Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (29 page)

Crouching down beside Robin, I peered into his eyes. “You in there, Caesar? Looking for those gladiators or ready to come back to the real world? I hope so, because we’ve really got to haul ass.”

“Caesar,” he echoed, rubbing a slow hand across his muddy face. “He was boring. Always off putting it to Cleo while claiming he was overseeing the training of camels for the Roman cavalry. But you recall that. One of them bit you in the ass . . . no. That was Keos. You’re . . . they took you, William . . . they
took
you.”

“Will,” I corrected absently, from a time when I had been Will with the only surname given a bastard village boy. Bastards received one surname, all of us. Bastards had whores or adultresses as mothers. Women painted in red. Scarlet. “Will Scarlet,” I muttered, then let it go. That life was over. “Not anymore. It’s Caliban. I’m Caliban.”

“Caliban . . . with the horrible beer.” He looked at the mud on his hand, obviously confused by it. “Where am I? Have I asked that before? Where . . .” And he was gone, wiping the mud from his hand onto my jeans. His pants? No. That’d be insane.

The important thing was he still seemed partially out of it. There was a bloody scrape on his forehead, evidence he’d hit his head on the way down. I could use the flashlight to see if his pupils were even or not, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean his brain wasn’t bruised, concussed, or anything else that might have it leaking out his ears if I gated us away.

He was talking and moving, more or less. Given ten or fifteen minutes, he might improve. “Come on, Goodfellow. Up. We have to go before the weasels break down the door.”

“I’m not up in the penthouse?” he asked absently as he continued to wipe again at his face with scrupulous care. “Take the elevator. No stairs. My head aches.”

“No, we’re not in your penthouse and like you’ve ever taken those sky-high stairs once,” I said with a healthy dose of desperation. “We’re in a sub sewer being chased
by weasels made of shadows and I think they missed their breakfast. We need to find a way out. For that you need to help me get you up. Do you get that? Do you understand? We need to move or be eaten by shadow weasels.”

He screwed his eyes shut and his mouth twisted in a pained grimace, but it was a thoughtful grimace. I had faith. He was thinking about getting up, how simple standing was, especially when someone else was doing ninety percent of the work. “Shadow weasels. The tunnel. The sewer.” Opening his eyes, he looked at the door. “My sword went through them. Your bullets too. If metal can go through them”—the whispering outside the door sounded now more like maniacal laughter—“can’t they go through metal?”

Wasn’t that a thought, shiny and crammed full of logic?

“Mother
fucker
. You putrid, evil bastards.” They were playing with us. For food or for fun, it didn’t matter.

A mass of narrow pointed black heads passed through for a look at the prey of their little game. They slithered back and forth away from the narrow beam of light. Between the laughter and whispers I thought I heard words here and there.
“Light . . . dim . . . nothing to fear . . . shine of moonless night.”

Great. I loved it when they talked. Unkillable and untouchable weren’t inconveniently ghastly enough. Let’s raise the bar and have them spit sinister whispers at you for shits and giggles.

Robin was trying doggedly to get his feet under him—getting
on
them wasn’t going to happen. I lifted him up, slinging his arm around my shoulder and my other around his waist. I kept the flashlight balanced by his shoulder and had put my Desert Eagle in its holster. It was useless anyway. I was able to accomplish it before the weasels came through the door completely, although they had crept halfway by now. I’d raised Goodfellow upright too fast while his feet were too unsteady to hold him, and was again bathing in another waterfall of vomit,
but I’d rather bathe in vomit than be eaten alive to avoid it.

“Bite . . . eat . . . take . . . bite . . . eat . . . take.”

“That’s elementary and middle school all over again. Biters everywhere you went.” I dragged the puck away from the door. I could keep backing us up while keeping them in sight and exposed to a flashlight they were less impressed with all the time. Or I could turn and run. If I lifted Goodfellow over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, I’d make better time than half hauling, half carrying him, but the few moments it’d take to get him and his uncontrolled, limp limbs up off the ground and on my shoulder would take longer. We’d have good odds of being torn to pieces before I could begin to run.

“They hurt you? When you were . . . a child?” The weasels he’d forgotten, but he was outrage incarnate over schoolyard bullying.

Shadow weasels were one thing, but there hadn’t been a day of my life I couldn’t protect myself from another kid like me. Why? For the plain reason that there were
no
other kids like me.

“Priorities, Goodfellow,” I said. “If we don’t die, you should look into how you rank those.” Ruefully, I went on to admit, “And actually I was the biter, but they brought it on themselves. I’d been small for my age, but I’m a lion. Lions—small, medium, or large—fuck with us and we will kick your ass. Or bite off your ear. Depends on our mood.”

I decided keeping the weasels in sight would get us killed, but it would allow us a few minutes more to think about what a horrible death it would be. Now or in minutes. We’d die the same way—no better or worse there. I’d take the minutes. I’d learned a long time ago, minutes you thought were useless could save your life. The weasels were sliding slower behind us, not as anxious to attack with the light in their faces. Technically, they didn’t have faces—wedge-shaped light-sucking heads. They didn’t fear the light, not quite, but they didn’t like it either. That meant even more minutes.

If we were going to die, hell yes, I’d fight for those minutes, every one of them.

I swiped the beam of light to the side and stopped a stealthier than the rest weasel in its tracks as half its jaw vanished. Behind it had been another that leaped at us over its injured buddy. Smacking it across the chest, I stopped it before it reached Goodfellow. Its front two legs became a memory. But our minutes were counting down and no matter what I did to a weasel, it was whole again before it fell farther than halfway down the pack. Keeping us both backing away from the flowing river of shadows, I came close to losing Robin.

“Ah . . .
skata
.” Robin’s brief surge of energy had in reality done more harm than good. His legs gave out under him, and I barely kept him from falling with a grip tight enough to crack a rib or two if he was unlucky. His eyes closed. “Head aches . . .
gamisou
, it hurts. Tired. Too tired for . . . all this. This? What is this? Don’t . . . care. Sleep. Bed. Home. I want . . . home.”

Him and me both.

The two of us weary, wanting home, but his home and mine were years apart. The weasels were too close to run now. If it runs, you chase it. If you chase it you kill it. If you kill it, you eat it. Auphe taught me that and lions on TV taught me that. I preferred the lions, but the end lesson was the same. “We are fucked now, you know that?”

He shook his head and immediately hung his head, a groan imprisoned behind clenched teeth. Pain and nausea, that sounded like a concussion. I didn’t have to watch those gory medical soap operas to make that guess. “No . . . we would’ve been fucked . . . if we’d found the gladiators.” He had cleared some, but he was back neck deep in confusion again.

“Can we forget the gladiators? As a favor?” The smell of mud, slime, supernatural lichen on the walls, brackish water pooling on top of the thicker, denser mud, it remained in the air. But there was a new scent. It reminded me of a storm, of the ozone lining the clouds with vicious threat. But warped to something more dangerous, sending an electric tingle down my spine with the same feeling you had when you were eight, lived in a trailer, heard the tornado siren, and stepped outside to see the green sky with a mile wide Wrath of God headed straight toward you.

I shifted us both around, Robin and me, keeping the light on the weasels to stall them, leaving none to see what was behind us. There was nothing I could make out in the dark, thick enough to breathe like air. That was it. I was gating and hoping Goodfellow’s brains didn’t ooze out his ears and he coped with his phobia.

Then came what I couldn’t see. A short, rough laugh—more intelligent than that of the weasels, but more sane? I had a feeling. When predator faces predator, you can scent the rabid on them. It . . . he . . . didn’t sound insane, but the best of us don’t, do we? “Goats for sacrifice. Mutts for stew.” His words were as rough and amused as his laugh. “Bow your head before your better. Kneel as my pets rip bite after bite from your bodies. Your flesh, your blood, it would please me.”

“How about a flashlight up your ass instead? Maybe you’re a shadow too. Nothing goddamned more than that,” I said coldly. He hadn’t been in the truck that had destroyed the bar, or he’d have burned with the others inside. I’d watched. The truck had been driven and precisely aimed. I’d seen no one get out of the flaming heap, no one run away. No, he hadn’t been there. That had been a job for a regular assassin or two, not a waste of a genetically altered monster/human hybrid. He had been Vigil once. As fierce a hold as they’d had over their members, remained Vigil.

Behind the voice lightning flared, sizzled, and struck twenty or more areas of the sewer wall. And it didn’t stop. They kept going, the multinumbered electric arms
of an Indian goddess of death. That was bad. If I was hit by one or more of those baleful arms, gating wouldn’t be a subject of conversation for a while. Enough electricity shorted out my ability to gate for a good long time.

The weasels didn’t strike me as that ominous now. Unkillable. So what? It was just a word. On reflection, I wasn’t positive it was a word.

The lightning was blindingly bright, enough so that now it was lighter than we needed or wanted. Vision swimming with white and blue, blinded to the point I couldn’t see the glimmer of my flashlight, or Lazarus. I saw the outline of a storm-shadowed figure at most. The black figure of a man, tall and broad, but I couldn’t make out anything else buried in the dark—until his arms both lifted. There was something in each one. It swung, against the blue-white corona of lightning, the same shaded black—narrow, almost serpentine—and they moved. Or he moved them.

Didn’t care, didn’t know, didn’t want to know. I was done.

Goodfellow had felt a
paien
he’d not felt before in his life. I’d seen Frankenstein on TV and I knew a puzzle piece monster when I saw one. Human shaped with inhuman powers and control of pets formed from the dark that had herded us to this spot. The Vigil and genetic engineering had done possibly more than they’d expected. Lazarus could be worse than any
paien
the Vigil had put down.

“They are for you.” The lightning doubled and I was completely blind, but not before I witnessed the swinging movement, the twisting and coiling, as whatever they were came nearer, extended by the eddy and flow that were the outlines of fists. Our clothes crackled with visible static.

I could almost taste his breath beyond the ozone and sewer reek. Almost. But I felt it. It was cold, colder than the ice of a zero degree day frozen in a strangling hand around the metal pole of a street sign. He was there. He could touch us. He could also electrocute us, have his
weasels eat us, and do something god-awful with whatever the fuck was writhing in his unseeable hands.

“They are the takers of your last breath.

“As I am the taker of your lives.

“The receiver of your souls.”

I felt the brush of something coarse against my face. Coarse then silken, but moving in the independent S-pattern of a snake or a serpent. Slithering toward my throat. Where else would it go? Taker of my last breath?

All right.

Now
I was done.

That whole cope with Robin’s phobia of gates, hope his brain isn’t injured enough to pour out of his ears when I did gate us? Those issues? Nope. Did not give a shit. Fuck his phobia, and right now his explanation could wait. He might rather die or be eaten. Too bad for him only the fully conscious and oriented people got to make that decision.

“If you have the brainpower to waste on gladiator fantasies, then you have brains to spare to survive a gate.” He had tumbled back into half-consciousness and it was a risk, but Lazarus wasn’t a risk. He was a sure thing and that sure thing was death.

Sometimes you have to roll the dice.

When it came to getaways and gates, lightning was pulling up the rear. I was faster, but not only that—nothing passed into my gate that I didn’t want there. I built it around us, no time for dramatic walking through. We were there, we were shining with purples, cyanotic blues, black, and the several shades of corpse gray. It was an odd, strangely colored light, but it shone. Not in the manner most would want to see or be able to see, but it was my sun and my moon and it got me the hell out of Dodge. It was the adrenaline life or death feel of a skydiver’s rush as he plummeted through the air into a desert of glass and stone and the bones of a dead race you’d destroyed before they destroyed you. It was the sensation of your feet hitting the red sand, the burn of acid wind, the yellow sky that watched you from above. I never did go there after my last escape, not in reality, as
it was the hell that had eaten half my soul. But for two years it had been home, complete with torture to make me believe it was home. It hadn’t been, wouldn’t ever be. But some feelings the Auphe shove into your brain, you couldn’t get out. This was what I thought of briefly when I gated. The feeling of coming home.

I wondered why it didn’t feel that way to anyone else.

Going home.

I had gated in front of the door to the wendigo’s basement abattoir, although it took a few minutes for the lightning glare that spread in a white blindness across my vision to clear enough to see I’d put us precisely where I’d meant. I was familiar with that location thanks to my pursuit of makeshift body bags—I did need to make a note to kill it when I had a spare moment. Good neighbor or not with the sharing of supplies, he was eating people. Couldn’t really let that go.

The location was convenient. It was somewhere close to the apartment, but nowhere Cal or Niko would accidentally see me if they were so anxious to die they’d ignored my advice and left their place to poke around for the Vigil assassin on their own. They’d been uncooperative enough to come strolling out in the hall to take a look at Goodfellow after I’d told them, told Niko—the responsible of us two—to stay inside or risk all of us dying thanks to some insignificant change. And it would be long before eight more years, knowing our luck. If I could stop Lazarus and get back home without Cal and Niko seeing me travel as Auphe alone did, that would be the only souvenir I’d need.
“I traveled in time, kicked assassin ass, and didn’t give my toddler self a psychotic break.”
Slap it on a mug and I was good to go.

If Cal did see it, that would be a spiraling mess of every self-aimed negative emotion in the book, a confirmation of the monster he suspected he was. It’d be an emo-explosion none of us had the time for. At eighteen
everything is about you. I don’t have the right car. I don’t have the right clothes. I don’t have the right friends. I’m a monster. I’m an abomination. I’m going to start eating people.

How Niko had resisted smothering me in my sleep for this particular chunk of years, I had no idea.

I had outgrown it, that was something to remember.

When the gate disappeared, leaving us here, Robin was no longer half-conscious. He was down and out. I’d gone from carrying most of his weight to all of it. He’d been talking before the traveling. That made me think this wasn’t a very positive sign. I was giving him a few minutes to come around before I put him down on the floor. If I had caused more damage, if he lost part of the brilliance, ego, and sly intelligence that made Robin Robin, that was something I couldn’t fix. It would be worse than if I’d left him to die.

One more thing I couldn’t live with. I’d add it to the list.

“Goodfellow,” I urged, “wake up. Gladiators wait for no man or puck.”

Nothing.

“Robin, Hercules says Zeus is your father and your mother was a donkey. The cock you’re so proud of is a donkey dick. That your sexual partners are literally sucking donkey dick.”

There was drool pooling over my collarbone, but that wasn’t the response I wanted. Drool is not as communicative as, say, words. Neither was the sewer slime, mud, blood, and a gallon of vomit we were both wearing. Robin did like a big breakfast. I exhaled and whipped out the big guns. “Do you remember this one? I don’t. Likely because Nik gave me a crack to the skull that makes yours a fucking fairy kiss. Do you remember how you got his ass so drunk in Rome that when he passed out, you hauled him to a tattooist and had
MY LUST FOR PHILOSOPHY IS T
EN TIMES MY SEXUAL D
ESIRE FOR MEN, WOMEN,
OR THE STALLIONS OF
CALIGULA’S STABLE
inked on his ass? He wasn’t that interested in philosophy that time
around either, hated it, making the insult worse. But you never cared about building the better mousetrap, only the more offensive insult.”

There was a questioning mumble and the chin resting on my shoulder moved, shifting his head with it. He was trying to get a less blurry look at me. After a blow to the head like that, you’re always half out of it in the beginning when you came around with no idea where you were, how you’d gotten there, or what had happened. That had been what happened in the sewer. I had no idea if the gate had knocked him back out or if whatever phobia he had was that bad. Considering the other time, he’d puked but not lost consciousness, I was going with the gate knocked him out. Being gate-sick on top of a concussion would do it. That he had shown and was again showing signs of waking up was reassuring. The sound I’d heard when he’d hit the concrete could easily have been the fracturing of a skull. Showing some signs of consciousness this soon for the second time was a relief.

I felt the nibble of lips and teeth on my ear and the mumble went from curious to enthusiastic.

That was
not
a relief.

I sighed and tightened my grip on his wrist, keeping his arm in place over my shoulder. “Less with the molesting and more with the walking. Try moving your feet. We have eight flights to climb, Goodfellow, and I am too worn-out to carry your ass.” He did move his feet, but not in a manner that facilitated walking. They were limp and aimless enough to snag on each step. How unlikely was it that he wouldn’t miss getting caught on at least one? That was a puck for you; defying all odds.

The mouth moved from my ear to my neck and the teeth became more involved. “Jesus fucking Christ. Goodfellow,
wake
up and get off of me. I am not above hitting an injured, barely conscious man. Normally I think of it as a bargain. Half the work’s already done for me. I will seriously beat you like a rug and brag about it afterward.” I kept progressing up the stairs, picking up
the pace and putting in more effort and less care about bruised ankles. If I broke one, then I’d contemplate feeling remorse. I didn’t think I would feel it, but I’d mull it over—if I wasn’t too busy. If I broke both of them, I would give it some thought. I’d decide it was blaming the victim, me, and dismiss the remorse midthought, that was a given on my part. Know thyself, right? But thought would’ve been involved. What more could anyone want than that?

“Safeword . . . fanny pack. Wait. That was . . . last year. Now is . . . Velcro . . . means . . . hell . . . no.”

“My safeword is a kick in your face and I’m about to use it.” The warning was clipped, grimly serious, and completely useless.

“Toybox . . .”

“I don’t want to know.” God, I couldn’t think of anything I less wanted to know.

Less talk was fine by him and he was back on my throat, attached firmly enough for it to be his biological purpose in life—remora to my shark. He may have hit his head harder than I thought. He may have fractured his skull, have a bleed in his brain. It was possible he could have brain damage. He’d
better
have brain damage.

I lifted my hand from its grip on a fistful of his shirt and suit jacket, trying to push his head back with no luck other than nearly dropping him. One hand wasn’t going to do it. Two hands and a crowbar didn’t inspire faith in me either. It might take the Jaws of Life. I wrapped my arm back around his waist again.

The thump thump of his feet trailing along the stairs behind us hadn’t caused any complaints. I didn’t think I could go faster carrying all of his weight. Getting up each flight alone would’ve been a shock, being weary enough to have double vision. But somehow I was making it and if I didn’t actually lose one of his feet entirely to bounce down to the landing below, I’d give faster a shot.

I think Moses, did the guy not know east from west using—I don’t know—the freaking sun, led his people across the desert in less time than it took me to get the
both of us up the stairs to the seventh floor using every ounce of energy left in me. It was ten minutes in reality, but it felt like the biblical forty years. Robin hit full consciousness between floors five and six and got his feet steady under him between six and seven. I hadn’t wondered how many bruises a puck could leave on your throat while half-conscious. It hadn’t been an issue, hadn’t imagined it would be an issue, might have gone ahead and said, fuck it; sorry, Nik, and shot myself at the pizza cart if I’d
known
it would be an issue.

When I was finally at the door and pounding at it furiously while picturing it as Robin’s face, he snatched a quick glance at me, looked away quickly as I jerked my head toward him, spearing him with a glare heated enough to melt his face with a swiftness and wrath that the Ark of the Covenant couldn’t begin to match. “It . . . it’s not—”

“It?
It?
” I started kicking the door in addition to beating my fist bloody against it.

“Um . . . ah . . . if we’re going for unnecessarily strict accuracy, I meant ‘they.’ They aren’t that noticeable.” He attempted to pacify my rage. My full justifiable edging toward homicidal rage. “With enough distance, no one will see them.”

“Distance? As in the distance from
space
? I’ve been attacked by a nest of giant demonic hazardous waste–marinated mutant lamprey eels that did less damage than you,” I hissed. “And they were a hundred times easier to pry off. If I hadn’t thought you were already brain-damaged from the fall in the sewer, I would’ve dragged you up the stairs by your ankles and let your head bounce off every single fucking step.”

“I was not at all aware, I promise you. I was confused. Head injuries are well-known for causing that, I’m sure you know. Safe and consensual have ever been my watchwords. My humble apologies.” He swayed, steadied himself against the wall, and gave me all the sincerity a puck could deliver.

As little as that was, thanks to the evolutionary
development of their rapaciously scheming species, I didn’t feel very forgiving. “I was going to switch you to a fireman’s carry, over my shoulder, but I didn’t want your pit-bull jaws locked on to my ass doing to it what you did to my neck.”

The fact that he was picturing that precisely as I’d put the mental image out there like the idiot I was had my next blow at the door, which swung open abruptly, close to taking Cal’s head off. “Motherf—” He ducked and fell backward, managing to miss the broken nose Robin had also given me hours ago. A pace behind him, Niko braced him and kept him upright. “Jesus.” He put a hand over his nose and mouth the same as Goodfellow had in the tunnels. “You guys stink worse than a sewer.”

“No. We stink exactly like a sewer as that’s where we’ve been.” I pushed past him.

“What the hell? What happened? Your leg is a mess. My favorite jeans that you stole like an asshole are fucked. You’re giving me the cash to buy me another pair.” Cal, what a humanitarian—one quality that hadn’t changed in the long stretch between us. He had homed in on the blood-soaked jeans I was wearing first. I wish he’d stayed fixed on them, but that wasn’t my life. He’d moved on to my neck. “That is nasty. Did something try to strangle you? Something with suckers you see on a tentacle? That giant octopus in the weird
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
movie. How are you even able to breathe?”

Niko, unfortunately, was a little more observant and a great deal more intelligent. He tipped his head once, then twice for views at different angles. I said something to him that I hadn’t before at any age. Until this incident, I couldn’t have conceived of saying it, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I couldn’t pretend this was an exhaustion-induced hallucination if I had to hear another word on the subject—from anyone. I shoved a finger in his face, near enough he could’ve bitten it off if he was more like his brother, both versions. “Niko,
shut
it.”

His visual examination continued to take in the rest
of me with a more sympathetic adding up of blatantly visible injuries, the blood I was tracking with one foot as it had run down my leg, into my combat boot, overflowed, and was leaving a crimson tread pattern behind. “Consider it most thoroughly shut,” he agreed mildly.

“If Goodfellow falls over, leave him in the hall for the wendigo to eat.” I went straight for the bathroom and locked the door behind me.

•   •   •

By the time I made it out of the tub equipped with shower head, taking both a bath and shower, I felt as filthy as when I’d first stepped in. I looked clean though. It was the dirt and shadows in my mind I couldn’t wash away. After brushing my teeth with Cal’s toothbrush, which made it mine, I bagged my clothes, stained in everyhing you wouldn’t want in your hemisphere, much less on you. I then dug into the tiny cabinet over the toilet. The first-aid kit was back but it was as woefully under stocked as last night. I yelled through the door, “Niko, where’s your stitches, needles, lidocaine. You know, the shit that keeps us alive?”

His answer, patient and quiet from the other side, didn’t improve my mood. “We don’t have stitches or lidocaine. I do have a needle from a kit I use to repair my sparring padding.”

Shit. If nothing else, that was a big enough needle. And the man flossed as a second religion. It’d have to do. “Needle,” I demanded, then added, “please.” It wasn’t his fault that while their lives were in daily danger from the Auphe that they hadn’t been wounded severely and often enough to play Martha Stewart and stitch up each other or themselves.

Moments later there was a knock and I unlocked the door with a freshly washed towel around my waist, did a careful Goodfellow check, and took three different-sized needles from Niko. “Thanks.”

He frowned, taking in the briskly bleeding cut, after a good while too, from the back of my knee to my heel. “What are you going to stitch it with? How are you going to stitch it without intensive contortionist training?”

“Dental floss. Glad you use the unflavored kind. The mint burns like a bitch.” I sat on the lid of the toilet and started threading the middle-sized needle. “And awkwardly, but not as awkwardly as if you offered, ended up with my leg hiked up on the edge of the tub and my junk in your face.”

The impatient look down his long nose was the same it would be in every year to come. “As if I have not seen your ‘junk’ since you were born. But if you’ve become that shy, you can lie on my bed with your towel and both of us will be spared the sight.”

It would simplify things some. Stitches from the angle I’d be coming at them with wouldn’t be neat or as effective, not that mine were that neat in spite of long experience. Niko’s would be neat, tight, but slow. That was the downside of lack of a considerable amount of wounds and the stitching that went with them. The lack of lidocaine sucked as well. The cut was in the muscle of my calf. When your brother makes you run ten miles a day, you don’t have extra flesh on your calves—only muscle, which was harder to get a needle through and, like mint dental floss, hurt like a bitch.