Doubletake

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.

Of course, it hurt like a motherfucker, which was good. I’d learned to like pain. Sidle had taught his prisoners that. He, my very first teacher, had taught us to love it. Hate and pain—they were the only things we could love.

So, so good.

Caliban had given me a present. I’d give him one too. Whether he’d learned to like pain the way I had, I didn’t know. He hadn’t had a Sidle.

Time enough to find out.

Sidle with his lessons had been my first teacher, but not my only one. There were no degrees in pain among the cattle.

I’d had several teachers as I traveled looking for Caliban before I caught up with him in Nevah’s Landing. For some reason the fight made me think of a teacher I couldn’t remember. A woman. Red hair? I didn’t recall. But the wound in my gut made me think of something I couldn’t think of. Something I’d done to her. Senseless, that. It was a lost memory and I didn’t lose memories. What Caliban had done to me was the same as birthdays and balloons. What I’d done to her was a hole in the ground with maggots your only party favors.

But who was she?

When had I sliced her open?

Maybe it was but a dream. A good dream, but a dream.

I traced a gloved finger over the clotted blood covering the slash in my stomach, then tore it away to let it bleed again, up the pain again. Ah, good, good. Pleasure and pain, pain and pleasure. I watched the blood course out.

The dream, which was all it could’ve been, made me think of martyrs. After hearing my long- gone warden read the Bible over and over, for the good parts—smiting, killing firstborns on either side, selling your daughter, sacrificing your firstborn son because God told you to before saying Psych! Destroying cities—I knew what to do with a martyr: Stone him or cut off his head. Stoning would take far too fucking long.

I could be logical and martyr a teacher too in a dream. What could be better?

The memory of the dream grew sharper.

Shit, what a giving, kind, love-everyone-in-the-whole-wide-blessed-be-world cow she’d been. It