Nevermore

Goodfellow’s wide-eyed stare turned into narrowed suspicious slits. “If there were a twelve step program, how many chips would you have?”

  Did chips come in halves?

  “First you tell me how long it took you to get on the wagon,” I drawled.

  To be born of Hob meant Goodfellow would’ve been Hob. He would look the same—all pucks did—had the same personality, same memories, same murderous inclinations. That was how reproduction worked for pucks. They were a duplicate in all ways to the one who made them. It was years, fifty to a hundred at the very least, Goodfellow had said, before you felt the urge to separate from your maker, travel on your own, have your own experiences, see the world through slowly changing eyes, fight battles, choose not to fight them, make memories that are yours, no one else’s, before the combination of it—every new day lived, every new sight seen—finally caused you to develop into a new person with a new personality and thoughts born of you, not Hob.

  “How long?” I repeated, too smug for my own good.

  Goodfellow was saved by the bell. If the bell was the ringtone of Robin’s phone. It was an old song, a year or two before I was born song, but filthy enough any teenage boy would be invested enough to find it. “Me so horny, me so horny, me so horny. Me love you long time.” It cut off there, which was a good thing as that was the least offensive part. The puck grumbled and glanced down at the phone.

  “You’re the biggest perv in existence,” I said, trying for judgmental and failing miserably.

  “But you’re a nun, knowing the lyrics of a song older than you are? Unless you age as slowly as an Auphe. No, the other you does look younger. Eight years to an Auphe isn’t measurable as a unit of time, it’s too small for their life span.”

  He frowned down at the phone in his hand. “That son of a bitch. Conan quit via text, the coward. He claims I’m too demanding. Me? The slander is unspeakable. And ‘That it was unbearable, my sexual harassment’—which he misspelled, leaving the second s out of ass. How harassed can you be if you can’t even spell ass? I swear, you cannot get good steroid popping cabana beasts these days.”

  “Did you harass him?” Like I didn’t know the answer to that.

  “Of course I did. I clearly didn’t hire him for his spelling skills.” He sighed. “And I’ve been blacklisted at all the employment and modeling agencies. Life is cruel.”

  “No big deal. In eight years when you’re dead you won’t have to worry anymore,” I reminded him, making an attempt—A for effort, D for execution—to hide my momentary spike of resentment at how lightly he was taking this.

  “Your life is a colossal whirlpool of melodrama, sucking in any proton of optimism or neutron of hope and devouring them.” His exasperation was clear. We would do it. We would save them including himself. He was confident, doubt-free.

  He hadn’t been the one to watch, powerless. He hadn’t frozen, unable to run into the flames and drag them out as they weren’t dying. They had been dead since the first flare of light. He hadn’t been confused by the dissonance of the oddly pleasant, almost sweet aroma of grilling meat while knowing that you weren’t a kid in the white trash version of the suburbs. That it wasn’t a distant neighbor’s backyard barbecue on their six square inches of scrub grass. It was people burning, your family, your friend, burning. And that sweet-to-sickening odor became a sense memory you couldn’t wipe away, part of you for the rest of your life.

  It was debatable if I’d be around long enough for that to be a problem.

  “Have faith in me. Have I or will I, should I say, ever failed you? An unmatched and illustrious reputation such as mine doesn’t come about when you leave a bread crumb trail of failures behind you. I’m known for a multitude of sins, but none of them were the sin of failure.”

  “The dying was a damned big one,” I said with a sour bite as I made it up and on my feet mainly by sliding up the wall.

  “Which, thanks to you and the assistance, I’m certain, of my own genius, we have every likelihood of stopping that. You may have already in the first hour you arrived yesterday and left your letter to me. I know where not to be, where you, your brother and everyone else cannot be. I’ll make it so. If it were more simple an undertaking, I’d hire an intern trickster to do it. Ishiah, however?” he questioned skeptically. “That pompous, hypocritical, mindless mouthpiece to the condemnations of heaven? That useless feather duster, squawking repent, repent, repent from whatever henhouse he squats in? I care if he’s fricasseed or not in the days to come? Mind-boggling.”

  He stood and brushed the sand off his pants. “I will be your optimism, your hope, your faith.” His hand squeezed on my shoulder, friend to friend. Brother to brother. “Bask in it. If doubt surfaces in you, tell me and I’ll drown it without mercy as I find gloom and doom ruins my mood.” Cal was going to be a life lesson for him then.

  Shoes held up and safe, he took charge. “Since Apollo isn’t bringing us any, we will have to go to the alcohol. Enormous amounts of alcohol. We’re both going to need it. As a rose-colored glasses outlook is clearly not a facet of the otherwise flawlessly glittering diamond of your personality. You have a long tale to tell including how you know parts of me and of my life I’ve not told anyone. Not to those I would have wished to tell. Friends and brothers who were born and died in eras that wouldn’t allow them to understand. I told nothing to no one. Not ever. I want to know why I did tell now, in those eight years. And it’ll be easier to hear if every word isn’t dripping with the tormented brooding reminiscent of Heathcliff fresh from the moors. Therefore, you combined with alcohol to spare me.”

  “Little harsh on Heathcliff, aren’t you? You have something against cats? Or comics?”

  He almost bought it, then said, shoulders slumping with relief, “Sarcasm and a complete disregard for culture. You can be redeemed. We’ll work on it. For now, if I have to allow events to unfold as they’re meant to, I need to know what they are. Tricksters, pucks foremost, aren’t as bound to ourselves as most creatures are. Our behaviors aren’t patterns or if they are, we frequently unravel them to weave different, more entertaining ones. Our outlooks aren’t as set. Reality’s grasp on us is looser than it is on others.

  “Humans, unknowingly put in the same situation three times over will make the same decision each of those three times,” he continued. “Pucks, on the other and more superior hand, have a spark of chaos in us as all tricksters do. Put me in the same situation three times and I could react the same, I could make three entirely different decisions, I could make nine—three each time just to tangle everything up for my own amusement and not necessarily know why. Whether I do or I don’t, leaving me in the dark cannot turn out well.”

  The door to the apartment opened and Niko and Cal both leaned out for a look, then stepped out for a better one. Niko had his katana. Cal had his Desert Eagle and in spite of a half hour gone, remained half-naked in the sheet. “What are you two doing?” Niko asked. “And who is that?” As I had mentioned a few details about Goodfellow to him and mythology didn’t always get it all wrong, he had to have a good guess. Robin did have certain things in common with the descriptions of Pan, puck, and the one who he’d either taken the name or was the source of it. He refused to say.

  Goodfellow glanced from Cal in his sheet then to me and back to Cal. The moan he gave was pitiful. “So many Hustler pornographic twin fantasies and so little time.” Cal, showing exceptional sense, promptly disappeared without a word back into the apartment. Robin moved on to Niko. “We’re off for some privacy that Caliban might tell me how not to undo all our lives and the universe with it in less than a week.”

  “Stay here and I mean it.” I was the older brother now. It was my turn to give a few for-your-own-good orders. “This ass could find us, but it was hard enough for him that no one else could. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  Robin had noticed as I’d talked. “You,” he said to Niko, “. . . yo
u remind me of a young Achilles.” Instead of making the lewd comment that should’ve been tattooed on his lips to save him from constantly repeating it, his attention was back on me again. “The name, the one you signed to the note you left, was it real? Was it?”

  “Once.” It was the smallest quirk of my lips, but it was as real as the name had been.

  “Tell me again,” he demanded, the desperation hidden enough that it wouldn’t be heard by anyone who didn’t know him and know him like they’d know themselves or a brother. “Let me hear it instead of only reading it.”

  I took two steps toward him, stopped at his side, close enough to his ear that he would hear it, but Niko wouldn’t. When I said it, Goodfellow stood frozen for a moment, and then apparently said the hell with his suit and tackled me in the sand. “Gamou. Finally, you son of a bitch.

  “Finally.”

  11

  “Patroclus,” he marveled. “You were Patroclus and you remember. What of the blonde in the hall? The one who looks enough like Achilles to nearly be his twin?”

  “That’s a weird one,” I replied, rocking the table back and forth on its two uneven legs. As the others had three or all uneven, it was the best table at Talley’s place. It was closed and empty this early in the morning, but closed meant nothing to me and empty was just a perk.

  “Weird at it gets,” I echoed. I remembered being vaguely disturbed by it months after finding out. “About four hundred years ago—wild guess, no one kept a history—our clan, the Vayash Clan, was traveling through Northern Greece. You know it’s forbidden to dirty yourself with a gadje, an outsider, Rom is for Rom. But shit happens and one of the ancestors of Niko’s father got knocked up by a Greek blacksmith who claimed he was a descendant of Achilles, which, fair, Achilles got around the villages and whorehouses. Not quite like you and I did, but he was no virgin. It could’ve been true.”

  “I would say to take it with the same grain of salt you would take mine, but it would be my natural competition speaking.” He spun a finger in a get-on-with-it motion. Pucks are fond of stories, and one that involves them? I was waiting for him to stick his hand down my throat and pull it out through my vocal cords to hurry it up.

  “Secluded enough,” I said wryly, but obeyed while salting my beer, “that the younger ones forgot or never knew there was a world outside and the elderly, the geezers with both feet and an elbow in the grave thought the gods had struck them down, but even they didn’t remember the names of the gods. What they did know was growing turnips and sheering sheep. It was all they wanted or needed to know, except for Achilles. They knew the whole story from his birth to his . . . to Troy. They said they were of his blood. Three thousand years later and they remembered him and bragged about him while they’d forgotten the gods, the names of the gods, the world itself, that could make a person believe they were his blood. The Clan wouldn’t have cared if it was true or not, but they’d cared enough when it came to what they could get out of it. A descendant of Achilles would come in handy. The Vayash had been all over Greece by then. A baby of Achilles could bring in the silver. They could show off the kid for a fee.” I took a deep swallow of the beer, which thanks to Auphe partial immunity to poisons meant it did very little for me.

  “Then four hundred years of some Clan inbreeding when no other Clans to marry into were around, and nowadays you occasionally see dark blond hair and gray eyes among the Vayash. They’re known by it. Instant signature.” I tried three more swallows, then simply chugged it as the next part was a little too convenient to have happened like that. It made you see the shadows of puppet strings. I’d had Auphe chasing me throughout my life to turn me into a puppet. Imagination or something beyond us; didn’t know, didn’t care, I was ignoring it.

  “Which means Achilles”—I refilled my glass from the pitcher—“was reincarnated into his own descendant, and isn’t that strangely coincidental, but you knew that too. Or guessed. We had told you about the Achilles bullshit legend our Clan told and you knew Niko had been Achilles, the real thing. You didn’t tell us then or years later when the reincarnation reveal had jumped out to slap us in the face with the force of a yearlong frozen giant turkey leg. Not that I minded. I don’t care how many years go by, three thousand or not, it’s bizarrely incestuous to me. I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Patroclus, as you said, scattered his seed about with even more enthusiasm than Achilles and they did have a fondness for sisters.” He spread his arms. The abracadabra was implied. “Your blood could easily have ended up in the same family that—” I was one more of his words away from throwing a full glass of beer in his face. The growling and twitch of my hand was a sign readable to anyone. You didn’t have to be a trickster.

  “Yes, it is the first time it’s happened that I know of, the first with you two. Why it did, if there exists a why at all, I don’t know. Perhaps Achilles felt he had unfinished business. If we’re meant to know, we will, but I’m hoping for coincidence. It is highly underrated and I am quite the fan of it. If it’s part of a plan, it’s beyond my sight and as nothing is beyond my sight, I’d rather not contemplate meandering down that mental path.” His hands returned to his glass, a thumb rubbing idly at a smudge.

  “But I agree on a change of subject,” he said briskly. “It’s difficult though. Those handful of years harbored many of the very best and the very worst memories of my entire life. Of a million years and more, these meant the most. For good and for bad. I try not to think of Troy. I start with all the good memories of that life, thinking I can stop at any point I wish, but I never can and am dragged to the end of them. It’s Troy. She will not let me go, the bitch. I hear the sand gritting beneath my sandals, the blood I wear that covers twice the amount of skin that my armor, tunic, and greaves do, the funeral pyres burning and blackening the bodies of my friend and brothers, the flames scorching my face, the smoke—”

  I was gone. In the bathroom puking up nothing but beer and bile. Thanks to not giving in to Niko, no food though. It made the puke session shorter and cleaner, if puke can be clean. It splattered less, let’s go with that. I straightened, flushed, and went to the sink. Snatching a few rough brown paper towels from the slow, creaking, and groaning dispenser, I twisted a knob and scrubbed my face in pale orange water. After tossing the wadded paper on the floor, bent my head to get my lips below the faucet, got a mouthful of the rusty water and rinsed thoroughly. I spit and did it again. The entire time, I thought of nothing. I put it on autopilot, which I’d gotten pretty damn skilled at with my earlier life, let my body do the work and my brain switch off.

  Back at the table, my ass halfway down on the seat of the chair, and I took the driver’s seat again. Robin knew what he’d done, what he’d said. It had been in the letter I left him. How he had died, how everyone had died, in an explosion. The way the flames cooked everyone inside the bar as it ate the building itself, in all probability going on to burn down the whole block, and I’d escaped because I’d been at the end of that block.

  He turned his glass around, one way then the other. Robin didn’t often have to work up to saying something, but once in a blue moon, he did. This is what it looked like. Fidgeting of any type. Fiddling with anything in his hands or he could reach to pull into his hands. It was the only time he did. If there was nothing to latch onto, he squirmed and twitched. Not the puck suave he displayed as the majority of his body language. Whatever he was gathering up the guts to say, I didn’t want to hear.

  “Do you know wolves can smell a hundred to a thousand times more than a human?” I asked. Somehow my beer had spilled, I didn’t remember how, but it had been wiped up with the now-soaking bar towel and my glass filled to the brim again.

  I shook my head when he opened his mouth to answer. “But a dog can smell around ten thousand to a hundred thousand times more than a human. A wolf chasing prey so it doesn’t starve. A dog tracking down a bowl of Alpo, you’d think it’d be the other way ar
ound. It’s not fair, but, hell, is anything ever fair?” This time I took a small taste of the beer to see if it was going to stay down. It did.

  “I don’t know how much better an Auphe’s sense of smell is than a dog or a wolf, but I know it’s better than a human’s. How much of it I inherited with the rest of the prize package, I don’t know either. I do know mine’s better than or equal to some Wolves.” Werewolves had so much inbreeding I didn’t think they knew what was average for them.

  “Which means while I sat on the sidewalk with the muzzle of my gun pressed under my chin and my finger having pulled the trigger halfway home, I didn’t smell what you did at Troy. I didn’t smell roasting meat. Not that it wouldn’t suck, I get that. Your friend, your brother dead and you staying at the pyre until it was done. I don’t know if I could’ve done that. Fuck, I know I couldn’t because I didn’t. But at least you knew they were already dead when they burned.” I was rolling my glass between both palms a lot like Goodfellow, but faster, less controlled. “You knew we were dead for at least a day to clean us up, put us in our best clothes that still smelled of perfume from the whorehouses, laying us out with coins on our eyes so those who knew us could pay their respects—I’ll bet that attendance wasn’t especially large for mine.”

  “You’d be wrong,” he said, but quietly enough I could ignore it and I did.

  “Then you build the pyre and light us up, but you knew.” I lifted the glass and slammed it back down hard. It didn’t shatter. I didn’t expect that. Instead I threw it at the wall behind Goodfellow. It shattered then, a cascade of glass, the blade-edged tears of the mad. “You knew they were dead. They’d been dead for a day, two days, at least.”

  I inhaled, held it, exhaled. Meditation breathing. My brother had poured every gallon of actual dairy milk down the sink and smugly handed me soy milk for my Captain Crunch cereal until I broke down and tried it. I’d hated that it had occasionally worked. I was calmer now, self-disciplined like Nik would want me to be.