Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (20 page)

He stretched his legs and yawned. “I left a handful of other minions, the kind that aren’t noticeable to the human eye, around the bar.” When I didn’t blink about nonhumans working for him, he went on. “They followed you to this building and then this apartment, although normally they wouldn’t have gone that far. Too
risky even for them, but the skin-walker battle for the ages made it easier to find the floor and take a quick peek at which door was shaking enough to qualify as an earthquake. It was disappointingly easy.”

I must not have had the most pleased expression on my face with the appeasing hand he held up. “Ah, ah, don’t be touchy that you’re not the James Bond you’d imagined. That was but the first part of my covert little operation. I didn’t wait for the skin-walker escapade to be over, as depending on your skills, that could take all night or you could be dead in thirty seconds. I had no idea of your capabilities. And I was not ruining a brand-new Ralph Lauren Blue Label suit by running to join in. I’ve fought enough of them in my life and they are walking bags of every type of disgusting fluid you don’t want to think about.

“Instead I went back to my penthouse, turned on my computer and accessed my database, which considering I own a satellite orbiting the planet for the storage alone, is quite extensive and I started running down your identities.” He was sulking now.

I snorted. “That was the part that wasn’t so easy, right, Sherlock?”

“It was very easy. I found hundreds.” He started counting them off on his fingers and when he ran out, started on them over again. “Fake driver’s licenses, fake social security cards, fake car registrations, fake car insurance, fake birth certificates, fake passports, fake pilot licenses, fake résumés with fake references and fake places of employment, two fake mortgages on houses that don’t exist, fake library cards—Aristotle would be proud—fake bank accounts with no money in them as you are the cash and carry type. It wouldn’t surprise me if you had a fake dog license and no dog to go with it. You have, or they have since you are eight years from home, seventy-five names between them. After all night of this, I came to one conclusion, no two. First, you deprived me of ten hours sleep or ten highly ranked escorts and no sleep. I’d have been happy with either. Second, and most important, I couldn’t find an identity for you or
the other two renting the apartment because you don’t have and never have had identities.”

He folded his arms and tilted his head to one side and then the other, adding up all the pieces and parts of me he’d taken in earlier. “No identity. Your black hair, your eyes—gray is rare but does pop up now and again among clans who appeared in Northern Greece six hundred years or so ago and the other clans they intermarried into, but your skin however, Snow White, doesn’t fit. Rom, but only part Rom. Half, I believe. With skin that pale, almost inhumanly so, your other half would have to be part . . .” The words trailed away, but his mouth didn’t shut as he stared, paler himself. It had taken him longer this time to recognize it in me, but time travel, anonymous notes, fake identities would distract anyone.

“No,” he whispered.

I’d forgotten how afraid he’d been of the Auphe, of me, when our very first crossing of ways had involved a knife to his throat and threats. I, and Niko too, had been throwing those far and wide. Robin’s fear of me had lasted seconds; he was good at sizing people up and I’d been nineteen, no idea what he was, and willing on the violence, but it was an obvious human type of violence. Goodfellow had decided I fell into that category: human more than Auphe. For those few seconds, though, he had been afraid.

“Relax.” Sliding my hands behind my neck, I linked fingers to ease the strained muscle. “I’m not a murderous homicidal psychotic monster who lives to slaughter.” I paused. “At least not unless it’s necessary.” The second hesitation was a shade longer. “Or some assholes really deserve it.” I thought back and next told what wasn’t technically a lie, as the Auphe genes weren’t in control any longer. I was. “I definitely don’t do it for fun.” And I didn’t, not
just
for fun. That wasn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it if it had to be done, such as putting down the skin-walker. Robin would know I was hedging, if it was about the past or not. You can’t lie to a puck, not even by omission. “Not anymore.”

There was perceptibly more white in Goodfellow’s eyes.

“I’m making it worse, aren’t I?” I asked ruefully.

“Yes. Stop. Please.” With that he managed to finally close his mouth.

“Don’t be a hypocrite. I know what ‘born of Hob’ means. I
met
Hob. He could hold his own with any Auphe, three at a time if he had to.” More than that and he’d ended up in pieces—too bad for Hob. I’d shed a tear if ever I gave a shit.

“You met
Hob
?” His face was painted with revulsion and rejection. “Hob is dead. All puck know this. If by some unholy misfortune, he is alive and you met him, you would be dead. Whatever puck you spoke with lied, pretended to be him, took his name, fooled you.”

“You were there. You knew him. I had no idea the first time who he was, what he was. I didn’t know much more for part of the second time.”

“No, it couldn’t be.” One last solid attempt at denial. “Hob, the true Hob, is
dead
.”

“He is now.” My smirk was the arc of a reaper’s scythe with the shine and deadly edge of razor wire. That was a fond recollection. Not what Hob had done to make me kill him. The punishment, however—the one of the “worse than deaths” Robin didn’t believe in and then a death I’d label unmatchable that had followed.

“He really did piss me off. All told, about twenty-five minutes of his combined face-to-face presence over three occasions and that managed it, no problem. It’s what he did behind the scenes that earned him that extra”—I searched for the words—“time-out.”

Thrown through a gate I’d made to the hell that had been the Auphe’s home away from home, he’d have been dismembered and killed quickly if the Auphe were feeling generous. Too bad that the Auphe hadn’t known the meaning of the word, they genuinely hadn’t. They had been born for mayhem and murder. The emotions that went with that had been all they’d possessed. No less, no more—much like Hob himself ironically enough.

Dying slowly, inch by inch, was the best Hob could’ve hoped for—if the Auphe were already full and sleepy.

But I was bare minutes past Robin showing real fear of Auphe, of me being one. He’d managed to cover it up when distracted by the Hob subject change. Hiding it, I knew, didn’t mean it was gone. I also knew, gone or not, that I didn’t want to see it again by being a shade too descriptive on my guess at how the end of the mighty fucking Hob had gone down.

“A time-out,” I repeated, able to keep the details to myself but not the satisfaction. It came through loud and clear in the vicious but peculiarly fond edge to my words and tone. Sounding for all the world as if I was nostalgic for a particularly painful cut I’d given myself while trying to shave with one of my knives. “An extremely permanent one.” I drew more Greek letters, then the more familiar transliteration in the soft, shifting surface—the last words I knew how to write.
Chytheí stagóna aímatos tou adelfoú mou.

“Spill a drop of my brother’s blood,” the puck read aloud for me. He said the rest along with it as well, although I hadn’t learned to write those words yet. “And death will be the only mercy and miracle for which you will beg,” he finished, not bothering to trace it into the sand. “You do know me. You know more of me than you should, but you are who you say. Friend and brother.” The light behind his eyes went out and his smile vanished. “But you are Auphe. Half or no, Auphe is Auphe.”

“The First Murderers to walk the earth,” I admitted.

Why pretend everyone wasn’t aware of it and used to be hatefully hostile and gleefully thrilled to tell me, ten, twenty times a night at work? I cured them of that happy hobby of theirs with a resourcefulness and rapidity that left them with no idea it was
their
tongue I’d torn out and dropped in their glass of vodka. Until they tried to drink it . . . or talk. The pink cocktail umbrellas I used to speared the bloody flesh was a tasteful touch, or so went my explanation to the boss.

“And Hob, the Trickster First, was the original of the second murderers to walk the earth, following in the
Auphe’s bloody footprints. You were the Trickster Second, now the Trickster . . .” I shrugged and through my shirt scratched one of the coyote bites from last night’s fight. I let him mentally fill in that blank himself on what he had been.

“It took me five years and a healer who was excited as hell to have a second guinea pig to try out his shiny new genetic manipulation. Between the two, I got on the wagon.” I flipped an invisible chip into the air. If the movement and the words weren’t as serious as they should be, somewhat snarky, so what? I’d lived through it all, which was impossible. If my living was impossible, I wasn’t going to ruin it being ungrateful enough to haul around ten tons of guilt. I was going to enjoy every day I shouldn’t be that lucky to have. No one should be that lucky. That type of luck didn’t exist, but here I was.

Or here I was if I was able to get my Niko and my Goodfellow back. If not, I’d give up that impossible life. I didn’t want it.

“I’m not really Auphe”—but there’d been times I’d forgotten that—“but, say that I am, if there was a twelve step Auphe program, Auphe Anonymous, I’d have kicked its ass,” I added.

Goodfellow’s wide-eyed stare turned into narrowed suspicious slits. “If there were a twelve step program, how many chips would you have?”

Did chips come in halves?

“First you tell me how long it took
you
to get on the wagon,” I drawled.

To be born of Hob meant Goodfellow would’ve
been
Hob. He would look the same—all pucks did—had the same personality, same memories, same murderous inclinations. That was how reproduction worked for pucks. They were a duplicate in all ways to the one who made them. It was years, fifty to a hundred at the very least, Goodfellow had said, before you felt the urge to separate from your maker, travel on your own, have your own experiences, see the world through slowly changing eyes, fight battles, choose not to fight them, make memories that are yours, no one else’s, before the
combination of it—every new day lived, every new sight seen—finally caused you to develop into a new person with a new personality and thoughts born of you, not Hob.

“How long?” I repeated, too smug for my own good.

Goodfellow was saved by the bell. If the bell was the ringtone of Robin’s phone. It was an old song, a year or two before I was born song, but filthy enough any teenage boy would be invested enough to find it.
“Me so horny, me so horny, me so horny. Me love you long time.”
It cut off there, which was a good thing as that was the least offensive part. The puck grumbled and glanced down at the phone.

“You’re the biggest perv in existence,” I said, trying for judgmental and failing miserably.

“But you’re a nun, knowing the lyrics of a song older than you are? Unless you age as slowly as an Auphe. No, the other you does look younger. Eight years to an Auphe isn’t measurable as a unit of time, it’s too small for their life span.”

He frowned down at the phone in his hand. “That son of a bitch. Conan quit
via
text, the coward. He claims I’m too demanding. Me? The slander is unspeakable. And ‘That it was unbearable, my sexual harassment’—which he misspelled, leaving the second s out of ass. How harassed can you be if you can’t even spell ass? I swear, you cannot get good steroid popping cabana beasts these days.”

“Did you harass him?” Like I didn’t know the answer to that.

“Of course I did. I clearly didn’t hire him for his spelling skills.” He sighed. “And I’ve been blacklisted at all the employment and modeling agencies. Life is cruel.”

“No big deal. In eight years when you’re dead you won’t have to worry anymore,” I reminded him, making an attempt—A for effort, D for execution—to hide my momentary spike of resentment at how lightly he was taking this.

“Your life is a colossal whirlpool of melodrama, sucking in any proton of optimism or neutron of hope and
devouring them.” His exasperation was clear. We would do it. We would save them including himself. He was confident, doubt-free.

He hadn’t been the one to watch, powerless. He hadn’t frozen, unable to run into the flames and drag them out as they weren’t dying. They had been dead since the first flare of light. He hadn’t been confused by the dissonance of the oddly pleasant, almost sweet aroma of grilling meat while
knowing
that you weren’t a kid in the white trash version of the suburbs. That it wasn’t a distant neighbor’s backyard barbecue on their six square inches of scrub grass. It was people burning, your family, your friend, burning. And that sweet-to-sickening odor became a sense memory you couldn’t wipe away, part of you for the rest of your life.

It was debatable if I’d be around long enough for that to be a problem.

“Have faith in me. Have I or will I, should I say, ever failed you? An unmatched and illustrious reputation such as mine doesn’t come about when you leave a bread crumb trail of failures behind you. I’m known for a multitude of sins, but none of them were the sin of failure.”

“The dying was a damned big one,” I said with a sour bite as I made it up and on my feet mainly by sliding up the wall.

“Which, thanks to you and the assistance, I’m certain, of my own genius, we have every likelihood of stopping that. You may have already in the first hour you arrived yesterday and left your letter to me. I know where not to be, where you, your brother and everyone else cannot be. I’ll make it so. If it were more simple an undertaking, I’d hire an intern trickster to do it. Ishiah, however?” he questioned skeptically. “That pompous, hypocritical, mindless mouthpiece to the condemnations of heaven? That useless feather duster, squawking repent, repent, repent from whatever henhouse he squats in? I care if he’s fricasseed or not in the days to come? Mind-boggling.”

He stood and brushed the sand off his pants. “I will be your optimism, your hope, your faith.” His hand
squeezed on my shoulder, friend to friend. Brother to brother. “Bask in it. If doubt surfaces in you, tell me and I’ll drown it without mercy as I find gloom and doom ruins my mood.” Cal was going to be a life lesson for him then.