Slashback

17

Cal

Present Day

“We should’ve done this sooner.”

“I think waiting until you could use your hands was the better notion,” Niko commented. “Not that I didn’t enjoy unzipping you every time you needed the bathroom.”

“Did you enjoy it?” Robin had his chin propped in his hand at the table.

“No,” Niko replied with a sigh that he made far grimmer than it had to be. “I would’ve paid you a hundred dollars a day to do it if I’d thought Cal wouldn’t have sooner pissed his pants at the thought.”

“You’ve seen Goodfellow naked. Hell, we both have.” Accidentally or catastrophically, both adjectives applied to that occasion. “I don’t want him or the Godzilla that doubles as his dick mocking Cal Junior and he would, the bastard.” The Ninth Circle was closed, empty . . . of patrons and peris. I was behind the bar, pulling two bottles of wine and one of Scotch. The Scotch was for me and the wine for Goodfellow and Nik. Normally Nik didn’t drink. This was not a situation anyone could define as normal. I tossed him a corkscrew. “I don’t think we need glasses. Buckets maybe, but glasses are too small for what I have in mind.”

I turned the chair, straddled it, and sat with them at the table in the far corner. It had been three weeks, but it was always a night where “back to the wall” was an adult monster-killer’s security blanket. I opened the Scotch with only some awkwardness with my healing hands and took a swallow. It wasn’t the cheapest Scotch in the place but it wasn’t the best either and I didn’t bother to savor the taste. It would be good on stubborn household stains though.

Taking a look at Robin’s shirt, a radical departure from his Italian suits that cost more than the gold toilets in the Vatican, I groaned at the eye-searing colors and slick polyester blend. “Disco is dead. If it hadn’t died before I was born I would’ve killed it myself. Burn the damn shirt.”

“This is vintage, I’ll have you know,” the puck said, the wounded pride evident in the way he ran his hand down the front of an era that rivaled the Dark Ages for inventive tortures: visual and auditory. “I have a friend in Miami, Saul. He sends me only the best. I save them for special occasions.”

“This is a special occasion?” Niko inquired, appearing more relaxed than he had since Jack had shown up.

“I thought Ishiah and the others cleared out to give us a night to finally decompress and, I don’t know, not rip them a new one for being lying dicks every day since we’ve known them?” I took another swallow.

Robin spread his arms wide, the wine bottle swinging in punctuation. “Angels. Please. It was a white lie. Barely a lie. If you both weren’t so naïve you would’ve immediately caught on and it wouldn’t have counted as a lie. Basically you have no one to blame but yourselves.”

“It was for our own good,” I snarked in an echo of my brother, not happy with it yet, but then again I did love my grudges and putting Nik in his place as it happened usually only once a decade.

“Yes, we’ve both been hearing that quite a bit lately,” Niko said wryly. “Let it go, Cal.” He was looking down his nose at the wine he’d just tasted. I’d tried to pick something expensive, but when your palate is accustomed to grass clippings and soy husks there isn’t much a person can do. “We know why they lied. Why Robin did as well. They had their reasons. We have issues.”

I snorted at that and drank again. Issues. That was a word for it, but not the right one by a long shot. Our issues should’ve come with radioactive warning labels, sealed in hazardous waste drums, and tossed into the Mariana Trench or Mount Doom if anyone had the upper body strength to carry them that far.

“Yes, they had their reasons. I had my reasons. We were trying to protect two babes in the woods. We were watching out the best we could for our friends.” Goodfellow drank half his bottle in one long swallow. It was an impressive and kind of filthy skill if you thought about it. I didn’t want to think about it.

“And, yes, Cal, this is a special occasion. To friends. Value them.” He lifted his bottle. He had an oddly indecipherable glint in the mossy green of his gaze. His bottle was held stiffly as if the toast was almost ceremonial. “They go and they come.”

Nik’s fingers clenched around his bottle as his face went blank. He echoed slowly, “They go and they come. That’s what you said before. I remember you. You were at our house. You were the man with the flat tire.” As he said it, I remembered it too, in a barely there haze, but I remembered Goodfellow . . . no, Goodman he’d called himself, standing on our porch and no doubt looking absolutely identical to how he looked now. My memory wasn’t clear enough to see it, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know it.

“Yes, the first time we met—this time around. I’d always thought of myself as unforgettable but six years later you show up at my car lot, which was your idea by the way, Niko—I opened one at your suggestion, and neither of you remembered. But considering what happened after that with Jack’s apprentice, I cannot say I’m surprised that you did everything you could to forget that entire year altogether. Now, toast for the love of Priapus’s ever-upright phallus. This is the first time I’ve been able to tell you, in all your lives, without being beat over the head with a club or the jawbone of an ass or a wine amphorae for blasphemy against the gods. Leave it to Niko to be a Buddhist before Buddha himself. To be that for all his lives and not know it.”

Not life. Lives.

Numbly I clinked my bottle against theirs and watched Niko go from shaken to intrigued, then rueful in less than a second flat. “And I the Buddhist—in this life at least—never caught on.”

My brother believed in life after death, many lives. I believed in nothing. It looked like I might be wrong.

“What the hell are you saying? You knew us? You’ve always known us? That we were your friends, comrades in arms, buddies, whatever, reincarnated over and over throughout history? That we knew you and hung out with you on purpose God knows how many times? Reincarnation I’ll buy. Maybe. But choosing to spend all of history listening to your egomaniacal ass sounds more like Hell to me.” I grinned at Robin because at the moment he appeared as if he could really use it. After the angels, telling us another truth was bound to be nerve-wracking. He couldn’t know how we’d take it.

On the whole, I thought we were damn lucky.

Life after life? I had no religious beliefs or philosophies, but if Niko wanted to drag me behind him through reincarnation after reincarnation, I did owe him, didn’t I? In this life and most likely every other one.

“Yes, because you’ve been such a delightful companion throughout the ages. Of the six hundred and seventy-eight times I’ve nearly been killed, six hundred at minimum have been your fault.” He turned to Niko to say one word, one name actually, “Achilles.”

Niko, the alcohol shall not profane my holy temple having gone out the window with Boris and now this, Niko, took another quick swallow before saying with disbelief, “Last month, when my father was here”—late father, for which I happily took full credit—“and you told him that you were there when Achilles cut his hair to mourn his cousin Patroclus, you were actually saying I was Achilles?”

“Simply because of how I, and even Cal, whose entire knowledge of history could be collected in a comic book, compare you to Achilles on a monthly basis? Oh, and the legend in your clan that your blond hair and exceptional genetic tendency toward lethality in a fight comes from a descendant of Achilles playing hide the loukaniko with a winsome Rom maiden when your clan was in Greece a few centuries ago?” Robin snapped, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his free hand. “Zeus’s golden shower, you’re as thick as your brother. Of course you were Achilles.”

“And I’m guessing I was the dead guy, Patroclus,” I muttered. “Great. Just my luck.” I had a feeling that history did love to repeat itself. But at the same time . . . once I’d been human. Not Auphe, not monster. I’d been human. That was worth knowing.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword. That little Jewish fellow with the big feet knew what he was talking about there. The two of you were mortal and warriors—always. Soldiers, mercenaries, fighters of all stripe, with nothing save a vulnerable human body to keep you alive. The combination makes for short life spans.” This time he finished the bottle rather than face us. “And shorter friendships.”

He peered at the empty bottle and sighed, bereft and despairing. That meant he was too lazy to get a replacement. I groaned and fetched one for him. “How’d you even figure this out? We looked different, right? We probably weren’t always brothers, were we?” A feeling of loss, icy and sharp, spiked in me at that thought.

“Strangely enough, you are brothers most often. Sometimes cousins. Occasionally, as I told you when you were younger, friends bonded by blood and battle. As for me noticing, it started when I kept crossing paths centuries apart with a string of humans of foul and sarcastic attitude. These were the days when there was little law, rare enforcement, and a smart-ass mouth was reason enough for someone to be beaten to death, anyone would agree. That I kept running into this same nonsurvival-prone personality type began to make me somewhat suspicious. Nature should’ve weeded this strain out hundreds of years after I first encountered it for the sake of the species.”

That was harsh. I didn’t think my personality was species dooming. Not necessarily.

“That this annoying persona was invariably accompanied by another saner character who kept him from being beaten to death as he deserved, I began to think I’d gone insane. Older pucks do once you’ve lived a million or so years. Then after sharing a meal and a conversation with Buddha, the thin Indian version, that conversation we had about sex—enlightenment is very overrated—I think I’ve mentioned this story before. Ah, yes, by the constipated look on Cal’s face I have told this one. Irregardless we discussed other things as well and I knew. I was cursed”—he coughed—“ah . . . blessed with eternal companions to fill the long years of an eternal life. One way or the other fate draws us together time and time again.”

When we’d first met him, or when I’d thought we’d first met him, at the car lot, Robin had seemed the most unwillingly solitary person or creature I’d known. Sex partners he had in plenty—he’d made certain we knew that in the first five minutes, but with the majority of the paien hating pucks and pucks absolutely despising each other, friends were definitely a seller’s market. He’d seized on us like a life preserver. For a moment I wondered how he could’ve been lonely if we’d been there all along and then I knew. We’d been mortal and he was not. We were seemingly eternal but present for a handful of years at a time. How many times had he seen Niko and me fall to that sword? How many times had he seen us die? How long were the stretches when we weren’t around? Tens of years, hundreds, thousands? Was he lonely or was it truer to say he was abandoned?

Now I felt guilty for dying—repeatedly—instead of feeling as if I’d fallen through the rabbit hole, which would be a far more normal reaction. Fuck. I gave him a light shove. For once, I’d try not to make everything about me. “Short, but apparently we always eventually turned back up . . . like a bad penny, the kind coated with the supernatural Ebola of rotten luck.”

“True.” His smile was solemn enough to make the unspoken words etch themselves in the air as sharp as diamond-cut crystal: although sometimes it took a very long time before you did.

There was nothing to be done about it—except taking it up with Niko’s Buddha and universe-at-large and I had a feeling that wasn’t an option. That meant I did with it what I did with all problems I couldn’t solve: I ignored it and moved on. “So since we met you at the car lot. No, hell, since you showed up on our porch when we were kids, you thought . . . knew who we were to you and you didn’t bother to say anything? Didn’t think we’d like to be clued in?”

“Naturally I didn’t tell you when you were children. First, you kept calling me a pervert.” He glared. I might have forgotten most of it but he hadn’t. Neither forgiven nor forgotten. “And second, it would’ve interfered with your development.”

Niko picked up the thread of conversation. “Who we’d become, who we were meant to be. A person has the same basic core of personality in each life, but there are some differences based on environment, genes, the paths we choose, things such as that.”

In this life, yeah, genes were in the driver’s seat on that one. In this life, for once, I wasn’t mortal, but I was as likely to have that short life span. More likely in fact.

“Did you know I was Auphe . . . when I was a kid?” I asked abruptly. I didn’t stop with one swallow of Scotch on that question.

“No.” Goodfellow sounded . . . hell, sounded as if he’d thought about this more nights than I’d care to consider and found himself guilty every time. “No. If I had known about them, if I’d known about Sophia, if I’d known how bad it truly was, I would’ve interfered and gamisou personality development. I could see you were poor, but I didn’t see the rest. I am sorry for that. You don’t know how sorry.”

He turned his attention to his wine. “When years later, at the car lot, when we met for what you thought was the first time, you hadn’t seen all that you’ve seen now. You wouldn’t have believed me, the things that I knew. You didn’t trust me either, not then. You didn’t know me.” And the wine was gone again. He was like a camel, storing wine for the long trek across the desert. “Finally, after six years, the time seemed right. Last month I started dropping more hints than the number of hair extensions Rapunzel threw out her tower window and you didn’t catch on. Achilles, the bacchanalia when we were in Greece, the lifetimes you’ve dragged my ass through the fire and on and on. I expected that from Cal. He’s oblivious in any life, but I was disappointed in you, Niko.”

“As there were three creatures trying to kill us then, including my own father,” he said dryly, “and Jack now, I’ve been a shade distracted. Forgive my unmindful ways.”

“Were we anyone else famous besides Achilles and Patroclus?” I asked curiously.

Goodfellow rolled his eyes upward. “The wonder of the afterlife revealed to you, your personal afterlife, mind you and that is the question you ask. How vain. If you’re good, I’ll tell you later. However, I was Robin Hood and my john was anything but little.”

On that somewhat horrifying note, Niko held up his bottle and Robin joined in, ignoring the fact his was empty. I raised mine to meet theirs and Niko said soberly, “To friends. They go and they come. The going must be difficult, but know we will always come back.”

Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of history repeating itself, but in this one case . . .

I made an exception.