Doubletake

things. Guns, knives, swords.” His other hand clenched, then flared with fingers spread, silver bright. He wore black gloves over his hands, but over his empty one was a metal set of claws that encased his fingers and hand, a modern imitation of an extinct Auphe taloned one. When he made a fist, four to five inches of metal would extend past his knuckles to carve you apart. “But I like the old ways too. And if you’re not born with them, you make them. Or have someone or something make them for you.”

“You know my name? Caliban?” I asked without emotion, sword between us but closer to him now. No feelings—none human, at any rate. Others, though…they were there. But if I did let those come, it would get down and dirty before I was ready for it.

“All in the Nevah’s Landing prison knew of Caliban. The golden boy who would return the world to what it should have been. But you didn’t, did you? You destroyed the Auphe instead. Then you shot the failures and burned down the house until the bones were fiery dust. I didn’t see the others, years after I left, with the windows boarded, but I saw what you did to our keeper, our torturer—Sidle.”

Proud, irritated, satisfied. Those emotions all showed on his face…because he let them. Why would he bother to hide his feelings? Auphe didn’t hide from anyone or anything. “Ah, that was the best. The way you scattered his brain and bone and blood without looking. You pulled the trigger and kept walking. I threw down the binoculars and laughed, laughed down the night sky, or at least I tried.”

Binoculars. That’s why I hadn’t felt him. He’d been far away…watching.

“I was jealous you were the one to do it. You always had all the good times, didn’t you, while I spent eighteen years in a cage, chained, tortured, and fed like a tame dog. That, Caliban, was not a good time, but the past doesn’t matter anymore. Because that was the moment I knew I wasn’t alone. You killed Sidle without a second or first thought. You killed him because he was weak. I knew then I had a worthy competitor.” Then he said worse. “A brother.”

Irritated and satisfied I couldn’t care less about, but I didn’t want this thing proud of me, and the very last thing I wanted him thinking was that I was his brother.

I’d killed Sidle, part Auphe himself, because he’d kept seven half-breeds—now I knew it had been eight—like me in cages all their lives, manacled, splashed with acid, tortured with a cattle prod, and who knew what else. I killed his prisoners because they were Auphe: insane and ready to butcher any living creature they came across if their cage doors were opened. I gave them the only escape available to them in this world.

I killed Sidle because he deserved it.

I hadn’t lost a moment of sleep over it, hadn’t spared a thought on the piece of shit since.

“That one empty cage in the house,” I said, taking another step forward with hand tight on the grip of the sword. “Sidle said that half-Auphe had died. He lied, didn’t he? He didn’t want to get in trouble with the masters. He was too stupid to know that they would’ve been doing a homicidal dance of joy at the first half-breed to gate. The first success, long before me. You said years of captivity…”

“Twelve of freedom. Born six years before you and caged eighteen of them. Too bad I didn’t learn to gate sooner.” The metal teeth gleamed. “But once I did…I killed and killed and killed, but finally I learned. You cannot take down an enemy that would drown you and the world in a mass of their flesh without lifting a finger. Not if you don’t know them. I had to learn, and now I know. Reading, writing, history.” He said it singsong, as a kid would—if that kid was possessed. “I know the cattle better now than they know themselves. I know how they think. I know how they smothered the Auphe, breeding like rabbits, and I know how to do the same to them.”

The first Auphe who knew that to learn about your enemy made killing easier, planning more efficient, wholesale massacres closer to reality. This son of a bitch…Jesus. “You went to school?” I lunged at him with the Greek sword, but he was equally quick. Hell, this wasn’t a situation to be lying to myself. He was quicker. He swatted the blade aside with what I knew were the metal claws he wore. I had to depend on knowing, as I didn’t see anything but the afterimage of a silver flash.

“I have a GED.” This time he swung at me, and as fast as I moved I didn’t escape the shallow slices across my chest. My adrenaline levels had tripled, and that did let me see the claws this time, if not avoid them. “I’m an educated monster. The top of my class. I had many teachers, all very proud…until I ate them. No spirit of celebration in them at all. Humans are incredibly dull. Barely worth the slaying.” The talons clacked against one another, ringing out his disappointment at the lack of challenge. “They would be enough for the half-breeds you killed in the Landing, but I am not the same as them. I’m like you, Caliban. I’m an improved version of you, you who are not quite that special and unique after all.”

It was true. He wasn’t like the ones in the Landing, all of them mentally and psychotically dysfunctional. They also had bodies twisted and mutated beyond the hope of passing for human. Not like I could. Not like he could. Worse, he wasn’t the same as them on the inside either. He was clever. He infiltrated the enemy; he was more than functional. He excelled.

He wanted something or we would be fighting to the death now instead of him holding back with baby slaps of his claws. I wasn’t one of the humans who bored him. It would take effort to kill me and he would crave that trial of himself, the escape from tedious prey to face an equal. He said he was my brother. He wasn’t. Sophia wasn’t his mother, and I knew there had to be plenty of Auphe sires at the time he or I was made. We were not brothers, no matter what he thought. He and I were the last of a half-breed race; that was all. In his eyes, however, I knew that was enough. It was the week for family reunions, unwanted and bloody. Niko and Kalakos. The Panic. And now me and mine.

Better to deny yourself than offend a brother, after all.

Oh, shut the hell up. I mentally slammed a hard foot down on my lurking internal smart-ass and, worse, the tingle of interest.

The last two of a race that shouldn’t have existed to begin with if there’d been a God or if nature had had any judgment. This was a reunion, but it had nothing to do with family. It had to do with an opportunity to put nature’s screwup right.

“Who the fuck are you, anyway?” I growled, slashing at his claws with the sword before reversing to knock my Eagle from his hand. He didn’t appear upset. His glittering teeth flashed, satisfied, as if I were a dog who’d done a particularly difficult trick.

“My name was the same as all the others were given. Failure. But once free I named myself. Now I am Grimm…for aren’t we the grimmest of brothers?”

“You’re not my brother.” Auphe were bad enough. Add the original Grimm Brothers fairy tales, with zombie horses and wolf-eaten grandmothers who stayed dead and half-digested, and “disgust” was a word that didn’t begin to cover the combination of the two.

“When we are the last of one race and the beginning of another, we are brothers.” The claws slashed again and this time I managed to just dodge them. “I’ve made you my sole interest.” The smile became sly and secretive. “A large interest. Blood and killing, like the sun rising—together they always come first to our kind, but that’s not to say you can’t serve as both.”

“That sounds pretty fucking convenient.” I stabbed at him with the xiphos.

“For me? It is. It very much fucking is.” He was gone in a darkling flare of gray light. I twisted to see him behind me. “Fine and fucking dandy, as Sidle used to tell us through the bars of our cages. Fine and fucking dandy.”

“Kill me already then,” I snarled, “or we can kill each other. That’s the best end to the fairy tales you named yourself after.”

“Kill you?” He laughed. A milder echo of the pure Auphe’s breaking-glass sound. “Why would I have gated that metal monstrosity off of you and your cattle if I wanted to kill you?”

“Janus? You were the one who stole it from the Rom? I hope you had a good time screwing around with it and me outside the bar.” He needed to believe I knew I hadn’t gated it. I’d thought I had, with my last effort, though I’d had no idea of how or where. Grimm couldn’t know I was weak and gateless for days.

But I wasn’t, was I?

“Baby games.” He smiled, teeth sliding back up, and he looked more human. I preferred him Auphe. I preferred knowing in every part of me what he was. “Not that I won’t kill you now that you’ve proved worthy, but I have things for you to do for me first. The blood I want from you is not to spill; it is to spread. When that is done, then finally we’ll have our real games, and don’t tell me you don’t want them as much as I do. That you don’t want to play…at the end. Prove who is the best.”