Nevermore

  “Huh. Only a day. Seemed longer,” I said distantly. “Much longer.”

  Reluctantly, I did have to be honest. “I thought I was alone. But I didn’t think it was because you and Niko wouldn’t come for me. I thought it was because it was impossible for you to come. Impossible was all that would stop you two.”

  His running had slowed and I pushed him along with my shoulder. “Aren’t you going to tell me what they did? What he did?” he asked, his shoulders braced as anything I said would be as equally physical as verbal a blow. Wasn’t I going to punish me for losing me and not saving me in time?

  “You said you found me”—he and Niko, because Niko would’ve been there, no stopping that—“said I was cold, dead since the night. So you saw me. Did you see your name burned into my chest? The sheriff did that personally, had his fingers crossed you wouldn’t miss that. That was a present to himself.”

  Goodfellow nodded, his throat moving, but he didn’t get out any words. I put them out there for him. “Then you know what they did. As long as you’ve been around, I know you saw everything those motherfuckers did to me. But here’s what you don’t know because I’m pretty damn sure that Niko went looking for whatever soldiers and sheriff’s men he could find and fought them, ten men, twenty, fought and didn’t stop until they finally killed him. And I’m just as sure after that you left. Maybe you buried us if you could get to our bodies, but you left. When we leave, you leave too.” He’d told me that. When Niko and I died, he would put countries between him and our latest graves.

  “So this is what you don’t know. While they were doing all the rest including hammering a nail through one hand, during all that they went from asking where the other six of us were to just where you were—you who convinced us freezing and starving in the forest for years would somehow lead to a plan that put you on the throne. You with all that gold on your head and me with all the pain they said they would take away if I told them all the bolt holes where you hid, but I didn’t care about the gold. And I didn’t give you up. I never fucking gave you up.” I twisted around, impaled the beam of light into another weasel’s head, turned back and ran faster.

  “I went through it all, with the last face I saw that of a man who hated you enough that he would’ve taken me apart piece by piece if I’d lived that long, and I didn’t say a word about you. Not one. Hell, I tried to bite off my tongue so I couldn’t say anything if my fever went higher and I became delirious. But I couldn’t get through the damn thing. It’s tougher than you’d think. Too tough from all the talking I did. I never did shut up in that life until then, the one time I made myself,” I laughed, the same one from that room with the gray sky long from here. Then I sobered to tell the rest of it. “I was lucky though, three times over. They only nailed my right hand down.”

  “No.” He saw it coming, but not exactly. He’d known all along, but Robin was the best liar born. That trumped having seen every kind of death there was and learning to recognize exactly how they had happened. “He sliced open your throat. I saw the cut. I covered it with my hand as if that would make it not disappear. Make it not true.”

  I kept going. The lies he told himself were his own to come to terms with. “Lucky that I couldn’t feel any pain by then. I lost some skin when I twisted my left wrist free from the rope knotted around it, but I didn’t feel it. By that point I didn’t feel much.” The blood had actually helped by making my skin slick.

  “No.” It made sense if you could lie to anyone, you could lie to yourself as easily. Denial would be your best friend. “He killed you with his prize ruby pommeled gamisou dagger he flaunted in everyone’s face and then he left it there on the floor. Threw it away because he was the sort of bastard who thought your blood on the blade made it trash.”

  Robin stumbled over a jumble of warped metal and concrete. I had no idea what it was, but I caught him as he fell face-first and kept him on his feet. He didn’t notice it had happened, distracted, refusing to stop the fight between what he wanted to believe and what he’d realized was true from the first moment he’d seen my body. That was a lot of years of denial to overcome—if he could at all. “Isn’t that how it was? He murdered you, didn’t he?” he demanded or he tried. It fell flat. You don’t need to demand when you already know the truth.

  When I didn’t answer, he almost fell again, the difference being there was nothing to fall over. “I murdered you. Not him. I did.” The statement was a disjointed spill of fragmented syllables meant to be words but too broken to want to be.

  “Same dramatic ass now as you were then. And I’m a fucking idiot. Was a fucking idiot, I mean.” I smiled, cocky, warm, and sad. It was the smile I’d had over five hundred years ago for two people, no others. “I thought you’d be proud. The skinny little bastard with a dead mother, no father who’d claim me. The kid in rags who begged and stole food, fought dogs for the scraps their owners threw out for them. The boy who, when the assholes were angry at their wives or drunk and pissed at the whole damn world, was kicked instead of those dogs. But you said I was more, that I was strong inside, and my body would catch up. You told me I was as good as anyone and better than most, fuck what the hypocrites in the village said. You took me in and beat half to death any man who laughed at the thought of me fighting for you.

  “I proved you right. I grew and I fought for you. I died for you and I wasn’t sorry.” Not through the pain, not through the blood. I’d never been sorry. “I was as proud of what I did as I thought you’d be.” But that wasn’t the end of the story that wasn’t merely a story. There was nothing merely about it.

  This . . . this was the end.

  “The sheriff wouldn’t let his favorite dagger be ruined heated in a fire. That dagger was at his belt and when you’re burning letters into someone’s chest, you have to be close. Close enough I hardly had to reach but a few inches.” Close enough to save Robin from what I might say when the fever did reel me under and I wouldn’t know where I was or who was who. But too close to get my hand between him and my chest, to slide between my ribs into my heart.

  I slit my throat instead. It wasn’t as quick a way to die. But it felt oddly familiar . . . oddly right. That it was how I should die with the warm rush of my own blood filling up my lungs.

  “I’d seen people die of fevers like mine,” I explained, “and they thought the people caring for them were their dead wives, their brothers gone fighting in the Crusade, and they would say anything. Their wife they loved could be trusted. Their missed brothers, they wouldn’t whisper a word of what he told them. I had minutes before that was me.” It hadn’t been a risk. It had been a truth absolute in minutes or less as the room swam and rippled, colors I couldn’t name bloomed and painted the walls. “Those bastards couldn’t have broken me, couldn’t have defeated me. You’d taught me that. My own body, though, it could have. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  The dagger had fallen from my hand and numb fingers. I’d wished I’d had the strength to cut a second throat, the one of the son of a bitch above me. His mouth a gaping snarl of a wolf, he was screaming. I’d heard it, a little, but it had faded fast.

  Robin wouldn’t be surprised, I’d thought hazily as I drifted down a river bright as poppies, the same color as my name. He’d raise a mug of ale in my name, mourn and bury his grief in any willing woman he could find, and he’d be proud. Skinny bastard kid that I’d been when he first met me, but he’d seen something in me, he’d said. At my core I was strong. My skinny legs and arms would grow, but I was already strong. From the moment he looked into me and not at me, the village bastard, he’d known what he’d earned with a few words. He’d known I’d die for him, as I’d die for John, as they would die for me. They hadn’t come for me, but that only meant they couldn’t. If there were any possible way, they would have.

  Sometimes you have to face death alone.

  It was worth it when I hadn’t had to face life like that.

/>   “I never gave you up,” I said quietly, one foot still in the past, the part of me that had followed Robin since I was seven, filthy and starved, who had worshipped him as larger-than-life starting then and not stopped, who had died for him and would do it again. “I didn’t betray you once in all the lives we’ve lived, but most of all, not in that one.”

  Then I snapped back to the present and recalled how pissed I was and why.

  “I would’ve beat a nun for a slice of cheese with one helluva crop of penicillin growing on it, and I was a hero.” Vigilante, but hero according to the idiots who’d have turned on us in a heartbeat if they’d been literate enough to read the price on the wanted posters. “But throw a little Auphe blood in me and I can’t be trusted with a gate. Throw a little Auphe blood and a gate in me and I am an Auphe. Can’t have one without the other. I can’t be just part. I can’t be something different made new from a combination of their Auphe and human DNA. I’m the monster terrifying enough that you’d rather be weasel chow than take a ride with me.”

  Reflecting on it, I thought the nun thing, when I’d been a human of dubious breeding but a human without denial, was equal to a great deal of shit the Auphe had gotten up to. But I hadn’t been doubted then. Wasn’t that a bitter pill?

  “My Robin believed in me,” I said, grim and far past tired of the subject. “Three days after we met this time around, to save my brother, I threw him as a distraction at a goddamn troll, at fucking Abbagor.” Abbagor, who all three of us had taken on and still lost against. In hindsight that was no surprise, considering Abbagor had been number two badass monster in the city. He fought Auphe as a freaking substitute for his weekly book club.

  “He believed in me even after that because he knew exactly why I did it. The Auphe in me didn’t matter to him. When a year is less than a minute to you, you shouldn’t be this different, but you are. You’re not him. None of you are. This Niko is not my brother, this Cal is not me, and you’re not my friend. My Robin is dead.” I shook my head, done with the entire mess. “Fuck it. You’re some random puck, and I don’t need your trust.”

  “Caliban, no.” His mouth twisted and I smelled the desperation on him before it turned into the adrenaline spike of anger. “No. That isn’t how it is. It’s not about trust or belief. It’s not about what flows in your veins. It’s about me,” he insisted. “I should’ve told you, as humiliating as it is. Hob certainly never let me forget. I’m sorry I was a fool to try to hide it.” He sucked in several breaths as we ran. “You have to listen. You will listen. It’s about what you’ve been saying. About being the Second Trickster and walking the earth when only Hob and the Auphe did. Thirty seconds is all I need. Please, give me that much.”

  I was considering telling him that, no, I didn’t have to, but, Jesus, it was Goodfellow or that’s what I’d thought when I’d heard his stupid line and seen his conman grin all over again, and he’d never before, not my Goodfellow, entertained the thought of turning his back on me at my most Auphe. He’d been jumpy a time or two, but anything edible in the area had been jumpy at those times. I hadn’t held that against him.

  We were tearing down the maintenance tunnel as our dodging either became worse or the tunnel began to become more crowded with rubble. This Robin and my Robin and a thousand Robins before, weren’t they one and the same? I’d never betrayed him, but he’d never betrayed me either. I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around any of the three of us being capable of stabbing the other in the back. And why would he not trust me now when he had and would years from now in the days that I lost control as often as our satellite lost its signal?

  He wasn’t a shadow. Robin was incapable of being anything but real. Nothing else in this world came close to the unbreakable solidity of him. Any more real and the sun would revolve around him and the smug conceit of that would never end.

  Maybe he was telling the truth. It wasn’t me. Maybe it was something else. Maybe he did have a reason I hadn’t had the chance to find out the first time around Hell’s merry-go-round.

  Before I could tell him, fine, I would listen, but it’d better be extremely fucking good, we ran into what had to be a pocket of abruptly humid air, but it felt similar to hitting a giant floating bubble of swamp water. It had to be the boglike odor thickly tainting the air that had it crawling down my airway as I coughed. It couldn’t be clogging my lungs. I couldn’t drown from humidity. Ah, hell, but I could asphyxiate from methane gas. I tried to choke back another cough and then a series of them.

  A hand gripped my elbow to support and pull me along although I hadn’t realized I’d slowed any. And within a split second that hand was gone. It didn’t drop from my hand; it was torn away. I staggered to a halt, taking in two scenes almost simultaneously: the approaching weasels dancing at the far reaches of my light and the hole in the concrete at my feet. Round and edged in metal, it was covered, or had been, by too many rags, rotting boards, dead rat carcasses for Robin to see it. But not enough to keep me from smelling whatever was below, which had done us exactly no damn good at all.

  It seemed a little coincidental those things should drift into a pile precisely in that particular location, a manhole that had lost its metal cover. They were smart. I’d say smarter than your average weasel, but I didn’t know how smart a not-too-bright weasel was, let alone your average ones.

  Right now, pondering the intelligence level of a shadow weasel’s brain wasn’t at the top of my list. However, throwing myself down the hole after Goodfellow was. Not that I went down as fast and catastrophically as he must have. I saw the embedded ladder and flung myself onto it. I hit every third rung on the way down. The force of each one jarred me from heels to teeth, and I nearly fell more than once. One hand held my gun, the flashlight tucked in my jeans with light pointing up to hold back the shadows, leaving only one free for gripping. Luckily it wasn’t far. Twenty feet and I was at the bottom. There was no standing water in this long forgotten sewer line, but plenty of thick, clinging mud. And lying in that mud was Robin.

  On his side with face half buried in the mud, he was moving, but they were slow, uncoordinated movements. He was either stunned or half-dead. Either choice wasn’t too fucking great. I get one Goodfellow killed and then make it a two-fer. “Shit.” I bent over, and slid my arms under his to pull him bodily to his feet. Holding him up, I gave him a good, hard shake. It wasn’t precisely First Aid protocol and if he’d broken his neck, I pretty much would’ve finished him right then and there. But that would’ve been a quicker and more pleasant way to go than what was getting ready to descend on our heads. “Robin, we have to run. Now. They’re right behind me.” I didn’t give him a chance to respond. Stepping to his side, I grabbed his arm, slung it over my shoulders and took off. For the first few seconds he was about as helpful as a sack of potatoes, but following that, he began to move his legs and feet. Sort of. But, hell, I would take what I could get. As for our talk, it would have to wait.

  “What . . .” He spat a mouthful of mud and tried again, a little less thickly this time. “What happened?”

  “You, Lord Style and Agility, fell down a manhole,” I grunted, trying for a faster pace. “And lost your sword and your flashlight.” The mud sucked at my feet with the tenacity of quicksand. It wasn’t methane gas though or we’d be dead by now. It did smell enough to put every sewer in the city combined with every swamp in the Everglades to shame. I struggled to breathe without puking knowing sooner or later with this kind of stink my nose would quit working for a few hours. There. That was something to look forward to. Who said I had no optimism? “I think the weasels covered it up with a bunch of crap, which makes them smarter than us. Correction, smarter than you, as you fell and I used the ladder.”

  It was dark down there, the only light coming from my flashlight and some funky-ass lichen creeping along the walls. And I do mean creeping . . . literally. But it was a slow and sluggish movement and I’d seen it in areas before
if the sewers had been abandoned by humans a long, long time. It was some sort of paien sewer shrubbery and harmless, but it would eat a dead body although that too would take a long, long time.

  That was when I heard it, the tap of claws and the smooth slide as if oil was pouring down the metal. It was the weasels coming down the ladder.

  “Okay,” I prompted when I didn’t receive a snipe back for mocking his intelligence, which worried me. “Are you positive you don’t want me to gate us where the shadows won’t eat us?” I gave him one more chance. “Feet first, remember? Like the Neanderthals. No fucking fun.”

  His chin had dropped to rest on his chest and his curly hair, now matted and dreadlocked with mud, fell over his face. “What happened?” he repeated in a mumble. “Poú eímai? Where am I? Are the . . . Where was I . . . Ah . . . the gladiator quarters? Lie they in this”—he vomited down his and my front both. Undeterred, he coughed, wiped his mouth on the shoulder of my jacket and finished—“direction?”

  If I got home and there was not a Mardi Gras fucking Resurrection Parade waiting for me with beads and bare breasts and my brother, everyone was dying. I was shooting everyone. If you were already dead and buried twenty years ago, I was digging you up and shooting you just to make sure.

  Okay.

  I’ll need truckloads of bullets and two hundred shovels. Make a note.

  Moving on.

  Goodfellow was out of the picture . . . at least mentally. That meant as tempting as it was to gate, it was also out of the picture. Ordinarily, if he’d been poisoned, choked out, broken his legs, anything not related to his brain, I would’ve gated us out and screw the “I’d rather die.” He could’ve punched me again if he’d wanted since he’d still be alive to do it and cry about his phobia and reasons later. Head wounds, though, they were tricky. Once Robin had been gated involuntarily his first time with me, which is what not sharing your phobias gets you, and the times after that, he’d been able to mentally brace himself for it. With every gate, however, whether it was Robin or Niko or both, they came out the other side sick as dogs. Eventually the fetal position moaning and projectile vomiting had stopped after repeated exposure, but the sickness didn’t go away. They just adjusted to it. Everyone, everything, every creature out there hated gating and they all ended up temporarily sick.