Doubletake

all kinds, from handguns to machine guns. Equal-opportunity methods of death and destruction.

The thirteenth building was hugely cavernous inside. Some of it was divided into four floors, but in some areas—the metalworking ones, from the equipment left behind—you could see straight up from the ground floor to the underside of the roof. In those large spaces light trickled from the small windows from what would’ve been one wall of the fourth floor. It was a dim light spilled from a thickly overcast sky, but Promise was cautious, pulling the hood of her silk cloak farther forward to shade her face. A stray hit of daylight wouldn’t cause her to combust, although it would go a long way toward explaining the urban legend of spontaneous “human” combustion. What it would give her was the vamp equivalent of a third-degree burn. While vamps were quick to heal from any other wound, those took months to heal, and aloe didn’t do a thing for that level of crispy.

Robin stopped to take the room in, eyes closed in concentration. “No, not here. Ah, I feel him now.” He indicated a hallway that ran the length of the building. “Not far, and asleep, I think, or we wouldn’t have made it this far without some difficulties.” I didn’t wonder how the dead or deadish slept. When I’d discovered there were undead mummified cats that followed pucks home and made themselves queen of the condo, I stopped questioning dead right then and there as too complicated for me.

He took out his sword from beneath a coat, the same long duster style as the one Nik always wore and was wearing now, thanks to Robin’s owning several. He didn’t carry a sword every day as my brother did, but enough that he needed the spares. Kalakos had his own. They were all virtually identical. Give them sunglasses and they’d be supernatural Men in Black.

Niko was carrying his xiphos and he handed me the second from inside his coat. Hephaestus hadn’t built Janus. Someone from a race older and more skilled had. If the Janus metal that formed the xiphos made the automaton stop and think, it might do worse to Hephaestus if he went off the deep end. Turn him from deadish to deader than dead. I had my holster back on and already had the Eagle out. I switched it to my left hand and carried the xiphos with my right. “Let’s go find out how to take out the batteries on that thing.”

“Yes, yes. Running toward imminent death rather than away like a sane person would. Your hobby, I know. Wait a moment.” He looked past me to Promise. “You can’t come, not yet.”

“Why not?” she demanded coolly. “I know you don’t doubt my abilities in a fight.” She didn’t have a collection of revenant heads she’d removed in the past, but she could have…if she was into that sort of thing. I know I didn’t doubt her or her abilities; after seeing her in action I knew for a fact that a revenant made the worst kind of Pez dispenser.

“Doubt? Hardly. And if I were ignorant enough to question the matter, I wouldn’t say so,” Robin said dryly. “I like my dick attached to my body. No, it’s Hephaestus. The sight of a woman, any woman at all, ups his insanity level considerably. But we will need you to come in as a distraction if we’re on the verge of a hideously painful death, which I strongly anticipate. I need you to stay here until you hear the screaming and the dripping of blood start. When you come in, say something idiotically syrupy, such as, ‘I am here, cherished of my heart, the sweet spring air that gives me breath. It is your beloved Aphrodite.’ Yes, that’s perfect. Her to the letter, not that she could read. A more vacant-brained person I’ve yet to meet.”

“Aphrodite?” Promise said with a suspicion I could hear if not read under her shadowed hood. “Wasn’t that his wife? Wasn’t her cheating on him with the god of war why he went insane?”

“Do we need to go into this or can we draw the usual conclusions?” Robin responded irritably. “And anyone can wear gold armor and pass himself off as a god of war, especially when the real one is off at war, as anyone with a brain cell would know. It’s not as if she asked to see any ID. Besides, I told all of you that he hated me beyond all things, yet here I am.” He started toward the dark hall. “Risking my life, as always. Brave and self-sacrificing. Noble and…”

I stopped listening, as Robin wouldn’t stop talking until Hephaestus was choking the air and life out of him. “Where do you think he keeps his little black book?” I murmured to Niko.

“In chapters, and they require approximately a thousand semis to haul from place to place.” He jerked his head, indicating to Kalakos that he should move ahead of us. Just in case. If he had to be at someone’s back, we wanted someone watching him, despite my elevated status in his eyes from monster to “not that bad.” That was practically a gold medal from the Vayash, the status of “eh, he could be worse.”

“Your exercise outside has improved your mood,” Nik went on to note.

He wanted to talk about Grimm. I’d given over everything I knew…when it came to facts. My emotions I’d kept to myself, locked down tight, and not from everyone else, but from Nik too. He knew it and he didn’t like it. I shook my head. “Later.”

His eyebrows lowered. He wasn’t happy. No matter how old you are, big brothers, at least the good ones, never stop thinking it’s their job to look out for you and to watch your back. I knew if I lived to be eighty and Nik eighty-two, sharing a room at the nursing home, he’d be asking why I sent back my tapioca pudding and beating the nurse’s aide with his walker for losing my dentures. And I would be damn lucky.

I didn’t have to try to find the words he wanted. They were already there, ugly and useless. “Grimm is me, Nik. He is me.” My palms sweated against the grip of my weapons, and not because of what we were about to face. “Only without whatever conscience you managed to shove down my throat.” And that I managed to hang on to—an extra-small portion for the healthy monster on the go. “If things had been different and the Auphe found out about him first and locked me away in that cage, I would be him. I would think the same thoughts. I would be doing the same things.”

Although Grimm had six years on me, which meant I might not be doing them as efficiently. “Shit, our sense of humor is even the same.” Bloody and sarcastic to the bone.

I lifted my hand holding the xiphos and had a vision of Grimm’s black glove hosting curved metal claws. I’d liked them. Me, the gun guy, was wondering where I could get a set made. Jesus. “I can’t tell you how I feel because I don’t know. I do want him dead. That isn’t going to change. I gutted the son of a bitch the first chance I had. It didn’t faze him much, but I did it and I enjoyed it. Don’t worry. I know how I feel about him.” I wanted him six feet under or in pieces.

“What I don’t know,” I concluded, “is how I feel about me. As soon as I’ve decided if I’m scared as shit or pissed as hell or both, I’ll tell you.”

I could’ve been Grimm and I could still be—someday. The first I accepted. The second…it was harder to deal with when it was in my face and not the occasional nasty thought whispering in my ear. The mental prodding was a potential. Seeing myself in Grimm was the reality, and I wasn’t ready for it.

Liar.

Niko started to open his mouth. He was going to tell me it wasn’t true. That the other half Auphe and I were nothing alike. If worse had come to worst in the past, caged or not, I wouldn’t have grown to be him. The things brothers are supposed to say. I shook my head again. “Later,” I repeated, “okay?” The “okay” was my version of “please.” Nik would recognize it, but no one else would. Goodfellow already had a picture of me beating a man with a frigging loafer. He didn’t need soppy dialogue to put on his planned Web site to go with it.

“All right,” he agreed, bumping my shoulder with his. “But the clock is ticking.” That small push meant that he needed to know what Grimm was going to do to my head as much as I did. Because he was my brother, but also because he needed to know how I’d handle the next battle with Grimm. It didn’t matter how ready your body was for the fight. It was a given: If your head was up your ass and your brain didn’t know up from down or what that smell was, you were dead.

We came to the end of the hall; the weak light from the room beyond was all that had helped us pick our way through jagged pieces of metal and garbage littering the floor. Stepping out into it, I saw it wasn’t a room; it was almost the twin of the echoing space we’d left behind. Open all the way up to the roof, it contained rusted beams and a floor where every step would have to be cautious or you’d step on a shard of metal, flip it up, and slice your leg open or off completely.

Robin’s list of his heroic traits finally came to a pause; there was never an end. “We’re here. The foundry,” he said quietly. “I told you Hephaestus was a fraud and could hardly build anything when you compare his work to Janus. Tinkertoys would practically puzzle him.”

“There’s a ‘but’ coming, isn’t there?” I asked. “I hear a ‘but.’ Why is there always a ‘but’?”

“I hear a ‘yet’ or a ‘however,’” Niko corrected, “but I’m more gifted in the vocabulary skills than you. Goodfellow?”

“That doesn’t mean he couldn’t make something that could kill you,” the puck answered grimly. “A sword is simple compared to the inner workings of a gun, but it can be equally as deadly. Don’t underestimate whatever he