Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (32 page)

“No,” I cut him off before I gave him a matching necklace of bruises, but I’d be using my hands or a garrote. Niko was bound to have one around here somewhere. “Those are two things that I do not want to talk about yet. I’m, what do they call it? Processing. I’m processing and pissed. You’ll have to wait and you’d be fucking wise to get over thinking you have any right to give
me crap about any of it. They are also two things you know, but Niko and Cal don’t. It stays that way. You follow your script, don’t start making up what you think are improvements on the fly or . . .” I cupped my hands and then spread my fingers in the shape of a large ball then spread them wide, the same as I had earlier.

He held up an imperious hand. “Yes, I have it. Boom.” While the gesture was pure arrogance, the face behind it was apologetic, deeply so, the likes of which I’d not seen Robin show often. “I can wait, and I know how little right I do have, believe it or not, but I swear it had nothing to do with you.”

“Loving the cryptic shit less and less,” Cal growled. “But getting hit in the face with more and more of it. If you can’t tell, stop hinting around like gossiping old women.”

“I have to agree with Cal. It is annoying. And why did you take Goodfellow with you and not us if you were waiting for Lazarus, to see if he’d show up? You could’ve told him whatever it was you can’t tell us.” Niko’s inquisitive nature had taken a blow there. “You could’ve gone someplace other than Talley’s bar, and when you were done, called us. Three or four, whatever it would’ve been, against one is improved odds over what you faced. That is something we not only can know, but need to know.”

“Two birds with one stone?” I shrugged in apology as Niko deserved one, but I wasn’t that sorry. “To try to keep you both safe until I knew what Lazarus even is?” We didn’t yet either, other than he was bad-fucking-news and deserving of an MVP trophy for Monstrously Vicious Prodigy for doing the Vigil proud, hopefully to be posthumously given. “Plus I’ve seen Goodfellow fight for almost a decade now and he could take all three of us with his sheet alone.” Take away my gating abilities and that would be true. “But I fucked up and we lost Lazarus and his subcontractors. Next time it’s all four of us. It’ll be a field trip.” If the bus was idling down the highway to Hell.

“With the sheet? It’s not a lie?” Niko gave the puck a reevaluating look over for signs of his fighting skills.
Goodfellow enjoyed it for other reasons. After all the time I’d known him, I didn’t need to see his grin to know.

“You trust him to be your backup? You trust him as much as Niko?” Cal questioned. “I don’t trust anyone but Niko. When did I get soft?”

Short truce.

I slid down in the chair, half an inch away from being too low to call it a slouch, and closed my eyes. If they were crimson now, that wasn’t Auphe. It was the weight of fatigue crushing me to the point that it made breathing itself a challenge equal to having eight hundred pounds sitting on my chest. “Goodfellow is conceited, arrogant, more sarcastic than we are and we hate that competition; is a more skilled swordsman than Niko who won’t admit it but also hates competition. He knows everyone, knows at least something about everything, has been everywhere and loves to rub it in your face even as he’s using it to help you. He never stops talking—never goddamn ever—is cocky, which wouldn’t be that bad if he hadn’t earned the right to be more cocky than he actually is. He tells ridiculous stories of ancient Roman orgies he attended that are obvious lies, then proves they’re true,
throws
orgies to this damn day but tells
you
Niko’s been asking to see his antique weapon collection—bring him and the popcorn. His penthouse door has an automatic electronic lock with an algorithmic code that changes hourly, meaning once you realize it is an orgy, no weapon-collection viewing, you panic and you
should
panic because you can’t get out.” That was a PTSD-level recollection that had my eyes opening instantly as I let the full-on body shudder go on as long as it wanted.

“He lies, steals, and cons and, thanks to being a born trickster, expects a Hallmark congratulations card from you despite the fact you were the one he lied to, stole from, and conned. He’s horny twenty-four hours a day and would hump a ficus plant if it said yes, will one day have a camera planted in the locker room at Niko’s dojo, give the tape to Michelangelo—
the
Michelangelo as he’s alive, some type of vampire, and owed Goodfellow a
favor. It ends up—that joke will never stop being funny—
ends
up as a marble sculpture of Niko’s ass displayed on a pedestal in the penthouse foyer and Niko will never notice whose ass it is, much less that it’s his. Worst of all, eventually, when you accidentally see Robin naked, he will remind you every fucking day how you’re the Vienna to his Polish sausage.”

I picked at a bleach spot on the leg of Niko’s sparring sweats. “But he’s loyal. He won’t fail you. He’ll risk dying for you,” which he had when he’d come for me in the castle. It wasn’t his fault he’d been too late. “And that’s something considering how long he’s lived. If it came down to it, he
would
die for you and no one in our lives, no one outside Nik and I did that or had done that. He had to teach us how to trust outside the two of us because we had no idea. We’d never learned. No one ever taught us. It wasn’t easy either. I’d have given up on us a hundred times in the first week. Hell, I never would’ve tried at all.”

“But you did.” Goodfellow tossed a pillow to me and pointed to my sliced and diced leg. I slid it carefully under it. It helped. Morphine would’ve helped more, but it helped. He smiled, sincere and a little sly with a touch of we both know something no one else knows. “If you hadn’t tried, in eight years you’d eventually have gotten a lucky shot and tossed me in the Dumpster behind Goodwill”—it was his turn to shudder—“to be able to kick me in the balls even after death.”

Cal crouched down to say something in quiet privacy to me. Anyone else would know what he was saying and thinking. Everything I’d said about Robin, how he was more like us than you’d imagine, his absolute determination to watch out for us, do anything he could to keep us alive, who would trust us and teach us to trust as no one else had bothered. That he’d die for us. Cal would be a little dubious that he couldn’t see something in Goodfellow, something that wasn’t friendship or trust now, but a seed had been planted and someday a possibility could be born. . . .

Anyone could see that. Anyone would know Cal
would know this was a chance he’d never had with anyone but his brother. Anyone would know he’d want it for his brother even more than for himself. Anyone could sense the hope.

Anyone else would be wrong.

Except me. I knew exactly what he was going to say.

“You couldn’t see me when I was behind the couch. Seriously, how’d you know I was going to stab him?” he asked, quizzical and a little sly himself. It was important knowledge to gather. One day soon he might want to stab me. He’d need to be prepared, and luck does not favor the fucked.

“It’s what I would’ve done.”

I snorted after I said it, but back then? Back in the now at eighteen? I would’ve tried like hell. Then Robin would’ve kicked my ass. And the next day he would’ve shown up and said the same as before.

“Forgive and forget.”

The Chinese food was delivered in an hour and a half.

Inventively.

I wasn’t asleep and I wasn’t awake. Drifting without reflection, a large chunk of brain was shut down producing nothing, and the rest was aware of the syrupy, surreal quality of the air. I had a vague wisp of amusement wind in and out of my brain at the thinnest streamer of a thought. I wasn’t hallucinating yet, but when I did, how would I know? Lightning . . . shadows that were weasels or were they weasels that were shadows. I followed the trailing end of that. What came first? The chicken or the egg? The weasels or the shadows? Did it matter? They were shadows now, ones that hadn’t feared the beams of our flashlights, losing only parts of themselves to grow more, but they hadn’t liked the flashlight glows either. They had to be painful, but they hadn’t shown any pain, hadn’t screamed or cried out. I knew they could have because they were laughing it the fuck up toward the end of our frolic in the sewer.

The beam of light hadn’t hurt them.

It had disintegrated a piece of them if you were close enough to ram it into their muzzles or heads. Black mist flying out and vanishing as their new head began to extend from the long length of the body, making it leaner, but whole. Reforming using shadow from its own body. The shadow was destroyed by the light. It didn’t scatter then join back together, reattach to the whole or make a
new weasel. It wasn’t making anything new. It was using what was left.

It had to build from what was left, but what if there was nothing left?

“We need flash bangs.” I jerked up out of my slouch, my leg and pillow falling off the footrest of the recliner. “Now. Today. Shitloads of them.”

“Yes.”
Robin sat up as suddenly as I had and pointed at me.

“Caliban, if you don’t sleep, I will choke you out. I don’t want to, but it would be for your own good.” Niko was picking up the pillow with one hand and wrapping the other around my foot to put both back in place. He had a case of the guilts that Robin had noticed that a guest and Niko’s Once and Future Brother, rolled into one, had been lying with his weight directly on half a leg’s worth of stitches that were holding together a painful and deep cut.

“No, he is”—Robin paused—“then again, yes, it’s true that rest, any rest, would do him well. But unfortunately now is not the time.” His finger remained pointing in my direction and he snapped his fingers. “Flashbangs. That is brilliant, in more than one way.” He grinned. “I saw, but I did not
see
.”

Cal was lying spread-eagle on the kitchen table, flipping a butterfly knife up in the air. It would rotate the necessary amount of times to land back in his hands closed and concealing the blade. “I can’t decide whether that cryptic crap makes me want to stab you for being too dramatic to inflict on the world or you’re dick enough to sound like a fortune cookie while I’m starving to death and our Chinese food is late.”

There was an enormous thud in the hall outside the door. It kept us from hearing Goodfellow’s response although safe to say it would’ve gone along the lines of “sit on my lap, cookie, and I’ll show you what enough dick is,” which would have had Cal attempting to stab him in the eye, Niko disarming his brother while stepping on Robin’s sheet and accidentally stripping him naked—
which would have resulted in harm to everyone’s eyes. That was the closest thing to running a day care center from the bowels of hell that I could imagine. And I wanted the least amount to do with it that I could. I was up as quickly as I could move and headed for the door, but Niko beat me there.

He did the automatic peephole check and dodge. “It’s dark,” he said. “The hall lights are out.”

“They couldn’t have followed us.” That was an absolute. They couldn’t have followed us from the sewers. The gates were mine, no one could hitch a ride when I built them around me or who I was taking with me. If I opened it as a door to walk through, they could try to follow, but all that would get them was cut into two pieces when I closed it as they were halfway between one side and the other.

Goodfellow had the sheet tied in a neat and secure toga. If he had to run, tripping on a silk sheet while escaping weasels isn’t the worst obit. It wasn’t even bad. In our underground world, it was the equivalent of slipped in the shower and broke his neck, but that didn’t mean Robin didn’t already have his ending written: died by orgy, this sex god the likes of which the world has witnessed but once and never shall again took one hundred grateful souls with him. All expired from an excess of sexual pleasure their bodies could not withstand but their souls could not live without. Praise he who was Pan. In lieu of flowers, have wild, uninhibited sex in the streets while condoms fall in a rain of color, glitter, and different flavors as you scream his name in one last prayer.

That was an image I didn’t want in my brain again. “We need lights. The brightest you have.”

Cal vaulted off the table and followed Niko back to their bedrooms to dig through supplies. “How did you guys get away from Lazarus again?” Cal, out of sight in his room, called back. “There was the running through the sewers, offshoots, grates, places too small for him to follow you—big guy—but the weasels should’ve been small enough to follow you anywhere. And you said as
shadows they just went through shit, walls and doors, like they weren’t there.”

“I have a concussion, and I was not conscious most of the time.” Slick and prompt, Goodfellow had had that one on tap, waiting to pull it out if backed into a corner.

I elbowed him hard, thought about taking a look myself, but if the hall was dark, I wasn’t going to see anything more than Niko had. “Let’s see,” I started. “I was trying to use the flashlight to keep the weasels back and at the same time to see where we were going and not end up face-first in a pile of concrete rubble. Decide whether the weasels were whispering and laughing or I was dying from methane gas on the floor of the sewer and that was what I got at the end. No meadows or bright lights calling my name. I got carnivorous shadow weasels laughing at me. I was also carrying Robin who kept asking where the naked gladiators were when he wasn’t spraying enough vomit on me that he could double as a fire hose in emergencies. Then there was the lightning, a big son of a bitch who wanted to sacrifice Goodfellow as a goat and eat me as mutt stew.”

True enough as it went.

“We ran some more, found a ladder up to a grate, got back in a subway tunnel, up, out and caught a cab.” I knew one of them was going to ask and added it before they could. “No, the cabbie wasn’t happy with the sewer and vomit stink, so I threw him out and stole the cab.” Which was what I’d done the day before, and not that unlikely with my general behavior. The rest was weak, but the only way we could’ve actually escaped would be if Lazarus let us go. Which, thinking about it, wouldn’t be the first time that had happened to me.

“Or we got out because he let us. The nastier and meaner they are the more they like to play games. It wouldn’t be the first, hell, second or third time it’s happened. The more powerful they are, the bigger the asshole they are. It’s an unwritten rule. However it happened, I know we weren’t followed. It’s a sunny day. They wouldn’t have come out into full sunlight. The
flashlights did some damage. Not much, but enough to know the sun would do a helluva lot more.”

“It’s not sunny any longer.” Niko was back and going through the trunks we had for sparring equipment. He had two flashlights already, but regular ones. The one he dug out of the trunk was high-powered and big enough to use to beat Godzilla to death. Rain was beating against the window as I looked over.

“Well, shit.” It was pithy and summed things up nicely.

“The shadows, they were whispering, laughing?” Robin asked. I shrugged and held out a hand to make a so-so gesture with it. I’d thought they were, but at that point I thought we were dead, no way around it, too. I wasn’t committing on talking weasels in the face of that. But . . .

“I think so.”

“Hmm. I know of a few creatures that they could be. If nothing else, it narrows it down. As for following us, I have a guess. It would be a better one had my skull not been all but crushed and I hadn’t been weak from hunger thanks to poor hosts—”

“Your food is in the hall, prick. The dark hall that is probably also full of hundreds of weasel monsters with millions of teeth,” Cal yelled as clothes came flying out of his room. He was searching under the bed then. “Have the fuck at it. Eat up. Tip ’em an arm or one of your feet if they brought extra fortune cookies.”

Goodfellow folded his arms, as comfortable in his toga as he’d been in his late departed suit. “You are extremely lucky I find you tolerable now. That it takes you eight years to become so is not the best of news.”

“Eight? Nah. I hit tolerable in five or six easy.” I didn’t pay attention to his huff while I pressed my ear to the door. Nothing. That was a positive note. No whispering or laughing or the crack of lightning. “How did they follow us? You were about to say before the Boy Wonder pissed you off.”

“Five . . . you’d best be lying.” He scowled, but returned to the subject more appropriate to keeping our asses uneaten and unfried. “If his shadow weasels come
aboveground around dusk, at night or during rainstorms, let us say, they would have all the shadows they needed to hide in. It’s possible they could talk to other shadows. Ordinary everyday shadows. Nothing
paien
or supernatural. Many of those type of ephemeral creatures we faced, the kind that can take the shape of shadow weasels, can use ordinary shadows. With all the shadows in the city come night, all passing information back and forth to one another, they could’ve found us here easily. Niko and Cal have been here for a few months now, yes? The shadows who live here know them.”

“Shadows are alive?” Cal came out of his bedroom with a flashlight in one hand and two rusty batteries in the other. “Come
on
. We can’t afford cable. There goes my personal private party time. The highlight of my day.” He held out the batteries to Niko, who regarded them and his brother with the pleased expression of someone who had received a lemon juice enema. “We’re lucky to have a single bulb in our bathroom,” Cal groaned on. “No way it’s not crawling with Peeping Tom shadows.”

Niko tossed the antique batteries over his shoulder to land in the trunk. “You must feel so used,” he commented, not with a lack of sympathy, but a perfect vacuum of it.

“Check the kitchen for batteries,” he continued, “ones on which you have
not
spilled entire liters of Mountain Dew.”

“What about the shadows, the normal ones, not the talking ones?” I pushed the puck for the story he hadn’t had a chance to finish. “I know that hasn’t come up any time down the road. I’m with Cal Junior on this one. Shadows perving on you in your own bathroom. That’s creepy as hell.” I caught the judgment Niko had tossed at Cal, but was now aiming in my direction.

“Really, Nik?” I pushed my slowly drying hair behind my ears and lifted one eyebrow that was an identical mockery of his disapproving one. It had been one of my latest ways to tease him that didn’t cross the line from amusing him to earning a five-hour sparring marathon.
It’d taken me months to get right—it was a challenge when you couldn’t stand to look in a mirror for years.

“Admit it. Whether you’re getting laid on the regular or not, every guy is still going to want to Jack a little Jill once in a while. Are you going to try to tell me you never polish the katana on occasion?” I asked. “You think in twenty-eight years you haven’t forgotten to lock the bathroom or your bedroom door at least once? That you might be smacking and jacking it with your personal lubricant. Organic, I know. You left it out one day, blessed by Tibetan monks too. The body is a temple thing.”

I slid a hand between Robin’s arm and chest to act as a crutch, holding him up as he started to glide down the wall toward the floor. He seemed content to go, but I kept him up anyway. “What was it?” I was trying to remember. Bs. Lots of Bs. “Butter . . . no. Buddha? Yes. That’s it. Buddha’s Butterful Bliss. And gluten-free; I almost accidentally mistook it for a pudding cup. I had a spoon halfway in it before I caught on. You should keep it in your bedside drawer. For my sake.”

Niko’s eyebrow had frozen. It couldn’t decide to go down to join the other one or have the other one go up to join it. “But, for future reference, I’m sorry I didn’t knock,” I apologized. “I’d never have guessed you went all out nude for your extracurricular activities.”

Down Goodfellow went again. My stitches were killing me and I let him go. His eyes were lifted up to Niko as if he were a messenger of God surrounded by a halo of light. “I am the most happy I have ever been,” he said, sounding as if he’d reached his tailor-made nirvana.

“One more word that is not about killing monsters in the hall and I’ll kill the two of you instead.” Eyebrows under control, in a tight V of pure rage, Niko ordered, “Now everyone get a flashlight and a weapon.” Unspoken was “so that I can beat you to death with them.” I didn’t think he meant it. We all, Niko included, have bad moods and bad days.

“We’re moving out in less than a minute,” he finished, swinging his flashlight with a contemplative look at the
floor. Measuring the distance between me and him—maybe he did mean it.

He switched his glance to Goodfellow. “Goodfellow, you may borrow one of my swords, which will be returned without a single fingerprint that indicates it has been fondled in any manner. You will also tell us about the shadows and if they can give away our location to the others and how long it takes? Hours, days, months?” he ordered. “Caliban will keep his mouth shut completely or I’ll use my new stitching skills, the remaining dental floss, and sew it shut myself. Cal, if you laugh even once, I will have Goodfellow remove his sheet and force you to observe what he is trying very hard not to conceal beneath it.

“Now
go
.”

I was a lion, but if he’d had a whip right then, I’d have hidden in the corner of my circus cage. Goodfellow kept his attention on Niko’s hands, wishing, I think, that he
did
have a whip. Cal was under the onslaught of more emotions than he’d experienced at one time. I knew at eighteen I hadn’t. But we did as we were told, despite that.