Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (10 page)

I’d seen the roots on Thor when I stepped over his unconscious body to get into Robin’s penthouse. All my life, when my hair was too long, I handed the scissors to Nik and told him to whack off about four inches; I’d been to a barber only once—a
barber
, not a nine-hundred-dollar-a-cut salon like Goodfellow—but that didn’t mean I couldn’t identify a truly shitty Clorox DIY job. Gods were freaks, every last one of them.

“
You
threatened me with that. Do you know what would happen if you dropped the hammer of that revelation on his boulder dense head? It would double the drunken weeping and wailing, and then he’d run home to Daddy Odin, who as my concerned father, would arrange yet another intervention—number six hundred and two.” The grin unholy enough to stop your heart slid away, and he spat, “The senile old shit who can’t remember he is
not
my father, but my blood brother and that due only to a blackout drunken state celebrating some battle or another. A regret I am bound to for eternity or until I kill the bastard,” he said, the words barely escaping the tight, grimly flattened lips. “I should’ve known better to drink around Odin who, senile or not, was a trickster before I was born. But there was no other choice for me when it came to entertainment as I hadn’t
yet glimpsed puberty and wasn’t old enough to be with a woman.”

“How old do you have to be if it’s a horse?” Ah shit. I winced. “Fuck. Completely my fault. It slipped out, autonomic reflex: heart, breathing, sarcasm. Sorry, Robin.” And I was sorry when it came to Robin. Loki, on the other hand or hoof, could suck it.

Goodfellow waved me off, frowning as he tapped his chin silently. Loki looked less forgiving with the temperature around us falling dramatically enough that frost began to form on my best dress Goodwill combat boots. I wasn’t taking the blame on that one.

“Hey, asshole,” I snapped, wriggling cold toes. “When you lie down with stallions, you get up with foals. That was your pervy mistake, not mine.”

I’d used up my one free pass to be a dick, and Robin slapped the back of my head as Niko often did, but Nik did it lightly. Goodfellow wasn’t about lightly. He was about education in one easy lesson. “Ow, what the hell?” I ran my palm over his target, feeling for a bump. Instead I felt a trace of wetness. Yanking my hand back, I glowered at the two small smears of red. “I’m bleeding, you goat humping—”

Shutting me up with one hand covering my face from forehead to chin and one shoving what felt like a napkin in my hand as I was now half-blind, he advised, “Ponder that lesson. Only the first is free. Loki, behave or I’ll whip out one of your IOUs and use you to cool my refrigerator for the next ten years while forcing you to live in the salad crisper for that decade. And I know you would never show me a disrespect so reprehensible as to refuse such a luxuriously decadent housing offer of a host as gracious as I. Finally, from this second on, the both of you will shut up and let me think.”

Which he did, dropping his hand from my face, giving me the gift of vision again. He paced, sat back on the table, staring sightlessly into the distance, stood, and paced some more. “Confusing,” he muttered. “That does sound typical to my repertoire, but I do not remember that at all. And I never forget the more entertaining
blackmail I commit. Nor would I forget to not invite the two of you to the same hemisphere, certainly not the same party. There’s entertainment and then there is insanity. Why do I remember Loki asking me in an amusing and humiliating”—he slowed—“manner that he would never employ?” He centered on me. “Why would I insist Niko bring you? You walking into a room where you are bound to cross paths with Loki is the same as you being the Sixth Seal in Revelations—a cataclysmic earthshaking event. The Wrath of God poured upon the dying earth.”

“If I ever grow feelings some day, you are going to make me cry. You know that, right?” I drawled, crumping up the napkin with its two small drops of blood. I was ignored—as usual when Robin was on a roll.

“I don’t remember it happening that way, not with Loki begging to compete against Thor, not thinking ahead to drug you and ship you to some tiny village in Kazakhstan until the party was over, for the safety of all humanity and
paien
-kind. I wouldn’t have done any of that while in my right mind, but I did. Why do something so entirely and unnecessarily dangerous for no discernible reason that— Oh.”

He stopped and stayed unmoving with a sudden bizarrely bright glitter to his gaze, identical to the light reflecting from a lens of a microscope or telescope. It could’ve been a sign of a sight beyond the rest of us. If you believed in signs. I didn’t. I didn’t care if Loki begged or Robin blackmailed. I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know. I ran out of fucks the moment Nik said I was going to Goodfellow’s party if he had to tie me up and toss me through the door announcing me as a stripper who wore his bondage gear instead of carrying it.

One thing I did know that while we stood here that someone out in the party was eating the last of the sausage appetizers and that was torture. Sheer fucking torture.

Goodfellow blinked once and the unnatural shine was gone. “Ah . . . I see it now. I see all the ways and all the paths, the why and wherefore. That was one I didn’t
see coming. Nor did I see it going.” He shook his head. “That is going to be extraordinarily . . .” He laughed. “No, that
was
extraordinarily fascinating.”

He briskly clapped his hands together once as he turned to Loki. “What is done is done, however it is done. Here’s a hint. It was done by me, therefore it was done brilliantly. Now, back to reality as we know it. Loki, I do know I had you sign a vow of no killing inside my penthouse. And you
did
sign it, with the blood of you and Fenrir, making it legally binding among your pantheon. Not that it matters. A simple nod from you would’ve been binding to me.”

“I did not break it.” The swirls had disappeared from the god’s skin and he had sounded much more calm, less violent, not as interested in animating my guts to eat me from the inside out. With a smooth face and that long hair twisted into a black braid, he stood motionless to the point of not breathing but with his body tense enough that he was coiled for action. If he’d had a goatee he would’ve vaguely reminded me of Nik’s evil and opposite-colored twin.

“To whom do you think you are speaking, Lie-smith? Tell me, can you be a lie-smith without a semibelievable lie ready on your tongue? I don’t think you can.” Robin sighed as if lamenting the unadulterated quantity of naiveté present in this existence that would have a trickster attempt to deceive
the
Trickster. Pivoting to his right, he lifted an entire bottle of wine from a server’s tray with a thief’s touch. Unnoticed and unseen by the waiter. He didn’t have to. It was his wine, but he said once you’re at your peak and lose your touch, you’ll never reach the top again.

Facing Loki again, he took a swallow straight from the bottle. Robin was richer than fucking God, but he’d lived a hundred thousand years before bottles were created. “Yes, I annoy you with my constant rampaging virility”—he passed the bottle to the Norse god who took a long drink after a resigned groan—“and my love of reminding all about it, sending you pictures of it with my phone now that humans eventually invented something
worthwhile, irritating with my never-ending tales of adventure and war, and causing you rampant envy over the franchise of whorehouses I owned in early Rome. And it is a bright moment in a boring morning when I turn on the TV and discover you’re furious enough with me for sleeping with your ex-wife and your daughter in a very kinky threesome, enough so that you’re tearing down an entire mountain in one impossibly large avalanche.” He took the bottle back for another swallow. “That made up for the lightly underdone crepes I had for that breakfast. That cook has to go—out the door or to Salome and Spartacus as a cat toy. But, back on track, do keep that up, the bitching and destruction. But . . .

“Do
not
lie to
this
liar.”

The voice was inhuman. I couldn’t scrape up anything in my brain to compare it against. It simply wasn’t human, inhuman, animalistic. It came from a place that was not here, where gods above other gods above other gods played dice for the fate of the universe.

Robin was my height, a few inches under six feet, but I’d have sworn then he stood above us, a towering idol hungry for sacrifice. “You forget that I am the Trickster Second, born of Hob the Trickster First. You are a god with the power of chaos linking your existence into a tangible mass. You were born of chaos, you
are
living chaos, but you were not born a trickster. Trickery was not in you. You chose it. You wrestled with it, seized it, and finally humbled yourself and invited it into you.”

Taking one last swallow of the wine, a drop of crimson smudged his lower lip. He ran a finger over it, studied the dark scarlet streak, and then placed his finger to the middle joint in his mouth to suck his skin clean. It wasn’t sexual in any way, shape, or form, and Goodfellow is
always
sexual in any way, shape, or form. He could pass out drunk in a ditch wearing a clown costume and spooning a lipstick, fake eyelash wearing donkey and the son of a bitch would somehow, someway make it into
Playgirl
magazine as the Sexiest Man of the Decade centerfold with that precise picture in it.

That this wasn’t aimed at being sex incarnate was
freaky as fuck. That it was the opposite—a god above Loki’s list of them—a god who craved sacrifice, blood, and lives was bizarrely atypical, too, I admit, but, knowing Goodfellow, the sex thing was actually more so.

“I won’t deny you’re an excellent trickster, little wolf, little snake, slippery fish,” Robin said, lazy and unsettling the shit out of me, with the boredom I hadn’t seen in him before. Naturally I’d seen him bored, normally bored the same as everyone can get, and I knew beneath his happy-go-orgy-it-up mask he wore, he had to be unbelievably bored at times as long as he’d lived. This, though, to not simply know it, but to see it. To witness what his life had been and the parts that lingered still when he was one of those among the first on the world—with nothing yet to do and no one yet any fun to trick.

And hundreds of thousands of years to wait for any of that.

How the hell he’d survived that, I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have.

Robin placed the empty bottle on the marble table. “You’re one of the best, of the
self
-
made
tricksters. You do your best to forget that, don’t you? But you, Silver-tongue, Sky-traveler, Lie-smith, were not birthed among our kind. And if you had been, it would make no difference. You still would not be
me
.” He didn’t say it with a vicious bite. He said it as an undisputed truth is said, plain and simple, and that made it worse. “Trickery is fickle.” He placed a firm finger in Loki’s chest. “Oh so very fickle. It’s your guest now. It lives within you as it finds you interesting, but it is not an innate part of you. More than merely that, as it is not part of you, not born within you, I can take it away.”

Holy shit. He could do that? I had then started thinking seriously of buying Robin a new bidet to replace the one I had shot . . . and maybe send an “I’m sorry. Please don’t rip my ability to piss out of me” Strip-o-gram.

“You would not.” Would not—not
could
not. That was the problem with being a liar. You couldn’t lie to yourself, Loki included.

“Hob is gone. I am First now. You would never have
the desire to lie, steal, manipulate, con, or trick again. You’d still have chaos, which is its own kind of party, but once you’ve been a trickster, you have little desire to live as anything else. You know that. Don’t be an impossibly stubborn bastard. Let this go. I did it. It was essential. Believe that I would not have put Caliban and you face-to-face if it weren’t. No trick would be worth that.” Goodfellow exhaled and instantly he was himself again, smirking and losing the heavily laden presence that demanded you throw your firstborn at his wrathful feet. “Look how long you hated me and now we coexist in blissful irritation and ire. If you survive me, you can survive Cal.”

He had removed his finger from Loki’s chest and patted it lightly. “Cal threw the first punch, but I know that was only because he was taught his entire life that self-defense has no timeline. If you fight fair, an oxymoron if ever there was one, if you wait for your turn, then you won’t survive. And I’ve no doubt it was self-defense with your temper and hatred of the Auphe reaching such heights that you’d risk breaking a blood oath to kill one.” He snatched another bottle of passing wine and emptied at least half before using it to point me out.

“I know as well you’re not blind enough to think he is a true Auphe. His father was one and his mother human. He is half of one and half the other, but neither at the same time. He is something old and something new and something unlike anything on this earth.” He flashed me a grin at the often repeated in-joke. “And he fears no gods, past, present, and future.” There was an odd emphasis on that last sentence. “Do you, Caliban?”

He didn’t give me a chance to answer although I thought having tried to kill Loki was a good enough answer. “He is more a victim of the Auphe than anyone else in history. He also destroyed the entire race . . . with a little assistance, but at the end of it all, with or without help, he was the only one who could end them. And he did,” he said with an awe none of us had lost to this day. We had defeated the Auphe Nation. “He
ended
them all.”

He waved both hands, but didn’t lose a single drop of his precious wine. “Loki, send Caliban a fruit basket for destroying those you hated most outside your own family. Now, go. Mingle. I invited an incredibly sexy
kitsune
with you in mind. She just earned her ninth tail, ascending to goddess status. A trickster god and goddess? Think of
that
sex. They’ll feel it all the way over in Japan. I’ve four bedrooms. Feel free to destroy them all.”

Loki hadn’t moved right away, instead looking at me, then
through
me. I felt it, a touch of crop-killing frost that radiated doubt . . . but a little curiosity too. “The Auphe, you killed them, to the last? And know as the god of lies, it’s a given I will know if you do not tell the truth.”