Doubletake

22

“Cal, you didn’t.”

I heard Niko hitting the ground beside me where I lay on my back. It had all given way: my knees, my legs, my body. I’d fallen as well—as all monsters had, Janus and Kalakos, one with the earth. “No. You didn’t do it. You didn’t. Tell me. Tell me, you son of a bitch.” This time he gripped my shoulders and shook them hard.

Being one with the earth wasn’t as peaceful as you’d think.

He shook me again, with more force. “Cal, tell me.

“Tell me you wouldn’t visit that nightmare on me.” There was no resignation. There was demand, refusal, and fingers pressing to the bone in a grip that was absolute and eternal.

Painful as shit too.

“Yeah, sorry. I kind of did. And ow.”

I opened my eyes and slid a hand under my head that my brother was knocking against the ground with the shaking. I had to give him a break on not picking up on the fact that I was breathing. With Janus inactive, it was dark now, and we’d been thoroughly conditioned to believe that making a third gate would burst my brain like an overfilled water balloon. Why wouldn’t he think that I was gone?

And it had been true—about the third gate. I’d seen that when I’d tried to gate out of the basement when I was trapped with Grimm. A third gate had been impossible then, and impractical. I’d have killed myself but not him. But that had been two days ago.

“Buddha,” he swore fervently. “How…No. Give me a moment.” He felt my face for the blood a second gate would cause. There was a small nosebleed at best, less by far than the usual.

“I can wipe my own nose. I am a man after all, remember?” I held up my fist to show the ring he’d given me. You could hardly see it in the night gloom, but it was there. “I have proof.” I brought my hand back and used the bandage on my left hand to soak up the slow-flowing smear of blood. “And I’m wiping, so why don’t you take a break?”

“I think I will.” He turned sideways and fell backward beside me. After a good five minutes, he said calmly, “I think you broke me.”

“I can see that.” If positions were reversed, I’d feel like a bag of shattered glass, slammed time and time again against a brick wall—every piece getting smaller and smaller. Disintegrating. “I had to, though. I didn’t know it would work. Doubted like hell it would work, but I couldn’t let them kill you. I…Hell, Nik…I couldn’t, okay? When Janus almost killed me at the Ninth Circle, I didn’t see you running for cover. It’s no different.”

“My father used me to try to murder you. It’s different.” There it was. The worst part of it all. Niko wouldn’t have seen his father again if the man had been honest and the story the truth. It had been too late for that, but he would’ve had the memory of an apology and knowing that his father, whatever he was, was proud of him. Now he had worse than nothing. I had had a genuine monster for a father. Niko had had a human version of one.

“Neither of us has a father or a mother. Christ, Nik, haven’t you always known that?” I finished soaking up the blood and watched the moon start to rise. “It’s always been you and me growing up. No family except us. Why would it be different now?”

The grass rustled as he shook his head. “Why you pretend to be so lazy and a completely idiotic ass at times, I don’t know. You’re too smart for my own good. You’re right. We’re all the family we have or need.”

“See? You should listen to me more often.” I paused. “But I don’t pretend to be lazy…and I am an ass.”

He laughed. It was a little choked but a laugh all the same. “How’d you do it? The third gate. How did it happen? Rafferty said his work on you couldn’t be undone.”

“It couldn’t, I don’t think. Not by anyone around now.” There were sirens in the distance. Soon I’d have to gate us home and Kalakos and Janus to Tumulus for disposal, but not yet. It was warm; I could smell the ocean, maybe even see what I thought were stars. “Remember when we thought Rafferty was the best healer who had ever been born?”

“Difficult to forget,” Niko said, now quietly somber. That had been a bad time.

“Remember how, after he rewired my gating ability and later fought Suyolak…” Antihealer. The Plague of the World. Suyolak had thought he was hot shit, the hottest, and he’d been right. No one, including Rafferty, could match him. “…how Suyolak kicked his ass, dumping him down to second-best and almost dead healer?”

“Even more difficult to forget.”

“When Kalakos gave you Suyolak’s ointment, there was some left. Remember—”

“How you ran your finger around the box like it was an almost empty pudding bowl and ate it.” He propped up on his elbows. “Quite a few ‘remembers,’ but I haven’t forgotten.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t know if it would work and, if it did work, if it would take days, weeks, years. It was a shot in the dark.”

What wasn’t in our lives?

He let himself drop back again. “Random luck. What if it had taken weeks or months? Or not worked at all? You’d be dead.” The sound of one hand clapping over his eyes lifted into the night. “God, I think you broke me twice now. You could be dead.”

It was in no way his fault that his father was a homicidal psychopath, surprising me that he and Sophia hadn’t gotten along better. He’d used Niko, and he’d used my wanting what was best for my brother to worm his way inside until he could kill me himself or recover Janus. I had meant it: Neither of us had parents. Kalakos was nothing more than a murderer, and if he’d been successful then I’d have been the equivalent of someone shot to death while mugged or eaten in Central Park. A victim of a monster. Nothing to do with Niko. Simply the wrong place, wrong time. But Niko would have to mull it over awhile before he let himelf off the hook. Until then he’d brood and feel guilty. He didn’t deserve that, but he was stubborn and he’d hang on to that guilt but good. How’d you make that better?

“I could’ve died.” I said it the same as I would say the sky was blue. Simple fact.

“Shut up,” he snapped. “Just…shut up.”

“Dying…scary fucking shit, right?”

“Shut up.” That was Niko on the ragged edge.

I thought and uncrossed my arm from my chest and held it over to him. “Want to hold my hand? I think I’d feel better.”

This time the laughter was real, the guilt was less, and I definitely saw stars above.

“You are such an ass.” He snorted. He’d said that already, but I let it go.

“I told you not to trust a man who looked like that. Big nose. Blond hair and dark skin, that’s just weird. Way too good with a sword. Obviously exercised too much. Probably liked bonsai trees and dating vampires too. Sign of a nut job right there.”

He slapped me on the stomach and said it for the third time. “Complete and utter ass.” This time we both laughed.

The stars were brighter than ever.

It was a great night.

“I can’t believe you went back to Hephaestus to get the info on Janus.” I put my feet up on the couch…it was in Robin’s condo but it was still my couch. “And didn’t tell us. He could’ve killed you. He should’ve killed you.”

“You would’ve interfered. Besides, if I recall correctly, I outran every one of you on the first visit.” He scratched Salome’s bony butt as she hung around his neck while he peered in the refrigerator. “I’m starving. I save your lives and you don’t even bring me a nice duck pizza home in gratitude.”

“Sorry.” I was damn hungry myself. I slid my phone out of my pocket, Grimm’s claw marks in my shoulder howling in protest, but I felt too good otherwise to care. Grimm, Janus, and Kalakos: That was a hat trick nothing could ruin. “So…when you went back to the armory, you pretended to be like Hob, thought like Hob to get Hephaestus to talk, didn’t you? I know you didn’t want to have to do that. Sorry,” I repeated. I was too.

Robin closed the refrigerator door when he saw me ordering pizza and sat on his couch where Niko rested, Spartacus having half strangled himself in my brother’s braid. “I didn’t think like Hob. I won’t do that. I cannot even step into his shoes. Walk the bloody road he traveled.” So many of us with our dark and bloody roads. “It would suck me in. But I could do a pretense of a pretense. A poor imitation, the cheapest of Halloween masks, and his reputation preceded him. I was convincing enough to make Hephaestus think cooperation is a wonderful thing. He couldn’t talk fast enough.” His eyes were slitted at the memory. “He obviously had never crossed paths with the actual Hob. The first Hob.”

“You were Hob once, weren’t you?” The question, without judgment, came from Niko. As Niko was the one Hob had tried to sacrifice, it needed to.

“Yes.” They were gone, the strange flashes that had obscured his normally wicked and sly ways. He’d always before clearly shown what he was. Not a fox with sour grapes—a fox with a ladder and someone dim enough to be convinced to climb it for him.

“The memories are long gone, but I know. First there was Hob and then there was me. The second puck to step foot to earth. Identical. Same body, same mind, same thoughts, same memories, same proclivities.” Then again there was the quickest glitter in the eyes, but it passed. “Then, as all pucks do, I made new memories, developed my own singular personality, became not-Hob. But always I know what cast its reflection into me. Although I walked away, the mirror remains. If I stare into it, I’ll see my birth. I’ll see what I was. If I see it, I’ll remember it; if I remember it, I’ll become it…and Hob will live again.” He threw his own phone to me. “Forget the pizza. Call a limo. We’re going drinking and we’re not stopping until every damn drop of alcohol has been drunk and every stripper spanked for being the bad, bad boy or girl they are.”

We let the subject drop as he wanted. After what he’d done for us, we’d be bastards if we didn’t.

“One thing bothers me. How did Grimm know Janus’s name if he didn’t steal him or know of his existence to begin with?” Niko wondered. That brooding of my brother’s I’d worried about? It couldn’t have lasted longer? No. Crap.

“I might have mentioned it in the basement where Grimm had me,” I mumbled. “He’d just said he gated that metal monstrosity off of me in front of the bar, I said ‘Janus,’ and there you go. He was playing games with me, testing me. I thought, Who more likely to steal something like that than a half Auphe? Little did I know it was your dear old dad who was out to viciously mur…Oh, hey, we need a limo at Rob Fellows’s place.” I didn’t bother to give an address. He was their most frequent rider/drinker/horn-dog in the city. “Viciously murder me,” I went on after disconnecting. “I don’t think one slip of the tongue—”

“Leading us down a completely wrong path of investigation while taking the real killer with us everywhere we went,” Niko completed caustically. Yeah, that guilt had faded much quicker than I thought it would. “I was wrong. You don’t pretend to be lazy and idiotic. You are both.”

“He held my hand when he thought I almost died,” I told Robin, tossing back the phone. “And although it was too dark to see for sure, I think he might’ve cried.”

“I did not. I shook you and pounded your head against the ground, which unfortunately didn’t knock anything back into place.” He frowned. I grinned. Giving up—a wise move on his part—he moved on. “Now, we may still have Grimm out there somewhere, and the Bae. He’s been free twelve years. We guessed at best he could’ve reproduced thirty to fifty of the Bae. What do you think, Goodfellow? How many do we have to worry about?”

Robin shook his head. “I have no idea. Succubae usually lay only one egg when they reproduce. Who knows what will happen when they breed with a half Auphe? And how many succubae he has? I can’t imagine it being more than fifty.” He stood and grabbed his coat to head down for the limo. “Twelve years, and Artemis the fertile one knows how long it took him to find that succubae were compatible with a half Auphe. It couldn’t have been more than eight years at the most. Fifty in eight years? I doubt it. Even I’m not that horny.”

When Goodfellow was right, he was right.

It didn’t get more logical than that.