by Rob Thurman
She saw us. She could’ve seen us from the moment we walked in. If it was a trap, it paid to get there first. Saluting us both with the glass, she sipped the champagne and wrinkled a slightly aquiline nose at the bubbles. That quickly the goddess disappeared and something much harder to resist appeared in her place. She took another small swallow and laughed. I could feel the sensation of the carbonation tickling my own nose. I wanted to laugh with her. I could now smell her flower-honey-cinnamon scent over the scent of anyone or anything else. She was your cute baby cousin, if you had one, going to her first school dance, and you’d do anything to make her happy. Get her a limo. Not beat up her loser rocker boyfriend. Take a hundred pictures like a huge-ass dork.
Tilting her head slightly, she smiled directly at us both, bent her fingers in the tiniest of waves, and it became ten times worse.
“Okay, is she fucking adorable or is it just me?” And “adorable”—not a word I’d ever used before, but one I was aware (just barely) existed—was dead-on. She was … had been hot as hell, gorgeous as they came, but without the sexual hunger that quality brought out. Beloved baby cousin was gone and now we had a kitten, a soft bunny … er … rabbit, a puppy with sweet-smelling milk breath. She was all that, the tactile and emotional draw of hundreds of them, and you wanted to go pat her on the head, tickle her tummy, and talk, goddamn truth, baby talk to her.
How the hell do you fight an adorable goddamn monster?
Come on, Auphe, kick in. You, the first killers on Earth, probably wore real, live rabbits on your feet for bunny slippers. If ever I needed some good old murderous rage, now was the time. And here it came, here it came, here it … Shit.
I had nothing.
I groaned. “We are so dead.”
A sex thing, that I could handle. We’d all run across succubi before. I’d slept with a sexual psychotic. Niko’s girlfriend would be very disappointed in him if he were susceptible … in a way that might lose him his dick altogether. Goodfellow was a sexual predator of sorts. If it was legal, he would take it down or had in the past. Kink of the Jungle. There wasn’t a creature alive that could out-sex-vibe him. All of us were inoculated to a certain degree against that approach. But this one?
Screwed. Screwed, screwed, screwed.
“I didn’t know you knew the word ‘adorable,’ ” Niko said as this time I was the one to grab his arm.
“Shut up. I want to go rub her stomach and let her chew on my fingers. I want a piece of yarn for her to play with. I want to get her some milk,” I said, my grip on him getting tighter with desperation. “Jesus, isn’t she getting to you?”
“Some. But I’ve done all those things before.” There was a pause, but I knew it was coming. Sure as shit, I knew it was. “With you. You know, when I changed your diaper and dusted on the baby powder. I didn’t want you getting a rash on your tiny little—”
“Say it and I’ll shoot you right here, right now.” I glared and let go of his arm, but the desire to throw myself into a pile of life-energy-sucking kittens had decreased. “Better yet, let’s go shoot her instead.” Of course, she was gone by then, but she left a scent trail that had me looking down with every step to make certain I wasn’t squashing a puppy. It was headed where we’d wanted her, the rooftop terrace. It was a good choice for her as well. If she was exposed down here, the vampires and Wolves would very easily decide twenty or thirty dead humans were worth killing Ammut, and there were enough of our clients here to do that—to do both. “Should we get the others?”
Niko shook his head. “Goodfellow might be all right, but he does love that murderous bald cat of his. Ishiah? I have no idea. And Promise only just lost her own daughter. I think that opens her up to maternal feelings that could be turned back on us.”
We were at the stairwell, locked at our request to keep the civilians out of the combat zone. It wasn’t locked any longer. “And you and me?” I asked.
“Do you have a deep, hidden desire to rub my stomach?” he countered with lifted eyebrows.
“Okay. Great job, Nik. Thanks. I’m feeling as pissed off and bloodthirsty as it possibly gets. Let’s get this cuddly kitten bitch before I try to beat you to death with a Jersey Costco-sized container of baby powder.” I took the stairs two at a time, the Eagle out. He was on my heels, this time with nothing to say about powder, diapers, or baby Cal’s diaper-rash-ridden ass.
We reached the roof in seconds and slammed the door behind us, blocking it with a heavy wood lounge chair jammed under the handle. That took care of the civilians, but it wouldn’t stop anyone discovering we were missing and wanting to rush up to help.
Civilians. This laugh was nasty and gleeful. Sheep. Bleating prey. Walking leeches. Foolish tricksters. Pigeons of a powerless god. All are nothing.
Now you show up, I thought with cranky irritation. Shadow-time is back, got it? We need to get our shit together. All our shit, regardless of how dark. This situation is going to call for it. Or do you want to go out, the last Auphe on the planet, while fetching this bitch a bowl of goddamn milk?
I didn’t get an answer. I did get a question, though.
“Where are your brothers and sisters?”
The voice came from everywhere … as a goddess’s voice would. Gone were the happy and fluffy. She had us where she wanted us and she had friends far more effective than kittens and puppies. She had her spiders. There were fifteen or twenty; they were climbing over the edge of the roof so quickly it was hard to count them all… . They were beside us, in front of us, over the top of the stairwell door behind us. I waited until three were on the edge and about to jump when I shot them with three silenced rounds in the midst of their daisy yellow eyes. For all my life, five minutes the way we were going, I’d forever link spiders and daisies—bright, sun-seeking daisies that opened their petals to the light to reveal a poisonous black predator hiding within.
“I’m his brother. If you are that interested, you should be talking to me.”
Niko had cut me off before I could ask her what she meant. It was one of the few memories I was still lacking. Niko was my only family, my only brother, and her obsession with me having more was bizarre. It made me wonder … Was she in New York by chance and appetite, or was she here for me and everything else was collateral damage? What did she want from me? Besides what Wahanket had wanted?
“You are hardly worth my interest. I want his true family. I want the whispers and the rumors made flesh. Made real. As they must be. If there is this one, how can there not be others?”
Practice makes perfect, baby boy, baby boy.
More spiders swarmed over and landed on the terrace, but I didn’t shoot them. My gun was up, finger on the trigger, but … fuck … she was right. If there was me, how could there not be more? When Wahanket had told me I was half Auphe, I’d known I was an experiment. Felt it in my gut. I was a freak of monster science, but how many brand-new experiments turn out right the very first time? Or the second? Or the twentieth?
None.
Here you have brothers and sisters.
Worthless failures.
Toys for you, baby boy, baby boy.
The saw grass, the moon white crocodile. Nevah’s Landing. It hadn’t been a sanctuary. It had been an invitation to a fucking family reunion. I could see it—the green, the white, the red … the silver flash of metal.
“Nik, there’s a crocodile out back.” Like in the book … like Peter Pan.
Alligators you could live with. Other things you couldn’t. When I was seven, I’d heard a story about a sanctuary for lost children and then I’d learned there was no such thing. I’d forgotten both, and I couldn’t blame that on any spider bite.
“Cal!”
The small patch of Nevah’s Landing evaporated from the night and I could see the roof again. I couldn’t have been out of it any more than a few seconds, but sometimes only seconds are needed. Now there were at least thirty Nepenthe spiders, black blots of shadow to the casual eye, that had crawled up the side of the
building and jumped over the edge of the roof. Advertised as spacious, the terrace wasn’t cutting it for that many giant arachnids. Everywhere was a clacking mandible; everywhere was the scuttle of their legs. There was no place you could turn and not see six alien eyes staring back at you. After this experience and Spider-Man 3, if I ever saw Tobey Maguire, I was going to punch him in the face.
They were on the chairs, crushing the small tables, spilling over one another and, though I turned to aim at the ones behind me, they ignored me. They all teemed in one direction—toward Niko on the other side of the terrace. I’d seen my brother fight nearly every monster alive, and I’d never failed to be awed. I was a hybrid of a creature that every other creature in history had feared, loathed, lived in terror of, and I could kill easily, too easily, but there wouldn’t ever be a day in my life I’d have anything on Nik in sheer skill. But sometimes all the skill in the world wasn’t enough. This many of them—Niko was only human. The most skilled human I’d ever seen at fighting, but at the end of the day … human. Sometimes you needed something that had less in common with unadulterated ability and more about having a soul you could pack away at a moment’s notice.
Souls … inconvenient scraps of nothing.
The spiders had Niko backing up, but he was taking down every single one within reach and some that weren’t. I lunged forward, shooting them from behind, which wasn’t the best location for putting a bullet in a spider. Blowing huge ragged holes in their abdomen to leak out was good, messy, but ineffective in the short term. A fork in the head, my favorite, worked great but shooting from behind while gory wasn’t good for killing them. For that I needed a head shot, but not one of the sons of bitches would turn around. Intent on Niko, I could pop them like party balloons and they didn’t care.
Fine. I would see exactly how much they didn’t care. I waded into them, a Lovecraftian version of a herd of Shetland ponies. All we needed was Cthulhu singing “Rawhide.” I moved up beside one spider and blew its brains all over the one next to it, climbed the dead one, and took out its buddy before it had even managed to get the brain goop out of its eyes well enough to see. Those daisy, sunshine eyes. I moved on to the next one. It was beginning to get how things were going and was starting to turn. “It’s going to be a bright, bright, bright sunshiny day, Shelob,” I said with enthusiastic dark cheer. “Too bad you won’t be here to see it.” Another round, another spider brain turned to pudding.
Niko was swinging his katana with one hand, his tanto with another, and if the son of a bitch would just let me get a machine gun or carry those convenient grenades to parties full of people, I’d have kicked his ass for not using them. One blade sliced through the head of the spider closest to him, bisecting it neatly. The other shorter blade he used to nail a jumping spider in midair. The silver, sheened with green-gray slime, exited the top of its head, but the mandibles thrashed on in the death throes and Niko swiftly flung the spider off his weapon. One bite had sent me to la-la land. One bite would kill him.
That was not fucking happening.
I moved to the next poisonous piece of shit, put it down, and was about to do the same to the next, but it was too late. Niko had tried to get around them, to fight back to back. We did that when the attackers were this many, but there wasn’t enough time and too many had never been this many. The closest ones to him were rearing on their back four legs to block the most of any escape route that they could—not that there was one. They had a plan and a purpose. Their goddess couldn’t kill me and get what she wanted, information I didn’t have, not yet. It was coming. Close … so close, seconds away, but not yet. And she wanted that more than anything, because what could be better than eating a half-breed Auphe? Having a literal buffet of them. She hadn’t tried to kill me in the canal, only take me … to where she could ask and I could answer.
Niko continued to take out the spiders right and left, his sword slinging spider blood in all directions as I continued to move toward him, even though we both knew it wouldn’t be enough. Plastered in sweat, covered in their blood, he couldn’t climb over them when they stood more than seven feet tall, but he could bury his blade in their vulnerable underbelly. It didn’t help. As each one fell dead, two more stretched high in its place, upper legs ending in curved claws striking. And when they died, the same happened again. Death meant nothing to them. They had only cared about one direction, one thing—getting him to take two steps backward. Niko knew it and I knew it, the same as he knew to watch his back if I wasn’t in a position to do it. He knew when he was being herded, but options could sometimes be limited. Having thirty Great Dane-sized spiders in your face was one of those occasions. It was only two steps, and as many bullets as I fired, as quickly as I tore my way through them, those two steps happened. And they were enough to get him within reach of Ammut.
She’d been behind an arched wooden covering that protected a couch and table with small candles lit in glass bowls. Following that, she was on top of the covering and her tail was wrapped tightly around Niko’s upper chest and throat. I’d forgotten her speed from the brownstone. When something can move that fast, you can’t remember it, not in accurate detail. How can you remember what you can’t see?
Snakes were swift and she was all snake again. She lay sinuously on the wood, her claws scoring it. Bronze and green, copper and gold, with that flower smell so strong it could’ve come from a hundred funeral homes. It was cloying and thick, never quite covering the ripeness of decay. She was beautiful still, in the way of nature if not woman, but I could smell what she really was. It didn’t matter. She could’ve smelled as beautiful underneath it all as she appeared.
Nothing mattered—not a goddamn thing in the world except that she had my brother.
He swung his katana, only to have it bounce off the scales, not doing any more damage than my bullets in the brownstone basement had. He couldn’t turn to strike at her face or eyes as the coils tightened around him, holding him in place. But this was Niko. He didn’t need to see his target; he needed only to know where it was. He reversed the grip on each of his blades and jabbed them backward and up. It was useless. I never thought I’d see anything faster than my brother. I was wrong. She avoided every blow with ease, her gold eyes strobing because her head moved so quickly. But Nik kept striking behind at Ammut’s face and then finally at those coils around him. Metal bounced off its equal. Ammut was copper and bronze, not only the appearance of it. Metal scales met the metal of his sword, and the faintest of sparks was the sole effect.
Niko didn’t give up, though. He didn’t know how to; he never had. He kept fighting because he was who he was, all the while turning more and more blue in the candlelight that was left from those he hadn’t knocked over in his struggle. Too quick, that color blue. She wasn’t going to asphyxiate him. She was going to break his neck—my brother’s neck. She wasn’t going to bother to take the time to suck out his life force. That wasn’t what she wanted. She was impatient and tired of waiting for me to give her what she did want. She was going to kill him and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it. I’d shot her before. It didn’t work. What the fuck, I tried again. It was the same as Nik’s attempt. I couldn’t hit her eyes. Her head weaved so fast, I saw only the afterimage of it. After she broke his neck, then broke me only in a different way, she no doubt thought, she’d have more time to pry what she wanted from my lost memories.
Only she didn’t know they were lost. Because of that she was going to kill Nik and I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t, not with a gun or a knife—not with any weapon I had.
She is nothing. A worm beneath your heel. A sheep with scales instead of wool. She is not like you. There is nothing like you. You need no weapon.
You were born a weapon.
Niko’s eyes rolled back. One hand let loose of his tanto. His other hand loosened on his katana. To drop his katana, Niko would have to be dead.
My brother …
Dead.
I thought I’d lost it
, lost consciousness, lost my brother, died myself wrapped in Ammut as it all went black—everything. There wasn’t a sole Manhattan light, not a flicker of a candle or the orange sky of nighttime NYC. There was only the dark … because I knew now. I was at home. The dark was me. I told myself stories there—every story about myself that I knew. Some were gone forever; only stories of stories, and that was how it had to be. Some stories weren’t nice and some were chaotic jumbles of terror and malice. Some were of Niko and me living short lives that seemed long, of the things we’d done—good and bad. I told myself about the killing, when it was necessary, when it wasn’t, and how you couldn’t always be perfect. Best of all, I spun the tale of why I’d been made … what the Auphe had needed … what I could do, what they had passed on to me. I told myself about the traveling, how I could slash a hole in the ether of the world anytime I wanted. Gates that were doorways to anywhere.
I liked that.
That was useful.
The first to walk the earth, and the earth would let us do anything, include rip screaming tears in it, if we would only walk through the gates and leave. If the earth hoped, if it prayed, that was what it prayed for—in vain, because we never left for good.
