They didn’t have the proper respect for a gate that they should. And not one had thought to open a gate in me, as I’d tried with Grimm. Grimm had said they matured physically in one year—mentally as well, from the cursing they sprinkled in with their hissing. Yeah, they were all grown-up and cussing with the big boys. It was efficient for breeding to retake the world, if you were only going by numbers, but one year of fighting experience didn’t make the grade.
I grinned at the three left, the one now having gated back. I had the blood of their siblings dripping off the blade of the xiphos. I liked the sound it made when it hit the floor. The pitter-patter of a slow and soft rain. “Daddy didn’t tell you what else was out in the big, bad world, did he? What else could put a boot up your pasty snake asses without half trying? Kids, you don’t know what a bona fide,” I drawled, “Auphe is, and now you never will.”
I could understand Niko’s appreciation of swords now. You felt the thud of the metal entering the flesh. You knew, by the vibration that traveled up your arm alone, whether you’d ended a life or only damaged it. Niko would value it for different reasons: giving your enemy more of a chance, having more time to decide if they deserved that death you were handing out as freely as Halloween candy, challenging yourself to be a superior fighter.
His reasons were principled; mine were not, but we ended up at the same place. I didn’t know if the difference mattered, and right then I didn’t care.
I dived to the floor as two gated out and one sprang toward me. I rolled onto my back, the one thing you didn’t want facing an enemy. This one was the biggest by a few inches, broader in the shoulders, heavier. If there was a runt in the litter, this one would’ve eaten it.
It almost vaulted over me as I’d planned, but was able to stop itself, if only barely, to land on top of me. “I have killed men and women. Children and babies.” Its breath was not Auphe hot on my face, but Auphe-bae cool, cold-blooded as its succubus-snake mother. The tang of truth was in what it said—that tang being rot and decomposition. “Vampires, Wolves, hordes of revenants, and you think me not Auphe?” The hissing soared, filling the small room with its rattrap, claustrophobically low ceiling. “You think me not worthy of the name?”
No, senseless little snake. No. No. No.
“In fifty years or so, you might be worthy.” I’d knocked my Desert Eagle from Grimm’s hand to land on the floor earlier. Grimm had forgotten it or wanted to see if this batch of Auphe-bae noticed, testing his progeny. They failed. They didn’t look at anything in the room but me. That wasn’t smart. I could’ve smashed the overhead lightbulb and jabbed the delicate sliver of glass into the eye of one of them until it pierced the brain. Anything can be a weapon.
“Maybe a hundred years,” I amended. “Give me a call then.” I reached behind me, hand scrambling against the concrete, seized the grip, then inserted the muzzle of the Eagle into one pointed ear and gifted him with five rounds.
“Thanks for reloading it,” I said to Grimm. I had time to see the quickest flash of him; his back hadn’t moved from the door. He was making sure this game played out to the end, whatever end that might be.
He had too—reloaded the Eagle. Niko had used all the explosive rounds in it. These were nice, normal hollow-points. I had to worry about wearing my victim’s blood and brain matter, but not roasting off my own face in the bargain.
“I went to school. So should they. Survival of the fittest is the best school,” I heard him say, nothing in his words but careless amusement. I killed his children and it didn’t trouble him. Why should it? He could make more.
A hundred years, you told the Bae. Together in a hundred years Grimm and I could make a hundred thousand…
“Can’t afford the child support,” I muttered to myself as I pushed the body of the one I’d shot off of me and impaled the one that gated out of the air above me before I could sit up. It kicked, flailed, and screamed with rage as its chest rested against my hand that gripped the xiphos while I finished it off with the Eagle, this time three rounds in a scarlet eye. That blew the dead body back, and I gave a jerk to the xiphos to let the child of the Second Coming go flying across the room.
Two more to go, and I had no expectations, belly wound or not, that Grimm would be anything like the Bae, who were so easy to dispose of that they no longer deserved the name Auphe. He was older than I was, had been free long enough to be more experienced in dealing death, could gate, was closer to true Auphe. If Grimm wanted to kill me, there was a chance that the best I could hope for was a suicidal tie.
It was time to find out.
His last pick of the litter had vanished in a vortex of silver, gray, and black before reappearing as I stood. It also had come out in midair, but not over my head. It appeared next to the ceiling, getting as much height as it could, and to the side, giving it an angled downward speed. As it did, I heard the force pounding against the basement door. I threw myself backward and sideways to let the Bae tumble and charge past me. Janus could follow the Vayash as if a GPS were stapled to my ass—funny, huh? But it wasn’t a serious consideration I’d had earlier about the war machine. It was a serious one, however, when it came to other matters.
When I’d been attacked by a mass of giant spiders and disappeared by gating out onto a beach at high tide in a childhood sanctuary in South Carolina, the only reason Niko had found me wrapped in a cocoon of amnesia was because of the GPS in my cell phone. It had washed down the beach by miles as it gave its last location before the ocean shorted it out. As the tidal drift had added days to his finding me, he decided that a brother who could gate hundreds or thousands of miles deserved something with added efficiency over a cell phone.
They made identification chips for pets small enough to be implanted under the skin and not seen, but not locator chips. They did make locators, but they were large enough to have to be fastened to a collar or an ankle band, as they did for sexual predators. Some could track one mile; some could link up to a satellite and cover at least half the country. The trouble with those is they were noticeable right off the bat, either by an amnesiac loony who’d yank it off his ankle, by someone who lost the control he was so certain of and did the same, or, in this case, by a kidnapper.
That meant that under the flesh it had to go. It was the size of a pacemaker and fit under a fist-shaped scar I already had on my chest. It filled the shallow crater some, and although the shape was squarish, it didn’t make it look much worse. It was experimental, and the FDA would keel over at the thought of it implanted in a human or semihuman being, but when Niko had asked me point-blank one day out of the blue, my answer had been as matter-of-fact as the question. And the fact that he had to cut me open to put it in and then again once a year to change the batteries, that made me know it was necessary. For his peace of mind if nothing else.
Who knew that it would come in handy so soon?
“My family,” I affirmed to Grimm. “And that, asshole, will never be you.”
He moved away from the door as his last child I’d dodged passed him. “We are something new.”
“We are something old,” I said automatically, the words beyond my power to swallow.
“We are something unlike anything on earth,” he finished.
I’d echoed those words, the same that a healer had once said about me, as I’d burned that South Carolina house of horrors to the ground. And Grimm, despite being far enough away that I couldn’t sense him, had heard me.