Doubletake

  Those two Cals became one. The venom had activated the Auphe healing to the extent that it had done more than return my memories. It had interwoven what had once been separate. And now there was me. I was improved. I had control, something I believed I’d always lack.

  Having control, that was something unbelievable. Incredible. There was no more reverting to the other half of my gene pool and chasing and eating Bambi in the woods, because there was no other half anymore—not mentally. There was something new and now whole formed by a joining of Auphe and human.

  Something new, something old, something unlike anything on this earth.

  I was in command, darker maybe, but the darkness was worth it.

  Darker than dark, blacker than night. Yessss.

  Enough, Gollum. Christ. I’d gotten the point already.

  But it was worth the trade—I thought. Before, I wouldn’t kill you unless I had to…although I might want to if you pissed me off. Now the whole—the new—Cal wouldn’t kill you unless I had to; I’d just want to a whole lot more—and you didn’t always have to piss me off to have me fondling my guns. The drive was increased, but the decision was the same…because of the control. I held back, unless you did have it coming to you.

  Killer, raper, monster, maimer.

  Past Cal would’ve put you down. I would too, but first you’d have the tour. Down and down, ’round and ’round, through Caliban’s town. In the past, it would’ve been quick. Now I took my time. Your pain equaled your victims. Your amount to arrive six feet under, it took longer.

  Niko believed in karma in the next life. I believed in karma in this one, and I was a stand-up soldier when it came to delivering it. The decisions I would’ve made in the past, they hadn’t changed. Much. The punishment…that I fulfilled more appropriately according to the crime and the time. I was the right hand of justice and the left hand of the undertaker.

  Clever excuses. But why do you think ending the useless needs them?

  The spider venom, the biological repair, had stabilized me—Niko, Robin, Promise, and I, we’d all recognized that. I hadn’t settled where others in the supernatural community would’ve liked, but I was stabilized. That, for everyone around me, was a relief, because it was one hell of a slippery slope, as they say, when my Auphe genes began to overcome the weaker human genes. Auphe genes always win—that’s what a long-gone healer friend of ours had said.

  He’d been right—until now. And would be right again…maybe…sometime in the future.

  There were the dreams too. Awash in blood and the hunt. Did I ever have dreams that heart-pounding? That savored?

  So wild?

  So wanted.

  Black thoughts and scarlet dreams, they didn’t mean anything in the end—unless they were useful. I was in command of myself now and that was all I needed to know. I would do what had to be done only when it had to be done, and if I enjoyed it a great deal more, then that was a win-win.

  I flipped on all the lights in the bar. The last thing I wanted was a dim atmosphere that assisted the pucks in scheming, assaulting, stealing, and a hundred other things.

  While at least I was in control of my mind, I knew I was way out of my depth on the approaching situation. The Panic? No fucking way. I tied the black apron around my waist and started lining up glasses on the bar of the Ninth Circle as I used that control to consider something else besides pucks. I thought about consequences—something I rarely did.

  Consequences were boring.

  Yet sometimes you had to man up and face them.

  That wasn’t boring. That just sucked. But for my brother, I would do it.

  Not that it still didn’t suck.

  “You think I made a mistake gating that SOB to the boggles before we found out what the Vayash burden is?” I asked my brother, who was working beside me with methodical movements.

  The last Rom clan who’d come to hire us to find their lost duty, their burden had been the watchers of an antihealer known not so euphemistically as the Plague of the World. Suyolak could’ve destroyed all life on the planet if we hadn’t stopped him. The Black Death was just a kiddie party to him, and one he’d started. It made me wonder what the hell the Vayash were supposed to be keeping locked down.

  If it was anything remotely close to Suyolak, that was bad fucking news.

  Niko showed no signs of being concerned as he shrugged slightly, following my lead with the glasses. “He’ll be back, as you said. And whatever the Vayash have lost, we cannot find today. Today is the Panic, and not only are we committed, but I think the Panic may supersede any other threat on the face of the planet.”

  It should’ve been a joke, but it didn’t sound like a joke, and I was under no illusions that it was.

  Goodfellow was the typical trickster with typical trickster ways, but he was sane. Fairly content, even happy now that he was in what used to be the foulest curse word in his vocabulary: a relationship. But he was only one of two pucks I’d met. The other, Hob, had been insane, malignantly narcissistic, and would not only kill you for no reason, but do it more efficiently than anyone alive. When you’re the first, born conceivably a million years ago, you learn to fight like there is no fucking tomorrow. My genes were of the firstborn, but I was not a firstborn. There was a difference—as in unnumbered-amount-of-years-of-carnage-experience difference.

  If they hadn’t crippled you, it would be different. Much different.

  “What do you mean, ‘crippled’?” Niko asked, the glass suspended in his hand. His knuckles were white and tense. Shit, I’d actually said that aloud.

  The door opening managed to get me out of an immediate explanation. Robin walked in wearing his usual outfit of expensive green shirt, black slacks, and shoes. He sat on a stool and said rapidly, “All right. Extremely important. Before the others get here you are not to mention, hint, or even think about how I’m in a monogamous relationship. Are we clear? It would ruin my reputation among the Panic. They’d hang me from the ceiling and beat me like a piñata. So keep your mouths shut. ¿Entienden?”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Trust me, I’m traumatized enough. The last thing I want to talk about with a hundred other yous is your sex life.”

  The green eyes shifted to something less Robin and considerably nastier as he raised his voice. “Come on in, brothers! Adelfae! Hear the news.” The door swung open again to reveal a streaming horde of pucks. “It’s true. Goodfellow is monogamous. He’s become a freak. A pervert. Depravity on the cloven hoof.”

  “Or his balls fell off,” suggested another puck who came to the bar. “Or his dick. Anyone who would hang about with Bacchus is bound to get a catastrophic genital rotting illness at some point.” This one was also identical except his hair was a few inches longer and he had both ears pierced with small gold hoops.

  Niko looked at me as the priest must’ve looked at the guy sitting in the electric chair in the old days right before the switch was flipped: resigned sympathy. “I didn’t know he wasn’t Goodfellow,” I protested, feeling the desperation sharply. Not our Goodfellow at any rate, but his carbon copy. “He looks dead-on Robin. He said he was Robin.”

  “Implied,” Niko corrected, the sympathy turning one hundred and eighty degrees to a mildly sadistic pleasure he didn’t make an effort to hide. “He implied it. He didn’t say it.”

  “He’s wearing the same kind of clothes Robin would wear”—I kept up the crumbling defense—“and all of them smell the same.” I hadn’t inherited the Auphe ability to see in the dark, but I had inherited their sharp sense of smell. “Every one of them smells like frigging Irish Spring. All green and minty. It’s not my fault.”

  He put the glass down and patted my back. “It was nice knowing you, little brother. When Goodfellow is through with you and if there’s enough left to bury, I’ll find you a nice plot.” The pucks kept pouring through the door and, immune to pheromones or not, I felt pretty damn panicked as they kept coming and coming. And I wasn’t touching that double entendre with a
ten-foot pole…or that one either.

  Another puck came pushing through the crowd. As soon as the others spotted him they started singing some ancient seventies song: “‘Do you like piña coladas? And getting caught in the rain…’” The tone was pure derisive malice, obviously not a “Hey, great to see ya, brother. Congrats on the boyfriend” song.

  A fist banged against the bar, rattling the glasses. “Who told them?” this puck demanded with a poisonous hiss that would’ve done any rattlesnake proud.

  “Goodfellow?” Niko asked dubiously.

  “Yes, Goodfellow. Goodfellow who has been outed as a freak monogamist whose shame will follow him to his dying day. Now who told?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He grabbed a handful of my shirt. “Why do I even ask? We are pucks. Didn’t that one brain cell you possess wake up long enough to let you know we all lie? We all deceive? We all hate one another’s attention-snatching guts and would do anything to humiliate one another?”

  He didn’t give me a chance to respond. “Ah, what did I expect? You’re a Boy Scout in a con man convention. If con men had the drive and conscience of Jack the Ripper.”

  Me? A Boy Scout? With the things I’d done? That was a first, but considering this company, he could be right. Releasing my shirt, he dropped his forehead onto the bar and mumbled, “We should’ve worked out a safe word. Give me three bottles of scotch.”

  A hand slapped his shoulder and squeezed. “Would you like a mercy killing? I’d hate for a tainted monogamy cell to enter the race should you lose the lottery.”

  It was the one who’d masqueraded as Robin. I could tell only by what he was wearing. Otherwise he and Goodfellow were beyond identical. It was creepy. The bar was full of about seventy of them, and besides length of hair, clothing, and the occasional scar, they were as Nik had said: clones. Your brain squirmed at the sight of it. It was unnatural—mirrors within mirrors. “No, thank you, Faunus,” Goodfellow said smoothly, sitting up. “I’d rather discuss how you haven’t had sex at all in a year. Did you take vows or is it true that an incubus bit off your penis in disappointment at your pathetic performance?” He grabbed the hand on his shoulder, slammed it on the bar, and pinned it there with a beautiful Spanish poniard gleaming silver and needle sharp. “Let us check and see.”

  I turned my back just in time to hear the slide of material as pants were yanked down and then a pained groan from the entire bar. Apparently the incubus story edged out the taking-vows one.

  “Is this the type of fight you hired us to prevent?” Niko questioned. I didn’t know where his gaze was, on Goodfellow or Faunus, because I remained with my back to the Panic. I might work that way the entire night if it was feasible—serving the customers without facing them.

  “Hardly,” Goodfellow dismissed. “A fight will be when one of us genuinely tries to kill another. We need alcohol to lubricate that into motion. Give us an hour. And you can look again, Cal—not that there was anything to see.” There was a wicked gloat at the monogamy revenge in the words. “His pants are back up. Luckily he does have a belt, as there is nothing else to hold them up.”

  Warily, I faced the bar again as Faunus disappeared into the jeering and laughing crowd, the bloody blade remaining on the bar. “I think you made an enemy for life.”

  “We are all enemies, but keeping the race alive is more important than that. And what precisely are you doing?” I ignored his question as I uncapped the black marker I’d fished out from under the bar, leaned across, and wrote “RG” on his forehead.

  “Just a precaution.” I put the marker back under the bar and handed over his three bottles of damn expensive scotch that he insisted be kept especially for him.

  “Actually, that’s not a completely idiotic idea…unless it’s permanent marker.” He scowled, but let it go and pointed to several other pucks around him. “This would be Piper, Pan, Shepherd, Paein, Paniskoi, Phobos, Philamnos, Phorbas, Panikon, Puckstein—he converted—Prank, Puca, Puki, Argos…and you’ll never remember the rest. Simply enjoy the spectacle and if you have to take a break, I’d go together. The buddy system is essential during the Panic.”

  “Mostly Ps. Why aren’t there any variations on Goodfellow or Robin?” Niko asked.

  His face went blank but he smiled…technically. If someone had taken that poniard from the bar and carved the smile on his face, the effect would’ve been the same. “That’s a good question. I’ve wondered myself and then I wonder something else. Hob was the first, a million years on this earth. No one dared to take his name. I say I’m a hundred thousand years old, but as I can’t remember half of those, what else might I not remember? A million more? Hob went insane because he did remember. All those years and all the things that he had done. In a million years they couldn’t all be good things, now, could they? Some might be extremely bad things.”

  His imitation of a smile became more unnatural as he continued. “Or if you don’t care what you do, the absolute number of years of boredom alone would drop you into the deepest pit of insanity. Maybe I’m a little smarter than Hob when I know a perfect memory can be the worst of enemies. Then again, maybes are only maybes. Maybe no one else cares enough for my name to steal it.”

  The smile disappeared piece by piece, chunks of ice shoved methodically one by one into a freezer. “Do you have any interesting questions to add, Caliban?”

  I felt like I’d asked someone what time it was and they beat me to death with Big Ben. Someone was cranky. I juggled more bottles of alcohol, ready to pour. “I was just going to ask why you guys have dicks if you don’t use them for the whole baby-making thing, but I think I can live without the info. Go party. Have fun. Stab somebody in the back. We’ve got it covered.”

  His eyes didn’t become any less opaque, but he did turn and disappear into the crowd. “I think I might’ve pissed myself a little bit,” I said conversationally to Niko. “How ’bout you?”

  “A drop. Perhaps two at the most.” Niko took the discarded poniard and tucked it away. He did like collecting blades.

  “I always wondered why he wasn’t afraid of me like everyone else.” Or hadn’t hated me like everyone else. You hate what you fear. Goodfellow didn’t fear me. He never had. “My monster cred just dropped a notch.”

  Both of us had started pouring drinks when one of the pucks shouted, “Where’s the entertainment? The strippers! The whores! I’ve ten thousand dollars in fives and a crotch on fire! Bring on the orgy!”

  “Oh God,” I croaked. The glass in my hand fell to shatter on the floor.

  And Niko didn’t catch it. Niko and his unmatched reflexes didn’t catch the glass. For the first time in his adult life, I thought my brother was frozen with fear.

  “I thought all other paien left when you guys rolled into town,” I said. “Goodfellow said so. I remember. Distinctly. Very distinctly.” With the possible exception of the boggles, and I didn’t see Mama Boggle on a stage wearing pasties over her scaly chest and a G-string made to accommodate her thrashing crocodile tail. Nine feet of croc-a-croc-a burning love. “Oh shit, I think I’m going to pass out.” I clenched the edge of the bar.

  “Almost all paien,” one of the pucks corrected. Puckstein—I recognized him by the Star of David around his neck. “Not the lili and lilitu. They can’t smell us.” He stretched as if he were next up in Olympic men’s gymnastics. Jesus. “Hope you have a fire hose handy to clean out the place. You’re going to need it when this night is over.”

  Jesus.

  I thought about shooting myself in the head. I thought about shooting the puck, but taking out seventy wasn’t going to happen. I decided on the simple: running out the emergency exit doors, if Niko didn’t beat me to them.

  But it was too late. There were three reasons for that. One was the commitment we’d made to Robin—by commitment I meant the money we’d taken and had no intention of giving back. The second was the chains I saw wrapped and locked around the emergency door push bars. Goddamn mind-reading Goodfellow. The third was the wo
rst.

  The entertainment had arrived.

  Seventy or so lions prowled through the front door. They walked upright, dressed in long raincoats to pass among humans, but they were lions. Until they stripped off the coats as soon as they passed through the door, and then they were lions and eagles. Male and female, they all had masses of hair—no, not hair, but manes, tawny or dark brown or a mixture of both. Sunglasses were dropped as well to reveal cat’s eyes in reverse, black with a golden slit of iris. They also had dark brown/black wings springing from their backs. That was comfortingly familiar. It was a peri bar. We were used to feathers here.

  But there was something off. I took a harder look. I was used to anything these days when it came to monsters. Yet there was something…missing.