Doubletake

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 goddamn 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