Rob Thurman - Nightlife

He snorted. "Don't get stuck on yourself, Cal. I've seen worse than that piece of shit. Hell, I've wiped my ass with worse."

Utter bullshit, every word of it, but I still appreciated the effort. "Gee, I had no idea you were such a badass," I remarked blandly. His choice in bathroom hygiene I thought better left undiscussed.

"But I always knew you were a smart one," he growled, getting back to his work with a snort. "Go wake your brother up. It's time he ate something too. After that, send him back to bed. And if he has a problem with that"—I caught only a glimpse of the smile, but it was enough to make me glad I wasn't Nik—"you come tell me."

I could handle Niko myself, but that didn't mean I wouldn't enjoy watching him at the mercy of someone else for a change. "Will do." Standing, I hesitated before saying softly, "Thanks, Raff. For saving my life, keeping me sane. I don't know how to—"

He didn't let me go on, waving a hand at me impatiently. "Get out of here, would ya? I'll never finish if you keep drooling all over me."

Thanks offered and received.

I went ahead and fixed Nik's lunch. I was willing to bet that there wasn't anything remotely acceptable to his palate in a twenty-mile radius. Once again peanut butter sandwiches were the name of the game. I made four and piled them on a plate. I'd finished off the milk and ended up carrying in a bottle of orange juice that hadn't even entered the fermentation state quite yet. A real find. In the surgery I passed through the door and made a wide circle around the area of the floor where Darkling had died. Or if I wanted to be more honest with myself… the area of the floor where I had turned him into a macerated mound of bleeding flesh. Honesty… who the hell needed it?

Putting the food on the small table beside the bed, I leaned over and laid a hand on Nik's shoulder. I could count the times on one hand I'd woken up my brother instead of vice versa. Giving him a light shake, I cajoled, "Up and at 'em, Cyrano." Dark blond lashes parted instantly to show a gleam of irritable gray. Following that, they just as promptly lowered, uninterested. "Okay, be that way," I drawled. "I can always call Robin in. He was saying something about sleeping beauties and princes. I didn't catch it all, but I'm sure he'd be willing to explain it. Maybe even demonstrate it." So much for my resolution to lay off the teasing for a while. But desperate situations called for desperate measures.

Besides, it worked.

The bloodshot glare was proof of that. But the glower disappeared almost instantly as Nik's brain caught up with the rest of him. Speaking of whammies, Rafferty must've laid a big one on him to get him to sleep so soundly. Gripping a handful of my sweatshirt, Niko levered himself up and wrapped an arm around me. The embrace was quick and hard, his short hair rough against my jaw. I hugged him back just as fiercely. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, we were both ourselves. Not a brother bent on an impossible rescue. Not a monster with nothing but murder and mayhem on his twisted mind. And not a traumatized leftover, crawling on the floor in panic and self-loathing. We were just family, separated for what seemed like an eternity but now together again.

"Cal," he said hoarsely against my ear. Clearing his throat, he released me and sat up. "You're better." He didn't say the next logical thing, that I was myself again. Niko had never been one to lie, even to make things easier. He was a big believer in the theory that when things are easier in the beginning, they're always worse in the end. Straightening my rumpled sweatshirt with a motherly gesture I'd kidded him about in the past a thousand times, he said pointedly, "I know those are not for me."

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I reached over and handed him the object of his ire. "Don't be a snob. If it was good enough for the King, it's good enough for you."

Dubiously, he accepted the peanut butter sandwich and peeled back the top layer of bread. "No bananas?"

"Give me a break. It's a wasteland in there. They don't even have the stuff to make a chili dog."

"A travesty," he commented gravely before taking a bite and chewing it with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. "The mystery meat consortia must be up in arms."

I watched patiently as he finished the first sandwich and began on the second before I asked diffidently, "Want to fill me in? Goodfellow told me some and we… Darkling figured some of it out on his own."

He caught the misstep, but let it go and launched into a succinct summary of what had transpired while I'd been otherwise occupied. "Otherwise occupied," it was a nice euphemism for what I'd really been doing—laying waste to all around me. Niko regained my attention with a sharp rap to my knee. As Robin had said, they'd searched high and low for me without any luck. George still refused to help. If she saw anything, she wasn't saying, even when Niko and Robin fought off a pair of werewolves at her door. Knowing what we did now, how could we have expected anything different? No matter what she'd said, she would be betraying someone. It was a god-awful position for anyone to be in, but it was a special hell for someone like George.

"What about Samuel?" I asked soberly. It had been Samuel who had saved the day; Darkling had been right about that. In the end the guitarist had seen the Grendels for what they were. He'd made a decision no one should have to make and he'd made it with a remarkable nobility. He'd turned to his niece and taken the weight from her shoulders. She'd given him our address and he'd gone to Niko with the location of the warehouse. The plan to smuggle my brother and Goodfellow in had been concocted and Samuel had cooperated every step of the way. He'd gotten them in and fought at their side. The last glimpse I'd had of him, the warehouse had been coming down around him as he held the Grendels back. Samson at the temple.

"He atoned." Nik wasn't a religious man by most standards, but he had a moral code that would have had Mother Teresa's staunch approval. Samuel had committed a grievous act, but in my brother's eyes he had more than redeemed himself.

"Do you think he made it out?"

Niko took the third sandwich and handed me the last one. "Anything's possible," he answered with care. "If nothing else over the years, we've seen that."

We'd also seen how few fairy-tale endings actually materialized, how many happily-ever-afters survived reality. Not too damn many. My fingers pressed deep into the soft bread before I exhaled and took a bite. "He was a good guy," I murmured around the mouthful. "Deep down, where it counted, he was a good man."

"Perhaps, I think, even a great man." Nik discarded his sandwich unfinished. Studying me with an unwavering attention, he watched as I slowly worked on mine. Several minutes of this scrutiny passed before he spoke. It might have been unnerving to someone else, but I was used to it. Niko had something to say. When he was ready he would say it and not a moment sooner. When the words finally came, they were fairly innocuous—on the surface. "How are you, Cal?"

How was I? A simple question, right? Straightforward. Direct. And as loaded as a dealer's Glock. "Didn't we cover this already?" I blinked and sucked peanut butter off of my thumb. "Fine and dandy. Right as rain. Want I should go on?" I'd known that I wasn't going to get off so easily. I just hadn't known it would come so soon.

"Only if you want to tell me what's really going on." His finger poked me in the chest and then flicked my head. "In here and here."

I'd always been a pathetic liar where Niko was involved. You would think Mom's swindler genes had skipped a generation altogether. Not that trying to lie to my brother came up that often. Now, though, in post-Darkling times, I felt more reticent with Nik than I had with the others. It wasn't difficult to understand why. I had tried to kill Goodfellow and I would've made the same attempt on Rafferty if I'd been given the opportunity. But while betrayal is betrayal, history is also history. What I'd done to Nik, who had spent his entire life trying to protect me… it was in a realm all its own. I knew my brother like no one else did, and I knew exactly what to do to hurt him the most. In an odd way I regretted the things I'd said to him almost more than the attempts to take his life.