe resistance to most poisons and venoms. Somewhat. Enough that you’d probably survive. Hurry, would you? I’m starving.”
At that point I honestly wouldn’t have minded being poisoned, and I snatched the pizza, taking a bite. Swallowing, I said, “Still alive, no poison, and, seriously, is this how you’ve handled all your would-be killers, assassins, murderers . . . you know, anyone who’s met you . . . in the past before Niko and I came along to try to buy a car from you the first time? Hire someone to kill them for you because you’re lazy as shit?” I held up my hands, one still holding a gun and one with half a piece of pizza. “Hey, no judging, as this time it’s saving my ass and I know you spent shitloads to do it. I’m just curious.”
He took a piece for himself and smirked at me. “You wish you were rich, don’t you, kid?”
Sometimes I liked the fight, but sometimes . . . “Hell, yes,” I said fervently, sitting on the table and waving over at Niko, who appeared either mildly stunned by developments, comatose, or most likely hiding behind a stony mask a desire to kick my ass for eating possibly poisoned pizza. “Come on, Nik. Pizza courtesy of assassin delivery. Assassin times two, I guess.”
“I have fought when rocks and my hands were the only weapons available. I’ve fought with spears and stone axes and bow and arrow and swords. I have fought with every weapon conceived against too many paien to classify, humans, angels, demons, you name it.” The puck ate with one hand and used the other to gesture for emphasis. “In every life that I’ve crossed paths with you two, I’ve fought and to be fair, in those times, wealthy or not, king or not, you would be in the battlefield slaughtering. Way of the world back then. But since the eighteen hundreds, I did get a bit tired of it. I thought why not take a break and let someone else who needed the money do it for me?”
“We weren’t around in the eighteen hundreds, I take it?” Niko asked, finally accepting a piece from another box, a white pizza with spinach. Naturally.
Robin shook his head. “No. The last I saw you before this life was the sixteen hundreds.” He brightened. “Musketeers. Brilliant fun, even more so than the books or those idiotic movies would make one think. Constant duels, wine everywhere—I think I was inebriated for an entire decade. And the corsets and breasts. It was a sea of powdered breasts wherever one looked.”
“So almost four hundred years before you saw us again,” Niko persisted before reconsidering. “You didn’t . . . I apologize. That would be a painful topic . . . I’m sorry.”
Goodfellow gave a breezy smile that didn’t seem as genuine as I thought he might hope. “At least you show up at the more interesting times in history.”
“You’ve killed angels and demons? Other than what became Jack?” Ishiah asked, uninterested in the pizza or the Musketeer story, and I gave him a narrow-eyed stare I suspect was worse than any of mine in the past, as this one was bloodred. It appeared to confuse him.
Not stopping with his dinner, Robin dismissed him. “All tricksters do. We don’t throw the first punch, but it’s a given that we will throw the last. You know what goes on in Vegas. You were involved. I heard Azrael finally got his just deserts. Angel of Death, my flawlessly shaped ass. He’d kill anyone, sinful, pagan, or not. Ha! I wish I’d seen that. Or had the opportunity to party with the first Angel of Death, current Duke of Hell, Eligos. If he doesn’t shred you to small gobbets of flesh, Eli’s one entertaining drinking companion.” He shoved a slice into the peri’s hand. “Let it go, Ishiah. You, Eligos, you were all the same once. You might still be the same if God had been more a fan of free will in the early days.”
“Vegas,” I said. “That’s one place I haven’t been. I’ll bet it’s like one big carnival.” If my eyes hadn’t been red before as I glared at Ishiah, I knew they were now.
His jaw tensed while the rest of him froze until I looked away and in the periphery of my vision he finally began to slowly eat. I’d not noticed before in the few years I’d known him that he’d been searching for something in me. Behind his glares, annoyed expressions, the unbelieving ones when I blew up the back wall of the bar, he’d been searching for recognition.
He’d finally gotten it.
Asshole.
Speaking of . . . I wiped a greasy hand on my jeans and put the gun down. “I have to fight Grimm. Whatever plan we come up with”—I had already come up with one except for a single detail—“we can’t lead him into a trap if I don’t play first. With Auphe there’s no payoff if there’s no play-off.”
“Think hard,” Robin cautioned. “You think he wants you alive, mostly, sometimes yes, sometimes no, at this point, but Icarus thought he could fly as high as he cared to as well. Yet when he reached the sun, he burned to ash.”
“That’s not remotely how the legend goes,” Niko said. “And not poss—”
“Do you want to discuss dusty mythologies and the true and false nature of them, Niko, or would you like to keep your brother alive?” The question was brusque, completely unfair, as all Nik and Robin did was talk about dusty mythology and history ninety-nine percent of the time, but I was distracted from the back and forth by the thoughts of Icarus flying toward the sun.
Huh. I did remember the legend.
Icarus had never touched the sun.
But I could.
* * *
It was several hours before we came up with the best we could do for now, planwise. Not the end game, but a step to get us there. I wouldn’t tell anyone what the end game was . . . not yet. In the meantime Ishiah had cornered me while Nik and Robin were off squabbling. I was beginning to think all this forced togetherness was making the two of them worse than Nik and I could be . . . which was staggering to contemplate.
“Cal.”
I kept my eyes on the bundle of glove-and-claws I tossed from hand to hand as I sat on my temporary bed. I couldn’t decide if taking them with me would make things bette
r or make me worse. “Yeah, Ish, don’t bother asking. I remember.” I didn’t want to look at him when it came down to it, not until I had to. “You don’t have to sneak around it trying to find out if I do or don’t. I’ve remembered for a couple of days now since Robin told you where I gated. Since I woke up in Arkansas.”
“You can’t know what it’s like for the rest of us.” He closed the door behind him with determination behind his eyes, his face, his white-knuckled hand on the door handle. I knew the emotion was fake. I wondered if he did or if he was fooling himself. “Niko, Robin, and you . . . the three of you were unique in being the first to put aside your fear and fight what others couldn’t. Fight the Auphe. When they lived no one fought the Auphe. No one dared.” My boss, gruff and hard, who’d not let me see a moment of vulnerability in him on the job, in fights too numerous to recall, in two genuine battles, and here he was, afraid, if hiding it. Not crawling, not yet . . .
You could make him. Worthless pigeon. Make him crawl.
Auphe thoughts, but not necessarily wrong in this situation.
“I never had met you face-to-face before then,” he continued. “I watched you now and again through your frequent lives because Robin was with you. I’ve not told him that I watched even when listening to his stories of the three of you. You were important to him, I wanted to know why. I was more angel then, less understanding of how emotions felt. I knew what they were and meant, but I didn’t feel them . . . except I knew I was drawn to Robin. To follow him. To speak to him. He only laughed and mocked, as the only words I knew were the Words of God and they do not apply to pucks.” For a second his face changed, lightened at the memory of Goodfellow’s laughing ridicule. Then his face fell again. “In the past hundred years, I finally had learned how to feel, peri, not angel. I followed Robin still, saw him find you as children. That’s when I began to check in on you and Niko now and again, to understand Robin better, and that’s when I saw the Auphe following you for the very first time, knew you weren’t entirely human, knew what you were. . . .”