Rob Thurman - Moonshine

"Damn it, would you change your antifreeze and have an emotion already?" came an irritated snipe from behind. A rumpled, snarling Goodfellow stood there. One hand held a sword and one had a death grip on his aching head. "It was Tumulus, wasn't it, Caliban? He tried to take Niko to Tumulus."

Tumulus, we'd learned, was Auphe hell, a dimension of bare rock and endless desolation. Their home away from home. I'd spent two years there when the Auphe had taken me at the age of fourteen. I didn't remember any of it, at least not consciously, but it was clear that some part of me was aware enough to recognize a gate to the Abyss when I saw it. I'd survived that place, but only because the Auphe had wanted me to. I didn't think they'd be so inclined with Niko.

It was a conversation for another time; I was nowhere near ready for it now. Looking away from Goodfellow, I focused in on the body of the Auphe. Colorless hair mixed with coarse soil and dark blood. The pale skin was now tinged with a creeping gray that spread like fungus. "I wonder what CSI will think about him," I muttered and closed my eyes tightly.

Not a whole lot, as it turned out. We stuffed him in the trunk of the police car and then we blew it up. Auphe and car… sky-high. Robin had suggested we put him in the RV with us and dispose of him later. Niko flatly refused, and he did it so that I didn't have to. Be in close proximity to an Auphe, even a dead one, for more than a few minutes? I couldn't have done it. I would've either thrown him out onto the road or jumped out myself.

Luckily, Flay had casually tossed off the inferno suggestion. Working for the Kin had provided him with the flexibility of mind and soul to assess a problem and immediately decide to blow it to kingdom come. Despite myself, I was beginning to have a reluctant—very reluctant—appreciation for the wolf. And when he jury-rigged a fuse for the gas tank out of one of the RV's ugly plaid curtains and detonated the car, all in the space of two minutes, I had to give credit where credit was due.

After that, we hauled ass. The poor damn dead cop was beyond help and we left him where he'd fallen. Flay had suggested we put his body in the car, but the rest of us couldn't go along with that. Bad enough he was dead; we could at least leave his family something to grieve over. He would've called in our license plate number, but there was nothing we could do about that. The first rest stop we came to we would swap our plates out with another vehicle. Goodfellow said that the Auphe would burn almost entirely. Their bones were softer and more flexible than a human's; there wouldn't be much left for the crime lab to work with. And what was found would be considered a hopelessly contaminated sample. A hoax, a fluke… a mirage. It would be explained away. It'd been done before, and it would be done again. As long as humans didn't want to see, they wouldn't. Hell, I envied them. I wished I were that blind.

"Is it as Robin said? Did it try to take Niko to that place?" a voice asked softly.

I was curled up in the back with my head against the curtain-shrouded window and my knees pulled up against my chest. I had flexible bones too. Was it youth or something else? Didn't know, didn't care. As Promise sat down in the seat opposite mine, voices floated back from the front. There were soft, undecipherable murmurs that made the space seem much larger. Niko, Goodfellow, Flay… they could've been miles away. If I concentrated, I could've brought them closer, but I was content enough in my self-imposed exile. Rather—I gave Promise a stony glance through strands of unbrushed hair—I had been.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Caliban." My name was said with patience and empathy, but also with determination. She was worried about me, but she was also worried about Niko, and if she had to push me, then she would.

"I said, I don't want to talk about it!" This time I snapped and bit.

When it came to pushing, Promise was among the very best. From gentle persuasion to an icy will, she had her ways of bringing you around. But her ways didn't compare to the ways of what was burning on the road far behind us. She could push all she wanted, but I'd been pushed all my life. I'd been watched from my first breath, and hounded to what should have been my last.

In other words, if I didn't want to talk, no one on this side of that gray doorway could make me. Recapturing a balance that was getting more precarious by the hour, I leaned my head back against the wall. "Go away, Promise."

Now I was the one pushing, and with a lot less finesse than Promise would have used. I didn't have to see the flash of temper that initiated; I could feel it on my skin, as intense as that noontime Florida sun. "I know you're afraid, perhaps even terrified." The typical Promise serenity was sounding taxed to the limit, and I had a feeling that if I bothered to look at her, I would see teeth revealed with those words, the kind of teeth you didn't want to see from a vampire. "But closing your eyes to the situation like a child isn't going to change things."

She was half-right. Behaving like a scared kid wasn't going to make this shit go away. The only problem was, nothing was going to do that. Not a goddamn thing. The sole reason we'd been able to defeat the Auphe previously was that they'd all been gathered in one location. I sincerely doubted that was going to happen again. We were screwed. Front, back, and all ways in between. We could talk until we were blue in the face, but that fun fact wasn't going to change. So why talk at all?

Instead, I did what she told me not to do. I closed my eyes. Literally, metaphorically, figuratively… choose your poison because I meant them all. Velvet darkness loomed behind my eyelids, but it didn't stop me from feeling the very quality of the air itself change as Promise decided I didn't deserve her patience anymore. "Not even for your brother would you try to face what is before you?" Cool and merciless. "Not even for the one who has thrown his life away for you?"

Strong words… I'd thought them to myself long before Promise had ever entered the picture. They didn't sound any different aloud than they had the thousands of times I'd heard them in my head.

"Promise, don't."

Different words, but in a way they were the same. Exactly the goddamn same. I opened my eyes to see Niko's forbiddingly impassive face tilted down toward the only person in his life he had loved aside from me. There he was, my big brother, doing what he invariably did… throwing his life away. Same as always.

Thanks to me.

"No," I said quickly, straightening. "No, she's right. I should tell you what I can, even if it's only guesses… impressions." And with that admission they came, whether I was ready for them or not. Triggered by the doorway to Tumulus, they'd been waiting in the wings poised for the faintest hint of an invitation. Stupid me, I gave it to them.

I swallowed convulsively as I tasted air not of this world. It was cold and acidic, and it tasted of slow, lingering suffering. Not death. Death was easy. What I tasted made you long for the pillow over the face, the cleansing shot of potassium chloride to stop your heart. My fingers dug into the cushion beneath me, but I felt the grit of an alien soil that was more cutting than ground glass. I heard hundreds of voices whispering words I couldn't understand. Consonants that cut the throat, vowels that made your ears want to bleed. It was when I began to repeat the words over and over, strangling on their unnatural shape, that the hard slap rocked my head back.

The world came back. The good world—bright and warm. Plaid curtains, the hum of an engine, the smell of musky wolf. Good. Even the blood on my lip was welcome. In comparison with what I had tasted, it was wine… chocolate. Wholesome and so normal , salty but clean. I touched a tongue to it and reveled in the tang of it.