Doubletake

laughed.

The stars were brighter than ever.

It was a great night.

“I can’t believe you went back to Hephaestus to get the info on Janus.” I put my feet up on the couch…it was in Robin’s condo but it was still my couch. “And didn’t tell us. He could’ve killed you. He should’ve killed you.”

“You would’ve interfered. Besides, if I recall correctly, I outran every one of you on the first visit.” He scratched Salome’s bony butt as she hung around his neck while he peered in the refrigerator. “I’m starving. I save your lives and you don’t even bring me a nice duck pizza home in gratitude.”

“Sorry.” I was damn hungry myself. I slid my phone out of my pocket, Grimm’s claw marks in my shoulder howling in protest, but I felt too good otherwise to care. Grimm, Janus, and Kalakos: That was a hat trick nothing could ruin. “So…when you went back to the armory, you pretended to be like Hob, thought like Hob to get Hephaestus to talk, didn’t you? I know you didn’t want to have to do that. Sorry,” I repeated. I was too.

Robin closed the refrigerator door when he saw me ordering pizza and sat on his couch where Niko rested, Spartacus having half strangled himself in my brother’s braid. “I didn’t think like Hob. I won’t do that. I cannot even step into his shoes. Walk the bloody road he traveled.” So many of us with our dark and bloody roads. “It would suck me in. But I could do a pretense of a pretense. A poor imitation, the cheapest of Halloween masks, and his reputation preceded him. I was convincing enough to make Hephaestus think cooperation is a wonderful thing. He couldn’t talk fast enough.” His eyes were slitted at the memory. “He obviously had never crossed paths with the actual Hob. The first Hob.”

“You were Hob once, weren’t you?” The question, without judgment, came from Niko. As Niko was the one Hob had tried to sacrifice, it needed to.

“Yes.” They were gone, the strange flashes that had obscured his normally wicked and sly ways. He’d always before clearly shown what he was. Not a fox with sour grapes—a fox with a ladder and someone dim enough to be convinced to climb it for him.

“The memories are long gone, but I know. First there was Hob and then there was me. The second puck to step foot to earth. Identical. Same body, same mind, same thoughts, same memories, same proclivities.” Then again there was the quickest glitter in the eyes, but it passed. “Then, as all pucks do, I made new memories, developed my own singular personality, became not-Hob. But always I know what cast its reflection into me. Although I walked away, the mirror remains. If I stare into it, I’ll see my birth. I’ll see what I was. If I see it, I’ll remember it; if I remember it, I’ll become it…and Hob will live again.” He threw his own phone to me. “Forget the pizza. Call a limo. We’re going drinking and we’re not stopping until every damn drop of alcohol has been drunk and every stripper spanked for being the bad, bad boy or girl they are.”

We let the subject drop as he wanted. After what he’d done for us, we’d be bastards if we didn’t.

“One thing bothers me. How did Grimm know Janus’s name if he didn’t steal him or know of his existence to begin with?” Niko wondered. That brooding of my brother’s I’d worried about? It couldn’t have lasted longer? No. Crap.

“I might have mentioned it in the basement where Grimm had me,” I mumbled. “He’d just said he gated that metal monstrosity off of me in front of the bar, I said ‘Janus,’ and there you go. He was playing games with me, testing me. I thought, Who more likely to steal something like that than a half Auphe? Little did I know it was your dear old dad who was out to viciously mur…Oh, hey, we need a limo at Rob Fellows’s place.” I didn’t bother to give an address. He was their most frequent rider/drinker/horn-dog in the city. “Viciously murder me,” I went on after disconnecting. “I don’t think one slip of the tongue—”

“Leading us down a completely wrong path of investigation while taking the real killer with us everywhere we went,” Niko completed caustically. Yeah, that guilt had faded much quicker than I thought it would. “I was wrong. You don’t pretend to be lazy and idiotic. You are both.”

“He held my hand when he thought I almost died,” I told Robin, tossing back the phone. “And although it was too dark to see for sure, I think he might’ve cried.”

“I did not. I shook you and pounded your head against the ground, which unfortunately didn’t knock anything back into place.” He frowned. I grinned. Giving up—a wise move on his part—he moved on. “Now, we may still have Grimm out there somewhere, and the Bae. He’s been free twelve years. We guessed at best he could’ve reproduced thirty to fifty of the Bae. What do you think, Goodfellow? How many do we have to worry about?”

Robin shook his head. “I have no idea. Succubae usually lay only one egg when they reproduce. Who knows what will happen when they breed with a half Auphe? And how many succubae he has? I can’t imagine it being more than fifty.” He stood and grabbed his coat to head down for the limo. “Twelve years, and Artemis the fertile one knows how long it took him to find that succubae were compatible with a half Auphe. It couldn’t have been more than eight years at the most. Fifty in eight years? I doubt it. Even I’m not that horny.”

When Goodfellow was right, he was right.

It didn’t get more logical than that.

23

Black Sheep

I had a teacher once.…I know. I had many, and many of them had tasted so good that I wondered if it was the meals I liked more than the learning. But one of my teachers had read a quote to his students by a human not as weak-minded as the others. I thought of it when I thought of my brother and the pain and burn of the bullet wounds in my chest. They would heal as all my wounds did and it was worth it to see what I’d seen. To hear what I’d heard. This long-dead human whose words were repeated to us should have met Caliban in the grass and fire, explosions and blood. Those words were something close to, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” That human would’ve known, seeing the face of Caliban, the flecks of red in the gray of his eyes, that his words had come far too late.

I smiled to myself, sitting on the ledge of the desert cavern, the full moon directly over the entrance turning the inside to winter. White walls, white floor, a huge mass of white slithering amongst one another, clawing and biting, snarling and playing the hunt, longing for the real thing. There were over a thousand of them. It was a start. I planned on hundreds of thousands. One day a million. But numbers didn’t matter. I already had an unstoppable army. I had a way to go yet, but a brother who was my equal, perhaps more than, and soon would be as much a part of the Second Coming as we all were here. He would take convincing that the Auphe were gone beyond resurrection and that he was above them, as were the Bae, but I’d had all those teachers. Why couldn’t I teach myself? I thought that, given a cage, a fiery poker, and a bucket of acid, he’d learn my lessons soon enough. See the light, or rather the dark. And then things would change.

The world would change.

Caliban thought the Second Coming was the future, thought there was time to stop it. He was wrong.

The Second Coming was here.

The Second Coming was now.

Those who remained would be something new, something old, something one day to be like everything on this earth.

Everyone the same as the next and the next and the next…

Bae.

And not a human to be found anywhere.

Now who was the failure?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rob Thurman lives in Indiana, land of cows, corn, and ravenous wild turkeys. Rob is the