Doubletake

8

The couch ended up at a sharp angle, one end propped up on the sofa in Goodfellow’s condo and the other on the floor. The expensive leather of Robin’s furniture ripped and tore. It was the second time I’d destroyed the puck’s wraparound couch. I only hoped the other end hadn’t landed on Salome or Spartacus. Spartacus didn’t deserve that, and Salome would gnaw off my leg and balls and be the first to bring the game of pool to the mummified cat community. It gave whole new meaning to “rack the balls.” I shoved Kalakos off of me. If we’d hit Salome, let her take her wrath out on him.

“You brought him too? Your generous nature surprises me,” Robin drawled; his end of the couch was the higher one. He looked comfortable. Good for him. He used to puke when I had to gate us away. Eventually he’d gotten used to it, as had Niko. Kalakos was all but doubled over, doing all he could to keep from vomiting. Humans didn’t like gates and gates didn’t like humans. “And you will pay for my sofa, I promise you.”

“I had to,” I snapped, wiping the slow ooze of blood from my nostrils. I was healed, but normally even in the best of conditions, the nosebleed would gush like a river. The headache would be the same as being hit in the head with a baseball bat, but now it was only a lower-level migraine. Not that I’d ever had a migraine, but I thought it was a good guess. “I didn’t have a choice. Any hands, legs, any piece of any one of us at all that was outside the gate would’ve been left behind in our apartment. Fingers on the floor draw rats. And I like our couch. My ass imprint is the perfect depth. I wasn’t leaving it behind.”

“Yet my furniture means nothing to you.” Goodfellow stayed in place, hands behind his head, as the rest of us slid off and onto the floor. “The two of you are quite the experts with swords.” He addressed Niko and Kalakos, who was recovering. He was less green. He’d head back into the nausea range, because Goodfellow was talking and didn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon.

Janus—no big deal. A sweaty version of American Gladiators right in front of him, that was worth discussing. “It is almost as if Niko inherited some talent from you, although he is superior. He fights with his skill and his heart. You fight with your skill alone. Too bad. A strong heart usually wins. We pucks hate that, as it makes trickery more difficult. Unfortunately it is true.”

Kalakos still held the xiphos in his hand, the one that had actually seemed to make a mild impression on Janus. “Niko is impressive. I will not deny. All the male line of my family is the same and has been since…I cannot remember. Blond hair, fighters. There is a story that a man impregnated a girl from our clan back in Greece hundreds of years ago. Northern Greek and blond, he was supposedly descended from the Trojan war hero Achilles.” He shifted his shoulders. “Foolishness. Mythology, the historical rumors that never die.”

Robin crossed his ankles and raised his eyebrows. “Mythology. When will you humans ever learn what is true and what is not? Achilles existed. There is no myth there. He was human, however. No goddess dipping him in a river by his heel. He was a human soldier and a superb warrior.” He moved a hand to pat his stomach. Salome appeared, jumped, and curled up, dead and purring. Her feline grin was the same as always—the Cheshire cat crossed with Hannibal Lecter. “It does explain a good deal. The inherent genetic talent of hundreds of years of warriors since Achilles, hundreds of more warrior ancestors before him. The general appearance: the blond hair and epic nose. You could be his brothers, both of you.”

Niko, ever prepared, had held on to his towel and finished cleaning up. “Or his cousin, Patroclus?”

“No, contrary to useless historical myth, they didn’t look much alike. Patroclus had dark hair. He also had a tendency toward a foul mouth and insubordination. When they were younger, years before Troy, he was whipped on one occasion, his back turned to rags of flesh…or at least he was until Achilles returned to camp and broke the neck of the antisyntag…the lieutenant colonel who was doing the ‘punishing.’ The man wasn’t fond of mercenaries to begin with. We had a time covering that one up. But as all the men hated him anyway, a few barrels of wine and it was forgive and forget.”

“They existed? You knew them?” Kalakos asked with a healthy dose of disbelief. “Achilles and Patroclus?”

Robin looked down his nose. “Were they worth knowing? Yes. Ergo, did I know them? Yes.” He stroked Salome’s wrinkly bare skin. “When Patroclus died, Achilles cut off his own hair to mourn him.” He stared into the light of Salome’s eyes as he said that, as if he could see it all over again in the dusty glow. “I handed him the dagger.”

“That tradition extended that far back?” The Rom had picked that up when passing through Greece. “To cut your hair?” Niko wondered, a shadowed memory passing over his face. Why wouldn’t he be curious? He’d once done it himself.

Robin didn’t answer the question, instead saying, “Niko, you can borrow the shower and some of my clothes if you wish. There is also soy milk in the refrigerator. Wine for Promise. Nothing for Cal, as he keeps destroying my condo. And when we are settled, I’d like to hear about the xiphos Kalakos has that didn’t kill Janus, but made the automaton at least hesitate for a second or two. Who knows how long we have? This is perfect weather for a war machine like Janus to move about unseen among the local populace.”

“We could’ve been hearing about the swords sooner if you weren’t telling us goddamn bedtime stories,” I growled. “And it’s a war machine? We have an actual war machine on our asses?”

The puck gently rang the gold loop in the tip of Salome’s ear. “I like stories. And obviously it’s a war machine. Do you think it was built to pick olives?”

What the hell did you say to that?

Niko showered, as did Kalakos, although he hadn’t been offered an invitation. The condo had three bathrooms. He took advantage. He wasn’t lacking in intelligence enough to take any of Robin’s or Ish’s clothes without the offer. He did ask politely for shoes, which Robin grumbled about before giving in. “But no shirt. If I have to give you shoes, I get a nice view in return. And if you could throw in a boom-chika-bow-wow once in a while, I might even give you shoes that fit.”

Kalakos slapped the xiphos lightly against his leg. “I’ve not killed a puck before.”

“And you never will. Achilles-lite. Vaguely similar taste with half the lethality. Now go take your shower or your generous host, me, will let you walk around New York shoeless, shirtless, and perhaps without your balls.”

Salome knew that word. Her hairless muzzle turned toward Kalakos and she showed him her bored let’s-play smile. I couldn’t figure out how she fit the dentures of a T. Rex in her cat-size mouth, and Kalakos didn’t waste time pondering the issue either. He was already moving for the hall and the bathrooms. When he returned he was re-dressed in his black pants and put on his long coat I hadn’t noticed him seizing before I’d gated. It must have been where the xiphos had been concealed. He also had the shoes Robin had promised him. He didn’t mention anything about the very visible fang marks in them.

When all was done but not said, fifteen minutes later we gathered around the dining room table and I said, “Spit it out, Kalakos.” He was at the opposite end of the table from me, not that that would do him any good. I had kept my Desert Eagle with me when I’d gated and it shone bright and deadly on the table in front of me.

“Niko will cut you some slack for your Suyolak-jacked-up Neosporin, but he’s my brother. He cares if I live or die. I have different priorities. ‘No life for a child.’” I was no Salome but I stretched my mouth into a grin that outdid your average crocodile. “I lived that life with him. And if it comes to me living or me dying and taking you with me because you discarded him like trash to live that life, I don’t have to flip a fucking quarter to know which choice I’d prefer.” I picked up the Eagle and aimed it at where his heart would’ve been if the son of a bitch had had one. “Tell us the story. Goodfellow told us one. Now it’s your turn.

“And, Kalakos,” I added, casual on the outside, but on the inside was the blackest of rage, “you know what I am. The entire Vayash clan knew from the day I was born. They kept an eye on Sophia, making sure the wild, crazy, sociopathic bitch didn’t get them in trouble. She laughed at that. And they knew the Auphe. All the Rom know the Auphe. The clan knew from the beginning and so did you. The Auphe don’t play games like me without a reason. When they make things like me, even they don’t know for certain how I’ll turn out.” I turned the Eagle on one side. “More human?” Then to the other side. “Less human?” Then I aimed it back at him.

“But you left Niko there anyway. You know what?” My finger tightened on the trigger. I wanted to pull it. God, I wanted it badly enough that I felt my finger cramp from the pressure of holding back. “That’s the bigger crime than leaving him with Sophia. I could’ve been born a monster. You could’ve left him with a monster.”

Kalakos tensed, fingers curling around the grip of the xiphos. “You are a monster.”

“Now you get it.” I felt Niko’s presence behind me, but my trigger finger didn’t relax. Neither did my predatory grin. “Now you know why Niko is willing to give you a week, but if I think you’re lying, I won’t give you a second. I’ll kill you, and the best thing you can hope for is that I use a gun to do it.” I finally let the tension drain away and leaned back in my chair, Eagle still aimed at him, but my grin gone. Niko moved up to my side, although if it had come down to it, I didn’t think he knew himself if he would’ve tried to stop me from pulling the trigger. He sat around the corner of the table from me. “So tell your goddamn story.”

All Rom clans have a burden and a duty. That’s where the story began. I didn’t know why they all did. I didn’t think they remembered when or why it had begun either, but this I did know: I didn’t give a shit. Janus was the Vayash burden. Created by Hephaestus, who claimed to be a Greek god…again, didn’t care…he gave the automaton to the Vayash those hundreds of years ago they’d squatted there. It was inactive, a dead machine, if machines could die. Only certain spells could bring it back to life, control it, or disable it again. No one knew the words, the incantations to do any of that. Hephaestus had not trusted them with that. Fake god or not, he was no fool.

“Incantations. Spells.” Robin clunked his forehead lightly against the table. “Isn’t the absolute magnitude of the supernatural enough for you? Must you humans continually offend us with your fairy dust and your talking, colored, egg-crapping rabbits? There is no magic. None. There is a technology that came far before that of humans and built by races long extinct, but there is no magic. Hephaestus without a doubt bought the thing, already an antique in his day, and passed it off as his own work. He wasn’t capable of anything like that. Could barely build a mousetrap, the lying bastard.” He tunneled fingers through his brown hair, squinted against what was a clearly massive headache. “But, to be perfectly clear one more time, there is no magic.”

“No Santa, huh?” I snorted.

“No, there was a Santa Claus, but a seven-year-old werewolf ate him,” he answered, distracted before turning his ire back on Kalakos. “And who knows this better than anyone? That magic is a trick and the cheapest one there is? An embarrassment to all?” He rearranged himself in the chair to lean closer to Kalakos. “You do. The best of the human tricksters, the Rom, yet you fake it nonetheless, giving us all a bad name.”

Closer still as he emphasized. “Do not think to play trickster games with a trueborn paien trickster or I’ll take Cal’s gun and put it where he wouldn’t think to before I fire it.”

Kalakos took that as a strong hint to continue the account with less of that magical bullshit, the only thing that offended Robin: trying to fool a puck. “Although it was assumed no one knew the codes, especially after so long, someone had. The Vayash had found Janus’s metal casket empty and the body of two Rom by it. One had had his throat slit neatly.…Blood must have been been part of the activation, combined with the correct command, or that’s what the Rom had guessed. It wasn’t as if we had a guard on a creature that did nothing but sleep. No, this was very deliberate and ritualistic. The scarlet was smeared liberally on and in the casket. The other Rom had been torn apart. Arms, legs, head, they were all scattered. The traitor. He had been the one to bring Janus to life, but the words used to control it beyond that were obviously not correct. Janus was gone. The clan was parked in Pennsylvania at an RV park and fortunate to be in the closest small town running a rickety fair, earning the day’s pay.”

If they’d been there when it had happened, Janus would’ve killed them all, Kalakos said. Hephaestus had warned that should Janus escape it would have enough low-level awareness to hate its captors and destroy them. Beyond that…

It would go home. Whether it was a beacon or some bizarre programming from the Greek geeks beyond time, it would return to the place of its creation. Greece before it was Greece. That was why it had headed to NYC. In a straight line from Pennsylvania, it was the closest to the ocean, and the ocean had to be crossed to reach home…but that was before it became distracted by the presence of three Vayash in the city. Kalakos didn’t know how it sensed us. Did it smell Vayash blood? He had no idea. But find us it could and would until we destroyed it or put it back to sleep, and as none of us knew the incantation—Robin glared when I emphasized the word evilly—that wasn’t going to happen.

Kalakos had placed his xiphos back onto the table. Facing a monster like me versus that threat of a colonoscopy given to him by a puck with a borrowed Desert Eagle—cooperating was in his best interest. From inside his coat he produced another xiphos. As I’d noticed before, they were the same dark metal that formed Janus. “We were given these with our burden and we were told they wouldn’t kill it or even harm it, but that they would cause it pain, give you the moments you needed to hopefully escape. I have only two.” He regarded Niko. “As you and I are the swordsmen here, I believe one should go to you and one to me. We will make the best use of them.”

“Logical. Reasonable.” Niko took the xiphos handed to him and passed it to me. The xiphos left on the table before Kalakos he took for himself without compunction. Niko was about logic and reason, but most of all practicality—the kind that suited him. He didn’t bother to look at Kalakos when he ordered, “If you have something to say, do not bother.”

“I have something to say. I’m a better swordsman than all of you put together,” Robin groused. “Why don’t I get a chance at one?”

“You don’t have Vayash blood,” Niko reminded him, running a hand over the dark metal. “Janus has nothing against you, although it will still eviscerate you if you get in its way. Do remember that. But this mess is not of your making. Stay back and stay safe. You as well, Promise. We have three more days before Cal’s gating ability will have recovered to solve all of this for us.” That gate I’d built to escape Janus today had set the clock back. Between the first and second gate I had no limit, although I had pain. Between the second gate and the third, which would kill me…it took three days to reset me back to gate one.

“Kicking metal butt and sending it to another dimension. That’s me.” Three days was a long time when Janus could find us as if we had a GPS stapled to our asses, and we all knew it.

I examined my own xiphos, for the first time putting down the gleaming Eagle. Goodfellow was on the money. He was a better swordsman than all of us, but hundreds of thousands of years—or longer…as he’d said in the bar, long enough to be forever—after that kind of time spent with a sword in his hand, he couldn’t be beaten by anyone human. Perhaps not even by anyone less or more than human. It made me think of what Robin had said in the bar. How old was he—genuinely? Why had no other puck poached on his name? What did they all know? Consciously or subconsciously?

The Auphe weren’t the only firsts. The first in time, but not the only first of a race or the only ones who had lived millions of years—a number that went hand in hand with insanity, unreasoning hatred of everyone and everything, and pitch-black malevolence. Hob, the first puck, had been that way, and although he was now dead…

He screamed. Didn’t he scream like a baby? First born—last torn.

It was a warm thought. He had tried to kill Niko and Georgina, a girl I’d loved. He had deserved to scream. There was no denying that, and most would scream their lungs inside out when ripped apart by the mass of unbelievably pissed-off Auphe I’d tossed him to. I had no regrets.

It didn’t change my original thought, though.

Hobgoblin—Hob to all others, as shorter names made it quicker in getting to the running part—was the first trickster and had been as much a murder-loving bastard as the Auphe. A combination like that we could use until the days passed and I could gate Janus onto the bones of those now-dead Auphe and the bones of the first puck as well in Tumulus. Good company for an ancient war machine. “Goodfellow.” I ran a careful thumb along the blade. “If he had to face Janus, what do you think Hob would do—to at least slow it down?”

Robin’s lips flattened. “I do not know.”

“You knew him better than most. You’ve said so. He was the first trickster. He would have a chance to put this bastard off for three days at least. What would he do?” Robin was one of the best tricksters out there, but he wasn’t what Hob had been—a blood-spilling psychopath created out of insanity and violence. He was violence, or had been, walking and talking, but so sly and slippery you didn’t see him coming until you wondered why your guts were on the outside instead of the inside. It would’ve been a challenge for him, but I’d seen into that bastard’s eyes. Pure poison was all that lurked in their depths. His tricks, they always ended in death. He would’ve known how, if not to take out the automaton, then how to delay it. I knew from personal experience that sometimes it took a monster to outthink a monster.

“I don’t know.” It was more that he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to go down that path. I didn’t blame him. I had my own path. I knew what it was like. Moving along the path slowly, controlling each step, but I was walking it all the same.

Halfway there now…

“Okay,” I said. I wouldn’t push him on it yet. I’d give him a chance to think about it before I brought it up again. “No big deal. We’ll just—”

That was when I felt it. Behind me. A gate. Jesus Christ, a fucking gate.

Once I would’ve thought, No. Not again. Not anymore. I was the last. I’d made sure of that. There were no more. No. No more kidnappings. No more threatening to kill my brother, my friends. No more red eyes, white skin, metal teeth. No more Auphe hell.

God, no more.

Of course, I was somewhat of a chickenshit then, not that everyone—or anyone—agreed with that. But I had been more human.

Not that I hadn’t had my moments back then, but they were Auphe moments, lost in a blind genetic rage. I wasn’t blind any longer. With help, I’d killed every last one of these bastards on the planet, culminating with eight half-breeds like me in Nevah’s Landing.

What were my thoughts now?

Shit, not again. And the emotion that went with it wasn’t fear. I was mad as hell. I’d destroyed our race. Our entire goddamn race. What the fuck did this out-of-thin-air, leftover asshole think he could do to me?

Arms wrapped around me from behind, steel bands. Stronger than me, stronger than Niko, who was hurtling toward us, but it was too late. The coldness of the gate swallowed us and the condo was gone. But I heard the words that floated behind.

An unfamiliar voice but with an all-too-familiar sarcasm, the same as mine—at someone else’s expense—said, “You could cover your windows, goat. I go where I see, and I saw far too many perversions through yours.”

It was bad when an Auphe thought your sex life—your monogamous sex life—was a perversion. Or it could be it wasn’t the sex but the emotion that went with it. Yeah, Auphe were creatures of few emotions and they were all malignant as biohazard waste filling their skulls. Hate, disgust, slaughter-glee, arrogance, ravenous hunger. No affection, though—that didn’t exist to them.

And we were gone, bodies and voice.

The gate dumped us in a dark basement with a concrete floor with one flickering bulb overhead and the rot of dead bodies—gone, but the decomposition lingered in the cold air, as did the taint of Auphe. I was used to my scent. I’d had it all my life, after all, but the smell of another Auphe was somehow different and repulsive. It…he released me and I whipped around, the xiphos between us. I missed my Desert Eagle as much as I’d miss my hand. “It was the feathers, wasn’t it?” I grinned, showing all my teeth, top and bottom. The predator’s grin—the better to eat you with.

If there was one thing I could say about an Auphe, it was that I didn’t have to conceal what I was in front of him.

Guard up, using every ounce of swordsmanship Niko had taught me, I drawled, “Spying, were you? I think that makes you the perv. Did you see the feathers flying around the bedroom as the peri”—he didn’t need to know Ishiah’s name—“spunked goose juice everywhere? Did he look like a pigeon that swallowed a grenade and exploded? That’s my mental nightmare.”

The Auphe. No, the half-Auphe, like me—I’d seen that at the same time as I’d smelled it—grinned back. He was even dressed all in black, as I was, although he had a leather jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and combat boots, whereas I was stuck with sweats and damned socks.

Ever had to face death while wearing a pair of socks? It’s somewhat humiliating.

He had human teeth, straight and white, until a second row of hundreds of hypodermic needles snapped down over the top of them. That made him more Auphe than me, as did the red irises he revealed when he took off and dropped dark sunglasses to the floor. His hair was white, the Auphe winter tint with the glitter of ice, but the same length and don’t-give-a-shit style as mine. It was on purpose, to mock me. I knew it. His skin wasn’t pale as mine was, though. His was a healthy human tint. Light tan. He was me, but the opposite of me.

“Peri and puck. I had to eat a pit bull to rinse the taste from my mouth after that show.” His voice was deeper than mine, with the faint grind of broken glass to each word. Semi-Auphe vocal cords. He shook his hand, the one that I had already seen gripping a black matte Desert Eagle, to show off the spiked dog collar wrapped three times around his wrist.

“What’s life without souvenirs?” I said. The gun he held was well-known, a black matte Desert Eagle with a scratch on the grip. Mine.

He saw my eyes flicker toward it. “Yes, Caliban, it’s yours. I picked it up off the street where that cattle you live with dropped it as he tried to save your life. I like it. It’s a good gun. I do like a good gun. In death I like all things. Guns, knives, swords.” His other hand clenched, then flared with fingers spread, silver bright. He wore black gloves over his hands, but over his empty one was a metal set of claws that encased his fingers and hand, a modern imitation of an extinct Auphe taloned one. When he made a fist, four to five inches of metal would extend past his knuckles to carve you apart. “But I like the old ways too. And if you’re not born with them, you make them. Or have someone or something make them for you.”

“You know my name? Caliban?” I asked without emotion, sword between us but closer to him now. No feelings—none human, at any rate. Others, though…they were there. But if I did let those come, it would get down and dirty before I was ready for it.

“All in the Nevah’s Landing prison knew of Caliban. The golden boy who would return the world to what it should have been. But you didn’t, did you? You destroyed the Auphe instead. Then you shot the failures and burned down the house until the bones were fiery dust. I didn’t see the others, years after I left, with the windows boarded, but I saw what you did to our keeper, our torturer—Sidle.”

Proud, irritated, satisfied. Those emotions all showed on his face…because he let them. Why would he bother to hide his feelings? Auphe didn’t hide from anyone or anything. “Ah, that was the best. The way you scattered his brain and bone and blood without looking. You pulled the trigger and kept walking. I threw down the binoculars and laughed, laughed down the night sky, or at least I tried.”

Binoculars. That’s why I hadn’t felt him. He’d been far away…watching.

“I was jealous you were the one to do it. You always had all the good times, didn’t you, while I spent eighteen years in a cage, chained, tortured, and fed like a tame dog. That, Caliban, was not a good time, but the past doesn’t matter anymore. Because that was the moment I knew I wasn’t alone. You killed Sidle without a second or first thought. You killed him because he was weak. I knew then I had a worthy competitor.” Then he said worse. “A brother.”

Irritated and satisfied I couldn’t care less about, but I didn’t want this thing proud of me, and the very last thing I wanted him thinking was that I was his brother.

I’d killed Sidle, part Auphe himself, because he’d kept seven half-breeds—now I knew it had been eight—like me in cages all their lives, manacled, splashed with acid, tortured with a cattle prod, and who knew what else. I killed his prisoners because they were Auphe: insane and ready to butcher any living creature they came across if their cage doors were opened. I gave them the only escape available to them in this world.

I killed Sidle because he deserved it.

I hadn’t lost a moment of sleep over it, hadn’t spared a thought on the piece of shit since.

“That one empty cage in the house,” I said, taking another step forward with hand tight on the grip of the sword. “Sidle said that half-Auphe had died. He lied, didn’t he? He didn’t want to get in trouble with the masters. He was too stupid to know that they would’ve been doing a homicidal dance of joy at the first half-breed to gate. The first success, long before me. You said years of captivity…”

“Twelve of freedom. Born six years before you and caged eighteen of them. Too bad I didn’t learn to gate sooner.” The metal teeth gleamed. “But once I did…I killed and killed and killed, but finally I learned. You cannot take down an enemy that would drown you and the world in a mass of their flesh without lifting a finger. Not if you don’t know them. I had to learn, and now I know. Reading, writing, history.” He said it singsong, as a kid would—if that kid was possessed. “I know the cattle better now than they know themselves. I know how they think. I know how they smothered the Auphe, breeding like rabbits, and I know how to do the same to them.”

The first Auphe who knew that to learn about your enemy made killing easier, planning more efficient, wholesale massacres closer to reality. This son of a bitch…Jesus. “You went to school?” I lunged at him with the Greek sword, but he was equally quick. Hell, this wasn’t a situation to be lying to myself. He was quicker. He swatted the blade aside with what I knew were the metal claws he wore. I had to depend on knowing, as I didn’t see anything but the afterimage of a silver flash.

“I have a GED.” This time he swung at me, and as fast as I moved I didn’t escape the shallow slices across my chest. My adrenaline levels had tripled, and that did let me see the claws this time, if not avoid them. “I’m an educated monster. The top of my class. I had many teachers, all very proud…until I ate them. No spirit of celebration in them at all. Humans are incredibly dull. Barely worth the slaying.” The talons clacked against one another, ringing out his disappointment at the lack of challenge. “They would be enough for the half-breeds you killed in the Landing, but I am not the same as them. I’m like you, Caliban. I’m an improved version of you, you who are not quite that special and unique after all.”

It was true. He wasn’t like the ones in the Landing, all of them mentally and psychotically dysfunctional. They also had bodies twisted and mutated beyond the hope of passing for human. Not like I could. Not like he could. Worse, he wasn’t the same as them on the inside either. He was clever. He infiltrated the enemy; he was more than functional. He excelled.

He wanted something or we would be fighting to the death now instead of him holding back with baby slaps of his claws. I wasn’t one of the humans who bored him. It would take effort to kill me and he would crave that trial of himself, the escape from tedious prey to face an equal. He said he was my brother. He wasn’t. Sophia wasn’t his mother, and I knew there had to be plenty of Auphe sires at the time he or I was made. We were not brothers, no matter what he thought. He and I were the last of a half-breed race; that was all. In his eyes, however, I knew that was enough. It was the week for family reunions, unwanted and bloody. Niko and Kalakos. The Panic. And now me and mine.

Better to deny yourself than offend a brother, after all.

Oh, shut the hell up. I mentally slammed a hard foot down on my lurking internal smart-ass and, worse, the tingle of interest.

The last two of a race that shouldn’t have existed to begin with if there’d been a God or if nature had had any judgment. This was a reunion, but it had nothing to do with family. It had to do with an opportunity to put nature’s screwup right.

“Who the fuck are you, anyway?” I growled, slashing at his claws with the sword before reversing to knock my Eagle from his hand. He didn’t appear upset. His glittering teeth flashed, satisfied, as if I were a dog who’d done a particularly difficult trick.

“My name was the same as all the others were given. Failure. But once free I named myself. Now I am Grimm…for aren’t we the grimmest of brothers?”

“You’re not my brother.” Auphe were bad enough. Add the original Grimm Brothers fairy tales, with zombie horses and wolf-eaten grandmothers who stayed dead and half-digested, and “disgust” was a word that didn’t begin to cover the combination of the two.

“When we are the last of one race and the beginning of another, we are brothers.” The claws slashed again and this time I managed to just dodge them. “I’ve made you my sole interest.” The smile became sly and secretive. “A large interest. Blood and killing, like the sun rising—together they always come first to our kind, but that’s not to say you can’t serve as both.”

“That sounds pretty fucking convenient.” I stabbed at him with the xiphos.

“For me? It is. It very much fucking is.” He was gone in a darkling flare of gray light. I twisted to see him behind me. “Fine and fucking dandy, as Sidle used to tell us through the bars of our cages. Fine and fucking dandy.”

“Kill me already then,” I snarled, “or we can kill each other. That’s the best end to the fairy tales you named yourself after.”

“Kill you?” He laughed. A milder echo of the pure Auphe’s breaking-glass sound. “Why would I have gated that metal monstrosity off of you and your cattle if I wanted to kill you?”

“Janus? You were the one who stole it from the Rom? I hope you had a good time screwing around with it and me outside the bar.” He needed to believe I knew I hadn’t gated it. I’d thought I had, with my last effort, though I’d had no idea of how or where. Grimm couldn’t know I was weak and gateless for days.

But I wasn’t, was I?

“Baby games.” He smiled, teeth sliding back up, and he looked more human. I preferred him Auphe. I preferred knowing in every part of me what he was. “Not that I won’t kill you now that you’ve proved worthy, but I have things for you to do for me first. The blood I want from you is not to spill; it is to spread. When that is done, then finally we’ll have our real games, and don’t tell me you don’t want them as much as I do. That you don’t want to play…at the end. Prove who is the best.”

Cal wants to plaaaaay.

Maybe I did, but that didn’t mean I would.

Spread my blood. That gave me a strong sense of déjà vu. I hated déjà vu.

But the hell with all that. If I hadn’t gated Janus that meant I had a third gate waiting in the wings. The final gate. I could try it on Grimm. I’d happily die to take this bastard with me. One gate opened inside of him and he’d be decorating all four basement walls. I had barely a chance to think of triggering it when the pain searing through my head gave me double vision. Opening a gate and taking Grimm with me was worth it. Opening the third gate and dying while Grimm looked at my twitching body with disappointed puzzlement—no more play—wasn’t.

The pain faded as I let the thought of the gate go. I could kill the bastard with my hands and my sword in the place of a gate and walk away from his cooling corpse. That was a better option. Better because I’d live, but better also because I’d be the reason he didn’t.

“I have questions too.” He gated again, gone from the room. I rushed the door, but before I could reach for the knob, he was back—directly in front of it—directly in front of me. Bare inches away. “You could have gated a hundred Auphe to a million years ago, if you weren’t the insolent badass you were and had refused. When I heard of that, I was…What do you call it? What’s that word? Happy? Happy as hell,” he said, pleased. He hadn’t wanted the Auphe to succeed any more than I had. He did hate them as much as I had—or hated them more—and seeing the prison, the cells, knowing what had been done to him, I didn’t blame him. He deserved that hate to banish those memories. In his place…

In his place, I would be him.

His expression changed to confusion. “After that you could gate as you pleased to the goat’s abode, but dying on a street last night, you couldn’t gate at all. That makes me curious. It also makes me annoyed. Annoyed enough that I was going to kill you and the cattle that wrung their hands to keep you alive—until things changed.”

“Cattle?” I noticed for the first time that he was the only supernatural creature that didn’t use the more typical word for humans. “Not sheep?”

He pressed the metal claws against my face. “Nooo, Caliban. Never sheep. I am the sheep. The black sheep of the Auphe. Blackest of the black. That is my title. They thought you a bad boy. I wish at least one remained to see what I am and what I will be. Bad enough that they would’ve bowed before me.”

The claws clutched my face lightly, but not so lightly that I didn’t know he could have removed my face if he’d wanted. I could see through the space between the talons as I felt their chill. “You gate, you can’t gate, and then today you gate again. And you heal from something when it should’ve taken you weeks to recover. I want to know what you have become. I’m intrigued. Life was so boring before you, Caliban. Borrrrrrring. You cannot know.”

“What things do you want me to do for you first?” I asked abruptly. “What do you mean by ‘spread my blood’?”

His red eyes flared brighter in anticipation or something close to it…GED, short attention span. He was more like me than I cared to admit. “Humans, they breed and breed. You know. This is why we were made. To go back and warn the first Auphe. Destroy the humans before they gobble up the world, gobble it all up when it belongs to us. It’s too late for that now, but it wouldn’t matter if it weren’t.” The talons loosened some, not for my comfort, but as he was caught up in what he had to say, his…hell…vision. “We are better than them. The Auphe are gone, but you and I remain. We are the Second Coming, the new wave that exceeds the first. We are meant to take their place and do what they could not. But as the Auphe in us breed slow, as we live so long—”

Keep dreaming on that one, asshole. I’ll outlive you; I promise you that, even if it’s by seconds, I thought, my grip tightening on the hilt of the xiphos.

“—I needed to find what else we could breed with besides humans. Something that matured faster, fast enough to equal the humans in a few centuries, at least.” He tilted his head until his forehead rested on the metal claws that pressed against my skin, his eyes bloody mirrors of mine, so close the gray of my own reflected in his. The same as the red of his must have reflected in mine. Not brothers, but something as binding, that called to every Auphe cell in me.

An obligation. The last. We were the last…until he proved we don’t have to be.

I pushed the thought away. Yes, we did have to be. The last. That’s what the remains of my conscience said, and it was right.

“And I did find what would breed the fastest.” His eyes remained fixed on mine. “Succubae. They lay eggs, but not with us. With Auphe they have litters, and those litters mature in a year. Three hundred and sixty-five days and you have a full-grown member of the Second Coming.”

Spread the blood. That’s where the déjà vu came from. I’d had this “invitation” before by the real deal. Pure Auphe, not the watered-down versions we were. I’d jumped off a building to turn that particular one down. I wasn’t any more enthusiastic about this one, no matter what other thoughts might slink about in the lowest levels.

“Succubae? They hate us, especially the taste of us.” I knew that from personal experience. Succabae lived on sexual energy, any sexual energy from any being, except one. Auphe energy revolted them. I’d had one nearly upchuck in my lap after tasting me. “They wouldn’t breed with an Auphe,” I said with all the ego-bruised confidence in the world. “For any reason.”

The jagged voice was mildly curious. “Who said I asked their permission?”

This was what I’d traded part of my humanity for…control and something else. Control for situations such as this. The something else was Niko’s life. Those months ago, while facing the Egyptian life-sucker whose pets had made me forget my life—all of it—things had taken a turn. I’d finally been on the verge of regaining my memories, and not only my memories but the biogenetic skills that resided there.

I couldn’t function properly, the useful part of me—the bad part of me—unless all was whole, memories that resided in brain cells and Auphe abilities that resided in both. I’d been close, minutes away, but they were minutes I didn’t have. Half a minute and my brother would’ve been dead. What I’d needed I’d needed right then, not in minutes.

You have to give to get.

The better Cal had pushed a part of his human self down and let the Auphe flow over it. Devour it. A small bite only, but large enough that I was myself again—less/more than myself again, the true Cal with an added cloud of a dead race. Thirty seconds then was more time than I needed to tear out the heart of that Egyptian snake goddess and watch it melt at my feet.

I’d saved my brother and gained control of my former attacks of dangerously unaware violence. The Auphe had been many things, but not unaware in their violence. They were very aware. With more Auphe in me as the human portion was swallowed up, I gained awareness.

Control: The Auphe in me spoke of obligations to what was left of our race—the Auphe in me that was yet only half, shit, maybe three-fourths as both time and genes multiplied, as I sacrificed, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough for Grimm’s plan. That was my newfound awareness.

As for permission…

He did say he hadn’t asked the succabae’s permission.

Control could also mean violently aware attacks. It wasn’t as limiting as one might think.

I didn’t ask for permission either when I sheathed the xiphos in Grimm’s stomach.

Grimm was more Auphe than I was, with their speed, but he also had another quality of theirs…enormous arrogance. That worked to my advantage. It made him assume things he shouldn’t.

Things such as: You’re my brother, because why wouldn’t you want to be?

I already have a brother, better than you.

You know you want to prove ourselves deadlier than the first Auphe.

Been there, done that. The T-shirt shop was closed.

You have to want to reclaim the world. You want to rule it and everything on it.

Rule the world? Too much damn work.

You want to kill whoever or whatever you want, whenever you want.

I already can.

You want to kill.

I do.

You need to kill.

In his conceit, he was right on that one.

At this precise moment, I did need to kill.

So thanks for the opportunity.

“What?” I twisted the blade and felt his blood pour over my hand. “Should I have asked your permission first? Like you asked the succubae?”

The talons tightened on my face. He said he liked guns, but I knew all Auphe save me liked claws and teeth the best. I didn’t want my face ripped off like a Halloween mask, yet it felt good to get down to the basics of flesh and blood, the cutting of one…the spilling of the other. As long as he died with me, it would be worth it. Here was the plate and here was me stepping up to swing the bat. I could save the world from him. Was that the martyr in me? It would sound better to say yes, but it would be a lie. It was about the world, but with the smell of blood, the warmth of it covering my sword hand, an enemy pinned by my metal and his arrogance, it was more about something else. It was about the game.

I could kill another Auphe, defeat him. He wanted to play? Let’s see who won.

But was it that easy? No. When is it ever that easy? From behind I felt five gates open. “Father?” The hiss was pure succubae/incubi, the smell mostly Auphe. Some visitors for Daddy. There went my opportunity to finish the game with Grimm.

Which pissed me off to no fucking end. Not good news for those available for me to take it out on.

I pulled the xiphos free. I was going to need it. Grimm smiled, that perfect human smile, before dropping his claws from my face. He didn’t appear upset about the black-red blood leaking from his abdomen. It was already clotting. With us human-Auphe half-breeds you couldn’t begin to know where the vital organs were. We were all different—although maybe not as different as I wished we were. “No, Caliban, we’re not ready for that game yet. We have things to do,” he said, before pointing a gleaming talon past me. “Turn and greet your new brothers and sisters.”

I did. It was the past returned to life, or very nearly. They looked as ghastly as the Auphe, but unlike the half-Auphe in Nevah’s Landing, these all appeared the same. Identical—same father, perhaps same mother. They were Auphe pale, nude, with the slippery long white hair, the whiteless red eyes, the small pointed ears, but there were no hundreds of metal needles in each narrow jaw. They had succubae/incubi fangs. Metal, but snake fangs all the same, each five inches long and curved, their black tongues forked. Here and there on their skin was the glint of a pearlescent snake scale. You couldn’t tell if a pure Auphe was male or female except by smell; the females had no breasts and the males’ reproductive organ was withdrawn until needed. It was the same with the new ones.

I usually didn’t bother to tell the difference. It was easier to think of them all as its.

It killed, it mutilated, it needed to die.

Grimm had done what he’d claimed. They appeared as deadly as the real Auphe had, but I felt a contemptuous disdain coiling in my gut. They were one-fourth Auphe, half of what I was. I felt about them as the original Auphe had felt about me and the others. They were lesser.

Pathetic corruptions.

Great. I was a monster, I had a nightmare family that would not die no matter how many times I killed them, and now the Auphe in me was not slaughter-prone alone; it was also a bigot. Whatever. It wasn’t as if I’d intended on welcoming them with a slap on the back and a six-pack anyway. And if they were sending off any cuddly-puppy vibes, I was missing them totally.

They crouched by the back basement wall, the five of them, fully grown, as Grimm had said they would be. Fangs bared; black natural talons that their father would envy were poised in the air. They continued to hiss. Despite my inner scorn, I’d try to be careful and do my best to believe that they were at least half as dangerous as the Auphe and Grimm. Arrogance had been his downfall. I wouldn’t let it be mine. There was one way to know—the tried-and-true way. The oldest way. Every Auphe proves himself an Auphe. Survival of the fittest. Time to prove myself part of a family I didn’t claim and hopefully prove it more lethally than they could, ending all of this at the same time.

I pointed the xiphos at the nearest one. “Call me Uncle Cal. It’ll make me feel all warm and fuzzy when I chop off your head.” Grimm was older than I was, but I was by far older than these new Auphe. They matured in a year?

I’d introduce them to twenty-four years of being the real bogeyman in the closet of every other weak excuse for a monster.

So much for careful.

Useless shadows. Garter-snake doppelgängers. Show them what a real Auphe is.

A real Auphe—a real predator—didn’t wait for its enemy to call it out or for its daddy to tell it what to do. It didn’t wait at all.

And I didn’t.