Doubletake

  What were my thoughts now?

  Shit, not again. And the emotion that went with it wasn’t fear. I was mad as hell. I’d destroyed our race. Our entire goddamn race. What the fuck did this out-of-thin-air, leftover asshole think he could do to me?

  Arms wrapped around me from behind, steel bands. Stronger than me, stronger than Niko, who was hurtling toward us, but it was too late. The coldness of the gate swallowed us and the condo was gone. But I heard the words that floated behind.

  An unfamiliar voice but with an all-too-familiar sarcasm, the same as mine—at someone else’s expense—said, “You could cover your windows, goat. I go where I see, and I saw far too many perversions through yours.”

  It was bad when an Auphe thought your sex life—your monogamous sex life—was a perversion. Or it could be it wasn’t the sex but the emotion that went with it. Yeah, Auphe were creatures of few emotions and they were all malignant as biohazard waste filling their skulls. Hate, disgust, slaughter-glee, arrogance, ravenous hunger. No affection, though—that didn’t exist to them.

  And we were gone, bodies and voice.

  The gate dumped us in a dark basement with a concrete floor with one flickering bulb overhead and the rot of dead bodies—gone, but the decomposition lingered in the cold air, as did the taint of Auphe. I was used to my scent. I’d had it all my life, after all, but the smell of another Auphe was somehow different and repulsive. It…he released me and I whipped around, the xiphos between us. I missed my Desert Eagle as much as I’d miss my hand. “It was the feathers, wasn’t it?” I grinned, showing all my teeth, top and bottom. The predator’s grin—the better to eat you with.

  If there was one thing I could say about an Auphe, it was that I didn’t have to conceal what I was in front of him.

  Guard up, using every ounce of swordsmanship Niko had taught me, I drawled, “Spying, were you? I think that makes you the perv. Did you see the feathers flying around the bedroom as the peri”—he didn’t need to know Ishiah’s name—“spunked goose juice everywhere? Did he look like a pigeon that swallowed a grenade and exploded? That’s my mental nightmare.”

  The Auphe. No, the half-Auphe, like me—I’d seen that at the same time as I’d smelled it—grinned back. He was even dressed all in black, as I was, although he had a leather jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and combat boots, whereas I was stuck with sweats and damned socks.

  Ever had to face death while wearing a pair of socks? It’s somewhat humiliating.

  He had human teeth, straight and white, until a second row of hundreds of hypodermic needles snapped down over the top of them. That made him more Auphe than me, as did the red irises he revealed when he took off and dropped dark sunglasses to the floor. His hair was white, the Auphe winter tint with the glitter of ice, but the same length and don’t-give-a-shit style as mine. It was on purpose, to mock me. I knew it. His skin wasn’t pale as mine was, though. His was a healthy human tint. Light tan. He was me, but the opposite of me.

  “Peri and puck. I had to eat a pit bull to rinse the taste from my mouth after that show.” His voice was deeper than mine, with the faint grind of broken glass to each word. Semi-Auphe vocal cords. He shook his hand, the one that I had already seen gripping a black matte Desert Eagle, to show off the spiked dog collar wrapped three times around his wrist.

  “What’s life without souvenirs?” I said. The gun he held was well-known, a black matte Desert Eagle with a scratch on the grip. Mine.

  He saw my eyes flicker toward it. “Yes, Caliban, it’s yours. I picked it up off the street where that cattle you live with dropped it as he tried to save your life. I like it. It’s a good gun. I do like a good gun. In death I like all things. Guns, knives, swords.” His other hand clenched, then flared with fingers spread, silver bright. He wore black gloves over his hands, but over his empty one was a metal set of claws that encased his fingers and hand, a modern imitation of an extinct Auphe taloned one. When he made a fist, four to five inches of metal would extend past his knuckles to carve you apart. “But I like the old ways too. And if you’re not born with them, you make them. Or have someone or something make them for you.”

  “You know my name? Caliban?” I asked without emotion, sword between us but closer to him now. No feelings—none human, at any rate. Others, though…they were there. But if I did let those come, it would get down and dirty before I was ready for it.

  “All in the Nevah’s Landing prison knew of Caliban. The golden boy who would return the world to what it should have been. But you didn’t, did you? You destroyed the Auphe instead. Then you shot the failures and burned down the house until the bones were fiery dust. I didn’t see the others, years after I left, with the windows boarded, but I saw what you did to our keeper, our torturer—Sidle.”

  Proud, irritated, satisfied. Those emotions all showed on his face…because he let them. Why would he bother to hide his feelings? Auphe didn’t hide from anyone or anything. “Ah, that was the best. The way you scattered his brain and bone and blood without looking. You pulled the trigger and kept walking. I threw down the binoculars and laughed, laughed down the night sky, or at least I tried.”

  Binoculars. That’s why I hadn’t felt him. He’d been far away…watching.

  “I was jealous you were the one to do it. You always had all the good times, didn’t you, while I spent eighteen years in a cage, chained, tortured, and fed like a tame dog. That, Caliban, was not a good time, but the past doesn’t matter anymore. Because that was the moment I knew I wasn’t alone. You killed Sidle without a second or first thought. You killed him because he was weak. I knew then I had a worthy competitor.” Then he said worse. “A brother.”

  Irritated and satisfied I couldn’t care less about, but I didn’t want this thing proud of me, and the very last thing I wanted him thinking was that I was his brother.

  I’d killed Sidle, part Auphe himself, because he’d kept seven half-breeds—now I knew it had been eight—like me in cages all their lives, manacled, splashed with acid, tortured with a cattle prod, and who knew what else. I killed his prisoners because they were Auphe: insane and ready to butcher any living creature they came across if their cage doors were opened. I gave them the only escape available to them in this world.

  I killed Sidle because he deserved it.

  I hadn’t lost a moment of sleep over it, hadn’t spared a thought on the piece of shit since.

  “That one empty cage in the house,” I said, taking another step forward with hand tight on the grip of the sword. “Sidle said that half-Auphe had died. He lied, didn’t he? He didn’t want to get in trouble with the masters. He was too stupid to know that they would’ve been doing a homicidal dance of joy at the first half-breed to gate. The first success, long before me. You said years of captivity…”

  “Twelve of freedom. Born six years before you and caged eighteen of them. Too bad I didn’t learn to gate sooner.” The metal teeth gleamed. “But once I did…I killed and killed and killed, but finally I learned. You cannot take down an enemy that would drown you and the world in a mass of their flesh without lifting a finger. Not if you don’t know them. I had to learn, and now I know. Reading, writing, history.” He said it singsong, as a kid would—if that kid was possessed. “I know the cattle better now than they know themselves. I know how they think. I know how they smothered the Auphe, breeding like rabbits, and I know how to do the same to them.”

  The first Auphe who knew that to learn about your enemy made killing easier, planning more efficient, wholesale massacres closer to reality. This son of a bitch…Jesus. “You went to school?” I lunged at him with the Greek sword, but he was equally quick. Hell, this wasn’t a situation to be lying to myself. He was quicker. He swatted the blade aside with what I knew were the metal claws he wore. I had to depend on knowing, as I didn’t see anything but the afterimage of a silver flash.

  “I have a GED.” This time he swung at me, and as fast as I moved I didn’t escape the shallow slices across my chest. My adrenaline l
evels had tripled, and that did let me see the claws this time, if not avoid them. “I’m an educated monster. The top of my class. I had many teachers, all very proud…until I ate them. No spirit of celebration in them at all. Humans are incredibly dull. Barely worth the slaying.” The talons clacked against one another, ringing out his disappointment at the lack of challenge. “They would be enough for the half-breeds you killed in the Landing, but I am not the same as them. I’m like you, Caliban. I’m an improved version of you, you who are not quite that special and unique after all.”

  It was true. He wasn’t like the ones in the Landing, all of them mentally and psychotically dysfunctional. They also had bodies twisted and mutated beyond the hope of passing for human. Not like I could. Not like he could. Worse, he wasn’t the same as them on the inside either. He was clever. He infiltrated the enemy; he was more than functional. He excelled.

  He wanted something or we would be fighting to the death now instead of him holding back with baby slaps of his claws. I wasn’t one of the humans who bored him. It would take effort to kill me and he would crave that trial of himself, the escape from tedious prey to face an equal. He said he was my brother. He wasn’t. Sophia wasn’t his mother, and I knew there had to be plenty of Auphe sires at the time he or I was made. We were not brothers, no matter what he thought. He and I were the last of a half-breed race; that was all. In his eyes, however, I knew that was enough. It was the week for family reunions, unwanted and bloody. Niko and Kalakos. The Panic. And now me and mine.

  Better to deny yourself than offend a brother, after all.

  Oh, shut the hell up. I mentally slammed a hard foot down on my lurking internal smart-ass and, worse, the tingle of interest.

  The last two of a race that shouldn’t have existed to begin with if there’d been a God or if nature had had any judgment. This was a reunion, but it had nothing to do with family. It had to do with an opportunity to put nature’s screwup right.

  “Who the fuck are you, anyway?” I growled, slashing at his claws with the sword before reversing to knock my Eagle from his hand. He didn’t appear upset. His glittering teeth flashed, satisfied, as if I were a dog who’d done a particularly difficult trick.

  “My name was the same as all the others were given. Failure. But once free I named myself. Now I am Grimm…for aren’t we the grimmest of brothers?”

  “You’re not my brother.” Auphe were bad enough. Add the original Grimm Brothers fairy tales, with zombie horses and wolf-eaten grandmothers who stayed dead and half-digested, and “disgust” was a word that didn’t begin to cover the combination of the two.

  “When we are the last of one race and the beginning of another, we are brothers.” The claws slashed again and this time I managed to just dodge them. “I’ve made you my sole interest.” The smile became sly and secretive. “A large interest. Blood and killing, like the sun rising—together they always come first to our kind, but that’s not to say you can’t serve as both.”

  “That sounds pretty fucking convenient.” I stabbed at him with the xiphos.

  “For me? It is. It very much fucking is.” He was gone in a darkling flare of gray light. I twisted to see him behind me. “Fine and fucking dandy, as Sidle used to tell us through the bars of our cages. Fine and fucking dandy.”

  “Kill me already then,” I snarled, “or we can kill each other. That’s the best end to the fairy tales you named yourself after.”

  “Kill you?” He laughed. A milder echo of the pure Auphe’s breaking-glass sound. “Why would I have gated that metal monstrosity off of you and your cattle if I wanted to kill you?”

  “Janus? You were the one who stole it from the Rom? I hope you had a good time screwing around with it and me outside the bar.” He needed to believe I knew I hadn’t gated it. I’d thought I had, with my last effort, though I’d had no idea of how or where. Grimm couldn’t know I was weak and gateless for days.

  But I wasn’t, was I?

  “Baby games.” He smiled, teeth sliding back up, and he looked more human. I preferred him Auphe. I preferred knowing in every part of me what he was. “Not that I won’t kill you now that you’ve proved worthy, but I have things for you to do for me first. The blood I want from you is not to spill; it is to spread. When that is done, then finally we’ll have our real games, and don’t tell me you don’t want them as much as I do. That you don’t want to play…at the end. Prove who is the best.”

  Cal wants to plaaaaay.

  Maybe I did, but that didn’t mean I would.

  Spread my blood. That gave me a strong sense of déjà vu. I hated déjà vu.

  But the hell with all that. If I hadn’t gated Janus that meant I had a third gate waiting in the wings. The final gate. I could try it on Grimm. I’d happily die to take this bastard with me. One gate opened inside of him and he’d be decorating all four basement walls. I had barely a chance to think of triggering it when the pain searing through my head gave me double vision. Opening a gate and taking Grimm with me was worth it. Opening the third gate and dying while Grimm looked at my twitching body with disappointed puzzlement—no more play—wasn’t.

  The pain faded as I let the thought of the gate go. I could kill the bastard with my hands and my sword in the place of a gate and walk away from his cooling corpse. That was a better option. Better because I’d live, but better also because I’d be the reason he didn’t.

  “I have questions too.” He gated again, gone from the room. I rushed the door, but before I could reach for the knob, he was back—directly in front of it—directly in front of me. Bare inches away. “You could have gated a hundred Auphe to a million years ago, if you weren’t the insolent badass you were and had refused. When I heard of that, I was…What do you call it? What’s that word? Happy? Happy as hell,” he said, pleased. He hadn’t wanted the Auphe to succeed any more than I had. He did hate them as much as I had—or hated them more—and seeing the prison, the cells, knowing what had been done to him, I didn’t blame him. He deserved that hate to banish those memories. In his place…

  In his place, I would be him.

  His expression changed to confusion. “After that you could gate as you pleased to the goat’s abode, but dying on a street last night, you couldn’t gate at all. That makes me curious. It also makes me annoyed. Annoyed enough that I was going to kill you and the cattle that wrung their hands to keep you alive—until things changed.”

  “Cattle?” I noticed for the first time that he was the only supernatural creature that didn’t use the more typical word for humans. “Not sheep?”

  He pressed the metal claws against my face. “Nooo, Caliban. Never sheep. I am the sheep. The black sheep of the Auphe. Blackest of the black. That is my title. They thought you a bad boy. I wish at least one remained to see what I am and what I will be. Bad enough that they would’ve bowed before me.”

  The claws clutched my face lightly, but not so lightly that I didn’t know he could have removed my face if he’d wanted. I could see through the space between the talons as I felt their chill. “You gate, you can’t gate, and then today you gate again. And you heal from something when it should’ve taken you weeks to recover. I want to know what you have become. I’m intrigued. Life was so boring before you, Caliban. Borrrrrrring. You cannot know.”

  “What things do you want me to do for you first?” I asked abruptly. “What do you mean by ‘spread my blood’?”

  His red eyes flared brighter in anticipation or something close to it…GED, short attention span. He was more like me than I cared to admit. “Humans, they breed and breed. You know. This is why we were made. To go back and warn the first Auphe. Destroy the humans before they gobble up the world, gobble it all up when it belongs to us. It’s too late for that now, but it wouldn’t matter if it weren’t.” The talons loosened some, not for my comfort, but as he was caught up in what he had to say, his…hell…vision. “We are better than them. The Auphe are gone, but you and I remain. We are the Second Coming, the new wave that e
xceeds the first. We are meant to take their place and do what they could not. But as the Auphe in us breed slow, as we live so long—”

  Keep dreaming on that one, asshole. I’ll outlive you; I promise you that, even if it’s by seconds, I thought, my grip tightening on the hilt of the xiphos.

  “—I needed to find what else we could breed with besides humans. Something that matured faster, fast enough to equal the humans in a few centuries, at least.” He tilted his head until his forehead rested on the metal claws that pressed against my skin, his eyes bloody mirrors of mine, so close the gray of my own reflected in his. The same as the red of his must have reflected in mine. Not brothers, but something as binding, that called to every Auphe cell in me.

  An obligation. The last. We were the last…until he proved we don’t have to be.

  I pushed the thought away. Yes, we did have to be. The last. That’s what the remains of my conscience said, and it was right.