Downfall (4 page)

Easy.

I reached toward the mirror and ripped down the towel as I fumbled for the first aid kit, one of several stashed around, under the sink, spotting the box of syringes while I did so. That was a different situation. I might dread the mirror, but I was pinning a lot of hopes on those syringes and the new bottles in the refrigerator that went with them.

But time for that later.

With gauze and peroxide I wiped the dried and fresh blood from the slice that ran from the far end of my right
eyebrow in an almost directly horizontal line to my hairline, keeping my eyes on it and only it. It was a red, seeping mess, but once I had it cleaned, it turned out not to be that deep and only a few inches long. It might not even scar. Wouldn’t that be a shock, considering the scarred mess my hands, chest, and ribs were? I applied several butterfly bandages and it looked good. A little blood would ooze past the antibiotic cream a half Auphe with a hyped-up immune system like me didn’t actually need, but otherwise it could’ve been worse.

The worse, of a different sort, was what I was preparing for now.

I dropped my eyes to study the sink as I pulled the ponytail holder out of my hair. It was a nice sink—no cracks in the glazing, the first one we’d had in the city where the water came out clear instead of rusty orange. I’d much rather look at it than the mirror. “Coward,” I exhaled before stiffening my shoulders and raising my gaze. My hair, now free of the holder, fell thick and black as my mother’s own had been. Dark and depthless as it always was . . . except for one solitary gleam. I felt my stomach burn as I raised slow fingers to tease out that glitter I’d seen in the broken piece of hell’s own reflection at the bar.

One silver-white hair.

It was tucked down in the lower layer and only chance, the flickering light of the bar’s bathroom, a flying sliver of mirror, and my own suspicious pessimism had let me see it. It could be natural. I’d already thought that. Black hair often goes prematurely gray or white. Sophia’s hadn’t. I was twenty-five now. She’d been thirty-eight when the Auphe burned her alive in our decrepit trailer, but she’d died with hair as black as her burned corpse. She could’ve been lucky, if dying a pretty much well-deserved death with your natural hair color could
be called lucky. Her mother or father could’ve gone gray younger. I wouldn’t know. I’d never met them, but . . . I had to have hope. Faith was a lying whore who’d kicked me to the curb me long ago, but Promise and Goodfellow had proved charity existed. Why not a little hope to prove the trio wasn’t a mirage?

The hair was between my thumb and forefinger—only the one. I didn’t see any more of them. One premature silver-white strand, it was normal. So fucking
normal
that I should be pissed at getting that worked up. Niko would snort at my idiocy. Goodfellow would buy me the cheapest box of hair dye he could find at the drugstore. They would . . . I dragged my fingers down the bright thread and felt the snag of serrated hooks too small to be seen by the naked eye. It stung, a hundred tiny bites.

Hope had given me my answer. Hope was a bitch, same as her sisters, because the Auphe had white hair. They had silver-white hair that burned and bloodied your skin when you snagged a hand in the fall of it as you jerked back their head to cut their throat. It bit and had a texture slick at first touch and then jagged, altogether strange compared to human hair.

I yanked at it, pulling it free from my scalp. It didn’t come easy like human hair either. It came stubbornly with a root stained with a clot of blood and a pain that didn’t only annoy; it pissed me the hell off. It showed in my eyes. Not from their narrowing in anger, but that the gray of them glittered with small flashes of ember red. They would, wouldn’t they? The Auphe had white hair and the Auphe had eyes as red as the Nile had once run in the First Plague of Egypt.

The beginning of the end. There was no stopping it now.

My life, as I knew it, was over.

As one healer had told me: Auphe genes always win.

He didn’t say it to be cruel, although Rafferty’s bedside manner was fairly crappy; he said it for two reasons. First, it slipped out, I thought, he was that surprised I looked completely human except for paler skin than normal. Second, it was true. The Auphe had been the apex predator of the entire world for millions of years. They didn’t have a recessive gene in them. I might have started out half human, but that hadn’t lasted too long. That had shown in ways that weren’t visible.

When I was young, I hadn’t thought like other kids did. I didn’t understand them or people in general. Rules, expectations, right and wrong. None of that came naturally. Practicality, expediency—that was what I had been born knowing. For Niko’s sake I had memorized the school’s rules, society’s rules, and for him I followed them when it was convenient.

It wasn’t always.

But what did they say? Charged but never convicted? That was good enough for me.

Then I became older. Then I was snatched away for two years to Tumulus Hell, and then I came back . . . then, then, then. I couldn’t remember those two years, but I’d changed. Age and subconscious trauma, a tantalizing good time for all. That’s when the occasional bouts of temper started. As a kid, it had never been personal. If you were in my way and I had to punt your balls to the sky to move you, I didn’t enjoy it . . . much. It just had to be done. After Tumulus and two years of age and raging hormones, I began to appreciate the little things like that. If I had to take down a monster for the good of the neighborhood . . . think of the children, right? Why not have fun while you were doing the “right” thing?

On and on marched the Auphe genes overriding my human ones, and there was no stopping it. After the increase in violence then came the loss of control now and
again . . . and perhaps one or two complete losses of sanity. No big deal, you understand, because I could push those away, make myself forget them.

It was a different game now. The Auphe had always played to fucking win, and their DNA did the same. The difference being as a six-year-old taking Dodgeball to a
Lord of the Flies
level because rules were inexplicable and winning was all that mattered was just a freaking strange-ass kid. Now I was a man, one who ran with the supernatural, the
paien
, and now everyone would see it. Not only smell it, sense it, observe it in the way I moved. No, the time had come when they would
see
it. With less than a glimpse, with a fraction of a glance, they would see.

If they could see it, I would be it.

Remember that pop quiz I’d warned about at the bar?

“It’s what’s on the inside that counts?”

Wrong.

There was another half Auphe in the world besides me. Grimm. He’d asked me once what would I do when I finally looked as Auphe on the outside as he knew me to be on the inside. He would find that saying hilarious. I mean, he wasn’t wrong. Is it fucking hilarious or what? People actually
say
that. It’s what’s on the inside. . . . What would they say if they knew what actually was on my inside, when the hereditary remains of the first murderer to walk the earth finally destroyed the dwindling human genes of its descendant and showed its true face?

What would they say when someday the red sparks grew like a lethal wildfire in my eyes until there was no gray left at all—only blood and flame?

What would they say when the Auphe inside and outside finally matched? Because that was what was happening. I couldn’t change the way I looked and not change the way I
was
. When the outer monster appeared,
it would magnify, explode, and raise all fucking hell with the inner me. There was no escaping that. I wouldn’t be half Auphe any longer. There’d be no more uneasy partnership with what I wished I was, what I actually was, and what I would soon be. I’d be pure Auphe, and the entire
paien
world including my family and friends knew that would make me a mobile slaughterhouse. Murder walking.

Cal would die and Caliban would be free.

Prisms and splinters of silver and glass rained around my feet. This was about the fifth mirror I’d shattered in my life. What did that add up to? Thirty-five years of bad luck. I laughed, but it wasn’t as dark and bitter a laugh as I’d expected. Then again, why cry over milk that had been spilled before I was born, a biblical flood of it from my very moment of conception? I grinned without humor or maybe only the kind of humor a human couldn’t see or understand. Time was running out, no matter what the mirrors wanted to charge me.

Thirty-five years of bad luck. Yeah, right. I laughed again. I should live so long.

And everyone else?

Everyone else should pray that I didn’t.

Goodfellow

Where was I before I was rudely yet inevitably interrupted. Ah . . . yes.

There’s a sucker born every minute.

Engrave that on every brain cell you have, if you don’t already know it. And if you do not know it, then you haven’t got a single brain cell to inscribe. You are brain-dead. Do everyone a favor and find an empty grave to settle into, as that is all you’re good for.

In the utmost seriousness, you will not hear any words more wise or more important in your life. Grip them tightly and do not forget. They may save your life someday.

There’s a sucker born every minute . . . and you might be one.

I hadn’t come up with the saying. That it hadn’t been me, Robin Goodfellow, shames me still, but someone
beat me to it. I’d no doubt been buying a pair of leather pants at the time. Ah, those were the days. I had said something similar long before that saying made the rounds. Of course I had.

“Pithekous richnei perittomata san anthropoid richnoun chemata.”

It was Latin, my second favorite language, for “People throw money like monkeys throw feces.” It loses a bit in translation, but it was quite popular, oh, a few thousand years ago. Some of my fellow pucks used it to this day. Most everyone else had forgotten it. How fleeting fame. As quick to come and go as virginity. What can one do . . . but enjoy it while it lasts?

Whatever the reason—I was almost positive it had been leather pants—a human, in fact, had said that, had beat me to it. If there were one thing to admire about humans, aside from their obsession throughout time with all things sexual, it would be their innate grasp of the obvious. They really put it out there, didn’t they? The obvious. The sex I was scheduled to think about in seven more minutes left me time now to concentrate on that: the
obvious
.

What was uncelebrated instinct to my kind, mortals had been forced to learn and then had embellished and gilded until it was a monument so massive it pierced the heavens themselves. It wasn’t enough to rip off those hobbled by morality; they had to slap a thick coat of sugary icing on it to hide what they’d done. Maybe some sprinkles while you were at it. You had to create an establishment out of it. Stick a franchise on every corner.

The art of the con, when had it become such an acceptable and, worse yet,
legal
career choice? All of that wrapped around one single concept: the blind, the naïve, the Pollyannas . . . the suckers.

Humans, they could take the fun out of anything—even being a used car salesman.

The time I was taking off from running the car lot might inspire me. It could be time for a new career or new for this millennium. Lawyer perhaps. Shakespeare hadn’t been wrong there. As a matter of fact, I think that I
was
Shakespeare’s lawyer when he wrote “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” He wasn’t wrong. When I’d finished billing him he didn’t have a pot to piss in. He didn’t even have a coin with which to buy something to drink to create piss.

Those were the days.

I took another swallow of my wine and pulled at my tie with my free hand. I drank beer on the rare occasion—when working a deal with the salt of the earth (of course a forty-five percent interest rate is normal on a car loan. Would I lie to you?) I tried not to choke on my wine on memories of my last sale, at least for a while. Humans. No challenge at all.

I also drank beer with friends, family really, who couldn’t afford what I normally imbibed in great quantities and liked to attempt to bring me down to their level via beer swilling, pizza gorging, and intolerably idiotic television in which even the eye candy couldn’t save your sanity.

That the attempts actually worked on occasion didn’t surprise me. These particular friends had spent lifetimes upon lifetimes returning to wear away at my spectacular taste. I was forced to give credit where credit was due as much as I hated that anyone could manipulate a trickster, much less a supreme trickster such as me. Then again, if I, fully aware, let them do it, was it manipulation at all?

As, despite myself, let them I did.

For a trickster, that was an unfathomable sacrifice. Yet they were my truest and oldest of friends. When you’d lived long enough to forget thousands of years as if they
were only a moment and could recall a world long before humans evolved, friends such as those mattered. When they reincarnated time and time again throughout eternity simply to keep me company—or that’s how I chose to think of it as everything
is
about me—they more than mattered. Of course my company was incomparable. Tagging after me through the endless years was absolutely understandable.

I took another drink, blind to the exquisite color of the grape. Loyalty, sadly, wasn’t everything.

Unfortunately they, unlike me, were the same as all humanity: suckers.

Not in all ways, not even in many ways, but in one very specific way and they never learned. They never learned.
Skata.

What I was to do about that, I didn’t know. Yet.

But I would know, as I was brilliant that way. I took another swallow and raised an eyebrow in appreciation. Oh, excellent. A distraction. Even in a “fulfilling monogamous relationship” or whatever the freaks called it, I was still allowed to look, and look I did.

A dryad swept past me in a scent cloud of apple blossoms and honeysuckle. My seven minutes until pornographic thoughts were to be given their due weren’t up yet, but I could push up the timeline and appreciate her lithe lines and exquisite curves. She gave me a coy look that didn’t require the bucket of pheromones splashed liberally in the air around her. I gave her my perfected “I would lift you and five of your sisters to sexual nirvana but, despair to the world, my mighty cock is shackled with the chains of fidelity” apologetic expression. Other species and cultures are often astounded by how much a puck can emote in one lowering of a brow combined with one regretful but minute tightening of our lips. Other species and cultures are so dim and dull
that I don’t know how they exist, not dying of boredom with their childlike and clumsy physical manifestations of emotion. They may as well physically vomit their feelings upon everyone around them. But, as the superior race and creature on this earth, I had to ignore that argument or I’d be along . . . except for other pucks. I shuddered at the notion.

Infinitely worse.

The dryad had shaken her fall of jade green hair and sighed in disappointment at the loss of a sexual experience that would’ve ruined her for all other trees. I couldn’t blame her for her depression clear to be seen as she moved to the far side of the bar laughing with a few nymph friends and cuddling up with an enormously large reddish brown Wolf—a ruse to hide her pain, I knew. I felt mildly guilty and sent a drink her way as an apology for my “condition.”

I tucked away the scarlet and silk sliver of arousal as well as the emerald and silver necklace I’d slipped from her neck without her having a clue—you couldn’t be the trickster you should be if you didn’t keep a larcenous and thieving hand in. I returned my focus to the very expensive wine that they kept behind the bar especially for me. Today had absolutely not been a beer day. Forget that it was what I was expected to drink by those who knew my current fake identity:

Rob Fellows, car salesman extraordinaire, shaking hands, slapping backs, tossing down a brewski with the guys. It was part of the job description. However, gods forbid if Bacchus, who’d finally given up AA as a long-lost cause, found out. To drink a wine before its time was a killing offense in his pickled brain. The shock of a Bud Lite might drain the immortality right out of him. If it didn’t, he would boot my unbelievable ass into the next century.

And we didn’t want to disappoint the ladies and fine gentleman, now, did we? My ass was a work of art. Damaging it would be like drawing on Michelangelo’s
David
with brightly colored markers. A crime against man and any number of pantheons of gods.

If one worshipped a god . . . and that god didn’t happen to be me.

Sometimes, when I let myself forget why I’d quit it, which wasn’t often, the Fall of Troy saw to that, I missed the god con: the temples, the marble statues of me in all my unclothed glory, the priestesses and priests none of whom were virgins in my service—that should go without saying. I missed the offerings of gold and jewels, honey cakes and wine. Then there was the sound; I’ve never been able to explain it. The indrawn breath of those who knelt, seeing their god for the first time. It was a softly reverent and a song of adoration for me and me alone. I was their world.

The orgies were nice too.

Very,
very
nice indeed.
Primo. Phantastike. Ausgezeichnet
.
Spectaculaire
. I took another sip of wine as the bar faded around me and ancient Rome surrounded me with its scents and sounds, the taste of grapes, the songs of my worshippers, and the feel of their warm skin against mine, covering every inch. Soft fingers in my hair, clever fingers cupping my . . .

The feather that dropped in my wine just in time for me to almost drink and choke on it jolted me back to the Ninth Circle—a bar that had not one speck of marble, gold, or honey cakes in it anywhere.
“Kolo,”
I hissed, leaning back from the assault to fish the red-soaked white-and-gold feather out of my glass. “What is wrong with you? Do you attempt to poison all your customers this way?” It wasn’t completely out of the question. “Or am I special?”

Naturally I was special, but that had nothing to do with my currently defiled wine. Still, I had been defiled by similar feathers frequently over the last year, defiled in the most positively carnal sense, and I went on to drink the wine with only a shrug.

“That was your orgy face,” my attacker said with grim disapproval. “We agreed. You can look all you wish, you can reminisce about the good old days when there was no STD you didn’t seek out, but you don’t make the orgy face while you do it. Also, is that blood on your collar and a rocket launcher leaning against your stool?”

Which was wholly unfair as I, a puck, could not catch any sexual diseases. Oh, perhaps there had been the one case of the pixie version of chlamydia during which my penis did radiate pink, yellow, and green for a month, but that had been over a thousand years ago at least. I’d been pixie-free since. Considering the size of my cock, causing it to be mistaken for the Aurora Borealis for those thirty days, it was for the best that the glow of rainbow colors passed quickly. Thousands of years didn’t change the fact that tourists were annoying as hell, or, as Cal would say, a bitch and a half.

Not to mention that I couldn’t go near the ocean without confused whales, dolphins, and other sea life beaching themselves. It had not been a good month.

I hissed in annoyance and gestured imperiously at one of the peris beyond the bar for a glass of water and a cloth to dab at the blood. This was my fifty-sixth favorite shirt. How unbelievably inconsiderate could one be to bleed on Dolce and Gabbana? “Yes, it is a rocket launcher. You might want to dispose of it before Cal returns to work and humps it with the love that dare not speak its name.” I flashed a smug grin at the peri leaning across the bar from me. “And you only know that’s my orgy face as you were spending your time outside the
temples and villas marking down the naughty and nice for a god who didn’t even create me.”

I pushed my glass toward him for a refill. “In this day and age I believe they’d call that stalking. Romantic really. You with your flaming sword. Me with the only sword I’ll ever need.” I gave my best salacious smirk. “We could’ve had so much amazing hate sex if you’d removed that pillar of salt out of your ass sooner.”

Dark eyebrows lowered in annoyed menace, but gray-blue eyes were bright with humor and the scar on his jaw tightened, which was a good indicator he was fighting back a smile. “I was only showing common sense, you randy goat. As they say, you lie down with dogs, you get up with pixie herpes. And where did you get the rocket launcher?”

“It was not herpes,” I snapped, keeping my voice low. No one gossiped like
paien
. “And you weren’t hanging about then with your schoolgirl crush and sermons on how to remove the greed, lust, avarice, sloth, gluttony, fornication—basically all the fun from my life.”

Ishiah, retired angel and full-time pain in my ass, but mostly in the very best of ways, studied me and did smile this time. “I always had an eye out for you, Robin, no matter where you were.”

Monogamy, it was a hard road to walk, particularly considering the rest of the puck race thought me perverse and disgusting for it, but at times like this, I couldn’t regret it. Over a year now and I wouldn’t change it.

“Always?” This time my grin was wider and far more wicked. “Was I often nude when you spied on me? How did that make your angel naughty parts feel? More holy? Less holy? Not holy at all?”

“You know how you made them feel last night.” He deposited the freshly filled wineglass in front of me. “Don’t fish for compliments.”

“Don’t fish . . .” I shook my head and dropped my chin in my hand. “Three thousand years since you’ve shown up in my life and it’s like you don’t know me at all.”

“Yet I know when you’re brooding. Which is worrying. I sent Cal home early, so I was hoping for a brood-free rest of the night.” He pulled back pale blond hair into a short tail and tied it off as around us the bar hummed with the gruff tones of werewolves, the sibilant tongue of lamias and succubae, the disheartened bubbling of
vodyanoi
who still smelled of the East River. It was a typical night.

“I wasn’t brooding. I was thinking of orgies. You yourself said so,” I contradicted, and took a large swallow of wine that showed no respect for the vintage at all.

“In between moping. Why are you moping?” he demanded with a scowl no one, not Hades the ice-hearted god of the underworld himself, could call sympathetic. Ishiah was correct, though. He did know me, and he knew that thrown a line of sympathy, I’d use it to verbally tie him in daisy chains of denial and skip the conversation altogether. He might be an ex-angel, but I was much older than him and had walked the earth a million years before his God had stumbled across the place. My tongue was a deadly weapon and not always in an enjoyable manner.