by Rob Thurman
“But it could conceivably, in the craziest of worlds, have something to do with the fact . . . did I say infinitesimal?” I growled and I put a heavy hit of Auphe in it. He sighed, “Your neck appears as if you were strangled, hanged, strangled again, and then suspended headfirst into a vat of a few thousand leeches.”
“You son of a—”
“But I wasn’t lying”—he kept on. Why not? He had only his own personal strangulation to lose—“when I said that was the smallest consideration if a consideration at all. The main reason is your face.”
“My face? What’s wrong with my face?” I pressed.
“It would be most accurately described, by people that don’t know you or will know you, judgmental people who assess others by purely unimportant physical attributes such as skin color, weight . . .” By now I had unfolded my arms, made a fist and was pulling it back to let it fly. “Fine. Try to spare a person’s feelings,” he huffed. “No good deed goes unpunished.” He shifted in my direction to face me and poked a finger in the center of my forehead. “It’s this. What you’re doing with your face. The best label would be,” he paused, then gave a decisive nod.
“Murder face.”
I wasn’t counting the reasons, good ones, that I deserved to be suicidal, resigned, and insane, but I’d thought I was hiding it from Niko and especially from Cal. I didn’t try with Robin. I had been doing the best twenty-one some odd years of conning and lying had taught me. With everything I was attempting to do and to not do, I wouldn’t have been surprised if an emotion had slipped through my mask a few times, the resignation, the despair, but this made no sense. “I don’t have a—”
“Murder face. Yes, you do. You could go with madness face—it’s appropriate, but murder face is slightly more accurate. It says that you are on your way to murder someone or you have murdered someone or you desperately want to and will murder someone as soon as that someone hurries up and looks at you in the most minute of wrong manners. Murder face,” he rattled off without hesitation or any other indication of doubt in his appraisal.
The cab stopped at a building on a corner and Goodfellow paid the cabbie. As with his sword, having no wallet on him, dressed as he was in a sheet, I didn’t know where he’d been keeping that Black Amex card and wad of cash, and I wasn’t curious about it in the least. If he’d tried to tell me, I either would’ve run or shot myself. I was finding on an hourly basis more and more reasons to go with the inevitable and shooting myself.
Starting down the sidewalk, he continued as if he hadn’t stopped. “It’s a billboard that screams ‘I have a day pass from the Hospital for the Homicidally Insane, and I earned it by dismembering everyone else in my group therapy session,’ ‘Death row is my summer home,’ ‘I hunt to prevent overpopulation—ever notice how incredibly overpopulated the world is?’, ‘Charles Manson has a restraining order against me,’ ‘I have the mind of a genius, the heart of a poet, and the liver of an alcoholic—they’re in the three jars on my shelf,’ ‘Mary had a little lamb, eating a baby sheep is wrong, Mary was tasty though,’ ‘The Apocalypse came, saw I was already here, and left screaming.’”
We had rounded the building at the corner and walked on three more blocks. Robin came to a halt in front of a black marble building, not that tall, but it gave the impression it was expensive to the point that there was no sense in making it taller as no one was left in the world who was rich enough to afford another floor. He nodded at the doorman, a tall, thin man with dark skin, perfectly round inhuman yellow eyes, and what could be the tips of white hair or tiny feathers showing beneath his uniform cap. He, despite the title, did not open the door. Goodfellow moved to an array of security crap the likes of which I’d not seen. There were retinal scans, fingerprint scans, a hair for DNA analysis, and fifty or sixty different codes to be entered.
The door opened by itself and the doorman said, “Congratulations on the escape of a grisly death and the devouring of your soul, Mr. Goodfellow.”
“Thank you. Your manners in the face of disappointment are impeccable as always, Mr. Kikiyaon.” There wasn’t any humor there. The puck was uncommonly polite and, of course, tipped him. Cal should take a lesson. I should take a lesson. I did tip now, but no one would call me a good tipper without swallowing their tongue. “I have two other guests coming. Male. One with a blond braid and one that looks like this one’s younger brother. Please do not eat the soul of that one. I will understand the temptation, trust me when I say more understanding I could not be, but they are both my guests. I will make it up to you. Ah, before I go.” He tipped him again. “Consider this to be from the one with the black hair. We would all die waiting a vast infinity of years until the universe fell dark and all life perished before he would do it himself. And, quite frankly, I don’t think you would care for how his soul tasted.”
He gave the doorman a shallow bow that was returned with a bare tilt of the head and then we were inside, the doors shutting silently behind us. “Before you ask, he’s an African soul cannibal. They are excellent in the field of security. Now”—he ignored the elevators like anyone who didn’t want to be trapped in one like a roach in a roach motel, and headed for a door that led to the stairs—“should I go on?”
“No,” I said grimly. A “murder face” was going to be harder to hide than other emotions if I was walking around in broad daylight unaware I was wearing one.
“It will pass,” he said, his voice echoing in the stairwell as solemnly as if we stood in a church. Not that the oldest pagan alive would care about church etiquette, but it reminded me of that. “You’ve only been wearing it since we escaped Lazarus and it’s also been off and on, when Niko and your emo clone weren’t watching. You said Lazarus wasn’t there at the explosion, but he is Vigil. I do think the same as you. He is as responsible for what happened to Niko and to me.”
I asked what had been gnawing at me since the explosion. And repeatedly since. I’d had the thought about Niko and me being together again, a little different, a lot the same, in our next reincarnation, and how it bothered me to lose any memories of any lives I’d spent with him, but I’d be human next time. No more Auphe racial memory, and lose them I would. We would be family and together as always though . . . but not Robin.
Pucks don’t reincarnate. If they did Goodfellow would’ve told us by now.
“What happens to pucks when they die?” I didn’t look at him when I asked. I, fuck, I just couldn’t.
A warm hand gripped my shoulder. “That is a tale for another time.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Another time,” he reiterated firmly.
He didn’t know. For Robin any story he could tell was for now; waiting was not in his vocabulary when it came to bragging and stories and tall tales. If we didn’t save him, he was gone. There might be puck heavens. He’d mentioned being on Mount Olympus, the Elysium Fields, Valhalla, all heavens in their own right. Didn’t that mean he could go there when he died? Or did he have to be alive and have living gods or goddesses themselves open the door and invite him to the party? When he died was he just no more? Niko and I, we’d never see him again, but a Goodfellow that was no more—that fucked up my life, all my lives to come, fucked up my world.
“Okay. Yeah, okay.” I wiped painfully dry eyes as I wouldn’t let this shithole of a world make me cry. It could kiss my ass a thousand times over first. Straightening from where I’d begun to slump, I started to climb the endless stairs again.
Goodfellow’s hand remained on my shoulder, keeping me from moving. “I do have a tale for now.” He added, “And a need to breathe.” He sat on the stair above us and pulled me down next to him. He clasped his hands in his lap, tight enough for his knuckles to whiten. His eyes stayed fixed on them. “There was—oh what there was—in the oldest of days and ages and times and beyond the dreams of gods that did not yet exist.”
His lips curved but not in what
I’d label nostalgia or amusement. “That’s how stories first began. That was the birth of ‘Once upon a time.’” He cleared his throat. “In those oldest of days and ages and times came the First to think, to have thoughts, not that they cared to use them. They preferred the killing and slaughtering of the animals that inhabited the land then. Or themselves. Either would do. A time after that was born the Second to think, to have thoughts, and he cared very much to use them. He also greatly enjoyed killing and slaughtering but not of his own kind, as he was the only one of his own kind. As he didn’t know of the First, as the world was large, and their meeting unlikely, he made another Second. He thought it would be a toy and torturing and slaughtering it to be the best of entertainment. What he didn’t know is that what he made was himself. Identical physically, mentally, even in his memories. They were the same and as willing murderers they wished to be. They were equally balanced, for when you are the same, how can you defeat each other? Disappointed, the first of the Second left the second of the Second, not to see him again for hundreds of thousands of years.”
Glancing off to the side as if he saw something, he went on. “Second of the Second, same in his digust and disappointment as same as the same is the same, went in the opposite direction. Years passed. Too many to count, but eventually the second of the Second noticed he was changing. His thoughts, his ideas were different. He had new memories. His own and no one else’s. That didn’t make him less bloodthirsty. It took many more years, a race called humans, and other races called paien to develop to show him what rocks, trees, and prehistoric sloths could not. But that is not this story. This story is when he first noticed new thoughts, new ideas, new memories, but one thought didn’t occur to him. If he had new memories, then there were more to be made. He couldn’t rely on those of the first Second being all that made up the world. Not that it mattered, as the first of the Second had never known of the First. Had no memories of them. Didn’t know they existed. And neither did I.”
Unlocking his hands, he rubbed one over his face. “No one these days can say that. No one can say they didn’t know of the Auphe, no one but me. Five of them came out of this madness, induced a rent in reality, sank claws in me before I could think to move, and dragged me through the gaping tear that screamed as if it were dying. I fell up and down, sideways. It turned me inside out and twisted every organ inside me. We came out hovering over a live volcano, and they dropped me before beginning their version of tag. They were not polite enough either to wait for me to stop vomiting from the ‘trip,’” he said bitterly.
I knew I had to be paler than my usual blizzard white. I felt like vomiting myself. To know about the Auphe and have them take you or chase you or both, that was a horror few lived through. To have it happen and not know of their existence, to be dragged behind them through the bleeding, screaming ether as you were turned inside out. To not know what they wanted when everyone now knew it had been the worst death they could give you. No wonder he had a fucking phobia of gating. “How . . . Fuck, how’d you survive?”
He waved a hand, dismissing the question. “There was a ledge. I’m agile enough that the Cirque du Soleil come to me for lessons. I caught the edge of it. I ran. I fought. I made weapons. Mainly I ran like a swan with Zeus on her tail feathers.” He shrugged. “I am me, after all. But all of that is nothing compared to the moral of the story.” Leaning his shoulder against mine, he gave me a solemn promise, “It was never about trust. I have and will always trust you. I have and will always trust Niko. The sole reason I didn’t tell you about the gates in years to come is that you managed to get me through one when I was poisoned and dying, as you said. And once it was done, it was done. I no doubt told myself I was beyond idiocy to sooner die than gate with someone I have trusted a thousand lives over. And I am sorry I didn’t tell you in the sewer. I knew this life has been one of your worst, and I should’ve known that trust would be something beyond value to you, especially as you never had a reason to doubt it before in all our days and years and aeons.
“Now.” He stood and held down a hand to pull me up, not that I needed it, but wasn’t that always what he’d done? Whether I needed it or not? “We work on finding Lazarus, saving the three of us—the only worthy part of the world worth saving honestly—and getting you home.”
“I miss my Goodfellow.” God, there was an understatement, but . . . “I think I’m going to miss you too, conceited jackass that you are, because the same as the same is not the same. Eight years makes a difference, even in million-year-old pucks.”
This grin was nothing but glee and cheer. “I’ll mail you a Valentine’s Day card every year to a PO Box then give you the number when we see each other again at the end of those eight years. Sparkly, tacky, pornographic, singing cards. It’ll be a thing of beauty.”
“Jackass,” I repeated. “I take it back. I won’t miss you at all.” Plus, he would be there. He’d be home with Niko and all the others: Ishiah, Promise, Ham, Mama Boggle and the kids, Rafferty and Catcher.
Home. And I would make it there. For when we all survived, the Niko and Robin here and now and the Niko and Robin in the future, my misplaced present, rising from the flames like a true phoenix. Not the fake phoenix I’d imagined at the explosion, one that brought death, ended in death, and never rose again.
They’d rise, if they hadn’t done so from the moment I’d dropped the letters off yesterday, and were already waiting for me.
Unlike the whiny slacker in the poem Robin’s coffin-buddy-with-benefits had written, I wasn’t sitting around hoping for someone to bring them back. I wasn’t asking when they’d bring themselves back. I wasn’t playing Twenty Questions with a goddamn bird instead of going out, kicking the universe in the balls until it gave them back. And when would I give up? Like that obnoxious bird said:
Nevermore.
16
Robin had a client. He was evasive on what he did for this client or who they were, which was weird as he loved bragging and name-dropping every opportunity he had. Whoever they were, they weren’t using their penthouse for a few months—or years—and Robin set us up. In more ways than one. A temporary safe house, new clothes—the scorched odor from the security guard was on the ones I was wearing and I stripped them off while still on the stairs before entering the penthouse floor. I hadn’t borrowed any of Niko’s underwear, brotherly codependence only goes so far, which meant it was me, my holster, guns, knives, and birthday suit waiting for Robin to do the same. He did with alacrity. Naturally. I went rummaging around his client’s penthouse that took up the entire floor for the clothes he’d promised would be waiting for us.
He’d lifted a phone from someone he passed to call his “people.” He’d lost his in the sewer and, despite the alcohol wipe down mine had been given by Niko, Goodfellow would sooner steal one than touch mine, which hadn’t been lost, but had bathed in sewage. Then again, my phone was also stolen, looted from the body of the junkie who’d tried to kill me and who I’d killed first and better. I couldn’t claim the high ground on stolen phones. Robin had made a call minutes before we had caught the cab and arranged for clothes, toiletries, stocking the refrigerator, extra ammunition as it was mundane ammunition and easily available, and anything else his people might think of.
While I was hunting for the clothes, I’d let him make the call to Niko and Cal with directions to the penthouse and instructions to do the same with their clothes I’d insisted we do with ours. I could hear Cal bitching in the background as Robin talked to Niko. Nude conspiracies were mentioned. I told Goodfellow flatly that Cal could be naked for two minutes and live or wear the clothes he had on and die. And it wouldn’t be Lazarus who did it. If he tried to come on this floor wearing those same funeral pyre stinking clothes, I’d shoot him myself before he made it off the top stair. Pass it on.
The bitching and complaining was dire, but they both did as they were told, bringing only their weapons and getting new clothes from Robin
or from me from Robin as Niko had a condition of his own. He’d stand in the foyer directly off the stairs in front of the penthouse door all day and night nude if I didn’t lock Goodfellow up until Niko was dressed. Niko was being as patient with Robin’s quirks now as my Niko had been, but being patient did not mean he lacked self-preservation.
The clothes had been delivered before Goodfellow and I had made it there. His employees, people, paien, or hyperintelligent—and hyperactive to be that quick—cockroaches, excelled at their job. It was all what I would’ve picked out for myself and was perfect for night work. The puck had gone so far as to bite the bullet and let us have our generic jeans, T-shirts, and leather, no Armani or Ralph Lauren. He’d remembered how I’d DIY’ed Cal’s T-shirt and went the extra mile to have one either printed up personally for me or picked out with my personality in mind. No magic marker needed.
YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE BAD WITH THE GOOD.
I, MOTHERFUCKER, AM
THE BAD
Nice.
I was stretched out on the couch, as it was that or wait a few more minutes until my legs folded bonelessly under me. The one with the weasel slash was less painful as in no pain, none. There wasn’t a twinge or an ache, nothing. I couldn’t exactly feel that leg or the other one, but it was a fair trade. Robin’s people, damn, I loved his people, loved their huge compassionate drug delivering cockroach hearts. They’d provided me with real pain meds. The bottle was labeled with a long complicated name that would mean something to a pharmacist, but not to me. Goodfellow told me it was Vicodin, gave me a bottle of water to chase two down, and told me if that didn’t help there was a morphine pump in one of the closets somewhere. From the looks of the place, I believed him.