Deathwish can-4

by Rob Thurman

  “Why do I think you’re not trying?” I asked dryly as the wind picked up along with the snow, and we stepped into the building. Cal, calm and safe. Unfortunately, I had to ask myself if there’d ever been a time when he’d felt that way. I paused by the stairs as it hit me. It was the memory I’d had just days ago. The Auphe at the window. It wasn’t the best of ones for me, but for Cal maybe that wasn’t true. It had been our routine. When Sophia left us alone, it was our time and it was a welcome time. A safe time. “Fish sticks and cartoons.”

  He looked at me warily as he pushed open the door to the stairwell. “All that granola and carrot juice has melted your brain. What are you talking about?”

  I didn’t blame him. It sounded ludicrous aloud, yet . . .

  Fish sticks and cartoons; he’d been three when Sophia had taunted him about his father, but he’d been five before he really understood, before he actually saw an Auphe himself. Five years old before he’d started searching every window he passed for the nightmare that usually lives only in a child’s darkest imaginary closet. Up until then, Sophia’s words had just been words, ugly and frightening, but just words. When she was gone, he and I were alone with our ritual. After he was five, he never thought we were alone again. And for the two years prior to that, I hadn’t ever let him think that I knew we weren’t. Of all the things I’d done in my life, I thought I was proudest of that than of anything else.

  “It was a long time ago.” He’d been so damn young, we both had, but some memory had to linger. And if not a memory, then a feeling. “Just say it, or my new mantra will involve your head, the nearest wall, and twenty-four prayer beads an hour.”

  He didn’t bother to say “You wouldn’t,” because he knew I most certainly would. Instead, he grumbled, then muttered low under his breath. I couldn’t hear it, but he had said it. I could tell by the spark of surprise in his eyes. “I feel . . .” He climbed up a step and another before stopping. “Hell, I remember. I watched cartoons and you made me fish sticks.” For a moment he was only a twenty-year-old caught in a pleasant memory. No monster father, no malicious mother. No impending Armageddon. Carefree. Unburdened. What he should’ve been, and what he never could be.

  “Yogurt isn’t tartar sauce, Nik,” he sniped, but there was a smile behind it.

  “You thought it was.” And our neighbor at the time, ninety with ten cats, had given me free containers of it if I dragged her garbage can to the curb for her. Her granddaughter bought the yogurt for her, and the old woman hated it with a passion. It might be my health-conscious nutrition had begun with a mother who rarely bought groceries and a cranky cat lady who’d survived nearly a century of dipping everything in lard and didn’t see a reason to change her ways.

  “I was dipping fish sticks in goddamn cherry yogurt.” He started back up the stairs. “I should so kick your ass.”

  “You should,” I agreed amiably, as he moved fingers under his sleeve to bead number two and repeated his mantra silently.

  “You tell anyone about it and I’ll kill you.” Bead number three. “Dead.”

  “And you’d have every right,” I said as mildly as before, and far more self-satisfied than could be good for my karma.

  “Damn straight I would.” Bead number four. Calm and controlled, he was working his way there. Slowly, perhaps, months away—a long, long path, but he would get there. If he continued to work at it. And if I had to throw him to the floor and sit on him every hour on the hour to accomplish that, so be it.

  But there is only so much meditation can do. What we found upstairs was enough to destroy an entire five hours of meditation, much less five minutes’ worth.

  I opened the door to see Cherish and Robin sitting at a table with cards in hand. The former had a pile of clothes at her feet, and the latter was nude except for one sock. Unfortunately, that sock wasn’t in a place that would’ve provided the rest of us with any comfort. I said a mantra of my own. It didn’t help. There was only one answer to this. I started walking. Fast.

  Goodfellow had once told us he had invented the game of poker. I doubted that was true, but I didn’t doubt he excelled at it. The only excuse for his catastrophic loss, catastrophic from my point of view at least, was the desire to show off his puckly attributes to Cherish. As Cal had once told me after accidentally interrupting one of Robin’s more dissolute fests, there was a good deal to show off.

  Green eyes turned brightly sly at the sight of us. “Niko.” He knocked on the chair to his left. “We have room for one more.”

  “I think you already have three at the table,” I said. And if I walked even faster, I wasn’t the slightest bit ashamed. I, usually the hunter, in Robin’s case knew very well what it was like to be prey. And as prey, you do what you have to to survive.

  Run like the wind.

  Cal was somewhat less restrained in his comments than I had been. “Jesus Christ, I cleaned my guns at that table last night, you perv. Where the hell am I supposed to clean them now?”

  “Perhaps the same place you got laid today?” Robin said smoothly.

  “How’d you know that?” Cal demanded.

  “It’s a sixth sense,” came the complacent answer.

  “Being a nosy, sex-sniffing bastard is a sixth sense? Since when?”

  By that time, I was in the bedroom and with relief closed the door behind me. Promise looked over from where she was firing her crossbow at a large painting on the wall. It was an especially fine rendition of Pan of the Green Wood. He was playing his pipes for a virginal maiden clad in a sheer Greek stola. Every bolt was buried in two areas: the curly head and those puckly attributes I’d seen in passing.

  “Did you know art galleries will deliver within an hour if you pay them enough,” she informed me as she turned back and casually fired another bolt into Goodfellow’s pride and joy.

  “I think Cherish can hold her own with Robin,” I said.

  “I know she can. That does not mean I want the sight inflicted on me,” she replied with exasperated annoyance. It was also said with a maternal protection I didn’t think she knew was present. With one last shot, she pierced the chest where the heart would be before tossing the crossbow onto the bed. The room was painted a deep chocolate brown, the same color as the wide streaks in the pale blond hair that was twisted into an intricate braid. She wore different clothes than she had yesterday. The painting wasn’t the only thing she’d had delivered. “I had clothes sent from my apartment, including what you have there,” she offered as she noticed my gaze. “I thought Cal could borrow some of yours. Robin, of course, had all new delivered. Not many, though,” she said. “I expected the entire upper loft to be devoted to them.”

  “To be fair, no one can go in his apartment now,” I reminded. “His cat might very well kill them and use the body as a plaything.” And that he’d only had a few clothes was a bad sign that Robin had had all the togetherness he could tolerate.

  “Yes, his pet. How very unlike Robin to take on something that requires attention—attention that I’m sure he thinks would be better spent on him.”

  Pucks weren’t well liked by other supernatural creatures. Their trickster personalities—in other words, the lying and stealing—didn’t make them very popular. Pucks also tended not to associate with other pucks—ever—which was understandable. All those massive egos gathered together, each vying to be the center of attention—as Cal had said, “All those drama kings in one place . . . no way that would be a pretty picture.”

  “He gets lonely.” More precisely, he anticipated being lonely. Despite having us now, not to mention the continuous faceless stream of sexual partners, one day Cal and I would be gone. When you live thousands of years, it’s the price you pay for befriending humans. A mummy cat would be around much longer. Although there was Cal’s Auphe blood. It was possible he could live longer than your average human. Could, but wouldn’t.

  I’d been the only constant for his entire life. I’d been the one who raised him. I’d been the one
to help him back to sanity after he’d escaped the Auphe following two unimaginably horrific years as their prisoner. He was rational now, but even so, he lived his life balanced on the thinnest of tightropes. I’d seen the suicide run he’d once made to save me. I wouldn’t be around to see the one he’d make to join me, but I knew it would come. I also knew that as much as I tried I couldn’t change that.

  “True, Robin and I don’t always see eye to eye, but when the time comes I’ll do what I can.” She laid her hand on my cheek. “I hope he can do the same for me if . . .”

  I knew what she left unspoken. If we made it past this. If we were still together. If I could forgive her.

  Now I knew there was nothing to forgive. I tilted my head down and kissed her. A warmth of lips, a fleeting touch of silken tongue, and a taste so familiar it seemed I’d known it all my life. “I was a bastard,”

  I said quietly, taking her hand and intertwining fingers with hers. “I expected perfection when I’m far from it myself. I’m sorry for that. We all have secrets. Or will.”

  An emotion flickered behind twilight eyes. Regret. Her hand tightened on mine. “Now I know how it feels to be on the receiving end. It’s not a pleasant sensation. I’m sorry for that, no matter what my reason.”

  I nodded and said quietly, “Cal.” Now worry joined the regret in her eyes. “You have to know and you have to remember, if there had been no Cal, there would be no me. I don’t know who or what I would’ve been, but it wouldn’t be the person I am now. I do know this though: It wouldn’t be a change for the better.”

  “Niko . . .”

  I didn’t let her finish. “Just remember.”

  Her eyes cleared. “I will. I promise.”

  Time would tell.

  The bedspread on Seamus’s bed was brown and gold. The sheets were ivory, the same as Promise’s skin. The light brown of my skin was a stark contrast to hers, yet it fit. Just as we fit—as we always fit. The touch of my hands on her breasts, stomach, hips; the feel of her beneath me, wrapped around me . . . how could that not always be?

  Rosewood blinds hid the now afternoon sun as I finally lay relaxed in a way I didn’t often allow myself the luxury of. There was a kiss in the dip of flesh where my neck met my shoulder. Only a kiss. Promise didn’t bite, not even gently. The lightest of nips, more of a caress, really, was as close as she came. Teeth were for food to her. They had been for spilling blood and ripping flesh for the majority of her life. When that was true, biting wasn’t erotic. It was the equivalent of using a steak knife during foreplay.

  I imagined Seamus had felt differently. But a sociopath’s preferences, whether vampire or human, weren’t worth wasting thought on. I twined a mixed strand of dark brown and pale blond hair around my fingers and tugged lightly as she raised her face to smile down at me. “Are things better now?” I didn’t need my brother’s name added to the question to know that she wasn’t talking about her and me. The warmth of her draped over me was more than answer enough to that. As for Cal . . .

  I told my first lie to Promise and kept my first secret.

  “Cal is fine.”

  I met her eyes as I said it. I could’ve hidden that it was a lie, covered it up with my mother’s skill. Or I could’ve looked away to soften it. I didn’t. In my mind I had no choice.

  If there had to be dishonesty between us, then I would be honest about it.

  9

  Cal

  That evening Niko and I had driven to one particular junkyard we’d been to more than once in the past. We’d passed through the unlocked gate when I let Niko know what I thought of the new arrangement between him and Promise. Honest dishonesty?

  “As philosophies go,” I observed, “I gotta say: That’s fucked up.”

  “No one asked you to say. It’s between Promise and me.” Niko eyed my wrist and narrowed his eyes.

  “Jesus, yes, I’ve done my meditation. Give it a rest, Buddha.” I had done it, and I tried to do it every hour. So far it had worked. Either that or no one had really pissed me off. I had to say it was probably the second one, but I was still in there, meditating my ass off. Shoving the monster down. Niko said it would help, and if he said so, then that was gospel in my book. I’d do it until it became habit, and who knew? It might have me slamming less heads against the bar at work. “I’ll pay my tab next week,” my ass.

  Habits. Meditation might make it there, but there was another old habit between Nik and me that I never needed reminding of. Without warning, I twisted sideways and jammed a foot in his abdomen. “See?” I said. “Meditation. My foot is one with your stomach.”

  “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have doubted you. You seem so much more at peace.” Instead of the hands on the ankle and the wrench I expected, his leg twisted around mine and took me to the ground. The knuckles of his fist pressed just hard enough against my larynx to make the memory stick. “By the way, sometimes the fish sticks were fried zucchini,” he added, “and cartoon Great Danes don’t actually solve mysteries.”

  “So you were born a diet Nazi.” I waited until he moved to sit up. I didn’t try anything else. There was no countermove to having your larynx crushed. Choking and dying tended to take up the rest of your attention. “And now you’re talking trash about Scooby. You are one evil bastard.”

  “So I’ve been told.” He held a hand down to me. “By you. Repeatedly.”

  I took his hand, got to my feet, and dusted off the jeans I’d borrowed from him. Black, of course. “It’s hard to be a ninja-slash-samurai-slash-Buddha-loving bad-ass in regular blue, huh?” I muttered. “God forbid.” I picked up the bag from the ground and started deeper into the piles of metal and trash that surrounded us, following the zigzag path. I didn’t limp as I went, but I wanted to. “I thought Buddha was about harming no living creature,” I grumbled on.

  “Buddha was a wise man.” He walked beside me, apparently unaffected by my blow to his stomach. “I am not.” He didn’t seem particularly affected by that either.

  “Maybe you should work on that.” I went ahead and limped as the muscle in my leg spasmed. What the hell. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know.

  “It’ll pass,” he assured me, not especially sympathetically, as I limped on. “In approximately sixty seconds. And next time you’ll remember.”

  A few seconds of discomfort were worth a few extra years of staying alive—because staying alive or sane was looking like an easy option now—but the smell out here? Nothing was worth that. Saturday in a Bronx junkyard—what’s not to love? I pulled the sleeve of my shirt over the heel of my hand and covered my mouth and nose. In reality, it wasn’t the junkyard so much as the waste station just up the river. But smell or not, this was where Mickey lived, and Mickey was who we needed to talk to. Which was why we were once again separated from the others in the loft. With Oshossi and the Auphe, it had come to the point where it was impossible to stay together all the time, not if we wanted to eventually get our asses out of the gigantic frigging sling they were in. I didn’t have to tell Niko that sooner or later the Auphe were going to seize the chance and attack the others while we were gone. Or us. More likely us. You didn’t need Auphe genes or a crystal ball to see that coming. Just a brain cell, and you were set there. But our choices were pretty much nonexistent, and sucking it up was the only thing left to do.

  We’d run into Mickey two or so years ago when looking for parts for Nik’s decrepit car. You wanted parts for a decrepit thing, you came to a decrepit place. Mickey wasn’t decrepit, though. He could find pretty much anything you wanted. Nothing too new, of course, but anything used showed up in a junkyard sooner or later. Mickey had seen us walk in back then, smelled the difference on me, and offered up his services . . . for a price.

  Luckily, Mickey’s price wasn’t as steep as Boggle’s tended to be. Where Boggle loved jewels and gold, Mickey was all about the food. He wasn’t your typical junkyard rat, content with rotting leftovers. He wanted the real thing, he wanted it fresh, and he wanted a wide var
iety. Chinese, Greek, Italian, Mexican, whatever; he liked it all. That didn’t mean he didn’t catch his own meal on occasion if times were hard. In that he was like your typical junkyard rat.

  He ate his own.

  “Smells good.”

  The voice was oil spreading across concrete, smooth and slick. Very slick indeed, which was Mickey all over. I slowed and looked up at a pile of cars to see liquid black eyes reflecting the setting sun. Cool and cunning, I couldn’t be sure if they thought it was the Mexican food that smelled good or me. So far, the preference had been for takeout, but it didn’t pay to take anything for granted. “Hey, Mick. Brought you tacos this time.” And about a dozen burritos. Mickey had an appetite. A tamale to go wasn’t going to get it for him.

  “Been long time. Yes, long, long time.” Black fur and skin slithered over shattered safety glass and rusted metal to hit the ground next to us. He was the same inky color as a cadejo, but where they had been doglike, Mickey was what I’d labeled him: a rat . . . if a rat crouched four feet high, had dark-skinned human hands, and talked. Niko said that there were old Rom legends about a shobolon, a giant rat with human characteristics. There were also legends of wererats. Whatever Mickey was, he wasn’t saying. Although considering the thick accent, I was betting he had something in common with Nik and me. And we weren’t part wererat.

  Besides the accent, Mickey had a sense of humor. Okay, maybe not so much, but he didn’t have a bad temper, which wasn’t always the case with our informants. He was fairly mellow, considering what I called him. I doubted it was even close to the name he’d been given at birth.

  A thick-skinned hand dropped the gnawed dead rodent it was holding and took the bag from me. Within seconds, red sauce was dripping from wickedly large yellow incisors. A naked gray tail wrapped around his feet as he ate. After the first seven tacos, he slowed down and licked his hands clean. “So, so, valued customers, picture of part. Picture of car.” Mickey wasn’t a mechanic by any means, but with a picture he could track down what you wanted in a matter of thirty minutes. Sometimes less. In a yard this size, that was something.