12

We ended up in the sewers.

If I got laid for every time a firefight, sword fight, or both ended up with me there in the unholy muck, my dick would’ve fallen off from overuse.

With Goodfellow leading the way, we ran eight or ten blocks. He didn’t lose that prickle at the base of his brain. He said as we ran that it wasn’t a solid, concrete awareness he had of those other paien races, the few of which were or had been before trickster races one and all, which made sense. Like to like. His link wasn’t the same as the one I’d had with the Auphe, an inescapable sense of their presence depending solely on distance. The puck’s was vague, a ghost of a tickle, which sounded easy to lose, but he didn’t. Twice he stopped, at first we hadn’t gone a block. “Gamou, it’s gone. I’ve lost it. He’s gone.”

“Fast bastard.” Damn it. He’d been here, right here, within reach of a hand or a bullet. This all could’ve been over. It could’ve been—

Robin had cut off my mental whining and bitching before I could get any further. “No, there it is. I have him again.” There were about five more blocks of racing down the sidewalk, on the edge of the street, when we knocked down entire piles of people on their way to work. That’s when we came to another halt, Goodfellow hitting every curse word in the Greek language as he spun around, trying to catch a wisp of what was iffy on qualifying for the definition of a wisp to begin with. And then he had a face-to-face lock. A phantom touch of an imaginary feather was how he described it later. The cursing ended abruptly when the puck said, “There he is yet again.” There was a speculative note to the statement, but I didn’t let it keep me from following him as he sprinted across the street, dodging and sliding agilely over moving car hoods as he went. As much as I wanted Lazarus dead, I wasn’t about to let Goodfellow lose me.

“He’s coming back when he loses us, letting you pick up his trail again.” I vaulted over a baby stroller carrying a Pomeranian with a rhinestone-studded collar, and bright purple painted toenails. I didn’t judge. For all I knew it was a cuter baby than I’d been.

“A trap, then. It’s not a particularly clever one, but a trap nonetheless.” Going by Robin’s wide smile and laugh, he was reaping the adrenaline rush himself.

“It’s always a trap, Caligula.” My feet pounded the pavement behind him. “Did you forget my biography already?”

“Let me enjoy myself for a few hours before I’m forced to dive into knowing every step and action I’m required to take during the next eight years, which is a torture and a hell for a trickster. We live to be surprised. It’s a rare treat as we most often see it coming. If our lives were a movie, we’d want a twist ending every hour of the day.” He body slammed a hug slab of beef who’d parked his truck on the sidewalk to unload frozen hunks of meat at a restaurant. Beef had caught sight of us coming and, while giving off the look of a small-brained, massively muscled explosion of steroid psychosis waiting for an excuse to beat someone, anyone, to a pulp, it turned out he was a Good Samaritan . . . who was an explosion of steroid psychosis, as the Bible didn’t say word one about steroids, and was waiting for an excuse to beat someone to a pulp.

“Stop running people down, assholes,” he spat. “Act like decent human beings before I rip off one of your legs and beat you both to shithead pudding.” He was already swinging a fist the size of my head, but it was slow and weighted down with muscle that was good for taking down people who didn’t know how to fight . . . or dodge. It could be a slow dodge at that—sliding to one side while texting your friends about dinner plans later that night. Possibly he normally stuck with blind assholes, who rudely smacked people with their walking stick.

Robin wasn’t blind, and he didn’t stop running. In fact he avoided the hovering fist of doom, kicked the guy in the crotch, hit him in the throat with the stiff, callused edge of his hand, and kept running over the top of him as he fell, a less than mighty redwood. “Your concern is noted, Samson. We thank you for your input. And drop off your résumé. I have an opening for a massively muscled, tiny brained combination driver and cabana boy. You’d be perfect,” echoed behind him as he kept going.

I ran around him as he was wheezing for air from the throat strike and was doing it through the vomiting that came with a brutally vicious punt to the balls. I’d had my fill of swimming in bodily fluids last night. If I could, I’d avoid it today. “Samson?” I caught up with Goodfellow. “I’d have gone with Paul Bunyan.”

“Yes, but you also called me Caligula, showing how untrained your assessment of a person’s psyche is. I knew Caligula. I tried to warn him horses weren’t the—”

“Monogamous type. I know. I know,” I grimaced. “You’ve said. I just didn’t think then to ask if you knew that because the horse was cheating on him with you.”

“You’re half Auphe with the propensity on occasion to treat me as a buffet, starting with my expensive pedicure, putting an entirely new spin on foot fetish, but you give as good as you take, same as ever.” He elbowed a Catholic priest in the ribs to shove him out of his path. “That was for the Spanish Inquisition. They never expect them, you know.”

I did know, but around five years from now he, Niko, and I would have a Monty Python marathon. It wasn’t a surprise, by any standard, but it was one thing I hadn’t told him as it was too small to matter. I’d left out that and those like it that couldn’t make a difference. Mainly due to a lack of time, but, too, because I did know how pucks loved their surprises and the next eight years were going to be either dull or a misery when it came to the notable events. I had to leave him something.

“I’m not half Auphe or I’d have given in and the world would now be dominated by the Auphe. And I’m not half human or I’d be dead twenty times over.” I saw what was ahead of us. It couldn’t be more of a trap if he’d painted the word on a sign and taped it up with a giant bunch of floating party balloons.

“Then what are you?” Goodfellow was slowing down.

“A lion.” I bared my teeth, but it was friendly, one predator showing respect to another.

We’d run two miles in about fifteen minutes, which wasn’t my best time by any means, but it was fair considering how many obstacles we’d had to go around—buildings—and how many we’d pushed through or gone over—people. The buildings weren’t bad. The people were, depending on their size, the same as running over stacks of inflatable mattresses. Wobbly and unstable.

Coming to a halt, we stood in front of one of Canal Street’s subway entrances. “Niko once calculated that seventy-three percent of traps occur in either subway tunnels or sewers. Given a choice, I’ll take subway tunnels every time.” I started down the stairs, ignoring the people pushing past me as I paused to glance back at Robin. Knowing it was a trap and walking into it were two different things altogether. And it’d been hundreds of years since our last lives together. He’d gotten a little lazy. “Coming? Now is when it starts to really get good. Think carnival without the creepy flesh-eating clowns.”

He came down the steps behind me. “Seen many of those, have you?”

“Shot a lot of those,” I corrected, taking the steps faster.

“Not all of them are children-eating monsters like the bodachs. Some are human.”

“And still creepy and probably still eat children. Shoot all clowns is a PSA to live by.” When we made it through the rush and onto the platform, I flicked Robin’s ear. “Come on, Lassie. Which way did he go, girl? Is he twisting off Timmy’s head even as we speak to use in his bowling league? Kind of soft, not much speed, lots of gutter balls, but it’s aesthetics over efficiency for some.”

“I’m shocked you know the word ‘aesthetics’ and are capable of using it correctly. And please do rein in your rampant enthusiasm when we close in on Lazarus. We know nothing about his abilities, the quantity or quality of them, or the predatory traits unique to him.” He headed to the left. “Call me Lassie again and what I did to Samson’s testicles will be gentle loving care compared to what I do to yours.” He hadn’t gone more than a few feet when he slowed to a fast walk. “A thought occurs. Let me check before I lose my signal.” Punching in a number, he raised the phone to his ear. There was time for one ring, if that, before he was saying two words, “The Vigil.”

He listened for three seconds, then disconnected. “Strangely enough, the Vigil has uprooted its entire organization and every single member is fleeing the city starting an hour ago. Planes, trains, cars, splitting up and stampeding in every direction. I think Lazarus gave them a little warning when he appeared in case I felt like doing what I’d done before.”

Hiring the Lupa to kill every Vigil member who didn’t have the sense to run. The new version of the werewolf mafia, the Lupa were all female under the leadership of their alpha, my ex-fiend with benefits, Delilah. They’d started, at Robin’s direction and receipt of a massive fee, with the Vigil assassins who’d been sent after me. They dealt with them with their usual ruthless efficiency. Then every Vigil member was given a gun and made an assassin. Untrained, cheated on their salary—had to be—they’d lasted a lot less longer against the Lupa. When it came to the Vigil in NYC now, my now, there were none.

“See? We know some of his traits. Responsibility and respect to the organization that turned him into lab rat. He’s a Boy Scout.”

We were wrong, we found out after it was all over. Lazarus hadn’t warned them. I’d forgotten or just didn’t think about how the Vigil had a psychic or two. They weren’t the more talented of their kind, but they had enough ability to see something headed straight for the city. Something cataclysmic enough to be one thing alone.

An act of god.

•   •   •

If I knew more about one subject than Goodfellow, it was the subway.

That would be because he refused to take it, took a car service, had his own limo, his own personal sports car, his BMW when flash wasn’t what he needed for a particular con, and enough money to afford to park a fleet more of them if he wanted. He once had tried to Febreze me when I showed up at his penthouse after being stuck in a three-hour-long stall, saying I stank from marinating among the plebeian, which he helpfully broke down into urine, cheap perfume, cheap cologne, cheap soap, body odor from lack of those last three, polyester, rayon, sweaty feet, Minoxidil, deodorant made in China that both failed spectacularly and was infused with mercury, and Aqua Net that hovered around me in a cloud intensely and thick to the point that I must have sat on the lap of a New Jersey reality star hopeful.

We kept following Robin’s sense of Lazarus for a few minutes before I realized it. “I know where he’s going.”

I had to remember that he’d lived in the city, he was a member of the Vigil who’d volunteered to be that lab rat as their last hope. Watching over the paien to see if they were staying under human radar meant knowing the city as well as the paien themselves did, including the home of the lowest of the low—the revenants—who used abandoned subway tunnels and sewers to get around the city, to stash the leftovers from whatever homeless victim they’d snatched, to sleep. It was all-purpose. The Vigil would know that and they’d know the both of them inside and out.

“Where? Hell? If so, we are there.” He had a hand over his nose and mouth. “I believe I recognize this stench as the Morning Star’s major weapon in the angelic Rebellion.”

“Yeah, you’re a delicate princess.” I moved past him. There was a hidden cover made of heavy metal plate in the floor under a pile of junk in a long unused, by humans, maintenance storage closet. Below that was another maintenance tunnel, again, abandoned by humans, but an interstate to revenant and other paien, that weren’t as disgusting but they weren’t qualified to be handing out perfume samples at Macy’s either.

“The Eighteenth Street subway station. It’s been shut down since, hell, I don’t know. The nineteen-forties? Fifties? You would know the exact date and time to the second if you ever got on the subway.” That was true. Whatever the puck used or could be of use to him, he knew everything about, down to the last detail. The subway had no possibility of making his list.

“It’s vulgar in smell, appearance, and the commonality of its populace. How can you bear it?”

“Because I’m not a snob,” I replied. “And you’ve been sharing your opinion on the subway for years and years. Enough that I hear it now when you’re not even around. You’re off getting your feathered freak-on with Ishiah and I’m working the bar when out of nowhere I hear your bitching that if I think that mass transit that involves slithering under the surface world and through the dirt like a worm, then I should shower before funkifying your penthouse. It’s like a song I can’t get out of my head, except it’s not my imagination. I hear your rich asshole voice smugly bouncing around inside my skull. I think it’s growing into a parasite, growing big enough to eat my brain.”

“I do not want to talk about that pigeon and when you return home, you are to obtain immediate monogamy deprogramming for me. Use a Taser to take me down if you must. There will be oaths on that in blood before you leave. And, for your edification, I cannot be a snob when I legitimately am better than everyone else.”

“Uh-huh, sure, your Loftiness,” I said absently, watching for the coming train. Once it passed us in an angry rumble, I grabbed Robin’s arm and ran, pulling him behind me. “Go!” It was far enough down the tunnel that you had to be quick before the next train came and that one was considerably closer to the tunnel wall or the tunnel was closer to it. Either way, it was easier to get sucked up, pulled along, then thrown under it. None of those had struck me as worth risking.

We’d reached the door, but hadn’t yet touched it when I heard the next train. “Great. Imminent death. What’s new?” I had gone for one of my knives, the bowie with the thick, straight nine-inch blade that was my weapon and pry bar of choice. I wedged it between the door and its frame, and leaned on the handle with all my weight. The door groaned, the grinding sound of rust against concrete, and popped open. Shoving Robin ahead of me, I yanked the door shut behind me, and had out my flashlight, small but bright. Ten seconds later we were climbing down the metal rungs of a ladder. It beat the door out on rust. The ladder itself was purposely made of rust and the dull gleam of irregular metal patches was its sign of deterioration.

There had once been lights in the maintenance tunnel, but they’d gone dark, dying a quiet death who knew how long ago. There were rats too, but they were alive, plump, and healthy. Revenants were ravenous eaters, which made them sloppy eaters. Half a mouthful of their meal went flying with every bite. In the empty tunnels like these and in the sewers, the rats followed them or waited for them while they were out hunting. It was a good life for a rat.

It was good for us, too.

Full rats were slow and happy rats. They let you be. Hungry rats were desperate and bold, starving hyenas on a smaller scale. I’d spent a fair share of my life sleeping or squatting in houses and mold-infested two-room apartments where you could hear the rats in the walls, too many to count sometimes. When I was four I’d asked Nik if we could catch one and keep it as a pet. No? Why not? They weren’t as ugly as the Chihuahua that belonged to my babysitter across the hall. Nik had said they were dirty and carried fleas, lice, and disease. That hadn’t sounded any different from the Chihuahua, but I’d listened to my brother. Not that he was always right, although he was. Four years old and I’d known that.

I’d listened because he was the only one who listened to me.

Doing what he told me hadn’t kept me from being bitten three or four times on my leg, but I hadn’t minded. I’d understood. At four I’d known I was a rat myself, but I hadn’t been half as good at going after food as they were. They’d taught me a lesson: If you can’t find what you need for a growling stomach, you go and you take it. It’d been a lesson worth learning and worth the blood. I’d been asleep on our mattress on the floor while Nik took a shower for school in the morning. Sophia wasn’t there. She wasn’t there a lot at night and when she was, I wished she wasn’t. She hadn’t been there during the day much either, but it hadn’t mattered. Whether she was or not, Nik had taken me over to Mrs. Sheckenstein, who watched me while he was gone.

It hadn’t mattered she’d smelled of a bathtub full of lavender flea market perfume and a full diaper or that she’d get irate at her TV talk shows and smack the screen with her walker. She’d fed me lunch, every school day, which had been as close as meeting a real live Santa Claus, flying reindeer and all, to my four-year-old self. And she’d taught me to play Monopoly and Clue and Texas hold ’em. She’d been a great old lady, who cackled each time I’d swept home a pot of Peanut Butter M&M’s, told me I had a gift at bluffing like nobody’s business. I’d known that once she’d explained bluffing was lying for fun. I’d lied that young for survival not fun, but it’d been nice to hear someone other than Nik tell me I was smart and good at something.

When I had been bitten, Nik had come out of the shower to find me awake in my Batman shorts and a once red, now faded pink Flash T-shirt from Goodwill. I’d been sitting up, the blanket the two rats had crawled under tossed aside, and had been very cautiously placing my carefully hoarded seven M&M’s in front of the gaunt pair crouched by me. I’d been four, but I hadn’t been stupid. I’d had blood running down one leg where they’d tried to take a few bites out of me. If they were that hungry, they’d gnaw off the tips of my fingers if I let them.

Nik’s face. It hadn’t worn that expression before that I could remember, not at four. It was gray under the dark olive, mouth open, not widely, but as if he had been in the middle of saying something and forgotten what it was. Now I knew he’d been horrified and guilt-stricken to come out and see rats had tried to eat his little brother. But at four, horror and guilt and the flu looked the same.

His eyes unable to leave the blood and bites, he’d reached for the baseball bat he left propped against the wall. He’d hit robbers breaking through windows and Sophia’s “dates” with it several times by the time he was eight. They’d deserved it, but the rats hadn’t.

“No! Don’t. They’re hungry, Nik. They didn’t bite me because they’re mean. Just hungry.” Niko and I had both known what that was like, but my brother had always given me a third of his food until I had turned eight myself and was skilled enough to steal at least the makings of one big meal or steal someone’s food at a fast-food place when they left it on the table to go to the soda machine with their cup. It’d been enough to split on the days at the end of the week when Nik’s paycheck had refused to stretch that far. I’d not been as smart as my brother, as polite or human—the human wasn’t my fault—with classmates or teachers and other authority figures, but I’d had my own talents. I’d been able to lie, steal, blackmail, and commit arson (only the once) like a motherfucker by the third grade.

It was something that Niko hadn’t had it in him to do. He would try before he’d let me go without, but his morals would strangle and trip him up. Or, I’d told him, let me do what I’m good at, being sneaky. When you try and they catch you, and they will, they’ll drag you off to foster care or a group home, and I’ll be alone with Sophia. If I’m alone with Sophia, stealing won’t be a problem as I won’t eat.

I’d been eight then, but when I’d made promises to my brother, he’d known they were real. I wouldn’t eat if the cops or the social workers took him. I wouldn’t eat until I saw him again and as poor a shoplifter as his conscience made him, that might’ve been too long. He’d given in. There was nothing else he could do.

When I was four, though, hunger had been more familiar. “You share with me when I’m hungry,” I’d said. “I should share with the rats.”

Nik had bitten his bottom lip until it was as bloody as my leg, but had let me finish feeding the rest of the M&M’s to the rodents before wrapping them up quickly in the blanket and shaking them out of the window, lucky we lived on the first floor, to be on their wild way . . . right back inside our walls, but we’d been young then. Not quite as smart as rats. Nik had cleaned my leg with peroxide, curiously upset to a four-year-old me who’d reassured him it hardly hurt. And the sight of blood hadn’t bothered me . . . ever, I guessed, as far back as I could remember. Blood was blood. Why would that disturb anyone? Except Niko’s blood. That disturbed me to the point of taking the baseball bat myself and making who’d caused my brother to bleed to bleed three times as much themselves.

In the end I’d had my leg wrapped, and a brother who’d sat on the mattress with me while I promptly fell back asleep while he stayed awake all night, watching for rats. The next day had been a “field trip” to the free clinic for a tetanus shot that had hurt like a bitch. The four bites Mickey and Minnie had given me combined hadn’t been as painful as that.

To this day, I didn’t hold a grudge at the memory. I had understood hunger and I could tolerate anything, rats included, over a Chihuahua. I didn’t bother to look down when several ran over my feet to flow into the darkness ahead of us. “You don’t have a problem with rats, I take it? In your future business, which I fear is spent entirely underground surrounded by disgusting smells, that if you did have such a phobia that you’d have to become accustomed.”

In the spill of the flashlight’s glow I glanced over at Robin’s comment and laughed with not a shred of humor to show for it. “I told you about the future and the Auphe. My past you’ll have to get from Cal Junior. I left something for your curiosity. I know pucks and I know you—how insane it would drive you to not have anything left to find out, dig up. So never bitch I didn’t give you anything. But, just this once, no, I don’t have a problem with rats. Having a few take a couple of mouthfuls out of my leg when I was a kid is probably one of my happier memories.”

I didn’t ask about Goodfellow and rats. As old as he was, he would’ve caught and eaten rat at some point in prehistory and counted it a choice morsel fit for a king.

The maintenance tunnel was about a third of a mile long before we stood in a much larger area with crumbled pillars. Although these weren’t marble, I still thought it had to be a duplicate of the abandoned platform above us. Why they had a half-finished duplicate down here, I had no idea. There were also piles of trash, heaps of bones, and graffiti on one cracked wall in what I suspected wasn’t brown paint, but dried blood, and in a language and alphabet I didn’t recognize. It curved and looped in a manner unfamiliar enough that it made my brain think about aching, then decide it wasn’t worth it. I gestured toward it. “‘For a good time, call Shub-Niggurath’?”

“With her thousand young, I think she’s had a good time and then some. ‘Azathoth thinks he was here but being the blind, idiot god, who knows?’”

“If you knew Lovecraft, tell me he was insane. I think I’d feel better about tentacles specifically and the universe in general.”

“He was not”—his smile was sly and devious, the perfect reflection of his personality—“at least he was not until he mentioned to his substitute geometry teacher in high school how he wished to be a writer and that teacher told him a few stories.”

“You are Satan, aren’t you? The fucking devil,” I groaned. “I knew it all along.”

“How was I to know about the evolutionary unviable streak of mental illness that ran in his family? I did, if nothing else, support him in his hatred of geometry, Euclidean or non. That is the devil’s tongue; mine is simply hypnotically convincing, eloquent, provocative, seductive, and occasionally indecent.” He was shining around the spare flashlight I’d given him. Bright as it was, it couldn’t begin to penetrate the nearest alcoves. Everything past that was a starless night. “It was only three days. I was undercover. There was a wood nymph on the grounds, beautiful, with the softest bed of pale green flowering moss shading her—” I kicked him in the ankle while using my light to get a look in the other direction.

Hissing in pain, he emphasized, “It was blooming for me, tiny star-shaped jasmine with a come-hither fragrance leading to a silken passage toward—” The second saving of my own personal sanity was a light rap of my flashlight to the back of his head to cut him off.

“Do you write romance novels for great-great-grandmothers? For nuns?” I was weaving, the exhaustion of the fight with the skin-walker, the sleepless night . . . the crushing inability to turn and see my brother. And I was having a repeat of the spotty vision.

“It is the poetry of erotic temptation, you heathen.”

“But talk about a guy or guys that you’ve screwed, or when you did before Ishiah stamped monogamous on your forehead while slapping a chastity Speedo on you, and I’m tortured with ‘huge cock,’ ‘dick that could go all night and I’m talking an Alaskan three-month night,’ ‘an ass almost half as fuckworthy as mine,’ ‘hung like Seabiscuit on Viagra,’ and ‘dick holster’—that was new to me. Thanks for that. Where’s the ‘throbbing manhood radiating incredible heat, wrapped in silken skin and a passion that needed no words to breach my heavenly gates’?” Mrs. Sheckenstein read a lot of trashy romance novels out loud, very out loud as she was half deaf, so I wouldn’t be bored in between the poker games and her TV shows.

I narrowed my eyes. There were more streaks I couldn’t blink away. They were dark now, not yellow. And they were coming toward us, sinuous and slinking as they moved.

“That is the foulest of foul. Heinous enough to drain one of the will to live and so hideous to the ear that if you do, you’d pray to be struck deaf and blind. There is something profoundly wrong with you. And if you say monogamous once more”—he gagged twice when he said the word—“once and only once, I will take my sword and—”

I slapped my hand over his mouth. This Robin wasn’t as familiar with me as mine had been after a few years. He was . . . he had . . . fuck, had, been easier to interrupt. Mine had learned to keep talking over me and if my hand had come near his face to casually attempt to stab it with an antique New Orleans gambler’s push dagger, the two-inch blade perfectly concealed in the palm of his hand. I’d wanted one, love at first sight, but he’d refused to tell me where he bought or stole it, the bastard. As he would’ve been a gambler in New Orleans a couple of hundred years ago, he’d likely bought it then and there.

“Yeah, take your sword,” I said quietly. “Now.”

Was that the scrape then quick scuttle of claws? I unholstered the Desert Eagle and shifted the light over to two pillars on the right. Nothing. Next to me Goodfellow had his sword out and it was one of his longer ones in spite of the shorter—helluva lot shorter—pricey suit jacket he was wearing with no addition of a long coat over it. “Where do you keep it?” I kept my voice low, but didn’t bother hiding the exasperation. “I’ve asked you before and you won’t tell me. Where the hell do you fit that in just a suit?”

“Have you ever seen me nude in this not quite utopian future?”

“Unfortunately. By accident.” I made sure the emphasis was audible if the words only just were as I swung the light to the left.

“Then why aren’t you asking me where I keep my cock instead? The difference between it and the sword is negligible. In fact, the length of the sword may be somewhat less.” He examined it for comparison. I was relieved he didn’t whip out what he was comparing it with to be positive.

The dark shuddered again. The light had touched them on this side, but if they’d been set a few inches farther back, it wouldn’t have. It wasn’t in the light themselves I saw them. I nearly did, but what had been a solid black shadow melted to a puddle of darkness in a blink of an eye and was gone. It was in the edges of the light, the faintest of dim glows, that I could make them out. Deep and velvety black—but without the depth or gleam of fur, there was a mass of them too entwined to separate and count. They were supple and boneless as weasels, if weasels were about six feet long, without any eyes that I could make out. I couldn’t see teeth either but there was the snapping of jaws with a ringing echo that is heard when there is a full mouthful of needle pointed fangs gnashing together. I pointed the flashlight directly at them. These didn’t melt—strength in numbers, always a bitch—but they did untangle their knot and writhe away from it.

Unfortunately that writhing was bringing them toward us.

They didn’t seem to like the light. They’d hump and slither away from a direct, head-on beam, but they’d keep to the dying glow where it dimmed to one side or the other. Apart, I could guess each would weigh about eighty or ninety pounds, but as their movement said every pound was pure, agile, and, knowing my luck, fucking gymnastic muscle. But with the no fur, no eyes, no mouth or teeth that I could see although I definitely heard that much, they were bizarre shadows except shadows aren’t that dense or solid that you could hear their teeth clashing and the scrape of nails against the cracked and crumbling floor.

“No idea what they are,” I said grimly as I shot the one in the lead to see the bullet swallowed and hear the impact of it on a wall or pillar behind it. It’d passed through it as if nothing was there, but knew that wasn’t true. “No idea and don’t like them,” I corrected.

I fanned the light back and forth to have them peeling off. It didn’t stop them, but it slowed them some. Goodfellow had stepped away from me to get space to swing his sword. It was a lighter version of a broadsword, heavier despite that but with more reach than the Roman short sword and more weight and force than his rapier. While I wished I hadn’t run that description through my head for a mental weapons checklist that was now labeled Goodfellow’s cock checklist, it’d been a good choice of weapon. It was too bad that it did nothing at all for the puck as the blade passed completely through the shadow and the shadow laughed. It was similar in no fucking way to the sound of a real weasel, but it was goddamn creepy as hell, no doubt.

Robin swore and aimed his own light at it, shoving it right into its face. And I do mean “into.” His hand vanished in the shadow that made up the creature. It squealed and backed away swiftly as ribbons of black began to pour from where the light had gone in. More swiftly than that, its entire narrow head fell apart. Turning into a rain of ebon, it fell to the floor, bubbled, and dissipated with the same consistency of mist. Its body began stretching and thinning as it began to grow a new head to replace the lost one.

I’d been counting and there were at least ten to fifteen of them. They were everywhere, then somewhere else. If one leaped into the darkened area our lights didn’t reach to our left, it would slither out from an equally lightless patch to our right. We couldn’t hurt them. Our weapons didn’t work on them. We could injure them with the flashlights, but not in a permanent way if they were growing back their heads. If anything, it irritated them more than anything else from the chorus of high-pitched squeals that had risen from the others in sympathy for the one who’d lost, and, goddamn it, seconds later grown its entire head back.

“We should meander, I think,” Robin suggested, holding up the hand that was gripping the flashlight he’d used to attempt brain surgery on our new friend. It was covered with blood. The skin of the back of it had been practically flayed. Long slices that had torn through every piece of skin that was available without completely skinning it altogether.

We couldn’t hurt them, but they had no difficulty hurting us.

“Yeah, we should go.” Regroup. Get out of this damn dark tunnel up into the daylight and, if pushed, shoot anyone whose shadow seemed too big for them. “Go and drink more. I don’t think we really tried hard enough with the drinking.”

They were coming for us, joining again into one mass undulation. They were between us and the direction we’d exited the tunnel onto the platform, but I’d been down here a few times before. I knew there was another way out. Stairs to a boarded-up door behind a fake facade of a small brick shop from WWII. Or, quicker and safer with instant gratification, there was another option. “I can gate us out of here,” I said as we backed away, pinning some in place and slowing other ones down. It kept them from leaping on us as a pack for as long as we could.

Goodfellow shook his head with enough force I wouldn’t have been that surprised if it had snapped. “No. I’d rather be eaten. What I said before, about doubting there were things worse than death, I’d forgotten the exception. I would truly rather be dead. I mean that and as you pointed out, technically, I already am dead. I’m already lost. So respect my wishes. Do not do—that thing. Just don’t.”

“Why?” I frowned, puzzled. I did get that the vomiting wasn’t much of a recommendation for gating, but it was less of a pain in the ass that certain agonizing death. And after a few trips, he’d gotten used to it and made it past the puking. He didn’t stop turning green, but he had toughed it out. “I’ve gated you before around twenty times at least, and you didn’t say anything. You didn’t say anything the very first time, which would’ve been the occasion for speak now or forever hold your peace.”

When had that been? If he was saying something about it now, he would’ve said something then. He was not a hold your peace type by any stretch of the imagination. What had . . . Ah. I had it.

“I remember. I didn’t give you any warning as I didn’t have any warning. A Babylonian sirrush tried to bite you in two, poisoned you, and, as I was dragging you away from it, it jumped us. It was fly or die time. There were no luxuries then, like thinking, when you were three-fourths dead on the floor and there were jaws about to snap around my head. Hey, you’re the information broker of the, hell, world. Here’s an interesting fact I picked up as I was half swallowed. The sirrush not only has tonsils, it has six of them.” I caught an ambitious weasel wriggling behind a mound of rubble close to one wall and used the flashlight beam to slice through its body in front of its back legs and tail. That was a big chunk to regenerate. Hopefully it would take it longer.

Being thrown in the deep end without knowing prior to the push must have gotten him past this death-before-gating philosophy. He’d continued to survive gating if not to like it, but no one liked it—no one but the Auphe. He hadn’t, though, said why or what had happened who knew how long ago to make him like that. He hadn’t hinted that he was or had been like that. Sooner die than gate? That was a double scoop of profound phobia.

“I’m not three-fourths dead now and I am saying no gating. Leave me if you have to, but gate me and one day, years from now when you’ve forgotten this festive discussion, I’ll break into your place and cut off your testicles.” His face was set and unyielding as marble.

“You’re serious? I’ve thought you were a crapshoot of borderline genius and borderline insane, but I didn’t think you were an idiot,” I snapped. “I’m not leaving you to die.”

“I gather then you’re not particularly fond of or attached to your balls. You unquestionably won’t be attached to them if you go against my wishes.” Damn, the weasels were on the move. He gave me a hard push. “Run!” He followed his own advice as we raced through across the platform, then jumped down and back into the tunnel in the opposite direction.

We raced as fast as we could force our legs to pump. Our lights bounced and scattered as we tripped or vaulted over rubble. I couldn’t resist a glance over my shoulder as the scuttle of claws followed us. I couldn’t tell how far back they were. I didn’t have time to turn the light on them and keep running without falling on my face.

“The Vigil turned Lazarus, normal human asshole, into some sort of unkillable pack of shadow weasels? I get the unkillable part is a benefit, a bonus package for being their guinea pig, but it doesn’t quite equal out to having to live as a pack of supernatural shadow weasels.” I felt teeth bury themselves in the back of the top of my knee and rip all the way down to the bottom of my heel—combat boot and all, a switchblade through butter. Slick as you please. “Son of a bitch.” I swiveled, impaled an inky neck with my flashlight and felt it vanish.

I hadn’t stopped to face it. I’d struck while still turning and let the momentum carry me around back to where I started and worked on running faster. There’s nothing like a little incentive and I had all I needed snapping at my heels.

“No. I saw him for a fraction—less than a fraction of a second actually. A fraction of a fraction. I couldn’t make out any details except that he was human in shape. Perhaps these shadows are pure unadulterated stench brought to unholy life.” Beside me, Goodfellow was keeping up easily. He was in good condition. Too good. He was arrogant as shit about his clothes, face, hair, but particularly his body. Yet I’d never seen him do anything resembling exercise.

He knew paien monsters, but he didn’t chase after them. Why would he? He hadn’t had a reason to until Niko and I had made a business out of it. He did the weekly orgy workout. That much sex could equal the ten miles I ran and the hours of sparring I’d both done daily, but I doubted it. If he could run like the Boston marathon was a stroll without regular exercise, what did it matter other than to hoard simmering resentment that he was an undeserving lucky bastard?

“Since we are going to die embarrassing deaths by shadow rodents—”

“Weasels aren’t rodents,” he corrected as automatically as Niko would have, but he tossed a handful of smug on top of that educational serving.

“Death by weasel isn’t less humiliating than death by rodent. Trust me, the loser quotient is equal.” I tripped on a wide crack hidden in the darkness, bounced off the wall, and kept running. If I’d learned one lesson in life that topped all others, it was if something already plans on eating you and is on your heels with a fork in one paw and a knife in the other—keep running. “I’ll be taking it to my grave anyway. Tell me why this gate phobia? Auphe phobia I get. Everyone gets that. But phobia versus death? Gates separate from the Auphe part”—although they never were—“how’d that happen?

“And it would be my gate,” I added, confident. Why wouldn’t I be? I hadn’t doubted myself in a while now. “Not an Auphe and its gate. You trust me with my own, don’t you?”

There was a telltale silence, airless and still. It would be what you heard when you woke up in a coffin after being buried alive. The uncomfortable sound of a lonely and imminent death by suffocation. Robin’s silence wasn’t as uncomfortable as that, but it stung. He knew me, not yet this time around, but he’d known me a thousand other times, and I’d never turned against him. “You don’t. You don’t trust me. Niko doesn’t trust me and he was my brother. I can’t say ‘is’ my brother. My brother is eight years from now” and likely dead. “Either/or, this Niko had been my brother once and he doesn’t trust me. Cal hates me.” That I could live with. I wasn’t too fond of the little shit myself. But this, this I couldn’t deal with. Not on top of this Niko. They were shadows of what I’d lost, but shadows, sometimes, can let you fool yourself into pseudo-sanity long enough to remake your own world. “You think I’m Auphe,” I said neutrally. “You think that because half of my blood is theirs that I’d, what? Eat you? Like the weasels?”

I turned and clenched my hands in my hair, banging my forehead on the sewer wall. “I should’ve thrown your letter in the gutter. I should’ve gone through with what I wanted, shot myself, followed my real brother the same as in every life. But the goddamn letter ruined everything.” I laughed hard enough to taste the salt of a scored throat. “I didn’t know there was anything left to ruin; I was as fucking wrong as it gets on that, wasn’t I? I came back because you told me it could be done, and because I trusted you, I believed it. I gave up my ticket out of this nightmare since you own my trust. You and Nik and no one else. I gave it to Niko and you, every scrap I ever had. I should’ve thought. I should’ve known that I’d come back and you’d still be dead. You aren’t Goodfellow. You aren’t Robin. Niko isn’t Nik. You’re memories, not people, and memories can’t give a damn about anyone. Can’t trust anyone. Can’t do shit for me.”

“No, that’s not how it is.” He was trying to pull me away from the wall despite the fact that I was simply leaning against it now, forehead to cold concrete. He could talk all he wanted. I wasn’t buying it. There were reasons not to like gates. There weren’t any that included “sooner die” than gate. A gate was a tool, a gun, and a gun was nothing but a paperweight without a hand to aim it and a finger to pull the trigger. He thought I was the hand and I was aiming at him with lethal intent. There was no excuse to prefer dying over letting me get us the hell out of here.

“That’s exactly how it is. You always trusted me before, but now I’m Auphe. Now I’m a monster, and you’d sooner die that trust me, you son of a bitch?” My Goodfellow hadn’t been like that, not once, and that was before I had known shit about the whole thousand lives past. “Hell, are you even real? Is any of this real? Or is it memories and nothing else? You can’t change memories or the future with them.

“If you are real, more than a shadow, then you know that in all those other lives, all through history, I never once betrayed you,” I snapped. “Never. And, believe me, asshole, there were certain centuries when life was brutal as fucking hell, where everyone, including three-year-olds, were ruthlessly amoral enough to slit your throat to steal everything on you and yank out your teeth to make jewelry for the rich. And there was me in that god-awful life, who wasn’t moral in the best of lives. I would’ve cheerfully beat the shit out of a nun for a slice of moldy cheese. And the price on your head was higher than I could even count. If ever there was a fucking occasion to not have faith in me, it would’ve been then, but you knew better.”

I would have kicked the crap out of the nun, too, without thinking twice about it. When you’re straddling the line between hunger and starvation, there’s not much you won’t do. With each life, the world changed, people changed, morals changed. “You do remember that life, right? What I did and didn’t do when it came to you, despite the daily goddamn misery that was survival. But you don’t trust me now?

“Half starving in the woods, no shelter, with a sociopathic madman who planned on hanging us all at once—one drop and seven broken necks. He and his men searching the forest every single day and night, knowing if he caught just one of us . . . one of us starving, sleepless luckless bastards who followed you, who believed in you”—Robin who’d be a better king than the one who deserted us and the one who was stealing and starving the country blind—“well, that one luckless bastard would tell them everything.

“But when they caught me”—we’d separated, the easier to lead those chasing us into circles—“when the edge of the hill collapsed and I fell”—fell forever—“landing on the rocks by the stream and breaking my leg”—I’d seen the snapped bone and a shard of it spearing through the meat of my calf and my threadbare trousers—“they were there, and I said nothing.” I’d screamed when one had kicked my brutalized leg viciously, but screams weren’t words. “When they’d tied my wrists, yanked them up over my head, knotted the rope around a horse’s saddle, and dragged me back”—along the ground, aiming my leg at any good-sized rock or broken branch, laughing as I shredded my bottom lip to a bloody pulp when every step of the horse felt like it was tearing off that leg, piece by piece—“I said nothing.”

There had been a castle five or six miles outside the forest, a small and blocky building, not the kind I’d picture now and the dungeon wasn’t underground. It wasn’t a dungeon at all. It didn’t have a single chain. It was just a room with a window high by the ceiling, no bigger than one foot by one foot. No way to get out of that if you’d had two working legs, but you could see the sky. It was gray every day I was there. I thought it had been three days then five, but after the first day, I didn’t know. It could’ve been a day, a month, or a year. I did know one thing.

I didn’t see the sun again.

My leg had gone bad in hours. The cloth below my knees frayed to nothing and let the open wound and bone crust with dirt. It smelled so strongly of infection that some of those holding knives for cutting and knives heated until they glowed red hot and a heavy poker for shattering bones had gagged, staggering out. I’d laughed, lying tied stripped naked on a rough wooden table scrounged from the kitchen along with the rest of their makeshift torture devices. Wasn’t that a sight? Torturers with weak stomachs. And I could laugh. The pain of my leg had gone past agony to a place I couldn’t feel it anymore. I was cold, the cold that seeps into you and holds you down when you fall through the rotted pond ice in early spring. It was a cold that numbed you to anything, even to the pain of fiery blades that had me screaming after the first ten burns despite swearing I wouldn’t give them that. I wouldn’t give them anything: words, screams, nothing.

My laughing brought more sliced and seared flesh but I didn’t feel it. The sheriff, a man who would’ve done his sworn duty for free when it included this, wasn’t one to give up. He pulled out two fingernails before the blacksmith’s tongs broke. He’d hurled it across the room. If he was trying to hit the wall, he was too angry to aim. It slammed into the forehead of one of his men, who swayed, a dent deeper than my thumb in his forehead, then fell to the floor. Deader than the doornail that had been hammered into the back of my left hand. If he hadn’t been mad before, the sheriff was now, flecks of foam and the glassy sheen of insanity in his eyes.

He burned Robin’s name on my chest. If I was that stupidly loyal to an enemy of the crown, I could wear my stupidity for the rest of my life. That joke was on him when he was the one who gave me the key out of that life. After that it had been a fog, heavy inside my chest. It had me coughing, but it passed. There was a morning mist that if you’d had a small cottage and a blanket or two, you could’ve lain on a pallet of straw and watched it through the window. I’d never had a home like that, but I could imagine it. The mist and sprinkle of rain that covered up any voices shouting to tell them now or they’d pour boiling water meant for their dinner broth on my arms until the skin peeled off in long pieces like the ribbons in a girl’s hair. Screaming at me to breathe, you worthless son of a whore. Breathe and say where he was, where he would be, one word, tell them or I’d boil. I let the rain turn the shouts into whispers too far away to make out.

I didn’t think they’d gone through with it. I knew they would have if they’d had the time, if I’d still been there. But I wasn’t. The weight in my lungs was gone and the air was fresh with the smell of wet grass. Getting up, I’d wrapped the blanket around me. I left the cottage on two strong, whole legs, with skin whole and unmarked, no pain—none anywhere, and I walked into the mist. When I left the cottage that never was, I left the room that shouldn’t have been.

I had moved on.

“They tied me to a table in some random room they decided would be the dungeon. They had to raid the kitchen for whatever they could find for the interrogation. The sheriff was purple he was that furious. He finally gets to torture someone with real information, something he wanted more than anything he’d wanted before and he had to depend on the Betty Crocker Line of Torture and Interrogation Devices.” They had worked just as well. Humiliated as he’d been, I thought he’d gone the extra mile and made them work with greater efficiency.

I checked behind us again for the weasels. “I died on a fucking kitchen table waiting for John and . . . for Niko and you to come for me, but you didn’t.”

“Don’t. Zeus, please don’t say that.” The appeal came out with the same pained grunt as a kick in the gut would cause. “Don’t think that.”

“I’m an Auphe. Isn’t that right? We think things you couldn’t in your darkest nightmares.” It was stated blandly and without emotion as there are occasions a lack of emotion inflicts a hurt sharper than the slice of the malicious ones. “I don’t think even an Auphe could come up with slow torturous death by kitchen utensils though.

“I hope you didn’t tell anyone the humiliating truth about that. Where I died.” I went on to snort bitterly, “Those were the days no one sang heroic songs about that kind of shit.” Tortured with heated spoons and dull knives, had several bones in both feet broken with a metal poker and that had been the first few hours. Necessity is the mother of invention and Betty Crocker was a bitch and a half.

“We found you,” Robin talked over my last few regrets about no heroic songs for me with enough agitated denial to drown me out. “We came for you. We shouted at his men to tell him I waited for him outside, and they laughed. They didn’t believe I’d risk certain death to save a peasant boy who followed me with the others. I was a would-be king and they thought you were nothing. Kings don’t give up their lives for common trash who were as wannabe as I was, but wannabe soldiers. They didn’t believe and they didn’t tell him. It took us two days to kill enough of them ringing the castle that the rest barricaded themselves inside. We surrounded the place with the straw we’d gathered and set it on fire. Cutting down a tree and using it as a battering ram to break through the door. We searched through the smoke and we”—his jaw worked—“we found you in a room on the second level. Two days and you were already cold. Colder than the room. Cold as the night before. Two days fighting and killing without stopping. Using anything as a weapon when our swords shattered and we ran out of arrows. Smashing men’s heads in with stones. Pushing their heads under the water of the pond and drowning them. Our bare hands strangling the life from them. Anything we could make work. The morning of the second day we had fought our way close enough that you might hear us.”

He looked behind us, too, but I didn’t think it was for the weasels. “We shouted your name. We told you that we were coming for you. Screaming and swearing again and again at you from sunup to sunset when we finally broke through. We’re here. Don’t give up, Will. Don’t give up. But we were shouting at ourselves. You were gone. You’d been gone since the end of the first day. You’d died in the night and you didn’t hear us. Weren’t there to hear us. You thought, Gods Above.” He struggled and tried again, “You thought you were alone. You weren’t. Even when you couldn’t hear us, we were there. You were never alone.”

“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.

Worse than that, as Goodfellow could puke all day and it’d be worth it to get away from these nightmares sniffing at our heels, was the brain. When I’d first begun to gate, it wasn’t easy. I’d had skull-splitting headaches, nosebleeds, and if I pushed hard enough, I’d bleed from my nose, ears, and eyes. It hadn’t happened to Nik and Robin during gating, but that’s when I was young and I was the one doing all the lifting, light or heavy. I was the plane, they were only the passengers. Nonetheless it’d made me think then what I was thinking now—gating didn’t make for a healthy brain if you were a prepubescent Auphe. I was fine with it now. I’d hit Auphe puberty, was full grown with the physical capability to gate with no effort or side effects. But if you were a human or a puck who already had a head injury, if you were bleeding inside your brain before I took you through a gate, I had no idea if it would make things worse or not effect anything at all.

Snatching a look as I aimed the light over my shoulder, I discovered to no real surprise that shadows and weasels move faster in mud than I do. Put the two together and we were out of luck. And in the confines of what was basically a stone death trap, their snapping jaws and what had started up as they came down the ladder as manic, crazed low whispering was ten times louder, ten times more terrifying. We were about fifteen seconds, maximum, from being eaten alive.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shadowed recess. It was either a doorway, an alcove for the exhibition of sewer art by some exciting new artist who was big in the 1940s, or a cruel hoax. I didn’t have time to weigh the odds of each. Carrying Goodfellow along, I lunged through the archway. And for once, luck wasn’t something I made myself. The doorway actually was a doorway and as we passed through I saw an iron door resting against the lichen covered wall. Easing the puck down as quickly as I could without actually dropping him, I shoved my gun away, held the end of a dysentery covered flashlight in my mouth and used both hands to push the heavy piece of metal through the mud to close with a muted clang. I barely made it. Immediately something hit the other side with brutal force. There was a lock, a dead bolt, which I shot, but it was wood and while it had once been thick and sturdy, years of dank, humid air couldn’t have been good for it.

Crouching down beside Robin, I peered into his eyes. “You in there, Caesar? Looking for those gladiators or ready to come back to the real world? I hope so, because we’ve really got to haul ass.”

“Caesar,” he echoed, rubbing a slow hand across his muddy face. “He was boring. Always off putting it to Cleo while claiming he was overseeing the training of camels for the Roman cavalry. But you recall that. One of them bit you in the ass . . . no. That was Keos. You’re . . . they took you, William . . . they took you.”

“Will,” I corrected absently, from a time when I had been Will with the only surname given a bastard village boy. Bastards received one surname, all of us. Bastards had whores or adultresses as mothers. Women painted in red. Scarlet. “Will Scarlet,” I muttered, then let it go. That life was over. “Not anymore. It’s Caliban. I’m Caliban.”

“Caliban . . . with the horrible beer.” He looked at the mud on his hand, obviously confused by it. “Where am I? Have I asked that before? Where . . .” And he was gone, wiping the mud from his hand onto my jeans. His pants? No. That’d be insane.

The important thing was he still seemed partially out of it. There was a bloody scrape on his forehead, evidence he’d hit his head on the way down. I could use the flashlight to see if his pupils were even or not, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean his brain wasn’t bruised, concussed, or anything else that might have it leaking out his ears if I gated us away.

He was talking and moving, more or less. Given ten or fifteen minutes, he might improve. “Come on, Goodfellow. Up. We have to go before the weasels break down the door.”

“I’m not up in the penthouse?” he asked absently as he continued to wipe again at his face with scrupulous care. “Take the elevator. No stairs. My head aches.”

“No, we’re not in your penthouse and like you’ve ever taken those sky-high stairs once,” I said with a healthy dose of desperation. “We’re in a sub sewer being chased by weasels made of shadows and I think they missed their breakfast. We need to find a way out. For that you need to help me get you up. Do you get that? Do you understand? We need to move or be eaten by shadow weasels.”

He screwed his eyes shut and his mouth twisted in a pained grimace, but it was a thoughtful grimace. I had faith. He was thinking about getting up, how simple standing was, especially when someone else was doing ninety percent of the work. “Shadow weasels. The tunnel. The sewer.” Opening his eyes, he looked at the door. “My sword went through them. Your bullets too. If metal can go through them”—the whispering outside the door sounded now more like maniacal laughter—“can’t they go through metal?”

Wasn’t that a thought, shiny and crammed full of logic?

“Motherfucker. You putrid, evil bastards.” They were playing with us. For food or for fun, it didn’t matter.

A mass of narrow pointed black heads passed through for a look at the prey of their little game. They slithered back and forth away from the narrow beam of light. Between the laughter and whispers I thought I heard words here and there. “Light . . . dim . . . nothing to fear . . . shine of moonless night.”

Great. I loved it when they talked. Unkillable and untouchable weren’t inconveniently ghastly enough. Let’s raise the bar and have them spit sinister whispers at you for shits and giggles.

Robin was trying doggedly to get his feet under him—getting on them wasn’t going to happen. I lifted him up, slinging his arm around my shoulder and my other around his waist. I kept the flashlight balanced by his shoulder and had put my Desert Eagle in its holster. It was useless anyway. I was able to accomplish it before the weasels came through the door completely, although they had crept halfway by now. I’d raised Goodfellow upright too fast while his feet were too unsteady to hold him, and was again bathing in another waterfall of vomit, but I’d rather bathe in vomit than be eaten alive to avoid it.

“Bite . . . eat . . . take . . . bite . . . eat . . . take.”

“That’s elementary and middle school all over again. Biters everywhere you went.” I dragged the puck away from the door. I could keep backing us up while keeping them in sight and exposed to a flashlight they were less impressed with all the time. Or I could turn and run. If I lifted Goodfellow over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, I’d make better time than half hauling, half carrying him, but the few moments it’d take to get him and his uncontrolled, limp limbs up off the ground and on my shoulder would take longer. We’d have good odds of being torn to pieces before I could begin to run.

“They hurt you? When you were . . . a child?” The weasels he’d forgotten, but he was outrage incarnate over schoolyard bullying.

Shadow weasels were one thing, but there hadn’t been a day of my life I couldn’t protect myself from another kid like me. Why? For the plain reason that there were no other kids like me.

“Priorities, Goodfellow,” I said. “If we don’t die, you should look into how you rank those.” Ruefully, I went on to admit, “And actually I was the biter, but they brought it on themselves. I’d been small for my age, but I’m a lion. Lions—small, medium, or large—fuck with us and we will kick your ass. Or bite off your ear. Depends on our mood.”

I decided keeping the weasels in sight would get us killed, but it would allow us a few minutes more to think about what a horrible death it would be. Now or in minutes. We’d die the same way—no better or worse there. I’d take the minutes. I’d learned a long time ago, minutes you thought were useless could save your life. The weasels were sliding slower behind us, not as anxious to attack with the light in their faces. Technically, they didn’t have faces—wedge-shaped light-sucking heads. They didn’t fear the light, not quite, but they didn’t like it either. That meant even more minutes.

If we were going to die, hell yes, I’d fight for those minutes, every one of them.

I swiped the beam of light to the side and stopped a stealthier than the rest weasel in its tracks as half its jaw vanished. Behind it had been another that leaped at us over its injured buddy. Smacking it across the chest, I stopped it before it reached Goodfellow. Its front two legs became a memory. But our minutes were counting down and no matter what I did to a weasel, it was whole again before it fell farther than halfway down the pack. Keeping us both backing away from the flowing river of shadows, I came close to losing Robin.

“Ah . . . skata.” Robin’s brief surge of energy had in reality done more harm than good. His legs gave out under him, and I barely kept him from falling with a grip tight enough to crack a rib or two if he was unlucky. His eyes closed. “Head aches . . . gamisou, it hurts. Tired. Too tired for . . . all this. This? What is this? Don’t . . . care. Sleep. Bed. Home. I want . . . home.”

Him and me both.

The two of us weary, wanting home, but his home and mine were years apart. The weasels were too close to run now. If it runs, you chase it. If you chase it you kill it. If you kill it, you eat it. Auphe taught me that and lions on TV taught me that. I preferred the lions, but the end lesson was the same. “We are fucked now, you know that?”

He shook his head and immediately hung his head, a groan imprisoned behind clenched teeth. Pain and nausea, that sounded like a concussion. I didn’t have to watch those gory medical soap operas to make that guess. “No . . . we would’ve been fucked . . . if we’d found the gladiators.” He had cleared some, but he was back neck deep in confusion again.

“Can we forget the gladiators? As a favor?” The smell of mud, slime, supernatural lichen on the walls, brackish water pooling on top of the thicker, denser mud, it remained in the air. But there was a new scent. It reminded me of a storm, of the ozone lining the clouds with vicious threat. But warped to something more dangerous, sending an electric tingle down my spine with the same feeling you had when you were eight, lived in a trailer, heard the tornado siren, and stepped outside to see the green sky with a mile wide Wrath of God headed straight toward you.

I shifted us both around, Robin and me, keeping the light on the weasels to stall them, leaving none to see what was behind us. There was nothing I could make out in the dark, thick enough to breathe like air. That was it. I was gating and hoping Goodfellow’s brains didn’t ooze out his ears and he coped with his phobia.

Then came what I couldn’t see. A short, rough laugh—more intelligent than that of the weasels, but more sane? I had a feeling. When predator faces predator, you can scent the rabid on them. It . . . he . . . didn’t sound insane, but the best of us don’t, do we? “Goats for sacrifice. Mutts for stew.” His words were as rough and amused as his laugh. “Bow your head before your better. Kneel as my pets rip bite after bite from your bodies. Your flesh, your blood, it would please me.”

“How about a flashlight up your ass instead? Maybe you’re a shadow too. Nothing goddamned more than that,” I said coldly. He hadn’t been in the truck that had destroyed the bar, or he’d have burned with the others inside. I’d watched. The truck had been driven and precisely aimed. I’d seen no one get out of the flaming heap, no one run away. No, he hadn’t been there. That had been a job for a regular assassin or two, not a waste of a genetically altered monster/human hybrid. He had been Vigil once. As fierce a hold as they’d had over their members, remained Vigil.

Behind the voice lightning flared, sizzled, and struck twenty or more areas of the sewer wall. And it didn’t stop. They kept going, the multinumbered electric arms of an Indian goddess of death. That was bad. If I was hit by one or more of those baleful arms, gating wouldn’t be a subject of conversation for a while. Enough electricity shorted out my ability to gate for a good long time.

The weasels didn’t strike me as that ominous now. Unkillable. So what? It was just a word. On reflection, I wasn’t positive it was a word.

The lightning was blindingly bright, enough so that now it was lighter than we needed or wanted. Vision swimming with white and blue, blinded to the point I couldn’t see the glimmer of my flashlight, or Lazarus. I saw the outline of a storm-shadowed figure at most. The black figure of a man, tall and broad, but I couldn’t make out anything else buried in the dark—until his arms both lifted. There was something in each one. It swung, against the blue-white corona of lightning, the same shaded black—narrow, almost serpentine—and they moved. Or he moved them.

Didn’t care, didn’t know, didn’t want to know. I was done.

Goodfellow had felt a paien he’d not felt before in his life. I’d seen Frankenstein on TV and I knew a puzzle piece monster when I saw one. Human shaped with inhuman powers and control of pets formed from the dark that had herded us to this spot. The Vigil and genetic engineering had done possibly more than they’d expected. Lazarus could be worse than any paien the Vigil had put down.

“They are for you.” The lightning doubled and I was completely blind, but not before I witnessed the swinging movement, the twisting and coiling, as whatever they were came nearer, extended by the eddy and flow that were the outlines of fists. Our clothes crackled with visible static.

I could almost taste his breath beyond the ozone and sewer reek. Almost. But I felt it. It was cold, colder than the ice of a zero degree day frozen in a strangling hand around the metal pole of a street sign. He was there. He could touch us. He could also electrocute us, have his weasels eat us, and do something god-awful with whatever the fuck was writhing in his unseeable hands.

“They are the takers of your last breath.

“As I am the taker of your lives.

“The receiver of your souls.”

I felt the brush of something coarse against my face. Coarse then silken, but moving in the independent S-pattern of a snake or a serpent. Slithering toward my throat. Where else would it go? Taker of my last breath?

All right.

Now I was done.

That whole cope with Robin’s phobia of gates, hope his brain isn’t injured enough to pour out of his ears when I did gate us? Those issues? Nope. Did not give a shit. Fuck his phobia, and right now his explanation could wait. He might rather die or be eaten. Too bad for him only the fully conscious and oriented people got to make that decision.

“If you have the brainpower to waste on gladiator fantasies, then you have brains to spare to survive a gate.” He had tumbled back into half-consciousness and it was a risk, but Lazarus wasn’t a risk. He was a sure thing and that sure thing was death.

Sometimes you have to roll the dice.

When it came to getaways and gates, lightning was pulling up the rear. I was faster, but not only that—nothing passed into my gate that I didn’t want there. I built it around us, no time for dramatic walking through. We were there, we were shining with purples, cyanotic blues, black, and the several shades of corpse gray. It was an odd, strangely colored light, but it shone. Not in the manner most would want to see or be able to see, but it was my sun and my moon and it got me the hell out of Dodge. It was the adrenaline life or death feel of a skydiver’s rush as he plummeted through the air into a desert of glass and stone and the bones of a dead race you’d destroyed before they destroyed you. It was the sensation of your feet hitting the red sand, the burn of acid wind, the yellow sky that watched you from above. I never did go there after my last escape, not in reality, as it was the hell that had eaten half my soul. But for two years it had been home, complete with torture to make me believe it was home. It hadn’t been, wouldn’t ever be. But some feelings the Auphe shove into your brain, you couldn’t get out. This was what I thought of briefly when I gated. The feeling of coming home.

I wondered why it didn’t feel that way to anyone else.

Going home.