Doubletake

3

“On the roof two blocks down, did you see it?”

He meant as we’d dumped the car several blocks away in a garage we couldn’t afford—there was blackmail involved—and walked the rest of the way home.

I’d seen it, but Niko didn’t stop testing me. It was his way of keeping me sharp, focused, and alive.

We’d left Robin’s over forty minutes ago and I was more exhausted from listening to him go on and on than from the fight with the kishi. Sitting on the edge of the tub in our bathroom, I continued to swab the puncture wounds on my thigh with peroxide. Then I’d move on to the antibiotic cream plus an antibiotic shot. You didn’t know what in the hell was living inside the mouths of half the monsters we came across, and I doubted the CDC did either. I had the immune system of my Auphe half, which was to say the best damn immune system around, but Niko was Niko. Big brothers were big brothers, and I took the same precautions a full human would, necessary or not.

There were a few advantages to not being human. More than I’d used to think, and more than I should think. But that’s who I was now and I was fine with that. Better than fine.

I answered Niko’s question, and it wasn’t an unusual one. Anything new in our world was to be immediately suspected and watched carefully. “I saw it. Five blocks back on the roof. You know I saw it or you would’ve picked me up by the scruff of my neck and shown it to me while swatting my ass with your katana.” I applied the cream and accepted the tape from my brother to secure the bandage around my leg. “Something metal. Steel maybe, and black too. It didn’t move and I couldn’t make out any details, but it wasn’t there this morning when we went by.”

Niko handed me the syringe and I injected my thigh muscle with the strongest antibiotic you could buy from a guy who had set up a pharmacy in his van. “I am as proud as if you’d actually graduated high school.”

He’d homeschooled me, the ass, and his graduation standards had been higher than any public or private school. I’d simply done my best to forget most of it. “Okay, a dark metal thing someone hauled up to the roof. Big deal. We’ll keep our eyes open, but I bet it’s just someone’s hideous idea of art, or a nerd making armor for the next big Ren Faire. I’m more concerned about the Panic.” “Concerned” was a good euphemism for metaphorically shitting my pants.

Goodfellow had been at our sides for three or four years now. He was the most loyal son of a bitch around, to us anyway, but every encounter with him put you one step closer to a mental hospital. I’d seen him naked three times, accidentally, and I didn’t give a shit which way the guy swung (he swung all ways…he swung in directions and dimensions scientists hadn’t plotted yet) as long as he didn’t hit on me.

And after seeing what he had a license to carry, I was kissing the ground, grateful he hadn’t made a move on me. Even if he hadn’t been rich, the man would need his own personal tailor to accommodate what he was hauling around. He did chase Niko in the beginning, but as much as I loved my brother, he was on his own there. And good luck. Every story Robin told was about himself, a threesome, a foursome, an orgy, and onward to things that would have jaded porn stars mystified if not terrified. The themes were pretty blatant—ego and sex.

I could take it, though, because he was a friend, a comrade in arms, and all that shit, but one hundred of him? If Niko wouldn’t have taken a picture with his phone, I’d have been curled up in the fetal position and sucked my thumb. Worse yet was how there were a hundred or so of them. Robin had always been evasive about how pucks procreated and I’d had no inclination whatsoever to push him on it. An all-male race who were completely identical to one another…a curious thing, but nowhere near curious enough to ask him or hear the answer. This time we got the answer whether we wanted it or not.

I absolutely did not.

Apparently there was no equivalent in nonsupernatural biology, although Niko tried his best to come up with a close comparison. Apogamy, androgenesis, adventitious embryony…all terms I’m sure I knew at one time, when Niko had been shoving biology into my brain with a crowbar seven or eight years ago. But I’d done my best to forget them, and my best was damn good.

“Male apoximes?” had been his last guess.

Robin had scowled. “Yes, Niko. Pucks reproduce exactly like Saharan cypress trees. In fact, we’re kissing cousins. Shall I show you my impressively large trunk?”

“Just tell me we don’t have to buy you maternity clothes if you lose the lottery,” I’d asked at that point during the briefing, pushing the meatball sub far away at the thought of a hormonal puck. “Jesus, I’m going to barf.”

“Gods.” He stared at me, disbelief dripping from the word. “How do you function when the hamster on the wheel between your ears takes his lunch break? Never mind. Just…here. Wrap your tiny brains around zygotes. It’s far more complex than that, as we are far more complex than you, but one puck essentially splits in two. The new puck will also have all the memories, personality, and skills of the original, which is another reason we hate one another so much. We yearn to be unique when in essence we all started out the same as someone else. We immediately part ways and the new puck will start developing memories of his own. As he does, his personality changes slowly as well. We all become different sooner or later.”

“Except for the ego, sex drive, trickery, lying, stealing, et cetera,” I said.

“Well, naturally. Why would we want to change the best of our race’s qualities?”

“You actually are family. In fact, you’re closer than family,” Niko had mused. “You’re supernatural clones.”

“All born of Hob,” the puck said quietly. As the three of us had nearly died at the hands of Hob before delivering him up to a well-deserved death, we skipped over talking more about the first puck to be whelped by the earth.

“How long does it take?” I’d asked, curious despite myself. “Is there a cocoon involved? Is it like Alien? Because that would be nasty as hell. Dripping fluids everywhere. Gah. Good luck finding a maid to clean that up.”

“Armani does not make a cocoon,” Goodfellow had replied with a sharp frost edging his voice, and fun time was over. He then went on to tell us about the Panic.

Capital P…for the capital R in “Run for your life.”

In ye olden times, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient who gave a crap, people had thought that panic was caused by Pan, pucks, whatever, unseen and rotten as hell, rustling and shaking the bushes off the paths to basically scare the living shit out of travelers. Not true. The word was still around today, but that definition wasn’t any more true than it had been in the beginning.

What was true about the Panic, Goodfellow had said, was that pucks produced pheromones by the buckets. Normally the chemical led their fellow supernatural creatures, not humans—it didn’t affect humans—to trust them. It made it all the easier for the pucks to steal from their fellow supernatural races and for them to believe the pucks when they said they were off for a romantic bottle of wine while in actuality they were shagging their thieving asses to safety, hauling gold, jewels, whatever they could steal. The pheromone also led the preternatural to lust after them—all the easier to get laid and…yeah, well, that was more than enough benefit there.

Eventually after a few thousand—or thirty or forty thousand years…who was counting—the pucks’ supernatural buddies eventually caught on—or at least their genes did—and after generations upon generations of other races being robbed, lied to, and somehow talked into an orgy with five of their best pals, the pheromones couldn’t overcome the nature-driven evolution of an innate and rather deserved mistrust.

That was the pheromones of one puck at work.

One.

Enticing in the beginning, suspicious and distrustful in the end…but, still, only one puck, Robin had said. But get more than one puck together and things changed. The pheromones mixed into something new, thanks to that evolution of suspicion and wariness—something new and unpleasant. Get five pucks together and everyone supernatural would become extremely nervous. Get ten together and there would be fighting, screaming, and running. Get the entire race in one spot and the chemical overload could conceivably drive lesser species mad or stop their hearts from fear alone. For the hardier predators, it would be as if they were a single small child drifting in the ocean while a hundred giant great white sharks circled them.

That was the Panic.

That was why all supernatural critters were fleeing NYC as fast as if someone had told them the Red Sox were invading. All of that sounded like a good excuse for me to desert Niko to the job. Keep my share of the money. See ya when I see ya. Send up a flare when it’s over. But, Robin had admitted sourly, Auphe weren’t affected. As with most poisons and venoms, they were immune to the pheromones. The Auphe were never any fun. The Auphe never played fair. The Auphe ate my brothers, sisters, dog, and crapped in the back of my pickup truck. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Here was the one time I thought I could use that in my favor; being half of the genetic monster to first crawl out of the primordial ooze…before turning around to murder the second slimy thing to creep out…but no.

When did I get my goddamn silver lining?

It obviously wasn’t going to be today. I went straight to my bedroom. The fight with the kishi had been light exercise. Goodfellow’s briefing had been as brutal as boot camp twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, five years in a row. I wanted sleep and I wanted it now.

Niko stayed up to read or meditate or trim his bonsai tree while thinking of ten ways to kill a revenant with its tiny gnarled branches and leaves. Those weren’t smart-ass guesses; they were what I knew. Niko had many interests, some lethal, some not, but I knew them all. Family. I hesitated in my bedroom doorway. “It’s kind of weird,” I said.

Niko had been headed for the main area of the apartment after I’d finished the first aid on my leg. He stopped to look back at me as I stood in the doorway of my room. His eyebrows lifted in silent question. “Family,” I elaborated. “I was thinking about family when we were fighting the kishi. I thought it was because they were making a home for their own family, but then Robin comes along with every family member on the face of the planet. Maybe I’m psychic; you think?” I didn’t want to be psychic. I had enough nonhuman traits to deal with as it was.

He whirled quickly enough that I couldn’t avoid the book he threw to nail me in the stomach. I grunted, but managed to catch it before it fell to the floor. Niko’s reflexes were the best I’d seen, among man or monster. “Did you see that coming, O psychic one?” He held out a hand and caught the book I tossed back at him.

“No. Ass.” But I rubbed my stomach and grinned. He was right. The Auphe hadn’t been psychic and our mother only pretended to be. “Let me know in the morning how many ways you come up with to use your puny shrub as a deadly weapon.” I changed and hit the bed hard. I slept hard as well. If that didn’t prove I didn’t have the slightest psychic ability, nothing else would.

But cursed?

That was a different story.

It was eight in the morning when someone banged a fist against our door. Niko was in the shower washing away the sweat of evil exercise. He’d already been out and run his ten miles. As my leg was tenderized and marinated by baby kishi Alpo, he’d given me a onetime break and hadn’t forced me to join him. I was still in bed when I heard the knocking, but I staggered up, cursing at the hair hanging down past my eyes and wearing nothing but sweatpants and two pairs of socks. My feet got cold. Hercules probably had acid reflux. We all have our weaknesses.

I passed through the large open space that formed the combination living area, kitchen, and workout gym to the door of our converted garage, and undid the one bolt. Most New Yorkers had several. Unless it was a particularly nasty case we were working, Niko and I didn’t have a problem with encouraging break-ins. Spontaneous sparring was like a jolt of extra caffeine in your coffee. Perked you up.

Opening the door, I began to snarl a natural, “What the hell do you want?” It was way too damn early and I embraced NYC manners like a native. What else would I say?

It turned out I didn’t end up saying anything at all. I swallowed the words as I saw it…him.…all in a split second. I saw the dark blond hair and olive skin, the familiar profile, the way he held himself on the balls of his feet, cautious and loose. A fighter. A warrior. I saw it all in an instant and I gave him what he deserved. Not a word, not a demand, not a greeting.

I tackled him in the doorway, slamming him to the floor.

I said I wore just sweatpants and socks to bed. I did. That wasn’t a lie. But I always carried something to bed, and out of it, with me. Sometimes it was the Desert Eagle tucked under my pillow. Sometimes it was the black matte Ka-Bar combat knife I kept under my mattress. Sometimes I swapped them. I wouldn’t want to get into a habit. Being predictable gets you killed. This morning it was the knife, serrated and ugly. Yet when it saves your life often enough, when it’s buried against the flesh of a traitor’s neck, it becomes a thing almost beautiful.

“You should be dead,” I hissed at him, a wholly inhuman hiss. I had one knee firmly planted in his flat gut, pinning him. He wasn’t struggling or fighting me and he could have. I felt the hard play of muscles under my knee. But if he didn’t want to defend himself, I didn’t care.

I’d thought it when fighting the kishi: I didn’t play by the rules. If you played by the rules, you died, and if anyone was going to die in this moment, it wasn’t going to be me. “You should be worse than dead.” This time I cut him, scarcely enough to split the skin…to let a measly few drops of blood course down to cup in the hollow of his throat.

“You motherfucker. You could’ve helped him. You could’ve saved him.” He could’ve saved him from our mother.

Saved him from me.

I could live with what I was now. It had taken years and finally an amnesia-induced epiphany, along with an inner sacrifice, but I could cope with the thing I was. That didn’t mean that Niko should’ve had to. He could’ve had a normal life. Ours was anything but.

Black eyes gazed at me impassively. “Are you going to kill me or not?”

I wanted to. More than anything in the world, at that moment I wanted to. And I didn’t see a single reason I shouldn’t…save one. I growled, my chest vibrating with the sound, and then slammed the blade home…millimeters from his head into the cheap pressed-wood flooring and padding we’d put down over the concrete. “It’s not my place to, you worthless son of a bitch. It’s his.”

I got to my feet and looked over my shoulder at Niko standing several feet behind. He was dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and black jeans, wet hair already braided, his gray eyes fixed on me with confidence. Knowing I’d do the right thing, or what he thought was the right thing. But that wasn’t it. It was what I’d said. The fate of that piece of shit on the floor was in Niko’s hands, not mine.

Gray…I was glad his and my eyes came from our mother. It was one thing he didn’t share with the man flat on his back. I peeled back my lips and gave a savage grin. “Daddy’s home. Want me to make the tea?”

I’d known what my father was since I was five or so. Sophia had told me from the day I was born, I was sure, but to genuinely grasp that Dad is a Creature Feature, you had to have a few years on you. When it came to Niko’s father, she’d told us he left before Niko was born, had left a few weeks after Niko was born, had visited once or twice but Niko was too young to remember. Sophia didn’t bother to keep her lies straight, because she didn’t lie to deceive, not to us. She lied to hurt.

Niko and I hadn’t known any truth of his father except he was Rom like Sophia and of the same clan, Vayash. Only Vayash had the occasional blond hair from hundreds of years ago, when they’d stayed in northern Greece for a time. And though it was forbidden to marry or have sex with a gadje, an outsider, that northern Greek blond hair and lighter eyes had made their way into the clan regardless.

Horny then was no different from horny now.

But that had been long ago and the Rom were nothing if not practical…eventually, which was how Niko could be blond and still be considered full Rom. He had their dark if slightly olive skin, and all Rom knew the quirks of all the clans. My black hair and gray eyes meant nothing when combined with my pale, decidedly non-Rom skin. I’d have been rejected as tainted with outsider blood.

If I weren’t already rejected as tainted with much worse.

I bent over and retrieved my knife before going into the kitchen. I wasn’t making any damn tea for Niko’s sperm donor, but the kitchen was as far as I could get while keeping an eye on him. As for me, normally I would’ve had waffles with half a bottle of syrup, and coffee. This morning I didn’t have an appetite for anything that wasn’t red and spilled with a blade. I folded my arms on the breakfast counter, bent at the waist to rest my chin on my forearm, the Ka-Bar remaining in my hand, and watched through the long strands of hair that still fell over my eyes.

A panther watching unblinking through the tall grass.

A last drop of blood ran from the tip of the knife to mar the sand-colored countertop. I lifted my top lip to show teeth at the sight of it and I went back to watching. The man…Niko’s father…didn’t miss any of my show.

He stood smoothly, moving the same as Niko moved: effortless and flowing as water. His clothes were similar as well. Dark, not particularly noticeable, would blend into the shadows well. He shifted his dark eyes from me to my brother. “I am Emilian Kalakos. Your mother, Sophia, I didn’t know if she told you that—my name.” He was confident with the smear of blood remaining on his neck. I almost growled again.

Niko regarded him without emotion before saying, “No. She didn’t. Close the door behind you. Our reputations here do not need any further fuel for the fire.”

“I am welcome then?” That was custom among the Rom. They didn’t include the gadje in it, but Rom wouldn’t enter another’s home without knowing they were welcome there.

Glancing at me, Niko quirked his lips, a somewhat less homicidal version of my predatory smile. He was letting me know he knew who his family was and it wasn’t this older reflection of himself. “No. But if you wait for welcome you will die an old man on the sidewalk. I leave it up to you.”

Kalakos apparently knew when to push and when to not look a gift horse in the mouth. He shut the door behind him. “Do you want an excuse or an explanation?” he asked calmly. I hated the sound of his voice. It was wry, amused, self-possessed—it was Niko’s voice, and Niko was unique. This shithead shouldn’t be moving like him, looking like him, or sounding like him. The fact that he deserted his son meant he shouldn’t be at all. This time I did growl once more.

“That would be Caliban. Your brother?”

To give him some credit, there wasn’t the hesitation I expected before “brother.” Nor were there the many other words the Rom had for me, none of which meant “brother” or anything remotely close to it. The Vayash, shamed as they were that a woman of their clan had whored herself out to a thing fouler than the word “monster” could begin to describe, had nonetheless eventually told the other clans of my existence once one hired us for a job. When that had happened, I couldn’t be a secret any longer. The others had to be warned.

With Niko at my side during negotiations, willing to dishonor himself by standing with me, the Vayash decided they had no choice. It was their duty to see that the others didn’t see me as merely polluted by gadje blood, that my pale skin wasn’t from a pasty white Midwesterner who lived on diet of deep-fried cheese but from an Auphe. Ninety-nine percent of humans knew nothing of the supernatural world that swirled around them. The Rom knew it all. They knew of the Auphe. They knew what I was.

I’d been spit on enough to prove that on our one visit to our Clan. But I’d been much younger then, half catatonic, half homicidal, and a great deal less in control.

Pity I’d had any control at all.

Pity indeed.

This time my conscious and my unnaturally mouthy subconscious agreed.

“His name is Cal. Do not call him the other again.” Niko’s lips flattened. Sophia had named me Caliban from the Shakespearean play. Caliban the beast-man-monster from The Tempest. She made sure I knew what it meant too, and called me by it every opportunity she had. Mommy had been an educated whore.

Niko had never called me anything but Cal. It was naïve for him to think that every one of his Cals could wipe out all the Caliban that came from Sophia’s lips.

Yep, naïve…but they sometimes did.

Kalakos kept his eyes on me and I knew what he saw. Half-naked, pale eyes gleaming through the curtain of my hair, a bloody knife, and a smile that tasted of years and years of spite—I wasn’t surprised he might think Sophia had been closer to the mark.

Good.

“Why are you here?” Niko demanded, his normal…his inherited calm gone. In its place were emptiness and the chill of the wind across the arctic ice.

Kalakos turned back to him. He looked about forty-five, but not an ounce of fat on him. All lean muscle, like Niko. They were almost exactly the same height. His hair was much shorter than Nik’s braid, though. Looking closer I could see one or two silver strands in it. He wore it slicked back tightly in a two-inch-long ponytail. It was good for fighting, not obscuring your vision. It was how I usually managed to keep the mess of my own heavy hair out of my face. Not anymore. Not while he was here.

“The Vayash Clan failed in its watch. We have lost our duty, our burden. They have sent me to bring it back. I know I cannot do it alone.” He included us both in his glance this time. “And none of them are fighters, not the kind you two are known to be. No matter what has come before, all Vayash must work to right this. The burden is here in the city. Worse, it knows that you are in the city. If you will not help me willingly, help yourselves. It can sense the Vayash and it will kill all Vayash that it can find.”

All clans had a duty and a watch. I thought I’d been the Vayash one. Looked like I was wrong. Or they had a two-for-one burden to carry. Too bad for them.

“All Vayash?” Niko narrowed his eyes. “Then that is not a problem for us. You are the only Vayash in this room and it’s been that way for seven years.” While we nodded to the clan name when dealing with other Rom, we didn’t claim it. It was a truth that became a lie and now was used only for convenience. Rom were honest only with other Rom. But their money spent the same as anyone else’s.

“We came to you when Sophia was murdered, burned to death by the Auphe,” Niko continued. “When Cal…” He didn’t finish that sentence. I knew he didn’t like saying it aloud; I knew he didn’t like remembering it.

I was better off, in a sense. I didn’t remember much of that time when we visited the Vayash, and what I did remember was a foggy haze. When I was fourteen, the Auphe had burned our trailer, killing our mother while Niko escaped out a tight back window, and they’d taken me to a place only Auphe can go. Another world or a murderous reflection of this one, I didn’t know or remember any of that. I didn’t remember escaping and finding my way back home. The fact that only a day and a half had passed at the burned trailer site, yet I’d returned—somehow—sixteen instead of fourteen at best guess, made not remembering that much…safer. They played with time like they played with lives. The Auphe had had me for two years. Yet all of it I’d recalled, more or less, was the rare sensation of cold or of rough rock against my skin.

Had I actually remembered those years in detail, I imagined the Cal in me would pour down an invisible drain and leave a Caliban-shaped nightmare in its place.

As it was, after I’d returned, it had been a long time before I’d been anything close to functional. I’d rarely spoken. The only human touch I could stand was my brother’s hand on my shoulder, and that took a while. I had remembered the Auphe taking me and I vaguely remembered stumbling home naked through a rip in reality, but next to nothing between. But I’d known they’d come for me again. I might not know anything else, but that I knew.

So we had run. We’d crashed in Nik’s car or in motels and I’d curled in a fetal position under the beds with my knife and gone days without sleep. Niko…Niko had rented rooms with a queen-size bed so he could sleep under it with me, to make sure I knew I wasn’t alone.

That’s why Niko had gone to the Vayash Clan, our clan, for help, but that’s not what they’d given us.

I didn’t remember much of it. Time had passed since I’d escaped the Auphe, but I hadn’t known how long. I couldn’t tell an hour from a minute then. Colors were bright enough to make my stomach turn. The light was too bright, sunny days, cloudy days, always too bright. For a while it made me retreat further into myself. When it came to guessing something as changeable as time, a month was probably close, sounded right, and did it matter? Niko had found the Vayash, I didn’t know how, and drove us there in the first piece-of-crap car he’d owned. He’d opened the car door for me when we arrived. I did remember that—his face, his mouth moving, although I didn’t understand what he said. I didn’t always know who I was, where I was, but I knew Niko. He was the only anchor in a world of chaos. He hadn’t been as fortunate with me. He hadn’t known when I would be less aware, when I would be a whole lot more, and what rabidly unpredictable things I would do if it was the latter.

That day, I thought, had started out a good day. I still ate with my hands—pancakes. Not meat. I refused to eat meat, refused to look at it, and gagged at the sight of pork. Pinkish white like something…something I didn’t remember. Eventually I’d gotten used to it again. It took almost a year. Pepperoni pizza couldn’t be given up forever. But before then Niko had learned not to feed me meat; even the smell of it repulsed me, although I didn’t know why.

You knew why.

What do Auphe eat?

Who do Auphe eat?

I had dressed without Niko having to carefully remind me more than twice. English came and went, as it did that day. Sometimes I understood it; sometimes I didn’t. While I hadn’t said a word that morning, I did dress, although no shoes. The concept of shoes to me seemed idiotic. I couldn’t see the reason for them when the random feeling of freezing cold with nothing but jagged rock to walk or flee on was what I expected. Asphalt, carpet, or grass—decadence.

I hadn’t needed shoes, but my knife—I hadn’t let go of my knife once then. Not to eat, piss, or sleep. My knife I’d kept with me.

Good day…it must’ve been or I wouldn’t have gotten out of the car to face a gathering of people with Nik. He hadn’t had much choice. Leaving me in a car by myself wasn’t the best option. The last time when I’d forgotten how the door handle worked, I had tried to kick my way out through the safety glass with those bare feet and succeeded. This time I had followed just behind him, the front of my shoulder almost touching his shoulder blade. I was oblivious, not really there. Not really anywhere. Good, good day.

Then I smelled meat cooking. Burning. That had seemed wrong to me. Food and fire, they shouldn’t mix, should they?

Waste of flavor, waste of blood. I didn’t know why I’d thought that. But wasn’t it true?

Sheep. It was what sheep did. I pulled my knife from under my jacket. Sheep, yes, but I smelled their rage and fear soaking the air. The rage I’d dismissed.

The fear I embraced.

It had been a good day, but unfortunately for Niko it turned into an aware day. I liked aware days.

But no one else did.

Niko had said something to the group slowly surrounding us. All men. I didn’t listen to it. “No, Cal.” That was said to me. That I did try to listen to. Tried. Tried. Tried. He’d taught me to recognize my name again. “No knife. Our clan.” The women and children had fled inside their RVs. I hadn’t caught it all, understood it all, or recalled it all.…It didn’t make a difference. The result was the same. I’d heard him say, “Help.” More sounds. “Kidnapped. Killed.” And finally, “Family.”

For some reason that word I had known clearly. “You are our family. Help us.” Knew it because my two years of imprisonment had imprinted on me that those words were only to be laughed at. Weak and worthless. The Auphe had no family, did they? I couldn’t remember, but if they had…instinct told me that if they did and one of that family pulled up lame, you…they…would eat that brother or sister. And those sheep gathered around us…they were born lame. Lame as a species.

Then Niko had said something that shocked me, even in my condition.

Beg. “I’m begging you.”

Fuck the Auphe. I had family. I had a brother and these sheep had made him beg.

The men had completed their circle and I had turned to rest my back against Niko’s. Watchyourbackwatchyourbackwatchyourback. Alwaysalwayswatchyourback. You took down more that way. They moved closer and that had been when Niko had gotten his answer.

“Armaya khul! Beng!” He’d been the biggest of the men, their leader. If it had been now, I could tell you if his hair was curly or straight, if he had a mustache or not, but then…humans had looked all the same—alien. Wrong. Puny…

Prey.

Except for Niko. He was the only one after two years in Tumulus, Auphe-world without the balloons and funnel cakes, who I could actually see in detail. He stood out sharp and clear. The rest? The blur of sheep? Who could tell one from another? Who cared if you could?

“Doshman!” Another, bigger one had lunged at us with a blade in his hand, then back again quickly when I shifted my gaze to him and grinned at him gleefully. That…oh, yesss, that I recognized. A sheep making threats. It was funny. It was so goddamn hilarious.

“Johai!”

The words, they were filthy and full of scorn. They hadn’t had to be in English or Auphe for me to know that. They had spit on us as well, forking the evil eye at me; Niko had taken it much more to heart than I did—eighteen years old with a dead mother, a desperately damaged brother, begging for help. Niko who never begged. Niko who had thought all our family couldn’t be as bad as Sophia.

Niko, who had been surprised in the very worst way.

“Marime! Bi-lacho! Za! Za!” Their leader had thrown out his arm to hold back the rest of the flock and spoken English to Niko. “You are Vayash. Cast off the monstrous bino. Or better, kill the mad beast and return to your clan.”

I hadn’t forgotten or missed a single word of that, I think because I’d seen the look on Niko’s face when he’d been given the choice. I was lost in a fog, but that look and the words that had caused it had managed to part it to let me see and hear clearly.

“You are the monsters. We don’t need your help. We don’t want your worthless damned help.” Niko’s voice had burned with betrayal and hate. Two emotions I knew better than any others. I’d known them when the Auphe had taken me. I knew them a thousand times more intensely when I’d returned.

Niko didn’t hate. Niko wasn’t like that. He wasn’t like Auphe. He wasn’t like me. I heard myself snarling. These sheep had made him hate.

I’d made a sound of anticipation and before Niko could swivel, I met the nearest two who had charged me at the moment of Niko’s defiance of the head sheep. I buried one’s own blade in his shoulder and mine in the other’s thigh. Don’t kill. Don’t kill. Don’t kill. Niko wouldn’t want me to kill. But it was hard, hard. I wanted it. Wanted. Needed.

Niko…

I snarled, but honored my brother, not the Auphe. As both men fell, I settled for laughing. I had known then and now that it hadn’t sounded anything like a human laugh.

I hadn’t cared. They were lucky it had started out as a good day before shifting to an aware one or I would’ve gone for their throats with my teeth and done more damage than they could have with their pigstickers. Eight years ago I’d barely understood anything around me. I hadn’t been right—in my head, in my soul. No, I hadn’t been right at all, far from it. The world had been twisted and strange and it was months before I would see it for what it was again.

If I ever truly had.

When Niko had pulled me back into the car ahead of an armed but uneasy mob, I’d said my first and only words of the day.

My voice had been rusty from rare use, but insistent, and the words were my first real step back toward sanity—toward Cal. “Don’t hate. Don’t beg. Not you.”

Because my brother had been better than that. Better than those sheep. Better than me.

He still was.

That encounter with the Vayash had in part made Niko what he was now: honorable if you deserved it, the unforgiving steel of his sword if you didn’t. That would always be a part of him. Thanks, in a large part, to that and this bastard I’d attacked at our door.

The one last thing I did remember…Sophia hadn’t taught us Rom. Not the language of our clan or the overall language of all clans. While he could guess from the tone what those words had implied, that wasn’t enough for Niko. Two days later we had stopped in a library. After an hour on the Internet, he’d taken me back to the car and I thought, in that one moment, that he’d been glad I wasn’t coherent enough to ask him what those words had meant. In the years since, he hadn’t once told me, and I hadn’t asked. He also hadn’t learned any more Rom; Niko who ate knowledge and languages like they were Wheaties. He would have nothing to do with it.

It didn’t make a difference if Kalakos was his absent father or not. He was Vayash and that damned him as equally in Nik’s eyes.

Kalakos nodded once. “I heard what happened, but I was not there. I swear it, Niko. I would not lie to you. Like Sophia, the clan is too small for me. I roam and I rarely see them. If I had been there, I would’ve spoken for you.”

Yeah, right.

“And I never came to you before”—prior to the Auphe’s taking me, before Niko’s second or third or fourth or seventh birthday—“as I found out about you when you were two years old. I didn’t know I had a son until then. But I thought your mother the better choice for you. The life I lead, constantly on the move, the work I do, not so different from yours, it wasn’t any life for a child.”

That…that was worth a fucking comment or two. “You thought Niko living with Sophia…a bat-shit crazy, abusive bitch of a mother, was a better life for a child? Is that your story?” He was a liar. He’d slept with her, he knew her, he knew what she was—a sociopath. People don’t change that much in three years. He’d known and he hadn’t wanted the responsibility of a kid, of Niko, any more than Sophia had. He’d just made it out in time before Niko entered the world—or a booze-soaked hell. With Sophia it was the same thing.

Better life?

Shit.

“Guess what, asshole? You were wrong.” I straightened and threw the Ka-Bar directly at him. I didn’t lose control. It was me, all me, and entirely deliberate.

In a move so reminiscent of Niko it was uncanny, he leaned to one side with incredible speed and caught the combat knife by the handle, as it would’ve passed by his neck or through his neck if he hadn’t dodged. The corner of his mouth lifted. I could see the curve of condescension building. For a half Auphe, I wasn’t too impressive, not at all—I could see the thought forming behind onyx eyes.

We’d see about that.

Yes, we would.

“Keep it,” I said with a mocking grin. “Where you’re going, you’re going to need it.”

The gate I created blossomed into hungry, pulsing dark gray around him and then he and it were gone. All Auphe could build gates to places they’d been to or could see. An endless number of gates. So could I…once. Now I was limited, but I had enough ability left in me, and this one had more than been worth it.

“You didn’t.” Niko frowned, and it wasn’t throwing the knife at his deadbeat dad that sparked that statement. “Tell me that you didn’t.”

I swept my hair back out of my eyes. It was nice to not be mistaken as the sheepdog entry in the Unshowered Best of Show. But letting it hang, glaring through it, I’d been what Kalakos had expected me to be—wild and tainted. Auphe. That had been worth it—delivering the goods. “Goodfellow said all supers had fled the city last night. Worst that happens is he gets mugged.”

“You did. Buddha on high, you gated him to the boggle pit.” Niko lowered his head to pound the base of his palm lightly against his forehead. “Cal, there is supernatural and then there is über-natural. The Panic might affect the boggles some, perhaps, but not enough to make them leave. They can burrow under the mud to avoid the pheromones if they have to, but pheromones or not, I have a feeling not even the Panic is enough to drive the boggles elsewhere.”

True. Boggles, nine feet of mud-wallowing, alligator-skinned, shark-mouthed humanoids that lived in the least accessible part of Central Park, were the unsocialized pit bulls of the paien world—if pit bulls were the size of bears, could talk, and ate muggers and joggers. Very little—actually nothing—scared them.

I groaned at having to admit social responsibility, which was only for Niko’s sake or I would’ve dropped that asshole straight into the pit and had a brewski to celebrate the occasion. “No, I didn’t.” I opened the refrigerator and grabbed some frozen waffles. “In case the boggles didn’t leave”—and I knew as well as my brother what tough mothers they were—“I gated him about one-fourth of a mile away. If he’s a fast runner, he’ll be back to annoy us—I mean you—soon enough.”

He would be too, the way he moved. I saw where Niko had obtained the potential to become the fighter he was. If he hadn’t put in the work, studied martial arts, trained in every single method he could get his hands on, the potential might have stayed dormant. But he had put in the work. He had to keep his brother alive from the pursuing monsters until I was old enough to do it myself, and that took effort.

All of his life had been about making sure I kept mine.

Giving Niko a better life, Kalakos had said.…That bastard.

I popped two waffles into the toaster. “Is it all right if I hate the son of a bitch for you?” I asked, pretending to search for syrup in the wrong cabinet. “He’s a dick and he screwed you bigger than anything, but he’s your father.…Guess it’s polite to ask: Can I hate him?” I already did, but if Niko had a problem with it, I’d pretend otherwise. If Niko wanted to bond with the deserting dick, the absentee asshole, I’d grit my teeth and go along with that as well. I’d despise it, and keep hating underneath, but I’d do it. To say I owed my brother didn’t quite cover it.

“Don’t worry.” Niko handed me the syrup from the pantry, ending my charade of not meeting his eyes. “He didn’t come for me and then he didn’t come for us both. You aren’t his son, but you’re my brother and he knew that. Family is family. He is not ours. He deserted not only me, but you as well.” His smile wasn’t savage as mine had been, but it was far more bitter.

“Trust me, Cal. I hate him enough for us both.”

Niko hated.

The younger me, the Cal of eight years ago, felt a pang of regret.