Downfall Read online

There’s a sucker born every minute . . . and you might be one.

  I hadn’t come up with the saying. That it hadn’t been me, Robin Goodfellow, shames me still, but someone beat me to it. I’d no doubt been buying a pair of leather pants at the time. Ah, those were the days. I had said something similar long before that saying made the rounds. Of course I had.

  “Pithekous richnei perittomata san anthropoid richnoun chemata.”

  It was Latin, my second favorite language, for “People throw money like monkeys throw feces.” It loses a bit in translation, but it was quite popular, oh, a few thousand years ago. Some of my fellow pucks used it to this day. Most everyone else had forgotten it. How fleeting fame. As quick to come and go as virginity. What can one do . . . but enjoy it while it lasts?

  Whatever the reason—I was almost positive it had been leather pants—a human, in fact, had said that, had beat me to it. If there were one thing to admire about humans, aside from their obsession throughout time with all things sexual, it would be their innate grasp of the obvious. They really put it out there, didn’t they? The obvious. The sex I was scheduled to think about in seven more minutes left me time now to concentrate on that: the obvious.

  What was uncelebrated instinct to my kind, mortals had been forced to learn and then had embellished and gilded until it was a monument so massive it pierced the heavens themselves. It wasn’t enough to rip off those hobbled by morality; they had to slap a thick coat of sugary icing on it to hide what they’d done. Maybe some sprinkles while you were at it. You had to create an establishment out of it. Stick a franchise on every corner.

  The art of the con, when had it become such an acceptable and, worse yet, legal career choice? All of that wrapped around one single concept: the blind, the naïve, the Pollyannas . . . the suckers.

  Humans, they could take the fun out of anything—even being a used car salesman.

  The time I was taking off from running the car lot might inspire me. It could be time for a new career or new for this millennium. Lawyer perhaps. Shakespeare hadn’t been wrong there. As a matter of fact, I think that I was Shakespeare’s lawyer when he wrote “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” He wasn’t wrong. When I’d finished billing him he didn’t have a pot to piss in. He didn’t even have a coin with which to buy something to drink to create piss.

  Those were the days.

  I took another swallow of my wine and pulled at my tie with my free hand. I drank beer on the rare occasion—when working a deal with the salt of the earth (of course a forty-five percent interest rate is normal on a car loan. Would I lie to you?) I tried not to choke on my wine on memories of my last sale, at least for a while. Humans. No challenge at all.

  I also drank beer with friends, family really, who couldn’t afford what I normally imbibed in great quantities and liked to attempt to bring me down to their level via beer swilling, pizza gorging, and intolerably idiotic television in which even the eye candy couldn’t save your sanity.

  That the attempts actually worked on occasion didn’t surprise me. These particular friends had spent lifetimes upon lifetimes returning to wear away at my spectacular taste. I was forced to give credit where credit was due as much as I hated that anyone could manipulate a trickster, much less a supreme trickster such as me. Then again, if I, fully aware, let them do it, was it manipulation at all?

  As, despite myself, let them I did.

  For a trickster, that was an unfathomable sacrifice. Yet they were my truest and oldest of friends. When you’d lived long enough to forget thousands of years as if they were only a moment and could recall a world long before humans evolved, friends such as those mattered. When they reincarnated time and time again throughout eternity simply to keep me company—or that’s how I chose to think of it as everything is about me—they more than mattered. Of course my company was incomparable. Tagging after me through the endless years was absolutely understandable.

  I took another drink, blind to the exquisite color of the grape. Loyalty, sadly, wasn’t everything.

  Unfortunately they, unlike me, were the same as all humanity: suckers.

  Not in all ways, not even in many ways, but in one very specific way and they never learned. They never learned. Skata.

  What I was to do about that, I didn’t know. Yet.

  But I would know, as I was brilliant that way. I took another swallow and raised an eyebrow in appreciation. Oh, excellent. A distraction. Even in a “fulfilling monogamous relationship” or whatever the freaks called it, I was still allowed to look, and look I did.

  A dryad swept past me in a scent cloud of apple blossoms and honeysuckle. My seven minutes until pornographic thoughts were to be given their due weren’t up yet, but I could push up the timeline and appreciate her lithe lines and exquisite curves. She gave me a coy look that didn’t require the bucket of pheromones splashed liberally in the air around her. I gave her my perfected “I would lift you and five of your sisters to sexual nirvana but, despair to the world, my mighty cock is shackled with the chains of fidelity” apologetic expression. Other species and cultures are often astounded by how much a puck can emote in one lowering of a brow combined with one regretful but minute tightening of our lips. Other species and cultures are so dim and dull that I don’t know how they exist, not dying of boredom with their childlike and clumsy physical manifestations of emotion. They may as well physically vomit their feelings upon everyone around them. But, as the superior race and creature on this earth, I had to ignore that argument or I’d be along . . . except for other pucks. I shuddered at the notion.

  Infinitely worse.

  The dryad had shaken her fall of jade green hair and sighed in disappointment at the loss of a sexual experience that would’ve ruined her for all other trees. I couldn’t blame her for her depression clear to be seen as she moved to the far side of the bar laughing with a few nymph friends and cuddling up with an enormously large reddish brown Wolf—a ruse to hide her pain, I knew. I felt mildly guilty and sent a drink her way as an apology for my “condition.”

  I tucked away the scarlet and silk sliver of arousal as well as the emerald and silver necklace I’d slipped from her neck without her having a clue—you couldn’t be the trickster you should be if you didn’t keep a larcenous and thieving hand in. I returned my focus to the very expensive wine that they kept behind the bar especially for me. Today had absolutely not been a beer day. Forget that it was what I was expected to drink by those who knew my current fake identity:

  Rob Fellows, car salesman extraordinaire, shaking hands, slapping backs, tossing down a brewski with the guys. It was part of the job description. However, gods forbid if Bacchus, who’d finally given up AA as a long-lost cause, found out. To drink a wine before its time was a killing offense in his pickled brain. The shock of a Bud Lite might drain the immortality right out of him. If it didn’t, he would boot my unbelievable ass into the next century.

  And we didn’t want to disappoint the ladies and fine gentleman, now, did we? My ass was a work of art. Damaging it would be like drawing on Michelangelo’s David with brightly colored markers. A crime against man and any number of pantheons of gods.

  If one worshipped a god . . . and that god didn’t happen to be me.

  Sometimes, when I let myself forget why I’d quit it, which wasn’t often, the Fall of Troy saw to that, I missed the god con: the temples, the marble statues of me in all my unclothed glory, the priestesses and priests none of whom were virgins in my service—that should go without saying. I missed the offerings of gold and jewels, honey cakes and wine. Then there was the sound; I’ve never been able to explain it. The indrawn breath of those who knelt, seeing their god for the first time. It was a softly reverent and a song of adoration for me and me alone. I was their world.

  The orgies were nice too.

  Very, very nice indeed. Primo. Phantastike. Ausgezeichnet. Spectaculaire. I took
another sip of wine as the bar faded around me and ancient Rome surrounded me with its scents and sounds, the taste of grapes, the songs of my worshippers, and the feel of their warm skin against mine, covering every inch. Soft fingers in my hair, clever fingers cupping my . . .

  The feather that dropped in my wine just in time for me to almost drink and choke on it jolted me back to the Ninth Circle—a bar that had not one speck of marble, gold, or honey cakes in it anywhere. “Kolo,” I hissed, leaning back from the assault to fish the red-soaked white-and-gold feather out of my glass. “What is wrong with you? Do you attempt to poison all your customers this way?” It wasn’t completely out of the question. “Or am I special?”

  Naturally I was special, but that had nothing to do with my currently defiled wine. Still, I had been defiled by similar feathers frequently over the last year, defiled in the most positively carnal sense, and I went on to drink the wine with only a shrug.

  “That was your orgy face,” my attacker said with grim disapproval. “We agreed. You can look all you wish, you can reminisce about the good old days when there was no STD you didn’t seek out, but you don’t make the orgy face while you do it. Also, is that blood on your collar and a rocket launcher leaning against your stool?”

  Which was wholly unfair as I, a puck, could not catch any sexual diseases. Oh, perhaps there had been the one case of the pixie version of chlamydia during which my penis did radiate pink, yellow, and green for a month, but that had been over a thousand years ago at least. I’d been pixie-free since. Considering the size of my cock, causing it to be mistaken for the Aurora Borealis for those thirty days, it was for the best that the glow of rainbow colors passed quickly. Thousands of years didn’t change the fact that tourists were annoying as hell, or, as Cal would say, a bitch and a half.

  Not to mention that I couldn’t go near the ocean without confused whales, dolphins, and other sea life beaching themselves. It had not been a good month.

  I hissed in annoyance and gestured imperiously at one of the peris beyond the bar for a glass of water and a cloth to dab at the blood. This was my fifty-sixth favorite shirt. How unbelievably inconsiderate could one be to bleed on Dolce and Gabbana? “Yes, it is a rocket launcher. You might want to dispose of it before Cal returns to work and humps it with the love that dare not speak its name.” I flashed a smug grin at the peri leaning across the bar from me. “And you only know that’s my orgy face as you were spending your time outside the temples and villas marking down the naughty and nice for a god who didn’t even create me.”

  I pushed my glass toward him for a refill. “In this day and age I believe they’d call that stalking. Romantic really. You with your flaming sword. Me with the only sword I’ll ever need.” I gave my best salacious smirk. “We could’ve had so much amazing hate sex if you’d removed that pillar of salt out of your ass sooner.”

  Dark eyebrows lowered in annoyed menace, but gray-blue eyes were bright with humor and the scar on his jaw tightened, which was a good indicator he was fighting back a smile. “I was only showing common sense, you randy goat. As they say, you lie down with dogs, you get up with pixie herpes. And where did you get the rocket launcher?”

  “It was not herpes,” I snapped, keeping my voice low. No one gossiped like paien. “And you weren’t hanging about then with your schoolgirl crush and sermons on how to remove the greed, lust, avarice, sloth, gluttony, fornication—basically all the fun from my life.”

  Ishiah, retired angel and full-time pain in my ass, but mostly in the very best of ways, studied me and did smile this time. “I always had an eye out for you, Robin, no matter where you were.”

  Monogamy, it was a hard road to walk, particularly considering the rest of the puck race thought me perverse and disgusting for it, but at times like this, I couldn’t regret it. Over a year now and I wouldn’t change it.

  “Always?” This time my grin was wider and far more wicked. “Was I often nude when you spied on me? How did that make your angel naughty parts feel? More holy? Less holy? Not holy at all?”

  “You know how you made them feel last night.” He deposited the freshly filled wineglass in front of me. “Don’t fish for compliments.”

  “Don’t fish . . .” I shook my head and dropped my chin in my hand. “Three thousand years since you’ve shown up in my life and it’s like you don’t know me at all.”

  “Yet I know when you’re brooding. Which is worrying. I sent Cal home early, so I was hoping for a brood-free rest of the night.” He pulled back pale blond hair into a short tail and tied it off as around us the bar hummed with the gruff tones of werewolves, the sibilant tongue of lamias and succubae, the disheartened bubbling of vodyanoi who still smelled of the East River. It was a typical night.

  “I wasn’t brooding. I was thinking of orgies. You yourself said so,” I contradicted, and took a large swallow of wine that showed no respect for the vintage at all.

  “In between moping. Why are you moping?” he demanded with a scowl no one, not Hades the ice-hearted god of the underworld himself, could call sympathetic. Ishiah was correct, though. He did know me, and he knew that thrown a line of sympathy, I’d use it to verbally tie him in daisy chains of denial and skip the conversation altogether. He might be an ex-angel, but I was much older than him and had walked the earth a million years before his God had stumbled across the place. My tongue was a deadly weapon and not always in an enjoyable manner.

  Although ninety-nine percent of the time it certainly was.

  “I’m taking a break from the business,” I said abruptly. He’d find out sooner or later. It might as well be now.

  I’d put my best manager in charge of the car lot until I returned—if I returned, another shark like me . . . but one in puppy dog clothing. Soulful brown eyes, a sheepish grin, and an “aw, shucks” accent had little old ladies and big hulking men falling all over themselves to throw money at him. They never got quite close enough to see that the flesh of his last meal hadn’t cleared his tonsils yet. He was wasted on humanity. He’d have made a great trickster—buy a lemon, learn an important life lesson.

  “Hmm.” Ishiah leaned closer to ring a fingernail against the crystal of the wineglass, then closer yet still until I felt his warm breath against the sensitive skin behind my ear. “Are we celebrating you temporarily shedding the responsibility of a moral, decent, and contributing member of society or at least the closest you can possibly come?” He tilted his head, and there was the sensation of the singing nerves of teeth scraping across the line of my jaw. Not quite a bite, but not quite the absence of one either. It caused my first genuine smile of the day, and I suspect he knew it. Easing back far too soon, he raised his eyebrows to wait for my answer.

  “Not quite. I do sell lemons, but I do not pay taxes, which removes the moral, decent, and contributing part of your question. And it’s not a vacation, as much as I’d like to spend a month or two on several nude beaches.” There was only a little mockery in the portion about nude beaches as I knew Ish would sooner fight another rebellion in Heaven than display himself on the most entertaining of beaches. I swiveled back and forth on the stool to give Ishiah a broad and no doubt lecherous smile. I can dial back the lechery, if my life depends on it in the utmost sense of the word, but that wasn’t often. And with the pictures of beaches and a naked angel in my head, now wasn’t one of those times.

  It wasn’t my fault. He had started it.

  “Then if it’s not a vacation, what are you planning?” He folded his arms to lean on the scratched and stained wood of the bar top beside me.

  I felt my dirty grin melt away along with my momentary good mood and dipped my finger into my glass. Sketching the symbol for infinity on the bar in a red that shouldn’t have looked like blood yet did, I studied it and then exhaled harshly. “It’s time . . . or it will be soon.”

  He gave a dark frown. It was more for me, I thought, than for what was coming. He kn
ew how attached I was. “Are you certain?”

  “Over a thousand lives watching them die now? Yes, I’m certain. Especially this time.” I stared at the symbol for all that is and all that will always be and was not comforted in the slightest. Reincarnation wasn’t the consolation one imagined.

  “Do they know?” He shifted, a thoughtful expression crossing his face to disappear as quickly as it had come. “Cal was here earlier, working. He got banged up a bit and I sent him home. He seemed . . . not tense at first. Distracted perhaps. But after the fight, more of a disagreement compared to most nights, he was very much on edge—as if something happened. Something I missed. And usually when he’s threatening to cut someone in half with an axe, he’s more cheerful.”

  “Sometimes they sense it.” As many lives as they’d lived, they should. I exhaled and shook my head, as when they did suspect what was coming, the end never changed. “Sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t matter if they do or not. They never fight to retreat from it. They always fight their way to throw themselves through it. Warriors. In almost every life, they are warriors,” I scoffed, “and as such they have no brain cells, only skulls sloshing with honor and adrenaline-fueled death wishes.” I wiped away the double loop sketched in wine with a gesture more careless and violent than was necessary.

  “And there never is a way through it?” A heavy hand rested on the nape of my neck. “Or a way to convince them to step back, just once?”

  “No.” I bowed my head and felt the heat of his palm sink through the muscle and into my spine itself. This was the first time in all my life that I hadn’t been alone in this. “Not yet. A puck who can’t talk someone out of certain death—over nine hundred times at least. I disgust myself.”

  And I had tried. In the names of all the gods and goddesses that had once ruled, I had tried. But Niko, in all his variations, never lacked an unbreakable conviction in whatever cause he chose, and Cal . . . Cal had never been able to let anything go. And that was in addition to his almost gleeful lack of self-preservation. If reincarnation was meant to teach them lessons, they were very slow students.