by Rob Thurman
Then came the second one.
There was silencer gunfire. . . . Cal . . . But the Auphe was as quick as the first. It came across the hall—touched with some blood, but not much, and moving so fast that I only managed to get the knife in my hand up bare inches before it was on me.
But Cal was on me first.
He wasn’t as quick as the Auphe, but he knew where this one was going. Cal had a head start and he made use of it. He hit me hard, his back slamming against my chest, and almost simultaneously the Auphe hit him. We impacted the dining room wall and hung there, pinned. Cal gave a guttural, “No. Me first. You take me first.” A human shield between the Auphe and me, protecting me where his gun had failed to. I tried to push him off, but in this he was as strong as I was, if not stronger. Cal would die for me. I knew it, but I didn’t have to accept it. I shoved again. Neither he nor the Auphe moved.
Despite the strained bulge of Cal’s bicep, one brutal clawed hand held Cal’s wrist down and the gun along with it. The other hand closed around Cal’s neck. That narrow jaw dropped to reveal its ripping capability in all its savage efficiency. Cal faced it head-on. “Me first,” he snarled again. “Take me, you bitch. Go on. Do it.”
There was a hesitation, then the jaws closed and it laughed. “You do not know. Cousin. Brother. Auphe.” It laughed again, and this time when it spoke I thought my eardrums would bleed. The Auphe language was as sharp as my blades, as brutal as a bullet-shattering glass. With every unnatural sound Cal tensed against me tighter and tighter. Then the gate appeared behind it and it sprang backward, disappearing just as Robin’s sword blow from the right and Promise’s from the left would’ve taken its head. Instead the gray light took half their blades before the gate vanished.
Cal fell off me. He tried to push away, but couldn’t coordinate the movement. He did manage to hit the wall solidly enough to lean against it beside me. His eyes were infinitely aged beyond that long-ago three-year-old boy, but the dread was the same. “You’re bleeding,” he said, the words syrup slow, before sliding down the wall and sheathing fingers in his still shower dripping hair as he drew up his knees. “I can’t do this.” He looked up at me with more desperation than he’d ever given an Auphe the satisfaction of. “You have to let me go, Nik. You have to.”
And selfish son of a bitch that I was, I kneeled down beside him and gave him my answer.
“No.”
Blind. I was so damn blind. I didn’t see what he was asking for. Not until his eyes fixed distantly on the gun that had dropped from his hand to skitter across the floor when the Auphe had disappeared. Cal wasn’t talking about running this time.
Auphe were quick, Cal was quick, but I’d never been so quick in my life. I grabbed his shoulders and held him firmly against the wall. “You promised me a long time ago. You promised you wouldn’t do that to me. You may as well pull the trigger on me first,” I said quietly, “do you understand?”
He swallowed thickly and bent his head to butt it against my chest like he hadn’t since he was five or six years old. “What did it say?” I asked, moving one hand to cup the back of his head. He’d understood it, one of the flashes that came from those missing two years, picking up the Auphe language. I wished he hadn’t, because I’d known without asking what it had said—I didn’t need to speak Auphe to understand what I’d wanted so badly to be wrong about.
The Auphe Cal had killed last year in Florida had been male. The last male we’d seen. Turn it around and you could say Cal had killed the last male Auphe.
When Cal had said all the Auphe in the park were females, I’d been uneasy. And when he’d confirmed the last Auphe before them, the dead one, had been male, I’d gone from uneasy to a balance of sharp worry and denial. Then I saw the shock in the eyes of the Auphe I’d just killed. It hadn’t expected to die. This hadn’t been a suicide run. They thought the four of us couldn’t take the two of them. They’d wanted to kill me in front of Cal and to make sure he knew, truly understood their new plan for him. No death. No escape. Nothing half so easy.
“They said . . .” He failed and tried again, but choked on the words.
“Never mind. It won’t happen. We won’t let it,” I denied, shaking my head. “You don’t have to say it.”
He did anyway. “The last male Auphe.” He shuddered with every word, but it didn’t stop him from repeating it in dull horror.
“I’m the last male Auphe.”
7
Cal
Guts stink.
Human, monster . . . it didn’t matter. They were rank, nasty, and had long ago lost the ability to bother me. They say nurses can wipe a patient’s ass with one hand and eat a sandwich with the other. It’s all in what you get used to, right? I lived a life where I was used to guts on the floor. Lucky me. Yeah, lucky, lucky me.
A pair of rubber gloves, a garbage bag, and I was good to go. I wasn’t wasting a Samuel favor on a mess this small, and as I was the only one not wounded, it fell to me. I doubted Promise’s cleaning service would’ve really understood. We don’t do windows and we don’t do body parts. Sorry.
“She’ll have to move. Between the cadejos and this, the stench will never come out.” Robin sat carefully at one of the dining room chairs. The flesh over his ribs was clawed and clawed deep, but other than that he and Promise had held off the second Auphe long enough that it hadn’t had time to turn its attention to Niko until the first one fell. Promise was worse off than Goodfellow, bitten on her shoulder and hip, and clawed from the nape of her neck to the small of her back, but she would heal a whole lot faster than he would, and feel it less.
Nik had a good swipe across his chest and a shallow bite on his neck. As it was right over his jugular, it would have to be shallow, wouldn’t it? A little deeper and he would’ve bled out before we could’ve done a damn thing to stop it. He would’ve died on the floor next to the Auphe and that . . .
Hell, that would’ve been that.
There’s another fact besides the guts-stink one. Sometimes you get pushed so far. . . . So much shit happens that you end up with three choices: You can eat your gun, you go catatonic and wear a diaper the rest of your life, or you can suck it up and go on.
For Nik, I picked the last option. I couldn’t have done anything else no matter how tempting another choice might have seemed for a second. Only the Auphe could make torture and death seem like a trip to Coney Island. Only they could make you wish that was the prize you won, being slowly ripped to pieces. That was the winning number and I could rip that lotto ticket up, because I’d lost big. But, hey, here’s the consolation prize. I got to be the last male Auphe in the whole damn world. Hybrid or not, pathetic half-sheep mutt that I was, I was all the Auphe had to rebuild their race. Which went to prove I didn’t know them quite as well as I thought I did. No suicide for them. The Auphe were mad, sure . . . join the crowd. But they were relentless too. They’d thought of a way to destroy the world before. Give them time and they might come up with another.
I was the time. Robin said Auphe lived nearly as long as he did, if not longer, but even twenty—no, eighteen now—Auphe might have trouble with world domination. But they could bide their time and breed. Build the race back up. And each successive breeding would slowly wipe out the human taint of the hybrid sire.
And Goodfellow thought he was a stud.
I bit back the jagged dark laughter. If I started that, then I would be in diapers when the Auphe came to drag me to Tumulus, and I didn’t want that. Because if they did manage that, then Niko would be gone and any promises I made would be gone with him. I wasn’t going to hell again, not to visit and not to live. The fact that I’d be insane the minute clawed hands threw me on ground glass sand under a dirty, piss yellow sky didn’t make a difference. I wasn’t adding to the Auphe population. I wasn’t making another monster, not a single one. Worse yet, I wasn’t making another one like me. Through Auphe arrogance I’d been left with Sophia for my childhood. Niko had raised me. What if the Auphe had in
stead? What would that baby have grown up to be?
The urge to laugh hysterically changed to the burn of bile against my throat, and I stopped thinking about it. Any of it. I had to focus on the here and now or I wasn’t going to make the next five minutes, much less long enough to come up with a way to save all our asses. See me suck it up. See me save my friends and brother. See me completely ignore reality so I didn’t lose my fucking mind.
I skirted my eyes around Niko’s blood on the floor as I kept scooping Auphe insides and tossing them in the plastic bag. Of all the blood I’d seen in my life, that was the blood I could never get used to—my brother’s. “If you think it smells, bring your deodorizer cat over here. That’ll fix it up,” I said grimly to Robin. “Maybe she could eat this . . . thing for us.” I didn’t even want to say the name. I definitely didn’t want to be touching it, but as I was the most mobile, I wasn’t going to let anyone else do it. And Niko had tried. He’d tried to push me into another room. Out of sight, out of mind. If he actually could’ve pulled the memory of the fight and the Auphe words out of my head, I think he would have. Hell, I know he would have. He’d suspected what those bitches wanted. Not that he’d told me. Never given me a single clue.
He was one goddamn good brother.
Niko wanted the truth in life. More often than not, I was happy with the lie.
“She’s dead,” Robin said with a snort at my ignorance. “Dead cats don’t eat. She only purrs, claws my furniture, and kills man-sized dogs.” He frowned at the last bit, then sighed. “What can you do? We are all true to our nature. It’s how Zeus made us.”
“Then Zeus can go screw himself if he’s responsible for this.” I knelt beside the body of the Auphe Niko had killed. She . . . it didn’t look any less against God-and-nature dead than it had alive. Empty red eyes and metal teeth slowly losing their mirror sheen, it gave death’s gaping grin. Against God . . . yeah, right.
“If I ever needed proof there’s no God”—and I didn’t—“here it is. No Zeus. No Allah. If there were, they wouldn’t let this kind of evil walk the earth.”
I heard the chair creak as Robin stood and walked away. Moments later he returned with a mop and bucket and slowly took care of the puddle of blood I couldn’t force myself to look at. When that was done, his hand braced itself on my shoulder as he squatted beside me, wincing as he did. “I don’t know. I did meet Buddha once, the skinny version, in India. He gave me half his rice, laughed at my clothes, and told me if I could stay celibate for an entire week I’d reach enlightenment.”
“In other words, he was screwing with you.”
“In other words,” he agreed, green eyes nostalgic. “But he made me laugh. I didn’t laugh much in those days, not and mean it. Maybe laughing is better than a god.” His hand squeezed, then let go. “Now, let’s do something about dumping this pasty bastard . . . ah . . . bitch in the river. I have a feeling Niko wants to pick up a LoJack while we’re out and strap it to your wanderlust ass.”
Robin had heard what I’d said about Nik letting me go, but he’d taken it at face value. He thought I wanted to leave in hopes the Auphe would follow me—the same idea I’d had earlier when fighting the eel. Probably for the best that he thought that. I didn’t need a twenty-four-hour suicide watch with someone holding my hand while I took a piss. Niko knew I wouldn’t break my promise. Goodfellow might not be so trusting. I didn’t clue him in, instead settling for a noncommittal shrug. And, truthfully, it still wasn’t the worst idea—except for the fact Niko would track me down faster than the Auphe, and we’d be right back where we started.
“Leaving might work,” he continued. “They may follow you and forget about us. And then again, they may locate you in a few weeks or months and dump our dead bodies at your feet. The Auphe have far more patience than you give them credit for. They don’t have to choose either/or. They can have their cake and mutilate it too.”
That was an option I hadn’t considered on the beach. Seems I wasn’t the only one who could think like an Auphe. But I was the only one who could breed like one. Good old science experiment Cal. A male Auphe could impregnate a female human, but apparently a male human couldn’t impregnate a female Auphe . . . or at least not as quickly as I could. Sure, I was better, being half Auphe, but it’d be easier grabbing a random guy with no gun, fighting skills, or lethal brother. Although good luck on him getting it up for a nightmare of pale skin, bone-cracking teeth, and eyes of blood. As for me . . . the Auphe and Tumulus would send sanity bye-bye on me. Madness, torture, the memories of probably the same from the past; the Auphe would get what they wanted from me. One way or the other. I just didn’t know if being insane would make it better or worse.
“Are you all right? You look like you might . . .” Robin made an obvious gesture with one hand, while patting my shoulder with the other and leaning away from me all at the same time. The guy had talent.
“Fine. I’m fine.” Frigging dandy. “I won’t run. Nik would find me and make me wish I was dead before the Auphe actually had the chance to do it.” It wasn’t a lie, just a rehashing of what Nik and I had talked about on the beach . . . before I knew what I knew now. We hadn’t told Robin and Promise that I’d understood what the Auphe had said, and when I’d told Niko I was the last male Auphe, it had barely been a whisper, and a garbled one at that. Robin and Promise didn’t know that while the Auphe still wanted them dead, they had different plans for me. And I didn’t want them to know. That kind of pity I couldn’t take. If I saw that on their faces every time I turned around, it would only make all of this more real. And right, now reality was the last thing I needed.
I stripped off the gloves, tossed them on the newspaper-covered table, and reached back to wipe a sweaty hand across the top of my back. My bloody back. Half dried, the sticky residue of Niko’s blood was rough against my palm. Before it had itched; now it burned. “Shit,” I said. I’d been unable to look at it, but here I was feeling it. The Auphe wanted me, but not yet. First I got to see the big show. Death and despair, and you want popcorn with that?
They wanted Nik first. They wanted me to watch. Wanted me to see. Wanted me wearing his blood.
And I was.
I moved for the bathroom and the shower without another word. I stood under steaming hot water, letting it wash the blood away. I was there a good five minutes before I thought to take my sweatpants off, and it was nearly half an hour before I stepped out nude from behind the curtain. Niko was waiting to toss me a towel.
He leaned against the double vanity as I silently dried off and wrapped the cloth around my hips. He hadn’t made a sound when he came in. I hadn’t heard him or the door over the thundering water, and I fully expected a swat for it. I didn’t get it. “Are you speaking to me yet?” he asked, folding his arms.
“ ‘Goddamn you, you son of a bitch’ was speaking,” I told him wearily.
And that’s what I’d said to him after revealing I was the Last Damn Mohican, my head burrowing into his chest like when I was a kid, and Sophia had told me another bedtime story about how the monster wasn’t under my bed—it was in it. That’s what I’d said to him for not letting me go out the quick and easy way.
That was me, shouldering my part and stepping up to the plate as I’d promised myself I would. Way to be a man. Really showing I’d meant it when I’d said things would be all right. Thinking like an Auphe, I’d said I could do it and I hadn’t, not by a long shot. Only I could manage to pull off being a monster, but not monster enough. I put the toilet lid down and sat, the back of my head thunking back carelessly against the wall.
“Pity party for yourself?” Niko asked dryly, but behind the sarcasm I could see the shadow of worry.
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” I exhaled. “BYOA. Bring your own angst. It’s festive as hell.” The bandage was white against the olive of his skin, but he was alive, and I felt the mental knot unravel a little at that thought.
“Perhaps I’ll join you. My brother . . .” He stopped, took
a long calming breath—probably to keep from banging my head repeatedly against the wall—and then started again, voice steady as a rock, worry to anger in a heartbeat: “My brother threw himself between me and the jaws of a shark. And if that wasn’t enough, he asked the shark to eat him first. Can you imagine how I would’ve felt if the shark had taken him up on it?”
“I’m guessing grateful’s not it.” Water—not Niko’s blood, just water—dripped from my hair and down my back. Cool and clean.
“No,” he replied grimly.
“Going to punch him in the nose? I hear he punched you.” The bruising under his eyes was more noticeable in the bright light of the bathroom. It’d been a good punch—short and precise with the exact amount of power I’d meant to go into it. Just as I’d been taught.
“No. That would be far too easy on him.” He loomed. Niko could loom like nobody’s business. “On you.”
“Nik, it wasn’t that big a risk. Hell, no risk at all.” The dripping water pooled in the small of my back, still cool, but not as cool as Niko’s expression. The cooler it got, the more pissed he would be. “We know better now. They won’t kill me.” No matter how much I demanded. “That’s not in their playbook anymore.”
“And as the Auphe are completely sane and utterly logical, we’ll depend on that? No, I don’t think so. It only takes one Auphe to get the taste of your blood and lose sight of its goal.” His lips tightened. “Just one. A shark can be docile, but throw one in an ocean of blood and all it would know is slaughter. The Auphe are the same. You can’t depend on madness. Or worse yet, they might not be as mad as we think. In that case, they might lose patience with vengeance and just take you. Leave the rest of us for later and take you to where I can’t get you back.”
It was true, although I had my doubts the Auphe would ever lose their lust for vengeance. If anyone could be mad and patient, it would be them.
