Caliban could tell he was becoming more Auphe, but completely Auphe? He wouldn’t believe that. He’d think monster… stupid word… predator, crazed, thoughts and actions of an abnormal beast. Close to an Auphe, but not an Auphe. He was right, but not in the way he wanted to be. We would make the myth of Auphe forgotten with what we would be and the things we would do.
The Auphe would be nothing next to us.
Caliban would’ve been happier to be pure Auphe if he knew that.
But all he saw were snakes and a half-breed. He’d believe one day. Denial didn’t last forever when your hair turned silver, eyes red, your fake family became a pool of blood and flesh at your doing.
Denial couldn’t turn its back against that.
I rested against the Bae’s cavern wall. The separated succubae, can you imagine, weren’t fond of me. The rapists didn’t like the raper. Hypocritical worms. I pointed at the nearest Bae. “I’m hungry.”
It nodded and disappeared into the murk. The only light was from the small opening far above us. It was cooler down here. I enjoyed it. I liked the warmth, but up above was too warm a good deal of the time. I examined my hand that Caliban had put a blade through almost at the same moment I’d put mine through his. I’d played nice. I needed him for the Coming, whole, not a cripple—although he’d healed fast from Janus’s attack. I put the ice pick center and parallel in his hand. My need to accelerate the Coming made me weak in that one action.
Caliban hadn’t been. He’d slammed his blade home transverse. He’d broken bone, torn tendon, sliced through nerves—doing the worst damage he could. He’d said he’d won that round. The son of a bitch had been right. While I needed things from him, he didn’t need a thing from me. And if I broke his new rule—stay away from his cattle—he would splatter his brain with whatever gun he happened to have in hand.
But I’d known that before he told me. Watching, watching, thinking. He was still the smallest measure too human to let that go. I’d always planned to let him solve the cattle problem himself when he was ready, and he would when he finally became what he’d always been born to be. What the Auphe themselves had never imagined could exist beyond them.
I tried to move my hand, but I could hardly twitch my fingers. I could try for anger, but…he was a worthwhile opponent. The only one I’d had. I’d heal sooner or later and the game was the game. If it didn’t hurt, if you were positive you wouldn’t die, why the hell would you play?
“Food, Father.” The Bae was back with a large chunk of meat. It had been skinned, but one whiff said what it was. Wolf. Not desert wolf, but werewolf. They were one of my favorites. They weren’t difficult to catch or slaughter, but they had a strong taste. Wolves had an appetite for anything. When you ate one of them, it was a regular buffet of tastes. Human and non.
I took it and dropped it in my lap before whipping out Caliban’s switchblade and pressing it against the Bae’s neck. “Are you afraid?”
It opened its mouth to hiss at me, black cobra fangs ready, red eyes unblinking. “No, Father. It’s the game. We play it too…some of us. From your stories.”
I narrowed my eyes in thought. “How old are you?”
“Ten years, Father.”
Ah, one of my first. “When does the fear go? How many years before the corruption of your breeding lizard bitches passes?” Caliban and his shitty assessment of my new race. Fearful. Little snakes. If he couldn’t force himself to accept what he was becoming, he couldn’t accept what my children would become, and, as rapidly as they matured, faster than he could think.
Imagine any of it, he couldn’t yet.
Lie, lie, lie, lie to yourself. That will only lose you the game and by then maybe make you eager to join the Coming. You can’t fight what is in you if you cannot admit it’s there.
“Five, Father. Some four. Some six. Some never. But at five years the fear usually goes.”
I was thinking how I’d like to be in Caliban’s face to tell him that—while perhaps cutting out that lying tongue—but a rumbling from outside distracted me. Janus. Time to put him back down until tonight. For a machine made for nothing but murder, my favorite hobby, it was nothing but an unholy pain in the ass to keep penned.
After tonight that wasn’t my worry anymore.
If anyone was still alive after this round, it was my gift to them.
Merry Second Coming.
Tonight at Fort Tilden. There went the two more days I needed to gate Janus to Tumulus, inescapable graveyard of radioactive bones and assholes like this that couldn’t die. We could run to get those two days, but Grimm would take it out on someone. Someone I couldn’t claim to care about to include in my protective circle, someone I might not know, but someone who didn’t deserve to die.
Or might. Taking that attitude would turn the dark road into a vertical slide. Holding on to the human in me was what I had. I’d use it to my last goddamn breath.
“Niko, I know Grimm, Christ, in a way you can’t. You have to listen when I tell you what to do when it comes to him,” I said as I tried to call Goodfellow. I didn’t get through but he had changed his voice mail message to say that if this was the Hardy Boys, he’d had another idea about Janus. He’d call us when he found out something. After three more calls, I gave up. I left the info on Fort Tilden and Janus. He’d call back sooner or later. His facing Janus with us was nothing compared to what we’d faced with the puck reunion.
“Again, when do you listen to me?” Niko demanded with a snort when I flipped the phone shut. “Particularly if someone stabbed me in the hand and seemed inclined to chew off my face with metal teeth?” On the way home from the bar, he’d bought a laptop with an extra battery, as the rain that had filled the place had knocked out the electricity. “We listen, but if we see an opportunity, we take it. I saw one. I took it.” He magnified the picture on the screen. “I was wary of trying to cut off his head. I thought he might see the swing of the blade out of the corner of his eye. I was in the right. Stop complaining.”
“Then why do I have to listen to you bitch for hours if I see a big fat opportunity and don’t do what you say?” I demanded.
“Big-brother prerogative.” He was staring at the screen, a satellite close-up of Fort Tilden. He was memorizing it. He had all that crap on his phone too, but bigger is better for imprinting rough terrain on your brain cells.
“You are such an ass,” I grouched before pushing up to sit on the breakfast counter beside him. “How’d you do it anyway? Neither one of us saw you, heard the door…although you have the ninja-stealth thing going on, but we didn’t smell you either. That much closer to us and we should’ve noticed how much stronger your scent was. You were like frigging Houdini.”
“I was able to do it because you and that misbegotten megalomaniacal would-be ruler of the world have three things in common.” He handed me the computer. “Arrange to meet that supplier of yours, Rapture. We’ll need all the explosives she has in stock.”
I sent an innocent, Let’s grab pizza today at five. My treat, e-mail. “Let’s grab lunch” meant I was in the market to buy. “Today” meant today or not again, and no one could afford to lose my business in weaponry. “My treat” meant I was willing to pay double if the shit was good, exotic, and plentiful.
“Okay, done. Now tell me what Grimm and I have in common.” His being aware that I could have been Grimm in another life was not what I wanted to know, but I could live with it. Not comfortably, but it was doable, knowing that except for one omission of Sidle’s to the Auphe a possibility would’ve been a stone-cold certainty. Past is past. Telling Nik and the others the way things might have been was one thing. Having my brother tell me the same was a knife in the gut. He was the one who told me it wasn’t true. That was what got me through and made me believe it part of the time.
