by Rob Thurman
“Cal, are you awake?”
I managed to open my eyes nearly all the way. “Nik?”
I saw his face then, not just a slash of hair. I saw the somber scrutiny, the tense line of his jaw. “It’s me. You’re safe, Cal. I swear it.” I hadn’t thought I wasn’t, but if I had, I would’ve believed him. Nik never lied to me. But he didn’t look himself: calm . . . in control. The anger I’d heard was gone, but the longer he met my eyes, the more bleak his own looked. He looked grim and a little lost, and that wasn’t him. It simply wasn’t and why would he . . .
What had Rafferty said again? About my waking up . . . Auphe?
Then I remembered—all of it. Remembered it and felt it. The truck, the traveling, the Ördögs, the poor goddamn deer. I’d killed it or helped kill it and I’d eaten part of it. I could still feel the heaviness of it in my stomach. I should’ve been nauseated, but I wasn’t. I should’ve gagged and been sick, but my body wanted it—the raw meat—and it wasn’t going to let it go. I swallowed hard. No wonder Niko looked like he did. No wonder he reassured me I was safe.
But was he? Was anyone around me?
“I fucked up,” I said hoarsely.
“You fucked up,” my brother confirmed, his own voice impassive—not accusing, but not letting me off the hook either. Trusting in my word earlier hadn’t worked out for either of us, but his hand on my shoulder gripped harder. Whatever I’d done, we were family, and for Niko, that would never change.
I was leaning against his chest, my legs bent at the knees with my lower legs behind the driver’s seat and in the floorboards. And the hand on my leg was Rafferty’s. It wasn’t moral support either. If I tried to leave—to travel—Rafferty would stop me, temporarily or permanently. I wouldn’t want to guess which call he’d make, although, if he were smart, he’d pick the second choice, which I suppose told me the answer after all.
Because Rafferty was smart.
I tried to sit up. I could see now that I was in the backseat of the car with Niko and Rafferty. Goodfellow was still driving or, more accurately, sitting behind the wheel of a parked car. He’d been trying to catch up to the truck, but thanks to the wreck and Suyolak who had caused it, that wasn’t going to happen. Catcher was curled up asleep in the passenger seat. He was knocked out, the same as I’d been knocked out, but a little more gently, by a healer, not a fist—or then again, maybe not. He might only be sleeping off a full belly. It didn’t have to be one of his episodes. He could’ve smelled the blood when I hit the deer and joined in. The hunt and the kill was a natural thing to Wolves, the most natural of things.
Knocked-out or sleeping, he looked better than I felt. I rubbed my jaw. It didn’t feel broken, but it definitely was bruised. “I’m sorry,” Niko said. “Rafferty was occupied.” Joining the deer buffet or putting out Catcher, one of the two. I didn’t ask. “And I didn’t have time to spare with your ability to disappear whenever you wish.”
It was stated plainly; again, not an accusation, but I winced anyway. Salome, who hadn’t shown up in the fight . . . coughing up a resin ball instead most likely . . . was on the dash, soaking up the sun. She lifted her head, stared at me, and hissed. A mummy cat that killed anything that moved didn’t like the looks of me. That couldn’t be the best of things.
I narrowed my eyes at her and she flashed under the passenger seat, fast as a water moccasin in muddy water. Then I caught sight of myself in the rearview mirror. No wonder Niko was so somber when looking into what should’ve been a reflection of his own eyes but wasn’t. Instead, I saw red in the mirror—in the irises of my eyes, minute flecks of molten lava in the gray. Auphe eyes were that color red—had been that color.
And were still that color.
Because I was still here, wasn’t I? I was still goddamn here. What Suyolak had threatened to do to me, I’d done to myself.
Niko’s hand hadn’t left my shoulder. “Can you turn it off, Rafferty? The traveling? It’s what’s done this.” He didn’t ask me, either because he didn’t think I was in my right mind—and he could’ve been correct—or because I was so frozen that I couldn’t ask for myself. The why of it didn’t matter. He asked. He wasn’t wrong either.
Before the traveling had gotten so easy, before it made me feel so damn good, I’d been myself. Being me had never been worth any prizes, but I hadn’t been killing animals and eating their raw meat and considering rather happily doing the same to my fellow road-trippers.
I hadn’t been in my right mind for a while now and never noticed. Or worse yet, I had noticed, but I’d liked it too much to wonder why life had gotten so much better, things so much easier.
I’d seen those people before, all my life, the jackasses. Everyone had seen them walking around, wearing those idiotic T-shirts—I’M WITH STUPID with an arrow pointed sideways. If life issued those routinely when needed, Rafferty and Niko would both be wearing I’M WITH SCREWED with the arrows pointed directly at me.
Really, really so damn screwed and it was my fault, all of it.
Rafferty didn’t close his eyes as I’d seen him do once or twice when concentrating on a patient. He’d had plenty of time to examine my inner workings while I was out. “No.”
“You’re absolutely sure?” Niko persisted, his calm still seeping away bit by bit, and Suyolak wasn’t responsible this time. I was.
“The only way to turn it off is to turn Cal off, and I don’t think you want that.” Rafferty’s hand was warm now, close to uncomfortably so.
Niko’s grip tightened yet again, the joint creaking under it. “It’s in his genes,” the healer continued. “And the thing about Auphe genes? They’re dominant over human genes. Hell, no matter what they’d managed to breed with, they would’ve been dominant. They were the first sentient creatures on this world. The first, and, in a way, the best—at least at what they did: kill. Up until now you said Cal had traveled rarely and with side effects: vomiting, dizziness, bleeding. But then it had gotten easier, right? That means the Auphe part of Cal’s genes that had been dormant became active. And there’s more Auphe in Cal than just traveling.” He moved his gaze from Niko to me. “You might look human on the outside, Cal—mostly—but on the inside, that’s not the case. In your blood, in your genes, you’re something new and something old, and something completely unlike anything on this earth. Your traveling did that. It was a biological initiative . . . or for you, a trap. The more you traveled, the more serotonin your brain released, and the better you felt—a feel-good loop. A happy pill a hundred times better than any pharmacy could dole out. And now here you are.” His hand wasn’t letting me go.
Niko had said that back at the beginning of this . . . at Abelia’s RV, when I’d opened a gate. When I’d said I could control it—control myself. When he’d also said I was an adult with adult consequences.
And here I was, Rafferty had said.
Here I was, all right, and it was a place way beyond meditation’s ability to help, although Niko had done his best there. If I’d done it more often, been better at it, it might have worked. Then again, from the way Rafferty talked, it was all a matter of time. It had been since I’d been made. Each time I thought I was free of the Auphe, they came back closer than ever. Being one was as close as it came: not half, not part, but a card-carrying last member of a dead race. I wasn’t going to go through this again. I wasn’t going to agonize over it. I was through with bullshit. I knew what I was; I’d known all along despite a crapload of denial. It was time to pay the piper and no damn whining when I did.
Time to face those adult consequences.
I’d gotten upright with Nik’s grip on my shoulder and the other hand helping me. I didn’t try to move my legs. I didn’t know how Rafferty would take that. My shoulder was now against my brother’s and I felt him tense when I said it—without shame, without rejection, with nothing but acceptance of the alcoholic reaching rock bottom. “I’m Auphe. I’m not human. Not part-time. Not even on the fucking weekends. I’m Auphe.”
“No,” Nik refuted with instant sharpness, as he always had. He never gave up, but this time was different. He was going to have to, for both of us.
“No,” Rafferty echoed, still focused on me. “You’re not Auphe. But you’re right, you’re not human either and thinking you are while using powers that aren’t is only going to get you dead or someone else dead. Maybe a lot of someones. All the wishing in the world isn’t going to change that, and I can’t turn off the Auphe part of your genes.” He’d said earlier that he’d never manipulate genes again after what he’d done to Catcher. I didn’t blame him. I could end up a lot worse than Catcher with the possibilities riding in my genetics. “I can’t turn off the powers that go with them either,” he went on, “but I can make it very unpleasant for you to use them. I can take the feel-good away, and you might, no promises, but you might stay where you are now. The Auphe in you won’t progress. Or,” he finished matter- of-factly, “I can end your life now. Your choice. But I won’t let another possible Auphe, the last Auphe, loose on the world. Suyolak can’t make you all Auphe like he threatened, but he doesn’t have to. There’s enough potential in you to be walking, talking murder incarnate without any of his help.”
Rafferty was right and it absolutely did not matter. He might as well have been talking to the wind. Niko had kept my SIG while I was unconscious. The three of us in the back of the car, me between them, it made blades awkward, although not impossible for my brother. Nothing regarding a blade was impossible for him, but this statement was for me and he used my weapon for it. He had the muzzle of the automatic pressed hard against Rafferty’s forehead with an inescapable speed. Caesar, Genghis, Attila, Alexander… I’d said it before: They all fell in Niko’s shadow.
“The only life ending will be yours,” he said flatly.
He had what looked like three pounds of pressure on a trigger that took a little less than four. Rafferty could kill him, stop his heart, explode a vessel in his brain, but the death spasm would take the healer along for the ride—all over an Auphe. A healer wasn’t dying because of that. And there was no damn way my brother was dying because of me.
I put my hand on Nik’s wrist and squeezed. He didn’t look at me and I didn’t expect him to. In battle, you kept your eyes on the enemy. I only had to get him to see that Rafferty wasn’t the enemy. “It’s okay, Cyrano. Adult consequences, remember? I’ll let him fix me.”
Fix me. . . .
He couldn’t fix me, though, could he? He could only cripple me—the bastard who imagined I needed fixing at all. I’d accepted who I was, hadn’t I?
Maybe I even liked who I was. I did like being able at work to scan the bar and make someone hate me or fear me with a single look. Wasn’t that better than being ashamed as I had been in the past? Wasn’t having others fear me better than fearing myself? Rafferty wanted to take the feel-good away. The feel-good was called that for a reason. It was the rush that made life better . . . more than better. Made it what people wished for when they were kids: perfect, everything you wanted, everything you needed, and you were ruler of it all. King of the mountain. King of all the mountains and everything that lay between them. Nothing could touch that feeling. No one could take it away either—not if you didn’t let them.
Not if you killed them first.
Ripped them apart. Eviscerated them and spread their guts for all to see.
Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be better than the fanciest of paintings?
I could kill them all, saving my brother for last, to show him all the training in the world couldn’t beat what you were born with. Even Niko couldn’t kill me if he couldn’t catch me, and no one could catch me when I started traveling. I could open a gate and come out behind him or above him and put a bullet in his head. It would be easy. I could see it: the head that had shared the same pillow with me when I was five; the bullet hitting, the blood staining his blond hair. I could see . . . I could see. . . .
The head that had shared my pillow then, to watch over me, because he knew before I did that monsters existed.
Monsters like me.
God. Rock bottom, I’d thought before.
This was rock bottom: thinking, relishing accomplishing what I’d die to prevent anyone else from doing to my brother. And if that anyone else also happened to be me, that was fine. I would die first. Fucking die.
“Now,” I said in a voice not mine, not remotely close, “Nik, let him do it now.” Or someone in this car would die. I only hoped it would be the right person. Rafferty would be reading my intent to vanish, because part of me was fighting hard to run, the part of me that had to be tamed so I could live. If it won, it would also lose. I hoped to God Rafferty made sure of that. But then Rafferty and Niko would follow me within a fraction of a second, Nik’s finger still tense on the trigger.
“Now,” I repeated, although it was so goddamn difficult to say.
Why was the sane option unbelievably hard to hold on to?
Then again, who wielded the almighty right to define sane?
Them? The weak? Why not me?
“Hurry the fuck up.” Not only was it not my voice; it was not a human voice at all.
Niko slowly let the gun fall while Rafferty put that scorching hand on my head and I learned what brain surgery without anesthesia was all about. Later Nik told me the brain actually can’t feel pain, only the nerves and muscles around it. I took it on faith that that was true for human brains, but for a part- Auphe brain, some Mayo Clinic geek needed to do some serious research in that area, because there was pain. There was more than pain. I could feel Rafferty in there, a thousand scalpels slicing every cell, a hundred, a thousand, a million times. It was pain beyond vision or breath, beyond hope of an end to it, beyond hope of anything but an eternal hell of agony. I wished that same million times that he’d killed me instead. It was never answered except that each time I made that wish, I felt another piece of me slashed open. It was minutes, in reality, I guessed, but it felt like years—thousands and thousands of years.
That made it easy to understand that when I could see again, I saw my hands around the healer’s throat doing my best to strangle the life out of him. My best was good. If I hadn’t been weak from that pain, I’d have succeeded. Rafferty wasn’t doing anything to stop me. Niko reached past me to peel my fingers from the purpling flesh.
“Sorry,” Rafferty apologized, massaging his throat. “You said hurry and I needed to. If I’d had more time, I wouldn’t have let you feel that. But you were—” He coughed harshly and substituted a rough hand movement aiming toward the sky. He was right. I’d been more than halfway gone in intent and a second away from the deed.
My head still throbbed without mercy and I methodically pounded it against the front bench seat. It was that kind of pain, the sort that makes you want to knock yourself out to escape it. Hitting rock bottom, acceptance of your addiction; officially those two concepts sucked. Doing the right thing also sucked. I might think differently later, when this passed, but at the moment I wasn’t counting on it. Niko’s hand rested on my back and that should’ve made it better. He was Nik again, my brother—not just one more victim in the crosshairs.
I hit my head harder. This time I wanted the pain. I deserved it. Having that thought about the only family I had, the only one who’d given a damn about me for most of my life, I deserved pain. Being crazy was no excuse. Going Auphe was no excuse. There was no goddamn excuse for it. It was Nik.
Rafferty should’ve killed me.
But he hadn’t, and I had to deal. Niko had done everything possible to save me. I’d let him down once—shit, more times than I could count. But right now, I was going to step up to the plate. Be a fucking man, even if genetically I didn’t come close. I heard Robin move in the front seat to lay one on the back of my neck. It felt like ice through my sweat-soaked hair. My chest hurt too, my heart beating so fast I was surprised it hadn’t torn its way through my chest. Yeah, good old rock bottom. Wasn’t one of the twelve steps to r
ecovery accepting a higher power? I didn’t believe in a higher power. I wished I did so I could hope one day to kick its ass for this.
“It’s all right, kid. It’ll pass.” He was probably guessing, but I appreciated Goodfellow’s effort. He’d been my friend for a while now, as hard as it had been to admit I could have friends—that I could trust someone besides my brother. But Robin was a friend, and a friend would lie to you when the truth wasn’t worth hearing.
“This is it,” Rafferty said quietly, words raw from a throat he felt didn’t deserve to be healed, else he would’ve done it. No bedside manner, but he’d been better off with a great bedside manner and a little less conscience. “It’s called serotonin syndrome. A little serotonin makes you feel good—like you did before—but a whole lot of it will kill you. Every time you travel, this is what you get—a shitload of serotonin your body isn’t meant to handle. The headache is from your blood pressure skyrocketing. A human might stroke out, but your human-Auphe brain can take it. The chest pain is from the tachycardia, your heart working triple time. Your body temperature will go up too, hundred two, hundred three. That’s from one jump. You make another one, you get another serotonin dump, and the blood pressure goes even higher, which your brain may not be able to handle. Your heart beats faster; your temperature goes up to one oh four or six. All of that has a good chance of killing you. A third jump . . .” He stopped before completing that sentence. Complete it he did though, sounding anything but proud. “A third jump means no more Cal.”
And that meant no more Auphe.
Okay then—problem solved. I couldn’t travel enough again to remotely think black and bloody Auphe thoughts about killing my brother. I’d die first, and that was fucking peachy by me. I stopped beating my head against the seat, though, and suffered through the headache. Goodfellow’s hand disappeared from my neck and I heard the gurgle of water. A moment later a bottle of water was slowly poured over my head and neck. It felt good, better than good, as my skin cooled beneath it. Taking a breath and shoving the pain down, I straightened, and what did I face?
