Downfall Read online

  If they weren’t Stephen King fans, I’d be damned disappointed.

  Here’s a fun fact about me: I wasn’t into mirrors, whether they were bolted to the wall, mounted on an oversexed puck’s ceiling, or broken in a bathroom with a large triangular-shaped piece of it flying toward me like a quicksilver blade.

  Mirrors. Not a fan.

  Nothing ever good could came of one. For that matter nothing good came in one or out of one.

  But this was my luck we were talking about, and it always took a nosedive at the Ninth Circle, a supernatural bar where I worked. The place put the fight in bar fight; that had been a fact from day fucking one. I had things thrown at me and my face in particular all the damn time. Occupational hazard. It was usually beer bottles, chairs, or even other patrons—you never knew. So, normally, having anything, knives included, tossed at me with vicious accuracy wouldn’t faze me.

  The fragment of mirror did.

  What I thought I saw reflected in it was worse.

  Shit.

  One moment I was investigating—otherwise known as hoping to break up a fight and kick ass—in the bathroom, and the next I was dodging impalement. We only had the one bathroom. Paien—monsters—didn’t care about separation of gender when it came to dumping bodily fluids, and as many species had more than two genders anyway, you couldn’t please everyone. One bathroom would have to do.

  I walked in with the fire axe, the one used frequently but never for fires, which we kept behind the bar, and ended up in a four-way bitch-fest between two succubae, one lamia—better known as a leech on two legs in my book, and one wildly grinning shirtless puck. I didn’t care he was bare from the waist up. I counted myself lucky he had pants. I’d unwillingly—so very unwillingly—seen more than my fair share of naked pucks in my life. Only half-naked, like this one, that was a gift from above.

  I was guessing from the trickster’s grin, the succubae’s bared snake fangs, and the lamia’s pulsating . . . You know what? Here’s an interesting evolutionary fact that most natural creatures and supernatural creatures have evolved from the same blob of cells before taking different forks in Darwin’s path. A swamp leech is distantly related to the paien humanoid leech masquerading as a woman, at least in how they both feed. Wide-open circular mouths ringed all the way around with teeth and a blood-seeking, hungering pulsation behind those teeth that would make you think more than twice about swimming in anything but a perfectly clear pool with an incredibly high saline content . . . and with a spear gun.

  Or like me, who’d seen far too many mouths of lamia attached to their victims and sucking them dry, I didn’t swim at all. Trust me, I didn’t miss it.

  Back to what I’d been thinking when I first walked in: The succubae wanted payment for services rendered to the puck. The lamia had been taking a bathroom break and simply wanted to eat the puck, as they are uncommon and the uncommon are generally considered a delicacy; and the puck was doing as all pucks do. He was skipping out on his bill, wreaking fucking havoc, and enjoying the hell out of himself.

  The two succubae, covered in glittering midnight blue snake scales with storm-cloud black and silver hair, grabbed the lamia and tossed her into the large rectangular mirror on the wall—some paien are vain, but mostly they like to know what’s sneaking up behind them. Hence the mirror. As the lamia was thrown through the air to hit and hit goddamn hard, the mirror shattered explosively. I ducked, the puck—pucks always know the better part of valor is watching their own ass—hid in a stall, and the lamia ended up lying crumpled on the floor. “Ladies,” I drawled. “You know the rules: Charging clients or eating clients”—no one cared which—“is done in the alley outside the bar. Leeches and sex slurpers are no exception.”

  The lamia took offense to the leech remark, not that I knew why. Once they fastened those round mouths and latched on, they paralyzed you and then they liquefied and sucked out everything contained in your sack of skin that wasn’t bone. If you don’t like the name, don’t spread the fame. Regardless, they never seemed to see the truth in that, and this one was no exception. Hissing in a lamia’s customary homicidal outrage—which I admit they did damn well—seven on a scale of one to ten in making your eardrums ache, she oozed up to a sitting position and snatched up a large shard of mirror to fling it at my face.

  That was when I saw it.

  There it was—maybe—in the shimmering surface before it tumbled and I threw myself to one side. I ended up with a painful slice across my forehead and a complete lack of patience. “Fine,” I spat. “You’ve been downgraded from ladies to bitches.” I lifted the axe, often used, well sharpened, and shining as bright as the edge of a brand-new guillotine. The lamia’s anger fled at the silver gleam, leaving her oddly deflated, her black eyes showing wild wariness as she peered up through the long dark hair that covered most of her face to cascade along with her floor-length black dress like a pool of poison on the dirty tile around her.

  “You know what a friend once told me the Good Book says?” I grinned with dark cheer. “Thou shall not suffer a bitch to live.”

  “That’s not quite how the quote goes,” came a deep, disapproving voice from behind me that I really didn’t want to hear right now. “Trust me, Caliban.” I didn’t. I went with ignoring him instead.

  The succubae were running. I didn’t care about them. They started this, but they’d been smart enough not to throw anything at me that might slice off my face . . . or make me feel something more painful. They got a freebie this time. The lamia? No freebies for her and her mirror and what she’d made me see.

  Making me see? Making me see that?

  It wasn’t that. It wasn’t. Nononono.

  Death was too easy for her, but it was all I had.

  I had started to heave the axe downward when a large hand caught the wooden handle just below the metal head and yanked me backward. “Let her go,” Ishiah ordered. “I can’t keep docking your pay whenever you maim or kill a patron. You’ve been working for free for three weeks now.”

  “Pigeons like you are cheap. What can I say?” I muttered under my breath before turning and letting Ishiah, my boss, an ex-angel or peri as the paien called them, take the axe. “It wasn’t my fault that she’d started a fight with a piece of glass and I was going to end it with a four-foot-long axe. That was purely poor planning on her part.” I waved a hand at my T-shirt. It was black with small red letters you’d have to be way too far into my personal space to make out. They spelled out IF YOU CAN READ THIS . . . YOU’RE ALREADY DEAD. I took my personal space seriously. “I’m responsibly labeled. What more do you want?”

  I was trying to distract myself by bitching to Ish, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t forget what I might have seen in that glass. It could’ve been a trick of the light. It could be nothing. There was time enough for that later. Like maybe never. If I was lucky. Unfortunately I was never lucky. I pushed it all away and moved on to dealing with my boss.

  “What I want, but doubt I will ever get, is an employee who is less bloodthirsty than all my patrons put together.” Ishiah had let the weight of the axe carry it to hang inches above the floor. He was swinging it slowly, barely moving it, all in all, but I got the picture.

  “Yeah, yeah. Ruin my fun.” I walked over and knocked on the stall door where the puck had fled. “You in there. We already have one puck in town. Robin Goodfellow. I don’t know whether he’d throw you a party to reminisce about the orgy days of yore or kill you for poaching on his territory. Want me to call and ask?”

  Pucks didn’t care for other pucks, being identical physical clones of one another. With the enormous ego each and every one of them had, two of them in one city was one too many. They either disliked each other, loathed each other, or hated each other with a homicidal fury. It depended on the pucks and their particular past. Added to that, Goodfellow, he was old. He said he’d been around before dinosaurs, when the stars were
the size of your fist, and the daytime sky was purple with the birthing gas of a new world. Or so he said. He could’ve been lying. To a puck, a lie was a work of art. Truth, except on rare occasions, was an insulting lack of effort on your part.

  I hadn’t been sure about the dinosaur issue, but I’d finally accepted it was true enough. My kind, half of what lived in my genes, had also apparently hunted dinos for sport. Not for food, for fucking fun. When it came to telling tales, there was one thing and only one that Robin didn’t lie about: the Auphe. When Nik and I were kids and hadn’t known what the monsters were that followed us from town to town, we’d called them Grendels thanks to Niko’s love of Beowulf. When we were a little older, we’d been clued in to what the true name of the bogeyman that did more than follow us; that had hid under our bed, in our closet, and outside every window of every house we’d lived in.

  Auphe.

  What humans had once hilariously, maybe hysterically painted into mythology as elves. See an Auphe face-to-face and survive it . . . that would make you hysterical, delusional, and more than a little mad. Storybook elves were as to Auphe as goldfish were to great white sharks—sharks with a thousand metal teeth in a hypodermic needle grin. They weren’t pretty, they didn’t ride horses, they didn’t wear golden armor. They didn’t wear clothes at all. The only use for a horse they would have would be to eat it. They had roamed the world, an albino, scarlet-eyed, clawed naked animal that Mother Nature had for some reason gifted with a brain. A twisted, psychopathic brain, but with the talent of cunning and speech and plans for genocide all the same.

  Too bad that hadn’t worked out for them. On the other hand, lift a cold one that it had turned out for me. Genocide didn’t look too good on most résumés, but in this case, I didn’t have one goddamn qualm. No one cried a single tear over their extinction.

  I most definitely hadn’t. They had been what had birthed the half of me, what had stamped my monster card and let me mix with the paien while bringing my human half along as my plus one. Paien thought humans were boring and often only good for eating, but they absolutely hated the Auphe. It could be because the Auphe had thought the same thing about paien—they were a meal, nothing more and nothing less. No better than a human. No more challenge than week-old roadkill. Although the Auphe, like cats and three-year-olds, did like to play with their food. That explained that while paien might loathe that half of me, they didn’t often fuck with it either.

  Thanks to Robin’s history lesson to my brother and me on everything that we didn’t know about the Auphe, which was that selfsame everything, I’d learned several years ago that if I stood up to a monster, most would slink away before I needed to pull a weapon. Goodfellow might lie for fun and profit, but I believed him about my murderous ancestors. If he said he’d once seen an Auphe rip off the head of a velociraptor, turning it into a prehistoric Pez dispenser, then he had.

  It meant something that there was someone to go to who knew the truth about the beginnings of my family tree—the first killers to walk this rock. It meant something that a born con man had taken two overgrown wildly suspicious delinquents, picked up on their clueless nature, their panicked need to escape the monsters that followed them, and filled them in on what was really watching them with scarlet eyes. What was watching me.

  Who I was.

  What I was.

  Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is being a defenseless pigeon right as the hawk hits you in a splatter of blood and feather. With the truth, if it was possible to survive, you’d have a chance to try. Damn straight it meant something, meant almost everything that Robin was the only one in our lives that had laid it out for us and told us that ugly truth. Ugly or not, it had saved our lives.

  Robin knew all the truths there were, I suspected, making my brother and I damn lucky he’d lived this long.

  It meant something entirely different to the puck hiding in the stall and lucky wasn’t it. Robin liked my brother and me, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about any pucks other than himself. In the paien world the older you were, the more powerful you were . . . and, as a bonus, often the more of a drooling, psychotic whack job you were. Goodfellow, most likely the second puck ever created, and almost as old as the Auphe, wasn’t insane, but that didn’t stop him from keeping the rest of the pucks on their toes, wondering if he would snap any moment, trap them with a thousand and one tricks not a single other trickster had yet to come up with, eat their faces, and then make artistic outdoor decorations with their bones. He had no problem encouraging that train of thought.

  I loved that about Robin. He had one helluva sense of humor.

  “Hey.” I knocked on the stall door again, asking, “If you had to spend your afterlife as some kind of trinket, what would it be? My nana, for instance”—I didn’t have a nana, but it made for a good story—“collects wind chimes, the kind made of natural materials. Wood, stone—oh, and bone. She says nothing sounds like bones do when they rattle in the wind. Her birthday is in a month. You might not know it, but Goodfellow lately has been heavy into arts and crafts, you know, in between the orgies. I was thinking of asking him if he could make Nana—”

  The door slammed open and the puck was out of the bathroom and gone. A flash of brown hair, green eyes, and leather pants and then nothing. It was nothing I was very grateful for. “Don’t let Robin wear leather pants,” I told Ishiah. “I like my eyes. I need them. I don’t want them to go Ark of the Covenant on me and melt down my face.”

  “You are not in the minority of that issue, trust me,” Ishiah snorted. “You should’ve seen him back in the day in a toga. No, the kilt was the worse. No, wait. When he dressed up as a handmaiden with Loki when they were trying to pass Thor off as the fertility goddess Freyja. That was . . .” He stared past me with glazed eyes and a look more haunted than any house built over a Native American burial ground in all the best cheesy movies. “I don’t want to talk about this any longer.”

  Shaking off the memories, the peri folded up his white-and-gold-feathered wings. They instantly disappeared. They always came out if there might be a fight. He’d once said it was for flight, maneuverability, and another way of knocking weapons from people’s hands. I’d called bullshit and told him he was the feathered version of a blowfish. He was trying to puff himself up to look more badass.

  He’d replied that he was an ex-angel of the Lord and his levels of badass couldn’t be measured by mere human means. I threw down the “I’m not human” card, the “the Auphe were on earth long before you were” card, and rounded it off with the “my bad-assery had gotten me the nickname of Unmaker of the World and yours gets you anally perched on Christmas trees every year” card. And when I emphasized that yes, I meant anally, not annually, everything had gone downhill from there.

  That no one knew that a resulting knock-down, drag-out fight would spill several bottles of common cleaning solutions that then could conceivably mix into an explosive that caused the temporary loss of part of the roof was a lack of education and not my problem. I never claimed chemistry was my best subject.

  That was my first week of docked pay.

  “Hey, Robin knows Loki and Thor? Loki and Thor are real?” For Nik and his love of mythology and me and my love of radically incorrect (but screw accuracy—look at those giant Amazonian Wonderbreasts) comic books and superhero movies, the concept was equally cool. “He hung out with the God of Mischief and Chaos and that other surfer dude with the hammer?” Then I homed in on the important part. “He dressed up like a bridesmaid? Goodfellow?” That was a bit of mythology Niko had told me that I’d for once enjoyed, although neither of us knew Robin had been there. “Oh, damn. I am going to give him shit forever.”

  “Best not. He might tell Loki and Norse gods care about the Auphe the same as most paiens—not at all. And certain trickster gods such as Loki in particular have a special hatred for them.”

  “Are you saying if Goodfellow invited him
to New York, I might end up in a bridesmaid dress for the rest of my natural life?”

  “He’s not that kind of trickster. He prefers his lessons short and to the point. You’d spend the rest of your life as a puddle of blood, bone fragments, and liquefied spleen,” he said dryly, “in a jar on his mantel with you still conscious and aware despite your souplike consistency until he eventually tired of listening to your splashing and burbling.”

  Okay, that I could do without. Stay away from Loki. I got it. I gave in as Ishiah provided me with a light shove toward the bathroom door. “The lamia sliced you fairly deep. Go home. We don’t want you bleeding all over the bar tonight.”

  I was mopping at my forehead with a wad of paper towels and gave in with a grumble. He was right. Head wounds, no matter how minor, bled like crazy, and when you worked in a bar that catered to vampires, Wolves, revenants, vodyanoi, lamia, and too many other ghoulies to count, you didn’t want to hang around leaking blood until someone finally snapped and fell off the wagon. It didn’t have to be blood drinkers. Blood could also trigger rage, the smell of prey, and all kinds of other things Ishiah wouldn’t want to put up with.

  Normally I would’ve run home. It’s far, but if I did run it, I could skip the ten miles in the morning. But smelling of blood and having difficulty with my usual emergency mode of travel, I took a cab. It had a mirror too, not like the one in the bathroom—the bright sliver that had tumbled through the air showing in brilliant detail things I didn’t want to see. That I probably hadn’t seen, had only imagined. This one now was your typical dark rearview mirror. I would’ve had to lean forward to see anything at all in it.

  I didn’t.

  I wasn’t ready. I wish we could’ve stuck with the Norse god discussion, because I wasn’t prepared to think about this. Not mirrors, reflections, any of it. I wouldn’t be ready at home either, but there I could turn on all the lights. Be in a safe place. If there was anything to see at all, and there probably wasn’t. I have good vision, but I’d only a split second to see my warped reflection in the shard the lamia had thrown at me. That isn’t enough time to see anything more than a trick of the light.