Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (17 page)

He reached over to move my hand back to my knee. There was a fresh drop of blood on the table’s surface where my nail had dug into the plastic extra deep. “I promise.” He was collected and cooperative with no offense at receiving a heaping helping of bitter blame he didn’t deserve. Take a Niko anywhere in a thousand points in history, in a million alternate dimensions, give him a fucked-up brother as a present with shiny bow and all, and he becomes an instant physical and emotional guardian. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do to keep that brother safe. And all of it was unconditional.

If I’d shown my true fucked-up colors sooner, he wouldn’t have punched me. Hindsight, she is a bitch and a half.

“The
balaur
didn’t know you, but he helped you—rather, helped this Robin Goodfellow to help you. That’s encouraging for our future. It’s a probable sign that Goodfellow did receive your warnings. Also the
balaur
assisting is encouraging for interspecies cooperation,” Niko pointed out.

Fuck me, he was so innocent. I’d never thought that in my life, but he was. Now, in any case.

“Not necessarily. Goodfellow is the oldest trickster alive.” I knew Niko would’ve already recognized the name, the version that had been made over into something the same and different both by Shakespeare. “He wouldn’t have needed messages from the past. He assumed the Vigil might not put all their grenades in one basket. If he was going to kill someone, he wouldn’t depend on one trap or one weapon. While he thinks no one is as smart as him, his plans always include the possibility that there’s a small chance they could be. That’s why he never loses . . . never lost.”

No, it took me to make that happen.

“There’s a good chance he planted notes for weeks near every place we hung out. As for cooperation?” I laughed. It was split between mourning and mockery. “Robin paid him. The bastard even came out and
ate
our pizzas while I read the note. You and Robin were dead. I had a gun in my—” I cut myself off. Taking in a deep breath, I went on as if I’d said nothing. “Nothing is free, Niko. Not back when we were kids, not here and now, not in the days to come.” The laugh hit me as hard as a kick in the gut and I leaned back with the force of it.

A hand rested on my shoulder carefully, easing me forward a few inches. This Niko didn’t know yet. Didn’t know that falling off a table would be funny, that falling off the roof of a twenty story building wouldn’t kill me, wouldn’t even hurt me, not unless I was unconscious before I fell.

Or if I was awake and wanted it enough.

But there was no time for pity parties now.

“Goodfellow sounds as impressively sly as the Bard
painted him when it comes to planning and prediction. May I see the letter?” he requested, treating me with the same careful caution you would a bomb. I didn’t blame him. I was a bomb. He knew only about the emotional type that topped my list. I had other skills, I’d kept to myself, that made me as physically explosive as the Vigil’s bomb had been.

“Not much in it. It’s mainly a ‘talk you or me down from the ledge’ note. Everything can be changed like we were planning before. Blah blah blah.” I handed him the letter. “There’s no actual useful information like where the shithead Lazarus is or will be, which means he didn’t know.” Although if I had changed him dying in the explosion with my own messages he might know now, but that didn’t do me any good, what with “now” being eight years away.

“Sorry about the nude photo,” I added. “He printed it on the paper. Hell, it might be on all his stationery for all I know.” I smirked with petty vengeance and reversed my opinion. “You know what? I’m not sorry. I’ve had seven more years of that pornographic perv to put up with. No reason you can’t start your suffering along with me right now.”

He thought he was ready, but his jaw dropped slightly before his mouth snapped shut. “Do tell me he manipulated the photo.”

“Unfortunately, so goddamn unfortunately, and accidentally, important to know, I can tell you I saw the real deal and nope, the bastard did not.” I grimaced. “My masculinity took a hit that day, crawled under the bed, and is probably still there.”

“And he’s always”—he waved a hand at the full-color photo-enhanced computer printed letter—“in a sharing mood?”

“He is. He was. He will be.” I was pure determination on the last.

“You can save him . . . and me. You have the time now,” he pointed out, his hand remaining on my shoulder. It hadn’t changed in the weirdness of who had once
been my big brother now being six years younger than me, but at the same time he felt less a shadow of Nik and more a part of my brother. Only a part, but solid and real.

“I know, don’t think I didn’t start making new plans the second I arrived here. I don’t have to be a trickster to have thought of that first thing.” The world might be destroyed as a consequence, but I couldn’t do everything. “Yeah, thanks to the Vigil and their two plans is better than one, I have the time to try to save my Nik and Goodfellow.”

They had Operation Lazarus, but that hadn’t been enough for them. They’d had one more plan—either to make certain I went down before I went back after Lazarus or maybe Lazarus wasn’t as reliable as they hoped. Either way, they’d given me a second chance they’d be kicking themselves over if they weren’t dead. By fang or by fire, in my time, every Vigil member was dead or had fled the city. Personally, I was hoping for the dead option.

I gave Niko a tight-lipped smile as another black blotch of a crow thumped against the window. NYC is friendly to rats and pigeons, but not much else. “Robin isn’t the only one who can send letters, e-mails, leave voice mails. I’ve drowned him in them.”

That’s where I’d gone after arriving, hijacking the cab before eventually making my way to Talleywhacker’s bar and Cal. I’d been spreading the word . . . written and using the drug dealer’s phone. “Besides, every time travel movie I’ve seen is a how-to guide to fixing this kind of crap.” Not that movies took the
paien
version of physics and all the other science they and I didn’t have a hope of comprehending into consideration. Bottom line: It was a crapshoot.

Movies. Life should be so easy. And although the one movie was made before I was born, I’d really wished the
Kyntalash
was a DeLorean. Near certain failure and death should have made the ride more entertaining.

“I didn’t stop with Goodfellow either. The guy who will be my boss at the bar, the one that . . .” I could see
the ball of fire, two, three, four stories high. How high had it gone and how far had it spread? I hadn’t stayed to see. I couldn’t have and kept the gun away from my head or my finger off the trigger. I’d left that subdivision of fiery hell as soon as I could stagger away.

“Anyway, my future boss, I left him a shitload of messages too.” As well as Niko’s future lady friend. Promise had given me a vampire flash of fangs when I’d referred to her once as Nik’s “girlfriend,” saying she was not a thirteen-year-old waiting for a boy to notice she’d grown breasts over the summer. “When that day comes again, no one will be there. The place will be empty.”

Not that I could know things wouldn’t change and the eddy and flow of time wouldn’t turn into a vicious riptide that would have the Vigil striking at us earlier, somewhere else . . . which is why I was banking on Goodfellow predicting their possible behavior in that note he’d left. Between his talent for out-thinking anyone else’s plan and my messages to him now that gave him eight years of planning time, we had a chance to save us all.

I couldn’t know or have absolute faith, but I couldn’t think the worst either. Simply by sitting here on this ledge breathing, I was changing a thousand tiny events and who knew what that would lead to?

“We only have to kill this assassin then and everything is taken care of.”

“The assassin that the Vigil injected with several kinds of supernatural DNA in a serious case of hypocrisy. The assassin we have no idea what he looks like or what he can do, if he’s remotely human still? No problem.” That I did mean. I’d fought against monsters no one had defeated before. I’d fought Auphe and with Niko, Robin, and ironically the Vigil’s help, had wiped them out. I could do this in my sleep. If I ever slept again.

Niko slid down from the table and opened the refrigerator. “Tell me more about the assassin and the Vigil. What is our situation?”

“Operation Lazarus. The project is meant to raise the order from the dead.” I hopped off the table myself and fell into an equally flimsy kitchen chair. “As you can
guess, original on names they are not. Calling themselves the Vigil in the first place probably gave that away. If you have a burning desire to call the assassin anything other than dead meat, call him Lazarus if you want, if you have time before I rip his goddamn head from his body.”

“Why didn’t the Vigil, a large organization from the sounds of it, not kill you in your own time? It seems far simpler than ancient technology and time travel.” There was rattling from inside the fridge as Niko pushed around his tofu heaven.

“They tried, trust me, enough times I lost count,” I said. “But when you have a friend who knows everyone and everything, not to mention has a few extra million in change under his couch cushions, he could hire better assassins than all the ones they sent after me. He could, if he wanted, decide an entire organization had been playing God too long to a pagan crowd, which meant no Hosannas were being sung in the Vigil’s name. They had one crime and one punishment—be revealed for what you are and you die for it. Robin decided, and all the
paien
backed him up, it was time for the humans who thought they could keep us in check to go.” Niko didn’t miss it, he wouldn’t, but he didn’t say anything when I included myself with the nonhuman
paien
. “One way or the other. They either left the city or they died. Lazarus is the only one left, whatever kind of lab-created killing machine he is. Robin’s contacts were never able to find that out.”

“You said the Vigil didn’t know this address.”

“No.” I glanced over at Cal. He was soundly out. He should be for several more hours. “But you can’t stay here forever. And you can’t be looking over your shoulder forever for Lazarus when you are already doing that with the Auphe.” He wasn’t going to like it, but I didn’t see another way. “We’re going to have to use Cal to chum the water. Have him back at the bar. Not inside it. That pathetic-sized closet is a kill box, if ever there was one. But if Cal walks around the area, Lazarus will spot him. We let him follow us to something more private and with more room to work. Lots of room, as we don’t know
what he is or can do after the Vigil juiced him up. Then”—I shaped two fingers into a gun and let the “hammer” fall—“done.”

“You want to use my brother as bait?” Niko reappeared with a Styrofoam container. “You referred to him as ‘chum’?”

“Everything I say about him, I’m saying about myself. And you know it’s the only way. I’d act as bait myself and let you lock him in a bank vault somewhere if I thought it would work. The Vigil wasn’t that sloppy though. They would have made certain Lazarus could recognize the younger me from the older me. I wish it had been less than eight years and we had a better hope of passing for each other. I’d be happy as hell to help you stuff him in that vault. I have years of fighting experience on Cal.” And I brought gating to the party with me, if worse came to worst. “If despite that, and Lazarus kills me anyway, your Cal won’t stop existing. You’ll have another shot at the asshole. But if Cal is killed, poof. Like a magic show, I’m gone. I never even was. This version of me won’t have happened. You’ll go from two Cals to none. I’d say if that happens that you could get Lazarus and take his
Kyntalash
”—I tapped mine through the long sleeve of my T-shirt—“go back an hour or so and warn us, giving us then two Nikos and two Cals at one time.” I wasn’t immune to a shudder at that thought. “But it’d be a lie. The moment Cal dies, Lazarus will be gone right along with me. If Cal doesn’t live at least several years longer, enough to break the Vigil’s top rule, there will be no reason for the Vigil to try to kill him, to make an assassin, and Lazarus, like me, will never be.”

If that happened, it would be Niko’s turn by the metaphorical pizza place, his own weapon aimed at himself. We both knew it. There was no need to say it.

“Then we’ll endeavor to keep that from occurring.” Niko opened the container. “You aren’t looking well. You’re paler than normal, which means you’re all but transparent. You haven’t eaten since you’ve been here, I know you wouldn’t consider it or remember food is a requirement for life after . . .” That halted him in his
verbal tracks as he searched for words for my day that he thought I could bear to hear. He must have decided there weren’t any and let it go. “Cal has some leftover lechon asado from his, both of yours I suppose, favorite food truck, favorite this month at least. You should finish it for him. It’ll be five less miles I’ll make him run.”

Lechon asado. Slow roasted pork.

The back of my throat was instantly burning with bile. I swallowed, coughed against it, and fought not to breathe through my nose. It didn’t make a difference. The smell of the meat was unavoidable and everywhere. If Niko thought I had looked bad before, he was going to have more to worry about when I vomited on the floor. Sliding the chair away from the table as far as I could get before it stopped, trapped by the deeper sand. Hand over my nose and mouth, I rasped, “I can say for sure I doubt I’ll ever eat grilled or roasted meat again.” Or be around any cooking meat—shit, eat meat of any kind at all. “It’s your dream come true, Nik. I’m now a vegetarian.”

The implication of it was instant. I’d been there, a block away while my brother and my friend burned. He knew my scenting abilities were equal to Cal’s if not grown sharper with age. He could guess what it had been like for me. Dumping the box of leftovers in the sink, he covered it with three-fourths of a bottle of dish soap and turned the water on full. When it was as thoroughly neutralized as anyone could make it, he carried the dripping box to the bathroom and flushed the leftovers. He tore the box to pieces and flushed them as well. He had to have since he came back empty-handed. He didn’t say word one about it. He knew, as he knew with the other Cal, it wouldn’t improve anything about the situation. God, it was weird as hell all what he knew about me, considering how much I’d changed in almost a decade. Or thought I’d changed.