Laughing, I mocked, “Sac up. Loki’s your friend, acquaintance, a person he knows—in the sense that he doesn’t hate you with everything in him and hasn’t killed you yet. I’m sure when ‘the Twilight of the Gods’ comes, he’ll let you hang out, eat, drink, and won’t remember at all you threatened to strip him of his trickster status, talent, and arms, not swords or daggers, his physical fucking arms.” I yawned and reached for more sausage before advising. “Just stay away from the stables. I hear bad things happen there when you can’t resist a horny stallion.”
I’d gone home later with a black eye that hurt like hell. Goodfellow could throw a punch. My ordinarily stoic brother—he’d been closer to a kid at Christmas than he’d ever been in his entire life. I slung an arm over his shoulder and he elbowed me in the ribs, big brother to little brother, when I’d said Loki would have to crown him queen for his contribution to the planned coup. He’d elbowed me a second time for talking trash about his new favorite god, and then kept on spinning out the plans for Ragnarok, his words tumbling over one another. This was my brother who thought one word was babbling as the minimal raise of an eyebrow was communication enough. He’d said it was something he hadn’t believed at first. Norse gods or any god, but with Loki . . . the Loki—with Ragnarok, he was a true believer. Converted. It was an experience he swore he wouldn’t forget.
He didn’t have to worry about that. Forgetting . . .
As two weeks later he was dead.
6
“How much of that story did you leave out?” Niko questioned.
Long story, a memory both only weeks behind me and yet a long time to come. I’d stopped walking, caught in the flash of the heat of that fire, the knowledge that crumbling ash was all that was left of my brother. I closed my eyes, took several deep breaths and gave myself a fiercely hard inner shake to refocus on when I was right now. To concentrate on what I had to do to stop an inferno. . . .
Eight years before it happened.
This Niko, not mine—no, he was waiting for an answer. And this Cal . . . if Loki thought I’d been an obnoxious, suicidal little shit at twenty-six, what would he think of this version of me eight years younger? I’d be willing to go a round of rock, paper, scissors on which of us held him down and which of us beat the shit out of him. Tapping one hand with first and middle finger spread in a V on top of a round fist must’ve had an air of cagy enthusiasm around it as Cal was currently watching me with fixed and frozen suspicion.
I put my hands back in my pockets. “Jesus. Give me a second.”
I’d left out the gating—they couldn’t know that before it happened to this Cal. That could screw up everything in a hundred different ways. I hadn’t said Goodfellow’s name or that he was a puck and trickster, no mention of killing all the Auphe, of my eyes turning red, or reincarnation. Holy hell, definitely not the reincarnation. I was boggled about that at least once a week despite it being six months after that revelation. I’d text Nik a few times when he was teaching history or at the dojo—few, several, every week when the revelation blew up in my brain on no particular schedule. We developed a short-hand. I’d text him: schizophrenic?? He’d text back: Not today. Try again tomorrow. It worked for us.
Counting them up in my head, I was certain that I’d managed to keep the important parts, buried and silent. “How much did I leave out? About three-fourths? To keep the future safe, leaving out seventy-five . . . eighty, ninety-five percent at most isn’t unreasonable. And trust me, if you knew what I know, you’d prefer my math.” I wanted to shrug, but I was stiff and aching from being thrown against the asphalt in the explosion. It had been hours ago, for me, only hours . . . it was close to unfathomable. I was tired too, exhausted enough to have to concentrate to keep from stumbling once I started walking again. The Kyntalash was treating me like a D battery when I was thinking I was a AAA at best.
“Sounds like all one big lie to me. You—and I don’t give a shit about your ‘superior-practice-makes-perfect’ knife skills—you took on Loki, god of Chaos, with what? A gun and some lame trash talk?” Cal scoffed, not impressed and equally not convinced.
Had I looked that perpetually pissy all the time? Did I still? I snapped a quick picture of him with my phone and then of myself while still walking. Flipping back and forth between them, I muttered a few Greek curse words picked up from Robin under my breath and then deleted the shots. That was a truth that didn’t need documenting for anyone to find. And it was badass, not pissy, I assured myself silently.
Bad. Ass.
“It was prime trash talk and I shot a god in the dick six times. Not to mention the fish eggs. You can weaponize that crap.” Without gating, surviving Loki long enough for Goodfellow to intercede was part of the ninety percent . . . ninety-five . . . whatever . . . that the CIA would label redacted. Need to know and no one needs to know who doesn’t already.
Junior dismissed the entire thing with an identical lack of interest in gods that I had. “How about something more important than parties and fucking finger food? Like, I don’t know, how are we going to find this bastard who’s trying to kill me? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be here for? The keeping me alive thing?” he snapped. “Although I have to say if killing me erases you from the future, I have all the sympathy in the world for whoever it is because you are one massive asshole.”
Again with “asshole.” He was getting monotonous as hell with that. I was going to work on expanding my profanity and vulgarities, if I survived. This was what people or paien heard from me two seconds before I made them dead people or dead paien? I was embarrassed for myself. It was humiliating that I didn’t do better, try harder. I took my insults almost more seriously than my executions.
I had been going to tell him stay away from gods. Every bad thing you’ve heard about them is true. But he wouldn’t. Niko would, for now, always be too caught up in the wide wild world of mythology and Cal would be at his side as I had been. No need to try to change that. We’d survived my brother’s curiosity, and, for putting up with me, he’d more than earned his hobby/avocation.
Nik, my Nik, who hadn’t stopped being an endlessly questioning bastard from the day he’d read his very first word. Hadn’t stopped and wouldn’t have if not for me. I tore the memory to confetti for more than one reason and let the pieces drift away.
Instead of that advice, I flipped off toddler me and moved on. “Everyone tries to kill us sooner or later. We’re not a popular guy. I’ll get to the specifics of who this particular time when we’re off the street. I’m tired, my head is killing me, the Kyntalash is draining what energy I had left and every single word you say is a finger poking a hole in my brain, turning it into Swiss cheese. Now shut up for five fucking whole minutes and let this kick in.” I shook an empty bottle of Tylenol I took from my pocket. “Unless you want me to tell you every detail about Nik’s future sex life. I do his laundry—”
“His sex life?” Cal smirked. “Wait. Here’s something I want to hear. You do his laundry. Every time? I don’t do his laundry except as a birthday present and you’re Mr. Badass from a fabric softener future. Pathetic.”
“Hell, yeah, I do. He cooks, when I don’t order in. He still spars with me when I say I’ve gotten as good as it gets. Let’s let this go. He tells me I’m wrong and I am. I get better all the time, which keeps me alive. He keeps the rest of the place clean. He does it all and he’s my big brother. My lazy ass owes him everything. So, yeah, I do the laundry . . . but not because of that.”
I shot a confused Niko an amused glance. “I do it because one time after years and years of me living happily in my pigsty, Nik lost it. He was coming down the hall, looked at my room same as a thousand times before, but this time, for no reason, nothing new or changed, he lost his fucking mind. No monster in the world could break him, but my room did. By the time I heard him from outside where I was dumping the trash and ran back in, he was cursing me in languages I
don’t think exist. He’d sprayed lighter fluid on the mess in my room, which, bad luck for me, is everything in my room and had just thrown in a match.”
Fortunately, a year before he’d made me keep my weapons and ammo out in the sparring area since if I needed it in an emergency situation, in my room I’d never find it.
“Buying a new mattress, cleaning out the Salvation Army to replace my clothes, sneakers, combat boots, but couldn’t do anything about the one hundred and fifty issues of classic porn gone forever. Once was enough. Now I do his laundry and he doesn’t burn down my room—as long as I keep the door shut so he can’t see it.” Then I concluded Cal’s lesson in shutting up with a threat as nasty and god-awful as I currently felt. “I wash his sheets. He’s the boy toy of a very wealthy woman with, from what I can tell, an incredibly demanding sex drive. I’m a scratch-and-sniff story at your disposal.”
I leaned toward him and growled. “Now . . . shut . . . up.”
“You—” I’d never been one for shutting up and I’d forgotten how much worse I’d been at eighteen.
“Fine.” I shrugged. “Your fucking funeral. Your big brother who raised you all your life, your perfect brother you don’t only love but worship like a god deep down inside though you don’t let it slip. So you’re dying to know how a diet of carrot and wheatgrass juice makes his jizz smell on the sheets—”
“Shutupshutupshutupshutupshut—”
But I could be taught at that age, it seemed, if the method was traumatic enough, I thought, as satisfied as I could manage, considering why I was here. A hand covered both of our mouths from where Niko had slid up behind us. “I think we should all be quiet until we are home or I may set both of you, not your rooms, no, but the two of you on fire. I have a growing headache of my own.” Smart man, he didn’t begin to trust us on silence. He kept our mouths covered until we were in sight of their building.
Cal was speaking before Niko had a chance to wipe the saliva from his hand on his younger brother’s jackets. “Thanks, you dick.” He raised a hand as if to shove me.
I grinned and taunted in a good mom’s singsong introduction, “Once upon a time . . .”
That apparently made him think I might finish that story if pushed and instead of going with physical violence, he bit off, “You’ve just ruined any hope of my having a sex life ever,” Cal complained. “After that, I don’t want to touch my own dick and I will never let anyone else within fifty feet of it. Let the assassin kill me. I have no reason to live.”
“Get over it, King of Emo. Sooner or later you’ll get laid, stop buying pornographic comic books, and cancel your monthly delivery of vats of zit cream, you whiny virgin.” I went on in picture-perfect innocence to give him a tip. “And by the way, jacking off with gun oil not only ups your psycho sex-killer quotient, but it gives you a rash that is embarrassing as hell to explain to the nurse at the free clinic.”
“I do not—” I raised my eyebrows. He could lie to anyone, including Niko though that was uncommon and more uncommon that we pulled it off, but he couldn’t lie to me about my own unfortunate and embarrassing past. He switched tactics, proving we did have an ounce of self-preservation.
No matter what my new BFF Norse god had said about Cals in general.
• • •
The apartment Niko and Cal lived in now and I’d lived in years ago was within walking—running, to be more accurate—distance of Talley’s, which had almost saved my life once. You’ve got to love the “almost” there, but I said nothing aloud. That nightmarish experience was at least a year yet to come and if we changed anything about that at all, all worlds would die, not just mine.
Several blocks from the bar, lights were strobing on police cars. They were parked in front of the alley I’d stepped out of from the future into the past, the dark into the light. Nik and JV Cal gave it an uninterested look with Cal grumbling, “Shitty neighborhood,” and both kept moving. And it was. There could be any reason why the alley would have cops swarming, but there was a tickle at the base of my brain. I didn’t . . . not for a moment or two, then . . .
Oh yeah.
That incompetent crackhead junkie asshole, who hadn’t cared I’d been thrown back eight years through a blaze of light as strange and bright as a solar flare. He either didn’t give a shit or, craving a fix so badly he didn’t realize reality had twisted itself enough to dump me practically in his lap. A man with priorities, he ignored what should’ve looked like magic to him or an impossible manipulation of physics to anyone smarter—he’d merely jumped from his bed in a pile of garbage and tried to slit my throat. Priorities in plenty, skill, however, that he lacked five ways to fucking Sunday.
“Bad neighborhoods do make for great training grounds,” I replied carelessly. “And the dead guy murdered people. Murdered kids. Killed them for drugs. No loss.”
“How do you know that?” Cal questioned, his suspicion making a return in the twitch of his fingers toward the weapons concealed in his own leather jacket.
I shrugged and tapped my nose with a mocking curl of my lips. “You’ve got one skill”—that would change—“Wee Willy Wonka. Use it.”
He took a deep breath and I saw the moment the coagulation of hours-long death, the drugs released through every pore of the chemical-soaked body, the blood not of the addict alone, but the older blood on his knife and clothes. Blood of other people. The men, women, and children—too many to count. “That’s why I couldn’t smell the Grendel in you in the bar,” he said, it hitting him suddenly. “Because you smell like me.”
Then he tacked on with resentment in every tense line of his body. “And the Wonka shit is worse than Junior. I will kill you in your sleep, I swear to fucking God. I’ll shove Nik’s feather pillow so far down your throat that if you survive, you’ll shit an entire flock of live geese the next day.”
I nodded. Expecting a threat and not bothered by it, approving if forced to admit it—it wasn’t “asshole” and that was an improvement. But . . . holy shit, I’d always been a dick, hadn’t I? Made me want to give myself a proud pat on the back. “Like we ever had feather pillows,” I dismissed, avoiding a crack in the sidewalk wide and deep enough to swallow me whole. “Everything in Niko’s room, once we started making more money a few years from now by . . . ah . . . an occupation you’ll find out . . . everything Niko owned was . . . is hypoallergenic. If they sold surgically sterile pillows at our local store, he’d have had those.”
Good threat though. If I survived this, I was ripping off that one and several others for the future. It wasn’t stealing. Can’t steal from yourself, right?
“And, yeah, it’s the same reason you didn’t recognize my voice,” I affirmed. “No one recognizes their own voice.” I could see my old apartment/converted warehouse one block down. It was the same and nothing like I remembered. Memories are strange like that.
But it didn’t make me forget Cal. The goose insult had been a good one, worthy of swiping, but despite that, he was going to pay for it. What could I say? I held grudges against nearly everyone, myself included.
Equal opportunity son of a bitch, that was me.
I went on to add, offhand as I could get without caring a damn how fake it came off, “Not recognizing my smell I get. I do. But why you didn’t notice I was armed, heavily and noticeably to all but the blind, I put down to you being a lazy, cocky little shit. Cockier than you have any reason to be.”
“And you’re not?” His glares were becoming frequent enough I feared for our future eyesight.
“I’m not cocky. I’m legitimately that good, but no changing the subject.” I pointed up at nothing in particular, but if we’d been standing in the bar, it was where that fragment of mirror would be. “It doesn’t matter if you look up at Talley’s security mirror and don’t see a gun already out. I’m carrying four guns, I won’t count the knives, and you didn’t catch scent of the metal on any of them. I c
ould’ve put two bullets in the back of your head before you could drop the glass you were cleaning. A double tap special that Talleywhacker would’ve named a drink after to up the bar’s business.
“What comes through the door doesn’t need white hair and red eyes or to smell like a werewolf to be dangerous,” I moved on, tone reasonable. I wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t true. Cal thought he was dangerous, but he’d never met what he would become. And there were things out there more lethal than me at eighteen or twenty-six, whether he knew about them or not. I’d been stupid at his age to think differently. Thinking life wasn’t that hard to lose unless it was an Auphe coming through the door was his assumption, one that could’ve gotten us killed. I could’ve gotten him killed. That wasn’t a lie. I was older, more skilled, and could’ve killed him quicker than a snap of the fingers.
That we’d survived our first years in New York had been ninety-five percent skill. Easy was the farthest description from what the reality had been. The other five percent had been pure luck. I knew it was a part of our survival, as I knew Nik and I shouldn’t have lived through what we had—with the help of a trickster or not. The last thing I needed was my younger self believing that simply staying alive would be a walk in the park with monsters throwing rose petals at his fucking feet. He had to earn his future in order to have a future, and that meant fighting off death around every corner.
I flashed in front of Niko to pull one of Cal’s guns, our favorite Desert Eagle, out of his jacket before either of the two could move. I flipped the trigger guard around my finger gunslinger style in a way that would have had my Nik slapping the back of my head and spraining my trigger finger fiercely enough to need a splint. As our lives became more dangerous, he’d become more and more imaginative with reminders that stupidity and showing off were death sentences.