Doubletake

  That meant that under the flesh it had to go. It was the size of a pacemaker and fit under a fist-shaped scar I already had on my chest. It filled the shallow crater some, and although the shape was squarish, it didn’t make it look much worse. It was experimental, and the FDA would keel over at the thought of it implanted in a human or semihuman being, but when Niko had asked me point-blank one day out of the blue, my answer had been as matter-of-fact as the question. And the fact that he had to cut me open to put it in and then again once a year to change the batteries, that made me know it was necessary. For his peace of mind if nothing else.

  Who knew that it would come in handy so soon?

  “My family,” I affirmed to Grimm. “And that, asshole, will never be you.”

  He moved away from the door as his last child I’d dodged passed him. “We are something new.”

  “We are something old,” I said automatically, the words beyond my power to swallow.

  “We are something unlike anything on earth,” he finished.

  I’d echoed those words, the same that a healer had once said about me, as I’d burned that South Carolina house of horrors to the ground. And Grimm, despite being far enough away that I couldn’t sense him, had heard me.

  “That makes us one. One, Caliban, and that is more than brothers, more than family. Plus it’s poetic. My teacher would’ve liked the symmetry. That is, before I ate her.” Did my grin, sarcastic and sinister in its eager violence, look like his? No wonder no one tipped me at the bar.

  He finished, back on topic, “One.” As the Bae hit the door and turned to charge back, a gate began to outline Grimm. “Until I kill you. Games are games and we’ll play—back and forth, give and take, but death is the ultimate move. And once you’ve given in, given up, given your all to the Second Coming by siring a tidal wave of our spawn, then you’ll die in the game.” He glowed. The gray-and-silver light. The metal claws waving a dark good-bye. The grin brilliant white then luminous mercury. He moved as if my sword hadn’t touched him, much less been buried in his stomach. “And this world will be mine to do with as I please.”

  I didn’t grin this time. I smiled, and it was a cold and hard slice of hell, as that part of me I normally kept silent decided to get mouthy. “Who says I’ll lose the game? Who says I’ll share?” And I said it in Auphe. My human vocal cords couldn’t duplicate the sound of the seven years’ bad luck of a mirror being smashed inside your ear, cutting your eardrum to ribbons before the shards burrowed into your brain, but the words I knew.

  From the flicker of anger that crossed his face, Grimm didn’t. He couldn’t speak Auphe at all. He hadn’t lived among them for two years as I had—even if the language was all I remembered—and none had wasted time teaching the caged failures the motherfucking tongue.

  “You’ll die and that won’t change. The game is mine to win. You, Caliban”—the glow brightened—“you might have been the Auphe’s fondest ambition, but you, bastard brother, are not me.”

  The door shattered to three large pieces and several smaller ones. The Bae staggered back as one stake-shaped piece slid perfectly into its chest as if it were the unlucky extra in a vampire movie. Niko passed it, dismissing it as the lesser threat. He swung a katana I didn’t recognize. That would mean it was one of Goodfellow’s many swords. It had greater reach than a xiphos. It should’ve cut Grimm in half, but he was gone. The closing of the gate did take half the katana’s blade with it. If I were an optimist, I’d hope it had done some damage before the half-Auphe disappeared.

  But if I were an optimist, this wouldn’t be my life we were talking about, would it?

  The Bae gripped the wood to pull it from its chest, then swiveled its head to hiss and lunge at the next person hesitating in the doorway. Kalakos cursed in Rom and took its head off at the shoulders with his saber. The move had been instinctual. That could be seen in his brown skin that now almost matched the color of the Bae as it fell in two pieces. Paler than pale. He hadn’t seen what was attacking him. It had been too quick, in the middle of a rescue, the moment too muddied. Kalakos had seen a threat. That was all. It wasn’t until it was down and dead that he saw, for the first time, an Auphe. Or the closest thing next to me to qualify as an Auphe.

  I watched it twitch and changed my mind, my former scorn sulking. I’d more or less told it that give it fifty years’ experience and it would be the next thing closest to me. Now I thought that in fifty years I’d be the closest thing to it instead. It had the equipment, the ability, and Grimm would make certain the Bae would learn to use them. Grimm knew education was an advantage above all others.

  “Makes me look pretty good, doesn’t it, Kalakos?” I said. “Given half a century or so of murder and mayhem and it would’ve become the shadow of an Auphe.” A thousand years and it would leave the Auphe in its dust. “Tell that to your clan, the cowardly sons of bitches. Afraid of a sixteen-year-old mentally damaged kid like I’d been. I doubt they’d have done much spitting if that had come calling in my place.”

  He took a step away from the Bae, regained the equilibrium a warrior needed to survive, and looked at me for the first time. Or rather saw me for the first time. All my…heh…quirky imperfections aside, I wasn’t the Bae. There was some human in it, but there was humanity in me. I wasn’t overflowing with it, but it was there.

  “I apologize,” he offered in that familiar if older echo of Niko’s voice, “for myself and my clan. This…this is a monster, not you. We misjudged our own blood and we are shamed for it.”

  That was unexpected, kind of decent, and the right thing to do. If it had come eight and a half, nine years earlier, it might have made a difference. It hadn’t, though, and my grudge was about what he, decent but not decent enough to be a father, and the Rom had done to Nik. I didn’t give a shit what they thought about me.

  Niko paused for the briefest of moments at the apology before overlooking it to grip one of my shoulders hard enough to get my instant—ow—attention. “Who was that? What was that?” He wasn’t talking about the dead Bae on the floor or the others. He was referring to the one clever enough to take me from the condo alive, fast enough to escape my real brother and survive—all while making an edgier game of it than I’d thought. I’d been down here less than fifteen minutes, listening to Grimm, attacking him, fighting the Bae. He hadn’t bothered to go any farther than what I had to think was two or three buildings down from Goodfellow’s. Niko didn’t have his tracker with him. That had been left back home when we’d fled Janus. Goodfellow had one, though, as did Promise and Ishiah in a locked safe at the bar.

  “He’s one I missed in South Carolina.” I wiped some of the Bae blood from the xiphos carelessly onto my pants. “By twelve years. He was the Auphe’s first success, not me, and they never knew it. He’s also head of the Auphe Second Coming. Big, bad Auphe messiah.” I ran a hand slowly through the space where his gate had been. I could feel the pain and the wound of reality knitting itself back together still. Every gate had a price. Mine too, as much as I tried to forget it.

  Kalakos had thought I was a monster and then he saw the Bae.

  I’d thought I was a monster when I’d been old enough to realize what a monster was.

  I’d eventually reached a point where I didn’t care anymore if I was one. I’d admitted it without shame. Sad to say I occasionally enjoyed it on the sly lately, but now I knew.

  Accepting that you were a monster wasn’t the same as being the real thing, full-time, every single second of every single day.

  Grimm had shown me that.

  He’d also shown me that he was right. He was superior to them. He was as ruthless as the Auphe, but smarter. More adaptable. Thrived on change. Nature had taken her fuckup and created a rung higher on the ladder, and Grimm was standing on it.

  “Nik,” I said, calm, not that that was what I felt. I didn’t know what I was feeling other than it was a seething mass of confliction. “You need to know. He’s better than me…even on my very best day.??
? Best day. Worst day. My Auphe days, the ones that were now gone or at the very least viciously choke-chained and powerless.

  And why wouldn’t they die? Auphe. Half-Auphe. I killed them over and over, three times now.

  Why wouldn’t they fucking die?

  Yet…

  Welcome back, brothers and sisters. I missed you.

  I missed the game.

  10

  My brother was surprised I was smart, smarter than him. That I’d gone to school and Death had a degree. I sat in the New Mexico desert, back against a rock, eyes closed, and slowly healed. It was cloudy even here today, but warm, and it felt good as the stab wound in my stomach bitched. It wasn’t a critical wound—that was the best part of being half-and-half. You never knew where our bodies kept the important parts. All of us had been different, but I’d lucked out and Caliban hadn’t. He’d skewered me all the way through, but hadn’t hit a single worthwhile organ when he did.

  Of course, it hurt like a motherfucker, which was good. I’d learned to like pain. Sidle had taught his prisoners that. He, my very first teacher, had taught us to love it. Hate and pain—they were the only things we could love.

  So, so good.

  Caliban had given me a present. I’d give him one too. Whether he’d learned to like pain the way I had, I didn’t know. He hadn’t had a Sidle.

  Time enough to find out.

  Sidle with his lessons had been my first teacher, but not my only one. There were no degrees in pain among the cattle.

  I’d had several teachers as I traveled looking for Caliban before I caught up with him in Nevah’s Landing. For some reason the fight made me think of a teacher I couldn’t remember. A woman. Red hair? I didn’t recall. But the wound in my gut made me think of something I couldn’t think of. Something I’d done to her. Senseless, that. It was a lost memory and I didn’t lose memories. What Caliban had done to me was the same as birthdays and balloons. What I’d done to her was a hole in the ground with maggots your only party favors.

  But who was she?

  When had I sliced her open?

  Maybe it was but a dream. A good dream, but a dream.

  I traced a gloved finger over the clotted blood covering the slash in my stomach, then tore it away to let it bleed again, up the pain again. Ah, good, good. Pleasure and pain, pain and pleasure. I watched the blood course out.

  The dream, which was all it could’ve been, made me think of martyrs. After hearing my long-gone warden read the Bible over and over, for the good parts—smiting, killing firstborns on either side, selling your daughter, sacrificing your firstborn son because God told you to before saying Psych! Destroying cities—I knew what to do with a martyr: Stone him or cut off his head. Stoning would take far too fucking long.

  I could be logical and martyr a teacher too in a dream. What could be better?

  The memory of the dream grew sharper.

  Shit, what a giving, kind, love-everyone-in-the-whole-wide-blessed-be-world cow she’d been. It was unbearable.

  I couldn’t remember her name. Georgia? No, not it—as if it mattered.

  She’d been a freshman in college, worked as a waitress to pay her tuition, worked the soup kitchen on alternate weekends—I like soup, or how it seasoned the homeless man who I’d eaten in the alley, and she’d volunteered her time to teach classes for GED candidates. She’d grown up in New York City, and shook her finger at us to not make fun of her accent. One day someone had asked her why she left and ended up in Columbus, Ohio—for college, and she thought she needed a change, she’d said. She’d been tired of the city. Tired of its not being what she wanted it to be and of knowing it never would. The world wouldn’t change. The world was the world and it had rules, and because it wouldn’t change, neither could she. The best you could do was change where you were in it, and she had.

  Fuck, she’s one of those, had been my disgusted thought.

  There’d been no waiting then. I couldn’t sit there every day with that in the room.

  “Patience is a virtue,” I’d read, curling my lips and nodding at the saying she’d written on the blackboard.

  She’d laughed, red hair springing around her shoulders. “I know. I’m such a hypocrite, aren’t I? Patience for everyone else is a virtue, but I lost patience for patience or for virtue. But that’s who I am now. We are who we are and sometimes there’s a cost. And that is how it will always be unless you decide you don’t want to pay it anymore. Now, this isn’t philosophy. Turn to the chapter on Charlemagne.”

  The rest of the students were puzzled and generally not that bright when it came to things they couldn’t see or touch. They had been sitting with their history books open, thumbing through to find what she was talking about. Idiots. Never did they want to think for themselves; they wanted knowledge handed to them like a blood-coated can. Drink it down. Ten seconds later they were goddamn geniuses. They didn’t know. Our teacher was human, but not all humans were golems of mud slouching from here to there, thick tongues with nothing interesting to say, no interesting ways to die.

  But I would’ve given anything to make a buffet of them all, scratching, and chewing gum, and poking me in the back to ask for a pen. That student hadn’t come back to class; they did tend to drop out once in a while, but this one did get his pen—jammed in his eye before I’d dumped him in the Ohio River.

  The teacher had begun class and I’d paid close attention. Cattle had things to teach me if I bothered to listen. They taught me how to imitate them, think like them, and end them. It was work, but after eighteen years in a cage, vengeance isn’t work. It’s a gift.

  After the class was over the teacher let the others go but had called me over to her. She’d sat on the edge of her desk, her gold-and-brown long skirt drawn primly around her legs. Her eyes had been brown, I’d thought, but, no, that was wrong. A gold light had glowed behind the brown. She’d known things. Some humans did. The ones who loved money told you what they saw in the dark of their minds. The ones who thought they knew their place in the world and the universe, they said what would be would be, and the knowledge they saw would only hurt you. You simply had to accept that there was a greater purpose. And what you did ask them they wouldn’t breathe a word of an answer to you. Greater purpose. Pat on the hand. They were as bad as the first. They thought they knew, but they didn’t. No one knew.

  The universe was a coin spinning on its edge. When I gated, I could see it. Violently unpredictable. You didn’t know which way it would fall. It was chaos and nothing more. But the peace-loving Gandhi wannabes thought differently, because they could see, but they couldn’t see what one like me could see. She was right. She was a hypocrite, but she didn’t know why. None of the good ones did. None of the good ones knew they lied to everyone and they lied to themselves. They told all that nothing big could be changed and you were stuck with what life gave you.

  But I had proved them wrong. It took a while, but I wasn’t stuck now.

  Not once did they stop to think that they took hope instead of giving it. Not that I needed hope or a denial of my fate. I made my fate.

  What will be will be.

  Suck that shit up.

  It was too bad. She’d been an adequate teacher, one of the best I’d had. But sometimes you had to move on.

  Because “what will be will fucking be.” As much as I despised her fucking kind, I couldn’t let her be anymore.

  As I’d stood by her desk, she’d taken my hand, the dark gold of hers a contrast of the light tan of mine. She met my eyes through the sunglasses I refused to take off in class. “I knew someone like you when I was a year or two younger.” Younger…when she’d lived in NYC. Someone like me. There was only one like me, except…I felt the grin start, but held it back.

  Cal-i-ban.

  “I loved him.” She’d squeezed my hand, but her eyes held only calm, no sadness. No fear. If she’d known me, she should’ve feared. “And he loved me. Too much, I think. He said I was born of peace and he was born of bloo
d and death. He told me it wasn’t a guess, but that he knew I wouldn’t survive in his world. And he was a killer, but he wouldn’t be responsible for killing me just by being with me. I was willing to trust fate. He wasn’t.”

  Then there had been sadness. It had made me smile. “He was right, but he gave me a chance,” she’d said. “He’d let me look at our path and where it led. I told him no. Little things can change. The whole of your life or death cannot. I refused to look and he refused to risk me without a guarantee I would be safe. That I would survive. I’ve thought since I came here of my sin and my lie. I loved him so much that I broke my only rule. I did look. And then I left. He was right and neither of us should have to see it happen.” Her voice was soft and would have been boring had it not been for the information on Caliban.