Doubletake

  Best to let it go this time.

  I dressed in a pair of Niko’s sweats rather than moving naked to my room next door, and thought about how Kalakos seemed to be telling the truth, how he might have saved my life, how, from what he said, he was trying to restore honor to his clan and keep Janus from slaughtering indiscriminately. The only problem I could find with him was that he’d abandoned his son. Could you kill someone for that alone, when compared to all the rest? When all was said and done, the threat defeated, could you? I picked up my Eagle, one in the pipe as always, and opened the door.

  I could.

  The clang of metal against metal was audible long before I walked down the hall. Niko and I practiced most often with wood. He didn’t want to accidentally cut off something essential I might plan on using later. But this wasn’t practice; this was something else entirely. I wasn’t worried. If Niko needed help against Kalakos, he’d let me know, but as that was unlikely, I decided I was hungry. A good sign. I laid my gun on the countertop, grabbed some cold, petrified pizza out of the fridge, hoisted a hip up on the counter, and watched the show. “What’s going on?” I took another bite. “I thought we were leaving. Why doesn’t Niko just take his head, shout, ‘There can be only one,’ and get this over with?”

  “They are trying to prove something first. Who is the best? Niko will let him live only because he made you whole again, but your brother requires working out a good deal of frustration regardless.” She tapped a light lavender nail to her softly rounded chin. “Hundreds of years and the male psyche still escapes me.”

  I lifted my head and caught the scent of musk and forest. “Wonderful. Chester the Molester is here,” I announced glumly.

  The door opened and no one had heard Goodfellow pick the lock. Kalakos didn’t know who he was competing with when it came to breaking and entering, and that was a fact. Goodfellow did have a key, but he felt that was boring. Tricksters needed to keep up their skills. He picked pockets too. The used-car-salesman cover was a self-explanatory con of pure evil. “Lazarus has arisen!” he announced at the sight of me. “Not to mention the rest of you appears much improved as well. And I heard your highly inflammatory statement.” He put his lock picks away and leaned a wet umbrella against the wall. Had to protect that expensive suit. “You were dying. You’re my friend. How can you accuse me of taking advantage?” He sat on the couch beside Promise. “Besides, I can’t find a picture of a small enough Santa hat to Photoshop on it for my yearly winter solstice cards. Christmas, to you heathens.”

  I began to wing what was left of the rock-hard pizza at his head when he folded his arms, leaned back against the armrest, and stretched out, while propping his legs across Promise’s lap. “Never mind. I’ll torture you later.” He glanced at the peek of Promise’s fangs over her lower lip. “Greetings, Elvira. Is that an overbite or are you just happy to see me?” He didn’t wait for an answer or for her to break his neck, the second being more likely. “Now, this is exceedingly more engaging. Hot, sweaty men in battle. Thank Zeus that Ishiah doesn’t mind my looking.”

  Promise gave his legs the same regard she would have if a giant gelatinous snail had flopped across her lap, but inhaled deeply and turned her attention back to the fight. For once in their lives she and Robin agreed on something. “The only way one such as you could not look is if your eyes were plucked from their sockets.” She tapped a painted nail against his chest, but he was beyond threats, his brain completely shut down. I could smell the waves of whatever was the puck equivalent of testosterone rising. He was practically one of those deodorizers they hang around car rearview mirrors.

  Scent: horny.

  Shape: I wasn’t going there.

  I went back to watching the fight myself. They were on the workout mats in the gym area. Barefoot, shirtless, and soaked with sweat, both were matched in number of scars, although they were differently shaped and located. Both were also impeccably good with swords—Niko with his katana and Kalakos with what I thought was a Polish saber. The blade was long and curved, more so than a katana, the grip centuries-old wood. A karabela. It meant “dark curse.” When I was a kid, Niko hadn’t been able to get me to remember the periodic table for love or money, but weapons…those I didn’t often forget.

  It had a few inches reach on the katana, but I had faith in my heart for my brother. You know what beat faith? A Desert Eagle in the hand that I wasn’t using to eat pizza. If Niko stumbled…I didn’t think he would—not my brother. No. But if he did, we’d have to pay the cleaning lady fifty extra bucks to scrub Kalakos’s brain off the wall.

  Money well spent.

  I finished the pizza as Kalakos spoke, barely breathing hard from the exertion. “I did desert you. I did know Sophia was…as she was. But I hunt clan criminals and return them for punishment, or deliver that punishment if the crime is grave enough.”

  Niko didn’t bother to reply. The fight went on. I hadn’t seen any human in my life who came close to my brother. Blades, bare-handed, the occasional gun he had little respect for—no one was as good. Neither was Kalakos, but was near enough that I didn’t like it. You can be the best in the world, but everyone stumbles; everyone makes that one mistake…humans and non. I had, more than once. The fact that Kalakos was good enough to take advantage of that if Niko did…

  No, I didn’t fucking care for it at all.

  “You’re one of the best I’ve fought,” Niko said. “It’s a shame.”

  He blocked another of Kalakos’s blows before the Polish saber whipped under the katana and slammed the Japanese blade upward toward Niko’s face; then metal circled metal as the karabela’s point plunged toward Nik’s neck. That was when Niko kicked his father in the stomach, staggering the older man back a few feet.

  He then blocked the hand gripping the saber, slamming fist against fist, started to sweep his leg, then abruptly swept the other, taking Kalakos off guard and throwing him down to the mat. “Elegant move. Rare. I’ve seen it used only once before at that short distance.” Yeah, when he practiced it on me. The karabela didn’t bother to come up to block the katana that sliced toward the man’s throat.

  Black met stony gray. “Not only did I hunt Rom, but I hunt the unclean, as you do when they threaten the clans. A child could not survive that life.”

  “A child survived worse. A hundred times worse. Your failure has nothing to do with me.” Niko lifted his katana and walked away. But before he did, he said, “If you had learned in the beginning to fight for family instead of money, you would be even a better fighter and less of a dishonorable bastard than you are now.” He was right. Kalakos wouldn’t chase criminals and monsters for free. We didn’t either…if the client could afford us. If they couldn’t, Niko may as well have been Sonny and Cher’s lesser-known child, Pro Bono. At least fifty percent of our work didn’t earn us a dime, which was fine. Protecting others was a reward worth more than money. I was lucky that Niko had taught me that.

  Killing is the true payment. Killing is the best part.

  I gave an internal shrug. It didn’t matter what the darkest part of me thought. When the goals were the same, it…no, not it…I could think whatever I wanted. I was who I was. I didn’t need to change that control or the improved me with the acid erosion of denial.

  Know thyself…and then know that your brother knows better than you.

  At a stack of neatly folded towels on a shelf near the paper targets hung on the wall, Nik propped up his katana for cleaning when he was done with himself. Wiping the sweat from his chest, arms, and back, he added remotely, “You healed Cal. That allows you and only you a week to recover Janus. Then he becomes someone else’s problem and not ours. The Vayash will have to send others to do what you could not.”

  He stood, no better off than Niko, but not much worse either. He might have sweated a little more, breathed a little harder, but the difference was small. I liked that less and less. Niko was younger and more motivated, but Kalakos would have picked up tricks along the longer
years to stay alive doing what he did. The dirtiest of tricks. My kind of tricks, but I wouldn’t turn them against my brother. Would he?

  Kalakos started toward Niko, refusing to give up. It was a good thing for him that he left his saber behind. “There is no one else who can—”

  I gave a low whisper of a hiss before slicing a hand across my throat, and he stopped talking immediately. That smell, the trace of rotten eggs…sulfur. I looked up at the metal ceiling far above. “Shit. Niko, now!” He didn’t question. He propelled himself across the room, lunged, and landed on top of Robin and Promise, which was a Goodfellow wet dream come true, and then I threw myself off the counter onto Nik. As I landed on his back, there was the tearing of metal and the shattering of our floor as Janus came to visit.

  Suyolak’s medicine had healed me, but Rafferty’s rewiring was still in place. That meant I couldn’t make a gate as fast as my first one yesterday—it took me three days to recover fully—but it was faster than it normally would’ve been. Too bad it wasn’t fast enough.

  Janus’s two-faced head was swiveling, its one claw missing. It was checking the soon-to-be battlefield, slower and more cautious this time. It then moved, deciding it had all enemies in sight, and was almost on us when Kalakos threw himself in front of it. He slid a sword into one of the glowing red seams in its chest. It wasn’t the saber. This was a Greek sword, true as any ancient warrior charging Troy had held—a xiphos made of the same dark metal of the automaton. Kalakos slammed his feet against Janus’s abdomen and pushed hard, ending up half on the couch. Janus jerked and staggered back a single step, the floor cracking beneath his feet again. It was for only a second or two, but that was all I needed.

  In those seconds we were as much history as Janus himself.

  7

  Black Sheep

  I liked games. It was true few others liked the games I played, but I didn’t care what they liked. It was a waste of their breath. I had discarded my sunglasses as the rain continued to fall and the lightning flashed. It was good weather. The air sizzled and danced and it was dark enough for certain curiosities to travel roofs and not be seen by the mass of ignorant humans that clogged the sidewalks of this place, insects overrunning their anthill. I tossed down the binoculars and laughed. That thing, that metal thing, had come back and dropped through the roof where Caliban lived.

  Little pig, little pig, let me come in. The first book I’d learned to read in my days of freedom. My teacher had been proud. I was a literate predator and that made me more dangerous than the first Auphe had been. When the prey was so many, you had to know them, truly know everything about them. My teacher said a mind was a terrible thing to waste. She was right, and when she taught me all she could, I ate hers. I thought it a compliment to her teachings. She thought differently.

  That meant I taught her a lesson as well: You shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.

  Ah, but back to the good part, the now part. That wasn’t the best part, that metal thing, metal toy, showing up. It remained as interesting as I’d thought last night, but it wasn’t on my agenda now.

  I was Auphe—the New Coming.

  Toys could wait.

  But Caliban…I couldn’t see him. The windows were too high, the angle wrong, but it didn’t matter. Blocks and blocks away, I had smelled the blood last night…Auphe blood—much more pungent and real than human blood. It would’ve been too far to smell him, whole, but the blood…its scent traveled…and traveled yet more. But then it had faded, disappeared this morning. Somehow he had put himself back together, all those pieces, and I wanted to know how. I would know how. He’d be happy…very happy to tell me. Or I’d be happy to force him to tell me. At times I mixed up the two—a mistake easy to make when you didn’t care one way or the other. I clicked the man-made metal claws that encased my one gloved hand against the dirt. It was an apartment building, and I hid in the greenery they had forced to grow there in pots against its will, choking on the fumes of this place. Such a minor evil that I felt disgust and rage. Humans—their wickedness was so dismal and feeble that I wanted to rip out the trees and bushes and throw them over the side of the roof.

  What had I been thinking again?

  What had I…

  Yes, games. I’d watched Caliban for three months now in this place. I’d had twelve years of freedom, but I’d returned for three years to piss around the home of my former prison—Nevah’s Landing—because I knew Caliban would as well. Sidle told us so. Sidle, our warden…our torturer…Caliban’s victim without a single look…the bullet through his brain.

  Not one glance as he pulled the trigger.

  It was beautiful.

  Games. Whether he’d admit it or not, I knew he liked games too. I’d followed him from Nevah’s Landing, a place he’d sooner not remember, living with cattle, picking up boring cattle emotion. He’d wiped out eight of our kind, useless kind, barely worth the carnage. But I might be wrong. Maybe he didn’t mind remembering what he had done—I wouldn’t. Maybe he had enjoyed it. Killing his brothers and sisters. I didn’t blame him. I’d have killed them too. They were weak. They couldn’t gate. Worthless maggots.

  A fun game I’d wanted to play in the three years I’d been back, but I couldn’t. I’d especially wanted to play with Sidle. I would’ve dragged it out for weeks and weeks until his vocal cords ruptured from the screams. But no, no, no. I left them for Caliban.

  The trap. The bait.

  I’d watched him from the swamp, too far for him to sense me, and I’d learned about the last of our kind, or so he thought. I’d followed him back to this disgusting stench of a city and I’d learned more. He couldn’t gate. At first I assumed I just didn’t happen to be watching him at the right time. I had needs. I couldn’t watch him always. But then last night, he gave me nothing…which made him useless and not the Caliban I’d expected, the one whose name was snarled by all the nonhumans. Not the Caliban who the Auphe had tried to use to travel back and wipe out the humans before they infested the world like billions of locusts.

  Caliban, but not the one they spoke of with fear and hatred. Not the one worth my time. I was on the verge of impossible-to-bear boredom, ready to kill him as he’d killed the others, if he didn’t die during the night. But not for revenge—he wasn’t worth revenge, but because he was the same as the ones he’d killed in my onetime prison:

  Useless.

  But now he wasn’t. He had gated.

  I had felt it. Auphe could feel one another, sense the presence of the superior, from a certain distance, which had kept me farther than I wanted from my target. But a gate was different. One could feel a gate much farther. Sidle had told us so. He enjoyed telling us the murderous tales and lethal abilities of the true Auphe, and of the shameful shadows we were of the true Auphe race.

  But there is true and then there is better.

  I was better.

  I would prove it to Caliban now that he was worth my time.

  I would prove it to the memory of the first Auphe. The first race had gone and the second had come.

  Evolution, bitches.

  8

  The couch ended up at a sharp angle, one end propped up on the sofa in Goodfellow’s condo and the other on the floor. The expensive leather of Robin’s furniture ripped and tore. It was the second time I’d destroyed the puck’s wraparound couch. I only hoped the other end hadn’t landed on Salome or Spartacus. Spartacus didn’t deserve that, and Salome would gnaw off my leg and balls and be the first to bring the game of pool to the mummified cat community. It gave whole new meaning to “rack the balls.” I shoved Kalakos off of me. If we’d hit Salome, let her take her wrath out on him.

  “You brought him too? Your generous nature surprises me,” Robin drawled; his end of the couch was the higher one. He looked comfortable. Good for him. He used to puke when I had to gate us away. Eventually he’d gotten used to it, as had Niko. Kalakos was all but doubled over, doing all he could to keep from vomiting. Humans didn’t like gates and gates
didn’t like humans. “And you will pay for my sofa, I promise you.”

  “I had to,” I snapped, wiping the slow ooze of blood from my nostrils. I was healed, but normally even in the best of conditions, the nosebleed would gush like a river. The headache would be the same as being hit in the head with a baseball bat, but now it was only a lower-level migraine. Not that I’d ever had a migraine, but I thought it was a good guess. “I didn’t have a choice. Any hands, legs, any piece of any one of us at all that was outside the gate would’ve been left behind in our apartment. Fingers on the floor draw rats. And I like our couch. My ass imprint is the perfect depth. I wasn’t leaving it behind.”