Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (37 page)

Well . . . maybe.

Little bit.

But it didn’t happen that way.

What did happen was so fast that at first I didn’t know how I’d ended up on my ass. There’d been a blinding light, air choked again with ozone, the feel of being thrown. I rubbed at my eyes and staggered up to see a rain of liquid metal between Lazarus and us through the halos and streaks across my vision. Four hundred rounds were now a curtain of silver and copper falling to the ground. An unshot Lazarus rested a hand on the crackling white light that circled him after destroying every bullet Cal and I had fired . . . over four
hundred
. It was impossible, but impossible or not, Lazarus wrapped that eye-searing light around his arm and sent it back up to where it belonged—the sky. Wasn’t that where lightning lived—the sky? I thought so.

It had been who knew how many bolts of lightning that had disarmed us. The asshole could control goddamn
lightning
, we were aware of that since this morning, but to melt four hundred bullets? Gotta love a challenge.

Blinking again, I could see there were dark marks, different shapes and sizes, scattered on every part of his skin that was visible, his face, his arms in the sleeveless leather shirt, his hands, and they were moving. They coalesced into tattoos. Pure black, they were either an arrow or a spear was my closest guess. Starkly primitive, it was made of two lines—a vertical one, then the second line that topped it. They were all pointing upward. If not for the peak of the second line giving it a sharp point aimed up at the sky, they almost could be Ts. A memory
hit me. Runes. It was some kind of rune. Niko had studied them as he’d studied everything. I’d caught a glance over his shoulder a few years ago at a page of them in a book he was reading. They had looked close to this.

That’s all I had the chance to think when Lazarus extended both hands. He shifted his focus from Cal to me. “You began this. You, Caliban, fired the first shot.” I hadn’t expected much talking from an assassin, but I hadn’t expected the Vigil to screw up so profoundly with their Frankenstein creation and make a monster instead, one that could stand shoulder to shoulder with any Auphe. And if I didn’t expect talking, I didn’t expect the wide mocking grin, glacial as the hand of death in the cold stretch of it. He lifted both arms and the hands that had been empty now held nooses. Made of shadows naturally, but managing to show the coarse texture of a hangman’s rope.

“But the first shot is nothing when I am the
war
.”

Cal spat, the disgust blatant enough to fly through the air as heavy as a thrown rock, “You’re as far from human as I am. You let those hypocrites do that to you? Take away who you were to make you into a monster like me, the thing you Vigil bastards hate?”

He took us all in now, his grin became more derisive. “The Vigil did not make me. I have always been. They guarded the human’s ignorance. They took one of their own, trained in the ways of weapons and the coward’s kill of assassination. They thought they had made an undefeatable soldier to fight for humans. But I am not a soldier. I am a
warrior
, the likes of which hasn’t been seen here since the Blood Eagle flew, and I care nothing for humans. With their mayfly lives, they do not live long enough to be counted as more than toys made to die for my amusement. The Vigil did not make a savior. They did not make a twisted unnatural creature with powers it did not deserve. They did not make anything new, nothing with a mind or a spirit. Instead, they created a vessel.

“My vessel.”

He lifted both arms above his head, hands wrapped
with rope, the nooses raised high. I felt a sudden tightening around my throat. I touched my throat with fingers ready to rip away whatever was strangling me, but there was nothing—nothing but the nooses Lazarus still held. That wasn’t impossible, but it was unfriendly as fuck. I was choking for breath as beside me Cal was doing the same.

“Do you not know me now? He who shares the title of The Hanged One. I bring Justice, but I
am
War.”

He shouted it at the sky and I thought I felt the ground beneath me shake.

“I am War. I am War.
I AM
WAR!
”

Oddly, for him, quiet until now, Goodfellow, who stood close behind us, gave a painfully hard yank on my hair that turned me around. He pulled me frantically into motion, and when he did, the pressure around my neck loosened before disappearing. He was also snapping at Niko and Cal to move their idiotic asses and run. When they hesitated, I emphasized his command while coughing out, “Options, Vanna says—hanging, eyes pecked out by crows, electrocuted, or run. Pick one!”

No one else had self-preservation skills close to a puck’s who’d dodged the reaper for millions of years. I knew when to listen to him. I had full confidence in him—until I noticed we were running toward the other end of the ship. I didn’t know the name—bow, aft, rudder, the “I’m the King of the World” spot, the shrimp buffet bulwark and open bilge bar. I knew nothing about boats, what to call any of it, and I didn’t give a damn about guessing.

I
did
know we were racing toward the end away from the dock, the end beyond which was nothing but water.

He was cursing now and it wasn’t his usual bitching about getting boggle blood on his Armani shirt. This was the kind of cursing he saved for the times he thought it was likely to be the other way around: What was trying to kill us would get
Robin’s
blood on its nondesigner scales. “
Forpoutanas
gie!
Tyr! He has the blood of
Tyr
in him. The tattoos. The nooses. The duplicity of his position when he was Justice, when all who he judged were
judged guilty without exception, and he watched each hanging with his dick in hand.”

He spat in disgust and kept moving and talking. Pucks excelled at doing both simultaneously. “The insatiable thirst for blood, brutality, and vengeance he disguises as victorious battles. The glory of wars that he rules honorable, declaring the other side to have twice the number of warriors he leads when in reality they have less than half. He lies his way to legend. His tongue tells nothing but lies, not that such a fact makes him any kind of trickster. He tells his lies for no other reason than senseless slaughter and any excuse for war. He says he is War. He wishes he was Death, the butchering bastard.”

I threw myself down at the scent of ozone and lightning streaked over my head. Then I was back up and running again. It was a fair-sized boat? Ship? I was guessing, but the length to run from one end of the
Titanic
to the other couldn’t be this far.

“But how did they get his blood? He cannot be dead. I would know. News of his death, the hypocritical, devious, genocidal
kolotripa
, would be more than a rumor. I’m a trickster. It’s my avocation to know all these things. Yet, where would the Vigil get the blood? What have I missed?” He hadn’t let go of my arm when I’d hit the floor, the deck, whatever, and was continuing to drag me, which I hated to admit was faster than I could run. The bastard was a fucking cheetah.

As I was a lion and not a cheetah, I wasn’t surprised when I stumbled, but used the chance to check that Niko and Cal were behind us and keeping up. Robin ignored my near fall and kept going, keeping me upright and taking me with him. “The lightning and shadow could be dealt with. The lightning and a slave ship. It must be the blood of an impundulu, a South African Lightning Bird—the shade of what it was living within him. Fighting us on
this
ship, it is nothing but a pretense at vengeance for those long dead slaves as Tyr himself has slaves by the dozens. The shadows . . . I still haven’t pinpointed them yet. Whatever they are, they and the impundulu, they are shades within Tyr, not living but not
dead. They’re weaker, capable of being defeated, but the majority of him is Tyr. But with two hands now instead of only one and two nooses to go with them,” he groaned.
“Gamisou!”

He was more or less talking to himself, but I was long familiar with that. When we were someplace safe enough he could speak slower, use smaller words, and give us the unthinkably bizarre free of charge explanation, we’d get filled in then.

Without another word to me, he turned and pushed me with enough force I was actually off my feet as I was thrown to land hard—just as another bolt of lightning flew by exactly where I’d been while running. “Thanks.” I staggered back up and started to run again.

“There has to be a way we can take him. And who is Tyr?” I asked, beginning to feel the burn in my chest, the need for oxygen, and we hadn’t run far, nothing like the ten miles I was used to. I felt my throat tightening again and the air I was pulling in and exhaling was coming and going with a stark wheeze. The noose was back.

Goodfellow heard it, my increasing struggle for air, and didn’t reply. Silent now as he kept the grim grip on my ponytail pulled over my shoulder from my back to the front to be used as a leash. I could see where he was headed and what he had in mind. We were going for the edge of the ship and he planned to pull us both over into the river. It might have worked, too, if the noose hadn’t kept tightening. I clawed at my throat, but it was the same. Nothing was there. Nothing I could touch. I stumbled and asked one last time before I fell. “Robin . . . who . . . is . . . Tyr?” I was on my knees then and my throat was closed completely. I couldn’t get any air to pass, not the smallest gasp, not a fraction of a breath. I couldn’t breathe. That didn’t stop me from trying to get up, to get to the edge. I had to stand. I had to make it. Robin wouldn’t leave me. I had to get the fuck up or when I died here, he’d die with me.

I tried, with everything in me, I tried.

I failed.

Barely on my knees now, I was wavering, about to fall
on my side. Robin was in front of me then, on his own knees to face me. His hands were on my shoulders keeping me upright. I might not be able to breathe or speak, but I could get across my point, last that it was. I put my hand flat on the puck’s chest and pushed him toward the side, toward the river. I could hear Niko shouting that Cal couldn’t breathe, that he was blue. I was most likely blue as well. His eyes held mine.

We were all fucked, but Niko, Cal, and I would come back and live again, fifty years or a hundred. Goodfellow wouldn’t. If he ran for it, if he survived, we’d see him again. If he died with us, we never would. Of course,
of
goddamn
course
, he wouldn’t do the smart thing, the puck thing, the selfish thing.
“No,”
he snapped, looping fingers around my wrist to keep me from pushing again. “You died for me on a
gamisou
kitchen table tortured with the medieval version of Ginsu knives in a pathetic excuse for a castle. You did it because you wouldn’t give me up—you said it yourself. That is not who you are. You would not and could not give me over to the mercy of a sociopathic bastard that wanted me hanged for treason. This is a different life, but I won’t shame myself by doing less by you. I am not giving you up to the exact same kind of monster you faced for me.”

That’s when Robin answered my question about Tyr.

I wished he hadn’t.

Then he hoisted me over his shoulder and ran for the edge, jerking and dodging streaks and bolts of lightning that were so thick in the air, I didn’t know how we weren’t dead on the deck, hearts stopped. I saw Niko through a distant haze. He had Cal over his shoulder and was running all out toward the edge and then was over it, both of them a distant splash. Robin avoided one more streak of lightning so close that I smelled burning hair. Then we, like Niko and Cal, were over and hitting the water. I couldn’t see much—black and yellow swirling across the world—and then I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t hear the sound as we sank into the depths of the water, but I felt the cold fist of it close around us. It faded nearly instantly as did the agony of oxygen-starved
lungs. I was almost gone, but that didn’t worry me. The time for worry was over. I was certain that was going to be my last thought. I didn’t know if I was right or wrong. Did where you have the thought count? Who knew? I did know I’d stopped breathing minutes ago. I recognized the very last beat of my heart when I felt it.

I knew I wasn’t in the river any longer and wouldn’t be again.

That’s how it was—always had been, always would be.

It was time to go.

“It hasn’t changed.”
Another thought, I’d give you that, but I didn’t have it in the river. That was ancient history. Now I stood in a cottage and stared out the window at a meadow of dew and grass and mist, not a river in sight. There was a pile of fresh-smelling straw to one side, a blanket thrown carelessly on it that would be warm against a morning chill. Would it kill someone to update to central heating? Apparently. As everything here was as I remembered in as minute detail as if I’d seen it yesterday, rather the infinity of moments since I’d been here last. When I’d left the room with the small window of gray, sunless sky, I’d walked the red path this way, drifted atop the deep scarlet stream to a place beyond pain, but that had all been closer to forever ago than to yesterday.

Like before, next I would wrap myself in the blanket and walk out the door to someplace new.

This is how it goes.

I frowned and didn’t reach for the blanket. That question, it could’ve been forever ago as well, I’d asked Robin . . . What was it? I snagged at the ragged end of the memory and yanked hard. I’d asked him—I pulled harder yet and there it was. I’d demanded, “Who is Tyr?” And he’d answered me, eyes gone from green to black with a fury so fierce and a fear so profound I didn’t think Robin even knew that consuming an emotion. I went to the cottage door and opened it.

This is how it goes here. You know that. It always has been, always will be.

“Tyr is a god.”

A god, Robin had answered me. How could we fight a god? I was dead anyway and standing in the doorway to what was beyond death. This death. It was time to go, but now it wasn’t the cottage I remembered clearly. It was what I’d left behind to come here that was splashed in vivid colors of desperation behind my eyes. I wanted Robin to survive. I wanted Niko to do the same. He wasn’t my Niko, but he would’ve been. And any Niko deserved to live. I wanted Cal to live and with me gone, went back to the way he’d been before I’d come in and stomped all over his life. I wanted him to be around to see Robin for the friend he was. I wanted them all to make it out of that river and walk away, but if they did, Tyr would still come after them. And Tyr was a god.