Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (4 page)

He, the kid, had frozen, still and unblinking but that didn’t last long. The eyes that had fixed on me narrowed to slits. The mouth that had gone fractionally slack with surprise, tightened to a hard line, then bared teeth in a snarl, and the baby face disappeared beneath the cold menace of a predator. He didn’t know. He really didn’t know. He had no idea that I was him, and he was me.

What he thought I was could only be someone else—
something
else he hadn’t imagined existed—until he wrongly guessed he was facing it. And there had been someone else—several, in fact, but only one that was functional. Cal and I, when we were one instead of two, we’d been blind and conceited to think we were the single half-breed born of the Auphe. I’d learned differently, and Cal was assuming differently now. And he was shocked as hell. I knew that, as I had been surprised myself when I’d met my genetic “cousin.” I shouldn’t have been. I’d known a long time I was an Auphe experiment,
made with a purpose. No good experiment has only one subject. I should’ve known better.

This younger me thought I was that kind of family, linked by DNA only, not the family you’d ever claim. It was a reasonable guess, as technically it could’ve been true.

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch, kid,” I drawled. “I’m not what you think.” And I also didn’t have much time to convince him of that, as my prediction minutes ago of what he’d do when he saw me for the first time was on the money. There went the hand reaching under the bar for either a weapon or a cell phone.

Which would I have reached for eight years ago?

Both.

Drumming all ten fingers on the bar, I leaned back and tried not to smirk, but it was hard to hold back. It was no less than he deserved. I’d screwed with everyone I knew my whole life, delivered sarcasm and snark to anyone who crossed my path, family and friends more than most. You torture the ones you love, else how would they know you gave a shit about them? That was my code through and through. This was the opportunity to fuck with myself and I couldn’t pass that up for anything.

I knew I had it coming.

But as I thought that, I thought something else. Did I sincerely deserve it? I’d forgotten this was also the me who was barely two and a half years back from being kidnapped by the Auphe. They’d snatched him/me through the explosion of glass that had been a trailer window and told me they were taking us home. My brother, trapped in a burning trailer, couldn’t stop them, and Sophia, giving them the entertainment they suddenly couldn’t get enough of, lit up like a torch and burned to death in the frame of the door.

We’d seen it, the two Cals that then had been one, before we were pulled through a hole in the world, a rip in the air itself to a place outside this reality, a place that would put Hell to shame. Two or so years later I’d torn open my own ragged doorway that I’d instantly forgot how to make and crawled through it back home, back to
my brother. Two years, but not. My brother had guessed that for me, now taller by several inches and hair longer by at least a foot, that it had been approximately two years. For him it had been not quite two days. Time ran different in Auphe-Land, where it’s all-you-can-eat so long as you can catch it, and the screaming is free!

When I’d returned, I’d spent my time alternating between acting as predatory and feral as the monsters who’d taken me or too terrified to crawl out from under the bed while clutching a knife twenty-four seven. I had reason for both behaviors, as in the beginning I’d remembered the years with the Auphe. Tried not to—what had been done to me, worse yet, the things I’d been forced to do. Tried to bury it, tried to wipe it clean.

Like I’d ever thought I’d be clean again.

But when I’d slowly realized the feral side, vicious side of me made my brother fear for me more than the horror that kept me shaking and hiding under beds in the safe dark under sagging box springs, inhaling the must of cheap motel carpet, I’d shed the savage side of me little by little for him. My brother needed me back, needed me sane, needed me to be more human to blend in as now we were on the run from the Auphe, the monsters. He needed, for him as much as for me, to keep me safe—this time.

I’d suffered, but my brother had suffered too—fear I was gone forever, guilt that I could smell on him. Guilt that he hadn’t been able to stop them from taking me. Guilt that he
hadn’t
kept me safe. Guilt that he couldn’t get me back. Guilt that I’d never talk again instead of growling, clawing, or screaming, much less wear shoes or recognize a fork. Guilt that I might never stop trying to stab strangers. And then the worse guilt of all: that what for him had been close to two days in this world had been two years for me in their world. Taken at fourteen and returned approximately at sixteen, all in less than two days.

That type of thing tends to fuck up everyone in the vicinity.

I’d told myself it wasn’t any different from a
Halloween costume, pretending to be something you weren’t for one night a year, except my costume was a human one and I wore mine and pretended every minute of every hour of every day, all three hundred and sixty-five of them for several years. I’d worn that human suit so thoroughly that I’d brainwashed myself into believing that I was something I was not.

Human.

Human with bad, bad genes, but human.

Tame
.

Until fourteen I hadn’t thought I was an Auphe. I knew I had part of them in me, but that didn’t make me one of them. It made me only something new. I had no problem with knowing that I was as far from being human as I was from being an Auphe. Niko had told me I was a lion. Lions weren’t human, lions were hunters, but there was nothing wrong with being a lion. Nature made us how we were meant to be.

If that meant taking a bite out of a kid’s ear in a competitive game of dodgeball, so what? If the gym teacher told me to play to win, then I played to win and screw the rules. Lions don’t have rules. That was who and what I was.

And I’d
liked
it.

But what is “like” compared to “love”? And I loved my brother. He’d protected me my entire life until the monsters snatched me. I couldn’t bitch that it had been my turn to do the same to help him in any way I could. I stopped trying to eat people in the McDonald’s bathroom. I learned about shoes and forks and words, English ones at least, again. I was what my brother needed me to be if we were going to outrun the Auphe who hadn’t let my escape go lightly. No regrets.

I was lion no more.

The tall grass I’d lived in hadn’t been my home any longer.

Besides, in the end it had made no difference. Eventually I’d learned to enjoy my life again, to take pride in who I truly was inside. It took years, but I’d rediscovered a self-esteem sketched in blood and violence, had
remembered how to laugh my ass off while scaring the shit out of customers, clients, and targets. I tore off my human suit in strips and handfuls and went back into the grass. I remembered how to be a lion.

This Cal, though, still thought he was a layer of human holding down the other half, a monster made of mayhem and murder. He believed he was a bad guy,
the
bad guy, the monster Sophia had always labeled me and, worse, he was kind of a little emo bitch, too.

I’d brainwashed myself a little too well.

Sitting in front of this baby Cal I was a lion again.

And lions are not little emo bitches. Mind made up, I had no problem teaching my younger self that, whether I should or not. If I changed the years to come or I didn’t.

A lion had to have some fun.

“I only asked for a beer,” I pointed out with a mocking innocence that did nothing to cover up the potential for violence painted in black and red violent strokes that rode along my voice.

“Hell, card me if you want. No need to pull out the . . .” Crap, what had I stored under the bar when I was eighteen? I concentrated. Hmmm. Oh, yeah. Baseball bat, yep. The one Cal whipped out and didn’t call his shot, but swung for the wall all the same. I leaned back rapidly enough to be missed having my skull crushed by an inch, then wrapped my hands above his grip around the scarred wood and then tore it from his hold. Letting it fall to the floor, I sucked at a drop of blood on my thumb. “You’re a rude son of a bitch. I told you I’m not who you think I am.”

“If you’re not what I think you are,” he snarled, “then you wouldn’t know what the fuck that is.”

“Yeah, we’re wrong there. We were wrong a lot these days.” I didn’t expect to convince him. I was biding my time, basically, waiting for the one that I could convince. Not that I was biding without the expectation that Cal would settle for one attempt at homicide. I could check off the bat. What else did I keep under . . . ? Christ, a thirty-eight.

“A thirty-eight?” I grimaced at that particular
memory. His eyes widened at the mention of it, quickly enough most would’ve missed it before they narrowed again. He didn’t know how I was aware of the gun and he wasn’t going to ask.

“The baseball bat I can semirespect”—especially when it was wrapped with barbed wire, which was how I’d received the drop of blood while grabbing it—“but a thirty-eight?” I said with a large dose of disgust. “What the hell had I—damn it—what the hell are you thinking with a thirty-eight? You can’t even kill a cockroach with that. You’ve got better shit at home by miles and you’re letting your life here depend on a gun too lame and small for Bodyguard Barbie to carry? I’m embarrassed for you, Cal.”

With the words and knowledge I shouldn’t have hanging in the air, and the name I shouldn’t have known, he twitched and his hands froze under the scarred wood of the counter. He was pale in the indistinct light—but we were pale in any light, and he stared. His black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, the same color and style as mine if a few inches shorter. He wore a black T-shirt and a bar apron. I wore a black T-shirt as well. I unzipped the jacket as the time for hiding weapons was over, but my shirt wasn’t a plain black like his. It said, (more or less), in steel gray letters
COME WITH ME IF YOU WAN
T TO LIVE
.

Clichéd? Sure. But I respected the classics and I couldn’t resist the sarcasm. I couldn’t resist sarcasm at any time when it came down to it. I ate it sprinkled like parmesan on my spaghetti and substituted it for Tabasco sauce on my tacos. Plus it had been free.

Cal’s face, now that I could see it clearly instead of as a grubby reflection, was mine, if a little fuller—not close to baby fat, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t wait to lie and tell him so. He did lack my scars—too many to list in my brain just now. There were a few that made a difference, that made
me
different from this younger version of me. The ones not hidden by my clothes. The ones he could see and doubt even more when the truth came out. There was the one that stretched from my temple to an inch or so above my right eyebrow and the ones that circled
both my wrists several times that looked as if playing with razor wire was my favorite hobby. Although the scar around my left wrist was concealed by braided metal. I adjusted the thick band of twisted black and red that started around my wrist and wrapped its way like a tangle of poisonous vines to just below my elbow.

“Thirty-eight or not, I don’t need a gun to kill you, asshole,” he said flatly. “I could kill you with the ink pen by the cash register, a dirty glass, or a used napkin folded in the shape of a motherfucking swan. And don’t think I wouldn’t have enough time to do some origami, shove it down your goddamn throat and watch you choke on it before you could move.”

Heh, good one.

Of course, good one or not, he was still a liar as we’d been since we’d learned to string together more than three words as a baby. He had the thirty-eight, no origami, halfway up, the muzzle over the counter and the grip still below. But with the muzzle pointed at me, I didn’t give a damn where the grip was. He was a stubborn asshole, I thought as I slid to the side as if the air were oiled, seized my barstool, pivoted to slam it into his hand holding the gun. As the gun skitted across the bar and flew several feet across the room, I considered such success should be rewarded. Slamming was working well for me and I repeated the action, this time with Cal himself and not simply a gun.

I threw myself on top of the bar—a lion perched on a rock ledge—rested on my stomach, folded my arms, and peered both over them and the edge of the counter. Cal was on his ass, tangled in the remnants of the stool, and glaring up at me with an unbelievably young, eighteen-year-old smooth-skinned face as icy and empty as any you’d see on death row. He wasn’t as emo as I remembered . . . or maybe I’d been the only one to know it then, keeping it inside. He was afraid, though—of what he thought I was. Terrified as I would’ve been back then in his practically preteen combat boots, but he didn’t let me see it.

Real lions or those that had forgotten they ever were, it didn’t matter: We always made fear our bitch.

“I warned you about the thirty-eight.” I grinned then advised, “You should’ve gone with the origami.”

“Give me the fucking napkin and I will fucking happily prove your ass right,” he snapped, throwing off pieces of the stool. He might have a bruise or two, but I’d pulled that punch as much as I could. I didn’t want to wake up in the future missing an eye or an ear.

“Damn, I had fucking attitude out the ass even in diapers, didn’t I?” It was a compliment whether he recognized it or not. I freed one hand, plucked up a crumpled napkin and tossed it down to him. He hurled back a metal leg with all the force he had. I pulled my head back, waited, then risked another look. This time I kept my arms unfolded and tapped the fingers of both hands idly close to the edge. “You’re one cranky dick, considering you started this. And I’d rather have a dinosaur than a swan with the napkin, but, whatever, it’s your weapon of choice.”

I didn’t give him a chance to respond—it would’ve been annoying anyway—instead looking around. “Where’s Meredith? She’s chronically late, but damn it gets old.” The bar’s only waitress . . . when she felt like showing up. “Is she here or out getting her third boob job?” I asked, not bothering to fake a laugh. She ended up dead and mutilated by the Auphe thanks to me . . . or us. Laughs, fake as they would be, weren’t wanted regarding this. But Cal didn’t know about Merry’s end yet. “Doesn’t it piss you the hell off that you never get a single tip the nights she works? I’ve seen guys stare at a chick’s tits, but I’ve never . . .”