This could be a problem.
2
The seven deadly sins.
Wrath, lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, pride.
The puck pillowing his head on the bar counter of the Ninth Circle, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted and overindulged, had the latter six covered. But Cal, my brother, had the first all to himself. He tried to hide it, and from anyone but me, I believe he most likely succeeded. He’d come a long way in a year. Then it would’ve rolled off him in waves, choppy and fierce. Some emotions still did show: annoyance and impatience being the primary ones, and annoyance was threatening enough when others knew you were half Auphe.
Discipline would come. He was only twenty. Twenty and missing two years of his life. Eighteen mentally, the cynicism of a forty-year-old, and one of the bravest men I knew. He would deny it, but it was true. Kidnapped by the Auphe, possessed by a creature that had all but eaten his soul, and he went on. He clawed his way from the pit and went on—balanced on a knife’s edge. The Auphe were determined to snatch his sanity before they took his life. He’d already seen things, experienced horrors that I hadn’t been able to save him from. But I wouldn’t let what had happened before happen again. I would kill anything.
Anyone.
He was my brother.
I’d been handed a newborn at the age of four. Our mother must’ve fed me and changed me. She must have given me the bare necessities to survive, but she didn’t do the same for Cal. From the moment he came into this world, she had never wasted one moment of affection or attention on him. After handing him to me, I don’t think she ever touched him again, not on purpose, in his entire life. Sophia took the Auphe’s gold to bear a half-human, half-Auphe child, but I don’t think she saw him as a child, just as a thing. She’d even named him Caliban—the offspring of witch and demon from Shakespeare, a deformed monster, and she made sure he knew what it meant.
Bitch. It wasn’t a word I said often, but it was the only description that suited her.
Sophia had died a horrible death, and I couldn’t say I once felt an ounce of sympathy for her. She’d have made a good Auphe: sociopathic and utterly without compassion. She might have not physically touched Cal. In fact, she barely acknowledged his existence, but when she did, she said things to him—gloating, evil words, and I couldn’t protect him from them all. Call a child a monster often enough and he’ll believe you, maybe all of his life.
After the home birth—no hospitals if they could avoid it for the Rom, living below the government’s radar—pale and sweating, she had cut the umbilical cord, tied it off with a strip of yarn, and handed the bloody, writhing bundle to me. “You’ve been wanting a pet,” she had said, voice hoarse from grunts and restrained screams. “Here you are.”
Four years old. What do you do with a baby when you’re four years old? You learn responsibility. You go next door to the next run-down row house and ask the woman there, the one with five children of her own. She tells you how often and how to feed, because Sophia can’t be bothered, gives you a few cans of formula, a half box of diapers, and an old bottle. Then she sends you away with a look in her eyes that says she’s done all she’s going to do. You’re not her problem, so don’t darken her door again. There are worthless monsters and worthless human beings, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.
I’d been lucky Cal had rarely been sick. Never a cold, never colic, only once with something like the stomach flu; the healthiest baby in the world, thanks in part, I was sure, to Auphe genes. If he hadn’t been, he might not have survived. Best intentions, especially at the age of four, don’t always count.
Bad memories and dark bars—the two seemed to go hand in hand.
We’d come to Cal’s work, his day job, so to speak, after agreeing to take Seamus’s case. It was early afternoon, but the bar was half full. I’d taken a table in the corner by the bar. I flipped my dagger as I opened my book, Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, and ruthlessly vanquished the desire to slam the blade into the polished wood of the tabletop.
I moved on to practicing grips before my control wavered and I did bury the dagger in the table. Memories—you can’t escape them, but you can’t let them rule you either. Or you won’t be any good to yourself or your brother. I should concentrate on this new development on the Auphe front. All female—what could it mean?
“You’re late.”
I didn’t look up at Ishiah’s annoyance. Cal’s employer was both bark and bite. Either way, Cal could handle it.
“It’s funny. You say that every time.” I heard Cal toss his jacket behind the bar. “Like you expect something different.”
Ishiah owned the bar the Ninth Circle. He hired Cal as a favor to Goodfellow. The two of them, peri and puck, had issues with one another, Cal had told me. Actually, he’d said they bitched about each other until they made his ears bleed. Always with the turn of phrase, my brother. Apparently, the behavior ranged from cool exchanges to out-and-out threats of violence. While it was entertaining as hell, Cal had yawned one night after work, he never had figured out what their history was. For all their sharp words, they had a certain respect for one another, it seemed. If it hadn’t been for Ishiah swooping in, literally, at the last minute earlier in the week, Robin would be dead. That said something. And I knew Cal was grateful.
But that didn’t mean he was going to be on time.
It was an understanding the two had. Ishiah had given Cal a job when he didn’t particularly want to. And as Cal tended to alarm a good deal of the clientele, it was no doubt best to get some liquor in them most days before he showed up. Sedate them somewhat. But with an understanding or not, Ishiah still called Cal out on it. He was the boss; that was his job. It wouldn’t do to let the other employees see Cal get any special treatment . . . especially as he was the only one without wings. Peris, like every other creature on the planet, weren’t without their prejudices.
The Circle was a peri bar. That meant quite a lot of plants and birds. Peris had a fondness for birds. It also meant Ishiah, Danyel, Samyel, Cambriel, and another peri whose name Cal had never mentioned beyond “it has a lot of z’s in it,” were all peris. The average peri might look like the customary depiction of angels, through a very dark lens, but they weren’t. No one was sure what they were or how long they’d been around.
Myth said they were half angel, half demon, but I had serious doubts that that was the truth—I’d yet to see mythology get anything completely correct. The big picture was close, if you blurred your eyes, but every one of the details was twisted or flat-out wrong.
It’s annoying when information doesn’t live up to your standards. Someday your life might depend on it, and when you’re bleeding to death on the ground, you may wish you’d taken it with a grain of salt.
As for peris: Peris had wings, peris had tempers, and peris kicked ass. I gave a quirk of my lips. Cal had told me that in exactly those words after working there for a time. That was my brother: the succinctness of the truly lazy.
I looked up from the book for a moment, the flat of the dagger balanced on the back of my hand. There were ten or so werewolves in the evening crowd. I’d focused on them the moment we’d entered. As one their heads had come up and their eyes had all been aimed at Cal. Gold, orange, reddish brown, pale blue, some wolf, some human—they all widened and then turned to slits at the sight and scent of him. There were some growling, snarls, and bared teeth, but no one marked their territory by urinating on a table leg. It was a nice change of pace.