Doubletake

9

That Kalakos was the one who took the last of the five Auphe-bae hit team out of this life was a surprise. To me some. To him most of all.

But that came a few minutes later. Right now the first four I had to take care of myself.

The Second Coming slashed at me with claws and jerked their heads forward in reptilian fashion to try to bury their fangs in my flesh. Succabae and incubi weren’t poisonous. They didn’t have to be. With the size of the fangs, these kiddies could cut through you ten times more efficiently than any butcher knife. The hissing…it didn’t stop. It was almost worse than the fractured-glass sound of an Auphe voice piercing your eardrum. That had been once in a while—not big talkers, the Auphe. This was constant. Trying to tune it out while listening for the movement of Grimm’s grown children was almost impossible. Add that to their gating when they pleased—and they pleased a damn good deal—and I was fighting what disappeared before me and what I couldn’t hear coming up behind me.

I loved every damn minute of it.

The adrenaline rush. The feeling of righteousness. Sometimes I thought the only time that I felt truly salvageable was when I fought something truly evil. Grimm’s doing—they were evil. They weren’t meant to dwell on the skin of this world. I didn’t get that feeling when I took out a supernatural hyena. They belonged. Yes, they ate people, but so did lions, given an opportunity. They weren’t evil as the very definition of the word, but what I faced was, in every sense and bitter syllable of the word.

I whirled as out of the corner of my eye I saw one reappear to my right. I sliced it from neck to pelvis with the xiphos. It didn’t matter where its vital internal organs were with that kind of wound, as basically every organ it had cascaded out onto the filthy concrete floor we fought on. Another one vanished from in front of me to appear behind me—directly behind, as I felt its weight on my back. Claws sank into my arms and I knew fangs were angling to tear my throat out. I didn’t waste any time. I saw another Auphe-bae gating out and I swung around to put the majority of the one leeched onto my back into the gate as it closed. That meant it took whatever part of the Auphe-bae that had been inside the gate with it. As pieces of him fell around me, I guessed it had been about three-fourths. There was half of a head left, the red eyes dulling but the jaws snapping slowly as black brain matter pooled outward. There were arms and legs, but a good deal of his torso, including his spinal cord, was gone.

They didn’t have the proper respect for a gate that they should. And not one had thought to open a gate in me, as I’d tried with Grimm. Grimm had said they matured physically in one year—mentally as well, from the cursing they sprinkled in with their hissing. Yeah, they were all grown-up and cussing with the big boys. It was efficient for breeding to retake the world, if you were only going by numbers, but one year of fighting experience didn’t make the grade.

I grinned at the three left, the one now having gated back. I had the blood of their siblings dripping off the blade of the xiphos. I liked the sound it made when it hit the floor. The pitter-patter of a slow and soft rain. “Daddy didn’t tell you what else was out in the big, bad world, did he? What else could put a boot up your pasty snake asses without half trying? Kids, you don’t know what a bona fide,” I drawled, “Auphe is, and now you never will.”

I could understand Niko’s appreciation of swords now. You felt the thud of the metal entering the flesh. You knew, by the vibration that traveled up your arm alone, whether you’d ended a life or only damaged it. Niko would value it for different reasons: giving your enemy more of a chance, having more time to decide if they deserved that death you were handing out as freely as Halloween candy, challenging yourself to be a superior fighter.

His reasons were principled; mine were not, but we ended up at the same place. I didn’t know if the difference mattered, and right then I didn’t care.

I dived to the floor as two gated out and one sprang toward me. I rolled onto my back, the one thing you didn’t want facing an enemy. This one was the biggest by a few inches, broader in the shoulders, heavier. If there was a runt in the litter, this one would’ve eaten it.

It almost vaulted over me as I’d planned, but was able to stop itself, if only barely, to land on top of me. “I have killed men and women. Children and babies.” Its breath was not Auphe hot on my face, but Auphe-bae cool, cold-blooded as its succubus-snake mother. The tang of truth was in what it said—that tang being rot and decomposition. “Vampires, Wolves, hordes of revenants, and you think me not Auphe?” The hissing soared, filling the small room with its rattrap, claustrophobically low ceiling. “You think me not worthy of the name?”

No, senseless little snake. No. No. No.

“In fifty years or so, you might be worthy.” I’d knocked my Desert Eagle from Grimm’s hand to land on the floor earlier. Grimm had forgotten it or wanted to see if this batch of Auphe-bae noticed, testing his progeny. They failed. They didn’t look at anything in the room but me. That wasn’t smart. I could’ve smashed the overhead lightbulb and jabbed the delicate sliver of glass into the eye of one of them until it pierced the brain. Anything can be a weapon.

“Maybe a hundred years,” I amended. “Give me a call then.” I reached behind me, hand scrambling against the concrete, seized the grip, then inserted the muzzle of the Eagle into one pointed ear and gifted him with five rounds.

“Thanks for reloading it,” I said to Grimm. I had time to see the quickest flash of him; his back hadn’t moved from the door. He was making sure this game played out to the end, whatever end that might be.

He had too—reloaded the Eagle. Niko had used all the explosive rounds in it. These were nice, normal hollow-points. I had to worry about wearing my victim’s blood and brain matter, but not roasting off my own face in the bargain.

“I went to school. So should they. Survival of the fittest is the best school,” I heard him say, nothing in his words but careless amusement. I killed his children and it didn’t trouble him. Why should it? He could make more.

A hundred years, you told the Bae. Together in a hundred years Grimm and I could make a hundred thousand…

“Can’t afford the child support,” I muttered to myself as I pushed the body of the one I’d shot off of me and impaled the one that gated out of the air above me before I could sit up. It kicked, flailed, and screamed with rage as its chest rested against my hand that gripped the xiphos while I finished it off with the Eagle, this time three rounds in a scarlet eye. That blew the dead body back, and I gave a jerk to the xiphos to let the child of the Second Coming go flying across the room.

Two more to go, and I had no expectations, belly wound or not, that Grimm would be anything like the Bae, who were so easy to dispose of that they no longer deserved the name Auphe. He was older than I was, had been free long enough to be more experienced in dealing death, could gate, was closer to true Auphe. If Grimm wanted to kill me, there was a chance that the best I could hope for was a suicidal tie.

It was time to find out.

His last pick of the litter had vanished in a vortex of silver, gray, and black before reappearing as I stood. It also had come out in midair, but not over my head. It appeared next to the ceiling, getting as much height as it could, and to the side, giving it an angled downward speed. As it did, I heard the force pounding against the basement door. I threw myself backward and sideways to let the Bae tumble and charge past me. Janus could follow the Vayash as if a GPS were stapled to my ass—funny, huh? But it wasn’t a serious consideration I’d had earlier about the war machine. It was a serious one, however, when it came to other matters.

When I’d been attacked by a mass of giant spiders and disappeared by gating out onto a beach at high tide in a childhood sanctuary in South Carolina, the only reason Niko had found me wrapped in a cocoon of amnesia was because of the GPS in my cell phone. It had washed down the beach by miles as it gave its last location before the ocean shorted it out. As the tidal drift had added days to his finding me, he decided that a brother who could gate hundreds or thousands of miles deserved something with added efficiency over a cell phone.

They made identification chips for pets small enough to be implanted under the skin and not seen, but not locator chips. They did make locators, but they were large enough to have to be fastened to a collar or an ankle band, as they did for sexual predators. Some could track one mile; some could link up to a satellite and cover at least half the country. The trouble with those is they were noticeable right off the bat, either by an amnesiac loony who’d yank it off his ankle, by someone who lost the control he was so certain of and did the same, or, in this case, by a kidnapper.

That meant that under the flesh it had to go. It was the size of a pacemaker and fit under a fist-shaped scar I already had on my chest. It filled the shallow crater some, and although the shape was squarish, it didn’t make it look much worse. It was experimental, and the FDA would keel over at the thought of it implanted in a human or semihuman being, but when Niko had asked me point-blank one day out of the blue, my answer had been as matter-of-fact as the question. And the fact that he had to cut me open to put it in and then again once a year to change the batteries, that made me know it was necessary. For his peace of mind if nothing else.

Who knew that it would come in handy so soon?

“My family,” I affirmed to Grimm. “And that, asshole, will never be you.”

He moved away from the door as his last child I’d dodged passed him. “We are something new.”

“We are something old,” I said automatically, the words beyond my power to swallow.

“We are something unlike anything on earth,” he finished.

I’d echoed those words, the same that a healer had once said about me, as I’d burned that South Carolina house of horrors to the ground. And Grimm, despite being far enough away that I couldn’t sense him, had heard me.

“That makes us one. One, Caliban, and that is more than brothers, more than family. Plus it’s poetic. My teacher would’ve liked the symmetry. That is, before I ate her.” Did my grin, sarcastic and sinister in its eager violence, look like his? No wonder no one tipped me at the bar.

He finished, back on topic, “One.” As the Bae hit the door and turned to charge back, a gate began to outline Grimm. “Until I kill you. Games are games and we’ll play—back and forth, give and take, but death is the ultimate move. And once you’ve given in, given up, given your all to the Second Coming by siring a tidal wave of our spawn, then you’ll die in the game.” He glowed. The gray-and-silver light. The metal claws waving a dark good-bye. The grin brilliant white then luminous mercury. He moved as if my sword hadn’t touched him, much less been buried in his stomach. “And this world will be mine to do with as I please.”

I didn’t grin this time. I smiled, and it was a cold and hard slice of hell, as that part of me I normally kept silent decided to get mouthy. “Who says I’ll lose the game? Who says I’ll share?” And I said it in Auphe. My human vocal cords couldn’t duplicate the sound of the seven years’ bad luck of a mirror being smashed inside your ear, cutting your eardrum to ribbons before the shards burrowed into your brain, but the words I knew.

From the flicker of anger that crossed his face, Grimm didn’t. He couldn’t speak Auphe at all. He hadn’t lived among them for two years as I had—even if the language was all I remembered—and none had wasted time teaching the caged failures the motherfucking tongue.

“You’ll die and that won’t change. The game is mine to win. You, Caliban”—the glow brightened—“you might have been the Auphe’s fondest ambition, but you, bastard brother, are not me.”

The door shattered to three large pieces and several smaller ones. The Bae staggered back as one stake-shaped piece slid perfectly into its chest as if it were the unlucky extra in a vampire movie. Niko passed it, dismissing it as the lesser threat. He swung a katana I didn’t recognize. That would mean it was one of Goodfellow’s many swords. It had greater reach than a xiphos. It should’ve cut Grimm in half, but he was gone. The closing of the gate did take half the katana’s blade with it. If I were an optimist, I’d hope it had done some damage before the half-Auphe disappeared.

But if I were an optimist, this wouldn’t be my life we were talking about, would it?

The Bae gripped the wood to pull it from its chest, then swiveled its head to hiss and lunge at the next person hesitating in the doorway. Kalakos cursed in Rom and took its head off at the shoulders with his saber. The move had been instinctual. That could be seen in his brown skin that now almost matched the color of the Bae as it fell in two pieces. Paler than pale. He hadn’t seen what was attacking him. It had been too quick, in the middle of a rescue, the moment too muddied. Kalakos had seen a threat. That was all. It wasn’t until it was down and dead that he saw, for the first time, an Auphe. Or the closest thing next to me to qualify as an Auphe.

I watched it twitch and changed my mind, my former scorn sulking. I’d more or less told it that give it fifty years’ experience and it would be the next thing closest to me. Now I thought that in fifty years I’d be the closest thing to it instead. It had the equipment, the ability, and Grimm would make certain the Bae would learn to use them. Grimm knew education was an advantage above all others.

“Makes me look pretty good, doesn’t it, Kalakos?” I said. “Given half a century or so of murder and mayhem and it would’ve become the shadow of an Auphe.” A thousand years and it would leave the Auphe in its dust. “Tell that to your clan, the cowardly sons of bitches. Afraid of a sixteen-year-old mentally damaged kid like I’d been. I doubt they’d have done much spitting if that had come calling in my place.”

He took a step away from the Bae, regained the equilibrium a warrior needed to survive, and looked at me for the first time. Or rather saw me for the first time. All my…heh…quirky imperfections aside, I wasn’t the Bae. There was some human in it, but there was humanity in me. I wasn’t overflowing with it, but it was there.

“I apologize,” he offered in that familiar if older echo of Niko’s voice, “for myself and my clan. This…this is a monster, not you. We misjudged our own blood and we are shamed for it.”

That was unexpected, kind of decent, and the right thing to do. If it had come eight and a half, nine years earlier, it might have made a difference. It hadn’t, though, and my grudge was about what he, decent but not decent enough to be a father, and the Rom had done to Nik. I didn’t give a shit what they thought about me.

Niko paused for the briefest of moments at the apology before overlooking it to grip one of my shoulders hard enough to get my instant—ow—attention. “Who was that? What was that?” He wasn’t talking about the dead Bae on the floor or the others. He was referring to the one clever enough to take me from the condo alive, fast enough to escape my real brother and survive—all while making an edgier game of it than I’d thought. I’d been down here less than fifteen minutes, listening to Grimm, attacking him, fighting the Bae. He hadn’t bothered to go any farther than what I had to think was two or three buildings down from Goodfellow’s. Niko didn’t have his tracker with him. That had been left back home when we’d fled Janus. Goodfellow had one, though, as did Promise and Ishiah in a locked safe at the bar.

“He’s one I missed in South Carolina.” I wiped some of the Bae blood from the xiphos carelessly onto my pants. “By twelve years. He was the Auphe’s first success, not me, and they never knew it. He’s also head of the Auphe Second Coming. Big, bad Auphe messiah.” I ran a hand slowly through the space where his gate had been. I could feel the pain and the wound of reality knitting itself back together still. Every gate had a price. Mine too, as much as I tried to forget it.

Kalakos had thought I was a monster and then he saw the Bae.

I’d thought I was a monster when I’d been old enough to realize what a monster was.

I’d eventually reached a point where I didn’t care anymore if I was one. I’d admitted it without shame. Sad to say I occasionally enjoyed it on the sly lately, but now I knew.

Accepting that you were a monster wasn’t the same as being the real thing, full-time, every single second of every single day.

Grimm had shown me that.

He’d also shown me that he was right. He was superior to them. He was as ruthless as the Auphe, but smarter. More adaptable. Thrived on change. Nature had taken her fuckup and created a rung higher on the ladder, and Grimm was standing on it.

“Nik,” I said, calm, not that that was what I felt. I didn’t know what I was feeling other than it was a seething mass of confliction. “You need to know. He’s better than me…even on my very best day.” Best day. Worst day. My Auphe days, the ones that were now gone or at the very least viciously choke-chained and powerless.

And why wouldn’t they die? Auphe. Half-Auphe. I killed them over and over, three times now.

Why wouldn’t they fucking die?

Yet…

Welcome back, brothers and sisters. I missed you.

I missed the game.