Killer, raper, monster, maimer.
Past Cal would’ve put you down. I would too, but first you’d have the tour. Down and down, ’round and ’round, through Caliban’s town. In the past, it would’ve been quick. Now I took my time. Your pain equaled your victims. Your amount to arrive six feet under, it took longer.
Niko believed in karma in the next life. I believed in karma in this one, and I was a stand-up soldier when it came to delivering it. The decisions I would’ve made in the past, they hadn’t changed. Much. The punishment…that I fulfilled more appropriately according to the crime and the time. I was the right hand of justice and the left hand of the undertaker.
Clever excuses. But why do you think ending the useless needs them?
The spider venom, the biological repair, had stabilized me—Niko, Robin, Promise, and I, we’d all recognized that. I hadn’t settled where others in the supernatural community would’ve liked, but I was stabilized. That, for everyone around me, was a relief, because it was one hell of a slippery slope, as they say, when my Auphe genes began to overcome the weaker human genes. Auphe genes always win—that’s what a long-gone healer friend of ours had said.
He’d been right—until now. And would be right again…maybe…sometime in the future.
There were the dreams too. Awash in blood and the hunt. Did I ever have dreams that heart-pounding? That savored?
So wild?
So wanted.
Black thoughts and scarlet dreams, they didn’t mean anything in the end—unless they were useful. I was in command of myself now and that was all I needed to know. I would do what had to be done only when it had to be done, and if I enjoyed it a great deal more, then that was a win-win.
I flipped on all the lights in the bar. The last thing I wanted was a dim atmosphere that assisted the pucks in scheming, assaulting, stealing, and a hundred other things.
While at least I was in control of my mind, I knew I was way out of my depth on the approaching situation. The Panic? No fucking way. I tied the black apron around my waist and started lining up glasses on the bar of the Ninth Circle as I used that control to consider something else besides pucks. I thought about consequences—something I rarely did.
Consequences were boring.
Yet sometimes you had to man up and face them.
That wasn’t boring. That just sucked. But for my brother, I would do it.
Not that it still didn’t suck.
“You think I made a mistake gating that SOB to the boggles before we found out what the Vayash burden is?” I asked my brother, who was working beside me with methodical movements.
The last Rom clan who’d come to hire us to find their lost duty, their burden had been the watchers of an antihealer known not so euphemistically as the Plague of the World. Suyolak could’ve destroyed all life on the planet if we hadn’t stopped him. The Black Death was just a kiddie party to him, and one he’d started. It made me wonder what the hell the Vayash were supposed to be keeping locked down.
If it was anything remotely close to Suyolak, that was bad fucking news.
Niko showed no signs of being concerned as he shrugged slightly, following my lead with the glasses. “He’ll be back, as you said. And whatever the Vayash have lost, we cannot find today. Today is the Panic, and not only are we committed, but I think the Panic may supersede any other threat on the face of the planet.”
It should’ve been a joke, but it didn’t sound like a joke, and I was under no illusions that it was.
Goodfellow was the typical trickster with typical trickster ways, but he was sane. Fairly content, even happy now that he was in what used to be the foulest curse word in his vocabulary: a relationship. But he was only one of two pucks I’d met. The other, Hob, had been insane, malignantly narcissistic, and would not only kill you for no reason, but do it more efficiently than anyone alive. When you’re the first, born conceivably a million years ago, you learn to fight like there is no fucking tomorrow. My genes were of the firstborn, but I was not a firstborn. There was a difference—as in unnumbered-amount-of-years-of-carnage-experience difference.
If they hadn’t crippled you, it would be different. Much different.
“What do you mean, ‘crippled’?” Niko asked, the glass suspended in his hand. His knuckles were white and tense. Shit, I’d actually said that aloud.
The door opening managed to get me out of an immediate explanation. Robin walked in wearing his usual outfit of expensive green shirt, black slacks, and shoes. He sat on a stool and said rapidly, “All right. Extremely important. Before the others get here you are not to mention, hint, or even think about how I’m in a monogamous relationship. Are we clear? It would ruin my reputation among the Panic. They’d hang me from the ceiling and beat me like a piñata. So keep your mouths shut. ¿Entienden?”
“Whatever,” I said. “Trust me, I’m traumatized enough. The last thing I want to talk about with a hundred other yous is your sex life.”
The green eyes shifted to something less Robin and considerably nastier as he raised his voice. “Come on in, brothers! Adelfae! Hear the news.” The door swung open again to reveal a streaming horde of pucks. “It’s true. Goodfellow is monogamous. He’s become a freak. A pervert. Depravity on the cloven hoof.”
“Or his balls fell off,” suggested another puck who came to the bar. “Or his dick. Anyone who would hang about with Bacchus is bound to get a catastrophic genital rotting illness at some point.” This one was also identical except his hair was a few inches longer and he had both ears pierced with small gold hoops.
Niko looked at me as the priest must’ve looked at the guy sitting in the electric chair in the old days right before the switch was flipped: resigned sympathy. “I didn’t know he wasn’t Goodfellow,” I protested, feeling the desperation sharply. Not our Goodfellow at any rate, but his carbon copy. “He looks dead-on Robin. He said he was Robin.”
“Implied,” Niko corrected, the sympathy turning one hundred and eighty degrees to a mildly sadistic pleasure he didn’t make an effort to hide. “He implied it. He didn’t say it.”
“He’s wearing the same kind of clothes Robin would wear”—I kept up the crumbling defense—“and all of them smell the same.” I hadn’t inherited the Auphe ability to see in the dark, but I had inherited their sharp sense of smell. “Every one of them smells like frigging Irish Spring. All green and minty. It’s not my fault.”
He put the glass down and patted my back. “It was nice knowing you, little brother. When Goodfellow is through with you and if there’s enough left to bury, I’ll find you a nice plot.” The pucks kept pouring through the door and, immune to pheromones or not, I felt pretty damn panicked as they kept coming and coming. And I wasn’t touching that double entendre with a ten-foot pole…or that one either.
Another puck came pushing through the crowd. As soon as the others spotted him they started singing some ancient seventies song: “‘Do you like piña coladas? And getting caught in the rain…’” The tone was pure derisive malice, obviously not a “Hey, great to see ya, brother. Congrats on the boyfriend” song.
A fist banged against the bar, rattling the glasses. “Who told them?” this puck demanded with a poisonous hiss that would’ve done any rattlesnake proud.