Doubletake

by Rob Thurman

  “Yet my furniture means nothing to you.” Goodfellow stayed in place, hands behind his head, as the rest of us slid off and onto the floor. “The two of you are quite the experts with swords.” He addressed Niko and Kalakos, who was recovering. He was less green. He’d head back into the nausea range, because Goodfellow was talking and didn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon.

  Janus—no big deal. A sweaty version of American Gladiators right in front of him, that was worth discussing. “It is almost as if Niko inherited some talent from you, although he is superior. He fights with his skill and his heart. You fight with your skill alone. Too bad. A strong heart usually wins. We pucks hate that, as it makes trickery more difficult. Unfortunately it is true.”

  Kalakos still held the xiphos in his hand, the one that had actually seemed to make a mild impression on Janus. “Niko is impressive. I will not deny. All the male line of my family is the same and has been since…I cannot remember. Blond hair, fighters. There is a story that a man impregnated a girl from our clan back in Greece hundreds of years ago. Northern Greek and blond, he was supposedly descended from the Trojan war hero Achilles.” He shifted his shoulders. “Foolishness. Mythology, the historical rumors that never die.”

  Robin crossed his ankles and raised his eyebrows. “Mythology. When will you humans ever learn what is true and what is not? Achilles existed. There is no myth there. He was human, however. No goddess dipping him in a river by his heel. He was a human soldier and a superb warrior.” He moved a hand to pat his stomach. Salome appeared, jumped, and curled up, dead and purring. Her feline grin was the same as always—the Cheshire cat crossed with Hannibal Lecter. “It does explain a good deal. The inherent genetic talent of hundreds of years of warriors since Achilles, hundreds of more warrior ancestors before him. The general appearance: the blond hair and epic nose. You could be his brothers, both of you.”

  Niko, ever prepared, had held on to his towel and finished cleaning up. “Or his cousin, Patroclus?”

  “No, contrary to useless historical myth, they didn’t look much alike. Patroclus had dark hair. He also had a tendency toward a foul mouth and insubordination. When they were younger, years before Troy, he was whipped on one occasion, his back turned to rags of flesh…or at least he was until Achilles returned to camp and broke the neck of the antisyntag…the lieutenant colonel who was doing the ‘punishing.’ The man wasn’t fond of mercenaries to begin with. We had a time covering that one up. But as all the men hated him anyway, a few barrels of wine and it was forgive and forget.”

  “They existed? You knew them?” Kalakos asked with a healthy dose of disbelief. “Achilles and Patroclus?”

  Robin looked down his nose. “Were they worth knowing? Yes. Ergo, did I know them? Yes.” He stroked Salome’s wrinkly bare skin. “When Patroclus died, Achilles cut off his own hair to mourn him.” He stared into the light of Salome’s eyes as he said that, as if he could see it all over again in the dusty glow. “I handed him the dagger.”

  “That tradition extended that far back?” The Rom had picked that up when passing through Greece. “To cut your hair?” Niko wondered, a shadowed memory passing over his face. Why wouldn’t he be curious? He’d once done it himself.

  Robin didn’t answer the question, instead saying, “Niko, you can borrow the shower and some of my clothes if you wish. There is also soy milk in the refrigerator. Wine for Promise. Nothing for Cal, as he keeps destroying my condo. And when we are settled, I’d like to hear about the xiphos Kalakos has that didn’t kill Janus, but made the automaton at least hesitate for a second or two. Who knows how long we have? This is perfect weather for a war machine like Janus to move about unseen among the local populace.”

  “We could’ve been hearing about the swords sooner if you weren’t telling us goddamn bedtime stories,” I growled. “And it’s a war machine? We have an actual war machine on our asses?”

  The puck gently rang the gold loop in the tip of Salome’s ear. “I like stories. And obviously it’s a war machine. Do you think it was built to pick olives?”

  What the hell did you say to that?

  Niko showered, as did Kalakos, although he hadn’t been offered an invitation. The condo had three bathrooms. He took advantage. He wasn’t lacking in intelligence enough to take any of Robin’s or Ish’s clothes without the offer. He did ask politely for shoes, which Robin grumbled about before giving in. “But no shirt. If I have to give you shoes, I get a nice view in return. And if you could throw in a boom-chika-bow-wow once in a while, I might even give you shoes that fit.”

  Kalakos slapped the xiphos lightly against his leg. “I’ve not killed a puck before.”

  “And you never will. Achilles-lite. Vaguely similar taste with half the lethality. Now go take your shower or your generous host, me, will let you walk around New York shoeless, shirtless, and perhaps without your balls.”

  Salome knew that word. Her hairless muzzle turned toward Kalakos and she showed him her bored let’s-play smile. I couldn’t figure out how she fit the dentures of a T. Rex in her cat-size mouth, and Kalakos didn’t waste time pondering the issue either. He was already moving for the hall and the bathrooms. When he returned he was re-dressed in his black pants and put on his long coat I hadn’t noticed him seizing before I’d gated. It must have been where the xiphos had been concealed. He also had the shoes Robin had promised him. He didn’t mention anything about the very visible fang marks in them.

  When all was done but not said, fifteen minutes later we gathered around the dining room table and I said, “Spit it out, Kalakos.” He was at the opposite end of the table from me, not that that would do him any good. I had kept my Desert Eagle with me when I’d gated and it shone bright and deadly on the table in front of me.

  “Niko will cut you some slack for your Suyolak-jacked-up Neosporin, but he’s my brother. He cares if I live or die. I have different priorities. ‘No life for a child.’” I was no Salome but I stretched my mouth into a grin that outdid your average crocodile. “I lived that life with him. And if it comes to me living or me dying and taking you with me because you discarded him like trash to live that life, I don’t have to flip a fucking quarter to know which choice I’d prefer.” I picked up the Eagle and aimed it at where his heart would’ve been if the son of a bitch had had one. “Tell us the story. Goodfellow told us one. Now it’s your turn.

  “And, Kalakos,” I added, casual on the outside, but on the inside was the blackest of rage, “you know what I am. The entire Vayash clan knew from the day I was born. They kept an eye on Sophia, making sure the wild, crazy, sociopathic bitch didn’t get them in trouble. She laughed at that. And they knew the Auphe. All the Rom know the Auphe. The clan knew from the beginning and so did you. The Auphe don’t play games like me without a reason. When they make things like me, even they don’t know for certain how I’ll turn out.” I turned the Eagle on one side. “More human?” Then to the other side. “Less human?” Then I aimed it back at him.

  “But you left Niko there anyway. You know what?” My finger tightened on the trigger. I wanted to pull it. God, I wanted it badly enough that I felt my finger cramp from the pressure of holding back. “That’s the bigger crime than leaving him with Sophia. I could’ve been born a monster. You could’ve left him with a monster.”

  Kalakos tensed, fingers curling around the grip of the xiphos. “You are a monster.”

  “Now you get it.” I felt Niko’s presence behind me, but my trigger finger didn’t relax. Neither did my predatory grin. “Now you know why Niko is willing to give you a week, but if I think you’re lying, I won’t give you a second. I’ll kill you, and the best thing you can hope for is that I use a gun to do it.” I finally let the tension drain away and leaned back in my chair, Eagle still aimed at him, but my grin gone. Niko moved up to my side, although if it had come down to it, I didn’t think he knew himself if he would’ve tried to stop me from pulling the trigger. He sat around the corner of the table from me. “So tell your godd
amn story.”

  All Rom clans have a burden and a duty. That’s where the story began. I didn’t know why they all did. I didn’t think they remembered when or why it had begun either, but this I did know: I didn’t give a shit. Janus was the Vayash burden. Created by Hephaestus, who claimed to be a Greek god…again, didn’t care…he gave the automaton to the Vayash those hundreds of years ago they’d squatted there. It was inactive, a dead machine, if machines could die. Only certain spells could bring it back to life, control it, or disable it again. No one knew the words, the incantations to do any of that. Hephaestus had not trusted them with that. Fake god or not, he was no fool.

  “Incantations. Spells.” Robin clunked his forehead lightly against the table. “Isn’t the absolute magnitude of the supernatural enough for you? Must you humans continually offend us with your fairy dust and your talking, colored, egg-crapping rabbits? There is no magic. None. There is a technology that came far before that of humans and built by races long extinct, but there is no magic. Hephaestus without a doubt bought the thing, already an antique in his day, and passed it off as his own work. He wasn’t capable of anything like that. Could barely build a mousetrap, the lying bastard.” He tunneled fingers through his brown hair, squinted against what was a clearly massive headache. “But, to be perfectly clear one more time, there is no magic.”

  “No Santa, huh?” I snorted.

  “No, there was a Santa Claus, but a seven-year-old werewolf ate him,” he answered, distracted before turning his ire back on Kalakos. “And who knows this better than anyone? That magic is a trick and the cheapest one there is? An embarrassment to all?” He rearranged himself in the chair to lean closer to Kalakos. “You do. The best of the human tricksters, the Rom, yet you fake it nonetheless, giving us all a bad name.”

  Closer still as he emphasized. “Do not think to play trickster games with a trueborn paien trickster or I’ll take Cal’s gun and put it where he wouldn’t think to before I fire it.”

  Kalakos took that as a strong hint to continue the account with less of that magical bullshit, the only thing that offended Robin: trying to fool a puck. “Although it was assumed no one knew the codes, especially after so long, someone had. The Vayash had found Janus’s metal casket empty and the body of two Rom by it. One had had his throat slit neatly.…Blood must have been been part of the activation, combined with the correct command, or that’s what the Rom had guessed. It wasn’t as if we had a guard on a creature that did nothing but sleep. No, this was very deliberate and ritualistic. The scarlet was smeared liberally on and in the casket. The other Rom had been torn apart. Arms, legs, head, they were all scattered. The traitor. He had been the one to bring Janus to life, but the words used to control it beyond that were obviously not correct. Janus was gone. The clan was parked in Pennsylvania at an RV park and fortunate to be in the closest small town running a rickety fair, earning the day’s pay.”

  If they’d been there when it had happened, Janus would’ve killed them all, Kalakos said. Hephaestus had warned that should Janus escape it would have enough low-level awareness to hate its captors and destroy them. Beyond that…

  It would go home. Whether it was a beacon or some bizarre programming from the Greek geeks beyond time, it would return to the place of its creation. Greece before it was Greece. That was why it had headed to NYC. In a straight line from Pennsylvania, it was the closest to the ocean, and the ocean had to be crossed to reach home…but that was before it became distracted by the presence of three Vayash in the city. Kalakos didn’t know how it sensed us. Did it smell Vayash blood? He had no idea. But find us it could and would until we destroyed it or put it back to sleep, and as none of us knew the incantation—Robin glared when I emphasized the word evilly—that wasn’t going to happen.

  Kalakos had placed his xiphos back onto the table. Facing a monster like me versus that threat of a colonoscopy given to him by a puck with a borrowed Desert Eagle—cooperating was in his best interest. From inside his coat he produced another xiphos. As I’d noticed before, they were the same dark metal that formed Janus. “We were given these with our burden and we were told they wouldn’t kill it or even harm it, but that they would cause it pain, give you the moments you needed to hopefully escape. I have only two.” He regarded Niko. “As you and I are the swordsmen here, I believe one should go to you and one to me. We will make the best use of them.”

  “Logical. Reasonable.” Niko took the xiphos handed to him and passed it to me. The xiphos left on the table before Kalakos he took for himself without compunction. Niko was about logic and reason, but most of all practicality—the kind that suited him. He didn’t bother to look at Kalakos when he ordered, “If you have something to say, do not bother.”

  “I have something to say. I’m a better swordsman than all of you put together,” Robin groused. “Why don’t I get a chance at one?”

  “You don’t have Vayash blood,” Niko reminded him, running a hand over the dark metal. “Janus has nothing against you, although it will still eviscerate you if you get in its way. Do remember that. But this mess is not of your making. Stay back and stay safe. You as well, Promise. We have three more days before Cal’s gating ability will have recovered to solve all of this for us.” That gate I’d built to escape Janus today had set the clock back. Between the first and second gate I had no limit, although I had pain. Between the second gate and the third, which would kill me…it took three days to reset me back to gate one.

  “Kicking metal butt and sending it to another dimension. That’s me.” Three days was a long time when Janus could find us as if we had a GPS stapled to our asses, and we all knew it.

  I examined my own xiphos, for the first time putting down the gleaming Eagle. Goodfellow was on the money. He was a better swordsman than all of us, but hundreds of thousands of years—or longer…as he’d said in the bar, long enough to be forever—after that kind of time spent with a sword in his hand, he couldn’t be beaten by anyone human. Perhaps not even by anyone less or more than human. It made me think of what Robin had said in the bar. How old was he—genuinely? Why had no other puck poached on his name? What did they all know? Consciously or subconsciously?

  The Auphe weren’t the only firsts. The first in time, but not the only first of a race or the only ones who had lived millions of years—a number that went hand in hand with insanity, unreasoning hatred of everyone and everything, and pitch-black malevolence. Hob, the first puck, had been that way, and although he was now dead…

  He screamed. Didn’t he scream like a baby? First born—last torn.

  It was a warm thought. He had tried to kill Niko and Georgina, a girl I’d loved. He had deserved to scream. There was no denying that, and most would scream their lungs inside out when ripped apart by the mass of unbelievably pissed-off Auphe I’d tossed him to. I had no regrets.

  It didn’t change my original thought, though.

  Hobgoblin—Hob to all others, as shorter names made it quicker in getting to the running part—was the first trickster and had been as much a murder-loving bastard as the Auphe. A combination like that we could use until the days passed and I could gate Janus onto the bones of those now-dead Auphe and the bones of the first puck as well in Tumulus. Good company for an ancient war machine. “Goodfellow.” I ran a careful thumb along the blade. “If he had to face Janus, what do you think Hob would do—to at least slow it down?”

  Robin’s lips flattened. “I do not know.”

  “You knew him better than most. You’ve said so. He was the first trickster. He would have a chance to put this bastard off for three days at least. What would he do?” Robin was one of the best tricksters out there, but he wasn’t what Hob had been—a blood-spilling psychopath created out of insanity and violence. He was violence, or had been, walking and talking, but so sly and slippery you didn’t see him coming until you wondered why your guts were on the outside instead of the inside. It would’ve been a challenge for him, but I’d seen into that bastard’s eyes. P
ure poison was all that lurked in their depths. His tricks, they always ended in death. He would’ve known how, if not to take out the automaton, then how to delay it. I knew from personal experience that sometimes it took a monster to outthink a monster.

  “I don’t know.” It was more that he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to go down that path. I didn’t blame him. I had my own path. I knew what it was like. Moving along the path slowly, controlling each step, but I was walking it all the same.

  Halfway there now…

  “Okay,” I said. I wouldn’t push him on it yet. I’d give him a chance to think about it before I brought it up again. “No big deal. We’ll just—”

  That was when I felt it. Behind me. A gate. Jesus Christ, a fucking gate.

  Once I would’ve thought, No. Not again. Not anymore. I was the last. I’d made sure of that. There were no more. No. No more kidnappings. No more threatening to kill my brother, my friends. No more red eyes, white skin, metal teeth. No more Auphe hell.

  God, no more.

  Of course, I was somewhat of a chickenshit then, not that everyone—or anyone—agreed with that. But I had been more human.

  Not that I hadn’t had my moments back then, but they were Auphe moments, lost in a blind genetic rage. I wasn’t blind any longer. With help, I’d killed every last one of these bastards on the planet, culminating with eight half-breeds like me in Nevah’s Landing.