by Rob Thurman
Every piece of furniture was upholstered in a material with a different animal pattern on it. Tiger stripes but purple against blue, cheetah spots that were forest green against a black that reflected colors like a raven’s wing, and a bizarre chair that was covered in something similar to chameleon scales except chameleons didn’t come that large or change color randomly. All fake with those colors except maybe the chair. That could be from a paien creature or an alien for all I knew.
“By the way, is this velvet?” I knew it wasn’t fur. I ran my hand over the cushion beside me. It was—the thick plush velvet you saw in the high-class pornos—which meant it was equally tacky as hell, but cost considerably more. As in crazy-stupid-money that could feed the hungry of every single third world nation on the planet and have enough left over to buy Canada for the skiing. I’d heard the rich like to ski.
“Holy hell. Is your secret client Hugh Hefner? How many drugs was his decorator on? Although the velvet, I asked if this was velvet, didn’t I? This velvet is the most comfortable thing I’ve laid on . . . except for Delilah’s naked body. I miss her naked body.” I mourned as I kept on petting the velvet like the dogs that ran before I could pat them, hating the Auphe in me so much. I cheered when the idea came to me and I asked. “Is it the paien version of Hugh Hefner?”
“No, that would be me, except I’m infinitely more attractive, far younger in appearance, and without need of erectile dysfunction medications.” Goodfellow patted me on the head with the fond gaze you’d give a puppy who hadn’t quite gotten down the walking part yet.
“You are damn good-looking. If I weren’t straight and we didn’t have this brotherly bond thing going, I’d screw you. No, wait, forgot. You have that weapon of mass destruction in your pants. Sorry, no matter my orientation, you’d have to keep Godzilla to yourself.”
“What the fuck,” Niko cursing again—unbelievable, “did you give him?” He had the puck by the arm with a grip that had to be painfully tight. I should share my drugs with him.
I held up the bottle in my other hand that wasn’t fascinated by the velvet. “Vicodin. Want some,” I asked the puck, “for your arm? Niko, want some for your mood? You’re not this pissy that often. Well, more pissy than you think you are, like dirty dishes are the call to release the Four Horsemen. Jesus, let it go just once.” I yawned. “But you’re my brother and I love you. If I’d had to raise me, I’d be pissy, too. Actually if I’d had to raise me, I’d have sold me in the Walmart parking lot when I was a baby and still cute. Hadn’t started biting ears off my classmates yet, which did not taste good. Cold and clammy and the ear wax was no fucking A.1. Sauce.” I waved the bottle at Goodfellow. “Remember, start with the feet. The screaming is like A.1. Sau—”
Niko’s hand clamped over my mouth and he let go of Robin to seize the bottle out of my grasp. He read the label and of course he recognized it as he’d probably gotten a pharmacy degree in two weeks, saving up the time by skipping bathroom breaks. Meditation had given him complete control over all bodily functions. “This is the generic name for Vicodin, but what did you actually put in the bottle?”
“Oh, that’s nothing. MS Contin, oral morphine, and he took only two. The recommended dose,” Goodfellow dismissed. “It was what was in the water. Thorazine, Ativan, an entire handful of Rohypnol, and ten or so doses of MDMA, ecstasy if you’re not familiar, to make him happy. He deserves a little happy after the two days he’s had.”
“Won’t that kill him? Really, fifty times over, kill him? Deader than dead? That seems over the top. If it seems over the top to me, when I want to slam his head against the wall over and over until Jimmy Hoffa or D. B. Cooper falls out of his ear, it has to be classified as excessive as fuck.” Cal, who had to be worried if he thought I was dying, hid it well . . . and deep, incredibly deep, too deep I assumed as the concern hit rock bottom and bounced back straight into curiosity.
He snapped his fingers and for the first time showed some enthusiasm toward Goodfellow. “This is like that Russian guy. Were you hanging around Rasputin? Which one were you? The one who poisoned him, stabbed him, shot him, cut off his dick, or threw him in the river? Or did you do them all?”
“No one cut off his penis. I am beyond exhausted of hearing that rumor.” Robin headed in toward what I vaguely remembered as being the direction of the kitchen. “His hygiene was far too lacking for anyone to entertain the idea of undoing his pants, much less touching what nested in the filth underneath. Dogs could smell him coming from miles away and would flee howling.”
“He’s going to die. We can’t take him to the hospital. They’ll know he’s different. His blood work, he’s only half human, who knows what the blood work will show. If they could save him, it would to be to dissect him later.” Niko, every inch of visible skin a dirty gray except his lips, pressed to a bloodless white. His katana was slicing toward Goodfellow at an angle to separate his head from his shoulders. “You’ve killed him.” Robin dodged beneath the blade. “Murdered him.” This time he jumped back and flipped over the lizard chair. Niko went right over the top after him, spitting venomously, “When he swore you were his friend, that you were loyal.” Look at that. Niko was trusting me more and more. I had to die to get there, but it was worth it. He swung the katana in from the side where it was promptly snared in a metallic bronze and silver zebra striped rug. Niko was thrown back over the chair landing facedown, the rug-wrapped sword kicked out of sight, the chair’s cushion yanked free to drop on Niko’s back, and Robin took a seat on it.
“Told you he was a good fighter,” I said, unfazed by this or anything: the world, life, death. It would work itself out. “Try the morphine, Nik,” I urged, enjoying the placid, floating sensation. “You’ll feel no pain.” I shook the bottle at him again before I realized I didn’t have the bottle any longer. He’d taken it.
Cal, who I was beginning to think didn’t much like me . . . the little prick, was pointing his Glock at Robin. “Get off of him. I know you’re not going to hurt him, and I know Caliban isn’t going to die. You said it yourself. You both had eight years to pull that off and neither of you did. But get off my brother or this crap will go on all night and I’m hungry. I couldn’t save any of the Chinese.”
Goodfellow grimaced. “Disgusting child.” He stood, caught the cushion that Niko flung at him with ease, and held down a hand. “Caliban told you. I could kill all three of you with a sheet. Imagine the horrors I could inflict with a cushion.” Niko ignored the hand and gained his feet without the assistance, not that he needed it. Robin sighed, “Pissy indeed. Caliban will be fine, but he has not been fine the past days, has he? He went through”—his eyes slid toward Cal, who’d lowered the gun—“some trauma, and time travel with the Kyntalash is not meant for humans or anyone with a single cell of Homo sapiens in them. It’s extremely debilitating. He should’ve dropped after the first step he took into this time, dropped and stayed out for a day at minimum. Instead he’s been fighting skin-walkers, shadow weasels, running like mad carrying my half-conscious self through sewers and up flights of stairs. He hasn’t slept, that’s easy to see as he appeared to have two black eyes before I broke his nose. Apologies again, Caliban. And from his reaction to my ordering of the Chinese food, he hasn’t eaten. By the time we go to face Lazarus, Caliban might trip and kill himself falling down the stairs.”
Niko was putting out fewer waves of rage, which I’d not realized you could see if you tried hard enough. They were purple. I’d have thought red. Every book says so. I saw red. My vision was red with rage. Nope. Purple. “And you decided to what? Put him in a coma?”
“Hardly. He told me the things I need to know about the coming eight years. He told me about having the Auphe resistance to poisons and venoms, how that’s increased as he matures and with repeated exposure to a multitude of said poisons and venoms.” He paused for a quick aside to Cal. “You, at this age and little exposure to poisons, I might have killed. So do no
t drink any bottled water you see in here to be on the safe side. Tap only, or sample the wide variety of juices, sodas, and ales of the world all in the refrigerator.”
And he was back to Niko. “Also he’s building up an inconvenient tolerance to various drugs, which is becoming a problem when he needs minor to moderate surgery. You have been forced to use more and more anesthesia to keep him under while you stitch him back together, but that’s a problem for another time and another you.”
Niko had been getting his color back. He lost it again instantly at that revelation. I was proud. My brother the black market illegal doctor. Robin was going strong yet. “He told me where the levels of his various tolerances are. I knew how much to use. I had no plans on killing him or inducing a coma, skata, distrustful bastards that you are. This is what is going to happen.” He held up a finger. “Prota, we’re going to feed him now that he’s in such an amenable mood.” He held up a second finger or it could be a fourth one. Things were becoming blurry. “Defteros, he’ll sleep until we go for Lazarus. Four a.m. seems the best time for the least possible number of people at the Pier.” Another finger went up. I didn’t attempt to estimate which number that was. There were fingers everywhere now. He was an octopus there were that many. “Trítos, one of us will sit with him at all times while he sleeps. We can take shifts, however you like, but he will not be alone. Not for a bathroom break, not to get a snack from the kitchen thinking as you can still see him, what could go wrong? Not for a single second is he to be alone, and if you have but the smallest scrap of a soul, then while you sit with him, you will hold his hand. Are we clear, sas agnoeí paidiá?” Waiting for an answer wasn’t part of his big plan. That would mean there was a chance they wouldn’t do what they were told.
When Robin Goodfellow was pissed, everyone did as they were told.
He would’ve been a good king.
He let his hand fall and used both of them to comb efficiently through my hair. It had dried finally on the cab ride over. It was Sophia’s hair, straight, but the thick weight of it made for a mess of stubborn twists and knots if I didn’t brush it while it was still damp and pull it back into a tight prison of a ponytail to let it dry completely.
“I wasn’t alone.” In the room with the small patch of gray sky high on the wall.
He murmured at my ear, “No, Will, you were never alone. And, Caliban, you won’t be alone either.”
“I don’t want to sleep.” If I slept, I’d dream, and I couldn’t see it again. Even under the foggy weight of the drugs, I didn’t forget that. “I’ll dream. Don’t make me dream.”
Niko’s face had gained years and weary lines during the puck’s speech. I understood that. It had been long. Very . . . extrem – . . . incredib – . . . just long. My brother but not my brother, not yet, knew why I wouldn’t want to dream. I’d told him about the explosion and how they’d left me. All of them. It was a good reason for showing no confusion over Goodfellow’s military style command of hand-holding. “You won’t. If you start to, whoever’s with you will wake you up. I promise, little brother.” He wasn’t mine and I wasn’t his, but I had been once and he would be again.
Cal was the opposite. When he spoke, there were emotions everywhere, high and low, waves crashing on a beach. Confusion, irritation, anger, jealousy, stubborn bucking of authority, resentment knowing he was being kept in the dark about something everyone else knew, and it all kept building and building. It was amazing to watch. I’d never gotten to see them on me, especially not as many and all at once. They combined, hit fury at record speed, and poured over his face in a cascade of . . . “Ha!” I got it now. Robin had been right. I pointed at Cal and announced with wickedly gleeful recognition.
“Murder face.”
• • •
I woke up screaming and I didn’t stop.
Not for four or five minutes, maybe longer. The three of them were there, two were talking, mouths moving fast, but I couldn’t hear them. I could hear only the explosion, the first blast, the devouring hunger of the flames, the second detonation, the howling of a tornado made of whirling fire, the sky falling. The third one’s mouth was shut, but his eyes were too wide, pale skin paler yet. Shocky. That’s what they’d say on some hospital show. He looked shocky. The first two came closer to me, one’s hand reached out to grip mine so tightly that my fingers were the blanched blue-white of interrupted circulation, but the third one, he moved back. Moved away and crouched on the floor, his arms wrapped around his knees, his hands fisted, knuckles white.
I knew who they were. I knew their names. But just as I could see their mouths move and not hear the words, knowing their names didn’t mean anything. I could see them spelled out in my mind, superimposed over the flames and smoke, but I couldn’t read them. I couldn’t say them. I couldn’t remember the sound of the letters spilling out into the air. And I couldn’t comprehend how I could see the three of them, the people with names no more use to me than hieroglyphs. How could I see them and the room around us when I was sitting in the street, surrounded by pizza boxes, watching my family burn? How could I see both at once?
Did I care how? No.
I didn’t care. I didn’t care. I didn’t care.
Wedging myself in a corner of the couch, yanking away from the touches, ripping my hand out of the one that was squeezing bones to dust, I snatched up the cushion next to me, retreated farther into my space, and pressed my face against the cloth. It didn’t block out my screams from the world, but it blocked out the world—this one—from me. I let myself fall back into nothing but the loss and the screaming.
Those I understood.
• • •
“Caliban.”
Robin had one of his cars sent over and drove it himself, ditching it blocks away, destined to be towed. We were making the rest of the way to the Ever docked at Pier 17 on foot. I didn’t think it mattered to Lazarus: On foot or by car, he’d be well aware we were coming. It was less trouble in that it made it easier to avoid security guards such as the one hopefully not still hanging across from Niko and Cal’s apartment.
My stomach was uncomfortably full. It was a given Niko and Goodfellow were too smart to overfeed me after days without food, but by the same token, a small amount of food would stretch a shrunken stomach. I didn’t remember what I’d eaten, it wouldn’t have been meat—I trusted them on that. I didn’t remember eating period, which meant I’d been too loopy and far gone to do it myself, choosing instead to paint my face with it and think I was making art. They had to have fed me, spooned it into my mouth like I was a goddamn baby. I closed my eyes and had a flash of someone making airplane noises. That fucking Cal. I didn’t get how Niko and Robin could trust me, now, all my life, when I couldn’t trust myself. Going by this Cal, this version of me, if my arms were longer, I’d stab myself in the back. And I’d do it with enough eager enthusiasm. I’d likely have balloons, a cake, and a magician while I did it—make a real party of it.
He hadn’t been shining bright with enthusiasm during the screaming. Wrapped up in a ball, trying hard not to piss or shit himself, staring at me like I was his worst nightmare. That would be because I was. He’d seen me screaming loud and long enough to bring down the building on top of us, and he knew. Whatever had happened to me to put me in a hell I couldn’t scream my way out of, it was going to happen to him. That was in his future and his future wasn’t looking pretty.
I hoped he had shit his pants, the spiteful little bastard.
“Caliban.” It wasn’t said with more insistence. If anything, it was said with more desperation.
I wasn’t pissed at Robin or Niko about the, not nightmares—that wasn’t what they called them. The terrors, that’s what they were. Terrors. It was worse when the terrors were one in the same as your life. Robin and Niko, it wasn’t their fault. They’d have noticed the first tremor or twitch and kept their word to wake me up. It hadn’t been their shift tho
ugh, as they were catching some needed sleep of their own for facing Lazarus. It had been Cal’s watch, and he had enough respect for his brother and enough wariness of Robin’s display of fighting skills and icy command to sit with me as he’d been told. That didn’t mean he cared enough to watch me. A nightmare. So what? He knew how bad nightmares could get from months of them after escaping his two years with the Auphe. He’d lived through them. If I had one, I’d live through it too.
Whatever he’d been staring at, the wall, the ceiling, his own feet wondering if they were still growing and whether his latest pair of combat boots had started to feel cramped, I had no idea. He hadn’t been keeping his eyes on me though, as that tremor, that twitch went unnoticed and then the abyss gobbled me up, chewing at me with teeth like serrated knives all the way down. Yeah, what Cal had been watching instead of me, I had no interest in asking him.
I did know he damn sure hadn’t been holding my hand. But I hadn’t expected that. I’d just expected him to watch. There was no question he didn’t like me. I hadn’t known that he hated me miles more than he’d ever hated himself.
Once I’d managed to climb out of the pit of nononononono, stop screaming in horrified denial, and recover enough to project the thinnest veneer of fake sanity, I’d regained the ability to talk . . . some . . . which is a good thing to have. I’d pushed Robin and Niko back and away with no real force, saying I needed to shower, which was true. I was soaked in sweat and stank of fear that human noses would be able to pick up. I reclaimed my hand from the puck’s grip as no matter how many times I’d torn free of it, he kept coming back to snag it. He realized, hell, everyone in the room realized, I was panicked, confused, not remotely oriented, had no idea which of the whens I was in, which of the versions of who were with me, had no idea what was real and what wasn’t, and smothering in terror that all of it was real.