by Rob Thurman
“And you had Cal gate us away,” Nik interrupted, “while you said you ran, but you didn’t run, did you? You stayed to talk to Grimm. Goodfellow, he could’ve killed you.”
“Yes, I lied. No, I didn’t run. And kill me?” Robin snorted, a plume of icy vapor filling the air. “I can talk anyone into anything as I’ve told you too many times to count. When will you believe me? I suppose it’s my own fault. The greatest trick I ever played was convincing the world that I didn’t exist.”
“That’s about the devil, you conniving asshole, with your stolen prose. Stolen and a lie as you take every Fenris-blessed opportunity to tell anyone who’ll listen that you exist,” Rafferty grumbled, the heat of his hand beginning to burn through my clothes and tingle almost painfully against my chest. “Get on with it.”
“You could ruin a weeklong marathon spank-fest,” Robin growled. “As I said, he didn’t kill me. We talked, had a little discussion. We made a deal.” He might not have been the devil, but the grin on his face now would’ve fit the devil perfectly as you signed away your soul. “I bet Grimm that Cal would beat him or his thousand Bae or both. And should Cal win in any of the three ways, Grimm would let him walk away for good. The game would be over. Finished. It was the ultimate move in that fun little kill-or-be-killed, maim-or-be-maimed Auphe game you so love to play. Naturally as it was I who was the one who was selling that move, Grimm went for it.”
“You bet Cal’s life?” Nik accused flatly, trying to get to his feet somewhat unsteadily.
“Cal was already dead,” Robin retorted cuttingly. “He was already dead. You were already dead. Your hearts merely hadn’t stopped beating yet. These were the end times, and Grimm was appropriately the Reaper. I obtained for you a chance to live, as you can’t ever be bothered to do it yourself, and made Grimm no longer a threat, not one to us at least. Not to mention that as it was a chance that I created, it was ninety-nine point nine percent foolproof.” He paused. “Although I admit when I found out it was a thousand Bae and not merely fifty, I had a moment where I entertained a doubt or two.”
He paused, face still and frozen. It wasn’t long, a second maybe, but it was long enough. I had seen it in the past days in the shadows that followed him, the faded green of his sly eyes, the constant drift of his thoughts to mostly memories of better times—it hadn’t been a doubt. He’d very nearly given up. Robin, who didn’t know of anything he couldn’t get out of with fast-talk and faster hands, he’d almost lain down to die with us.
The hesitation disappeared and he was as smug as ever. “But never has a doubt defeated me, which means here you are. Alive. Unmutilated. No better endowed sexually than before, but one can’t have everything. Healers aren’t miracle workers. Bringing you back from death is one thing, enlarging your penis to a passably normal size would require the selling of your soul. As Rafferty said, show him some respect.”
For once Nik was a little abashed. I could tell, as the tips of his ears turned pink, or that might have been frostbite, but I was going with embarrassed. Whether it was at the thought of rudeness or that Robin had somehow gotten a glimpse of his dick, I didn’t know. With Nik, rudeness would be my pick. He was weird like that. “I apologize,” he said. “You’re correct. We’re alive and we shouldn’t be. Wouldn’t be. But technically Cal lost. We died in the gate.”
“Ah.” Goodfellow unfolded his arms to hold up a superior finger. “No. He killed all the Bae. That was the deal. He defeats Grimm or the Bae or Grimm and the Bae. That it would be a kamikaze suicide plan was beyond easy to predict. All Cal’s plans are. He just usually somehow survives them out of sheer dumb luck.”
“Hey,” I protested, surging up. Rafferty smacked me back down with his other hand to my forehead and Wolf strength. “Fine. Whatever. How’d you save me from my idiocy this time? How’d you even know what it was to begin with?”
“It’s as if I’m playing chess with preschoolers, it truly is.” He held up a second finger. “A giant box of more epinephrine than you could possibly need for the next entire year, enough that you could gate anywhere.”
“You mentioning Icarus and your false telling of him flying to the sun instead of near the sun,” Niko added. “You planted the idea.”
Robin nodded and held up a third finger. “It was the one place you could be certain the Bae wouldn’t survive. And once I found out Grimm’s gating powers are advanced enough that he can do virtually anything with them, I knew it was safe enough to nudge Cal in that direction. Once Cal opened the gate to send the Bae and you both to the sun, he had won, and as he had won, I told Grimm the equivalent of letting him walk away was plucking you both out of the gate before the two of you made it to the sun.”
“But that large a gate killed me when I activated it. I felt it. I felt myself die. And Nik wouldn’t have survived it either,” I reasoned. “You had to know that.”
“Which is why I’m sitting on my ass in the snow,” Rafferty rumbled, finally dropping his hand to dust them both off. “Curly lit up the entire worldwide trickster network a week ago to find me in the wilds of the Great White North so I could have the probably unpaid privilege of bringing you both back to the land of the fucking living.” He shrugged. “If possible. If you’d been exploded balls of meat, I couldn’t have swung that, but you weren’t. Damn close, but not quite. It worked. That’s all that counts.”
“He sent me track him down when he have location. Give healer cell phone. Listen to them yell for hours at each other. Someone will pay me.”
I sat up hurriedly and twisted around to see a beat-up RV that I remembered as brand-new and expensive as hell and also stolen from Goodfellow. An albino Wolf, of the All Wolf Cult variety, stood in front of it. “Flay?” Flay, with his lupine claws, white hair, red eyes, mouthful of wolf teeth, and not-especially human vocal cords, had helped me infiltrate the Kin five years ago and saved Niko, Georgina, and my life. After his betrayal to the Kin, to get our help in rescuing his kidnapped son, he’d fled New York in an RV stolen from Goodfellow, pissing the puck off to no end, and hadn’t been seen or heard from since. He was also Delilah’s half brother. Which is how I met Delilah . . . and there was no reason to think of that now.
“Your sister took over the Kin,” I said, rather mindlessly, but I couldn’t think of what else to say. My brain was as frozen as the snow I sat in. Robin had planned all this? Finding Rafferty, who apparently didn’t believe in owning his own cell phone, using Flay to chase him down for some communication and to get him to what I was guessing was the spot Robin picked closest to the Wolves or to at least stay in one location.
I couldn’t picture it, but it had to have happened—then Robin giving Grimm GPS coordinates, which was why he’d copied the half Auphe’s cell number from me, and telling him to make certain he could get our bodies there should I win. It was more than a little unbelievable. Yet he had. I knew that he had, as that was exactly what Robin would do to have all prepared for being on the winning side of a deal. He could’ve talked Grimm into bringing him here as well or more likely had Ishiah pull in another heavenly favor from an angel that didn’t have to actually use his wings to go long distances. And when I’d called Ishiah to “save” Robin, Ishiah had already known everything—Goodfellow’s entire plan.
Robin had gotten a retired angel to lie to me. What couldn’t that son of a bitch do?
Flay shrugged in his parka. “Not surprised about Delilah and Kin. She always bossy when pups.” Speaking of pups, the RV door was pushed open and a half-grown apricot-colored wolf jumped out.
“Slay.” Flay’s son. I’d been the one to get him back from the kidnapper, although him biting a chunk of flesh out of my side had been my only thanks. But what the hell? At the time he’d been only three years old, and a damn deadly three he’d been. Flay shrugged again but grinned this time with those overlarge sharp teeth. “He likes rabbits. Easier hunt this way.” Slay bounded off into the snow to kill a fe
w Thumpers.
Someone else came through the door. His hair was reddish too, although it was one shade darker auburn than Rafferty’s and his eyes were one shade lighter to full gold. His disposition was lighter too; his grin was happy as hell. “Looking better, Cal. You still remember how many cocker spaniels you have to skin to make a pimp coat for an Auphe?” That was the same god-awful joke Catcher had told me once, using a pencil to type it out on his computer because Catcher was a Wolf and a wolf. He’d been sick in college and Rafferty had healed him, but he’d had to go to the genetic level to do it and he’d done it too well.
Wolves, werewolves, weren’t people who’d evolved the ability to turn into wolves. It was the other way around. Wolves had started out as wolves and Rafferty had cured Catcher only to start him on the path to de-evolution. He’d been stuck in wolf form and, worse, slowly losing the higher intelligence werewolves have in any form. The last we’d seen them had been in Yellowstone Park when Catcher was a wolf in form and mind, finally lost to the wild, and Rafferty had joined him to live out their lives as wolves.
“Holy fuck.” I grinned back at him. It was the first time I’d ever seen him in human form other than in a picture on the dresser of his bedroom. “Doesn’t it feel weird not to be on all fours after so long?”
“That’s what she said,” he laughed, shoving hands in the pockets of his jacket.
“Damn,” Robin muttered. “I wish I’d said that.”
Niko was staring at me and that was odd because here was Catcher, not back from the dead, but improbably back from something equally difficult. He’d been stuck in wolf form for seven or eight years before his mind finally went. “Rafferty,” he said, “you told us you couldn’t fix Catcher. You couldn’t undo what you’d done at the genetic level.”
“I couldn’t. No healer, shaman, half trickster, no one could help.” Rafferty was, as far as we knew, the best healer alive in the world today. We’d brought him in to fight the antihealer, Suyolak, Plague of the World; that’s how talented he was. If he needed help with Catcher, his chances of finding it had been extremely low. “But I finally found a full-fledged god who’d made a short jailbreak and was running around northern Canada. Our god, god of the wolves, Fenris. He heard me, he saw my offerings of meat and blood. He came when I asked.” He looked up at the sky, refusing to be ashamed if his stubborn scowl meant anything. “Wolves do pray too.”
Even I knew Fenris was the Norse wolf-god and son of the trickster god Loki. “He showed me a few things about genetics and shape-changing. He’s back on the chain gang again.” He lowered his eyes back to the ground and shrugged as if the loss of his god were nothing. . . . Nothing he was willing to show us was more likely. “But I got my cousin back. My more mouthy version of him anyway,” he amended. “And at least he remembers to flush now.”
Catcher rolled his eyes as he stepped down into the snow, bent down, came up again, and nailed his cousin with a snowball. “The love, it’s almost embarrassing.” He grinned cheerfully.
Niko reached over and took a handful of my hair to hold up for me to see. “Is that how you were able to do this? Genetics?”
It was black. My hair clenched tight in my brother’s hand, it was black again. I swiped a tongue across my gums and didn’t feel the ridge of receded metal teeth any longer. “My eyes?”
“Gray.” Niko smiled. “Plain boring gray. Do you think you can survive that? Is that not exotic enough for you now?”
“Is it permanent?” I turned to Rafferty, who was brushing the snow out of his hair. “If it is, I’d think about kissing you on the mouth if it wouldn’t give Robin ideas. Maybe even tongue.”
He grimaced. “Yeah, I think I’d rather be paid, thanks. And yes, it’s permanent. Okay, not the eyes. You can still give a flash of red to scare the shit out of whatever you’re fighting at the time. I know you’re ass enough to enjoy that and a little Auphe cred goes a long way. They’re wired to your emotional responses, your evil temper, same as they were. You’ll have to practice not making the cabbies piss themselves if you get annoyed at being short-changed.”
“Please keep the tongue and the ideas to yourself,” Catcher added. “I’m as laid back as a Wolf gets, but I’m not a saint.”
“As if I don’t always have ideas.” Robin reached down a hand and pulled me to my feet.
Rafferty followed us up. “You’re not human. I still can’t remove half your genetic material without you turning into a puddle of fleshy goo. But I’ve taken you to as far back as I could, your birth DNA setting. You’re still half human, half Auphe, but now you’re frozen that way. The Auphe genes won’t take over. It can bite my healing ass. This once Auphe genes don’t win.”
The closest to human I’d been . . . but not a part of humanity. I had been different since the beginning—from the first beat of my heart in the womb. Everyone who’d come into contact with me, child, kid, or adult, had known it. They’d known I wasn’t like them. I might look like them, but on the inside, I wasn’t. They sensed that I was other. Not human. Not Auphe, as they didn’t know what an Auphe was. My own species—mine and Grimm’s.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t a fucking miracle. As a kid I’d been a lion doing his best to behave in the middle of a herd of sheep, but in the past few years, I hadn’t been a lion. I’d been a rabid thing. While homicidal rage came in handy once in a while, I’d make do without—because, hey, fucking goddamn miracle. “What about gating?”
He made a so-so motion with his hand. “Not sure. Gating isn’t a physically cosmetic attribute like the eyes. Can newborn Auphe gate? I don’t know. I really don’t want to know. It could go either way. Don’t try it here, though. It’s fucking disgusting to see or feel for the rest of us. I hope you have to walk like the rest of us clowns.”
Robin’s hand was still gripping mine from pulling me to my feet and I yanked him into a hard hug. “You saved our lives, you ass, lying from start to finish. Hell, you always save us in some way we don’t know about, but this was an outstanding con job from the beginning. A thing of beauty.” It had been. Sophia would’ve clawed out his eyes with envy. We’d been manipulated by him for months now if not an entire year, and as much as I chafed against being scammed, he was the only reason Nik and I were alive. I, for once in my life, was not going to bitch about things being kept in the dark.
“You have every right to brag, you son of a bitch.” I smacked the back of his head just as Nik had taught me by example. “Go raibh maith agat”—thank you in Gaelic—“from Cullen,” I whispered at his ear. “Also Cullen kicked out your hypnosis when Rafferty healed us. You saved our lives with it, I know”—the only reason I wasn’t pissed as fucking hell he’d manipulated me into it to begin with—“which is the single excuse I have for not following Cullen’s example, but by kicking a sensitive body part of yours instead, asshole. Don’t try that again, not without asking, lifesaving or not.” I smacked the back of his head again. “But thanks all the same from me, too. This me.”
Robin twitched in surprise when I mentioned Cullen. Then he grimaced at the mention of the hypnosis. He kept hoping, I think, that Cullen would sleep again. I thought he would now, that part of me, but he’d waited around to see the end, after popping up here and again to look through my eyes and tell me the lengths that Robin would go . . . including the whole Svengali thing he’d pulled on me.
“Brat.” He tried for scathing, but he didn’t come close to making it. “Besides, a promise made three times three. What could I do but save this new life for you? Nil a bhuiochas ort, Cullen,” he told Cullen, and as he did I felt Cullen slip away, satisfied. Resting once again. “You’re welcome.”
The words were painted with melancholy. Robin and Cullen, in real life they’d not had the chance to meet. I wish they could’ve. The two of them, both devious as hell . . . my descendants would still be kings or queens of an independent Ireland and the rest of the U.K. would be huddled
as far from the drunken and nuclear-enforced border as they could get.
I’d once been devious. Hadn’t thought shooting someone in some area of the body other than the face was as sneaky as you could get. Who’d have thought?
“It’s too bad reincarnation doesn’t go backward. Imagine what we could do then knowing what we do now,” I said, slapping him hard on the back to pull him into a rough embrace before turning him loose.
“Funny you should say that. There’s an artifact I’ve heard of for thousands of years now. It is said to manipulate time in some fashion. No one’s quite certain what the result of its use is, but . . . it’s a thought. I was thinking of looking for it. Achilles and Patroclus could live long enough to get erectile dysfunction. I would find that hilarious.” He slung his arm over my shoulder and both of us grinned at the sight of Nik dropping his face into his hands.
“You should have let us die,” he said, muffled and heavy with grim morose, the complaint aimed at Rafferty. “It would’ve been more merciful. Never mind. I’ll do it myself. Someone hand me my katana.”
I laughed, a real laugh without a hint of cynicism, and it was one of the first I could remember being that fucking pure, before throwing my own arm around Niko’s neck and reeling him into a pile of three—three times three times three. Niko, Robin, and me . . . death itself hadn’t been able to change that no matter how many times it took two of us. We came back each time and each time Robin was waiting. “You said you were ready for a new game, a new ride.” I gave my brother’s braid a yank.
“How about we live our life, perhaps even a whole one, this once? I could use the rest.” He gave a doubting groan, but I knew a fake one when I heard it.
“I think we can do that.” I grinned at him. It was a genuine one. Despite the earlier laugh, it didn’t feel any less odd on my face. Wildly rare and beyond bizarre. “We made it, Cyrano.”