Doubletake

Except for Niko. He was the only one after two years in Tumulus, Auphe-world without the balloons and funnel cakes, who I could actually see in detail. He stood out sharp and clear. The rest? The blur of sheep? Who could tell one from another? Who cared if you could?

“Doshman!” Another, bigger one had lunged at us with a blade in his hand, then back again quickly when I shifted my gaze to him and grinned at him gleefully. That…oh, yesss, that I recognized. A sheep making threats. It was funny. It was so goddamn hilarious.

“Johai!”

The words, they were filthy and full of scorn. They hadn’t had to be in English or Auphe for me to know that. They had spit on us as well, forking the evil eye at me; Niko had taken it much more to heart than I did—eighteen years old with a dead mother, a desperately damaged brother, begging for help. Niko who never begged. Niko who had thought all our family couldn’t be as bad as Sophia.

Niko, who had been surprised in the very worst way.

“Marime! Bi-lacho! Za! Za!” Their leader had thrown out his arm to hold back the rest of the flock and spoken English to Niko. “You are Vayash. Cast off the monstrous bino. Or better, kill the mad beast and return to your clan.”

I hadn’t forgotten or missed a single word of that, I think because I’d seen the look on Niko’s face when he’d been given the choice. I was lost in a fog, but that look and the words that had caused it had managed to part it to let me see and hear clearly.

“You are the monsters. We don’t need your help. We don’t want your worthless damned help.” Niko’s voice had burned with betrayal and hate. Two emotions I knew better than any others. I’d known them when the Auphe had taken me. I knew them a thousand times more intensely when I’d returned.

Niko didn’t hate. Niko wasn’t like that. He wasn’t like Auphe. He wasn’t like me. I heard myself snarling. These sheep had made him hate.

I’d made a sound of anticipation and before Niko could swivel, I met the nearest two who had charged me at the moment of Niko’s defiance of the head sheep. I buried one’s own blade in his shoulder and mine in the other’s thigh. Don’t kill. Don’t kill. Don’t kill. Niko wouldn’t want me to kill. But it was hard, hard. I wanted it. Wanted. Needed.

Niko…

I snarled, but honored my brother, not the Auphe. As both men fell, I settled for laughing. I had known then and now that it hadn’t sounded anything like a human laugh.

I hadn’t cared. They were lucky it had started out as a good day before shifting to an aware one or I would’ve gone for their throats with my teeth and done more damage than they could have with their pigstickers. Eight years ago I’d barely understood anything around me. I hadn’t been right—in my head, in my soul. No, I hadn’t been right at all, far from it. The world had been twisted and strange and it was months before I would see it for what it was again.

If I ever truly had.

When Niko had pulled me back into the car ahead of an armed but uneasy mob, I’d said my first and only words of the day.

My voice had been rusty from rare use, but insistent, and the words were my first real step back toward sanity—toward Cal. “Don’t hate. Don’t beg. Not you.”

Because my brother had been better than that. Better than those sheep. Better than me.

He still was.

That encounter with the Vayash had in part made Niko what he was now: honorable if you deserved it, the unforgiving steel of his sword if you didn’t. That would always be a part of him. Thanks, in a large part, to that and this bastard I’d attacked at our door.

The one last thing I did remember…Sophia hadn’t taught us Rom. Not the language of our clan or the overall language of all clans. While he could guess from the tone what those words had implied, that wasn’t enough for Niko. Two days later we had stopped in a library. After an hour on the Internet, he’d taken me back to the car and I thought, in that one moment, that he’d been glad I wasn’t coherent enough to ask him what those words had meant. In the years since, he hadn’t once told me, and I hadn’t asked. He also hadn’t learned any more Rom; Niko who ate knowledge and languages like they were Wheaties. He would have nothing to do with it.

It didn’t make a difference if Kalakos was his absent father or not. He was Vayash and that damned him as equally in Nik’s eyes.

Kalakos nodded once. “I heard what happened, but I was not there. I swear it, Niko. I would not lie to you. Like Sophia, the clan is too small for me. I roam and I rarely see them. If I had been there, I would’ve spoken for you.”

Yeah, right.

“And I never came to you before”—prior to the Auphe’s taking me, before Niko’s second or third or fourth or seventh birthday—“as I found out about you when you were two years old. I didn’t know I had a son until then. But I thought your mother the better choice for you. The life I lead, constantly on the move, the work I do, not so different from yours, it wasn’t any life for a child.”

That…that was worth a fucking comment or two. “You thought Niko living with Sophia…a bat-shit crazy, abusive bitch of a mother, was a better life for a child? Is that your story?” He was a liar. He’d slept with her, he knew her, he knew what she was—a sociopath. People don’t change that much in three years. He’d known and he hadn’t wanted the responsibility of a kid, of Niko, any more than Sophia had. He’d just made it out in time before Niko entered the world—or a booze-soaked hell. With Sophia it was the same thing.

Better life?

Shit.

“Guess what, asshole? You were wrong.” I straightened and threw the Ka-Bar directly at him. I didn’t lose control. It was me, all me, and entirely deliberate.

In a move so reminiscent of Niko it was uncanny, he leaned to one side with incredible speed and caught the combat knife by the handle, as it would’ve passed by his neck or through his neck if he hadn’t dodged. The corner of his mouth lifted. I could see the curve of condescension building. For a half Auphe, I wasn’t too impressive, not at all—I could see the thought forming behind onyx eyes.

We’d see about that.

Yes, we would.

“Keep it,” I said with a mocking grin. “Where you’re going, you’re going to need it.”

The gate I created blossomed into hungry, pulsing dark gray around him and then he and it were gone. All Auphe could build gates to places they’d been to or could see. An endless number of gates. So could I…once. Now I was limited, but I had enough ability left in me, and this one had more than been worth it.

“You didn’t.” Niko frowned, and it wasn’t throwing the knife at his deadbeat dad that sparked that statement. “Tell me that you didn’t.”

I swept my hair back out of my eyes. It was nice to not be mistaken as the sheepdog entry in the Unshowered Best of Show. But letting it hang, glaring through it, I’d been what Kalakos had expected me to be— wild and tainted. Auphe. That had been worth it—delivering the goods. “Goodfellow said all supers had fled the city last night. Worst that happens is he gets mugged.”

“You did. Buddha on high, you gated him to the boggle pit.” Niko lowered his head to pound the base of his palm lightly against his forehead. “Cal, there is supernatural and then there is über-natural. The Panic might affect the boggles some, perhaps, but not enough to make them leave. They can burrow under the mud to avoid the pheromones if they have to, but pheromones or not, I have a feeling not even the Panic is enough to drive the boggles elsewhere.”

True. Boggles, nine feet of mud-wallowing, alligator-skinned, shark-mouthed humanoids that lived in the least accessible part of Central Park, were the unsocialized pit bulls of the paien world—if pit bulls were the size of bears, could talk, and ate muggers and joggers. Very little—actually nothing—scared them.

I groaned at having to admit social responsibility, which was only for Niko’s sake or I would’ve dropped that asshole straight into the pit and had a brewski to celebrate the occasion. “No, I didn’t.” I opened the refrigerator and grabbed some frozen waffles. “In case the boggles didn’t leave”—and I knew as well as my brother what tough