Doubletake

11

I told Niko, Robin, and Promise about Grimm, the Auphe-bae, every detail I could remember, except for the specific ones of what I’d done in South Carolina to the other imprisoned failures. That I glossed over. Niko already knew them. I’d told him the day I’d returned home. I told Niko almost everything, and not only because he was my brother. He was all that stood between me and the world. I wasn’t worried about myself. Of the two, the earth and Cal off his leash, I wasn’t the one that needed protecting. I was sane currently, and I did go back and forth on whether that was a good thing or not, but who knew if that would last?

Not if. How long…

I didn’t tell the puck and Promise the particulars of what I’d done in Nevah’s Landing at the beginning of the year, that I’d shot seven half-Auphe manacled in cages like fish in a barrel, because it was my only option. I didn’t want to and I didn’t have to. They knew what had happened, as it was the only thing that could’ve happened. They didn’t need me painting them a mental picture. It hadn’t bothered me when I’d done it, and it didn’t bother me now. There was nothing else to do.

But I didn’t want to see them look at me with that mental image in a continuous loop behind their eyes. On the other hand, Sidle, the warden and torturer…When it came to killing him, my only regret was that I couldn’t do it again…and again. He merely wasn’t worth mentioning to the others, as he had been a useless thing. He’d been proof that you didn’t have to gate or look like an Auphe to be a monster. You could be a weak one with an advantage that he hadn’t deserved. The half-Auphe had been in cages while he roamed free to find instruments of pain to make them behave.

It was in that one instance that Grimm had been right. I should’ve made that bastard suffer instead of putting him down instantly and painlessly like a rabid dog.

“I’ve killed, Caliban,” Promise said, curled on Robin’s couch after we’d pushed ours off of it. She’d said the male psyche was a mystery to her, but that wasn’t true. Not with five deceased elderly husbands. As far as I’d seen, Promise knew any thought that might run through a man’s head. And she saw mine.

“In the old days before we had ways other than blood, I killed to live. You shouldn’t feel that you are worse than I was—or Goodfellow, for that matter.” She slanted a knowing glimpse of violet and velvet his way. “I have heard tales of his escapades, and pretending to be a god wasn’t the worst of them.”

As far as Robin was concerned, the vampire wasn’t there and the subject she’d brought up didn’t exist. He didn’t want to talk about it, apparently. And that was more bizarre—alien-pod-person bizarre. Goodfellow was incapable of “not wanting to talk.” From the first time he’d opened his mouth to introduce himself and try to sell us a car, he hadn’t shut up once, and that had been close to five years ago. He’d been kind of…off during the Panic. I’d thought he’d gone back to his old self after it was over, but now I wasn’t as sure. I watched as he continued to pretend Promise wasn’t on his couch—or on the planet, for that matter. The dismissal of her was that complete.

He was rearranging notification cards on the table. When we’d returned to the condo, I’d read them upside down as I’d looped around the coffee table to grab my spot on the couch. They said that he was not monogamous, and should he find the originator of the rumor he would drench his dick in Tabasco sauce, piss in his treacherous mouth, as that was all it was good for, and then draw and quarter him before letting a horny mule hump his remains.

Sounded like a great start for a new line of greeting cards to me. They were clearly meant as damage control for the attending members of the Panic. Next to them was a stack of smaller personal cards spelling out Robin Goodfellow—monogamous since 2011, with the suicide hotline at the bottom for those who couldn’t face the fact. Side by side sat the contradiction. It didn’t make any difference to the puck. What was one lie to a trickster? Especially when it was to other tricksters?

A lie would be the first words out of a trickster’s, especially Robin’s, mouth the moment he woke up in the morning.

Of course you’re not average size. You’re enormous, he’d say. Unbelievable. I was stunned, momentarily blinded by the vastness of it. Now…is it a penis or a clitoris again? Sorry. I drank entirely too much last night.

Or he might tell the truth if it was worse than a lie. A puck knew how to do the most damage, and the best weapon to wield.

It’s not me; it’s you. It’s really, really you. It could not be more you. You should carry a bucket for your sex partner to hurl into when they wake up and see you in the daylight.

But that was before monogamy with Ishiah. I didn’t want to know what he told him first thing in the morning, but it crept into my mind all the same. Having sex with a walking, talking feather duster doesn’t make me sneeze at all.

I sneezed through my entire shift every shift at the bar. I knew that would be a whopper of a lie. As a matter of fact, I sneezed as I finished telling my grimmer-than-Grimm fairy tale and scattered Goodfellow’s cards across the coffee table. It was psychosomatic, since I hadn’t seen Ish anywhere since the Panic had come and gone. I didn’t know if he’d returned or not. I thought he and Robin still kept separate apartments, but I didn’t ask, as I had no desire to know. I liked the boss/employee relationship the way it was…with me not knowing shit about what he did after hours. Now, though, with the mess we were in, it seemed odd he wasn’t around. “Where’s Ish?”

Niko went to the door to let Kalakos inside. The Vayash wasn’t privy to Auphe, half-Auphe, one-fourth-Auphe secrets. As far as he knew, the pure Auphe race existed yet. He didn’t know they were extinct. Very few did know that, rumormongering tricksters included, difficult as that was to believe. Mainly, Niko had put forth, because no one wanted to talk about the Auphe. They were the original “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil”—with an emphasis on “speak no evil.” If no one talked about them, then no one could know they were gone.

Kalakos didn’t need to know anything about our lives, and as Niko wouldn’t have trusted him with our plastic tableware, he’d been left in the hall while we’d talked. Although I had to give it to him: He had charged into that basement behind Niko and ended up decapitating the last Bae. He’d watched Niko’s back—far too late by twenty-seven years, but it meant something all the same. Maybe.

I’d think about it.

But regardless of what Kalakos had done, it wasn’t my call to make. I elbowed Robin, who was gathering the cards into neat piles again with impatient, quick movements that made a professional cardsharp appear to be moving in slow motion. “Ishiah?” I prompted.

“He’s in Vegas. Lucky bastard,” he grumbled. “The peri have something rather like…” He rearranged the cards again. If it had been anyone else, I’d have said he was buying time. But this was Robin, trickster extraordinaire. He didn’t need to make up a lie. He already knew every one there ever had been or would be. “They have something like the National Guard. Ishiah is retired, but he’s been reactivated for one mission. It shouldn’t take more than a few days. A week at the most.”

Why peri would need a National Guard was my next question, but the puck cut that off promptly with a suggestion. “I’ve been thinking. Cal, note that—you can think all the time. It’s true, but I digress. My first thought is this: Janus will be showing up soon, as it’s still storming and he can move about unseen. Which means we should move before he tracks the Vayash among us here. As if it would hurt any of you to use an effective war machine–deflecting deodorant?” he complained. “My second thought is that perhaps Hephaestus could assist us with the situation.”

As Kalakos came through the door, Niko closed it and asked verbally what I longed to ask physically, with my hands wrapped tightly around Goodfellow’s neck. “He’s alive? He traded whatever currency of the time for that monstrosity before years later passing it on to the Rom to guard, and you only thought now to bring up the fact that he’s still alive?”

Robin snorted. “If it were that easy, don’t you think I would have? No, he’s not alive. He’s dead. Deadish. Yes, deadish would be more accurate, and he’s wildly insane, quite naturally. All Greek legends end up insane sooner or later. It must be something in the water.” He shrugged, as I put a water purifier for him on my mental Christmas list. “But he was insane long before he became biofunctionally challenged, which makes it that much more difficult.”

“Is he in Greece?” I asked. “Because that’s a long trip. But if we go with you, Janus will probably jump the plane and ride it all the way there.”

“Greece? No. Very few of us are there now. When the people stopped believing in us, we left. Too many painful memories of better days.” He checked his watch. “Conveniently enough, Hephaestus is in Connecticut. With traffic we could be there in two and a half hours.”

“He’s in Connecticut. Dead and in Connecticut? Less than two to three hours away?” Niko said dubiously. “I find that difficult to believe. Greece, very well. But if he’s dead, why isn’t he in Hades or the Elysian fields?”

My brother the Buddhist believed in life after death—of all different sorts. An afterlife for every belief that has been and will come. I didn’t give him grief over it. After what he’d lived through in this life, he was entitled to believe whatever he wanted. But I knew after death there was nothing but emptiness and nonexistence. I had no problem with that. It was heaven in my book.

Goodfellow answered Niko’s question by holding up two fingers. “Two words: industrial revolution.” He added, “And guns. He loved weapons, anything that could inflict death and despair. We all have our hobbies. He was late by a hundred years or so. As I said, wildly insane, easily distracted, and behind on the news, but by the time he caught up, weapons were that much more advanced. I’m sure he was quite the happy camper when he discovered the concept. They don’t have guns in Hades or the fields, so he went where the guns did.”

“I repeat, you didn’t bring this up sooner?” Niko’s voice lowered to the same threatening rumble of the thunder outside.

“Niko, he’s madder than a syphilitic-ridden Al Capone, not deader than dead, but deader than he should be, and he hates me. Ares’s steroid-induced rages, does he hate me. You don’t need to know why. If I thought he had an iota of sanity or cooperation in him, I’d have mentioned it, I don’t know, perhaps while Cal was dying, while you were beating your father like a Turkish rug, when we were again attacked by Janus, while Cal had been kidnapped and we were frantically searching for him as if he were a microchipped prizewinning Westminster Labradoodle. So many wasted opportunities when we were lying about while lacking in any pertinent activity, I realize, but it’s a chance in a thousand anyway. He despises me more than any creature I know, and that, considering my extraordinary reputation, is saying much.” He gave up on the cards and pushed them off the table.

“Was I put in my place?” Niko asked me ruefully, not entirely used to the feeling.

I was, however, and didn’t mind seeing someone else suffer. “You were puck-slapped but good. Okay, we’re taking two cars and I’m not wearing a sweater.”

Goodfellow was shocked and appalled. Everyone wore sweaters in Connecticut. He was ninety-nine percent positive that you couldn’t cross the state line without one.

“Two cars. No sweaters,” I stressed.

Then I leaned closer to Robin and did something I shouldn’t have, that made me feel like crap, but could be necessary. I murmured, “Hephaestus hates you, but what does he think of Hob?”

He feared him. He had to. Alive, dead, or halfway between, all feared Hob.

And no one except Niko, Robin, Promise, Georgina, and me knew Hob was dead. And not deadish, as Hephaestus was, but as dead as they came. Gone from this world for good. It was something to think about.

Until Goodfellow gave a low hiss back, inaudible to everyone but me. “What would he think of an Auphe? What would he think of you if you threw away your sanity, your ability to tell right from wrong, and lived only for every life you could extinguish, to ask him a question? All while knowing if you did, you couldn’t come back. No second chances like you’ve had before, not this time. You would never be Cal again. Never sane again. Never right again.” In that moment he wasn’t Robin. “The next time you speak of Hob is the last time we speak,” he added without emotion, but cold, hard promise.

I knew I shouldn’t have brought up the subject again. Unfortunately I knew too late.

The sly, snarky, patronizingly sarcastic, fast talking, horny, name-dropping Goodfellow was gone; this Robin I didn’t know. He wasn’t my friend, and as I had only the one besides my brother, I wasn’t going to risk losing him. I leaned back before the others noticed the exchange and gave the best and most honest apology I could. It was one my friend would recognize for what it was and hopefully come back.

“Okay. Shit.” I grimaced. “I’ll wear a goddamn sweater.”

It was ninety degrees in Bridgeport, Connecticut, unusually hot, the radio said—before I kicked it. It wasn’t the kind of weather you layered for, and I was wearing a bright green cashmere Lacoste cardigan over a pink polo shirt, pleated khaki pants, white socks, and loafers. I’d also been offered a holster for my Eagle and something called a Members Only jacket to cover that. I knew the names because Goodfellow had labeled each plastic bag in which they were immaculately folded, along with a catalogue page of some blond, blue-eyed, tanned, blindingly white-toothed man wearing the same outfit while standing by a boat. With a blond woman. A blond kid. A blond damn dog…wearing a matching damn sweater.

Douche bag.

It covered the catalogue dick and Robin both.

“What did you do to piss off Goodfellow this badly?” Niko asked, edging away from me as if I were color-contagious. He was dressed in the black-and-gray clothes the puck had smugly given him. Normal clothes. The kind that didn’t make you look like someone pulled the head off a Golfing Ken doll and stuck a catastrophically pissed-off serial killer’s head in its place, which was a look I was pulling off in spades. I let my black hair hang where it wanted. Still no ponytail for me, until Kalakos was gone despite what I’d talked to Niko about in the car.

“You don’t want to know,” I said glumly.

We stood by the rusted chain-link fence at the abandoned Remington Arms factory. Despite its being early afternoon, it wasn’t a safe place to be for most. It was the typical bad part of town, but it would be more peculiar if I were in a good part of town. An industrial area near the water, no shadows, no alleys, nothing green—not a blade of grass pushing up through the sidewalk. Or what was left of the sidewalk.

Nothing but our rusty fence the armory stretched far behind, a wide street with dilapidated houses on the other side. Nik and I were waiting for the others to get out of their car, parked by ours at an empty house across the road with a battered For Sale sign. Promise climbed out of the car, her gloved hands keeping her face well shadowed by the hood of her cloak. She wanted to see this through as much as we did, if only for Niko’s sake.

Following her out of the car was Kalakos, who, as Goodfellow had said, was like a terminal case of gonorrhea with a side order of herpes. You couldn’t get rid of him no matter how hard you tried.

As the three of them were crossing the street, I looked back down at the clothes that were my punishment for pissing off Robin. “Nik, if Hephaestus kills me, strip me, would you? I don’t want my corpse seen like this.” None of the clothes had been worn before. Robin had been waiting with this vengeance bomb for a while, and I’d been the one to set it off. He wouldn’t be caught dead in any of it himself. He dressed expensive and sharp always, but he leaned more toward James Bond than whatever this crime against humanity was. I scratched my stomach, then an arm. “I think it’s burning my skin. Like holy water. I thought that was only in the movies.” I scratched again. “I’m sweating like a pig. Jesus.”

“Stupid assholes. Shitheads. Give me your money or I will fuck you up so bad your mama won’t know you on the slab.”

Finally. I didn’t think he was ever going to make it down our way with that slow shamble.

He was a mugger, gangbanger, junkie, homicidal shit with a knife, probably all four. I’d seen him stumbling down the cracked and crumbling sidewalk as soon as we’d parked the car and hit pavement. He hadn’t been an issue then. If he’d had half a brain to look past me to Niko or to look at my face instead of the opposite of camouflage I was wearing, he wouldn’t be an issue now. But I’d been hoping, and when you wish on that kick-him-in-the-balls star twinkling high above at night, sometimes you get your wish.

Another douche bag, and I couldn’t wait.

“I’m not going to bother to ask. You need him more than I do,” Niko said. “Try not to kill him. We’re not one hundred percent certain he deserves it.”

I was already stripping off that stupid jacket. It was lightweight, though, and that could be useful at times. “Today my percentage on the curve has dropped from one hundred to twenty-five. Maybe fifteen.”

I couldn’t tell if he was white, biracial, Hispanic, young, or middle-aged, as he was so covered in filth, hair matted for years, teeth all but gone from meth, clothes layered rags, but what did it matter? I did know he was a son of a bitch with no bark or bite and he’d crossed me on the wrong day.

Any day would’ve been a wrong day, but with his knife—a kitchen butcher knife, pitiful—I would’ve given him the less humiliating “go away.” I would’ve used a round to his leg from one of my guns or put my own knife, the kind you don’t steal from your grandmother, through his hand to make sure I cut enough tendons that he’d not carry a weapon again. But today…today wasn’t any day.

I strangled him unconscious with the Members Only jacket.

It rolled up nice and tight. It wasn’t a wire garrote, but it did get the job done.

Better yet, he had a friend, a buddy, a compadre, otherwise known as the dumb ass who came over the fence to help cut us up. This one was wired on meth or crack. That meant he was snake-mean, gave him the sad illusion that he was immortal, and made him a cheetah in speed compared to his friend, who’d done a believable imitation of the living dead from an old zombie movie. My opinion about those movies had been formed from minute one: If you could trot or even speed-walk, there was no excuse for your not surviving that apocalypse.

“Give! Give it! Fuckers! Give it over before I cut your goddamn head off!” This one had a switchblade he stabbed in my direction with frenzied, wild motions. I shrugged off my holster and tossed it over my shoulder, knowing Niko would catch it. Then off came the sweater, which surprised me by rolling up as nicely as the jacket. Cashmere, huh? Shelling out the dough on expensive fancy douche-bag clothes was worth it. Who would’ve believed it?

I dodged the stab of the switchblade. Yeah, he was a cheetah next to the other guy, all right, but Niko had taught me to be the actual article, with lessons starting when I was about eight. I snared the guy’s arm with my new weapon, broke his wrist in a particularly nasty way that would never heal right, and then strangled him with the sweater until he was down and out to match his partner. That improved my mood enough that I kept going, kicking off a loafer and beating Mr. Switchblade in the head with it. It wasn’t as effective as the other pieces of clothing, but it was still entertaining.

Imitating my shoe-beating squat, Niko crouched across from me, gazed down at the drooling mugger and then at me. “You didn’t kill them. That’s something,” he said with a noticeable lack of conviction. “Should I be concerned or is this a new type of crime-fighting superpower hitherto undiscovered in those comic books you read as a kid?”

“I still read ’em.” I gave a wicked grin, able to forget about Janus and Grimm—better than me on my best day—long enough that I could enjoy myself for a minute. “Find me five more. I still have a shirt, pants, two socks, and one shoe left.”

There was a flash out of the corner of my eye. I looked up to see Robin considering the picture on his phone. “I have the shot of the infamous Leandros penis—infamous like the Loch Ness monster: Most thought it a rumor. I have a preppy demon spawn armed by Nordstrom assaulting criminals. It’s a start to a porn site. I just need a theme.”

Kalakos spit on the sidewalk; the Vayash clan did love their saliva and sharing it. We didn’t know how Janus tracked us. Kalakos and Niko both thought it was likely the genetic signature of Vayash blood. I had a different theory: the unique chemical makeup of Vayash spittle. It had been exercised fiercely enough over the generations that it was better, stronger, faster. Steve Austin couldn’t hope to deliver the loogie that a Vayash could.

“We are wasting time,” Kalakos said with frustration boiling over the stoicism he’d worn, head to toe, since he’d arrived. “The burden needs to be returned to sleep or destroyed, and you are playing games like…” There he was stuck. Like a child? Hardly. Like a monster? Not if he wanted that apology from the basement to stick.

Goodfellow didn’t wait for him to sort it out. “The wannabe Achilles is right.” He put the phone away and tossed me the black combat boots he held in his other hand. “Time to go. You’re without a shred of doubt going to have to run for your life in there. You can’t do that in loafers.”

I caught the boots and snarled at the smirk that had been thrown with them. It was a halfhearted snarl, though. Robin was back and that made all this worth it. Almost.

“In there” was the thirteenth building of the Remington Arms factory. All thirteen were identical and connected by a massive bridge that matched the brick outside of the buildings. It loomed, the entire structure. It was only four stories high, but somehow it loomed. That this was a place that had made weapons didn’t surprise me. They sure as hell hadn’t been turning out toys. It had been built in the early nineteen hundreds to make guns, all kinds, from handguns to machine guns. Equal-opportunity methods of death and destruction.

The thirteenth building was hugely cavernous inside. Some of it was divided into four floors, but in some areas—the metalworking ones, from the equipment left behind—you could see straight up from the ground floor to the underside of the roof. In those large spaces light trickled from the small windows from what would’ve been one wall of the fourth floor. It was a dim light spilled from a thickly overcast sky, but Promise was cautious, pulling the hood of her silk cloak farther forward to shade her face. A stray hit of daylight wouldn’t cause her to combust, although it would go a long way toward explaining the urban legend of spontaneous “human” combustion. What it would give her was the vamp equivalent of a third-degree burn. While vamps were quick to heal from any other wound, those took months to heal, and aloe didn’t do a thing for that level of crispy.

Robin stopped to take the room in, eyes closed in concentration. “No, not here. Ah, I feel him now.” He indicated a hallway that ran the length of the building. “Not far, and asleep, I think, or we wouldn’t have made it this far without some difficulties.” I didn’t wonder how the dead or deadish slept. When I’d discovered there were undead mummified cats that followed pucks home and made themselves queen of the condo, I stopped questioning dead right then and there as too complicated for me.

He took out his sword from beneath a coat, the same long duster style as the one Nik always wore and was wearing now, thanks to Robin’s owning several. He didn’t carry a sword every day as my brother did, but enough that he needed the spares. Kalakos had his own. They were all virtually identical. Give them sunglasses and they’d be supernatural Men in Black.

Niko was carrying his xiphos and he handed me the second from inside his coat. Hephaestus hadn’t built Janus. Someone from a race older and more skilled had. If the Janus metal that formed the xiphos made the automaton stop and think, it might do worse to Hephaestus if he went off the deep end. Turn him from deadish to deader than dead. I had my holster back on and already had the Eagle out. I switched it to my left hand and carried the xiphos with my right. “Let’s go find out how to take out the batteries on that thing.”

“Yes, yes. Running toward imminent death rather than away like a sane person would. Your hobby, I know. Wait a moment.” He looked past me to Promise. “You can’t come, not yet.”

“Why not?” she demanded coolly. “I know you don’t doubt my abilities in a fight.” She didn’t have a collection of revenant heads she’d removed in the past, but she could have…if she was into that sort of thing. I know I didn’t doubt her or her abilities; after seeing her in action I knew for a fact that a revenant made the worst kind of Pez dispenser.

“Doubt? Hardly. And if I were ignorant enough to question the matter, I wouldn’t say so,” Robin said dryly. “I like my dick attached to my body. No, it’s Hephaestus. The sight of a woman, any woman at all, ups his insanity level considerably. But we will need you to come in as a distraction if we’re on the verge of a hideously painful death, which I strongly anticipate. I need you to stay here until you hear the screaming and the dripping of blood start. When you come in, say something idiotically syrupy, such as, ‘I am here, cherished of my heart, the sweet spring air that gives me breath. It is your beloved Aphrodite.’ Yes, that’s perfect. Her to the letter, not that she could read. A more vacant-brained person I’ve yet to meet.”

“Aphrodite?” Promise said with a suspicion I could hear if not read under her shadowed hood. “Wasn’t that his wife? Wasn’t her cheating on him with the god of war why he went insane?”

“Do we need to go into this or can we draw the usual conclusions?” Robin responded irritably. “And anyone can wear gold armor and pass himself off as a god of war, especially when the real one is off at war, as anyone with a brain cell would know. It’s not as if she asked to see any ID. Besides, I told all of you that he hated me beyond all things, yet here I am.” He started toward the dark hall. “Risking my life, as always. Brave and self-sacrificing. Noble and…”

I stopped listening, as Robin wouldn’t stop talking until Hephaestus was choking the air and life out of him. “Where do you think he keeps his little black book?” I murmured to Niko.

“In chapters, and they require approximately a thousand semis to haul from place to place.” He jerked his head, indicating to Kalakos that he should move ahead of us. Just in case. If he had to be at someone’s back, we wanted someone watching him, despite my elevated status in his eyes from monster to “not that bad.” That was practically a gold medal from the Vayash, the status of “eh, he could be worse.”

“Your exercise outside has improved your mood,” Nik went on to note.

He wanted to talk about Grimm. I’d given over everything I knew…when it came to facts. My emotions I’d kept to myself, locked down tight, and not from everyone else, but from Nik too. He knew it and he didn’t like it. I shook my head. “Later.”

His eyebrows lowered. He wasn’t happy. No matter how old you are, big brothers, at least the good ones, never stop thinking it’s their job to look out for you and to watch your back. I knew if I lived to be eighty and Nik eighty-two, sharing a room at the nursing home, he’d be asking why I sent back my tapioca pudding and beating the nurse’s aide with his walker for losing my dentures. And I would be damn lucky.

I didn’t have to try to find the words he wanted. They were already there, ugly and useless. “Grimm is me, Nik. He is me.” My palms sweated against the grip of my weapons, and not because of what we were about to face. “Only without whatever conscience you managed to shove down my throat.” And that I managed to hang on to—an extra-small portion for the healthy monster on the go. “If things had been different and the Auphe found out about him first and locked me away in that cage, I would be him. I would think the same thoughts. I would be doing the same things.”

Although Grimm had six years on me, which meant I might not be doing them as efficiently. “Shit, our sense of humor is even the same.” Bloody and sarcastic to the bone.

I lifted my hand holding the xiphos and had a vision of Grimm’s black glove hosting curved metal claws. I’d liked them. Me, the gun guy, was wondering where I could get a set made. Jesus. “I can’t tell you how I feel because I don’t know. I do want him dead. That isn’t going to change. I gutted the son of a bitch the first chance I had. It didn’t faze him much, but I did it and I enjoyed it. Don’t worry. I know how I feel about him.” I wanted him six feet under or in pieces.

“What I don’t know,” I concluded, “is how I feel about me. As soon as I’ve decided if I’m scared as shit or pissed as hell or both, I’ll tell you.”

I could’ve been Grimm and I could still be—someday. The first I accepted. The second…it was harder to deal with when it was in my face and not the occasional nasty thought whispering in my ear. The mental prodding was a potential. Seeing myself in Grimm was the reality, and I wasn’t ready for it.

Liar.

Niko started to open his mouth. He was going to tell me it wasn’t true. That the other half Auphe and I were nothing alike. If worse had come to worst in the past, caged or not, I wouldn’t have grown to be him. The things brothers are supposed to say. I shook my head again. “Later,” I repeated, “okay?” The “okay” was my version of “please.” Nik would recognize it, but no one else would. Goodfellow already had a picture of me beating a man with a frigging loafer. He didn’t need soppy dialogue to put on his planned Web site to go with it.

“All right,” he agreed, bumping my shoulder with his. “But the clock is ticking.” That small push meant that he needed to know what Grimm was going to do to my head as much as I did. Because he was my brother, but also because he needed to know how I’d handle the next battle with Grimm. It didn’t matter how ready your body was for the fight. It was a given: If your head was up your ass and your brain didn’t know up from down or what that smell was, you were dead.

We came to the end of the hall; the weak light from the room beyond was all that had helped us pick our way through jagged pieces of metal and garbage littering the floor. Stepping out into it, I saw it wasn’t a room; it was almost the twin of the echoing space we’d left behind. Open all the way up to the roof, it contained rusted beams and a floor where every step would have to be cautious or you’d step on a shard of metal, flip it up, and slice your leg open or off completely.

Robin’s list of his heroic traits finally came to a pause; there was never an end. “We’re here. The foundry,” he said quietly. “I told you Hephaestus was a fraud and could hardly build anything when you compare his work to Janus. Tinkertoys would practically puzzle him.”

“There’s a ‘but’ coming, isn’t there?” I asked. “I hear a ‘but.’ Why is there always a ‘but’?”

“I hear a ‘yet’ or a ‘however,’” Niko corrected, “but I’m more gifted in the vocabulary skills than you. Goodfellow?”

“That doesn’t mean he couldn’t make something that could kill you,” the puck answered grimly. “A sword is simple compared to the inner workings of a gun, but it can be equally as deadly. Don’t underestimate whatever he might throw at us. As they say, it’s not what’s on the outside that counts; it’s how many arms and legs something’s inside tells its outside to remove from our bodies.”

“I don’t remember the saying going like that and I think I would’ve remembered that version. Nik?” I said.

“It might not be accurate, but I’d argue it has merit.” He took several impossibly silent steps to the side. There wasn’t a single sliver of metal that rang out. Kalakos, as impossibly silent, followed his lead but in the opposite direction.

Goodfellow had one more piece of advice for us. “Besides toys he might have an employee or several hanging about. I’d tell you that the eye is the best place to hit them, but if that’s not self-explanatory on sight then you need to go back to preschool.”

Then he raised his voice in a shout that rang all of the metal in the room. It was like standing in a Buddhist temple while every monk gathered around to smack you in the head with four-foot-long wind chimes. Despite that I heard Robin’s voice plain as day over it all. “Hephaestus! You humpbacked bastard! Wake up! You have a visitor—it’s Goodfellow and I’ve come to apologize!”

When he quit shouting, the metal slowly fell into silence and I heard him mutter quietly, “Although I shouldn’t have to. It was the best thing to happen to him. The woman was so empty-headed that if your ear was close enough to hers, she would literally suck thoughts out of your head to fill hers. Where most have minds, she had a miniature black hole inside her skull. What she could do with her tongue, which was absolutely unbelievable, wasn’t worth having to listen to her go on and on about butterflies and flowers and how she wanted to spend a month doing nothing but smelling the milk breath of puppies…”

Hephaestus woke up.

I was thankful. I’d already pissed off Robin once today. I didn’t want to do it again by pistol-whipping him into blissfully silent unconsciousness. Hephaestus made that unnecessary by shoving himself to the front of the line.

“Puck.”

Hey, he’d picked up English from the long-dead workers that had toiled over and around him nearly a hundred years before the factory was abandoned. That was convenient. I wouldn’t have to listen to Goodfellow and him insult each other in the seven-thousand-plus past and present languages Robin claimed to know. I had picked up some good Greek curse words from him, though, for the times I was craving a gyro from the shortchanging jackass street vendor who set his food truck up on the sidewalk ten blocks down from our place.

“That’s me,” Robin said with a manic and reckless cheer that didn’t bode of good things to come. “I’ve come to apologize for soiling your wife. I was in the wrong. I’m deeply sorry. I now can admit to my illness and am seeking help through Sex Addicts Anonymous. I am here to make amends, offer you a stale doughnut from one of the meetings if you’d like, and, oh, coincidentally”—as if it were the most casual of thoughts to pop up—“I have a question for you about Janus. You must remember Janus. I’ll bet you sold it for more gold than you could carry. An incredible piece of work. Staggering in its brilliance. Unparalleled in its mixture of art and efficiency.” Giving credit and flattery where it wasn’t due—it was a trickster’s best weapon, according to Robin. “Now, how do we turn it off?”

“Puck…”

The rumble faded into nothing. He wasn’t a morning person, was slow to wake. I related. And he was dead, deadish, whatever. The combination could make no time a good time to wake up. I was thinking we should’ve brought several gallons of caffeine when he spoke again. This time he almost brought a few of the beams far above us down. I dodged a rain of smaller pieces of falling metal while avoiding impaling a foot on those already on the floor around me.

“Aphrodite. Where is Aphrodite? Virgin to my bed, petals of the rose, she who owns my loins and heart. Come home. Come home. Come home. You …Puck…Goodfellow, good—fellow. Good…But where is the good? Where? Nowherenowherenowhere. Wife stealer. Life stealer. Liar. Wretched thief in the night, tainter of all that is pure, death awaiting its day. This day. This day. This day. My day. Puckpuckpuckpuckpuck.”

I didn’t think Aphrodite, named as the goddess of love and sexuality, had been any kind of virgin on her honeymoon. But I did think Robin had been right: Hephaestus was bat-shit crazy, and getting anything out of him on Janus wasn’t looking promising. His voice shook the entire building. It was the sound of an earthquake that brought down cities, islands, nations. The grate and thunder of the earth losing its patience and shifting to throw anything living off its skin or bury it deep beneath itself.

I shouted at Goodfellow, “Where is he?” From the ear-bleeding echo, he could be anywhere in here, but the puck didn’t hesitate. He headed straight for what squatted in the center. It was a vat about twelve feet tall and wide enough around to mimic a giant swimming pool. Robin said some paien knew other paien sometimes, some knew most of the time, and some always knew. Goodfellow always knew.

Following him, I saw him start up the ladder mounted to the side. I circled to the other side in hopes of finding another one and bingo, there one was. I holstered my gun, but held on to the xiphos as I climbed. The rungs were filthy under my hand and carried the strong smell of stone. It was the same smell as the rock in a deep cave. Rock under the sun and sky didn’t smell that way. They had the scent of life to them, although they weren’t alive. A cave had the same scent/taint of an underground tomb of someone buried alive and chained to a forge: despair, exile, and death.

At the top I hooked my arm around one curved handhold on the ladder and leaned over the edge to see. I didn’t have to lean far. What had once been eight feet high and who knew how many gallons of molten metal almost a century ago was now a cold, frozen pool of steel. Robin pointed at the mass with his sword.

The guy was right. If Hephaestus was embedded in that somewhere, drowned in metal, melted fragments at one with his executioner, he’d have to be deadish at the very least.

I leaned further and tapped the metal with my sword. “Goodfellow’s a bastard and a son of a bitch. Everybody knows it. And his ‘sorry’s aren’t worth a fart in the wind.” In the past I’d found out the easiest way to reach someone as crazy as a shithouse rat and prone to removing visitors’ arms and legs frequently enough to warrant only a casual verbal warning label.

And that method was to agree with them totally.

“Tell us about Janus, and what the hell, we’ll kill the puck for you,” I promised.

Opposite me, Robin grimaced and lowered his face into the palm of his hand. He hadn’t said anything, but he hadn’t needed to. Before it was covered, his face had said it all: We are beyond fucked now.

That was my reward for thinking like the human I wasn’t. Would I, Caliban—not Cal—want someone to kill my worst enemy for me, or would I want to do that wet work myself?

Stupid question. Stupid attempt. Stupid me.

“No! Mine! Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.”

That’s when everyone else woke up.

It was also when I wished for one of the few times in my life that I’d kept my mouth shut. But those that came from beneath, they were willing to shut it for me. Or remove it altogether.

So many pieces of flesh to be devoured.

And all the time in the world.