Roadkill

dead. Maybe a lot of someones. All the wishing in the world isn’t going to change that, and I can’t turn off the Auphe part of your genes.” He’d said earlier that he’d never manipulate genes again after what he’d done to Catcher. I didn’t blame him. I could end up a lot worse than Catcher with the possibilities riding in my genetics. “I can’t turn off the powers that go with them either,” he went on, “but I can make it very unpleasant for you to use them. I can take the feel-good away, and you might, no promises, but you might stay where you are now. The Auphe in you won’t progress. Or,” he finished matter- of-factly, “I can end your life now. Your choice. But I won’t let another possible Auphe, the last Auphe, loose on the world. Suyolak can’t make you all Auphe like he threatened, but he doesn’t have to. There’s enough potential in you to be walking, talking murder incarnate without any of his help.”

Rafferty was right and it absolutely did not matter. He might as well have been talking to the wind. Niko had kept my SIG while I was unconscious. The three of us in the back of the car, me between them, it made blades awkward, although not impossible for my brother. Nothing regarding a blade was impossible for him, but this statement was for me and he used my weapon for it. He had the muzzle of the automatic pressed hard against Rafferty’s forehead with an inescapable speed. Caesar, Genghis, Attila, Alexander… I’d said it before: They all fell in Niko’s shadow.

“The only life ending will be yours,” he said flatly.

He had what looked like three pounds of pressure on a trigger that took a little less than four. Rafferty could kill him, stop his heart, explode a vessel in his brain, but the death spasm would take the healer along for the ride-all over an Auphe. A healer wasn’t dying because of that. And there was no damn way my brother was dying because of me.

I put my hand on Nik’s wrist and squeezed. He didn’t look at me and I didn’t expect him to. In battle, you kept your eyes on the enemy. I only had to get him to see that Rafferty wasn’t the enemy. “It’s okay, Cyrano. Adult consequences, remember? I’ll let him fix me.”

Fix me…

He couldn’t fix me, though, could he? He could only cripple me-the bastard who imagined I needed fixing at all. I’d accepted who I was, hadn’t I?

Maybe I even liked who I was. I did like being able at work to scan the bar and make someone hate me or fear me with a single look. Wasn’t that better than being ashamed as I had been in the past? Wasn’t having others fear me better than fearing myself? Rafferty wanted to take the feel-good away. The feel- good was called that for a reason. It was the rush that made life better… more than better. Made it what people wished for when they were kids: perfect, everything you wanted, everything you needed, and you were ruler of it all. King of the mountain. King of all the mountains and everything that lay between them. Nothing could touch that feeling. No one could take it away either-not if you didn’t let them.

Not if you killed them first.

Ripped them apart. Eviscerated them and spread their guts for all to see.

Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be better than the fanciest of paintings?

I could kill them all, saving my brother for last, to show him all the training in the world couldn’t beat what you were born with. Even Niko couldn’t kill me if he couldn’t catch me, and no one could catch me when I started traveling. I could open a gate and come out behind him or above him and put a bullet in his head. It would be easy. I could see it: the head that had shared the same pillow with me when I was five; the bullet hitting, the blood staining his blond hair. I could see… I could see…

The head that had shared my pillow then, to watch over me, because he knew before I did that monsters existed.

Monsters like me.

God. Rock bottom, I’d thought before.

This was rock bottom: thinking, relishing accomplishing what I’d die to prevent anyone else from doing to my brother. And if that anyone else also happened to be me, that was fine. I would die first. Fucking die.

“Now,” I said in a voice not mine, not remotely close, “Nik, let him do it now.” Or someone in this car would die. I only hoped it would be the right person. Rafferty would be reading my intent to vanish, because part of me was fighting hard to run, the part of me that had to be tamed so I could live. If it won, it would also lose. I hoped to God Rafferty made sure of that. But then Rafferty and Niko would follow me within a fraction of a second, Nik’s finger still tense on the trigger.

“Now,” I repeated, although it was so goddamn difficult to say.

Why was the sane option unbelievably hard to hold on to?

Then again, who wielded the almighty right to define sane?

Them? The weak? Why not me?

“Hurry the fuck up.” Not only was it not my voice; it was not a human voice at all.

Niko slowly let the gun fall while Rafferty put that scorching hand on my head and I learned what brain surgery without anesthesia was all about. Later Nik told me the brain actually can’t feel pain, only the nerves and muscles around it. I took it on faith that that was true for human brains, but for a part- Auphe brain, some Mayo Clinic geek needed to do some serious research in that area, because there was pain. There was more than pain. I could feel Rafferty in there, a thousand scalpels slicing every cell, a hundred, a thousand, a million times. It was pain beyond vision or breath, beyond hope of an end to it, beyond hope of anything but an eternal hell of agony. I wished that same million times that he’d killed me instead. It was never answered except that each time I made that wish, I felt another piece of me slashed open. It was minutes, in reality, I guessed, but it felt like years-thousands and thousands of years.

That made it easy to understand that when I could see again, I saw my hands around the healer’s throat doing my best to strangle the life out of him. My best was good. If I hadn’t been weak from that pain, I’d have succeeded. Rafferty wasn’t doing anything to stop me. Niko reached past me to peel my fingers from the purpling flesh.

“Sorry,” Rafferty apologized, massaging his throat. “You said hurry and I needed to. If I’d had more time, I wouldn’t have let you feel that. But you were-” He coughed harshly and substituted a rough hand movement aiming toward the sky. He was right. I’d been more than halfway gone in intent and a second away from the deed.

My head still throbbed without mercy and I methodically pounded it against the front bench seat. It was that kind of pain, the sort that makes you want to knock yourself out to escape it. Hitting rock bottom, acceptance of your addiction; officially those two concepts sucked. Doing the right thing also sucked. I might think differently later, when this passed, but at the moment I wasn’t counting on it. Niko’s hand rested on my back and that should’ve made it better. He was Nik again, my brother-not just one more victim in the crosshairs.

I hit my head harder. This time I wanted the pain. I deserved it. Having that thought about the only family I had, the only one who’d given a damn about me for most of my life, I deserved pain. Being crazy was no excuse. Going Auphe was no excuse. There was no goddamn excuse for it. It was Nik.

Rafferty should’ve killed me.

But he hadn’t, and I had to deal. Niko had done everything possible to save me. I’d let him down once-shit, more times than I could count. But right now, I was going to step up to the plate. Be a fucking man, even if genetically I didn’t come close. I heard Robin move in the front seat to lay one on the back of my neck. It felt like ice through my sweat-soaked hair. My chest hurt too, my heart beating so fast I was surprised it hadn’t torn its way through my chest. Yeah, good old rock bottom. Wasn’t one of the twelve steps to recovery accepting a higher power? I didn’t believe in a higher power. I wished I did so I could hope one day to kick its ass for this.

“It’s all right, kid. It’ll pass.” He was probably guessing, but I appreciated Goodfellow’s effort. He’d been my friend for a while now, as hard as it had been to admit I could have friends-that I could trust someone besides my brother. But Robin was a friend, and a friend would lie to you when the truth wasn’t worth hearing.

“This is it,” Rafferty said quietly, words raw from a throat he felt didn’t deserve to be healed, else he would’ve done it. No bedside manner, but he’d been better off with a great bedside manner and a little