Downfall

by Rob Thurman

  I liked it.

  Hell, let’s be honest, I loved it. It made a hundred continuous orgasms boring in comparison, and I knew what that said about me.

  Nothing good.

  A stray piece of silver hair fell across my eyes to underline faithfully who and what I was, and I pulled the whole mess of it back with merciless competence into a ponytail—Robin even kept the elastic bands around for that or they were Ishiah’s, which I wish I hadn’t considered. Second chances or not, I persisted in staying pissed about what the peri had done or not done when Niko and I were kids working the carnival, but I wanted my hair out of my face and my sight more. I couldn’t win. Giving up every thought I currently had that didn’t involve weapons as a lost cause, I knelt beside my bed and began moving metal storage boxes from beneath it out into the light.

  My Desert Eagle and SIG would be in Nik’s room where he’d cleaned up the blood and did his version of first aid, incredibly more detailed than your basic version, before I gated us to Arkansas. I didn’t go for them. That was if I’d managed to hold on to them after being shot. I couldn’t remember, but it was a rare thing indeed that I lost my guns no matter what condition I was in. They would be three days fired and not cleaned. That wasn’t anywhere near a problem, but as I had many guns—one might categorize the number as a shitload—I didn’t have to take the chance. I had several Desert Eagles, matte black and chrome, several SIGs, several 9mms, and beyond that several guns that long-past, if classic, Dirty Harry would’ve found to be excessive in size and firepower.

  Dirty Harry was a pussy in this day and age when a six-year-old could smuggle a gun illegally converted to full auto with five hundred rounds into his juice and cookies. A pity that was, I knew, but I had paramilitary organizations, werewolves, part Auphe and full-on Bae to take on. I armed myself as needed. What ordinary people, who didn’t know monsters were real, much less were fighting them, were arming themselves for, I didn’t know.

  The collapse of Walmart maybe? That would be more destructive than any zombie apocalypse.

  There were too many video games and bad movies in the world, I thought absentmindedly. I opened one last box that held a glove. The box held a considerable amount of hypocrisy as well, but that didn’t stop me from grinning viciously at the sight of it.

  When I first met Grimm, face-to-face, he’d worn a glove, black leather and supporting a set of three long metal claws attached. If he made a fist, those claws would be six inches of steel extending past his knuckles and capable of ripping out throats. It was his answer to lacking Auphe true talons. They’d been born with them, long and black and sharper than any razor. Grimm had the silver hair and the scarlet eyes and even a second set of metal needle teeth that dropped over his human ones when he was annoyed, but he didn’t have the claws. Grimm was smart. Grimm knew what he wanted, and Grimm had his own made. I’d seen them and I should’ve been disgusted and outraged, but . . . I was Auphe too. After all was said and done, as in I kicked his ass and he ran home for Mommy—except half Auphes don’t have mommies, as they’re all deeeeead—I hadn’t been able to forget. And knowing he’d come back . . . it didn’t seem strange to me to want to be well matched for him when he did.

  Wanted. Wanted. Wanted. Wanted for yourself, no one else. Not for Grimm. For you. Liar, liar, liar.

  That would be the epinephrine and gating gathering all the Auphe parts of me into one. I’d been missing a part of me without the traveling, but now I had it all. I was whole. That wasn’t desirable. I’d been doing well when my genes were working on fixing my absent gates, less homicidal in every way. Did I wish it could be different? Maybe. But Grimm had come, which meant I had no choice, and that was all there was to think about that situation. I let the pushing and prodding of my vindictive and partially fiend/freak subconscious range free—I had no time to think about it. I had a sight before me now that deserved more of my thoughts.

  I slid my hand into the glove I’d had made by an artist of weapons, the man who most often obtained or forged blades for Niko. He hadn’t failed Niko and he hadn’t failed on this one. The glove fit perfectly and when I made a fist, the matte black talons, which were the same color as those of the Auphe, proved in a weird fashion I was more true to them than Grimm with his unnaturally polished metal ones. Like his in one way, however, they extended those six inches that would take out throats, guts, or anything else I could reach. I liked guns. I liked the distance of a kill when you were forced to it. I’d taken that into account when I had the glove made for my nondominant hand. I was good with knives too, excellent, you could say, thanks to Nik’s constant drilling, but I’d always preferred guns and distance when it came to weapons.

  Until now.

  I continued to smile at the glove-and-claws, thinking of all they could do. Who they could do it to. How efficiently as well. I now regretted I hadn’t had it made for my dominant hand, saving that hand for a gun. How boring, guns, compared to this. The smile turned into a jagged twist of lips that felt beyond vicious and into something actually alien on my face, but I didn’t care. Claws were for those who weren’t afraid to fight close and personal.

  Claws were for the Auphe.

  Weren’t they?

  I was made by the Auphe.

  Wasn’t I?

  “I like the T-shirt. Shall we trade?”

  Grimm squatted on my bed above me, his grin as feral as mine. His gate came and went with such speed it was as if he’d always been there, for years and then some, and I hadn’t noticed. It wouldn’t be that surprising. In some ways he belonged to this existence more than I did. He knew what he was and he didn’t have any reservations about himself for an instant.

  Grimm was Grimm. That was all he needed to know. He was his own creation. He knew himself inside and out because he’d made himself. Half Auphe, and he’d shaped out of himself something more. Smarter, swifter, more deadly than the original Auphe in some ways. It would’ve been unimaginably remarkable . . . you know . . .

  If he hadn’t been wrong.

  “Mutt,” I greeted him with a bored tap of my claws on the floor. “Sire of mongrel beasts not worth pissing on.” My grin stretched wider into less than sane proportions and it felt good. I was a lion raised by sheep, raised to be docile, domesticated, but that hadn’t taken, not as much as I sometimes fooled myself into thinking it had. “How ya been since I last shot your ass?” And shot him, I had. Several times.

  Good times.

  Aside from the bullets, he was the same as before: Auphe silver hair, Auphe crimson eyes, but skin more human in color than mine, black jacket, T-shirt, and jeans and the glove-and-claws I’d had twinned. I didn’t feel bad about that, the claws. He dressed like me, carried the same guns as me; he copied me intentionally to screw with my head and had said so—I was allowed one deadly glove to make up for it. Not to mention my claws were fashionably black and invisible in the night.

  So fuck him.

  “Your shirts are ever entertaining with their quaintly murderous quotes.” He stretched out his nonclawed hand to rest on the top of my head, touching silver hair, no black left now, I knew. I didn’t have to see it reflected in a mirror or window glass, not that there was neither in my room, or to have him tell me.

  I just knew. When he appeared, it had been a matter of seconds before the last of my visible humanity had disappeared.

  “So bright and beautiful—the color of an ice-frozen carcass.” His hand grew heavier, then smoothed its path along my hair until it cupped the back of my skull. “I told you what you’d become. I told you what you would be, but did you hear me? Did you pay attention?” he said in a ground-glass croon. “I think not. F for effort. F for execution.”

  Grimm was judging me. Grimm with his GED, I thought he’d be a monster with his master’s by now. Grimm who assumed that I hadn’t paid attention.

  That pissed me off.

  Too much to measure
.

  His lips lifted farther to reveal the metal teeth that fell into place over the human ones. “But any execution is a good execution no matter the grade.” He leaped, somersaulted over my head, and ended up crouched on my Salvation Army dresser behind me. I moved almost as fast, aiming a gun with one hand and my claws up and ready with the other.

  Dressed in human clothes, my clothes for all I could tell, he was settled in the predatory position of a hungry beast ready to leap and attack whatever living creature that dared pass by. Did you smell of blood and meat? Then he would be on you, one would think . . . but he appeared so human—if not for the hypodermic teeth and not your entirely average coloring. At this point he might appear more human than I did. He had the teeth of an Auphe, but I . . . laughter seeped out of me uncontrollably . . . I was an Auphe.

  “Poor Grimm,” I mocked. “I lived in the caverns and slept on red sand, learned to survive on air with half the oxygen, hunted naked under a sky the color of diseased urine, ate whatever . . . whoever I found, and fought for the scraps with all the others. You’ll never know the truth of that life. You who eat flabby security guards and go to school like a good little monster.”

  I remembered. Being torturedbeatentrainedsubmitchangedAuphekillinghuntingfree.

  I wasn’t supposed to—someone had told me that, to bury Tumulus and not remember it again—but I did. I did remember. Grimm thought himself better. Grimm had gone to school, gotten an education, planned the demise of mankind with mankind’s own teachings. Grimm aped their behavior by wearing clothes and planning genocide—the human equivalent—using their own flawed history books to plot against them. Grimm who was so very smart according to human standards. Grimm who ate people, probably with a napkin at his side and floss for his metal teeth, and created Bae, but remained trapped by his half he didn’t acknowledge existed.

  Yawn.

  How stupid.

  How very stupid of him.

  I laughed again and it sounded wrong, if you were in this world, but if you were in the Auphe home, how it sounded in the thin, thin air would be unmatchable music, songs screamed by the dying and pleased to die they had been. Hymns of the devoured and damned.

  “Grimm, my cousin, my not-brother, maker of the Bae-abominations of weakness with no will of their own, it is time for you to listen.” The trigger was pulling tight under my finger, but I knew that wasn’t how it would end. Grimm was wary and too quick for me to catch him off guard with a gun again. I didn’t mind, as I didn’t want it to end in such a mind-numbing fashion.

  “Grimm,” I said; the absurdity of it all hadn’t faded. “I am Auphe, your disgusting offspring are useless Bae, frail little snakes who can only do what they’re told, but you . . .” I couldn’t stop laughing as much as I tried. “You are worse.” I let the gun fall from my hand to the floor and laughed on. “You went to school on purpose. You wear my clothes. You cannot speak Auphe, you cannot go to Tumulus.” Unless I took him there, and I wouldn’t—he hadn’t earned it. “You use human methods of warfare.”

  I sat on the floor and reclined against my mattress with the dark hilarity that wouldn’t cease. “Human, Grimm. You model your war to come after their wars of the past. You listen to human prey as if their words have any wisdom at all. You write down the bleating of sheep. Of cattle. Why would I join you, Grimm? You are lower than the mutts you conceive. You play dress-up with your hair and eyes and teeth and think you are Auphe because you look like them. You think you are more than Auphe, as your thoughts of killing and how to protect your army never stop, but your thoughts mean nothing. You think like a human, Grimm, how to survive.”

  He loved killing, but he wanted to continue to keep breathing along with that. For an Auphe, that was illogical, incompatible thoughts to hold simultaneously. A lone Auphe hadn’t thought how to survive. A lone Auphe knew he couldn’t fall. Prey fell; prey died, not Auphe. “That is what prey thinks, no-brother-of-mine. ‘How do I protect my army?’ If they need protecting, you should kill each and every one yourself. ‘How do I stay alive?’ That’s what your next meal thinks, not an Auphe. You, cousin, you think like prey.”

  That did stop my laughter. Auphe as prey, disgusting. No Auphe had thought how to live, only how to make others die. I choked on genuine bile that it would be any other way. Unnatural. Defective. I spit my disgust on the floor. “I never did. I never thought as sheep do. You are more of a human than I ever was from my first day, bathed in birth blood. You’re a born if not bred victim. Nature didn’t make a better Auphe in you. Nature made a better human.”

  “Cur.” This time I said the last insult in Auphe, which Grimm wouldn’t understand and wasn’t that the point? How could you think yourself more than Auphe if you were but the weakest imitation of an Auphe to begin with? It wasn’t a lie what I told Grimm. He was closer to human than I was—than I’d been.

  Sorry, Nik, but that’s how it is and how it has been from when I could first crawl. You knew, didn’t you? It was why you watched me that closely in school. Not for who might hurt me, but for who I might hurt. Or both. It didn’t make a difference. I hadn’t ever been anyone’s definition of human and I wouldn’t ever be, but you’re my brother. My being the bogeyman didn’t change that, and my genes could scream forever in denial of it, brother to a human, but I wouldn’t listen to them. Not about you. You don’t have to runhideflee from me.

  Niko was safe from me.

  Grimm . . . I didn’t give him a warning as I threw myself at him, my claws eager to bury themselves in his flesh. He was prey. Prey didn’t warrant words. It was time to end Grimm. He was about to be roadkill scattered two miles long.

  Grimm was the one who should run.

  Grimm was the one who should hide, as my claws were now inches from his skin.

  Grimm was dead fucking meat, and I couldn’t wait.

  Unfortunately, thanks to Nik standing in the doorway aiming a gun, it turned out that I didn’t have as much a choice about waiting as I’d have liked.

  And the thing about it? About waiting?

  It sucked.

  12

  Goodfellow

  A phone call from Niko led me to the brothers’ apartment. Urgent as it sounded, I wasn’t as quiet as normal about picking the lock and running through the place until I found them. Even so with me at my most careless, Niko didn’t hear me as I came to a stop in the doorway of Cal’s room. That meant Niko was not having the best of days. Blond head bent, his back to the door . . . back to the Zeus-forsaken door—Niko who couldn’t have been born breech, as he wouldn’t leave his back unprotected in fetal stage . . . he was oblivious.

  “Niko?” I tried cautiously.

  “I shot him.” He didn’t look up or back at me. Too tired to take the most basic of precautions and that was worse than the phone call had been.

  “He was attacking Grimm and they looked the same.” He stumbled verbally, murmuring “not the teeth, not yet.” As if he’d said nothing, he surged on. “Robin, they looked the same.” Niko was sitting on the floor of Cal’s room. “When I saw that, I shot him.” He had one hand resting on Cal’s chest to make certain it continued to rise and fall as smoothly as it should. To make certain that Cal continued to breathe despite what had been injected into his bloodstream. Niko’s other hand was white-knuckled around the grip of a tranquilizer gun modeled after one we’d used on Cal a long time ago when he was possessed by a Darkling. This one I’d had made with the strength of the sedative taken up past “horse” to “herd of elephants.” I had known when the time came to use this that Cal would be Caliban and Caliban would be as Auphe as he could be.

  End-days Auphe.

  End-days Auphe would come with a metabolism to match, and I wanted to know that once hit he would go down without killing one of us, as I didn’t know if he’d know what that meant any longer—to be one of us. I’d had the gun made after Cal gated in front of all the world, fo
r what he cared, gated in the light of humanity’s eyes and then killed a basement full of murdering humans with a single thought all because of that murdering Jack who had taken his brother. I’d given the gun to Niko this morning after insisting Cal take the trash to the incinerator, as he’d created so very much of it making breakfast.

  There had been massive rumblings about my lack of gratitude, but I’d gained the few minutes necessary to give the gun to Niko and do a great deal of convincing in a very short period of time. I knew, however, he wouldn’t have accepted it any sooner, not while I was seeking my assistance with the Vigil. That hadn’t been threat enough to cause Cal to lose himself.

  But there had been Cal’s physical transformation, and while that itself hadn’t done it, there had been Grimm, then the thousand Bae, and finally Niko couldn’t deny it . . . End days.

  The transformation that was all but complete now.

  I sighed and sat cross-legged on a floor Cal apparently hadn’t cleaned, not once, after they moved in—slovenly infant. I sat beside Niko—whose phone calls, by the way, were beginning to rattle what was serving as my most stable grip on sanity lately—and a crumpled Cal. I traced a careful finger along a length of silver that had come free from the younger brother’s ponytail. The strand bit at my finger with invisible barbs and I absently sucked a drop of blood from my skin. There wasn’t a single black thread remaining in his hair now. I lifted one of his eyelids to see a scarlet iris and drug-dilated pupil. White and red. He was all Auphe save, as Niko dreaded, for the teeth now. His sedated breathing remained slow and he didn’t move under my touch. “You knew you might have to,” I said. “You doubtlessly saved his life.”