by Rob Thurman
I don’t think he heard me. “And the sand. Everything. It’s gone.” He finally ended up facing me. “How?”
“With what you guys keep in stock, it wasn’t easy.” I yawned, eyes gritty, muscles tight with the feeling you get when you’re too tired to sleep. “But I remembered the rusalka, the lamia, and the wendigo. I’ve never figured out what rusalka get out of drowning people, but it does leave entire bodies to dispose of. The lamia”—I winced—“are a little like vampires, but they don’t care about drinking blood. They care about drinking everything. You don’t want to know how they do it. Don’t ask. Point is it leaves bodies too, but they weigh less. They’re like a juice box a snot-nosed little kid has drained dry. The wendigo eats everything but the bones. Disposal, you’d think, would be easier, but it’s not. The bones spear through your average garbage bag like a knife through butter.”
I shrugged and smirked wearily. “I just made like a friendly neighbor and borrowed all their heavy-duty extra-large family-sized boxes of Costco garbage bags.” I was beginning to feel like an ad placement in my own life for those damned things. “Because this”—I glared as I snatched up one of his will-o’-the-wisp, tissue paper, tiny garbage bags off the cushion next to me and flipped it in his face—“does not get the job done. Thank fuck you had a few gallons of bleach around so I could scrub the floor once I got rid of the sand. You need to start shopping like a fanatically enthusiastic, wildly prolific serial killer. An ‘I love my hobby, have multiple orgasms with each body I drag home, nightly cruising’ serial killer. It’s how you stay prepared for when assholes like the skin-walker come along.”
He snapped the plastic away from his face, which wore a perplexed expression I didn’t know he had in him. “What did you do with all the bagged bodies? What did you do with all the sand?”
“Bodies are in your Dumpster, which I then swapped with one down the street. Sand is in the hall. Without an industrial vacuum it takes weeks to get rid of sand. In the hall was good enough.” I rolled up another strip and plunked it in the bowl. “Put industrial wet-dry vac on your Christmas list. I’m Mary frigging Poppins here to whip you two into shape. Aren’t you lucky?”
Niko was beginning to focus more clearly as the shock of a Cal who cleaned, if for massacres only, began to sink in. He pointed at the bowl. “And that?”
“Snakeskin. I skinned them before I bagged them. Cal did say he wanted a pair of snakeskin boots when I made the offer.” I didn’t give a damn if he got the boots—unless he managed to hold on to them long enough they made it to me someday. Skin-walker boots. I’d impress even myself with those. More to the point, I didn’t have anything else to do and sleep wasn’t an option. Neither was eating.
Perplexed Niko was gone, replaced by unimpressed Niko. That was a Niko I was used to seeing every day. “You didn’t sleep. Not at all.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Isn’t that the saying?” A saying, prediction, an absolute truth if things didn’t go my way. Rock, paper, scissors.
I had tried to sleep, against my better judgment. Sixty seconds with my eyes closed was the equivalent of the longest IMAX movie made of the god-awful moment of my life. The flames were real enough I thought I could touch them. I’d tried. Then I opened my eyes and went with the theory that I had three days before sleep deprivation had me hallucinating. That was three days to put one in Lazarus’s head. Time limits, I could deal with them easier than I could deal with sleeping.
“Hey, who stole my favorite jeans?” Cal stomped up, sheet around his hips as last night we’d run out of the six whole towels they owned, Niko and I using the last two with our showers. He was leaving a wide puddle on the floor I’d spent part of the night cleaning, but it was a clear puddle. Blood I’d wipe up. Clean water, that’s where the laziness came in. It’d dry eventually on its own. Cal’s soaked hair hung flattened around his face and dripping steadily.
“Your only clean pair? That’d be me. Niko’s sweats were a complete loss with all the blood and guts I spent half the night in on my knees scrubbing like your combination babysitter and maid.” I finished with the last strip of scaled skin, threw it in the bowl, and tossed the whole thing to Cal. He caught it one handed while losing half his grip on his sheet. “Here you go. Find yourself a boot maker. Oh, I borrowed a T-shirt too. I had a duffel bag with two changes of clothes and a shitload of weapons you’d give up sex for in a second—when you have it. I couldn’t fit the flamethrower, but I had my varsity lineup in there.”
None of it had done me any good, as it had been resting by Niko’s feet for him to keep an eye on while I went for the pizzas. “Time travel didn’t agree with them for some reason.” I lied as easily as my heart beat—smooth and even. Not a single blip in my heart rate. Polygraphs are worthless when you’re amoral and then some. “I came through, but no duffel bag. I’m lucky the trip included the clothes I was wearing and the weapons on me. Doing covert crap like walking down the sidewalk to a hole-in-the-wall bar while naked and it’s not quite dark yet, that would be a pain in the ass.”
I stood up and stretched, every bone in my back cracking audibly. “Wait. Where’d you get that shirt? Where did the shirt get that?” Niko had gone from perplexed, stunned, unimpressed, and was heading toward either embarrassed or disapproving. He’d used his entire weekly allotment of facial expressions in less than four minutes. A record if ever there was one.
“This?” I plucked at the medium gray T-shirt. “I borrowed it from Cal with the jeans.” It was plain or had been. These were the days when my sarcasm was verbal. I hadn’t branched out into visual to go with that for four or so years yet. Having none with me, I’d made my own. I searched around the drawer I vaguely remembered as the one drawer we’d used to hold all our pens, marker, notepads. Finding a red marker, I’d come up with my own snarky shirt, although it was a real place. It was a thriving franchise thanks to the Kin, the werewolf mafia. It read:
HUMPERS
Werewolf Strip Club
Full! Frontal! Fur!
Best TAIL in town!
I’d thought about trying for their trademark sexy wolf in the middle of it, but an artist I wasn’t. “No,” Niko denied firmly. “I am not leaving this apartment or standing anywhere near you if you wear that. You look like an unhinged interspecies pervert.”
Cal was more interested than offended. “Werewolf strip club. Huh.” He was less casual than he thought. “So is that a real pl—”
Niko clapped his hand over his mouth. “No. You are not starting down that path on my watch. You’d have fleas and be rabid within a week. You, Caliban, change the shirt.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t get your panties wedged up too high. You’ll be sterile before Cal is rabid.” I stripped off the shirt, turned it inside out, and put it back on. It now read:
WEREWOLVES
ONCE YOU GO FURRY,
YOU NEVER HAVE TO WORRY.
I hadn’t managed a wolf on the other side, but I did accomplish a mildly lopsided paw print on this one. “There. Happy now, grandma?”
“No. Disgusted and appalled, but I would not say happy.”
I was thinking of an outrageous lie to make him worry about his own taste, something along the lines of the retro stage that would hit in two years that would have him cutting his hair into the longest mullet in the city, when there was a knock on the door. I gave up. He wouldn’t have believed me.
There was only one reason Niko cut his hair.
“Yeah,” I grumbled, “you two stay there. One half-naked sheet burrito flooding the floor and a seizure waiting to happen over my taste in shirts. Don’t answer your own door.” Not that I would have let them. If one of us had to die, I’d be the least damaging to all our lives. I reached for the Glock tucked in the back of the jeans I was wearing. We knew Lazarus wasn’t aware of this address, but I’d rather be safe and alive than sorry and dead. At least if I did end up dead, I’d be b
uried in a hilarious T-shirt. Gun hidden behind me, I stayed to one side of the door in case anyone tried to shoot through it. After the second knock, I leaned over for a split second there-and-back look out of the peephole.
Wicked—and not wicked as in an impish, mischievous manner but more of the full-blown demonic kind—green eyes, brown hair halfway between curly and wavy, and a grin wide enough for ten car salesmen despite being just the one.
Oh, fuck me sideways. I should’ve caught his scent. Why hadn’t I . . . The bleach I’d used to scrub the tile floor. It remained hanging in the air, a noxious fog that would block out any other smell for days. I slid over and rested my forehead against the door, holding back the impulse to bang it repeatedly. With the third cheerful knock—how could a knock be cheerful—I groaned, “Jesus Christ.”
“Nope.” The voice exceeded the cheer of the knock. And it was familiar. God, was it. “I dated his cousin though. Great set of yabbos.”
“Damn,” Cal commented, clutching at his sheet with one hand and balancing the bowl of snakeskin with the other. “I’m an atheist and I’m not sure I wanted to hear that.”
I did bang my head against the door this time. I’d lived through hearing that line once before. Of all the things I could relive, hearing that again wasn’t at the top of my list.
It wasn’t who it was. Who it was had flashes of light darting across my sight. Shock led to low blood pressure, low blood pressure led to annoying yellow streaks, and wishing you had the luxury of keeling over to stare at the ceiling for a while. But I didn’t and blinked them away instead. It was a shock all right, but the good kind, the best. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was here a year too goddamn early. As he was the linchpin of us living through the next year, any mistakes at this point and you should go ahead, climb a mountain, sing “Kumbayah,” and drink the Kool-Aid, because those nut jobs, for once, would be right.
“Stay here,” I told Niko and Cal. “This is . . . complicated. Niko, tell your brother about how lazy shits who sit on their asses instead of sweeping the aftermath of a fight get bitten by poisonous giant snakes. And brief him on the Vigil/Lazarus crap while you’re at it. I’m too tired to go over that again.” Niko gave a minute nod to show he remembered what and what not to let Cal in on—nearly everything.
I yanked open the door just enough to slip through and keep the person in the hall hidden, stepped out, and slammed it shut behind me. Unlike Niko and Cal, he didn’t look any younger. I could’ve gone back eighty years or eight hundred, he’d be the same. As a precaution, I started down the hall. It wouldn’t matter if Niko caught a glimpse of him as he was one of the secrets Niko was currently keeping, but Cal didn’t need to if we could avoid it. “You couldn’t resist, could you? Not for one goddamned year?” I accused. “Never mind I told you to stay away until then or you could foul it all up.”
“Your note said we have eight years before the world was deprived of me, the brilliance of its one true sun. There’s clearly no hurry. And I never foul up, as you say, anything,” he discounted smugly with an actual snap of the fingers. That was the same. I should suggest he get new annoying habits. That one was getting stale.
“I hate to tell you you’re wrong, wait, no, I don’t. You’re wrong. It’s not like what will happen in eight years is the first time we all almost die or do die,” I snapped. “That’s practically a yearly occurrence for us, like freaking Christmas. But we get through it or we would have if we kept everything the same. Yet you fucked that up in nine hours. What, did it feel like a year? Did you set your alarm wrong, one year to nine hours? Easy mistake, right? This will screw up so much future shit. Forget eight years. We’ll be lucky to survive six months. In a year, we will be dead, as there’s no avoiding that particular coming cluster fuck. We shouldn’t have made it through the first time. This is all because of your”—impatience, curiosity, insatiable need to know everything as soon as puckishly possible—“because of you being you. We’re dead . . . or worse.”
“I think you exaggerate. And death? There are worse fates than death to you? Never mind. Boring topic, death,” he dismissed. Death, my death, everyone’s possible death. He was totally unconcerned. Of course he was.
“I heard enough of it during that threesome with Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. On and on about funerals in brains. She wanted to dig a grave and have sex in a shiny new coffin. And then there was ‘lost Lenore.’ Angels crying. On and on. No one knew Eddie’s Lenore was his pet rat. It died of old age, a rat, yet the man never stopped with the ‘Night’s Plutonian shore,’ and the ‘Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore.’ And the weeping, such an incredible amount of weeping. We nearly drowned in that coffin. It put me off threesomes for a decade.”
We hadn’t swapped names yet, not officially, and he was starting with a sex story off the bat. I had to give that to him—he began as he meant to go on. Backward or forward, whichever direction you could go, Goodfellow would be the same. He matched my path down the hall, carrying a pair of shoes that knowing him were more expensive than a brand-new BMW with an imported on call 24/7 German mechanic who could relate to it at a cultural level that beat the effort of any American mechanic.
“I’d forgotten how much you let the pervert in you run wild and free in the beginning,” I grimaced. “And let me tell you when I want to hear another story like that one.” He thought I was honest and was raising eyebrows in sly challenge, while his brain eagerly tossed another filthy one on the assembly line to be delivered.
“Yes?”
“Never-fucking-more,” I said flatly.
“Very well. On to the boring . . .” I began to turn around to head back to the apartment with the obvious intention of locking him out. The conversation was over. “Fine. Fine. Not boring. Perhaps more entertaining when punctuated with a few raunchy stories, but I can do without.” I halted the turn and kept on in my original direction away from Niko and Cal’s. With relief, Robin scuffled along heedless of the flying sand. “Then we do know each other or you think we do.” That was complicated too. I could rip him a new one all day long. It wouldn’t make him think twice of what he’d done. He wanted to know. Couldn’t stand not knowing, and, being a trickster, he would know. No one could stop him, including me.
I should’ve been more careful about the note, but I needed him to take my warning seriously about his death eight years from now. He was a puck, the oldest puck. They assume you’re lying as they’re always lying themselves. That’s why I’d left proof in a few names and a hook in the last name I’d used to sign the letter. I couldn’t see any way that it could’ve led him here. It shouldn’t have. I hadn’t seen the risk, but if I had, I’d have done the same. I needed his one hundred percent belief to keep his horny ass from being wiped out by the Vigil’s explosion.
“You aren’t supposed to be here. I said so in the letter.” I’d left it at his car lot. What would a puck and a trickster be but a used car salesman? “You know you’re fucking up right now just being here because you were the one who told me that. To keep you away. You said, ‘Change events enough, Caliban, and you won’t fuck up impressively as normal. You’ll fuck up spectacularly. The world, the universe, every dimension, you’ll erase them all and then how will I get laid?’”
I shoved his shoulder, not hard, but not particularly lightly either. “This is on you. I quoted you exactly in the letter”—except leaving out “Caliban”—“I listened to you. You didn’t listen to yourself.” I flopped down to sit on the sand. It had a taint of blood to it, but that was a smell I was used to.
He walked through the sand that was as high or a little higher than a few inches above our ankles until he caught up. He sat. I don’t think it was as gingerly and careful of his suit as he’d planned on, the kind of suit too elite for people like me to be allowed to know the name of the tailor. He secured his ludicrously expensive shoes, the only kind he’d owned since I’d known him, on his lap away from the sa
nd.
“I was curious, and I don’t listen to myself all the time. How boring would that be?” he said, waving both arms to be sure I saw how boggling the concept was. “How many adventures would I have missed, destruction I wouldn’t have wrought? The Tower of Babel would still be standing for one, and that was too hideous to bear. I could’ve been blinded by a structure so misshapen, such an eyesore, its epic hideousness has not been matched. The architect and builders should’ve been chopped up and fed to the pigs.”
Switching subjects at a speed that used to cause motion sickness before I got used to it. “I didn’t introduce myself, which could be awkward as I’m telling tales from my life that occurred hundreds or thousands of years ago. But as you addressed the envelope of your letter to Robin Goodfellow and not to Rob Fellows, a captivating and charming human car salesman but certainly no one whom mythological figures were based upon, you must know that already. Or think that you do.”
He hesitated, absently sketching a few Greek letters sideways in the sand. “Your correspondence, on the highly exciting stationery that was the back of a flyer for Planned Parenthood said that we were friends.” The last word was stated neutrally and with wary caution, but Robin, second trickster born, either couldn’t hold back or had no idea the reality of how sad and fucking melancholy it was.
“I have people,” he covered hurriedly, “and people to tell my people to talk to someone else’s people. I have acquaintances, contacts, lovers, and potential victims of what will be spectacular cons if I get bored. But I don’t have friends or I do, but they come and they go, in the blink of an eye. I never know when I’ll see them again.”
The letters he’d written in the sand spelled Filous in the Greek alphabet. Friends. He’d tried to teach me Greek, but I knew five words on a good day, to read and write. He’d taught me twenty or so of the filthiest curse words in the language. Those were for yelling, no reading or writing needed in learning those.