Deathwish

6

“She didn’t know about your mother. She didn’t mean it, not that way. She’s one hundred and sixty-five, but in human terms that makes her barely eighteen.”

I didn’t care about Cherish’s age, and I barely heard Promise’s words.

Samuel and his colleagues had come and gone. They’d taken the cadejos with them as well as the rug that was ruined beyond repair. They hadn’t said a word other than a murmured “careful of the teeth” amongst themselves as they rolled the bodies in tarps. They were knowledgeable; Samuel hadn’t been wrong about that. He didn’t ask any questions when he arrived or when he left. He simply did the work, paying his debt.

If he thought he was done, he was mistaken. He may have helped to save Cal, but he had helped to betray him first. Seeing him made me remember things I’d sooner not. The sensation of my sword’s blade sliding into Cal’s abdomen. The absolute certainty that I was going to have to kill my brother to save his soul. That I had failed him. Knowing I chose to die with him hadn’t changed what had twisted my gut, had frozen my brain . . . the feeling of . . .

There were no words.

I, who had read so many of them in my life, had no words for it. The blade slipping through the resistance of his flesh. The blood. On me, Cal’s blood, warm and flowing. Dripping from my hands to the floor. Red with a quick patter like rain. Images and sensations; I had those. So many. But no words. Words were for defining, capturing. I didn’t want that moment defined. I only wanted it gone. Over a year later and I still just wanted it gone.

Samuel could clean up every dead body in the city if he desired. I didn’t know that it would ever be enough.

I leaned my forehead against the glass and watched the lights below, the nearly empty street. Promise’s bedroom was large, her apartment spacious, but now it felt tight and small. I wanted to be down there running. Running was like meditating. It stilled your mind, sank your thoughts in a pool of calm until there were no thoughts at all. There were only light and peace and the ground thudding beneath your feet. Clarity.

Sometimes.

It should’ve put Promise’s deception in perspective, the dark memory of my brother dying in my hands . . . by my hand. Yet somehow it didn’t.

“She didn’t know.” Hands rested on my shoulders and a warm weight leaned into me from behind. “I promise you, Niko. She didn’t.”

“I know.” But Cal didn’t. He thought it was written on his forehead. Son of a whore. Gypsy trash. Monster. All the lies Sophia had told him for fourteen years were always waiting for the opportunity to whisper: They know. They look at you and they know. Everyone knows. No one was quicker to think the worst of my brother than he himself.

But he dealt with it. He always had; he always would. He was strong. Promise knew that and she knew this wasn’t the conversation I was going to have. Not now.

“But Cal doesn’t know.” The breath at my ear was touched with regret. “I’ll have her apologize.”

“Promise,” I said coolly as I straightened. “Stop.”

When she’d asked in the past—most often among tangled sheets, I’d told her about my life, childhood, and time on the run. I told her about Sophia, amorality made flesh, a woman who’d tarnished our lives as equally as the Auphe. The reason I required absolute trust, the reason Cal thought everyone but me lied. I talked more about Cal, the things he wouldn’t have minded her knowing. She’d already inadvertently learned the worst. I told her all. From the beginning of our relationship, I had given her only the truth. And when I asked her about her past . . . I received quick snapshots. The Great Plague of London in the 1600s. How blood was hard to come by then. It was the only time she’d ever mentioned feeding. How you drank to survive and tried not to kill. “Dead cows don’t give milk, do they?” she’d said with a sadly bleak smile. Yes, you tried not to kill, but trying wasn’t always succeeding.

Ugly truth, but truth.

She told me how she had come to America following the Civil War, how vampires blended into the larger cities. Her parents were long dead, or so she’d heard. Vampires didn’t stay together long in large groups. They didn’t crave the contact of their own kind the way humans do. Nature’s way of keeping the predators from outbreeding their food source. She didn’t talk much of her lovers. The hundreds of years she’d lived, I didn’t expect to hear of every one. She hadn’t mentioned Seamus.

She did tell stories of her five human husbands. Elderly and wealthy, but she’d been fond of each one. She’d lived through the Great Plague. I didn’t blame her for wanting to be surrounded by beauty and life after that. I could understand her wanting to feel safe no matter what might arise. And if it took millions for her to feel that way, I didn’t judge. I understood and I trusted—me, who, like Cal so very rarely trusted anyone.

Cherish might have shattered more than a window tonight. I didn’t know. Not yet.

We all had our needs. Promise needed safety. I needed trust. Complete trust. No daughters swept under the rug. No lovers so close that she’d considered them uncle or father to that daughter. She had an entire family and hadn’t told me. Had us work for the vampire who’d once been her mate and hadn’t felt the need to mention it. I had always been honest with her, and it seemed now she had been anything but.

I moved from beneath her and took my sword from the bed. “It’s my watch.”

“Wait.” Regret was still there, stronger than ever, but so was temper. The ivory sheath of a nightgown rippled as she turned over to face me. Waves of hair were twisted into a loose braid for sleep, and a rainbow-chased black pearl choker was fastened around her neck. She slept in pearls. She always slept in pearls . . . even when she slept in nothing else. A slim nude form and pearls—proof that poetry could live and breathe. And keep secrets.

Like Sophia.

She took a handful of my shirt to hold me still. She was strong enough that she might succeed if I put it to the test. “You should’ve told me,” I said without compromise. Because wasn’t that who I was? Niko Leandros, who had his brother and his honor. You fell between the two or you fell outside. It sounded inflexible and it was, but Cal and I had shared that same lying, manipulative mother. We both had survived her in different ways. I doubted I could change my ways now.

“I should have but . . .” She took a deep breath. “You, Niko. You raised a good man. Despite all that he had against him, you did that with Cal. I raised a thief, one who has little care for anyone but herself. I raised a predator who was reluctant to give up drinking when the rest of us did. I raised a liar, who would say anything to get what she wanted.” Her hand released the cloth and flattened on my chest as she went on somberly, “She’s also charming and bright and loves me . . . I hope.” Her eyes clouded. “I didn’t do well. It shames me. I keep hoping she’ll mature. She was loved, and yet right and wrong are only words to her. My failure, and it’s hard to live with, much less tell.”

Cherish wasn’t so different from Goodfellow, then. But that wasn’t true. Robin did have a care. They were few and far between, but he did care for us and stood with us when we needed him. And if we needed him to stand away, he would do that as well. Cherish didn’t seem inclined to go anywhere. She feared the Auphe, but they were legend to her. She’d not ever seen one, and consequently, in her mind, this Oshossi was as much of a threat. Survival—it was pass or fail. She’d thrown herself decisively on what might be the failing side—and was dragging our chances ever further down.

I waited as she looked away and then back, eyes blacker than the night outside. “And Seamus . . . Seamus, Cherish, and me, we lived in the time of blood. We were a family of predators. We took blood wherever we found it. Sometimes we didn’t kill, but sometimes we did. Three take so much more blood to nourish than just one. I endured it. Cherish wasn’t old enough to know it was wrong, and Seamus . . . Seamus enjoyed it. I didn’t see it in him at first, but more and more he showed it. He had a passion for killing, far more than he had for his art or for me. And because of that, I left him, but not as soon as I should have. I was fond of him. Cherish and I were safer with him than alone, so I closed my eyes when I should’ve been running.”

“But you did leave,” I said, “finally.” There was judgment in that last word. There was no denying it.

“Finally.” Her voice hardened slightly. “And I heard he changed. I saw him again, and he seemed to have genuinely altered his ways. I wouldn’t have involved us with him otherwise, never, but tell you about him and my past?” Her lips tightened. “You don’t know the time we lived in. What we had to do to survive. What the humans would’ve done to the three of us if we’d been caught. You have no idea.”

“No, I don’t, because you didn’t tell me.” Not once as we lay there with sheets twisted around our bodies.

“No, I didn’t, did I?” Her temper spiked. “Maybe I didn’t want to see how you would look at me when I told you in detail the killer that I used to be. That my family was no more than a trio of monsters, living no matter the cost to the innocent.” The temper, the regret—it faded, to be replaced with puzzlement. “You’re difficult to live up to, Niko. You are not quite twenty-three years old. You’re a child in comparison to me, but you live this life, this black-and-white life. You have this unbreakable core.” Her hand rose to my cheek, then fell away. “Honor. It’s a wonder. It’s a curse.” The hand went back to my chest and she pushed me away. “You have your watch. Go.”

I didn’t. I needed trust, but I needed Promise as well. She hadn’t lied. I held on to that. She hadn’t actually lied. But neither had she told the truth—and it was a great deal of truth not to tell.

And that was something I couldn’t pretend hadn’t happened. I couldn’t close my eyes and pretend she hadn’t held back a major part of her life, that she had hidden the knowledge of her family from me. And more.

“You met him while Cal and I were fighting on the beach. He smelled him on you.” I stared, unblinking, at her. “A business meeting or reminiscing about that past you don’t want to talk about?”

“Business, although it is honestly none of yours.” The heat was back, but she reined it in and tried again when I didn’t move, saying, “Except for Seamus and Cherish, I’ve been honest with you since we’ve been together, Niko.”

Except for my family, my mate, my life. Except for all that.

“Except” . . . a small word to do so much damage. This time I did go. Silently. Leaving her behind.

And I felt . . . nothing. I walked to the living room, hollowed out—an empty shell called honor. I didn’t believe in ghosts, not even in our world, yet at that moment I was one.

So be it.

If I was a cold ideal, with every bit of compromise stripped away, then that was survival. If I were an abstract, that’s how it had to be. Never mind the things it made me wonder. As in, Had Sophia won? As in, Outside honor, did I truly exist at all?

Then Cal punched me in the nose and, as a starburst of pain flared behind my eyes and I tasted blood, I decided that I did. I wasn’t precisely happy about it at the moment, but I did exist. “Better?” he asked, shaking out the ache in his hand.

I wiped at the trickle of blood on my upper lip and replied honestly, “Actually, yes.”

“I didn’t break it. Hell, I’d need a baseball bat to take out something that big.” He went to the kitchen and returned with a hand towel full of ice. “Here.” He was the one I was relieving. During his watch, he’d finished taping up the window with black plastic. The Vigil, ever efficient, had removed all the blood and glass with the bodies. If not for the missing window and rug, you wouldn’t have known what had taken place. “And since you let me hit you,” he added, “I figured you needed it.”

I had let him and I had needed it. An odd thing to need, pain. A smaller one to set a much larger one free. If it’s not free, you can’t acknowledge it, you can’t see it. And if you can’t see it, you can’t fight it.

I hadn’t known, but Cal had. Cal wasn’t black-and-white like me. Cal was all shades of gray. He knew right from wrong, unlike Cherish, but that didn’t mean the end result was any different. He never let that knowing stop him from making the necessary choice. He had a care for some, and such a ferocious carelessness for others that the contrast was . . . stark. Cal wasn’t the good man Promise labeled him, but he was a man. He struggled every day to be one—to be that and not the monster he suspected was ready to crawl out at any second. Endlessly stubborn, utterly loyal, and could throw a fairly decent punch when needed. Compared to that, good was highly overrated.

With black hair shoved behind his ears, he wiped a blood smear from his knuckles onto his jeans and offered, “You know, I’ve never had a problem with hitting a girl.”

Promise was correct: I really had raised him right.

I pulled the ice pack away from my nose and felt the bridge—straight and unmarred. As he’d said, unbroken. “A girl might be one thing,” I said, the taste of salt still on my tongue. “You’d be hitting a woman who would then paddle your ass like the Whiffle-ball-bat wielding child that you are.”

“Ye of little faith.” There was a dark tone under the flippant words that had me shaking my head.

I cuffed his head lightly. I did have one person to depend on always. It was well worth remembering. I filled him in on what Promise had told me. Seamus’s agenda had more history behind it than we suspected. It made his brutal jealousy easier to understand.

“In all honesty, I’m not sure who’s to blame, Promise or me.” Everyone else—Robin, Cherish, and her companion—had gone to bed. Cal and I stood alone in the living room. The lights were low but I could still see my breath form in the cold air leaking around the plastic. “Sophia made sure you and I both have our issues.”

“Issues?” he echoed incredulously. “Jesus, Nik. People on Dr. Phil have issues. We have atomic-powered, demonic-flavored, fresh-from-the-pits-of-hell, full-blown fucking neuroses. Freud would’ve been in a corner sucking his thumb after one session with us. And don’t ever think our bitch of a mother did worse by me than you. She stole your childhood, she was the reason you had to stand between me and her again and again, she made you the one that had to tell the truth, because all she could do was lie. Thanks to her, we both have walls around us like steel. If she ever taught us anything, it was that the only one we can trust is each other.”

He looked at me and winced. “Black eyes. Sorry.” Pushing my hand with the ice pack back toward my nose, he continued, “We learned differently with Robin. He lies for fun. He doesn’t mean it. He’s so full of shit with us we wouldn’t believe him for a second.” Which was true, and a puck’s way of being honest. “But Promise . . .” Cal shrugged.

I waited for him to say “I told you so.” He was the one who had smelled Seamus’s scent transferred from her to me. I expected him to tell me to cut her loose immediately. But he didn’t. Not quite.

“She didn’t tell you the truth,” he went on. “Maybe she didn’t lie outright, but she didn’t tell you she has a kid, about Seamus, that they were a family. That’s a big deal. Huge. If she’s not telling you that, what else isn’t she telling you?”

“You think I should give her up, then?” That freed pain wasn’t going anywhere. It simmered and swelled like the ache of a broken bone. It wasn’t alone. There was anger there as well—anger and betrayal.

His lips turned downward at the corners. “What do I think? Let’s see. I have a woman who loved me but I couldn’t be with because—forget truth—she wouldn’t tell me any damn thing at all. And I’m sleeping with a wolf who if she wants an after-sex snack might decide that’s me, but I still like her anyway.”

I hadn’t known that . . . that there might be the potential for more than sex between Delilah and him. I should have. Delilah wasn’t afraid of Cal. That was rare among the supernatural community, and I knew how incredible that must’ve felt to him—to be accepted. How could he not want more of that?

“What do I think?” He mused as he bent to pick up his gun from the coffee table. “I think you deserve the best,” he murmured, studiously not looking at me as he turned away to absently eject the clip from his Glock and slam it home again. “But there’s no such thing as the best. There’s good enough, though. Sometimes. Can you trust her for good enough?” He started for the hall, pausing only to say, “She made you happy, Nik. A happy brother’s not such a bad thing. And, Nik? I don’t have a problem being suspicious enough for both of us.”

When he was gone, I thought of how Promise hoped her daughter cared for her. I never had to hope my family cared for me. I knew.

Family—it can be the making of you or the breaking of you. If it had been only me as a child with Sophia, with no one to protect, to stand with, to share that cold, empty life . . . Sophia could’ve been the breaking of me. Cal . . . Cal had been the making of me.

I settled in to watch for the Auphe, Seamus, and any more of Cherish’s problems. I turned the lights all the way down and did silent katas in the dark. You could lose yourself in the smooth movements, in the structure and the balance. If you let yourself. I didn’t. I moved and listened and watched. I shifted the inner tangle of emotions aside and pushed away the image of pale blond and earth-brown hair spread over a silver-gray pillowcase. I ignored the phantom sensation of skin against mine, intermingled breath, and a giving warmth under my hands.

Conflict and confusion could get you killed. Focus and a calm mind kept you alive.

I doubted Seamus felt conflicted or confused—he knew exactly what he wanted—but that next morning he was dead nonetheless.

The sun was barely coming up when Cal’s cell phone rang. It was lying on the couch where he’d discarded it after calling Samuel hours before. I wasn’t surprised it was Samuel again. Cal wasn’t the most social of creatures. Very few people had his number, especially since he’d convinced Robin to stop writing it on bathroom walls.

“Yes?” I answered.

“Niko?” Samuel said.

“Yes,” I repeated evenly. Despite his help with the cadejos, I was still on the fence regarding Samuel. I couldn’t imagine that would change anytime soon.

From his reserved tone, he picked up on that. “We have a cleanup at your friend Seamus’s place. You might want to take a look first, since he was your client.”

“He’s hardly our friend and no longer our client,” I said shortly. “If we do go there and he’s alive, I’ll kill him. And as I’m human, I can be as overt as I care to be. And right now I’m in the mood to be extremely overt.”

“Trust me, the alive thing, you don’t have to worry about that.”

He was right. An hour later we were looking at Seamus’s body and head, neither of which shared a relationship anymore. When that person was trying to kill you, you like to see that sort of thing with your own eyes. To be certain—and I was certain: Seamus wouldn’t be a problem for me anymore.

“Well, this has to be the best news you’ve had all week,” Robin observed, nudging the decapitated head with a foot covered in one highly expensive shoe. There was very little mess. Once the heart stops beating, which would’ve been nearly instantaneously, there’s nothing to pump the blood out. Despite what most literature said, vampires did have hearts that beat as human ones did, and they stopped just the same.

“He’s been drinking blood,” Cal reappeared from a quick recon of the loft.

Promise, who’d been looking at Seamus without a hint of emotion in her eyes, lifted her gaze. “Drinking? How do you know?”

“The dead girl in the bathtub was pretty much a dead giveaway,” he answered grimly. “Her neck’s torn out. I guess Seamus wasn’t taking those Flintstone vitamins you guys swear by. Bastard.” He delivered a perfunctory kick to Seamus’s body, which rocked under the blow.

Although she had said she would kill him herself, Promise now winced and said with dark melancholy, “Seamus, cara mo anam, how far you fell.”

I almost reached out and ran my hand in one sweep from her shoulder down to her wrist, but I didn’t. Although, current differences aside, I understood how she could feel that way about him considering their history—bloody and violent though it may have been. She wasn’t feeling for him, but for what she thought he had managed to become. Another lie—his this time.

“Cal.”

“What?” He folded his arms stubbornly and glared at me. “He tried to kill you, and it looks like he killed enough girls to have the Vigil on his ass. He deserves exactly what he got.”

Robin, for once defusing the pressure rather than adding to it, said lightly while scanning the walls, “His art will most likely triple in value. Anyone for a souvenir?”

Only Cherish seemed shocked and upset. She knelt by his torso and rested her head on the still chest. “Tíío. Papa.” There were no tears, but grief hung gray beneath the pale brown of her skin. Xolo, in what was turning out to be typical behavior, lurked in her shadow. Cherish raised her eyes to Promise. “This is your Seamus, Madre. Our Seamus. Why do you just stand there?”

“Yes, this is Seamus, and he was a killer long past our killing days. He killed innocents and he tried to kill Niko. He’s my Seamus no more.” Promise’s melancholy disappeared under an iron determination. “Obviously, he won’t be needing his place any longer, and Oshossi’s cadejos don’t know of it. They do know of my penthouse. You will be safer from them here as well as from the Auphe, hija.” She reached down and smoothed the black hair.

“But Oshossi . . .” Cherish began instantly, her mood shifting just as quickly to demanding and desperate as she rose from Seamus’s body.

“No matter what you think, Cherish, Oshossi isn’t nearly the threat the Auphe are. This is the best way to protect you, and I do want you protected. Call us if he manages to find you again and we’ll do what we can to help you.” Pausing, she corrected, “I’ll do what I can to help you.” She felt she couldn’t speak for me, and I certainly wasn’t sure I could speak for Cal in this case. He watched out for me the same as I did for him, and while he had suggested last night that I would be happier with Promise than without, there was no guarantee he would want to lend our support to Cherish when we could least afford to give it. I’d say Robin would be even less inclined. But as for me . . . I couldn’t not say it.

“I’ll come as well.”

Cal’s jaw tightened, Cherish’s son-of-a-whore remark still with him, I knew, but he gave in. “Shit. Fine. We’ll help.” The “but I don’t have to like it” hung unspoken in the air.

“Lemmings,” Robin sighed, “all of us. Still, it should be entertaining if we don’t end up dead and buried.” He walked to one wall and took a painting of blues, purples, and an acid green. “I wonder who did our artist friend in. The Vigil is good, but good enough to take Seamus’s head without a struggle? They would definitely be a force to be reckoned with.” He considered another painting and took it as well. “Ah, now, this one I like.” It was a nude, of course, in a startling primary red.

“A force indeed.” I gave Seamus one last look and then dismissed him as ancient and decomposing history. If I nursed a feral satisfaction, no one need know about it. “Are we done here?” I addressed everyone, but Cal in particular, whose face had gone from annoyed to bored in a heartbeat as Robin had rambled on about the power needed to kill Seamus.

“Yeah, I’m more than done.” He headed for the door.

Cherish’s eyes followed us as we left, and they weren’t saddened anymore. They were brilliant with anger and fear. She really was in a trap of her own making, but from what I’d seen, she could hold her own in a fight. Young or not. It might be enough. It might not. The same could be said of us.

“You would go with them?” she demanded incredulously. “You would choose them over me?”

Promise stopped in the doorway at that, softening further. “If you had seen the Auphe but even once, you would know the escape I’m giving you. Now, there are those outside who will be in to clean this all up. Get the keys from them. And please be as careful as you can. Know I’m never far.”

“But I am never close, am I?” she said softly, but with a trace of bitterness. It could’ve been aimed at herself or her mother, but she shut the door between us before I made the determination.

“And this is why I’m glad I reproduce in the old-fashioned way,” Robin said as he balanced the paintings that were too large to tuck under an arm. The Vigil were four men waiting at the end of the hall for us to be finished with our business. They were dressed in uniforms, not brown or gray, but somewhere in between. They could’ve been movers or exterminators. No one would know or care enough to ask—which is no doubt how they managed to get away with a good deal of what they did. No one noticed; no one cared. Much as I did not care either. I was more curious about Robin’s comment than I was about the Vigil’s cleanup methods.

“Which would be?” I asked. Not once had I come across in any book a hint as to how pucks multiplied. Since there were no females of the species I was sure it was, if nothing else, noteworthy. And, no doubt, profoundly pornographic. These were pucks after all. Someone had once called Goodfellow a mitotic bastard. It was a clue, but it didn’t go far enough for picturing it in your head . . . if you were perverse enough to want to.

“Should I decide to double your pleasure in all things Goodfellow, you’ll be the first to know,” he retorted with a wicked grin. “Participation isn’t strictly necessary, but I always enjoy an appreciative audience. Volunteers are especially”—he caught Promise’s eye and shifted smoothly—“but never mind that. I was thinking Thai for lunch. Any takers?”

Promise’s gaze moved to meet mine. What I saw there . . . I wasn’t sure what it was. A chance? An unwillingness to surrender what we had? Both perhaps, and both still built on secrets. She had compromised with me . . . my half-Auphe brother. Our ongoing battle with those monsters. She had been loyal when it would’ve been in her far better interest to be otherwise. She had risked her life. Actions are supposed to speak louder than words.

I still wanted the words.

I wanted the truth—whole and unvarnished. I wanted it all. With my mother, I had had nothing. With my brother, I had the words, the action, and the truth . . . no matter how grim it might be. I had no experience with the territory that lay between the two extremes. I didn’t know that I could dwell there.

I caught Cal’s elbow before it could connect with my ribs. I looked from Promise to him and he tapped his nose meaningfully. “I’m good for another one,” he said.

“You’re a good brother,” I replied dryly. Despite his good, if overly physical, intentions, now wasn’t the time to make any decisions. It was time to concentrate on the Auphe—they were certainly concentrating on us.

Cal had said they would come. He’d said it hollowly in the dark of his room where the only light had come firefly-distant through the window and from the sickly gray illumination flowing around his hand. They would come and they would come soon because that’s how he thought . . . no, how he knew they would think.

I wanted him to be wrong. And it wasn’t that the more time without the Auphe, the more time we had to sharpen ourselves, to prepare. It was a good reason, but that wasn’t it. I wanted him to be wrong because I didn’t want him thinking that his thoughts were the same as Auphe thoughts. They weren’t. Cal was not Auphe. In the past, I’d threatened those who’d said that. And I’d hurt those who’d attempted to act on their belief, inflicted a great deal of pain with an even greater lack of regret. I wouldn’t have anyone believing Cal was Auphe, not even himself.

But in another way I wanted him to be right. If he were right, then what I suspected from what he had seen in Washington Square Park would be wrong, and I’d never wanted to be wrong so much in my life.

The universe, in its infinite indifference, didn’t care either way. The Auphe came that evening.

Filthy, malevolent monsters.

I was oiling the katana when the first whirlpool of tarnished silver light formed before me. I had the dining room table covered in newspaper with the rest of my blades fanned in a semicircle, waiting their turn. I heard a door slam against a wall, the sound of spraying water, and Cal shouting, “Auphe!” If a gate was opened close enough, within a few blocks of him, he’d feel it . . . just as he felt this one.

And the one that followed.

Cal came running down Promise’s hall, dressed only in sweatpants, still soaking from his interrupted shower. His face was already set, frozen and blank. He had the knife he kept with him always and the gun he must’ve taken into the bathroom with him. Prepared. He had believed what I hadn’t been able to drive from his head. That Auphe blood was Auphe blood. That Auphe was Auphe.

Two gates . . . one less than he had said. It was a small number, and I was afraid that made me right and him wrong. On the other hand, two Auphe were enough for a suicide run, as Cal had guessed. We would see.

I stood with katana ready. I’d seen my first Auphe when Cal was three and I was seven. I was sure they’d been there since Cal was born, spying, but that was the first time I actually saw one. It had been at our kitchen window while we ate supper. Sophia had been out doing what she did: drinking, conning, or whoring. All three at once, maybe. I’d known from a younger age than seven that that’s what her life was. This time she’d gone out instead of bringing her work home with her. It was better that way. Fish sticks and cartoons for Cal. A sandwich and a book for me. Sixteen years later, I thought wryly, things weren’t so very different.

I hadn’t minded being home alone then. It was safer. There was no yelling or slurred insults or thrown whiskey bottles. There were none of Sophia’s “friends,” the kind that paid before they walked through the door. There was quiet, Cal’s occasional laugh at the tiny TV screen, and The Lord of the Rings. The librarian said it was too much book for me, and I’d told her she was wrong. But when I’d lifted eyes to see what shared the winter night against the small dingy window, I wondered if I’d been the one who was wrong.

The glow of red eyes, the triangular white face with tarnished silver teeth so wickedly fine you couldn’t begin to count them all. It could’ve come straight from the pages in front of me. It smiled as I froze. Smiled and then tapped a black nail against the glass. The sound convinced me of what my eyes couldn’t. It was real. Monsters were real. Those awful things Sophia said about Cal’s father . . . I’d managed to turn my head to see my brother. He was on his last fish stick, face bright and happy as the TV burbled. I jerked my eyes back to the window. Empty. I’d swallowed hard and felt warm wetness at my crotch.

Real. It was real.

I’d put Cal to bed, which was my bed too. Sophia wasn’t wasting money on two beds when we both fit in one. It was the first time I was glad she was cheap; it let me watch Cal, protect him. And now I knew he really needed it. Sophia was a liar, but the one time I wished she had lied, she did worse. She told the truth. I had cleaned up and washed my pants in the bathroom sink. I didn’t sleep a minute that night, and I didn’t say a word to Sophia when she came home, but it didn’t matter. She saw it the next day—the spidery handprint on the window. Cal was sitting at the table with the bowl of oatmeal I’d fixed him when she bent down to be face-to-face with him. “Daddy came, didn’t he?” Her smile had less teeth than the monster’s, but it was as cold and hard. “Daddy came to see his special little boy. His little half-breed freak.” I still remembered the crumpled look of confusion on Cal’s small face—his eyes wide and wary with dread behind long black bangs.

Every time I saw an Auphe, I saw my first monster. I felt that echo of that first knowledge that there were things foul and hideous in the world. But now? Now I was ready for the monsters . . . the murderers . . . the dealers of death. And when the Auphe came through the light, I was ready for it as well. I couldn’t think of it as female, no more than I would’ve thought of a shark as male or female—just as death. I sliced at it, but the narrow head and pale flesh slithered under the blow so quickly that it was inside my guard almost before my eyes registered the move. The predator unparalleled.

Almost.

As it lunged at me, it impaled itself on the dagger I held in my other hand, close to my hip. I didn’t say anything. There was nothing in an Auphe worth wasting words on, but I did smile. It was a Sophia smile, cold, hard, and satisfied. Then I ripped the blade upward, from abdomen to bony sternum. Where Cal’s blood had been warm on my hand a year ago, this blood was cool and slippery.

“You are quick.” It moved an inch closer, giving me a smile of its own as bone scraped and caught on steel. “For a sheep.”

I was. I was quicker than Cal and Promise, and close to a sober Goodfellow. I excelled at what I did. I was a scholar, a friend, and a brother, but beneath it all I was a killer, pure and simple. Better at taking lives than anyone or anything you’d meet walking the street. I’d made sure of it. And this evil was the reason why.

I ripped the blade free and slashed it across its throat. But its throat wasn’t there. I was quick.

Auphe was quicker.

I felt the claws ripping across my chest and I dove for the floor. Ignoring the puddle of Auphe blood pooled on the wood, I swung both blades outward in an open scissors motion and caught its legs. Barely. Trailing more blood, it leapt on top of the table and then back onto me, taking me down. For all the damage I’d done, to an Auphe it was superficial. It could live with it. I didn’t plan on letting it. This time my blade punctured its chest, but not its heart. They didn’t carry their hearts in the same place as humans, and suicide run or not, this Auphe had no plans on going anywhere without me.

The Auphe laughed from above, tasting its own blood as if it were wine. “A worthy piece of prey. Struggle all you wish. We shall take you, we shall take them all, and only then shall we take him.” This time teeth found my throat just as my other blade, strapped to my thigh, found its heart between its ribs from behind. I felt a jolt of satisfaction as strong as the pain that flared under my jaw. Getting a knee between us, I heaved it off.

With my blood flowing down my neck, I was halfway up when it came back with my knife embedded in its heart. Still fighting. Essentially dead, but still fighting. I pulled my blade out of it and sliced it across its abdomen, spilling its guts to the floor. It kept coming, taking one step, another, until it fell. Finally, it fell. It was the first time I’d ever seen shock in the eyes of an Auphe. A human had killed it, a sheep with mere blades.

Then came the second one.

There was silencer gunfire. . . . Cal . . . But the Auphe was as quick as the first. It came across the hall—touched with some blood, but not much, and moving so fast that I only managed to get the knife in my hand up bare inches before it was on me.

But Cal was on me first.

He wasn’t as quick as the Auphe, but he knew where this one was going. Cal had a head start and he made use of it. He hit me hard, his back slamming against my chest, and almost simultaneously the Auphe hit him. We impacted the dining room wall and hung there, pinned. Cal gave a guttural, “No. Me first. You take me first.” A human shield between the Auphe and me, protecting me where his gun had failed to. I tried to push him off, but in this he was as strong as I was, if not stronger. Cal would die for me. I knew it, but I didn’t have to accept it. I shoved again. Neither he nor the Auphe moved.

Despite the strained bulge of Cal’s bicep, one brutal clawed hand held Cal’s wrist down and the gun along with it. The other hand closed around Cal’s neck. That narrow jaw dropped to reveal its ripping capability in all its savage efficiency. Cal faced it head-on. “Me first,” he snarled again. “Take me, you bitch. Go on. Do it.”

There was a hesitation, then the jaws closed and it laughed. “You do not know. Cousin. Brother. Auphe.” It laughed again, and this time when it spoke I thought my eardrums would bleed. The Auphe language was as sharp as my blades, as brutal as a bullet-shattering glass. With every unnatural sound Cal tensed against me tighter and tighter. Then the gate appeared behind it and it sprang backward, disappearing just as Robin’s sword blow from the right and Promise’s from the left would’ve taken its head. Instead the gray light took half their blades before the gate vanished.

Cal fell off me. He tried to push away, but couldn’t coordinate the movement. He did manage to hit the wall solidly enough to lean against it beside me. His eyes were infinitely aged beyond that long-ago three-year-old boy, but the dread was the same. “You’re bleeding,” he said, the words syrup slow, before sliding down the wall and sheathing fingers in his still shower dripping hair as he drew up his knees. “I can’t do this.” He looked up at me with more desperation than he’d ever given an Auphe the satisfaction of. “You have to let me go, Nik. You have to.”

And selfish son of a bitch that I was, I kneeled down beside him and gave him my answer.

“No.”

Blind. I was so damn blind. I didn’t see what he was asking for. Not until his eyes fixed distantly on the gun that had dropped from his hand to skitter across the floor when the Auphe had disappeared. Cal wasn’t talking about running this time.

Auphe were quick, Cal was quick, but I’d never been so quick in my life. I grabbed his shoulders and held him firmly against the wall. “You promised me a long time ago. You promised you wouldn’t do that to me. You may as well pull the trigger on me first,” I said quietly, “do you understand?”

He swallowed thickly and bent his head to butt it against my chest like he hadn’t since he was five or six years old. “What did it say?” I asked, moving one hand to cup the back of his head. He’d understood it, one of the flashes that came from those missing two years, picking up the Auphe language. I wished he hadn’t, because I’d known without asking what it had said—I didn’t need to speak Auphe to understand what I’d wanted so badly to be wrong about.

The Auphe Cal had killed last year in Florida had been male. The last male we’d seen. Turn it around and you could say Cal had killed the last male Auphe.

When Cal had said all the Auphe in the park were females, I’d been uneasy. And when he’d confirmed the last Auphe before them, the dead one, had been male, I’d gone from uneasy to a balance of sharp worry and denial. Then I saw the shock in the eyes of the Auphe I’d just killed. It hadn’t expected to die. This hadn’t been a suicide run. They thought the four of us couldn’t take the two of them. They’d wanted to kill me in front of Cal and to make sure he knew, truly understood their new plan for him. No death. No escape. Nothing half so easy.

“They said . . .” He failed and tried again, but choked on the words.

“Never mind. It won’t happen. We won’t let it,” I denied, shaking my head. “You don’t have to say it.”

He did anyway. “The last male Auphe.” He shuddered with every word, but it didn’t stop him from repeating it in dull horror.

“I’m the last male Auphe.”