Doubletake

1

Family…it is a fucking bitch.

Just like he was a bitch. I had seen him—wallowing amongst the game, but never tasting of the herd. More perverse, he lived with prey, had been raised by prey, had been taught the ways of the world by prey, when I’d had to teach myself. Clawing myself along, I had chewed my way through knowledge as grimly as I’d once chewed discarded putrid meat and bone. Everything I’d earned, I’d earned with blood, mine or someone else’s. I had done what no one else could do.

The castoff failure, but look at me now. Damn right, look at me. Look hard and look good—right before I gut you.

Then there was him, the golden boy, yet look at what he had done.

Naughty and bad, bad and naughty. But much worse: disobedient. Not what they’d expected of their one true success at all.

I laughed at the irony of it.

I laughed, but I hated him, hated him, hated him, hated him, hated him.

Not for what he’d done, but that he’d been the one instead of me to do it.

That was all right, though. That was fine and fucking dandy, as someone I used to know once said. Fine and fucking dandy, because I hated everyone anyway. The only difference was, I was related to this one…and that made the hate sweeter. Hate was all I’d known. All I had ever been given and all I had ever had. I was created from it, molded by it, lived by it. Hate was like air, necessary to life. I wore my hate as a second skin and let it warm me when nothing else did.

I saw him through binoculars from where I lay atop a roof far enough away that he wouldn’t know I was there. It was night, but I saw him clearly. Light was for the fearful herd; the night was for me. Not that it was ever truly dark in this immense mound of misbegotten roadkill waiting to happen.

Yes, I saw him. He had black hair, pale skin, light-colored eyes. Nothing like I was at all. That I didn’t hate. That I liked—I was better, purer, closer to the truth.

It was all about the truth.

The new truth.

My truth.

And he was part of that, whether he wanted to be or not.

Family was a hateful bitch; it was. I had the hot poker scars of that burned into my flesh to prove it, but, scars or not, sometimes family was all you had worth playing with. Maybe he would see that. Maybe he would want to play too. I played rough. I played to win.

Did he?

I’d bet he did if given the chance, not that this boring scuffle I was watching was anything to go by. It wasn’t a fraction of the challenge I’d give him.

The Unmaker of the World, they had called him.

Unimpressed, I waggled black-gloved fingers in a mocking wave. We’d see. Sooner or later, we’d see exactly what family and blood meant to him. He might look like one of the cattle, but he would never be one.

Besides, if he could unmake the world, how much more fun would it be for me to remake it instead?