by Rob Thurman
Niko had said Cal had mentioned how they hunted in Tumulus. Packs of Auphe like packs of wolves . . . and Cal with them racing across the ground and killing anything they came across. Whether he was remembering or not, I thought Cal considered this a hunt.
Fire, blood, bone—less than a minute and it was already heading toward a massacre.
I thought the Bae would start gating away, out of range, then gate back to take you from behind. That’s how they’d fought before, but not this time. It hit me abruptly why that was so.
Once Cal had said that if you could gate, then you could stop others from gating. It wasn’t a matter of who was stronger than who to do it. All Auphe could, although when it came down to stopping more than the one to equal you, strength and will, especially will, did enter into it. Cal had done it before, even stopped other Auphe, although not as many as forty, the number of the Bae here, and it had nearly killed him. But Bae were not Auphe, not in their ability to murder, and not in their ability to gate. They weren’t Auphe, only pale shadows of them, and Cal could hold them much more easily. Was holding them.
The Bae—lesser in all ways than the Auphe—and his belief in them, was Grimm’s first true mistake.
Cal and Grimm were different. They were an improvement on the Auphe—astonishingly enough, they could do things the Auphe hadn’t been able to do. Cal could open a gate inside someone and turn them into a geyser of flesh and bone. No one else could do that. The Auphe, definitely not the Bae, and if Grimm could, I had yet to see it. It was a new skill that had come with the mixed human/Auphe genes in him.
Grimm was a different story. I knew Cal couldn’t do that with him. He’d tried before and failed. Grimm had stopped his gate easily. When Cal had then tried to keep Grimm from gating and failed, it was then a fact. Cal had been able to stop Auphe from gating, but he couldn’t do the same to Grimm. Grimm’s ability to build gates was inconceivable, unstoppable, and better than that of Cal and the long-dead Auphe. Perhaps that was his newly bred skill.
Interesting.
The Auphe had created more than they had ever known.
The Bae, confused, were growing more murderous at what Cal had done to them. Enraged at the loss of half of what they were, that their fighting was limited in a manner that was close to neutering them, they grew more vicious or more desperate—sometimes the two are the same. No vanishing and returning to snap your neck from behind. And wasn’t that terrible they were held to the same rules as Niko and me? While my sympathy for them did not overflow in the slightest, Niko continued to burn them alive, and I fought as I’d fought on so many battlefields. The sand beneath my feet was the same as the sand I’d stood on for too many wars to count: It soaked up blood with the same efficiency.
I took one Bae’s head, to whirl and slice the one leaping from behind me from sternum to pubis, and stepped over the guts that spilled free. I skewered one with a dagger through the eye and sliced through the throats of two more who’d crouched a little too close to each other. I felt claws rake across my back and twisted to the side and buried the dagger in one pointed ear to scramble what little brains it had.
In the next second I had one of them on the ground . . . the trees here were horrid, twisted things, vegetation scarce—I didn’t see a vacation here in my future . . . as I rammed my sword through its stomach. “You are . . . not human. Not . . . sheep.” It drooled black froth with its last gasping breaths. I tapped my dagger on the tapered snout on his spade-shaped snake head. “No, child. I am not. And you are not an Auphe or anything close to one.”
Poor snake. If there weren’t a thousand of them, moving as one beneath Grimm’s command, they would be little in the way of a threat at all. Yet there were a thousand, and as magnificent fighters as we were, or at least I was, talent and ability didn’t matter when the three of you were smothered under the weight, teeth, and talons of a thousand.
Rolling to one side and leaping to my feet, I avoided the hissing, slithering charge of three more, taking two heads and then the third with a sweep of silver. Four more came and I started to lose track. White scales, the shine and curve of long metal succubae/incubi fangs, the sheets of night-shaded blood, the screams, and thuds of falling bodies.
Work, work, work.
A fight, yes. It could be considered a small battle. They weren’t Auphe, but they were incredibly more adept, dangerous, and deadly than human warriors.
It certainly was not a war, though.
Rather dull, considering that I’d once kept company with Ares, God of War.
I heard the barest shift of sand behind me and had my sword at a throat before they could move—standing thirty feet away was hardly good enough to evade me in the midst of a killing dervish.
“Goodfellow?”
“Ah.” I let the tip of my sword fall. “Apologies, Niko. I tend to lose track with busywork. I wish Cal had let them gate. That would have been more interesting.” That was a lie. If they had been able to gate, one or more of us might have died fighting forty of them. But I did have a reputation to maintain, didn’t I? I moved about to nudge the nearest body with the tip of my sword. “This isn’t enough to stop me from allowing myself to be distracted thinking where I might next vacation. This desert landscape depresses me.”
“You’re . . .” He moved his hand in the air in front of him from his head to wave at his feet. In the purple light he appeared to grimace if only very slightly. This was Niko after all.
I knew what he was referring to. It wasn’t the first, hundredth, or thousandth time I’d been covered head to toe in blood. It was why I was wearing some clothes I’d, this time for once, borrowed from Cal instead of the other way around. I wasn’t ruining any of my clothes this way. “Yes?” I raised my eyebrows in question. “It does go with the territory. You most often fight with a sword. You know this.”
“I am guessing I never fought quite as you do.” He was disappointed in himself. I could see it.
There’d been many and I’d put more effort and speed into it than was customarily needed. We fought skirmishes these days, but many other times we’d fought wars, fought against hundreds of thousands in a single battle. I patted him consolingly on the shoulder, leaving a bloody, wet black handprint on gray cloth. “Niko, did you actually think that you did?” I stepped back farther and scanned for Cal and Grimm. “I am your teacher, though, in as many lives as I can be. If you didn’t die after thirty or so years and rest between incarnations for hundreds of years, you would be much closer to me in ability, I swear.”
The frown evident in his voice told me I hadn’t done the job I’d hoped in improving his mood. Or to be honest, hadn’t hoped that much: Did he truly consider himself one with he who had been Hob? I thought not, lifelong companion and war-birthed family or no. All this time and the two remained far too young for that in experience or general comparison of my incomparable fighting skills. I saw little need to sugarcoat that. I had my own ego to think of, didn’t I?
“They are there.” He pointed.
One hundred or so feet away, past the mounds of dead Bae. Some were burned. Some were bloody from my sword, Cal’s claws . . . and some torn at with teeth. Cal’s teeth, and that was a good sign that lucidity had left the building and sanity was a stain in the sand.
Cal was surrounded by seven Bae and I knew he had let that happen. He had his gun holstered but wasn’t using it, and in no world would Cal let himself get encircled by the enemy. If nothing else and there were too many, he’d find a rock and put his back against it. He wasn’t trapped. He was playing.
Playing. Ares himself would be alarmed.
He was also laughing as if he was having the time of his life. And, Hades help us, perhaps he was. “You.” He pointed at one Bae. “Boom.”
It exploded, spraying blood and pulped organs in every direction. That would be Cal opening a gate in him with that special talent I’d thought of before,
but hadn’t thought how the bile would rise in my throat to see it in action. I expected him to do the same with the other six. I was wrong.
They couldn’t gate, as he wouldn’t let them, but he could and gate he did. He was here, then there, then behind, beside, and in front of them all. He ripped heads from bodies, flesh from bone, tore out abdomens with his teeth—his teeth—used his claws to cut arms and legs free. Finally, although “finally” was barely a minute if not less, he let the last Bae fall, spitting a large chunk of its throat onto the ground. The worst part was he left half of them alive . . . suffering. For some it would be minutes; for some it might be hours.
His mouth and the metal in it were dripping black with blood. It was easy to see despite the approaching darkness overtaking the twilight, as his grin was that wide. Almost too wide for his jaw and far too wild for reason. I felt Niko’s hand tight on my forearm, but he didn’t say anything. I didn’t think he had any words for this. “Do you still have the tranquilizer gun?” I asked quietly. If he didn’t, I had another hidden under my shirt, not that I’d felt the need to share that information.
It was strained, hoarse, but he did manage at least one word. “Yes.” When we had come through the gate, Niko was calm at the sight of a completely physically changed Cal. He was less calm now, but he was holding on and he was not broken. “But he said he would stay with us, and he will.” More words, kudos to Niko, but they were naïve ones.
We puck had a saying: O ye of too much faith.
Grimm had stepped across the ground, smooth and silent, without the warning a rattlesnake would have the courtesy to give. He stopped to stand beside Cal. “Look, Caliban. Look, my brother. They are afraid. They are afraid of you.”
For all Niko had that faith and for all I wished I could, Cal and Grimm looked much closer to brothers now, same clothes, same hair, eyes, teeth, and the shadows of approaching night hid the difference in skin color. And they were both staring at us as identical amusement and reflection, cold and beyond lethal, flowed over their faces. I imagined the reflection was at what they might make from our intestines when they pulled them, the difficult way, out through our mouths. Cat’s cradle would be no challenge at all, would it? Details, details.
“Afraid? Is that what you see?” Cal watched us with a head cocked, curious. “They do smell afraid, don’t they? And maybe they are. Maybe they have their toy gun with them so they can put me to sleep again. Maybe Goodfellow-Hob-the-younger will kill me for the world’s own good or maybe he’ll just try. Or just maybe I’ll slice off the dick he never stops talking about and give it to your other Bae as a toy or take it back to his pigeon as a present.”
He licked the blood thoughtfully from his lips and teeth. Either he had no problem with the taste, the ingestion, or he might not have noticed he was doing it, but he kept at it until the metal shone bright again. All the while he contemplated us and our fear, because it was there—that fear. Impossibly his grin went wider. “And maybe . . . just maybe I get tired of repeating myself when I say you’re not my fucking brother!”
He buried the dark claws low in Grimm’s abdomen and ripped upward. Red-black blood gushed, intestines began to spill, and Grimm was gone. He left nothing but air and falling blood behind. Not dead, that I doubted. Grimm had shown in the past he could survive horrific wounds, but he was gone.
I approved of that. If he could be more gone, as perhaps from existence and memory, I’d approve of that more.
The metal teeth slid up out of sight as the blood continued to drip from the claws mounted on Cal’s glove to dapple the sand in a cheerful spring shower, and Cal’s grin stayed in place, but human now and pleased as he aimed it at us. “Good game, guys. Damn good game. I should make you honorary Auphe.”
I’d lived long enough that there wasn’t much left that could startle me, and surprising me I would have thought to be close to entirely out of the question. That didn’t stop me from answering Niko’s comment in the manner that I did.
“I think I may have pissed my pants,” he said, his voice low and absent of life.
“You are not fucking alone,” I replied honestly.
15
Caliban
“You were really afraid?” I asked.
Goodfellow threw a statue of a mermaid and a horny dolphin at my head. The thing was the size of a basketball and shattered against the wall as I ducked. He then continued pushing Ishiah out the front door of his condo as he’d been doing since I gated us back. The statue had once sat on a table in the foyer. Convenient for tossing. I wondered if he planned it that way while having the place decorated.
“But I stopped all the Bae from gating, and without that, they’re nothing like the Auphe to fight. Nik had the flamethrower, and I saw you taking them down, Goodfellow. You went through them like a Stephen King possessed-from-Hell lawn mower. I was impressed.” And a little jealous. “It was a downpour of blood wherever I looked. You couldn’t have been afraid—” This time it was a bronze bowl, small but deadly, and it bounced off my shoulder.
“Ow, you shithead. What the hell?” I complained.
“Absolutely not, Robin. I am not leaving you to face this Grimm and Bae situation alone.” Overriding my complaints, Ishiah was refusing to go, and Robin, the puck of all the words, had not one to say to any of us. Ishiah was bigger than Robin, but the trickster was older, wilier, with some sneaky moves I hadn’t once seen Nik use, and that meant they were sneakier than hell. He had Ishiah out the door with it slammed and locked quicker than the eye could follow.
Finally he did have some words, but not many. “Don’t bother trying to break it down with your sword,” he said through the door, “or I’ll call security.” In other words, he’d let the humans see, and Ishiah, unlike me, was sane, followed the rules, and wouldn’t risk that.
“It was barely a game at all,” I said to Niko, who was on the couch . . . sprawled on the couch.
I had not in my life seen Niko sprawl, not a single time, and he had a thousand-yard stare that a troll and a boggle combined hadn’t been able to give him. Robin stalked past us without a look, covered as literally as a person could be in blood, black blood, but blood was blood. I’d seen him fight many times, but not against forty at once. It kicked his game up a notch. He’d been lazing a lot in the past apparently, but I didn’t think now was the time to bring that up.
“It wasn’t,” I insisted. Robin’s shoe hit me in the side of the head from twenty feet away. “Jesus Christ.” I backed away from him even as he kept moving in the opposite direction. “Was it Grimm?” Fuck knew I was wary of him when I was in my right mind. He could be death incarnate when he wanted. To non-Auphe he had to be scary as shit. “It was Grimm, right?”
“It was you.”
I whipped my head away from Robin’s retreat to the shower, I was guessing, to Nik. “What?”
“We were afraid of you,” he said it as blankly as his eyes stayed.
Not Goodfellow was afraid. We. We were afraid.
My stomach lurched. No. That couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be true. “But I was in control. I told you I’d stay in control.” I did too, and I was proud of that as it had been close to impossible. “I was able to get the drop on Grimm by pretending I was Cal, but Caliban. That I couldn’t hold out, that I was the same as him like he wanted.” Because the Bae weren’t the point in the game. When we played, Grimm and I were the pieces that mattered. “I faked it . . . you didn’t know? You thought I meant what I said?”
Nik shook his head, but before he could answer, Robin discovered words again. Out of sight, he yelled them down the hall, “It wasn’t only the words! It was the words about my gamou cock combined with the gamou metal teeth and you killing gamou Bae and spitting out their gamou flesh with your gamou metal teeth and the gamou licking of the blood from your gamou metal gamou teeth, you gamou idiot!”
Shit. Shit. Had I done that? I rem
embered the waves of white scales and black blood that would go flying as I sliced with my claws . . . and then . . . then I’d bit with my teeth, my jaw locking, and the ripping-away motion as I’d jerked my head. Damn it to hell, I had. I had torn open throats with my teeth. I’d licked off the blood like if was leftover ice cream, and I hadn’t thought once about what I was doing. It was natural. It was instinct. It was who I was. God. I promptly puked black vomit on Robin’s billion-dollar antique rug.
“Hades, take me now! Why do I try?” Robin didn’t bother coming back down the hall to follow his frustrated shout, and I didn’t know if he would again. If anyone could drive a wildly partying puck to become an agoraphobic hermit, it would be me.
“To be fair,” Niko continued, a face so lacking in emotion that it freaked me out, “I believe it was your threat to cut off his penis that disturbed him as much as the killing with your teeth and lapping up of the blood.”
“Do you gamou think that might be the gamou case? Or that he said he’d bite it off with his gamou metal gamou teeth, piece of skata that he is! Zeus, strike me dead. Lift me to Olympus. Save me from this horror of an existence.” His voice was getting louder, but I had the feeling he was getting further away from us and not physically.
I stared dully down at the dark vomit at my feet. “I think I broke Robin.” I stepped backward and looked up at him. “Did I break you too?”
The blankness was replaced slowly with a solemn study of me before he said, “I’ve told you before you could speak, Cal, I will always be with you and I’ll never give up on you. If that means dragging you back from the brink, then I will. If it means going with you over that brink, that I will do as well. Whether I’m afraid that most of you might already be gone doesn’t matter. I’ll be on your heels bringing what’s left of you with me. Fear can’t stop me. That the Cal I grew up with now has silver hair, scarlet eyes, and bear-trap teeth that come and go can’t stop me. That will be true until the day we die.” The twitch of his lips was more reflex than anything, but I’d take it. “All the days we die, which as Robin keeps telling us are many. Now would you step over your vomit and bring me two bottles of Robin’s most dusty and expensive-appearing wine? I’m in an unaccustomed mood.” Drinking, he was drinking again. My brother who thought tea with caffeine was the equivalent of Jägermeister.
