Rob Thurman - Doubletake

“All right,” he agreed, bumping my shoulder with his. “But the clock is ticking.” That small push meant that he needed to know what Grimm was going to do to my head as much as I did. Because he was my brother, but also because he needed to know how I’d handle the next battle with Grimm. It didn’t matter how ready your body was for the fight. It was a given: If your head was up your ass and your brain didn’t know up from down or what that smell was, you were dead.

We came to the end of the hall; the weak light from the room beyond was all that had helped us pick our way through jagged pieces of metal and garbage littering the floor. Stepping out into it, I saw it wasn’t a room; it was almost the twin of the echoing space we’d left behind. Open all the way up to the roof, it contained rusted beams and a floor where every step would have to be cautious or you’d step on a shard of metal, flip it up, and slice your leg open or off completely.

Robin’s list of his heroic traits finally came to a pause; there was never an end. “We’re here. The foundry,” he said quietly. “I told you Hephaestus was a fraud and could hardly build anything when you compare his work to Janus. Tinkertoys would practically puzzle him.”

“There’s a ‘but’ coming, isn’t there?” I asked. “I hear a ‘but.’ Why is there always a ‘but’?”

“I hear a ‘yet’ or a ‘however,’” Niko corrected, “but I’m more gifted in the vocabulary skills than you. Goodfellow?”

“That doesn’t mean he couldn’t make something that could kill you,” the puck answered grimly. “A sword is simple compared to the inner workings of a gun, but it can be equally as deadly. Don’t underestimate whatever he might throw at us. As they say, it’s not what’s on the outside that counts; it’s how many arms and legs something’s inside tells its outside to remove from our bodies.”

“I don’t remember the saying going like that and I think I would’ve remembered that version. Nik?” I said.

“It might not be accurate, but I’d argue it has merit.” He took several impossibly silent steps to the side. There wasn’t a single sliver of metal that rang out. Kalakos, as impossibly silent, followed his lead but in the opposite direction.

Goodfellow had one more piece of advice for us. “Besides toys he might have an employee or several hanging about. I’d tell you that the eye is the best place to hit them, but if that’s not self-explanatory on sight then you need to go back to preschool.”

Then he raised his voice in a shout that rang all of the metal in the room. It was like standing in a Buddhist temple while every monk gathered around to smack you in the head with four-foot-long wind chimes. Despite that I heard Robin’s voice plain as day over it all. “Hephaestus! You humpbacked bastard! Wake up! You have a visitor—it’s Goodfellow and I’ve come to apologize!”

When he quit shouting, the metal slowly fell into silence and I heard him mutter quietly, “Although I shouldn’t have to. It was the best thing to happen to him. The woman was so empty-headed that if your ear was close enough to hers, she would literally suck thoughts out of your head to fill hers. Where most have minds, she had a miniature black hole inside her skull. What she could do with her tongue, which was absolutely unbelievable, wasn’t worth having to listen to her go on and on about butterflies and flowers and how she wanted to spend a month doing nothing but smelling the milk breath of puppies…”

Hephaestus woke up.

I was thankful. I’d already pissed off Robin once today. I didn’t want to do it again by pistol-whipping him into blissfully silent unconsciousness. Hephaestus made that unnecessary by shoving himself to the front of the line.

“ Puck .”

Hey, he’d picked up English from the long-dead workers that had toiled over and around him nearly a hundred years before the factory was abandoned. That was convenient. I wouldn’t have to listen to Goodfellow and him insult each other in the seven-thousand-plus past and present languages Robin claimed to know. I had picked up some good Greek curse words from him, though, for the times I was craving a gyro from the shortchanging jackass street vendor who set his food truck up on the sidewalk ten blocks down from our place.

“That’s me,” Robin said with a manic and reckless cheer that didn’t bode of good things to come. “I’ve come to apologize for soiling your wife. I was in the wrong. I’m deeply sorry. I now can admit to my illness and am seeking help through Sex Addicts Anonymous. I am here to make amends, offer you a stale doughnut from one of the meetings if you’d like, and, oh, coincidentally”—as if it were the most casual of thoughts to pop up—“I have a question for you about Janus. You must remember Janus. I’ll bet you sold it for more gold than you could carry. An incredible piece of work. Staggering in its brilliance. Unparalleled in its mixture of art and efficiency.” Giving credit and flattery where it wasn’t due—it was a trickster’s best weapon, according to Robin. “Now, how do we turn it off?”

“ Puck…”

The rumble faded into nothing. He wasn’t a morning person, was slow to wake. I related. And he was dead, deadish, whatever. The combination could make no time a good time to wake up. I was thinking we should’ve brought several gallons of caffeine when he spoke again. This time he almost brought a few of the beams far above us down. I dodged a rain of smaller pieces of falling metal while avoiding impaling a foot on those already on the floor around me.

“ Aphrodite. Where is Aphrodite? Virgin to my bed, petals of the rose, she who owns my loins and heart. Come home. Come home. Come home. You …Puck…Goodfellow, good—fellow. Good…But where is the good? Where? Nowherenowherenowhere. Wife stealer. Life stealer. Liar. Wretched thief in the night, tainter of all that is pure, death awaiting its day. This day. This day. This day. My day. Puckpuckpuckpuckpuck. ”

I didn’t think Aphrodite, named as the goddess of love and sexuality, had been any kind of virgin on her honeymoon. But I did think Robin had been right: Hephaestus was bat-shit crazy, and getting anything out of him on Janus wasn’t looking promising. His voice shook the entire building. It was the sound of an earthquake that brought down cities, islands, nations. The grate and thunder of the earth losing its patience and shifting to throw anything living off its skin or bury it deep beneath itself.

I shouted at Goodfellow, “Where is he?” From the ear-bleeding echo, he could be anywhere in here, but the puck didn’t hesitate. He headed straight for what squatted in the center. It was a vat about twelve feet tall and wide enough around to mimic a giant swimming pool. Robin said some paien knew other paien sometimes, some knew most of the time, and some always knew. Goodfellow always knew.

Following him, I saw him start up the ladder mounted to the side. I circled to the other side in hopes of finding another one and bingo, there one was. I holstered my gun, but held on to the xiphos as I climbed. The rungs were filthy under my hand and carried the strong smell of stone. It was the same smell as the rock in a deep cave. Rock under the sun and sky didn’t smell that way. They had the scent of life to them, although they weren’t alive. A cave had the same scent/taint of an underground tomb of someone buried alive and chained to a forge: despair, exile, and death.

At the top I hooked my arm around one curved handhold on the ladder and leaned over the edge to see. I didn’t have to lean far. What had once been eight feet high and who knew how many gallons of molten metal almost a century ago was now a cold, frozen pool of steel. Robin pointed at the mass with his sword.