“And, yes, Cal, this is a special occasion. To friends. Value them.” He lifted his bottle. He had an oddly indecipherable glint in the mossy green of his gaze. His bottle was held stiffly as if the toast was almost ceremonial. “They go and they come.”
Nik’s fingers clenched around his bottle as his face went blank. He echoed slowly, “They go and they come. That’s what you said before. I remember you. You were at our house. You were the man with the flat tire.” As he said it, I remembered it too, in a barely there haze, but I remembered Goodfellow . . . no, Goodman he’d called himself, standing on our porch and no doubt looking absolutely identical to how he looked now. My memory wasn’t clear enough to see it, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know it.
“Yes, the first time we met—this time around. I’d always thought of myself as unforgettable but six years later you show up at my car lot, which was your idea by the way, Niko—I opened one at your suggestion, and neither of you remembered. But considering what happened after that with Jack’s apprentice, I cannot say I’m surprised that you did everything you could to forget that entire year altogether. Now, toast for the love of Priapus’s ever-upright phallus. This is the first time I’ve been able to tell you, in all your lives, without being beat over the head with a club or the jawbone of an ass or a wine amphorae for blasphemy against the gods. Leave it to Niko to be a Buddhist before Buddha himself. To be that for all his lives and not know it.”
Not life. Lives.
Numbly I clinked my bottle against theirs and watched Niko go from shaken to intrigued, then rueful in less than a second flat. “And I the Buddhist—in this life at least—never caught on.”
My brother believed in life after death, many lives. I believed in nothing. It looked like I might be wrong.
“What the hell are you saying? You knew us? You’ve always known us? That we were your friends, comrades in arms, buddies, whatever, reincarnated over and over throughout history? That we knew you and hung out with you on purpose God knows how many times? Reincarnation I’ll buy. Maybe. But choosing to spend all of history listening to your egomaniacal ass sounds more like Hell to me.” I grinned at Robin because at the moment he appeared as if he could really use it. After the angels, telling us another truth was bound to be nerve-wracking. He couldn’t know how we’d take it.
On the whole, I thought we were damn lucky.
Life after life? I had no religious beliefs or philosophies, but if Niko wanted to drag me behind him through reincarnation after reincarnation, I did owe him, didn’t I? In this life and most likely every other one.
“Yes, because you’ve been such a delightful companion throughout the ages. Of the six hundred and seventy-eight times I’ve nearly been killed, six hundred at minimum have been your fault.” He turned to Niko to say one word, one name actually, “Achilles.”
Niko, the alcohol shall not profane my holy temple having gone out the window with Boris and now this, Niko, took another quick swallow before saying with disbelief, “Last month, when my father was here”—late father, for which I happily took full credit—“and you told him that you were there when Achilles cut his hair to mourn his cousin Patroclus, you were actually saying I was Achilles?”
“Simply because of how I, and even Cal, whose entire knowledge of history could be collected in a comic book, compare you to Achilles on a monthly basis? Oh, and the legend in your clan that your blond hair and exceptional genetic tendency toward lethality in a fight comes from a descendant of Achilles playing hide the loukaniko with a winsome Rom maiden when your clan was in Greece a few centuries ago?” Robin snapped, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his free hand. “Zeus’s golden shower, you’re as thick as your brother. Of course you were Achilles.”
“And I’m guessing I was the dead guy, Patroclus,” I muttered. “Great. Just my luck.” I had a feeling that history did love to repeat itself. But at the same time . . . once I’d been human. Not Auphe, not monster. I’d been human. That was worth knowing.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword. That little Jewish fellow with the big feet knew what he was talking about there. The two of you were mortal and warriors—always. Soldiers, mercenaries, fighters of all stripe, with nothing save a vulnerable human body to keep you alive. The combination makes for short life spans.” This time he finished the bottle rather than face us. “And shorter friendships.”