by Rob Thurman
“There has to be a way we can take him. And who is Tyr?” I asked, beginning to feel the burn in my chest, the need for oxygen, and we hadn’t run far, nothing like the ten miles I was used to. I felt my throat tightening again and the air I was pulling in and exhaling was coming and going with a stark wheeze. The noose was back.
Goodfellow heard it, my increasing struggle for air, and didn’t reply. Silent now as he kept the grim grip on my ponytail pulled over my shoulder from my back to the front to be used as a leash. I could see where he was headed and what he had in mind. We were going for the edge of the ship and he planned to pull us both over into the river. It might have worked, too, if the noose hadn’t kept tightening. I clawed at my throat, but it was the same. Nothing was there. Nothing I could touch. I stumbled and asked one last time before I fell. “Robin . . . who . . . is . . . Tyr?” I was on my knees then and my throat was closed completely. I couldn’t get any air to pass, not the smallest gasp, not a fraction of a breath. I couldn’t breathe. That didn’t stop me from trying to get up, to get to the edge. I had to stand. I had to make it. Robin wouldn’t leave me. I had to get the fuck up or when I died here, he’d die with me.
I tried, with everything in me, I tried.
I failed.
Barely on my knees now, I was wavering, about to fall on my side. Robin was in front of me then, on his own knees to face me. His hands were on my shoulders keeping me upright. I might not be able to breathe or speak, but I could get across my point, last that it was. I put my hand flat on the puck’s chest and pushed him toward the side, toward the river. I could hear Niko shouting that Cal couldn’t breathe, that he was blue. I was most likely blue as well. His eyes held mine.
We were all fucked, but Niko, Cal, and I would come back and live again, fifty years or a hundred. Goodfellow wouldn’t. If he ran for it, if he survived, we’d see him again. If he died with us, we never would. Of course, of goddamn course, he wouldn’t do the smart thing, the puck thing, the selfish thing. “No,” he snapped, looping fingers around my wrist to keep me from pushing again. “You died for me on a gamisou kitchen table tortured with the medieval version of Ginsu knives in a pathetic excuse for a castle. You did it because you wouldn’t give me up—you said it yourself. That is not who you are. You would not and could not give me over to the mercy of a sociopathic bastard that wanted me hanged for treason. This is a different life, but I won’t shame myself by doing less by you. I am not giving you up to the exact same kind of monster you faced for me.”
That’s when Robin answered my question about Tyr.
I wished he hadn’t.
Then he hoisted me over his shoulder and ran for the edge, jerking and dodging streaks and bolts of lightning that were so thick in the air, I didn’t know how we weren’t dead on the deck, hearts stopped. I saw Niko through a distant haze. He had Cal over his shoulder and was running all out toward the edge and then was over it, both of them a distant splash. Robin avoided one more streak of lightning so close that I smelled burning hair. Then we, like Niko and Cal, were over and hitting the water. I couldn’t see much—black and yellow swirling across the world—and then I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t hear the sound as we sank into the depths of the water, but I felt the cold fist of it close around us. It faded nearly instantly as did the agony of oxygen-starved lungs. I was almost gone, but that didn’t worry me. The time for worry was over. I was certain that was going to be my last thought. I didn’t know if I was right or wrong. Did where you have the thought count? Who knew? I did know I’d stopped breathing minutes ago. I recognized the very last beat of my heart when I felt it.
I knew I wasn’t in the river any longer and wouldn’t be again.
That’s how it was—always had been, always would be.
It was time to go.
“It hasn’t changed.” Another thought, I’d give you that, but I didn’t have it in the river. That was ancient history. Now I stood in a cottage and stared out the window at a meadow of dew and grass and mist, not a river in sight. There was a pile of fresh-smelling straw to one side, a blanket thrown carelessly on it that would be warm against a morning chill. Would it kill someone to update to central heating? Apparently. As everything here was as I remembered in as minute detail as if I’d seen it yesterday, rather the infinity of moments since I’d been here last. When I’d left the room with the small window of gray, sunless sky, I’d walked the red path this way, drifted atop the deep scarlet stream to a place beyond pain, but that had all been closer to forever ago than to yesterday.
Like before, next I would wrap myself in the blanket and walk out the door to someplace new.
This is how it goes.
I frowned and didn’t reach for the blanket. That question, it could’ve been forever ago as well, I’d asked Robin . . . What was it? I snagged at the ragged end of the memory and yanked hard. I’d asked him—I pulled harder yet and there it was. I’d demanded, “Who is Tyr?” And he’d answered me, eyes gone from green to black with a fury so fierce and a fear so profound I didn’t think Robin even knew that consuming an emotion. I went to the cottage door and opened it.
This is how it goes here. You know that. It always has been, always will be.
“Tyr is a god.”
A god, Robin had answered me. How could we fight a god? I was dead anyway and standing in the doorway to what was beyond death. This death. It was time to go, but now it wasn’t the cottage I remembered clearly. It was what I’d left behind to come here that was splashed in vivid colors of desperation behind my eyes. I wanted Robin to survive. I wanted Niko to do the same. He wasn’t my Niko, but he would’ve been. And any Niko deserved to live. I wanted Cal to live and with me gone, went back to the way he’d been before I’d come in and stomped all over his life. I wanted him to be around to see Robin for the friend he was. I wanted them all to make it out of that river and walk away, but if they did, Tyr would still come after them. And Tyr was a god.
It is time to go.
No one could fight and win against a god. Not even the three of them. Not by themselves.
Not alone.
I hadn’t been alone fighting for my life in the gray room.
I hadn’t heard them, but they’d been there for me the entire time. They’d fought for me harder than I was able to fight for myself. On that first and last day in one, the day that had counted above all the rest, they had never left me alone.
It is time to go.
And I was not going to leave them alone either.
No one could defeat Tyr?
It is time to go.
Damn straight, it was time to go. I slammed the cottage door on that boring and bland painting of a Thomas Kinkade clichéd misty meadow. Then I turned back into the cottage, moving from where I’d come. There was a door other than the one that led to the wet green silver grass. This was a door that was supposed to open once then lock behind you. Fortunately for me, I’d been picking locks since I was five years old and I didn’t care if they were solid or goddamn metaphysical. If I wanted that door open, then, by God, it would fucking open if only to let me prove Goodfellow wrong.
No one could defeat a god? What about the First who were born before them? Ruled before them? Invented murder, death, and war before them?
No one could defeat a god?
Good. I didn’t want to simply defeat him. I wanted him dead. Could someone kill a god when he was born of the First? Could he with all he’d learned from the First? Even if he wasn’t quite a First himself, not entirely.
I grabbed for the handle of the door I didn’t remember coming through.
No one could defeat a god.
We’d fucking see about that.
The second part of the story will continue in the next Cal Leandros novel, coming in winter 2016 from Roc.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Thurman is the New York Times bestselling author of the Cal Le
andros novels, including Slashback and Doubletake, the Trickster novels, including The Grimrose Path and Trick of the Light, the Korsak Brothers novels, including Basilisk and Chimera, and several stories in various anthologies.
For updates, teasers, music videos, deleted scenes, social networking (the time-suck of an author’s life), and various other extras such as free music and computer wallpaper, visit the author online.
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