Slashback: A Cal Leandros Novel (CAL AND NIKO)

by Rob Thurman

  I felt the nauseating pain of my thumb slam one more time against the pole and pop out of the joint. There are times pain isn’t pain; it’s relief and it’s hope and it was life. My life. Cal’s life. I folded my fingers into as narrow a wedge as I could, tore them out of the metal cuff, and I ran.

  I wasn’t lithe and sleek as my martial arts teachers would’ve hoped. The one cuff still fastened to one wrist and rattling, I stumbled up the stairs, falling once with splinters ramming under my short nails and hitting my dislocated thumb. It should’ve hurt. It should’ve paralyzed me with agony, made me curl into a ball as pain exploded through me.

  I didn’t feel a thing.

  I slipped in my own blood dripping from my wrists as I hit the cheap kitchen linoleum and kept moving. The attic I spotted in a nerve-freezing moment. The pull-down stairs in the hallway were waiting for me and I went up them as clumsily as the basement ones, but I went fast. Speed over form. Life over death. There was dried blood on them. Long soaked into the raw wood. Cleaner wouldn’t get that out of the grain, would it? No, never. There was death on every step upward, but this wasn’t Jacob’s ladder. This trail of screams and mortality didn’t raise you up—it led to Hell. I knew it.

  Cal . . . God, Cal, don’t be dead.

  In the space above there was a skylight and it let in enough streetlights and faint painpricks, because they hurt—what they showed—hurt, of stars as well as a quarter moon.

  I saw it all.

  Cal’s shirt was neatly folded, such a neat serial killer was Junior, on a table of knives and scalpels and other things that wouldn’t leave my memory as long as I lived. My brother was there, his hands duct taped behind him and his dark head flopping loosely with chin down against his chest. He was facing the wall, slumped bonelessly in a far corner.

  Limp.

  Unmoving.

  Rivulets of blood on the floor.

  My brother.

  Foulmouthed, purple handprints on the refrigerator, smart and lazy, read stacks of comic books instead of schoolbooks, who’d taken on a raging, drunk Sophia to save my money for college, who taught me the difference between shades of gray and black and white and lied to little old ladies if there were cookies in it for him. My brother who I’d seen born and who I’d let die because I didn’t believe him soon enough.

  I didn’t look for Junior. I didn’t care. Kill me, don’t kill me—I did not care.

  I pulled Cal up in my arms. He wasn’t Sophia’s, he wasn’t the Grendel’s, he wasn’t Junior’s. He was mine and I would keep him as long as I could.

  Forever if I could. With my brain crumbling at the edges, fracturing through the middle, forever seemed . . . right.

  I pushed his hair from his eyes, leaving my blood on his face. They were closed, black lashes against paper white skin. There was a sluggishly bleeding slice straight across his chest a few inches below his nipple line. The top slash of a J.

  “I like to sign my work.”

  No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t right. His blood should be inside him, not out. I wiped a hand frantically over the blood, trying to push it back in the wound, back inside Cal. I only ended up smearing it everywhere over Cal’s stomach and thin chest, making it worse.

  How could it be worse?

  The thought staggered me.

  Swallowing broken glass that had nothing to do with the bleach, I thought numbly . . . wait . . . no . . . the dead don’t bleed. And they don’t breathe. Cal was doing both. I clutched him tighter, so damn small, and all there was in my world.

  Junior. Where was Junior? Where was the dead man?

  Someone was growling savagely. It might have been me.

  There was another crumpled pile in the opposite corner of Cal. This bundle was much larger. I settled Cal against the far wall, carefully making sure the blood wasn’t as much as I’d thought. He wasn’t bleeding out. It was a slow flow, I could see now. For a moment it could wait. Cal wouldn’t mind, considering what I had planned.

  I limped over and nudged clothes and muscle disguised as fat over onto his back. Junior’s eyes were half open and bloody foam framed his mouth. That would be from the vicious slashes that penetrated his clothes and several inches of flesh from the base of his neck to just above his groin. I caught the faint foul smell that had to be the spill of intestinal contents. The room had a colored tint to the air, red as the blood all around us, from the crimson moon shining through the tiny skylight made of scarlet glass.

  The Grendel had listened.

  It had come and gone, but it had listened. It had done what I couldn’t do.

  I didn’t know what that meant, but it was worth it. Right now it was worth it.

  But it hadn’t finished the job. Oh, given three minutes and Junior would be as dead as the victims in his basement, but the Grendel had left me a present.

  Or it might be a reminder.

  They were watching Cal. I needed to do that too and do it better.

  I picked up the knife that lay across Junior’s slack palm. It had blood on it, Cal’s blood. Junior didn’t get any of that. It didn’t belong to him. I methodically wiped the blade on my pants. “I have a line, you know. It’s been moving around lately, but I have one,” I said cold and brittle as frost. “You, motherfucker, crossed it.”

  I rammed the knife through flesh and bone and into his heart.

  The faint uneven beat vibrated through the metal, the handle, and into my hand before finally stopping. He touched my little brother—I stopped his heart.

  It was a fair trade.

  15

  Cal

  Present Day

  It wasn’t fair.

  Robin and Ishiah made plans. I guessed that’s what they did. I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t care. I had my own plan. If I could lure Jack far enough away from Niko, then I could open a gate inside him. Nik wouldn’t die from the mass of moving crystal-feathered shrapnel that was the inner Jack and I’d try to gate away in time to avoid the same fate. If I made it, great. If I didn’t, shit happened. I’d go down fighting. It was the best end I had hope for in my life anyway.

  Life wasn’t fair, childish to complain, but there you go.

  I would save Nik—that was the bottom line. He hadn’t survived twelve years ago to die at the whim or hand of the same monster now.

  Life wasn’t fair and who told you that it was?

  That’s what they always said. Fine. This time I said, that’s who, and I didn’t care if that was childish or immature. I said it was going to be fair therefore it would be and God help you if you got in my way. But God wouldn’t help, would He? God didn’t interfere and that was a damn shame for you.

  I knew because I did nothing but interfere, and I didn’t work in mysterious ways. I worked in bloody ones.

  At least Jack had let Niko take his katana with him; that was something. That his phone was centered in Nik’s perfect anal-retentive manner on his dresser meant no tracking him by GPS, which was why I was ripping the list off the printer of the search I’d done on abandoned churches in the city. Ishiah said Jack would be in a church. I’d find that church and if I had to tear it down brick by brick to get to Nik, I would. I shoved the list in my pocket and went to my room to get a few things. Opening a gate in Jack was the only chance I had, but Nik would tell me to prepare for any eventuality. He had learned that lesson the hard way. I wouldn’t do him any justice to forget that now.

  “Where are you going?”

  Goodfellow sounded odd, his words moving slowly as though the air was water. “To the churches. To kill Jack. To bring Nik home.” It was a stupid question and he seemed to realize it.

  “I think I meant more what will you do?” He chose his words more carefully now. “To accomplish those things. Jack can’t be killed.”

  “An Auphe can kill anything. You know that.” He did. He’d seen it often enough before.

  As I finished gathering my weapons, he said tightly, “If they don’t care about surviving, that’s true. But I k
now better than to have this talk with you and I don’t know that I would do any differently. This once I won’t play the hypocrite. Start at the top of your list. Ishiah and I will begin at the bottom. If we find them first, we’ll call you.”

  The air was air again and I felt more human than I had in a long time. Nothing brings out the humanity in you like sheer terror. “He thinks it was his fault. I tried to help him. I think I did, some, but what if he thinks he deserves this? To be to Jack what I was to Junior? What if he doesn’t fight hard enough? Shit, Robin, what if he doesn’t wait for me?”

  He pushed me hard enough to have the pain of my broken rib slicing through my panic but not hard enough to actually injure me. “Don’t be an idiot. Yes, he feels guilty, but do you think for a second your brother would willingly transfer that guilt to you?” He pushed me again, this time in motion toward the hall and then the front door.

  Robin was right. Nik wouldn’t do that to me. He would do anything to be there when I showed up, still alive . . . still fighting. I glanced at the door, then back at Goodfellow. “I won’t be needing that. Look for him. Find him. Call me.” I pulled the gate, a gate I thought about because Nik would want me to, around myself and left this world.

  I reappeared at the location of the first church. I knew it, had passed it a hundred times. It was one of the locations I was familiar enough with to travel through a rip in the world and arrive at its step. I was wearing Niko’s long coat he’d left behind. It covered up enough weapons to take out the entire NRA. Nothing covered up that I’d appeared in broad daylight out of thin air surrounded by the violent purple and black oil slick of a wound that was reality torn around me. I was separated from the sidewalk by a chain-link fence, but it wasn’t much of one and people saw. I don’t know how many, but from the shouts and gasps it was more than one or two.

  There’d be hell to pay for that later . . . if there was a later. I didn’t care about the consequences. I did care about finding Nik as fast as I possibly could. If I had to reveal every hidden paien alive to an unknowing human world, so fucking be it.

  This church wasn’t that old. It was that ugly, square industrial look from the 1950s with one of those steeples that don’t actually have a cross or a bell and you wonder why they stuck a steeple on it at all. What did I know though? Sophia and religion hadn’t gone hand in hand. As far as I remembered, I’d never been in a church. It had nothing to do with being Rom. Rom were the same as everyone else; some were more religious than others and religious traditions varied from clan to clan.

  It was amazing the shit your mind could come up with to stop the mental images of your brother being skinned alive that ran through every thought like a garrote rusted red with old blood.

  Time to go.

  I shot the chain and lock off the door and ran into my first church. I searched the two floors and the basement, kicking down the more flimsily locked doors. I didn’t get what I was praying for. Except for rats the building was empty.

  The next church called for a taxi. I had to gate back home to come out and catch it. I couldn’t flag it down at the church. From inside I could hear the people gathering on the sidewalk, the disbelieving voices. If I didn’t come out of the church, it was a little better. Not a lot better, but a little. They wouldn’t see more proof that someone . . . something had been there to begin with.

  I needed the taxi for the second church as if I’d passed that address, I didn’t remember it. And if I couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t gate there. As the cab pulled up at the second address, I told the driver to keep going and gave him a new one. This one was already half converted into condos and workers were moving inside and out. If Jack was there anywhere, there would be a good deal more screaming and slaughter or a pile of cooling dead bodies hidden somewhere inside.

  The next was the same, as was the next. Nothing stayed undeveloped for long in this city. The longer I searched, the more Niko’s chances declined. Unless . . . unless Jack didn’t kill during the day no matter how safe his lair. Junior had his attic, his skylight . . . for Jack to watch maybe, or maybe for another reason. Jack didn’t belong to Heaven anymore. At night under the stars and the moon might be the closest he could come to being home. I couldn’t see the stars in the New York night sky with so much light pollution, but Jack’s eyes weren’t mine. Neither was Jack’s mind. Jack’s mind wasn’t the mind he’d always had either. Maybe Jack was crazy enough to think the stars were the eyes of his fellow angels watching his work with approval.

  If I wanted to lie to myself and grasp at straws, I would. In my life I’d learned one thing: the truth will kill you as often as it sets you free.

  The next church was Jack’s. Not his one true church, but it belonged to him. The first floor was empty, but the basement was home to fourteen fucking hoodie-wearing acolytes. If I never saw another hoodie or whoever had spread the fashion gospel on those goddamn things, I’d be happy as hell. The men had been sleeping when I came down the stairs. It was a small area, meant for storage, not a dormitory, but that’s the purpose it served now. They sat up on old sleeping bags, not one of them with a knife in hand. From the direction they were reaching they slept with them under flattened, ancient pillows. It was a good place if you were smart enough to sleep with your hand under there grasping the handle. They weren’t that smart. They did know me. I saw it in the set of their jaw, the disgust in their eyes. One stood up—the leader, ready to face me unarmed. That’s what a brave if stupid leader would do. The rest were all still reaching for those knives when I sent Jack a message.

  It was a messy one.

  But sometimes you have to make a mess to get the point across.

  I did think about it, Nik, before I did it, as you’d told me to. I decided if the consequences of being Auphe over human in this instance meant getting you back, it was more than worth it.

  The basement was covered in gore, charred flesh, far-flung limbs when I finished walking down the stairs to jump the last stair to the concrete and moved across to the one remaining—the one I hadn’t opened a gate within to turn inside out, upside down, round and round. He was still standing, the one who would know of any of them, where Jack might be. That hoodie had been white; it was Carrie-crimson now, but he was covered in a little worse than pig’s blood.

  I grinned at him with teeth that couldn’t be as sharp and wicked in reality as they felt in my mind. “Careful. The floor’s slick. I wouldn’t want you to fall and hurt yourself.”

  That disgust in his eyes was gone. It’s easy to hate an idea—that of a Godless creature—to want to destroy what was behind it . . . when it’s only an idea. It’s harder when that idea is a reality right in your face. Dripping down your face in this case. That’s when there’s only room for fear. This guy might think he was going to Heaven when he died, but God oh God, he didn’t want to die like that, now did he?

  I circled him. “It’s funny really. When I was a kid . . . and I was once a kid, hard to believe, I know. But when I was little, one of the scariest things I came across was a jack-in-the-box. I practically pissed my pants at the sight of one.” I tugged on his hood as I’d tugged on Nik’s braid hours ago. “Yet now that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for Jack in his godforsaken fucking box and you’re going to tell me where that box is.”

  He did.

  I didn’t doubt that he would. He could barely get the words out fast enough; they tumbled over each other, a run of stones racing down the side of a mountain. That was usually a warning sign of something bigger and worse to come

  This wasn’t any different from that.

  There may have been an assumption on his part that I’d let him live if he talked. I wasn’t an idiot and I wasn’t naïve. I’d dealt with the Auphe race. Jack was a poison, a disease that could spread even if he was gone. The Auphe had taught me to be a fan of the scorched earth policy. Burn it, salt it, let nothing ever grow here again.

  That’s what I did, and then I went to find Jack.
>
  * * *

  Jack’s church was one of those I thought of as real churches. Not real in a sense of what one worshipped in an ugly church was inferior to what one worshipped in this type of church. It was just what I’d grown up seeing in movies and on TV as the epitome of the House of God. It was stone with a steeple that pierced a sky now purple and pale orange with dusk. There was a stained glass window in front that was two stories tall. There was no scene, no grazing sheep, or sunlight streaming from the sky. It was a complex mixture of rectangular and square shades of glass—a thousand windows, each leading to a better place. The doors were a dark wood and arched at least four feet over the tallest person to walk through them.

  I saw all of this once I’d gotten through a fence much more secure than had been at the first church. I gated through it. I had no time for a fence this difficult. This one even came with the kind of razor wire you saw on prison fences. It was ugly and evil, an odd choice to surround a building even I thought of as beautiful. Jack was inside there though, a cancer that made all that beauty an empty shell that didn’t yet know it was terminal. Didn’t know there was no cure strong enough to save it.

  Until me. I could save it. I could be the scalpel that cut Jack away. It wouldn’t be clean but clean was overrated as long as you got to live.

  The double doors weren’t locked. Why would they be? Jack loved all the company he could get. As Robin had said, who among the city would Jack consider truly innocent? Not many and trespassing would be equal to thou shall not kill in his warped mind. Jack had his own commandments and ten didn’t come close to numbering them.

  Inside with the doors shut behind me I could still see well enough though the light was gray and dim. There was some clutter, but not as much as the other empty churches had. Jack had cleaned up. Why not? Who wanted to skin people in an untidy work area? Nik would applaud his work ethic. I swallowed with difficulty. Surprised something that automatic would be that hard to do. I swallowed again and although there was no blood in my mouth I thought I could taste it . . . because I could smell it.