Doubletake

pit. I was firing as soon as her scaled arm started to wrap around me. I couldn’t avoid it—not with her speed—but I could react. Male boggles were bad fucking news, and fast. Female boggles were bigger, stronger, faster, and bad fucking news to the tenth power. They were of the “shoot first, ask questions never” kind if they came after you.

I was emptying the clip as fast as it would go, which, as I’d learned how to convert semiautomatics to full- auto when I was seventeen, I think equaled Mama Boggle’s speed. Goodfellow would be using his sword with all the skill possible in a liquid pool of mud. All in all, we were probably going to die anyway, but she’d feel it when we did.

I like being right, but I also like being wrong. This was one of the times that wrong was my pick of the day. There was a tremendous push and I was out of the mud and back in the air again. Flying through it, but breathing it too. I landed hard against a tree trunk and fell to the ground on my side. Robin was next to me on his stomach, although lucky enough to have missed the tree. Both of us were covered in mud—rank, rank mud that reeked of decomposition.

With the Auphe scenting skills of a predator, I’d had a problem with things like that in the past. When a human came across a whiff of the bloated gaseous dead, it was disgusting. When I did, the same whiff was multiplied by fifty. It was the difference between driving past roadkill and shoving a rancid portion of it up your nose. “Hard to deal with” would be a huge understatement. I was getting more control of it now, though. I went ahead and puked twice. In the old days, I’d have vomited for fifteen minutes at least.

Robin was already on his feet and trying to pull me up as well, but his muddy hand kept sliding off my similarly covered shirt. “I hope you didn’t break your back when you hit the tree, because now is the time for running. And I can’t carry you and outrun a boggle. One or the other, but not both.” He was optimistic. A Kentucky Derby winner couldn’t outrun an adult boggle.

I wiped the mud from my face as I staggered up with his slippery help, then automatically ejected the Glock’s empty clip and jammed in a new one. Glocks were sturdy enough to handle a little mud—if I was lucky. It was liquid, which helped, but it was thick, which didn’t.

Mama Boggle was half in and half out of the pit, one of her harvest-moon eyes gone. Muddy pulp. She seemed determined to end us, but I felt a pang nonetheless. Boggles, like the alligators and sharks they resembled, weren’t beautiful, National Geographic glorious, or anything less than freaking flat-headed, black-taloned evil with the smell of dead humans on their breath. But if they did have one redeeming physical quality, it was their eyes. Big, brilliant, and orange as a Halloween pumpkin. They were like the gems they desired, and either I or Robin had destroyed one. I regretted it.

Goddamn pussy.

Next to that mouthy part of me, some piece of me might be, but I had memories of lying in fields in the fall when I was seven or eight with my brother and seeing moons as round and as bright in color. I felt as if I’d torn it from the sky and it wouldn’t be seen again. Every autumn would pass, but that miracle of nature wouldn’t light the sky again.

Everything passes. Everything.

But not today.

I scanned the area for Niko and felt a stronger pang of relief when I saw him. He was less than thirty feet away with his sword buried in Kalakos’s shoulder. The five boglets loosely surrounding him he was keeping at bay with the xiphos in his other hand. He had seen me thrown clear of the pit. I knew because the katana blade was in his father’s shoulder and not his heart. Kalakos had Niko’s best interest in mind, but Kalakos didn’t have any idea that my brother was as extreme as I was when it came to some subjects. Keeping me alive was Niko’s number one subject, A-plus, and more degrees in it than a Nobel Prize committee could handle.

Interfering with that would get you stabbed. The result of your interference would determine where you were stabbed. If I hadn’t been tossed out of the pit that rapidly, Kalakos wouldn’t have had to worry about the best interests of anyone again.

Niko was his son. I’d been, by his eyes, bait for a prehistoric crocodile and already swallowed. But that didn’t mean that no good deed went unpunished. Step between brothers, for any reason—good or bad—and you might find a high price to pay.

“I’ll take Mama. Go help Nik with the boglets.” I gave Goodfellow a push, but no warning. He knew how lethally dangerous they could be. He also knew they were nothing compared to the one who whelped them.

“You think you’re more able to fight her off than I am?” He may have lifted his eyebrows, but as he was a talking mud pie, I couldn’t tell.

“I think I can hit her other eye without having to get anywhere as close as you’d have to.” I pointed my gun at his sword.

“Good point. Spanking the kiddies, it is.” He ran toward Niko, Kalakos, and the boglets with sword leveled and ready. “Spanking” was a euphemism for the end of days for boggles in Central Park. They were teens in monster terms and I didn’t like it.

Liar.

All right. The best part of me didn’t like it, but whatever had happened had set them off and there was nothing left to be done. It was us or them. You could dump a few pints of Mother Teresa genes in me to counteract the Auphe, but when it was an us-or-them situation, it was always going to be them. I’d hike up that nun habit and keep shooting.

I had the Glock aimed at Mama’s remaining sundown eye and was halfway through the exhalation that would end in pulling the trigger—until she flung six hundred pounds of herself on the ground beside the pit and screamed. When you think scream, you think chick or kid or man with his balls crushed with a pair of pliers. High-pitched and hopeless. Boggle’s wasn’t that. Hers was deep-throated, wailing, a crocodile/she-lion/bear mourning in an agony fierce enough to banish the day and bring an endless night. The sound shook the leaves from the trees to fall as if the first frost had come early. It was a bellow of pain and of loss. Woman or boggle, the loss was the same. It was the shrieking sorrow of dead children snatched to the empty heavens itself.

When the boglets heard it, they deserted Niko and his father and gathered around the pit and wailed with their grieving mother. One eye was gone, but she didn’t care. I didn’t think she had noticed after the first explosion of agony. Her arms disappeared under the mud again, this time to pull free one dead boglet and then another. It took more than two attempts. They weren’t whole. One had his head hacked off by metal claws and one had his entire body separated at the waist. Both had the faint scent of sulfur on them.

Janus.

“They hunt.” Boggle gathered the pieces of them to her. Limp arms and legs. A head and only that cradled against her chest. Intestines resting on top of the mud and spilling forth further as she huddled over them. Hands and talons tried to shove them back together, to scoop up the guts and shove them back inside. To grind a head back onto the shattered vertebrae of its neck. “They hunt but they do not come back. We search and we see it. Atrocity.” Her lips writhed to reveal the inward-curving shark teeth. “Not sheep. Not paien. Thing. It was a thing of metal and fire and wrong. Not of this time. Not of this place. Wrong.”

Monsters love their children too. Not all of them, but some or there wouldn’t be any monsters left. Enemy or informant, the death of Boggle’s children was our fault. My fault.

Grimm’s fault.

I felt his gate and I felt him, all at once. I searched up where Boggle’s desolate cries had gone. There he was, crouching in the top of a tree. “Want to take a shot?” His teeth were silver again as he grinned. I didn’t see the red of his eyes. He had his impenetrable black sunglasses back in place. “See if I can gate faster than you can pull the trigger? Or if you can gate faster than I can pull the trigger.” He had another gun and it was aimed at my chest. Another Desert Eagle, the same matte black as the one he’d stolen from me and I’d stolen back.

“You should work on getting a personality of your own,” I said, aiming my own gun, but at his head. A chest shot was for amateurs; a head shot was for professionals. “It’s pretty pathetic when you’re no more than a copy of me. I’m surprised you haven’t dyed your hair to get it all.” I gave him a matching grin, challenging and dark. “But when you’re a failure, when you’re not the Auphe chosen savior—one and fucking only—imitating the real thing is all you can hope for, huh, loser? They were right to put you in a cage. You want to one-up the Auphe, the First, with the offspring of a half-breed and some snakes? Ones that were so pitifully easy