Blackout

13

The penthouse party was the same as all penthouse parties—this being my second, which made me an expert. It was fancy; everyone was rich and snooty; it had great views of the Manhattan skyline; there was food … absolutely fantastic food. I’d taken over a platter of bacon, mushroom, and crab bits I couldn’t begin to pronounce but could eat by the bucketful, and I was hoarding the platter for myself.

“Does Niko know you’re almost you again?”

“Can you picture the invisible cross he’s dragging around on his back,” I asked, “hear the splish-splash of Pontius Pilate lathering up with hand sanitizer?”

“Yes.”

“That’d be a no then,” I snorted.

“Blasphemy,” Ishiah muttered under his breath at my exchange with Robin as a feather wafted out of nowhere to land in Goodfellow’s wineglass.

“I’m beginning to have serious doubts about this nonangel crap you peris are spouting.” Other than that comment, I went back to concentrating on the room. Ammut was here. I had the musty corpse taste of her in the back of my throat, under the bacon, but the entire room reeked of Wolves, vamps, other supers who could pass for human, and humans themselves soaked in perfume or cologne.

That was what Delilah had meant when she’d said I didn’t need to wear my cologne. I had that spray Robin had given me last year to cover up my Auphe smell from Wolf noses when I’d meet to hook up with Delilah. I hadn’t used it in a long time now. When she’d smelled me in that stairwell at her attempted massacre of our clients, she’d been smelling the mostly human me; the Auphe part of me had been on vacation—gone fishing, buried, or busy.

My best guess was the Auphe in the rest of my genes had become more or less dormant while the ones in the memory portion of my brain—if Niko had been there, he would’ve provided the medical word for that—had become hyperactive trying to repair the venom damage. All my Auphe channeled its energy to that one area. For a while, I was more human than I’d ever been in my entire life.

Or would ever be again.

The Auphe immune system wasn’t like a human one, it was far more efficient and goal-oriented, or there had been many things over my life that I wouldn’t have survived. Those were thoughts for other times though. For now, I was sticking with the original problem—Ammut and her arachnid posse.

Above the penthouse was the rooftop terrace, which was essential. Half the guests were human and taking out monsters was a private thing unless we wanted a shitload of humans convinced they’d been slipped some illegal hallucinogenic. Or we’d have a shitload of dead humans because the Wolves and vamps were certain to make sure the humans wouldn’t be spreading the news of the supernatural—who were natural and not super at all. Either way, shit was involved and it was far too much trouble. That was why we had the terrace… . It was prime cage-fighting territory, minus the cage, with the addition of the possibility of falling to a splattery death on the sidewalk far below.

Eh. Details.

Speaking of Wolves and vamps, we were quickly surrounded by them. One Wolf made a move on my platter of bacon goodies. I growled. He snapped, and I snapped back. He was in completely human form, a high breed—no All Wolf for him—and I looked as human as anyone else, but no matter how human we both looked, snapping at each other like hungry bears over a platter of hors d’oeuvres drew a bit of attention.

“Stop it. Be good. No treats for you tonight,” Goodfellow hissed at the two of us. The Wolf had brown hair pulled back into a short ponytail and ice blue eyes. Average, ordinary, if not for the eyes. If you saw past the unusually pale eyes and smelled what lay beneath, then you’d know much more. He was an Alpha, a big and bad one. “We are wolves amidst the sheep, but the sheep rule this world now. Don’t forget it,” the puck warned.

The vamps, including Promise, who was standing with Niko, looked resigned at the food-aggressive behavior as they gathered around us. Puppies, always piddling on the carpet, always making a mess, always wanting attention. In the spirit of unity, I let the Wolf take a handful off my platter. “Yeah, like you fang manglers never fought over food … while it was still kicking and screaming,” I said with scorn to the other vamps around us. At least the Wolves were honest about it. You’d think the vamps never ordered their steak rare, much less had eaten a person in the old days. “All the dental bonding and porcelain veneers in the world can’t cover up how you used to get your food in the old days.”

Niko lost all expression, not that he usually had much to lose. He knew something was up, which meant he also knew my Nepenthe venom blood levels were down. But there was no chocolate-mint toothpaste here and that meant my brother was up the creek without a toothbrush, a spider, or a hope. I grinned at him, then handed off the platter to my new Wolf friend and opened my Armani-Brioni some kind of hyperexpensive tux jacket to reveal the black T-shirt beneath: IF BEING A DICK IS WRONG … I KNOW I’M NOT RIGHT.

The Wolf growled again when he caught sight of it. “Lighten up, Fido,” I said. “I gave you some Snausages, so shut your Alpo-hole.”

“Ammut is here,” Niko added, stepping forward with a look for everyone except me. “We will kill her and you will pay us the other portion of our fee. If you feel this is a problem, take it out of the Lupa’s earnings. They’re responsible for at least half of this mess.” Not that they were, but if they were going to claim to be, then why not make them cough up the price? “If you don’t exert some domination soon, they’ll be the only ones of you left to make any messes at all.”

Promise had those pristine, perfectly manicured violet nails of hers through the tux of what looked like the lead vampire, a small, unassuming bald man with the blackest, most empty eyes I’d seen. I think her nails went through skin and flesh as well, because there was a pained flicker at the corner of his mouth. “We are civilized now,” she said in a voice that was silk over titanium. “We cooperate with others. We pay our debts. We are beings of reason, not of bloodlust. Do not make me remind each and every one of you why I was the sole vampire to survive the Black Death without being burned alive. Show the Leandros brothers and their companions the respect they are due and perhaps no more of us need perish.” She stepped back, already with a small strip of silver gray cloth to wipe the blood from her nails. She tucked it into the bald vampire’s jacket. “I take blood from no one now. Not even the likes of you.”

A hand grabbed my arm and yanked me into motion. “Let’s do a circuit of the room and see if you’re any closer to finding Ammut’s scent than while standing about stuffing your face with all the work ethic of a minimum-wage slushie operator,” Niko ordered.

“Do you know how hard it is to make the perfect slush—” I didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence. It was for the best.

“You’re starting to remember, aren’t you?” he demanded in an undertone. “What you did to Wahanket. The cats. Resorting to violence over bacon, a bigger giveaway than all the others. It’s coming back.”

I kept my eyes focused on every woman we passed. Ammut was an Egyptian legend, but with those bronze scales and the myth of a lion’s mane, I had her pinned as a blonde. “Yep. Just like you said it would. You said it would wear off and you were right.” The grip on my arm tightened. It felt like the grasp of denial at odds with one of hope, and the double-strength grasp was beginning to hurt.

How did I read emotions from a grip, from the clench of bone, and the ripple of muscle? I’d been hit a damn lot in this job. You picked things up. I could close my eyes and tell you what kind of monster had punched me in the face and if it was because he wanted to eat me, kill me for fun, or was showing off for his girlfriend. I’d been educated in the ways. “I know … No, I remember how much you love being right,” I said, but not rubbing it in too much. After all, he was always right—almost. He’d find out soon enough that this “almost” was one goddamn big one he might never live down. “I also know if you don’t ease up, I won’t be able to use this arm to shoot anything, much less an Egyptian fake goddess. And, most important of all, bacon is worth fighting over.”

He released me. “I suppose I didn’t expect that it would happen this … quickly. I thought that flash with Delilah at the brownstone was a fluke.”

“Right now, it doesn’t much matter. When I’m all the way back, we’ll have a party. Celebrate my homecoming and Ammut’s going. Oh shit, there she is.” I’d been wrong. She did appear Egyptian and she was a goddess. By one of the long stretches of windows, she stood with a champagne glass in hand. She was alone, a long fall of black hair rippling in waves to the middle of her back. Her skin was dark, but only a shade darker than Niko’s, her lips full and painted a dark red-bronze, and her eyes as black as her hair. Her dress was familiar; green-andgold scales that molded her from a high neck to an inch or so above the floor. She knew it was a trap—anyone with one brain cell would—but she was confident that we would fail and she’d scarf us up the same as those bacon appetizers. I couldn’t blame her. We hadn’t been much of a challenge earlier, and bacon … Damn, it was bacon. How could you not risk a little to get a pound of that for breakfast?

She saw us. She could’ve seen us from the moment we walked in. If it was a trap, it paid to get there first. Saluting us both with the glass, she sipped the champagne and wrinkled a slightly aquiline nose at the bubbles. That quickly the goddess disappeared and something much harder to resist appeared in her place. She took another small swallow and laughed. I could feel the sensation of the carbonation tickling my own nose. I wanted to laugh with her. I could now smell her flower-honey-cinnamon scent over the scent of anyone or anything else. She was your cute baby cousin, if you had one, going to her first school dance, and you’d do anything to make her happy. Get her a limo. Not beat up her loser rocker boyfriend. Take a hundred pictures like a huge-ass dork.

Tilting her head slightly, she smiled directly at us both, bent her fingers in the tiniest of waves, and it became ten times worse.

“Okay, is she fucking adorable or is it just me?” And “adorable”—not a word I’d ever used before, but one I was aware (just barely) existed—was dead-on. She was … had been hot as hell, gorgeous as they came, but without the sexual hunger that quality brought out. Beloved baby cousin was gone and now we had a kitten, a soft bunny … er … rabbit, a puppy with sweet-smelling milk breath. She was all that, the tactile and emotional draw of hundreds of them, and you wanted to go pat her on the head, tickle her tummy, and talk, goddamn truth, baby talk to her.

How the hell do you fight an adorable goddamn monster?

Come on, Auphe, kick in. You, the first killers on Earth, probably wore real, live rabbits on your feet for bunny slippers. If ever I needed some good old murderous rage, now was the time. And here it came, here it came, here it … Shit.

I had nothing.

I groaned. “We are so dead.”

A sex thing, that I could handle. We’d all run across succubi before. I’d slept with a sexual psychotic. Niko’s girlfriend would be very disappointed in him if he were susceptible … in a way that might lose him his dick altogether. Goodfellow was a sexual predator of sorts. If it was legal, he would take it down or had in the past. Kink of the Jungle. There wasn’t a creature alive that could out-sex-vibe him. All of us were inoculated to a certain degree against that approach. But this one?

Screwed. Screwed, screwed, screwed.

“I didn’t know you knew the word ‘adorable,’ ” Niko said as this time I was the one to grab his arm.

“Shut up. I want to go rub her stomach and let her chew on my fingers. I want a piece of yarn for her to play with. I want to get her some milk,” I said, my grip on him getting tighter with desperation. “Jesus, isn’t she getting to you?”

“Some. But I’ve done all those things before.” There was a pause, but I knew it was coming. Sure as shit, I knew it was. “With you. You know, when I changed your diaper and dusted on the baby powder. I didn’t want you getting a rash on your tiny little—”

“Say it and I’ll shoot you right here, right now.” I glared and let go of his arm, but the desire to throw myself into a pile of life-energy-sucking kittens had decreased. “Better yet, let’s go shoot her instead.” Of course, she was gone by then, but she left a scent trail that had me looking down with every step to make certain I wasn’t squashing a puppy. It was headed where we’d wanted her, the rooftop terrace. It was a good choice for her as well. If she was exposed down here, the vampires and Wolves would very easily decide twenty or thirty dead humans were worth killing Ammut, and there were enough of our clients here to do that—to do both. “Should we get the others?”

Niko shook his head. “Goodfellow might be all right, but he does love that murderous bald cat of his. Ishiah? I have no idea. And Promise only just lost her own daughter. I think that opens her up to maternal feelings that could be turned back on us.”

We were at the stairwell, locked at our request to keep the civilians out of the combat zone. It wasn’t locked any longer. “And you and me?” I asked.

“Do you have a deep, hidden desire to rub my stomach?” he countered with lifted eyebrows.

“Okay. Great job, Nik. Thanks. I’m feeling as pissed off and bloodthirsty as it possibly gets. Let’s get this cuddly kitten bitch before I try to beat you to death with a Jersey Costco-sized container of baby powder.” I took the stairs two at a time, the Eagle out. He was on my heels, this time with nothing to say about powder, diapers, or baby Cal’s diaper-rash-ridden ass.

We reached the roof in seconds and slammed the door behind us, blocking it with a heavy wood lounge chair jammed under the handle. That took care of the civilians, but it wouldn’t stop anyone discovering we were missing and wanting to rush up to help.

Civilians. This laugh was nasty and gleeful. Sheep. Bleating prey. Walking leeches. Foolish tricksters. Pigeons of a powerless god. All are nothing.

Now you show up, I thought with cranky irritation. Shadow-time is back, got it? We need to get our shit together. All our shit, regardless of how dark. This situation is going to call for it. Or do you want to go out, the last Auphe on the planet, while fetching this bitch a bowl of goddamn milk?

I didn’t get an answer. I did get a question, though.

“Where are your brothers and sisters?”

The voice came from everywhere … as a goddess’s voice would. Gone were the happy and fluffy. She had us where she wanted us and she had friends far more effective than kittens and puppies. She had her spiders. There were fifteen or twenty; they were climbing over the edge of the roof so quickly it was hard to count them all… . They were beside us, in front of us, over the top of the stairwell door behind us. I waited until three were on the edge and about to jump when I shot them with three silenced rounds in the midst of their daisy yellow eyes. For all my life, five minutes the way we were going, I’d forever link spiders and daisies—bright, sun-seeking daisies that opened their petals to the light to reveal a poisonous black predator hiding within.

“I’m his brother. If you are that interested, you should be talking to me.”

Niko had cut me off before I could ask her what she meant. It was one of the few memories I was still lacking. Niko was my only family, my only brother, and her obsession with me having more was bizarre. It made me wonder … Was she in New York by chance and appetite, or was she here for me and everything else was collateral damage? What did she want from me? Besides what Wahanket had wanted?

“You are hardly worth my interest. I want his true family. I want the whispers and the rumors made flesh. Made real. As they must be. If there is this one, how can there not be others?”

Practice makes perfect, baby boy, baby boy.

More spiders swarmed over and landed on the terrace, but I didn’t shoot them. My gun was up, finger on the trigger, but … fuck … she was right. If there was me, how could there not be more? When Wahanket had told me I was half Auphe, I’d known I was an experiment. Felt it in my gut. I was a freak of monster science, but how many brand-new experiments turn out right the very first time? Or the second? Or the twentieth?

None.

Here you have brothers and sisters.

Worthless failures.

Toys for you, baby boy, baby boy.

The saw grass, the moon white crocodile. Nevah’s Landing. It hadn’t been a sanctuary. It had been an invitation to a fucking family reunion. I could see it—the green, the white, the red … the silver flash of metal.

“Nik, there’s a crocodile out back.” Like in the book … like Peter Pan.

Alligators you could live with. Other things you couldn’t. When I was seven, I’d heard a story about a sanctuary for lost children and then I’d learned there was no such thing. I’d forgotten both, and I couldn’t blame that on any spider bite.

“Cal!”

The small patch of Nevah’s Landing evaporated from the night and I could see the roof again. I couldn’t have been out of it any more than a few seconds, but sometimes only seconds are needed. Now there were at least thirty Nepenthe spiders, black blots of shadow to the casual eye, that had crawled up the side of the building and jumped over the edge of the roof. Advertised as spacious, the terrace wasn’t cutting it for that many giant arachnids. Everywhere was a clacking mandible; everywhere was the scuttle of their legs. There was no place you could turn and not see six alien eyes staring back at you. After this experience and Spider-Man 3, if I ever saw Tobey Maguire, I was going to punch him in the face.

They were on the chairs, crushing the small tables, spilling over one another and, though I turned to aim at the ones behind me, they ignored me. They all teemed in one direction—toward Niko on the other side of the terrace. I’d seen my brother fight nearly every monster alive, and I’d never failed to be awed. I was a hybrid of a creature that every other creature in history had feared, loathed, lived in terror of, and I could kill easily, too easily, but there wouldn’t ever be a day in my life I’d have anything on Nik in sheer skill. But sometimes all the skill in the world wasn’t enough. This many of them—Niko was only human. The most skilled human I’d ever seen at fighting, but at the end of the day … human. Sometimes you needed something that had less in common with unadulterated ability and more about having a soul you could pack away at a moment’s notice.

Souls … inconvenient scraps of nothing.

The spiders had Niko backing up, but he was taking down every single one within reach and some that weren’t. I lunged forward, shooting them from behind, which wasn’t the best location for putting a bullet in a spider. Blowing huge ragged holes in their abdomen to leak out was good, messy, but ineffective in the short term. A fork in the head, my favorite, worked great but shooting from behind while gory wasn’t good for killing them. For that I needed a head shot, but not one of the sons of bitches would turn around. Intent on Niko, I could pop them like party balloons and they didn’t care.

Fine. I would see exactly how much they didn’t care. I waded into them, a Lovecraftian version of a herd of Shetland ponies. All we needed was Cthulhu singing “Rawhide.” I moved up beside one spider and blew its brains all over the one next to it, climbed the dead one, and took out its buddy before it had even managed to get the brain goop out of its eyes well enough to see. Those daisy, sunshine eyes. I moved on to the next one. It was beginning to get how things were going and was starting to turn. “It’s going to be a bright, bright, bright sunshiny day, Shelob,” I said with enthusiastic dark cheer. “Too bad you won’t be here to see it.” Another round, another spider brain turned to pudding.

Niko was swinging his katana with one hand, his tanto with another, and if the son of a bitch would just let me get a machine gun or carry those convenient grenades to parties full of people, I’d have kicked his ass for not using them. One blade sliced through the head of the spider closest to him, bisecting it neatly. The other shorter blade he used to nail a jumping spider in midair. The silver, sheened with green-gray slime, exited the top of its head, but the mandibles thrashed on in the death throes and Niko swiftly flung the spider off his weapon. One bite had sent me to la-la land. One bite would kill him.

That was not fucking happening.

I moved to the next poisonous piece of shit, put it down, and was about to do the same to the next, but it was too late. Niko had tried to get around them, to fight back to back. We did that when the attackers were this many, but there wasn’t enough time and too many had never been this many. The closest ones to him were rearing on their back four legs to block the most of any escape route that they could—not that there was one. They had a plan and a purpose. Their goddess couldn’t kill me and get what she wanted, information I didn’t have, not yet. It was coming. Close … so close, seconds away, but not yet. And she wanted that more than anything, because what could be better than eating a half-breed Auphe? Having a literal buffet of them. She hadn’t tried to kill me in the canal, only take me … to where she could ask and I could answer.

Niko continued to take out the spiders right and left, his sword slinging spider blood in all directions as I continued to move toward him, even though we both knew it wouldn’t be enough. Plastered in sweat, covered in their blood, he couldn’t climb over them when they stood more than seven feet tall, but he could bury his blade in their vulnerable underbelly. It didn’t help. As each one fell dead, two more stretched high in its place, upper legs ending in curved claws striking. And when they died, the same happened again. Death meant nothing to them. They had only cared about one direction, one thing—getting him to take two steps backward. Niko knew it and I knew it, the same as he knew to watch his back if I wasn’t in a position to do it. He knew when he was being herded, but options could sometimes be limited. Having thirty Great Dane-sized spiders in your face was one of those occasions. It was only two steps, and as many bullets as I fired, as quickly as I tore my way through them, those two steps happened. And they were enough to get him within reach of Ammut.

She’d been behind an arched wooden covering that protected a couch and table with small candles lit in glass bowls. Following that, she was on top of the covering and her tail was wrapped tightly around Niko’s upper chest and throat. I’d forgotten her speed from the brownstone. When something can move that fast, you can’t remember it, not in accurate detail. How can you remember what you can’t see?

Snakes were swift and she was all snake again. She lay sinuously on the wood, her claws scoring it. Bronze and green, copper and gold, with that flower smell so strong it could’ve come from a hundred funeral homes. It was cloying and thick, never quite covering the ripeness of decay. She was beautiful still, in the way of nature if not woman, but I could smell what she really was. It didn’t matter. She could’ve smelled as beautiful underneath it all as she appeared.

Nothing mattered—not a goddamn thing in the world except that she had my brother.

He swung his katana, only to have it bounce off the scales, not doing any more damage than my bullets in the brownstone basement had. He couldn’t turn to strike at her face or eyes as the coils tightened around him, holding him in place. But this was Niko. He didn’t need to see his target; he needed only to know where it was. He reversed the grip on each of his blades and jabbed them backward and up. It was useless. I never thought I’d see anything faster than my brother. I was wrong. She avoided every blow with ease, her gold eyes strobing because her head moved so quickly. But Nik kept striking behind at Ammut’s face and then finally at those coils around him. Metal bounced off its equal. Ammut was copper and bronze, not only the appearance of it. Metal scales met the metal of his sword, and the faintest of sparks was the sole effect.

Niko didn’t give up, though. He didn’t know how to; he never had. He kept fighting because he was who he was, all the while turning more and more blue in the candlelight that was left from those he hadn’t knocked over in his struggle. Too quick, that color blue. She wasn’t going to asphyxiate him. She was going to break his neck—my brother’s neck. She wasn’t going to bother to take the time to suck out his life force. That wasn’t what she wanted. She was impatient and tired of waiting for me to give her what she did want. She was going to kill him and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it. I’d shot her before. It didn’t work. What the fuck, I tried again. It was the same as Nik’s attempt. I couldn’t hit her eyes. Her head weaved so fast, I saw only the afterimage of it. After she broke his neck, then broke me only in a different way, she no doubt thought, she’d have more time to pry what she wanted from my lost memories.

Only she didn’t know they were lost. Because of that she was going to kill Nik and I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t, not with a gun or a knife—not with any weapon I had.

She is nothing. A worm beneath your heel. A sheep with scales instead of wool. She is not like you. There is nothing like you. You need no weapon.

You were born a weapon.

Niko’s eyes rolled back. One hand let loose of his tanto. His other hand loosened on his katana. To drop his katana, Niko would have to be dead.

My brother …

Dead.

I thought I’d lost it, lost consciousness, lost my brother, died myself wrapped in Ammut as it all went black—everything. There wasn’t a sole Manhattan light, not a flicker of a candle or the orange sky of nighttime NYC. There was only the dark … because I knew now. I was at home. The dark was me. I told myself stories there—every story about myself that I knew. Some were gone forever; only stories of stories, and that was how it had to be. Some stories weren’t nice and some were chaotic jumbles of terror and malice. Some were of Niko and me living short lives that seemed long, of the things we’d done—good and bad. I told myself about the killing, when it was necessary, when it wasn’t, and how you couldn’t always be perfect. Best of all, I spun the tale of why I’d been made … what the Auphe had needed … what I could do, what they had passed on to me. I told myself about the traveling, how I could slash a hole in the ether of the world anytime I wanted. Gates that were doorways to anywhere.

I liked that.

That was useful.

The first to walk the earth, and the earth would let us do anything, include rip screaming tears in it, if we would only walk through the gates and leave. If the earth hoped, if it prayed, that was what it prayed for—in vain, because we never left for good.

Blackness flickered; the blackbird’s wing that had taught me about death fluttered across my vision and then was gone. I could see. I could feel. And I could remember everything. Not the seventy-five percent I’d walked in with, but one hundred percent prime-grade Cal. I could remember me—all of me, human and Auphe. I could remember what I’d told myself in the dark:

The thing I was.

The things I’d done.

The things I might do.

I was okay with that—better than okay. There was pain. I’d expected it. I’d had it after my first encounter with Wahanket, my first coming back, the first of the shadows, then again at the brownstone. It was hot and white—my soul, if I had one, giving up the ghost or sinking down to bide its time, buried in a shallow grave. My human genes bowed down before the Auphe ones as they always had before. I muscled through the burning ache of it and hung on to that moment where everything felt right. Nothing felt more right than this. Sad, in a way, but it was the way things were meant to be. Some would say I was giving up something I might not get a chance at again. I said I was getting something back—me. The real me. All of me.

He slipped away, the Cal I could’ve been, but never would’ve been—thanks to memories. Yeah, maybe. But mostly thanks to genes that had been too busy fighting off the spider venom to make themselves known. That was why Delilah hadn’t scented Auphe the first time. In body I’d still been part Auphe, but faded—faded to practically nothing because every capable working Auphe gene had been concentrating on feeding its power to those in the part of my brain that could get me back to normal—my normal. During that time, while Auphe genes had been reknitting old memories, I’d been human, as close to human as I ever could be, with human emotions, human decisions, human instincts.

I hadn’t known. My entire life—I’d never known how far away from that I was. How far away I’d always been. I hadn’t known that human was only a word, and that never had that word been for me.

The time we’d spent looking for Ammut, looking for the monster, I’d been the monster all along.

Me.

What we’d been chasing was nothing compared to what lived inside of me—what was me. With every job we did, every case we took on, every mystery we tried to untangle, I’d been the real monster and we’d all pretended we didn’t know it. I’d been half right a week ago. A killer had woken up on that South Carolina beach. A killer and a monster; that was who I was, and it was never going to change.

So what?

I gave a mental shrug, for once in agreement with that particular inner voice. After all, this voice was me. The other one had been a soul I barely had fighting for an existence in a body that simply wasn’t meant to support one. Again …

So what?

If you couldn’t change it, you used it; otherwise, it wouldn’t be long before it used you. That was why I’d had Niko get the Aramaic tattoo—to understand what I did; not to regret what he had done. Brothers before souls. Bros before souls. Although if I said it like that, he’d kick my ass, and so what if it didn’t actually rhyme? Close enough. It got the point across. Brothers before souls. I’d made the decision to be the brother Niko truly wanted—even if he could’nt admit to himself that a human Cal and an Auphe Cal couldn’t be one and the same. Now I saw as I’d seen before that he needed that same brother, the old Cal—the real one, but not for the reason he thought. Not for a shared past. Not for a lost familiarity.

Not for what I could do.

But for what I would do.

Her mistake was letting me so close, because she wanted me. No matter what you wanted, you should never let someone like me get close. No matter what you wanted, you should never let something like me be on the same fucking planet.

“Let him go,” I said, calm and sure. And I was sure … of precisely what she wanted. “Let him go and you can have me. Me and my brothers and sisters.”

“Yes? You care so much for him? You’d give up yourself and your siblings?” She was suspicious, but she also wanted this, maybe more than anything in her snaky little life. An Auphe. To feed on an Auphe; no one would claim that. To feed on many of them—that would make her the goddess she claimed.

“Cleopatra, I don’t give a rat’s ass about anything else. Let him go and it’s all yours.” One of the best things about having an Auphe as a father and a sociopath as a mother was that lying was by far easier than telling the truth. Nik hadn’t learned that. He was too damn good, and I wasn’t letting that kind of good pass from this world. I’d take down the world first and anything else that got in my way. “I’ll even let you have a taste first before I tell you about the rest of the family.”

That was too much temptation. Temptation and greed make you stupid, and honestly she hadn’t seen me be much of a threat so far, except as an exterminator. And, hard as it was to admit, she was right. Then. Now was a different story. The coils around Niko’s chest and neck loosened. His neck wasn’t broken, and I could hear the ragged breath he pulled in. He fell to his knees, barely conscious, but he still had that sword in his hand. An entire army of samurai was nothing compared to him.

Ammut slithered down from the protective wooden covering and balanced in front of me. One hand rested on top of Niko’s bowed head as he struggled to breathe. “I do not have to break his neck to take his life. I can do the second as easily and just as swiftly.”

“I’ll behave,” I promised. I wanted to grin. Goddamn, I wanted to, but I was good and lived by the lessons both my parents had taught me—human and monster. Lie, steal, slaughter, and never let them see it coming … until it’s too late.

I dropped the Eagle. Why did I think I needed a gun? As I’d told myself, I was a weapon—one more effective than any automatic. I put my hand against her chest, the scales a razor-sharp scrape under my palm. “Let him go,” I repeated. “Him for me. That’s the only way you’re going to get what you want. What you’ve wanted since you came here, Auphe to devour. Vampires and Wolves, they have to get boring after a while, centuries of fur and fang. But me … and my brothers and sisters. There’s nothing like us. You know that. You came here for that, didn’t you? Not all the others, but for me—for me and my brothers and sisters?” I knew it. Everywhere we’d gone, she’d left messages for me I hadn’t understood … until now.

Give them to me. Where are your brothers and sisters?

Givegivegive.

And I was. I was going to give her what she wanted. It was her bad luck that she didn’t know I was more poisonous than any Nepenthe spider.

“I can tell you where they are, the rest of us half-breeds, and me? I’m right here.” I felt the strange suction where my flesh touched hers as she drew a little of me … of my life out. It was barely a mouthful and I had a lot of life to give. She was welcome to it. “I know you can feel me. I know you can taste the Auphe in me, can’t you?”

“Yes.” The gold eyes, wild and striking in their way, closed. Ecstatic yet almost hesitant. That answered that question. She’d never sampled an Auphe in the flesh, not before me. She was intoxicated instantly. Some couldn’t handle their liquor; some couldn’t handle their life force. Too bad for her. Someone’s eyes were bigger than their stomach. “Dark,” she murmured. “Infinite in its rage, hate, hunger, and other desires. Desires the same as my own.”

Not hardly. Her desires were a Santa wish list compared to mine.

“I’m glad you like it. Consider that one taste a freebie.” I opened a gate around my hand, tarnished gray and silver, and shoved it through her chest. Her scaled flesh melted away, gone forever, beneath my fingers until I touched what passed for her heart. I could feel the serpent-slow beat of it against my skin. She couldn’t feed through a gate. Nothing could breach a gate unless I wanted it to. The gates,the doors, they belonged to me and only me.

“Can you still feel me?” I tightened my fingers. “How about now? Can you feel me now, Goddess? You murdering bitch.” The eyes were open again and they weren’t so beautiful any longer. “Let Niko go or we’ll see how you manage to tie on the lobster bib and chow down on anything in the future without your fucking heart.”

Ishiah had told the truth in the bar when I’d asked the question.

I was a bad guy, when I needed to be, which made me the right guy for the job.

The fury behind those eyes, in the fast and ominous chittering of all the spiders that surrounded us, didn’t matter. That the bronze and green coils unwrapped themselves from around Niko’s neck, setting him free, was the only thing that did. He dropped to the concrete on his side, unmoving. In the yellow illumination of the rooftop lights I could see the gray touch, the ashes of mortality in the color of his skin. It would fade as his breathing returned to normal. His color would come back; it was coming back. He was all right. Safe. That was the only way it could be.

A good guy or a bad one, a monster or a man, whichever, I fucking loved my brother.

A soul I could do without. I couldn’t do without Niko. When it came to options, there I had none. I didn’t want any. And when someone messed with him, hurt him, especially because of me … goddamn what a big mistake they’d made—one they would regret as long as they lived.

Yeah … That wouldn’t be too fucking long, now would it?

“Release me.” Her heart was beating faster beneath my fingers now. She was a predator, but all predators had someone higher than them on the food chain. Something bigger. Something badder. They all had to answer to someone. Today her someone was me. “I did as you said. Release me. Now!” The goddess voice was back. Ammut, Eater of Hearts, Devourer of Souls. Hear my voice and obey. Bow and obey. The hypnotic flower aroma was back too, everywhere, thicker than ever as it soaked every molecule of air, but it wasn’t helping her now. Fool me once… .

There was no second part to that saying in the life I lived.

I cocked my head, as if considering the request. “Why? I didn’t say I would. I only said what I’d do if you didn’t do what I told you. And in any case, whatever I said, it wouldn’t make a difference. Unlike you, I am a monster. I was born to lie and kill. You, pathetic fucking monster wannabe, you were born to die.” I ripped out her heart, black and gold, and threw it down. Ammut, Eater of Hearts. We would see how she did without one of her own and a huge, gaping hole in her chest. Then, with the gate still glowing gray around my hand, I took her brain. Sometimes the heart wasn’t enough. The heart and the brain together always were.

“Wannabe to never was. So long, Queen of the Nile,” I said flatly.

She fell, a snake whose back was broken on a country road by a careless driver. As she fell, so did the spiders. I hadn’t planned on that. I was about to grab Niko and go through a larger gate. To where? Who cared? Out of here was the important thing. But it wasn’t necessary. The remainder of the thirty or so spiders shivered, legs flailing, before they flipped onto their backs into full-blown convulsions and finally collapsed—turning gray and still. They were now the husks Ammut had made of her victims. She’d shared her stolen life force to keep them alive … likely from the days of pyramids and pharaohs when Nepenthe spiders were common in the desert. Now they were nothing but long-dead bugs ready to be swept off the windshield.

That was the way some days went—a bitch of one if you were a spider.

A cold February wind blew by and the spiders disintegrated into heaps of gray dust—bad day for spiders; fantastic fucking day for me and the janitors. Ammut was slowly dissolving into an oil slick of gold and black. Profound age made for a great cleanup. The gold mixing with the night color—it was the sun being swallowed by a permanent eclipse. It was beautiful, it was a cataclysm, and then it was only a memory.

I had many of those now.

The irony of the entire thing was that she hadn’t been much of a monster at all; we’d faced much worse. Not to mention the only reason she’d come here was for me. I hope the replacement council never found out about that. If I’d been at full capacity—had been myself—we’d have gotten her at the brownstone and been at home watching TV, eating pizza, and not wearing uncomfortable James Bond cast-off tuxes. I crouched next to Niko and smacked his face lightly, then more firmly. He was nearly back to his normal olive color, although the bruising around his neck was going to be nasty. “That stings,” he grumbled, his voice hoarse and his eyes still shut.

“Yeah, I’m crying for you on the inside. I swear. Open up those baby grays, Cyrano. I did all the work. At least you could live through it.”

He did live. He opened his eyes too, rolling slowly and carefully onto his back. “That’s the second time you’ve called me Cyrano.” His gaze shifted to the ash mound of what had been the spiders and to the puddle of Ammut. “You killed them. You killed all of them.” I couldn’t take credit for the spiders, but, then again, why not? It had been a weird week. I’d take all the credit I could get.

I reached down under Niko’s neck and back to pull his braid free, laid it on his chest, and gave it a pat. “No need to cut your hair. I’m back. All of me. I’ve been on my way back for a while.” I shook my head and snorted. “Nepenthe venom in the toothpaste, Nik? Really? As if I wouldn’t notice that and you becoming Hans the Hygiene King?” I slid a hand behind his back and eased him up to a more or less sitting position. “It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. Not in the end. My Auphe immune system would’ve fought off the full dose of venom the Nepenthe spider gave me in Central Park.” Not Goodfellow’s lie about a half dose. Before I gated to Nevah’s Landing, I’d gotten a full dose of venom all right. No doubt. But an Auphe immune system had no peer. Had I been full Auphe, the bite might not have affected me at all.

“It would’ve eventually fought off your minty-fresh version too. Humans build up a tolerance to drugs. Auphe ride over them hell-bent-for-leather.” I tugged his braid, for the first time since I’d disappeared. I didn’t know if he missed that, but I’d missed doing it. I’d been doing it as long as he’d had one. “I was coming back, sooner or later, and no one, not even you, could stop that.”

“You were happy,” he said. He was ashamed for drugging me behind my back, but stubborn too. He wasn’t backing down an inch on doing something he’d thought he didn’t have in him. Deception aimed at his brother. “Cal, damn it, you were happy.” He didn’t bring up whether he had been or not. Knowing him, he didn’t even think about it. Committing a level of deceit that went against everything he was, that had been for me, not for him.

But my Auphe genes had made all that trickery unnecessary. They’d fixed me up, making me right again. Despite what Niko thought about my happiness or what a sliver of my own subconscious tried to tell me about monsters, it was only a matter of perspective. Happiness was an emotion invented by a greeting card company to sell pink bears and shiny balloons. But duty and family had existed since the dawn of time—human time at least.

To thine own self be true. Someone old, smart, and wordy had said that … and, yes, I knew who. It was time I started listening to the smart and wordy of the world. I was who I was, and labels such as normal and right and good, like everything, were open to interpretation. It was long past time for me to be my own interpreter.

“You lied to me, you know.” I stabilized him as he regained his balance enough to sit without falling over.

“I did.” He was obstinate through and through, and what he thought of as his dishonor, no matter if with the best of intentions, he hid out of sight. And he did think that to the depths of his soul—that he had thrown away every shred of honor in him.

“You drugged me,” I reminded him, bracing him with a hand on his back.

“I did.” Now he sounded empty. No embarrassment, no determination. He’d broken every rule he’d ever made for himself and, while he’d done it for me, how does the most honorable of men deal with that? Losing your brother and losing yourself all in one.

I punched his shoulder lightly and grinned. “How’s it feel to be the black sheep of the family for once?” I gave him a moment to think about that before adding, “Not that it counts, since it was for what you thought was my own good and not for your good at all. Only you could turn lying into something noble and pure.” I finished up with annoyance and affection mixed. “Always a martyr.”

He thought I’d blame him for what he’d done. That I’d hate him. As if I had that in me. I had many things in me some would say I’d be better off without, but hating Niko wasn’t one of them. He’d only done what I’d asked for, not especially indirectly either. I wanted to serve up waffles, ignore the reality of monsters, and get a gut from diner food, because that was what ordinary people did. I’d been content—I’d thought. I’d been normal—I’d thought. I’d made it clear at the beginning that I wanted to stay that way and not be the dark reflection in that Halloween picture.

He’d been willing to give it up for me, all of it—our memories, our history. Knowing someone better than one knew oneself. All that he’d done for me throughout my life … to keep me sane and keep me alive. All the things I did to do the same for him. Sometimes it was the smallest things that did that, the sanity part—the nicknames, the purposeful aggravation, the pokes, and elbows in the ribs. Sometimes it was the biggest things, such as surviving Sophia together.

But he’d tried to do it, to let all that go. He did his best to carry that entire burden alone. To accept a new Cal when it must have felt like the old Cal had died, his real brother had died, and all because he thought I was happier that way, being human. That was Niko. For me, he’d lose me and he’d do his damnedest to never show how it felt. That was my brother, the one I remembered from the first memory I’d ever had.

I’d been about three when we hid in the closet as Sophia trashed the house in a drunken rage. Three years old and the glass breaking and the chairs hitting the wall, scary noises, but someone’s arm was tightly around me. Someone was there to keep me safe. I’d heard his voice, whispering reassuring words, although I didn’t remember those words. I did remember what I felt … not alone. I wasn’t alone.

I couldn’t leave Nik alone either. He’d stayed with me then, and I was staying with him now. After what we’d lived through, Sophia and the Auphe, no one should have to carry that past by themselves. He needed the brother he’d always had—not a Stepford version, not a Boy Scout.

Not one who would hesitate to tear out the heart of what, at times, had been a beautiful woman. The best predators were always beautiful. It made them good at what they did. My Auphe made me good at what I did—protecting my brother. The other Cal—he wasn’t equipped. I’d told Niko before if there were gray areas in what we did, that was why I was there. Those places weren’t for him. It didn’t stop there. If there were those pitch-black places to go, unimaginable lines to be crossed, that was for me as well—not him.

Someone’s heart … quivering in my hand … It was the very least of what I would do for my brother.

Don’t ask what the most would be.

Sitting beside him, I leaned against him so he could pretend he wasn’t leaning against me. He always had to be the strong one. Who was I to take that away, even once? “I was going to work at the bar when she and her spiders jumped me in the park.” I ran there on occasion. Boggles made great incentive on improving your running time. “She kept asking me where my brothers and sisters were. I had no idea what she was talking about. It was her and about forty spiders. If I could’ve seen her, I could’ve taken care of her then, but I couldn’t. She was hiding in the trees and her scent was everywhere. And forty spiders?”

I shrugged. “I’m good, but no one’s that good. One bit me and my memories began to disappear, erasing backward. It was strange how I could feel that. Like those old VHS tapes when you’d rewind them. So I traveled. I built a gate and went through, but the venom was so damn fast, it hit my memories of being seven and in South Carolina at the same time that I hit the gate. By the time I went through and ended up on the beach, it was all gone. But I remember now. I remember being seven at that glorified shed we stayed in. I remember you telling me the Peter Pan story. And I remember the Auphe that talked to me when I was playing out back, the one I thought was the crocodile from the book. White with red eyes and metal teeth—no wonder I thought that story was scary as shit.” The third voice in my head wasn’t a voice at all. It was only the echo of what wasn’t even a memory, unless you counted repressed ones.

“The alligator you told me you saw.” I had forgotten everything; Niko had remembered it all.

I looked up at the sky. No stars. There never were here. “Can’t blame a spider for that one. I forgot all on my own there. The Auphe told me I had brothers and sisters. Rejects. Failures. Toys for me to play with when I grew up to be a big-boy Auphe. Ammut must have heard the rumors. Who knows from where. Other life suckers. Or tricksters—they never let a piece of juicy dirt go by.” I looked back down and picked at the sole of my black sneaker. “Don’t you hate it when someone knows more about your life than you ever did? Gossipy assholes.” Had Robin known all this time that there might be more of me out there? Could be. But good friends don’t always tell you the truth. Good friends know that sometimes a lie is better. I shifted my shoulders. I was turning into a regular emo shrugging machine. “Anyway, that memory disappeared too, and I was in the middle of the one where you were going on about Neverland. Tree houses. Flying. A safe place. That was why I went there, the seven-year-old me falling through a gate, before there was nothing left but amnesia. I was a scared kid looking for sanctuary. I definitely wasn’t looking for a killer Auphe crocodile or a freak show family.”

Niko exhaled and traced his fingers over the grip of his katana. We all have our security blankets, some more lethal than others, and his and mine hadn’t changed an iota over the years. “I’d wondered before,” he started cautiously, then more resolutely, “how many times did the Auphe try before you? How many failures were there before you were born? I’ve wondered that since I was old enough to take my first biology class in school. What they were trying to do … Whom they were trying to make. Human genes crossed with Auphe genes would never work with only one attempt. I can’t imagine how many it would take.” He’d wondered, huh? He’d wondered; Robin had very well known of the possibility. I should have thought about it too, but I hadn’t wanted to. I was the very best at not doing or thinking things I didn’t want to. Cowardice or self-survival or both; at those I excelled.

The Auphe hadn’t been keeping an eye on just me in those days, but on multiple mes. For some reason the others hadn’t been allowed to “be human” for a time while being observed. The Auphe needed two things from their breeding program: the ability to travel—to build gates and move hundreds of miles in a second—and the capacity to still be human enough to host a parasitic creature called a Darkling that could channel a power enormous enough to cross millions of years instead of only miles. Humans were the only creatures the Darkling could possess, and it had accidentally blown up a few Auphe while proving that. That the creature slid in and out of mirrors, more slippery than any reflection and no less homicidal than the Auphe, had been the beginning of my mirror phobia. That it had taken my mind and slid in and out of it as easily wasn’t something I wanted to think about.

It would’ve taken a while to find out if the rest of the Auphe-human half-breeds were defective, or maybe they’d been defective from the day they were born. I didn’t know which would be worse—being defective or being the success, the goddamn golden boy of Auphe genetics. I was about to find out, though. The ones that were alive were in Nevah’s Landing—as the albino crocodile with the smile of metal had told me. Waiting … They were waiting for me.

I hadn’t gone there for them at the beginning of all of this; I hadn’t known they’d existed, but I was going for them now.

“Let’s get Promise and Goodfellow out here to help you,” I said, standing. “I have something to do.” Something that should’ve been done before I was born. But the Auphe, in their infinite ability to be sons of bitches, hadn’t done what I would have guessed. They hadn’t killed the failures. That would have been too easy for them and for me.

Niko shook his head. “No. Do not even think about it. You are not going to Nevah’s Landing to take out a nest of half Auphe by yourself—if they need taking out at all. Think, Cal. They might be like you. Only without the power to build gates. They could be the same as you.”

That was funny. Goddamn hilarious. They might be like me. Of anyone in this city, only Niko would think that made it better. God, I did love my brother, no way around it.

“No, I’ll go. This is mine.” I helped him stand and, within seconds, he was good—stable and capable of taking care of himself as I called Goodfellow on the cell to get his ass out here. I wished he’d taken better care of himself in the past week and less care of what had only been a reflection of me—the best reflection.

“They’re not your responsibility, Nik,” I said. On this I had no give. “They’re not your family.” Thank God they weren’t. He didn’t deserve that. “They’re mine. I don’t want you to see that.” I met his eyes quickly before looking away. He wasn’t the only one ashamed. We’d both have to learn to get over it. “I don’t want you to see them in me, all right? I don’t. I’m not sure that’s something I could live with, knowing what you might see.”

And there was no way I wanted him to see what I might have to do.

“I’ll check them out. See if they’re salvageable. I’ll call if I need help. There come Promise and Robin now.” The chair was kicked aside as the door to the roof opened. “They missed the real thing, but they can take you to the after-party.” I gave his braid one last yank, tossed it over his shoulder, and said, “Ask Ishiah what your tattoo means. I’ll be back in time for you to kick my ass over it. Swear.”

He sheathed his sword, jaw tightening before he exhaled. “You’re the most goddamn stubborn man I know. Goddamn it, I missed you, you asshole.” Three curse words in two sentences—that was more big-time emotion for Nik. He wrapped one arm around me and that brotherly man hug I’d tried to avoid in Nevah’s Landing came back to bite me in the ass. The one arm made it brotherly. That my ribs nearly gave way and my spleen pretty much did too made it manly. That I returned it just as hard was, hell, just manners.

I was always about manners.