Doubletake

13

Home is where the heart is or where you bury the ones you want to eat later.

The cattle with their idiotic sayings, mooed by lungs not fit to breathe the same air as mine. The new world would have sayings that fit the mouth of the predator, not the bleating prey. But the new world took time, and I had too much work to do to bother inventing new ones until the Second Coming ruled—hundreds of years yet. It wasn’t so long for those with Auphe blood. A pureblood Auphe had lived thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. I did the math. I didn’t like it. I’d used a calculator for it and to keep track of my growing horde of children, but I’d done it. I would survive a few thousand years easily. Hundreds were nothing.

A drop in the bucket.

Humans. I dragged my claws through the dirt and wished it were flesh. Boring in what they did, boring in what they said, boring to hunt. Criminally boring.

Bored, bored, bored with them and bored, bored, bored here. But I did have to check on the family. Didn’t want naughty thoughts developing in tiny meandering minds or escapes being planned by the incubators. I had picked them out a nice place, more room than the cage that had been my home. Prison. Homes were prisons; prisons were homes. Were homes, were homes…No.

I snarled, then pulled my talons out of the dirt they’d ended up buried knuckle-deep into. It was a good place. Good enough. A cavern in the New Mexico desert, unknown by man or forgotten, it was a small opening three feet across that led straight down. It opened up into four large caverns. I kept the succubae in one guarded by their own children, the Second Coming in another, the dead bodies or the live waiting their turn in the third. The fourth was left for the children to spread as I made more. Room for the family to grow, little bundles of death and teddy bears everywhere.

Cute. Sweet. Look at Junior and Junior and Junior and Junior.

I’d need a new cavern soon.

Worst part was keeping the fifty succubae fed. It was human after human. Fifty every month to be drained of their sexual energy, all energy, unto death. It became tedious when I was the single one intelligent enough to steal them away without alarming the herd and bring them back from all the cities I’d ever traveled to be dropped down the cavern. Some children were grown, but not experienced. Stupid, in fact. Goddamn stupid. They weren’t ready for hunting trips, and nobody delivered this far from a city, no matter the tip.

Life was hard.

It was strange about the sex. Humans were supposed to enjoy it, and it was everywhere you looked where the cattle massed together as their herding instinct told them to. On every building, every wall, every TV or movie screen. It was…pervasive. Ah, that was the kind of word an educated monster like me would know. It was pervasive, and yet despite that none of the human husks were smiling when I sent in the children to clean out the succubae’s lair. Not a one. Screaming was a better name for the open rictus of frozen jaw. All of them the same, and I’d seen many. Too many to count, not interesting enough to bother with a calculator. Many said it well enough. Succubae liked to eat as much as I did.

I didn’t respect them. They weren’t as weak as humans, but only several slithers above them. I did respect the she-snakes’ philosophy, even if it was another human one made their own. They turned it into “if you can’t fuck it then eat it” and did both at the same time. It was efficient, economical, and twice the fun.

The earth began to tremble. Finally. This was what I’d been waiting for while chasing nonsense thoughts around, seconds away from teaching a few of the children about inexperience and stupidity as Caliban had taught the others in that basement. My brother had had my gift of them. Toys. He had many toys, the golden child. Here came one now.

I’d gated to just outside Caliban’s own cave after I felt him gate out as the machine plunged through the roof. I’d shot the lock out of the door, no windows to see through—inhospitable. I walked in and saw what I needed, the inside of the room and what it held. You can’t go where you have never seen and you can’t take anything from there either. This was about taking. I took Janus and gated it far down another cavern that was more of a well tunneling through rock several stories down. Then I had gated sand and dirt on top to complete its desert burial plot for safekeeping.

The tremble of the earth changed to a shaking, with plumes of sand erupting several feet high. It was impressive. Strong, quick, and useful for testing Caliban. How he reacted and fought it told me things, things I needed to measure his worth in the Second Coming. Unfortunately the things I learned were contradictory. No gate, then gate. On the verge of death, then whole again. Intriguing and annoying.

Janus was simpler. Intriguing and a tool, that was all. I planned on sending him back to New York and Caliban again soon enough. So much to learn…and while it wasn’t the ultimate game of Auphe against Auphe, it was a good game. I hadn’t been bored once it finally began.

Sand stopped flying up and now sank down under the earth, into a new pit as a hand, darkly gleaming in the hot sun, broke its way into the air and freedom.

On the downside: “You are a pain the ass. I’ve had body parts in a cooler without ice that kept longer than you.” I was also a truthful monster. When you had no one to fear, you had no reason to lie. “There was a teacher once. She had a saying she wrote every day on the blackboard. ‘Patience is a virtue.’ It made its mark on me, those words of the cattle. From weakness came truth. Those words have let me come as far as I have. From blood and filth and bars and cages, no way out. No way, no way, no way…” My thoughts circled viciously, ’round and ’round, then slowed. I pushed my sunglasses closer to my eyes, which I kept aimed on the sand. I didn’t look at the sun. It burned. It didn’t like me and I didn’t like it. But I would take the burn over the cage. Always. “Until one day I found a way out. I took it, and I plan to take everything else. All there is—because of patience. But while patience is a virtue, pissing me off is not.” I gated it down again and refilled the grave. I’d be back to check on its blind progress.

When I wasn’t watching…judging Caliban. Fitting those conflicting pieces of him together—if I had to tear bits of them off to do it. Finding out how he worked—if I had to open him up and see the wheels go ’round and ’round in his guts and his brain.

Patience is a virtue…

But only sometimes.