Doubletake

grinned wider. “Human failures go back to their cages.”

He’d gated as I pulled the trigger, but I was already turning, faster than I’d ever moved in my life, to where I felt reality ripple behind me. I was firing the Glock this time before the gate even opened. I hit him several times in the chest in that one second before he disappeared again.

“So long, brother.” The sneer wasn’t on my face, but the word was soaked with it. I didn’t think he’d be coming back for a while if at all. That gave me time.

Things to do. Track him or his corpse down. Him and his Bae bastards, his succubae breeding ground. My succubae breeding ground. They were long-lived. They could wait as long as I could for my last human cell to die, gobbled up and transformed to something far superior. Then the first race to walk the earth, the first to discover the pleasure of murder, the Cains of the supernatural world—we would return.

No.

I cocked my head to the side. What was that?

I’d heard…What had I heard? A voice. Small, but determined.

No. Caliban time is over. No more practical today. It’s Cal time again. They were the words of a four-year-old. Familiar. Firm. Undeniable.

Me.

I hissed with rage as I felt the shadows creep away at the order of a four-year-old kid twice as smart as Cal. I stubbornly refused to reach for the control they revealed. It reached for me instead. Caliban became Cal again—if we’d been separate to begin with. I hadn’t lost control as I used to in the past. I’d purposely put it aside, but it remained a hard-won part of me as much as the Auphe was a part. As I’d known since my last visit to Nevah’s Landing, we were one, a disagreeable, highly conflicted one, but one.

The kid I had once been was right. I would come back from any future trips to Auphe land and those trips could be nothing but deliberate and by choice.

For now.

How long would now last?

But it wasn’t time for thinking about the future when the present had gone to hell, no road of good intentions needed to lead the way. I heard, “Cal, move!” and jerked my head up in time to see Janus, wreathed with smoke, but still intact except for the original missing claw-hand. He was rushing me, and Niko was behind him with the antitank rocket.

It reminded me bizarrely of the old Road Runner cartoons. Explosives, grenades, antitank rocket and a determined coyote, and it was then that it struck me that the poor furry bastard had gotten screwed by Acme’s products every damn time and we weren’t doing any better.

I lunged sideways, heard the rocket fire and hit Janus in the back. It knocked it forward, but not off its feet. It went down to all fours, claws digging into the earth, its head spinning slowly. One face smiling, one frowning. Over and over.

Scrambling off to the other side away from Niko where we wouldn’t be one concentrated target, I shouted, “You’ve got to be shitting me! C4 and the rocket?”

“And all of my grenades. Don’t bother wasting yours,” Niko called back grimly.

But I did have to when Janus staggered back up, shaking the ground, and came after me again. Mr. Popularity, that was me. I ran. I wasn’t as fast as when I’d been Caliban, and that was a problem, because Janus was quick enough that he was a blur of metal and flame. Throwing another grenade, I kept going, barely avoiding the claws reaching for my legs. One more explosion to Janus, and nothing compared to the C4 and rocket. He went down and was up again faster this time.

That’s when Niko ran between us, his xiphos up. He was trying to distract Janus from me and annoy him with the xiphos, which was the full extent of its powers I’d seen so far. And where the fuck was Kalakos? He wanted his role in the battle. Well, here it was. I started to yell his name when Niko found a way to make the sword do something else than only annoy the automaton. He arched his arm back and threw it directly in the boiling red left eye. There was a sound, metallic and buzzing but louder, as if Janus had swallowed a hundred chain saws. It staggered in a weaving circle. Niko pushed at me. “We have to find Kalakos and his sword.”

I was already moving, but as I ran I felt it in my pocket. My cell phone was vibrating. I snatched it and held it to my ear. “Way to go with the goddamn impeccable timing, Goodfellow!” I snapped. I heard frantic noises, but they weren’t loud enough to register as words. Shit. I couldn’t imagine it could be as important as being halfway to dead, and shoved it back in my pocket, still running. It vibrated again.

“Motherf—” I cut myself off. I could be wrong. With Robin it might be that important. I switched to text and read as I ran and yelled for Kalakos all at once. After I read it again, I stopped and I didn’t shout for Kalakos again. From what I was reading, he was the last person we wanted around.

I was on the other side of the powder magazine, and with one eye black and dead, as I’d done to Boggle, Janus was walking through the rubble of it that now stood less than four feet high. I was on the automaton’s blind side until its head started to turn again. I crouched down in the bushes. Kalakos, the son of a bitch, stood, rising opposite me on the other side of the clearing. Only the red light and his dark blond hair let me spot him. For all his complaining, it didn’t look like he was in any hurry to join the fight.

And I knew why.

“I saw you, Caliban.” With my pale skin, no one had much problem seeing me.

Kalakos had shouted, but his voice was piercing, deep, and full of the contempt I’d expected at the beginning when he’d first shown up at our door.

A Vayash, proving you should always judge a book by its cover. “I saw you on your phone. You looked surprised, although not as surprised as I expected. A father touches his son, who in turn touches his brother. You accepted me if only for him. Family can be a joyous and yet woefully naïve thing.”

His smile was my smile, the one I gave the worst of my enemies…the moment before I ended them in metal and mortality, guts and gore. I should’ve been his son, not Niko.

“That horny goat who’s been missing, let me guess. He had something to tell you, didn’t he?”

Robin had. There had been a secret code, commands in a long-lost language, but with each new buyer, they were changed to the new language. Mutable, as Dodger had said. Adusted to the new owner’s language of choice. And wouldn’t that make sense? You don’t sell a car but refuse to give over the keys. The commands had been changed to Rom when Hephaestus had given Janus to the Vayash for safekeeping, and hardly a burden when you thought about it. He was an unplugged toaster for all the guarding or care he needed. The Vayash knew turning him on in this modern day and age wasn’t an option. And they weren’t murderers. Some were con artists, bounty hunters; some got by doing honest odd jobs; some were thieves. They were all different, the same as any other people.

Except when it came to their real burden. Then they were all killers with one truly exceptional assassin, a man who could fight like Niko but lacking the conscience of his son, and he was ready to do what had to be done. Grimm hadn’t stolen Janus from the Rom. No one had.

We were separated now, the four of us. We stood at the four points of a rectangle. If I could hear again from the rocket’s explosion—well enough, anyway—Niko would be able to as well. If I wished him deaf for a few minutes, I thought he would understand. He was staring at Kalakos now. He had heard what was said about Goodfellow and the derision that had been unmatched by the paien in the black market. The monsters didn’t hate me as much as my former clan did.

“Janus is not the Vayash burden I came for.” He pointed his sword at me. “While some burdens are to be kept, some duties to be honored, some are to be destroyed. Janus is an obedient tool if used wisely; you, Auphe freak, are a chaotic nightmare and we will carry you no more.”

“Goodfellow says the Rom can waken Janus by the blood from the death of one of their own clan. Their burden. Their blood. You killed your own clan members just to flip a switch and turn him on like a goddamn vacuum cleaner?” I growled.

“Only the one. There was no second victim. That was an embellishment to the story, as all good stories have. I was certain I could do you on my own…easily. I am Achilles reborn, but the others insisted I use Janus. Their fear of you is that deep that they cannot believe a human would be a match for you. That meant the sacrifice was necessary. Lots were drawn. It was a good death. A death to restore his clan’s honor among the other Rom. He went willingly and I made it painless.”

His smile wasn’t mine any longer. It wasn’t the imitation of Nik’s. It was that of a ruthless murderer, one