by Rob Thurman
“Directly in the heart might be the way to go,” I said. “Just in case.”
“Just in case you want that much fluid pressure to explode your heart, yes, certainly. Niko, you failed at teaching him biology, anatomy, physics, and how much water fits in a glass.” Robin knelt on the floor of the tower, swiped the syringe in my hand, and cheerfully jammed the needle through my sweatpants—he’d insisted I wear them over jeans and now I knew why—and into my outer thigh. “Come to Daddy,” he said as he hit the plunger home.
“Motherfu—” I didn’t have the breath to finish, as he was already injecting the next one and then the next one, switching thighs with each one, and with a speed that had several near-orange-sized lumps swelling at the top of both my legs before slowly being absorbed.
“And you wanted all that injected into your heart.” He gave my jaw a light slap. “You barely have a heart, Cal, and one the size of a basketball? I think not.” Straightening, he discarded the last syringe. “Time to be all the Auphe you can be, little sociopath.”
First, I wasn’t little. I was his size if not taller. Second . . . “I’m not a sociopath. I love Nik. I love my brother, and I have vague feelings for you that aren’t necessarily hatred or disgust. Ergo, not a sociopath. More like a generalized, family-oriented lovable psychopath.” I massaged my legs and felt the epinephrine disperse further and go to work. “Okay, occasionally lovable,” I snapped as Robin crossed his arms and yawned in the face of my sincerity . . . or as close to it as I could come to sincerity.
“My heart is warmed. Truly. You don’t inevitably hate or are disgusted by me. It’s every comrade-in-arms’ dream come true.” He had moved to again stare out over the trees, but he reached behind to pat me absently on the shoulder.
Niko had his sword ready as the sun started nearing the horizon. “We should’ve waited with the epinephrine. Until we were certain they were coming.”
“They’re coming right now.” Robin kept his gaze out to the green that stretched below us and infinitely into the distance. “It’s like smelling the ozone of an approaching lightning storm. The rumble of Vesuvius at Pompeii. Can you not feel it?”
I could. I didn’t know how I missed it. Grimm’s gates were too quick for me to feel now. The gate of one or forty Bae I wouldn’t feel until a second before they appeared. But a thousand Bae all gating here. It was like a storm or a tsunami. You felt your stomach fall, your ears pop, your heart stutter in your chest, and your brain curl up into a knot and pray not to know. Earth-shattering. Unstoppable. That was the Bae. That was the Second Coming. Or so they named themselves. So they thought.
They were wrong.
“Ishiah!” I shouted. “Now!”
He came flying in at a speed I’d not seen him reach before, tackled Robin, wrapped his arms in tight imprisonment around him, and was out and flying again in less than the blink of an eye. Goodfellow was screaming, “No!” Not shouting, but screaming as if he’d been gutted on the battlefield and it was horrible to hear, but it didn’t stop me from shouting at Ishiah again. “More than a mile! Go more than a mile! I’m taking it all with me!” White-and-gold wings beating, and I’d denied it before, but I saw it now. Wrath of God in every wing stroke. In that moment I forgave Ish completely. He couldn’t save my brother Niko, but he could save my brother Robin. I didn’t know if the puck would forgive us, not in this life, as we’d be dead. Not in the next life either, I didn’t think. He, for once, could do the sane thing and avoid us for the rest of eternity. I wouldn’t blame him.
They disappeared from sight just as the Bae appeared. I grinned at Nik, wishing the metal teeth wouldn’t fall into place, but they did. “Our own personal Bolivian army.” I peered over the side of the rail to see white everywhere. White serpentine bodies, scales glittering like snow on fire in the failing sunlight. The eyes were fire and nothing else. Thousands and thousands of metal fangs were bared, and the hissing was louder than a hurricane.
“You’re not smart enough to be Butch or handsome enough to be Sundance,” Niko had to shout in my ear to be heard, but he was smiling.
“We’ll just be ourselves, then. That’s more than good enough for me.”
I didn’t see Grimm, but the Bae were climbing the tower now. They could’ve gated up, but there wasn’t room for more than a few at a time and I’d planned on that. They couldn’t suffocate us with their sheer numbers. Niko sliced the throats of several and the heads of a few more who tried to climb over the rail and I leaned over myself and gated my voice to a hundred locations, for miles, over a thousand heads to be heard by every last one of them.
“Grimm, I know you’re out there somewhere, watching me and your children.” Then I saw him perched at the top of a tree less than fifteen yards away. He was grinning the same as I was. Matching metal smiles. He rested his chin in his hand as if he were a teacher observing a student. I didn’t doubt he thought he was. Even over the Bae, I could hear him, “Show me, brother. Show me, Caliban. Show me how you plan to win this particular game.” He hissed in laughter and anger, “But you can’t. You can’t win and you’ll throw away the world we could make. You’ll throw away your family, my family, the only family the two of us will ever have. You’ll throw away all the bloody games we could’ve played. Selfish bastard. Make your choice. Choose death. Isn’t that what all cowards do?”
He was furious—that I would deprive him of a conquered world, a new race, and the games that were all the Auphe ever truly lived for besides murder and slaughter. Furious I would leave him alone when murder is more entertaining with two.
The Auphe, the original ones, all the half-breeds they created—they’d destroyed. Even the successes, Grimm and me. They had more to answer for than I’d known.
But it was too late now.
“Your children. Your Bae, your snakes, not mine,” I said with disgust and derision. “Then there’s Tumulus. You’ve never been to the homeland. Can’t get there. Never seen it, never will. Never seen your true world.” I grinned, savage and proud, too much at the taste of the metal of my teeth. “But I have. I lived there for years, and doesn’t that eat you up alive, cousin?” Not that it mattered that he craved what I’d had when I’d have given anything in my human moments, my soul if I still had one, to have never seen that hell. “And here? Earth, that’s only the Auphe feeding ground. They were the first murderers to walk this place, but this place wasn’t the first they walked, was it?
“You’re a Second Coming without the Promised Land, without Tumulus. And while you’re supposed to treat this”—I threw my arms wide to indicate anything and everything in the world—“as a hunting ground, a buffet, a vacation house that belongs to you, fight to the death with anyone who tries to take it away, including the natives—you don’t live here with the cattle. You own it . . . you come and snack as you please. Low-maintenance massacres. But staying here, mingling with the herds, stinking of the sheep, the cattle, and the bleating paien who are no more a challenge than humans? You might as well be their shepherds. It’s pathetic. That’s not the Auphe way. And your Bae? They have no way of their own, no instinct, no home, nothing. All of you, you don’t belong. Not here. Not anywhere.
“You’re trespassers but you won’t goddamn leave!” I was all taunting contempt as I saw the blood drip from his sliced lips where teeth were buried to keep him from screaming in rage. “You’re tourists. That’s all you are. Fucking tourists. And I’m kicking your asses out . . . permanently.”
Then I let it go—all of it. Everything I’d been saving up all my life, building and growing inside me, too much to hold in one half-human body. God, I thought I’d known, but I hadn’t. I’d had no idea all that was in me. So much. Too much, until I cracked here and there and everywhere, but I held it down. I trapped it in mental chains that were on the verge of shattering, held on until all I saw was a haze painted the same dim glow of a thousand long-dead stars. It tried to push its way out of
every part of me, out of every single pore in my skin, piggybacking on every thought, carried on my pain-racked insanity-driven scream. It pushed and fought to be free with a force that turned me into a bomb with a timer vibrating on zero.
Now was the time.
Now I was free, but so was everything I’d fought so hard not to be.
The gate—a living, carnivorous thunderstorm of rage and hunger—exploded around us. It did as I’d told it. It obeyed. Why wouldn’t it? It was starving. It wanted to be fed. Shredding and tearing through the glowing dusk around us, it opened in the very air itself: a jagged wound that I could see no end to. I felt reality recoil and rush away. I heard the world wail at the unnatural horror that clawed at it until it was ripped open. I also heard the hissing screams of the monsters surrounding us as they tried to retreat—too young and unpracticed to tear free of my gate with one of their own. They were trapped and they weren’t getting out.
Amateurs.
I laughed, and then hummed silently to myself.
Anything you can do, I can do better.
Anything I can do, you can’t fucking do at all.
Kiddies shouldn’t play with grown-up toys. Too bad for them. I was Ground Zero and there was no escaping the shock wave of the implosion that was designed to trap, not blast free. The gate was an inescapable tsunami that swept wave after wave over the thrashing lengths of white-scaled nightmares—it covered them in deepest blacks, glowing grays, and painfully bruised purples, all of which was ringed with a whirlpool of lightning made to burn through flesh.
It was light and the absence of light. It was a gangrenous wound of the veil that stood between here and there. It was a door.
It was the end.
That’s what happens when you show up to a fight with claws and I show up with an evolutionary-created one-way trip to thermonuclear Hell.
Top of the food chain, bitches. It’s the only place to be.
“Buckle up, time to go, boys and girls!” I laughed, and if it was a little dark and a shitload more than a little crazy, it wasn’t like anyone was going to be around to tell the tale. At least no one who would hold it against me, I knew, as I felt Nik grab my hand and hold it high in victory. In life together, in death together—why had I thought that was wrong? With my brother always, what could be more right?
The door was open and I didn’t hesitate when I picked the destination.
Then I died.
I didn’t mind. That was, after all, half the point.
I died when I took the gate to the sun, dragging with it a thousand screaming monsters, two humans, more or less, and a big fuck-you to the murdering army of assholes that thought they could take me down.
I died, making certain every monster in a one-mile radius went with me.
I died on my own terms and denying the darkest part of me with my last breath even as I used that darkest part to make it happen.
I died with my brother at my side. I died free. There are worse ways to go, but there are no better.
I died, and it was slow and painful, but that was a price I was willing to pay.
Nik and I took our last look of the world as our hearts began to tear themselves apart, gripped hands tight enough to feel the blood drip, raised our eyes to the descending sun, and took our last ride of this life as I took us into the fire. It hurt. It hurt more than anything could, that gate. I was dying cell by cell and I felt every one of them go. That was all right, though. There would be other lives and they’d be as good if not more so as we’d stay family. Death couldn’t change that. I should’ve known that before Robin had told us.
We rode into the sunset in a life where that meant dying.
No happy ending.
But that was okay. I was with my brother. I got to save the world.
There’d be other endings.
They would be better ones.
So yeah, as I said, shit does happen.
But sometimes . . . sometimes it’s not that bad.
There was one last thing, one last thought. From me to Grimm and the Auphe and Bae nations.
I played your games, all of them, and fuck you. . . .
I won.
16
Caliban
I wasn’t dead.
That wasn’t life. It was a stupid thing to think—death isn’t life—but it was true. This wasn’t life—life didn’t work this way. Not my life. There was no happy ending. No riding off into the sunset, not while I was still breathing. I didn’t get to live after gating a thousand Bae into the sun. That shit didn’t happen unless being alive meant something much worse than death was waiting for me. And what that could possibly be, I didn’t want to know. I could imagine many things, too many and then some, but I did not want to know. Period. End of story.
Shivering, I could feel the cold around me. Maybe I was back in Tumulus. The Auphe had somehow resurrected from the dead and were going to keep me there for years of torture until they had a hunt across the red sand with me as the rabbit. That would qualify as worse than dying. Yeah, you could say that. That would be no real surprise with how my life had gone up until now.
But . . .
I smelled the bite of snow and pine trees, the distant musk of what I was guessing was an elk or a moose and Wolves, the were kind, and I smelled Nik and Goodfellow. I smelled Grimm too, but as if he’d been here and gone, not that I cared. What I did care about was that if I was alive, Nik would be too. He had to be. I couldn’t have gotten him killed but not myself. That was not fucking acceptable and I’d take Tumulus over that. I’d take any fucking form of hell and be goddamn happy with it over Nik being gone without me.
I opened my eyes and it was light. There was a blue sky with the sun only now sliding toward the top of the trees and the horizon, and they were tall trees, very tall, dark green pines with snow clumped on them. There was a warm weight on my chest, a bare hand, and I followed the arm it was attached to up to a familiar face with shaggy reddish hair and predatory gold eyes. “Rafferty?” Rafferty, the healer and Wolf who’d saved my life twice now. He’d saved me when Niko had first thought years ago he could keep his oath, kill me if that was the only solution. He couldn’t and had taken me to help. That had been Rafferty then, and he was here now. How? Damn, I hurt. Fuck. “Nik.”
“Here, little brother.”
I turned my head to see him next to me, flat on his back as well and with Rafferty’s other hand resting on his chest too. His braid was nearly buried in the snow we were lying in and he was shaking from the cold the same as I was, but he was alive. Fuck. He was alive. “You’re not dead. We’re not dead,” I said, stunned.
He reached out a hand toward me and I stretched back to grip it as hard as I could. Relaxed and as peaceful as I hadn’t seen him since this all began, he let his lips edge into a smile that came close to being astounded as mine. “No, we’re not. But I applaud your grasp of the obvious.”
“Yeah, not dead now, but you were,” Rafferty snapped, as irritable as he’d always been all the times he’d healed and helped us through the years. “Dead as they get, both of you. You don’t build a fucking gate to the sun and expect to live through that. I’m surprised I was able to get all your blood back into you. Show a little respect and gratitude to the guy who kicked the Grim Reaper in the balls to yank you back from his bony fingers.”
“You healed. . . . How the hell did you know? How’d we get here? Where is here? And how the fuck did we get out of the gate?” I had more questions and a great deal more pained cursing to go with them, but that’s when someone cleared their throat. It sounded so damn smug that I didn’t have to look up to see who it was, but I did. I was an idiot that way. Robin stood behind the crouching Rafferty. His arms were folded as they’d been in the fire tower, there was snow in his hair, and the smirk on his face combined with the bright gleam in his green eyes was that much more arrogant
.
“You,” I accused.
“Of course me. Who else could pull this off, kid? Did you buy into my screaming when Ishiah ‘saved’ me? I thought that was Oscar-level acting there. You should be appreciative I pulled out all the stops on that performance. As you bought in to it, so did Grimm.” The smirk grew. “Before you ask why I couldn’t tell you, think about it. Long and hard.” His smug smile transmuted into something stark. “As it became apparent over the past, I don’t know, five hundred incarnations of yours that you two were utterly incapable of keeping yourselves alive, I thought I’d finally better step in and fucking do it for you.”
Niko slowly sat up and Rafferty let him, but when I tried, he shook his head and held me down with his hand remaining on my chest. “I’m not through with you yet. Freeze your ass off for a couple more minutes while Curly tells us all how goddamn amazing he is.”
Robin scowled at the back of Rafferty’s head. He’d not been fond of the nickname the first time they’d met. “Scruffy leg-humper. If you owned a cell phone like every other creature walking, flying, or swimming the earth, I’d have found you sooner. And we’re in Banff, Canada, by the way, if Niko and you were curious.”
“He’s still healing me here,” I protested. “Could you not piss him off, which would waste all your work? Not to mention that I kind of like being alive—there’s that to think about.”
Before he could decide on whether it was worth it or not, Nik asked, “How did you get us out of the gate?”
“I didn’t. Grimm did. We have discussed how Grimm’s gates put the true Auphe and yours to shame. If anyone could pull you out of your own gate to another destination, it would be Grimm.” Goodfellow was in his element now, so self-satisfied and impressed with his own cleverness that he could barely stand it. “When Cal was first shot by the Vigil and Grimm showed up in your apartment—”
