Downfall (10 page)

Niko snorted, convinced, and why wouldn’t he be? I hadn’t invented the lie, but I’d been second in line behind the one who had. “Thank you.”

I leered. “For not impregnating half—”

“For helping with the Vigil,” he interrupted, trying for annoyed, but you didn’t have to be a puck to hear the affectionate humor in his voice. “Delilah and the Kin are after Cal as well. She sent a few Wolves after him the night of the Howl, but I think we can handle them.”

Yawning—it had been a long day already—I dismissed with “I’ve taken care of that as well. You don’t have to worry about Delilah and her puppies anymore, not for a while. A few weeks, a month—I’ll let you know.”

“Why? And how would you know this?” His fingers wrapped around the edge of the rock table that was his seat. Not in a suspicious clench, but in a hopeful and loose grip.

“Trust me. The Kin is handled for a time and when Delilah and they are back on Cal’s trail, I will let you know.”

He nodded and gave me that emotion pucks hardly ever receive. Faith. “Very well.” Curiously, it was now he who looked as if he needed a little faith of his own. “I need to get back home. We might have found a solution for Cal’s gating problem today, but last night he noticed he had gotten a little more . . .” He hesitated. “Auphe. A few white hairs. Specks of red that come and go in his eyes. So far it has nothing to do with him gating. It started the night before that and he’s handling it well. No rages. No massacres, but I’d like to keep an eye on him.”

He stood, took his glass to the kitchen to carefully rinse it out as the most polite of guests do, thanked me again, and was out the door before I was able to close my mouth. Speechless now for the second time in eight hundred years. It could not be fathomed. Yes, my brother was physically turning into the most murderous creature spawned in the mists of time and I should check to make certain he consumed his microwave meal instead of our neighbors. What? Pardon? Should I have mentioned that sooner? Was the “no massacres” comment not reassuring?

I let myself twist sideways and then fall backward on the couch, vaguely hoping Salome and Spartacus might eat me and put me out of my misery. Not that they ate, being dead and all, but they weren’t above killing large mammals, Great Dane–sized mammals. Puck-sized mammals. At least I didn’t have to concern myself with the Vigil as much as Cal had brought it on himself. It was
rather insulting that Niko thought I’d wait for him to ask for my aid. As I’d told Ishiah last night, I’d known the Vigil was a threat, and I’d known about the shooting in the park this morning five minutes after it had happened. The hundreds of my informants had come in handy then. I was a trickster. I knew almost everything there was to know . . . in this city, if not the majority of the world.

“Help with the Vigil,” he’d requested.

I laughed, perhaps a little deranged and more than a little arrogant.

Zeus on High.

I’d taken care of the Vigil
hours
ago.

*   *   *

Fingers woke me from my nap, wandering their way through my hair, tracing their way lightly across my scalp, before pulling free and flicking my earlobe with stinging force. Loving, I’m certain, but stinging as well. “
Ganbay llebaa
, it’s time for me to go.”

It wasn’t Aramaic that Ishiah spoke, but it was a close enough variation for anyone to gather the gist of what he said when he bothered to speak at all. I did like them laconic and mysterious. Denying you have a type is the same as lying about your favorite sexual position or particularly naughty kink: You’re the only one who loses out in the end.

“Ish.” I scowled in sleep-soaked recognition while rubbing my ear before I snapped to a hyper state of vigilance I’d learned over too many battles. It was a lesson well learned long before I’d fought in history’s first genuine war. One should always be alert. Now, in particular, was a time to keep that in mind. I had many irons in the fire and only two hands to juggle them. Readiness was all. Relax for one heartbeat alone and death could be upon you or upon those more important than you.

I opened my eyes, released my ear, and rolled over
onto my back to offer a comfortably loose and forgivingly drowsy grin to him as he leaned, resting his folded arms on the back of the couch. Although the lack of anxiety was a lie and the comfortable ease was false, it was the best intentioned of deceptions. A gift better than the truth. Ishiah knew part of my plans, but not all of them, not yet. Nor did he know quite how risky they were, how dependent on every single thing falling perfectly into place. Let him keep his peace of mind a little longer.

“Ganbay llebaa,”
I echoed with a more salacious flavor to the words
.
“Thief of your heart.” A closer approximation would be “heart thief” with the implication that the theft had been devious, not entirely desired, yet unexpectedly welcome. It was a complex and ancient language. Ishiah knew that his version would be even more appreciated and closer to a puck’s first love: our ego.

“Do you tell the other peris that’s what you call me? Do they know the romantic and poetic soul that lurks behind their boss’s sour expression and foul temper?” I asked, reaching up to seize a strand of his hair that had fallen loose around his scarred face. I liked it that way. It reminded me of the first time I’d seen Ishiah, in some nameless battle, smiting demons or those who’d partaken of shellfish or pork or they who had labored on the Sabbath. I couldn’t remember the insignificant details of it all having concentrated rather obsessively on him, who had then been an angel.

The light blond hair had been wild in the wind created by the thrashing of his muscular white-and-gold wings. Or I’d guessed at the time that was the color of the feathers under the ubiquitous layer of desert sand. That combined with what very little angels had worn in those days—to call it a loincloth would be generous—with the contrast of dark eyebrows and a pugnacious jaw ridged by scar tissue was positively created to catch my
attention. Lust at first sight, I was quite used to by then and more than willing to admit it to him once the smiting was done. And admit it quickly I had.

It you do not ask, you do not receive. I
knew
Ishiah had plagiarized that from me and put his own twist on it before passing it on to a scribbling monkey named Luke or Matthew or Roscoe. Whoever.

It was too bad plagiarism was the least annoying result of that situation. Ishiah had been my first angel. I’d heard of them for years, of course, yet not crossed paths with one. Ishiah had managed to replace my happy-go-lucky lust with fury in one sentence. He was gifted in that manner.

“Or,” I continued, “do you tell them you call me an oversexed, disease-ridden, humping, sinning goat who would burn in Hell for all eternity while forced to consume my own flaming intestines if only you had the jurisdiction? You remember? As you told me when we first met?” I released his hair to take a handful of his shirt and pull him over the back of the couch and on top of me. From a distance his eyes were blue-gray, a rainstorm on the horizon, but up close they were blue. Clear blue but for a single large speck of gray next to the pupil of his right one. I ran my thumb along his stubborn chin. I couldn’t see the bristle, but I could feel the invisible prick of it against my skin. A hundred years as an ex-angel and he still forgot to shave some days.

With an impatient huff, he moved in for a kiss, warm and with enough hungry bite to it to banish that fragment of desert-worn history running through my mind. After a year, the slide of tongue, the teeth nipping just short of painful, the unique taste of rain and ozone. He’d left Heaven, but the sky he’d flown in and its more dangerous moods still burned in him. The taste and feel were familiar enough to revel in with the added comfort of
knowing I had all the time in the world. It was also thoroughly addicting and left me craving more. Now. Immediately. Perhaps never to stop.

Sadly, what I wanted and what the world was delivering at my doorstep were poles apart. I had all the time in the world, but others did not.

I licked a stripe across the slightly salty skin of his throat before slapping him firmly on his ass, not as awe-inspiring as mine naturally, but as close as one could come without being me. “Yes, time for you to go. We don’t have long.” His frown was darkly resigned. The gray-and-blue that studied me was clouded with hesitation and worry. But other things as well . . . better things . . . things meant only for me and not for the dangerous circumstances that surrounded us. My lips curved. “Aren’t you thankful I taught you tongues are for more than talking,
aetos-mou
?”

My eagle. He pretended that the name meant nothing, but he had yet to fail to smile when I called him that . . . as opposed to the time he cut me off from sex for a week when I called my turtledove—in front of Niko, who understood Greek. Niko, despite his not especially vast sense of humor, had found it rather amusing, enough so to choke on his tea. Niko had been more entertained and me not at all when Ishiah stood firm on the no sex punishment. A hard lesson learned.

Unfortunately not the type of hard lesson for which I had a great deal of enthusiasm, a greater amount of equipment, and a safe word.

Pity.

“Ass.” He kissed me, quickly this time, and then sat up. “They don’t ask what I call you, the other peris. They see it in my eyes whenever I watch you walk into the bar.”

Words such as that should heat you from within, not make you feel as if you’re tempting fate. I hid them away
that I alone and not the fickle finger could find them. With that, I shoved Ishiah to his feet. “If you can’t get this done, if someone wants to take issue with you over this”—brutal and violent issue—“tell me now. We’ll find another way.” Sitting up, I ran a hand over my hair, smoothing down what Ishiah’s fingers no doubt had teased into a mess of which only Einstein would’ve approved. “I don’t trust them.”

“They are me or rather I was once them. You do trust me.” He’d hidden his wings and now stood straight and tall, the ex-soldier he was.

“Yes, yes, I trust you.” I grimaced as he tried and failed to not look as if I’d given him the keys to ten absolutely street-
illegal
Lamborghinis with that one simple word. But in a way, I had. Pucks didn’t have a word for trust in our mother tongue; it was that foreign a concept. We had to coopt the term from other languages. Trust from a puck meant . . . it was . . . I couldn’t. I didn’t have the luxury to think about that, not now when I least could afford being distracted. And Ishiah was the very definition of distraction.

“But I don’t trust them, whether you were once them and whether they are uncannily good at locating people.” And of that we were in desperate need as my earthbound informants weren’t as effective as those who could fly. “And you shouldn’t either.”

I held up an imperious hand—I’d taught that to Caesar—as he started to speak. “You think that you know them, but you don’t. You knew them a long time ago. Do not assume all will be the same. They aren’t your kind any longer. Try to be prepared for it, that’s all I ask.” For now, that’s all I asked. When he returned, I’d ask for removal of clothing and a vigorous round of Kama Sutra bingo, but at present a healthy sense of suspicion and caution to keep him unharmed was all I required.

“What you want is in everyone’s best interest. Heaven’s as well. They’ll see the positive side of cooperation,” Ishiah promised. He promised it with a defiant glare that didn’t bode well for our potential allies if they disagreed with him. He was young, to think logic made such a difference. I forgot that at times. He was four thousand years old, give or take, but I was millions of years and I knew what he did not. Logic was a fantasy. Reason and common sense were the unicorns of the thinking world. Glorious and wonderful for the most naïve to imagine, but did they exist?

It depended on who you asked.

Virgins didn’t count.

I hoped he was correct, because if we couldn’t find this particularly talented individual that Niko, Cal, and I all knew, none of this counted for anything. I followed Ishiah to the door, where he suddenly stopped, turned, and leaned forward to rest his forehead against mine. As he closed his eyes, one hand came up to tightly cup the back of my neck. We stayed that way for minutes, maybe longer. His breath was warm against my ear, steady and even, until it finally hitched slightly. “So . . . time for your best lie?” My breezy and casual attitude when he’d woken me up hadn’t fooled him as much as I’d hoped.

“I can do this. All of it,” I promised. Including the schemes he knew nothing of yet, which was for the best if he hoped to concentrate on his own mission. “Everyone has a weak spot.

“Everyone is a sucker, one way or the other, and I haven’t met a sucker I couldn’t take since day one,” I added with the unshakeable arrogance and cold confidence of Hob the Elder and the Younger, the first and second trickster to walk the earth. “I
can
do this.”

It was true. I could . . . or I would die trying. That wasn’t a lie unless it was a white one. I hid any doubts
using all my skill from the time when rivers were far more often made of lava than water. No one would see them, including those who knew more of me than most.

He nodded with visible relief, reassured and full of faith. The faith wasn’t my fault. That came from Above. By no means would I teach anyone such a disastrously simplistic and deluded concept—not if I wanted them to survive for very long. I’d been working on that with him, trying to shove him into reality, but he was stubborn. Hopefully there would be a future to work on it more. I kissed him again, slapped his ass one more time for luck—and because it truly was one fine ass—and he left.

He left, shutting the door behind him, without seeing the feather I’d plucked from wings of invisibility to have it turn to gold-dusted ivory resting in my hand. Ridiculous. Sentimental. All the things pucks were not. I tucked it down inside my shirt, pulled in a deep breath, and switched gears. I ruthlessly forced myself back to my birthright—the engineer of deserved downfalls. Scourge of any sucker who crossed my path. And was there anyone who wasn’t a sucker? To me? No. I was Goodfellow. There was no trick I hadn’t pulled, no lie I hadn’t invented. Grimm thought the Auphe played games. I had learned to cheat before games
existed
. It was time to remember that. I smiled to myself, tasting the past victories—sweet and sharp like blood—of those games on my tongue, before moving my thoughts to the next step.