Moonshine

Chapter 17

I should've given a shit, and Abelia-Roo was more than happy to gloat over every detail that told me why I should. I'd thought the crown had looked too drab and plain to be your typical bauble. I was right. The Bassa had made that innocuous bit of metal for a reason—a very dark and infinitely practical reason. They'd created a thief… or a tool for a thief. Wear the crown and take from a person anything you wished. Their life, their knowledge… their power. I doubted Caleb needed any help taking lives or was interested in any extra smarts. He thought he was as clever as they fucking came.

But power… that was a different matter entirely. Take away the first two and it's the only option left. He wanted the ability to take someone's power… their gift. Although it couldn't be as easy as all that. Not many creatures in the world had talents he might envy. What could he want? What did he covet so profoundly that would be worth this much trouble—oh. God, I was stupid. So damn stupid.

There had been more unpleasant information dancing on the tip of the old Rom's tongue, I could tell as I'd cursed my idiocy, but at the last second she decided to keep it to herself. For fun or profit, and since she wasn't haggling for even more money, I was guessing it was pure, malicious fun. Granny had a way about her; she damn sure did.

"So he wants Georgina's gift." Niko held the circlet up to the dimly flickering firelight after I shared my grim thought. "He could see whatever he wanted. Know the future, the past, and all that lay between. It makes sense; what Georgina has is invaluable." He exhaled and shook his head. "But it also complicates things to no end."

"How?" I demanded. "It's not as if we planned on letting Caleb walk away in the first place. The second we have him in our sights, we give him the crown." I watched the fire reflect sinuously in the curve of the metal. "Promptly followed by a bullet to the brain."

"I have a feeling it won't be quite that simple."

Through the drifting smoke I saw that across the campsite Goodfellow was handing over two duffel bags of cash to Branje. Abelia-Roo didn't waste any time muscling him aside to unzip them and count their contents with flashing fingers. Both Promise and Robin had contributed to the Calabassa fund, since Niko and I barely had two nickels to rub together. The price wasn't that of a small country… quite, but it was damn close. "No?" I looked back at the crown and frowned. Ugly goddamn thing. "Then I guess we'll just have to make it that simple."

"Easier said than done." Between one breath and the next Niko had crossed the six feet between us. He was closer than close and as angry as I'd seen him. Scratch that. He was furious… with me, and that I had never seen. "Nothing is simple at the moment, not with your recent moronic behavior. What the hell were you doing with Branje?"

"Is that why you're pissed?" My frown deepened. "Hell, Cyrano, it was your idea. Rip off his mustache and feed it to him, you said. I just picked different things to slice and dice is all."

"Cal, you cannot go off without thought, without reason…" He tilted his head down until his eyes were level with mine, utterly pissed off and completely inescapable. "Without backup."

"You watched my back," I pointed out with what I thought to be fairly evident logic. "You were right there, same as always." Same as always… you always remember the words that come back to bite you in the ass, no matter how much you'd like to forget them.

"I could've been there more quickly if you'd bothered to let me know what was going through your head." His free hand fisted in the collar of my shirt. "Branje isn't much of a threat; you could've handled him before you could crawl, but if you try that imbecilic recklessness on someone else, someone along the lines of Abbagor or Cerberus or worse yet the Auphe, they will put you in your grave. Is that what you want?" He shook me, hard enough that I felt the snap of it in my neck. "Is it?"

It was a fair question, and denying that would be a lie. George was gone, the Auphe were back, and things had long spiraled out of control. But as selfish as I was, even I had my limits. I couldn't do that to my brother, no more than he could've done it to me. "No, Nik," I answered soberly. "It's not what I want."

The fury, a masquerade for something much starker, drained away as quickly as it had come. "All right, then." He exhaled and released my shirt. "Let's not have this conversation again."

I looked down at my shirt, then stuck my finger through the new Niko-fashioned rip and said wryly, "I'll try and keep that in mind."

He gave one abrupt nod and ordered, "Do that." Then, letting the issue go, he went on, "Let's eat. We've been invited to dinner by Abelia-Roo. I think…" Reluctant amusement tweaked his lips upward. "I think she may have her eye on Goodfellow. She might find him less than a man when it comes to haggling, but apparently that isn't the only standard of measurement she uses."

She should be grateful she wasn't around when Robin had "haggled" with a succubus. That may have changed her mind about his manhood damn quick. "Sounds entertaining." And a few weeks ago, I would've paid good money for that kind of entertainment, but now… I looked up at the sky. It was moonless and clear; I could see hundreds, thousands of stars and every fiery blink was a second lost. "But we need to go. We don't have much time."

"We have time to eat, to relax—even if only for an hour." His hand reached for mine and folded my fingers around the Calabassa. "Besides, it will maintain a little goodwill with the Sarzo. We might need their help again someday."

"We couldn't afford their help again," I groused, but relented. "An hour, okay? Then we go."

"An hour," he agreed. "I'm sure Goodfellow will be indebted to you for that. He's even more anxious than you to get on the road."

With a toothless Roo on his tail, I didn't blame him. I turned the metal under my hands, my skin crawling at the feel of it. There was one last thing I needed to do before we sat down to a heaping helping of Goodfellow humiliation. "Here," I said gruffly, pushing the crown back into his hands. "You hang on to it."

"Cal." The amusement reflected in the quirk of his mouth faded.

"I've already lost one." I folded my arms and tucked my hands out of sight. "That's my limit, thanks."

I'd half expected an Auphe to appear the instant the Gypsy Calabassa had been unveiled. I fully expected to wake up every night with Auphe claws in my throat and a doorway to hell before me. I'd slept with my knife for so long that it'd finally become a comfort to me. But knowing what I knew now, I could sleep with a thousand knives and it wouldn't make one bit of difference.

I walked away before Niko could try to convince me that I hadn't frozen in the face of the enemy. I had. It had cost us the first crown, and I wasn't about to risk losing another. Frankly, guarding George's last chance wasn't a responsibility I was up for.

An hour and a half later we were back on the road, flush with success… and something else. "Jesus." I grimaced as the alcohol fumes wafted my way. "Goodfellow, it's actually coming out of your pores."

A haunted look sought me out over a rapidly emptying bottle of fruit brandy. I'd long lost track of how many such bottles he'd sucked down during the previous hour. "I've lived through the fall of Rome,, the Hundred Years' War, even that sleazy Troy debacle, but I've never faced anything such as that." He took another hurried pull on the bottle before repeating in a shell-shocked whisper, "Never."

Dinner had not gone well for our puck. Abelia-Roo's hands had been anywhere but on her fork. For once, Robin had been the hunted, not the hunter, prey of a wizened, bare-gummed predator. Niko, behind the wheel, was not surprisingly unsympathetic to his plight and offered little comfort. "Be grateful we didn't leave you there. She seemed quite serious about the leash threat." He arched an eyebrow in consideration. "Then again, it may have been more of a promise than a threat."

Goodfellow had a response to that. By now, I knew that he had a response to anything. I managed to turn on the radio just in time to drown it out. After tuning in to the first station I came across, I pulled on the lever on the bottom of the passenger seat to ease it back. Toeing off my shoes, I put my feet up on the dashboard, shifted onto my side, and dozed off. Stomach heavy with food, mind dull with heat, there wasn't much else to do. There was a long stretch of blissfully empty darkness that was broken what must have been hours later by a hand on my shoulder. I squinted at the orange and pink sky outside the window and revised my estimate. Many hours later—it was morning. I sat up and ran fingers through sleep-rumpled hair. Beside me, the owner of the hand that had pulled me from sleep growled, "Trouble."

Trouble all right, and it was reflected in the rearview mirror as flashing red and blue lights. Fan-fucking-tastic. I glared at Flay, who seemed to have replaced Niko at the steering wheel, and asked with typical morning ill humor, "Do you even have a license, Snowball?"

"Do you?" came his impatient gargle.

He had a point. Mine hadn't come as a prize in a box of cereal, but neither had it come from the DMV. While it was good enough to pass a casual glance, it couldn't fool the computers, which was why we were driving instead of flying. Good fake ID was easy enough to come by; excellent fake ID was increasingly rare in this hyper-security-sensitive world.

"Shit." I looked over my shoulder. Niko, Promise, Robin—they were all already awake. I immediately pegged Goodfellow as our best bet. He'd been running under the radar longer than the rest of us by far. If anyone had passable paper, it would be him. It was a good thought, in theory, until I took in the bloodshot eyes and white-knuckled fists pressed to his head, and breath that could embalm a corpse. I went immediately to our next best hope. "Promise?"

She could've pulled it off, I think. If not by convincing the cop that she'd been driving, then by the simple fact of being Promise. I'd never know, because it didn't come to that.

The Auphe came first.

I didn't see the rip in the air he plummeted through, but I doubted that it was more than ten feet up. He came down fast—too damn fast.

Walking toward us, the cop was freshly stamped from the hero cookie cutter. Square jaw, wide shoulders, impenetrable sunglasses paired with an impenetrable expression. Disciplined, stalwart, a noble defender of order—it took less than five seconds for him to die. The Auphe landed on top of him, knocking him to his hands and knees. An infinity of teeth found the bare strip of skin over the starched collar and passed through it as if it were no more substantial than a flesh-colored mist. Then there was another mist, this one red and viscous. I didn't remember moving, yet somehow I'd traveled from my seat to the back of the RV. Hands pressed against the glass, I saw the cop try to struggle upward. With one hand supporting his weight, he used the other to claw at the nightmare on his back. It was futile. His strength had disappeared with the blood pouring from his mutilated throat.

I wouldn't have recognized the growl that filled the air as my own if it hadn't been for the searing sensation of barbwire in my throat. I did recognize the gun in my hand, and better than that, I recognized that I could shoot through the window glass as if it were air. But as my finger tightened on the trigger, someone beat me to the punch.

Niko was a dark shadow in the sun's morning glow.

He was on the Auphe as quickly as the Auphe had been on the cop. Unfortunately, the Auphe had preternaturally fast reflexes, something his victim lacked. Or rather, had lacked. The dark glasses had fallen from the cop's face to reveal eyes that passed from stunned to empty. Arms and legs spasmed, then gave way and the cookie-cutter hero fell. He didn't get up again. He never would.

The Auphe rode him all the way down. Lean and sleek, the bundle of sinew and claws showed the new day a dripping crimson smile. It was the same grin he turned on my brother as Niko's sword swung to separate head from body. Overconfidence—it wasn't a failing exclusive to humans. The Auphe knew how fast he was—what he didn't know was how fast Niko was. It was a mistake, a big one, and it lost him the bottom half of that charming smile. The narrow mandible disappeared in an explosion of black blood and bone as the Auphe flipped backward, saving the rest of his head. Niko followed so closely that it was impossible the Auphe could escape. Unless…

Shit. Shit.

I tore through the RV, tumbled through the door, and ran. A car, the first to pass since our stop, nearly hit me. It had slowed to gawk at the fallen cop. When I rocketed into its path with a gun and a matching metallic snarl, the driver swerved, gave up on the looky-lou, and sped off with squealing tires. I ignored the breeze of a bumper kiss and kept running. I passed the dead man lying in the emergency lane, vaulted the dry ditch, hit sand and scrubby grass, and kept moving. I was still fifty feet away when I felt it. It was only a shadow of the eviscerating sensation I'd felt when I'd unwittingly opened my own, but it was still a first. I'd never been able to sense an Auphe doorway before it opened—not until now. A ghostly hand pulled my intestines into a knot just before the air began to bleed gray.

The Auphe couldn't speak, not without a jaw, but he made sounds nonetheless. They were horribly triumphant gobbles that sprayed blood in an arc as he threw himself on Niko's sword with enough force to impale himself right up to the hilt. Arms wound with ropy muscle wrapped around Niko's shoulders and with what was either a laugh or a death rattle, the Auphe fell backward with him toward the gate. I hit them both in an impossibly long tackle, taking us away from that hungry silver light. As we hit the ground, I screwed the Glock into one pointed ear and pulled the trigger. Repeatedly. The pointed skull deflated into a misshapen mass and turned the surrounding soil into a rancid blot. Repugnant, but not as much as the door that hung before us—still open, still ravenous.

"You don't want to go there."

Niko's hand was on my arm gripping hard. "Where does it go? Cal, where does it go?"

"You don't want to go there," I said again dully, my eyes locked on the doorway. It was bad, what lay behind it. There wasn't a word for the bad of it.

Then it closed, like the popping of a soap bubble. And with it, the awful blackness in my head receded. Blinking, I levered myself up off Niko and the dead Auphe. "Cops." I cleared the hoarseness from my throat and tried again as I swiftly patched over the cracks in my artificial calm. "The cops will be coming. We need to get out of here."

"Damn it, would you change your antifreeze and have an emotion already?" came an irritated snipe from behind. A rumpled, snarling Goodfellow stood there. One hand held a sword and one had a death grip on his aching head. "It was Tumulus, wasn't it, Caliban? He tried to take Niko to Tumulus."

Tumulus, we'd learned, was Auphe hell, a dimension of bare rock and endless desolation. Their home away from home. I'd spent two years there when the Auphe had taken me at the age of fourteen. I didn't remember any of it, at least not consciously, but it was clear that some part of me was aware enough to recognize a gate to the Abyss when I saw it. I'd survived that place, but only because the Auphe had wanted me to. I didn't think they'd be so inclined with Niko.

It was a conversation for another time; I was nowhere near ready for it now. Looking away from Goodfellow, I focused in on the body of the Auphe. Colorless hair mixed with coarse soil and dark blood. The pale skin was now tinged with a creeping gray that spread like fungus. "I wonder what CSI will think about him," I muttered and closed my eyes tightly.

Not a whole lot, as it turned out. We stuffed him in the trunk of the police car and then we blew it up. Auphe and car… sky-high. Robin had suggested we put him in the RV with us and dispose of him later. Niko flatly refused, and he did it so that I didn't have to. Be in close proximity to an Auphe, even a dead one, for more than a few minutes? I couldn't have done it. I would've either thrown him out onto the road or jumped out myself.

Luckily, Flay had casually tossed off the inferno suggestion. Working for the Kin had provided him with the flexibility of mind and soul to assess a problem and immediately decide to blow it to kingdom come. Despite myself, I was beginning to have a reluctant—very reluctant—appreciation for the wolf. And when he jury-rigged a fuse for the gas tank out of one of the RV's ugly plaid curtains and detonated the car, all in the space of two minutes, I had to give credit where credit was due.

After that, we hauled ass. The poor damn dead cop was beyond help and we left him where he'd fallen. Flay had suggested we put his body in the car, but the rest of us couldn't go along with that. Bad enough he was dead; we could at least leave his family something to grieve over. He would've called in our license plate number, but there was nothing we could do about that. The first rest stop we came to we would swap our plates out with another vehicle. Goodfellow said that the Auphe would burn almost entirely. Their bones were softer and more flexible than a human's; there wouldn't be much left for the crime lab to work with. And what was found would be considered a hopelessly contaminated sample. A hoax, a fluke… a mirage. It would be explained away. It'd been done before, and it would be done again. As long as humans didn't want to see, they wouldn't. Hell, I envied them. I wished I were that blind.

"Is it as Robin said? Did it try to take Niko to that place?" a voice asked softly.

I was curled up in the back with my head against the curtain-shrouded window and my knees pulled up against my chest. I had flexible bones too. Was it youth or something else? Didn't know, didn't care. As Promise sat down in the seat opposite mine, voices floated back from the front. There were soft, undecipherable murmurs that made the space seem much larger. Niko, Goodfellow, Flay… they could've been miles away. If I concentrated, I could've brought them closer, but I was content enough in my self-imposed exile. Rather—I gave Promise a stony glance through strands of unbrushed hair—I had been.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Caliban." My name was said with patience and empathy, but also with determination. She was worried about me, but she was also worried about Niko, and if she had to push me, then she would.

"I said, I don't want to talk about it!" This time I snapped and bit.

When it came to pushing, Promise was among the very best. From gentle persuasion to an icy will, she had her ways of bringing you around. But her ways didn't compare to the ways of what was burning on the road far behind us. She could push all she wanted, but I'd been pushed all my life. I'd been watched from my first breath, and hounded to what should have been my last.

In other words, if I didn't want to talk, no one on this side of that gray doorway could make me. Recapturing a balance that was getting more precarious by the hour, I leaned my head back against the wall. "Go away, Promise."

Now I was the one pushing, and with a lot less finesse than Promise would have used. I didn't have to see the flash of temper that initiated; I could feel it on my skin, as intense as that noontime Florida sun. "I know you're afraid, perhaps even terrified." The typical Promise serenity was sounding taxed to the limit, and I had a feeling that if I bothered to look at her, I would see teeth revealed with those words, the kind of teeth you didn't want to see from a vampire. "But closing your eyes to the situation like a child isn't going to change things."

She was half-right. Behaving like a scared kid wasn't going to make this shit go away. The only problem was, nothing was going to do that. Not a goddamn thing. The sole reason we'd been able to defeat the Auphe previously was that they'd all been gathered in one location. I sincerely doubted that was going to happen again. We were screwed. Front, back, and all ways in between. We could talk until we were blue in the face, but that fun fact wasn't going to change. So why talk at all?

Instead, I did what she told me not to do. I closed my eyes. Literally, metaphorically, figuratively… choose your poison because I meant them all. Velvet darkness loomed behind my eyelids, but it didn't stop me from feeling the very quality of the air itself change as Promise decided I didn't deserve her patience anymore. "Not even for your brother would you try to face what is before you?" Cool and merciless. "Not even for the one who has thrown his life away for you?"

Strong words… I'd thought them to myself long before Promise had ever entered the picture. They didn't sound any different aloud than they had the thousands of times I'd heard them in my head.

"Promise, don't."

Different words, but in a way they were the same. Exactly the goddamn same. I opened my eyes to see Niko's forbiddingly impassive face tilted down toward the only person in his life he had loved aside from me. There he was, my big brother, doing what he invariably did… throwing his life away. Same as always.

Thanks to me.

"No," I said quickly, straightening. "No, she's right. I should tell you what I can, even if it's only guesses… impressions." And with that admission they came, whether I was ready for them or not. Triggered by the doorway to Tumulus, they'd been waiting in the wings poised for the faintest hint of an invitation. Stupid me, I gave it to them.

I swallowed convulsively as I tasted air not of this world. It was cold and acidic, and it tasted of slow, lingering suffering. Not death. Death was easy. What I tasted made you long for the pillow over the face, the cleansing shot of potassium chloride to stop your heart. My fingers dug into the cushion beneath me, but I felt the grit of an alien soil that was more cutting than ground glass. I heard hundreds of voices whispering words I couldn't understand. Consonants that cut the throat, vowels that made your ears want to bleed. It was when I began to repeat the words over and over, strangling on their unnatural shape, that the hard slap rocked my head back.

The world came back. The good world—bright and warm. Plaid curtains, the hum of an engine, the smell of musky wolf. Good. Even the blood on my lip was welcome. In comparison with what I had tasted, it was wine… chocolate. Wholesome and so normal, salty but clean. I touched a tongue to it and reveled in the tang of it.

"Cal, can you hear me? Stay with me, all right? Stay with me." Niko didn't look too happy as his hand gripped my shoulder, and as I saw the tiny wisp of winter fog roiling in the air before me, I could see why. It was small, the size of an orange. It wasn't a door, not yet… a keyhole at best, but it was the last one you wanted to peer through.

"You don't want to go there," I said in a low and shaky echo, my eyes locked on the eddy and swirl of it. "But I guess maybe it wants to come here."

"Can you close it?"

I felt it inside of me, the way it turned… how it fed off of my energy, how it grew strength from my concentration and focus. It was in control, not me. "Knock me out," I said sharply as it doubled in size, gobbling up air and space. "Now."

Niko didn't hesitate. He knew a little temporary pain was nothing compared with what would come crawling out of that rip once it grew large enough. It didn't hurt much. He didn't have the time to painlessly choke me out, but I barely saw the fist that flashed at my jaw with surgical precision, and I scarcely had time to register the crunch of knuckle against bone before I was gone where pain couldn't follow. I could only hope I took the door to hell with me.