Doubletake

16

I was swatted awake the next morning by a paper in the face. It was rolled up and I wondered briefly if I’d piddled on the couch. “Up and at ’em, couch thief. Janus came back last night and wiped out about half an acre of Central Park. At least I’d say it’s a reasonable assumption it was Janus, as the unnatural and unseen tornado out of a clear sky makes less sense, but is a weatherman’s wet dream. One drop of rain and they’re on TV yap-yap-yap, counting every drop, predicting the planet-threatening sprinkle but a mere five days away.”

I snatched the paper from Goodfellow’s hand as he kept yap-yap-yapping himself, to find it was in Chinese, which left me out. But there was a picture zoomed in on a circle of trees splintered and flattened. “Shit.” Central Park. “The boggles.” I’d come to the conclusion that Grimm wouldn’t mess with family or friends, but I hadn’t considered enemies. Some enemies can be more useful than friends on occasion. Then there were the kids.…“Jesus,” I groaned, and sat up, every muscle aching.

“You were right. Grimm is intelligent, too intelligent.” Niko was handing me some kind of sticky pastry with a napkin wrapped around it and a cup of coffee. I looked at both blankly for a good minute before I recognized what they were and what to do with them. Morning was not my thing. “He may have gone after something we value but can’t claim as family. It’s a fine line, if it’s one he’s indeed walking.”

I grunted and ate. “Go?”

“Yes, I think we should. The area that was destroyed isn’t close to the boggle pit, but it’s not far enough for comfort either. And there is no other reason for Janus to have been there. We weren’t.”

“Games.” One in which Grimm was several moves ahead of me. Did he think I cared enough about the boggles to come after him? Or that I cared that they were too useful for him to be screwing with? He was outlining the boundaries, dipping a toe in the water to see if Caliban the shark snapped at his leg and pulled him under. He wanted to know how far he could push, yet keep the possibility of my changing teams. Observation had shown him how I felt about family and friends; now he wanted to know how I felt about others.

Did I know myself? You can spend enough time with a monster that would rip off your arm like a turkey leg if you eventually let yourself get used to it. A give and take that goes on for years. Information for pay. Sparring for experience. As long as you’re equally matched and you both can walk away…some were convenient to have around. Like Boggle and her litter.

“I need more coffee,” I mumbled. “Lots more coffee.”

At first I thought the mud pit was empty. To be polite we’d shouted we were coming for a “consultation” with Mama Boggle when we were several hundred feet away in the deepest part of the woods of the park. It wasn’t necessary. She had a nose as good as a Wolf’s, but temperamental was a boggle’s nature. That and predatory, homicidal, and they liked bright, shiny things. Mama Boggle was nine feet of scales, claws, pumpkin orange eyes. She was a humanoid alligator with the backward bite of a shark’s mouth, and a magpie’s attraction to gold and gems. When she was mildly annoyed, she’d uproot full-grown trees and throw them at you. If you were a mugger or a lost jogger, she ate you.

As informants went, she was a good one. If she knew anything and you bought her a bag full of Tiffany’s best, she’d tell you. If she didn’t know anything, she’d ignore you…or go back to throwing trees at you. If she hadn’t had the kids to feed and teach to hunt, she would’ve been more interested in killing us, but keeping her litter in line took a lot of time and energy. They looked just like their mom, but only seven feet tall and not that bright. They’d outgrow it. And when they did, I wasn’t sure what would happen. One boggle in Central Park was survivable. One with a litter of boglets—they were occupied teaching and learning, also doable. But when the boglets became full-grown, I didn’t think Central Park could sustain that many adult boggles. I knew we couldn’t take on that many if worse came to worst.

Unless they stayed on the dim side.

I crouched by the pit and knocked on the edge of the mud. It wasn’t as crusted around the edge, thanks to yesterday’s storm that had finally cleared up around late afternoon. I lifted my hand and wiped the coating of mud on the grass. “Boggle?” I swiveled my head to look up at Nik and the others. “I smell sulfur. Janus. But not strong. Not like it was here. More like the boggles brought the scent back on them.”

“I don’t care for the sound of that. Unless they did us a favor and took Janus apart to keep his bright and sparkly pieces for souvenirs,” Robin said with a yawn as he stood beside me, leaning on his sword. The floor hadn’t been conducive to sleep, he’d said…repeatedly. That was intended to make me feel guilty.

It didn’t.

I was about to knock again when the pit erupted and widely sweeping arms wrapped around Goodfellow and me and dragged us under. So much for the neighborly visit. My last sight was Kalakos holding Niko back, yelling, “It’s too late! You can’t fight that! And there are others…”

I didn’t hear any more about the others as mud filled my ears, nose, but not my mouth. I kept that shut. It was true that enemies could be more useful than friends once in a while, but that didn’t mean you ever forgot what they were. You’d be tempted to…with every interaction you survived, but if you let yourself forget, you’d be delivered from that temptation in a less than biblical way. I’d always known that about Mama Boggle. The first time you dropped your guard, she’d take you down.

Which is why, when I’d knocked with one hand, I’d been aiming my Glock with the other dead center at the pit. I was firing as soon as her scaled arm started to wrap around me. I couldn’t avoid it—not with her speed—but I could react. Male boggles were bad fucking news, and fast. Female boggles were bigger, stronger, faster, and bad fucking news to the tenth power. They were of the “shoot first, ask questions never” kind if they came after you.

I was emptying the clip as fast as it would go, which, as I’d learned how to convert semiautomatics to full-auto when I was seventeen, I think equaled Mama Boggle’s speed. Goodfellow would be using his sword with all the skill possible in a liquid pool of mud. All in all, we were probably going to die anyway, but she’d feel it when we did.

I like being right, but I also like being wrong. This was one of the times that wrong was my pick of the day. There was a tremendous push and I was out of the mud and back in the air again. Flying through it, but breathing it too. I landed hard against a tree trunk and fell to the ground on my side. Robin was next to me on his stomach, although lucky enough to have missed the tree. Both of us were covered in mud—rank, rank mud that reeked of decomposition.

With the Auphe scenting skills of a predator, I’d had a problem with things like that in the past. When a human came across a whiff of the bloated gaseous dead, it was disgusting. When I did, the same whiff was multiplied by fifty. It was the difference between driving past roadkill and shoving a rancid portion of it up your nose. “Hard to deal with” would be a huge understatement. I was getting more control of it now, though. I went ahead and puked twice. In the old days, I’d have vomited for fifteen minutes at least.

Robin was already on his feet and trying to pull me up as well, but his muddy hand kept sliding off my similarly covered shirt. “I hope you didn’t break your back when you hit the tree, because now is the time for running. And I can’t carry you and outrun a boggle. One or the other, but not both.” He was optimistic. A Kentucky Derby winner couldn’t outrun an adult boggle.

I wiped the mud from my face as I staggered up with his slippery help, then automatically ejected the Glock’s empty clip and jammed in a new one. Glocks were sturdy enough to handle a little mud—if I was lucky. It was liquid, which helped, but it was thick, which didn’t.

Mama Boggle was half in and half out of the pit, one of her harvest-moon eyes gone. Muddy pulp. She seemed determined to end us, but I felt a pang nonetheless. Boggles, like the alligators and sharks they resembled, weren’t beautiful, National Geographic glorious, or anything less than freaking flat-headed, black-taloned evil with the smell of dead humans on their breath. But if they did have one redeeming physical quality, it was their eyes. Big, brilliant, and orange as a Halloween pumpkin. They were like the gems they desired, and either I or Robin had destroyed one. I regretted it.

Goddamn pussy.

Next to that mouthy part of me, some piece of me might be, but I had memories of lying in fields in the fall when I was seven or eight with my brother and seeing moons as round and as bright in color. I felt as if I’d torn it from the sky and it wouldn’t be seen again. Every autumn would pass, but that miracle of nature wouldn’t light the sky again.

Everything passes. Everything.

But not today.

I scanned the area for Niko and felt a stronger pang of relief when I saw him. He was less than thirty feet away with his sword buried in Kalakos’s shoulder. The five boglets loosely surrounding him he was keeping at bay with the xiphos in his other hand. He had seen me thrown clear of the pit. I knew because the katana blade was in his father’s shoulder and not his heart. Kalakos had Niko’s best interest in mind, but Kalakos didn’t have any idea that my brother was as extreme as I was when it came to some subjects. Keeping me alive was Niko’s number one subject, A-plus, and more degrees in it than a Nobel Prize committee could handle.

Interfering with that would get you stabbed. The result of your interference would determine where you were stabbed. If I hadn’t been tossed out of the pit that rapidly, Kalakos wouldn’t have had to worry about the best interests of anyone again.

Niko was his son. I’d been, by his eyes, bait for a prehistoric crocodile and already swallowed. But that didn’t mean that no good deed went unpunished. Step between brothers, for any reason—good or bad—and you might find a high price to pay.

“I’ll take Mama. Go help Nik with the boglets.” I gave Goodfellow a push, but no warning. He knew how lethally dangerous they could be. He also knew they were nothing compared to the one who whelped them.

“You think you’re more able to fight her off than I am?” He may have lifted his eyebrows, but as he was a talking mud pie, I couldn’t tell.

“I think I can hit her other eye without having to get anywhere as close as you’d have to.” I pointed my gun at his sword.

“Good point. Spanking the kiddies, it is.” He ran toward Niko, Kalakos, and the boglets with sword leveled and ready. “Spanking” was a euphemism for the end of days for boggles in Central Park. They were teens in monster terms and I didn’t like it.

Liar.

All right. The best part of me didn’t like it, but whatever had happened had set them off and there was nothing left to be done. It was us or them. You could dump a few pints of Mother Teresa genes in me to counteract the Auphe, but when it was an us-or-them situation, it was always going to be them. I’d hike up that nun habit and keep shooting.

I had the Glock aimed at Mama’s remaining sundown eye and was halfway through the exhalation that would end in pulling the trigger—until she flung six hundred pounds of herself on the ground beside the pit and screamed. When you think scream, you think chick or kid or man with his balls crushed with a pair of pliers. High-pitched and hopeless. Boggle’s wasn’t that. Hers was deep-throated, wailing, a crocodile/she-lion/bear mourning in an agony fierce enough to banish the day and bring an endless night. The sound shook the leaves from the trees to fall as if the first frost had come early. It was a bellow of pain and of loss. Woman or boggle, the loss was the same. It was the shrieking sorrow of dead children snatched to the empty heavens itself.

When the boglets heard it, they deserted Niko and his father and gathered around the pit and wailed with their grieving mother. One eye was gone, but she didn’t care. I didn’t think she had noticed after the first explosion of agony. Her arms disappeared under the mud again, this time to pull free one dead boglet and then another. It took more than two attempts. They weren’t whole. One had his head hacked off by metal claws and one had his entire body separated at the waist. Both had the faint scent of sulfur on them.

Janus.

“They hunt.” Boggle gathered the pieces of them to her. Limp arms and legs. A head and only that cradled against her chest. Intestines resting on top of the mud and spilling forth further as she huddled over them. Hands and talons tried to shove them back together, to scoop up the guts and shove them back inside. To grind a head back onto the shattered vertebrae of its neck. “They hunt but they do not come back. We search and we see it. Atrocity.” Her lips writhed to reveal the inward-curving shark teeth. “Not sheep. Not paien. Thing. It was a thing of metal and fire and wrong. Not of this time. Not of this place. Wrong.”

Monsters love their children too. Not all of them, but some or there wouldn’t be any monsters left. Enemy or informant, the death of Boggle’s children was our fault. My fault.

Grimm’s fault.

I felt his gate and I felt him, all at once. I searched up where Boggle’s desolate cries had gone. There he was, crouching in the top of a tree. “Want to take a shot?” His teeth were silver again as he grinned. I didn’t see the red of his eyes. He had his impenetrable black sunglasses back in place. “See if I can gate faster than you can pull the trigger? Or if you can gate faster than I can pull the trigger.” He had another gun and it was aimed at my chest. Another Desert Eagle, the same matte black as the one he’d stolen from me and I’d stolen back.

“You should work on getting a personality of your own,” I said, aiming my own gun, but at his head. A chest shot was for amateurs; a head shot was for professionals. “It’s pretty pathetic when you’re no more than a copy of me. I’m surprised you haven’t dyed your hair to get it all.” I gave him a matching grin, challenging and dark. “But when you’re a failure, when you’re not the Auphe chosen savior—one and fucking only—imitating the real thing is all you can hope for, huh, loser? They were right to put you in a cage. You want to one-up the Auphe, the First, with the offspring of a half-breed and some snakes? Ones that were so pitifully easy to kill they may as well have been human?”

I wanted him mad. I wanted him furious. It was the one way I could think of for him to make a mistake. He’d been arrogant in the basement and I’d taken advantage of it. But Grimm’s life and existence were testament to how fast he learned. Making the same mistake most likely wouldn’t happen. Fool him once…

He wasn’t making this one either. “I am a copy in that I covet what you covet. Black. Leather. Things that kill. Good taste runs in the family. But all is superficial. A Caliban costume for the game. I am your opposite in the ways of the real world. It’s how it should be. Black to white.” Our hair. “Pale to brown.” Our skin. “Storm clouds to spilled blood.” Our eyes. “But we do have one thing that is the same. We have an identical need. We will make the Second Coming not one or the other of what we are, but the whole of what we can be.” Without any sign or warning, he fired and I felt the bullet burn the skin on the side of my neck as he shifted aim while pulling the trigger. For intimidation, not killing.

Good shooting?

You goddamn betcha.

“The whole of what we will be.” He tapped what had to be the still-hot muzzle against his silver hair, no concern I’d shoot back.

“The baddest motherfuckers on the planet?” I said with a shell of boredom I wouldn’t let him see through. I would’ve shot back, but I knew the answer to his quiz. He could gate faster than a bullet could fly.

He laughed. “The way you play the game, brother, I won’t mind when all is said and done and the Bae rule, if you finally win over me.”

“It won’t take that long, trust me, and I don’t have your need.” While he remained calm and patient, I was the one losing my temper. The fake wall of boredom was beginning to crack, but I held it together with everything I had in me. I didn’t have a choice. Grimm dressed like me and carried a gun the same as one of mine, but he’d said it. That was superficial. The way he shot—that wasn’t. If he wasn’t my equal, he was close. Or vice versa.

“You know you do, Caliban. Ahhh, you know you do. Your cattle brother knows. Your goat knows. But they don’t know how strong your need is and how tired you are of denying it.” The grin went back to human. “But right now my need is for a drink.” This time there was a tornado, a sideways swirl that opened behind him. “I know how you feel about your so-called enemies. Don’t make me find out how you feel about your fellow workers. Neither of us would care for that. I’ve never liked chicken.” He fell backward into the gray and it swallowed him up, but his last words—the bastard always had the last word—lingered behind. “But I am curious: When you twist a peri’s head off, how long do they run around, flapping their wings, before they finally fall down?”

Shit. I could call the bar and clear it out, but it was too late. He was already there.

I pushed down the anger. He’d wait awhile. He’d think it was part of the game and he liked the way I played it. He’d like it less if he found out the reason I was unpredictable was because I couldn’t gate. Three more days, counting today and I’d gate him inside out.

The fight had gone out of the boggles, if they’d had it at all. Boggles were predators without remorse, butchers and devourers of criminals and careless humans, but they knew the concept of family. They continued to mourn. The boglets rocking back and forth. The mother trying repeatedly to put her two dead children back together. She tore at the dirt outside the pit to make thicker mud and attempt to paste the head of the one boglet on his neck. The one sliced apart at the waist, she buried the lower half again and then its upper half to its chest. “Alive? Alive?” She would prop it up and croon, grooming the neck scales with her teeth. But its head flopped and though the mud up to its armpits kept it from falling over, the shoulders slumped, its chin rested against its chest, and the eyes had gone from fire to ash.

Enemies, but enemies I’d dragged into something they had no part of. Two of their family had been viciously torn apart because of me. Two dead children—size and bloodthirsty disposition was meaningless. They’d been half-grown children all the same. There was no sorry for that. No asking for forgiveness.

“Alive? Alive?” The hope was dying.

There was destroying the creature that had done it and the monster, the monster too much like me, who had pushed it into action.

That was it. It wouldn’t be enough. Yet all I could do.

“Alive?” Fading.

I put my gun away as Niko unsheathed the metal from Kalakos’s shoulder.

“Alive?” All but gone.

“Grimm is right,” I said distantly. “I need a drink.”