Doubletake can-7

by Rob Thurman

  Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen a face in the window…colors of brown, red, and amber. I’d smelled the pumping heart and the circulating blood of healthy life.

  I’d heard one word.

  Forget.

  The desert heat made me sleepy as I tasted my own blood from the tip of my leather-covered finger. It had made me dream. An enjoyable dream.

  Forget.

  I could see the blood, brighter than any other blood I could think of. It was all I could see. It was a curtain pulled over everything else. But I didn’t mind. I liked blood, and I liked red. As I began to tumble into a healing semicoma, I had an image of me handing Caliban an apple and laughing. Laughing. Laughing. Laughing.

  Forget.

  I could hear a woman crying. “I’ll find a way to change it. I will.”

  Forget.

  Had I dreamed? It didn’t matter. If I had, I would sleep again and dream of better things, things that I could remember. Such as Cal’s sword in my stomach. The Second Coming.

  Family.

  The end of the world.

  The beginning of mine.

  11

  I told Niko, Robin, and Promise about Grimm, the Auphe-bae, every detail I could remember, except for the specific ones of what I’d done in South Carolina to the other imprisoned failures. That I glossed over. Niko already knew them. I’d told him the day I’d returned home. I told Niko almost everything, and not only because he was my brother. He was all that stood between me and the world. I wasn’t worried about myself. Of the two, the earth and Cal off his leash, I wasn’t the one that needed protecting. I was sane currently, and I did go back and forth on whether that was a good thing or not, but who knew if that would last?

  Not if. How long…

  I didn’t tell the puck and Promise the particulars of what I’d done in Nevah’s Landing at the beginning of the year, that I’d shot seven half-Auphe manacled in cages like fish in a barrel, because it was my only option. I didn’t want to and I didn’t have to. They knew what had happened, as it was the only thing that could’ve happened. They didn’t need me painting them a mental picture. It hadn’t bothered me when I’d done it, and it didn’t bother me now. There was nothing else to do.

  But I didn’t want to see them look at me with that mental image in a continuous loop behind their eyes. On the other hand, Sidle, the warden and torturer…When it came to killing him, my only regret was that I couldn’t do it again…and again. He merely wasn’t worth mentioning to the others, as he had been a useless thing. He’d been proof that you didn’t have to gate or look like an Auphe to be a monster. You could be a weak one with an advantage that he hadn’t deserved. The half-Auphe had been in cages while he roamed free to find instruments of pain to make them behave.

  It was in that one instance that Grimm had been right. I should’ve made that bastard suffer instead of putting him down instantly and painlessly like a rabid dog.

  “I’ve killed, Caliban,” Promise said, curled on Robin’s couch after we’d pushed ours off of it. She’d said the male psyche was a mystery to her, but that wasn’t true. Not with five deceased elderly husbands. As far as I’d seen, Promise knew any thought that might run through a man’s head. And she saw mine.

  “In the old days before we had ways other than blood, I killed to live. You shouldn’t feel that you are worse than I was—or Goodfellow, for that matter.” She slanted a knowing glimpse of violet and velvet his way. “I have heard tales of his escapades, and pretending to be a god wasn’t the worst of them.”

  As far as Robin was concerned, the vampire wasn’t there and the subject she’d brought up didn’t exist. He didn’t want to talk about it, apparently. And that was more bizarre—alien-pod-person bizarre. Goodfellow was incapable of “not wanting to talk.” From the first time he’d opened his mouth to introduce himself and try to sell us a car, he hadn’t shut up once, and that had been close to five years ago. He’d been kind of…off during the Panic. I’d thought he’d gone back to his old self after it was over, but now I wasn’t as sure. I watched as he continued to pretend Promise wasn’t on his couch—or on the planet, for that matter. The dismissal of her was that complete.

  He was rearranging notification cards on the table. When we’d returned to the condo, I’d read them upside down as I’d looped around the coffee table to grab my spot on the couch. They said that he was not monogamous, and should he find the originator of the rumor he would drench his dick in Tabasco sauce, piss in his treacherous mouth, as that was all it was good for, and then draw and quarter him before letting a horny mule hump his remains.

  Sounded like a great start for a new line of greeting cards to me. They were clearly meant as damage control for the attending members of the Panic. Next to them was a stack of smaller personal cards spelling out Robin Goodfellow—monogamous since 2011, with the suicide hotline at the bottom for those who couldn’t face the fact. Side by side sat the contradiction. It didn’t make any difference to the puck. What was one lie to a trickster? Especially when it was to other tricksters?

  A lie would be the first words out of a trickster’s, especially Robin’s, mouth the moment he woke up in the morning.

  Of course you’re not average size. You’re enormous, he’d say. Unbelievable. I was stunned, momentarily blinded by the vastness of it. Now…is it a penis or a clitoris again? Sorry. I drank entirely too much last night.

  Or he might tell the truth if it was worse than a lie. A puck knew how to do the most damage, and the best weapon to wield.

  It’s not me; it’s you. It’s really, really you. It could not be more you. You should carry a bucket for your sex partner to hurl into when they wake up and see you in the daylight.

  But that was before monogamy with Ishiah. I didn’t want to know what he told him first thing in the morning, but it crept into my mind all the same. Having sex with a walking, talking feather duster doesn’t make me sneeze at all.

  I sneezed through my entire shift every shift at the bar. I knew that would be a whopper of a lie. As a matter of fact, I sneezed as I finished telling my grimmer-than-Grimm fairy tale and scattered Goodfellow’s cards across the coffee table. It was psychosomatic, since I hadn’t seen Ish anywhere since the Panic had come and gone. I didn’t know if he’d returned or not. I thought he and Robin still kept separate apartments, but I didn’t ask, as I had no desire to know. I liked the boss/employee relationship the way it was…with me not knowing shit about what he did after hours. Now, though, with the mess we were in, it seemed odd he wasn’t around. “Where’s Ish?”

  Niko went to the door to let Kalakos inside. The Vayash wasn’t privy to Auphe, half-Auphe, one-fourth-Auphe secrets. As far as he knew, the pure Auphe race existed yet. He didn’t know they were extinct. Very few did know that, rumormongering tricksters included, difficult as that was to believe. Mainly, Niko had put forth, because no one wanted to talk about the Auphe. They were the original “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil”—with an emphasis on “speak no evil.” If no one talked about them, then no one could know they were gone.

  Kalakos didn’t need to know anything about our lives, and as Niko wouldn’t have trusted him with our plastic tableware, he’d been left in the hall while we’d talked. Although I had to give it to him: He had charged into that basement behind Niko and ended up decapitating the last Bae. He’d watched Niko’s back—far too late by twenty-seven years, but it meant something all the same. Maybe.

  I’d think about it.

  But regardless of what Kalakos had done, it wasn’t my call to make. I elbowed Robin, who was gathering the cards into neat piles again with impatient, quick movements that made a professional cardsharp appear to be moving in slow motion. “Ishiah?” I prompted.

  “He’s in Vegas. Lucky bastard,” he grumbled. “The peri have something rather like…” He rearranged the cards again. If it had been anyone else, I’d have said he was buying time. But this was Robin, trickster extraordinaire. He didn’t need to make up a l
ie. He already knew every one there ever had been or would be. “They have something like the National Guard. Ishiah is retired, but he’s been reactivated for one mission. It shouldn’t take more than a few days. A week at the most.”

  Why peri would need a National Guard was my next question, but the puck cut that off promptly with a suggestion. “I’ve been thinking. Cal, note that—you can think all the time. It’s true, but I digress. My first thought is this: Janus will be showing up soon, as it’s still storming and he can move about unseen. Which means we should move before he tracks the Vayash among us here. As if it would hurt any of you to use an effective war machine–deflecting deodorant?” he complained. “My second thought is that perhaps Hephaestus could assist us with the situation.”

  As Kalakos came through the door, Niko closed it and asked verbally what I longed to ask physically, with my hands wrapped tightly around Goodfellow’s neck. “He’s alive? He traded whatever currency of the time for that monstrosity before years later passing it on to the Rom to guard, and you only thought now to bring up the fact that he’s still alive?”

  Robin snorted. “If it were that easy, don’t you think I would have? No, he’s not alive. He’s dead. Deadish. Yes, deadish would be more accurate, and he’s wildly insane, quite naturally. All Greek legends end up insane sooner or later. It must be something in the water.” He shrugged, as I put a water purifier for him on my mental Christmas list. “But he was insane long before he became biofunctionally challenged, which makes it that much more difficult.”

  “Is he in Greece?” I asked. “Because that’s a long trip. But if we go with you, Janus will probably jump the plane and ride it all the way there.”

  “Greece? No. Very few of us are there now. When the people stopped believing in us, we left. Too many painful memories of better days.” He checked his watch. “Conveniently enough, Hephaestus is in Connecticut. With traffic we could be there in two and a half hours.”

  “He’s in Connecticut. Dead and in Connecticut? Less than two to three hours away?” Niko said dubiously. “I find that difficult to believe. Greece, very well. But if he’s dead, why isn’t he in Hades or the Elysian fields?”

  My brother the Buddhist believed in life after death—of all different sorts. An afterlife for every belief that has been and will come. I didn’t give him grief over it. After what he’d lived through in this life, he was entitled to believe whatever he wanted. But I knew after death there was nothing but emptiness and nonexistence. I had no problem with that. It was heaven in my book.

  Goodfellow answered Niko’s question by holding up two fingers. “Two words: industrial revolution.” He added, “And guns. He loved weapons, anything that could inflict death and despair. We all have our hobbies. He was late by a hundred years or so. As I said, wildly insane, easily distracted, and behind on the news, but by the time he caught up, weapons were that much more advanced. I’m sure he was quite the happy camper when he discovered the concept. They don’t have guns in Hades or the fields, so he went where the guns did.”

  “I repeat, you didn’t bring this up sooner?” Niko’s voice lowered to the same threatening rumble of the thunder outside.

  “Niko, he’s madder than a syphilitic-ridden Al Capone, not deader than dead, but deader than he should be, and he hates me. Ares’s steroid-induced rages, does he hate me. You don’t need to know why. If I thought he had an iota of sanity or cooperation in him, I’d have mentioned it, I don’t know, perhaps while Cal was dying, while you were beating your father like a Turkish rug, when we were again attacked by Janus, while Cal had been kidnapped and we were frantically searching for him as if he were a microchipped prizewinning Westminster Labradoodle. So many wasted opportunities when we were lying about while lacking in any pertinent activity, I realize, but it’s a chance in a thousand anyway. He despises me more than any creature I know, and that, considering my extraordinary reputation, is saying much.” He gave up on the cards and pushed them off the table.

  “Was I put in my place?” Niko asked me ruefully, not entirely used to the feeling.

  I was, however, and didn’t mind seeing someone else suffer. “You were puck-slapped but good. Okay, we’re taking two cars and I’m not wearing a sweater.”

  Goodfellow was shocked and appalled. Everyone wore sweaters in Connecticut. He was ninety-nine percent positive that you couldn’t cross the state line without one.

  “Two cars. No sweaters,” I stressed.

  Then I leaned closer to Robin and did something I shouldn’t have, that made me feel like crap, but could be necessary. I murmured, “Hephaestus hates you, but what does he think of Hob?”

  He feared him. He had to. Alive, dead, or halfway between, all feared Hob.

  And no one except Niko, Robin, Promise, Georgina, and me knew Hob was dead. And not deadish, as Hephaestus was, but as dead as they came. Gone from this world for good. It was something to think about.

  Until Goodfellow gave a low hiss back, inaudible to everyone but me. “What would he think of an Auphe? What would he think of you if you threw away your sanity, your ability to tell right from wrong, and lived only for every life you could extinguish, to ask him a question? All while knowing if you did, you couldn’t come back. No second chances like you’ve had before, not this time. You would never be Cal again. Never sane again. Never right again.” In that moment he wasn’t Robin. “The next time you speak of Hob is the last time we speak,” he added without emotion, but cold, hard promise.

  I knew I shouldn’t have brought up the subject again. Unfortunately I knew too late.

  The sly, snarky, patronizingly sarcastic, fast talking, horny, name-dropping Goodfellow was gone; this Robin I didn’t know. He wasn’t my friend, and as I had only the one besides my brother, I wasn’t going to risk losing him. I leaned back before the others noticed the exchange and gave the best and most honest apology I could. It was one my friend would recognize for what it was and hopefully come back.

  “Okay. Shit.” I grimaced. “I’ll wear a goddamn sweater.”

  It was ninety degrees in Bridgeport, Connecticut, unusually hot, the radio said—before I kicked it. It wasn’t the kind of weather you layered for, and I was wearing a bright green cashmere Lacoste cardigan over a pink polo shirt, pleated khaki pants, white socks, and loafers. I’d also been offered a holster for my Eagle and something called a Members Only jacket to cover that. I knew the names because Goodfellow had labeled each plastic bag in which they were immaculately folded, along with a catalogue page of some blond, blue-eyed, tanned, blindingly white-toothed man wearing the same outfit while standing by a boat. With a blond woman. A blond kid. A blond damn dog…wearing a matching damn sweater.

  Douche bag.

  It covered the catalogue dick and Robin both.

  “What did you do to piss off Goodfellow this badly?” Niko asked, edging away from me as if I were color-contagious. He was dressed in the black-and-gray clothes the puck had smugly given him. Normal clothes. The kind that didn’t make you look like someone pulled the head off a Golfing Ken doll and stuck a catastrophically pissed-off serial killer’s head in its place, which was a look I was pulling off in spades. I let my black hair hang where it wanted. Still no ponytail for me, until Kalakos was gone despite what I’d talked to Niko about in the car.

  “You don’t want to know,” I said glumly.

  We stood by the rusted chain-link fence at the abandoned Remington Arms factory. Despite its being early afternoon, it wasn’t a safe place to be for most. It was the typical bad part of town, but it would be more peculiar if I were in a good part of town. An industrial area near the water, no shadows, no alleys, nothing green—not a blade of grass pushing up through the sidewalk. Or what was left of the sidewalk.

  Nothing but our rusty fence the armory stretched far behind, a wide street with dilapidated houses on the other side. Nik and I were waiting for the others to get out of their car, parked by ours at an empty house across the road with a battered For Sale sign. Promi
se climbed out of the car, her gloved hands keeping her face well shadowed by the hood of her cloak. She wanted to see this through as much as we did, if only for Niko’s sake.

  Following her out of the car was Kalakos, who, as Goodfellow had said, was like a terminal case of gonorrhea with a side order of herpes. You couldn’t get rid of him no matter how hard you tried.

  As the three of them were crossing the street, I looked back down at the clothes that were my punishment for pissing off Robin. “Nik, if Hephaestus kills me, strip me, would you? I don’t want my corpse seen like this.” None of the clothes had been worn before. Robin had been waiting with this vengeance bomb for a while, and I’d been the one to set it off. He wouldn’t be caught dead in any of it himself. He dressed expensive and sharp always, but he leaned more toward James Bond than whatever this crime against humanity was. I scratched my stomach, then an arm. “I think it’s burning my skin. Like holy water. I thought that was only in the movies.” I scratched again. “I’m sweating like a pig. Jesus.”

  “Stupid assholes. Shitheads. Give me your money or I will fuck you up so bad your mama won’t know you on the slab.”

  Finally. I didn’t think he was ever going to make it down our way with that slow shamble.

  He was a mugger, gangbanger, junkie, homicidal shit with a knife, probably all four. I’d seen him stumbling down the cracked and crumbling sidewalk as soon as we’d parked the car and hit pavement. He hadn’t been an issue then. If he’d had half a brain to look past me to Niko or to look at my face instead of the opposite of camouflage I was wearing, he wouldn’t be an issue now. But I’d been hoping, and when you wish on that kick-him-in-the-balls star twinkling high above at night, sometimes you get your wish.

  Another douche bag, and I couldn’t wait.

  “I’m not going to bother to ask. You need him more than I do,” Niko said. “Try not to kill him. We’re not one hundred percent certain he deserves it.”