Downfall (9 page)

The hand stayed on my wrist, Niko still counting. “You know who he was.”

Yeah, I did.

“Un-fucking-lucky for one,” I muttered. “He was good with an even better gun.” But I’d been better. I kicked up enough of the bright-colored fallen foliage to imitate a phoenix as I ran faster. No one held a grudge like a paramilitary organization.

You might forget your fuckups, although saving Nik would never be a fuckup to me, but you can bet those who tally the fuckups never forgot them. . . .

Or you.

Goodfellow

“The Vigil is after Cal.”

I had a deep and abiding camaraderie, a friendship undeniable with Niko. In every one of his lives that I’d encountered him, I’d found him to be intelligent, loyal, noble, brave, an excellent fighter, the best possible human to have watching your back, and incredibly sexy even in only a slave’s loincloth. What was I thinking? Especially in only a loincloth. Yet there were times, rare as a virgin in a Roman whorehouse, true, but there did exist the uncommon occasion when I would’ve greatly enjoyed breaking an urn, a small piece of statuary, or, in these times, a chair over his head.

I slid farther down on my couch designed for twenty people or one puck and one possessive mummified dead cat. Salome rasped a purr, sounding as if she were choking on a pound of Egyptian sand, while draped over my
knee. There was no heartbeat in her still chest, and after years, I had yet to get used to that. I rubbed tired eyes and then raised my best incredulous gaze to his stubborn one. I hated the stubborn one. It was akin to a stew of obstinacy and righteousness seasoned with a demand deadly enough it had you giving in when the first two wouldn’t have swayed you at all. Particularly when he had his sword out . . . as he did now. Curse my self-preservation instincts.

“You don’t possibly think this surprises me,” I said skeptically. “If you tell me that it surprises
you
, I will be forced to downgrade you from ‘the smart brother.’” Straightening from my weary sprawl, I put Salome on the floor to go find her fellow dead cat companion, Spartacus. Cal had gifted me with him after killing the murderous mummy that had made the both of them. I thought he was hoping for an unholy spawning and a litter of more zombie cats. That would be my luck.

Niko continued to loom, katana at his side, waiting. He knew words were my weapon, but they were also my weakness and, of all others, Niko best knew how to use that against me. Silence, I loathed it, and he knew it. “He gated in broad daylight when he was trying to save you from Spring Heeled Jack!” I snapped, spreading my arms wide to indicate all the unbelievable lunacy that act entailed. I had hundreds of informants in the city and I hadn’t needed to talk to one of them to know that the Vigil would come after Cal after that idiotic move he’d made. The Vigil had made their rules clear. Humanity, as a whole, could not know of
paien
of the supernatural—outside horrible reality shows. Neither were they wrong. If humanity knew of us, there were enough of them to kill us all or lead to a fear-based, on their side, war if nothing else.

“Broad daylight!” Yes, it was a repetition and I was
more skilled with any language to make that unnecessary, but . . . by Menoetius, most reckless and crazed of the Titans, sometimes even Niko didn’t listen.

“It was more toward twilight actually and irrelevant.” Face smooth, eyes calm, he lifted the katana and tapped the point not quite idly on the thick slab of rock crystal that constituted my coffee table.

“Fine. It was dim. It was dusk. The fact remains it wasn’t dark. People could see, which leads us to another very unpalatable fact: He did it in front of at least twenty people!” I dropped my arms. Nothing could stretch far enough to show the amount of idiocy that went into that. This wasn’t ancient Greece. Mount Olympus wasn’t the current tourist attraction and gods and goddesses didn’t disappear into the ether on a daily basis in the sight of whoever they chose. Those days were gone.

“Much as it pains me to admit, I’m not quite capable of seducing those twenty witnesses and using my immeasurable stamina and infinity of sexual positions to put them all in orgasm-induced comas, catatonic at the knowledge nothing in this life will ever match a mere fifteen minutes with me.” I continued with little that could be construed as a good mood. “We were fortunate as it was that he was quick enough that no one caught it on their phone. Therefore it’s not at one million hits on YouTube. It wasn’t on television. There was the infinitely amusing hallucinogenic gas theory, as you couldn’t blame it on swamp gas in
gamou
New York City, so someone was doing their part in covering it up.” The Vigil at their best.

“But it remains, Cal lost control in public. No, that’s not true. Cal didn’t have any control to begin with when he was searching for you and Jack and care he did not. And don’t for a moment underestimate me by assuming I don’t know about a basement full of partially
disintegrated bodies that happened less than twenty minutes later,” I sniped, “which, I’m assuming, is how he did find Jack and you, the mandatory sacrifice in these overwrought scenarios, the helpless golden-haired ninja-in-need.” I’d pay for that description sooner or later, but it would be worth it. I went on to voice the obvious. “Even brainwashed people talk when other people around them begin to explode like one hundred and fifty pounds of raw meat wrapped around a stick of dynamite.”

“They were not good people. Bad things tend to happen to not good people.” There was a minute shift of his shoulders, the most dismissive of shrugs. “Also irrelevant.” The sword tapped against the stone again.

“I think the Vigil would agree with you there. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that they have found Caliban irrelevant to life and plan on relieving him of it altogether,” I said with bitter force. I couldn’t help it. Always . . .
always
they made it so difficult to keep them alive.

There was a nearly invisible flicker of fear behind Niko’s calm. Present, then vanished in the smallest fraction of a moment. No one would’ve seen it aside from me or Cal, but no one had known Niko for most of human history save the two of us.

Sighing, I waved a hand in his direction. “You are beyond fortunate I remember how you looked in a loincloth. Put away your toy and sit down while I get us both something to drink. Then we can play our little game I’ve become so fond of over the years.”

Rising to my feet, I went to my bar. I wavered between the truly hard liquor and wine. Achilles had grown up drinking wine as if it were water, as had Alexander as well. Arturus drank a piss-poor beer-ale mix the memory of which made me cringe to this day. Niko in this life didn’t drink often at all, but there were exceptions. This
would qualify. I went with wine and handed him the glass. He had sat on the coffee table, katana sheathed, back ruler straight, appearing stoic as one could be yet cripplingly afraid, although he’d refuse to admit it to anyone, Cal and me included. Always had he been this way. The strong one—afraid to be afraid.

My living room was more than large enough that I could sit on the couch without invading his personal space, and I did. I dropped down opposite him and clinked my glass against his. He took a swallow and questioned with one raised eyebrow, “Game? What game?”

Tossing back half my glass, no decorous swallows for me, I answered impatiently, “The game we so often play. You ask, ‘Robin, will you help us on this utterly doomed and certainly suicidal quest?’ And I say, ‘You’re mad. Insane. A demon resides in your head and we must find a physician to do a nice trepanning, drill a hole in your skull and let it out. Now, go away and leave me to drink and whore in peace.’”

I drained my glass with my next swallow and then pointed the crystal goblet at him. “Whereupon you prevail on honor that I do not possess and accuse me of an inherent courage I would consider worse than a venereal disease and eventually say that you cannot do it without me. You cannot do it without your friend.”

I’d brought the bottle of wine with me and poured myself another glass. “Of course I’m not able to resist that. I never have been. The ‘cannot do it without me’ part, yes. That I can resist. I’m brilliant. Naturally there are many things that cannot be done without me.” I watched the liquid in my glass swirl as I tilted it from side to side. “But when you say ‘friend,’ I am defenseless.” I put the now empty bottle down on the couch beside me and concentrated on drinking my wine more slowly this time. “I’ll assist with the Vigil. You knew that
before you walked through my door.” With a key I was beginning to regret having given him.

A hand touched my knee, heavy and comforting. “I have never meant it like that, Robin, I swear. I have never meant to use your friendship.” His gaze was steady on mine. “I depend on you like Cal depends on me. Sometimes, like now, I am lost and you’re the only one I know who might have a map. And if you didn’t or couldn’t help, you’d still be my friend. Our friend. That will never depend on what you can do for us. It depends solely on you being you.”

He leaned back, removing his hand, and giving me one of his smiles that occurred so infrequently. “Not to mention, who else can drive Cal into hiding simply by threatening nudity?” I drank my wine, for the first time in eight hundred years or so speechless. Niko went on easily, blatantly giving me a chance to recover. “And when did you ever see me in a loincloth?”

“A slave auction in the southern part of Britain,” I said promptly, the taste of grape on my tongue. “You’d been captured probably in what is Ireland now. Tribes fighting tribes. Whoever was captured alive ended up as a slave. Unfortunately that was the way of the world then. But you were apparently not agreeable to being a slave.” No, Niko didn’t have it in him to give in, to not make them earn every single inch they dragged him along. “Barely seventeen at the most, you were fighting your captors every step of the way. You had reddish blond hair and skin much more pale than yours is now. You did have the same nose, however.”

I smiled at the memory, the first flare of excitement at finding him again. “I’d learned to recognize you both by then, no matter the color of your hair or skin. Your temperaments oddly rarely change”—this life was the most dramatic change I’d seen by far . . . thanks to the Auphe
genes in Cal—“and are wholly unmistakable. I bought you and gave you your freedom.”

“What about Cal?” Niko questioned, rolling the wineglass between both hands. “Did you buy him too or did I go back home to find him?”

There was the end of the pleasant part of that recollection, too many lifetimes for me to barely recall. Niko wouldn’t remember at all. That was how his particular rebirth worked.

As I was not reincarnated, I was not as fortunate as Nik in losing those memories, the good ones or the ones that made for sleepless nights. I’d been around before the spoken word existed. When they developed one by one, language after language, I had learned them all. I hadn’t only seen what Niko of that incarnation had done then, I’d also understood what he’d said. Paying the slaver, who I would get back at some day for putting a man such as Niko in chains, I’d unlocked those same chains and told Niko he was free.

He hadn’t known I was there. His eyes had been wild as his head whipped about, looking . . . searching. He found it in a nearby gawking tribesman. He had then called out a name in a voice ragged and torn before lunging at the tribesman, seizing the knife from his belt, and cutting his own throat all in one swift continuous movement. It happened so fast that no one could stop it—not Zeus, not God, Odin, or Allah, certainly not me.

He had crumpled at my feet and bled to death in seconds. With my hands wrapped around his neck trying in vain to stop the flood, I’d learned my lesson. If one brother was found,
watch
him until the other is in sight. The name he had said with black guilt and blacker despair, it would be that of his brother—the Cal of this time.

Kneeling in the mud, hands and arms up to my elbows
coated in scarlet, I’d bent my head and buried my face in dirty red hair. I stayed that way until he was as cold as the ground beneath us and the blood on me dried to a maroon crust. It had been a hundred and ten years since I’d seen him last, and to lose him in a matter of minutes . . . well . . . I wasn’t going to let that go, was I?

I’d done what I did best, brushing off the death by claiming to be a sentimental fool who hated to see a pet die. I’d talked and drunk and laughed and sucked information out of every man in that tribe until I’d narrowed it down to the three possible men who had killed a five-year-old Cullen during the raid. They’d all gathered around while one swooped down to grab him as he ran toward his brother, who was shouting for him across the field. The one, whichever one it had been, had held the little boy upside down by his legs and cut his throat. Slaughtered him like a pig in the very same way Niko, with remorse-driven purpose, had slaughtered himself.

I hadn’t been able to find which of the three held the blade that took that Cal’s life and, for all intents and purposes, had taken Niko’s as well. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know, because I’d killed all three. One had held the knife, but the other two had watched and laughed. They all deserved what I gave them. It wasn’t quick as say the slitting of a child’s throat was. It wasn’t like that at all. Once they’d drunk enough to pass out, I stole a horse and cart to take them out of the village far enough that there would be no interruptions, and then I took my time. I couldn’t remember if it was two days or three, but in vengeance of a five-year-old child and a seventeen-year-old young man, neither of whom I would be able to rejoin this time, I doubted it had been long enough.

Not nearly.

“Robin?”

I left the past where it belonged and finished my wine
before giving Niko’s expression of concern a brightly wicked smile. “Yes. You went home to him and took me along with you. Cullen was his name then.” That was true. It was the last thing Niko had said before drowning in his own blood. I didn’t know what his own name had been, but Cullen meant cub and so I’d thought of Niko as Phelan—wolf—when I returned those three days later to bury him.

Phelan and Cullen, another two I hadn’t been able to save.

“There was a grand celebration.” I saw it that way sometimes, imagining laughter, firelight, the smell of roasting chickens, and that terrible ale. I pictured a small boy who threw himself into my lap and gave me a handful of sticky honeycomb for bringing his brother home to him. Everyone knows pucks lie. Few know why we lie. They don’t know that the truth can be so unbearable that you’d rather lie to anyone, yourself most of all. I stretched my smile wider. “Dancing and drinking all night and well into the next day. If human females were fertile with pucks, I would no doubt have impregnated half your village.”