Doubletake can-7

by Rob Thurman

  I’d seen it, but Niko didn’t stop testing me. It was his way of keeping me sharp, focused, and alive.

  We’d left Robin’s over forty minutes ago and I was more exhausted from listening to him go on and on than from the fight with the kishi. Sitting on the edge of the tub in our bathroom, I continued to swab the puncture wounds on my thigh with peroxide. Then I’d move on to the antibiotic cream plus an antibiotic shot. You didn’t know what in the hell was living inside the mouths of half the monsters we came across, and I doubted the CDC did either. I had the immune system of my Auphe half, which was to say the best damn immune system around, but Niko was Niko. Big brothers were big brothers, and I took the same precautions a full human would, necessary or not.

  There were a few advantages to not being human. More than I’d used to think, and more than I should think. But that’s who I was now and I was fine with that. Better than fine.

  I answered Niko’s question, and it wasn’t an unusual one. Anything new in our world was to be immediately suspected and watched carefully. “I saw it. Five blocks back on the roof. You know I saw it or you would’ve picked me up by the scruff of my neck and shown it to me while swatting my ass with your katana.” I applied the cream and accepted the tape from my brother to secure the bandage around my leg. “Something metal. Steel maybe, and black too. It didn’t move and I couldn’t make out any details, but it wasn’t there this morning when we went by.”

  Niko handed me the syringe and I injected my thigh muscle with the strongest antibiotic you could buy from a guy who had set up a pharmacy in his van. “I am as proud as if you’d actually graduated high school.”

  He’d homeschooled me, the ass, and his graduation standards had been higher than any public or private school. I’d simply done my best to forget most of it. “Okay, a dark metal thing someone hauled up to the roof. Big deal. We’ll keep our eyes open, but I bet it’s just someone’s hideous idea of art, or a nerd making armor for the next big Ren Faire. I’m more concerned about the Panic.” “Concerned” was a good euphemism for metaphorically shitting my pants.

  Goodfellow had been at our sides for three or four years now. He was the most loyal son of a bitch around, to us anyway, but every encounter with him put you one step closer to a mental hospital. I’d seen him naked three times, accidentally, and I didn’t give a shit which way the guy swung (he swung all ways…he swung in directions and dimensions scientists hadn’t plotted yet) as long as he didn’t hit on me.

  And after seeing what he had a license to carry, I was kissing the ground, grateful he hadn’t made a move on me. Even if he hadn’t been rich, the man would need his own personal tailor to accommodate what he was hauling around. He did chase Niko in the beginning, but as much as I loved my brother, he was on his own there. And good luck. Every story Robin told was about himself, a threesome, a foursome, an orgy, and onward to things that would have jaded porn stars mystified if not terrified. The themes were pretty blatant—ego and sex.

  I could take it, though, because he was a friend, a comrade in arms, and all that shit, but one hundred of him? If Niko wouldn’t have taken a picture with his phone, I’d have been curled up in the fetal position and sucked my thumb. Worse yet was how there were a hundred or so of them. Robin had always been evasive about how pucks procreated and I’d had no inclination whatsoever to push him on it. An all-male race who were completely identical to one another…a curious thing, but nowhere near curious enough to ask him or hear the answer. This time we got the answer whether we wanted it or not.

  I absolutely did not.

  Apparently there was no equivalent in nonsupernatural biology, although Niko tried his best to come up with a close comparison. Apogamy, androgenesis, adventitious embryony…all terms I’m sure I knew at one time, when Niko had been shoving biology into my brain with a crowbar seven or eight years ago. But I’d done my best to forget them, and my best was damn good.

  “Male apoximes?” had been his last guess.

  Robin had scowled. “Yes, Niko. Pucks reproduce exactly like Saharan cypress trees. In fact, we’re kissing cousins. Shall I show you my impressively large trunk?”

  “Just tell me we don’t have to buy you maternity clothes if you lose the lottery,” I’d asked at that point during the briefing, pushing the meatball sub far away at the thought of a hormonal puck. “Jesus, I’m going to barf.”

  “Gods.” He stared at me, disbelief dripping from the word. “How do you function when the hamster on the wheel between your ears takes his lunch break? Never mind. Just…here. Wrap your tiny brains around zygotes. It’s far more complex than that, as we are far more complex than you, but one puck essentially splits in two. The new puck will also have all the memories, personality, and skills of the original, which is another reason we hate one another so much. We yearn to be unique when in essence we all started out the same as someone else. We immediately part ways and the new puck will start developing memories of his own. As he does, his personality changes slowly as well. We all become different sooner or later.”

  “Except for the ego, sex drive, trickery, lying, stealing, et cetera,” I said.

  “Well, naturally. Why would we want to change the best of our race’s qualities?”

  “You actually are family. In fact, you’re closer than family,” Niko had mused. “You’re supernatural clones.”

  “All born of Hob,” the puck said quietly. As the three of us had nearly died at the hands of Hob before delivering him up to a well-deserved death, we skipped over talking more about the first puck to be whelped by the earth.

  “How long does it take?” I’d asked, curious despite myself. “Is there a cocoon involved? Is it like Alien? Because that would be nasty as hell. Dripping fluids everywhere. Gah. Good luck finding a maid to clean that up.”

  “Armani does not make a cocoon,” Goodfellow had replied with a sharp frost edging his voice, and fun time was over. He then went on to tell us about the Panic.

  Capital P…for the capital R in “Run for your life.”

  In ye olden times, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient who gave a crap, people had thought that panic was caused by Pan, pucks, whatever, unseen and rotten as hell, rustling and shaking the bushes off the paths to basically scare the living shit out of travelers. Not true. The word was still around today, but that definition wasn’t any more true than it had been in the beginning.

  What was true about the Panic, Goodfellow had said, was that pucks produced pheromones by the buckets. Normally the chemical led their fellow supernatural creatures, not humans—it didn’t affect humans—to trust them. It made it all the easier for the pucks to steal from their fellow supernatural races and for them to believe the pucks when they said they were off for a romantic bottle of wine while in actuality they were shagging their thieving asses to safety, hauling gold, jewels, whatever they could steal. The pheromone also led the preternatural to lust after them—all the easier to get laid and…yeah, well, that was more than enough benefit there.

  Eventually after a few thousand—or thirty or forty thousand years…who was counting—the pucks’ supernatural buddies eventually caught on—or at least their genes did—and after generations upon generations of other races being robbed, lied to, and somehow talked into an orgy with five of their best pals, the pheromones couldn’t overcome the nature-driven evolution of an innate and rather deserved mistrust.

  That was the pheromones of one puck at work.

  One.

  Enticing in the beginning, suspicious and distrustful in the end…but, still, only one puck, Robin had said. But get more than one puck together and things changed. The pheromones mixed into something new, thanks to that evolution of suspicion and wariness—something new and unpleasant. Get five pucks together and everyone supernatural would become extremely nervous. Get ten together and there would be fighting, screaming, and running. Get the entire race in one spot and the chemical overload could conceivably drive lesser species mad or stop their hearts from fear
alone. For the hardier predators, it would be as if they were a single small child drifting in the ocean while a hundred giant great white sharks circled them.

  That was the Panic.

  That was why all supernatural critters were fleeing NYC as fast as if someone had told them the Red Sox were invading. All of that sounded like a good excuse for me to desert Niko to the job. Keep my share of the money. See ya when I see ya. Send up a flare when it’s over. But, Robin had admitted sourly, Auphe weren’t affected. As with most poisons and venoms, they were immune to the pheromones. The Auphe were never any fun. The Auphe never played fair. The Auphe ate my brothers, sisters, dog, and crapped in the back of my pickup truck. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Here was the one time I thought I could use that in my favor; being half of the genetic monster to first crawl out of the primordial ooze…before turning around to murder the second slimy thing to creep out…but no.

  When did I get my goddamn silver lining?

  It obviously wasn’t going to be today. I went straight to my bedroom. The fight with the kishi had been light exercise. Goodfellow’s briefing had been as brutal as boot camp twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, five years in a row. I wanted sleep and I wanted it now.

  Niko stayed up to read or meditate or trim his bonsai tree while thinking of ten ways to kill a revenant with its tiny gnarled branches and leaves. Those weren’t smart-ass guesses; they were what I knew. Niko had many interests, some lethal, some not, but I knew them all. Family. I hesitated in my bedroom doorway. “It’s kind of weird,” I said.

  Niko had been headed for the main area of the apartment after I’d finished the first aid on my leg. He stopped to look back at me as I stood in the doorway of my room. His eyebrows lifted in silent question. “Family,” I elaborated. “I was thinking about family when we were fighting the kishi. I thought it was because they were making a home for their own family, but then Robin comes along with every family member on the face of the planet. Maybe I’m psychic; you think?” I didn’t want to be psychic. I had enough nonhuman traits to deal with as it was.

  He whirled quickly enough that I couldn’t avoid the book he threw to nail me in the stomach. I grunted, but managed to catch it before it fell to the floor. Niko’s reflexes were the best I’d seen, among man or monster. “Did you see that coming, O psychic one?” He held out a hand and caught the book I tossed back at him.

  “No. Ass.” But I rubbed my stomach and grinned. He was right. The Auphe hadn’t been psychic and our mother only pretended to be. “Let me know in the morning how many ways you come up with to use your puny shrub as a deadly weapon.” I changed and hit the bed hard. I slept hard as well. If that didn’t prove I didn’t have the slightest psychic ability, nothing else would.

  But cursed?

  That was a different story.

  * * *

  It was eight in the morning when someone banged a fist against our door. Niko was in the shower washing away the sweat of evil exercise. He’d already been out and run his ten miles. As my leg was tenderized and marinated by baby kishi Alpo, he’d given me a onetime break and hadn’t forced me to join him. I was still in bed when I heard the knocking, but I staggered up, cursing at the hair hanging down past my eyes and wearing nothing but sweatpants and two pairs of socks. My feet got cold. Hercules probably had acid reflux. We all have our weaknesses.

  I passed through the large open space that formed the combination living area, kitchen, and workout gym to the door of our converted garage, and undid the one bolt. Most New Yorkers had several. Unless it was a particularly nasty case we were working, Niko and I didn’t have a problem with encouraging break-ins. Spontaneous sparring was like a jolt of extra caffeine in your coffee. Perked you up.

  Opening the door, I began to snarl a natural, “What the hell do you want?” It was way too damn early and I embraced NYC manners like a native. What else would I say?

  It turned out I didn’t end up saying anything at all. I swallowed the words as I saw it…him.…all in a split second. I saw the dark blond hair and olive skin, the familiar profile, the way he held himself on the balls of his feet, cautious and loose. A fighter. A warrior. I saw it all in an instant and I gave him what he deserved. Not a word, not a demand, not a greeting.

  I tackled him in the doorway, slamming him to the floor.

  I said I wore just sweatpants and socks to bed. I did. That wasn’t a lie. But I always carried something to bed, and out of it, with me. Sometimes it was the Desert Eagle tucked under my pillow. Sometimes it was the black matte Ka-Bar combat knife I kept under my mattress. Sometimes I swapped them. I wouldn’t want to get into a habit. Being predictable gets you killed. This morning it was the knife, serrated and ugly. Yet when it saves your life often enough, when it’s buried against the flesh of a traitor’s neck, it becomes a thing almost beautiful.

  “You should be dead,” I hissed at him, a wholly inhuman hiss. I had one knee firmly planted in his flat gut, pinning him. He wasn’t struggling or fighting me and he could have. I felt the hard play of muscles under my knee. But if he didn’t want to defend himself, I didn’t care.

  I’d thought it when fighting the kishi: I didn’t play by the rules. If you played by the rules, you died, and if anyone was going to die in this moment, it wasn’t going to be me. “You should be worse than dead.” This time I cut him, scarcely enough to split the skin…to let a measly few drops of blood course down to cup in the hollow of his throat.

  “You motherfucker. You could’ve helped him. You could’ve saved him.” He could’ve saved him from our mother.

  Saved him from me.

  I could live with what I was now. It had taken years and finally an amnesia-induced epiphany, along with an inner sacrifice, but I could cope with the thing I was. That didn’t mean that Niko should’ve had to. He could’ve had a normal life. Ours was anything but.

  Black eyes gazed at me impassively. “Are you going to kill me or not?”

  I wanted to. More than anything in the world, at that moment I wanted to. And I didn’t see a single reason I shouldn’t…save one. I growled, my chest vibrating with the sound, and then slammed the blade home…millimeters from his head into the cheap pressed-wood flooring and padding we’d put down over the concrete. “It’s not my place to, you worthless son of a bitch. It’s his.”

  I got to my feet and looked over my shoulder at Niko standing several feet behind. He was dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and black jeans, wet hair already braided, his gray eyes fixed on me with confidence. Knowing I’d do the right thing, or what he thought was the right thing. But that wasn’t it. It was what I’d said. The fate of that piece of shit on the floor was in Niko’s hands, not mine.

  Gray…I was glad his and my eyes came from our mother. It was one thing he didn’t share with the man flat on his back. I peeled back my lips and gave a savage grin. “Daddy’s home. Want me to make the tea?”

  I’d known what my father was since I was five or so. Sophia had told me from the day I was born, I was sure, but to genuinely grasp that Dad is a Creature Feature, you had to have a few years on you. When it came to Niko’s father, she’d told us he left before Niko was born, had left a few weeks after Niko was born, had visited once or twice but Niko was too young to remember. Sophia didn’t bother to keep her lies straight, because she didn’t lie to deceive, not to us. She lied to hurt.

  Niko and I hadn’t known any truth of his father except he was Rom like Sophia and of the same clan, Vayash. Only Vayash had the occasional blond hair from hundreds of years ago, when they’d stayed in northern Greece for a time. And though it was forbidden to marry or have sex with a gadje, an outsider, that northern Greek blond hair and lighter eyes had made their way into the clan regardless.

  Horny then was no different from horny now.

  But that had been long ago and the Rom were nothing if not practical…eventually, which was how Niko could be blond and still be considered full Rom. He had their dark if slightly olive skin, and all Rom knew the qui
rks of all the clans. My black hair and gray eyes meant nothing when combined with my pale, decidedly non-Rom skin. I’d have been rejected as tainted with outsider blood.

  If I weren’t already rejected as tainted with much worse.

  I bent over and retrieved my knife before going into the kitchen. I wasn’t making any damn tea for Niko’s sperm donor, but the kitchen was as far as I could get while keeping an eye on him. As for me, normally I would’ve had waffles with half a bottle of syrup, and coffee. This morning I didn’t have an appetite for anything that wasn’t red and spilled with a blade. I folded my arms on the breakfast counter, bent at the waist to rest my chin on my forearm, the Ka-Bar remaining in my hand, and watched through the long strands of hair that still fell over my eyes.

  A panther watching unblinking through the tall grass.

  A last drop of blood ran from the tip of the knife to mar the sand-colored countertop. I lifted my top lip to show teeth at the sight of it and I went back to watching. The man…Niko’s father…didn’t miss any of my show.

  He stood smoothly, moving the same as Niko moved: effortless and flowing as water. His clothes were similar as well. Dark, not particularly noticeable, would blend into the shadows well. He shifted his dark eyes from me to my brother. “I am Emilian Kalakos. Your mother, Sophia, I didn’t know if she told you that—my name.” He was confident with the smear of blood remaining on his neck. I almost growled again.

  Niko regarded him without emotion before saying, “No. She didn’t. Close the door behind you. Our reputations here do not need any further fuel for the fire.”

  “I am welcome then?” That was custom among the Rom. They didn’t include the gadje in it, but Rom wouldn’t enter another’s home without knowing they were welcome there.

  Glancing at me, Niko quirked his lips, a somewhat less homicidal version of my predatory smile. He was letting me know he knew who his family was and it wasn’t this older reflection of himself. “No. But if you wait for welcome you will die an old man on the sidewalk. I leave it up to you.”