Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel Read Online Free

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—fanaticallyloyal. 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 nomoney. 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