by Rob Thurman
“Then we have that job chasing down a Bakeneko. You’ll enjoy it. They can throw fireballs and unhinge their jaws like a python to swallow a human whole. They can walk upright on their hind legs if they desire. Interesting creature.” Man-eaters who could throw fireballs? Niko wasn’t giving me a hard way to go. This was almost a present. He knew that I would have a good time. “Although this one is younger, not as strong or large as an adult, and tends to eat children.”
That was not a present, but if we killed it, we’d save some future victims. There would be kids who’d live to grow up; that was something. Not to discount the fireballs. I wanted to see the fireballs.
“I do enjoy fire,” I confirmed in the wildest of understatements. I enjoyed it more when I was the pyromaniac in charge, but being on the receiving end was fun for a challenge now and again. Arson—it wasn’t a compulsion, but it was an entertaining hobby.
“How does it lure kids out where it can steal them?” I questioned curiously. “I wasn’t the brightest kid, but I wouldn’t have gone with a man-sized cat that walked on its hind legs and threw fire. But I was a little introverted”—hardly that, I thought, grinning to myself—“who’s to say?”
“The Bakeneko can also talk,” he answered, the words somewhat absent and vague. “What they say to children isn’t documented anywhere unfortunately.”
Finishing about half of his breakfast, which was more than I expected considering the topic of conversation, Nik tapped long fingers on the edge of the plate. The drumming seemed random but was either a rhythmic pattern of Morse code or a riff by some long-dead guy whose music caused healthy people to lapse into comas instead of vice versa. It was inevitable, though. I’d grown up seeing the same signs. That’s how Nik’s mind worked, logical inside and out. I was lucky this particular outside show of logic wasn’t expressed through two hours of katas.
“You’re changing on the outside, fast or slow.” He put a special weight on “slow.” “We can’t be sure without a healer, but we knew it would come one day. Rafferty always had a bedside manner that would make even the AMA cringe, but he balanced it out with almost always being right.” Stopping the tapping, he pushed the plastic dish out of the way and focused on me in a way no one else ever had. Read me like no one else ever could because no one else had spent my entire life watching over me. “But on the inside?” he asked. “You said you haven’t changed, except perhaps for the better. More control.”
I hadn’t. He would’ve noticed. The man noticed if I said I was going out to watch a game with Goodfellow when I meant I was going out to get laid by a forest nymph in Central Park. And that wasn’t lying . . . that was . . . ah . . . privacy.
How’d I catch on that he knew? The small can of bug spray—termites aren’t particular in choosing one type of wood over another more personal kind—and the condom—both hit me in the back of the head every time I was halfway out the door. I only slept with nymphs mainly as they couldn’t breed with an Auphe or a half Auphe. There were spores and pollen and I didn’t much listen past that once Goodfellow gave me a list of female paien that I absolutely could not impregnate with a cute little bundle of flesh-eating baby Auphe.
This all meant that outside of the minor inconvenience of food-crazed aphids possibly attacking my dick, it was a given that Niko noticed everything about his little brother. For years I’d tried to convince him that a two-year difference between us didn’t make me his sole responsibility. I was twenty-five, Jesus. I could take care of myself.
Well, hell, fine, there was the one time after getting laid by the nymph, I did accidentally stab that performance artist with the five-foot-long, three-foot-wide mass of dreadlocks in Times Square, but anyone would’ve thought he was a yeti. Anyone. And as an FYI for other performance artists at large: Do not scream in the ear of a man at nighttime in NYC as a part of your art. I know I’m what some would call excessively armed, but there are perfectly normal humans who would’ve blown his head off with whatever cheap piece of tin crap they had tucked in the back of their jeans. It was lucky I’d been trained not to flash a gun in a crowd and that his haystack pile of dreads and flailing limbs concealed any kind of guess at a vulnerable area for a killing blow. I think I stabbed him in the armpit. It was no lie that my knife smelled that way when I was cleaning it later.
Completely off the subject, I know. The guy lived . . . Nik checked the paper. Nik was also the one who wanted to know why I couldn’t smell the difference between a hygiene-challenged human and a yeti. That meant we spent a week tracking down a yeti in the Catskills—a yeti, America wasn’t the great melting pot for humans alone—just so I could memorize its scent. And this all started with Nik knowing I planned on getting a little nymph action before I even did.
Big brothers could dish out some scary omniscience shit.
This time that was a good thing, as it also meant that when I told him, “No. Like I said, I’ve felt fine. Normal anyway. I’m not saying I don’t want to kill monsters who piss me off, but they always deserve it and it’s no different than, hell, the best I’ve been in years,” he knew I wasn’t lying. “Minus the fake yeti, not my fault, my homicidal urges have been surprisingly low.” Trying to kill the slimy lamia at the bar wasn’t out of the ordinary. She started it. She fed off humans and killed them in the process. She wouldn’t have been missed or mourned.
It was surprising, though, the past month, how I’d reverted to a younger, less psychotic personality.
My inner Auphe, the part of me that didn’t show, liked a side order of violence frequently. It was a bitch to rein in, and it was a bitch and a half when I was less than successful at doing it. I gave a mental shrug. I gave it my best shot and was mostly successful unless provoked. That I was very easy to provoke—I didn’t know if that was the Auphe or just me. Eh, what could you do? I took Nik’s fork and a biteful of what was left on the plate. I was glad he’d liked it because . . . Christ. I barely choked it down and let the fork fall with a clatter.
“My control has been good,” I confirmed. The past month my monster within had been remarkably well behaved. Weirdly so. I ran a finger along the scars that ringed my wrists. They weren’t pretty. Were scars ever? Sometimes . . . yes. It looked as if I’d been chained up by a crazed serial killer, and I had been. But a few slugs from a shotgun to loosen the chain allowed me to rip my hands through the still-entirely-too-tight links. Metal fragments had embedded in my wrists. Once they’d healed, they left thickened, angry red and gouged depths of glossy white flesh around my wrists like barbwire bracelets were my personal fetish. I didn’t mind, though; not many of us did, not in our world—unless you were an overprotective brother.
Scars meant you walked away. Scars meant you won. Scars meant the one that chained you was dead and gone and you’d laughed as he’d plummeted all the way to hell.
“Do you think what Jack did to you”—Niko touched a finger tip to my temple—“could that be causing this? The Auphe in you trying to come out in other ways since you can’t travel?”
Jack. The original Spring Heeled Jack who’d been killing since the 1800s. He hadn’t been a he, but a them—a two-in-one killer, although they’d functioned as one and it was simpler to think of them as one, not a killer-combo meal. Truth or not. A paien parasitic storm spirit attached to and feeding off the energy of an angel. A true angel, with all the power that went with it, not the retired, lacking in the phenomenal cosmic power kind the peris were. Not like Ishiah, who could make a sword turn to flame for old times’ sake, but that was pretty much it.
Yeah, good old Jack, who’d taken Nik right out from under my nose for his newest sacrifice.
Once they were separated from each other, the storm spirit parasite attached to the angel that had combined to become Spring Heeled Jack had been both easy enough to kill. Oddly, the angel half had been the easiest. One shotgun blast to a crystalline tortured and twisted form did the trick, and I don’t think the
angel was sorry to die. He wasn’t what he’d once been. The storm spirit had mutilated him into something vile and insane, something that thought a murderer was the same as an underage prostitute selling her body to keep starvation at bay. Both sinned. Both would be skinned, the flesh burned, and sent up to God as an offering Old Testament–style. Although back then those sacrifices had been mostly lambs and sheep—a goat for variety—Jack had held to stricter standards.
Jack got to keep the skin. He who offers the sacrifices on high in the scent and smoke of roasting meat shall keep the skin for himself as reward for serving God. So said the Bible.
Amen.
And you thought reading wasn’t a laugh a fucking minute.
Jack had used the power of the storm spirit to give me a DIY electroshock treatment during my incredibly crappy rescue attempt. He knew what I was, what I could do—tasted it in my blood. He thought cooking my brain would keep me from gating/traveling out of the chains and upstairs to where he was about to kill Niko. I could still feel the dry ice burn of hands pressed to both temples and the storm that was Jack flaring suddenly inside me. I saw the lightning and then I was the lightning. The floor had vanished beneath me as I hung suspended in midair, arms and legs splayed as I seized, convulsion after convulsion.
I didn’t remember anything more after that until I woke up chained in the basement. And Jack had been right . . . he had fixed me but good. I couldn’t gate. I couldn’t tear a hole in the world and escape my chains. There was no walking through the space between reality, nothingness, and back again to stand between my brother and our would-be killer. Unfortunately for Jack, he had concentrated on my supernatural talents, which was far from all I had. I’d grown up as a teen with the only special abilities of gutting you with a kitchen knife or, if you were human, using all that Nik had taught me to beat the shit out of you—hand to hand.
I had a brief flicker of nostalgia for the good old days when I knew of only one monster in the world and kitchen utensils could solve all my problems. Then it had been time for work, and when that work was done, I could play. All work and no play, Jack hadn’t known what that meant. Jack hadn’t known anything but punishment and death in the name of his Lord. Jack hadn’t known what a shotgun was either . . . as he’d left me mine on the floor within reach.
It had worked as well as a gate.
Nik’s fingers looped around my scarred wrists and I mused, “Sometimes the human ways work just as well.” I’d survived without gates since Jack’s death, and if it weren’t for Grimm, I’d continue to endure. Unfortunately, there was Grimm and he’d figure it out sooner or later that I was crippled in the gating department. That’s when it would come crashing down.
His thumbs rubbed absently across the more raised scars as if he could wipe them away. He’d done that since they had healed. I didn’t think he was aware of the habit these days—he’d done it that often. Like I said . . . overprotective. I didn’t mind. A brother who loved me. How could I mind that?
“I don’t know if the Auphe is showing more on the outside to make up for the fact that I can’t gate since Jack fried my brain. But I don’t feel any different. If it wasn’t for”—I pulled one wrist free of his grip and waved a hand in front of my face to indicate my hair and eyes—“. . . if not for that, I’d say I feel good. Relaxed.” As relaxed as I’m capable of was closer to the truth, but I took what I could get when it came to that attitude. It was often hard to come by in my adult years. “But that might have less to do with what Jack did to me and more with what happened in the other church basement. What I did.”
That had satisfied the Auphe in me, the human in me, and the brother in me. No part of me had a problem with it. That gratification could be lingering.
Before I found Jack, I’d found his followers, zealots, insane killing nut jobs, call them what you want, the assholes, in one of the churches I was searching for Jack and my brother. An angel, twisted as he was, where else would he go? His happily homicidal little cult had stood between me and that information. They’d stood between me and Nik. That hadn’t been acceptable.
My demonstration on how unacceptable had been to the point.
It hadn’t ended well for them. The coroners must have spent a week minimum soaking them up with a sponge. When I can make gates, I can build one to walk through to someplace a block away, a hundred miles away, a Hell’s dimension away . . . or I can build a gate inside a member of a psychotic sect who wouldn’t tell me where my brother was. There were fourteen of them, with knives and bared teeth. They were almost as vicious and feral as me . . . on a good day. It wasn’t a good day that day. I opened thirteen gates and tore those bastards to shreds. The last one, the one I left to talk, spilled all. And then he joined his friends.
When I was a kid, five years old I think, I thought there was a difference between humans and monsters. Both could hurt you and both could be evil, but killing monsters was different from killing humans. Years later, when I was ten and in the attic of a completely human serial killer, I figured out why I’d thought something so stupid.
Monsters are much easier to spot. They can be beautiful, but unreal. Otherworldly. They can also be a hideous, horrifying, putrefaction that somehow lives and moves. Seeing one of those is enough to make you want to vomit and deny its reality, deny that somehow the world had created this.
Humans, though, humans look normal. They smile. They ruffle the hair of children and pat dogs, laugh as a long canine tongue swipes across their faces. They slap you on the back and offer to help you move your furniture into your new apartment. They might offer you a soda too . . . hot, sweaty work, right? And they could possibly spike your soda, drag your unconscious body into their place next door, and dismember you in their bathtub. With monsters you know where you stood. But humans—they keep their nightmare selves hidden.
Monsters had the decency to warn you. People . . . they didn’t.
In the end, I’d learned. If you lived to kill, maim, or torture for no reason other than your own personal entertainment, I’d put you down and I didn’t give a shit what you looked like or what species you were when I did it. When it came my turn, if that’s what I became, I hoped someone did the same for me.
A hypocrite I was not.
Those fourteen acolytes of Spring Heeled Jack that I killed would’ve kept spreading his word and his work whether he was gone or not. You steal, you die. You lie, you die. You commit adultery, you die. You work on the Sabbath (rough on the people who work in the hospitals), you die. And on and on. Everyone knows the Big Ten, and mitigating circumstances weren’t a concept these guys had a grasp on at all. They were no less a disease than Jack had been and they had to go before their poison infected others, before innocent people began to die every day.
I hadn’t lied to Nik about it. I hadn’t lied to Nik about anything since I was ten maybe, once when I was fourteen if lies of omission counted. He raised me, and lying was no way to pay him back. Plus, when I needed a moral compass—and, holy shit, did I ever—then my brother was the perfect person to provide it.
“You think ridding the world of fourteen would-be serial killers has made you . . . mellow?” Niko was on his feet and covering the rest of the casserole with plastic wrap to put in the fridge. His eyes were on me, however, eyebrows lifted doubtfully. “I don’t think so.”
He wasn’t wrong now that I thought it through. In the past the more violence I was forced into, the more I craved. Maybe this had just been a good month and I was in a mood to match it. Good moods were unusual for me, but so were good months. No looking a gift horse in the mouth.
“Okay. The hair and eye thing has something to do with my fried brain, then.” I yawned, not bothering to smother it. “Can we talk about this in the morning? Because I know in the morning for you is four hours away. And that doesn’t come close to qualifying as a nap in my book.”
He relented and why not? I’d cooked f
or him—unheard-of effort there. I’d bagged my own kills if I hadn’t had the chance to toss them in the Dumpster outside yet. I found out that I was changing physically into an Auphe and hadn’t had the type of reaction ending up with me setting the couch on fire with my completely illegal but fun-as-hell flamethrower. I was dealing . . . for now.
Gold star for me.
“Go to bed,” Nik said. “I’ll see what we can do about the Wolves for you and in four and a half hours we’ll be in the park, injecting you with somewhat illegal drugs in hopes of repairing your talent for shortcuts before Grimm puts two and two together.” Peering around the open refrigerator door, he pointed out, “This has happened before, remember? You were bitten by those Egyptian spiders with the amnesia venom and all the Auphe portion of your genes immediately concentrated on fixing your lost memories.”
They had, leaving me more human than I’d been since . . . hell . . . conception. I remembered that, how it felt to be human for the first time in my life. I wished I didn’t. You don’t know what you’re missing if you’ve not had it at all.
But once the Auphe genes had done their job, I was restored. I returned to normal. Not human—that had never been my normal, whether I’d looked that way or not.
“Meaning if we fix the gating issue, I could stop changing physically?” I slid off the stool and started toward the hall before hesitating. “What if it works the other way? What if I can gate again and I keep changing? The genes keep going like Rafferty said they eventually would?” What if this had been the trigger that kicked the slow-moving genes into high gear for good. If so, I’d be more Auphe—a damn sight more Auphe, inside and out. If that happened, I’d be all Auphe sooner or later.
I’d always known that, but I’d been crossing my fingers for it to be later. “It might be better to leave the gating thing alone.” Like I’d said, people didn’t know that what’s on the outside does sometimes count more than the inside—when you’re an Auphe.
