by Rob Thurman
“All right,” I sighed, and used my other hand, empty as it was, to make a wiping motion from my forehead to my chin but inches away from my face—the imitation of putting on a mask. “Happy? I’m sane again. And I didn’t go Auphe. I told you what Rafferty did. He healed me. The Auphe genes are there but they can’t spread like before.” I scrubbed at my face, the towel coming away red. “But before Rafferty, yeah, I could go Auphe. I did go Auphe several times. That was what it will be like. I won’t be that way again, but that doesn’t mean I don’t remember. Or that I don’t use the memories to end fights before they start when they’re not enough of a challenge to be worth my time.”
He didn’t strike me as convinced as he was standing behind his chair with one eye on the door. “You pissed me off, okay? You were a patronizing asshole. I warned you and you ignored me. I told you what you thought you wanted to hear, the truth, and you probably broke my nose. You think I had a choice in my sperm donor? My sell-it-with-a-smile mother? That I wanted to be born this way?” I flipped over the towel and wiped again.
“You were a dick, you made me mad, and I wanted to pay you back. Oh, and I’m insane, but not how I used to be. Not Auphe insane. I just put on a show. I won’t go Auphe again either, that’s true, but Cal? Cal will be going all the Auphe that will have you shitting yourself and more. That’s my past, but it’s his future. Your future too if you stick around as you did last time.” I added, “I can’t believe it. You lived through it, lived through everything, and, here’s the bitch of it, I eventually get cured and then you die.” After a few more sweeps, my face felt clean. I ignored the ice and used beer to swish around my mouth and clean my teeth.
“I didn’t think of it until now, but you could leave the city. Stay away from them. The human race will be wiped out and the Auphe will rule but they’d leave the paien alive or they wouldn’t have a food source, but you’re a survivor. You could make it through.” He wouldn’t see us again. If there were no humans, we couldn’t be reborn. But having to choose between us and living this life as I’d laid it out for him, I wouldn’t blame him for saying a thousand go-rounds with us was enough. Later, gator. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.
“You called the Wolves idiots. Don’t be one yourself,” he ordered sharply. “And use the ice for your nose. I did break it, and it’s a picture Da Vinci would absolutely refuse to paint.”
I was reaching for it with another insult on the tip of my tongue when he sucked in a breath. “Gods, there he is. There is Lazarus.”
Jerking my face toward the small window in the door, I saw a pale smear. I couldn’t make out any features, but I could see dark marks scattered on the almost white in contrast skin beneath. They looked larger than medium to me, but this was as good as it was going to get. This was Lazarus, although how Robin recognized him, I didn’t know. “What? Holy shit, it is. How do you know?” Questions aside, I was on my feet and running. We’d had a demonstration that Robin wasn’t right one hundred percent of the time, but after eight years now and too many years in past lives to count, I’d put him in the mid-nineties. Right too often to overlook.
“I know all paien races that exist. He was too quick to see, but I could feel him in the manner I feel very few, very strong races of paien, a claw scraping featherlight across the surface of my mind. He felt like none of them, but that I could feel him at all means he’s powerful and he’s nothing remotely human inside with what the Vigil did to him, not anymore. I couldn’t guess what he’s become.”
“Then we’ll find out. Classify his ass as we assassinate it. Ready?” I called over my shoulder as I yanked open the door and was out.
Goodfellow, who’d witnessed a thousand of my lives with not one ending peacefully, was right on my heels.
12
We ended up in the sewers.
If I got laid for every time a firefight, sword fight, or both ended up with me there in the unholy muck, my dick would’ve fallen off from overuse.
With Goodfellow leading the way, we ran eight or ten blocks. He didn’t lose that prickle at the base of his brain. He said as we ran that it wasn’t a solid, concrete awareness he had of those other paien races, the few of which were or had been before trickster races one and all, which made sense. Like to like. His link wasn’t the same as the one I’d had with the Auphe, an inescapable sense of their presence depending solely on distance. The puck’s was vague, a ghost of a tickle, which sounded easy to lose, but he didn’t. Twice he stopped, at first we hadn’t gone a block. “Gamou, it’s gone. I’ve lost it. He’s gone.”
“Fast bastard.” Damn it. He’d been here, right here, within reach of a hand or a bullet. This all could’ve been over. It could’ve been—
Robin had cut off my mental whining and bitching before I could get any further. “No, there it is. I have him again.” There were about five more blocks of racing down the sidewalk, on the edge of the street, when we knocked down entire piles of people on their way to work. That’s when we came to another halt, Goodfellow hitting every curse word in the Greek language as he spun around, trying to catch a wisp of what was iffy on qualifying for the definition of a wisp to begin with. And then he had a face-to-face lock. A phantom touch of an imaginary feather was how he described it later. The cursing ended abruptly when the puck said, “There he is yet again.” There was a speculative note to the statement, but I didn’t let it keep me from following him as he sprinted across the street, dodging and sliding agilely over moving car hoods as he went. As much as I wanted Lazarus dead, I wasn’t about to let Goodfellow lose me.
“He’s coming back when he loses us, letting you pick up his trail again.” I vaulted over a baby stroller carrying a Pomeranian with a rhinestone-studded collar, and bright purple painted toenails. I didn’t judge. For all I knew it was a cuter baby than I’d been.
“A trap, then. It’s not a particularly clever one, but a trap nonetheless.” Going by Robin’s wide smile and laugh, he was reaping the adrenaline rush himself.
“It’s always a trap, Caligula.” My feet pounded the pavement behind him. “Did you forget my biography already?”
“Let me enjoy myself for a few hours before I’m forced to dive into knowing every step and action I’m required to take during the next eight years, which is a torture and a hell for a trickster. We live to be surprised. It’s a rare treat as we most often see it coming. If our lives were a movie, we’d want a twist ending every hour of the day.” He body slammed a hug slab of beef who’d parked his truck on the sidewalk to unload frozen hunks of meat at a restaurant. Beef had caught sight of us coming and, while giving off the look of a small-brained, massively muscled explosion of steroid psychosis waiting for an excuse to beat someone, anyone, to a pulp, it turned out he was a Good Samaritan . . . who was an explosion of steroid psychosis, as the Bible didn’t say word one about steroids, and was waiting for an excuse to beat someone to a pulp.
“Stop running people down, assholes,” he spat. “Act like decent human beings before I rip off one of your legs and beat you both to shithead pudding.” He was already swinging a fist the size of my head, but it was slow and weighted down with muscle that was good for taking down people who didn’t know how to fight . . . or dodge. It could be a slow dodge at that—sliding to one side while texting your friends about dinner plans later that night. Possibly he normally stuck with blind assholes, who rudely smacked people with their walking stick.
Robin wasn’t blind, and he didn’t stop running. In fact he avoided the hovering fist of doom, kicked the guy in the crotch, hit him in the throat with the stiff, callused edge of his hand, and kept running over the top of him as he fell, a less than mighty redwood. “Your concern is noted, Samson. We thank you for your input. And drop off your résumé. I have an opening for a massively muscled, tiny brained combination driver and cabana boy. You’d be perfect,” echoed behind him as he kept going.
I ran around him as he was wheezing for a
ir from the throat strike and was doing it through the vomiting that came with a brutally vicious punt to the balls. I’d had my fill of swimming in bodily fluids last night. If I could, I’d avoid it today. “Samson?” I caught up with Goodfellow. “I’d have gone with Paul Bunyan.”
“Yes, but you also called me Caligula, showing how untrained your assessment of a person’s psyche is. I knew Caligula. I tried to warn him horses weren’t the—”
“Monogamous type. I know. I know,” I grimaced. “You’ve said. I just didn’t think then to ask if you knew that because the horse was cheating on him with you.”
“You’re half Auphe with the propensity on occasion to treat me as a buffet, starting with my expensive pedicure, putting an entirely new spin on foot fetish, but you give as good as you take, same as ever.” He elbowed a Catholic priest in the ribs to shove him out of his path. “That was for the Spanish Inquisition. They never expect them, you know.”
I did know, but around five years from now he, Niko, and I would have a Monty Python marathon. It wasn’t a surprise, by any standard, but it was one thing I hadn’t told him as it was too small to matter. I’d left out that and those like it that couldn’t make a difference. Mainly due to a lack of time, but, too, because I did know how pucks loved their surprises and the next eight years were going to be either dull or a misery when it came to the notable events. I had to leave him something.
“I’m not half Auphe or I’d have given in and the world would now be dominated by the Auphe. And I’m not half human or I’d be dead twenty times over.” I saw what was ahead of us. It couldn’t be more of a trap if he’d painted the word on a sign and taped it up with a giant bunch of floating party balloons.
“Then what are you?” Goodfellow was slowing down.
“A lion.” I bared my teeth, but it was friendly, one predator showing respect to another.
We’d run two miles in about fifteen minutes, which wasn’t my best time by any means, but it was fair considering how many obstacles we’d had to go around—buildings—and how many we’d pushed through or gone over—people. The buildings weren’t bad. The people were, depending on their size, the same as running over stacks of inflatable mattresses. Wobbly and unstable.
Coming to a halt, we stood in front of one of Canal Street’s subway entrances. “Niko once calculated that seventy-three percent of traps occur in either subway tunnels or sewers. Given a choice, I’ll take subway tunnels every time.” I started down the stairs, ignoring the people pushing past me as I paused to glance back at Robin. Knowing it was a trap and walking into it were two different things altogether. And it’d been hundreds of years since our last lives together. He’d gotten a little lazy. “Coming? Now is when it starts to really get good. Think carnival without the creepy flesh-eating clowns.”
He came down the steps behind me. “Seen many of those, have you?”
“Shot a lot of those,” I corrected, taking the steps faster.
“Not all of them are children-eating monsters like the bodachs. Some are human.”
“And still creepy and probably still eat children. Shoot all clowns is a PSA to live by.” When we made it through the rush and onto the platform, I flicked Robin’s ear. “Come on, Lassie. Which way did he go, girl? Is he twisting off Timmy’s head even as we speak to use in his bowling league? Kind of soft, not much speed, lots of gutter balls, but it’s aesthetics over efficiency for some.”
“I’m shocked you know the word ‘aesthetics’ and are capable of using it correctly. And please do rein in your rampant enthusiasm when we close in on Lazarus. We know nothing about his abilities, the quantity or quality of them, or the predatory traits unique to him.” He headed to the left. “Call me Lassie again and what I did to Samson’s testicles will be gentle loving care compared to what I do to yours.” He hadn’t gone more than a few feet when he slowed to a fast walk. “A thought occurs. Let me check before I lose my signal.” Punching in a number, he raised the phone to his ear. There was time for one ring, if that, before he was saying two words, “The Vigil.”
He listened for three seconds, then disconnected. “Strangely enough, the Vigil has uprooted its entire organization and every single member is fleeing the city starting an hour ago. Planes, trains, cars, splitting up and stampeding in every direction. I think Lazarus gave them a little warning when he appeared in case I felt like doing what I’d done before.”
Hiring the Lupa to kill every Vigil member who didn’t have the sense to run. The new version of the werewolf mafia, the Lupa were all female under the leadership of their alpha, my ex-fiend with benefits, Delilah. They’d started, at Robin’s direction and receipt of a massive fee, with the Vigil assassins who’d been sent after me. They dealt with them with their usual ruthless efficiency. Then every Vigil member was given a gun and made an assassin. Untrained, cheated on their salary—had to be—they’d lasted a lot less longer against the Lupa. When it came to the Vigil in NYC now, my now, there were none.
“See? We know some of his traits. Responsibility and respect to the organization that turned him into lab rat. He’s a Boy Scout.”
We were wrong, we found out after it was all over. Lazarus hadn’t warned them. I’d forgotten or just didn’t think about how the Vigil had a psychic or two. They weren’t the more talented of their kind, but they had enough ability to see something headed straight for the city. Something cataclysmic enough to be one thing alone.
An act of god.
• • •
If I knew more about one subject than Goodfellow, it was the subway.
That would be because he refused to take it, took a car service, had his own limo, his own personal sports car, his BMW when flash wasn’t what he needed for a particular con, and enough money to afford to park a fleet more of them if he wanted. He once had tried to Febreze me when I showed up at his penthouse after being stuck in a three-hour-long stall, saying I stank from marinating among the plebeian, which he helpfully broke down into urine, cheap perfume, cheap cologne, cheap soap, body odor from lack of those last three, polyester, rayon, sweaty feet, Minoxidil, deodorant made in China that both failed spectacularly and was infused with mercury, and Aqua Net that hovered around me in a cloud intensely and thick to the point that I must have sat on the lap of a New Jersey reality star hopeful.
We kept following Robin’s sense of Lazarus for a few minutes before I realized it. “I know where he’s going.”
I had to remember that he’d lived in the city, he was a member of the Vigil who’d volunteered to be that lab rat as their last hope. Watching over the paien to see if they were staying under human radar meant knowing the city as well as the paien themselves did, including the home of the lowest of the low—the revenants—who used abandoned subway tunnels and sewers to get around the city, to stash the leftovers from whatever homeless victim they’d snatched, to sleep. It was all-purpose. The Vigil would know that and they’d know the both of them inside and out.
“Where? Hell? If so, we are there.” He had a hand over his nose and mouth. “I believe I recognize this stench as the Morning Star’s major weapon in the angelic Rebellion.”
“Yeah, you’re a delicate princess.” I moved past him. There was a hidden cover made of heavy metal plate in the floor under a pile of junk in a long unused, by humans, maintenance storage closet. Below that was another maintenance tunnel, again, abandoned by humans, but an interstate to revenant and other paien, that weren’t as disgusting but they weren’t qualified to be handing out perfume samples at Macy’s either.
“The Eighteenth Street subway station. It’s been shut down since, hell, I don’t know. The nineteen-forties? Fifties? You would know the exact date and time to the second if you ever got on the subway.” That was true. Whatever the puck used or could be of use to him, he knew everything about, down to the last detail. The subway had no possibility of making his list.
“It’s vulgar in smel
l, appearance, and the commonality of its populace. How can you bear it?”
“Because I’m not a snob,” I replied. “And you’ve been sharing your opinion on the subway for years and years. Enough that I hear it now when you’re not even around. You’re off getting your feathered freak-on with Ishiah and I’m working the bar when out of nowhere I hear your bitching that if I think that mass transit that involves slithering under the surface world and through the dirt like a worm, then I should shower before funkifying your penthouse. It’s like a song I can’t get out of my head, except it’s not my imagination. I hear your rich asshole voice smugly bouncing around inside my skull. I think it’s growing into a parasite, growing big enough to eat my brain.”
“I do not want to talk about that pigeon and when you return home, you are to obtain immediate monogamy deprogramming for me. Use a Taser to take me down if you must. There will be oaths on that in blood before you leave. And, for your edification, I cannot be a snob when I legitimately am better than everyone else.”
“Uh-huh, sure, your Loftiness,” I said absently, watching for the coming train. Once it passed us in an angry rumble, I grabbed Robin’s arm and ran, pulling him behind me. “Go!” It was far enough down the tunnel that you had to be quick before the next train came and that one was considerably closer to the tunnel wall or the tunnel was closer to it. Either way, it was easier to get sucked up, pulled along, then thrown under it. None of those had struck me as worth risking.
We’d reached the door, but hadn’t yet touched it when I heard the next train. “Great. Imminent death. What’s new?” I had gone for one of my knives, the bowie with the thick, straight nine-inch blade that was my weapon and pry bar of choice. I wedged it between the door and its frame, and leaned on the handle with all my weight. The door groaned, the grinding sound of rust against concrete, and popped open. Shoving Robin ahead of me, I yanked the door shut behind me, and had out my flashlight, small but bright. Ten seconds later we were climbing down the metal rungs of a ladder. It beat the door out on rust. The ladder itself was purposely made of rust and the dull gleam of irregular metal patches was its sign of deterioration.