Hell, the dog had been a beagle, but the infection had set in by the next day. His arm had swollen and turned bright red. The bite had been on the wrist. In three days the infection was an inch away from his elbow. He was eight. I was four. Sophia was working two conventions back-to-back, emphasis on the “back.” I was four and I knew what that meant from the smirking kids down the street, but medicine and nonmicrowaved food, those I didn’t know anything about.
She wouldn’t have done anything anyway.
I’d wanted to go to the house next door from where we rented. A nurse lived there. Or she’d been a nurse, but then she wasn’t. Nik had said she stole medicine from the hospital and was fired. Everyone in the neighborhood knew it. I’d brightened when I remembered that and said she’d help us. She was a nurse. She had to have tons of medicine because she stole it. The same as we had tons of things Sophia stole, but useless stuff. No medicine. Nik had shaken his head. “That’s not the kind of medicine she has, kiddo.”
I’d stood by the rickety table where Niko was doing his homework. It was hot, but he wore long sleeves to cover his arm. It was the first time I’d had to help Nik like this, but not the last, and it was the first time he told me: Don’t tell. Don’t tell teachers about Sophia. Don’t tell the counselor. Don’t tell anyone. They’ll take us away. I’d thought being taken away from Sophia sounded great…until Niko had said that then they might take us away from each other. There might not be enough room in foster homes for two kids at once. They were crowded all the time.
Take us away? Niko gone? When he’d said that I’d blinked hard to keep from crying. I was four years old and I was a big boy. Big boys didn’t cry.
“Never tell. I’ll never tell. I won’t forget,” I’d chanted, rubbing the first tear away hard before it had a chance to reach my cheek. “I promise. I promise.”
Niko had looked sicker than he already had. His dusky skin was lighter, kind of gray. After my promise, it had turned as white as his could. He wrapped the arm that wasn’t hurt around me and hugged me tightly. His longish blond hair—no money for haircuts and no trusting Sophia’s shaky hands with a pair of scissors—fell against my cheek. “I’m sorry, little brother. It won’t happen. I won’t leave you. They can’t make me. I promise. Okay? I promise and you know I never lie.”
I’d hugged him back, careful not to touch his bad arm. No, Nik never lied. If he said it wouldn’t happen, it wouldn’t happen. He sometimes ducked the truth or circled it somehow, but not to me. He was good, in the way adults were on TV, but sometimes he was too good. Already I knew if you needed something, needed it really badly, being good didn’t work.
I’d offered to microwave him some soup. He said he wasn’t hungry. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday and then just crackers. I’d said okay and that I’d go outside to play. But I didn’t. I’d gone next door to talk to the used-to-be-a-nurse. She’d opened the door wearing flip-flops and sweatpants and a top that was small enough that I could see her pasty belly pooch out. Her hair was straw blond, her eyes bloodshot brown, and she had a cigarette hanging from her lip. She didn’t look like any nurse on TV. She stared at me and then started to shut the door without saying anything.
“Wait!” I pushed against the door and slipped inside just before it shut. “It’s my brother. He’s sick. A dog bit him and his arm is huge and red and he’s hot. He has a fever.” How high I didn’t know. We didn’t have a thermometer. “He needs medicine. Everyone says you have medicine.”
“Go to the doctor, kid.” She flopped on the couch to blankly watch TV. “My folks might’ve named me Happy, the bastards, but I ain’t no charity and I ain’t got the kind of medicine to help no dog bite.”
“But maybe you could get it?” Four-year-olds didn’t cry. Big boys didn’t cry. I didn’t cry…unless I wanted to. And I did. I’d cried and cried. My face was wet, my shirt, part of my hair. I didn’t whine. Whining was a mistake and adults didn’t like whining. Adults told me how cute I was. Playing outside, shopping in the grocery store with Nik, buying clothes at the Salvation Army. Black hair, pale skin, huge solemn gray eyes. They hadn’t seen a little boy as cute as me. When cute little boys cry, most adults run to help. “Please,” I’d begged, my voice hitching. I was sad and scared. Really, really sad. Really, really scared. No one could not see that. “He’s sick. We can’t go to the doctor, and he’s so sick.”
She yawned. “Yeah, and it’s a damn shame, but I don’t have what you need and if I did, what’re you gonna give me for it? A Tonka truck? Go home.”
Oh. She was one of those kinds of adults. She was a Sophia. Fake tears wouldn’t help. The same with fake sad and fake scared. I wasn’t sad or scared anymore. I hadn’t been since I’d known what to do. I’d stopped crying instantly, dried my face with the front of my shirt, and asked, showing all the mean I felt in me, “What do you want? We have five bottles of scotch, a stolen diamond ring, a pearl necklace,” stolen too, but Sophia wasn’t sure if it was real or not, “and a motorcycle. The big ones that cost a lot. A Harley-Davidman.” It was a whole lot of mean as I added, “And I know how to call nine-one-one. Cops don’t like people that steal. They don’t like people who hit little kids either. Or touch them in bad places like it says on TV.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, kid.” She stared at me, then finally clicked off the TV with the remote. “A Harley-Davidman, huh? Stolen too?”
I’d smiled. Not a cute kid smile. She was a bad lady. She didn’t deserve a smile at all. But I’d seen Sophia do business, and though Nik wasn’t like her and I wasn’t like her, I was something else. Not good like my brother, and not rotten like Sophia, but maybe in between. And even at four I’d known sometimes you have to do not-so-good things. I knew Niko would’ve done it for me, but he’d have moped over it forever and ever. That people weren’t better, that life wasn’t better, that you had to do wrong things to do right things.
Sometimes Niko wasn’t very…practical.
He’d taught me that word last week. It was weird how I knew what it meant right away and he was four years older and didn’t know. He could spell it and explain it to me, but inside, he didn’t know it. No. That wasn’t right. Not really. He knew, but it was hard for him to do it? Um…be it? Maybe when he was older it’d be easier.
He was a hero. Heroes on TV, where I learned most stuff, usually weren’t practical either. It got them into all sorts of trouble. I was practical and I didn’t care about anybody like I cared about my brother. “You’re some strange-ass kid, you know that? Creepy as hell too, you little blackmailing asshole.” Like I’d cared. They were just words. I’d heard a whole lot worse from my mother. They didn’t matter. What mattered was that Nurse Happy stood up. “But I’ll go get an antibiotic. If it’s practically his whole arm, he’ll need a shot. That’ll take a little longer to get.”
I couldn’t tell time yet. It was hard to learn even with Nik teaching me. But she didn’t know that. “In an hour I’ll pour a bottle of whiskey down the sink. In two hours I’ll flush the diamond ring down the toilet. In three hours…”
She’d made it before my favorite cartoon was over. Nik said that lasted half of an hour. He’d liked that I was interested in learning to tell time again and was trying to give me a lesson when Nurse Happy showed up. She’d given a confused Niko a shot and a bottle of pills to take twice a day. I’d hidden them in a rusty lunch box under the porch steps where the rats were. Sophia hated rats. She wouldn’t go there. She wouldn’t find them. “Thanks for doing this,” he had told her, although pinching me for disobeying him. “It’s very nice of you. What’s your name?”
“You don’t know? Your…No one told you?” she said, her eyes sliding sideways to look at me. She saw the finger I put to my lips, but Nik didn’t. He was too sick to be worrying that she’d tell on me for doing a kind of naughty thing. She wouldn’t tell because she knew I hadn’t lied. I did know how to call 911. I knew that she hadn’t cared about my tears, but cops would. And I knew who cops would believe between a cute, crying kid
and someone who’d been fired for stealing medicine from sick people.
“Happy,” she answered. “Good joke on me by my parents, huh?” She snapped her fingers at me. “Pay up.”
I’d made Nik rest on the couch with a blanket over him—that’s what they did on TV when you were sick, covered you with blankets—and ignored his questions about paying. That he didn’t come after me through the house meant he was as sick as I’d thought and maybe more. The kind-of-naughty thing didn’t seem at all naughty then.
I’d shown Nurse Happy where Sophia thought she hid her whiskey. Under the bed in shoe boxes covered with magazines of men with no clothes on. That wasn’t hiding. That was saying, I’m trying so hard to hide you have to see me. Then the diamond ring and pearl necklace. “The motorcycle’s in the garage. You’ll have to push it. Sophia did when she stole it. She doesn’t have a key. She’ll be back in four days. Hide it good or sell it before then. You’re not nice. My brother’s like that Forrest Gump guy. He thinks everyone can be nice if they want. I know that’s not the way things are. You might be mean like a snake; I don’t know. But Sophia is worse than not nice. If she comes home and sees you with any of her stuff, she’ll hurt you. With a knife. She’s done it before. She cut a guy’s pinkie off once. People who steal don’t like people who steal from them. My brother says that’s called no honor among thieves.” She was as pale as Nik now. “But if it’s all gone by then, I’ll say we were robbed while Nik was at school and I was at Mrs. Thomasina’s with the other kids till Nik got home.”
She’d held the stuff gathered in her arms and backed away from me. “You’re not a strange kid after all. You’re a goddamned scary kid.”
“And you’re not nice. So now you go away.”
She’d slammed the door behind her and I’d crawled up to sit on Niko’s blanket-covered lap. “You’ll get better now. And I’ll make you soup and a cheese sandwich,” I said. “You won’t die and we’ll stay together and it’s fixed, right? It’s fixed.” I rested my head against his chest. He was taller than most eight-year-olds and I was smaller than most kids my age. He made a perfect pillow.
“It’s fixed,” he’d said slowly, smoothing my hair down. All the fake crying was real water and had turned my straight hair damp and messy. “What’d you do, Cal? I mean, I see what you did, but what made you think of that?” He’d seen part of what I’d done with the paying. That was enough. Maybe someday I’d tell him the rest when he got over his mopey phase.
I’d smiled up at him. My real smile. Proud and wanting him to be proud of me. He took care of me and now I took care of him.
“I was practical.”
“Where did the two of you go?”
“Where you weren’t,” I said with now automatic accusation as I rested my punctured hand palm up on my leg, the Vicodin for the game having long worn off. Nik nudged me and handed me two more automatically. Getting off the childproof cap on the bottle with one hand made it difficult to open without tossing pills everywhere like candy from a piñata; we both knew that from personal experience.
“I see. Ancient history.” Kalakos rubbed the finger where he’d once worn the Vayash ring of manhood. The paler strip of skin was his shame. He’d given the ring to Niko at Goodfellow’s rental in Mr. Chen’s subbasement. Niko’d refused it. Robin solved the problem by swiping it.
Efficiency, thy name is Goodfellow.
“You were both where you shouldn’t have been,” Kalakos continued. “Where no child should’ve been. And on my shoulders that will stay forever.” The bitterness that I heard was for the first time directed inward, and the Vayash appeared brutally unforgiving of himself. Niko hadn’t been able in twenty-four years of trying to make me believe that it was possible that people could change who they were and would be in the future. But now…if Kalakos could accomplish that, Nik damn well warranted it.
I didn’t have a look or another comment for Kalakos’s metaphorical “coming to God” as he leaned against the wall, the water he was standing in only half an inch deep now. That I had nothing for him wasn’t due to the fact that all of this wasn’t his fault. It was his fault if you went back far enough. Regret didn’t change that.
But I was thinking of other things, such as how at four I’d already shown a little Auphe when I hadn’t known what they were yet. Sophia told me I was a monster from the day I was born, before I knew what words were. Niko told me she was crazy and spiteful and there were no such things as monsters. He knew there were, but I’d believed him…for a while. It wasn’t a lie I’d hold against him, then or now.
Niko did have a look for his father, though, the recrimination in the tightening of his jaw, but then it loosened into a frustrated exhalation. The man had saved his life and thought he was saving it twice. My brother had eventually learned to do practical and do it well, but he’d not grown to like it. The guilt that went with it had faded, yet a sliver would always remain. To him that would mean that if his father could feel guilt, he might be salvageable as a human being.
What people…what Kalakos had done in the past, however…they couldn’t undo. I’d go along with what Niko wanted, but I wouldn’t forget that. Kalakos didn’t have the patent on being brutally unforgiving.
I returned to the original subject. “What three things do Grimm and I have in common that let you sneak up on us?”
Niko poured the rest of the pills into a small pocket on my jacket lying between us and zipped it. The night was going to be long or short, depending on how successful or unsuccessful we were. I might need them. “First, and you said it yourself: You’re both arrogant. Grimm doesn’t think anyone or anything can take him. You’re the same, except when it comes to me.” True. Niko had taught me to fight. He knew what I’d do before I did it. Without gates, Niko could and had taken me down.
“Second: competition. Right now you use the game. When you play the game, neither of you sees anything else. You see each other, the pain, the blood. Competition blinds you to all but the game.” He was right when it came to that too. Once I’d smelled Grimm’s blood, the rest of the bar had been lost in a fog.
He slid off the counter. “I suggest we grab an hour or two of rest before we meet your combustible contact.” The roof of the bedrooms had remained intact. The floor was wet, but the beds were dry. “Kalakos, I’ll give you a blanket if you can find something mostly dry to sleep on.”
“Hey, what’s the third one?” I asked. “You said we had three things in common.”
“I’d thought that obvious. You’re both idiots.” That wasn’t a joke. He was serious. “He taunts you; you taunt him back. Forget he’s making baby Bae right and left; it’s all about the game. Forget you might kill him and ruin his plan. Forget all those potentially life-ending, world-ending issues. ‘We’re part Auphe. We have to play. Born to play. So much fun I can’t fucking stand it.’” He quoted me with a mixture of anger and frustration.
“But you’re both lying to yourself. It’s not a game. It’s suicide. Grimm thinks he wants to take over everything, but the entire damn world? He doesn’t know that he can. He is smart enough to know that maybe he can’t. He’ll be a failure like he was before.” He jammed a finger into my chest. “And you think you want to stop him and this is how to do it. It takes an Auphe to beat an Auphe. You two think the game is the Auphe part of you. It’s not. The blood is. The pain is. Even the game, but you’re not playing it how the Auphe would play. The rest of it, the winner and the loser when it comes to you two, isn’t Auphe. That’s the human in you. It’s the easy way out and you know it is. The game is what you let it be.”
That wasn’t right, was it?
“Grimm would sooner die than fail again, and you think that you could’ve been Grimm, that you will be Grimm someday. You’d sooner die than be that, to get that far. I know you don’t trust yourself, but, Cal, trust me. I won’t let it happen. That’s my promise.”
This time he slapped me. It wasn’t a real slap but the Godfather kind. The “whatta I’m
gonna do with this boy?” light one. The anger was gone. The frustration remained, but it was tempered with empathy. “As I said: idiots. Using an Auphe game for a human reason.”
He opened my hand and put something in it, concealing the object until he closed my fingers around it. “You’re twenty-four, twenty-five next month. You’re a man, Cal. You have been long before you could drive. Be as practical as you were when you were four, little brother. You don’t play to win. You just win and screw the games.”
He lifted a bunch of the hair hanging in front of my eyes and added, “And for the love of all that is holy, will you do something with your damn hair? You can fight blind, but your chances are better if you don’t.”
Orders given, he went to his room. When his door shut, I opened my hand and saw a ring. It wasn’t the Vayash solid-silver ring of manhood. The top half was black metal and the bottom half bronze. Or the other way around, depending how you flipped it.
Black for me, bronze for Niko, and it may as well have been case-hardened steel. We wouldn’t be Vayash; neither of us would want a ring attached to that name. He might mean this as my “Leandros” ring of manhood. Niko putting the lie to the black-market monsters who accused me of being much more of a nightmare than they were. Niko denying Grimm’s games and plans and lures.