by Rob Thurman
The mirror again.
Things hadn’t changed. No, that wasn’t entirely true. The gray was still shot here and there with dark scarlet. The tiny flecks weren’t the blazing fire glow of Auphe eyes, though, but they didn’t belong in your ordinary human eyes either. Yeah, this was good. Before, there were some that could smell the monster on me. Now everyone in the supernatural world could see it. “What the hell,” I muttered, wringing my hair out as I eased back against the seat behind me. I covered my eyes with my other hand. “Great opportunity to get a few pairs of dark sunglasses. Expensive. People will think I work for the government or the Sunglass Hut.” I felt in my jacket pocket for my old pair. Nothing. Naturally. No sunglasses. No cheerful Cal. No anything. Auphe blood had made me a happy guy for a while, a short while, but it had felt nice. I should’ve known that was way too good to be true. No nice for Cal Leandros. It didn’t mean I didn’t miss the feeling—lie that it had been. But it didn’t mean I was going to let myself dwell on it either.
Dwelling on what I’d thought about doing to Nik was a different story. Getting me to open another gate was going to take one goddamn compelling reason or an act of God, and since I didn’t believe in the latter . . .
It wasn’t worth the risk, a Rafferty-engineered bomb in my brain or not.
“No bother, Niko,” Robin said. “I have several.” Before my brother could pass me his, I felt a pair folded into my hand. “Not quite a thousand dollars, so bang them up all you wish. I probably have twenty in my glove compartment.”
I slipped them on before opening my eyes. “I’m sorry.” The apology was for Niko. He’d trusted me and I’d blown it. Massively. Or my genes had. It didn’t matter where the blame fell. It served me right that now I could see what I’d done each time I looked in a mirror. I used to have a mirror phobia not that long ago—with good reason. I wasn’t going to let myself get away with that this time. No, this time and from now on I faced all that potential Rafferty had labeled me with.
Something new, something old, and something entirely unlike anything on this earth, Rafferty had said.
That wasn’t a lonely feeling. Not at all.
13
Cal
“You not talk to your brother.”
The accident, the ambulances, the police cars, the fire trucks; it was all still keeping us from moving. Rafferty couldn’t knock out fifty-some people, so we could drive around and follow the now-petless Suyolak. Or he could have if it hadn’t been for the energy he’d expended on me—I didn’t know and I wasn’t going to ask. I’d contributed enough drama to the situation. I wasn’t looking to add any more by making Rafferty feel guilty if he had run low on juice.
I was sitting on the edge of the highway among dirt and tufts of dusty grass here and there. I had my knees up, my arms folded across them, as I looked across the highway at nothing. Figuratively. Literally. Both applied. Although Utah wasn’t the flat-ass empty state I’d imagined. It would’ve been more appropriate if it were, because I was feeling flat and empty myself.
Delilah sat beside me, careless of her white leathers. “You not talk to me either?” She could’ve gone around the mess, blocking both sides of the highway on her Harley, but cops would’ve chased her. They wouldn’t have caught her, but then if she caught up with Suyolak, there wasn’t much she could do but die.
It was that kind of day.
No, I wasn’t talking to Delilah either. I wasn’t talking to anyone. There wasn’t much point. I was accepting. Accepting took quiet time. Quiet time let you avoid thinking, if you were exceptional in that area, and I was. It wasn’t denial; it was layaway recognition. I’d think about it about the same time I paid off Niko’s Christmas present. I was comfortable with that. Five months was a good time frame . . . for presents and self-realization and thoughts of blowing away a chunk of your brother’s head.
Delilah didn’t cooperate with my plan and Christmas went out the window. “Why the sulk?” She slid her fingers through my drying hair. “Things are no different now. You are Cal as you’ve always been Cal.” She inhaled my scent before admitting, “Perhaps some different, but same ingredients.” She smiled at her own joke and tilted her head to kiss my neck.
The same ingredients. Yeah. Delilah was sharp and she wasn’t wrong. But someone had taken the cookbook and rewritten a few amounts. A cup here, a cup there. I’d always said I was monster; I’d always said I was half human, half Auphe. But deep down I’d always wished I were more human than Auphe. I’d known better, but I’d wished anyway. All that dominant crap Rafferty had been talking about; I hadn’t known about that. I only knew what I felt and what I hoped. It didn’t matter, though, the past, because it was the now that was important. Now I knew. I wasn’t human with some Auphe. I wasn’t even a half-and-half hybrid. I was Auphe. If you looked hard enough, you might find a trace of human, a thin ribbon raveling through me, but when it came right down to it, I was Auphe or one step away from it. Rafferty had said it. He hoped he’d stopped the progression. I wasn’t much on hope these days. Reality: It was the only way to fly.
I was Auphe now and I’d only be more Auphe as the years passed. Stick a party hat on me and celebrate the splendor of the homicidal in its larval stage. I turned to look at Delilah as her lips left my neck. I thought of how I’d considered eating her at the deer carcass when I’d been more outside my mind than in it. I wondered how long it would be before I had the same thought, but calmly, rationally? Not driven to it by running prey, the smell of blood, or the Auphe part of me fighting hard against Rafferty’s building that internal wall. Thinking of eating her just . . . hell, just because.
She reached up and took off my sunglasses. “Ah, I was wrong. You are different. But different, it is not so bad.”
“If I kill and eat you, you might think again,” I said without emotion. “Or eat, then kill. Either or.”
Her smile was both seductive and wistful as this time she kissed my neck again and then licked it. “Now you think like Kin. You should not fight it.”
As she always had in the past, I guessed, and probably more so when the Kin found out about us. Another thing I’d known, but denied . . . or pretended to deny—before and after the Kin. I’d told myself that every night I’d spent with her was a carnivorous toss of the coin, but it was worth it. She wanted me, she liked me, and therefore it was worth it. Remarkably I still thought it was worth it, although it did make me respect myself a little less, which I would’ve thought hard to accomplish at that point. But life loved nothing better than proving my ass wrong. I took back the glasses and replaced them. Hell, she was a predator. I was a predator. Genes. Who knew how long it would be before I started tossing that bright and shiny coin soon, too, and one day . . .
Deer weren’t the only ones who would run. How long it would be before I could stop myself from the chase was anyone’s guess.
“Go away.” I resumed staring at nothing. She snorted at what she considered my brooding. Killers killed; predators ate; both played with their food. Why question that? Better to be who you were and not to look back. Kin, they were something all right, but I was hardly going to be a hypocrite and point fingers. I didn’t have that right. As I sat unmoving, Delilah gave an exasperated sigh, then cupped my head and kissed me on the mouth this time. I tasted deer blood. I just didn’t know if it was from her or from me.
It tasted good.
“Mopey cub, cheer up.” She gained her feet in one graceful movement, trailed her fingers along my jaw, and disappeared in the milling people bitching about the delay and the sun and the dust. I was assuming it had to be hot. The lingering fever still left me feeling slightly chilled, enough so that when the fur-covered body leaned against my right side, I didn’t mind the warmth.
I hadn’t talked to Nik, Robin, or Rafferty after the change in me that had taken place had really hit me. I’d taken the sunglasses and gone quiet—the whole not-thinking thing that I was striving for. I’d only talked to Delilah to make her leave me alone,
although I knew Niko would be back without a doubt. Catcher though—Catcher wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t try to tell me everything would be fine, which would remind me that, nope, it wouldn’t be. He wouldn’t be supportive when he should be punching me in the face for becoming an addicted asshole. He wouldn’t say I was still me—not that “me” had ever been that much to brag about to begin with. He would only sit there, a silent, wordless comfort.
The laptop dropped onto the ground in front of me.
Well, shit.
When I refused to drop my head and read the screen, teeth nipped me hard over the ribs. I hissed, glared at the wolf, and then read what was typed on the screen. He’d used the caps lock again, either to get his point across or because he didn’t believe much in my reading skills.
SUCKS TO BE ONE OF A KIND.
He rested his chin on my shoulder, sneezed at the dust, and waited.
“Yeah,” I commented after a long pause. “It does. Good Wolf or bad Auphe, it sucks to be the only one.” Great. First Delilah, then him. They both had me pulling shit out of layaway early.
This time he nipped my shoulder before retrieving from the dirt the ink pen he’d dropped to bite me. He typed: ALL AUPHE WERE BORN BAD. YOU ARE NOT ALL AUPHE. YOU HAVE A CHOICE. YOU CAN BE GOOD. He considered, then backspaced, deleting the GOOD and changing it to NOT SO BAD. At least he was honest, the fur ball.
Then he punctuated the sentence. Joy. “I didn’t know there was an emoticon for a dog humping another dog. Thanks for sharing.” I took off the glasses and rubbed my eyes.
There was more typing. I glanced at the screen. At least now that he was sure that he had my attention, he’d stopped with the capitalization. Cal smart monster. Cal can read. Good for me.
Knock knock
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I groaned.
Knock knock, he persisted, growling around the pen. “Okay, just to shut you up: Who’s there?” I gave in. Why not? At this point, it was almost ludicrous. An Auphe being counseled by a butt-sniffing pound reject.
No one. The Auphe ate everyone in the house.
“You son of a bitch,” I growled.
Knock knock. This time he didn’t wait for the “Who’s there?” Twenty cocker spaniels the Auphe is going to skin to make a pimp coat.
“Seriously, quit it or I will shoot your mangy ass.”
Knock knock
God, he was as relentless as Niko. “Last one,” I warned. “Last one or your ass is grass.” The threat didn’t hold much weight when it was followed with “Who’s there?” I went on, resigned.
You, and what happens behind the door is up to you.
He was smart and he was right, but my decision making had never been among the very best. Not as disastrous as the sinking of the Titanic was what I was usually shooting for in final outcomes, but I could try to do better. If Catcher could deal with being stuck being half of what he once was, I could deal with being more than I wanted to be. For a while. As long as my genes would let me. Next to Catcher, I’d be a complete jackass if I didn’t at least try to do that much.
“He’s a wise person.” Niko crouched on the other side of me. “You should listen to him. If you won’t listen to me.”
I closed the laptop and said to Catcher, “Scoot, Scooby.” The wolf made a sound halfway between a growl and a grunt, seized the computer in his teeth, and trotted off. I brushed dust idly off my jeans. It was just something to do. I was sitting in the stuff. I wasn’t coming clean. “I always listen to you, Cyrano,” I said, still uselessly rubbing at the dirt—my brand-new hobby, “except when I ate Bambi’s mom, and as I’d rather not mentally relive that, can we skip over it if I promise not to make any more exceptions in the future?”
He didn’t look at me, and I didn’t mind saying that scared the shit out of me more than the thought of being Auphe. Nik was always there for me. When I was a kid, if bullies picked on me, he was there . . . usually to pull me off the bullies’ backs as I tried to strangle them with my backpack strap, but he was there. He was there to stand between me and a scotch-bottle-throwing Sophia; there when the Auphe took me—just too busy not burning to death to be able to do anything about it, but he was still there when I came back psychotic as hell—temporarily psychotic, but still no damn picnic. And when the Auphe took me again, that time he did get me back, and there was never a time in my life he wouldn’t meet my eyes. But my eyes were different now, weren’t they? They were the only physical feature we shared in common and now we didn’t even have that.
He continued to look at the ground, braid of hair over his shoulder and lying on his chest, as he sketched a few letters in the gritty dirt. Fratres. “Do you know what that means?” He didn’t wait for my answer, although I actually had one that time. “It means brothers. The plural of the Latin word for brother. It’s part of that tattoo around your arm. At least they spelled that word correctly. We’ll discuss sterility of instruments, hepatitis, and the ablative case of Latin later.” Now he looked at me, amusement layered over something deeper and darker. “Yes, you have ‘brothers- in-arm’ tattooed around your biceps instead of ‘brothers- in-arms,’ but as always, it’s the thought that counts.”
Before I could groan at my . . . no, the tattoo parlor’s stupidity . . . Nik gripped that same tattooed arm. “I’m kidding. Fratres-in-armis is correct. Although you should have me vet all future tattoos in foreign or dead languages. Just in case.” His grip tightened as that deeper and darker became more so. “We’re brothers, Cal. We always will be. I don’t care if you grow fur like Catcher and hunt down and eat a deer every night. Six months ago I thought you died. This is nothing compared to that. I don’t care about your Auphe genes, and no matter what you do, no matter what,” he emphasized, “you will always be my brother.”
That was a big promise to keep, especially in the face of so many things. “Mayhem, violence . . . murder?” I asked quietly. “If I try to do those things? If I try to do them to you?”
“You already know the answer to that.”
I did. Real brothers, true brothers, stood by each other—even if it came to a Butch and Sundance moment. If there came a time that, like Catcher, I wasn’t myself and never would be again, if Nik had to be my combination Butch and Bolivian army, there was no one I would rather be the one to do it. I hadn’t wanted to talk to him earlier because I’d failed him. I often did and he more than often denied it. Sometimes I thought if I hadn’t been born, I still would’ve found a way to let him down. Sounds impossible, but I would’ve found a way to do it. Been incarnated as a cranky Chihuahua and mauled his ankle. Who knows? But if I had faith in anything besides my brother, I had faith in that. Niko believed in karma and I had bad karma stamped on my ass from the day I was born; yet I’d gotten nothing but the good kind in the form of my brother. It was hardly fair to him or his life, but incredibly good luck for me and my fucked-up one. I would be an ungrateful bastard to spit on it, although it would be the right thing to do, the noble thing, the Niko thing. And yet Niko himself would never let me. He never had before.
And he thought I had survival issues.
“Brothers.” I held out my hand and he gripped that instead of my arm. “But if you had any damn sense, you’d kick my butt off a ten-story building.”
“Brothers,” he reaffirmed. “And I know, but smothering you with your pillow would be less messy. You know I despise messy.” Behind the joke, he’d answered me in all seriousness. For the first time I thought he did actually know and wasn’t in denial about who or what I really was; yet that knowing still didn’t make a difference to him.
Hell, Niko was as screwed up as I was.
It was a revelation, but it didn’t change the fact that it was also a moving moment, doubly so when a foot slammed into my ribs, moving me over and against Nik. “This? This is why I give you the money that keeps starvation from our door? So you can sit in the dirt like a worthless beggar, the soulless monster and his clan traitor of a bar?” I’d picked up by now that
bar was brother, and I also discovered an evil, vicious old woman could swing a mean old-lady shoe. Her foot was the size of a child’s, but it had the feel of a three-hundred-pound football player’s size thirteen . . . with a pointy heel.
An arm came over me and across my chest to hold me back. Niko knew before I did myself that I was going for Abelia-Roo and I couldn’t blame it on the Auphe. I could’ve been human to the last cell, with ancestors who came over on the damn Mayflower, squatted on Plymouth Rock having tea and biscuits, and never saw a cute little fairy under a cabbage leaf, much less screwed a monster, and I would’ve felt the same: homicidal. She was calling Nik a traitor, when he’d almost died because of her? That took balls and if she’d been a man, I would’ve relieved her of them.
“We wait and we wait, because of you. Suyolak causes this.” She waved an arm at what was left of the wreck down the interstate. “We hire you to work, and work means you find ways around Suyolak’s machinations.” Dusty black and purple skirts rustled as she aimed another kick.
Niko caught her foot with his spare hand, which was smart. If I had caught it, I would’ve turned it into a paperweight and she could’ve beat her next subcontractors with the stump that was left. “Attracting the attention of the authorities will only slow us down and give Suyolak more time to pull ahead of us. Also the fact that I won’t let my brother take your foot home as a souvenir doesn’t mean I won’t pick up your eighty pounds of venom-spewing ancient body and stuff you back in that eye-searing RV from Easter Egg Hell. Now go.” He released her foot. “And reexamine your knowledge of souls. Those without aren’t equipped to make judgments about the status of others.”
