Downfall (33 page)

“Grimm, I know you’re out there somewhere, watching me and your children.” Then I saw him perched at the top of a tree less than fifteen yards away. He was grinning the same as I was. Matching metal smiles. He rested his chin in his hand as if he were a teacher
observing a student. I didn’t doubt he thought he was. Even over the Bae, I could hear him, “Show me, brother. Show me, Caliban. Show me how you plan to win this particular game.” He hissed in laughter and anger, “But you can’t. You can’t win and you’ll throw away the world we could make. You’ll throw away your family, my family, the only family the two of us will ever have. You’ll throw away all the bloody games we could’ve played. Selfish
bastard
. Make your choice. Choose death. Isn’t that what all cowards do?”

He was furious—that I would deprive him of a conquered world, a new race, and the games that were all the Auphe ever truly lived for besides murder and slaughter. Furious I would leave him alone when murder is more entertaining with two.

The Auphe, the original ones, all the half-breeds they created—they’d destroyed. Even the successes, Grimm and me. They had more to answer for than I’d known.

But it was too late now.

“Your children. Your Bae, your snakes, not mine,” I said with disgust and derision. “Then there’s Tumulus. You’ve never been to the homeland. Can’t get there. Never seen it, never will. Never seen your true world.” I grinned, savage and proud, too much at the taste of the metal of my teeth. “But I have. I lived there for years, and doesn’t that eat you up alive, cousin?” Not that it mattered that he craved what I’d had when I’d have given anything in my human moments, my soul if I still had one, to have never seen that hell. “And here? Earth, that’s only the Auphe feeding ground. They were the first murderers to walk this place, but this place wasn’t the first they walked, was it?

“You’re a Second Coming without the Promised Land, without Tumulus. And while you’re supposed to treat
this”—I threw my arms wide to indicate anything and everything in the world—“as a hunting ground, a buffet, a vacation house that belongs to you, fight to the death with anyone who tries to take it away, including the natives—you don’t
live
here with the cattle. You own it . . . you come and snack as you please. Low-maintenance massacres. But staying here, mingling with the herds, stinking of the sheep, the cattle, and the bleating
paien
who are no more a challenge than humans? You might as well be their shepherds. It’s pathetic. That’s not the Auphe way. And your Bae? They have no way of their own, no instinct, no home,
nothing
. All of you, you don’t belong. Not here. Not anywhere.

“You’re trespassers but you won’t goddamn leave!” I was all taunting contempt as I saw the blood drip from his sliced lips where teeth were buried to keep him from screaming in rage. “You’re tourists. That’s all you are. Fucking
tourists
. And I’m kicking your asses out . . . permanently.”

Then I let it go—all of it. Everything I’d been saving up all my life, building and growing inside me, too much to hold in one half-human body. God, I thought I’d known, but I hadn’t. I’d had no idea all that was in me. So much. Too much, until I cracked here and there and everywhere, but I held it down. I trapped it in mental chains that were on the verge of shattering, held on until all I saw was a haze painted the same dim glow of a thousand long-dead stars. It tried to push its way out of every part of me, out of every single pore in my skin, piggybacking on every thought, carried on my pain-racked insanity-driven scream. It pushed and fought to be free with a force that turned me into a bomb with a timer vibrating on zero.

Now was the time.

Now I was free, but so was everything I’d fought so hard not to be.

The gate—a living, carnivorous thunderstorm of rage and hunger—exploded around us. It did as I’d told it. It obeyed. Why wouldn’t it? It was starving. It wanted to be fed. Shredding and tearing through the glowing dusk around us, it opened in the very air itself: a jagged wound that I could see no end to. I felt reality recoil and rush away. I heard the world wail at the unnatural horror that clawed at it until it was ripped open. I also heard the hissing screams of the monsters surrounding us as they tried to retreat—too young and unpracticed to tear free of my gate with one of their own. They were trapped and they weren’t getting out.

Amateurs.

I laughed, and then hummed silently to myself.

Anything you can do, I can do better.

Anything I can do, you can’t fucking do at all.

Kiddies shouldn’t play with grown-up toys. Too bad for them. I was Ground Zero and there was no escaping the shock wave of the implosion that was designed to trap, not blast free. The gate was an inescapable tsunami that swept wave after wave over the thrashing lengths of white-scaled nightmares—it covered them in deepest blacks, glowing grays, and painfully bruised purples, all of which was ringed with a whirlpool of lightning made to burn through flesh.

It was light and the absence of light. It was a gangrenous wound of the veil that stood between here and there. It was a door.

It was the end.

That’s what happens when you show up to a fight with claws and I show up with an evolutionary-created one-way trip to thermonuclear Hell.

Top of the food chain, bitches. It’s the only place to be.

“Buckle up, time to go, boys and girls!” I laughed, and if it was a little dark and a shitload more than a little
crazy, it wasn’t like anyone was going to be around to tell the tale. At least no one who would hold it against me, I knew, as I felt Nik grab my hand and hold it high in victory. In life together, in death together—why had I thought that was wrong? With my brother always, what could be more right?

The door was open and I didn’t hesitate when I picked the destination.

Then I died.

I didn’t mind. That was, after all, half the point.

I died when I took the gate to the sun, dragging with it a thousand screaming monsters, two humans, more or less, and a big fuck-you to the murdering army of assholes that thought they could take me down.

I died, making certain every monster in a one-mile radius went with me.

I died on my own terms and denying the darkest part of me with my last breath even as I used that darkest part to make it happen.

I died with my brother at my side. I died free. There are worse ways to go, but there are no better.

I died, and it was slow and painful, but that was a price I was willing to pay.

Nik and I took our last look of the world as our hearts began to tear themselves apart, gripped hands tight enough to feel the blood drip, raised our eyes to the descending sun, and took our last ride of this life as I took us into the fire. It hurt. It hurt more than anything could, that gate. I was dying cell by cell and I felt every one of them go. That was all right, though. There would be other lives and they’d be as good if not more so as we’d stay family. Death couldn’t change that. I should’ve known that before Robin had told us.

We rode into the sunset in a life where that meant dying.

No happy ending.

But that was okay. I was with my brother. I got to save the world.

There’d be other endings.

They would be better ones.

So yeah, as I said, shit does happen.

But sometimes . . . sometimes it’s not that bad.

There was one last thing, one last thought. From me to Grimm and the Auphe and Bae nations.

I played your games, all of them, and fuck you. . . .

I
won
.

Caliban

I wasn’t dead.

That wasn’t life. It was a stupid thing to think—death isn’t life—but it was true. This wasn’t life—life didn’t work this way. Not my life. There was no happy ending. No riding off into the sunset, not while I was still breathing. I didn’t get to live after gating a thousand Bae into the sun. That shit didn’t happen unless being alive meant something much worse than death was waiting for me. And what that could possibly be, I didn’t want to know. I could imagine many things, too many and then some, but I did not want to know. Period. End of story.

Shivering, I could feel the cold around me. Maybe I was back in Tumulus. The Auphe had somehow resurrected from the dead and were going to keep me there for years of torture until they had a hunt across the red sand with me as the rabbit. That would qualify as worse
than dying. Yeah, you could say that. That would be no real surprise with how my life had gone up until now.

But . . .

I smelled the bite of snow and pine trees, the distant musk of what I was guessing was an elk or a moose and Wolves, the were kind, and I smelled Nik and Goodfellow. I smelled Grimm too, but as if he’d been here and gone, not that I cared. What I did care about was that if I was alive, Nik would be too. He had to be. I couldn’t have gotten him killed but not myself. That was not fucking acceptable and I’d take Tumulus over that. I’d take any fucking form of hell and be goddamn happy with it over Nik being gone without me.

I opened my eyes and it was light. There was a blue sky with the sun only now sliding toward the top of the trees and the horizon, and they were tall trees, very tall, dark green pines with snow clumped on them. There was a warm weight on my chest, a bare hand, and I followed the arm it was attached to up to a familiar face with shaggy reddish hair and predatory gold eyes. “Rafferty?” Rafferty, the healer and Wolf who’d saved my life twice now. He’d saved me when Niko had first thought years ago he could keep his oath, kill me if that was the only solution. He couldn’t and had taken me to help. That had been Rafferty then, and he was here now. How? Damn, I hurt. Fuck.
“Nik.”

“Here, little brother.”

I turned my head to see him next to me, flat on his back as well and with Rafferty’s other hand resting on his chest too. His braid was nearly buried in the snow we were lying in and he was shaking from the cold the same as I was, but he was alive. Fuck. He was
alive
. “You’re not dead. We’re not dead,” I said, stunned.

He reached out a hand toward me and I stretched
back to grip it as hard as I could. Relaxed and as peaceful as I hadn’t seen him since this all began, he let his lips edge into a smile that came close to being astounded as mine. “No, we’re not. But I applaud your grasp of the obvious.”

“Yeah, not dead now, but you were,” Rafferty snapped, as irritable as he’d always been all the times he’d healed and helped us through the years. “Dead as they get, both of you. You don’t build a fucking gate to the sun and expect to live through that. I’m surprised I was able to get all your blood back into you. Show a little respect and gratitude to the guy who kicked the Grim Reaper in the balls to yank you back from his bony fingers.”

“You healed. . . . How the hell did you know? How’d we get here? Where is here? And how the fuck did we get out of the gate?” I had more questions and a great deal more pained cursing to go with them, but that’s when someone cleared their throat. It sounded so damn smug that I didn’t have to look up to see who it was, but I did. I was an idiot that way. Robin stood behind the crouching Rafferty. His arms were folded as they’d been in the fire tower, there was snow in his hair, and the smirk on his face combined with the bright gleam in his green eyes was that much more arrogant.

“You,” I accused.

“Of course me. Who else could pull this off, kid? Did you buy into my screaming when Ishiah ‘saved’ me? I thought that was Oscar-level acting there. You should be appreciative I pulled out all the stops on that performance. As you bought in to it, so did Grimm.” The smirk grew. “Before you ask why I couldn’t tell you, think about it. Long and hard.” His smug smile transmuted into something stark. “As it became apparent over the past, I don’t know, five hundred incarnations of yours
that you two were utterly incapable of keeping yourselves alive, I thought I’d finally better step in and fucking do it for you.”

Niko slowly sat up and Rafferty let him, but when I tried, he shook his head and held me down with his hand remaining on my chest. “I’m not through with you yet. Freeze your ass off for a couple more minutes while Curly tells us all how goddamn amazing he is.”

Robin scowled at the back of Rafferty’s head. He’d not been fond of the nickname the first time they’d met. “Scruffy leg-humper. If you owned a cell phone like every other creature walking, flying, or swimming the earth, I’d have found you sooner. And we’re in Banff, Canada, by the way, if Niko and you were curious.”

“He’s still healing me here,” I protested. “Could you not piss him off, which would waste all your work? Not to mention that I kind of like being alive—there’s that to think about.”

Before he could decide on whether it was worth it or not, Nik asked, “How did you get us out of the gate?”

“I didn’t. Grimm did. We have discussed how Grimm’s gates put the true Auphe and yours to shame. If anyone could pull you out of your own gate to another destination, it would be Grimm.” Goodfellow was in his element now, so self-satisfied and impressed with his own cleverness that he could barely stand it. “When Cal was first shot by the Vigil and Grimm showed up in your apartment—”

“And you had Cal gate us away,” Nik interrupted, “while you said you ran, but you didn’t run, did you? You stayed to talk to Grimm. Goodfellow, he could’ve killed you.”

“Yes, I lied. No, I didn’t run. And kill me?” Robin snorted, a plume of icy vapor filling the air. “I can talk anyone into anything as I’ve told you too many times to
count. When will you believe me? I suppose it’s my own fault. The greatest trick I ever played was convincing the world that I didn’t exist.”

“That’s about the devil, you conniving asshole, with your stolen prose. Stolen and a lie as you take every Fenris-blessed opportunity to tell anyone who’ll listen that you exist,” Rafferty grumbled, the heat of his hand beginning to burn through my clothes and tingle almost painfully against my chest. “Get on with it.”

“You could ruin a weeklong marathon spank-fest,” Robin growled. “As I said, he didn’t kill me. We talked, had a little discussion. We made a deal.” He might not have been the devil, but the grin on his face now would’ve fit the devil perfectly as you signed away your soul. “I bet Grimm that Cal would beat him
or
his thousand Bae
or
both. And should Cal win in any of the three ways, Grimm would let him walk away for good. The game would be over. Finished. It was the ultimate move in that fun little kill-or-be-killed, maim-or-be-maimed Auphe game you so love to play. Naturally as it was
I
who was the one who was selling that move, Grimm went for it.”

“You bet Cal’s life?” Nik accused flatly, trying to get to his feet somewhat unsteadily.

“Cal was already dead,” Robin retorted cuttingly. “He was already dead. You were already dead. Your hearts merely hadn’t stopped beating yet. These were the end times, and Grimm was appropriately the Reaper. I obtained for you a chance to live, as you can’t ever be bothered to do it yourself, and made Grimm no longer a threat, not one to us at least. Not to mention that as it was a chance that I created, it was ninety-nine point nine percent foolproof.” He paused. “Although I admit when I found out it was a thousand Bae and not merely fifty, I had a moment where I entertained a doubt or two.”

He paused, face still and frozen. It wasn’t long, a
second maybe, but it was long enough. I had seen it in the past days in the shadows that followed him, the faded green of his sly eyes, the constant drift of his thoughts to mostly memories of better times—it hadn’t been a doubt. He’d very nearly given up. Robin, who didn’t know of anything he couldn’t get out of with fast-talk and faster hands, he’d almost lain down to die with us.

The hesitation disappeared and he was as smug as ever. “But never has a doubt defeated me, which means here you are. Alive. Unmutilated. No better endowed sexually than before, but one can’t have everything. Healers aren’t miracle workers. Bringing you back from death is one thing, enlarging your penis to a passably normal size would require the selling of your soul. As Rafferty said, show him some respect.”

For once Nik was a little abashed. I could tell, as the tips of his ears turned pink, or that might have been frostbite, but I was going with embarrassed. Whether it was at the thought of rudeness or that Robin had somehow gotten a glimpse of his dick, I didn’t know. With Nik, rudeness would be my pick. He was weird like that. “I apologize,” he said. “You’re correct. We’re alive and we shouldn’t be. Wouldn’t be. But technically Cal lost. We died in the gate.”

“Ah.” Goodfellow unfolded his arms to hold up a superior finger. “No. He killed all the Bae. That was the deal. He defeats Grimm or the Bae or Grimm and the Bae. That it would be a kamikaze suicide plan was beyond easy to predict. All Cal’s plans are. He just usually somehow survives them out of sheer dumb luck.”

“Hey,” I protested, surging up. Rafferty smacked me back down with his other hand to my forehead and Wolf strength. “Fine. Whatever. How’d you save me from my idiocy this time? How’d you even know what it was to begin with?”

“It’s as if I’m playing chess with preschoolers, it truly is.” He held up a second finger. “A giant box of more epinephrine than you could possibly need for the next entire year, enough that you could gate anywhere.”

“You mentioning Icarus and your false telling of him flying to the sun instead of near the sun,” Niko added. “You planted the idea.”

Robin nodded and held up a third finger. “It was the one place you could be certain the Bae wouldn’t survive. And once I found out Grimm’s gating powers are advanced enough that he can do virtually anything with them, I knew it was safe enough to nudge Cal in that direction. Once Cal opened the gate to send the Bae and you both to the sun, he had won, and as he had won, I told Grimm the equivalent of letting him walk away was plucking you both out of the gate before the two of you made it to the sun.”

“But that large a gate killed me when I activated it. I
felt
it. I felt myself die. And Nik wouldn’t have survived it either,” I reasoned. “You had to know that.”

“Which is why I’m sitting on my ass in the snow,” Rafferty rumbled, finally dropping his hand to dust them both off. “Curly lit up the entire worldwide trickster network a week ago to find me in the wilds of the Great White North so I could have the probably unpaid privilege of bringing you both back to the land of the fucking living.” He shrugged. “If possible. If you’d been exploded balls of meat, I couldn’t have swung that, but you weren’t. Damn close, but not quite. It worked. That’s all that counts.”

“He sent me track him down when he have location. Give healer cell phone. Listen to them yell for hours at each other. Someone
will
pay me.”

I sat up hurriedly and twisted around to see a beat-up RV that I remembered as brand-new and expensive as
hell and also stolen from Goodfellow. An albino Wolf, of the All Wolf Cult variety, stood in front of it. “Flay?” Flay, with his lupine claws, white hair, red eyes, mouthful of wolf teeth, and not-especially human vocal cords, had helped me infiltrate the Kin five years ago and saved Niko, Georgina, and my life. After his betrayal to the Kin, to get our help in rescuing his kidnapped son, he’d fled New York in an RV stolen from Goodfellow, pissing the puck off to no end, and hadn’t been seen or heard from since. He was also Delilah’s half brother. Which is how I met Delilah . . . and there was no reason to think of that now.

“Your sister took over the Kin,” I said, rather mindlessly, but I couldn’t think of what else to say. My brain was as frozen as the snow I sat in. Robin had planned all this? Finding Rafferty, who apparently didn’t believe in owning his own cell phone, using Flay to chase him down for some communication and to get him to what I was guessing was the spot Robin picked closest to the Wolves or to at least stay in one location.

I couldn’t picture it, but it had to have happened—then Robin giving Grimm GPS coordinates, which was why he’d copied the half Auphe’s cell number from me, and telling him to make certain he could get our bodies there should I win. It was more than a little unbelievable. Yet he had. I knew that he had, as that was exactly what Robin would do to have all prepared for being on the winning side of a deal. He could’ve talked Grimm into bringing him here as well or more likely had Ishiah pull in another heavenly favor from an angel that didn’t have to actually use his wings to go long distances. And when I’d called Ishiah to “save” Robin, Ishiah had already known everything—Goodfellow’s entire plan.

Robin had gotten a retired angel to lie to me. What couldn’t that son of a bitch do?

Flay shrugged in his parka. “Not surprised about Delilah and Kin. She always bossy when pups.” Speaking of pups, the RV door was pushed open and a half-grown apricot-colored wolf jumped out.

“Slay.” Flay’s son. I’d been the one to get him back from the kidnapper, although him biting a chunk of flesh out of my side had been my only thanks. But what the hell? At the time he’d been only three years old, and a damn deadly three he’d been. Flay shrugged again but grinned this time with those overlarge sharp teeth. “He likes rabbits. Easier hunt this way.” Slay bounded off into the snow to kill a few Thumpers.

Someone else came through the door. His hair was reddish too, although it was one shade darker auburn than Rafferty’s and his eyes were one shade lighter to full gold. His disposition was lighter too; his grin was happy as hell. “Looking better, Cal. You still remember how many cocker spaniels you have to skin to make a pimp coat for an Auphe?” That was the same god-awful joke Catcher had told me once, using a pencil to type it out on his computer because Catcher was a Wolf and a wolf. He’d been sick in college and Rafferty had healed him, but he’d had to go to the genetic level to do it and he’d done it too well.