by Rob Thurman
But what the hell? Sanity was overrated. What had it ever done for me anyway?
“I’m sentimental. You’re optimistic.” I dropped back on the couch. “Watch out, Snow White. There’s two new dwarves in town.”
He wasn’t distracted. “Are you ready for this?”
“I’ve been ready a long, long time.”
And I had been.
Before I was born. When I was nothing but a pile of gold in a whore’s hand, I’d been ready.
Waiting, like timing, can be a bitch.
I’d hoped it would be the first night. I wanted it over with, and I wanted it over with now. Of course it wasn’t. The next night, I felt five outside. My stomach tensed, I carried my gun with me the entire night, and didn’t sleep one minute of it. Five could be enough. Five might do the trick for Niko and me. But they’d tried four times before. Two times playing, two times in sincerity . . . although it was a mocking sincerity. I didn’t think there would be any mocking this time. I thought they were coming for Nik, coming for me, and game time was over.
The third time is the charm. Isn’t that what they say? It didn’t feel like a charm, but it felt like a chance, and that was the best we could hope for.
I’d been dozing on the couch off and on that night. Staying awake three nights in a row turned out not to be doable, but the feeling brought me out of the drowse instantly. Eighteen. Eighteen of the bitches were out there, and they weren’t going to stay out there long. All they needed was the time to catch a glimpse through the window, to see where they were going, and they’d be there. That’s why we kept the small window covered with a blanket, and it was the only thing that gave us the time we needed.
“Nik, now.” I bolted off the couch fully dressed, shoes on. It was the way we’d catnapped for the past days now.
I hit the door running, Niko right behind me. We were on the street in seconds and in a cab in minutes. We moved fairly briskly through the nighttime traffic and were at the warehouse district in less than a half hour. Delilah had given us the address—long abandoned by humans or Kin, and abandoned was what we needed. It was a hulk of a building with windows.
Huge, unobstructed if grimy windows. The Auphe had good night vision. They could see where they wanted to go—see the way in. And they were there, every last one of them, following us from rooftop to rooftop, maybe. From the top of a bus or truck. I didn’t care. They were there, and that’s what mattered.
Niko and I pushed through the front doors, then slammed them behind us. They were unlocked. Wasn’t that lucky? Yeah, right. Planning is better than luck any day.
It was a trap. The Auphe knew it was a trap. A paste-eating, booger-picking kindergartner would’ve known it was a trap. That was the Auphe weakness. They were strong, incredibly fast, fanatical, hard as fucking hell to kill, but they were arrogant.
Promise, Cherish, Robin, Niko, and me. What could the five of us possibly accomplish against their eighteen? Take one or two with us? Maybe. But other than that, not a damn thing.
But there were no Promise, Cherish, or Robin. There were others, though, those who wanted the Auphe gone almost as much as we did.
Niko and I made our way to the center of the warehouse. He didn’t draw his sword, one of the strangest things I’d seen in a battle—Niko without some blade drawn. “Samuel!” he rapped. From twenty feet away, Samuel tossed him a large metal briefcase that just happened to contain a nuclear device. Tossed. Okay, Nik had explained a suitcase nuke was much smaller in destructive power than the kind dropped from a plane that can take out whole cities. But it would take out a chunk, and they were tossing it like a basketball—even though Samuel had told Niko it weighed only about fifty pounds.
“Don’t worry, Cal. It’s not volatile. It has to be triggered, not dropped,” Samuel said.
Right. That guy should watch more TV.
I didn’t pull my gun from my holster, another first for an expected battle. I looked at my brother and wanted to repeat what we’d said after we’d fallen out of the sky. I wanted to ask if he was sure. He still had a chance to make a run for it. He still had a chance to live.
He anticipated me. “Together,” he repeated.
I barely had time to nod when the eighteen gates opened behind us, and Niko and I dropped to our knees instantaneously. That’s when the Uzis of thirty of the Vigil who had been waiting in the warehouse moved between the Auphe and us and fired. Just as Niko had planned it with Samuel and his companions four days before, they formed a shield for us, to give us time to do what was needed. They were a line of the best-equipped human assassins in, if at least not the entire city, definitely a fifteen-block radius.
They might as well have been carrying Super Soakers.
The Auphe had smelled them, smelled more than the five they’d counted on, smelled a far bigger trap than they’d been expecting, and they didn’t care. Nope, a shit they simply did not give. And if it had only been the Vigil, they wouldn’t have a reason to. They couldn’t have smelled anything in the air but a cloud of fear sweat. The Vigil had been around, and Uzis were fun and all, but this was the Auphe. The Vigil might be the only humans alive besides Nik who knew what the Auphe were and what they could do. They had every reason to be afraid, and the Auphe proved it. A blur of motion, they leapt from their gates, some up to the walls and some across the floor straight toward the men and into the near wall of bullets.
I was occupied wrapping a cloth over my nose and mouth and tying it behind my neck. It smelled strongly of the oil Niko used on his swords. I was going to use my gun oil, but something that smelled of Niko . . . it had a better chance. Gave me a better chance.
“How many seconds?” Niko asked as he opened the case.
We’d discussed this at least twenty times in the past few days, but it came down to me. How fast I could open a gate and how fast I could shut eighteen down. Then there was moving through and . . . shit. Shit. I didn’t know. I could only guess.
“Cal.”
Niko had his hand hovering above a computerized trigger. The Vigil were being torn to pieces around us. Bullets, bullets everywhere, but these were the Auphe. If they couldn’t dodge it, and most they could, it didn’t matter unless it took their head off, and I didn’t see a single headless Auphe torso. Which I happily would’ve wanted an eight-by-ten glossy of if I had. I did see human guts, heard screaming, limbs ripped from bodies, and throughout it all the switchblade stab of hyena laughing. I saw it all—the future of the world. If the Auphe had their way.
Fuck ’em. They weren’t getting it.
I wrapped the second cloth over my eyes. “Five seconds. Go.” I heard the click of the timer being switched on, and I opened the gate to hell. Tumulus. It was half of the plan. Forget gating. The Auphe can run too. We needed someplace we could blow up the size of a few football fields. Even the Auphe couldn’t run that fast. Especially with what Niko was packing.
When I said “Go,” I tore a hole in reality. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it—inside me, howling in glee, all but screaming my name. And I discovered there was something better than meditation for pushing down my inner monster; the thought of a nuke three feet from me.
Niko’s hand grabbed my arm and yanked me through. I felt the ripple of pure power and then we were there. I couldn’t smell it, only the oil-soaked cloth over my mouth. I couldn’t see it, thanks to the blindfold. But it touched me. The biting cold on my face, the grit of glass sand under my hands and through the knees of my jeans. I was back.
Four seconds.
Niko had said no when I told him back at Rafferty’s what we needed to do. He’d seen me the first time I’d returned from Tumulus. He’d heard and seen what I’d done when hypnotized to recover the lost memories of this place and what had happened to me here. We both thought the same. If I went back, that’d be it. No lost memories to save me. No juvenile traumatic amnesia this time. More likely the two years I’d lost to begin with would all come flooding back and do to my brain what the Au
phe had done to the Vigil.
But it could be that wasn’t true, I’d argued. Maybe every time I thought of going back to Tumulus and losing my sanity, I was thinking of being dragged there by the Auphe. Maybe it wasn’t just the place but the monsters that went with it and what they would do to me if they ever took me there again.
Three seconds.
I felt the eighteen gates open around us.
I’d argued with Niko for hours over it. Saying it was worth the risk. He wouldn’t agree—it wasn’t going to happen—until I said the Auphe were following me. They wanted Niko dead. They wanted me alive. Either way, if Niko went through to Tumulus without me, there was no guarantee all the Auphe would follow him and his bomb. Some would stay for me, and Nik knew it. It was the only reason he’d given in. It was him, naturally, that came up with blocking my sense of sight and smell. Blocking as much of Tumulus as we could. And it seemed to be working.
And the time element . . . if I kept the gate open, like Niko had suggested when he’d wanted to go through alone earlier in the week for reconnaissance, if I kept it anchored to our world, it might keep the time flow there and here the same. Although, hell, at this point, the time difference was the least of our concerns.
They came through their gates. I heard the whisper of sand under their feet and claws. I felt their eyes on me the same as I’d felt them watching me the past days.
Two seconds.
I didn’t think they knew what the bomb was, but they did recognize a trap that would actually work. Smelled the confidence on Niko, the vicious triumph on me—not the fear they’d scented on the Vigil. Mad, feral, but smart as the most cunning of predators. A predator like that would retreat, think things over, see what would happen.
Too bad I slammed their gates in their faces. At Niko’s harsh “Now” and hard squeeze of my shoulder, I closed them all.
I knew how they did it. I knew it in me—when they had done it to mine, they’d taught me to do it to theirs—but knowing and closing one was one thing. Closing eighteen. Could I do that? Guess what. I’d learned last year, if you’re willing to die, physically you can do almost anything before you go. To kill the Auphe, I was willing to die. . . . But I didn’t. I closed their gates and my brain didn’t explode. Did it hurt? Jesus, yes, it hurt, but I was still conscious, and that’s what mattered. Niko hit me midchest and knocked me back through the only gate left—mine. I felt the concrete floor of the warehouse under my back, his weight on top of me and I closed the door to Tumulus instantly. It was gone.
One.
The world shook. I pulled off the rags from my face as the pounding in my brain continued. There was no light brilliant enough to burn away the flesh from your bones. No force strong enough to take out city blocks. There was nothing, but the world still shook. The glass didn’t quiver in the windows; the dust motes floating in the dim lights set in the ceiling didn’t drift a millimeter. I didn’t care. I still felt it. A part of a world—not this one—but a part of some other world had just died.
I started to ask Nik if he felt it too . . . but I saw it. Quicker than the other seventeen. More of that razor-edge intelligence. It couldn’t open its gate, so it used mine. It came through with us, fast and alive when it should’ve been dead. Metal teeth that had grinned through so many of my childhood windows and adult nightmares. Eyes more radioactive than any mushroom cloud. Claws, transparent skin, jagged joints, death . . .
No.
Red glass granules on my hands cutting them . . . like before.
No.
That thin, cold air that wanted to suck your lungs inside out.
The bitch should’ve died there.
I growled and threw Nik off me, before he saw it behind him. Threw him off like he weighed nothing. The sand, the cold, being naked in caves, being fed meat, and told what kind it was only after I was done. Discovering as bad as eating it was, being forced to eat it again after you’d vomited it on the ground was worse. Beaten and clawed and fed handfuls of it from the stone. Fed by what could’ve been the same goddamn bitch. Because they needed their tool healthy, to open a gate back in time to when the world was new and wipe out the humans before they had a chance to get the smallest grip on life.
My teeth were in its throat, ripping it with one smooth motion as I took it to the floor. It had moved to evade. I had moved with the same speed. Used the same throat tearing I’d seen them use on the weaker or wounded ones. Or sometimes they killed each other just for the hell of it—in the caves or under the boiling sky. A game. And now I got to play too.
Black blood flowed down its chest, but it wouldn’t kill it. It would only slow it down for half a second . . . a second. More than enough for an Auphe to take advantage of, and I did.
I’d seen them use their claws in those caves, not just their teeth. I didn’t have claws, not homegrown, but I had others. My hands went into my jacket and came out with two dirk daggers, one in each hand. Narrow blades, the perfect size to fit the eye sockets that held those pools of lava and blood. I sheathed them there to the hilts and punctured the malignant tumor of a brain. Its body bucked under me, its claws trying for my face, my side, but the spidery hands went limp first and fell to the ground.
“Unworthy,” I hissed. I withdrew the blades and slammed them home one more time. It bucked again, and the faint hiss of air bubbled through the blood that was still pumping from its throat, but more slowly. And slower still.
Then there was no more gurgling. No more fighting to escape. Only the last escaping breath ripe with the smell of Vigil flesh. There was a bead of moisture on my bottom lip. I’d ripped out its throat with such speed that only a drop of blood touched my mouth. I touched it with the tip of my tongue, sampled it. It tasted like poison and death and the rich earth of a long-forgotten graveyard.
It wasn’t half bad.
“Cal. Come back.”
I looked up, a boiling acid glare through the strands of black hair that fell over my face. “My kill. Mine.” The words hurt my throat. Weren’t right. They twisted and knotted the air, they didn’t flow through it.
“Cal, I told you I was bringing you back with me. All of you. I meant it. Now come back.” I recognized that voice. He was there the first time I’d come back from . . . that place. He’d been there, waited for me. My brother.
Like he was waiting for me now—in the warehouse, not at a burned trailer. No, not waiting. He’d been with me to hell and back. Blown hell to hell and back.
I laughed. It didn’t sound quite right either, but better than the words I’d spat.
“Cal, now.” There were hands on my arms, gripping hard.
I let go of one of the dirks and rubbed my eyes, then the blood from my mouth. “Nik.”
The random mixing of colors I’d seen settled into olive skin, with a touch of green from the gate travel, dark blond hair, warning eyes. My brother’s face. “The Vigil,” he said softly enough only I could hear and steely enough to let me know I was on the edge of Auphe-ing myself into the Vigil’s classification of overt as King Kong pregnant with Mothra’s baby, and telling Oprah all about his mood swings.
I’d been as fast as an Auphe, killed an Auphe in seconds, spoke Auphe, had been considering . . . no one needed to know what I was considering. I didn’t need to know. But I did know. I knew what Auphe did with their prey.
The Auphe’s heart stopped under me.
It had stopped breathing a moment before, but sometimes the heart takes some time to catch up. It did, and this time my brain did explode. I fell off the Auphe, over onto my back, and began convulsing. There had been lights in my brain. A dark and grim constellation, always there but I’d never known it. I knew now because they all blinked out. They very last one wavered, faded, and disappeared. The half-genetic, half-telepathic web was gone. I’d only known about the connection for days, but it felt like millions of neurons were dying. It was as if every single star in the universe went out. Every single one.
Now I really was the Last Mohi
can.
Nik’s hand was on my shoulder as he turned me from back to side, in case I vomited. “Get away,” I heard him snap, probably to Samuel. Let’s face it, all the Zen in the world wasn’t getting Nik over Samuel’s onetime serving of the Auphe. Seeing me actually taste Auphe blood, though, no big deal. I had the little-brother-get-out-of-jail-free-forever card. Big brothers. “Cal, can you hear me?”
I could hear him, but I couldn’t keep my teeth from chattering long enough to answer. And I thought three things—the last was the worst by far and away. The first, seizures were bad. The second, seizures could kill you. Third, seizures could make you piss your pants. Dear God, don’t let me piss my pants, I thought desperately as the thrashing turned to shuddering and from there to utter limpness. Niko moved me onto my back again. Someone had already dragged the Auphe away. “Can you hear me?” he repeated tightly.
“Tell me . . .” I swallowed and blinked, vision clearing. “Tell me . . . I didn’t . . . piss myself.”
He bowed his head for a moment, shoulders relaxing, then looked up to slap my face lightly. “Not so much that you’d notice, little brother.”
I glared with hazy eyes. “You suck, you know that?”
Samuel ignored Niko’s warning for a moment, either a brave man or a stupid one, and moved closer. “They’re watching,” he muttered low. “If Niko hadn’t pulled you out of it, I don’t think they’d just be watching.”
Yeah, I’ll bet the Vigil was watching—or what was left of them. “He still sucks,” I mumbled. I tried to get my hands under me to push up. The dizziness was sharp, my muscles like spaghetti, and I nearly fell, but Nik braced me with one hand behind my back. My legs weren’t cooperating yet. “I think I’m going to puke.” I closed my eyes. “Or die. Or both.” A hand grasped my face and shook it carefully until my eyes opened. Niko looked into them. Apparently, what he saw satisfied him and he exhaled with more emotion than he usually let show. “I think you’ll recover, wet pants and all.”
