He was here and, year early or not, he wasn’t leaving. It didn’t matter what I told him. With Niko and me, he forgot that self-preservation was a puck’s number one priority. I gave up.
Leaning forward, I scrawled a word beneath his. Adélfia. Brothers.
“No need. I know exactly who you are.” My grin wasn’t like his, unless you found predatory and wolfish to be charismatic. Fortunately, Robin did. He had that grin and worse in his repertoire. Ten thousand grins for ten thousand different types of cons.
“You think you do, do you?” He was doing his best to hide how shaken he was. I knew that as I knew him and had for a very long time. It was the hope. With what I was hoping to do and who I was hoping to bring back, I understood how painful and uncertain hope could be.
“Trickster Second, born of Hob, the Trickster First.” I kept my grin and flicked sand at him. “You better sit down. I know green’s your favorite color, but I don’t think your skin gets included in that.”
His eyes glazed, the blurred glazed stare falling to focus on something less confusing than me. Lifting up a handful of the grains of sand, he let them trickle between his fingers, back to where they came. He did keep them away from the flow of letters, painstaking in his effort to not disturb them. “Skin-walkers, a bargain compared to purchasing the sand.” His voice was distant and stilted. But he was Robin Goodfellow, second trickster to walk the earth. He could recover quickly enough to make someone doubt the puck had been startled at all.
One breath, two, and the conceit and confidence was back full force. “If I’d known there was a beach party, I would’ve brought piña coladas.” He brightened. How, I didn’t know. He was already as bright as he could get without inflicting the permanent blindness you’d get from staring at the sun for hours.
“Ah! I’ve an idea. I invariably have ideas staggering enough in their brilliance that I’m surprised the earth doesn’t confuse my mind with the sun and start rotating around my head.” I tried to stop him but Goodfellow was faster with a phone than Doc Holliday with a gun. “Hercules. Raid the liquor supply in the limo. I want piña coladas, hurricanes, mojitos, sex on the beach. . . .” The puck raised an eyebrow as he looked me up and down. “Make that all the sex on the beach you know I can handle.” He gave me a wink wicked enough that inside his apartment Cal’s sheet had unraveled instantly until it was a pile of thread around his feet and he was naked as the day he was born with no idea how or why.
“Oh, and, Brutus, get the cabana boy outfit out of the trunk, you know the one I like, change out of your driver’s uniform and into that before you get up here. I’m on the seventh floor. Bring a beach chair if we still have one after that incident last month. A beach towel if we don’t. Yes, oiling your muscles is mandatory with that outfit whether there is sun or not, Adonis. You ask every time. Don’t complain or I’ll take away your unlimited employee gym membership.” He turned off the phone and rolled his eyes. “What a whiny infant.”
I couldn’t resist. I made the effort. I had years of experience with Robin and his orgy-loving personality, but I couldn’t keep the question to myself. “Hercules, Brutus, Adonis, you have no idea what the guy’s name is, do you?”
I had years of experience, but Goodfellow didn’t, not this time.
“I would be offended if it weren’t the truth. But as he barely knows it himself, I can carry on under the heavy burden of massive guilt.” His grin was brilliantly white and horny as hell. He’d denied that with every one of them he flashed, claiming they were magnetic and charismatic. He’d told me once, the fourth day we’d met, I thought, that horny was in the ass of the beholder, and had said it while his hand was on my ass.
The fourth day of what was supposed to have been the first time we’d met.
That had been the days of getting to know each other better through typical Alpha male butt sniffing, endless repetitions of my heterosexuality, and a face in the gutter drinking binge. We’d straightened things out—ironically enough, I thought—I’d bought him a beer and shoved him over onto Nik. Nik had been more polite and had put up with drunken, lustful, and predatory attempts at his virtue, which Robin had been certain he had locked in a chastity belt inside his pants. He’d waved a cocktail umbrella at him, slurring there was no lock he couldn’t pick. Nik had in turn passed him on to a waitress with a rack large enough that Goodfellow had used it as a pillow and passed out on it.
Nik had been able to take care of himself. And good luck if he couldn’t. As long as Robin had stopped with me, I’d been fine and less . . . I admit . . . terrified. And, after all, as the puck had noted, there were enough men, women, nymphs, Wolves, vampires to be had, although he’d made his way through the city once and would have to start issuing a repeat banging punch card, the prize being guest of honor at one of his orgies.
Yeah, I’d found out he had orgies—all the time. I’d told him he was that guy you heard about. He’d fuck a snake if he could get it to hold still. He hadn’t been insulted. Hell, he’d been proud if anything, the arrogant bastard, and scoffed, “If a snake met me, it wouldn’t hold still. It would be the one chasing me down.”
I’d lived through the trauma of that once already. I was not repeating it. I didn’t care how many years early he had shown up.
“Born of Hob,” he murmured, audible but only if you had excellent hearing. “You do know me, then. I can’t decide whether that’s thrilling or dangerous. Hades warm and fiery cock, I like them both.” He whipped up another wide grin. And, again, because I did know him, I knew it was his deceitful one like I knew he was defensive and offensive, wary, curious, ready to con me any way he could, hopeful it could be true. That I did know him. He was suspicious, he had to be. It was easier last time when I hadn’t known anything about him at all. Ignorance he could trust. Knowledge, that was dangerous.
I’d seen him at his true work, not selling cars, on other people. Worse came to worst, he’d be tempted to get me in bed to see what information he could pry out of me, tempted to get me in bed simply to fuck me, tempted to kill me because better alive and horny than dead and never horny again, because hope his friend had returned? That hope was a splinter from a giant redwood that was delusion.
The thought of a seduction attempt was more horrifying than the one of a murder attempt by far. I groaned. “Look, I have lived this nightmare before. After massive suffering on my part, we called a cease-fire on your libido. You’ll have to try your luck with the me who belongs in this time. He’s young, wild, and barely legal. Put him in a kiddie harness, the leash in your hand and you’ll be the happiest puck alive.”
Under the bus I threw Cal Junior without a second thought. It was his turn to suffer now.
I rested my head back against the wall. “How’d you find me? I left an anonymous letter at your car dealership. Anonymous.” Or anonymous in a way that couldn’t lead to me. “No address. No fingerprints.” Not that mine were on file. Only those who are caught are in the system and me? Caught? As if that would ever happen. I’d stolen the cabbie’s gloves anyway. The house always wins unless you take precautions that it doesn’t.
“You said I called you Caliban in a similar letter I left you.” He was looking at me again, but this time not a leering up and down. He was taking in every feature. I knew him, but did he really know me? He hoped, but no puck ever relied on hope. “That’s not how you signed the letter to me. Is Caliban your real name?”
“Sometimes,” I answered, but didn’t elaborate. “I also said I’d answer your questions after you answered mine. How’d you find me? It’s important. If you can, someone else can. Someone we don’t want to find us, not here.”
“Recognition software,” he sighed. “I have it all over the car lot and the building. It didn’t ping on your face, but the software in the mail slot did flag your ‘Robin Goodfellow’ envelope. I have people in the city who know me, but they know when and when not to use that name. The
system alarmed on my computer and I pulled up all the digital camera footage. I have the entire block covered in fact. I had your face, which went nowhere, but I had the license plate and the number of your cab. Some calls here and there. Money greasing palms, your driver was more than eager to give you up. He really didn’t care for you. I went to where he dropped you off, called up a few minions, passed out some photos and fifteen minutes later I found you. I’d found two of you. But the note did talk about time travel and there was the proof . . . or could be. You could also be brothers.”
He stretched his legs and yawned. “I left a handful of other minions, the kind that aren’t noticeable to the human eye, around the bar.” When I didn’t blink about nonhumans working for him, he went on. “They followed you to this building and then this apartment, although normally they wouldn’t have gone that far. Too risky even for them, but the skin-walker battle for the ages made it easier to find the floor and take a quick peek at which door was shaking enough to qualify as an earthquake. It was disappointingly easy.”
I must not have had the most pleased expression on my face with the appeasing hand he held up. “Ah, ah, don’t be touchy that you’re not the James Bond you’d imagined. That was but the first part of my covert little operation. I didn’t wait for the skin-walker escapade to be over, as depending on your skills, that could take all night or you could be dead in thirty seconds. I had no idea of your capabilities. And I was not ruining a brand-new Ralph Lauren Blue Label suit by running to join in. I’ve fought enough of them in my life and they are walking bags of every type of disgusting fluid you don’t want to think about.
“Instead I went back to my penthouse, turned on my computer and accessed my database, which considering I own a satellite orbiting the planet for the storage alone, is quite extensive and I started running down your identities.” He was sulking now.
I snorted. “That was the part that wasn’t so easy, right, Sherlock?”
“It was very easy. I found hundreds.” He started counting them off on his fingers and when he ran out, started on them over again. “Fake driver’s licenses, fake social security cards, fake car registrations, fake car insurance, fake birth certificates, fake passports, fake pilot licenses, fake résumés with fake references and fake places of employment, two fake mortgages on houses that don’t exist, fake library cards—Aristotle would be proud—fake bank accounts with no money in them as you are the cash and carry type. It wouldn’t surprise me if you had a fake dog license and no dog to go with it. You have, or they have since you are eight years from home, seventy-five names between them. After all night of this, I came to one conclusion, no two. First, you deprived me of ten hours sleep or ten highly ranked escorts and no sleep. I’d have been happy with either. Second, and most important, I couldn’t find an identity for you or the other two renting the apartment because you don’t have and never have had identities.”
He folded his arms and tilted his head to one side and then the other, adding up all the pieces and parts of me he’d taken in earlier. “No identity. Your black hair, your eyes—gray is rare but does pop up now and again among clans who appeared in Northern Greece six hundred years or so ago and the other clans they intermarried into, but your skin however, Snow White, doesn’t fit. Rom, but only part Rom. Half, I believe. With skin that pale, almost inhumanly so, your other half would have to be part . . .” The words trailed away, but his mouth didn’t shut as he stared, paler himself. It had taken him longer this time to recognize it in me, but time travel, anonymous notes, fake identities would distract anyone.
“No,” he whispered.
I’d forgotten how afraid he’d been of the Auphe, of me, when our very first crossing of ways had involved a knife to his throat and threats. I, and Niko too, had been throwing those far and wide. Robin’s fear of me had lasted seconds; he was good at sizing people up and I’d been nineteen, no idea what he was, and willing on the violence, but it was an obvious human type of violence. Goodfellow had decided I fell into that category: human more than Auphe. For those few seconds, though, he had been afraid.
“Relax.” Sliding my hands behind my neck, I linked fingers to ease the strained muscle. “I’m not a murderous homicidal psychotic monster who lives to slaughter.” I paused. “At least not unless it’s necessary.” The second hesitation was a shade longer. “Or some assholes really deserve it.” I thought back and next told what wasn’t technically a lie, as the Auphe genes weren’t in control any longer. I was. “I definitely don’t do it for fun.” And I didn’t, not just for fun. That wasn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it if it had to be done, such as putting down the skin-walker. Robin would know I was hedging, if it was about the past or not. You can’t lie to a puck, not even by omission. “Not anymore.”
There was perceptibly more white in Goodfellow’s eyes.
“I’m making it worse, aren’t I?” I asked ruefully.
“Yes. Stop. Please.” With that he managed to finally close his mouth.
“Don’t be a hypocrite. I know what ‘born of Hob’ means. I met Hob. He could hold his own with any Auphe, three at a time if he had to.” More than that and he’d ended up in pieces—too bad for Hob. I’d shed a tear if ever I gave a shit.
“You met Hob?” His face was painted with revulsion and rejection. “Hob is dead. All puck know this. If by some unholy misfortune, he is alive and you met him, you would be dead. Whatever puck you spoke with lied, pretended to be him, took his name, fooled you.”
“You were there. You knew him. I had no idea the first time who he was, what he was. I didn’t know much more for part of the second time.”
“No, it couldn’t be.” One last solid attempt at denial. “Hob, the true Hob, is dead.”
“He is now.” My smirk was the arc of a reaper’s scythe with the shine and deadly edge of razor wire. That was a fond recollection. Not what Hob had done to make me kill him. The punishment, however—the one of the “worse than deaths” Robin didn’t believe in and then a death I’d label unmatchable that had followed.
“He really did piss me off. All told, about twenty-five minutes of his combined face-to-face presence over three occasions and that managed it, no problem. It’s what he did behind the scenes that earned him that extra”—I searched for the words—“time-out.”
Thrown through a gate I’d made to the hell that had been the Auphe’s home away from home, he’d have been dismembered and killed quickly if the Auphe were feeling generous. Too bad that the Auphe hadn’t known the meaning of the word, they genuinely hadn’t. They had been born for mayhem and murder. The emotions that went with that had been all they’d possessed. No less, no more—much like Hob himself ironically enough.
Dying slowly, inch by inch, was the best Hob could’ve hoped for—if the Auphe were already full and sleepy.
But I was bare minutes past Robin showing real fear of Auphe, of me being one. He’d managed to cover it up when distracted by the Hob subject change. Hiding it, I knew, didn’t mean it was gone. I also knew, gone or not, that I didn’t want to see it again by being a shade too descriptive on my guess at how the end of the mighty fucking Hob had gone down.
“A time-out,” I repeated, able to keep the details to myself but not the satisfaction. It came through loud and clear in the vicious but peculiarly fond edge to my words and tone. Sounding for all the world as if I was nostalgic for a particularly painful cut I’d given myself while trying to shave with one of my knives. “An extremely permanent one.” I drew more Greek letters, then the more familiar transliteration in the soft, shifting surface—the last words I knew how to write. Chytheí stagóna aímatos tou adelfoú mou.
“Spill a drop of my brother’s blood,” the puck read aloud for me. He said the rest along with it as well, although I hadn’t learned to write those words yet. “And death will be the only mercy and miracle for which you will beg,” he finished, not bothering to trace it into the sand. “You do kno
w me. You know more of me than you should, but you are who you say. Friend and brother.” The light behind his eyes went out and his smile vanished. “But you are Auphe. Half or no, Auphe is Auphe.”
“The First Murderers to walk the earth,” I admitted.
Why pretend everyone wasn’t aware of it and used to be hatefully hostile and gleefully thrilled to tell me, ten, twenty times a night at work? I cured them of that happy hobby of theirs with a resourcefulness and rapidity that left them with no idea it was their tongue I’d torn out and dropped in their glass of vodka. Until they tried to drink it . . . or talk. The pink cocktail umbrellas I used to speared the bloody flesh was a tasteful touch, or so went my explanation to the boss.
“And Hob, the Trickster First, was the original of the second murderers to walk the earth, following in the Auphe’s bloody footprints. You were the Trickster Second, now the Trickster . . .” I shrugged and through my shirt scratched one of the coyote bites from last night’s fight. I let him mentally fill in that blank himself on what he had been.
“It took me five years and a healer who was excited as hell to have a second guinea pig to try out his shiny new genetic manipulation. Between the two, I got on the wagon.” I flipped an invisible chip into the air. If the movement and the words weren’t as serious as they should be, somewhat snarky, so what? I’d lived through it all, which was impossible. If my living was impossible, I wasn’t going to ruin it being ungrateful enough to haul around ten tons of guilt. I was going to enjoy every day I shouldn’t be that lucky to have. No one should be that lucky. That type of luck didn’t exist, but here I was.
Or here I was if I was able to get my Niko and my Goodfellow back. If not, I’d give up that impossible life. I didn’t want it.
“I’m not really Auphe”—but there’d been times I’d forgotten that—“but, say that I am, if there was a twelve step Auphe program, Auphe Anonymous, I’d have kicked its ass,” I added.