time. I shrugged. She must not have been that interesting.
Now the blood began to splatter the floor.
But that’s what happened when you broke your own rules. My kind had no rules. We lived—or had lived—in the same place, but dwelled in different worlds.
I was sure she thought she’d gone to a better one. They always did. There were other worlds, I knew. Whether she went to a good or bad one wasn’t up to her, whatever she thought. It was up to that ever- spinning and capricious universe. And if it had made me, it couldn’t be very good and generous, could it?
She had been a good teacher, though.
I took the apple out of my jacket pocket, polished it on my sleeve, and left it in her limp hand before I left. I’d brought it to be ironic. An apple a day will never keep an Auphe away.
I walked out into the hall and closed the door behind me. I thought I heard the sound of something being tossed into a metal trash can, the kind by the teacher’s desk. With my Auphe hearing, if I heard something, there was something. I glanced back through the frosted glass and saw a misty outline of a crying woman, face in her hands, red hair.…I rubbed my eyes again and it was gone.
Just a dead human on the altar of a teacher’s desk, martyred as she’d meant to be. A human without a face or color or a name.
“I’ll find a way to change it. I will. I don’t care if it’s never been done. The world can’t stop me. No one can stop me.”
It was a woman’s voice choked with tears and determination. Familiar. I turned to look again, but then I’d found myself on the first floor with no memory of coming down the stairs. Too much excitement, too much glee at the games to come. My brother. Fighting, blood, family joined again and maybe a few hundred deaths or so.
Because he was in…She’d said he lived in…Fuck.
I’d known.
I’d just this second known and it was gone too, like the other things…like…what other things?
Absently I put my sunglasses back on, left the building, and stepped down to the sidewalk. Why was I standing here doing nothing? I could be in the library searching the Internet for Caliban. Or I could be off showing one of those gangs downtown that when they said they were going to take your money and shove your head up your ass, it was harder than it sounded. You had to break a lot of vertebrae to do that, have some real upper-body strength, and a machete to make that back door a few sizes bigger. I had the ability and the motivation. Tonight, I’d thought, I’d be the teacher.
Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen a face in the window…colors of brown, red, and amber. I’d smelled the pumping heart and the circulating blood of healthy life.
I’d heard one word.
Forget.
The desert heat made me sleepy as I tasted my own blood from the tip of my leather-covered finger. It had made me dream. An enjoyable dream.
Forget.
I could see the blood, brighter than any other blood I could think of. It was all I could see. It was a curtain pulled over everything else. But I didn’t mind. I liked blood, and I liked red. As I began to tumble into a healing semicoma, I had an image of me handing Caliban an apple and laughing. Laughing. Laughing. Laughing.
Forget.
I could hear a woman crying. “I’ll find a way to change it. I will.”
Forget.
Had I dreamed? It didn’t matter. If I had, I would sleep again and dream of better things, things that I could remember. Such as Cal’s sword in my stomach. The Second Coming.
Family.
The end of the world.
The beginning of mine.
I told Niko, Robin, and Promise about Grimm, the Auphe-bae, every detail I could remember, except for the specific ones of what I’d done in South Carolina to the other imprisoned failures. That I glossed over. Niko already knew them. I’d told him the day I’d returned home. I told Niko almost everything, and not only because he was my brother. He was all that stood between me and the world. I wasn’t worried about myself. Of the two, the earth and Cal off his leash, I wasn’t the one that needed protecting. I was sane currently, and I did go back and forth on whether that was a good thing or not, but who knew if that would last?
Not if. How long…
I didn’t tell the puck and Promise the particulars of what I’d done in Nevah’s Landing at the beginning of the year, that I’d shot seven half-Auphe manacled in cages like fish in a barrel, because it was my only option. I didn’t want to and I didn’t have to. They knew what had happened, as it was the only thing that could’ve happened. They didn’t need me painting them a mental picture. It hadn’t bothered me when I’d done it, and it didn’t bother me now. There was nothing else to do.
But I didn’t want to see them look at me with that mental image in a continuous loop behind their eyes. On the other hand, Sidle, the warden and torturer…When it came to killing him, my only regret was that I couldn’t do it again…and again. He merely wasn’t worth mentioning to the others, as he had been a useless thing. He’d been proof that you didn’t have to gate or look like an Auphe to be a monster. You could be a weak one with an advantage that he hadn’t deserved. The half-Auphe had been in cages while he roamed free to find instruments of pain to make them behave.
It was in that one instance that Grimm had been right. I should’ve made that bastard suffer instead of putting him down instantly and painlessly like a rabid dog.
“I’ve killed, Caliban,” Promise said, curled on Robin’s couch after we’d pushed ours off of it. She’d said the male psyche was a mystery to her, but that wasn’t true. Not with five deceased elderly husbands. As far as I’d seen, Promise knew any thought that might run through a man’s head. And she saw mine.
“In the old days before we had ways other than blood, I killed to live. You shouldn’t feel that you are worse than I was—or Goodfellow, for that matter.” She slanted a knowing glimpse of violet and velvet his way. “I have heard tales of his escapades, and pretending to be a god wasn’t the worst of them.”
As far as Robin was concerned, the vampire wasn’t there and the subject she’d brought up didn’t exist. He didn’t want to talk about it, apparently. And that was more bizarre—alien-pod-person bizarre. Goodfellow was incapable of “not wanting to talk.” From the first time he’d opened his mouth to introduce himself and try to sell us a car, he hadn’t shut up once, and that had been close to five years ago. He’d been kind of…off during the Panic. I’d thought he’d gone back to his old self after it was over, but now I wasn’t as sure. I watched as he continued to pretend Promise wasn’t on his couch—or on the planet, for that matter. The dismissal of her was that complete.
He was rearranging notification cards on the table. When we’d returned to the condo, I’d read them upside down as I’d looped around the coffee table to grab my spot on the couch. They said that he was not monogamous, and should he find the originator of the rumor he would drench his dick in Tabasco sauce, piss in his treacherous mouth, as that was all it was good for, and then draw and quarter him before letting a horny mule hump his remains.
Sounded like a great start for a new line of greeting cards to me. They were clearly meant as damage control for the attending members of the Panic. Next to them was a stack of smaller personal cards spelling out Robin Goodfellow—monogamous since 2011, with the suicide hotline at the bottom for those who couldn’t face the fact. Side by side sat the contradiction. It didn’t make any difference to the puck. What
