Doubletake

12

From below the floor they were reborn.

The floor was concrete, but they broke through it with as little effort as if it had been a bar napkin, the cheap kind that disintegrates if one drop of liquid is spilled on it. They swarmed loose of earth and man-made rock and opened mouths filled with large, square, thick teeth, each one a different size, each mouth a child’s drawing. Crooked and slanting inward, outward, large and some larger—made for chewing stone to mine the metal needed for Hephaestus’s forge. The teeth reminded us we weren’t as solid as stone, and the mouths stretched wide to roar at us.

But didn’t.

There was no roaring. There was worse. It was the sound of thousands of years of crackling, white-hot flame and the hiss of steam hot enough to boil your flesh from your bones. They were crouched until they were almost doubled over, backs curved into sharp, unnatural peaks. That didn’t keep them from moving fast, scuttling sideways like crabs. Their hands matched—a thumb and a thick extension of flesh, four fingers fused into one. Each, thumb and the rest, had a single talon each. Longer than the hand itself and of a gleaming metal that would score rock as easily as the bulldozer teeth.

The single eye was fire. Red, orange, yellow, white, it burned. Every single eye burned and the pale flesh around it was scorched and blackened. But fire could see, or Hephaestus could see through the fire. I wondered if the fire burned in their brains too. Were the roars not roars but screams of long years of agony? Was the sound of flames and corrosive steam their way of screaming?

Burn.

I burn.

We burn.

I didn’t know and I didn’t have the luxury of caring. They were here to butcher us, and whether putting them down was self-defense or a mercy killing, the end was the same. “Cyclops,” I heard Kalakos say, incredulous. He said he hunted the unclean, but he hadn’t hunted anything close to this. With the Auphe-bae, these, and Janus all in two days, he might hang up his sword.

“Welcome to the big time.” I slid down the ladder to stop at the last rung and step carefully into the minefield of metal and broken concrete. At this level I could see that the hunched backs of the Cyclops stood about five feet tall. If they could’ve stood upright, they would’ve been tall. NBA recruitment material, but not literal giants, as Niko had taught in mythology when I was a kid. I told Goodfellow so.

“Work twenty-four/seven in a small cave and smaller tunnels mining ore and it will take barely a hundred years to take you from giant to this.” Robin had gone down his ladder simultaneous with me, but I heard him from the other side of the vat over the Cyclops venting Hephaestus’s rage. “But they’re no less dangerous for it. They are wholly pissed and they do not care who they take it out on.”

The one closest to me moved sideways a step, head rocking back and forth, soot stains coloring its misshapen chin, but with the eye always on me. It had moved less than a foot, but that was enough for me to see in the cloudy, weak light that it had silver painted in swirls all over its sunless body. I thought it was a tattoo. I was wrong. It wasn’t a tattoo and it wasn’t silver; it was more like mercury. It flowed. And it wasn’t on its body; it was in it—channels eaten into its moon-slug flesh. But where mercury was poisonous, it didn’t burn. These coiled channels were lined on each side with thin ribbons of black. I could smell the flesh burning. I could see the wisps of smoke rising. If there was pain, that I didn’t see.

I did see the scuttle and lunge through the air, the madly grinding teeth aimed at my heart, the mechanically thrashing hands and claws aimed at my gut. Not good. I put two rounds directly in the furnace of an eye.

I hadn’t been solely tattoo watching after I reached the bottom of the ladder. I’d switched the xiphos to my other hand and drawn my Glock. As Goodfellow had said, if you’re going after a Cyclops, guessing where to start isn’t a problem. If they couldn’t play “I spy with my one Cyclopian eye” because I sent a bullet through it, that put them at a disadvantage. If it passed through to their brain and killed them as well as blinded them, that was a bonus.

If bullets worked on an eye made of fire. If their brain was high-functioning enough to be bothered by losing half out of the hole blown in the back of their skulls.

This one did have a problem with it. He threw back his head and the hiss and crackle became a real scream, deep and hoarse and full of fury. The eye flickered but didn’t go out, not until he staggered backward, with each step impaling or slicing his legs with metal, and finally fell. His crushing hands grasping nothing but air, he screamed one last time. No fear, no despair, only unfulfilled rage.

Then he was still, his eye a dead black socket and the quicksilver running out of the curving, carved canals that covered him to disappear into the concrete and metal beneath the body. I studied my gun, the body again, and shrugged.

Okay. Cyclops. Not that big a deal.

I kept thinking that as I saw Nik with his back to the wall strike, his sword in the eye of another Cyclops. I thought it right up until I was gauging who was the nearest and next in line. I was looking in the wrong direction. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nik disappear, the ground opening up beneath him. He was swallowed, the teeth of broken concrete and discarded metal chewing at him as he went. I knew it because I smelled it: the too familiar tang of his blood, bright and healthy as it came—when it was inside his body instead of out.

I ran. I wasn’t as agile as Nik at dodging the minefield of a floor, but I didn’t care and I could move close to as fast as a purebred and faster than any half-breed except Grimm. Who didn’t matter now. As the pain didn’t matter. There was no pain. There was the empty space where my brother had stood. That was all.

I reached it a second behind Kalakos. He’d been closer to Niko, close enough that he reached down and yanked him up and out, hands to wrists, before the Cyclops below Nik had a chance to turn him into the flesh-and-blood version of ore, a crushed pulp of bleeding tissue and shattered bone. I came to a stop between the hole in the floor and Nik and Kalakos. Seeing the eye, a miniature sun, below in the dark, I fired. The scream, maddened, was the same—as was the eye extinguished to the darkness of death.

Feeling my first Vayash impulse—to spit on the body packed tightly in the earth below—I instead growled and turned to look Nik up and down. He was bloody from being pulled through the floor, an inanimate monster all its own, but aside from scrapes, cuts, and abrasions, he’d live. He’d be sore for a while, but he wasn’t going to bleed out.

Kalakos had come to the same conclusion and had his sword back up for the next charge. “You don’t have to thank me,” he said, “either of you.”

“You think I would?” I snapped, and fired at another Cyclops across the foundry.

“No, because I know now it’s something a father must do instead of supposed to do and should’ve been doing since the day his son was born. I see now.” The rushing Cyclops came low, his eye down. Kalakos half removed his head from the thick neck, slammed it backward with the flat of his sword to bring the target in view, and quenched the flame. “Gratitude for that would be no different from gratitude for breathing. The Vayash have a duty. I’ve learned I have more than one.”

He moved away then. He didn’t wait for a comment. The fight was only warming up. There was blood to be spilled, lives—our own—to be saved, answers to be wrenched from an insane god.

“I hate him more now than I did before,” I muttered. “Sanctimonious ass.” Whether he meant it or not, it was too late.

“Perhaps he meant it and we should take it at face value, but that window of opportunity has unfortunately long closed.” He added, “And he managed to get the last word.” His clothes were saturated with blood. I could feel the warmth of it against my back as I did my best to press him hard enough against the wall to pin him, leaving no room for him to be sucked down again. That meant there was no avoiding feeling his blood, all but seeing the cloud of bright copper in the air floating around us.

“Unfortunately,” he’d said, which meant regret, and my brother deserved much more than regret, thanks to that Vayash son of a bitch.

“Last word. That’s the worst.” No—regret was. “Bastard,” I said, wishing for the first time that Kalakos hadn’t been one as I watched for the next Cyclops. “You okay? I can smell the blood. Not enough to take you out of the fun, but could be enough to slow you down.”

“Other than your crushing me into what I’m beginning to think is a piggyback position, I’m all right. Fully functional, certainly not slow, and definitely not your papoose.” I felt his hand urge me away; he was ready to rejoin the battle. I thought about stalling, but this was Niko and he was right. He’d have to lose half the blood in his body to slow down.

As I began to move, I heard a groan from above. The beams that had shaken earlier at Hephaestus’s voice were moving again…and Hephaestus wasn’t talking. They were wrenching free of their mounting and joining together over our heads, booming as they struck. The movement…it wasn’t falling. Not falling down, but moving fast and inevitably, as if they were falling sideways. Tinkertoys would puzzle him, Robin had said. I didn’t think so. I was looking at the most badass set of Tinkertoys on the planet, and Hephaestus wasn’t stopping there. Metal hit metal and was held in place with the sudden intense red, then white glow of a forge I didn’t see.

“Hephaestus is also the god of volcanoes. Fire and metal.” Niko’s hand had altered from pushing to fisting my shirt—Jesus, I was going to die in this pink shirt—and yanking me to stand still. “What is he making?”

A brilliant mind asking a question with the most obvious of answers. Or let’s be honest. Just a damn stupid question.

“Something to kill us, Dr. Oblivious,” I hissed, hoping whatever it was didn’t have great hearing, or any at all. The beams were joining faster, other metal flying up to it to enhance its status as the bestselling murder machine for kids four years and up. It was the size of Janus, no bigger, but a framework with no head. It had arms, though, four of them, with grasping metal claws. I could hear the creak of the ratchets as the hands opened and closed. And it had two legs. Thirteen feet tall in length, it hung above like a waiting spider. Would it climb down or leap inst— Motherfucker.

It was on fire.

All of it.

Like the Cyclops’s eyes but thirteen feet of it. A metal skeleton became an inferno. Metal shouldn’t burn like that, unless Hephaestus wanted it to—as if it were an endless fuel. There was a darting of flaring coat, brown hair, and sword. Robin was getting out before he turned to charcoal. I thought that was a damn good idea. Fighting monsters was one thing. Fighting a god and the industrial age combined, we weren’t properly armed—like with a fire truck and several bulldozers and earthmovers from the nearest construction site.

Shit, it fell. Just…fell. Didn’t climb. Didn’t jump. The building shook under the earthquake of it.

No sense of survival, no pain, no mind to manipulate, on fire, and could play with our charcoaled remains until Christmas if Hephaestus wanted. “Robin was right. This was a bad idea.” Niko’s hand still wrapped in my shirt, I began to weave my way toward the door, then flat-out run as it rose to stand upright. Sliced feet I’d worry about later, if there was a later.

I saw Promise at the entrance to the hall. An earthquake was a good cue that we needed help, but unless she had a couple of tanks with her I’d stick with the running. “Hephaestus, it is I. Aphrodite…O sweet Virgin Mary in heaven.” Under the hood of her cloak her eyes widened and stared upward.

There was the sound of a footstep behind us. Metal against metal, it was the peal of the largest of bells—the one tolling for our asses. The heat had been intense when it had hit the floor. It was getting hotter now.

Idiot Puck. Dying for the answer to the simplest of questions.

Then Hephaestus laughed and the hundreds of shards of metal rang again, this time church bells for a funeral…ours.

Robin ran past Promise, hooking his arm in hers and dragging her after him down the hallway. He wasn’t deserting us. If he had made it out, we could too. And if we couldn’t, other than adding himself as another piece of coal to the furnace in a heroically martyred brothers-in-arms gesture, there was nothing he could do. And if it doesn’t save anyone and you’re still dead, it’s hard to appreciate all the perks of martyrdom. Like having his dick preserved as a sacred relic.

I didn’t look for Kalakos. He had saved Nik, said it was his duty, but it was my duty too and had been long before he came into the picture. Of course, Niko felt the same, and no one outdid him at the job. He was behind me, beside me, and then in front of me, decapitating a Cyclops. Flames were a fountain out of its neck before it collapsed and we ran over the top of its body.

Another step from behind, another earthquake, another rising of the heat until I thought the earth was crashing into the sun. I started to look over my shoulder before deciding I had no desire to see the world of shit about to drop onto us.

“The Cyclops,” Niko snapped.

The last of them were clawing free of the earth—in front of us, on each side—and I snatched a glance behind me…yeah, there too, right in front of something that made me rethink that whole atheist, nonhell philosophy of mine. A gigantic scarecrow of pure hellfire, made special for us on some black altar. No, the devil wasn’t close to this. When it came to taking names and incinerating asses, Greek gods had it all over him.

Step.

I felt my skin began to tighten against the heat.

The Cyclops surrounded us in a closing circle. It wasn’t too many, but it was too little time. We were out of it. Out of goddamn time. Not martyrs, but dead just the same. Didn’t that suck? Didn’t it just…

No.

Hell, no.

Fuck that.

“Niko, down!” I yelled as I raised the Glock. He hit the floor instantly and I started shooting.

Ten Cyclops, I’d counted. You carry guns, you count your ammunition, and you count the enemy. I spun, firing as I went. Every eye a target, every target my whole world. One…four…seven…ten. Ten and the end. Ten shots in a fraction over a second—check the speed-shooting records—and each Cyclops a dead, eyeless heap on the floor. This was why I carried guns. This was why I loved them. Some felt the need for speed and some were about the result: Kill ’em all and let God sort them out. I was a fan of both. I came to a stop where I’d started, the first and last Cyclops to die lying side by side. “I think I’m ready to shoot in the Olympics now.”

“You were ready for the Olympics seven years ago. Stop stroking your ego and your penis extension and move.” Niko was up and running flat-out for the entrance. I was on his heels. Goodfellow was waiting for us there. He had come back, knowing he could do nothing but die with us. What a friend—and an idiot, as a god had told him seconds ago.

I told him so as Niko and I slammed into him, carrying him along in the rush before he had a chance to turn around. The fiery proxy hand of an infuriated dead god, like a plummeting comet, crushed the hall three feet behind us. We erred on the side of caution and kept running. Promise waited for us in the next room and she joined our escape. When we made it out of the building, we all stopped and turned to see if this was far enough. If New Jersey would be far enough.

It was. Hephaestus wouldn’t reveal himself or his machines to the outside world. I guess he’d gotten comfortable in his coffin of solid metal, mouth filled with it, eyes blinded by it. Or he was crazy enough that “out of sight, out of mind” was a literal term. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I sat on the ground and then lay back, eyes on the sky. My legs and feet were hamburger; those godawful khaki pants Goodfellow had forced on me were more red than tan now. If Niko hadn’t been wearing black, I’d have seen the same on him, except from the neck down. We both had cuts on our faces. Robin was also in dark colors and I did smell blood on him, puck blood—green and earthy as a forest—but not as much. Goodfellow could move when he wanted to. A hundred thousand lifetimes and more of outrunning jealous husbands or wives—he should be.

We were alive, though, and “surprised about it” didn’t begin to sum that up. I waved a hand to get Promise’s attention. “Sweet Virgin Mary? Yeah? I didn’t know you were Catholic. Didn’t know vampires were anything.”

“My housekeeper is Catholic,” she said, still staring at building thirteen of the factory. “I must have picked it up subconsciously from her. It did seem oddly appropriate. In all my days…Gods.” She pulled at her hood, her hands gloved in silk against the sun as well. “I never wanted to meet one, and I don’t plan on repeating the experience.”

“I warned you he has a bad temper,” Goodfellow said. “And the insanity issue. I said this probably wouldn’t work. But did you listen?”

I lifted a weary arm and aimed the Glock at his knee. “I have one round left. It’s all I need.”

Kalakos came around from the side of the building, where he must have escaped out the back. The cherry on top of the fucking sundae.

“Never mind.” I let my hand flop back. “I think I’ll save it for myself.”