by Rob Thurman
“I’d do anything to save my brother. Anything.” I’d proven that. Some lived to regret it, most didn’t, and I hadn’t given a rat’s ass once.
“And he’d do the same for me. He has done the same,” I went on. “Think it through. He risks his life for mine. Then I see the mess he’s gotten himself into while pulling my ass out of the fire, and I’m right back in after him. Same risk. Same mess. Then back it goes again. Vicious circle, I think they call it.”
“That’s all but suicide,” he snapped. He was stunned, angry, and me? I was not giving a rat’s ass all over again. If he wanted a say in Niko’s life, he would’ve shown up sooner.
I ignored the comment. “And if we’re too far from each other and it’s too late”—I shrugged—“vengeance has nothing to do with the Lord. Cain was wrong. I am my brother’s keeper. And Niko’s mine.”
“That is suicide, plain and simple.”
“You said it yourself, Father Kalakos. Niko is who he is because of me. I am who I am because of him. For me that won’t stop. I’m terminal and Nik is my chemo. He keeps me human and he keeps me sane.” For as long as he could. I walked toward the door and Kalakos took a few reluctant steps back. He’d said I wasn’t a monster like the Bae, but I didn’t think he or I actually believed it.
“Niko,” I reflected, “I don’t know what he would’ve been without me. Not you. Absolutely not you. Better off? Maybe. Able to love, like he loves Promise? To trust, like he trusts Goodfellow? I don’t know. And neither does he.”
“It’s insane. Friends and family grieve and go on when people die. They don’t jump in the grave after them. People live on.”
“Yeah, people do.” I brushed past him in the hall and left him behind. People mourn and move on.
Certain monsters and heroes don’t.
Leaving Kalakos at our place, we took a cab to the Ninth Circle. There was no worrying over the driver hearing us. He couldn’t hear us. He was an Ullikummi. They were from the Middle East, their skin the same color as cooled volcanic rock, blind eyes hidden behind sunglasses, and they were deaf to go along with the rest. Despite being blind, they navigated somehow. I hadn’t seen one get a ticket once or run over anyone unless it was on purpose.
“As plans go, this is lacking in everything that one consists of,” Niko said, also back in his own clothes and content with his own weapons. “Facts, arrangements, a goal in general.”
An Auphe had once killed one of Ishiah’s peris before to get to me. I wasn’t going to let that happen again. “Plan or not,” I said, “Grimm has us by the balls.” We had nothing, but Grimm—he had a plan…for years. Complex and with every chance of working, of taking back the world, that was his plan. My plan had been surviving as long as I could. Trying not to kill too many people when it came to the end, and holding back the end as long as I was able. I’d thought it was a plan. It wasn’t.
It was fucking irresponsible.
Of course, I might not be the end I thought I’d be. Grimm had a hell of a bigger shot at that than I did. His objective was different and he was all about the Second Coming. If he had five or six backup plans to the Coming, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“If we don’t have a plan, then a fact-finding mission will do,” Nik decided, running a finger around his steel mala bead bracelet.
“You and your obsessive need to label shit.” I started to elbow his ribs as usual, but remembered we all had weeks to go before we weren’t the next-best thing to pork cutlets. I wanted to give him a hard time, but not double him over in pain. “How about some unknown facts? We don’t know how many Bae there are. Grimm’s been on the loose for twelve years…”
“But he would’ve had to acclimate, learn to blend into the human population, find out the Auphe were dead, depriving him of revenge and forcing him to come up with a new plan,” Niko took over.
“And a goddamn plan like that takes time to set up,” I thought aloud.
“We also don’t know how many succubae he’s keeping prisoner, how long he’s had them, or how many Bae a pregnant succabae would deliver at one time. One? Three?”
I had no idea about any of it and didn’t particularly want to know. There could be anywhere from twenty or fifty Bae out there. Fifty. God. They were young and no Auphe, but every year they’d be tougher opponents. Every year they’d learn and sharpen their killing skills. If one year was enough for a Bae to mature to full-grown status, think what it could become in five years. Every year equal to eighteen or twenty years of added intelligence and reflexes. In a decade, they would be Auphe and more.
Undefeatable.
“How are your legs?” Niko asked. Grimm’s seeing me limping wasn’t what we wanted. “Did you take the pills?”
I grinned. “Oh yeah.” I’d dosed up on Vicodin to the max and then some before we left home. “I’m pretty sure I have legs, but I’m not feeling them.” The wounded don’t get to play the game. The wounded are broken Monopoly pieces thrown in the garbage. Grimm couldn’t know, which changed the winding road of my thoughts to the one that was waiting for me. I felt him like he’d feel me. The entertainment factor of that thought was higher than sitting in a cab discussing plans we didn’t know and facts we didn’t have. My chances of dying were higher as well, but that was the game.
Time to play.
Yeah, time to play.
The cab was stopping at the bar. “He’s there. I can feel him.” I reached for the handle while Nik paid. “I’ll talk to him. That’s what he wants, right? To drink, talk, and to convince me to be the second founding father of the Bae. But, Nik, you can’t sit with us. Take a table across the room, all right? Behind me.” Watching my back as always.
“Why?” was followed and erased by, “No. Absolutely not.”
“It’s the game. Him and me. Only Auphe get to play. There are two rules and that’s one of them.” I slid out and slammed the door behind me.
“We could take him together. It’s a possibility.” Niko slammed his own door, considerably harder.
“And he could gate however many Bae he’s fathered into the bar and wipe out everyone. If it looks like he’s going to kill me, I would appreciate your coming over and joining in. Swear. But if I don’t at least try the game, prove myself—then it’s all over. He’ll know I’m not as good as he is.” Or the same as he was. And I wasn’t.
Not yet.
“And it’ll be hell-in-a-handbasket time then,” I finished.
“I don’t like it,” he said, standing between the door and me. He could’ve been made of obstinacy instead of flesh and blood.
“And you wonder why I’m stubborn. I come by it honestly, Big Brother.” I snorted. I stepped up on the curb and then stopped. “Be ready and don’t move.” I added reluctantly. “The second rule of the game.”
This time his question was silent, but as forceful.
The second rule. “We’re going to hurt each other, him and me. Not fatally, at least not now. But like the park.” I rubbed at the bullet burn along the side of my neck. “Don’t come over with your sword to make sure all new baby Bae are born with two assholes, one carved by a katana, okay? The game always hurts. Whether you’re playing to play or playing to win, it’ll always hurt.”
“Why?” It was an echo of his earlier questions.
I didn’t answer this time. I didn’t want to tell him the truth.
If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not fun. If someone doesn’t bleed, it’s not the game.
I’d learned that when the Auphe had me in Tumulus. I didn’t remember it, but I knew it. Felt it.
“Just a fact-finding mission. Right?” I said.
He didn’t respond to the verbal poke, holding the bar door shut, before saying something I hadn’t expected to hear from him. Not in my lifetime. “I’ve seen you, Cal, when you’re Caliban, which is more often than you think. Don’t ever doubt you can take him.” It was the first time Nik had admitted there was a Caliban, that I was Auphe as much as or more than human. Cal and Caliba
n, not two. One. In the past I’d have been ashamed that he’d let himself believe it—the brother who always thought the best of me. Now I understood that this was how it should be and for the rest of my life how it had to be. He accepted me, all of me, with no denying of what I might become and what I might do.
“You’re my brother, every part of you. Don’t you forget that. And if you have to, then kick his goddamn ass, because I know you can,” he ordered, opening the door and following me through it.
“How many times do I have to say that this non-Niko cursing is beginning to worry me,” I started to say before I saw Grimm two tables over from the door. Niko kept walking to take a table against the back wall. He didn’t look at me again or indicate anything other than that he just happened to be here at the same time as me. Grimm wouldn’t touch him, but being careful not to do anything to change that frame of warped half-Auphe mind was a good idea.
Samyel and Kushial were working the bar and neither one seemed too happy. I didn’t blame them. They didn’t know what Grimm was, but they would have a good guess. They knew what he looked like, with his white hair, clawed glove, and red eyes, his sunglasses discarded. He looked Auphe—part Auphe. Like me, only more so. That would normally make you want to leave, but turning your back on an Auphe of any kind, half, a quarter, was the same: asking for claws buried in your back or tearing out your throat. If it wasn’t trying to eat you at the moment, staying calm and as motionless as possible was the best choice you could make to keep it uninterested in you.
And the last thing you wanted was for it to be interested in you.
There were no Wolves in the bar. Lamia, revenants, vodyanoi, vamps, but no Wolves. This was a big Wolf hangout. If there wasn’t a Wolf in here, the reason was sitting at the table to my right. They’d smelled him ten blocks away and found a different bar. I guessed he didn’t smell like me then, or the difference was slight but enough for a Wolf to detect. They were used to my being behind the bar. Grimm they weren’t used to and didn’t want to be, from the lack of leg humping and clumps of fur on the floor.
The other bar patrons couldn’t smell an Auphe or hadn’t seen one in their lives. They knew he wasn’t human, but there were so many races of paien around that they didn’t know all of them. Drinking and laughing, clawing and snarling, it was party time as usual for them.
I knew he’d felt me coming for a while. I moved to the table and turned the chair around to straddle it, same as he’d already done—which I’d bet he’d copied from watching me—and sat across the table from Grimm. He had a black-gloved hand, the one without the claws, lying casually on the table next to a half-empty pretzel bowl. He liked pretzels or he ate out of boredom. I did both. I reached for one. He tilted his head, irises red but as opaque as if he had kept on his sunglasses. “We should talk,” he said cheerfully as he slammed an ice pick into my left hand, pinning it to the center of the table.
“Yeah, we should.” That’s what he heard after my switchblade had skewered his hand in place as well, next to the pretzel bowl of both our downfalls.
“Fast,” he approved. “I didn’t see it coming. Someone’s been practicing. I’d clap, but, well…” He grinned, his human one, and raised his free hand for a round of drinks. The metal cat-claw glove wouldn’t have drawn any attention in the Ninth Circle unless you knew what was wearing them…as the peris did.
Behind me, I’d heard the scrape of a chair against the floor, but Niko, after the first involuntary movement, kept his seat. He was trusting me on this, because on this no one knew as much except for Grimm himself.
“Practicing.” I rolled the word around and I was juiced by the scent of the blood, the successful nailing of his hand, the pain inflicted, all part and parcel of the dark road. “No. Just not holding back as much to make the game last longer. You aren’t the player I thought you were. Sending Janus after half-grown boggles? If you’re that damn desperate, I should get a Chihuahua to kick, if that’ll make you feel king of the Auphe.”
“King is right. Bow down whenever you pull your hand free.” He nodded at my shirt. “I like that. Where can I get one?”
“Free my hand? Why? Doesn’t bother me.” I drawled with an insulting ocean of fake sympathy, “Does yours bother you?”
As for the shirt, I’d dug it out of a drawer where I’d hidden several “attitudinal” tees. I knew Niko wouldn’t find them there. Put shirts in a drawer? I didn’t know what a drawer was, in his opinion. I’d retired them after he’d threatened to burn them all, but once in a while you need an ego boost. This one, my favorite, read, KING OF THE FUCKING UNIVERSE.
And I did feel like the king of the fucking universe. Grimm had gotten me, but I’d matched him. That was the game. Although my hand ached mildly, it didn’t hurt as much as it should, whether I counted the normal few minutes of shock or not.
That’s because I was cheating. If you want to win the game, you have to be willing to go the extra mile. Like cheating—I had no problem with it whatsoever. The triple dose of Vicodin hadn’t been for my legs alone. I could handle pain if I had to, but showing none at all…you were a true player. The pills had helped my legs, but they’d also been for the pain I’d known was coming in one form or another.
Cheater. Cheater. Aren’t you proud?
Couldn’t have been prouder. If he was going to force me to play, I was going to play to win, and cheating was nothing compared to what I’d do.
No rules but two. You must be Auphe. There must be pain.
But there wasn’t pain. I didn’t plan on cheating Grimm. I planned on cheating the game too. The Auphe in me didn’t know whether to be amused or pissed off by that. I didn’t care. Grimm thought he was better than they had been, and after listening to and fighting him, I did as well. I was not an Auphe. I was something different and if I played games, they’d be my games. The Auphe said no rules but two?
Bullshit.
I said no rules, period.
Grimm flashed a scarlet glance at my hand. He could look all day…or at least until the Vicodin wore off. Of the two of us, he’d remove the blade from his hand first. Fact. “I don’t care what your idiotic shirt says, I am king. Did you come to prove me better, Cal-i-ban, by playing my game?”
Surprisingly my wound wasn’t as bad as I’d suspected. The ice pick could’ve hit nerves or tendons or broken some metacarpal bones and screwed up my hand but good. It hadn’t. It had gone in parallel to the bones and between them, closer to my fingers than my wrist. I’d have another two holes to stitch up, but I’d be tossing blades and pulling triggers in no time. Besides, it wasn’t my dominant hand. You don’t reach for pretzels with that one.
Either Niko or Chuck Norris had said that.
“I’ll prove you a thousand times better. Auphe don’t play the game, not your game, over bar snacks. That’s degrading. Pathetic. And boring.” I took the bottle of beer Samyel brought over as he did his best to ignore two hands impaled to the table. “Besides we both know we can gate away and this will have been for nothing.” One of us could gate away, at least.
“Gate? Why?” He took a swallow of his beer right behind me. If a half-Auphe could be mellow, it mellowed him, or the game had shifted. “We haven’t talked. It’s important that family talk.” There was that Auphe silver grin again. “I saw that on Oprah.”
“Oprah?” I said, both skeptical and rather disgusted.
“Judgmental to have been raised by cattle, aren’t you?” He put down the bottle of beer and swiped a finger across the top of my pinned hand. There wasn’t much blood, but enough for a taste. “We are the same, but we’re different too. The best of both…or so you should be hoping.”
He returned to the beer. “Daytime TV can be helpful. I have the kiddies to raise. A single father needs all the advice he can get. And chewing through their throats when they screw up doesn’t work. They make more mistakes then. Then there’s more punishment and more mistakes. On it goes. If this keeps up, I’ll have to start from scratch.”
> The ache in my hand was growing slightly. The shock had faded. Without being signaled, Samyel came over with two whiskies with a beer back—a different kind of painkiller. Samyel was a good guy, his wings flashing in and out of existence in nervousness, but I’d already had Niko warn him. This was between Grimm and me. No sweeping in like a feathered cavalry. Being a good guy didn’t mean Samyel wouldn’t end up dead if he tried. In some ways Samyel was a little too good.
I tossed the whiskey back and felt the burn. I didn’t like whiskey, but it could take the edge off an ice pick through your hand like nothing else except Vicodin. It assisted that considerably. I put the empty glass back down and gave Grimm a grin to match his earlier one. The Bae. His plan with them had a flaw.
“Oh, Daddy Grimm’s done fucked up.” That made me happy as you could be. “Your little Auphe-bae are afraid. And each time you kill one for messing up you make the others more afraid. The more afraid they are the more likely they are to mess up again and on and on. Maybe I should call in a social worker. Daddy has a temper.”
Grimm had switched from beer to whiskey. He swallowed half of it. He didn’t need the whole glass I’d finished in one swallow. Eighteen years of torture had given him a pain tolerance I knew would’ve exceeded mine if I hadn’t thought ahead to dope up. He’d earned his righteously, though. I gave him that. His metal teeth descended to crack the edge of the glass. “Auphe do not fear. Our bastard fathers did not fear. Their blood overcame the human in us and we do not fear. I do not fear. There can be no fear in the Second Coming.”
I dipped a finger in his blood. Turnabout was fair play—the only fair play you’d see here. And it was his blood that had created the Bae, after all. I drew on the table. “The Auphe were pure.” I talked as I drew a Y with lines of equal length. “We are half and the Auphe made us, own us, even past their death. We can’t escape our breeding.”
