Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (28 page)

“I’d seen people die of fevers like mine,” I explained, “and they thought the people caring for them were their dead wives, their brothers gone fighting in the Crusade, and they would say anything. Their wife they loved could be trusted. Their missed brothers, they wouldn’t whisper a word of what he told them. I had minutes before that was me.” It hadn’t been a risk. It had been a truth
absolute in minutes or less as the room swam and rippled, colors I couldn’t name bloomed and painted the walls. “Those bastards couldn’t have broken me, couldn’t have defeated me. You’d taught me that. My own body, though, it could have. I couldn’t let that happen.”

The dagger had fallen from my hand and numb fingers. I’d wished I’d had the strength to cut a second throat, the one of the son of a bitch above me. His mouth a gaping snarl of a wolf, he was screaming. I’d heard it, a little, but it had faded fast.

Robin wouldn’t be surprised, I’d thought hazily as I drifted down a river bright as poppies, the same color as my name. He’d raise a mug of ale in my name, mourn and bury his grief in any willing woman he could find, and he’d be proud. Skinny bastard kid that I’d been when he first met me, but he’d seen something in me, he’d said. At my core I was strong. My skinny legs and arms would grow, but I was already strong. From the moment he looked
into
me and not
at
me, the village bastard, he’d known what he’d earned with a few words. He’d known I’d die for him, as I’d die for John, as they would die for me. They hadn’t come for me, but that only meant they couldn’t. If there were any possible way, they would have.

Sometimes you have to face death alone.

It was worth it when I hadn’t had to face life like that.

“I never gave you up,” I said quietly, one foot still in the past, the part of me that had followed Robin since I was seven, filthy and starved, who had
worshipped
him as larger-than-life starting then and not stopped, who had died for him and would do it again. “I didn’t betray you once in all the lives we’ve lived, but most of all, not in that one.”

Then I snapped back to the present and recalled how pissed I was and why.

“I would’ve beat a nun for a slice of cheese with one helluva crop of penicillin growing on it, and I was a hero.” Vigilante, but hero according to the idiots who’d have turned on us in a heartbeat if they’d been literate enough to
read
the price on the wanted posters. “But
throw a little Auphe blood in me and I can’t be trusted with a gate. Throw a little Auphe blood
and
a gate in me and I
am
an Auphe. Can’t have one without the other. I can’t be just part. I can’t be something different made new from a combination of their Auphe and human DNA. I’m the monster terrifying enough that you’d rather be weasel chow than take a ride with me.”

Reflecting on it, I thought the nun thing, when I’d been a human of dubious breeding but a human without denial, was equal to a great deal of shit the Auphe had gotten up to. But I hadn’t been doubted then. Wasn’t that a bitter pill?

“My Robin believed in me,” I said, grim and far past tired of the subject. “Three days after we met this time around, to save my brother, I threw him as a distraction at a goddamn troll, at fucking
Abbagor
.” Abbagor, who all three of us had taken on and still lost against. In hindsight that was no surprise, considering Abbagor had been number two badass monster in the city. He fought Auphe as a freaking substitute for his weekly
book
club
.

“He believed in me even after that because he knew exactly why I did it. The Auphe in me didn’t matter to him. When a year is less than a minute to you, you shouldn’t be this different, but you are. You’re not him. None of you are. This Niko is not my brother, this Cal is not me, and you’re not my friend. My Robin is dead.” I shook my head, done with the entire mess. “Fuck it. You’re some random puck, and I don’t need your trust.”

“Caliban, no.” His mouth twisted and I smelled the desperation on him before it turned into the adrenaline spike of anger. “No. That isn’t how it is. It’s not about trust or belief. It’s not about what flows in your veins. It’s about me,” he insisted. “I should’ve told you, as humiliating as it is. Hob certainly never let me forget. I’m sorry I was a fool to try to hide it.” He sucked in several breaths as we ran. “You have to listen. You will
listen
. It’s about what you’ve been saying. About being the Second Trickster and walking the earth when only Hob and the
Auphe did. Thirty seconds is all I need. Please, give me that much.”

I was considering telling him that, no, I didn’t have to, but, Jesus, it was Goodfellow or that’s what I’d thought when I’d heard his stupid line and seen his conman grin all over again, and he’d never before, not
my
Goodfellow, entertained the thought of turning his back on me at my most Auphe. He’d been jumpy a time or two, but anything edible in the area had been jumpy at those times. I hadn’t held that against him.

We were tearing down the maintenance tunnel as our dodging either became worse or the tunnel began to become more crowded with rubble. This Robin and my Robin and a thousand Robins before, weren’t they one and the same? I’d never betrayed him, but he’d never betrayed me either. I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around any of the three of us being capable of stabbing the other in the back. And why would he not trust me now when he had and would years from now in the days that I lost control as often as our satellite lost its signal?

He wasn’t a shadow. Robin was incapable of being anything but real. Nothing else in this world came close to the unbreakable solidity of him. Any more real and the sun would revolve around him and the smug conceit of
that
would never end.

Maybe he was telling the truth. It wasn’t me. Maybe it was something else. Maybe he did have a reason I hadn’t had the chance to find out the first time around Hell’s merry-go-round.

Before I could tell him, fine, I would listen, but it’d better be extremely fucking good, we ran into what had to be a pocket of abruptly humid air, but it felt similar to hitting a giant floating bubble of swamp water. It had to be the boglike odor thickly tainting the air that had it crawling down my airway as I coughed. It couldn’t be clogging my lungs. I couldn’t drown from humidity. Ah, hell, but I could asphyxiate from methane gas. I tried to choke back another cough and then a series of them.

A hand gripped my elbow to support and pull me along although I hadn’t realized I’d slowed any. And
within a split second that hand was gone. It didn’t drop from my hand; it was torn away. I staggered to a halt, taking in two scenes almost simultaneously: the approaching weasels dancing at the far reaches of my light and the hole in the concrete at my feet. Round and edged in metal, it was covered, or had been, by too many rags, rotting boards, dead rat carcasses for Robin to see it. But not enough to keep me from smelling whatever was below, which had done us exactly no damn good at all.

It seemed a little coincidental those things should drift into a pile precisely in that particular location, a manhole that had lost its metal cover. They were smart. I’d say smarter than your average weasel, but I didn’t know how smart a not-too-bright weasel was, let alone your average ones.

Right now, pondering the intelligence level of a shadow weasel’s brain wasn’t at the top of my list. However, throwing myself down the hole after Goodfellow was. Not that I went down as fast and catastrophically as he must have. I saw the embedded ladder and flung myself onto it. I hit every third rung on the way down. The force of each one jarred me from heels to teeth, and I nearly fell more than once. One hand held my gun, the flashlight tucked in my jeans with light pointing up to hold back the shadows, leaving only one free for gripping. Luckily it wasn’t far. Twenty feet and I was at the bottom. There was no standing water in this long forgotten sewer line, but plenty of thick, clinging mud. And lying in that mud was Robin.

On his side with face half buried in the mud, he was moving, but they were slow, uncoordinated movements. He was either stunned or half-dead. Either choice wasn’t too fucking great. I get one Goodfellow killed and then make it a two-fer.
“Shit.”
I bent over, and slid my arms under his to pull him bodily to his feet. Holding him up, I gave him a good, hard shake. It wasn’t precisely First Aid protocol and if he’d broken his neck, I pretty much would’ve finished him right then and there. But that would’ve been a quicker and more pleasant way to go
than what was getting ready to descend on our heads. “Robin, we have to run.
Now.
They’re right behind me.” I didn’t give him a chance to respond. Stepping to his side, I grabbed his arm, slung it over my shoulders and took off. For the first few seconds he was about as helpful as a sack of potatoes, but following that, he began to move his legs and feet. Sort of. But, hell, I would take what I could get. As for our talk, it would have to wait.

“What . . .” He spat a mouthful of mud and tried again, a little less thickly this time. “What happened?”

“You, Lord Style and Agility, fell down a manhole,” I grunted, trying for a faster pace. “And lost your sword and your flashlight.” The mud sucked at my feet with the tenacity of quicksand. It wasn’t methane gas though or we’d be dead by now. It did smell enough to put every sewer in the city combined with every swamp in the Everglades to shame. I struggled to breathe without puking knowing sooner or later with this kind of stink my nose would quit working for a few hours. There. That was something to look forward to. Who said I had no optimism? “I think the weasels covered it up with a bunch of crap, which makes them smarter than us. Correction, smarter than
you
, as you fell and I used the ladder.”

It was dark down there, the only light coming from my flashlight and some funky-ass lichen creeping along the walls. And I do mean creeping . . . literally. But it was a slow and sluggish movement and I’d seen it in areas before if the sewers had been abandoned by humans a long, long time. It was some sort of
paien
sewer shrubbery and harmless, but it would eat a dead body although that too would take a long, long time.

That was when I heard it, the tap of claws and the smooth slide as if oil was pouring down the metal. It was the weasels coming down the ladder.

“Okay,” I prompted when I didn’t receive a snipe back for mocking his intelligence, which worried me. “Are you positive you don’t want me to gate us where the shadows won’t eat us?” I gave him one more chance. “Feet first, remember? Like the Neanderthals. No fucking fun.”

His chin had dropped to rest on his chest and his curly hair, now matted and dreadlocked with mud, fell over his face. “What happened?” he repeated in a mumble. “
Poú eímai?
Where am I? Are the . . . Where was I . . . Ah . . . the gladiator quarters? Lie they in this”—he vomited down his and my front both. Undeterred, he coughed, wiped his mouth on the shoulder of my jacket and finished—“direction?”

If I got home and there was not a Mardi Gras fucking Resurrection Parade waiting for me with beads and bare breasts and my brother,
everyone
was dying. I was shooting everyone. If you were already dead and buried twenty years ago, I was digging you up and shooting you just to make sure.

Okay.

I’ll need truckloads of bullets and two hundred shovels. Make a note.

Moving on.

Goodfellow was out of the picture . . . at least mentally. That meant as tempting as it was to gate, it was also out of the picture. Ordinarily, if he’d been poisoned, choked out, broken his legs, anything not related to his brain, I would’ve gated us out and screw the “I’d rather die.” He could’ve punched me again if he’d wanted since he’d still be alive to do it and cry about his phobia and reasons later. Head wounds, though, they were tricky. Once Robin had been gated involuntarily his first time with me, which is what not sharing your phobias gets you, and the times after that, he’d been able to mentally brace himself for it. With every gate, however, whether it was Robin or Niko or both, they came out the other side sick as dogs. Eventually the fetal position moaning and projectile vomiting had stopped after repeated exposure, but the sickness didn’t go away. They just adjusted to it. Everyone, everything, every creature out there hated gating and they all ended up temporarily sick.

Worse than that, as Goodfellow could puke all day and it’d be worth it to get away from these nightmares sniffing at our heels, was the brain. When I’d first begun to gate, it wasn’t easy. I’d had skull-splitting headaches,
nosebleeds, and if I pushed hard enough, I’d bleed from my nose, ears, and eyes. It hadn’t happened to Nik and Robin during gating, but that’s when I was young and I was the one doing all the lifting, light or heavy. I was the plane, they were only the passengers. Nonetheless it’d made me think then what I was thinking now—gating didn’t make for a healthy brain if you were a prepubescent Auphe. I was fine with it now. I’d hit Auphe puberty, was full grown with the physical capability to gate with no effort or side effects. But if you were a human or a puck who already had a head injury, if you were bleeding inside your brain before I took you through a gate, I had no idea if it would make things worse or not effect anything at all.

Snatching a look as I aimed the light over my shoulder, I discovered to no real surprise that shadows and weasels move faster in mud than I do. Put the two together and we were out of luck. And in the confines of what was basically a stone death trap, their snapping jaws and what had started up as they came down the ladder as manic, crazed low whispering was ten times louder, ten times more terrifying. We were about fifteen seconds, maximum, from being eaten alive.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shadowed recess. It was either a doorway, an alcove for the exhibition of sewer art by some exciting new artist who was big in the 1940s, or a cruel hoax. I didn’t have time to weigh the odds of each. Carrying Goodfellow along, I lunged through the archway. And for once, luck wasn’t something I made myself. The doorway actually was a doorway and as we passed through I saw an iron door resting against the lichen covered wall. Easing the puck down as quickly as I could without actually dropping him, I shoved my gun away, held the end of a dysentery covered flashlight in my mouth and used both hands to push the heavy piece of metal through the mud to close with a muted clang. I barely made it. Immediately something hit the other side with brutal force. There was a lock, a dead bolt, which I shot, but it was wood and while it had
once been thick and sturdy, years of dank, humid air couldn’t have been good for it.