Doubletake

Cal wants to plaaaaay.

Maybe I did, but that didn’t mean I would.

Spread my blood. That gave me a strong sense of déjà vu. I hated déjà vu.

But the hell with all that. If I hadn’t gated Janus that meant I had a third gate waiting in the wings. The final gate. I could try it on Grimm. I’d happily die to take this bastard with me. One gate opened inside of him and he’d be decorating all four basement walls. I had barely a chance to think of triggering it when the pain searing through my head gave me double vision. Opening a gate and taking Grimm with me was worth it. Opening the third gate and dying while Grimm looked at my twitching body with disappointed puzzlement—no more play—wasn’t.

The pain faded as I let the thought of the gate go. I could kill the bastard with my hands and my sword in the place of a gate and walk away from his cooling corpse. That was a better option. Better because I’d live, but better also because I’d be the reason he didn’t.

“I have questions too.” He gated again, gone from the room. I rushed the door, but before I could reach for the knob, he was back—directly in front of it—directly in front of me. Bare inches away. “You could have gated a hundred Auphe to a million years ago, if you weren’t the insolent badass you were and had refused. When I heard of that, I was…What do you call it? What’s that word? Happy? Happy as hell,” he said, pleased. He hadn’t wanted the Auphe to succeed any more than I had. He did hate them as much as I had—or hated them more—and seeing the prison, the cells, knowing what had been done to him, I didn’t blame him. He deserved that hate to banish those memories. In his place…

In his place, I would be him.

His expression changed to confusion. “After that you could gate as you pleased to the goat’s abode, but dying on a street last night, you couldn’t gate at all. That makes me curious. It also makes me annoyed. Annoyed enough that I was going to kill you and the cattle that wrung their hands to keep you alive—until things changed.”

“Cattle?” I noticed for the first time that he was the only supernatural creature that didn’t use the more typical word for humans. “Not sheep?”

He pressed the metal claws against my face. “Nooo, Caliban. Never sheep. I am the sheep. The black sheep of the Auphe. Blackest of the black. That is my title. They thought you a bad boy. I wish at least one remained to see what I am and what I will be. Bad enough that they would’ve bowed before me.”

The claws clutched my face lightly, but not so lightly that I didn’t know he could have removed my face if he’d wanted. I could see through the space between the talons as I felt their chill. “You gate, you can’t gate, and then today you gate again. And you heal from something when it should’ve taken you weeks to recover. I want to know what you have become. I’m intrigued. Life was so boring before you, Caliban. Borrrrrrring. You cannot know.”

“What things do you want me to do for you first?” I asked abruptly. “What do you mean by ‘spread my blood’?”

His red eyes flared brighter in anticipation or something close to it…GED, short attention span. He was more like me than I cared to admit. “Humans, they breed and breed. You know. This is why we were made. To go back and warn the first Auphe. Destroy the humans before they gobble up the world, gobble it all up when it belongs to us. It’s too late for that now, but it wouldn’t matter if it weren’t.” The talons loosened some, not for my comfort, but as he was caught up in what he had to say, his…hell…vision. “We are better than them. The Auphe are gone, but you and I remain. We are the Second Coming, the new wave that exceeds the first. We are meant to take their place and do what they could not. But as the Auphe in us breed slow, as we live so long—”

Keep dreaming on that one, asshole. I’ll outlive you; I promise you that, even if it’s by seconds, I thought, my grip tightening on the hilt of the xiphos.

“—I needed to find what else we could breed with besides humans. Something that matured faster, fast enough to equal the humans in a few centuries, at least.” He tilted his head until his forehead rested on the metal claws that pressed against my skin, his eyes bloody mirrors of mine, so close the gray of my own reflected in his. The same as the red of his must have reflected in mine. Not brothers, but something as binding, that called to every Auphe cell in me.

An obligation. The last. We were the last…until he proved we don’t have to be.

I pushed the thought away. Yes, we did have to be. The last. That’s what the remains of my conscience said, and it was right.

“And I did find what would breed the fastest.” His eyes remained fixed on mine. “Succubae. They lay eggs, but not with us. With Auphe they have litters, and those litters mature in a year. Three hundred and sixty-five days and you have a full-grown member of the Second Coming.”

Spread the blood. That’s where the déjà vu came from. I’d had this “invitation” before by the real deal. Pure Auphe, not the watered-down versions we were. I’d jumped off a building to turn that particular one down. I wasn’t any more enthusiastic about this one, no matter what other thoughts might slink about in the lowest levels.

“Succubae? They hate us, especially the taste of us.” I knew that from personal experience. Succabae lived on sexual energy, any sexual energy from any being, except one. Auphe energy revolted them. I’d had one nearly upchuck in my lap after tasting me. “They wouldn’t breed with an Auphe,” I said with all the ego-bruised confidence in the world. “For any reason.”

The jagged voice was mildly curious. “Who said I asked their permission?”

This was what I’d traded part of my humanity for…control and something else. Control for situations such as this. The something else was Niko’s life. Those months ago, while facing the Egyptian life-sucker whose pets had made me forget my life—all of it—things had taken a turn. I’d finally been on the verge of regaining my memories, and not only my memories but the biogenetic skills that resided there.

I couldn’t function properly, the useful part of me—the bad part of me—unless all was whole, memories that resided in brain cells and Auphe abilities that resided in both. I’d been close, minutes away, but they were minutes I didn’t have. Half a minute and my brother would’ve been dead. What I’d needed I’d needed right then, not in minutes.

You have to give to get.

The better Cal had pushed a part of his human self down and let the Auphe flow over it. Devour it. A small bite only, but large enough that I was myself again—less/more than myself again, the true Cal with an added cloud of a dead race. Thirty seconds then was more time than I needed to tear out the heart of that Egyptian snake goddess and watch it melt at my feet.

I’d saved my brother and gained control of my former attacks of dangerously unaware violence. The Auphe had been many things, but not unaware in their violence. They were very aware. With more Auphe in me as the human portion was swallowed up, I gained awareness.

Control: The Auphe in me spoke of obligations to what was left of our race—the Auphe in me that was yet only half, shit, maybe three-fourths as both time and genes multiplied, as I sacrificed, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough for Grimm’s plan. That was my newfound awareness.

As for permission…

He did say he hadn’t asked the succabae’s permission.

Control could also mean violently aware attacks. It wasn’t as limiting as one might think.

I didn’t ask for permission either when I sheathed the xiphos in Grimm’s stomach.

Grimm was more Auphe than I was, with their speed, but he also had another quality of theirs…enormous arrogance. That worked to my advantage. It made him assume things he shouldn’t.

Things such as: You’re my brother, because why wouldn’t you want to be?

I already have a brother, better than you.

You know you want to prove ourselves deadlier than the first Auphe.

Been there, done that. The T-shirt shop was closed.

You have to want to reclaim the world. You want to rule it and everything on it.

Rule the world? Too much damn work.

You want to kill whoever or whatever you want, whenever you want.

I already can.