Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (19 page)

“I think you exaggerate. And death? There are worse fates than death to you? Never mind. Boring topic, death,” he dismissed. Death, my death, everyone’s possible death. He was totally unconcerned.
Of course
he was.

“I heard enough of it during that threesome with Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. On and on about funerals in brains. She wanted to dig a grave and have sex in a shiny new coffin. And then there was ‘lost Lenore.’ Angels crying. On and on. No one knew Eddie’s Lenore was his pet rat. It died of old age, a
rat
, yet the man never stopped with the ‘Night’s Plutonian shore,’ and the ‘Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore.’ And the weeping, such an incredible amount of weeping. We nearly drowned in that coffin. It put me off threesomes for a decade.”

We hadn’t swapped names yet, not officially, and he
was starting with a sex story off the bat. I had to give that to him—he began as he meant to go on. Backward or forward, whichever direction you could go, Goodfellow would be the same. He matched my path down the hall, carrying a pair of shoes that knowing him were more expensive than a brand-new BMW with an imported on call 24/7 German mechanic who could relate to it at a cultural level that beat the effort of any American mechanic.

“I’d forgotten how much you let the pervert in you run wild and free in the beginning,” I grimaced. “And let me tell you when I want to hear another story like that one.” He thought I was honest and was raising eyebrows in sly challenge, while his brain eagerly tossed another filthy one on the assembly line to be delivered.

“Yes?”

“Never-fucking-more,” I said flatly.

“Very well. On to the boring . . .” I began to turn around to head back to the apartment with the obvious intention of locking him out. The conversation was over. “Fine. Fine. Not boring. Perhaps more entertaining when punctuated with a few raunchy stories, but I can do without.” I halted the turn and kept on in my original direction away from Niko and Cal’s. With relief, Robin scuffled along heedless of the flying sand. “Then we do know each other or you think we do.” That was complicated too. I could rip him a new one all day long. It wouldn’t make him think twice of what he’d done. He wanted to know. Couldn’t stand not knowing, and, being a trickster, he
would
know. No one could stop him, including me.

I should’ve been more careful about the note, but I needed him to take my warning seriously about his death eight years from now. He was a puck, the oldest puck. They assume you’re lying as they’re always lying themselves. That’s why I’d left proof in a few names and a hook in the last name I’d used to sign the letter. I couldn’t see any way that it could’ve led him here. It shouldn’t have. I hadn’t seen the risk, but if I had, I’d have done the same. I needed his one hundred percent
belief to keep his horny ass from being wiped out by the Vigil’s explosion.

“You aren’t supposed to be here. I said so in the letter.” I’d left it at his car lot. What would a puck and a trickster be but a used car salesman? “You
know
you’re fucking up right now just being here because you were the one who told me that. To keep you away. You said,
‘Change events enough, Caliban, and you won’t fuck up impressively as normal. You’ll fuck up spectacularly. The world, the universe, every dimension, you’ll erase them all and then how will I get laid?’”

I shoved his shoulder, not hard, but not particularly lightly either. “This is on you. I quoted you exactly in the letter”—except leaving out “Caliban”—“
I
listened to you. You didn’t listen to yourself.” I flopped down to sit on the sand. It had a taint of blood to it, but that was a smell I was used to.

He walked through the sand that was as high or a little higher than a few inches above our ankles until he caught up. He sat. I don’t think it was as gingerly and careful of his suit as he’d planned on, the kind of suit too elite for people like me to be allowed to know the name of the tailor. He secured his ludicrously expensive shoes, the only kind he’d owned since I’d known him, on his lap away from the sand.

“I was curious, and I don’t listen to myself all the time. How boring would that be?” he said, waving both arms to be sure I saw how boggling the concept was. “How many adventures would I have missed, destruction I wouldn’t have wrought? The Tower of Babel would still be standing for one, and that was too hideous to bear. I could’ve been blinded by a structure so misshapen, such an eyesore, its epic hideousness has not been matched. The architect and builders should’ve been chopped up and fed to the pigs.”

Switching subjects at a speed that used to cause motion sickness before I got used to it. “I didn’t introduce myself, which could be awkward as I’m telling tales from my life that occurred hundreds or thousands of years ago. But as you addressed the envelope of your letter to
Robin Goodfellow and not to Rob Fellows, a captivating and charming human car salesman but certainly no one whom mythological figures were based upon, you must know that already. Or think that you do.”

He hesitated, absently sketching a few Greek letters sideways in the sand. “Your correspondence, on the highly exciting stationery that was the back of a flyer for Planned Parenthood said that we were friends.” The last word was stated neutrally and with wary caution, but Robin, second trickster born, either couldn’t hold back or had no idea the reality of how sad and fucking melancholy it was.

“I have people,” he covered hurriedly, “and people to tell my people to talk to someone else’s people. I have acquaintances, contacts, lovers, and potential victims of what will be spectacular cons if I get bored. But I don’t have friends or I do, but they come and they go, in the blink of an eye. I never know when I’ll see them again.”

The letters he’d written in the sand spelled
Filous
in the Greek alphabet. Friends. He’d tried to teach me Greek, but I knew five words on a good day, to read and write. He’d taught me twenty or so of the filthiest curse words in the language. Those were for yelling, no reading or writing needed in learning those.

He was here and, year early or not, he wasn’t leaving. It didn’t matter what I told him. With Niko and me, he forgot that self-preservation was a puck’s number one priority. I gave up.

Leaning forward, I scrawled a word beneath his.
Adélfia.
Brothers.

“No need. I know exactly who you are.” My grin wasn’t like his, unless you found predatory and wolfish to be charismatic. Fortunately, Robin did. He had that grin and worse in his repertoire. Ten thousand grins for ten thousand different types of cons.

“You think you do, do you?” He was doing his best to hide how shaken he was. I knew that as I knew him and had for a very long time. It was the hope. With what I was hoping to do and who I was hoping to bring back, I understood how painful and uncertain hope could be.

“Trickster Second, born of Hob, the Trickster First.” I kept my grin and flicked sand at him. “You better sit down. I know green’s your favorite color, but I don’t think your skin gets included in that.”

His eyes glazed, the blurred glazed stare falling to focus on something less confusing than me. Lifting up a handful of the grains of sand, he let them trickle between his fingers, back to where they came. He did keep them away from the flow of letters, painstaking in his effort to not disturb them. “Skin-walkers, a bargain compared to purchasing the sand.” His voice was distant and stilted. But he was Robin Goodfellow, second trickster to walk the earth. He could recover quickly enough to make someone doubt the puck had been startled at all.

One breath, two, and the conceit and confidence was back full force. “If I’d known there was a beach party, I would’ve brought piña coladas.” He brightened. How, I didn’t know. He was already as bright as he could get without inflicting the permanent blindness you’d get from staring at the sun for hours.

“Ah! I’ve an idea. I invariably have ideas staggering enough in their brilliance that I’m surprised the earth doesn’t confuse my mind with the sun and start rotating around my head.” I tried to stop him but Goodfellow was faster with a phone than Doc Holliday with a gun. “Hercules. Raid the liquor supply in the limo. I want piña coladas, hurricanes, mojitos, sex on the beach. . . .” The puck raised an eyebrow as he looked me up and down. “Make that all the sex on the beach you
know
I can handle.” He gave me a wink wicked enough that inside his apartment Cal’s sheet had unraveled instantly until it was a pile of thread around his feet and he was naked as the day he was born with no idea how or why.

“Oh, and, Brutus, get the cabana boy outfit out of the trunk, you know the one I like, change out of your driver’s uniform and into that before you get up here. I’m on the seventh floor. Bring a beach chair if we still have one after that incident last month. A beach towel if we don’t.
Yes
, oiling your muscles is mandatory with that outfit whether there is sun or not, Adonis. You ask every time.
Don’t complain or I’ll take away your unlimited employee gym membership.” He turned off the phone and rolled his eyes. “What a whiny infant.”

I couldn’t resist. I made the effort. I had years of experience with Robin and his orgy-loving personality, but I couldn’t keep the question to myself. “Hercules, Brutus, Adonis, you have no idea what the guy’s name is, do you?”

I had years of experience, but Goodfellow didn’t, not this time.

“I would be offended if it weren’t the truth. But as he barely knows it himself, I can carry on under the heavy burden of massive guilt.” His grin was brilliantly white and horny as hell. He’d denied that with every one of them he flashed, claiming they were magnetic and charismatic. He’d told me once, the fourth day we’d met, I thought, that horny was in the ass of the beholder, and had said it while his hand was
on
my ass.

The fourth day of what was supposed to have been the first time we’d met.

That had been the days of getting to know each other better through typical Alpha male butt sniffing, endless repetitions of my heterosexuality, and a face in the gutter drinking binge. We’d straightened things out—ironically enough, I thought—I’d bought him a beer and shoved him over onto Nik. Nik had been more polite and had put up with drunken, lustful, and predatory attempts at his virtue, which Robin had been certain he had locked in a chastity belt inside his pants. He’d waved a cocktail umbrella at him, slurring there was no lock he couldn’t pick. Nik had in turn passed him on to a waitress with a rack large enough that Goodfellow had used it as a pillow and passed out on it.

Nik had been able to take care of himself. And good luck if he couldn’t. As long as Robin had stopped with me, I’d been fine and less . . . I admit . . . terrified. And, after all, as the puck had noted, there were enough men, women, nymphs, Wolves, vampires to be had, although he’d made his way through the city once and would have
to start issuing a repeat banging punch card, the prize being guest of honor at one of his orgies.

Yeah, I’d found out he had orgies—all the time. I’d told him he was that guy you heard about. He’d fuck a snake if he could get it to hold still. He hadn’t been insulted. Hell, he’d been proud if anything, the arrogant bastard, and scoffed, “If a snake met me, it wouldn’t hold still. It would be the one chasing
me
down.”

I’d lived through the trauma of that once already. I was not repeating it. I didn’t care how many years early he had shown up.

“Born of Hob,” he murmured, audible but only if you had excellent hearing. “You do know me, then. I can’t decide whether that’s thrilling or dangerous. Hades warm and fiery cock, I like them both.” He whipped up another wide grin. And, again, because I did know him, I knew it was his deceitful one like I knew he was defensive
and
offensive, wary, curious, ready to con me any way he could, hopeful it could be true. That I did know him. He was suspicious, he had to be. It was easier last time when I hadn’t known anything about him at all. Ignorance he could trust. Knowledge, that was dangerous.

I’d seen him at his true work, not selling cars, on other people. Worse came to worst, he’d be tempted to get me in bed to see what information he could pry out of me, tempted to get me in bed simply to fuck me, tempted to kill me because better alive and horny than dead and never horny again, because hope his friend had returned? That hope was a splinter from a giant redwood that was delusion.

The thought of a seduction attempt was more horrifying than the one of a murder attempt by far. I groaned. “Look, I have lived this nightmare before. After massive suffering on my part, we called a cease-fire on your libido. You’ll have to try your luck with the me who belongs in this time. He’s young, wild, and barely legal. Put him in a kiddie harness, the leash in your hand and you’ll be the happiest puck alive.”

Under the bus I threw Cal Junior without a second thought. It was his turn to suffer now.

I rested my head back against the wall. “How’d you find me? I left an anonymous letter at your car dealership. Anonymous.” Or anonymous in a way that couldn’t lead to me. “No address. No fingerprints.” Not that mine were on file. Only those who are caught are in the system and me? Caught? As if that would ever happen. I’d stolen the cabbie’s gloves anyway. The house always wins unless you take precautions that it doesn’t.

“You said I called you Caliban in a similar letter I left you.” He was looking at me again, but this time not a leering up and down. He was taking in every feature. I knew him, but did he really know me? He hoped, but no puck ever relied on hope. “That’s not how you signed the letter to me. Is Caliban your real name?”

“Sometimes,” I answered, but didn’t elaborate. “I also said I’d answer your questions after you answered mine. How’d you find me? It’s important. If you can, someone else can. Someone we don’t want to find us, not here.”

“Recognition software,” he sighed. “I have it all over the car lot and the building. It didn’t ping on your face, but the software in the mail slot did flag your ‘Robin Goodfellow’ envelope. I have people in the city who know me, but they know when and when not to use that name. The system alarmed on my computer and I pulled up all the digital camera footage. I have the entire block covered in fact. I had your face, which went nowhere, but I had the license plate and the number of your cab. Some calls here and there. Money greasing palms, your driver was more than eager to give you up. He really didn’t care for you. I went to where he dropped you off, called up a few minions, passed out some photos and fifteen minutes later I found you. I’d found
two
of you. But the note did talk about time travel and there was the proof . . . or could be. You could also be brothers.”