by Rob Thurman
Clichéd? Sure. But I respected the classics and I couldn’t resist the sarcasm. I couldn’t resist sarcasm at any time when it came down to it. I ate it sprinkled like parmesan on my spaghetti and substituted it for Tabasco sauce on my tacos. Plus it had been free.
Cal’s face, now that I could see it clearly instead of as a grubby reflection, was mine, if a little fuller—not close to baby fat, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t wait to lie and tell him so. He did lack my scars—too many to list in my brain just now. There were a few that made a difference, that made me different from this younger version of me. The ones not hidden by my clothes. The ones he could see and doubt even more when the truth came out. There was the one that stretched from my temple to an inch or so above my right eyebrow and the ones that circled both my wrists several times that looked as if playing with razor wire was my favorite hobby. Although the scar around my left wrist was concealed by braided metal. I adjusted the thick band of twisted black and red that started around my wrist and wrapped its way like a tangle of poisonous vines to just below my elbow.
“Thirty-eight or not, I don’t need a gun to kill you, asshole,” he said flatly. “I could kill you with the ink pen by the cash register, a dirty glass, or a used napkin folded in the shape of a motherfucking swan. And don’t think I wouldn’t have enough time to do some origami, shove it down your goddamn throat and watch you choke on it before you could move.”
Heh, good one.
Of course, good one or not, he was still a liar as we’d been since we’d learned to string together more than three words as a baby. He had the thirty-eight, no origami, halfway up, the muzzle over the counter and the grip still below. But with the muzzle pointed at me, I didn’t give a damn where the grip was. He was a stubborn asshole, I thought as I slid to the side as if the air were oiled, seized my barstool, pivoted to slam it into his hand holding the gun. As the gun skitted across the bar and flew several feet across the room, I considered such success should be rewarded. Slamming was working well for me and I repeated the action, this time with Cal himself and not simply a gun.
I threw myself on top of the bar—a lion perched on a rock ledge—rested on my stomach, folded my arms, and peered both over them and the edge of the counter. Cal was on his ass, tangled in the remnants of the stool, and glaring up at me with an unbelievably young, eighteen-year-old smooth-skinned face as icy and empty as any you’d see on death row. He wasn’t as emo as I remembered . . . or maybe I’d been the only one to know it then, keeping it inside. He was afraid, though—of what he thought I was. Terrified as I would’ve been back then in his practically preteen combat boots, but he didn’t let me see it.
Real lions or those that had forgotten they ever were, it didn’t matter: We always made fear our bitch.
“I warned you about the thirty-eight.” I grinned then advised, “You should’ve gone with the origami.”
“Give me the fucking napkin and I will fucking happily prove your ass right,” he snapped, throwing off pieces of the stool. He might have a bruise or two, but I’d pulled that punch as much as I could. I didn’t want to wake up in the future missing an eye or an ear.
“Damn, I had fucking attitude out the ass even in diapers, didn’t I?” It was a compliment whether he recognized it or not. I freed one hand, plucked up a crumpled napkin and tossed it down to him. He hurled back a metal leg with all the force he had. I pulled my head back, waited, then risked another look. This time I kept my arms unfolded and tapped the fingers of both hands idly close to the edge. “You’re one cranky dick, considering you started this. And I’d rather have a dinosaur than a swan with the napkin, but, whatever, it’s your weapon of choice.”
I didn’t give him a chance to respond—it would’ve been annoying anyway—instead looking around. “Where’s Meredith? She’s chronically late, but damn it gets old.” The bar’s only waitress . . . when she felt like showing up. “Is she here or out getting her third boob job?” I asked, not bothering to fake a laugh. She ended up dead and mutilated by the Auphe thanks to me . . . or us. Laughs, fake as they would be, weren’t wanted regarding this. But Cal didn’t know about Merry’s end yet. “Doesn’t it piss you the hell off that you never get a single tip the nights she works? I’ve seen guys stare at a chick’s tits, but I’ve never . . .”
“Seen a woman stare at her own twice as much,” he finished, almost free of the rubble I’d buried him in. He was abruptly calmer now, oddly so, to what I’d have counted as beyond the strange and eerie at his age. Getting his ass kicked by what he knew, absolutely had complete faith was a monster. Hell, considering that, he was practically relaxed.
And that . . . that was a giveaway.
I knew what that attitude meant.
His lips curved, sharp and lethal, and that softer-edged face became as hard as the one I wore. All the uncertainty and fear inside him was gone. He had reached for more than a baseball bat and a gun under the bar from earlier. He’d gone for what was a hundred times more deadly than a thirty-eight. A phone with an emergency code. The jagged-glass smile widened. It was an expression I recognized well.
I know something you don’t know.
Unfortunately I did know. I had some serious talking to do ahead of me to get out of what was to come, but I’d expected that. I groaned in annoyance and moved my right hand, fingers still tapping, a fraction enough that the point of the switchblade went between my fingers instead of through the back of my hand. Cal’s own hand had appeared from beneath the bar along with the rest of him as he stood, swaying scarcely any. The knife throw had been damn fast, impressive in a kid his age, but damn fast wasn’t good enough anymore.
“I’d forgotten about that too,” I mused. “Took it off a drunk hooker whose boyfriend was her pimp slash cop of all things. The To Protect and Perv engraved on it was classic.”
It wasn’t the most lethal choice he’d latched onto below the counter, that I knew for a fact, but I liked it. I had fond memories of it. I might keep it.
Then came the fact.
I’d already admitted to myself that I hadn’t thought in the past on how a near twin would react to seeing himself. In the end, I didn’t need to think about it. He would see what I would’ve seen—a twisted genetic mirror, a relative in the worst possible sense. It was all either of us could comprehend. I knew how he would respond. I knew what he would do. We were the same—how could we act otherwise?
I knew what both of us would do: We’d call in our brother. It was what I’d been waiting on—someone who had brain cells and logic to drive them. We were going to need a huge amount of that logic now.
“Whatever you are, whoever you are, move away from him and you’re dead.”
It was his voice, frigid ice that was echoed in the cold metal of the katana blade resting against the nape of my neck. It was my brother’s voice and it hurt to hear it. Hurt like fucking hell, but at the same time it brought me back to life. Confusing as shit, but both were true. I’d been all but dead from the moment I’d appeared in that alley. Nothing had seemed real, not the people, the buildings, the city . . . not me.
Until now.
It was absolutely Niko, all of it. The voice, the katana, the fact that he didn’t say “step back from him or you’re dead.” No, there was no choice there. It was “step back from him and you are still dead.”
“That kind of honesty isn’t the best incentive, Nik. For future reference.” I sat up slowly, the edge of the katana’s blade against my skin every millimeter I moved, then turned my head carefully enough to not incite immediate decapitation to look at him over my shoulder. I let him see my face, my eyes the same color as his, Cal’s, our mother’s eyes. I let him see because I knew who could. Cal probably didn’t have the capability to overcome the distrust that was more a part of him than the humor or the monster genes. But Niko was smart. Niko could see the truth . . . hopefully.
I almost choked on my ne
xt words. At the last second, though, I managed to confess as casually as I decidedly did not feel. Apart from my effort at casual, I said the words exactly as I felt them. Warm and true.
“Hey, big brother. I’ve missed you.”
3
“And please don’t cut off my head.”
That hasty addition wasn’t due to an unrealistic fear. The casual let’s-all-be-calm attempt had been for a reason. Niko was not a fan of the unexpected, especially not around his little brother. It made him twitchy, although he was a statue on the outside. It hit him internally, where he thought no one could see. No one did, except for me.
Seeing him turned out to be worse than hearing him had been.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible. I grinned anyway, one of my rare authentic ones. I couldn’t help it. I hurt, God, I hurt, but . . . it was Nik. It was Nik and he was right fucking here. It was my big brother who’d kicked my ass in sparring just yesterday without half trying, and yet now, like my younger self, he was a baby. Tall, muscular but flexibly so and one of the best in the world with any kind of sword. A deadly lethal MMA freaking baby.
All right, not a baby, but there’s a big difference between twenty-eight and twenty, especially in the lives we led. Rode hard and put up wet should’ve been stamped across our ass.
“Always your brother’s keeper. I’ve told you about that. That I can take care of myself,” I said ruefully. “Unfortunately that hasn’t proven true.” No, it had not. “But now you’re here, it’s a party.” The pressure of the blade increased, unimpressed with me, my words, my everything. My brother was not and had never been or would be an easy man to impress—that was a fact.
“I did ask about not taking my head already. You wouldn’t do that to me, your little brother, would you, Niko Pali-busno Leandros? It’s the only one I have and you’re always telling me even one brain isn’t enough to keep me alive. What would I do without one at all?” I didn’t deny the truth of it. I had done some sincerely stupid shit in my life.
“Then there’s the fact that I’ve come one hell of a long way, eight years to be exact, to see you and . . . shit . . . myself,” I added.
I studied him harder than I had Cal. At this point Nik was in every way more intelligent, imaginative, and reasonable than Cal . . . and me, Cal eight years later. We weren’t ever going to be as smart as Niko. He was also a better fighter than eighteen-year-old Cal, although that Cal was innately cunning. He was also genetically gifted or cursed in his juvenile opinion, but it worked or would in the future and that’s what counted. Cal, though, could wait.
Niko couldn’t.
And this was Niko, twenty or twenty-eight, I needed him on my side; I needed him invested. He was my best hope. Cal . . . the younger me . . . he was good with a gun, but he didn’t have our more lethal fighting abilities yet. The kind you can’t buy but are born with, and the ones you can’t use until Auphe puberty hits you like a sledgehammer. They were the same skills I didn’t want to use in front of the two of them if I could avoid it. They weren’t ready to see what I could do, no one else needed to know, and then there was the prospect of driving Cal into a flashback ending in a foaming psychotic split.
I could say from experience that a theme park waiting to happen, they were not.
For now I was waiting to see if Niko was the same as I recalled. I hadn’t bothered to guess. Big brothers are always giants in our memories. And at eighteen I had worshipped my big brother . . . in the same way I had at five . . . and at twenty-six. What had he been like though, not seen through the haze of that little brother reverence? What was the reality of him now when Cal was eighteen, he was twenty, and everyone in the world was assumed to be against us?
As most of them had been.
“You’re saying you’re Cal?” he questioned slowly, but I wasn’t fooled. After twenty-six years I recognized suspicion and surprise on my brother’s face when I saw it. He had a hundred masks to hide his emotions, but none of them worked on me. “You look almost identical, save for the scars”—Nik was more observant on that than the younger me as some things never did change—“but you could be a relative and you know the kind of relative I’m speaking of.” Not the human kind . . . not the all human kind at least. “Then again, you know my name.” And that wasn’t possible was what swam unsaid under those words.
“Yeah, yeah. Eight years changes you some, okay? I’ll invest in a skin care regimen in the future if it makes you happy. And, yes, I’m Cal. An improved, faster, sleeker, undeniably extra ass-kicking future version, but I’m Cal.” I didn’t pay attention to Junior’s offended rant at that. I stayed focused on Niko. As for knowing his name . . . “Little Billy-goat. That’s your middle name, because you were stubborn; from day one Sophia said you were probably the only baby who potty trained himself in three days from birth.”
Swiveling back to Cal, I made no further move to vault down from the countertop. Neither did I react to the edge of the blade of Niko’s sword following me. “And Caliban Beng-rup Leandros. The monster. The devil of silver.” Caliban for half-breed monster and Beng-rup for silver devil. “That describes an A—a Grendel”—because neither of them would know the word “Auphe” as they hadn’t met . . . hadn’t met the one who’d told them yet—“all over, doesn’t it? Sophia had a knack for being a hateful, hurtful but one damn well-read bitch.”
I laid down the final proof with a familiar and affectionate exasperation I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried. Nik was careful in all our years. I was used to it. “Could anyone else know what I know and as a bonus be this annoying and obnoxious?”
He considered that for a moment as a very fair point, but gave a small negative shake of his head. “Killing you would be easier and safer than believing you,” he said as matter-of-fact as calling in a take-out order. Great. Nik would kill anyone to save his brother. I had never guessed it’d be me. That was serious irony there. I was about to gate my neck to a safer location—the hell with Cal’s possible psychosis. It wasn’t as if I could save them both if my own brother killed me first. But just before I did, Niko exhaled and let the katana fall down to his side. “Unfortunately, I do believe you. I know what could be my brother when I see him . . . and hear him and his tactless tongue.” How about that? Obnoxious and annoying finally paid off for me.
“Time travel.” He didn’t ask it, he said it—as if it were not simply the only option, but so obvious that he pitied those who didn’t know that. He was freaking smart as they came. That would never change with his age. “Hmmm. Interesting. However—” His voice sharpened.
“Say that word again, call him monster again, and I will go with the easy route. I’ll take your head and make a new future, not yours, for my brother and me. As no matter what you say, you are not him. You are not my brother. You could be, you might be, but right now you are only the possibility of one.” I’d forgotten about how touchy Niko came to that word when it was applied to the brother he had now. Fiercely, rabidly, intensely touchy.
“Okay. I’ll be good.” That made him twist the katana’s grip in his hand, more skeptically prepared than before. “Not good, that would be suspicious. I’ll be as good as I’ve ever been. How’s that? I’ll do my best to not kill me over the M word. Better?” I pulled the switchblade out of the scarred wood, retracting the blade, tossed it back to Cal, and slid off the counter back down to the floor.
“Heads up though,” I added. “I become used to that word down the road. You will too. You won’t like it, but you’ll get over it. You might want to try sooner rather than later on that, if you can, or you’ll be beating the living shit out of assholes right and left twenty-four seven.”
Niko was as I remembered him. Tough, willing to take out a threat to his brother without a second or first thought. He had no rose-colored glasses involving anyone except me . . . his version of me at least. Tough as hell when it came to anyone else, one protective son of a bitch when i
t came to his little brother.
He did look younger to me than I’d have thought. I didn’t know if he would have to anyone else. His face, too, was a tiny bit fuller, his build a shade less leanly muscular and iron-hard. In my imagination, Niko was ageless. In reality he was human. Mortal. Born with an expiration date. The Auphe lived a long, long time unless another Auphe had killed them for shits and giggles. I didn’t know about me, if I’d eventually age or not.
I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know.
Shaking off the thought, I concentrated on the rest. The long dark blond braid was there, the dark clothes and long coat, the forbidding expression now fading that said he’d fight to the death if you gave him a reason. He was Nik in all the more important ways. And he was here, right here . . . real . . . and that was something I couldn’t . . . didn’t . . . fuck. I dropped back onto the stool next to the one I destroyed, propped my elbows up, and let my head fall into my hands.
I had time for other issues but not time for a psychotic breakdown of my own. Accepting this Niko was correct was the better road to take, sanity-wise. I wasn’t his brother, simply the potential of one.
Cal, full of empathy as usual—because if Niko went into a box labeled NOT MY BROTHER then Cal went in one labeled NOT ME. It was the only way to survive mentally. “Me? How can he be me? You don’t believe this bullshit, do you, Nik?” Cal demanded, flicking the lever on the switchblade I’d just returned, and made an effort at stabbing my hand again. This being the hand that was holding up my head. At my count, this was the third or fourth attempt at profound bodily harm and I was done with it.
I had the switchblade out of his grip before he was able to trim a single strand of my hair. I’d done it with a trick, a twist, and a lift that Goodfellow had taught me, combined with a speed that had made it virtually invisible. I twirled it with one hand, fast enough that it was a continuous circle of silver; that was one Niko had trained me to do himself and had me practice endlessly. It showed Cal how slow he’d been in his currently second try at using it.
