Rob Thurman - Doubletake

“He’s in Vegas. Lucky bastard,” he grumbled. “The peri have something rather like…” He rearranged the cards again. If it had been anyone else, I’d have said he was buying time. But this was Robin, trickster extraordinaire. He didn’t need to make up a lie. He already knew every one there ever had been or would be. “They have something like the National Guard. Ishiah is retired, but he’s been reactivated for one mission. It shouldn’t take more than a few days. A week at the most.”

Why peri would need a National Guard was my next question, but the puck cut that off promptly with a suggestion. “I’ve been thinking. Cal, note that—you can think all the time . It’s true, but I digress. My first thought is this: Janus will be showing up soon, as it’s still storming and he can move about unseen. Which means we should move before he tracks the Vayash among us here. As if it would hurt any of you to use an effective war machine–deflecting deodorant?” he complained. “My second thought is that perhaps Hephaestus could assist us with the situation.”

As Kalakos came through the door, Niko closed it and asked verbally what I longed to ask physically, with my hands wrapped tightly around Goodfellow’s neck. “He’s alive? He traded whatever currency of the time for that monstrosity before years later passing it on to the Rom to guard, and you only thought now to bring up the fact that he’s still alive ?”

Robin snorted. “If it were that easy, don’t you think I would have? No, he’s not alive. He’s dead. Deadish. Yes, deadish would be more accurate, and he’s wildly insane, quite naturally. All Greek legends end up insane sooner or later. It must be something in the water.” He shrugged, as I put a water purifier for him on my mental Christmas list. “But he was insane long before he became biofunctionally challenged, which makes it that much more difficult.”

“Is he in Greece?” I asked. “Because that’s a long trip. But if we go with you, Janus will probably jump the plane and ride it all the way there.”

“Greece? No. Very few of us are there now. When the people stopped believing in us, we left. Too many painful memories of better days.” He checked his watch. “Conveniently enough, Hephaestus is in Connecticut. With traffic we could be there in two and a half hours.”

“He’s in Connecticut. Dead and in Connecticut? Less than two to three hours away?” Niko said dubiously. “I find that difficult to believe. Greece, very well. But if he’s dead, why isn’t he in Hades or the Elysian fields?”

My brother the Buddhist believed in life after death—of all different sorts. An afterlife for every belief that has been and will come. I didn’t give him grief over it. After what he’d lived through in this life, he was entitled to believe whatever he wanted. But I knew after death there was nothing but emptiness and nonexistence. I had no problem with that. It was heaven in my book.

Goodfellow answered Niko’s question by holding up two fingers. “Two words: industrial revolution.” He added, “And guns. He loved weapons, anything that could inflict death and despair. We all have our hobbies. He was late by a hundred years or so. As I said, wildly insane, easily distracted, and behind on the news, but by the time he caught up, weapons were that much more advanced. I’m sure he was quite the happy camper when he discovered the concept. They don’t have guns in Hades or the fields, so he went where the guns did.”

“I repeat, you didn’t bring this up sooner?” Niko’s voice lowered to the same threatening rumble of the thunder outside.

“Niko, he’s madder than a syphilitic-ridden Al Capone, not deader than dead, but deader than he should be, and he hates me. Ares’s steroid-induced rages, does he hate me. You don’t need to know why. If I thought he had an iota of sanity or cooperation in him, I’d have mentioned it, I don’t know, perhaps while Cal was dying, while you were beating your father like a Turkish rug, when we were again attacked by Janus, while Cal had been kidnapped and we were frantically searching for him as if he were a microchipped prizewinning Westminster Labradoodle. So many wasted opportunities when we were lying about while lacking in any pertinent activity, I realize, but it’s a chance in a thousand anyway. He despises me more than any creature I know, and that, considering my extraordinary reputation, is saying much.” He gave up on the cards and pushed them off the table.

“Was I put in my place?” Niko asked me ruefully, not entirely used to the feeling.

I was, however, and didn’t mind seeing someone else suffer. “You were puck-slapped but good. Okay, we’re taking two cars and I’m not wearing a sweater.”

Goodfellow was shocked and appalled. Everyone wore sweaters in Connecticut. He was ninety-nine percent positive that you couldn’t cross the state line without one.

“Two cars. No sweaters,” I stressed.

Then I leaned closer to Robin and did something I shouldn’t have, that made me feel like crap, but could be necessary. I murmured, “Hephaestus hates you, but what does he think of Hob?”

He feared him. He had to. Alive, dead, or halfway between, all feared Hob.

And no one except Niko, Robin, Promise, Georgina, and me knew Hob was dead. And not deadish, as Hephaestus was, but as dead as they came. Gone from this world for good. It was something to think about.

Until Goodfellow gave a low hiss back, inaudible to everyone but me. “What would he think of an Auphe? What would he think of you if you threw away your sanity, your ability to tell right from wrong, and lived only for every life you could extinguish, to ask him a question? All while knowing if you did, you couldn’t come back. No second chances like you’ve had before, not this time. You would never be Cal again. Never sane again. Never right again.” In that moment he wasn’t Robin. “The next time you speak of Hob is the last time we speak,” he added without emotion, but cold, hard promise.

I knew I shouldn’t have brought up the subject again. Unfortunately I knew too late.

The sly, snarky, patronizingly sarcastic, fast talking, horny, name-dropping Goodfellow was gone; this Robin I didn’t know. He wasn’t my friend, and as I had only the one besides my brother, I wasn’t going to risk losing him. I leaned back before the others noticed the exchange and gave the best and most honest apology I could. It was one my friend would recognize for what it was and hopefully come back.

“Okay. Shit.” I grimaced. “I’ll wear a goddamn sweater.”

It was ninety degrees in Bridgeport, Connecticut, unusually hot, the radio said—before I kicked it. It wasn’t the kind of weather you layered for, and I was wearing a bright green cashmere Lacoste cardigan over a pink polo shirt, pleated khaki pants, white socks, and loafers. I’d also been offered a holster for my Eagle and something called a Members Only jacket to cover that. I knew the names because Goodfellow had labeled each plastic bag in which they were immaculately folded, along with a catalogue page of some blond, blue-eyed, tanned, blindingly white-toothed man wearing the same outfit while standing by a boat. With a blond woman. A blond kid. A blond damn dog…wearing a matching damn sweater.

Douche bag.

It covered the catalogue dick and Robin both.

“What did you do to piss off Goodfellow this badly?” Niko asked, edging away from me as if I were color-contagious. He was dressed in the black-and-gray clothes the puck had smugly given him. Normal clothes. The kind that didn’t make you look like someone pulled the head off a Golfing Ken doll and stuck a catastrophically pissed-off serial killer’s head in its place, which was a look I was pulling off in spades. I let my black hair hang where it wanted. Still no ponytail for me, until Kalakos was gone despite what I’d talked to Niko about in the car.