by Rob Thurman
“Because I know you will.” He finished his drink. “And you’ll enjoy it. The blood, the taste, the betrayal and pain—because of you and for you.”
He held my switchblade and tasted his blood and my metal. “Good. I like the mix.”
Not done with me yet, he pointed the blade at the bathroom in the back of the bar. He’d seen the quick consideration I’d given it, no more than a tic of my head in that direction. “And don’t think you can stop any of this by going back there right now, a wolf trying so hard to be cattle, and blow your human-tainted brains over the walls. You do that and my word is done. I’ll make your nightmare happen, your so-called family die before your body hits the piss-covered floor. Three gates and you not there to warn them as I claw air and reality apart and then claw through them as easily. You wouldn’t be giving your ‘family’ any chance then.”
He held the switchblade in front of me. “A different game, Caliban, with your one more rule, but I’ll make fucking do.” The black and gray spun around him this time, not behind or in front—a demon’s aura. “Come to Fort Tilden tonight. You say you won this round. It’s my turn for the next move. Janus is a damned bitch to keep penned up. Let’s see what you can do with my toy. Better than last time or I wouldn’t have your genes in the Bae. Defective bast…”
Not bothering to finish the word, he dropped his eyes to see the katana blade that had passed through his back, anything in between, and exited where a human’s heart would be. “That is impressive. For cattle, you would’ve made a half-decent Auphe. My highest compliment.” The gate closed around him and he disappeared with about a third of Niko’s blade.
Half-Auphe were different. My heart was where a human’s would be, and the majority of the half-breeds I’d killed in Nevah’s Landing had been the same, but not all were that way. Some, like Grimm, took after the pure Auphe, who had kept theirs elsewhere.
“I thought”—I caught the towel Samyel threw me and wrapped it around my sluggishly bleeding hand—“you were going to let me handle this?”
Niko dropped the handle of the ruined katana in disgust and took the towel I was wrapping with one hand and tied it briskly and with enough pressure to stop the bleeding. “When did I say that?”
I scowled. “When I told you how the game worked, to take the back table, and to interfere only if he was going to kill me.”
“Yes, you said quite a few things, but I don’t recall agreeing to any of them.” He must have gone out the side door to the alley, back in the front, and Grimm and I were focused with such intensity on the game, neither had heard him or the door. Grimm was right. He wouldn’t make a half-bad Auphe.
My scowl deepened. Grimm was heavy shit, but he was my heavy shit. I might be hurt thanks to him, but no one else would be. With something like this, something worse than Auphe, Niko had to listen to me. For once in my life I knew more than he did.
“When did you stop following my directions?” I asked. He raised an eyebrow at the question with a comeback that was uncomfortably true.
“When did you start following mine?”
18
Black Sheep
If I could respect cattle, an impossible, stupid notion, but if I could, I might almost respect the human Caliban claimed to be his brother. He was devious and sly. I liked both of those qualities. He wasn’t bad with a sword either, but he was cattle and I couldn’t respect one of them whatever their talent. And he was human, and that was the reason he wasn’t Caliban’s brother.
As if a human could be part of us. That made me want to gag. Their blood was in us, I knew, but it was disappearing. The Auphe cells are more efficient than any virus in existence. They touched the human cells or enveloped them or excreted a contagion.…I didn’t know or think about it as long as it worked.
And it did work. It turned them. Human became Auphe. We ate humans in this form, a farmer surprised in his field—he’d tasted of pork, and our cells ate human cells in turn on the inside of the form. It was a slow process by human standards, but a whirlwind to an Auphe or a half Auphe who planned to live as long as the First.
Efficiency beats fear and war on every occasion. The Auphe hadn’t known that.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
They had the tools, but not the schooling. Instead they attempted to make a thing that could make a gate and the last of the First would meet the first of the First to end humans before they barely began, or keep them cave-bound and low in numbers. They had determination and luck and then bad luck.
One of my teachers had taught that invaluable lesson on efficiency by combining biology and history. He told us of some human seaport close to a thousand years ago with walls too thick to breach…for humans. The attacking army came down with the plague and, smarter than your average cow, catapulted their diseased dead over the walls into the city. Those cowering there were then infected and that battle was over. That teacher—I had so many, learned so much—went on to say it did little good in the end, as the plague swept the continent and most of the humans died.
Flying humans: dead, rotting, and crawling with contamination. An entire continent all but wiped out. Cattle inventing a new way to kill, cunning enough to do tricks not unlike dogs do for treats.
All that comedy, and I missed it. It would’ve been hilarious.
I ate that teacher too, but I did pat him on his balding head first for the excellent job he’d done. He’d tasted of roots and rice and beans. A vegetarian. One bite and I’d spit it out. Evil. No good deed goes unpunished. That was my first and last plant eater.
I could taste the vegatation now and wished I’d broken every bone in his body instead of only his neck. And I took back the pat. Grass eaters could have all the knowledge in the world, but no one who tasted that bad deserved a pat.
Disappointing, and the memory of his flavor was making me want to vomit. I sighed and continued to wrap a bandage around my chest. I’d leave it until the edges of the two sword cuts meshed back together. I healed faster than the other half Auphe had. I thought I healed faster than the Auphe themselves had. I laughed at that. More proof I was above them. I’d told Caliban we were evolution in motion.
Or had I told myself that?
Or the Bae?
Who knew?
I didn’t worry. My memory was fine. Top of my class. Top…of…my…class. I didn’t remember, because I didn’t care. I was all that mattered. My plan all that mattered. Memories came and went, but I didn’t forget a single part of the plan. The plan that was born of the only beautiful thing I’d known in my life: biology. There was more to it than plague and flying bodies.
Although those were as beautiful too.
I’d always been the most Auphe of the others in Nevah’s Landing—insane and weak every one—and years later the Auphe in me had grown, then continued to grow and spread. When I took biology…I’d enjoyed throwing the irritating lab tech off the roof. Him I had no desire to eat. He was greasy and flabby with the stench of STDs following him like a cloud. How he’d gotten anyone, even a whore, to give them to him was a mystery. And loud. He was loud enough to puncture my eardrums. Off he had to go. I didn’t leave that class. I wasn’t finished and he was an obvious suicide. He covered the sidewalk in an explosion of bacon-grease-coated syphilis. He…
Where was I? Where was I? Where…
Biology.
I’d learned and what I learned combined with what I knew and felt happening in me. It wasn’t hard to figure out. The Auphe were the first predators of merit on earth. Didn’t Sidle the warden tell us that enough? Brown-nosing, cocksucking shit.
The Auphe genes had survived and evolved the longest. Mixed with any others, they couldn’t lose. You could start out half Auphe, but given years—I didn’t know how many, but I could wait—all the human would be gone from the inside. Consumed. Perhaps the outside too. We’d see.
With time, you would become pure Auphe. And with us, better—smarter. Able to learn and knowing it necessary to learn. Auphe times two. The
Second Coming.
Caliban’s cattle companion taught college classes. I’d watched. He’d taught Caliban because that’s what cattle companions, loyal and true, do. They would both know biology as I did. They would have seen the changes in Caliban over the years.
They knew.
But they didn’t know.
Because they didn’t want to know.
And so they would refuse to know.
Caliban could tell he was becoming more Auphe, but completely Auphe? He wouldn’t believe that. He’d think monster… stupid word… predator, crazed, thoughts and actions of an abnormal beast. Close to an Auphe, but not an Auphe. He was right, but not in the way he wanted to be. We would make the myth of Auphe forgotten with what we would be and the things we would do.
The Auphe would be nothing next to us.
Caliban would’ve been happier to be pure Auphe if he knew that.
But all he saw were snakes and a half-breed. He’d believe one day. Denial didn’t last forever when your hair turned silver, eyes red, your fake family became a pool of blood and flesh at your doing.
Denial couldn’t turn its back against that.
I rested against the Bae’s cavern wall. The separated succubae, can you imagine, weren’t fond of me. The rapists didn’t like the raper. Hypocritical worms. I pointed at the nearest Bae. “I’m hungry.”
It nodded and disappeared into the murk. The only light was from the small opening far above us. It was cooler down here. I enjoyed it. I liked the warmth, but up above was too warm a good deal of the time. I examined my hand that Caliban had put a blade through almost at the same moment I’d put mine through his. I’d played nice. I needed him for the Coming, whole, not a cripple—although he’d healed fast from Janus’s attack. I put the ice pick center and parallel in his hand. My need to accelerate the Coming made me weak in that one action.
Caliban hadn’t been. He’d slammed his blade home transverse. He’d broken bone, torn tendon, sliced through nerves—doing the worst damage he could. He’d said he’d won that round. The son of a bitch had been right. While I needed things from him, he didn’t need a thing from me. And if I broke his new rule—stay away from his cattle—he would splatter his brain with whatever gun he happened to have in hand.
But I’d known that before he told me. Watching, watching, thinking. He was still the smallest measure too human to let that go. I’d always planned to let him solve the cattle problem himself when he was ready, and he would when he finally became what he’d always been born to be. What the Auphe themselves had never imagined could exist beyond them.
I tried to move my hand, but I could hardly twitch my fingers. I could try for anger, but…he was a worthwhile opponent. The only one I’d had. I’d heal sooner or later and the game was the game. If it didn’t hurt, if you were positive you wouldn’t die, why the hell would you play?
“Food, Father.” The Bae was back with a large chunk of meat. It had been skinned, but one whiff said what it was. Wolf. Not desert wolf, but werewolf. They were one of my favorites. They weren’t difficult to catch or slaughter, but they had a strong taste. Wolves had an appetite for anything. When you ate one of them, it was a regular buffet of tastes. Human and non.
I took it and dropped it in my lap before whipping out Caliban’s switchblade and pressing it against the Bae’s neck. “Are you afraid?”
It opened its mouth to hiss at me, black cobra fangs ready, red eyes unblinking. “No, Father. It’s the game. We play it too…some of us. From your stories.”
I narrowed my eyes in thought. “How old are you?”
“Ten years, Father.”
Ah, one of my first. “When does the fear go? How many years before the corruption of your breeding lizard bitches passes?” Caliban and his shitty assessment of my new race. Fearful. Little snakes. If he couldn’t force himself to accept what he was becoming, he couldn’t accept what my children would become, and, as rapidly as they matured, faster than he could think.
Imagine any of it, he couldn’t yet.
Lie, lie, lie, lie to yourself. That will only lose you the game and by then maybe make you eager to join the Coming. You can’t fight what is in you if you cannot admit it’s there.
“Five, Father. Some four. Some six. Some never. But at five years the fear usually goes.”
I was thinking how I’d like to be in Caliban’s face to tell him that—while perhaps cutting out that lying tongue—but a rumbling from outside distracted me. Janus. Time to put him back down until tonight. For a machine made for nothing but murder, my favorite hobby, it was nothing but an unholy pain in the ass to keep penned.
After tonight that wasn’t my worry anymore.
If anyone was still alive after this round, it was my gift to them.
Merry Second Coming.
19
Tonight at Fort Tilden. There went the two more days I needed to gate Janus to Tumulus, inescapable graveyard of radioactive bones and assholes like this that couldn’t die. We could run to get those two days, but Grimm would take it out on someone. Someone I couldn’t claim to care about to include in my protective circle, someone I might not know, but someone who didn’t deserve to die.
Or might. Taking that attitude would turn the dark road into a vertical slide. Holding on to the human in me was what I had. I’d use it to my last goddamn breath.
“Niko, I know Grimm, Christ, in a way you can’t. You have to listen when I tell you what to do when it comes to him,” I said as I tried to call Goodfellow. I didn’t get through but he had changed his voice mail message to say that if this was the Hardy Boys, he’d had another idea about Janus. He’d call us when he found out something. After three more calls, I gave up. I left the info on Fort Tilden and Janus. He’d call back sooner or later. His facing Janus with us was nothing compared to what we’d faced with the puck reunion.
“Again, when do you listen to me?” Niko demanded with a snort when I flipped the phone shut. “Particularly if someone stabbed me in the hand and seemed inclined to chew off my face with metal teeth?” On the way home from the bar, he’d bought a laptop with an extra battery, as the rain that had filled the place had knocked out the electricity. “We listen, but if we see an opportunity, we take it. I saw one. I took it.” He magnified the picture on the screen. “I was wary of trying to cut off his head. I thought he might see the swing of the blade out of the corner of his eye. I was in the right. Stop complaining.”
“Then why do I have to listen to you bitch for hours if I see a big fat opportunity and don’t do what you say?” I demanded.
“Big-brother prerogative.” He was staring at the screen, a satellite close-up of Fort Tilden. He was memorizing it. He had all that crap on his phone too, but bigger is better for imprinting rough terrain on your brain cells.
“You are such an ass,” I grouched before pushing up to sit on the breakfast counter beside him. “How’d you do it anyway? Neither one of us saw you, heard the door…although you have the ninja-stealth thing going on, but we didn’t smell you either. That much closer to us and we should’ve noticed how much stronger your scent was. You were like frigging Houdini.”
“I was able to do it because you and that misbegotten megalomaniacal would-be ruler of the world have three things in common.” He handed me the computer. “Arrange to meet that supplier of yours, Rapture. We’ll need all the explosives she has in stock.”
I sent an innocent, Let’s grab pizza today at five. My treat, e-mail. “Let’s grab lunch” meant I was in the market to buy. “Today” meant today or not again, and no one could afford to lose my business in weaponry. “My treat” meant I was willing to pay double if the shit was good, exotic, and plentiful.
“Okay, done. Now tell me what Grimm and I have in common.” His being aware that I could have been Grimm in another life was not what I wanted to know, but I could live with it. Not comfortably, but it was doable, knowing that except for one omission of Sidle’s to the Auphe a possibility would’ve been a stone-cold
certainty. Past is past. Telling Nik and the others the way things might have been was one thing. Having my brother tell me the same was a knife in the gut. He was the one who told me it wasn’t true. That was what got me through and made me believe it part of the time.
“Not what I wish you’d shown back then.” He looked at my hand when he said the words, the large puncture flushed, stitched, and wrapped in a bandage cleaner than a bar towel. And there’d been another shot instead of ointment. Hands were more prone to infection than most body parts. Nushi didn’t have to teach Nik that. We’d seen that ourselves years before Nushi and we both remembered. Niko had come close to dying from a bite. Not a Wolf bite, but a dog bite.
Like he’d said, back then…
