Doubletake

covered you with blankets—and ignored his questions about paying. That he didn’t come after me through the house meant he was as sick as I’d thought and maybe more. The kind-of-naughty thing didn’t seem at all naughty then.

I’d shown Nurse Happy where Sophia thought she hid her whiskey. Under the bed in shoe boxes covered with magazines of men with no clothes on. That wasn’t hiding. That was saying, I’m trying so hard to hide you have to see me. Then the diamond ring and pearl necklace. “The motorcycle’s in the garage. You’ll have to push it. Sophia did when she stole it. She doesn’t have a key. She’ll be back in four days. Hide it good or sell it before then. You’re not nice. My brother’s like that Forrest Gump guy. He thinks everyone can be nice if they want. I know that’s not the way things are. You might be mean like a snake; I don’t know. But Sophia is worse than not nice. If she comes home and sees you with any of her stuff, she’ll hurt you. With a knife. She’s done it before. She cut a guy’s pinkie off once. People who steal don’t like people who steal from them. My brother says that’s called no honor among thieves.” She was as pale as Nik now. “But if it’s all gone by then, I’ll say we were robbed while Nik was at school and I was at Mrs. Thomasina’s with the other kids till Nik got home.”

She’d held the stuff gathered in her arms and backed away from me. “You’re not a strange kid after all. You’re a goddamned scary kid.”

“And you’re not nice. So now you go away.”

She’d slammed the door behind her and I’d crawled up to sit on Niko’s blanket-covered lap. “You’ll get better now. And I’ll make you soup and a cheese sandwich,” I said. “You won’t die and we’ll stay together and it’s fixed, right? It’s fixed.” I rested my head against his chest. He was taller than most eight-year-olds and I was smaller than most kids my age. He made a perfect pillow.

“It’s fixed,” he’d said slowly, smoothing my hair down. All the fake crying was real water and had turned my straight hair damp and messy. “What’d you do, Cal? I mean, I see what you did, but what made you think of that?” He’d seen part of what I’d done with the paying. That was enough. Maybe someday I’d tell him the rest when he got over his mopey phase.

I’d smiled up at him. My real smile. Proud and wanting him to be proud of me. He took care of me and now I took care of him.

“I was practical.”

“Where did the two of you go?”

“Where you weren’t,” I said with now automatic accusation as I rested my punctured hand palm up on my leg, the Vicodin for the game having long worn off. Nik nudged me and handed me two more automatically. Getting off the childproof cap on the bottle with one hand made it difficult to open without tossing pills everywhere like candy from a piñata; we both knew that from personal experience.

“I see. Ancient history.” Kalakos rubbed the finger where he’d once worn the Vayash ring of manhood. The paler strip of skin was his shame. He’d given the ring to Niko at Goodfellow’s rental in Mr. Chen’s subbasement. Niko’d refused it. Robin solved the problem by swiping it.

Efficiency, thy name is Goodfellow.

“You were both where you shouldn’t have been,” Kalakos continued. “Where no child should’ve been. And on my shoulders that will stay forever.” The bitterness that I heard was for the first time directed inward, and the Vayash appeared brutally unforgiving of himself. Niko hadn’t been able in twenty-four years of trying to make me believe that it was possible that people could change who they were and would be in the future. But now…if Kalakos could accomplish that, Nik damn well warranted it.

I didn’t have a look or another comment for Kalakos’s metaphorical “coming to God” as he leaned against the wall, the water he was standing in only half an inch deep now. That I had nothing for him wasn’t due to the fact that all of this wasn’t his fault. It was his fault if you went back far enough. Regret didn’t change that.

But I was thinking of other things, such as how at four I’d already shown a little Auphe when I hadn’t known what they were yet. Sophia told me I was a monster from the day I was born, before I knew what words were. Niko told me she was crazy and spiteful and there were no such things as monsters. He knew there were, but I’d believed him…for a while. It wasn’t a lie I’d hold against him, then or now.

Niko did have a look for his father, though, the recrimination in the tightening of his jaw, but then it loosened into a frustrated exhalation. The man had saved his life and thought he was saving it twice. My brother had eventually learned to do practical and do it well, but he’d not grown to like it. The guilt that went with it had faded, yet a sliver would always remain. To him that would mean that if his father could feel guilt, he might be salvageable as a human being.

What people…what Kalakos had done in the past, however…they couldn’t undo. I’d go along with what Niko wanted, but I wouldn’t forget that. Kalakos didn’t have the patent on being brutally unforgiving.

I returned to the original subject. “What three things do Grimm and I have in common that let you sneak up on us?”

Niko poured the rest of the pills into a small pocket on my jacket lying between us and zipped it. The night was going to be long or short, depending on how successful or unsuccessful we were. I might need them. “First, and you said it yourself: You’re both arrogant. Grimm doesn’t think anyone or anything can take him. You’re the same, except when it comes to me.” True. Niko had taught me to fight. He knew what I’d do before I did it. Without gates, Niko could and had taken me down.

“Second: competition. Right now you use the game. When you play the game, neither of you sees anything else. You see each other, the pain, the blood. Competition blinds you to all but the game.” He was right when it came to that too. Once I’d smelled Grimm’s blood, the rest of the bar had been lost in a fog.

He slid off the counter. “I suggest we grab an hour or two of rest before we meet your combustible contact.” The roof of the bedrooms had remained intact. The floor was wet, but the beds were dry. “Kalakos, I’ll give you a blanket if you can find something mostly dry to sleep on.”

“Hey, what’s the third one?” I asked. “You said we had three things in common.”

“I’d thought that obvious. You’re both idiots.” That wasn’t a joke. He was serious. “He taunts you; you taunt him back. Forget he’s making baby Bae right and left; it’s all about the game. Forget you might kill him and ruin his plan. Forget all those potentially life-ending, world-ending issues. ‘We’re part Auphe. We have to play. Born to play. So much fun I can’t fucking stand it.’” He quoted me with a mixture of anger and frustration.

“But you’re both lying to yourself. It’s not a game. It’s suicide. Grimm thinks he wants to take over everything, but the entire damn world? He doesn’t know that he can. He is smart enough to know that maybe he can’t. He’ll be a failure like he was before.” He jammed a finger into my chest. “And you think you want to stop him and this is how to do it. It takes an Auphe to beat an Auphe. You two think the game is the Auphe part of you. It’s not. The blood is. The pain is. Even the game, but you’re not playing it how the Auphe would play. The rest of it, the winner and the loser when it comes to you two, isn’t Auphe. That’s the human in you. It’s the easy way out and you know it is. The game is what you let it be.”

That wasn’t right, was it?

“Grimm would sooner die than fail again, and you think that you could’ve been Grimm, that you will be Grimm someday. You’d sooner die than be that, to get that far. I know you don’t trust yourself, but, Cal, trust me. I won’t let it happen. That’s my promise.”

This time he slapped me. It wasn’t a real slap but the Godfather kind. The “whatta I’m gonna do with this boy?” light one. The anger was gone. The frustration remained, but it was tempered with empathy. “As I said: idiots. Using an Auphe game for a human reason.”

He opened my hand and put something in it, concealing the object until he closed my fingers around it. “You’re twenty-four, twenty-five next month. You’re a man, Cal. You have been long before you could drive. Be as practical as you were when you were four, little brother. You don’t play to win. You just win and screw the games.”

He lifted a bunch of the hair hanging in front of my eyes and added, “And for the love of all that is holy, will you do something with your damn hair? You can fight blind, but your chances are better if you don’t.”

Orders given, he went to his room. When his door shut, I opened my hand and saw a ring. It wasn’t the Vayash solid-silver ring of manhood. The top half was black metal and the bottom half bronze. Or the other way around, depending how you flipped it.