by Rob Thurman
“You were ready for the Olympics seven years ago. Stop stroking your ego and your penis extension and move.” Niko was up and running flat-out for the entrance. I was on his heels. Goodfellow was waiting for us there. He had come back, knowing he could do nothing but die with us. What a friend—and an idiot, as a god had told him seconds ago.
I told him so as Niko and I slammed into him, carrying him along in the rush before he had a chance to turn around. The fiery proxy hand of an infuriated dead god, like a plummeting comet, crushed the hall three feet behind us. We erred on the side of caution and kept running. Promise waited for us in the next room and she joined our escape. When we made it out of the building, we all stopped and turned to see if this was far enough. If New Jersey would be far enough.
It was. Hephaestus wouldn’t reveal himself or his machines to the outside world. I guess he’d gotten comfortable in his coffin of solid metal, mouth filled with it, eyes blinded by it. Or he was crazy enough that “out of sight, out of mind” was a literal term. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I sat on the ground and then lay back, eyes on the sky. My legs and feet were hamburger; those godawful khaki pants Goodfellow had forced on me were more red than tan now. If Niko hadn’t been wearing black, I’d have seen the same on him, except from the neck down. We both had cuts on our faces. Robin was also in dark colors and I did smell blood on him, puck blood—green and earthy as a forest—but not as much. Goodfellow could move when he wanted to. A hundred thousand lifetimes and more of outrunning jealous husbands or wives—he should be.
We were alive, though, and “surprised about it” didn’t begin to sum that up. I waved a hand to get Promise’s attention. “Sweet Virgin Mary? Yeah? I didn’t know you were Catholic. Didn’t know vampires were anything.”
“My housekeeper is Catholic,” she said, still staring at building thirteen of the factory. “I must have picked it up subconsciously from her. It did seem oddly appropriate. In all my days…Gods.” She pulled at her hood, her hands gloved in silk against the sun as well. “I never wanted to meet one, and I don’t plan on repeating the experience.”
“I warned you he has a bad temper,” Goodfellow said. “And the insanity issue. I said this probably wouldn’t work. But did you listen?”
I lifted a weary arm and aimed the Glock at his knee. “I have one round left. It’s all I need.”
Kalakos came around from the side of the building, where he must have escaped out the back. The cherry on top of the fucking sundae.
“Never mind.” I let my hand flop back. “I think I’ll save it for myself.”
13
Black Sheep
Home is where the heart is or where you bury the ones you want to eat later.
The cattle with their idiotic sayings, mooed by lungs not fit to breathe the same air as mine. The new world would have sayings that fit the mouth of the predator, not the bleating prey. But the new world took time, and I had too much work to do to bother inventing new ones until the Second Coming ruled—hundreds of years yet. It wasn’t so long for those with Auphe blood. A pureblood Auphe had lived thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. I did the math. I didn’t like it. I’d used a calculator for it and to keep track of my growing horde of children, but I’d done it. I would survive a few thousand years easily. Hundreds were nothing.
A drop in the bucket.
Humans. I dragged my claws through the dirt and wished it were flesh. Boring in what they did, boring in what they said, boring to hunt. Criminally boring.
Bored, bored, bored with them and bored, bored, bored here. But I did have to check on the family. Didn’t want naughty thoughts developing in tiny meandering minds or escapes being planned by the incubators. I had picked them out a nice place, more room than the cage that had been my home. Prison. Homes were prisons; prisons were homes. Were homes, were homes…No.
I snarled, then pulled my talons out of the dirt they’d ended up buried knuckle-deep into. It was a good place. Good enough. A cavern in the New Mexico desert, unknown by man or forgotten, it was a small opening three feet across that led straight down. It opened up into four large caverns. I kept the succubae in one guarded by their own children, the Second Coming in another, the dead bodies or the live waiting their turn in the third. The fourth was left for the children to spread as I made more. Room for the family to grow, little bundles of death and teddy bears everywhere.
Cute. Sweet. Look at Junior and Junior and Junior and Junior.
I’d need a new cavern soon.
Worst part was keeping the fifty succubae fed. It was human after human. Fifty every month to be drained of their sexual energy, all energy, unto death. It became tedious when I was the single one intelligent enough to steal them away without alarming the herd and bring them back from all the cities I’d ever traveled to be dropped down the cavern. Some children were grown, but not experienced. Stupid, in fact. Goddamn stupid. They weren’t ready for hunting trips, and nobody delivered this far from a city, no matter the tip.
Life was hard.
It was strange about the sex. Humans were supposed to enjoy it, and it was everywhere you looked where the cattle massed together as their herding instinct told them to. On every building, every wall, every TV or movie screen. It was…pervasive. Ah, that was the kind of word an educated monster like me would know. It was pervasive, and yet despite that none of the human husks were smiling when I sent in the children to clean out the succubae’s lair. Not a one. Screaming was a better name for the open rictus of frozen jaw. All of them the same, and I’d seen many. Too many to count, not interesting enough to bother with a calculator. Many said it well enough. Succubae liked to eat as much as I did.
I didn’t respect them. They weren’t as weak as humans, but only several slithers above them. I did respect the she-snakes’ philosophy, even if it was another human one made their own. They turned it into “if you can’t fuck it then eat it” and did both at the same time. It was efficient, economical, and twice the fun.
The earth began to tremble. Finally. This was what I’d been waiting for while chasing nonsense thoughts around, seconds away from teaching a few of the children about inexperience and stupidity as Caliban had taught the others in that basement. My brother had had my gift of them. Toys. He had many toys, the golden child. Here came one now.
I’d gated to just outside Caliban’s own cave after I felt him gate out as the machine plunged through the roof. I’d shot the lock out of the door, no windows to see through—inhospitable. I walked in and saw what I needed, the inside of the room and what it held. You can’t go where you have never seen and you can’t take anything from there either. This was about taking. I took Janus and gated it far down another cavern that was more of a well tunneling through rock several stories down. Then I had gated sand and dirt on top to complete its desert burial plot for safekeeping.
The tremble of the earth changed to a shaking, with plumes of sand erupting several feet high. It was impressive. Strong, quick, and useful for testing Caliban. How he reacted and fought it told me things, things I needed to measure his worth in the Second Coming. Unfortunately the things I learned were contradictory. No gate, then gate. On the verge of death, then whole again. Intriguing and annoying.
Janus was simpler. Intriguing and a tool, that was all. I planned on sending him back to New York and Caliban again soon enough. So much to learn…and while it wasn’t the ultimate game of Auphe against Auphe, it was a good game. I hadn’t been bored once it finally began.
Sand stopped flying up and now sank down under the earth, into a new pit as a hand, darkly gleaming in the hot sun, broke its way into the air and freedom.
On the downside: “You are a pain the ass. I’ve had body parts in a cooler without ice that kept longer than you.” I was also a truthful monster. When you had no one to fear, you had no reason to lie. “There was a teacher once. She had a saying she wrote every day on the blackboard. ‘Patience is a virtue.’ It made its mark on me, those words of the cattle. From weakness came t
ruth. Those words have let me come as far as I have. From blood and filth and bars and cages, no way out. No way, no way, no way…” My thoughts circled viciously, ’round and ’round, then slowed. I pushed my sunglasses closer to my eyes, which I kept aimed on the sand. I didn’t look at the sun. It burned. It didn’t like me and I didn’t like it. But I would take the burn over the cage. Always. “Until one day I found a way out. I took it, and I plan to take everything else. All there is—because of patience. But while patience is a virtue, pissing me off is not.” I gated it down again and refilled the grave. I’d be back to check on its blind progress.
When I wasn’t watching…judging Caliban. Fitting those conflicting pieces of him together—if I had to tear bits of them off to do it. Finding out how he worked—if I had to open him up and see the wheels go ’round and ’round in his guts and his brain.
Patience is a virtue…
But only sometimes.
14
It was heading toward evening and as I’d gated us and Kalakos yesterday, all of us from home to Goodfellow’s penthouse to escape Janus this morning, that still left me with three days before I could build a new gate to take that thing out of this world. Janus’s waiting those days didn’t seem likely; neither did Niko’s letting me attempt the third death gate in the hopes it would move the titan. But no guarantee.
That meant we moved to the last idea Robin had: the black market. As it involved sewers and underground tunnels, Promise decided that in addition to demented gods and a leviathan of fire and metal that had almost destroyed us while nearly converting her to Catholicism, she had had enough for the day. She wished Niko thought the same, given the much more passionate kiss she shared with him by the cars. Both of them were usually more private in their affections.
We decided to clean up on the way. We couldn’t go back to Niko’s and my place, thanks to Janus, or Promise’s, thanks to the time limit. Same went for Goodfellow’s, thanks to Grimm.
Grimm, whose own timing was suspiciously coincidental when it came to Janus.
In the car, I made Robin sit in the back with Kalakos and hoped for one day that he could at least pretend to let the monogamy slide. Man hath no fear like a closed-minded Rom chased by a puck ready to tap that, knock some boots, bang some balls, whatever those puck kids were calling it these days. If I had cut Kalakos’s throat when he first showed up, as I’d been tempted to, it wouldn’t approach the punishment of a horny puck thinking you reminded him of Achilles.
We all threw down Tylenol as I drove back to the city. “I was thinking,” I said, fiddling with the radio, putting it off, as I didn’t want to say it at all, “Janus and Grimm showing up at the same time. Maybe it wasn’t a Rom family in the clan that passed down the frigging secret password to get Janus’s juice flowing. Grimm has been around thirty years, free twelve of them. The son of a bitch went to adult-education classes to get his GED. He knows how to research and problem-solve, not just slaughter. Probably reads Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, like Nik.” I added, “I hope he doesn’t sleep with them like Nik does. That’s not Auphe; that’s just sick.”
Niko snorted as he was cleaning the blood where he could, pulling up his pants legs and taking off his shirt. He was using surgical sterile scrubs from the first-aid kit he’d brought with us. We didn’t go much of anywhere without one. “I sleep with someone much warmer. Can you say the same?”
Not since I’d booted my ex, Delilah, out of my life and was waiting to put her down like a rabid dog. In a way she was. She was a Wolf, taking over the werewolf Mafia—the Kin—and had tried to kill me, Niko, and two other long-gone friends. The other Wolves, Alphas or not, feared her. She had no limits, no conscience—only ruthlessness and the certainty that no one counted in this world but her. Rabid in the mind and soul.
But in better days, she had been warm in bed.
Robin accepted the kit handed back to him. “You think Grimm is capable of that? Finding out how to wake up Janus and stealing him? Being what he is?”
I flipped down the visor and wished for sunglasses. The clouds were thinning, and the sun, lower in the sky or not, was directly in my eyes. The radio did say the rain had stopped in the city. That should keep Janus out of sight until nightfall.
“Grimm is me on crack with eighteen years of torture, locked naked in a cage, fed nothing but raw meat, and then escaping to twelve years of freedom. He hates the Auphe more than I did, and who the hell thought that was possible? Think what I would’ve been like if I’d lived his life. If I were more driven, smarter, so sociopathic that they need a new name for it, and not crazy.”
If he’d had the Auphe kind of crazy along with their skills and predation, that could’ve actually helped us. Arrogance and insanity—they had been their only weaknesses.
“You like him?” Robin decided he didn’t want to think about it and brushed it off with, “I wouldn’t have tried to sell you that first car. I promise you that.” He had taken off his coat and then his pants entirely, not bothering to roll them up like Nik, to scrub down the slashes and cuts on his legs. I could see in the rearview mirror that there was enough red splattered for an entire finger-painting class gone wild. My legs felt as his appeared as I drove, but since Niko had been pulled beneath the earth, scraping metal as he went, and Robin was about as bad off as I was, I’d rather have him tormenting Kalakos while I claimed the driver’s seat.
“You would be more driven, in a positive way, if you were less lazy,” Niko pointed out doggedly. “And you are intelligent. You lack some on occasion in the knowledge base of what we hunt, but again…”
“Lazy,” I grumped. “Well, you can take it to the bank Grimm is not. He’s motivated, obsessed, and since the Auphe aren’t here for vengeance, he’s decided the world will do instead.”
“Who is Grimm? Another Auphe?” asked Kalakos, who hadn’t been allowed in on the debriefing of my kidnapping, “and why isn’t this ¸tap wearing any underwear, his koro kani waving free in the breeze?”
“My dick is not blind nor a scrawny chicken, and if I was going to die fighting Hephaestus, I wanted its glory witnessed one last time,” Robin replied, offense lurking nastily behind the trickster facade. “And if I weren’t monogamous, arthida, you’d find that a Rom can’t run far or fast enough to escape what I’m carrying. But no worries, I do not sexually assault, in the traditional fashion. I’d strangle you instead with my nonblind, nonchicken dick. I have the reach to circle your neck and some to spare.”
From Kalakos’s saber suddenly lying across his lap, he believed him. I laughed, didn’t try not to. He had healed me and saved Niko, but trust is earned, and not in two actions or two days. “Your arm’s bleeding a good deal,” Niko commented, while still cleaning blood from his skin. He unbuttoned the sleeve at my wrist as I noticed the entire material starting six inches below my shoulder had gone from pink to solid red. It was worth it. I’d take red over pink and anything over those damn buttons, no matter how I had to get it. Goddamn Goodfellow.
He rolled up the sleeve until he revealed the cut. I took a quick look, then eyes back on the road. It was a keeper. Monsters…paien…whatever Robin wanted to call them, they respected scars. In our life we’d eventually come around to that way of thinking as well. Not as badges of honor, or attractive to the opposite sex, but signs you’d fought something big and bad and lived to show the proof. We didn’t care about the first two, or Niko didn’t; I kept the second one on call if needed, but the third…it was a warning that something nasty had fucked with me and not walked away. You’d best make certain you were bigger and badder and nastier than hell if you didn’t want to make their same mistake.
Bleeding in the gush of a slow waterfall, the wound was long and ugly, starting in the front of my biceps, curving to the back of my arm, and was about half an inch wide. A Cyclops’s talon isn’t as sharp or precise as a scalpel. One thing did relieve me. It was two inches below my tattoo. Messing that up would’ve pissed me off.
Kalakos, once Robin’s p
ants were back on, leaned up to see. “‘Fratres…’ Part of your tattoo says ‘brothers’ in Latin. What does the rest say?”
“It says, ‘If you’re close enough to read this, I’m going to pluck out your eyes and use them as Ping-Pong balls.’ Mind your own damned business.” I ducked instinctively as the first-aid kit came flying back over. Niko caught it. “You want your stitches while you’re driving or in a fast-food parking lot?”
I was hungry. That tipped the scales. While we were at McDonald’s, I ate a Big Mac with my other hand while Niko stitched my arm. Goodfellow refused the food, saying he’d seen pigs at troughs who dined better. Kalakos had brought back the Big Mac, fries, and chocolate shake for me, a salad for Niko, and two plain hamburgers for himself.
“You are stoic. Admirable.” Kalakos watched Niko’s precise work. “I’ve sewn myself up often enough and cursed most of the time. On the first and last occasion that I killed a werewolf, I may have screamed in finishing the stitching of the last of the seven claw marks.”
“I’m not stoic.” I reached for the shake wedged between my legs. “I’m used to it. Big difference. If I screamed or yelled every time I was cut up and Nik had to turn me into a craft project, I’d lose my voice.”
“We face Wolves every day. They don’t attack us often anymore, but for years it was almost a daily event. You, Emilian Kalakos”—it was the first time I’d heard Niko say his entire name—“are out of your league here. When Janus is dealt with, you should leave. The creatures that live in the city make Wolves seem as puppies.” Niko finished washing off the stitches with another surgical scrub.
“And I’m not wanted.”
“You may have saved Cal. You did save me. It’s appreciated, but it doesn’t wipe out the past. Your opportunity to make amends has long come and gone.” He slipped his shirt back on and put the first-aid kit back together and handed it to Kalakos in case he needed it. He didn’t want him around, didn’t want him at all, but Nik, contrary to what he was saying and unlike his father, did do what was right from the very beginning. Not a lifetime later.
