Doubletake

claws thrusting through the air with such a swift velocity that the flash of them was only an afterimage. It was a titan. It had some abilities that couldn’t be re-created these days. It was faster than an Auphe…

But it wasn’t an Auphe.

We had abilities too, and they beat speed-walking every fucking time.

The long-lost metal went completely through Kalakos to touch but not penetrate Niko’s chest in the day’s last red-stained impossibility. I saw Kalakos shudder, I saw his head fall back to gaze blindly at the sky, and I saw him die. With it I saw Janus go dark, the scarlet in it go black, and the automaton fall backward. Asleep again. Vayash blood would awaken him and Vayash blood would send him back to sleep. For all that Kalakos had been a shit and a half, he had been Vayash. His blood did the trick, no problem. Niko. Niko I could see standing hardly a stone’s throw away from it all.

Alive.

That was all I needed to see.

I closed my eyes as the darkness came.

All I needed…

22

“Cal, you didn’t.”

I heard Niko hitting the ground beside me where I lay on my back. It had all given way: my knees, my legs, my body. I’d fallen as well—as all monsters had, Janus and Kalakos, one with the earth. “No. You didn’t do it. You didn’t. Tell me. Tell me, you son of a bitch.” This time he gripped my shoulders and shook them hard.

Being one with the earth wasn’t as peaceful as you’d think.

He shook me again, with more force. “Cal, tell me.

“Tell me you wouldn’t visit that nightmare on me.” There was no resignation. There was demand, refusal, and fingers pressing to the bone in a grip that was absolute and eternal.

Painful as shit too.

“Yeah, sorry. I kind of did. And ow.”

I opened my eyes and slid a hand under my head that my brother was knocking against the ground with the shaking. I had to give him a break on not picking up on the fact that I was breathing. With Janus inactive, it was dark now, and we’d been thoroughly conditioned to believe that making a third gate would burst my brain like an overfilled water balloon. Why wouldn’t he think that I was gone?

And it had been true—about the third gate. I’d seen that when I’d tried to gate out of the basement when I was trapped with Grimm. A third gate had been impossible then, and impractical. I’d have killed myself but not him. But that had been two days ago.

“Buddha,” he swore fervently. “How…No. Give me a moment.” He felt my face for the blood a second gate would cause. There was a small nosebleed at best, less by far than the usual.

“I can wipe my own nose. I am a man after all, remember?” I held up my fist to show the ring he’d given me. You could hardly see it in the night gloom, but it was there. “I have proof.” I brought my hand back and used the bandage on my left hand to soak up the slow-flowing smear of blood. “And I’m wiping, so why don’t you take a break?”

“I think I will.” He turned sideways and fell backward beside me. After a good five minutes, he said calmly, “I think you broke me.”

“I can see that.” If positions were reversed, I’d feel like a bag of shattered glass, slammed time and time again against a brick wall—every piece getting smaller and smaller. Disintegrating. “I had to, though. I didn’t know it would work. Doubted like hell it would work, but I couldn’t let them kill you. I…Hell, Nik…I couldn’t, okay? When Janus almost killed me at the Ninth Circle, I didn’t see you running for cover. It’s no different.”

“My father used me to try to murder you. It’s different.” There it was. The worst part of it all. Niko wouldn’t have seen his father again if the man had been honest and the story the truth. It had been too late for that, but he would’ve had the memory of an apology and knowing that his father, whatever he was, was proud of him. Now he had worse than nothing. I had had a genuine monster for a father. Niko had had a human version of one.

“Neither of us has a father or a mother. Christ, Nik, haven’t you always known that?” I finished soaking up the blood and watched the moon start to rise. “It’s always been you and me growing up. No family except us. Why would it be different now?”

The grass rustled as he shook his head. “Why you pretend to be so lazy and a completely idiotic ass at times, I don’t know. You’re too smart for my own good. You’re right. We’re all the family we have or need.”

“See? You should listen to me more often.” I paused. “But I don’t pretend to be lazy…and I am an ass.”

He laughed. It was a little choked but a laugh all the same. “How’d you do it? The third gate. How did it happen? Rafferty said his work on you couldn’t be undone.”

“It couldn’t, I don’t think. Not by anyone around now.” There were sirens in the distance. Soon I’d have to gate us home and Kalakos and Janus to Tumulus for disposal, but not yet. It was warm; I could smell the ocean, maybe even see what I thought were stars. “Remember when we thought Rafferty was the best healer who had ever been born?”

“Difficult to forget,” Niko said, now quietly somber. That had been a bad time.

“Remember how, after he rewired my gating ability and later fought Suyolak…” Antihealer. The Plague of the World. Suyolak had thought he was hot shit, the hottest, and he’d been right. No one, including Rafferty, could match him. “…how Suyolak kicked his ass, dumping him down to second-best and almost dead healer?”

“Even more difficult to forget.”

“When Kalakos gave you Suyolak’s ointment, there was some left. Remember—”

“How you ran your finger around the box like it was an almost empty pudding bowl and ate it.” He propped up on his elbows. “Quite a few ‘remembers,’ but I haven’t forgotten.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t know if it would work and, if it did work, if it would take days, weeks, years. It was a shot in the dark.”

What wasn’t in our lives?

He let himself drop back again. “Random luck. What if it had taken weeks or months? Or not worked at all? You’d be dead.” The sound of one hand clapping over his eyes lifted into the night. “God, I think you broke me twice now. You could be dead.”

It was in no way his fault that his father was a homicidal psychopath, surprising me that he and Sophia hadn’t gotten along better. He’d used Niko, and he’d used my wanting what was best for my brother to worm his way inside until he could kill me himself or recover Janus. I had meant it: Neither of us had parents. Kalakos was nothing more than a murderer, and if he’d been successful then I’d have been the equivalent of someone shot to death while mugged or eaten in Central Park. A victim of a monster. Nothing to do with Niko. Simply the wrong place, wrong time. But Niko would have to mull it over awhile before he let himelf off the hook. Until then he’d brood and feel guilty. He didn’t deserve that, but he was stubborn and he’d hang on to that guilt but good. How’d you make that better?

“I could’ve died.” I said it the same as I would say the sky was blue. Simple fact.

“Shut up,” he snapped. “Just…shut up.”

“Dying…scary fucking shit, right?”

“Shut up.” That was Niko on the ragged edge.

I thought and uncrossed my arm from my chest and held it over to him. “Want to hold my hand? I think I’d feel better.”

This time the laughter was real, the guilt was less, and I definitely saw stars above.

“You are such an ass.” He snorted. He’d said that already, but I let it go.

“I told you not to trust a man who looked like that. Big nose. Blond hair and dark skin, that’s just weird. Way too good with a sword. Obviously exercised too much. Probably liked bonsai trees and dating vampires too. Sign of a nut job right there.”

He slapped me on the stomach and said it for the third time. “Complete and utter ass.” This time we both