Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (36 page)

More than that though, Cal without Robin to teach him, yes, life was dead set on killing him personally, but all the more reason not to take it so seriously. Laugh. Have some fun. You’re a virgin because you don’t want to make more baby Auphe to eat the maternity ward nurses? I know this meadow nymph. She can have kids only by
pollination
. I’ll set you up. You’re a monster? Ha! You wish, Damien. Go down five blocks to the Goth club and emo it up with them. Whine about no one understanding how evil you are. Get that goat’s head pentacle tattooed on your ass, stock up on eyeliner. You’re a four-month-old puppy thinking his spiked collar makes him badder than all the big dogs who’d swallow you whole, spiked collar and all. Stop your moaning, a Spielberg Gremlin could kick your ass, and serve me some decent wine for a change.

“Caliban, you asshole, don’t make me shoot you in the leg.”

Niko had to think I wasn’t a monster. He was my brother. But Robin, long before he’d ever told us about reincarnation, someone not my brother telling me that?
Wanting to be a friend? Proving, and we’d made him prove it more times than anyone else would’ve tolerated, that we could trust him? Showing me life was dark, but sometimes the best parties happen when the lights go down. Getting me
laid
? Without Robin doing all that, being that friend, showing me shit I never wanted to see but had made me laugh it was so disgusting. Without Robin there would be no Caliban. No me. I don’t know what I would’ve been, a self-fulfilling prophecy of the dark, the grim, the monstrous—someone with less humor and faith in me to fight the Auphe tendencies when they came. Turning his back on Cal was the same as doing what I had. Taking my gun and putting it to my head, but this time the trigger would be pulled, it would just be Robin who was doing it.

And he didn’t know.

Fuck.
Try to stop an assassin, resurrect your family, and you ended up in a goddamn soap opera.

We’d left Bridge and Broad Street and were now turning on Pearl. Then it would be Wall Street, South Street, and Lazarus. We’d kill his ass, with extreme prejudice, and finally I’d go home. I’d find out if my letters worked, if the ones Robin said he’d continue to send, had a service set up to continue to send if something happened to him, and of course his sly and sneaky self, better than any letter, if just one thing had worked. If I’d fixed it.

Or if I’d go back to the beginning. Stand by the rubble, blackened and cold by the time I returned, pay my respects. Put Niko’s hand-sized statue of Buddha on the street in front of it, throw a handful of the tackiest brightest colored glitter speckled condoms on the burnt mountain of bricks, say see you soon and so long for good. Buy a slice of cheese pizza, no meat, eat it, and then put the Desert Eagle’s muzzle back under my chin and blow out my brains.

It’d be one of the two.

Guess I’d see.

“
Stop
! Caliban, Jesus Christ, please, just fucking
stop
!”

A hand grabbed my arm and halted me in my tracks. He was lucky I’d heard him behind me, asking me to stop, and had been ignoring it. If I hadn’t, I’d have put a knife in his gut. On edge didn’t cover my emotional state right now. I glanced at his hand and he let go of me instantly. “What.” I said it flatly. I didn’t ask it. It wasn’t a question as if there was an answer I didn’t care about knowing.

“I’m sorry.” He bent his head to carefully study the asphalt beneath our feet. We didn’t say that too often, either of us. Cal’s own ponytail was losing strands and sat a little lopsided on the nape of his neck. “I didn’t know that would happen. I just thought . . . nightmares. We both had them. We both slept under hotel beds and had nightmares every night when we came back from”—he looked back up at me and swallowed—“that place. So I slacked off, what with hating you like the world’s worst case of crotch rot. I sat with you, but I didn’t watch you.” He gripped the bottom of his leather jacket and straightened it or, as it was already straight, made it crooked. Now it matched the rest of his unbalanced look. Wrinkled T-shirt from repeated yanking of cloth by fisted hands. Jeans with a half-undone zipper. A streak of gun oil along his jaw.

Behind him by at least a block I could see Niko and Robin arguing. Niko for giving Cal a chance to make it right, and Robin for keeping him the hell away from me. I could take care of myself against almost anyone after the eight years I’d told him about and Goodfellow knew it. But I couldn’t do anything to Cal without doing it to myself and he knew that too.

I’d learned to use sarcasm before I’d learned to use a knife. I could depend on doing verbal damage. I didn’t need to physically hurt him.

“I didn’t know that . . . whatever that was would . . . shit, I didn’t know. And I am sorry and not because Niko . . . because my big brother is disappointed in me. Or because that puck you know is pissed enough that he would’ve already cut out my heart and shoved it down the garbage disposal if that wouldn’t make you,
alakazam . . . poof, disappear, never existed those eight years to be this you,” he said. “I’m sorry as no one should have to go through that, whatever that was, besides terrifying as shit.”

“That’s a lie.
Mostly
a lie.” I gave him a grim smile, the odd grimmer than grim as the corners of your mouth turn down, not up, but somehow it’s still a smile. “You are sorry that you made Niko
ashamed
of you. Disappointment falls pretty short of how he looks at you now.” Pull of the trigger and bull’s-eye. He actually staggered back a step. “You aren’t sorry about Robin; that’s true since you know he can’t do anything to you. Physically.” Cal didn’t know Robin well enough to imagine the damage he could do with his words.

“For the rest of it, I liked the phrasing. No one should have to go through that. Not that you, Caliban, shouldn’t have had to go through that. Lie by omission but a lie all the same. What you meant was
you
shouldn’t have to go through that. Uncontrollable screaming, panic, horror, insanity, that doesn’t look that fun when you realize they’re making one in your size, that it’s coming for you. But you let it happen and now it will. It’ll be rap, rap, rapping at your chamber door.
That’s
why you’re sorry. Now you know seriously bad shit is going to hit you in eight years. Shit so horrific that it’ll make those nightmares of two years in Auphe hell, for real and for true, not that bad.” He flinched, at the truth of that or at our old childhood saying of for real and for true, or both.

“You’ll get to relive that bad shit because a hateful, spiteful bastard of your younger self lets you. And you don’t even know half of it. You saw the screaming and mental breakdown, you have no idea what was under that. What I felt. What I feel. You think it couldn’t be worse, what you saw, right? But it was. It still is. Now. We’re talking blah blah and I’m feeling it. I never stopped feeling it. I just stopped screaming. You know what the best part is?” I jammed a thumb into the lowest part of his stomach right about the waist of his jeans where the bladder’s located. I didn’t do it with enough force to hurt. It was just sufficient pressure to remind
him for a block or two. “I pissed myself.” I smiled, sharper . . . to cut. “Have fun with that.”

Robin and Niko, neither had said anything about it. Cal had been too far from the couch and me to notice. I hadn’t pissed myself during the Tumulus dreams and I’d been sixteen and feral. I was twenty-six and insane now and, considering everything, I’d have been surprised if I hadn’t emptied my bladder, ruining a hellaciously tacky but expensive sofa in the bargain.

“Try telling me you’re sorry when you’re sorry for the right reason. If you ever are sorry. Hell, if you ever fucking know the reason.” I started to walk away, then paused to add, “You and me, we’re not the same and in some way, I don’t know how, I don’t think we ever were. I’m not a monster. I know that. But you? You are.”

I left him frozen, his mouth open. I’d killed a junkie in self-defense, but I’d let him die slow, drop by crimson drop. He’d murdered kids. He deserved it. Some people would agree that he had death coming, but the slow part, that was torture and that was wrong. I thought it was punishment, well earned. I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt over it. I was a predator. We didn’t do guilt. But even I, twenty-six and not only a lion, but a man-eating one, wouldn’t have done what Cal had. I wouldn’t have hurt one of our own.

That’s what monsters did.

Of course it took the rest of the walk to the
Ever
before it struck me that I was doing what I was afraid Robin was going to do: fucking this kid up. He and I had our monster issues off and on for a long time, but eventually outgrew them. Learned the truth of what we were and what we weren’t. We weren’t human, but we weren’t monsters either. That’s how it had gone.

How would it go when your future self, and who would know you better, tells you that you
are
a monster? It was safe to say it could possibly put a damper on outgrowing that fear or recognizing the truth if it bit you in the ass. I, future I, thinks I, present-day I, am a monster therefore I am one. I think therefore I am.
Puto me ergo monstrum monstrum.
Just as I’d been telling myself for two years now.

Cal wasn’t the Cal I’d been at eighteen. But at eighteen I hadn’t had future Cals popping in, telling my brother things he then wouldn’t tell me. My brother who told me everything and always had, he was now listening to someone else over me. Then strange pucks are dumped on my couch, when I wouldn’t have known pucks were real, and this other Cal is saying here’s your new best friend. You’ve at least nine years to bond, party, and kill things together. Enjoy.

This asshole Cal, because it’s not me—I wouldn’t steal my younger self’s brother, shake my life up and down like a snow globe, push people I didn’t know or trust in my home—is saying, sorry if you have an opinion, don’t
care, and this is how it’s going to be. And the one person I’d had in my life, the one and only person that cared if I lived or died, the one who was my mother, father, brother, and all I ever had, all I’d always known I ever would have, he was suddenly split between three people. Everyone knew something I didn’t. And the one person who was the only person in my life was still the only person in my life, but I wasn’t the only one in his, not anymore.

I wouldn’t have behaved any better.

I might have behaved worse.

But that was thoughts for when shadow weasels weren’t chasing us across the deck of the
Ever
.

We’d came across one security guard, choked him out, handcuffed, gagged, and hidden him in the trunk of his own car. They really needed two guards to get good coverage by the ship, but I presumed number two was the unfortunate son of a bitch who had been hanging in Niko and Cal’s hall. Niko had informed me that, yes, he had removed the body. Had he lost the use of half his brain in the future that would make me think that of him now? Then came the great awkward moment when he realized he’d spoken before he thought, and that he’d lost
all
the use of his brain when he had
died
in a massive explosion in front of his brother’s eyes.

The
Ever
had dock lines—that’s what Goodfellow called them—securing her to the dock, but she also had a wide sweep of shallow wooden stairs built for tourists that led straight up to the deck. Handy. We didn’t bother to sneak or hide. Weasels were already slithering up and down the far sides of the stairs, some curled up like sleepy cats. There should’ve been lights around, up high, keeping the ship fairly light whether it was night or not. They had gone dark. From the smell of ozone in the air, that had been a simple trick for our favorite assassin. I sighed. I wanted it to be simple. I’d expected it to be. Inject three to a hundred different
paien
DNA samples in a human member of the Vigil and it could be impressive . . . if you gave him a decade or two to work with the mess roiling around inside him. My Robin’s
contacts said at most he’d had a week, the Vigil had been that desperate, the experiment never tested, no one had any idea what the results would be. I’d been surprised their guinea pig hadn’t melted into a puddle of goo. Simple had been the game plan . . . before the explosion. Afterward nothing was simple, but I did expect Lazarus to go down quick and easy and be the least of my problems.

The shadow weasels on their own, the slinky bastards, had proved me wrong there. Then the lightning, and, yeah, that didn’t enter the category of simple or easy. What Lazarus himself would be, I might have to unveil my backup after all, gate the shithead into oblivion, and hope Cal’s mind didn’t explode and he ended up on the deck sucking his thumb or, better and better, he went Auphe early.

The rough voice from the sewers abruptly split the air. “Death waits for no one.”

Grade A megalomaniacal psychopath. Those were the ones that when you put them down and finally, finally, finally walked away, they’d have a chunk of your flesh clamped in their dead jaws. “Is it always like this?” Niko asked quietly. “A clichéd Old West gunslinger shootout, where you face each other, trade insults, and see who precisely is Doc Holliday and who is dead?”

“Only when they’re bigger, badder, and crazier than us and like to play with their food,” I answered. “It’s not a good sign.”

“Do not keep Death waiting.” It boomed, a voice you would hear across battlefields.

At that the weasels stopped playing and lazing and came at us in the same pack style they’d used in the sewers. Goodfellow grin, sword out, “I’ve been looking forward to this, you sleazy evil
porni gious
.” He ran up the stairs with a bounce to his step that said he hadn’t seen a good fight in a long time. The sewer didn’t count. We hadn’t been armed for our particular opponents. We’d made some changes there.

We followed him, Niko also with a sword, Cal with his Desert Eagle and me with mine. Isn’t it cute when people dress
and
arm their identical toddlers the same? The
weasels were at our heels until we turned the high powered flashlights, nothing like we’d had in the sewer, on them over our shoulders and they squealed. Some faded back to a safer range and a few faded out of existence. We kept running and aimed the lights away. They were effective to a point, could even destroy a few weasels, but not all of them. There were uncertain whispers behind us, then a shrill razor-edged whistling, aggressive and predatory. They weren’t laughing now, not like before. Now they were mad, which made it more surprising we’d survived them in the tunnel and the sewer when we hadn’t known that they were merely playing then.

Dodging them, neither Cal nor I fired; we’d told them how useless that was. The four of us were nearly to the center of the ship when we gathered back-to-back in a loose circle. We waited as the weasels surrounded us from all sides, the whistling getting higher and higher in pitch. Watching them until, shadows or not, we’d seen their hindquarters bunch in preparation to leap on us, a clan of hyenas rushing a wounded zebra calf to mound and wash over it, vanishing its body from sight as they tore it to pieces.

But they weren’t hyenas and this wasn’t Animal Planet.

“Now!” Goodfellow called. “Curtain is down! And the lights are on!” We’d all dropped our weapons already and put in the ear plugs. Now we put a hand in each pocket we’d turned into goody bags, pulled two pins with each hand and threw them out before throwing ourselves flat, closing our eyes, and covering our ears. A second and a half later someone bombed the
Ever
. With eyes closed, face pressed to the deck, hands covering ears and ear plugs, it was what I’d imagine being at ground zero would be when someone dropped a nuclear bomb. Flash bangs. Military grade light and noise stun grenades. They more than lived up to their name. The light that crept through the space between my face and the deck lit up my closed lids bright red. But the light itself, it was white, a pure intense white, nothing like flames and fire, nothing like a real explosion. I kept that
repetition going in my mind. Not an explosion. Not the explosion. Not my explosion.

I didn’t open my eyes until I felt a tap on my shoulder. Not my explosion. No one would be tapping me there. I cautiously opened my eyes, ears ringing despite our precautions and let Robin pull me to my feet. I did a quick turn and scan. There wasn’t a single shadow weasel left. Every last one wiped out. That’s what working with the proper tools did for you. Niko and Cal were up too and Cal was the least sullen and depressed I’d seen him in hours. He was grinning, not a huge one, but me grinning at that age was a miracle. “That was fucking
fantastic
,” he declared/shouted to be heard over our temporary semideafness.

“Impressive, carrying the light of a storm in your hands to kill my pets. Pity for you I have more pets.”

The figure stepped out of the shadows, a faint halo of lightning circling above him. It was enough to let us see without our flashlights and from what I knew, this bastard, who carried around an entire pet store as to not run out, could see in the dark.

This was him. This was the Vigil’s last hope: Lazarus. He stood, still as a stone, as he stared at us—or at Cal rather. Killing me was too little and too fucking late for the Vigil, although he’d treated himself to a little entertainment by trying anyway. But that had been all it could be for an assassin, a distraction. He had a purpose and that, to an assassin, would always come first.

It was Cal who was the true target.

Over six and a half feet in height, six eight or six nine, I thought, and thickly muscled under his natural brown leather shirt and pants, medium-sized strangely familiar ivory tube shaped beads were scattered through his hair, grouping it all into at least fifty or sixty separate dangling long twists. It made it difficult to tell what color his hair was—brown, the darkest brown you could get without edging close to black. It was streaked with a deep rusty red, but the red didn’t look . . . right. There was something about it. The whole mass of it fell past his shoulders, unseen in length, except for a few stray pieces that
fell midway to the front between his chest and lower abdomen. It was matted enough to be dreadlocks. Not from the texture but from dried substance mixed in it—blood. From the smell, it was fresh, no more than two days old. That explained the red streaks. There were beads, too . . . or tubes, they had their own distinct odor, one I didn’t recognize. I’d come across similar but nothing exactly the same. Some of them were whole, some cracked and twisted and the color was not old ivory, but fresh and dazzling white. Then I realized they weren’t beads. They were bones. Finger bones carefully stripped of flesh and polished. The chalky tang, a different odor of death, told me the remnants of life that lingered in them were fresh, no more than two days dead. With Cal alive beside me, the blood and bone pointed to nothing but bad.

Random kill . . . for
bones
.

A purposeful kill to take what he needed to look this way. What way this was or why he chose it, it had to do with the blood of one of the
paien
injected in him. Its DNA changing him as my DNA had once changed me.

Holy shit. I was beginning to think the Vigil had gone further than they’d planned. This wasn’t the assassin they’d wanted, one with a single goal. This wasn’t an assassin. This was a murderer of anything and everything for no reason at all with several types of
paien
genes that had gone overboard and then some in doing their job in remaking him. They had given him abilities that could make him a killer without limitation. They had screwed up in the deadliest of manners. They, in wanting to put me down—remove what they thought I was from the world—had done the opposite and made something closer to what they’d labeled me.

Monster.

The Vigil had once rubber-stamped me a monster waiting to happen and then restamped me a monster scheduled for destruction. Yet at my very worst when I was twisted up into the mind and body of what the Auphe had half brainwashed me into being and let the other half, their genes, do the rest, I had blood-soaked,
nightmare urges. I had cravings, for slaughter, murder, hunting prey that could speak but it was their screams I wanted. So many urges, so much blood to be had, so many kills I wanted to make, but not one of them had ever been for
fucking fashion.

As he took a step toward us, I could see that his eyes were a pale, pale blue; that if they’d been any lighter they would’ve been white . . . until they spiderwebbed with jagged veins red as blood. In the air around him was a faint whisper. It came and grew until it was the sound of men shouting, metal clashing against metal, and the call of crows, the ones that circled the battlefields that had been their banquets. They would wait for the fall of a blood-covered fighter, then instantly plummet down, perch on unmoving chests, and use their sharp beaks to pluck hungrily at dead eyes. That’s when they came. He had said he had more pets.

Shadow crows flew out of his chest, through his skin and shirt without touching either with the pointed beaks, black claws, wings that were faintly outlined with the ripple of feathers. They kept coming, a river of them with no signs of stopping. Up they went, the new weasels, and I raised my eyes to follow. Above us and the size of a storm cloud, they wheeled, shades against the city’s light-polluted orange night sky. The circle of them was wide and thick enough for thousands of the scavengers, all waiting for that first single fall to descend and gorge.

“He appears to be a Viking,” Niko said quietly, “if that wasn’t impossible as he’s
paien
now, not human any longer. The sound effects and show above us, however, are evidence he’s both.”

“How does pumping a guy full of monster blood get you a Viking?” Cal asked, his Glock was already out and pointed at Lazarus. “Could someone tell me that? You know what, never mind. I don’t give a shit. And don’t bother playing Kevin Costner any of you. I can save myself.” He pulled the trigger and shot Lazarus several times in the face. Like Nik had always taught us, in a fight use every advantage. When you’re fighting for your life there’s no such thing as playing dirty, only playing to live.

But I beat him by pulling the trigger of the AR-15 I’d obtained, along with a few extra magazines tucked in my jacket. I sent four hundred rounds a minute toward Lazarus and I hoped I’d have a chance to rub it in Mini Me’s face. If we got past him hating me, to where I could mock him a little without getting shot in the face myself. It could happen. If I came off as smug or conceited, it’d be all in good, wholesome fun.