Downfall (31 page)

“Goodfellow?”

“Ah.” I let the tip of my sword fall. “Apologies, Niko. I tend to lose track with busywork. I wish Cal had let them gate. That would have been more interesting.” That was a lie. If they had been able to gate, one or more of us might have died fighting forty of them. But I did have a reputation to maintain, didn’t I? I moved about to nudge
the nearest body with the tip of my sword. “This isn’t enough to stop me from allowing myself to be distracted thinking where I might next vacation. This desert landscape depresses me.”

“You’re . . .” He moved his hand in the air in front of him from his head to wave at his feet. In the purple light he appeared to grimace if only very slightly. This was Niko after all.

I knew what he was referring to. It wasn’t the first, hundredth, or thousandth time I’d been covered head to toe in blood. It was why I was wearing some clothes I’d, this time for once, borrowed from Cal instead of the other way around. I wasn’t ruining any of my clothes this way. “Yes?” I raised my eyebrows in question. “It does go with the territory. You most often fight with a sword. You know this.”

“I am guessing I never fought quite as you do.” He was disappointed in himself. I could see it.

There’d been many and I’d put more effort and speed into it than was customarily needed. We fought skirmishes these days, but many other times we’d fought wars, fought against hundreds of thousands in a single battle. I patted him consolingly on the shoulder, leaving a bloody, wet black handprint on gray cloth. “Niko, did you actually think that you did?” I stepped back farther and scanned for Cal and Grimm. “I am your teacher, though, in as many lives as I can be. If you didn’t die after thirty or so years and rest between incarnations for hundreds of years, you would be much closer to me in ability, I swear.”

The frown evident in his voice told me I hadn’t done the job I’d hoped in improving his mood. Or to be honest, hadn’t hoped that much: Did he truly consider himself one with he who had been Hob? I thought not,
lifelong companion and war-birthed family or no. All this time and the two remained far too young for that in experience or general comparison of my incomparable fighting skills. I saw little need to sugarcoat that. I had my own ego to think of, didn’t I?

“They are there.” He pointed.

One hundred or so feet away, past the mounds of dead Bae. Some were burned. Some were bloody from my sword, Cal’s claws . . . and some torn at with teeth. Cal’s teeth, and that was a good sign that lucidity had left the building and sanity was a stain in the sand.

Cal was surrounded by seven Bae and I knew he had let that happen. He had his gun holstered but wasn’t using it, and in no world would Cal let himself get encircled by the enemy. If nothing else and there were too many, he’d find a rock and put his back against it. He wasn’t trapped. He was playing.

Playing. Ares himself would be alarmed.

He was also laughing as if he was having the time of his life. And, Hades help us, perhaps he was. “You.” He pointed at one Bae. “Boom.”

It exploded, spraying blood and pulped organs in every direction. That would be Cal opening a gate in him with that special talent I’d thought of before, but hadn’t thought how the bile would rise in my throat to see it in action. I expected him to do the same with the other six. I was wrong.

They couldn’t gate, as he wouldn’t let them, but he could and gate he did. He was here, then there, then behind, beside, and in front of them all. He ripped heads from bodies, flesh from bone, tore out abdomens with his teeth—his
teeth
—used his claws to cut arms and legs free. Finally, although “finally” was barely a minute if not less, he let the last Bae fall, spitting a large chunk of its
throat onto the ground. The worst part was he left half of them alive . . . suffering. For some it would be minutes; for some it might be hours.

His mouth and the metal in it were dripping black with blood. It was easy to see despite the approaching darkness overtaking the twilight, as his grin was that wide. Almost too wide for his jaw and far too wild for reason. I felt Niko’s hand tight on my forearm, but he didn’t say anything. I didn’t think he had any words for this. “Do you still have the tranquilizer gun?” I asked quietly. If he didn’t, I had another hidden under my shirt, not that I’d felt the need to share that information.

It was strained, hoarse, but he did manage at least one word. “Yes.” When we had come through the gate, Niko was calm at the sight of a completely physically changed Cal. He was less calm now, but he was holding on and he was not broken. “But he said he would stay with us, and he will.” More words, kudos to Niko, but they were naïve ones.

We puck had a saying: O ye of too much faith.

Grimm had stepped across the ground, smooth and silent, without the warning a rattlesnake would have the courtesy to give. He stopped to stand beside Cal. “Look, Caliban. Look, my brother. They are afraid. They are afraid of you.”

For all Niko had that faith and for all I wished I could, Cal and Grimm looked much closer to brothers now, same clothes, same hair, eyes, teeth, and the shadows of approaching night hid the difference in skin color. And they were both staring at us as identical amusement and reflection, cold and beyond lethal, flowed over their faces. I imagined the reflection was at what they might make from our intestines when they pulled them, the difficult way, out through our mouths. Cat’s cradle would be no challenge at all, would it? Details, details.

“Afraid? Is that what you see?” Cal watched us with a head cocked, curious. “They do smell afraid, don’t they? And maybe they are. Maybe they have their toy gun with them so they can put me to sleep again. Maybe Goodfellow-Hob-the-younger will kill me for the world’s own good or maybe he’ll just try. Or just maybe I’ll slice off the dick he never stops talking about and give it to your other Bae as a toy or take it back to his pigeon as a present.”

He licked the blood thoughtfully from his lips and teeth. Either he had no problem with the taste, the ingestion, or he might not have noticed he was doing it, but he kept at it until the metal shone bright again. All the while he contemplated us and our fear, because it was there—that fear. Impossibly his grin went wider. “And maybe . . . just maybe I get tired of repeating myself when I say you’re
not
my fucking brother!”

He buried the dark claws low in Grimm’s abdomen and ripped upward. Red-black blood gushed, intestines began to spill, and Grimm was gone. He left nothing but air and falling blood behind. Not dead, that I doubted. Grimm had shown in the past he could survive horrific wounds, but he was gone.

I approved of that. If he could be more gone, as perhaps from existence and memory, I’d approve of that more.

The metal teeth slid up out of sight as the blood continued to drip from the claws mounted on Cal’s glove to dapple the sand in a cheerful spring shower, and Cal’s grin stayed in place, but human now and pleased as he aimed it at us. “Good game, guys. Damn good game. I should make you honorary Auphe.”

I’d lived long enough that there wasn’t much left that could startle me, and surprising me I would have thought to be close to entirely out of the question. That didn’t
stop me from answering Niko’s comment in the manner that I did.

“I think I may have pissed my pants,” he said, his voice low and absent of life.

“You are not fucking alone,” I replied honestly.

Caliban

“You were really afraid?” I asked.

Goodfellow threw a statue of a mermaid and a horny dolphin at my head. The thing was the size of a basketball and shattered against the wall as I ducked. He then continued pushing Ishiah out the front door of his condo as he’d been doing since I gated us back. The statue had once sat on a table in the foyer. Convenient for tossing. I wondered if he planned it that way while having the place decorated.

“But I stopped all the Bae from gating, and without that, they’re nothing like the Auphe to fight. Nik had the flamethrower, and I saw you taking them down, Goodfellow. You went through them like a Stephen King possessed-from-Hell lawn mower. I was impressed.” And a little jealous. “It was a downpour of blood wherever I looked. You couldn’t have been afraid—” This time it
was a bronze bowl, small but deadly, and it bounced off my shoulder.

“Ow, you shithead. What the hell?” I complained.

“Absolutely not, Robin. I am not leaving you to face this Grimm and Bae situation alone.” Overriding my complaints, Ishiah was refusing to go, and Robin, the puck of all the words, had not one to say to any of us. Ishiah was bigger than Robin, but the trickster was older, wilier, with some sneaky moves I hadn’t once seen Nik use, and that meant they were sneakier than hell. He had Ishiah out the door with it slammed and locked quicker than the eye could follow.

Finally he did have some words, but not many. “Don’t bother trying to break it down with your sword,” he said through the door, “or I’ll call security.” In other words, he’d let the humans see, and Ishiah, unlike me, was sane, followed the rules, and wouldn’t risk that.

“It was barely a game at all,” I said to Niko, who was on the couch . . . sprawled on the couch.

I had not in my life seen Niko sprawl, not a single time, and he had a thousand-yard stare that a troll and a boggle combined hadn’t been able to give him. Robin stalked past us without a look, covered as literally as a person could be in blood, black blood, but blood was blood. I’d seen him fight many times, but not against forty at once. It kicked his game up a notch. He’d been lazing a lot in the past apparently, but I didn’t think now was the time to bring that up.

“It wasn’t,” I insisted. Robin’s shoe hit me in the side of the head from twenty feet away. “Jesus Christ.” I backed away from him even as he kept moving in the opposite direction. “Was it Grimm?” Fuck knew I was wary of him when I was in my right mind. He could be death incarnate when he wanted. To non-Auphe he had to be scary as shit. “It was Grimm, right?”

“It was you.”

I whipped my head away from Robin’s retreat to the shower, I was guessing, to Nik. “What?”

“We were afraid of you,” he said it as blankly as his eyes stayed.

Not Goodfellow was afraid. We. We were afraid.

My stomach lurched. No. That couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be true. “But I was in control. I told you I’d stay in control.” I did too, and I was proud of that as it had been close to impossible. “I was able to get the drop on Grimm by pretending I was Cal, but Caliban. That I couldn’t hold out, that I was the same as him like he wanted.” Because the Bae weren’t the point in the game. When we played, Grimm and I were the pieces that mattered. “I faked it . . . you didn’t know? You thought I meant what I said?”

Nik shook his head, but before he could answer, Robin discovered words again. Out of sight, he yelled them down the hall, “It wasn’t only the words! It was the words about my
gamou
cock combined with the
gamou
metal teeth and you killing
gamou
Bae and spitting out their
gamou
flesh with your
gamou
metal teeth and the
gamou
licking of the blood from your
gamou
metal
gamou
teeth, you
gamou
idiot!”

Shit. Shit. Had I done that? I remembered the waves of white scales and black blood that would go flying as I sliced with my claws . . . and then . . . then I’d bit with my teeth, my jaw locking, and the ripping-away motion as I’d jerked my head. Damn it to hell, I had. I had torn open throats with my teeth. I’d licked off the blood like if was leftover ice cream, and I hadn’t thought once about what I was doing. It was natural. It was instinct. It was who I was. God. I promptly puked black vomit on Robin’s billion-dollar antique rug.

“Hades, take me now! Why do I try?” Robin didn’t
bother coming back down the hall to follow his frustrated shout, and I didn’t know if he would again. If anyone could drive a wildly partying puck to become an agoraphobic hermit, it would be me.

“To be fair,” Niko continued, a face so lacking in emotion that it freaked me out, “I believe it was your threat to cut off his penis that disturbed him as much as the killing with your teeth and lapping up of the blood.”

“Do you
gamou
think that might be the
gamou
case? Or that he said he’d
bite
it off with his
gamou
metal
gamou
teeth, piece of
skata
that he is! Zeus, strike me dead. Lift me to Olympus. Save me from this horror of an existence.” His voice was getting louder, but I had the feeling he was getting further away from us and not physically.

I stared dully down at the dark vomit at my feet. “I think I broke Robin.” I stepped backward and looked up at him. “Did I break you too?”

The blankness was replaced slowly with a solemn study of me before he said, “I’ve told you before you could speak, Cal, I will always be with you and I’ll never give up on you. If that means dragging you back from the brink, then I will. If it means going with you over that brink, that I will do as well. Whether I’m afraid that most of you might already be gone doesn’t matter. I’ll be on your heels bringing what’s left of you with me. Fear can’t stop me. That the Cal I grew up with now has silver hair, scarlet eyes, and bear-trap teeth that come and go can’t stop me. That will be true until the day we die.” The twitch of his lips was more reflex than anything, but I’d take it. “All the days we die, which as Robin keeps telling us are many. Now would you step over your vomit and bring me two bottles of Robin’s most dusty and expensive-appearing wine? I’m in an unaccustomed mood.” Drinking, he was drinking again. My brother who thought tea with caffeine was the equivalent of Jägermeister.

I had done this. The Cal he’d known with the black hair and eyes the same as his was gone, and the image of an Auphe was in his place. Anyone else would’ve already killed me. Would’ve been justified in killing me when the words of an Auphe came out of the mouth of one, but I expected Robin and him to not be afraid? To know I was pretending when all the times in the past there had been no pretense.

Idiot me.

An hour later I’d cleaned up the puke, although the stain would stay, I thought, for eternity. Salome and Spartacus the zombie cats regarded it with feline disgust, and if they’d had working bladders, no doubt would’ve pissed on it. I was sitting on the couch. Niko had forced me to. After a bottle of wine, he’d ended up with his head in my lap. He hadn’t passed out; he wasn’t that much of a lightweight. No, he’d gone to sleep, exhausted. I was too, but every time I closed my eyes I saw myself as I must’ve looked to Nik and Robin while I’d stood with Grimm, threatened them, and now I understood. To see two Auphe, one your brother but maybe not any longer when you see the way he’d killed with metal teeth and claws, how would you know what to think? I’d kept my promise. I said I wouldn’t go Auphe, and I didn’t. But I hadn’t entirely been Cal either, tearing Bae apart like an animal would. Like an Auphe would. I couldn’t sleep when I relived that each time I started to doze.

Robin came out finally. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t come out for days. He was clean of the head-to-toe blood, wearing a long dark green bathrobe of some material so expensive whoever made it had to charge by the inch. He had his sword and a tranquilizer gun with him.

Dropping into the chair, he took in his stained rug, the empty wine bottle, a comatose Nik, and spoke with utter
disinterest, which was wrong. Robin always had an interest, in one direction or another—always had an opinion for or against. This . . .
lack
 . . . wasn’t the Goodfellow I knew.

“You’ve destroyed my life, my belongings, my ability to get an erection . . . at least for another hour . . . and my relationship temporarily, as I had to send Ishiah away, as chances are high that you might eat him for drinking the last of the orange juice.” He tapped the oddly shaped muzzle of the gun against the arm of the chair. “Your work is done, Cal. You have done what no other creature could claim. You’ve driven me to the edge of insanity and removed all willingness to live from me entirely. Bravo. If I had two free hands, I would applaud you.”

But he didn’t have a free hand, as both held a weapon specifically for me. If I hadn’t broken him, I’d done a damn good imitation.

I didn’t say I was sorry. That would be one helluva insult in view of what I’d done. All the things I’d done. I didn’t say I’d make it up to him, as, if I lived to be ninety, I couldn’t, and I wasn’t going to live to be ninety. I’d be lucky to live ninety more hours, much less years. “You deserve better.” That I could say, because that was true.

He deserved better and Niko deserved better. “Next life toss me in a volcano the minute I pop out. Make sure Nik never sees me. Force-feed my mother birth control.” But that was all impossible, of course. He didn’t find us that young, didn’t find us when we were still cooking in the oven. Didn’t find us in time to save Nik. “Hell, Robin, at least save yourself. Don’t try to find us anymore. And if you do accidentally, walk away. I’m a curse. I might as well be your and Niko’s personal fucking curse. All our lives sound as if they end in blades and blood. You have only one life. Just . . . walk away. Walk away and enjoy your life, because it would fucking kill me if you died
thanks to me. And unlike Nik and me, you wouldn’t come back.”

He sighed, deep and full of the sound of resignation, and with that he was back. Not a Robin-shaped manikin, but the genuine deal—real, if ruefully that way. “I couldn’t. I’m a hopeless case, kid. Damn you for reminding me.” Propping the sword against his chair, he offered, “And you wouldn’t say that if you remembered the good times. Try. Think about the time you were Patroclus and we were in that one
chamaitypeion
that had a statue of me depicting me as far less endowed than I actually am. You were so offended on my behalf . . . and drunk . . . that you—”

“Pushed it over and shattered it, then set the whorehouse on fire,” I finished, because
chamaitypeion
was Greek for whorehouse or brothel, and I knew that although I’d never learned it. I knew it because I’d lived it.

“Or when you were Caiy and that one chieftain caught us with his daughters.”

“And I stole all his horses,” I said, the memory suddenly so clear. The twenty shaggy horses, the white crescents that shone in the rolling of their eyes, the aggressive stomping of large hooves, the annoyed bugle that came from velvet muzzles as we moved them into a gallop.

“After setting his tent on fire. Of course you were nice enough to clear everyone out first,” he said. “That was considerate of you. And when you were a musketeer . . .”

“I tried to set
Paris
on fire,” I said with horror and, all right, a little pride in having high goals. That was nothing but a blur. If Robin had spent a decade in a drunken state, I’d been right there with him.

“You can see why I’m not surprised by your love for a flamethrower these days,” he responded with a fond forgiveness I didn’t think I could’ve managed in his position.

“I don’t want to know where I was for all of this. Tell me and I’ll destroy you both,” Niko said with his eyes still shut.

I yanked lightly at his braid. “Paying bail? Breaking us out of prison, the gaol, stopping the execution, whatever they did to . . . um . . . high-spirited people back then?”

“High-spirited,” he repeated with palpable scorn. “My entire existence spent as a babysitter.”

With a snort he sat up. I thought about that: how he’d rested his head in my lap without a thought for metal teeth, silver hair, crimson eyes, and flashes of homicidal mania. It was an unbelievable trust and an equally unbelievable lack of survival skills when it came to me.

My brother, and there was nothing more that could be thought or said to encompass that.

Robin laughed; it wasn’t his usual one, but it was a laugh and that counted. “I love how you assume you were some sort of Mother Teresa with a sword. You helped burn down that brothel and then disappeared with three of the whores. We didn’t see you for a week. You’ve always been an excellent warrior, but you do not get to be Achilles or Alexander or Arturus by wiping the foreheads of the sick and delivering food to the hungry. In many lives you were rather power-hungry and ruthless . . .
nobly
, of course.” Goodfellow’s straight face did nothing to hide the mockery beneath. “As nobly as you can be when visiting whorehouses before washing your enemy’s blood off you. Oh, and Arturus didn’t get his sword from a stone. He pulled it out of the gut of his primary rival, but with a very noble flourish as he did so, if that makes you feel more principled and honorable.”

“You should’ve left the vomit on his rug,” Nik growled. “And I know my history. Allow me my illusions
if you please. And while we speak of illusions, what are we to do about Grimm?”

“I know.” The shadowed blight on the rug didn’t shatter any of my illusions as I focused on it, but then again I hadn’t had any. It was a confirmation of what had to be done. “I’ve known for a while what to do about Grimm and all his Bae, every last one.”

Niko wouldn’t like it, but he would see the necessity of it and the inevitability of it. Robin wouldn’t care for it at all, as much effort as he’d put into keeping us safe and alive in the past week or so. It would’ve been better if he hadn’t begun to forgive me for the
gamou
metal
gamou
teeth incident barely an hour ago. I hid a mental smile, rueful and tasting of regret. I should’ve left him fearing for his true love: his dick. He might not object to my plan if I had. He most likely would’ve packed us a lunch and taken a nap or called Ishiah back to make up for all the screwing he was missing thanks to trying to take care of us. Money, sex, and almost his life—Goodfellow had pulled out all the stops on this. I wished he hadn’t.