Downfall (16 page)

I had to be careful, as careful as you could be while conning everyone you knew.

Conning Niko, in addition, took more than being
careful. It was beyond dangerous. Niko, who in this life was closest to Achilles than in any other before save the original. I knew how he’d possibly react—not well. Of all his past selves, why Achilles? I hadn’t been able to reach any of them, a staggering one hundred percent failure rate, but Achilles had been my worst mistake. Achilles who seemed to have no fear—who you could believe was half god raised on high, yet had fallen the furthest. He’d had fear and doubt, but hid it away so deeply no one saw it.

Much like Niko.

But why would he show those darker emotions or keep them once I’d appeared in their lives? A living all-powerful god had claimed him as brother-in-arms and family closer than blood. He could let it all go, drop the weight from his shoulders. He had his cousin Patroclus to keep whole in battles and war and the Great God Pan at his side to help him do it—with that, how could he possibly lose? He thought that he no longer had anything to risk or capable of being lost.

Achilles, who I recalled so well. . . .

Achilles had been a hand’s grasp away from being a god himself.

Achilles, although entirely human, had been even less than a hand’s grasp away from being a monster, one equal to what Cal now assumed he himself could be.

I stared blindly at the computer screen and saw only blood.

When Cal . . . when Patroclus had died, that brutal and bloody death—it was one slow enough for Achilles to run to his side, to see the words bubbling through blood, to watch death come and seize Patroclus in a convulsion that came from a lack of oxygen as his lungs filled with blood.

“You were to keep him safe.” He’d grasped the edge of my armor, shaking me with all his strength. I thought
he’d hoped my neck would snap. “You are the Great
God
Pan and you swore to keep him safe.” Turning away from me, he’d let go and shoved me back from resting on my knees to hitting the rocky ground hard enough I felt my spine wrench, a rib break, and a concussion flare in red mist behind my eyes when my head hit the hard surface. Achilles gave me a look made of dual sharp blades of disgust and betrayal before he spat blood-tinged saliva onto my chest where my heart beat under the armor.

I’d played the god game several times before, but I couldn’t bear to again, not after that.

I struggled to sit up as I told Achilles that I’d tried,
never
would I have let this happen if I could’ve stopped it. I would’ve taken the blows myself if I had reached him in time. I had sworn to watch over him for Achilles. Swearing oaths in war is the most foolish and heartbreaking of things. It’s futile. They can’t be kept. Sometimes in battle you get separated—as much as you attempt not to. I’d seen Patroclus swept away in a wave of soldiers, Trojan and ours. I worried, but I wasn’t desperate as I fought my way back toward him. He wasn’t like Achilles in skill, but he scraped by enough to survive more battles than he had summers since his birth. He could take care of himself until I made it to his side.

He shouldn’t have fallen.

Couldn’t have fallen.

He should stand up, let me take the blow in his place; I’d told Patroclus the same. That here, watch, I’d remove my armor. I had done so and tossed the breastplate as far across the stone and sand as I could. Slit my throat, puncture my lung, skewer my heart with his sword, I’d demanded, though that wasn’t a mercy I deserved. I told that to empty gray eyes and a blood-drenched body crumpled in death.

I meant it. But when the blood began to dry on him
and he drew not another breath, my frenzy passed. The guilt stayed, but no longer could I fool it with a crazed hope that Patroclus could do what I asked. Patroclus was dead, and the dead did nothing.

I’d not been fortunate enough in life for any of my bouts of madness to last, mercy that it would’ve been.

Achilles was not me.

His mind left him and it did not return.

His last words to me remained, “. . . you swore to keep him safe.” I’d been surprised he didn’t try to finish what he’d started in killing me. I didn’t know what I’d have done if he had. Handed my sword over to him and let him do his worst? I thought I might very well have. It hadn’t been put to the test. To Achilles I no longer existed. His mind had fallen away to nothing, his sanity washing out and disappearing like the tide. He’d given Patroclus his funeral, kneeling by the pyre as empty and blank as a doll, and then he’d gone into Troy to die. But what he’d done before he died . . . the inhumanity of it, the savagery . . . I hadn’t forgotten.
Paien
had a much different opinion of right and wrong than humans did, less restrictive, yet even so I’d shut my eyes that night in Troy. I hadn’t wanted to see what Achilles had become.

Homer was a drunk and a liar and sometimes a coward. In his epic writings, he lied when he didn’t know the truth, and when the truth was more than anyone could bear, Homer left it out altogether.

Achilles was a hero. Achilles died. No one needed to know what else Achilles could be or what he would be when pushed to the edge.

I closed my eyes to block the sight of the crimson running down the screen . . . as if it were on the computer and not in my mind and memory, forever engraved. Pucks do denial as well as anyone else when they want.

“I had to do it. Cal was right. Grimm was here,” I said
with the weight of truth on my side. It was convenient when truth actually worked for you. “Cal was hurt. He couldn’t have held his own. Grimm has sworn to him not to touch any of us. It’s only Cal he can tear to shreds if he wants to keep playing that psychotic game the Auphe play.”

The game of: I make you bleed. You make me bleed and who’s still standing when it’s all over? The Auphe had played it with each other since the dawn of time.

“He would’ve hurt him or, worse, he would’ve taken him. Gating away was the only option I could think of. I didn’t tell Cal to take me, as I could’ve been the straw that broke the camel’s back.” That was true as well, in its way. If Cal had to gate three people instead of two, his chances of survival would’ve gone down radically.

The fact that I’d wanted to talk to Grimm alone didn’t make that any less true.

“How did you get away from Grimm?” Niko asked with suspicion. My boy. I was proud.

“Retreat is the most valuable skill one can use in a fight. I reminded him of Cal’s promise to blow his own brains out if Grimm killed one of us”—Cal’s family—“and then I ran like a cowardly bat out of hell.” Not at all true, a complete lie, but it had been half a million years at least since I cared between truth and lies or that I’d thought the divergence between them anything more than cosmetic.

Seizing my attention with several low tones, I opened my eyes to see that several e-mails on my computer appeared worthwhile and I answered them with promises of rewards and a reminder that if the world couldn’t be saved, a single dollar bill would mean nothing to them.

“Is he gone?”

I shut down the computer and rubbed a hand down the leg of a set of finely woven bleached cotton pajamas.
I told Ishiah they were my monk-wear, available at all the finest ascetic monasteries. I had preferred to sleep in the nude, but a deceased housekeeper who’d later tried to murder me and Cal and Niko both had all made their preference known that walking about naked in the living room or kitchen while they were around wasn’t acceptable. After the murder attempt, which often makes you stop and reevaluate, I decided this once I might be in the wrong. That was so unlikely, however, me being in the wrong, that I decided to go with the odds: fifty-fifty. Now I slept sometimes in pajamas, and sometimes only in the skin that no god was skilled enough to make, pity them.

Unless I was drunk. I always slept in the nude when I was drunk.

“Grimm? From your place, yes. I sent a minion around this morning to check.” I had and was pleasantly surprised not to lose a minion for once, although I had to pay the fee and that was annoying. Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle acted as if street kids and the homeless worked for pennies. That was a laugh. “Does he remain in the city or gate in and out regularly? I have no idea. He must have been wondering all this time why Cal stopped gating again. It is unlikely, although that he knows anything about Cal’s electrocution via serial killer and how that threw him offline, so to speak.”

I’d given much consideration to asking Niko if we could turn Cal off, then back on again. My tech support hadn’t failed me with that advice yet. Deciding I preferred to live, I didn’t mention it, but I had thought about Grimm and what he was thinking when no gates pinged in his brain woven of barbwire. It wouldn’t be good, I did know that.

Grimm hated Cal.

Grimm wanted to be Cal.

Grimm knew he was better than Cal.

Grimm knew that Cal was better than him.

Grimm wanted Cal to be with him, the founders of a new Auphe race.

Grimm had no idea what he wanted from Cal, but he knew he wanted something.

Grimm would kill Cal without hesitation if he thought Cal had become somehow lesser—such as losing his gating ability.

Grimm might kill himself as well, out of boredom and lack of competition.

Grimm was fifty gold ingots of crazy in a five-gold-ingot bag.

I left the computer and wandered into the kitchen, checking the refrigerator for whatever my new, less murderous housekeeper had left me the afternoon before. Ah, feta cheese, raspberries, blackberries, and grilled chicken on a spinach salad. With the plate and a fork I’d taken from a drawer, I settled in at the granite kitchen island. “Cal is stable, yes? When he first started gating, just one would knock him out for hours. He’s basically starting over again. I’m not surprised he won’t wake up yet. Give him a few hours before panicking.”

My fork hovered over the salad as I thought, for the first time, I wasn’t telling all I knew—what if Niko was doing the same? Me lying was a given, but what of Niko? He could lie. I’d seen him do it. He’d learned well from his con artist mother. He didn’t like doing it, but he was quite, quite good at it when he had to be. What if this was a “had to” situation?

What if Niko was lying and I hadn’t thought to listen,
actually
listen to him? What if he was buying time on his way to kill me or to kill himself because Cal was . . . gone?

“He
is
stable, isn’t he? You would take him to the
hospital if he was otherwise. Penny-pinching Charon, he’s not
dead
, is he?” I didn’t care that that would mean Niko was coming for me with vengeance in his heart and hands ready to bathe in blood. It made no difference in this life that Niko might hold on to a fraction more sanity than Achilles, enough to avenge. I cared simply that if Cal was dead, then Cal was
dead
. And Niko would soon follow him, and I’d sworn that wouldn’t happen this time.

Not this soon.

Not again.

“Niko.” I’d lunged to my feet, the breakfast plate gone sliding and spinning off the granite to shatter on the floor. “No.
No
. Put him on the phone. Hades, he’s not awake, you said. He can’t speak. You’re lying. You’re lying. Niko, tell me. Tell me he is alive. That he’s not . . .
tell
me!”

My panic was enough to have Niko’s restraint solidifying, returning to normal. What I lost, he regained in equal measure. “Robin, he’s all right. He’s asleep, but he’s not bleeding and his vital signs are normal. Here, listen.” Niko’s voice vanished and for several seconds I heard the soft in-and-out pattern . . . the inhalation and exhalation of someone sound asleep. Cal.

“Robin?” It was Niko again, sounding considerably more worried than he had before.

I sat with a clumsy stumble, none of my customary grace, on the floor, berries flattened and smeared beneath my bare feet. “He wasn’t in your armor.” It was randomly said. I didn’t mean to say it, but I couldn’t stop. It appeared to be the day for reliving Troy . . . the nightmare war and cursed city. I could not let that one life go, much as I’d tried; I couldn’t be at peace with it.

“That part of the story wasn’t true,” I continued dully. “You had matching armor or not quite, but close enough. Matching armor for the cousins.” Matching armor that had been a gift from me. That sort of irony was a blade
sharp enough to slice into your gut all the days of your very long life.

“But the Trojans didn’t know that. They thought he was you. There was a plan. We all knew it. So he went, but he went too far.” Patroclus then as Cal now inevitably went too far. Older than Achilles, he was a man with the heart of a boy, wildly impetuous with no grasp of his own mortality. “He was supposed to pull back when the ships were protected, but he didn’t. He chased them all the way back to the gates of Troy, and that’s where they killed him.” Stupid,
stupid
boy. “I was following him, trying to catch up, but I wasn’t soon enough. You and I were with him when he died, and his words were blood.” I was numb, but the memory was sharp. “He spoke in blood.”

“Goodfellow.” The name buzzed in my ear, but it had no meaning.

Air that bubbled through thick scarlet. What had he tried to say? I never knew. The floor was cold beneath me, but all I saw, all I felt was red-soaked sand and an unforgiving white sun in a painfully blue sky.

“You wouldn’t let anyone take his body. Not our men. Not me. You said he wasn’t dead, and killed two of our own soldiers when they tried to pry him from your arms. He couldn’t be dead, you swore. It was all lies, lies, lies, but he was. You fought us off for an entire day. Finally you let us take him. You cut off your hair to mourn.”

How unlucky was I to have seen that tradition twice in my life now?

“You helped us build the pyre to burn him.” His eyes had been a gray as empty as the dead ones of his cousin as he watched him burn. Cousins with the matching eyes and matching armor and legends in their own time, but now they were gone.

“The funeral games lasted days.” And he didn’t say a word to me or acknowledge me again. The only words I
heard him speak after fighting off those who came to prepare Patroclus’s body for funeral rites were when someone asked couldn’t our patron god Pan, he who fought by the cousins’ side, bring Patroclus back from Hades and the Elysium Fields? His response had been cold and flat.