Nightlife

Chapter One

Most kids don't believe in fairy tales very long. Once they hit six or seven they put away "Cinderella" and her shoe fetish, "The Three Little Pigs" with their violation of building codes, "Miss Muffet" and her well-shaped tuffet—all forgotten or discounted. And maybe that's the way it has to be. To survive in the world, you have to give up the fantasies, the make-believe. The only trouble is that it's not all make-believe. Some parts of the fairy tales are all too real, all too true. There might not be a Red Riding Hood, but there is a Big Bad Wolf. No Snow White, but definitely an Evil Queen. No obnoxiously cute blond tots, but a child-eating witch… yeah. Oh yeah.

There are monsters among us. There always have been and there always will be. I've known that ever since I can remember, just like I've always known I was one. Well, half of one anyway. And regardless of what inherited nastiness I might have on the inside, on the outside I was all human. In fact Niko had said, and pretty damn frequently, that I had more human qualities than I had good sense. He never hesitated to remind me that no matter how god-awful I thought my problems were, I was still his punk-ass kid brother. If I wanted to beat up on myself, I'd have to go through him first. Niko was such a Boy Scout—albeit one with a lethal turn and a Merit Badge in deadly weapons.

Niko, for all his fascination with sharp, pointy things, didn't have a drop of monster blood in him. Of course his father could barely be classified as human in my book, but technically the man met the definition. Worthless bastard. Niko had been two weeks old when his dear old dad had taken off. He'd seen him no more than three times in his entire life. There were some true parenting skills at work. Three times. Hell, I'd seen my father more than that.

Yeah, I'd seen mine at least once a month. It watched me. There were no father-and-son chats, no invites to see the monster cousins, no interaction of any sort. There was just a shadowed figure lurking in an alley as I passed. Or maybe a silhouette with lithe, sinuous lines and sharp, sharp teeth cast against my window at night. Of course, it wasn't like it was wearing a name tag that said "Dad" on it or leaving me birthday presents topped with a bow tied by unnaturally long, clawed fingers. I had no proof it was my demonic sperm donor, but come on. When your mother is quick to tell you you're a freak, an abomination that should've been aborted on cheap bathroom tile, you have to think… why else would this monster be stalking me? Funny, that monster had more interest in me than my mother ever had.

Over the years I got used to it, the shadowing. A couple of times I tried to approach it—out of curiosity, or a morbid death wish, who knew? But it always disappeared, melting into the darkness. Mostly I was relieved. It was one thing to be part monster, another altogether to embrace that less-than-Mayflower heritage. Then when I was fourteen that all changed. After that, I didn't look for monsters.

I ran from them.

Actually we ran from them, Niko and I. For four years that felt more like forty, we ran. Ran until it was a way of life. It wasn't the kind of life Niko deserved. But did he listen to me when I told him so? Shit. Hardly. My brother had made a career out of trying to protect me. Talk about your minimum-wage, no-benefits occupations.

Sort of like the one I had now, I thought glumly. Dumping the mop back in the battered bucket, I swirled it around once in the gray foul-smelling water, then flopped it back on the scarred wooden floor. You'd be amazed at how much vomit a barful of drunks could produce. I was, at first. Now I was just amazed at how damn long it took to clean it up. It was rather ironic that the fake ID that aged me up from nineteen to twenty-one had me cleaning up alcoholic chunks rather than spewing them myself.

"Cal, I'm heading out. Close up for me?"

I cast a jaundiced look over my shoulder. Good old "Close up for me" Meredith. You could always put your faith in her—that is, the faith that she would leave you high and dry to duck out early. "Yeah. Yeah." I waved her off. One day I'd tell her to bite me and stick around to do her job, but I was guessing that day would come when she was wearing a top that was a little less tight or a shade less low-cut. "Want me to walk you out?"

"No, the boyfriend's outside." She tugged at my short ponytail as she headed toward the door. "See you tomorrow." And then she was gone, her long cascading red hair and curving figure lingering in the air to dazzle the eye like a fluorescent afterimage. Meredith was all about a look. She'd sculpted herself with the passion and precision of any artist. I doubt that even she had a clue what her original hair color was—or her original breast size, for that matter. She was a walking, talking advertisement for better living through plastic surgery.

And despite 99 percent of it being artificial, it was a damn good body. Fantasizing about it made the unpleasant chore of mopping up human bodily fluids pass a little faster. I actually didn't mind pulling "close up" duty at the bar. After bartending all night it was kind of nice to be surrounded by nothing but silence and empty space. I was beginning to think working at a bar was ruining my appreciation of a good party. Drunk people were starting to lose their charm; hell, they were even starting to lose their comedic ways. You can watch a wasted guy fall off a barstool and crack his head open only so many times before it's just not funny anymore. Well, not as funny anyway.

At the moment the bar was quiet. It was a comforting quiet, the kind that wrapped around you like the thickest of fleecy blankets sold at stores you couldn't even afford to walk through the front door of. It was nice… peaceful. It was also dangerous and Niko would kick my ass if ever I didn't recognize that. Being alone, being distracted, that all added up to being a walking, talking target. I was a fugitive, hunted, and not for one minute, one second, could I forget that. Other things I'd forgotten, in a big way, but never that. Putting away the mop, I finished locking up and ended up on the sidewalk about four thirty. Even at that late hour the streets of New York weren't totally empty, but they were sparser… for a few hours the road less traveled. With the chill of October already a vicious bite in the air, I zipped up the battered black leather jacket I'd picked up from a street vendor in Chinatown for twenty-five bucks. A knockoff of a knockoff, but all I cared about was that it let me blend in with the night.

Keeping my hand in my pocket and firmly gripping a deadly little present Niko had given me, I walked home. It wasn't too far, about five blocks over to Avenue D. It wasn't the best part of town by any means, but neither were we the best type of people. I kept my eyes open and my senses as sharp as those of any rabbit that smelled the wolf. Although to give myself some credit, I was a rabbit with teeth. Not to mention one helluva kick. This time, however, I made it back with no sign of anything with claws, molten eyes, or a hunger for my blood—a good night in my book. Niko and I lived in an older apartment building, pretty run-down but not a complete slum. Depending on your definition. The front door had been secure at some point in time, I suppose, but now it usually hung ajar by a few inches, the gap-toothed grin of a dirty old man. I took the stairs up, seven stories, grumbling and cursing under my breath. There wasn't an elevator; apparently our landlord considered housing laws not exactly a must-read. Not that it mattered. Even if there were one, it probably wouldn't work and if it did, an elevator was no place to be trapped. A metal box of guaranteed death for someone on the run, Niko had said on occasion. And as my brother had absolutely no talent or inclination for exaggeration, I tended to stay out of elevators. Picturing what might drop through the roof or burrow through the floor wasn't the kind of thought I liked to entertain. Making my way down the hall to our door, I slid the key into the lock and opened the door to a dark room. Finding the roughly aged plastic of the light switch with my fingers, I flipped it on.

Nothing happened.

The lightbulb could be burned out; that's what your average person would think. Not me. Instantly I shrugged out of my jacket; the rustle of the leather would do its best to give me away before I moved an inch. I let it slip to the floor as silently as possible and then slid along the wall, slow step by slow step. The plaster was cool even through my shirt, a light trace of ice against my spine as I listened and listened hard. There was no sound, not the brush of a foot against the floor, not the single sigh of an exhaled breath. But something was there. I didn't need to spend $2.99 a minute on Miss Cleo to know that. I crouched slightly and started a cautious pass with my arm through the pitch-black air before me. Not a good idea.

A grip as unbreakable as any bear trap snared my wrist. It pulled me away from the wall, virtually off my feet. Something hard hit me in the pit of my stomach and I flipped to land forcefully on my back, the air exploding painfully out of my lungs. An iron pressure was applied to my throat and a sibilant voice hissed, "Any last words, dead man?"

I coughed, sucked in a ragged breath, then drawled hoarsely, "You are such an asshole, Niko. You seriously need to invest in a hobby."

"Keeping you alive is my hobby. It certainly doesn't appear to be yours." There was a sharp clap and the lights flared on. Wonderful. We now had clap-on, clap-off technology in our midst. All the better to illuminate my humiliaton.

I scowled and batted in annoyance at the long blond braid that hung down in my face. "I already have the one side of my family out to put me in a box or worse. Is it too much to ask you stop playing Cato?"

"Yes, it is." With an automatic shrug he flipped the braid back over his shoulder and stood. "And Inspector Clouseau would certainly be a better student than you." Holding out a hand to me, he asked pointedly, "And where exactly is that knife I gave you?"

I took the hand and let him pull me to my feet. "In my jacket pocket." Gray eyes shifted to the puddle of leather by the door, and pale eyebrows rose skyward in silent but potent disapproval. "Yeah, well, at least with it over there I'm not tempted to make like a Cuisinart all over your scrawny ass."

"Quite the threat," he said dryly. "I'm sure you are the terror of Girl Scouts everywhere." He brushed the dust from his black turtleneck and pants with a fastidious hand. "Lock the door, Cal. Let's not make it any easier for the Grendels than we have to."

Names were funny things. They meant things… no matter how much you might deny it, no matter how much you might want to believe they were chosen at a whim. Niko had come up with the name "Grendels." It wasn't enough he was a blond Bruce Lee, but he was smart as hell too. One reading of Beowulf in the sixth grade and he'd labeled my stalkers Grendels. I'd been only in the first grade myself, five years younger than Niko, so it hadn't meant much to me at the time. But Grendels they became; after all, monsters were monsters.

Of course now I was just three years younger than my butt-kicking big brother. Wasn't that a trick?

"Caliban" was a helluva name too. Nice label to put on a kid, right? Mom might have lived in a dark, cramped one-room apartment over a tattoo parlor. She might've told fortunes for a living, ripping off the naive, the desperate, the flat-out stupid. And she might have been as quick with a slap as she was to tilt a bottle of cheap wine. But one thing you could give her credit for, she knew her Shakespeare. The Tempest's Caliban, born of a witch and a demon. Half monster… a slouching nightmare of a creature tainting everything he touched.

Gee, thanks, Mom. You really knew how to make a boy feel special.

I locked the door and headed toward our bathroom, saying with a grin, "What're you still doing up? You know all good little ninjas should be in bed, visions of homicidal sugarplums dancing in their heads."

With a grunt of resignation Niko retrieved my jacket from the floor. It hung from the point of one of his many, many blades until he draped it over the back of our battered sofa. "They're not completely homicidal." His lips twitched with amusement. He followed me down the tiny hall, leaned with casual grace against the wall, and folded his arms. "And I had a last-minute scheduling for bodyguard duty. An off-off-off-Broadway actress who imagines herself the target of a literal army of sex-crazed stalkers. It was exhausting."

"I'll bet." I gave him a mock leer as I leaned over the bathroom sink. As I pulled the rubber band free from my hair, the ruler-straight black strands fell forward against my face. Squeezing a generous dollop of toothpaste on my brush, I went to work, scrubbing and spitting. Niko had a casual business relationship with an agency that provided bodyguards and security around the city. Actually, the agency was one guy with a lot of contacts, some of which were even almost legal. But it was fair money and the pay was strictly under-the-table. No taxes. No government. No trail for the Grendels. Not that I pictured a Grendel in a bow tie and spectacles climbing that corporate ladder or waiting on his retirement. Still, Grendels weren't above using humans, and most humans weren't above being used.

Niko watched me silently as I finished up, rinsing my mouth and then pulling off my shirt. I slid him a glance, a little worried. "Okay, what?" When you've known someone all your life you don't need a neon sign to know when something is wrong. A faint shadow in his eyes, a slight flattening of his mouth—something was bugging Niko.

He hesitated, then said quietly, "I saw one today."

Four words. That's all it took to have the ground disintegrating under my feet. Just four goddamn words. I wadded up my shirt with suddenly clumsy fingers. "Oh." Articulate as always. Flipping the lid down on the toilet, I sat, tossed the shirt into the sink, and started to untie my sneakers.

Niko moved closer, a solidly reassuring presence in the doorway. "It was in the park. I was doing my evening run."

"The park," I repeated emotionlessly. "Makes sense." Grendels, as far as we could tell, didn't much care for cities; they seemed to be more prevalent in rural areas, the woods, the creeks, the silent and sullen hills. But New York was one damn big place. Of all the cities we'd run to, this was the one where we were bound to come across the occasional monster, Grendel, vampire, ghoul, boggle… whatever. One Grendel in Central Park should not a crapfest in your pants make, right? Right? "So we stay or go?"

He knocked ruminatively on the sink. Once, twice. "I think that perhaps we should stay, at least unless we spot more. It's unlikely this one had anything to do with us."

"Had?" I dragged a hand through my hair and fixed him with a suspicious look. "I'm no English major, Nik, but that sounds like the past tense to me."

"It rather does, doesn't it?" he agreed mildly. Retrieving my shirt from the sink, he handed it to me. "Go to bed. I'll take first watch."

We were back to that, then. We'd done it almost religiously for the first year after I had come back from… wherever. But after a while we'd reverted to a more casual routine, and thank God for that. I'd been perpetually sleep deprived that entire year. And I loved to sleep. That's the definition of a teenager, isn't it? A coma with two legs and an endless appetite. Certainly being deprived of my God-given right to ten hours a night made me cranky.

I grimaced, then nodded. "Okay. Wake me in four." Hitting my mattress hard, I rolled up in the blanket and dropped off instantly, a skill I'd never had to learn. I could sleep anytime and anywhere. It was a good talent to have when you spent your life dodging monsters. Snatching minutes here and there was sometimes the best you could hope for.

On the other hand sleep meant dreams, and dreams meant nightmares. Or memories. As far as I could tell the two were interchangeable. I had some sheet rippers, no doubt, and I was betting Niko did too. Of course he would claim he didn't, that his disciplined mind was too well trained for such subconscious antics. Begone nasty boogeymen; I, Niko the Magnificent, have spoken. Nik did have a way of making even utter bullshit seem noble.

Yeah, I definitely took regular tours through nightmare city, and so far I hadn't figured a way to fool anyone about that… including myself. It was always the same, the dream. Maybe that should have given me some warning; even asleep I should've had a chance to prepare… to brace myself. Never happened. It started on the same note too, with the same feel, the same sweet taste of something bright and hopeful.

Wasn't that a bitch?

I woke up before my four hours were up. Catapulted out of sleep with a pounding heart and a sweat that would've done a malaria victim proud, I swallowed the taste of bile and gripped handfuls of the blanket as if it were the only thing keeping me from plummeting into the abyss. Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I grabbed at the lamp and found it with practiced ease. Light bloomed in the room, but some shadows remained. Right then even one was too many. I lurched to my feet and hit the wall switch. Every time we spotted a Grendel. Every goddamn time.

In the dream I was fourteen again. A punk-ass kid, but no worse than any other kid, I guess. I drank some. Shoplifted a few times. Skipped school once or twice. Usual shit. I didn't fight, though. Ever. You think you got it bad? Joe Junior whose daddy is an alcoholic? Well, screw your dependency gene. Try carrying a bucketful of monster DNA. While you were worried about having a tendency to have a beer glued to your hand, I was more concerned with pulling out the still-beating heart of the obnoxious asshole who sat in front of me in homeroom. It hadn't happened yet, but you never knew. I never knew. It was always there, the potential, whether I saw signs of it or not. I couldn't let myself doubt that. I wouldn't let myself doubt it.

That day was different, though. A good day. Hell, a great day. Niko had found a good job and a place of his own, and we were moving out. Moving on. Niko was in his first year of state college; he'd gotten a full scholarship. He could've done better, a lot better. But he'd wanted to stay close to home. Close to me, the demonic albatross around his neck. That was a thought I kept to myself. I liked my ass enough to want to keep it in one piece, and Niko would have been all too happy to put a boot up it if he even suspected what I was thinking. But, hell, it was only what Mom told me time and time again. And if anyone should know demons, it'd be her.

After all, she had screwed one.

She wouldn't be sorry to see me go, my mom, Sophia Leandros. She wasn't precisely overflowing with maternal instincts, even for her human son. It was like those TV specials about animals born and raised in captivity. The mothers had never seen babies born, had never had babies of their own, and had no idea what to do with them once they did. They'd give the mewling wet little creatures a disgusted sniff and a wary and disbelieving look, and off they'd go without a backward glance. Sometimes I imagine good old Mom made it to the bar across the street before the nurse even finished toweling the birth blood off me. The same went for Niko. She might have found him more acceptable, being human and all, but she didn't shower him with love and affection either… just a little less revulsion.

So, as they say, I was more than ready to shake the dust off my shoes. More than ready to get away from dark, dark hills and shadowy trees that could hide a thousand things. Grendels hadn't ever bothered us over the years; they'd just watched. But it was better in town; there you saw only a few once in a while. In fact it used to be only the one—Daddy dearest, I'd been betting—but over time that had changed. Dad had started bringing friends with him when he showed up to watch me. But out here in the country I saw Grendels almost every day. Sometimes, after the sun went down, there were as many rapt red eyes floating in the twilight as there were fireflies. It was… shit… creepy as hell. No matter that I'd seen them all my life. One or two were bad enough. More than you could count was enough to make the air freeze and fracture in your lungs.

Yeah, the city had been better, but Sophia had lost her lease after running off most of her regular clients through boozing. She'd also racked up a few debts that made a relocation to the country suddenly seem desirable. And off we went to live the good life, the good life being a battered, rusting metal trailer squatting on a piece of land far from the nearest neighbors. I didn't know who owned the land or the trailer. I'm not even sure Sophia knew. But she'd found it with a sixth sense honed by years of scrounging, conning, and outright stealing. We'd been in the tin Taj Mahal now for almost two months. I was lucky it was summer because I had no idea where the nearest high school was and even if I had known, there wasn't much chance a bus came out this way.

But today was the final day in the boonies. I was packing up the last of my shit in the best luggage garbage bag companies made when Niko shifted weight on my worn mattress and grimaced. "You can't want to bring that, Cal, honestly."

"Caliban," I corrected automatically. I'd decided recently that I didn't want to be called Cal anymore. "Caliban" meant monster, and that's what I was. I had no intention of forgetting that, not for one minute. Looking down at the sweatshirt wadded in my hand, I demanded, aggrieved, "Why not? It's my favorite one. I wear it all the time."

He let the name issue go for the moment. But I wasn't under any illusions that he'd give up. He'd give me some space and if that didn't bring me around, he'd jump on me when I least expected it. I was never going to be the poster child for mental health, but Niko wasn't about to accept that. Returning to the sweatshirt topic, he leaned over and poked a finger through a hole in the shoulder of the shirt. "Yes, I noticed that. It looks to have been almost favored to death. Not to mention the color."

"Purple? What have you got against purple?" I shoved the shirt into the bag and gave him a warning look. Love me, love my shirt.

"Only everything in the world, and that particular shade barely qualifies as a color. It's more a visual assault."

I grinned. "College boy with his big fancy words." I began to tie off the bag when the sound of shattering glass came from outside the tiny bedroom. "Mom's up," I said, matter-of-fact.

"I didn't think there was anything breakable left in this forsaken pit." A hand landed on my shoulder, a steady and comforting grip. For the first time in a while I didn't grumble or try to shake him off like any self-respecting, full-of-himself fourteen-year-old who knew he was too old to be treated like a baby. I simply soaked up the warmth that sank through my shirt.

"Probably just a plate. Breaking's easier than washing, right?" I pulled another garbage bag out of the box. The hand moved to my hair and mussed it without mercy.

"Considering the way you wash them, it's probably more sanitary at any rate." He stood and moved past me to the bedroom door. "Once more into the breach," he exhaled ruefully. "Keep packing. We'll be leaving in an hour or so."

And then we'd give the phrase "Don't look back" a run for its money. As I finished up with my things, I could hear Niko's quiet, calm voice and Sophia's slurred one coming from the kitchen. To be more exact, I heard every word spoken. Hell, the kitchen was barely twelve feet away; I didn't have much choice. "You two still here?" came the uninterested voice. Once it had been a smoky blue velvet; now it was a threadbare polyester, raveled around the edges and stained with cheap whiskey. I thought it had been one of the reasons she'd been such a successful fortune-teller. People paid not so much for what she said, but more for how she said it. Even the most stupid and inane "You'll meet a tall, dark stranger" sounded seductive and mysterious when Sophia Leandros said it. Or it had once upon a time.

I had her voice. I also had her inky black hair and slate gray eyes. No olive-tinted skin, though. I was pale, Grendel pale. Mom had looked at me once when I was younger, about eight. It was a strange look, one of repugnance mixed with a reluctant pride. "You're a monster, but you're a beautiful one," she had said. Great, I was an evil, squatting thing wrapped in shiny silver Christmas paper. Even at eight I hadn't thought that was much of a compliment.

As I gathered up a few musty, used paperbacks, Niko's voice drifted into the room. "We're leaving as soon as we get Cal's things loaded into the car. It shouldn't be long." There was a pause and then he added without any real enthusiasm, "Will you be all right?"

There was a humorless laugh and the clink of ice in a glass. "Without you and the demon spawn? Shit, sweetheart, things could only get better."

And just like that, before I even knew it, I was standing in the narrow doorway, my eyes on my mother… a fine upstanding woman whose reproductive system should've been removed at birth. She sat at the lopsided rickety table with her hand curled around a glass. Black hair untouched by silver spilled past her shoulders and onto a red silk robe that had seen better days, better years even. Eyes as polished and cold as steel studied Niko as she half emptied the glass in two swallows. "Where's my money?"

I watched as Niko silently pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and laid it on the table. He'd been giving money to Sophia since his first job at fourteen. I'd have been expected to do the same, but out here there were no jobs and since I was too young to drive, there was no way to get to them if there had been any. She scooped up the cash and counted it with nimble fingers. "Keep it coming, puss, or our nosy little monster comes back home with me. We all clear on that?" Her gaze pinned me in the doorway for a moment, and then I melted back into the gloom of the bedroom.

I'd wondered why Niko hadn't stopped giving her most of his paycheck when he'd moved off to college and the dorm. But it was as I'd suspected. Sophia had us both over a barrel. I was only fourteen. She didn't have to let me go live with my brother, and the law would see it the same way. How the hell Niko would manage to pay for an apartment while giving her practically all his money, I didn't have a clue. Even with me getting a job there and helping out, it'd be tight. Real tight. But the dorm room… it had been part and parcel of the scholarship. No rent there. No younger brothers either.

Sitting on the bed, the mattress bowing beneath me, I took a good look at my pile of "luggage." Suddenly every bag looked like a chain, a heavy one made exclusively to drag my brother down. He'd end up quitting school to get a second job. He'd have to. He was smart as friggin' hell but there were only so many hours in the day.

Only so many chances in a lifetime.

I pulled the nearest bag to me and began to untie the knot at the top. A hand looped around my wrist and squeezed tight enough to make me turn loose of the plastic. "Don't even think about it or I'll put your things up front and stuff you in the trunk," came the unruffled voice.

Niko. And he was pissed. Niko kept his anger under rigid control and most people wouldn't have even known it was there, but I knew. I could smell it every time. And not once, in all my life, could I remember it ever being directed at me. Neither was it now.

"You are not staying here. Not for any reason." Eyes uncompromising on mine, he released me and retied the bag. "It will be all right, Cal. We'll do just fine. I promise you."

I wasn't too sure I bought that, but I did know one thing. Niko wasn't leaving me. For a year I'd made do with seeing him on the weekends, escaping Sophia only then. For a year we'd planned and saved. But the year was over and now, maybe, we would survive. Maybe it just took a little faith. And if I was short on that, it could be Niko might have enough for us both.

"Yeah?" I said with less skepticism than I was shooting for.

It didn't matter. Niko would've seen through it anyway. "Yeah," he repeated, the side of his mouth curling up faintly. "Of course, just fine means doing your homework, keeping our place clean and neat, helping little old ladies across the street, obeying my every sensible word…"There was more, but it was lost in the pillow I used to whack him in the face.

That was when the dream always took a turn for the worse.

It started with the car. It wouldn't start. Did that suck? Yes, it surely did. Was I surprised? Hell, no. That was life. You know that saying, right? "When life hands you lemons…" Well, when it does you might as well shove 'em where the sun doesn't shine, because you're sure as hell never going to see any lemonade.

Niko worked on the car for almost four hours before he finally got the cranky engine to turn over. Slamming the hood down, he motioned for me to switch the engine off. Walking back to the window, he wiped his hands on a rag that had once been an old shirt of mine. "I think we'd better spend the night and leave in the morning," he said reluctantly. "It's running, but I would hate to break down halfway there at midnight. A long walk doesn't begin to cover it."

I scowled and thumped the steering wheel with the heel of my hand. "Piece of crap," I muttered, sliding down in the seat a few inches.

"Yes, well, two hundred and fifty dollars doesn't buy what it used to," Niko commented wryly. "I should've driven the Jag instead."

So we were biding our time until the morning. It shouldn't have mattered; after all it was just one more night. But getting out of Niko's beat-up car and walking back into the trailer… it wasn't the best moment I'd ever had. It was like drowning and then being pulled onto the boat only to get booted off the other side. In other words, it sucked.

Still, I tried to keep it in perspective. One night, just one out of my entire life, it didn't amount to much. I tried repeating that to myself a few times while I was brushing my teeth in the tiny, cramped bathroom. I left the lights off. Our electricity had been cut off so many times, I'd gotten used to doing most things in the dark. As I bent down to rinse my mouth with water from my cupped hand, I thought I saw something in the mirror. Something behind me, a shadow against the shadows. "Nik?" I turned, but there was nothing but a wadded towel hanging over the rack. The wrath of the evil terry cloth… boogety, boogety. I snorted at myself and headed to bed. I lay on the field of lumps masquerading as a mattress and tried to doze off without success. Big surprise. Eventually, too wired at the prospect of escape, I rolled over, pounded the pillow a few times, and gave up on sleep for a while. I could hear Niko's slow, even breathing from the next room, where he was asleep on the couch. Laid-back to the point of coma—that was my brother. I was giving serious thought to getting a bowl of warm water and seeing if the legends were true, when another legend reared its ugly head. A darker legend, one that had shadowed me all my life.

It looked like its shadowing days were over.

There was a sound at the window. It wasn't terrifying; it wasn't supernatural. Hell, it wasn't even scary. It was just a polite tap. One-two. Light and restrained. Your friend for the summer, your best pal from school… just passing by, you know? Maybe you wanted to sneak out and smoke a cigarette or watch the stars. It was a rapping rich with familiarity and goodwill. Hey, buddy, whatcha up to?

So I looked up without alarm at the window that hung at the head of my bed. For a split second I forgot that I didn't have any friends since we'd moved. I didn't know anyone out here and no one lived close enough to be merely passing by.

Nobody but family.

The Grendel hung outlined in the window by a scrubbed and shining lunar light. One hand was splayed on the glass with long thin fingers and skin as pale as the moon. A narrow, pointed face grinned at me with a thousand needle teeth and the predatory cheer of a fox in a henhouse. Slanted almond-shaped eyes glowed with sullen reds, scarlet as blood. Tapered ears pressed flat to the skull, and long hair as fine as milkweed shimmered in the air like a corona. The finger tapped again, the nail a metallic ticking against the glass, and a voice spoke. It was a serpent's hiss wrapped around the wet crunch of gargling glass. One word. Just one. It was enough.

"Mine."

The roiling-lava eyes looked down at me with more pride than I'd ever seen in my mother's. Or maybe it wasn't pride so much as rabid avarice. I'd seen Grendels before, more times than I could count, but never like this. Never so close I could see the naked greed in the eyes, the poreless texture of the skin, hear the utterly alien whisper.

Jesus Christ, my mom had fucked that?

I tried to swallow, but the saliva pooled in my mouth as all my muscles gave up the ghost and turned instantly to overcooked spaghetti. My eyes were locked to the ones staring at me through the window as air stuttered in and out of my lungs. Breathing was pretty much all I was up for and even that was shaky. The Grendel tilted its head and rasped again, "Mine." Gloating and complacent.

And still I couldn't move. This thing, this monster, was claiming me as its own and I couldn't move a muscle, not a goddamn finger. That is, not until a pallid hand burst through the glass and wrapped around my neck. Sharp nails sank into my flesh, fastening tight like barbed hooks. That was when I rediscovered movement in a big way. Yelling bloody murder, I threw myself back desperately. Flowing like water over the jagged broken glass in the window frame, the Grendel followed suit. It landed hard on my chest with a weight that belied its slender frame. It easily weighed as much as I did. Tiny slits flared a bare inch from my face as it inhaled deeply. It was sampling my scent, smelling me.

"Blood of my blood. Flesh of my flesh. Breath of my breath." I felt the warm trickle of liquid on my neck as the shredding smile moved to my ear and murmured, "Time to go home."

I didn't yell this time. I screamed. It was with pure, wordless terror as I tore at the hand at my throat and raised my knee up to push the Grendel away. I didn't budge it, not an inch. In fact its other hand snared my leg, and it felt like a bear trap. Suddenly, I was lifted into the air and then I was flying through it. I went through what was left of the window, glass and metal slashing at me. Hitting the ground hard, I felt the smothering sensation of the air being forced from my lungs by the blow. I gasped, trying to suck in a breath, as I managed to roll over on my back. The stars were out, dancing a duet with the brilliant moon. For a moment I lost myself in it, my thoughts slow and thick as molasses.

Then I heard Niko call my name. His normally calm voice had knotted into a barbwire ball of anguish and fury. That cut through the fuzziness like a knife, and I managed to get my hands under me to push up to a half-reclining position. The world spun lazily, but I could still see the trailer. Yeah, I could still see and I would've given anything at the moment to have been blind.

She stood in the doorway, Sophia… my mother. For one second, one moment outside time, she was as coldly beautiful as she'd always been. And then she was a bonfire. Her nightgown burned on her, a leaping red-and-yellow silk. Her flesh began to melt and blacken as her hair ignited in a glowing aurora. I think she was screaming or maybe I was. Then she disappeared, falling back into the raging inferno of the trailer. The screams remained; they must have been mine. Sophia was gone, but Niko… Niko, I didn't see. I couldn't see him, and I couldn't hear him anymore.

I tore at the grass and dirt under me and managed to flip over onto my knees. I couldn't walk, but I could crawl. And I did. I'd gone barely a few feet when hands on my arms and legs and in my hair jerked me back. Grendels, they were everywhere, on me, loping away from the burning trailer, ripping a hole in the velvety night. I kicked and swung my fists at the ones holding me back from the trailer; I yelled for Niko until my voice cracked. Beside me two Grendels had done something to the air itself. It had split longways, a ribbon of pulsating, corpse-gray light. It widened, stretched, and elongated until the night itself had a ragged hole in it. I was still screaming Niko's name as they dragged me towards it. Screaming his name even though I knew he was dead. Knew my brother, the only one who'd ever loved me, ever gave a shit about me, was gone. He'd died not only for me, but also because of me.

I gave up. There was no reason not to. I'd tried; I couldn't fight them. I couldn't get away. And now… now I didn't even want to. "My blood," came the crooning at my ear as I was pulled along. "My spawn. Mine." Skin as cold as bone pressed against my cheek as nails sank deeper into my arms. It wasn't a hole after all. It was a door, a door to hell.

Daddy, true to his word, took me home through it.

It was a dream maybe, but not just a dream. It had happened, all of it. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your view, I didn't remember what had followed my being dragged through the gate. Niko had had to fill me in later.

He hadn't died. That was a big one in my book, no matter how he glossed over it. The biggest. He'd managed to get out a window in the back of the trailer. He'd had some burns and some cuts from the glass, but he'd survived. He'd come running around the blazing trailer just in time to see me disappear in the midst of monsters. The rip had closed behind the Grendels and me, leaving Niko alone. I was gone; Sophia was dead. It was just Niko and what ended up as a smoldering pile of melted plastic and metal. He didn't leave, though. Didn't get in his car and drive away. Didn't cut his losses and realize there wasn't a damn thing he could do to help Mom or me. He stayed. God knows why. But he stayed, all alone. No firemen came, no police. I guess we'd lived so far out no one even spotted the fire.

Niko had sat on the grass where I'd vanished and he waited. For two days he watched and sat vigil. He didn't give up on me. He never had, not from day one. So I guess it was no surprise he waited.

The surprise was that I actually came back.

On the second night in the same place at almost the same time, I came spilling out of the darkness. Limp and naked, I fell onto the grass, a panting, snarling mess. I'd growled like a rabid wolf when Niko dropped to his knees beside me. I might've taken a chunk out of his arm if I hadn't struggled past layers of confusion and a smothering blanket of disorientation. But in the end I'd recognized him. It took me only seconds even as whacked-out as I was. Took Niko a while longer to return the favor. It'd been only two days for him.

For me it had been two years.

That'd been our best guess, of course. Wherever I'd been, wherever the Grendels had taken me, time was apparently out to lunch. I'd dropped back into the world obviously older. My hair, once short, had grown to my shoulders; I was taller by inches, my shoulders broader. I was even going to bat with a little more wood than before. So there was one nice side effect to taking a time-bending trip through amnesia hell.

But I didn't remember a single moment after having been shanghaied through the gate with the Grendels. Nothing. That time was a darkness so deep and vast that I was hard put to even know it was there. If I hadn't been so physically changed, I would've sworn I hadn't been gone at all. It was a memory loss so pervasive that I could barely recognize its presence.

If I was having some problems, it was ten times worse for Niko. He'd lost his mother and brother in one fell swoop. Yeah, okay, Sophia hadn't been pulling down any mother-of-the-year awards. God knows, we'd been more than happy to move out and leave her far behind. But hoping you never saw someone again is a damn sight different from wishing them dead. There are easy ways and hard ways to go; burning to death is in a category all its own. Then I come back, an amnesiac, howling loony who has no idea he's been gone for any time, two days or two years. Not a fun time for my brother. But he'd bucked up, sucked it up, and gone on. He'd put me in some of his spare sweats that he'd had in the trunk of his car. None of my clothes, which had already been packed into the backseat, fit anymore. After I dressed with clumsy, shaking motions, he checked me over. Pushing up the sleeves on my borrowed sweatshirt, he'd looked at my arms with a fixed gaze.

"I saw blood," he had said quietly. "When they took you. I saw blood on your arms, your neck." With a finger he'd touched the scars on my arm and then the ones on my neck. The puncture wounds were ugly, but long healed. "Jesus, Cal, it really is you."

Pulled into a crushing hug, I'd corrected numbly, "Caliban." Even Niko couldn't deny I was a monster now, right?

"Cal, anything wrong?"

Wrong. Even after four years of running from Grendels, Niko had never once called me Caliban. Never once given in to my darkest interpretation of self. Damn Pollyanna. I stood in the doorway, stood in the welcome light, and watched as Niko materialized out of the darkness in the hall. "Four hours?" I shrugged. "Who could sleep that long? Go on to bed. I'm up for good." I punched him lightly in the arm and grinned wearily. "Keep the snoring to a minimum, Cyrano. Can't hear the bad guys if you drown them out."

Niko had the nose of a Roman general. His profile was classic and clean and women always had a spare look or three for my brother, but I wasn't about to ever admit that. Instead I came up with lots of interesting names for him ("Cyrano" being the least offensive), and he loved each and every one of them—if love could be expressed as a smack on the back of the head.

This time he let it go, and he let my obvious nighttime lie go too. He knew as well as I what prompted it. Heading for his quarter-bouncing, hospital-cornered, anal-retentively made bed, he stripped down and climbed under the covers. I didn't comment on the large knife he slid under the pillow. We all have our security blankets in this world. Some are just sharper than others.