Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (33 page)

We went.

By the time I had a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, and another pair of Cal’s boots, Goodfellow had picked out a sword. He’d gone in another direction in footwear, a pair of sandals to go with the toga theme, deadly serious that none of the Walmart, Goodwill, Salvation Army clothing in here was contaminating his body. In addition, he was halfway through the normal, ordinary, bathroom-lurking shadow explanation.

“. . . so, no, they aren’t alive. Think of them as clay, less solid of course, but as impressionable a texture. The ones
that appear in the same place every day, if the same people pass by, the same events happen, slowly that seeps into them. It can be read, not as a language, but like a picture book—images can be seen. Intense emotions can be felt. That is, if you’re a creature that is made of and lives in shadows. If they found us, that’s how.”

“Fascinating as fuck,” Cal offered, face blank with boredom. “Can we kill something now?”

“For once I agree with Tiny Tim,” I said, jacking a bullet in the chamber.

We all did, as armed with weapons for Lazarus and lights for the weasels, we rushed the door. Niko and I both opened it together, keeping Cal behind us. He didn’t like it, but he was the target. We swung the lights up and down the hall, in every corner and the depth of other door jambs. There were no weasels. No Lazarus.

There was, however, our Chinese food.

And a deliveryman that no tip in the world could help.

•   •   •

He’d been hanged.

Big deal, right? I’d seen a hundred worse ways to die. Inflicted a few myself. But this was different.

He was hanging still, suspended on the wall, his feet dangling two feet above the sand-covered floor. It would’ve been less disturbing if there had been a rope holding him up. There wasn’t. The indention pressed deeply in the flesh of his neck and slanted at an upward angle added to his broken neck: He’d definitely been hanged, not strangled. He also had burn marks around his wrists and ankles, blackened and charred. Lazarus’s lightning, but not done here or we’d have heard it. The burns were wider than I’d have thought for lightning, three and a half to four inches, and in a perfectly circular band. His eyes were burnt too. There was no reason for that other than to torture the poor bastard. It wasn’t as if he’d lived long enough to be a witness, to tell us anything about Lazarus if he’d seen him.

It wasn’t as if he’d lived to hear Lazarus or the weasels, whichever had put him here, leave. That hadn’t been
an option, whether there had or hadn’t been a reason to kill him. It took one face-to-face encounter with Lazarus to come to that conclusion. He had a hard-on for death. He’d want to watch it come. Through his own eyes or through whatever functioned as the eyes of his shadows. We’d seen that Lazarus wasn’t separating and shaping the whole of himself into a pack of weasels. He was apart from them, a being independent. It didn’t mean he couldn’t mentally be inside of his nasty pets. It wouldn’t be that unusual for a
paien
, and that’s what he was now, with that amount of raw power to be able to do that.

“How the hell is he just . . . hanging up there like that?” Cal backed away from the smell of burnt flesh. I knew the feeling and had backed away faster, ignoring the piles of food and sand I was stepping in and gagging as I went. “And that’s not our normal delivery guy. I mean, there’s Chinese food everywhere, but he’s not him.”

“What gave it away? The thirty pound weight difference? The six inch height difference? The extra twenty years in age? Your eye for the smallest of minutiae approaches supernatural levels.”

“No, Cyrano, you smartass,” Cal snorted. “Bruj has
FUCK YOU, BAT-GWAI
tattooed down his arm.”

“White devil, I do appreciate an accurate tattoo,” Robin drawled. “Did he have it done with you specifically in mind?”

Cal shrugged, but admitted without a grudging snarl or any sign of shame, “He said he did. He didn’t have it until he’d delivered here a few months. Told me no one was a shittier tipper than me.”

“What did you tip,” Robin asked, “that caused him an annoyance with you of such profound levels that he’d mark his skin for life thanks to you and only you?”

“Tip?” Cal snorted. “I don’t tip. No one tips me at work. I’m just paying it forward.”

“He was clearly not a delivery person of any sort, ours or anyone else’s, not with what he’s wearing.” Niko was examining him at a range that would capture any and all details . . . and soak up the odor of barbecued meat with
the effectiveness of a sponge. I took another step back. “He was a security guard.”

He reached for a brass name tag and unpinned it from the uniform. “Zachary Adams, from that ship docked at Pier Seventeen as a museum. The one Colonel DePry had built, the largest pleasure yacht at the time. Suspiciously too big with too many men needed to sail it. Naming it
The Nomad
, he took one cruise around the harbor and then the ship was gone. Sold, he said, to some rich duke in England more willing to pay enough men to sail and maintain it. A lie and all were well aware of the fact. While slavery was illegal in New York then, other places and people were lining up to buy slave ships.”

Another look was aimed at the burns and I turned my back on it. The body, the three of them. I’d listen and that would have to count as adequate for the job. “They are the size of shackles,” Niko confirmed. “There’s a faint tracery of burns trailing around his arms that are link-shaped. Chains. It’s why this ship is famous. One trip, its last as a slave ship, the prisoners rebelled, took over, forced the slavers to sail to the nearest port, and
The Nomad
ended up where it had started. There was a trial, not that one was needed, and the prisoners were freed, given the ship, and a crew to sail them home. They renamed her
Never Wander, Never Roam, Ever Free, Ever Home
. The South Street Seaport Museum had an exhibition quoting some people from the day saying that was a poem and a bad one at that, not the name of a ship. Considering very few of the freed slaves spoke more than a word or two of English, I don’t think they did that badly. Regardless, once they were home, they sent the ship back with the crew. They never wanted to see another ship to their dying day. The crew brought her back to New York, simply called her
Ever
and eventually the museum bought her.”

“Sad story. Happy ending. Humanity at its worst and best. Now I’m getting the fuck out of here.” I couldn’t handle the seared stench any longer. “As an arrow pointing ‘I am here. Come and face me,’ it gets the job done. Lazarus wants us on the ship. Tonight, late, we go.” I was
going as I spoke, flashlight showing the way, moving down the hall and halfway to gone. “We need flash bangs, other supplies, the kind you two don’t have yet. Haven’t needed.” I was at the door to the stairs and ready to head down. “My supplier doesn’t know me yet. She’d shoot me if I asked to buy a firecracker from her. We’ll have to hit up the Kin or see if Robin has contacts with the good stuff.”

“Where are you going? Now, I mean. Where are you going?” Niko called after me as I started down the stairs.

“Don’t know and, as long as it’s not here in this hall or your place”—because of course we’d left the door open behind us and the smell would be in there now—“don’t care.”

And I didn’t.

Didn’t fucking care at all.

Robin, toga and all, followed me while Niko and Cal packed up more weapons. He’d suggested we could stay at his place until he talked to several somewhat illegal people about several excessively illegal things. I hadn’t believed that ludicrous a statement came out of his mouth. “They know your place, the shadow included.
Everyone
in the city knows your place,” I snorted. “Orgy central. The weasels don’t have to know your face like they know Cal’s and mine. They need one glimpse they held on to from the sewers and every nonsupernatural shadow will point them straight to your penthouse.” I shook my head and limped on. “
Nuns
teaching Catholic school know and have been to your place.”

“And most who visit lost their virginity there, I can assure you.”

Maybe that’s why he had died in fire and flames, burned at a functional substitute for a stake.

As it turned out, Goodfellow had no problem hailing a cab in a silk sheet toga when, fully dressed, I couldn’t get but a few to admit I existed and those few veered into the next lane over to get farther away from me. “What is it? Do I have 666 stamped on my forehead?” I demanded, getting in the backseat of the taxi with him. The driver, who hadn’t glanced once at Robin’s toga, raised his eyes to the rearview mirror for a look when he heard me bitching. The inside of the cab was instantaneously drowned in the cologne of an entire ocean of
fear sweat. “I haven’t had this much of a problem until I came here,” I complained. Here being 2005.

“I surmise, and this is but the wildest of assumptions based on no evidence whatsoever, that it’s your face. Keep in mind the wildest of assumptions and no evidence portions and take it with a grain, no, an entire shaker of salt.”

“What the hell . . .” I gave up and slammed back against the seat, folding my arms. “It’s in mind. I’ve taken an amount of salt so damn large it would kill me if I had a heart condition. Now tell me.”

Robin gave an address to the cabbie whose hands I could see shaking on the steering wheel. “One problem, the smallest you could imagine, infinitesimal really,” he offered with his widest car salesman smile. “Odor? Damp? Dead fish in the glove compartment? Ridiculous, hand to God, this car was never submerged in the Hudson.”

“But it could conceivably, in the craziest of worlds, have something to do with the fact . . . did I say infinitesimal?” I growled and I put a heavy hit of Auphe in it. He sighed, “Your neck appears as if you were strangled, hanged, strangled again, and then suspended headfirst into a vat of a few thousand leeches.”

“You son of a—”

“But I wasn’t lying”—he kept on. Why not? He had only his own personal strangulation to lose—“when I said that was the smallest consideration if a consideration at all. The main reason is your face.”

“My face? What’s wrong with my face?” I pressed.

“It would be most accurately described, by people that don’t know you or will know you, judgmental people who assess others by purely unimportant physical attributes such as skin color, weight . . .” By now I had unfolded my arms, made a fist and was pulling it back to let it fly. “Fine. Try to spare a person’s feelings,” he huffed. “No good deed goes unpunished.” He shifted in my direction to face me and poked a finger in the center of my forehead. “It’s this. What you’re doing with your face.
The best label would be,” he paused, then gave a decisive nod.

“Murder face.”

I wasn’t counting the reasons, good ones, that I deserved to be suicidal, resigned, and insane, but I’d thought I was hiding it from Niko and especially from Cal. I didn’t try with Robin. I had been doing the best twenty-one some odd years of conning and lying had taught me. With everything I was attempting to do and to not do, I wouldn’t have been surprised if an emotion had slipped through my mask a few times, the resignation, the despair, but this made no sense. “I don’t have a—”

“Murder face. Yes, you do. You could go with madness face—it’s appropriate, but murder face is slightly more accurate. It says that you are on your way to murder someone or you have murdered someone or you desperately want to and will murder someone as soon as that someone hurries up and looks at you in the most minute of wrong manners. Murder face,” he rattled off without hesitation or any other indication of doubt in his appraisal.

The cab stopped at a building on a corner and Goodfellow paid the cabbie. As with his sword, having no wallet on him, dressed as he was in a sheet, I didn’t know where he’d been keeping that Black Amex card and wad of cash, and I wasn’t curious about it in the least. If he’d tried to tell me, I either would’ve run or shot myself. I was finding on an hourly basis more and more reasons to go with the inevitable and shooting myself.

Starting down the sidewalk, he continued as if he hadn’t stopped. “It’s a billboard that screams ‘I have a day pass from the Hospital for the Homicidally Insane, and I earned it by dismembering everyone else in my group therapy session,’ ‘Death row is my summer home,’ ‘I hunt to prevent overpopulation—ever notice how incredibly overpopulated the world is?’, ‘Charles Manson has a restraining order against me,’ ‘I have the mind of a genius, the heart of a poet, and the liver of an alcoholic—they’re in the three jars on my shelf,’ ‘Mary had a little
lamb, eating a baby sheep is wrong, Mary was tasty though,’ ‘The Apocalypse came, saw I was already here, and left screaming.’”

We had rounded the building at the corner and walked on three more blocks. Robin came to a halt in front of a black marble building, not that tall, but it gave the impression it was expensive to the point that there was no sense in making it taller as no one was left in the world who was rich enough to afford another floor. He nodded at the doorman, a tall, thin man with dark skin, perfectly round inhuman yellow eyes, and what could be the tips of white hair or tiny feathers showing beneath his uniform cap. He, despite the title, did not open the door. Goodfellow moved to an array of security crap the likes of which I’d not seen. There were retinal scans, fingerprint scans, a hair for DNA analysis, and fifty or sixty different codes to be entered.

The door opened by itself and the doorman said, “Congratulations on the escape of a grisly death and the devouring of your soul, Mr. Goodfellow.”

“Thank you. Your manners in the face of disappointment are impeccable as always, Mr. Kikiyaon.” There wasn’t any humor there. The puck was uncommonly polite and, of course, tipped him. Cal should take a lesson. I should take a lesson. I did tip now, but no one would call me a good tipper without swallowing their tongue. “I have two other guests coming. Male. One with a blond braid and one that looks like this one’s younger brother. Please do not eat the soul of that one. I will understand the temptation, trust me when I say more understanding I could not be, but they are both my guests. I will make it up to you. Ah, before I go.” He tipped him again. “Consider this to be from the one with the black hair. We would all die waiting a vast infinity of years until the universe fell dark and all life perished before he would do it himself. And, quite frankly, I don’t think you would care for how his soul tasted.”

He gave the doorman a shallow bow that was returned with a bare tilt of the head and then we were inside, the doors shutting silently behind us. “Before you
ask, he’s an African soul cannibal. They are excellent in the field of security. Now”—he ignored the elevators like anyone who didn’t want to be trapped in one like a roach in a roach motel, and headed for a door that led to the stairs—“should I go on?”

“No,” I said grimly. A “murder face” was going to be harder to hide than other emotions if I was walking around in broad daylight unaware I was wearing one.

“It will pass,” he said, his voice echoing in the stairwell as solemnly as if we stood in a church. Not that the oldest pagan alive would care about church etiquette, but it reminded me of that. “You’ve only been wearing it since we escaped Lazarus and it’s also been off and on, when Niko and your emo clone weren’t watching. You said Lazarus wasn’t there at the explosion, but he is Vigil. I do think the same as you. He is as responsible for what happened to Niko and to me.”

I asked what had been gnawing at me since the explosion. And repeatedly since. I’d had the thought about Niko and me being together again, a little different, a lot the same, in our next reincarnation, and how it bothered me to lose any memories of any lives I’d spent with him, but I’d be human next time. No more Auphe racial memory, and lose them I would. We would be family and together as always though . . . but not Robin.

Pucks don’t reincarnate. If they did Goodfellow would’ve told us by now.

“What happens to pucks when they die?” I didn’t look at him when I asked. I, fuck, I just couldn’t.

A warm hand gripped my shoulder. “That is a tale for another time.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Another time,” he reiterated firmly.

He didn’t know. For Robin any story he could tell was for now; waiting was not in his vocabulary when it came to bragging and stories and tall tales. If we didn’t save him, he was gone. There might be puck heavens. He’d mentioned being on Mount Olympus, the Elysium Fields, Valhalla, all heavens in their own right. Didn’t that mean he could go there when he died? Or did he have to be alive and have living gods or goddesses themselves open the door and invite him to the party? When he died was he just no more? Niko and I, we’d never see him again, but a Goodfellow that was no more—that fucked up my life, all my lives to come, fucked up my world.

“Okay. Yeah, okay.” I wiped painfully dry eyes as I wouldn’t let this shithole of a world
make
me cry. It could kiss my ass a thousand times over first. Straightening from where I’d begun to slump, I started to climb the endless stairs again.

Goodfellow’s hand remained on my shoulder, keeping me from moving. “I do have a tale for now.” He added, “And a need to breathe.” He sat on the stair above us and pulled me down next to him. He clasped his hands in his lap, tight enough for his knuckles to whiten. His eyes stayed fixed on them. “There was—oh what there was—in the oldest of days and ages and times and beyond the dreams of gods that did not yet exist.”

His lips curved but not in what I’d label nostalgia or amusement. “That’s how stories first began. That was the birth of ‘Once upon a time.’” He cleared his throat. “In those oldest of days and ages and times came the First to think, to have thoughts, not that they cared to use them. They preferred the killing and slaughtering of the animals that inhabited the land then. Or themselves. Either would do. A time after that was born the Second to think, to have thoughts, and he cared very much to use them. He also greatly enjoyed killing and slaughtering but not of his own kind, as he was the only one of his own kind. As he didn’t know of the First, as the world was large, and their meeting unlikely, he made another Second. He thought it would be a toy and torturing and slaughtering it to be the best of entertainment. What he
didn’t know is that what he made was himself. Identical physically, mentally, even in his memories. They were the same and as willing murderers they wished to be. They were equally balanced, for when you are the same, how can you defeat each other? Disappointed, the first of the Second left the second of the Second, not to see him again for hundreds of thousands of years.”

Glancing off to the side as if he saw something, he went on. “Second of the Second, same in his digust and disappointment as same as the same is the same, went in the opposite direction. Years passed. Too many to count, but eventually the second of the Second noticed he was changing. His thoughts, his ideas were different. He had new memories. His own and no one else’s. That didn’t make him less bloodthirsty. It took many more years, a race called humans, and other races called
paien
to develop to show him what rocks, trees, and prehistoric sloths could not. But that is not this story. This story is when he first noticed new thoughts, new ideas, new memories, but one thought didn’t occur to him. If he had new memories, then there were more to be made. He couldn’t rely on those of the first Second being all that made up the world. Not that it mattered, as the first of the Second had never known of the First. Had no memories of them. Didn’t know they existed. And neither did I.”

Unlocking his hands, he rubbed one over his face. “No one these days can say that. No one can say they didn’t know of the Auphe, no one but me. Five of them came out of this madness, induced a rent in reality, sank claws in me before I could think to move, and dragged me through the gaping tear that screamed as if it were dying. I fell up and down, sideways. It turned me inside out and twisted every organ inside me. We came out hovering over a live volcano, and they dropped me before beginning their version of tag. They were not polite enough either to wait for me to stop vomiting from the ‘trip,’” he said bitterly.

I knew I had to be paler than my usual blizzard white. I felt like vomiting myself. To know about the Auphe and
have them take you or chase you or both, that was a horror few lived through. To have it happen and not know of their existence, to be dragged behind them through the bleeding, screaming ether as you were turned inside out. To not know what they wanted when everyone now knew it had been the worst death they could give you. No wonder he had a fucking phobia of gating. “How . . . Fuck, how’d you survive?”

He waved a hand, dismissing the question. “There was a ledge. I’m agile enough that the Cirque du Soleil come to me for lessons. I caught the edge of it. I ran. I fought. I made weapons. Mainly I ran like a swan with Zeus on her tail feathers.” He shrugged. “I am me, after all. But all of that is nothing compared to the moral of the story.” Leaning his shoulder against mine, he gave me a solemn promise, “It was never about trust. I have and will always trust you. I have and will always trust Niko. The sole reason I didn’t tell you about the gates in years to come is that you managed to get me through one when I was poisoned and dying, as you said. And once it was done, it was done. I no doubt told myself I was beyond idiocy to sooner die than gate with someone I have trusted a thousand lives over. And I am sorry I didn’t tell you in the sewer. I knew this life has been one of your worst, and I should’ve known that trust would be something beyond value to you, especially as you never had a reason to doubt it before in all our days and years and aeons.