Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (11 page)

It had been as Robin had said . . . I had killed them all, but not alone. It had taken his and Niko’s help, but as I’d died twice to do it, it was truth enough right now. “I did. Like any beaten lab created mutt, I bit the hand that made me. However much you hated them, I hated them more. My only regret is they didn’t suffer a thousand times over, but they did suffer.” I had grinned at the memories. It was a grin too Auphe to be human, too human to be Auphe.

“So does that happy thought of my Auphe genocide melt the glacier up your ass?” I added with a curled mockery of a smile.

Loki’s high-class, superior accent had vanished to be replaced with one more appropriate for whatever con Robin mentioned that he was working in Vegas. It was deeper and a shade more touched with sandpaper. He suddenly smelled of the desert and crappy buffets too as he scowled at me, then transferred it to Goodfellow before trying for a bargain. “Let me kill him. The bastard has no sense of self-preservation. I’d be doing Darwin’s work. He’s a suicidal obnoxious shit. I’ll snatch the spear from Odin’s feeble, filthy, syphilitic hand and make you king. You’re conceited enough to think you’re one as it is. I’ll make it true. I’ll give you Valhalla as a vacation home and all the Valkyries your horny, groping self can handle. Just let me kill the son of a bitch.”

Robin’s smile was as sly as they all were. “Like I could
not have all that if I wanted without your help. Yes, roll your eyes. Very befitting a god. One last thing. It’s the entire reason you’re here, both of you.” He seized one hand from both of us and slammed them together. “Clasp, grasp, shake, pick a time period. You are here to meet each other. Caliban, the Unmaker of the World and Reaper of the Firstborn, now he has become Death, destroyer of the Auphe, greet Loki, the Destroyer of All Worlds, the Alpha and Omega that is Ragnarok, now he has become Death, the destroyer of existence in its infinite forms. You’ve met. You will respect each other and remember, Loki, qualities you admire in Caliban, such as Auphe genocide and biologically inventive ways of killing, and, you, Caliban, with your enjoyment of widespread chaos and destruction the same as a toddler enjoys fingerpainting every square inch of freshly painted white walls. No one is better at chaos and destruction than Loki. You are now comrades-in-arms. This is not optional. If you forget this, I’ll make certain you have no arms left to be comrades with anyone. They are decent arms. I could get a good price for them.”

His grip on our hands that was holding them together was . . . yeah . . . painful as hell.

Squeezing tighter, for emphasis no doubt, he then let us go, took his phone out of his suit jacket, and snapped a picture of Loki and me basically holding hands as neither of us could decide between the clasp, grasp, or shake. Or unbend our fingers yet as Goodfellow had done his best to break them.

“
Skata
, could you be more adorable? Caliban with his shocked expression and nearly drooling air of catatonia. Loki with an absolutely blank expression as empty of thought that I’ve only previously seen its equal on Thor—and is that the trace of a tear? No? Watery eyes? I didn’t know gods had allergies. This will be my Saturnalia card this year. Check your e-mail. The two of you are cute as fluffy brain-dead puppies. But don’t forget. Fight again and I sell your arms on the black market.”

He’d then turned Loki and pushed him into motion in the opposite direction, muttering, “And we’re mingling.
No killing. Mingling. Let’s find you that fox-spirit before Thor stumbles over her, gropes her tails, and puts her off gods forever, never mind she is one now.”

That had been the end of the party mostly, except for Thor puking on my shoes, gallons and gallons of it, too projectile to escape, and that was one time I did not exaggerate. Gods’ stomachs, unlike tanker trucks, had no limits. I did have limits though and that had been one. I’d decided then and there that gods were above my pay grade and I didn’t want to see one again as long as I lived.

The end except for one small, tiny issue.

Niko had crossed paths with Loki and it was a trashy talk show special of twin brothers separated at birth. They’d met when the
kitsune
couldn’t be found and ended up confiscating Goodfellow’s huge spread of coffee table, cleaning it to an immaculate empty space with a casually intimidating sweep of Nik’s katana. Sitting on the couch, they’d put their heads together in deep discussion while pointing at various points on the marble. Every time one of them did, a small spot of glowing color lit up . . . red, blue, green, purple . . . too many to count. I hadn’t been interested. I’d played this game with Niko before. My brother was having a good time, and it was my turn to find the same.

Going to clean my boots of whatever had been in Thor, internal organs included I didn’t doubt, I’d found the
kitsune
drying off her fox tails in one of the bedroom master baths—despite being a Japanese trickster spirit, she hadn’t had any idea about the bidet obsession either. And Goodfellow had been right: Sex with a trickster spirit turned goddess was . . .
damn
. What she could do with those tails . . . If I was capable of getting it up in the next
year
I’d be surprised.

Later, Robin had come up to me as I sat on the floor in a corner with an entire sliced sausage platter resting on my legs and my gun beside me to shoot anyone who was suicidal enough to try for a single sliver of one. He was paler than usual. “What’s up?” There was concern in
my voice and the way I curved my arm protectively around my food platter, just not concern for him.

He’d crouched beside me and answered, “Your brother”—paused to massage his temples as if that aneurysm had finally burst—“your
brother
has strategized with Loki and come up with a battle plan that will allow Loki to be the victor at
Ragnarok
.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, looking around us with rapid glances to make sure he wasn’t overheard. “And it will
work
.”

I tried to laugh and ended up choking on the appetizer or five I had in my mouth. After I’d managed to get it all down, I coughed, finally saying, “When I was a kid, Nik found some stupid ‘take over the known world’ board game at the Salvation Army from, shit, decades before we were born. He made me play it with him a thousand times. ‘To sharpen my strategy and tactics.’ I was in the fourth grade for Christ’s sake.” I dove for another piece of sausage. “But I’m twenty-six now and he still has that mold-covered piece of crap in our closet. He breaks it out every month. I’ve never won a single game in my life, not exactly a challenge for anyone much less Niko, but it’s his drug of choice.”

I had leaned backward, tilting my head back to rest my head against the wall. Looking up the necessary few inches for the perfect angle to see Robin’s expression. I had known it would be a good one and it was. “Niko was Achilles, Alexander the Great, Arturus, Hannibal, and more. You know. You were there. He didn’t ride along with history, he
made
it.”

I smirked. “And you invited him to this party. You let him know Loki was a guest. Loki who starts the battle of Ragnarok, so infamous that
I’ve
heard of it and we all know I can’t be bothered to read up on or remember shit. Then you turned your back on them for a second and didn’t expect this?”

I flicked his forehead, unable not to gloat some after the years of smug conceit I’d endured, laid on thick and deep the way only a puck could. “Not as smart as you imagine, are you? You were the one who told us the stories about the good old days. Of who we were, what we
did. Of how Nik had a hobby of taking over the world. Repeatedly. Loki has a hobby of ending it . . . mostly. Put the two of them together and naturally they’d figure out how to have both the battle
and
keep the world in one piece to rule it. Some trickster you are.”

Laughing, I mocked, “Sac up. Loki’s your friend, acquaintance, a person he knows—in the sense that he doesn’t hate you with everything in him and hasn’t killed you yet. I’m sure when ‘the Twilight of the Gods’ comes, he’ll let you hang out, eat, drink, and won’t remember at all you threatened to strip him of his trickster status, talent, and
arms
, not swords or daggers, his physical fucking arms.” I yawned and reached for more sausage before advising. “Just stay away from the stables. I hear bad things happen there when you can’t resist a horny stallion.”

I’d gone home later with a black eye that hurt like hell. Goodfellow could throw a punch. My ordinarily stoic brother—he’d been closer to a kid at Christmas than he’d ever been in his entire life. I slung an arm over his shoulder and he elbowed me in the ribs, big brother to little brother, when I’d said Loki would have to crown him queen for his contribution to the planned coup. He’d elbowed me a second time for talking trash about his new favorite god, and then kept on spinning out the plans for Ragnarok, his words tumbling over one another. This was my brother who thought one word was babbling as the minimal raise of an eyebrow was communication enough. He’d said it was something he hadn’t believed at first. Norse gods or any god, but with Loki . . .
the
Loki—with Ragnarok, he was a true believer. Converted. It was an experience he swore he wouldn’t forget.

He didn’t have to worry about that. Forgetting . . .

As two weeks later he was dead.

“How much of that story did you leave out?” Niko questioned.

Long story, a memory both only weeks behind me and yet a long time to come. I’d stopped walking, caught in the flash of the heat of that fire, the knowledge that crumbling ash was all that was left of my brother. I closed my eyes, took several deep breaths and gave myself a fiercely hard inner shake to refocus on
when
I was right now. To concentrate on what I had to do to stop an inferno. . . .

Eight years before it happened.

This Niko, not mine—no, he was waiting for an answer. And this Cal . . . if Loki thought I’d been an obnoxious, suicidal little shit at twenty-six, what would he think of this version of me eight years younger? I’d be willing to go a round of rock, paper, scissors on which of us held him down and which of us beat the shit out of him. Tapping one hand with first and middle finger spread in a V on top of a round fist must’ve had an air of cagy enthusiasm around it as Cal was currently watching me with fixed and frozen suspicion.

I put my hands back in my pockets. “Jesus. Give me a second.”

I’d left out the gating—they couldn’t know that before it happened to this Cal. That could screw up everything in a hundred different ways. I hadn’t said Goodfellow’s name or that he was a puck and trickster, no mention of killing all the Auphe, of my eyes turning
red, or reincarnation. Holy hell, definitely not the reincarnation.
I
was boggled about that at least once a week despite it being six months after that revelation. I’d text Nik a few times when he was teaching history or at the dojo—few, several, every week when the revelation blew up in my brain on no particular schedule. We developed a short-hand. I’d text him:
schizophrenic??
He’d text back:
Not today. Try again tomorrow.
It worked for us.

Counting them up in my head, I was certain that I’d managed to keep the important parts, buried and silent. “How much did I leave out? About three-fourths? To keep the future safe, leaving out seventy-five . . . eighty, ninety-five percent at most isn’t unreasonable. And trust me, if you knew what I know, you’d prefer my math.” I wanted to shrug, but I was stiff and aching from being thrown against the asphalt in the explosion. It had been hours ago, for me, only hours . . . it was close to unfathomable. I was tired too, exhausted enough to have to concentrate to keep from stumbling once I started walking again. The
Kyntalash
was treating me like a D battery when I was thinking I was a AAA at best.

“Sounds like all one big lie to me. You—and I don’t give a shit about your ‘superior-practice-makes-perfect’ knife skills—you took on Loki, god of Chaos, with what? A gun and some lame trash talk?” Cal scoffed, not impressed and equally not convinced.

Had I looked that perpetually pissy all the time? Did I still? I snapped a quick picture of him with my phone and then of myself while still walking. Flipping back and forth between them, I muttered a few Greek curse words picked up from Robin under my breath and then deleted the shots. That was a truth that didn’t need documenting for anyone to find. And it was badass, not pissy, I assured myself silently.

Bad. Ass.

“It was prime trash talk and I shot a god in the dick six times. Not to mention the fish eggs. You can weaponize that crap.” Without gating, surviving Loki long enough for Goodfellow to intercede was part of the ninety percent . . . ninety-five . . . whatever . . . that the
CIA would label redacted. Need to know and no one needs to know who doesn’t already.

Junior dismissed the entire thing with an identical lack of interest in gods that I had. “How about something more important than parties and fucking finger food? Like, I don’t know, how are we going to find this bastard who’s trying to kill me? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be here for? The keeping me alive thing?” he snapped. “Although I have to say if killing me erases you from the future, I have all the sympathy in the world for whoever it is because you are one massive asshole.”

Again with “asshole.” He was getting monotonous as hell with that. I was going to work on expanding my profanity and vulgarities, if I survived. This was what people or
paien
heard from me two seconds before I made them
dead
people or
dead
paien
? I was embarrassed for myself. It was humiliating that I didn’t do better, try harder. I took my insults almost more seriously than my executions.

I had been going to tell him stay away from gods. Every bad thing you’ve heard about them is true. But he wouldn’t. Niko would, for now, always be too caught up in the wide wild world of mythology and Cal would be at his side as I had been. No need to try to change that. We’d survived my brother’s curiosity, and, for putting up with me, he’d more than earned his hobby/avocation.

Nik, my Nik, who hadn’t stopped being an endlessly questioning bastard from the day he’d read his very first word. Hadn’t stopped and wouldn’t have if not for me.
I tore the memory to confetti for more than one reason and let the pieces drift away.

Instead of that advice, I flipped off toddler me and moved on. “Everyone tries to kill us sooner or later. We’re not a popular guy. I’ll get to the specifics of who this particular time when we’re off the street. I’m tired, my head is killing me, the
Kyntalash
is draining what energy I had left and every single word you say is a finger poking a hole in my brain, turning it into Swiss cheese. Now shut up for five fucking whole minutes and let this kick in.” I shook an empty bottle of Tylenol I took from
my pocket. “Unless you want me to tell you every detail about Nik’s future sex life. I do his laundry—”

“His sex life?” Cal smirked. “Wait. Here’s something I
want
to hear. You do his laundry. Every time? I don’t do his laundry except as a birthday present and you’re Mr. Badass from a fabric softener future. Pathetic.”

“Hell, yeah, I do. He cooks, when I don’t order in. He still spars with me when I say I’ve gotten as good as it gets. Let’s let this go. He tells me I’m wrong and I am. I get better all the time, which keeps me alive. He keeps the rest of the place clean. He does it all and he’s my big brother. My lazy ass owes him everything. So, yeah, I do the laundry . . . but not because of that.”

I shot a confused Niko an amused glance. “I do it because one time after years and years of me living happily in my pigsty, Nik lost it. He was coming down the hall, looked at my room same as a thousand times before, but this time, for no reason, nothing new or changed, he lost his fucking mind. No monster in the world could break him, but my room did. By the time I heard him from outside where I was dumping the trash and ran back in, he was cursing me in languages I don’t think
exist
. He’d sprayed lighter fluid on the mess in my room, which, bad luck for me, is
everything
in my room and had just thrown in a match.”

Fortunately, a year before he’d made me keep my weapons and ammo out in the sparring area since if I needed it in an emergency situation, in my room I’d never find it.

“Buying a new mattress, cleaning out the Salvation Army to replace my clothes, sneakers, combat boots, but couldn’t do anything about the one hundred and fifty issues of classic porn gone forever. Once was enough. Now I do his laundry and he doesn’t burn down my room—as long as I keep the door shut so he can’t see it.” Then I concluded Cal’s lesson in shutting up with a threat as nasty and god-awful as I currently felt. “I wash his sheets. He’s the boy toy of a very wealthy woman with, from what I can tell, an incredibly demanding sex drive. I’m a scratch-and-sniff story at your disposal.”

I leaned toward him and growled. “Now . . . shut . . . up.”

“You—”
I’d never been one for shutting up and I’d forgotten how much worse I’d been at eighteen.

“Fine.” I shrugged. “Your fucking funeral. Your big brother who raised you all your life, your perfect brother you don’t only love but
worship
like a god deep down inside though you don’t let it slip. So you’re dying to know how a diet of carrot and wheatgrass juice makes his jizz smell on the sheets—”

“Shutupshutupshutupshutupshut—”

But I could be taught at that age, it seemed, if the method was traumatic enough, I thought, as satisfied as I could manage, considering why I was here. A hand covered both of our mouths from where Niko had slid up behind us. “I think we should all be quiet until we are home or I may set both of you, not your rooms, no, but the two of
you
on fire. I have a growing headache of my own.” Smart man, he didn’t begin to trust us on silence. He kept our mouths covered until we were in sight of their building.

Cal was speaking before Niko had a chance to wipe the saliva from his hand on his younger brother’s jackets. “Thanks, you dick.” He raised a hand as if to shove me.

I grinned and taunted in a good mom’s singsong introduction, “Once upon a time . . .”

That apparently made him think I might finish that story if pushed and instead of going with physical violence, he bit off, “You’ve just ruined any hope of my having a sex life ever,” Cal complained. “After that, I don’t want to touch my own dick and I will never let anyone else within fifty feet of it. Let the assassin kill me. I have no reason to live.”

“Get over it, King of Emo. Sooner or later you’ll get laid, stop buying pornographic comic books, and cancel your monthly delivery of vats of zit cream, you whiny virgin.” I went on in picture-perfect innocence to give him a tip. “And by the way, jacking off with gun oil not only ups your psycho sex-killer quotient, but it gives you
a rash that is embarrassing as hell to explain to the nurse at the free clinic.”

“I do
not
—” I raised my eyebrows. He could lie to anyone, including Niko though that was uncommon and more uncommon that we pulled it off, but he couldn’t lie to me about my own unfortunate and embarrassing past. He switched tactics, proving we did have an ounce of self-preservation.

No matter what my new BFF Norse god had said about Cals in general.

•   •   •

The apartment Niko and Cal lived in now and I’d lived in years ago was within walking—running, to be more accurate—distance of Talley’s, which had almost saved my life once. You’ve got to love the “almost” there, but I said nothing aloud. That nightmarish experience was at least a year yet to come and if we changed anything about that at all, all worlds would die, not just mine.

Several blocks from the bar, lights were strobing on police cars. They were parked in front of the alley I’d stepped out of from the future into the past, the dark into the light. Nik and JV Cal gave it an uninterested look with Cal grumbling, “Shitty neighborhood,” and both kept moving. And it was. There could be any reason why the alley would have cops swarming, but there was a tickle at the base of my brain. I didn’t . . . not for a moment or two, then . . .

Oh yeah.

That incompetent crackhead junkie asshole, who hadn’t cared I’d been thrown back eight years through a blaze of light as strange and bright as a solar flare. He either didn’t give a shit or, craving a fix so badly he didn’t realize reality had twisted itself enough to dump me practically in his lap. A man with priorities, he ignored what should’ve looked like magic to him or an impossible manipulation of physics to anyone smarter—he’d merely jumped from his bed in a pile of garbage and tried to slit my throat. Priorities in plenty, skill, however, that he lacked five ways to fucking Sunday.

“Bad neighborhoods do make for great training grounds,” I replied carelessly. “And the dead guy murdered people. Murdered kids. Killed them for drugs. No loss.”

“How do you know that?” Cal questioned, his suspicion making a return in the twitch of his fingers toward the weapons concealed in his own leather jacket.

I shrugged and tapped my nose with a mocking curl of my lips. “You’ve got one skill”—that would change—“Wee Willy Wonka. Use it.”

He took a deep breath and I saw the moment the coagulation of hours-long death, the drugs released through every pore of the chemical-soaked body, the blood not of the addict alone, but the older blood on his knife and clothes. Blood of other people. The men, women, and children—too many to count. “That’s why I couldn’t smell the Grendel in you in the bar,” he said, it hitting him suddenly. “Because you smell like me.”

Then he tacked on with resentment in every tense line of his body. “And the Wonka shit is worse than Junior. I will kill you in your sleep, I swear to fucking God. I’ll shove Nik’s feather pillow so far down your throat that if you survive, you’ll shit an entire flock of live geese the next day.”

I nodded. Expecting a threat and not bothered by it, approving if forced to admit it—it wasn’t “asshole” and that was an improvement. But . . . holy shit, I’d always been a dick, hadn’t I? Made me want to give myself a proud pat on the back. “Like we ever had feather pillows,” I dismissed, avoiding a crack in the sidewalk wide and deep enough to swallow me whole. “Everything in Niko’s room, once we started making more money a few years from now by . . . ah . . . an occupation you’ll find out . . . everything Niko owned was . . . is hypoallergenic. If they sold surgically sterile pillows at our local store, he’d have had those.”

Good threat though. If I survived this, I was ripping off that one and several others for the future. It wasn’t stealing. Can’t steal from yourself, right?

“And, yeah, it’s the same reason you didn’t recognize
my voice,” I affirmed. “No one recognizes their own voice.” I could see my old apartment/converted warehouse one block down. It was the same and nothing like I remembered. Memories are strange like that.

But it didn’t make me forget Cal. The goose insult had been a good one, worthy of swiping, but despite that, he was going to pay for it. What could I say? I held grudges against nearly everyone, myself included.

Equal opportunity son of a bitch, that was me.

I went on to add, offhand as I could get without caring a damn how fake it came off, “Not recognizing my smell I get. I do. But why you didn’t notice I was armed, heavily and noticeably to all but the blind, I put down to you being a lazy, cocky little shit. Cockier than you have any reason to be.”