Rob Thurman - Slashback

I didn’t look for Junior. I didn’t care. Kill me, don’t kill me-I did not care.

I pulled Cal up in my arms. He wasn’t Sophia’s, he wasn’t the Grendel’s, he wasn’t Junior’s. He was mine and I would keep him as long as I could.

Forever if I could. With my brain crumbling at the edges, fracturing through the middle, forever seemed. . right.

I pushed his hair from his eyes, leaving my blood on his face. They were closed, black lashes against paper white skin. There was a sluggishly bleeding slice straight across his chest a few inches below his nipple line. The top slash of a J.

“I like to sign my work.”

No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t right. His blood should be inside him, not out. I wiped a hand frantically over the blood, trying to push it back in the wound, back inside Cal. I only ended up smearing it everywhere over Cal’s stomach and thin chest, making it worse.

How could it be worse?

The thought staggered me.

Swallowing broken glass that had nothing to do with the bleach, I thought numbly. . wait. . no. . the dead don’t bleed. And they don’t breathe. Cal was doing both. I clutched him tighter, so damn small, and all there was in my world.

Junior. Where was Junior? Where was the dead man?

Someone was growling savagely. It might have been me.

There was another crumpled pile in the opposite corner of Cal. This bundle was much larger. I settled Cal against the far wall, carefully making sure the blood wasn’t as much as I’d thought. He wasn’t bleeding out. It was a slow flow, I could see now. For a moment it could wait. Cal wouldn’t mind, considering what I had planned.

I limped over and nudged clothes and muscle disguised as fat over onto his back. Junior’s eyes were half open and bloody foam framed his mouth. That would be from the vicious slashes that penetrated his clothes and several inches of flesh from the base of his neck to just above his groin. I caught the faint foul smell that had to be the spill of intestinal contents. The room had a colored tint to the air, red as the blood all around us, from the crimson moon shining through the tiny skylight made of scarlet glass.

The Grendel had listened.

It had come and gone, but it had listened. It had done what I couldn’t do.

I didn’t know what that meant, but it was worth it. Right now it was worth it.

But it hadn’t finished the job. Oh, given three minutes and Junior would be as dead as the victims in his basement, but the Grendel had left me a present.

Or it might be a reminder.

They were watching Cal. I needed to do that too and do it better.

I picked up the knife that lay across Junior’s slack palm. It had blood on it, Cal’s blood. Junior didn’t get any of that. It didn’t belong to him. I methodically wiped the blade on my pants. “I have a line, you know. It’s been moving around lately, but I have one,” I said cold and brittle as frost. “You, motherfucker, crossed it.”

I rammed the knife through flesh and bone and into his heart.

The faint uneven beat vibrated through the metal, the handle, and into my hand before finally stopping. He touched my little brother-I stopped his heart.

It was a fair trade.

Cal

Present Day

It wasn’t fair.

Robin and Ishiah made plans. I guessed that’s what they did. I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t care. I had my own plan. If I could lure Jack far enough away from Niko, then I could open a gate inside him. Nik wouldn’t die from the mass of moving crystal-feathered shrapnel that was the inner Jack and I’d try to gate away in time to avoid the same fate. If I made it, great. If I didn’t, shit happened. I’d go down fighting. It was the best end I had hope for in my life anyway.

Life wasn’t fair, childish to complain, but there you go.

I would save Nik-that was the bottom line. He hadn’t survived twelve years ago to die at the whim or hand of the same monster now.

Life wasn’t fair and who told you that it was?

That’s what they always said. Fine. This time I said, that’s who, and I didn’t care if that was childish or immature. I said it was going to be fair therefore it would be and God help you if you got in my way. But God wouldn’t help, would He? God didn’t interfere and that was a damn shame for you.

I knew because I did nothing but interfere, and I didn’t work in mysterious ways. I worked in bloody ones.

At least Jack had let Niko take his katana with him; that was something. That his phone was centered in Nik’s perfect anal-retentive manner on his dresser meant no tracking him by GPS, which was why I was ripping the list off the printer of the search I’d done on abandoned churches in the city. Ishiah said Jack would be in a church. I’d find that church and if I had to tear it down brick by brick to get to Nik, I would. I shoved the list in my pocket and went to my room to get a few things. Opening a gate in Jack was the only chance I had, but Nik would tell me to prepare for any eventuality. He had learned that lesson the hard way. I wouldn’t do him any justice to forget that now.

“Where are you going?”

Goodfellow sounded odd, his words moving slowly as though the air was water. “To the churches. To kill Jack. To bring Nik home.” It was a stupid question and he seemed to realize it.

“I think I meant more what will you do?” He chose his words more carefully now. “To accomplish those things. Jack can’t be killed.”

“An Auphe can kill anything. You know that.” He did. He’d seen it often enough before.

As I finished gathering my weapons, he said tightly, “If they don’t care about surviving, that’s true. But I know better than to have this talk with you and I don’t know that I would do any differently. This once I won’t play the hypocrite. Start at the top of your list. Ishiah and I will begin at the bottom. If we find them first, we’ll call you.”

The air was air again and I felt more human than I had in a long time. Nothing brings out the humanity in you like sheer terror. “He thinks it was his fault. I tried to help him. I think I did, some, but what if he thinks he deserves this? To be to Jack what I was to Junior? What if he doesn’t fight hard enough? Shit, Robin, what if he doesn’t wait for me?”

He pushed me hard enough to have the pain of my broken rib slicing through my panic but not hard enough to actually injure me. “Don’t be an idiot. Yes, he feels guilty, but do you think for a second your brother would willingly transfer that guilt to you?” He pushed me again, this time in motion toward the hall and then the front door.

Robin was right. Nik wouldn’t do that to me. He would do anything to be there when I showed up, still alive. . still fighting. I glanced at the door, then back at Goodfellow. “I won’t be needing that. Look for him. Find him. Call me.” I pulled the gate, a gate I thought about because Nik would want me to, around myself and left this world.

I reappeared at the location of the first church. I knew it, had passed it a hundred times. It was one of the locations I was familiar enough with to travel through a rip in the world and arrive at its step. I was wearing Niko’s long coat he’d left behind. It covered up enough weapons to take out the entire NRA. Nothing covered up that I’d appeared in broad daylight out of thin air surrounded by the violent purple and black oil slick of a wound that was reality torn around me. I was separated from the sidewalk by a chain-link fence, but it wasn’t much of one and people saw. I don’t know how many, but from the shouts and gasps it was more than one or two.

There’d be hell to pay for that later. . if there was a later. I didn’t care about the consequences. I did care about finding Nik as fast as I possibly could. If I had to reveal every hidden paien alive to an unknowing human world, so fucking be it.