Downfall (32 page)

In the end, it would be a waste.

“Pine Barrens. New Jersey. Delilah dragged me out there once in the sexing days to look for the Jersey Devil or Cthulhu, I don’t remember. But there’s a fire tower on Apple Pie Hill that’s high and isolated enough for a thousand and one Bae to swarm and no people to see them.” Or get eaten by them, which I thought those hypothetical people would appreciate that.

Robin’s mild leer let me in on the fact that he knew what Delilah and I had been doing out there and it wasn’t looking for the Jersey Devil. “It’s been an incredibly wet fall. The fire tower would be unmanned. That is a positive. What do you plan on doing with Grimm and the Bae when or if they show up?”

“Gate them away, someplace they can’t come back from. With all that epinephrine you had delivered, I can make the biggest gate the world has seen.”

“And where will you send them from which they can’t return? You can only gate to places you’ve been to or seen,” Niko said. He was suspicious and it showed in deepened lines beside his mouth and the millimeter narrowing of his eyes. “Any of those including Tumulus they could make their way back.”

I pointed up.

*   *   *

They didn’t like it. I told them I could gate all the Bae for certain into the sun and with a chance I’d survive. It wasn’t a substantial chance, I noted, but it was one. Grimm was the problem. Grimm could gate like nothing I’d seen. He might escape my gate, but he wouldn’t be able to take all the Bae with him, four or five at the most. That was something I, and my box of epinephrine, was sure of. And a handful of Bae he could save, we could kill easily enough. Grimm himself should still be weak enough from the gutting I’d given him, if given a few days or not to duct-tape himself back together, that we’d have good odds of taking him out as well.

They still didn’t like it. Niko, because he knew I was lying, but he knew the same as I did that the time had come and this time there’d be no escape. Robin took my word that I’d survive. His problem was I didn’t want him there. There was nothing I could do about Niko. I hated it and I hated that I was fucking cowardly enough to be comforted that I wouldn’t be alone. But this was a lifetime of eventuality in motion. It was our time and that couldn’t be changed, thanks to Grimm, and we’d be back . . . someday. If Robin didn’t make it, he wouldn’t. I didn’t know what
paien
paradise he had picked out. He said there were hundreds upon thousands, but he had a
good life here. He wasn’t ready to die and I wasn’t ready to know that when Niko and I eventually did come back in fifty or a hundred years, he wouldn’t be here. He’d tell me I was an idiot and that I wouldn’t know he wasn’t there with the new set of memories I’d make.

But I knew he was wrong.

Getting my brother killed with me was . . . fuck . . . it was enough. I wasn’t letting my friend die with us. That was why I called Ishiah. I wasn’t any more happy with him than I had been, but when death is half a breath away, you gain priority. What he’d done, he’d done. He couldn’t undo it, couldn’t go back in time and change who he’d been then. But since I’d known him in New York, he’d backed us up every time, he’d saved our lives, especially Nik’s, risking his own to do all of it, and he’d saved Robin’s life. The last was most important, as I needed him to do that again. I let my anger go—there was a first—and told him my plan and when and where I needed him to be then forced a promise from him to not tell Goodfellow. That was the easiest part. If he told him, Robin would die and Ish didn’t want that any more than I did. He wished me good luck and sounded sincere, which was ironic, as I was going off to die, but angels, ex or not, they were weird.

And then it was a waiting game. I had gotten Grimm with a good shot, but he was tough, he healed fast, and he would duct-tape his gut together before backing down from this kind of invitation to play—that hadn’t been an exaggeration. I called him with the place and the time. “I’ll give you five days to find the place and teach your Bae to either follow your gate there or take them in field trips of fifty to get it fixed in their mind.” I was lying on the guest bed and staring at the ceiling. Robin’s condo was like the Sistine Chapel. All the ceilings were painted but with far less biblical images . . . unless you
counted the one in the corner of this room where Eve and the Serpent were doing some pretty unspeakable and hopefully illegal things with each other under an apple tree. “It’ll also give you time to scoop your guts back into your belly and staple it shut. I think me killing all one thousand of your Bae snakes should make up for how pathetic your own performance will be. You didn’t even touch me yesterday. That, you Auphe-fucking-wannabe, is pretty goddamn pathetic.”

“I touched you.” Auphe wannabe or Auphe wannabe better, he had their voice. The screech of metal and shattering of glass that come from the most catastrophic of car wrecks, where blood turns the paint job red and no one walks away. They’re pulled out in pieces. Whenever an Auphe had spoken, whenever Grimm did, that was what you heard . . . or worse.

“I saw your teeth. I didn’t put a hand on you, Caliban, but since I first saw you, I’ve touched you every single day. Haven’t you looked at yourself? You and I, our first game, I triggered this in you. I turned you from a member of the herd into the Second Coming. No more grazing with the cattle for you,
brother
. Only eating them.” He laughed, an avalanche screaming down on you to sweep you away. “I saw that my Bae you killed were missing a few mouthfuls of flesh. Did you really spit them all out or did you savor one or two bites? Do you think your friends, your so-called cattle family, will taste any different? More meaty? I’ll bet you’re wondering right now, aren’t—”

“Five days,” I interrupted, shut off the phone, and threw it against the wall. I hadn’t eaten any of the Bae. The blood, yeah, I’d licked that off my teeth and it was probably a good thing I was going to die because I wouldn’t fucking forget that otherwise. But I hadn’t
eaten any of them. I didn’t believe it. I refused to because it had
not
happened.

Your Honor, I bit but I did not swallow.

I turned over and buried the less than sane laughter in the pillows. Behind and above me, Eve, her thoughts as reluctantly dark and twisted as mine, rained commiseration on me and the Serpent sneered and smirked, welcoming me to the Big Time.

*   *   *

The five days passed and I don’t know how they did or what we’d done. We couldn’t clean out our apartment and give everything to the Salvation Army. Robin would’ve known what the true plan was if we had done so.

Niko spent the nights with Promise, and I couldn’t bear to ask what he told her. I knew he didn’t tell her good-bye, as she’d have told Goodfellow within seconds and double-teamed us in an effort to stop us. I’d taken that away from my brother as well as his life—the chance to say good-bye to the woman he loved. The days he spent with me. We didn’t say much, I don’t think, as we’d had our entire lives to say it all. But if I sat on the couch, he sat beside me shoulder to shoulder. At breakfast at the kitchen island, he did the same, although he had to move the chair over by nearly a foot. Robin had started to say something about that, but at the last minute didn’t.

Instead he told us more stories of our numerous pasts, but only the funny ones and the happy ones. I was a little surprised at how many of those there were. I was not surprised to learn that Robin as Myrddynn/Merlin pulled his dick out of his hat instead of a rabbit. At Robin’s goading, I
did
remember, on first seeing him do it as Caiy that I’d tried to beat the giant serpent to death with an axe handle, then fallen on the dirt floor of the hovel we were in laughing myself sick over it, followed by
sulking the rest of the night at how I did not measure up. Caiy, I was thinking, drank a great deal, more than all the rest of my incarnations combined.

I did practice a little with the epinephrine, measuring the rise of my heart rate, which grew less and less each time I injected myself, the Auphe immune system at work. I had hoped it would work that way; otherwise the epinephrine could kill me before the gate did. Good to know that I was going to die and take a thousand monsters with me and not just shoot up to drop dead of a heart attack while the Bae and Grimm finished off Niko. That was not a heroic way to go. Not that I counted what I was doing as heroic either. It was a last resort, as I wasn’t smart enough or good enough to do anything differently, as Grimm had been smarter and created an army. He who disdained the Auphe and had been right in all he told me. He was a smarter, more efficiently lethal monster than the Auphe. The Bae fell short, but sheer numbers couldn’t be beaten. He’d make more and more and more until he ruled the world and drenched it in blood, just as the Auphe had tried to use me to do. He was the better monster and I could compete with that only by being the more insane one.

That would be my obituary. Caliban Leandros, Crazy beats smart every time. Free porn collection at this location if a puck doesn’t steal it first. See ya, would’ve liked to be ya.

But monsters didn’t get to pick who or what they would be.

However we passed those days, they did pass, and finally we were in the Pine Barrens after a silent drive and a long trek though trees and grass-covered muck masquerading as ground. The fire tower was easy to find, right where I’d remembered it being. I hadn’t gated us, as I wanted to save all that up. We climbed the stairs and took
a look around at our last stand. It was nice, brisk, cool breeze, and the smell of pine needles sharp and astringent. Taking a last glance around at the world, I turned to the small duffel bag I’d carried with me. I’d been injecting epinephrine the entire ride, and once we were up in the tower I had several last of the horse-sized syringes to go. I unzipped the bag and reached for the first one.

“Directly in the heart might be the way to go,” I said. “Just in case.”

“Just in case you want that much fluid pressure to explode your heart, yes, certainly. Niko, you failed at teaching him biology, anatomy, physics, and how much water fits in a glass.” Robin knelt on the floor of the tower, swiped the syringe in my hand, and cheerfully jammed the needle through my sweatpants—he’d insisted I wear them over jeans and now I knew why—and into my outer thigh. “Come to Daddy,” he said as he hit the plunger home.

“Motherfu—” I didn’t have the breath to finish, as he was already injecting the next one and then the next one, switching thighs with each one, and with a speed that had several near-orange-sized lumps swelling at the top of both my legs before slowly being absorbed.

“And you wanted all that injected into your heart.” He gave my jaw a light slap. “You barely have a heart, Cal, and one the size of a basketball? I think not.” Straightening, he discarded the last syringe. “Time to be all the Auphe you can be, little sociopath.”

First, I wasn’t little. I was his size if not taller. Second . . . “I’m not a sociopath. I love Nik. I love my brother, and I have vague feelings for you that aren’t necessarily hatred or disgust. Ergo, not a sociopath. More like a generalized, family-oriented lovable psychopath.” I massaged my legs and felt the epinephrine disperse further and go to work. “Okay, occasionally lovable,” I snapped as Robin crossed
his arms and yawned in the face of my sincerity . . . or as close to it as I could come to sincerity.

“My heart is warmed. Truly. You don’t inevitably hate or are disgusted by me. It’s every comrade-in-arms’ dream come true.” He had moved to again stare out over the trees, but he reached behind to pat me absently on the shoulder.

Niko had his sword ready as the sun started nearing the horizon. “We should’ve waited with the epinephrine. Until we were certain they were coming.”

“They’re coming right now.” Robin kept his gaze out to the green that stretched below us and infinitely into the distance. “It’s like smelling the ozone of an approaching lightning storm. The rumble of Vesuvius at Pompeii. Can you not feel it?”

I could. I didn’t know how I missed it. Grimm’s gates were too quick for me to feel now. The gate of one or forty Bae I wouldn’t feel until a second before they appeared. But a thousand Bae all gating here. It was like a storm or a tsunami. You felt your stomach fall, your ears pop, your heart stutter in your chest, and your brain curl up into a knot and pray not to know. Earth-shattering. Unstoppable. That was the Bae. That was the Second Coming. Or so they named themselves. So they thought.

They were wrong.

“Ishiah!” I shouted. “Now!”

He came flying in at a speed I’d not seen him reach before, tackled Robin, wrapped his arms in tight imprisonment around him, and was out and flying again in less than the blink of an eye. Goodfellow was screaming, “No!” Not shouting, but screaming as if he’d been gutted on the battlefield and it was horrible to hear, but it didn’t stop me from shouting at Ishiah again. “More than a mile! Go more than a mile! I’m taking it all with me!” White-and-gold wings beating, and I’d denied it before,
but I saw it now. Wrath of God in every wing stroke. In that moment I forgave Ish completely. He couldn’t save my brother Niko, but he could save my brother Robin. I didn’t know if the puck would forgive us, not in this life, as we’d be dead. Not in the next life either, I didn’t think. He, for once, could do the sane thing and avoid us for the rest of eternity. I wouldn’t blame him.

They disappeared from sight just as the Bae appeared. I grinned at Nik, wishing the metal teeth wouldn’t fall into place, but they did. “Our own personal Bolivian army.” I peered over the side of the rail to see white everywhere. White serpentine bodies, scales glittering like snow on fire in the failing sunlight. The eyes were fire and nothing else. Thousands and thousands of metal fangs were bared, and the hissing was louder than a hurricane.

“You’re not smart enough to be Butch or handsome enough to be Sundance,” Niko had to shout in my ear to be heard, but he was smiling.

“We’ll just be ourselves, then. That’s more than good enough for me.”

I didn’t see Grimm, but the Bae were climbing the tower now. They could’ve gated up, but there wasn’t room for more than a few at a time and I’d planned on that. They couldn’t suffocate us with their sheer numbers. Niko sliced the throats of several and the heads of a few more who tried to climb over the rail and I leaned over myself and gated my voice to a hundred locations, for miles, over a thousand heads to be heard by every last one of them.