by Rob Thurman
When he was gone, I thought of how Promise hoped her daughter cared for her. I never had to hope my family cared for me. I knew.
Family—it can be the making of you or the breaking of you. If it had been only me as a child with Sophia, with no one to protect, to stand with, to share that cold, empty life . . . Sophia could’ve been the breaking of me. Cal . . . Cal had been the making of me.
I settled in to watch for the Auphe, Seamus, and any more of Cherish’s problems. I turned the lights all the way down and did silent katas in the dark. You could lose yourself in the smooth movements, in the structure and the balance. If you let yourself. I didn’t. I moved and listened and watched. I shifted the inner tangle of emotions aside and pushed away the image of pale blond and earth-brown hair spread over a silver-gray pillowcase. I ignored the phantom sensation of skin against mine, intermingled breath, and a giving warmth under my hands.
Conflict and confusion could get you killed. Focus and a calm mind kept you alive.
I doubted Seamus felt conflicted or confused—he knew exactly what he wanted—but that next morning he was dead nonetheless.
The sun was barely coming up when Cal’s cell phone rang. It was lying on the couch where he’d discarded it after calling Samuel hours before. I wasn’t surprised it was Samuel again. Cal wasn’t the most social of creatures. Very few people had his number, especially since he’d convinced Robin to stop writing it on bathroom walls.
“Yes?” I answered.
“Niko?” Samuel said.
“Yes,” I repeated evenly. Despite his help with the cadejos, I was still on the fence regarding Samuel. I couldn’t imagine that would change anytime soon.
From his reserved tone, he picked up on that. “We have a cleanup at your friend Seamus’s place. You might want to take a look first, since he was your client.”
“He’s hardly our friend and no longer our client,” I said shortly. “If we do go there and he’s alive, I’ll kill him. And as I’m human, I can be as overt as I care to be. And right now I’m in the mood to be extremely overt.”
“Trust me, the alive thing, you don’t have to worry about that.”
He was right. An hour later we were looking at Seamus’s body and head, neither of which shared a relationship anymore. When that person was trying to kill you, you like to see that sort of thing with your own eyes. To be certain—and I was certain: Seamus wouldn’t be a problem for me anymore.
“Well, this has to be the best news you’ve had all week,” Robin observed, nudging the decapitated head with a foot covered in one highly expensive shoe. There was very little mess. Once the heart stops beating, which would’ve been nearly instantaneously, there’s nothing to pump the blood out. Despite what most literature said, vampires did have hearts that beat as human ones did, and they stopped just the same.
“He’s been drinking blood,” Cal reappeared from a quick recon of the loft.
Promise, who’d been looking at Seamus without a hint of emotion in her eyes, lifted her gaze. “Drinking? How do you know?”
“The dead girl in the bathtub was pretty much a dead giveaway,” he answered grimly. “Her neck’s torn out. I guess Seamus wasn’t taking those Flintstone vitamins you guys swear by. Bastard.” He delivered a perfunctory kick to Seamus’s body, which rocked under the blow.
Although she had said she would kill him herself, Promise now winced and said with dark melancholy, “Seamus, cara mo anam, how far you fell.”
I almost reached out and ran my hand in one sweep from her shoulder down to her wrist, but I didn’t. Although, current differences aside, I understood how she could feel that way about him considering their history—bloody and violent though it may have been. She wasn’t feeling for him, but for what she thought he had managed to become. Another lie—his this time.
“Cal.”
“What?” He folded his arms stubbornly and glared at me. “He tried to kill you, and it looks like he killed enough girls to have the Vigil on his ass. He deserves exactly what he got.”
Robin, for once defusing the pressure rather than adding to it, said lightly while scanning the walls, “His art will most likely triple in value. Anyone for a souvenir?”
Only Cherish seemed shocked and upset. She knelt by his torso and rested her head on the still chest. “Tíío. Papa.” There were no tears, but grief hung gray beneath the pale brown of her skin. Xolo, in what was turning out to be typical behavior, lurked in her shadow. Cherish raised her eyes to Promise. “This is your Seamus, Madre. Our Seamus. Why do you just stand there?”
“Yes, this is Seamus, and he was a killer long past our killing days. He killed innocents and he tried to kill Niko. He’s my Seamus no more.” Promise’s melancholy disappeared under an iron determination. “Obviously, he won’t be needing his place any longer, and Oshossi’s cadejos don’t know of it. They do know of my penthouse. You will be safer from them here as well as from the Auphe, hija.” She reached down and smoothed the black hair.
“But Oshossi . . .” Cherish began instantly, her mood shifting just as quickly to demanding and desperate as she rose from Seamus’s body.
“No matter what you think, Cherish, Oshossi isn’t nearly the threat the Auphe are. This is the best way to protect you, and I do want you protected. Call us if he manages to find you again and we’ll do what we can to help you.” Pausing, she corrected, “I’ll do what I can to help you.” She felt she couldn’t speak for me, and I certainly wasn’t sure I could speak for Cal in this case. He watched out for me the same as I did for him, and while he had suggested last night that I would be happier with Promise than without, there was no guarantee he would want to lend our support to Cherish when we could least afford to give it. I’d say Robin would be even less inclined. But as for me . . . I couldn’t not say it.
“I’ll come as well.”
Cal’s jaw tightened, Cherish’s son-of-a-whore remark still with him, I knew, but he gave in. “Shit. Fine. We’ll help.” The “but I don’t have to like it” hung unspoken in the air.
“Lemmings,” Robin sighed, “all of us. Still, it should be entertaining if we don’t end up dead and buried.” He walked to one wall and took a painting of blues, purples, and an acid green. “I wonder who did our artist friend in. The Vigil is good, but good enough to take Seamus’s head without a struggle? They would definitely be a force to be reckoned with.” He considered another painting and took it as well. “Ah, now, this one I like.” It was a nude, of course, in a startling primary red.
“A force indeed.” I gave Seamus one last look and then dismissed him as ancient and decomposing history. If I nursed a feral satisfaction, no one need know about it. “Are we done here?” I addressed everyone, but Cal in particular, whose face had gone from annoyed to bored in a heartbeat as Robin had rambled on about the power needed to kill Seamus.
“Yeah, I’m more than done.” He headed for the door.
Cherish’s eyes followed us as we left, and they weren’t saddened anymore. They were brilliant with anger and fear. She really was in a trap of her own making, but from what I’d seen, she could hold her own in a fight. Young or not. It might be enough. It might not. The same could be said of us.
“You would go with them?” she demanded incredulously. “You would choose them over me?”
Promise stopped in the doorway at that, softening further. “If you had seen the Auphe but even once, you would know the escape I’m giving you. Now, there are those outside who will be in to clean this all up. Get the keys from them. And please be as careful as you can. Know I’m never far.”
“But I am never close, am I?” she said softly, but with a trace of bitterness. It could’ve been aimed at herself or her mother, but she shut the door between us before I made the determination.
“And this is why I’m glad I reproduce in the old-fashioned way,” Robin said as he balanced the paintings that were too large to tuck under an arm. The Vigil were four men waiting at the end of the hall for us to be finished
with our business. They were dressed in uniforms, not brown or gray, but somewhere in between. They could’ve been movers or exterminators. No one would know or care enough to ask—which is no doubt how they managed to get away with a good deal of what they did. No one noticed; no one cared. Much as I did not care either. I was more curious about Robin’s comment than I was about the Vigil’s cleanup methods.
“Which would be?” I asked. Not once had I come across in any book a hint as to how pucks multiplied. Since there were no females of the species I was sure it was, if nothing else, noteworthy. And, no doubt, profoundly pornographic. These were pucks after all. Someone had once called Goodfellow a mitotic bastard. It was a clue, but it didn’t go far enough for picturing it in your head . . . if you were perverse enough to want to.
“Should I decide to double your pleasure in all things Goodfellow, you’ll be the first to know,” he retorted with a wicked grin. “Participation isn’t strictly necessary, but I always enjoy an appreciative audience. Volunteers are especially”—he caught Promise’s eye and shifted smoothly—“but never mind that. I was thinking Thai for lunch. Any takers?”
Promise’s gaze moved to meet mine. What I saw there . . . I wasn’t sure what it was. A chance? An unwillingness to surrender what we had? Both perhaps, and both still built on secrets. She had compromised with me . . . my half-Auphe brother. Our ongoing battle with those monsters. She had been loyal when it would’ve been in her far better interest to be otherwise. She had risked her life. Actions are supposed to speak louder than words.
I still wanted the words.
I wanted the truth—whole and unvarnished. I wanted it all. With my mother, I had had nothing. With my brother, I had the words, the action, and the truth . . . no matter how grim it might be. I had no experience with the territory that lay between the two extremes. I didn’t know that I could dwell there.
I caught Cal’s elbow before it could connect with my ribs. I looked from Promise to him and he tapped his nose meaningfully. “I’m good for another one,” he said.
“You’re a good brother,” I replied dryly. Despite his good, if overly physical, intentions, now wasn’t the time to make any decisions. It was time to concentrate on the Auphe—they were certainly concentrating on us.
Cal had said they would come. He’d said it hollowly in the dark of his room where the only light had come firefly-distant through the window and from the sickly gray illumination flowing around his hand. They would come and they would come soon because that’s how he thought . . . no, how he knew they would think.
I wanted him to be wrong. And it wasn’t that the more time without the Auphe, the more time we had to sharpen ourselves, to prepare. It was a good reason, but that wasn’t it. I wanted him to be wrong because I didn’t want him thinking that his thoughts were the same as Auphe thoughts. They weren’t. Cal was not Auphe. In the past, I’d threatened those who’d said that. And I’d hurt those who’d attempted to act on their belief, inflicted a great deal of pain with an even greater lack of regret. I wouldn’t have anyone believing Cal was Auphe, not even himself.
But in another way I wanted him to be right. If he were right, then what I suspected from what he had seen in Washington Square Park would be wrong, and I’d never wanted to be wrong so much in my life.
The universe, in its infinite indifference, didn’t care either way. The Auphe came that evening.
Filthy, malevolent monsters.
I was oiling the katana when the first whirlpool of tarnished silver light formed before me. I had the dining room table covered in newspaper with the rest of my blades fanned in a semicircle, waiting their turn. I heard a door slam against a wall, the sound of spraying water, and Cal shouting, “Auphe!” If a gate was opened close enough, within a few blocks of him, he’d feel it . . . just as he felt this one.
And the one that followed.
Cal came running down Promise’s hall, dressed only in sweatpants, still soaking from his interrupted shower. His face was already set, frozen and blank. He had the knife he kept with him always and the gun he must’ve taken into the bathroom with him. Prepared. He had believed what I hadn’t been able to drive from his head. That Auphe blood was Auphe blood. That Auphe was Auphe.
Two gates . . . one less than he had said. It was a small number, and I was afraid that made me right and him wrong. On the other hand, two Auphe were enough for a suicide run, as Cal had guessed. We would see.
I stood with katana ready. I’d seen my first Auphe when Cal was three and I was seven. I was sure they’d been there since Cal was born, spying, but that was the first time I actually saw one. It had been at our kitchen window while we ate supper. Sophia had been out doing what she did: drinking, conning, or whoring. All three at once, maybe. I’d known from a younger age than seven that that’s what her life was. This time she’d gone out instead of bringing her work home with her. It was better that way. Fish sticks and cartoons for Cal. A sandwich and a book for me. Sixteen years later, I thought wryly, things weren’t so very different.
I hadn’t minded being home alone then. It was safer. There was no yelling or slurred insults or thrown whiskey bottles. There were none of Sophia’s “friends,” the kind that paid before they walked through the door. There was quiet, Cal’s occasional laugh at the tiny TV screen, and The Lord of the Rings. The librarian said it was too much book for me, and I’d told her she was wrong. But when I’d lifted eyes to see what shared the winter night against the small dingy window, I wondered if I’d been the one who was wrong.
The glow of red eyes, the triangular white face with tarnished silver teeth so wickedly fine you couldn’t begin to count them all. It could’ve come straight from the pages in front of me. It smiled as I froze. Smiled and then tapped a black nail against the glass. The sound convinced me of what my eyes couldn’t. It was real. Monsters were real. Those awful things Sophia said about Cal’s father . . . I’d managed to turn my head to see my brother. He was on his last fish stick, face bright and happy as the TV burbled. I jerked my eyes back to the window. Empty. I’d swallowed hard and felt warm wetness at my crotch.
Real. It was real.
I’d put Cal to bed, which was my bed too. Sophia wasn’t wasting money on two beds when we both fit in one. It was the first time I was glad she was cheap; it let me watch Cal, protect him. And now I knew he really needed it. Sophia was a liar, but the one time I wished she had lied, she did worse. She told the truth. I had cleaned up and washed my pants in the bathroom sink. I didn’t sleep a minute that night, and I didn’t say a word to Sophia when she came home, but it didn’t matter. She saw it the next day—the spidery handprint on the window. Cal was sitting at the table with the bowl of oatmeal I’d fixed him when she bent down to be face-to-face with him. “Daddy came, didn’t he?” Her smile had less teeth than the monster’s, but it was as cold and hard. “Daddy came to see his special little boy. His little half-breed freak.” I still remembered the crumpled look of confusion on Cal’s small face—his eyes wide and wary with dread behind long black bangs.
Every time I saw an Auphe, I saw my first monster. I felt that echo of that first knowledge that there were things foul and hideous in the world. But now? Now I was ready for the monsters . . . the murderers . . . the dealers of death. And when the Auphe came through the light, I was ready for it as well. I couldn’t think of it as female, no more than I would’ve thought of a shark as male or female—just as death. I sliced at it, but the narrow head and pale flesh slithered under the blow so quickly that it was inside my guard almost before my eyes registered the move. The predator unparalleled.
Almost.
As it lunged at me, it impaled itself on the dagger I held in my other hand, close to my hip. I didn’t say anything. There was nothing in an Auphe worth wasting words on, but I did smile. It was a Sophia smile, cold, hard, and satisfied. Then I ripped the blade upward, from abdomen to bony sternum. Where Cal’s blood had been warm on my hand a year ago, this blood was cool and slippery.
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“You are quick.” It moved an inch closer, giving me a smile of its own as bone scraped and caught on steel. “For a sheep.”
I was. I was quicker than Cal and Promise, and close to a sober Goodfellow. I excelled at what I did. I was a scholar, a friend, and a brother, but beneath it all I was a killer, pure and simple. Better at taking lives than anyone or anything you’d meet walking the street. I’d made sure of it. And this evil was the reason why.
I ripped the blade free and slashed it across its throat. But its throat wasn’t there. I was quick.
Auphe was quicker.
I felt the claws ripping across my chest and I dove for the floor. Ignoring the puddle of Auphe blood pooled on the wood, I swung both blades outward in an open scissors motion and caught its legs. Barely. Trailing more blood, it leapt on top of the table and then back onto me, taking me down. For all the damage I’d done, to an Auphe it was superficial. It could live with it. I didn’t plan on letting it. This time my blade punctured its chest, but not its heart. They didn’t carry their hearts in the same place as humans, and suicide run or not, this Auphe had no plans on going anywhere without me.
The Auphe laughed from above, tasting its own blood as if it were wine. “A worthy piece of prey. Struggle all you wish. We shall take you, we shall take them all, and only then shall we take him.” This time teeth found my throat just as my other blade, strapped to my thigh, found its heart between its ribs from behind. I felt a jolt of satisfaction as strong as the pain that flared under my jaw. Getting a knee between us, I heaved it off.
With my blood flowing down my neck, I was halfway up when it came back with my knife embedded in its heart. Still fighting. Essentially dead, but still fighting. I pulled my blade out of it and sliced it across its abdomen, spilling its guts to the floor. It kept coming, taking one step, another, until it fell. Finally, it fell. It was the first time I’d ever seen shock in the eyes of an Auphe. A human had killed it, a sheep with mere blades.
