by Rob Thurman
I wiped the mud from my face as I staggered up with his slippery help, then automatically ejected the Glock’s empty clip and jammed in a new one. Glocks were sturdy enough to handle a little mud—if I was lucky. It was liquid, which helped, but it was thick, which didn’t.
Mama Boggle was half in and half out of the pit, one of her harvest-moon eyes gone. Muddy pulp. She seemed determined to end us, but I felt a pang nonetheless. Boggles, like the alligators and sharks they resembled, weren’t beautiful, National Geographic glorious, or anything less than freaking flat-headed, black-taloned evil with the smell of dead humans on their breath. But if they did have one redeeming physical quality, it was their eyes. Big, brilliant, and orange as a Halloween pumpkin. They were like the gems they desired, and either I or Robin had destroyed one. I regretted it.
Goddamn pussy.
Next to that mouthy part of me, some piece of me might be, but I had memories of lying in fields in the fall when I was seven or eight with my brother and seeing moons as round and as bright in color. I felt as if I’d torn it from the sky and it wouldn’t be seen again. Every autumn would pass, but that miracle of nature wouldn’t light the sky again.
Everything passes. Everything.
But not today.
I scanned the area for Niko and felt a stronger pang of relief when I saw him. He was less than thirty feet away with his sword buried in Kalakos’s shoulder. The five boglets loosely surrounding him he was keeping at bay with the xiphos in his other hand. He had seen me thrown clear of the pit. I knew because the katana blade was in his father’s shoulder and not his heart. Kalakos had Niko’s best interest in mind, but Kalakos didn’t have any idea that my brother was as extreme as I was when it came to some subjects. Keeping me alive was Niko’s number one subject, A-plus, and more degrees in it than a Nobel Prize committee could handle.
Interfering with that would get you stabbed. The result of your interference would determine where you were stabbed. If I hadn’t been tossed out of the pit that rapidly, Kalakos wouldn’t have had to worry about the best interests of anyone again.
Niko was his son. I’d been, by his eyes, bait for a prehistoric crocodile and already swallowed. But that didn’t mean that no good deed went unpunished. Step between brothers, for any reason—good or bad—and you might find a high price to pay.
“I’ll take Mama. Go help Nik with the boglets.” I gave Goodfellow a push, but no warning. He knew how lethally dangerous they could be. He also knew they were nothing compared to the one who whelped them.
“You think you’re more able to fight her off than I am?” He may have lifted his eyebrows, but as he was a talking mud pie, I couldn’t tell.
“I think I can hit her other eye without having to get anywhere as close as you’d have to.” I pointed my gun at his sword.
“Good point. Spanking the kiddies, it is.” He ran toward Niko, Kalakos, and the boglets with sword leveled and ready. “Spanking” was a euphemism for the end of days for boggles in Central Park. They were teens in monster terms and I didn’t like it.
Liar.
All right. The best part of me didn’t like it, but whatever had happened had set them off and there was nothing left to be done. It was us or them. You could dump a few pints of Mother Teresa genes in me to counteract the Auphe, but when it was an us-or-them situation, it was always going to be them. I’d hike up that nun habit and keep shooting.
I had the Glock aimed at Mama’s remaining sundown eye and was halfway through the exhalation that would end in pulling the trigger—until she flung six hundred pounds of herself on the ground beside the pit and screamed. When you think scream, you think chick or kid or man with his balls crushed with a pair of pliers. High-pitched and hopeless. Boggle’s wasn’t that. Hers was deep-throated, wailing, a crocodile/she-lion/bear mourning in an agony fierce enough to banish the day and bring an endless night. The sound shook the leaves from the trees to fall as if the first frost had come early. It was a bellow of pain and of loss. Woman or boggle, the loss was the same. It was the shrieking sorrow of dead children snatched to the empty heavens itself.
When the boglets heard it, they deserted Niko and his father and gathered around the pit and wailed with their grieving mother. One eye was gone, but she didn’t care. I didn’t think she had noticed after the first explosion of agony. Her arms disappeared under the mud again, this time to pull free one dead boglet and then another. It took more than two attempts. They weren’t whole. One had his head hacked off by metal claws and one had his entire body separated at the waist. Both had the faint scent of sulfur on them.
Janus.
“They hunt.” Boggle gathered the pieces of them to her. Limp arms and legs. A head and only that cradled against her chest. Intestines resting on top of the mud and spilling forth further as she huddled over them. Hands and talons tried to shove them back together, to scoop up the guts and shove them back inside. To grind a head back onto the shattered vertebrae of its neck. “They hunt but they do not come back. We search and we see it. Atrocity.” Her lips writhed to reveal the inward-curving shark teeth. “Not sheep. Not paien. Thing. It was a thing of metal and fire and wrong. Not of this time. Not of this place. Wrong.”
Monsters love their children too. Not all of them, but some or there wouldn’t be any monsters left. Enemy or informant, the death of Boggle’s children was our fault. My fault.
Grimm’s fault.
I felt his gate and I felt him, all at once. I searched up where Boggle’s desolate cries had gone. There he was, crouching in the top of a tree. “Want to take a shot?” His teeth were silver again as he grinned. I didn’t see the red of his eyes. He had his impenetrable black sunglasses back in place. “See if I can gate faster than you can pull the trigger? Or if you can gate faster than I can pull the trigger.” He had another gun and it was aimed at my chest. Another Desert Eagle, the same matte black as the one he’d stolen from me and I’d stolen back.
“You should work on getting a personality of your own,” I said, aiming my own gun, but at his head. A chest shot was for amateurs; a head shot was for professionals. “It’s pretty pathetic when you’re no more than a copy of me. I’m surprised you haven’t dyed your hair to get it all.” I gave him a matching grin, challenging and dark. “But when you’re a failure, when you’re not the Auphe chosen savior—one and fucking only—imitating the real thing is all you can hope for, huh, loser? They were right to put you in a cage. You want to one-up the Auphe, the First, with the offspring of a half-breed and some snakes? Ones that were so pitifully easy to kill they may as well have been human?”
I wanted him mad. I wanted him furious. It was the one way I could think of for him to make a mistake. He’d been arrogant in the basement and I’d taken advantage of it. But Grimm’s life and existence were testament to how fast he learned. Making the same mistake most likely wouldn’t happen. Fool him once…
He wasn’t making this one either. “I am a copy in that I covet what you covet. Black. Leather. Things that kill. Good taste runs in the family. But all is superficial. A Caliban costume for the game. I am your opposite in the ways of the real world. It’s how it should be. Black to white.” Our hair. “Pale to brown.” Our skin. “Storm clouds to spilled blood.” Our eyes. “But we do have one thing that is the same. We have an identical need. We will make the Second Coming not one or the other of what we are, but the whole of what we can be.” Without any sign or warning, he fired and I felt the bullet burn the skin on the side of my neck as he shifted aim while pulling the trigger. For intimidation, not killing.
Good shooting?
You goddamn betcha.
“The whole of what we will be.” He tapped what had to be the still-hot muzzle against his silver hair, no concern I’d shoot back.
“The baddest motherfuckers on the planet?” I said with a shell of boredom I wouldn’t let him see through. I would’ve shot back, but I knew the answer to his quiz. He could gate faster than a bullet could fly.
H
e laughed. “The way you play the game, brother, I won’t mind when all is said and done and the Bae rule, if you finally win over me.”
“It won’t take that long, trust me, and I don’t have your need.” While he remained calm and patient, I was the one losing my temper. The fake wall of boredom was beginning to crack, but I held it together with everything I had in me. I didn’t have a choice. Grimm dressed like me and carried a gun the same as one of mine, but he’d said it. That was superficial. The way he shot—that wasn’t. If he wasn’t my equal, he was close. Or vice versa.
“You know you do, Caliban. Ahhh, you know you do. Your cattle brother knows. Your goat knows. But they don’t know how strong your need is and how tired you are of denying it.” The grin went back to human. “But right now my need is for a drink.” This time there was a tornado, a sideways swirl that opened behind him. “I know how you feel about your so-called enemies. Don’t make me find out how you feel about your fellow workers. Neither of us would care for that. I’ve never liked chicken.” He fell backward into the gray and it swallowed him up, but his last words—the bastard always had the last word—lingered behind. “But I am curious: When you twist a peri’s head off, how long do they run around, flapping their wings, before they finally fall down?”
Shit. I could call the bar and clear it out, but it was too late. He was already there.
I pushed down the anger. He’d wait awhile. He’d think it was part of the game and he liked the way I played it. He’d like it less if he found out the reason I was unpredictable was because I couldn’t gate. Three more days, counting today and I’d gate him inside out.
The fight had gone out of the boggles, if they’d had it at all. Boggles were predators without remorse, butchers and devourers of criminals and careless humans, but they knew the concept of family. They continued to mourn. The boglets rocking back and forth. The mother trying repeatedly to put her two dead children back together. She tore at the dirt outside the pit to make thicker mud and attempt to paste the head of the one boglet on his neck. The one sliced apart at the waist, she buried the lower half again and then its upper half to its chest. “Alive? Alive?” She would prop it up and croon, grooming the neck scales with her teeth. But its head flopped and though the mud up to its armpits kept it from falling over, the shoulders slumped, its chin rested against its chest, and the eyes had gone from fire to ash.
Enemies, but enemies I’d dragged into something they had no part of. Two of their family had been viciously torn apart because of me. Two dead children—size and bloodthirsty disposition was meaningless. They’d been half-grown children all the same. There was no sorry for that. No asking for forgiveness.
“Alive? Alive?” The hope was dying.
There was destroying the creature that had done it and the monster, the monster too much like me, who had pushed it into action.
That was it. It wouldn’t be enough. Yet all I could do.
“Alive?” Fading.
I put my gun away as Niko unsheathed the metal from Kalakos’s shoulder.
“Alive?” All but gone.
“Grimm is right,” I said distantly. “I need a drink.”
17
We’d gone home. All of us. We needed it. A respite. Several near-deaths and death itself called for it. Home was the closest thing to putting you right, particularly when you’d spent most of your life on the run: your mother from the cops, you from the Auphe. When you do find a place you can stop, own things that are more than can be packed in a garbage bag, you don’t take it for granted.
Robin went back to his condo and mummified cats. Niko and I returned to the garage apartment that was drenched in two or three inches of water from a new skylight, a gift of Janus. Everything in the main area was ruined…except the couch that I’d gated to Goodfellow’s condo when the automaton had come through our roof. The TV was dead from the rain that had run down the wall. I didn’t mourn as the boggles mourned, but I wasn’t happy about it either. The workout mats were underwater, as was the rest of the floor. Everything was wet and already smelling of mold.
It made no difference in the end. It was home. Correction: It was home for two of us. The third, Kalakos, it was not his home. But until Janus was taken care of, he had no intention of staying in a hotel.
That he was around to have intentions or a lack of them, he should’ve been damn thankful. He’d made an attempt to keep Niko from going after Robin and me in Boggle’s pit. He’d said it was too late. We were gone and they had the boglets coming for them. He was doing what he could to save Niko as he’d saved him before from the Cyclops.
He could’ve thought he was doing the right thing. He hadn’t seen Niko grow up, but in the past two days I’d have thought he’d have learned that, hell, no, what he did wasn’t the right thing. When it came to Niko’s manner of thinking, what he’d done was a crime, a sword the punishment, the homicide justifiable, and the justice karmic.
But bottom line to the philosophy of Niko’s morals and what flipped them upside down was simple: Don’t insult his brother, don’t fuck with his brother, and don’t get between him and his brother.
“I was doing what I could to keep him alive. I thought you and the puck were beyond hope. Do you think I was wrong?”
My bedroom was relatively dry, thanks to my habit of keeping my dirty laundry as well as most of my clean laundry on the floor. It was a system. It worked and it had soaked up the water that we splashed through in every other room.
Coming home was necessary and going into my room was a second homecoming. I was able to wear my own clothes after showering off the mud from the park. I’d lucked out and done a load of laundry the morning before Janus had attacked us. I’d dumped half of it on and half off my unmade bed. I wouldn’t have to wear something off the floor that’d have to dry on my body. I put on my holster and shrugged into my jacket. The first had been ripped to shreds by Janus when he’d attacked me outside the Ninth Circle. But I had backups. The holsters and jackets were the two things I didn’t leave on the floor. I hung them from four hooks I’d jammed into the wall. I had three of each, three holsters and three jackets. The holsters hung on one hook, but each jacket had its own. I used hangers, believe it or not, but I took my jackets seriously.
“Was I wrong?” Kalakos demanded with a sharpness that was a clue to how he went about his business…with impatience that would lead to threats and on to the results of those threats. Then the inevitable boring cleanup of whatever was left. When it came to personality and ethics (too much of one and not enough of the other), he should’ve been my father. He was nothing like Niko.
“I heard you,” I answered. “I’m thinking. Shut up and wait.”
The jacket felt good. Leather, comfortable, and ready to load up. I was me again. A man wasn’t a man without a cool jacket…the coolness factor measured by the fact that while wearing one I could carry enough weapons to make me my own walking WMD.
“Nope. I don’t think you were wrong.” I had thought, but I doubted Kalakos would get it. How do you explain the color red to someone who’s been blind since birth?
I reached under my bed and pulled out a locker. It was army-sized, but waterproof. Opening it, I chose the Desert Eagle I’d taken back from Grimm, Eagle against Eagle, because I had no doubt he had one of his own. I backed it up with my SIG Sauer. “Keeping Nik safe is it. Number one priority for me.” I started shoving clips in my pockets.
“Then you see.” He yanked the tie from his hair and shoved fingers through it in clear frustration. “Then why won’t he? I want my son back. We were making progress and now this.” I felt his eyes on me, questioning. I didn’t meet them. He’d been gone twenty-six years. That was too late for wanting big-eyed fucking tearful reassurance from me. “If it had been you I’d have held back,” Kalakos pushed, “with Niko already beyond reach and gone, you would’ve understood.”
When I’d moved the locker from under my bed, I’d turned it and myself to the side to keep Kalakos in the per
iphery of my vision from where he stood in the doorway. Force of habit with any stranger…and the majority of those I knew. I trusted my back to four…eh, two people. That was it. “Oh yeah, I’d understand,” I said without emotion. “If you’d tried to hold me back from getting to Nik, no matter what the odds, I’d understand you’d be breathing through a bullet hole in your throat.”
From the locker, I picked three knives: serrated combat, two throwing blades, and left room for the xiphos. A small sword, it fit in my jacket in a holster that held two guns and a smallish sword against my back. It wasn’t comfortable, but it made the grade of concealed weapon. Lastly I slipped a switchblade in my pocket with the ammunition clips. Unfortunately I’d used my last grenade in the black market on that mutated octopus. I hadn’t stocked up on those lately. Getting lazy. I didn’t bother with the flamethrower. Janus was made of impervious metal and filled with some type of lavalike substance. It’d think a flamethrower was a refreshing shower or a damn sex toy.
Shoving the trunk back under my bed with a solid kick, I stood from my crouch. My combat boots were wet, but they would’ve been wet from walking through the several inches of water anyway. They’d dry. “I’m going to cut you a break because you did save Nik at least once. But I know you won’t get it. You look like Nik, but you’re not half as smart, and wanting to invest in emotions for your son now? Is ‘too late’ not in your vocabulary? But since you want to try…”
It was Nik. I didn’t know what he wanted when it came to Kalakos, because he didn’t know what he wanted. I’d do my best to leave the door open, though—in case that’s what he decided.
“So listen, Kalakos. Concentrate.” Now I did meet his eyes, and he didn’t care for it. It didn’t matter that Niko and I had eyes of the same gray. The color wasn’t what counted. There were things in my eyes that no one would ever see in Nik’s. That no one would see in anyone’s eyes…except maybe Grimm’s.
