“That makes us one. One, Caliban, and that is more than brothers, more than family. Plus it’s poetic. My teacher would’ve liked the symmetry. That is, before I ate her.” Did my grin, sarcastic and sinister in its eager violence, look like his? No wonder no one tipped me at the bar.
He finished, back on topic, “One.” As the Bae hit the door and turned to charge back, a gate began to outline Grimm. “Until I kill you. Games are games and we’ll play—back and forth, give and take, but death is the ultimate move. And once you’ve given in, given up, given your all to the Second Coming by siring a tidal wave of our spawn, then you’ll die in the game.” He glowed. The gray-and-silver light. The metal claws waving a dark good-bye. The grin brilliant white then luminous mercury. He moved as if my sword hadn’t touched him, much less been buried in his stomach. “And this world will be mine to do with as I please.”
I didn’t grin this time. I smiled, and it was a cold and hard slice of hell, as that part of me I normally kept silent decided to get mouthy. “Who says I’ll lose the game? Who says I’ll share?” And I said it in Auphe. My human vocal cords couldn’t duplicate the sound of the seven years’ bad luck of a mirror being smashed inside your ear, cutting your eardrum to ribbons before the shards burrowed into your brain, but the words I knew.
From the flicker of anger that crossed his face, Grimm didn’t. He couldn’t speak Auphe at all. He hadn’t lived among them for two years as I had—even if the language was all I remembered—and none had wasted time teaching the caged failures the motherfucking tongue.
“You’ll die and that won’t change. The game is mine to win. You, Caliban”—the glow brightened—“you might have been the Auphe’s fondest ambition, but you, bastard brother, are not me.”
The door shattered to three large pieces and several smaller ones. The Bae staggered back as one stake-shaped piece slid perfectly into its chest as if it were the unlucky extra in a vampire movie. Niko passed it, dismissing it as the lesser threat. He swung a katana I didn’t recognize. That would mean it was one of Goodfellow’s many swords. It had greater reach than a xiphos. It should’ve cut Grimm in half, but he was gone. The closing of the gate did take half the katana’s blade with it. If I were an optimist, I’d hope it had done some damage before the half-Auphe disappeared.
But if I were an optimist, this wouldn’t be my life we were talking about, would it?
The Bae gripped the wood to pull it from its chest, then swiveled its head to hiss and lunge at the next person hesitating in the doorway. Kalakos cursed in Rom and took its head off at the shoulders with his saber. The move had been instinctual. That could be seen in his brown skin that now almost matched the color of the Bae as it fell in two pieces. Paler than pale. He hadn’t seen what was attacking him. It had been too quick, in the middle of a rescue, the moment too muddied. Kalakos had seen a threat. That was all. It wasn’t until it was down and dead that he saw, for the first time, an Auphe. Or the closest thing next to me to qualify as an Auphe.
I watched it twitch and changed my mind, my former scorn sulking. I’d more or less told it that give it fifty years’ experience and it would be the next thing closest to me. Now I thought that in fifty years I’d be the closest thing to it instead. It had the equipment, the ability, and Grimm would make certain the Bae would learn to use them. Grimm knew education was an advantage above all others.
“Makes me look pretty good, doesn’t it, Kalakos?” I said. “Given half a century or so of murder and mayhem and it would’ve become the shadow of an Auphe.” A thousand years and it would leave the Auphe in its dust. “Tell that to your clan, the cowardly sons of bitches. Afraid of a sixteen-year-old mentally damaged kid like I’d been. I doubt they’d have done much spitting if that had come calling in my place.”
He took a step away from the Bae, regained the equilibrium a warrior needed to survive, and looked at me for the first time. Or rather saw me for the first time. All my…heh…quirky imperfections aside, I wasn’t the Bae. There was some human in it, but there was humanity in me. I wasn’t overflowing with it, but it was there.
“I apologize,” he offered in that familiar if older echo of Niko’s voice, “for myself and my clan. This…this is a monster, not you. We misjudged our own blood and we are shamed for it.”
That was unexpected, kind of decent, and the right thing to do. If it had come eight and a half, nine years earlier, it might have made a difference. It hadn’t, though, and my grudge was about what he, decent but not decent enough to be a father, and the Rom had done to Nik. I didn’t give a shit what they thought about me.
Niko paused for the briefest of moments at the apology before overlooking it to grip one of my shoulders hard enough to get my instant—ow—attention. “Who was that? What was that?” He wasn’t talking about the dead Bae on the floor or the others. He was referring to the one clever enough to take me from the condo alive, fast enough to escape my real brother and survive—all while making an edgier game of it than I’d thought. I’d been down here less than fifteen minutes, listening to Grimm, attacking him, fighting the Bae. He hadn’t bothered to go any farther than what I had to think was two or three buildings down from Goodfellow’s. Niko didn’t have his tracker with him. That had been left back home when we’d fled Janus. Goodfellow had one, though, as did Promise and Ishiah in a locked safe at the bar.
“He’s one I missed in South Carolina.” I wiped some of the Bae blood from the xiphos carelessly onto my pants. “By twelve years. He was the Auphe’s first success, not me, and they never knew it. He’s also head of the Auphe Second Coming. Big, bad Auphe messiah.” I ran a hand slowly through the space where his gate had been. I could feel the pain and the wound of reality knitting itself back together still. Every gate had a price. Mine too, as much as I tried to forget it.
Kalakos had thought I was a monster and then he saw the Bae.
I’d thought I was a monster when I’d been old enough to realize what a monster was.
I’d eventually reached a point where I didn’t care anymore if I was one. I’d admitted it without shame. Sad to say I occasionally enjoyed it on the sly lately, but now I knew.
Accepting that you were a monster wasn’t the same as being the real thing, full-time, every single second of every single day.
Grimm had shown me that.
He’d also shown me that he was right. He was superior to them. He was as ruthless as the Auphe, but smarter. More adaptable. Thrived on change. Nature had taken her fuckup and created a rung higher on the ladder, and Grimm was standing on it.
“Nik,” I said, calm, not that that was what I felt. I didn’t know what I was feeling other than it was a seething mass of confliction. “You need to know. He’s better than me…even on my very best day.” Best day. Worst day. My Auphe days, the ones that were now gone or at the very least viciously choke-chained and powerless.
And why wouldn’t they die? Auphe. Half-Auphe. I killed them over and over, three times now.
Why wouldn’t they fucking die?
Yet…
Welcome back, brothers and sisters. I missed you.
I missed the game.
10
My brother was surprised I was smart, smarter than him. That I’d gone to school and Death had a degree. I sat in the New Mexico desert, back against a rock, eyes closed, and slowly healed. It was cloudy even here today, but warm, and it felt good as the stab wound in my stomach bitched. It wasn’t a critical wound—that was the best part of being half-and-half. You never knew where our bodies kept the important parts. All of us had been different, but I’d lucked out and Caliban hadn’t. He’d skewered me all the way through, but hadn’t hit a single worthwhile organ when he did.