Nevermore

Book 10: Cal Leandros

by Rob Thurman

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Urban Fantasy; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

People die.
 
Everyone knows that. I knew it intimately as everyone in my life died thanks to my one seemingly harmless mistake. I'd brought down Heaven, lifted up Hell, and set the world on fire, all due to one slip of the memory.
 
I forgot the pizzas...
 
Caliban is a dead man. The Vigil, a group devoted to concealing the paranormal from humanity, has decided Cal has stepped out of the shadows once too often, and death is the only sentence. They plan to send a supernatural assassin into the past to take down the younger, less lethal Cal.
 
But things change when The Vigil makes one last attempt on Caliban's life in the present—and end up destroying everyone and everything he cares about.
 
Now, Cal has to save himself, warn those closest to him, and kill every Vigil bastard who stole his world. But if he fails, he and everyone in his life will be history…

Release date: December 1, 2015

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 352

Sample

Praise

Books by Rob Thurman

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

About the Author

Prologue

People die.

All the time. Everyone knows that, right? The world is dangerous. Existence is precarious, the footing beneath you shaky. Your first breath isn’t a guarantee and if you get that, your next breath is the same. Touch and go. Life doesn’t come with a warranty. It’s something to be snatched, clawed for, and held in the tightest of grips. Life cuts you no slack, doesn’t care if you’re around or not, but death . . . death can’t wait to drag you to his party. And once he does . . . you know that old song is as true as they come, “It’s hard to leave if you can’t find the door.”

People die . . . but they usually don’t die over something so meaningless. Me? I was the exception to that. I was the trigger. At least thirty people died all thanks to my one seemingly harmless mistake, one trivial, overlooked chore.

I forgot the pizzas.

Insane, right? That the world should end because I forgot several boxes of cheese, pepperoni, and grease. They weren’t even the best pizzas in town. But that didn’t matter. I’d brought down Heaven, lifted up Hell, and set the world on fire, all thanks to one slip of the memory.

How’s that for the worst fuckup of all time?

One casual everyday event like forgetting my phone and running back a block to our place for it. That meant a five-minute shift in my routine, just enough to sidetrack my brain to revert to my normal schedule. I unconsciously skipped over the irregular task of the pizza pickup I’d been stuck with at the last minute, and that was it . . . the world ended. Not with a whimper or a thousand radioactive mushroom clouds. No, it ended because I was an idiot.

It ended because I’d forgotten I’d lost a coin toss.

The only reason I didn’t end with it as well was just dumb luck. I’d remembered at the last second fifteen feet inside the bar, cursed, and left, annoyed and impatient enough to use the “emergency door” to get them. I should’ve been there when it all ended, but, again, dumb luck.

No. Not true.

It wasn’t dumb luck. It was bad luck. Worse luck. The darkest of goddamn fucking fortune.

Hell, wasn’t that the story of my life?

There was a certain grungy bar, cramped, but popular among a certain crowd, that I’d been standing in less than three seconds ago when I remembered the pizzas. The name of the bar didn’t matter. That I worked there most nights didn’t make a difference either. What did matter was that the building where it squatted on the first floor slinging alcohol right and left was hit by an eye searing blast of light. It was as bright as it was incomprehensible. It was barely dusk. What could be that bright? I’d seen the flash from the corner of my eye as I stood at the pizza truck parked at the other end of the block. I turned to see what it was, not where it was. I should’ve known the where was what mattered, but I didn’t have a flicker of suspicion that it was the bar, my bar. The one full of people, my people. It was one of those things you can’t think. You can’t know, as once you do you can’t unknow it. That part of your brain shuts down. If it didn’t all of your brain would stop . . . stop thinking, stop feeling, stop everything, and chances were good it’d never start again.

It was too late for all that now. I had turned. When I did, I wished I’d been smart enough to not turn, and when I had, then to not look, to live in blissful ignorance a few seconds more. But I wasn’t that smart, never had been. I didn’t register that it was an explosion, one that temporarily deafened me. In that silence I had turned. I had seen. I had seen it all.

It was as if the sun had plunged from where it hung bloodred and low to crash down on top of the city.

It was all it could be. The sun had fallen from the sky, I thought numbly as the money drifted from one hand as the pizzas slipped off the balancing palm of the other to tumble through superheated air to the street. The sun had fallen and we were all on fire—not the city alone, but everything. It was early evening with thin stripes of twilight purple clouds, and we should’ve stood in shadows, but we didn’t. It was bright as day on the street and we were on fire.

The entire world was on fire.

I fucking prayed the way atheists like me do when the sky falls and their world is ripped away. I prayed that it was a lie. But I got what prayers gave you when you need their help the most. A kick in the gut and a spiteful laugh in your face as it was granted.

Because the world wasn’t on fire.

It would’ve been better if it were.

No, the world didn’t burn, I knew, only a small piece of it.

That I’d had the thought at all—the whole world burning to a cinder—had been shock and despair tearing my brain to shreds—not for thinking that it was true, but because I knew it wasn’t. The world gone with a fiery snap of some child-eating pagan god’s fingers, all of us . . . to the very last of us, dying with the earth, I could take that. I could take it with a, yes, sir, may I have another. But being left behind, a survivor who had no fucking desire to survive? That was the true nightmare. That I couldn’t take.

I stared at the inferno that raged; it already had consumed the first floor front of the building. Gobbled up where I’d worked and drunk for years and had just stood heartbeats ago. I hoped with everything in my tarnished soul that its appetite would spread to at least the city if not to everything flammable on the planet. I hoped that it would roll over me like a wildfire and take me along with the rest of what it had already stolen.

It didn’t happen. What you want the most hardly ever does. What you need the most never does.

Instead, it concentrated on my handful of the world, small as it was, with more inescapable flame than could remotely be needed for one small bar. The fire had grown before I could take a single breath. It was a breath I didn’t want to take, knowing that the Auphe in me, compared to the human, would sharpen every scent a hundred times over. I didn’t care if I took another breath again, for that reason and a thousand others, but your body overrides your wishes, no matter how desperate. Lungs rebelling, I gasped, pulling in that unwanted breath. I smelled ammonia, nitrate, other chemicals I didn’t bother with. . . .

And flesh. They smelled different, the roasting scent of several Wolves from the lesser number of peri, and both distinct from the crowd of vampires. Every group similar but not the same as the other, but soon to end as identical charred fumes. Above them all, I caught the smell of two others. Not a group—just two. The two that mattered most.

Until now one had smelled of grass, fallen leaves, loamy earth, and musk. The other of sweat and weapon oil for cleaning every type of blade at the end of sparring, of goat milk soap and unbleached cotton from the shower that followed, of the clean bite of a chill wind only truly found on the top of a mountain where the air grew thin.

One puck.

One human.

Neither would give off their born scent again, the way they once had. Not in reality, and not in my memories that would be as blackened as the mound of rubble that would act as the tomb that covered them when the fire eventually died.

Not that I would be around to see their makeshift grave in the aftermath and not that I would have memories of any kind.

The smallest sliver of a second later there came a second explosion, a massive fireball ten, twelve stories high erupted, though the building itself was only four stories tall. It came close to incinerating anything left of the brick and metal of the bar and the bodies inside. The backwash of incredible heat and a concussive wave threw me flat, knocking the air from my lungs before I was able to vomit at the stench that had crawled inside me to stay.

An infinity of fire: Hell couldn’t have claimed it all.

I sat up slowly and painfully to the sight of what the second one had birthed, a Jacob’s ladder of fire that stretched up to touch the sky, maybe Heaven itself. It made the first look like an amateur attempt at a Boy Scout campfire. It burned with the rage, flame, and heat of a hundred phoenixes. Yet when it finally would burn down, hours maybe days—ashes to ashes—no new phoenix would rise from it. Nothing would. The reaper owned this place now and everyone who’d been in it. One swipe of a scythe hotter than the sun had taken it all.

Now I am become Death.

Something that had been said in history a time or two.

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

I didn’t think about who had done it—who was Death.

I already knew the answer to that.

I didn’t think about how it had been done.

I didn’t think why. I knew the why was a who. And I was still here as the fuckers had missed.

I didn’t think anything but the bottom line of it all.

I didn’t care.

Who, why, how, none of that mattered now.

My own personal Armageddon had arrived.

As the heat seared my skin, I sprawled on the asphalt with—unbelievably enough as forcefully as I’d been thrown back—the pizza boxes that had landed with me, one beside me, the other against my leg, almost in my fucking lap. A mocking jeer from the powers that be. “Your life is over, but dinner’s on us!” My eyes were half-blinded by the fire, not that I cared to better see details of the apocalypse meant for me personally . . . but had missed.

It hadn’t been able to steal my life, but as a trade, it had taken and destroyed my reason for living it.

As much as I hated to give them the satisfaction, they’d won. I didn’t have to be at their ground zero in a failed aim at wiping me from existence. One block away was close enough to know that your heart could beat and your lungs could fill with oxygen, but it didn’t make you less dead.

Wasn’t that a trick?

I slid my hand inside my jacket. I touched the only comfort left: the leather holster that cradled my way out. The metal of the trigger, the hard plastic of the grip, and the grimly comfortable weight of my escape.

Sliding my Desert Eagle out, I placed the muzzle under my chin. My finger captured the trigger tight without any thought from me.

It didn’t need any. It was automatic. I didn’t have to think as I’d already thought about this too many times before. The end had come, no surprise. I’d been waiting on it for a good part of my life. But I hadn’t thought it would be like this, unbearable as the lone survivor on a burnt and bloody battlefield. Dying was easy. Being alone, the last standing, having seen the others fall, it snatched away the relief and turned a mercy killing into a grim surrender.

Fuck it, surrender, retreat, despite being coward enough to not only think I’d go first, but to hope for it, I’d been prepared for years, waiting for the feel of the metal, the resistance on the pull of seven pounds of trigger pressure.

Seven pounds was my ticket out of this hell.

And it was hell, more of one than I’d ever end up in.

All because I forgot the goddamn pizzas.

But I’d forgotten something else too. The pizza guy. And he had something to say.

First, he said my name. I barely heard it with what small amount of hearing had returned. Whether what came next would have my finger sliding off the trigger, I didn’t know. I doubted it.

Then he said a second name.

One that made me question, finger still on the trigger, yeah, but . . .

It made me . . . not hope. Hope was too hard, too distant. It didn’t do that. Yet . . .

It did make me think. It made me consider the metal muzzle under my jaw as a sealed letter dropped into my lap, smelling of anchovies. With that second name said aloud and with me climbing out of the muffling quicksand of borderline catatonia, another form of escape that I hadn’t bothered to fight, things changed. I began truly thinking instead of letting the smothering shock pull me deeper. I stopped my body and mind from reacting mechanically as both had from the first moment of the explosion. I did it solely because I could guess what that letter might say considering who had written it.

Tricks and truths . . .

It wasn’t over until it was over and in this one unique case, maybe . . . maybe not necessarily then either.

Once, three or four years ago, I’d said something profound as hell—also wrong as shit—but it had sounded good and I thought it true at the time. I had said that what had been made couldn’t be unmade.

What had been done couldn’t be undone.

I’d been wrong.

I was going to do all that and more now. Undo this all. If I had to unravel reality itself at its seams, as a result, that’s what I would do.

Why the hell not?

If there were consequences, if there was a cost? So what?

I’d already fucking paid it.

1

I believe the future is the past again, entered only through another gate.

—Arthur Wing Pinero, 1894

History.

They say that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

They also say history teaches by example. History is written by the victors. God himself can’t change the past, but historians can. And a thousand more sayings about it. But the last one was the one I was holding on to with both hands. God can’t change it, but historians could. They could write, erase, delete, and write a brand-new version.

They say a lot—hell, yeah, they do. But who cared?

History was, for the most part, boring.

Not like fire. Fire was anything but boring. The starkly chemical tainted smoke, now more of a taste than a smell, still coated my tongue and throat thickly enough to make me want to puke. The stink of burnt blood, sizzled to nothing in seconds. The heat of the flames had been intense enough that I’d been dully surprised my face wasn’t seared to a blackened mask, despite feeling normal when I rubbed a hand roughly over it.

Then there was the image of it all locked inside my brain and tattooed behind my eyelids whenever I blinked, an afterimage of everything I saw: the explosive eruption of fire and fury that streamed upward with a raging hunger that made it seem possible for it to set Heaven itself on fire, devour God himself if he had existed. And the sound . . . shit, the sound, or the lack of it. The explosion, the roar of not flames, but of not one but two unstoppable infernos, yet not a single scream or shout. Not a sign that anyone had been alive in a building before it had become what Hell longed to be. No sign of it, life, but there had been.

Before.

There had been brothers, friends, others. They hadn’t been alive, though, not after that. They’d died with the initial flash of light—there was nothing to hear from them. The Reaper had stolen their voices. They couldn’t scream, couldn’t say my name as they had since the day of my birth. They couldn’t. . . .

Shit. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t function with this memory, only a half hour old and yet at the same time one that came from an event that wouldn’t happen for eight more years. I took that moment and pushed it away, buried it, as I couldn’t do the job, couldn’t do what I needed to if I had to see it in my head every minute of the day. I couldn’t fucking breathe if I had to carry that weight on my shoulders.

Forget that was where half of it belonged.

And there was no goddamn hope of having the strength to carry that.

Ignoring the mental accusation, I took in the situation at hand and the alley I stood in. Both were grimy and ugly. One, the alley, was expected and two, the situation, wasn’t precisely unexpected.

In this alley, in fact, this circumstance had been a routine risk in the day.

If nothing else, it could be a needed distraction. But with my luck, which was no luck, it would be nothing but an inconvenience. I found out which when I sidestepped, with little effort, the shard of metal rusty and crusted with old blood swung at my face or throat, his aim wasn’t good enough to make an estimate, by a stinking, filthy waste of humanity. He’d leaped out of a bed of alley trash, his tainted harsh exhalation the hiss of a snake thanks to several missing teeth. He wore a stench of living on the street that was one step from decomposition and eyes muddy brown swimming in wide pools of deep piss-yellow.

Inconvenience it was.

Putting a boot in his lower back as he passed me unable to stop in time, I helped him continue his headlong rush attempt by sending him the rest of the way across the alley to slam into the opposite wall. As inconvenience was more likely to piss me off than distract me. But I’d smelled what was on the knife. I couldn’t let that go. I’d have to make do because this was what I had.

There was the sound of crushing cartilage and the scent of blood when he hit the brick. Someone had bought themselves a broken nose. Those were a bitch. It would be several seconds before he could see through the tears of pain to attack again. I folded my arms to wait. Inconvenience and then some. If not for what coated that damned knife . . .

I’d originally planned coming here eight years in my past to stop an assassination, my own assassination, by the Vigil. Pretentious asshole name aside, they had played a big part in history as well. They’d been human, but they hadn’t interfered with the paien world often, didn’t care if a boggle made a meal of a human. It was the circle of life, in their opinion—no more, no less, and their group had been around thousands of years, long enough to see the truth of that. Humans, thanks to a population of billions, were on top of the food chain as a species, but not individually. If it came down to a war, humans would win with their bigger weapons. Unimaginable monsters worse than anything you dreamed could live in your closet at night, even they couldn’t walk away from ground zero of a nuke blast. Yeah, humans would win, but, first, the paien would make them damn sorry they played. Second, when it came to nukes, and it would have to come to them to end up on top, collateral damage to your own population will be a bitch.

The Vigil had one rule: stay hidden. Humans do not need to know mythology books are actually wildly incorrect, but with a grain of truth, history books. Do not show yourself in a manner that humanity might find out werewolves, vampires, lamia, revenants, ghouls, hundreds of other “bogeymen” existed. Let humans live in the ignorant bliss that fairy tales were just that. That fairies weren’t real, spit acid in your face, and sucked off the melted flesh. Eating was a necessary sin of survival, of course, and some paien are predators. They have certain nutritional requirements. Merely don’t be seen doing it unless it’s by who you’re currently consuming.

Slipups were understandable, but make certain they’re at night and only at night and by no more than two or three people who will easily convince themselves it was a trick of the light. Admittedly, the paien were here first. It’s a big world and they wanted to share it. But the average human, masses of them, wouldn’t understand, the Vigil had said. They’d panic, and it’ll happen as it has always happened when one civilization discovers another. War. We don’t want to be pushed into that corner. If a paien follows the rule, we won’t have to put that paien down. We don’t want to put you down. We—

Aaand here he came again, interrupting my train of thought. With his nose bent to the side, blood gushing from it, I’d thought he’d have learned. Nope. This attack was crazed wild motion like the first. He was fast, I’d give him that, but fast is useless when your ambition wildly exceeds your ability to aim and your victim can . . . hell . . . practically Sunday fucking stroll out of your target area. With this attack he managed to hit the opposite wall himself, no assistance called for.

This was a chore and a half. I had to face it. I wasn’t getting an iota of distraction here. It was down to business on his next try.

Back to the Vigil until then.

One rule. It seemed simple. It wasn’t.

I broke that fucking rule like it had never been broken.

But I’d had a good reason, and I’d do it again.

The Vigil hadn’t seen it that way and turned out to be aggressively armed with weapons, stolen paien artifacts, biology labs, and assassins than they’d been remotely upfront about when it came to the subject. For all the sharing and fucking caring they spouted, they had the type of Cold War arsenal they hadn’t hinted at wanting or needing. Pity it wasn’t as effective as they’d planned.

In the end, when it came to the world, humans would win. When it came to a throw down in NYC, the Vigil was wiped out except for my guess of two or three members: one a custom-made assassin with a stolen time traveling artifact.

They couldn’t fix their wholesale destruction in the present, but they could send their hypocritically fabricated, mutated hope, Project Lazarus, back. They could kill me, the younger me, before the Vigil had known of Caliban Leandros, before I’d known of them, before I could break that rule. Then they’d be reborn. They never would’ve died.

Aside from the assassin, the remaining one or two members would’ve been all that had been left of the last cell. And every cell had one of their goddamn psychics the Vigil had loved for their spying. They would’ve briefed the cell, before we’d wiped them out, that a paien friend of mine, with contacts and spies better than psychics on his payroll, had already discovered what the Vigil had stolen years ago. The psychic would’ve told the cell we knew what we’d need to stop Lazarus when he used the artifact. They had known we already had a twin to their stolen one.

That was the two pieces of information my friend’s contacts hadn’t found out, that the Vigil was aware we were equally equipped to their assassin and that any of the Vigil survived aside from that assassin. The Vigil had been closer to being Nazis than the shepherds they painted themselves, but they were loyal—fanatically loyal. The single or few left made one last ditch effort against us. A truck packed with ANFO—overkill, not that they’d cared. The ammonia and nitrate reek I’d smelled was the unmistakable sign of a tool popular when the monsters were human and homegrown. The one or two Vigil who’d survived—it had probably been two, to gather all the components necessary, pack them in barrels, load the truck as that shit sounded heavy—had planned to keep me from using my own borrowed artifact to following Lazarus when he used his. They had tried to catch me at the bar.

By driving their bomb on wheels into it.

Funny, wasn’t it? All that work and I was the only one they hadn’t caught.

Funny.

But if they could undo what had been done, so could I. I’d still stop the assassination of an eighteen-year-old me. That goal would stay the same, but I had to do so goddamn much more now. I had to also fix a world, my world. It was a small part of the whole, but all I wanted or needed. The rest of the world—I didn’t give a shit about, not anymore. If I couldn’t remake mine, if I failed, what was left could burn for all I cared. Hell, I’d start the fire myself.

Anyone have a match?

Or maybe a lighter.

“You have a lighter I could borrow, shithead?” I drawled, tired of waiting for the third attempt. Shit, he’d been playing possum. He might have a brain cell left that the drugs hadn’t eaten. Coming off the wall, quicker than before, the jagged steel was now whipping at my throat. The hand that held it was white knuckled with tension where it wasn’t encrusted with dirt, and it slashed with vicious force, but no skill. Too easy. I didn’t have to waste any effort on a fight this pathetic.

That was the trouble with what lurked in dirty, ugly alleys. Dirty, ugly assholes who will cut your throat for a dollar. Drugs aren’t easy to come by when you have no money. I might have money. If nothing else my jacket would go for ten.

I didn’t let my mind fixate about how this was holding me up. I needed to go, but I also needed to crush a poisonous scorpion under my heel. Dripping venom from its stinger, it hid in the trash and the dark. Deadly to anyone who wandered off the path, the single safe place as all fairy tales tell you. It wouldn’t take long and required little effort, handling the scorpion, I had to think of that, think of anything that wouldn’t have me throwing him to the side and running to save the people I knew, not strangers.

It would take minutes, less, to save those strangers and those minutes were nothing compared to the time I’d need to change everything back. I could spare it. Nik would want me to.

Shit. Shit. Okay, then, big brother. For you.

I scavenged in my thoughts for anything else to concentrate on besides abandoning wandering sheep to this murderer. As inefficient as this dick was at cutting throats, I had the time. What had I been dwelling on—during my first step into the alley? Before the burnt and bloody thoughts. The boring side of history, that’s what it had been. Dull, boring, cruel and unusual punishment. Ask any kid in school.

The generation of Saturday morning cartoons had it so much easier, the middle-aged bastards.

The shot heard ’round the world . . .

Was the beginning of the revolution. . . .

Take your rifle, take your gun. . . .

Knives hadn’t made that list. I didn’t know why. They were as good in the right situation. Good, well-made ones at least.

Mine was very good.

That’s what I thought as I changed mental paths with a quick and savage satisfaction. I grabbed a handful of greasy hair as I evaded the man’s lunge at me. It was as unexpectedly fast, if as unskilled as his knife-work. Desperate and fast go hand in hand sometimes. I yanked my attacker’s head back, and did what he’d tried to do to me, only more efficiently. I cut his throat with one slice, blood erupting to paint the dirty brick wall of the alley with vivid crimson. It was almost twilight here as it had been almost twilight there—eight years in the future.

When you’re killing someone, whether it’s self-defense as they tried to kill you first or you’re a jackass who tries to kill for the hope of five bucks in your wallet, twilight is a good time for it. Alleys are a good place. Anyone would be less likely to be seen. It was probably why this one had chosen it.

I’d slid behind him before using my knife as that was some small piece of history, for once, worth remembering. I’d learned it long ago and it remained useful. Stand in front of someone when you cut their throat and the force of the crimson carotid spray will cover you from face to chest. As much as you wipe, you never get it all off either, not until you hit the shower. It makes for a cannibal-fresh-from-an-all-you-can-eat-buffet look.

And it makes catching a taxi impossible.

The ma