Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (15 page)

“Why? Why did you do it? He’s you. Not figuratively but factually. It’s the same as if you did it to yourself. Tell me why you let this happen.” Angry and suspicious, that was a Niko no one wanted to go up against.

“I didn’t plan it. I didn’t know one had escaped until I saw its beady eyes under the couch when Cal flopped his careless ass on it. I don’t speak rattler, and I’m not some sort of psychic snake whisperer. I didn’t tell it to bite Cal. It was luck.” I defied. It sounded true because it was true. “I got lucky, pure and simple. That and I’m bright enough not to sit on furniture that slithery, scuttling creatures can hide under before we’d checked that the battle area was clear. But you’re right. I spotted it and I didn’t warn Cal. I saw a break and I took it. And I’m not one damn bit sorry.”

The second punch I dodged. As I did, there came a nearly simultaneous knock at the door. Fuck me. Would this day never end?

Keeping a wary eye on a Niko who was as furious as he’d been with the first punch, I turned, slogged to the door through knee-high sand, flipped the one lock the skin-walker had slammed into place and opened it. From the hall there was a strong drift of air that pushed its way inside. It carried with it the signature of dank water, rot, and old blood scent. All of which I’d encountered before.

I didn’t bother to bite back the snarl vibrating up
through my throat. It had been the longest, worst day of my life and I wasn’t in the mood.

Covered liberally with coyote blood, shredded pieces of their intestines, and whatever green goop had sprayed explosively out of giant spiders when you put several large caliber rounds in their beach-ball-sized bodies, I faced the
rusalka
, the lamia, and the wendigo that I’d scented before we’d stepped into the building. I seriously considered killing them, but that was a change not yet necessary and one that would spread the word among the supernatural community. That we’d killed the skin-walker would make ripples of gossip enough. Adding more wouldn’t be a good thing.

I leaned against the door jamb and kept growling. I had every right.

They were rude.

Not one of them had a fruit basket to thank us for taking care of the skin-walker, which would’ve craved a midnight snack sooner or later. If one of his people wasn’t conveniently and immediately available,
paien
disappear much more easily than humans with friends and family. He’d have started with them first, although they probably weren’t bright enough to know it. There aren’t many true stories about skin-walkers as there aren’t more than a handful of species with ferocious enough fighters to live through the encounter. These three, predatory breeds or not, weren’t anywhere close to the type of
paien
capable of facing a skin-walker. The
yee naaldlooshii
weren’t at the top of the food chain, but they were past the halfway mark. These three couldn’t see the bottom of a skin-walker’s feet, he was that much higher than they were.

They were gazing past me at an apartment littered with body parts and walls that had the equivalent of a new paint job donated by Carrie’s prom committee.

Their own colors weren’t any sort of improvement over what was on the walls. There were eyes of stagnant green rivers paired with the dark tangled red hair of a week-old drowning victim, a gaze of a starless empty sky of no color at all but difficult to see through the
floor-length cloak of the lamia’s own black hair, and then there was the decomposing cataract gray-white marbles, no hair but the distinct smell of Rogaine, as the three of them looked their fill, then shifted their attention from Niko and Cal’s home back to what both coated a good deal of me and was soaked into large swathes of my clothes. It also dripped off of me like a slow, unnaturally thick rain. What’s more was the fact that with my added years—Auphe maturity come finally—they, like the skin-walker, could sniff out that Auphe in me. That should’ve had them running until they hit New Jersey. It should not have them knocking at the door. But then again they were idiotic enough to live in a building with a skin-walker. Maybe they’d thought he had killed us and were going to interrupt his meal he’d made of us by trying to snipe our better apartment from beneath our cold, dead rent deposit. They had fingers crossed to snag the place with the killer view, the one they were hoping we’d died for. They were idiotic enough to do just that.

Some days it made me wonder why I bothered to carry a gun at all. I could easily beat them to death with my TV remote.

“Did you send your RSVPs?” I drawled, leaning toward them. All three muttered inhuman consonants under their breath as they looked away, sniffed again, and took a step back. “I didn’t think so.” I cocked my head slightly. “But, hey, the more the merrier. We love making new friends.”

I gave them the crazed, warped chasm of a grin I’d held in all day, more and more difficult with each hour to do; the same one I’d learned when I ran with the Auphe and played their games as gleefully as they did. It felt as if it split my face in half, and, hell, maybe it did. “I’d think about it though. Think hard.” Then I let my eyes bleed Auphe red. Niko was behind me and couldn’t see, so why not? The combination of the grin, the eau de Auphe, and the eyes made me the farthest thing from a poster child for moderation when it came to maiming, mutilation, and murder.

“Done thinking?” I took a step out into the hall
toward them to equal the one they’d taken back away from me.

“Now tell me . . . is this a party you
really
want to crash?”

It wasn’t.

No surprise there on my part. They were gone as fast as if they hadn’t existed at all. “That’s what I thought,” I grumbled with savage bite. As I felt my eyes turn back to the human gray, the color this Niko was familiar with, I stepped back into the apartment, closed the door, and returned to the situation at hand.

“We need to talk,” I said. My foot hit a lump under the sand. I bent down and dug out my jacket along with my favorite knives tucked in the lining. “You and I, Niko, we need to have a long, serious as fuck talk. It’s one that Cal can’t hear and can’t know. Not now. If . . .
when
we fix things, you can tell him if you want. Just not now.”

I checked to make certain he was as soundly out of it as he should be. He was. “That’s why when I saw the snake I let it do what snakes do. I needed Cal down and out for this. I hadn’t thought of how to do it, didn’t know I’d need to do it until today. And then, like a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk, there it was. The snake.” Shaking the sand off my jacket, I slid another glance at him . . . him, me . . . this was one thing we were identical in. Eight extra years—hell, twenty years would make no difference. In this, we would be the same. That would never change.

“Our talk, it’s one Cal couldn’t be a part of without going off the rails, getting himself killed, or both.” It was the truth. I knew as it had happened to me today, just hours ago.

“And like I told you, with the bite I knew he’d be okay. That goes for anything else I might do. I hurt him and I hurt myself.” I bent over and pulled up the bottom of one leg of my jeans while pushing down the soft leather of a worn combat boot. Where the snake bite was on Cal’s leg, fresh and new, there were faded white scars in the same place on mine. Four indentations of whiter
than white dense tissue. “I didn’t have that until fifteen minutes ago. Trust me, a little bite like this? I’ve had . . . he’ll have worse. We’re both your brother, Nik. You can trust me with him as much as my Niko trusted me with myself.”

“If I didn’t know you are my brother or who he’ll be someday, I wouldn’t have punched you for the snake. I would have killed you. If I didn’t feel it as solid as the ground under my feet that you are who you say, you’d be dead,” he bit off. It was a verbal bite but as sharp as any the dead snakes around us once had. “Do anything similar to this again and you’ll wish you were. I can’t kill you, but I can and will make you exceedingly sorry. As my brother, I’m certain you’d forgive me.” I felt the slice on that one. It drew blood, if mentally instead of physically. If I’d thought Niko’s edge had been any less cutting when we were babes in the woods, I was wrong.

“As for trusting you with him as your brother trusts you with yourself . . .” He didn’t show any relief. The opposite if I had to label it. “I’m not a fool now and I doubt I’m one in the years to come.” Resignation was seeping in to replace the anger that trickled out with the relaxation, finger by finger, of his fist. Snake sin aside, he’d said it: He knew I was his brother, or enough of him that he couldn’t aim his rage at me for much longer.

“I cannot trust you with him at all,” he finished. “As my brother, which means you as well, are both inherently suicidal.”

I shrugged. “You don’t really mean that, but funny you should say it.” At eighteen I’d been reckless, had everything to lose, which had me playing the game all in or all out, but I wouldn’t have run as long and fast as I had from the Auphe if I hadn’t wanted to live. Now I was wild, careless, running as fast as possible as I was finally the one doing the chasing, taking any and all risks with my life and having a helluva time doing it. What’s the point of having a life if you’re not going to live it to the last crazy second? From the outside or to those who didn’t know us, Cal’s desperation to survive and my
eagerness to live anything and everything once I
had
survived, it might’ve looked like we were suicidal. But that wasn’t the case, not for Cal. And not for me.

Or it hadn’t been.

I tossed my jacket across the chair after fishing a piece of paper clumsily folded several times from the pocket. Once more, I trudged through the sand across the apartment to boost up and sit on the end of the creaky rectangular-shaped kitchen table. It wobbled, but eventually stabilized to hold my weight as I sat cross-legged just as I’d seen Niko do a thousand times while doing yoga. “Whenever you’re ready,” I announced.

“It’s story time.”

•   •   •

“As in a ‘Once upon a time’ story?” Niko had taken the position opposite me at the other end of the table. As agile and lightly as he moved, I didn’t have to see him to feel the faint shiver beneath me. I was surprised the Dumpster scrounged piece of flimsy furniture managed to hold both our weight.

Once upon a time . . . a few hours ago and eight years technically yet to come.
Turn the page and read the next two words that waited.

The End.

Two lines. It was a quick read. Who didn’t like that?

Fuck.

Giving in to the stabbing aches and complaint of every muscle in me, I slumped forward, letting my face rest in my hands, covered by my palms. The mess of thick hair I’d gotten from Sophia fell around my face to turn the weakly lit apartment into a place of complete shadow without a hint of light. Hiding me from the world. That was nothing but a good thing with what I felt rising inside.

Once upon a time.

I made a sound. I didn’t think there was a word for it. It wasn’t a laugh, not unless one could be a broken jumble of crazed choking and a strangled rasp that came from fighting back every molecule of air in my lungs wanting to escape in a frenzy of rage, hate, and despair.
But letting out that kind of obvious clawing desperation might make Nik uncomfortable knowing I was neck deep in a mental breakdown, possibly panic the living shit out of him. I didn’t want that. Nope. I wanted, I
needed
him in top form if any of us, here or there, were going to survive. I needed him at his best. Someone had to be, and I had no difficulty accepting straight up that I was so far from my best that I couldn’t find it with a GPS tracker and a bloodhound.

So I held it back, all of it, behind gritted teeth, a locked jaw, and humorless barbwire tangle of my lips. I was lucky Niko couldn’t see my face. He wouldn’t believe that was a smile. No one in their right mind would. Swallowing thickly, I gave a shot at clearing my throat back to a voice more like my own.

“Once upon a time.” It came out hoarse, but not insane. I’d take that.

Keeping my face concealed by my hair, I rubbed at eyes that burned from the fire, the heat, pain, exhaustion, and fear. It was a fear deep and dark enough to smother any but the smallest scrap of hope. I couldn’t stop from admitting the last to myself, if not to this Niko or this Cal. I could lie to them, but about what had happened to my Nik, I couldn’t lie to myself. As much as I wanted to.

“No,” I finally answered him. I gave one last banishing swipe across my face. “It’s not really that kind of story.”

I straightened, sitting up to dig in the pocket of my jeans for a tie to pull my hair back into the ponytail I’d lost somewhere on the walk from the bar. If Nik had to hear this fairy tale that the Grimm brothers had nothing close to in competition, I should have to look him in the face when I told it.

“You never asked me, you know,” I said, calm now. Detached. I had to be if I had a chance of pulling off any of this. “Why did I come back? Why not you instead? You’re smarter. Quicker. Better at hand to hand or with any kind of blade. As good with guns as me too, as much as it kills me to admit it. And tactics, you memorized Sun Tzu’s
Art of War
before you were in junior high. My Nik and you together, what couldn’t you do?”

Not much. But there was one thing neither Nikos could do, but I could—as a last resort. That’s why I’d been batter up. But this Nik didn’t know about my Auphe gift for gating, traveling, and how it could be used as an escape or a weapon if worse came to worst and our backs were against the wall. As he didn’t have any idea about that and wouldn’t for a while, added to his massively overprotective complex when it came to brothers, one he’d never lose no matter how many years went back and forth, I’d been surprised he hadn’t asked.

Why me. Why not him?

“I wondered,” he admitted. “With the same temperament and methods, I would’ve found myself easier to work alongside.” He raised a judgmental eyebrow and added, “To not punch in the face.” He was untangling his hair from its twist and braiding it. It didn’t mean he wasn’t giving his all, listening to and analyzing every word, syllable, letter. It was just Niko, an action so automatic for most of his life, that half the time he was surprised to find a braid instead of a loose fall of hair at the end of our strategy and planning sessions for taking down the next monster payday.