This dedication can go only to all my fans (you are an army), fellow authors, publishing staff, my family, and Web mistress Jayda—all who kept my career intact and alive while I was in the hospital and unable to do it myself. You saved me. Never will I forget it.

To Mike G. and Chuck W., who rescued my computer from being tossed out my car window in frustration; Jeff Thurman, my guy in the FBI for the customary weapons, explosives, and general mass destruction advice; Linda and Richard, whose generosity of spirit knows no bounds; my agent and my editor, Lucienne and Anne, without whom these books wouldn’t exist; and, finally, to my personal hero and artist, Chris McGrath. This time you gave me a cover so amazing that it knocked me on my ass at first glance. I had to edit the book ferociously simply because I didn’t think it lived up to the cover.…An artist that talented is rare. All hail Chris—the one true Art God.

Family…it is a fucking bitch.

Just like he was a bitch. I had seen him—wallowing amongst the game, but never tasting of the herd. More perverse, he lived with prey, had been raised by prey, had been taught the ways of the world by prey, when I’d had to teach myself. Clawing myself along, I had chewed my way through knowledge as grimly as I’d once chewed discarded putrid meat and bone. Everything I’d earned, I’d earned with blood, mine or someone else’s. I had done what no one else could do.

The castoff failure, but look at me now. Damn right, look at me. Look hard and look good—right before I gut you.

Then there was him, the golden boy, yet look at what he had done.

Naughty and bad, bad and naughty. But much worse: disobedient. Not what they’d expected of their one true success at all.

I laughed at the irony of it.

I laughed, but I hated him, hated him, hated him, hated him, hated him.

Not for what he’d done, but that he’d been the one instead of me to do it.

That was all right, though. That was fine and fucking dandy, as someone I used to know once said. Fine and fucking dandy, because I hated everyone anyway. The only difference was, I was related to this one…and that made the hate sweeter. Hate was all I’d known. All I had ever been given and all I had ever had. I was created from it, molded by it, lived by it. Hate was like air, necessary to life. I wore my hate as a second skin and let it warm me when nothing else did.

I saw him through binoculars from where I lay atop a roof far enough away that he wouldn’t know I was there. It was night, but I saw him clearly. Light was for the fearful herd; the night was for me. Not that it was ever truly dark in this immense mound of misbegotten roadkill waiting to happen.

Yes, I saw him. He had black hair, pale skin, light-colored eyes. Nothing like I was at all. That I didn’t hate. That I liked—I was better, purer, closer to the truth.

It was all about the truth.

The new truth.

My truth.

And he was part of that, whether he wanted to be or not.

Family was a hateful bitch; it was. I had the hot poker scars of that burned into my flesh to prove it, but, scars or not, sometimes family was all you had worth playing with. Maybe he would see that. Maybe he would want to play too. I played rough. I played to win.

Did he?

I’d bet he did if given the chance, not that this boring scuffle I was watching was anything to go by. It wasn’t a fraction of the challenge I’d give him.

The Unmaker of the World, they had called him.

Unimpressed, I waggled black-gloved fingers in a mocking wave. We’d see. Sooner or later, we’d see exactly what family and blood meant to him. He might look like one of the cattle, but he would never be one.

Besides, if he could unmake the world, how much more fun would it be for me to remake it instead?

Family…it is a bitch.

The thought came out of nowhere.

Or maybe not, considering my current situation. There was no denying that it was true. Everyone thought it sooner or later, didn’t they? If there’s only you, you’re good—lonely maybe, but good. You can’t fight with yourself. If there’re two of you, it can still be good. Your options are limited. You make do and appreciate what you have, unless it’s the stereotypical evil-twin scenario. Then you aim for the goatee and blow his ass back to the alternate dimension he popped out of.

A kishi—better known as my paycheck in the form of a supernatural hyena—hit my back with staggering force. I flipped it over my shoulder and put a bullet between its eyes.

Yeah, normally two was a doable number for family. It was when you hit three and higher that things started to go bad. That was when the bitching and moaning started, the pitting of one against another, the slights that no one forgot. No one could tell me that Noah didn’t pitch a few of his relatives kicking and screaming off the Ark long before the floodwaters receded. It was no familial Love Boat, and I believed that to my core.

Which brought up the question: Did that wrathful Old Testament God kill the sharks? I don’t think he did. You can’t drown a shark. I think they were snacking on biblical in-laws right and left. Noah, Noah, Noah…

I swung around and kicked the next kishi in the stomach as I slammed another clip home before putting three in its gaping, lethally fanged mouth as it jumped again. It sounded easy, but considering the one I also had attached to my other leg…it was a pain in the ass.

Family-wise, I had no pain in the asses. I was lucky. I had one brother and he was a damn good one. Once we were on our own, I’d escaped the curse of screaming Thanksgiving dinners.…I had a turkey pizza; Niko had a vegan one. No bitter arguments around a Christmas tree…Niko gave me a new gun; I gave him a new sword. Absent was the awkward discovery of first cousins shacking up at the summer vacation get-togethers at the lake. I didn’t have to wait for summer. I saw my brother every day when he winged my sopping towel off the bathroom floor at my head or I asked—after the fact—if I could use his priceless seventeenth-century copy of some boring book no one but him and the author had read to prop up a wobbling coffee table.

Summer vacations…if you thought about it, what kind of people actually gathered together at a lake with cabins and all that crap anyway? Hadn’t they ever watched Friday the 13th? Jason? Hockey masks? Machetes? A good time for me, yeah—oh hell, yeah—but not as much for the members of your average Prius-driving middle class.

Stupidity is everywhere.

But for me, right now, things were good. My brother and I kicked supernatural ass for fun and profit. I had a shirt that said that with our phone number. Humans wouldn’t take it seriously. Humans didn’t know what the world really hosted. But the kind that hired us—nonhuman—they knew a walking billboard when they saw it. Running your own business is a bitch. You have to advertise. Promo. Market. Niko did that. I couldn’t be bothered with that crap—unless it resulted in my offensive T-shirt slogan. He and I had been doing this for four years now. Before that we’d done the same, but it had been a hobby, not a career.

Okay, I say hobby, but it was self-defense, pure and simple. When you’re half human and half of the worst monster to walk the earth—a creature that ate the supernatural for appetizers without putting hardly any effort into it—you weren’t popular with the other monster types. And there were thousands of different kinds. Some immediately attacked me, sensing the half human in me and assuming it would make me weaker—they were wrong. Some ran—they were smart. And some didn’t care either way—we hung out and had a beer.

Good family. Interesting and well-paying career. Half monster…well, everything couldn’t be perfect, but otherwise right now things were good. I was hoping they stayed that way. Except for Niko. I didn’t have to hope when it came to family.

The rest of my life might be challenging in some other areas, like at the moment as an adolescent kishi was either trying to eat my leg or hump it to the bare bone, but family? I knew I had that under control. I watched my brother’s back; he watched mine. We were a Hallmark card dipped in blood and made of unbreakable steel. I’d never had a doubt about my family and I never would—no matter what the kishi, who had brought the topic to mind to begin with, were doing to annoy me on the general subject.

No, it was all smooth sailing, rather like this current job, until my cell phone rang. “Niko,” I said, shooting another adult kishi with jaws stretched wide enough to swallow my entire head. It had leaped downward at me from a fire escape of a condemned tenement apartment building long crumbled in on itself—no demolition crew needed. Gravity worked for free. “Can you get this one off of my leg before I need sexual assault counseling?”

Niko said to not kill the babies, although at one hundred and fifty pounds “baby” was pushing the definition, but I was doing my best, more or less, to be a good boy. Although it would’ve been much easier to be a bad boy.

So very bad. So very fun.

For my brother, however, I reined in that part of me—that nonhuman half of me, choke-chaining it with a practiced grip. It was the price I paid to keep my brother satisfied. Bearing in mind that if it weren’t for him I’d be dead or sanity-challenged ten times over, I owed the man. I was also fond enough of his bossy, anal-retentive ass to die for him.

More important, to kill for him.

And to have chosen the darkest of roads to make that happen.

All that made ignoring a giant baby with an equally giant bite easy enough. As I fished for my cell, Niko was less than awed at my babysitting skills and said so: “If you can’t do a minimum of three tasks at once, I have failed you with all my training and instruction. I’d blame myself, but clearly it’s entirely your fault, your laziness, your total ineptitude.”

Not that we shared the fraternal fondness out loud. How manly would that be?

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard that all before. If adults heard lullabies when they slept, that would be mine. I shook my leg again, shot another kishi bounding down the side of the next building, equally as dilapidated as the first, putting three bullets between its blazing silver eyes. They shone brighter than any streetlights in this part of town…until their life seeped away and left only the dull gray of death. I felt bad for them—almost—but they had turned a block that had once hosted scavenging homeless, thriving drug dealers, and sullen hookers into a desolate wasteland. In my opinion, I didn’t have a preference for one over the other, kishi or human. The mayor wanted the city cleaned up. The kishi clan was doing the job one block at a time…even if it meant eating quite a few people.

Were those people good people? If I knew anything, I knew that these days, starting four months ago, I wasn’t in the position to make the call on whether certain people were worth saving or leaving to the predators. That I left up to Nik. I simply stepped over their bodies and went on with the job.

Regardless of whether they were good or evil, those people belonged, whether they knew it or not, to the Kin. The Kin, the werewolf Mafia of NYC, weren’t pleased to be sharing their money or their snacks with Johnny-come-lately supernatural hyenas from the depths of…um…I should’ve paid attention to where those depths were during the premission rundown—maybe Africa, but Niko knew. That was enough. I didn’t think it mattered much. They were encroaching on Kin territory, and the Wolves didn’t like that.

Unfortunately for the Kin, the kishi, as a race, howled at a decibel level that would have any Kin Wolf’s ears bleeding ten blocks away. Curled up in homicidal furry balls, moaning for their mommies, they hadn’t had much success in taking down the kishi. Luckily for Niko, me, and our bank account, human ears couldn’t hear notes that high.

And although I wasn’t entirely human, my hearing was. That made us the go-to guys for this job. It had seemed easy from the hiring and the half our fee slapped into my palm—if it hadn’t been for Niko’s research, finding out the kishi were highly intelligent preternatural hyenas, if extremely malevolent. That meant the adults were fair game, but the younger kishi we had to pat on the head and find a goddamn supernatural foster and rescue organization for murderous fur babies to raise them right, socialize their asses, put rhinestone collars on them, and take them off our hands.

How many of those do you think were in the phone book? Nada? Good fucking call.

But the bottom line was, it was all about family, which had to be where that thought had originated. The adult kishi taking down prey for their young, which luckily was only one at this point, feeding him or her, setting up a nest, claiming this place for their own. They were doing what evolution had bred in them to do. Evolution worked the same for nonhumans as for humans. Kishi were predators to their bones. They would slaughter anything they thought they had a chance of bringing down, but to give them credit, they looked after their family.

That’s where family became a bitch in yet another way. You eat people for your family, you piss off the Kin for your family, you die for your family.

As a random bully had once said to me when I was a kid in the fourth grade as he demanded my sneakers and backpack, life isn’t fair. I agreed with him by punching his annoying teeth down his equally annoying throat. If that’s the way the world wanted to be, I’d go along. I didn’t make the rules. I only played by them.

Since when?

Since never.

This wasn’t a schizophrenic voice; at least, I hoped not. This was just my subconscious, my new subconscious. Since I’d let a small piece of me wither and die months ago to save my family, the swamp in my mind that made up the subliminal me was considerably more shadowed. It was more prone to the bad thoughts people think, normal people too, that they shouldn’t, don’t like to admit to, and don’t act on. But as I wasn’t normal and wasn’t exactly the Webster’s dictionary definition of a person, my bad thoughts were much badder than most and I wanted to act on them. Sometimes or often or frequently or very frequently, depending on my mood…no judgment needed or wanted. If I thought it, I absolutely wanted to do it.

But I didn’t.

The voices/thoughts were almost as much a bitch as family could be, the squabbling, but I’d learned to mostly tune them out. Many psychotherapists would be proud of my progress—the ones who hadn’t met me and, if they had any sense, wouldn’t care to.

I wasn’t good or bad. I was only me, and I was neither.

They’d have to invent a new bizarrely long German psychological description for what I was. How did the German say, “To see him is to piss your pants in fear”? Freud would’ve known.

I shook my leg futilely one more time and exhaled in irritation at the molten mercury eyes, the dark red coat dappled with silver spots, the milk teeth—as large as a German shepherd’s adult teeth—that continued to gnaw at my thigh. “Three seconds and he’s a rug under the coffee table. Your move, Cyrano.”

Did Niko have a proud, hawklike nose? Yes, he did. Did I give him hell over it? What do you think?

I answered my still-ringing cell phone as I shot the last kishi that leaped through a boarded-up window. Wood split, glass shattered, and bone splintered. The combination made for one dead kishi whose stomach was rounded and full with its last meal, which, I was guessing, had been the last occupant of this street. From the hypodermic the para-hyena coughed up in its dying throes, that meal had most likely been a tweaker.

They say drugs kill, but does anyone ever listen?

“Yeah, Leandros,” I said into the phone. “Death and destruction by the dollar. The meter’s ticking. Go.”

I hadn’t had a chance to check the incoming number, not with Kishi Junior both seducing and making a meal of my leg. But it didn’t surprise me to hear a familiar voice. Five people total had my personal number. Our business number was an untraceable phone with voice mail lying on the floor of an otherwise empty storage locker. Niko and I’d been sorry before—we went with safe now. “Kid, thank Bacchus.” I heard the relieved exhalation. “I need you and Niko at my place now.”

The three seconds was up, and I had the muzzle of my Desert Eagle planted between toddler kishi’s moon eyes as it gnawed harder at my lower thigh. I had a high pain tolerance—you learned to in this business—but to balance it out, my tolerance for nearly everything else remotely irritable in the universe was low. Damn low. Contaminating part of your soul will do that…if you believed in souls. I hadn’t made up my mind, but either way it was too bad for baby. It was night-night time. I might as well stop the pattern now. The same as its parents, it would grow up to be a killer anyway.

Like you did?

As if I didn’t know that.

But I was a done deal; the kishi wasn’t, not quite yet. “Goodfellow? You in trouble?” I started to put pressure on the trigger and tried to overlook the shadow of guilt. It was a kid. A killer kid, but a kid. Couldn’t I relate? On every single level? Then again, did I care if I could relate? Was I Dr. Phil? Hell, no. I was, however, Niko’s brother. That had me yanking harder at my internal leash while frowning crossly at Niko as I gave him a few extra seconds to move over and slide his katana blade between my leg and the kishi to pry it off with one efficient move.

“You owe me,” I grumbled at him.

While it squealed, barked, yowled, and laughed hyena-crazy through a toothy muzzle, Niko threw the last kishi down and hog-tied its preteen fuzzy ass. My brother—he wasn’t a bleeding heart. There were more dead monsters and people in whatever version of hell you wanted to believe in who’d testify to that. He did like to give a break when he thought one was due, though—or when he thought their birthright shouldn’t automatically condemn them.

He’d learned that raising me and adjusting to my birthright—a lifetime of habits, right or wrong, was hard to break.

Robin’s voice was in my ear, catching my attention again. “Am I in trouble? Ah. Hmmm. It’s more like everyone else is in trouble with the exception of myself,” he hedged. “I’d rather explain it in person and give you the keys to the bar. Ishiah left them for you.”

Ishiah was my boss at my day job/night job/afternoon job, whenever I wasn’t out doing what pulled in the real rent money—disposing of monster ass. He owned a nonhuman bar—not that humans knew the supernatural existed—called the Ninth Circle, was a peri, which was a winged humanish-type creature that had spawned angel legends, and was generally neutral on whether he should kill me or crown me employee of the month for making it a week without icing a customer while serving up their liquor of choice.

Why would he want to kill me? We had a lot of unpaid tabs because I hadn’t once made that said employee of the month. But hand held to the empty, godless space that filled the sky, if I killed you, you usually had it coming. Or you just weren’t that quick. In my world, the two were practically the same.

“The keys? Why did he…Ah, hell with it. We’ll get the story when we get there.” I looked down at Niko crouching on the street, rhythmically rubbing the kishi’s stomach. It crooned mournfully, my blood on its teeth, the silver of its eyes surrounded by the white of fear. “Fuck me.” I sighed. Before I let Goodfellow off the phone, I added, “By the way, do you know anywhere we could drop off a baby kishi to be raised up all good with God? Religious, righteous, and true? Oh, and non-people-eating?”

“Your imitation of a Southern drawl is pathetic, and yes, drop him off here.” He rattled off an address. “They take in strays all the time. But you’d better do it in the next hour or they’ll be gone.”

“Gone where?” I asked.

“Who knows? It doesn’t matter. They’ll all be gone. Everyone. Now hurry the hell up. I’m paying your bill this time. I’m a puck, a trickster, and a used-car salesman. Don’t think I won’t squeeze every penny out of Niko’s well-shaped ass if you don’t perform this job to perfection.” His phone disconnected in my ear.

“Who was that?”

I grinned down at my brother. “Robin is hiring us for a job, and I’m thinking seriously about taking a dive in the fifth, because it’s your ass on the line if we screw up.”

“Goodfellow will be a good client. He wouldn’t cheat us.” He’d cheat anyone else—man, woman, or child, but not us. Niko finished the knot on the rope and slitted his eyes at me. “And let us leave my ass out of it. Why I claim you as my blood, I will never know.”

It wasn’t true. I didn’t know why he put up with me, but I took it on faith that Niko knew something that made me worth keeping around. Niko inherently knew extraordinary things that most others didn’t know and wouldn’t ever know. He was like that. Then again, very rarely, Niko screwed the hell up, wasn’t the infallible older brother—because no one was infallible. No one. I hadn’t kept count before, the times he was wrong, but if I’d known what was headed our way, I might’ve starting adding them up now.

Number one was a little over sixty minutes away and headed for us like a freight train.

Tick-tock.

“On the roof two blocks down, did you see it?”

He meant as we’d dumped the car several blocks away in a garage we couldn’t afford—there was blackmail involved—and walked the rest of the way home.

I’d seen it, but Niko didn’t stop testing me. It was his way of keeping me sharp, focused, and alive.

We’d left Robin’s over forty minutes ago and I was more exhausted from listening to him go on and on than from the fight with the kishi. Sitting on the edge of the tub in our bathroom, I continued to swab the puncture wounds on my thigh with peroxide. Then I’d move on to the antibiotic cream plus an antibiotic shot. You didn’t know what in the hell was living inside the mouths of half the monsters we came across, and I doubted the CDC did either. I had the immune system of my Auphe half, which was to say the best damn immune system around, but Niko was Niko. Big brothers were big brothers, and I took the same precautions a full human would, necessary or not.

There were a few advantages to not being human. More than I’d used to think, and more than I should think. But that’s who I was now and I was fine with that. Better than fine.

I answered Niko’s question, and it wasn’t an unusual one. Anything new in our world was to be immediately suspected and watched carefully. “I saw it. Five blocks back on the roof. You know I saw it or you would’ve picked me up by the scruff of my neck and shown it to me while swatting my ass with your katana.” I applied the cream and accepted the tape from my brother to secure the bandage around my leg. “Something metal. Steel maybe, and black too. It didn’t move and I couldn’t make out any details, but it wasn’t there this morning when we went by.”

Niko handed me the syringe and I injected my thigh muscle with the strongest antibiotic you could buy from a guy who had set up a pharmacy in his van. “I am as proud as if you’d actually graduated high school.”

He’d homeschooled me, the ass, and his graduation standards had been higher than any public or private school. I’d simply done my best to forget most of it. “Okay, a dark metal thing someone hauled up to the roof. Big deal. We’ll keep our eyes open, but I bet it’s just someone’s hideous idea of art, or a nerd making armor for the next big Ren Faire. I’m more concerned about the Panic.” “Concerned” was a good euphemism for metaphorically shitting my pants.

Goodfellow had been at our sides for three or four years now. He was the most loyal son of a bitch around, to us anyway, but every encounter with him put you one step closer to a mental hospital. I’d seen him naked three times, accidentally, and I didn’t give a shit which way the guy swung (he swung all ways…he swung in directions and dimensions scientists hadn’t plotted yet) as long as he didn’t hit on me.

And after seeing what he had a license to carry, I was kissing the ground, grateful he hadn’t made a move on me. Even if he hadn’t been rich, the man would need his own personal tailor to accommodate what he was hauling around. He did chase Niko in the beginning, but as much as I loved my brother, he was on his own there. And good luck. Every story Robin told was about himself, a threesome, a foursome, an orgy, and onward to things that would have jaded porn stars mystified if not terrified. The themes were pretty blatant—ego and sex.

I could take it, though, because he was a friend, a comrade in arms, and all that shit, but one hundred of him? If Niko wouldn’t have taken a picture with his phone, I’d have been curled up in the fetal position and sucked my thumb. Worse yet was how there were a hundred or so of them. Robin had always been evasive about how pucks procreated and I’d had no inclination whatsoever to push him on it. An all-male race who were completely identical to one another…a curious thing, but nowhere near curious enough to ask him or hear the answer. This time we got the answer whether we wanted it or not.

I absolutely did not.

Apparently there was no equivalent in nonsupernatural biology, although Niko tried his best to come up with a close comparison. Apogamy, androgenesis, adventitious embryony…all terms I’m sure I knew at one time, when Niko had been shoving biology into my brain with a crowbar seven or eight years ago. But I’d done my best to forget them, and my best was damn good.

“Male apoximes?” had been his last guess.

Robin had scowled. “Yes, Niko. Pucks reproduce exactly like Saharan cypress trees. In fact, we’re kissing cousins. Shall I show you my impressively large trunk?”

“Just tell me we don’t have to buy you maternity clothes if you lose the lottery,” I’d asked at that point during the briefing, pushing the meatball sub far away at the thought of a hormonal puck. “Jesus, I’m going to barf.”

“Gods.” He stared at me, disbelief dripping from the word. “How do you function when the hamster on the wheel between your ears takes his lunch break? Never mind. Just…here. Wrap your tiny brains around zygotes. It’s far more complex than that, as we are far more complex than you, but one puck essentially splits in two. The new puck will also have all the memories, personality, and skills of the original, which is another reason we hate one another so much. We yearn to be unique when in essence we all started out the same as someone else. We immediately part ways and the new puck will start developing memories of his own. As he does, his personality changes slowly as well. We all become different sooner or later.”

“Except for the ego, sex drive, trickery, lying, stealing, et cetera,” I said.

“Well, naturally. Why would we want to change the best of our race’s qualities?”

“You actually are family. In fact, you’re closer than family,” Niko had mused. “You’re supernatural clones.”

“All born of Hob,” the puck said quietly. As the three of us had nearly died at the hands of Hob before delivering him up to a well-deserved death, we skipped over talking more about the first puck to be whelped by the earth.

“How long does it take?” I’d asked, curious despite myself. “Is there a cocoon involved? Is it like Alien? Because that would be nasty as hell. Dripping fluids everywhere. Gah. Good luck finding a maid to clean that up.”

“Armani does not make a cocoon,” Goodfellow had replied with a sharp frost edging his voice, and fun time was over. He then went on to tell us about the Panic.

Capital P…for the capital R in “Run for your life.”

In ye olden times, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient who gave a crap, people had thought that panic was caused by Pan, pucks, whatever, unseen and rotten as hell, rustling and shaking the bushes off the paths to basically scare the living shit out of travelers. Not true. The word was still around today, but that definition wasn’t any more true than it had been in the beginning.

What was true about the Panic, Goodfellow had said, was that pucks produced pheromones by the buckets. Normally the chemical led their fellow supernatural creatures, not humans—it didn’t affect humans—to trust them. It made it all the easier for the pucks to steal from their fellow supernatural races and for them to believe the pucks when they said they were off for a romantic bottle of wine while in actuality they were shagging their thieving asses to safety, hauling gold, jewels, whatever they could steal. The pheromone also led the preternatural to lust after them—all the easier to get laid and…yeah, well, that was more than enough benefit there.

Eventually after a few thousand—or thirty or forty thousand years…who was counting—the pucks’ supernatural buddies eventually caught on—or at least their genes did—and after generations upon generations of other races being robbed, lied to, and somehow talked into an orgy with five of their best pals, the pheromones couldn’t overcome the nature-driven evolution of an innate and rather deserved mistrust.

That was the pheromones of one puck at work.

One.

Enticing in the beginning, suspicious and distrustful in the end…but, still, only one puck, Robin had said. But get more than one puck together and things changed. The pheromones mixed into something new, thanks to that evolution of suspicion and wariness—something new and unpleasant. Get five pucks together and everyone supernatural would become extremely nervous. Get ten together and there would be fighting, screaming, and running. Get the entire race in one spot and the chemical overload could conceivably drive lesser species mad or stop their hearts from fear alone. For the hardier predators, it would be as if they were a single small child drifting in the ocean while a hundred giant great white sharks circled them.

That was the Panic.

That was why all supernatural critters were fleeing NYC as fast as if someone had told them the Red Sox were invading. All of that sounded like a good excuse for me to desert Niko to the job. Keep my share of the money. See ya when I see ya. Send up a flare when it’s over. But, Robin had admitted sourly, Auphe weren’t affected. As with most poisons and venoms, they were immune to the pheromones. The Auphe were never any fun. The Auphe never played fair. The Auphe ate my brothers, sisters, dog, and crapped in the back of my pickup truck. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Here was the one time I thought I could use that in my favor; being half of the genetic monster to first crawl out of the primordial ooze…before turning around to murder the second slimy thing to creep out…but no.

When did I get my goddamn silver lining?

It obviously wasn’t going to be today. I went straight to my bedroom. The fight with the kishi had been light exercise. Goodfellow’s briefing had been as brutal as boot camp twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, five years in a row. I wanted sleep and I wanted it now.

Niko stayed up to read or meditate or trim his bonsai tree while thinking of ten ways to kill a revenant with its tiny gnarled branches and leaves. Those weren’t smart-ass guesses; they were what I knew. Niko had many interests, some lethal, some not, but I knew them all. Family. I hesitated in my bedroom doorway. “It’s kind of weird,” I said.

Niko had been headed for the main area of the apartment after I’d finished the first aid on my leg. He stopped to look back at me as I stood in the doorway of my room. His eyebrows lifted in silent question. “Family,” I elaborated. “I was thinking about family when we were fighting the kishi. I thought it was because they were making a home for their own family, but then Robin comes along with every family member on the face of the planet. Maybe I’m psychic; you think?” I didn’t want to be psychic. I had enough nonhuman traits to deal with as it was.

He whirled quickly enough that I couldn’t avoid the book he threw to nail me in the stomach. I grunted, but managed to catch it before it fell to the floor. Niko’s reflexes were the best I’d seen, among man or monster. “Did you see that coming, O psychic one?” He held out a hand and caught the book I tossed back at him.

“No. Ass.” But I rubbed my stomach and grinned. He was right. The Auphe hadn’t been psychic and our mother only pretended to be. “Let me know in the morning how many ways you come up with to use your puny shrub as a deadly weapon.” I changed and hit the bed hard. I slept hard as well. If that didn’t prove I didn’t have the slightest psychic ability, nothing else would.

But cursed?

That was a different story.

It was eight in the morning when someone banged a fist against our door. Niko was in the shower washing away the sweat of evil exercise. He’d already been out and run his ten miles. As my leg was tenderized and marinated by baby kishi Alpo, he’d given me a onetime break and hadn’t forced me to join him. I was still in bed when I heard the knocking, but I staggered up, cursing at the hair hanging down past my eyes and wearing nothing but sweatpants and two pairs of socks. My feet got cold. Hercules probably had acid reflux. We all have our weaknesses.

I passed through the large open space that formed the combination living area, kitchen, and workout gym to the door of our converted garage, and undid the one bolt. Most New Yorkers had several. Unless it was a particularly nasty case we were working, Niko and I didn’t have a problem with encouraging break-ins. Spontaneous sparring was like a jolt of extra caffeine in your coffee. Perked you up.

Opening the door, I began to snarl a natural, “What the hell do you want?” It was way too damn early and I embraced NYC manners like a native. What else would I say?

It turned out I didn’t end up saying anything at all. I swallowed the words as I saw it…him.…all in a split second. I saw the dark blond hair and olive skin, the familiar profile, the way he held himself on the balls of his feet, cautious and loose. A fighter. A warrior. I saw it all in an instant and I gave him what he deserved. Not a word, not a demand, not a greeting.

I tackled him in the doorway, slamming him to the floor.

I said I wore just sweatpants and socks to bed. I did. That wasn’t a lie. But I always carried something to bed, and out of it, with me. Sometimes it was the Desert Eagle tucked under my pillow. Sometimes it was the black matte Ka-Bar combat knife I kept under my mattress. Sometimes I swapped them. I wouldn’t want to get into a habit. Being predictable gets you killed. This morning it was the knife, serrated and ugly. Yet when it saves your life often enough, when it’s buried against the flesh of a traitor’s neck, it becomes a thing almost beautiful.

“You should be dead,” I hissed at him, a wholly inhuman hiss. I had one knee firmly planted in his flat gut, pinning him. He wasn’t struggling or fighting me and he could have. I felt the hard play of muscles under my knee. But if he didn’t want to defend himself, I didn’t care.

I’d thought it when fighting the kishi: I didn’t play by the rules. If you played by the rules, you died, and if anyone was going to die in this moment, it wasn’t going to be me. “You should be worse than dead.” This time I cut him, scarcely enough to split the skin…to let a measly few drops of blood course down to cup in the hollow of his throat.

“You motherfucker. You could’ve helped him. You could’ve saved him.” He could’ve saved him from our mother.

Saved him from me.

I could live with what I was now. It had taken years and finally an amnesia-induced epiphany, along with an inner sacrifice, but I could cope with the thing I was. That didn’t mean that Niko should’ve had to. He could’ve had a normal life. Ours was anything but.

Black eyes gazed at me impassively. “Are you going to kill me or not?”

I wanted to. More than anything in the world, at that moment I wanted to. And I didn’t see a single reason I shouldn’t…save one. I growled, my chest vibrating with the sound, and then slammed the blade home…millimeters from his head into the cheap pressed-wood flooring and padding we’d put down over the concrete. “It’s not my place to, you worthless son of a bitch. It’s his.”

I got to my feet and looked over my shoulder at Niko standing several feet behind. He was dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and black jeans, wet hair already braided, his gray eyes fixed on me with confidence. Knowing I’d do the right thing, or what he thought was the right thing. But that wasn’t it. It was what I’d said. The fate of that piece of shit on the floor was in Niko’s hands, not mine.

Gray…I was glad his and my eyes came from our mother. It was one thing he didn’t share with the man flat on his back. I peeled back my lips and gave a savage grin. “Daddy’s home. Want me to make the tea?”

I’d known what my father was since I was five or so. Sophia had told me from the day I was born, I was sure, but to genuinely grasp that Dad is a Creature Feature, you had to have a few years on you. When it came to Niko’s father, she’d told us he left before Niko was born, had left a few weeks after Niko was born, had visited once or twice but Niko was too young to remember. Sophia didn’t bother to keep her lies straight, because she didn’t lie to deceive, not to us. She lied to hurt.

Niko and I hadn’t known any truth of his father except he was Rom like Sophia and of the same clan, Vayash. Only Vayash had the occasional blond hair from hundreds of years ago, when they’d stayed in northern Greece for a time. And though it was forbidden to marry or have sex with a gadje, an outsider, that northern Greek blond hair and lighter eyes had made their way into the clan regardless.

Horny then was no different from horny now.

But that had been long ago and the Rom were nothing if not practical…eventually, which was how Niko could be blond and still be considered full Rom. He had their dark if slightly olive skin, and all Rom knew the quirks of all the clans. My black hair and gray eyes meant nothing when combined with my pale, decidedly non-Rom skin. I’d have been rejected as tainted with outsider blood.

If I weren’t already rejected as tainted with much worse.

I bent over and retrieved my knife before going into the kitchen. I wasn’t making any damn tea for Niko’s sperm donor, but the kitchen was as far as I could get while keeping an eye on him. As for me, normally I would’ve had waffles with half a bottle of syrup, and coffee. This morning I didn’t have an appetite for anything that wasn’t red and spilled with a blade. I folded my arms on the breakfast counter, bent at the waist to rest my chin on my forearm, the Ka-Bar remaining in my hand, and watched through the long strands of hair that still fell over my eyes.

A panther watching unblinking through the tall grass.

A last drop of blood ran from the tip of the knife to mar the sand-colored countertop. I lifted my top lip to show teeth at the sight of it and I went back to watching. The man…Niko’s father…didn’t miss any of my show.

He stood smoothly, moving the same as Niko moved: effortless and flowing as water. His clothes were similar as well. Dark, not particularly noticeable, would blend into the shadows well. He shifted his dark eyes from me to my brother. “I am Emilian Kalakos. Your mother, Sophia, I didn’t know if she told you that—my name.” He was confident with the smear of blood remaining on his neck. I almost growled again.

Niko regarded him without emotion before saying, “No. She didn’t. Close the door behind you. Our reputations here do not need any further fuel for the fire.”

“I am welcome then?” That was custom among the Rom. They didn’t include the gadje in it, but Rom wouldn’t enter another’s home without knowing they were welcome there.

Glancing at me, Niko quirked his lips, a somewhat less homicidal version of my predatory smile. He was letting me know he knew who his family was and it wasn’t this older reflection of himself. “No. But if you wait for welcome you will die an old man on the sidewalk. I leave it up to you.”

Kalakos apparently knew when to push and when to not look a gift horse in the mouth. He shut the door behind him. “Do you want an excuse or an explanation?” he asked calmly. I hated the sound of his voice. It was wry, amused, self-possessed—it was Niko’s voice, and Niko was unique. This shithead shouldn’t be moving like him, looking like him, or sounding like him. The fact that he deserted his son meant he shouldn’t be at all. This time I did growl once more.

“That would be Caliban. Your brother?”

To give him some credit, there wasn’t the hesitation I expected before “brother.” Nor were there the many other words the Rom had for me, none of which meant “brother” or anything remotely close to it. The Vayash, shamed as they were that a woman of their clan had whored herself out to a thing fouler than the word “monster” could begin to describe, had nonetheless eventually told the other clans of my existence once one hired us for a job. When that had happened, I couldn’t be a secret any longer. The others had to be warned.

With Niko at my side during negotiations, willing to dishonor himself by standing with me, the Vayash decided they had no choice. It was their duty to see that the others didn’t see me as merely polluted by gadje blood, that my pale skin wasn’t from a pasty white Midwesterner who lived on diet of deep-fried cheese but from an Auphe. Ninety-nine percent of humans knew nothing of the supernatural world that swirled around them. The Rom knew it all. They knew of the Auphe. They knew what I was.

I’d been spit on enough to prove that on our one visit to our Clan. But I’d been much younger then, half catatonic, half homicidal, and a great deal less in control.

Pity I’d had any control at all.

Pity indeed.

This time my conscious and my unnaturally mouthy subconscious agreed.

“His name is Cal. Do not call him the other again.” Niko’s lips flattened. Sophia had named me Caliban from the Shakespearean play. Caliban the beast-man-monster from The Tempest. She made sure I knew what it meant too, and called me by it every opportunity she had. Mommy had been an educated whore.

Niko had never called me anything but Cal. It was naïve for him to think that every one of his Cals could wipe out all the Caliban that came from Sophia’s lips.

Yep, naïve…but they sometimes did.

Kalakos kept his eyes on me and I knew what he saw. Half-naked, pale eyes gleaming through the curtain of my hair, a bloody knife, and a smile that tasted of years and years of spite—I wasn’t surprised he might think Sophia had been closer to the mark.

Good.

“Why are you here?” Niko demanded, his normal…his inherited calm gone. In its place were emptiness and the chill of the wind across the arctic ice.

Kalakos turned back to him. He looked about forty-five, but not an ounce of fat on him. All lean muscle, like Niko. They were almost exactly the same height. His hair was much shorter than Nik’s braid, though. Looking closer I could see one or two silver strands in it. He wore it slicked back tightly in a two-inch-long ponytail. It was good for fighting, not obscuring your vision. It was how I usually managed to keep the mess of my own heavy hair out of my face. Not anymore. Not while he was here.

“The Vayash Clan failed in its watch. We have lost our duty, our burden. They have sent me to bring it back. I know I cannot do it alone.” He included us both in his glance this time. “And none of them are fighters, not the kind you two are known to be. No matter what has come before, all Vayash must work to right this. The burden is here in the city. Worse, it knows that you are in the city. If you will not help me willingly, help yourselves. It can sense the Vayash and it will kill all Vayash that it can find.”

All clans had a duty and a watch. I thought I’d been the Vayash one. Looked like I was wrong. Or they had a two-for-one burden to carry. Too bad for them.

“All Vayash?” Niko narrowed his eyes. “Then that is not a problem for us. You are the only Vayash in this room and it’s been that way for seven years.” While we nodded to the clan name when dealing with other Rom, we didn’t claim it. It was a truth that became a lie and now was used only for convenience. Rom were honest only with other Rom. But their money spent the same as anyone else’s.

“We came to you when Sophia was murdered, burned to death by the Auphe,” Niko continued. “When Cal…” He didn’t finish that sentence. I knew he didn’t like saying it aloud; I knew he didn’t like remembering it.

I was better off, in a sense. I didn’t remember much of that time when we visited the Vayash, and what I did remember was a foggy haze. When I was fourteen, the Auphe had burned our trailer, killing our mother while Niko escaped out a tight back window, and they’d taken me to a place only Auphe can go. Another world or a murderous reflection of this one, I didn’t know or remember any of that. I didn’t remember escaping and finding my way back home. The fact that only a day and a half had passed at the burned trailer site, yet I’d returned—somehow—sixteen instead of fourteen at best guess, made not remembering that much…safer. They played with time like they played with lives. The Auphe had had me for two years. Yet all of it I’d recalled, more or less, was the rare sensation of cold or of rough rock against my skin.

Had I actually remembered those years in detail, I imagined the Cal in me would pour down an invisible drain and leave a Caliban-shaped nightmare in its place.

As it was, after I’d returned, it had been a long time before I’d been anything close to functional. I’d rarely spoken. The only human touch I could stand was my brother’s hand on my shoulder, and that took a while. I had remembered the Auphe taking me and I vaguely remembered stumbling home naked through a rip in reality, but next to nothing between. But I’d known they’d come for me again. I might not know anything else, but that I knew.

So we had run. We’d crashed in Nik’s car or in motels and I’d curled in a fetal position under the beds with my knife and gone days without sleep. Niko…Niko had rented rooms with a queen-size bed so he could sleep under it with me, to make sure I knew I wasn’t alone.

That’s why Niko had gone to the Vayash Clan, our clan, for help, but that’s not what they’d given us.

I didn’t remember much of it. Time had passed since I’d escaped the Auphe, but I hadn’t known how long. I couldn’t tell an hour from a minute then. Colors were bright enough to make my stomach turn. The light was too bright, sunny days, cloudy days, always too bright. For a while it made me retreat further into myself. When it came to guessing something as changeable as time, a month was probably close, sounded right, and did it matter? Niko had found the Vayash, I didn’t know how, and drove us there in the first piece-of-crap car he’d owned. He’d opened the car door for me when we arrived. I did remember that—his face, his mouth moving, although I didn’t understand what he said. I didn’t always know who I was, where I was, but I knew Niko. He was the only anchor in a world of chaos. He hadn’t been as fortunate with me. He hadn’t known when I would be less aware, when I would be a whole lot more, and what rabidly unpredictable things I would do if it was the latter.

That day, I thought, had started out a good day. I still ate with my hands—pancakes. Not meat. I refused to eat meat, refused to look at it, and gagged at the sight of pork. Pinkish white like something…something I didn’t remember. Eventually I’d gotten used to it again. It took almost a year. Pepperoni pizza couldn’t be given up forever. But before then Niko had learned not to feed me meat; even the smell of it repulsed me, although I didn’t know why.

You knew why.

What do Auphe eat?

Who do Auphe eat?

I had dressed without Niko having to carefully remind me more than twice. English came and went, as it did that day. Sometimes I understood it; sometimes I didn’t. While I hadn’t said a word that morning, I did dress, although no shoes. The concept of shoes to me seemed idiotic. I couldn’t see the reason for them when the random feeling of freezing cold with nothing but jagged rock to walk or flee on was what I expected. Asphalt, carpet, or grass—decadence.

I hadn’t needed shoes, but my knife—I hadn’t let go of my knife once then. Not to eat, piss, or sleep. My knife I’d kept with me.

Good day…it must’ve been or I wouldn’t have gotten out of the car to face a gathering of people with Nik. He hadn’t had much choice. Leaving me in a car by myself wasn’t the best option. The last time when I’d forgotten how the door handle worked, I had tried to kick my way out through the safety glass with those bare feet and succeeded. This time I had followed just behind him, the front of my shoulder almost touching his shoulder blade. I was oblivious, not really there. Not really anywhere. Good, good day.

Then I smelled meat cooking. Burning. That had seemed wrong to me. Food and fire, they shouldn’t mix, should they?

Waste of flavor, waste of blood. I didn’t know why I’d thought that. But wasn’t it true?

Sheep. It was what sheep did. I pulled my knife from under my jacket. Sheep, yes, but I smelled their rage and fear soaking the air. The rage I’d dismissed.

The fear I embraced.

It had been a good day, but unfortunately for Niko it turned into an aware day. I liked aware days.

But no one else did.

Niko had said something to the group slowly surrounding us. All men. I didn’t listen to it. “No, Cal.” That was said to me. That I did try to listen to. Tried. Tried. Tried. He’d taught me to recognize my name again. “No knife. Our clan.” The women and children had fled inside their RVs. I hadn’t caught it all, understood it all, or recalled it all.…It didn’t make a difference. The result was the same. I’d heard him say, “Help.” More sounds. “Kidnapped. Killed.” And finally, “Family.”

For some reason that word I had known clearly. “You are our family. Help us.” Knew it because my two years of imprisonment had imprinted on me that those words were only to be laughed at. Weak and worthless. The Auphe had no family, did they? I couldn’t remember, but if they had…instinct told me that if they did and one of that family pulled up lame, you…they…would eat that brother or sister. And those sheep gathered around us…they were born lame. Lame as a species.

Then Niko had said something that shocked me, even in my condition.

Beg. “I’m begging you.”

Fuck the Auphe. I had family. I had a brother and these sheep had made him beg.

The men had completed their circle and I had turned to rest my back against Niko’s. Watchyourbackwatchyourbackwatchyourback. Alwaysalwayswatchyourback. You took down more that way. They moved closer and that had been when Niko had gotten his answer.

“Armaya khul! Beng!” He’d been the biggest of the men, their leader. If it had been now, I could tell you if his hair was curly or straight, if he had a mustache or not, but then…humans had looked all the same—alien. Wrong. Puny…

Prey.

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.

Several months ago, I’d killed eight members of my family.

No, that wasn’t what I meant, whether it was true or not.

Several months ago there was a somewhat, in some people’s eyes, relatively normal Cal—or by and large normal—the best he was able to be as a half Auphe. Occasionally he did lose his shit, attacked and ate deer while on road trips through the woods, created massive holes in between dimensions to shove through malevolently murderous pucks, and once in a while ripped out an Auphe’s throat with his teeth. He also opened a gate or two to save his friends, blew up an antihealer from the inside out to save the world, cleaned his guns while watching porn, and generally was a smart-ass to everyone.

Normal.

I opened the front door to the Ninth Circle to start preparation for the Panic. There was nothing normal about that.

But I had been normal, considering the world we lived in.

Again, in some people’s eyes…

Then that Cal was jumped by several Great Dane–size spiders in Central Park and bitten on his way home from this same bar. The venom caused the loss of most of his memories and separated the human part of Cal from the Auphe part for a while. The Auphe genes concentrated solely on fixing the damage located in the section of the mind that stored memory. They ignored the rest of the body and brain unaffected by the venom. And while they were occupied the rest of the suddenly mostly human Cal showed what he could’ve been—in a fictional world where Auphe hadn’t existed, where they hadn’t been half of what he was. A dream. A “what if” in a world where “what if” are the cruelest words around. Finally the poison’s effects were healed, and not only the amnesia, but something else—a mental split that had existed since birth, a defect, the Auphe would’ve said—joined back together and there weren’t two different Cals anymore: the human one who was snarky and would take you down if you deserved it and then the subconscious Auphe one who wanted out, although it took him nineteen years, wanted free, who thought control was a disease and slaughter the most natural thing there could be.

Those two Cals became one. The venom had activated the Auphe healing to the extent that it had done more than return my memories. It had interwoven what had once been separate. And now there was me. I was improved. I had control, something I believed I’d always lack.

Having control, that was something unbelievable. Incredible. There was no more reverting to the other half of my gene pool and chasing and eating Bambi in the woods, because there was no other half anymore—not mentally. There was something new and now whole formed by a joining of Auphe and human.

Something new, something old, something unlike anything on this earth.

I was in command, darker maybe, but the darkness was worth it.

Darker than dark, blacker than night. Yessss.

Enough, Gollum. Christ. I’d gotten the point already.

But it was worth the trade—I thought. Before, I wouldn’t kill you unless I had to…although I might want to if you pissed me off. Now the whole—the new—Cal wouldn’t kill you unless I had to; I’d just want to a whole lot more—and you didn’t always have to piss me off to have me fondling my guns. The drive was increased, but the decision was the same…because of the control. I held back, unless you did have it coming to you.

Killer, raper, monster, maimer.

Past Cal would’ve put you down. I would too, but first you’d have the tour. Down and down, ’round and ’round, through Caliban’s town. In the past, it would’ve been quick. Now I took my time. Your pain equaled your victims. Your amount to arrive six feet under, it took longer.

Niko believed in karma in the next life. I believed in karma in this one, and I was a stand-up soldier when it came to delivering it. The decisions I would’ve made in the past, they hadn’t changed. Much. The punishment…that I fulfilled more appropriately according to the crime and the time. I was the right hand of justice and the left hand of the undertaker.

Clever excuses. But why do you think ending the useless needs them?

The spider venom, the biological repair, had stabilized me—Niko, Robin, Promise, and I, we’d all recognized that. I hadn’t settled where others in the supernatural community would’ve liked, but I was stabilized. That, for everyone around me, was a relief, because it was one hell of a slippery slope, as they say, when my Auphe genes began to overcome the weaker human genes. Auphe genes always win—that’s what a long-gone healer friend of ours had said.

He’d been right—until now. And would be right again…maybe…sometime in the future.

There were the dreams too. Awash in blood and the hunt. Did I ever have dreams that heart-pounding? That savored?

So wild?

So wanted.

Black thoughts and scarlet dreams, they didn’t mean anything in the end—unless they were useful. I was in command of myself now and that was all I needed to know. I would do what had to be done only when it had to be done, and if I enjoyed it a great deal more, then that was a win-win.

I flipped on all the lights in the bar. The last thing I wanted was a dim atmosphere that assisted the pucks in scheming, assaulting, stealing, and a hundred other things.

While at least I was in control of my mind, I knew I was way out of my depth on the approaching situation. The Panic? No fucking way. I tied the black apron around my waist and started lining up glasses on the bar of the Ninth Circle as I used that control to consider something else besides pucks. I thought about consequences—something I rarely did.

Consequences were boring.

Yet sometimes you had to man up and face them.

That wasn’t boring. That just sucked. But for my brother, I would do it.

Not that it still didn’t suck.

“You think I made a mistake gating that SOB to the boggles before we found out what the Vayash burden is?” I asked my brother, who was working beside me with methodical movements.

The last Rom clan who’d come to hire us to find their lost duty, their burden had been the watchers of an antihealer known not so euphemistically as the Plague of the World. Suyolak could’ve destroyed all life on the planet if we hadn’t stopped him. The Black Death was just a kiddie party to him, and one he’d started. It made me wonder what the hell the Vayash were supposed to be keeping locked down.

If it was anything remotely close to Suyolak, that was bad fucking news.

Niko showed no signs of being concerned as he shrugged slightly, following my lead with the glasses. “He’ll be back, as you said. And whatever the Vayash have lost, we cannot find today. Today is the Panic, and not only are we committed, but I think the Panic may supersede any other threat on the face of the planet.”

It should’ve been a joke, but it didn’t sound like a joke, and I was under no illusions that it was.

Goodfellow was the typical trickster with typical trickster ways, but he was sane. Fairly content, even happy now that he was in what used to be the foulest curse word in his vocabulary: a relationship. But he was only one of two pucks I’d met. The other, Hob, had been insane, malignantly narcissistic, and would not only kill you for no reason, but do it more efficiently than anyone alive. When you’re the first, born conceivably a million years ago, you learn to fight like there is no fucking tomorrow. My genes were of the firstborn, but I was not a firstborn. There was a difference—as in unnumbered-amount-of-years-of-carnage-experience difference.

If they hadn’t crippled you, it would be different. Much different.

“What do you mean, ‘crippled’?” Niko asked, the glass suspended in his hand. His knuckles were white and tense. Shit, I’d actually said that aloud.

The door opening managed to get me out of an immediate explanation. Robin walked in wearing his usual outfit of expensive green shirt, black slacks, and shoes. He sat on a stool and said rapidly, “All right. Extremely important. Before the others get here you are not to mention, hint, or even think about how I’m in a monogamous relationship. Are we clear? It would ruin my reputation among the Panic. They’d hang me from the ceiling and beat me like a piñata. So keep your mouths shut. ¿Entienden?”

“Whatever,” I said. “Trust me, I’m traumatized enough. The last thing I want to talk about with a hundred other yous is your sex life.”

The green eyes shifted to something less Robin and considerably nastier as he raised his voice. “Come on in, brothers! Adelfae! Hear the news.” The door swung open again to reveal a streaming horde of pucks. “It’s true. Goodfellow is monogamous. He’s become a freak. A pervert. Depravity on the cloven hoof.”

“Or his balls fell off,” suggested another puck who came to the bar. “Or his dick. Anyone who would hang about with Bacchus is bound to get a catastrophic genital rotting illness at some point.” This one was also identical except his hair was a few inches longer and he had both ears pierced with small gold hoops.

Niko looked at me as the priest must’ve looked at the guy sitting in the electric chair in the old days right before the switch was flipped: resigned sympathy. “I didn’t know he wasn’t Goodfellow,” I protested, feeling the desperation sharply. Not our Goodfellow at any rate, but his carbon copy. “He looks dead-on Robin. He said he was Robin.”

“Implied,” Niko corrected, the sympathy turning one hundred and eighty degrees to a mildly sadistic pleasure he didn’t make an effort to hide. “He implied it. He didn’t say it.”

“He’s wearing the same kind of clothes Robin would wear”—I kept up the crumbling defense—“and all of them smell the same.” I hadn’t inherited the Auphe ability to see in the dark, but I had inherited their sharp sense of smell. “Every one of them smells like frigging Irish Spring. All green and minty. It’s not my fault.”

He put the glass down and patted my back. “It was nice knowing you, little brother. When Goodfellow is through with you and if there’s enough left to bury, I’ll find you a nice plot.” The pucks kept pouring through the door and, immune to pheromones or not, I felt pretty damn panicked as they kept coming and coming. And I wasn’t touching that double entendre with a ten-foot pole…or that one either.

Another puck came pushing through the crowd. As soon as the others spotted him they started singing some ancient seventies song: “‘Do you like piña coladas? And getting caught in the rain…’” The tone was pure derisive malice, obviously not a “Hey, great to see ya, brother. Congrats on the boyfriend” song.

A fist banged against the bar, rattling the glasses. “Who told them?” this puck demanded with a poisonous hiss that would’ve done any rattlesnake proud.

“Goodfellow?” Niko asked dubiously.

“Yes, Goodfellow. Goodfellow who has been outed as a freak monogamist whose shame will follow him to his dying day. Now who told?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He grabbed a handful of my shirt. “Why do I even ask? We are pucks. Didn’t that one brain cell you possess wake up long enough to let you know we all lie? We all deceive? We all hate one another’s attention-snatching guts and would do anything to humiliate one another?”

He didn’t give me a chance to respond. “Ah, what did I expect? You’re a Boy Scout in a con man convention. If con men had the drive and conscience of Jack the Ripper.”

Me? A Boy Scout? With the things I’d done? That was a first, but considering this company, he could be right. Releasing my shirt, he dropped his forehead onto the bar and mumbled, “We should’ve worked out a safe word. Give me three bottles of scotch.”

A hand slapped his shoulder and squeezed. “Would you like a mercy killing? I’d hate for a tainted monogamy cell to enter the race should you lose the lottery.”

It was the one who’d masqueraded as Robin. I could tell only by what he was wearing. Otherwise he and Goodfellow were beyond identical. It was creepy. The bar was full of about seventy of them, and besides length of hair, clothing, and the occasional scar, they were as Nik had said: clones. Your brain squirmed at the sight of it. It was unnatural—mirrors within mirrors. “No, thank you, Faunus,” Goodfellow said smoothly, sitting up. “I’d rather discuss how you haven’t had sex at all in a year. Did you take vows or is it true that an incubus bit off your penis in disappointment at your pathetic performance?” He grabbed the hand on his shoulder, slammed it on the bar, and pinned it there with a beautiful Spanish poniard gleaming silver and needle sharp. “Let us check and see.”

I turned my back just in time to hear the slide of material as pants were yanked down and then a pained groan from the entire bar. Apparently the incubus story edged out the taking-vows one.

“Is this the type of fight you hired us to prevent?” Niko questioned. I didn’t know where his gaze was, on Goodfellow or Faunus, because I remained with my back to the Panic. I might work that way the entire night if it was feasible—serving the customers without facing them.

“Hardly,” Goodfellow dismissed. “A fight will be when one of us genuinely tries to kill another. We need alcohol to lubricate that into motion. Give us an hour. And you can look again, Cal—not that there was anything to see.” There was a wicked gloat at the monogamy revenge in the words. “His pants are back up. Luckily he does have a belt, as there is nothing else to hold them up.”

Warily, I faced the bar again as Faunus disappeared into the jeering and laughing crowd, the bloody blade remaining on the bar. “I think you made an enemy for life.”

“We are all enemies, but keeping the race alive is more important than that. And what precisely are you doing?” I ignored his question as I uncapped the black marker I’d fished out from under the bar, leaned across, and wrote “RG” on his forehead.

“Just a precaution.” I put the marker back under the bar and handed over his three bottles of damn expensive scotch that he insisted be kept especially for him.

“Actually, that’s not a completely idiotic idea…unless it’s permanent marker.” He scowled, but let it go and pointed to several other pucks around him. “This would be Piper, Pan, Shepherd, Paein, Paniskoi, Phobos, Philamnos, Phorbas, Panikon, Puckstein—he converted—Prank, Puca, Puki, Argos…and you’ll never remember the rest. Simply enjoy the spectacle and if you have to take a break, I’d go together. The buddy system is essential during the Panic.”

“Mostly Ps. Why aren’t there any variations on Goodfellow or Robin?” Niko asked.

His face went blank but he smiled…technically. If someone had taken that poniard from the bar and carved the smile on his face, the effect would’ve been the same. “That’s a good question. I’ve wondered myself and then I wonder something else. Hob was the first, a million years on this earth. No one dared to take his name. I say I’m a hundred thousand years old, but as I can’t remember half of those, what else might I not remember? A million more? Hob went insane because he did remember. All those years and all the things that he had done. In a million years they couldn’t all be good things, now, could they? Some might be extremely bad things.”

His imitation of a smile became more unnatural as he continued. “Or if you don’t care what you do, the absolute number of years of boredom alone would drop you into the deepest pit of insanity. Maybe I’m a little smarter than Hob when I know a perfect memory can be the worst of enemies. Then again, maybes are only maybes. Maybe no one else cares enough for my name to steal it.”

The smile disappeared piece by piece, chunks of ice shoved methodically one by one into a freezer. “Do you have any interesting questions to add, Caliban?”

I felt like I’d asked someone what time it was and they beat me to death with Big Ben. Someone was cranky. I juggled more bottles of alcohol, ready to pour. “I was just going to ask why you guys have dicks if you don’t use them for the whole baby-making thing, but I think I can live without the info. Go party. Have fun. Stab somebody in the back. We’ve got it covered.”

His eyes didn’t become any less opaque, but he did turn and disappear into the crowd. “I think I might’ve pissed myself a little bit,” I said conversationally to Niko. “How ’bout you?”

“A drop. Perhaps two at the most.” Niko took the discarded poniard and tucked it away. He did like collecting blades.

“I always wondered why he wasn’t afraid of me like everyone else.” Or hadn’t hated me like everyone else. You hate what you fear. Goodfellow didn’t fear me. He never had. “My monster cred just dropped a notch.”

Both of us had started pouring drinks when one of the pucks shouted, “Where’s the entertainment? The strippers! The whores! I’ve ten thousand dollars in fives and a crotch on fire! Bring on the orgy!”

“Oh God,” I croaked. The glass in my hand fell to shatter on the floor.

And Niko didn’t catch it. Niko and his unmatched reflexes didn’t catch the glass. For the first time in his adult life, I thought my brother was frozen with fear.

“I thought all other paien left when you guys rolled into town,” I said. “Goodfellow said so. I remember. Distinctly. Very distinctly.” With the possible exception of the boggles, and I didn’t see Mama Boggle on a stage wearing pasties over her scaly chest and a G-string made to accommodate her thrashing crocodile tail. Nine feet of croc-a-croc-a burning love. “Oh shit, I think I’m going to pass out.” I clenched the edge of the bar.

“Almost all paien,” one of the pucks corrected. Puckstein—I recognized him by the Star of David around his neck. “Not the lili and lilitu. They can’t smell us.” He stretched as if he were next up in Olympic men’s gymnastics. Jesus. “Hope you have a fire hose handy to clean out the place. You’re going to need it when this night is over.”

Jesus.

I thought about shooting myself in the head. I thought about shooting the puck, but taking out seventy wasn’t going to happen. I decided on the simple: running out the emergency exit doors, if Niko didn’t beat me to them.

But it was too late. There were three reasons for that. One was the commitment we’d made to Robin—by commitment I meant the money we’d taken and had no intention of giving back. The second was the chains I saw wrapped and locked around the emergency door push bars. Goddamn mind-reading Goodfellow. The third was the worst.

The entertainment had arrived.

Interesting.

And fucking annoying.

He was maimed. Spoiled. He hadn’t gated away. Couldn’t gate away, but why? He was the Unmaker of the World. He had once been able to build a gate to the past…to millions of years ago. You can’t create a damned and doomed doorway such as that without the innate ability to gate with unmatchable ease.

Nearly unmatchable, that is. There was me, wasn’t there? Yes…ah, yes…there was me.

I took another bite of my dinner and chewed as I put down the binoculars. He had looked dead as the pathetic meat bag of a human and the goat tried to free him from the metal claws of a thing the likes of which I’d never seen. A curious thing too, but I didn’t have time for another curiosity. Caliban was my one and only at the moment. I’d gated his attacker to the top of a building far across the city. It seemed to like building tops. Whatever that thing was, it wasn’t mine, but it might prove useful to keep around. One never knew when death incarnate would be needed. But in the end my brother was my toy; his miserable life or death belonged to me alone.

I swallowed and took another mouthful. Caliban might have looked dead, but he wasn’t. He was family, and our family didn’t die easily. No no no no no. I was proof of that. I had lived through twenty years of torture…lived and escaped. Twelve more years hadn’t made me forget every burn, every sear, every slice of a blade, every week of starvation—none of it, because those memories made me stronger and more determined.

This failure was going to prove to the family that rejected me, the family that was gone but not forgotten, that I was better than they were…so very much better.

And the success…Cal-i-ban, something had happened to him. He had built a gate to the past. I’d “talked” to those who roamed this city: the vampires, the revenants, the Wolves, others. I’d talked to them with my teeth and my man-made claws. I left nothing but shredded flesh, intestines, and death when I was done with them. But isn’t that the result of talking? I thought it was, and if I thought it was, no one would tell me anything differently or I’d talk to them as well.

They’d all said the same: He could gate like a motherfucker.

Something had happened. I had only to find out what. Not that in the end it mattered. We healed. Against anything that didn’t kill us—we healed. It might take time, but we never failed in that.

We were Auphe.

What didn’t kill us only pissed us the fuck off.

I tossed away the leg of the security guard who had tried to stop me from accessing the rooftop of the building at a safe distance from Caliban’s party. He wasn’t muscular or flabby, the guard, but in between. Succulent and soft, yet not too soft—the perfect consistency. But I was full. The rest could stay on the roof until someone found the leftovers. I sat up and put my sunglasses back on. Night to everyone else, but the lights…it made it day to me. I didn’t like the day. I didn’t like the tedium of lying on rooftops either. I’d relieve the tedium later by slaughtering one or two people…or three or four. With the sudden lack of paien -kind around for the past two days—except for the goats, and even I wouldn’t bother with a putrid, diseased goat—humans were all I had, and they were no challenge. It took more to satisfy.

But soon…soon I’d find out what had made Caliban less of an opponent, less family, and so much less interesting. I had patience though. Thirty years of it. We would see what we would see. He could again be a worthwhile challenge himself, sooner or later.

I needed a challenge, and so…

I would wait.

Awhile.

“Nothing for his blood pressure. It’s far too high from Rafferty’s manipulation, but with the blood loss it should be dropping like a rock. If we give it a chance, the combination should stabilize it in a normal range.”

Odd when hearing something like that can be comforting, but it meant one thing: I was home.

It was still dark, but that was fine. I was content to float there awhile. I knew when I opened my eyes that things weren’t going to be as pleasant.

Once we had a healer, Rafferty. He could lay his hands on you and knit flesh back together like magic. Except there was no magic, only monsters. He had a genetic gift, one much better than mine. Then Rafferty had left—for good, I thought. He had family of his own to care for.

There’d also been a Japanese healing spirit who had lived in the city, working as a doctor and teaching premed at Columbia. But a time had come when he’d wanted to return home. And me? I couldn’t go to a hospital, not like Niko. On the outside I was human; on the inside, I was less so. One blood test, one CT scan, and in would swoop the black helicopters, and the government would take me apart. I doubted very seriously that they’d put me back together when they were done.

That left Niko, who, when he found a problem, found a solution…or he took out his sword and beheaded the problem. One of the two. Either way, he got things done.

Which meant that he’d gone to med school—in a way. He had only three months’ notice that O-Kuni-Nushi, better known to his oblivious colleagues as Dr. Ken Nushi, was headed home for several hundred years at least, but Niko was smart, the smartest son of a bitch I knew. He spent every spare moment with Nushi for those months, that big brain of his soaking up every piece of knowledge at maximum speed. Nushi had known the only medical training needed for us was trauma, and that had made it easier. And as a practicing doctor, he had access to plenty of medical supplies and drugs to send our way. What he didn’t have access to—he worked as a general practitioner, not a surgeon—had to be stolen or bought from highly questionable sources.

Seemed right. I was highly questionable myself.

I slitted my eyes and hissed at the spike of pain caused by the light. Almost immediately the level was lowered. “Damn it to hell. Head?” I mumbled, recognizing the symptoms from too many times before. I then vaguely remembered the bounce of my skull off the street when that thing had slammed into me before trapping me with those massive claws. That would be a big yes on the head injury.

“Head, a few burns to your legs, and sliced open like a side of beef. Oh, and Rafferty’s ‘gift’ that keeps on giving.” It was Goodfellow’s jovial rundown.

I opened my eyes wider this time. I felt a little loopy, and that wouldn’t be from Niko knocking me out. “I feel…weird. Kind of…happy? Is this happy? I think I like it.”

I heard Niko’s snort, and his face appeared above me. “Deep sedation, IV. I had to stitch you up, and not just skin, but layers of muscle. When we managed to get that thing off of you I could see your ribs. I could see bone. When I didn’t see the blood.” His lips tightened before I saw him tuck the image away. “You’ll be useless for weeks. Not that you aren’t perpetually useless to begin with,” he added.

“Love you too, big brother.” I grinned and that hurt too. “Ow, Jesus.”

“You also have a mild burn to your face from the first explosive round you fired. Fortunately that one knocked the automaton back far enough that the flash from the other rounds didn’t reach you. Although if it had happened, I’m certain Goodfellow would be the first in line with the barbecue sauce.”

“You engage in one bonding incident of cannibalism to save your life from a pissed-off pack of natives and you never live it down,” Robin muttered.

Niko ignored the sulking as he chose a syringe from the metal table beside him, pulled off the plastic cap, and slid the needle into the port to the IV in the back of my hand. “This should help. Not that you need it for your face. It could pass as a sunburn, but your incisions over your ribs and the one on the back of your head are going to wake up and let you know they are there soon enough.”

Suddenly I wasn’t feeling quite as happy anymore. I looked around, doing my best not to turn my head and irritate the injury there any sooner than I had to. I was in Nik’s room. All the more intensive medical care was done there. God knew it was as antiseptic as any operating room. I had bandages that ran the width of my sides, three on the right and one on the left. A blood-pressure cuff around my right arm. There were IVs, one in my right hand and one in the crook of my left arm. Clear fluids on one side and a bag of blood on the other. You couldn’t find half-human, half-Auphe blood, but Nushi had assured Niko that the Auphe in my system could tolerate any type of blood: A, B, AB, O. Probably cow blood if it came to it, and that wasn’t a joke. Nushi didn’t joke about medical matters, Nik had said.

Anesthesia, surgery, blood—it was the first test of Niko’s training, not the basic first aid we’d picked up along the way. I didn’t think he cared for it too much. I knew the feeling. I’d sat at the side of his hospital bed once, helpless to do anything. Which was worse? Knowing there wasn’t a damn thing you could do for your brother or knowing you were the only one who could?

That was an easy question to answer: They both sucked equally.

Niko’s scrubs—those we could buy legally, although that wasn’t as much fun—were stained liberally with blood. He didn’t bother with a surgical cap or mask. With my immune system, a stray hair or flu germ wasn’t going to be a blip on the radar. He did use gloves, though, if only to keep the blood off his hands. The gloves had their work cut out for them this time, I saw, as he peeled them off and tossed them in the garbage can that had to be at his feet even if I couldn’t lift my head from the pillow to see it. Niko would sooner commit seppuku than toss garbage on the floor.

“Doctor, samurai, weapons expert, teacher, historian, barkeep-slash–puck boy toy, monster killer. You’re this generation’s Buckaroo Banzai,” Robin drawled. He was dressed in bloody scrubs and stripping off gloves as well. A desperately quick surgery required someone to hand over the instruments, hang more fluids, maybe wipe up the floor so you didn’t slip in the blood. No one in the room had had much of a good time, except the unconscious guy. But my body would make sure I paid for that later.

I knew Niko didn’t care for the doctor part of Robin’s list, and that more than anything made me change the subject. “Did you say that thing was an auto-something? Jesus, if it was a Transformer, I wish you would’ve just let me go. I don’t want to live in a world where those actually exist.” Things were getting blurry and soft around the edges. The painkillers kicking in. Unfortunately the pain had jumped on the track and was neck and neck with the drugs. I hung in there. I’d hurt worse in my life, more times than I could count. I’d most likely hurt sometime worse in the future. It was the way things were.

“Automaton,” Niko corrected as he pulled a heated blanket over me. That was another way to know I was genuinely conscious…Niko correcting me. The warmth of the blanket banished an icy chill I hadn’t been aware of until then and had me shutting my eyes, interest in my question instantly gone.

But Goodfellow always had a way of getting anyone’s attention, anytime, anywhere, any way. I heard his cheerful comment close to my ear: “You know what surgery tends to include?” The next word went from cheerful to wickedly gleeful. “Catheters.”

I opened my eyes and glared first at him, then at Niko. “You didn’t let him”—I waved a hand at the general area—“play around down there. Tell me you didn’t. Niko, I will kick your ass so damn far it’ll rotate around the earth like a fucking defense satellite.”

He shrugged. “It’s a simple procedure, especially for someone like Goodfellow, with so much experience in that area. I could talk him through it while I did my best to keep you from bleeding to death, which you almost did.” His impassive gaze took me in. “Do you have anything further to say about the situation?”

No, I didn’t. That shut me up as Goodfellow smirked, stripped off his bloody scrub top, and headed for the bedroom door. “I’m going to change while you give him the history lesson, Niko.”

“Robin said that from the look of the metal and the description I gave him, the creature was an automaton, specifically a Janus automaton, as it had two faces. It’s a metallic, virtually living machine made by the Greek god”—or whatever was pretending to be a god—“Hephaestus. Robin hadn’t heard of this particular one, but he said Hephaestus made so many or bought them and passed them off as his own that our mythology doesn’t know one-fifth of what he created.” The automatic whine of the blood-pressure cuff inflating again had Niko’s eyes fixed on the glowing numbers.

I didn’t care to look. Either it was so high it killed me, thanks to Rafferty, or it was low enough that I lived. Nothing I could do about it. The warmth and the pain meds finally taking over had me wanting to drift away slowly again, but I resisted it for the moment. “How do we stop it?”

Niko was frowning as he reached for another syringe and injected that into my IV as well. “Apparently we don’t. None of our weapons will be effective against it—it’s an ancient technology that outreaches ours today. You need to know the correct phrases—a long-dead language, I’m assuming—to turn it off. Goodfellow doesn’t know them. He said every automaton has different command codes, I suppose you’d call them in this time. How it was activated is a mystery, the mystery being some Vayash traitor did, at least, know that phrase. That means we avoid it if possible until you’re well enough to send it to Tumulus. I am guessing that’s where you were attempting to send it.”

“No, Nik, to Coney Island for a roller-coaster ride and a giant goddamn pretzel.” I tried to snort sarcastically. I wasn’t too successful except for the trickle of blood I felt start running from my nose over my lip. Niko took a washcloth and wiped it away.

“Stop thinking, or what passes for your version of thinking, and go to sleep. Second gates aren’t supposed to kill you, but you tried too hard and Rafferty’s work is too effective. I can’t get your blood pressure down yet. So for the love of Buddha, sleep…please.”

He didn’t say “please,” my brother, not often. He was polite and honorable—when he wasn’t forced to kill you, given—but somehow he avoided the word as if your behavior should be equally polite and therefore no “please”s required.

When he did say it…I obeyed. I was about to close my eyes when he whipped his head around and soundlessly put a hand on the unsheathed katana on the low dresser behind him. He was listening. I didn’t hear anything except dripping IVs, the low beep of a blood-pressure machine, and a narcotic ringing in my ears, but if Niko heard something, it was there.

I started to sit up, but realized before I did that that was the worst thing I could do. Monster slayer? I couldn’t slay a hamster right now. The only thing I would do was get in Niko’s way. He stood, not frozen, but waiting. What he waited for stepped into view out of the darkness of the hall. The only light on in the place was in this room, and it was a low light in deference to my concussion at that. It didn’t matter. I recognized him all the same.

Kalakos.

He had outrun the boggles. Damn that streak of humanity in me. At the moment I didn’t regret anything more than not dropping him directly into their pit. Mama Boggle would’ve solved this problem for us with one bite of her jaws. Niko’s father scanned the bedroom. He didn’t seem surprised by what he saw. “You heard me pick the lock,” he said to Niko. “I suspected you kept it slightly rusty for a reason. You are like me. No matter what we do, you and I, we will always have our reasons.”

I saw Robin in the murk behind him. Kalakos didn’t hear him. As long as he had lived or guessed he’d lived, no one would hear Goodfellow if he didn’t want to be heard. He had a sword as well, not a katana, more crusader style, but lighter-weight. It was lined up directly at Kalakos’s back as the puck took several silent steps closer.

Niko pointed his katana. “Leave,” he ordered flatly. “Now.” I was vulnerable, embarrassing as that was, and around an unknown variable. He didn’t like it.

He didn’t like it to the point of being on the verge of burying steel in flesh without a thought.

But that bastard didn’t see that as I did. Kalakos’s eyes showed no fear, but they did show resignation. “I told you that the burden is one all Vayash are responsible for recovering.”

“We have nothing to do with your burden or the Vayash.” Kalakos didn’t know Nik, had never bothered to know him, but I knew him. I knew that while he rarely lost control, when he did…it was one goddamn thing to see. And he was standing on the edge. Teetering.

The black eyes focused on me, on the bandages, the medical equipment, the dried blood that still covered Nik’s scrubs.

Just…about…now.

“I think it seems that you do.”

That was that.

“That is the burden? That is the duty? It did this to my brother? When you said it could sense Vayash, you meant that literally? Sense us by our blood?” Niko’s knuckles went white under his olive skin. “And you wanted us to help you fight it. Did you lead it here?”

The point of Goodfellow’s sword came to rest against flesh. I could see that in the tightening of the skin around Kalakos’s mouth. Sandwiched between two blades, he kept his hands carefully away from his body. It was a smart move.

“I told you that it smells Vayash like a wolf smells a sheep. You chose not to listen. And I did not bring it. It came of its own—”

Niko didn’t listen to the rest. His hand wrapped around the grip of the katana slammed into his father’s face with brutal force, knocking him down and out. While Kalakos lay unconscious on the floor, Niko spit on him. I didn’t think I’d seen Niko do something more unlike himself or had seen him as furious, but then, as Kalakos had said, he and my brother always had their reasons. This was history repeating itself. “This is what the Vayash gave us when we came to you,” Niko said coldly. “And this is what you get in return, you bastard. You and your burden.”

Kalakos’s getting his ass kicked in a truly righteous way for a truly righteous reason made me feel better than all the narcotics in the room. Niko had buried this for his entire life, and it was time that he had a chance to get it out and deal with it. To “emote.” It was a fancy word for a beat-down, “emote,” but that only made me enjoy it more. I had only one regret.

“Goodfellow, kick him in the ribs for me, would you?” I said. The words were barely understandable. I was going down as fast as Kalakos had, but barely was good enough. As my eyes closed, I heard the meaty thud of Robin’s shoe against flesh. It was a good sound to take me into sleep. I probably gave a smile as I went.

One dark and satisfied smile.

I liked games. It was true few others liked the games I played, but I didn’t care what they liked. It was a waste of their breath. I had discarded my sunglasses as the rain continued to fall and the lightning flashed. It was good weather. The air sizzled and danced and it was dark enough for certain curiosities to travel roofs and not be seen by the mass of ignorant humans that clogged the sidewalks of this place, insects overrunning their anthill. I tossed down the binoculars and laughed. That thing, that metal thing, had come back and dropped through the roof where Caliban lived.

Little pig, little pig, let me come in. The first book I’d learned to read in my days of freedom. My teacher had been proud. I was a literate predator and that made me more dangerous than the first Auphe had been. When the prey was so many, you had to know them, truly know everything about them. My teacher said a mind was a terrible thing to waste. She was right, and when she taught me all she could, I ate hers. I thought it a compliment to her teachings. She thought differently.

That meant I taught her a lesson as well: You shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.

Ah, but back to the good part, the now part. That wasn’t the best part, that metal thing, metal toy, showing up. It remained as interesting as I’d thought last night, but it wasn’t on my agenda now.

I was Auphe—the New Coming.

Toys could wait.

But Caliban…I couldn’t see him. The windows were too high, the angle wrong, but it didn’t matter. Blocks and blocks away, I had smelled the blood last night…Auphe blood—much more pungent and real than human blood. It would’ve been too far to smell him, whole, but the blood…its scent traveled…and traveled yet more. But then it had faded, disappeared this morning. Somehow he had put himself back together, all those pieces, and I wanted to know how. I would know how. He’d be happy…very happy to tell me. Or I’d be happy to force him to tell me. At times I mixed up the two—a mistake easy to make when you didn’t care one way or the other. I clicked the man-made metal claws that encased my one gloved hand against the dirt. It was an apartment building, and I hid in the greenery they had forced to grow there in pots against its will, choking on the fumes of this place. Such a minor evil that I felt disgust and rage. Humans—their wickedness was so dismal and feeble that I wanted to rip out the trees and bushes and throw them over the side of the roof.

What had I been thinking again?

What had I…

Yes, games. I’d watched Caliban for three months now in this place. I’d had twelve years of freedom, but I’d returned for three years to piss around the home of my former prison—Nevah’s Landing—because I knew Caliban would as well. Sidle told us so. Sidle, our warden…our torturer…Caliban’s victim without a single look…the bullet through his brain.

Not one glance as he pulled the trigger.

It was beautiful.

Games. Whether he’d admit it or not, I knew he liked games too. I’d followed him from Nevah’s Landing, a place he’d sooner not remember, living with cattle, picking up boring cattle emotion. He’d wiped out eight of our kind, useless kind, barely worth the carnage. But I might be wrong. Maybe he didn’t mind remembering what he had done—I wouldn’t. Maybe he had enjoyed it. Killing his brothers and sisters. I didn’t blame him. I’d have killed them too. They were weak. They couldn’t gate. Worthless maggots.

A fun game I’d wanted to play in the three years I’d been back, but I couldn’t. I’d especially wanted to play with Sidle. I would’ve dragged it out for weeks and weeks until his vocal cords ruptured from the screams. But no, no, no. I left them for Caliban.

The trap. The bait.

I’d watched him from the swamp, too far for him to sense me, and I’d learned about the last of our kind, or so he thought. I’d followed him back to this disgusting stench of a city and I’d learned more. He couldn’t gate. At first I assumed I just didn’t happen to be watching him at the right time. I had needs. I couldn’t watch him always. But then last night, he gave me nothing…which made him useless and not the Caliban I’d expected, the one whose name was snarled by all the nonhumans. Not the Caliban who the Auphe had tried to use to travel back and wipe out the humans before they infested the world like billions of locusts.

Caliban, but not the one they spoke of with fear and hatred. Not the one worth my time. I was on the verge of impossible-to-bear boredom, ready to kill him as he’d killed the others, if he didn’t die during the night. But not for revenge—he wasn’t worth revenge, but because he was the same as the ones he’d killed in my onetime prison:

Useless.

But now he wasn’t. He had gated.

I had felt it. Auphe could feel one another, sense the presence of the superior, from a certain distance, which had kept me farther than I wanted from my target. But a gate was different. One could feel a gate much farther. Sidle had told us so. He enjoyed telling us the murderous tales and lethal abilities of the true Auphe, and of the shameful shadows we were of the true Auphe race.

But there is true and then there is better.

I was better.

I would prove it to Caliban now that he was worth my time.

I would prove it to the memory of the first Auphe. The first race had gone and the second had come.

Evolution, bitches.

The couch ended up at a sharp angle, one end propped up on the sofa in Goodfellow’s condo and the other on the floor. The expensive leather of Robin’s furniture ripped and tore. It was the second time I’d destroyed the puck’s wraparound couch. I only hoped the other end hadn’t landed on Salome or Spartacus. Spartacus didn’t deserve that, and Salome would gnaw off my leg and balls and be the first to bring the game of pool to the mummified cat community. It gave whole new meaning to “rack the balls.” I shoved Kalakos off of me. If we’d hit Salome, let her take her wrath out on him.

“You brought him too? Your generous nature surprises me,” Robin drawled; his end of the couch was the higher one. He looked comfortable. Good for him. He used to puke when I had to gate us away. Eventually he’d gotten used to it, as had Niko. Kalakos was all but doubled over, doing all he could to keep from vomiting. Humans didn’t like gates and gates didn’t like humans. “And you will pay for my sofa, I promise you.”

“I had to,” I snapped, wiping the slow ooze of blood from my nostrils. I was healed, but normally even in the best of conditions, the nosebleed would gush like a river. The headache would be the same as being hit in the head with a baseball bat, but now it was only a lower-level migraine. Not that I’d ever had a migraine, but I thought it was a good guess. “I didn’t have a choice. Any hands, legs, any piece of any one of us at all that was outside the gate would’ve been left behind in our apartment. Fingers on the floor draw rats. And I like our couch. My ass imprint is the perfect depth. I wasn’t leaving it behind.”

“Yet my furniture means nothing to you.” Goodfellow stayed in place, hands behind his head, as the rest of us slid off and onto the floor. “The two of you are quite the experts with swords.” He addressed Niko and Kalakos, who was recovering. He was less green. He’d head back into the nausea range, because Goodfellow was talking and didn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon.

Janus—no big deal. A sweaty version of American Gladiators right in front of him, that was worth discussing. “It is almost as if Niko inherited some talent from you, although he is superior. He fights with his skill and his heart. You fight with your skill alone. Too bad. A strong heart usually wins. We pucks hate that, as it makes trickery more difficult. Unfortunately it is true.”

Kalakos still held the xiphos in his hand, the one that had actually seemed to make a mild impression on Janus. “Niko is impressive. I will not deny. All the male line of my family is the same and has been since…I cannot remember. Blond hair, fighters. There is a story that a man impregnated a girl from our clan back in Greece hundreds of years ago. Northern Greek and blond, he was supposedly descended from the Trojan war hero Achilles.” He shifted his shoulders. “Foolishness. Mythology, the historical rumors that never die.”

Robin crossed his ankles and raised his eyebrows. “Mythology. When will you humans ever learn what is true and what is not? Achilles existed. There is no myth there. He was human, however. No goddess dipping him in a river by his heel. He was a human soldier and a superb warrior.” He moved a hand to pat his stomach. Salome appeared, jumped, and curled up, dead and purring. Her feline grin was the same as always—the Cheshire cat crossed with Hannibal Lecter. “It does explain a good deal. The inherent genetic talent of hundreds of years of warriors since Achilles, hundreds of more warrior ancestors before him. The general appearance: the blond hair and epic nose. You could be his brothers, both of you.”

Niko, ever prepared, had held on to his towel and finished cleaning up. “Or his cousin, Patroclus?”

“No, contrary to useless historical myth, they didn’t look much alike. Patroclus had dark hair. He also had a tendency toward a foul mouth and insubordination. When they were younger, years before Troy, he was whipped on one occasion, his back turned to rags of flesh…or at least he was until Achilles returned to camp and broke the neck of the antisyntag…the lieutenant colonel who was doing the ‘punishing.’ The man wasn’t fond of mercenaries to begin with. We had a time covering that one up. But as all the men hated him anyway, a few barrels of wine and it was forgive and forget.”

“They existed? You knew them?” Kalakos asked with a healthy dose of disbelief. “Achilles and Patroclus?”

Robin looked down his nose. “Were they worth knowing? Yes. Ergo, did I know them? Yes.” He stroked Salome’s wrinkly bare skin. “When Patroclus died, Achilles cut off his own hair to mourn him.” He stared into the light of Salome’s eyes as he said that, as if he could see it all over again in the dusty glow. “I handed him the dagger.”

“That tradition extended that far back?” The Rom had picked that up when passing through Greece. “To cut your hair?” Niko wondered, a shadowed memory passing over his face. Why wouldn’t he be curious? He’d once done it himself.

Robin didn’t answer the question, instead saying, “Niko, you can borrow the shower and some of my clothes if you wish. There is also soy milk in the refrigerator. Wine for Promise. Nothing for Cal, as he keeps destroying my condo. And when we are settled, I’d like to hear about the xiphos Kalakos has that didn’t kill Janus, but made the automaton at least hesitate for a second or two. Who knows how long we have? This is perfect weather for a war machine like Janus to move about unseen among the local populace.”

“We could’ve been hearing about the swords sooner if you weren’t telling us goddamn bedtime stories,” I growled. “And it’s a war machine? We have an actual war machine on our asses?”

The puck gently rang the gold loop in the tip of Salome’s ear. “I like stories. And obviously it’s a war machine. Do you think it was built to pick olives?”

What the hell did you say to that?

Niko showered, as did Kalakos, although he hadn’t been offered an invitation. The condo had three bathrooms. He took advantage. He wasn’t lacking in intelligence enough to take any of Robin’s or Ish’s clothes without the offer. He did ask politely for shoes, which Robin grumbled about before giving in. “But no shirt. If I have to give you shoes, I get a nice view in return. And if you could throw in a boom-chika-bow-wow once in a while, I might even give you shoes that fit.”

Kalakos slapped the xiphos lightly against his leg. “I’ve not killed a puck before.”

“And you never will. Achilles-lite. Vaguely similar taste with half the lethality. Now go take your shower or your generous host, me, will let you walk around New York shoeless, shirtless, and perhaps without your balls.”

Salome knew that word. Her hairless muzzle turned toward Kalakos and she showed him her bored let’s-play smile. I couldn’t figure out how she fit the dentures of a T. Rex in her cat-size mouth, and Kalakos didn’t waste time pondering the issue either. He was already moving for the hall and the bathrooms. When he returned he was re-dressed in his black pants and put on his long coat I hadn’t noticed him seizing before I’d gated. It must have been where the xiphos had been concealed. He also had the shoes Robin had promised him. He didn’t mention anything about the very visible fang marks in them.

When all was done but not said, fifteen minutes later we gathered around the dining room table and I said, “Spit it out, Kalakos.” He was at the opposite end of the table from me, not that that would do him any good. I had kept my Desert Eagle with me when I’d gated and it shone bright and deadly on the table in front of me.

“Niko will cut you some slack for your Suyolak-jacked-up Neosporin, but he’s my brother. He cares if I live or die. I have different priorities. ‘No life for a child.’” I was no Salome but I stretched my mouth into a grin that outdid your average crocodile. “I lived that life with him. And if it comes to me living or me dying and taking you with me because you discarded him like trash to live that life, I don’t have to flip a fucking quarter to know which choice I’d prefer.” I picked up the Eagle and aimed it at where his heart would’ve been if the son of a bitch had had one. “Tell us the story. Goodfellow told us one. Now it’s your turn.

“And, Kalakos,” I added, casual on the outside, but on the inside was the blackest of rage, “you know what I am. The entire Vayash clan knew from the day I was born. They kept an eye on Sophia, making sure the wild, crazy, sociopathic bitch didn’t get them in trouble. She laughed at that. And they knew the Auphe. All the Rom know the Auphe. The clan knew from the beginning and so did you. The Auphe don’t play games like me without a reason. When they make things like me, even they don’t know for certain how I’ll turn out.” I turned the Eagle on one side. “More human?” Then to the other side. “Less human?” Then I aimed it back at him.

“But you left Niko there anyway. You know what?” My finger tightened on the trigger. I wanted to pull it. God, I wanted it badly enough that I felt my finger cramp from the pressure of holding back. “That’s the bigger crime than leaving him with Sophia. I could’ve been born a monster. You could’ve left him with a monster.”

Kalakos tensed, fingers curling around the grip of the xiphos. “You are a monster.”

“Now you get it.” I felt Niko’s presence behind me, but my trigger finger didn’t relax. Neither did my predatory grin. “Now you know why Niko is willing to give you a week, but if I think you’re lying, I won’t give you a second. I’ll kill you, and the best thing you can hope for is that I use a gun to do it.” I finally let the tension drain away and leaned back in my chair, Eagle still aimed at him, but my grin gone. Niko moved up to my side, although if it had come down to it, I didn’t think he knew himself if he would’ve tried to stop me from pulling the trigger. He sat around the corner of the table from me. “So tell your goddamn story.”

All Rom clans have a burden and a duty. That’s where the story began. I didn’t know why they all did. I didn’t think they remembered when or why it had begun either, but this I did know: I didn’t give a shit. Janus was the Vayash burden. Created by Hephaestus, who claimed to be a Greek god…again, didn’t care…he gave the automaton to the Vayash those hundreds of years ago they’d squatted there. It was inactive, a dead machine, if machines could die. Only certain spells could bring it back to life, control it, or disable it again. No one knew the words, the incantations to do any of that. Hephaestus had not trusted them with that. Fake god or not, he was no fool.

“Incantations. Spells.” Robin clunked his forehead lightly against the table. “Isn’t the absolute magnitude of the supernatural enough for you? Must you humans continually offend us with your fairy dust and your talking, colored, egg-crapping rabbits? There is no magic. None. There is a technology that came far before that of humans and built by races long extinct, but there is no magic. Hephaestus without a doubt bought the thing, already an antique in his day, and passed it off as his own work. He wasn’t capable of anything like that. Could barely build a mousetrap, the lying bastard.” He tunneled fingers through his brown hair, squinted against what was a clearly massive headache. “But, to be perfectly clear one more time, there is no magic.”

“No Santa, huh?” I snorted.

“No, there was a Santa Claus, but a seven-year-old werewolf ate him,” he answered, distracted before turning his ire back on Kalakos. “And who knows this better than anyone? That magic is a trick and the cheapest one there is? An embarrassment to all?” He rearranged himself in the chair to lean closer to Kalakos. “You do. The best of the human tricksters, the Rom, yet you fake it nonetheless, giving us all a bad name.”

Closer still as he emphasized. “Do not think to play trickster games with a trueborn paien trickster or I’ll take Cal’s gun and put it where he wouldn’t think to before I fire it.”

Kalakos took that as a strong hint to continue the account with less of that magical bullshit, the only thing that offended Robin: trying to fool a puck. “Although it was assumed no one knew the codes, especially after so long, someone had. The Vayash had found Janus’s metal casket empty and the body of two Rom by it. One had had his throat slit neatly.…Blood must have been been part of the activation, combined with the correct command, or that’s what the Rom had guessed. It wasn’t as if we had a guard on a creature that did nothing but sleep. No, this was very deliberate and ritualistic. The scarlet was smeared liberally on and in the casket. The other Rom had been torn apart. Arms, legs, head, they were all scattered. The traitor. He had been the one to bring Janus to life, but the words used to control it beyond that were obviously not correct. Janus was gone. The clan was parked in Pennsylvania at an RV park and fortunate to be in the closest small town running a rickety fair, earning the day’s pay.”

If they’d been there when it had happened, Janus would’ve killed them all, Kalakos said. Hephaestus had warned that should Janus escape it would have enough low-level awareness to hate its captors and destroy them. Beyond that…

It would go home. Whether it was a beacon or some bizarre programming from the Greek geeks beyond time, it would return to the place of its creation. Greece before it was Greece. That was why it had headed to NYC. In a straight line from Pennsylvania, it was the closest to the ocean, and the ocean had to be crossed to reach home…but that was before it became distracted by the presence of three Vayash in the city. Kalakos didn’t know how it sensed us. Did it smell Vayash blood? He had no idea. But find us it could and would until we destroyed it or put it back to sleep, and as none of us knew the incantation—Robin glared when I emphasized the word evilly—that wasn’t going to happen.

Kalakos had placed his xiphos back onto the table. Facing a monster like me versus that threat of a colonoscopy given to him by a puck with a borrowed Desert Eagle—cooperating was in his best interest. From inside his coat he produced another xiphos. As I’d noticed before, they were the same dark metal that formed Janus. “We were given these with our burden and we were told they wouldn’t kill it or even harm it, but that they would cause it pain, give you the moments you needed to hopefully escape. I have only two.” He regarded Niko. “As you and I are the swordsmen here, I believe one should go to you and one to me. We will make the best use of them.”

“Logical. Reasonable.” Niko took the xiphos handed to him and passed it to me. The xiphos left on the table before Kalakos he took for himself without compunction. Niko was about logic and reason, but most of all practicality—the kind that suited him. He didn’t bother to look at Kalakos when he ordered, “If you have something to say, do not bother.”

“I have something to say. I’m a better swordsman than all of you put together,” Robin groused. “Why don’t I get a chance at one?”

“You don’t have Vayash blood,” Niko reminded him, running a hand over the dark metal. “Janus has nothing against you, although it will still eviscerate you if you get in its way. Do remember that. But this mess is not of your making. Stay back and stay safe. You as well, Promise. We have three more days before Cal’s gating ability will have recovered to solve all of this for us.” That gate I’d built to escape Janus today had set the clock back. Between the first and second gate I had no limit, although I had pain. Between the second gate and the third, which would kill me…it took three days to reset me back to gate one.

“Kicking metal butt and sending it to another dimension. That’s me.” Three days was a long time when Janus could find us as if we had a GPS stapled to our asses, and we all knew it.

I examined my own xiphos, for the first time putting down the gleaming Eagle. Goodfellow was on the money. He was a better swordsman than all of us, but hundreds of thousands of years—or longer…as he’d said in the bar, long enough to be forever—after that kind of time spent with a sword in his hand, he couldn’t be beaten by anyone human. Perhaps not even by anyone less or more than human. It made me think of what Robin had said in the bar. How old was he—genuinely? Why had no other puck poached on his name? What did they all know? Consciously or subconsciously?

The Auphe weren’t the only firsts. The first in time, but not the only first of a race or the only ones who had lived millions of years—a number that went hand in hand with insanity, unreasoning hatred of everyone and everything, and pitch-black malevolence. Hob, the first puck, had been that way, and although he was now dead…

He screamed. Didn’t he scream like a baby? First born—last torn.

It was a warm thought. He had tried to kill Niko and Georgina, a girl I’d loved. He had deserved to scream. There was no denying that, and most would scream their lungs inside out when ripped apart by the mass of unbelievably pissed-off Auphe I’d tossed him to. I had no regrets.

It didn’t change my original thought, though.

Hobgoblin—Hob to all others, as shorter names made it quicker in getting to the running part—was the first trickster and had been as much a murder-loving bastard as the Auphe. A combination like that we could use until the days passed and I could gate Janus onto the bones of those now-dead Auphe and the bones of the first puck as well in Tumulus. Good company for an ancient war machine. “Goodfellow.” I ran a careful thumb along the blade. “If he had to face Janus, what do you think Hob would do—to at least slow it down?”

Robin’s lips flattened. “I do not know.”

“You knew him better than most. You’ve said so. He was the first trickster. He would have a chance to put this bastard off for three days at least. What would he do?” Robin was one of the best tricksters out there, but he wasn’t what Hob had been—a blood-spilling psychopath created out of insanity and violence. He was violence, or had been, walking and talking, but so sly and slippery you didn’t see him coming until you wondered why your guts were on the outside instead of the inside. It would’ve been a challenge for him, but I’d seen into that bastard’s eyes. Pure poison was all that lurked in their depths. His tricks, they always ended in death. He would’ve known how, if not to take out the automaton, then how to delay it. I knew from personal experience that sometimes it took a monster to outthink a monster.

“I don’t know.” It was more that he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to go down that path. I didn’t blame him. I had my own path. I knew what it was like. Moving along the path slowly, controlling each step, but I was walking it all the same.

Halfway there now…

“Okay,” I said. I wouldn’t push him on it yet. I’d give him a chance to think about it before I brought it up again. “No big deal. We’ll just—”

That was when I felt it. Behind me. A gate. Jesus Christ, a fucking gate.

Once I would’ve thought, No. Not again. Not anymore. I was the last. I’d made sure of that. There were no more. No. No more kidnappings. No more threatening to kill my brother, my friends. No more red eyes, white skin, metal teeth. No more Auphe hell.

God, no more.

Of course, I was somewhat of a chickenshit then, not that everyone—or anyone—agreed with that. But I had been more human.

Not that I hadn’t had my moments back then, but they were Auphe moments, lost in a blind genetic rage. I wasn’t blind any longer. With help, I’d killed every last one of these bastards on the planet, culminating with eight half-breeds like me in Nevah’s Landing.

What were my thoughts now?

Shit, not again. And the emotion that went with it wasn’t fear. I was mad as hell. I’d destroyed our race. Our entire goddamn race. What the fuck did this out-of-thin-air, leftover asshole think he could do to me?

Arms wrapped around me from behind, steel bands. Stronger than me, stronger than Niko, who was hurtling toward us, but it was too late. The coldness of the gate swallowed us and the condo was gone. But I heard the words that floated behind.

An unfamiliar voice but with an all-too-familiar sarcasm, the same as mine—at someone else’s expense—said, “You could cover your windows, goat. I go where I see, and I saw far too many perversions through yours.”

It was bad when an Auphe thought your sex life—your monogamous sex life—was a perversion. Or it could be it wasn’t the sex but the emotion that went with it. Yeah, Auphe were creatures of few emotions and they were all malignant as biohazard waste filling their skulls. Hate, disgust, slaughter-glee, arrogance, ravenous hunger. No affection, though—that didn’t exist to them.

And we were gone, bodies and voice.

That Kalakos was the one who took the last of the five Auphe-bae hit team out of this life was a surprise. To me some. To him most of all.

But that came a few minutes later. Right now the first four I had to take care of myself.

The Second Coming slashed at me with claws and jerked their heads forward in reptilian fashion to try to bury their fangs in my flesh. Succabae and incubi weren’t poisonous. They didn’t have to be. With the size of the fangs, these kiddies could cut through you ten times more efficiently than any butcher knife. The hissing…it didn’t stop. It was almost worse than the fractured-glass sound of an Auphe voice piercing your eardrum. That had been once in a while—not big talkers, the Auphe. This was constant. Trying to tune it out while listening for the movement of Grimm’s grown children was almost impossible. Add that to their gating when they pleased—and they pleased a damn good deal—and I was fighting what disappeared before me and what I couldn’t hear coming up behind me.

I loved every damn minute of it.

The adrenaline rush. The feeling of righteousness. Sometimes I thought the only time that I felt truly salvageable was when I fought something truly evil. Grimm’s doing—they were evil. They weren’t meant to dwell on the skin of this world. I didn’t get that feeling when I took out a supernatural hyena. They belonged. Yes, they ate people, but so did lions, given an opportunity. They weren’t evil as the very definition of the word, but what I faced was, in every sense and bitter syllable of the word.

I whirled as out of the corner of my eye I saw one reappear to my right. I sliced it from neck to pelvis with the xiphos. It didn’t matter where its vital internal organs were with that kind of wound, as basically every organ it had cascaded out onto the filthy concrete floor we fought on. Another one vanished from in front of me to appear behind me—directly behind, as I felt its weight on my back. Claws sank into my arms and I knew fangs were angling to tear my throat out. I didn’t waste any time. I saw another Auphe-bae gating out and I swung around to put the majority of the one leeched onto my back into the gate as it closed. That meant it took whatever part of the Auphe-bae that had been inside the gate with it. As pieces of him fell around me, I guessed it had been about three-fourths. There was half of a head left, the red eyes dulling but the jaws snapping slowly as black brain matter pooled outward. There were arms and legs, but a good deal of his torso, including his spinal cord, was gone.

They didn’t have the proper respect for a gate that they should. And not one had thought to open a gate in me, as I’d tried with Grimm. Grimm had said they matured physically in one year—mentally as well, from the cursing they sprinkled in with their hissing. Yeah, they were all grown-up and cussing with the big boys. It was efficient for breeding to retake the world, if you were only going by numbers, but one year of fighting experience didn’t make the grade.

I grinned at the three left, the one now having gated back. I had the blood of their siblings dripping off the blade of the xiphos. I liked the sound it made when it hit the floor. The pitter-patter of a slow and soft rain. “Daddy didn’t tell you what else was out in the big, bad world, did he? What else could put a boot up your pasty snake asses without half trying? Kids, you don’t know what a bona fide,” I drawled, “Auphe is, and now you never will.”

I could understand Niko’s appreciation of swords now. You felt the thud of the metal entering the flesh. You knew, by the vibration that traveled up your arm alone, whether you’d ended a life or only damaged it. Niko would value it for different reasons: giving your enemy more of a chance, having more time to decide if they deserved that death you were handing out as freely as Halloween candy, challenging yourself to be a superior fighter.

His reasons were principled; mine were not, but we ended up at the same place. I didn’t know if the difference mattered, and right then I didn’t care.

I dived to the floor as two gated out and one sprang toward me. I rolled onto my back, the one thing you didn’t want facing an enemy. This one was the biggest by a few inches, broader in the shoulders, heavier. If there was a runt in the litter, this one would’ve eaten it.

It almost vaulted over me as I’d planned, but was able to stop itself, if only barely, to land on top of me. “I have killed men and women. Children and babies.” Its breath was not Auphe hot on my face, but Auphe-bae cool, cold-blooded as its succubus-snake mother. The tang of truth was in what it said—that tang being rot and decomposition. “Vampires, Wolves, hordes of revenants, and you think me not Auphe?” The hissing soared, filling the small room with its rattrap, claustrophobically low ceiling. “You think me not worthy of the name?”

No, senseless little snake. No. No. No.

“In fifty years or so, you might be worthy.” I’d knocked my Desert Eagle from Grimm’s hand to land on the floor earlier. Grimm had forgotten it or wanted to see if this batch of Auphe-bae noticed, testing his progeny. They failed. They didn’t look at anything in the room but me. That wasn’t smart. I could’ve smashed the overhead lightbulb and jabbed the delicate sliver of glass into the eye of one of them until it pierced the brain. Anything can be a weapon.

“Maybe a hundred years,” I amended. “Give me a call then.” I reached behind me, hand scrambling against the concrete, seized the grip, then inserted the muzzle of the Eagle into one pointed ear and gifted him with five rounds.

“Thanks for reloading it,” I said to Grimm. I had time to see the quickest flash of him; his back hadn’t moved from the door. He was making sure this game played out to the end, whatever end that might be.

He had too—reloaded the Eagle. Niko had used all the explosive rounds in it. These were nice, normal hollow-points. I had to worry about wearing my victim’s blood and brain matter, but not roasting off my own face in the bargain.

“I went to school. So should they. Survival of the fittest is the best school,” I heard him say, nothing in his words but careless amusement. I killed his children and it didn’t trouble him. Why should it? He could make more.

A hundred years, you told the Bae. Together in a hundred years Grimm and I could make a hundred thousand…

“Can’t afford the child support,” I muttered to myself as I pushed the body of the one I’d shot off of me and impaled the one that gated out of the air above me before I could sit up. It kicked, flailed, and screamed with rage as its chest rested against my hand that gripped the xiphos while I finished it off with the Eagle, this time three rounds in a scarlet eye. That blew the dead body back, and I gave a jerk to the xiphos to let the child of the Second Coming go flying across the room.

Two more to go, and I had no expectations, belly wound or not, that Grimm would be anything like the Bae, who were so easy to dispose of that they no longer deserved the name Auphe. He was older than I was, had been free long enough to be more experienced in dealing death, could gate, was closer to true Auphe. If Grimm wanted to kill me, there was a chance that the best I could hope for was a suicidal tie.

It was time to find out.

His last pick of the litter had vanished in a vortex of silver, gray, and black before reappearing as I stood. It also had come out in midair, but not over my head. It appeared next to the ceiling, getting as much height as it could, and to the side, giving it an angled downward speed. As it did, I heard the force pounding against the basement door. I threw myself backward and sideways to let the Bae tumble and charge past me. Janus could follow the Vayash as if a GPS were stapled to my ass—funny, huh? But it wasn’t a serious consideration I’d had earlier about the war machine. It was a serious one, however, when it came to other matters.

When I’d been attacked by a mass of giant spiders and disappeared by gating out onto a beach at high tide in a childhood sanctuary in South Carolina, the only reason Niko had found me wrapped in a cocoon of amnesia was because of the GPS in my cell phone. It had washed down the beach by miles as it gave its last location before the ocean shorted it out. As the tidal drift had added days to his finding me, he decided that a brother who could gate hundreds or thousands of miles deserved something with added efficiency over a cell phone.

They made identification chips for pets small enough to be implanted under the skin and not seen, but not locator chips. They did make locators, but they were large enough to have to be fastened to a collar or an ankle band, as they did for sexual predators. Some could track one mile; some could link up to a satellite and cover at least half the country. The trouble with those is they were noticeable right off the bat, either by an amnesiac loony who’d yank it off his ankle, by someone who lost the control he was so certain of and did the same, or, in this case, by a kidnapper.

That meant that under the flesh it had to go. It was the size of a pacemaker and fit under a fist-shaped scar I already had on my chest. It filled the shallow crater some, and although the shape was squarish, it didn’t make it look much worse. It was experimental, and the FDA would keel over at the thought of it implanted in a human or semihuman being, but when Niko had asked me point-blank one day out of the blue, my answer had been as matter-of-fact as the question. And the fact that he had to cut me open to put it in and then again once a year to change the batteries, that made me know it was necessary. For his peace of mind if nothing else.

Who knew that it would come in handy so soon?

“My family,” I affirmed to Grimm. “And that, asshole, will never be you.”

He moved away from the door as his last child I’d dodged passed him. “We are something new.”

“We are something old,” I said automatically, the words beyond my power to swallow.

“We are something unlike anything on earth,” he finished.

I’d echoed those words, the same that a healer had once said about me, as I’d burned that South Carolina house of horrors to the ground. And Grimm, despite being far enough away that I couldn’t sense him, had heard me.

“That makes us one. One, Caliban, and that is more than brothers, more than family. Plus it’s poetic. My teacher would’ve liked the symmetry. That is, before I ate her.” Did my grin, sarcastic and sinister in its eager violence, look like his? No wonder no one tipped me at the bar.

He finished, back on topic, “One.” As the Bae hit the door and turned to charge back, a gate began to outline Grimm. “Until I kill you. Games are games and we’ll play—back and forth, give and take, but death is the ultimate move. And once you’ve given in, given up, given your all to the Second Coming by siring a tidal wave of our spawn, then you’ll die in the game.” He glowed. The gray-and-silver light. The metal claws waving a dark good-bye. The grin brilliant white then luminous mercury. He moved as if my sword hadn’t touched him, much less been buried in his stomach. “And this world will be mine to do with as I please.”

I didn’t grin this time. I smiled, and it was a cold and hard slice of hell, as that part of me I normally kept silent decided to get mouthy. “Who says I’ll lose the game? Who says I’ll share?” And I said it in Auphe. My human vocal cords couldn’t duplicate the sound of the seven years’ bad luck of a mirror being smashed inside your ear, cutting your eardrum to ribbons before the shards burrowed into your brain, but the words I knew.

From the flicker of anger that crossed his face, Grimm didn’t. He couldn’t speak Auphe at all. He hadn’t lived among them for two years as I had—even if the language was all I remembered—and none had wasted time teaching the caged failures the motherfucking tongue.

“You’ll die and that won’t change. The game is mine to win. You, Caliban”—the glow brightened—“you might have been the Auphe’s fondest ambition, but you, bastard brother, are not me.”

The door shattered to three large pieces and several smaller ones. The Bae staggered back as one stake-shaped piece slid perfectly into its chest as if it were the unlucky extra in a vampire movie. Niko passed it, dismissing it as the lesser threat. He swung a katana I didn’t recognize. That would mean it was one of Goodfellow’s many swords. It had greater reach than a xiphos. It should’ve cut Grimm in half, but he was gone. The closing of the gate did take half the katana’s blade with it. If I were an optimist, I’d hope it had done some damage before the half-Auphe disappeared.

But if I were an optimist, this wouldn’t be my life we were talking about, would it?

The Bae gripped the wood to pull it from its chest, then swiveled its head to hiss and lunge at the next person hesitating in the doorway. Kalakos cursed in Rom and took its head off at the shoulders with his saber. The move had been instinctual. That could be seen in his brown skin that now almost matched the color of the Bae as it fell in two pieces. Paler than pale. He hadn’t seen what was attacking him. It had been too quick, in the middle of a rescue, the moment too muddied. Kalakos had seen a threat. That was all. It wasn’t until it was down and dead that he saw, for the first time, an Auphe. Or the closest thing next to me to qualify as an Auphe.

I watched it twitch and changed my mind, my former scorn sulking. I’d more or less told it that give it fifty years’ experience and it would be the next thing closest to me. Now I thought that in fifty years I’d be the closest thing to it instead. It had the equipment, the ability, and Grimm would make certain the Bae would learn to use them. Grimm knew education was an advantage above all others.

“Makes me look pretty good, doesn’t it, Kalakos?” I said. “Given half a century or so of murder and mayhem and it would’ve become the shadow of an Auphe.” A thousand years and it would leave the Auphe in its dust. “Tell that to your clan, the cowardly sons of bitches. Afraid of a sixteen-year-old mentally damaged kid like I’d been. I doubt they’d have done much spitting if that had come calling in my place.”

He took a step away from the Bae, regained the equilibrium a warrior needed to survive, and looked at me for the first time. Or rather saw me for the first time. All my…heh…quirky imperfections aside, I wasn’t the Bae. There was some human in it, but there was humanity in me. I wasn’t overflowing with it, but it was there.

“I apologize,” he offered in that familiar if older echo of Niko’s voice, “for myself and my clan. This…this is a monster, not you. We misjudged our own blood and we are shamed for it.”

That was unexpected, kind of decent, and the right thing to do. If it had come eight and a half, nine years earlier, it might have made a difference. It hadn’t, though, and my grudge was about what he, decent but not decent enough to be a father, and the Rom had done to Nik. I didn’t give a shit what they thought about me.

Niko paused for the briefest of moments at the apology before overlooking it to grip one of my shoulders hard enough to get my instant—ow—attention. “Who was that? What was that?” He wasn’t talking about the dead Bae on the floor or the others. He was referring to the one clever enough to take me from the condo alive, fast enough to escape my real brother and survive—all while making an edgier game of it than I’d thought. I’d been down here less than fifteen minutes, listening to Grimm, attacking him, fighting the Bae. He hadn’t bothered to go any farther than what I had to think was two or three buildings down from Goodfellow’s. Niko didn’t have his tracker with him. That had been left back home when we’d fled Janus. Goodfellow had one, though, as did Promise and Ishiah in a locked safe at the bar.

“He’s one I missed in South Carolina.” I wiped some of the Bae blood from the xiphos carelessly onto my pants. “By twelve years. He was the Auphe’s first success, not me, and they never knew it. He’s also head of the Auphe Second Coming. Big, bad Auphe messiah.” I ran a hand slowly through the space where his gate had been. I could feel the pain and the wound of reality knitting itself back together still. Every gate had a price. Mine too, as much as I tried to forget it.

Kalakos had thought I was a monster and then he saw the Bae.

I’d thought I was a monster when I’d been old enough to realize what a monster was.

I’d eventually reached a point where I didn’t care anymore if I was one. I’d admitted it without shame. Sad to say I occasionally enjoyed it on the sly lately, but now I knew.

Accepting that you were a monster wasn’t the same as being the real thing, full-time, every single second of every single day.

Grimm had shown me that.

He’d also shown me that he was right. He was superior to them. He was as ruthless as the Auphe, but smarter. More adaptable. Thrived on change. Nature had taken her fuckup and created a rung higher on the ladder, and Grimm was standing on it.

“Nik,” I said, calm, not that that was what I felt. I didn’t know what I was feeling other than it was a seething mass of confliction. “You need to know. He’s better than me…even on my very best day.” Best day. Worst day. My Auphe days, the ones that were now gone or at the very least viciously choke-chained and powerless.

And why wouldn’t they die? Auphe. Half-Auphe. I killed them over and over, three times now.

Why wouldn’t they fucking die?

Yet…

Welcome back, brothers and sisters. I missed you.

I missed the game.

My brother was surprised I was smart, smarter than him. That I’d gone to school and Death had a degree. I sat in the New Mexico desert, back against a rock, eyes closed, and slowly healed. It was cloudy even here today, but warm, and it felt good as the stab wound in my stomach bitched. It wasn’t a critical wound—that was the best part of being half-and-half. You never knew where our bodies kept the important parts. All of us had been different, but I’d lucked out and Caliban hadn’t. He’d skewered me all the way through, but hadn’t hit a single worthwhile organ when he did.

Of course, it hurt like a motherfucker, which was good. I’d learned to like pain. Sidle had taught his prisoners that. He, my very first teacher, had taught us to love it. Hate and pain—they were the only things we could love.

So, so good.

Caliban had given me a present. I’d give him one too. Whether he’d learned to like pain the way I had, I didn’t know. He hadn’t had a Sidle.

Time enough to find out.

Sidle with his lessons had been my first teacher, but not my only one. There were no degrees in pain among the cattle.

I’d had several teachers as I traveled looking for Caliban before I caught up with him in Nevah’s Landing. For some reason the fight made me think of a teacher I couldn’t remember. A woman. Red hair? I didn’t recall. But the wound in my gut made me think of something I couldn’t think of. Something I’d done to her. Senseless, that. It was a lost memory and I didn’t lose memories. What Caliban had done to me was the same as birthdays and balloons. What I’d done to her was a hole in the ground with maggots your only party favors.

But who was she?

When had I sliced her open?

Maybe it was but a dream. A good dream, but a dream.

I traced a gloved finger over the clotted blood covering the slash in my stomach, then tore it away to let it bleed again, up the pain again. Ah, good, good. Pleasure and pain, pain and pleasure. I watched the blood course out.

The dream, which was all it could’ve been, made me think of martyrs. After hearing my long-gone warden read the Bible over and over, for the good parts—smiting, killing firstborns on either side, selling your daughter, sacrificing your firstborn son because God told you to before saying Psych! Destroying cities—I knew what to do with a martyr: Stone him or cut off his head. Stoning would take far too fucking long.

I could be logical and martyr a teacher too in a dream. What could be better?

The memory of the dream grew sharper.

Shit, what a giving, kind, love-everyone-in-the-whole-wide-blessed-be-world cow she’d been. It was unbearable.

I couldn’t remember her name. Georgia? No, not it—as if it mattered.

She’d been a freshman in college, worked as a waitress to pay her tuition, worked the soup kitchen on alternate weekends—I like soup, or how it seasoned the homeless man who I’d eaten in the alley, and she’d volunteered her time to teach classes for GED candidates. She’d grown up in New York City, and shook her finger at us to not make fun of her accent. One day someone had asked her why she left and ended up in Columbus, Ohio—for college, and she thought she needed a change, she’d said. She’d been tired of the city. Tired of its not being what she wanted it to be and of knowing it never would. The world wouldn’t change. The world was the world and it had rules, and because it wouldn’t change, neither could she. The best you could do was change where you were in it, and she had.

Fuck, she’s one of those, had been my disgusted thought.

There’d been no waiting then. I couldn’t sit there every day with that in the room.

“Patience is a virtue,” I’d read, curling my lips and nodding at the saying she’d written on the blackboard.

She’d laughed, red hair springing around her shoulders. “I know. I’m such a hypocrite, aren’t I? Patience for everyone else is a virtue, but I lost patience for patience or for virtue. But that’s who I am now. We are who we are and sometimes there’s a cost. And that is how it will always be unless you decide you don’t want to pay it anymore. Now, this isn’t philosophy. Turn to the chapter on Charlemagne.”

The rest of the students were puzzled and generally not that bright when it came to things they couldn’t see or touch. They had been sitting with their history books open, thumbing through to find what she was talking about. Idiots. Never did they want to think for themselves; they wanted knowledge handed to them like a blood-coated can. Drink it down. Ten seconds later they were goddamn geniuses. They didn’t know. Our teacher was human, but not all humans were golems of mud slouching from here to there, thick tongues with nothing interesting to say, no interesting ways to die.

But I would’ve given anything to make a buffet of them all, scratching, and chewing gum, and poking me in the back to ask for a pen. That student hadn’t come back to class; they did tend to drop out once in a while, but this one did get his pen—jammed in his eye before I’d dumped him in the Ohio River.

The teacher had begun class and I’d paid close attention. Cattle had things to teach me if I bothered to listen. They taught me how to imitate them, think like them, and end them. It was work, but after eighteen years in a cage, vengeance isn’t work. It’s a gift.

After the class was over the teacher let the others go but had called me over to her. She’d sat on the edge of her desk, her gold-and-brown long skirt drawn primly around her legs. Her eyes had been brown, I’d thought, but, no, that was wrong. A gold light had glowed behind the brown. She’d known things. Some humans did. The ones who loved money told you what they saw in the dark of their minds. The ones who thought they knew their place in the world and the universe, they said what would be would be, and the knowledge they saw would only hurt you. You simply had to accept that there was a greater purpose. And what you did ask them they wouldn’t breathe a word of an answer to you. Greater purpose. Pat on the hand. They were as bad as the first. They thought they knew, but they didn’t. No one knew.

The universe was a coin spinning on its edge. When I gated, I could see it. Violently unpredictable. You didn’t know which way it would fall. It was chaos and nothing more. But the peace-loving Gandhi wannabes thought differently, because they could see, but they couldn’t see what one like me could see. She was right. She was a hypocrite, but she didn’t know why. None of the good ones did. None of the good ones knew they lied to everyone and they lied to themselves. They told all that nothing big could be changed and you were stuck with what life gave you.

But I had proved them wrong. It took a while, but I wasn’t stuck now.

Not once did they stop to think that they took hope instead of giving it. Not that I needed hope or a denial of my fate. I made my fate.

What will be will be.

Suck that shit up.

It was too bad. She’d been an adequate teacher, one of the best I’d had. But sometimes you had to move on.

Because “what will be will fucking be.” As much as I despised her fucking kind, I couldn’t let her be anymore.

As I’d stood by her desk, she’d taken my hand, the dark gold of hers a contrast of the light tan of mine. She met my eyes through the sunglasses I refused to take off in class. “I knew someone like you when I was a year or two younger.” Younger…when she’d lived in NYC. Someone like me. There was only one like me, except…I felt the grin start, but held it back.

Cal-i-ban.

“I loved him.” She’d squeezed my hand, but her eyes held only calm, no sadness. No fear. If she’d known me, she should’ve feared. “And he loved me. Too much, I think. He said I was born of peace and he was born of blood and death. He told me it wasn’t a guess, but that he knew I wouldn’t survive in his world. And he was a killer, but he wouldn’t be responsible for killing me just by being with me. I was willing to trust fate. He wasn’t.”

Then there had been sadness. It had made me smile. “He was right, but he gave me a chance,” she’d said. “He’d let me look at our path and where it led. I told him no. Little things can change. The whole of your life or death cannot. I refused to look and he refused to risk me without a guarantee I would be safe. That I would survive. I’ve thought since I came here of my sin and my lie. I loved him so much that I broke my only rule. I did look. And then I left. He was right and neither of us should have to see it happen.” Her voice was soft and would have been boring had it not been for the information on Caliban.

She’d put her other hand against my face. I’d felt the warmth of it through the hair that fell across my cheek. “I know you won’t believe me, as he didn’t believe me, but the first day you sat in my class I knew you. I broke my rule again and looked into your future too. I won’t run and I won’t blame you. You were born to be who you are, Grimm. We are all born to a purpose.” I hadn’t told her my real name in class, yet she knew.

I really hated those damn seers.

“Balance in this world is far more important than those who live in it.” She’d leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “But, Grimm, you will not tell him what you think to do here.”

Not tell Caliban I sliced up one of his old girlfriends? Yeah, that was a promise. Stupid bitch.

Her hand on my face had burned, and the brown—no, what color?—of her eyes had turned to pure glowing golden amber, and I thought felt something leave…no, something stolen from my mind. It was there. It was about Caliban, who was in NYC, but what…? I wasn’t supposed to tell…tell him about my teacher? Why would I?

I’d forgotten her name and face the second I used a switchblade to slice open her stomach. It wasn’t like she was important. Finding Caliban, after all these years, that was the only thing.

I’d retracted the blade to put back in my pocket, shook my head, and removed my sunglasses to rub at my eyes, my headache fierce. The teacher, Georgina…George…G.

Eh, it was gone. Why would I waste a brain cell on her name or her face anyway?

I’d left her sprawled across her desk. Blood pooled around her. I couldn’t really tell what color her hair was—brown? Black? Red as her own blood? I did see the palm of her hand—it was the same silver-white as my hair. Freaking bizarre.

But she was gone and so was I. And the world was better off with one less psychic. I’d planned on killing her when the GED class graduated anyway—martyrs and psychics. Hell with them. And I knew where Caliban was, NYC—I didn’t know how I knew, but suddenly I did know—and teachers were a dime a dozen. I was on the move. Blood dripped to the floor. I vaguely remembered gutting her, but not with the intensity I normally did. I loved a good gutting. I liked to lie in the grass or abandoned buildings or even a bed and relive them from time to time. I shrugged. She must not have been that interesting.

Now the blood began to splatter the floor.

But that’s what happened when you broke your own rules. My kind had no rules. We lived—or had lived—in the same place, but dwelled in different worlds.

I was sure she thought she’d gone to a better one. They always did. There were other worlds, I knew. Whether she went to a good or bad one wasn’t up to her, whatever she thought. It was up to that ever-spinning and capricious universe. And if it had made me, it couldn’t be very good and generous, could it?

She had been a good teacher, though.

I took the apple out of my jacket pocket, polished it on my sleeve, and left it in her limp hand before I left. I’d brought it to be ironic. An apple a day will never keep an Auphe away.

I walked out into the hall and closed the door behind me. I thought I heard the sound of something being tossed into a metal trash can, the kind by the teacher’s desk. With my Auphe hearing, if I heard something, there was something. I glanced back through the frosted glass and saw a misty outline of a crying woman, face in her hands, red hair.…I rubbed my eyes again and it was gone.

Just a dead human on the altar of a teacher’s desk, martyred as she’d meant to be. A human without a face or color or a name.

“I’ll find a way to change it. I will. I don’t care if it’s never been done. The world can’t stop me. No one can stop me.”

It was a woman’s voice choked with tears and determination. Familiar. I turned to look again, but then I’d found myself on the first floor with no memory of coming down the stairs. Too much excitement, too much glee at the games to come. My brother. Fighting, blood, family joined again and maybe a few hundred deaths or so.

Because he was in…She’d said he lived in…Fuck.

I’d known.

I’d just this second known and it was gone too, like the other things…like…what other things?

Absently I put my sunglasses back on, left the building, and stepped down to the sidewalk. Why was I standing here doing nothing? I could be in the library searching the Internet for Caliban. Or I could be off showing one of those gangs downtown that when they said they were going to take your money and shove your head up your ass, it was harder than it sounded. You had to break a lot of vertebrae to do that, have some real upper-body strength, and a machete to make that back door a few sizes bigger. I had the ability and the motivation. Tonight, I’d thought, I’d be the teacher.

Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen a face in the window…colors of brown, red, and amber. I’d smelled the pumping heart and the circulating blood of healthy life.

I’d heard one word.

Forget.

The desert heat made me sleepy as I tasted my own blood from the tip of my leather-covered finger. It had made me dream. An enjoyable dream.

Forget.

I could see the blood, brighter than any other blood I could think of. It was all I could see. It was a curtain pulled over everything else. But I didn’t mind. I liked blood, and I liked red. As I began to tumble into a healing semicoma, I had an image of me handing Caliban an apple and laughing. Laughing. Laughing. Laughing.

Forget.

I could hear a woman crying. “I’ll find a way to change it. I will.”

Forget.

Had I dreamed? It didn’t matter. If I had, I would sleep again and dream of better things, things that I could remember. Such as Cal’s sword in my stomach. The Second Coming.

Family.

The end of the world.

The beginning of mine.

I told Niko, Robin, and Promise about Grimm, the Auphe-bae, every detail I could remember, except for the specific ones of what I’d done in South Carolina to the other imprisoned failures. That I glossed over. Niko already knew them. I’d told him the day I’d returned home. I told Niko almost everything, and not only because he was my brother. He was all that stood between me and the world. I wasn’t worried about myself. Of the two, the earth and Cal off his leash, I wasn’t the one that needed protecting. I was sane currently, and I did go back and forth on whether that was a good thing or not, but who knew if that would last?

Not if. How long…

I didn’t tell the puck and Promise the particulars of what I’d done in Nevah’s Landing at the beginning of the year, that I’d shot seven half-Auphe manacled in cages like fish in a barrel, because it was my only option. I didn’t want to and I didn’t have to. They knew what had happened, as it was the only thing that could’ve happened. They didn’t need me painting them a mental picture. It hadn’t bothered me when I’d done it, and it didn’t bother me now. There was nothing else to do.

But I didn’t want to see them look at me with that mental image in a continuous loop behind their eyes. On the other hand, Sidle, the warden and torturer…When it came to killing him, my only regret was that I couldn’t do it again…and again. He merely wasn’t worth mentioning to the others, as he had been a useless thing. He’d been proof that you didn’t have to gate or look like an Auphe to be a monster. You could be a weak one with an advantage that he hadn’t deserved. The half-Auphe had been in cages while he roamed free to find instruments of pain to make them behave.

It was in that one instance that Grimm had been right. I should’ve made that bastard suffer instead of putting him down instantly and painlessly like a rabid dog.

“I’ve killed, Caliban,” Promise said, curled on Robin’s couch after we’d pushed ours off of it. She’d said the male psyche was a mystery to her, but that wasn’t true. Not with five deceased elderly husbands. As far as I’d seen, Promise knew any thought that might run through a man’s head. And she saw mine.

“In the old days before we had ways other than blood, I killed to live. You shouldn’t feel that you are worse than I was—or Goodfellow, for that matter.” She slanted a knowing glimpse of violet and velvet his way. “I have heard tales of his escapades, and pretending to be a god wasn’t the worst of them.”

As far as Robin was concerned, the vampire wasn’t there and the subject she’d brought up didn’t exist. He didn’t want to talk about it, apparently. And that was more bizarre—alien-pod-person bizarre. Goodfellow was incapable of “not wanting to talk.” From the first time he’d opened his mouth to introduce himself and try to sell us a car, he hadn’t shut up once, and that had been close to five years ago. He’d been kind of…off during the Panic. I’d thought he’d gone back to his old self after it was over, but now I wasn’t as sure. I watched as he continued to pretend Promise wasn’t on his couch—or on the planet, for that matter. The dismissal of her was that complete.

He was rearranging notification cards on the table. When we’d returned to the condo, I’d read them upside down as I’d looped around the coffee table to grab my spot on the couch. They said that he was not monogamous, and should he find the originator of the rumor he would drench his dick in Tabasco sauce, piss in his treacherous mouth, as that was all it was good for, and then draw and quarter him before letting a horny mule hump his remains.

Sounded like a great start for a new line of greeting cards to me. They were clearly meant as damage control for the attending members of the Panic. Next to them was a stack of smaller personal cards spelling out Robin Goodfellow—monogamous since 2011, with the suicide hotline at the bottom for those who couldn’t face the fact. Side by side sat the contradiction. It didn’t make any difference to the puck. What was one lie to a trickster? Especially when it was to other tricksters?

A lie would be the first words out of a trickster’s, especially Robin’s, mouth the moment he woke up in the morning.

Of course you’re not average size. You’re enormous, he’d say. Unbelievable. I was stunned, momentarily blinded by the vastness of it. Now…is it a penis or a clitoris again? Sorry. I drank entirely too much last night.

Or he might tell the truth if it was worse than a lie. A puck knew how to do the most damage, and the best weapon to wield.

It’s not me; it’s you. It’s really, really you. It could not be more you. You should carry a bucket for your sex partner to hurl into when they wake up and see you in the daylight.

But that was before monogamy with Ishiah. I didn’t want to know what he told him first thing in the morning, but it crept into my mind all the same. Having sex with a walking, talking feather duster doesn’t make me sneeze at all.

I sneezed through my entire shift every shift at the bar. I knew that would be a whopper of a lie. As a matter of fact, I sneezed as I finished telling my grimmer-than-Grimm fairy tale and scattered Goodfellow’s cards across the coffee table. It was psychosomatic, since I hadn’t seen Ish anywhere since the Panic had come and gone. I didn’t know if he’d returned or not. I thought he and Robin still kept separate apartments, but I didn’t ask, as I had no desire to know. I liked the boss/employee relationship the way it was…with me not knowing shit about what he did after hours. Now, though, with the mess we were in, it seemed odd he wasn’t around. “Where’s Ish?”

Niko went to the door to let Kalakos inside. The Vayash wasn’t privy to Auphe, half-Auphe, one-fourth-Auphe secrets. As far as he knew, the pure Auphe race existed yet. He didn’t know they were extinct. Very few did know that, rumormongering tricksters included, difficult as that was to believe. Mainly, Niko had put forth, because no one wanted to talk about the Auphe. They were the original “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil”—with an emphasis on “speak no evil.” If no one talked about them, then no one could know they were gone.

Kalakos didn’t need to know anything about our lives, and as Niko wouldn’t have trusted him with our plastic tableware, he’d been left in the hall while we’d talked. Although I had to give it to him: He had charged into that basement behind Niko and ended up decapitating the last Bae. He’d watched Niko’s back—far too late by twenty-seven years, but it meant something all the same. Maybe.

I’d think about it.

But regardless of what Kalakos had done, it wasn’t my call to make. I elbowed Robin, who was gathering the cards into neat piles again with impatient, quick movements that made a professional cardsharp appear to be moving in slow motion. “Ishiah?” I prompted.

“He’s in Vegas. Lucky bastard,” he grumbled. “The peri have something rather like…” He rearranged the cards again. If it had been anyone else, I’d have said he was buying time. But this was Robin, trickster extraordinaire. He didn’t need to make up a lie. He already knew every one there ever had been or would be. “They have something like the National Guard. Ishiah is retired, but he’s been reactivated for one mission. It shouldn’t take more than a few days. A week at the most.”

Why peri would need a National Guard was my next question, but the puck cut that off promptly with a suggestion. “I’ve been thinking. Cal, note that—you can think all the time. It’s true, but I digress. My first thought is this: Janus will be showing up soon, as it’s still storming and he can move about unseen. Which means we should move before he tracks the Vayash among us here. As if it would hurt any of you to use an effective war machine–deflecting deodorant?” he complained. “My second thought is that perhaps Hephaestus could assist us with the situation.”

As Kalakos came through the door, Niko closed it and asked verbally what I longed to ask physically, with my hands wrapped tightly around Goodfellow’s neck. “He’s alive? He traded whatever currency of the time for that monstrosity before years later passing it on to the Rom to guard, and you only thought now to bring up the fact that he’s still alive?”

Robin snorted. “If it were that easy, don’t you think I would have? No, he’s not alive. He’s dead. Deadish. Yes, deadish would be more accurate, and he’s wildly insane, quite naturally. All Greek legends end up insane sooner or later. It must be something in the water.” He shrugged, as I put a water purifier for him on my mental Christmas list. “But he was insane long before he became biofunctionally challenged, which makes it that much more difficult.”

“Is he in Greece?” I asked. “Because that’s a long trip. But if we go with you, Janus will probably jump the plane and ride it all the way there.”

“Greece? No. Very few of us are there now. When the people stopped believing in us, we left. Too many painful memories of better days.” He checked his watch. “Conveniently enough, Hephaestus is in Connecticut. With traffic we could be there in two and a half hours.”

“He’s in Connecticut. Dead and in Connecticut? Less than two to three hours away?” Niko said dubiously. “I find that difficult to believe. Greece, very well. But if he’s dead, why isn’t he in Hades or the Elysian fields?”

My brother the Buddhist believed in life after death—of all different sorts. An afterlife for every belief that has been and will come. I didn’t give him grief over it. After what he’d lived through in this life, he was entitled to believe whatever he wanted. But I knew after death there was nothing but emptiness and nonexistence. I had no problem with that. It was heaven in my book.

Goodfellow answered Niko’s question by holding up two fingers. “Two words: industrial revolution.” He added, “And guns. He loved weapons, anything that could inflict death and despair. We all have our hobbies. He was late by a hundred years or so. As I said, wildly insane, easily distracted, and behind on the news, but by the time he caught up, weapons were that much more advanced. I’m sure he was quite the happy camper when he discovered the concept. They don’t have guns in Hades or the fields, so he went where the guns did.”

“I repeat, you didn’t bring this up sooner?” Niko’s voice lowered to the same threatening rumble of the thunder outside.

“Niko, he’s madder than a syphilitic-ridden Al Capone, not deader than dead, but deader than he should be, and he hates me. Ares’s steroid-induced rages, does he hate me. You don’t need to know why. If I thought he had an iota of sanity or cooperation in him, I’d have mentioned it, I don’t know, perhaps while Cal was dying, while you were beating your father like a Turkish rug, when we were again attacked by Janus, while Cal had been kidnapped and we were frantically searching for him as if he were a microchipped prizewinning Westminster Labradoodle. So many wasted opportunities when we were lying about while lacking in any pertinent activity, I realize, but it’s a chance in a thousand anyway. He despises me more than any creature I know, and that, considering my extraordinary reputation, is saying much.” He gave up on the cards and pushed them off the table.

“Was I put in my place?” Niko asked me ruefully, not entirely used to the feeling.

I was, however, and didn’t mind seeing someone else suffer. “You were puck-slapped but good. Okay, we’re taking two cars and I’m not wearing a sweater.”

Goodfellow was shocked and appalled. Everyone wore sweaters in Connecticut. He was ninety-nine percent positive that you couldn’t cross the state line without one.

“Two cars. No sweaters,” I stressed.

Then I leaned closer to Robin and did something I shouldn’t have, that made me feel like crap, but could be necessary. I murmured, “Hephaestus hates you, but what does he think of Hob?”

He feared him. He had to. Alive, dead, or halfway between, all feared Hob.

And no one except Niko, Robin, Promise, Georgina, and me knew Hob was dead. And not deadish, as Hephaestus was, but as dead as they came. Gone from this world for good. It was something to think about.

Until Goodfellow gave a low hiss back, inaudible to everyone but me. “What would he think of an Auphe? What would he think of you if you threw away your sanity, your ability to tell right from wrong, and lived only for every life you could extinguish, to ask him a question? All while knowing if you did, you couldn’t come back. No second chances like you’ve had before, not this time. You would never be Cal again. Never sane again. Never right again.” In that moment he wasn’t Robin. “The next time you speak of Hob is the last time we speak,” he added without emotion, but cold, hard promise.

I knew I shouldn’t have brought up the subject again. Unfortunately I knew too late.

The sly, snarky, patronizingly sarcastic, fast talking, horny, name-dropping Goodfellow was gone; this Robin I didn’t know. He wasn’t my friend, and as I had only the one besides my brother, I wasn’t going to risk losing him. I leaned back before the others noticed the exchange and gave the best and most honest apology I could. It was one my friend would recognize for what it was and hopefully come back.

“Okay. Shit.” I grimaced. “I’ll wear a goddamn sweater.”

From below the floor they were reborn.

The floor was concrete, but they broke through it with as little effort as if it had been a bar napkin, the cheap kind that disintegrates if one drop of liquid is spilled on it. They swarmed loose of earth and man-made rock and opened mouths filled with large, square, thick teeth, each one a different size, each mouth a child’s drawing. Crooked and slanting inward, outward, large and some larger—made for chewing stone to mine the metal needed for Hephaestus’s forge. The teeth reminded us we weren’t as solid as stone, and the mouths stretched wide to roar at us.

But didn’t.

There was no roaring. There was worse. It was the sound of thousands of years of crackling, white-hot flame and the hiss of steam hot enough to boil your flesh from your bones. They were crouched until they were almost doubled over, backs curved into sharp, unnatural peaks. That didn’t keep them from moving fast, scuttling sideways like crabs. Their hands matched—a thumb and a thick extension of flesh, four fingers fused into one. Each, thumb and the rest, had a single talon each. Longer than the hand itself and of a gleaming metal that would score rock as easily as the bulldozer teeth.

The single eye was fire. Red, orange, yellow, white, it burned. Every single eye burned and the pale flesh around it was scorched and blackened. But fire could see, or Hephaestus could see through the fire. I wondered if the fire burned in their brains too. Were the roars not roars but screams of long years of agony? Was the sound of flames and corrosive steam their way of screaming?

Burn.

I burn.

We burn.

I didn’t know and I didn’t have the luxury of caring. They were here to butcher us, and whether putting them down was self-defense or a mercy killing, the end was the same. “Cyclops,” I heard Kalakos say, incredulous. He said he hunted the unclean, but he hadn’t hunted anything close to this. With the Auphe-bae, these, and Janus all in two days, he might hang up his sword.

“Welcome to the big time.” I slid down the ladder to stop at the last rung and step carefully into the minefield of metal and broken concrete. At this level I could see that the hunched backs of the Cyclops stood about five feet tall. If they could’ve stood upright, they would’ve been tall. NBA recruitment material, but not literal giants, as Niko had taught in mythology when I was a kid. I told Goodfellow so.

“Work twenty-four/seven in a small cave and smaller tunnels mining ore and it will take barely a hundred years to take you from giant to this.” Robin had gone down his ladder simultaneous with me, but I heard him from the other side of the vat over the Cyclops venting Hephaestus’s rage. “But they’re no less dangerous for it. They are wholly pissed and they do not care who they take it out on.”

The one closest to me moved sideways a step, head rocking back and forth, soot stains coloring its misshapen chin, but with the eye always on me. It had moved less than a foot, but that was enough for me to see in the cloudy, weak light that it had silver painted in swirls all over its sunless body. I thought it was a tattoo. I was wrong. It wasn’t a tattoo and it wasn’t silver; it was more like mercury. It flowed. And it wasn’t on its body; it was in it—channels eaten into its moon-slug flesh. But where mercury was poisonous, it didn’t burn. These coiled channels were lined on each side with thin ribbons of black. I could smell the flesh burning. I could see the wisps of smoke rising. If there was pain, that I didn’t see.

I did see the scuttle and lunge through the air, the madly grinding teeth aimed at my heart, the mechanically thrashing hands and claws aimed at my gut. Not good. I put two rounds directly in the furnace of an eye.

I hadn’t been solely tattoo watching after I reached the bottom of the ladder. I’d switched the xiphos to my other hand and drawn my Glock. As Goodfellow had said, if you’re going after a Cyclops, guessing where to start isn’t a problem. If they couldn’t play “I spy with my one Cyclopian eye” because I sent a bullet through it, that put them at a disadvantage. If it passed through to their brain and killed them as well as blinded them, that was a bonus.

If bullets worked on an eye made of fire. If their brain was high-functioning enough to be bothered by losing half out of the hole blown in the back of their skulls.

This one did have a problem with it. He threw back his head and the hiss and crackle became a real scream, deep and hoarse and full of fury. The eye flickered but didn’t go out, not until he staggered backward, with each step impaling or slicing his legs with metal, and finally fell. His crushing hands grasping nothing but air, he screamed one last time. No fear, no despair, only unfulfilled rage.

Then he was still, his eye a dead black socket and the quicksilver running out of the curving, carved canals that covered him to disappear into the concrete and metal beneath the body. I studied my gun, the body again, and shrugged.

Okay. Cyclops. Not that big a deal.

I kept thinking that as I saw Nik with his back to the wall strike, his sword in the eye of another Cyclops. I thought it right up until I was gauging who was the nearest and next in line. I was looking in the wrong direction. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nik disappear, the ground opening up beneath him. He was swallowed, the teeth of broken concrete and discarded metal chewing at him as he went. I knew it because I smelled it: the too familiar tang of his blood, bright and healthy as it came—when it was inside his body instead of out.

I ran. I wasn’t as agile as Nik at dodging the minefield of a floor, but I didn’t care and I could move close to as fast as a purebred and faster than any half-breed except Grimm. Who didn’t matter now. As the pain didn’t matter. There was no pain. There was the empty space where my brother had stood. That was all.

I reached it a second behind Kalakos. He’d been closer to Niko, close enough that he reached down and yanked him up and out, hands to wrists, before the Cyclops below Nik had a chance to turn him into the flesh-and-blood version of ore, a crushed pulp of bleeding tissue and shattered bone. I came to a stop between the hole in the floor and Nik and Kalakos. Seeing the eye, a miniature sun, below in the dark, I fired. The scream, maddened, was the same—as was the eye extinguished to the darkness of death.

Feeling my first Vayash impulse—to spit on the body packed tightly in the earth below—I instead growled and turned to look Nik up and down. He was bloody from being pulled through the floor, an inanimate monster all its own, but aside from scrapes, cuts, and abrasions, he’d live. He’d be sore for a while, but he wasn’t going to bleed out.

Kalakos had come to the same conclusion and had his sword back up for the next charge. “You don’t have to thank me,” he said, “either of you.”

“You think I would?” I snapped, and fired at another Cyclops across the foundry.

“No, because I know now it’s something a father must do instead of supposed to do and should’ve been doing since the day his son was born. I see now.” The rushing Cyclops came low, his eye down. Kalakos half removed his head from the thick neck, slammed it backward with the flat of his sword to bring the target in view, and quenched the flame. “Gratitude for that would be no different from gratitude for breathing. The Vayash have a duty. I’ve learned I have more than one.”

He moved away then. He didn’t wait for a comment. The fight was only warming up. There was blood to be spilled, lives—our own—to be saved, answers to be wrenched from an insane god.

“I hate him more now than I did before,” I muttered. “Sanctimonious ass.” Whether he meant it or not, it was too late.

“Perhaps he meant it and we should take it at face value, but that window of opportunity has unfortunately long closed.” He added, “And he managed to get the last word.” His clothes were saturated with blood. I could feel the warmth of it against my back as I did my best to press him hard enough against the wall to pin him, leaving no room for him to be sucked down again. That meant there was no avoiding feeling his blood, all but seeing the cloud of bright copper in the air floating around us.

“Unfortunately,” he’d said, which meant regret, and my brother deserved much more than regret, thanks to that Vayash son of a bitch.

“Last word. That’s the worst.” No—regret was. “Bastard,” I said, wishing for the first time that Kalakos hadn’t been one as I watched for the next Cyclops. “You okay? I can smell the blood. Not enough to take you out of the fun, but could be enough to slow you down.”

“Other than your crushing me into what I’m beginning to think is a piggyback position, I’m all right. Fully functional, certainly not slow, and definitely not your papoose.” I felt his hand urge me away; he was ready to rejoin the battle. I thought about stalling, but this was Niko and he was right. He’d have to lose half the blood in his body to slow down.

As I began to move, I heard a groan from above. The beams that had shaken earlier at Hephaestus’s voice were moving again…and Hephaestus wasn’t talking. They were wrenching free of their mounting and joining together over our heads, booming as they struck. The movement…it wasn’t falling. Not falling down, but moving fast and inevitably, as if they were falling sideways. Tinkertoys would puzzle him, Robin had said. I didn’t think so. I was looking at the most badass set of Tinkertoys on the planet, and Hephaestus wasn’t stopping there. Metal hit metal and was held in place with the sudden intense red, then white glow of a forge I didn’t see.

“Hephaestus is also the god of volcanoes. Fire and metal.” Niko’s hand had altered from pushing to fisting my shirt—Jesus, I was going to die in this pink shirt—and yanking me to stand still. “What is he making?”

A brilliant mind asking a question with the most obvious of answers. Or let’s be honest. Just a damn stupid question.

“Something to kill us, Dr. Oblivious,” I hissed, hoping whatever it was didn’t have great hearing, or any at all. The beams were joining faster, other metal flying up to it to enhance its status as the bestselling murder machine for kids four years and up. It was the size of Janus, no bigger, but a framework with no head. It had arms, though, four of them, with grasping metal claws. I could hear the creak of the ratchets as the hands opened and closed. And it had two legs. Thirteen feet tall in length, it hung above like a waiting spider. Would it climb down or leap inst— Motherfucker.

It was on fire.

All of it.

Like the Cyclops’s eyes but thirteen feet of it. A metal skeleton became an inferno. Metal shouldn’t burn like that, unless Hephaestus wanted it to—as if it were an endless fuel. There was a darting of flaring coat, brown hair, and sword. Robin was getting out before he turned to charcoal. I thought that was a damn good idea. Fighting monsters was one thing. Fighting a god and the industrial age combined, we weren’t properly armed—like with a fire truck and several bulldozers and earthmovers from the nearest construction site.

Shit, it fell. Just…fell. Didn’t climb. Didn’t jump. The building shook under the earthquake of it.

No sense of survival, no pain, no mind to manipulate, on fire, and could play with our charcoaled remains until Christmas if Hephaestus wanted. “Robin was right. This was a bad idea.” Niko’s hand still wrapped in my shirt, I began to weave my way toward the door, then flat-out run as it rose to stand upright. Sliced feet I’d worry about later, if there was a later.

I saw Promise at the entrance to the hall. An earthquake was a good cue that we needed help, but unless she had a couple of tanks with her I’d stick with the running. “Hephaestus, it is I. Aphrodite…O sweet Virgin Mary in heaven.” Under the hood of her cloak her eyes widened and stared upward.

There was the sound of a footstep behind us. Metal against metal, it was the peal of the largest of bells—the one tolling for our asses. The heat had been intense when it had hit the floor. It was getting hotter now.

Idiot Puck. Dying for the answer to the simplest of questions.

Then Hephaestus laughed and the hundreds of shards of metal rang again, this time church bells for a funeral…ours.

Robin ran past Promise, hooking his arm in hers and dragging her after him down the hallway. He wasn’t deserting us. If he had made it out, we could too. And if we couldn’t, other than adding himself as another piece of coal to the furnace in a heroically martyred brothers-in-arms gesture, there was nothing he could do. And if it doesn’t save anyone and you’re still dead, it’s hard to appreciate all the perks of martyrdom. Like having his dick preserved as a sacred relic.

I didn’t look for Kalakos. He had saved Nik, said it was his duty, but it was my duty too and had been long before he came into the picture. Of course, Niko felt the same, and no one outdid him at the job. He was behind me, beside me, and then in front of me, decapitating a Cyclops. Flames were a fountain out of its neck before it collapsed and we ran over the top of its body.

Another step from behind, another earthquake, another rising of the heat until I thought the earth was crashing into the sun. I started to look over my shoulder before deciding I had no desire to see the world of shit about to drop onto us.

“The Cyclops,” Niko snapped.

The last of them were clawing free of the earth—in front of us, on each side—and I snatched a glance behind me…yeah, there too, right in front of something that made me rethink that whole atheist, nonhell philosophy of mine. A gigantic scarecrow of pure hellfire, made special for us on some black altar. No, the devil wasn’t close to this. When it came to taking names and incinerating asses, Greek gods had it all over him.

Step.

I felt my skin began to tighten against the heat.

The Cyclops surrounded us in a closing circle. It wasn’t too many, but it was too little time. We were out of it. Out of goddamn time. Not martyrs, but dead just the same. Didn’t that suck? Didn’t it just…

No.

Hell, no.

Fuck that.

“Niko, down!” I yelled as I raised the Glock. He hit the floor instantly and I started shooting.

Ten Cyclops, I’d counted. You carry guns, you count your ammunition, and you count the enemy. I spun, firing as I went. Every eye a target, every target my whole world. One…four…seven…ten. Ten and the end. Ten shots in a fraction over a second—check the speed-shooting records—and each Cyclops a dead, eyeless heap on the floor. This was why I carried guns. This was why I loved them. Some felt the need for speed and some were about the result: Kill ’em all and let God sort them out. I was a fan of both. I came to a stop where I’d started, the first and last Cyclops to die lying side by side. “I think I’m ready to shoot in the Olympics now.”

“You were ready for the Olympics seven years ago. Stop stroking your ego and your penis extension and move.” Niko was up and running flat-out for the entrance. I was on his heels. Goodfellow was waiting for us there. He had come back, knowing he could do nothing but die with us. What a friend—and an idiot, as a god had told him seconds ago.

I told him so as Niko and I slammed into him, carrying him along in the rush before he had a chance to turn around. The fiery proxy hand of an infuriated dead god, like a plummeting comet, crushed the hall three feet behind us. We erred on the side of caution and kept running. Promise waited for us in the next room and she joined our escape. When we made it out of the building, we all stopped and turned to see if this was far enough. If New Jersey would be far enough.

It was. Hephaestus wouldn’t reveal himself or his machines to the outside world. I guess he’d gotten comfortable in his coffin of solid metal, mouth filled with it, eyes blinded by it. Or he was crazy enough that “out of sight, out of mind” was a literal term. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I sat on the ground and then lay back, eyes on the sky. My legs and feet were hamburger; those godawful khaki pants Goodfellow had forced on me were more red than tan now. If Niko hadn’t been wearing black, I’d have seen the same on him, except from the neck down. We both had cuts on our faces. Robin was also in dark colors and I did smell blood on him, puck blood—green and earthy as a forest—but not as much. Goodfellow could move when he wanted to. A hundred thousand lifetimes and more of outrunning jealous husbands or wives—he should be.

We were alive, though, and “surprised about it” didn’t begin to sum that up. I waved a hand to get Promise’s attention. “Sweet Virgin Mary? Yeah? I didn’t know you were Catholic. Didn’t know vampires were anything.”

“My housekeeper is Catholic,” she said, still staring at building thirteen of the factory. “I must have picked it up subconsciously from her. It did seem oddly appropriate. In all my days…Gods.” She pulled at her hood, her hands gloved in silk against the sun as well. “I never wanted to meet one, and I don’t plan on repeating the experience.”

“I warned you he has a bad temper,” Goodfellow said. “And the insanity issue. I said this probably wouldn’t work. But did you listen?”

I lifted a weary arm and aimed the Glock at his knee. “I have one round left. It’s all I need.”

Kalakos came around from the side of the building, where he must have escaped out the back. The cherry on top of the fucking sundae.

“Never mind.” I let my hand flop back. “I think I’ll save it for myself.”

Home is where the heart is or where you bury the ones you want to eat later.

The cattle with their idiotic sayings, mooed by lungs not fit to breathe the same air as mine. The new world would have sayings that fit the mouth of the predator, not the bleating prey. But the new world took time, and I had too much work to do to bother inventing new ones until the Second Coming ruled—hundreds of years yet. It wasn’t so long for those with Auphe blood. A pureblood Auphe had lived thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. I did the math. I didn’t like it. I’d used a calculator for it and to keep track of my growing horde of children, but I’d done it. I would survive a few thousand years easily. Hundreds were nothing.

A drop in the bucket.

Humans. I dragged my claws through the dirt and wished it were flesh. Boring in what they did, boring in what they said, boring to hunt. Criminally boring.

Bored, bored, bored with them and bored, bored, bored here. But I did have to check on the family. Didn’t want naughty thoughts developing in tiny meandering minds or escapes being planned by the incubators. I had picked them out a nice place, more room than the cage that had been my home. Prison. Homes were prisons; prisons were homes. Were homes, were homes…No.

I snarled, then pulled my talons out of the dirt they’d ended up buried knuckle-deep into. It was a good place. Good enough. A cavern in the New Mexico desert, unknown by man or forgotten, it was a small opening three feet across that led straight down. It opened up into four large caverns. I kept the succubae in one guarded by their own children, the Second Coming in another, the dead bodies or the live waiting their turn in the third. The fourth was left for the children to spread as I made more. Room for the family to grow, little bundles of death and teddy bears everywhere.

Cute. Sweet. Look at Junior and Junior and Junior and Junior.

I’d need a new cavern soon.

Worst part was keeping the fifty succubae fed. It was human after human. Fifty every month to be drained of their sexual energy, all energy, unto death. It became tedious when I was the single one intelligent enough to steal them away without alarming the herd and bring them back from all the cities I’d ever traveled to be dropped down the cavern. Some children were grown, but not experienced. Stupid, in fact. Goddamn stupid. They weren’t ready for hunting trips, and nobody delivered this far from a city, no matter the tip.

Life was hard.

It was strange about the sex. Humans were supposed to enjoy it, and it was everywhere you looked where the cattle massed together as their herding instinct told them to. On every building, every wall, every TV or movie screen. It was…pervasive. Ah, that was the kind of word an educated monster like me would know. It was pervasive, and yet despite that none of the human husks were smiling when I sent in the children to clean out the succubae’s lair. Not a one. Screaming was a better name for the open rictus of frozen jaw. All of them the same, and I’d seen many. Too many to count, not interesting enough to bother with a calculator. Many said it well enough. Succubae liked to eat as much as I did.

I didn’t respect them. They weren’t as weak as humans, but only several slithers above them. I did respect the she-snakes’ philosophy, even if it was another human one made their own. They turned it into “if you can’t fuck it then eat it” and did both at the same time. It was efficient, economical, and twice the fun.

The earth began to tremble. Finally. This was what I’d been waiting for while chasing nonsense thoughts around, seconds away from teaching a few of the children about inexperience and stupidity as Caliban had taught the others in that basement. My brother had had my gift of them. Toys. He had many toys, the golden child. Here came one now.

I’d gated to just outside Caliban’s own cave after I felt him gate out as the machine plunged through the roof. I’d shot the lock out of the door, no windows to see through—inhospitable. I walked in and saw what I needed, the inside of the room and what it held. You can’t go where you have never seen and you can’t take anything from there either. This was about taking. I took Janus and gated it far down another cavern that was more of a well tunneling through rock several stories down. Then I had gated sand and dirt on top to complete its desert burial plot for safekeeping.

The tremble of the earth changed to a shaking, with plumes of sand erupting several feet high. It was impressive. Strong, quick, and useful for testing Caliban. How he reacted and fought it told me things, things I needed to measure his worth in the Second Coming. Unfortunately the things I learned were contradictory. No gate, then gate. On the verge of death, then whole again. Intriguing and annoying.

Janus was simpler. Intriguing and a tool, that was all. I planned on sending him back to New York and Caliban again soon enough. So much to learn…and while it wasn’t the ultimate game of Auphe against Auphe, it was a good game. I hadn’t been bored once it finally began.

Sand stopped flying up and now sank down under the earth, into a new pit as a hand, darkly gleaming in the hot sun, broke its way into the air and freedom.

On the downside: “You are a pain the ass. I’ve had body parts in a cooler without ice that kept longer than you.” I was also a truthful monster. When you had no one to fear, you had no reason to lie. “There was a teacher once. She had a saying she wrote every day on the blackboard. ‘Patience is a virtue.’ It made its mark on me, those words of the cattle. From weakness came truth. Those words have let me come as far as I have. From blood and filth and bars and cages, no way out. No way, no way, no way…” My thoughts circled viciously, ’round and ’round, then slowed. I pushed my sunglasses closer to my eyes, which I kept aimed on the sand. I didn’t look at the sun. It burned. It didn’t like me and I didn’t like it. But I would take the burn over the cage. Always. “Until one day I found a way out. I took it, and I plan to take everything else. All there is—because of patience. But while patience is a virtue, pissing me off is not.” I gated it down again and refilled the grave. I’d be back to check on its blind progress.

When I wasn’t watching…judging Caliban. Fitting those conflicting pieces of him together—if I had to tear bits of them off to do it. Finding out how he worked—if I had to open him up and see the wheels go ’round and ’round in his guts and his brain.

Patience is a virtue…

But only sometimes.

It was heading toward evening and as I’d gated us and Kalakos yesterday, all of us from home to Goodfellow’s penthouse to escape Janus this morning, that still left me with three days before I could build a new gate to take that thing out of this world. Janus’s waiting those days didn’t seem likely; neither did Niko’s letting me attempt the third death gate in the hopes it would move the titan. But no guarantee.

That meant we moved to the last idea Robin had: the black market. As it involved sewers and underground tunnels, Promise decided that in addition to demented gods and a leviathan of fire and metal that had almost destroyed us while nearly converting her to Catholicism, she had had enough for the day. She wished Niko thought the same, given the much more passionate kiss she shared with him by the cars. Both of them were usually more private in their affections.

We decided to clean up on the way. We couldn’t go back to Niko’s and my place, thanks to Janus, or Promise’s, thanks to the time limit. Same went for Goodfellow’s, thanks to Grimm.

Grimm, whose own timing was suspiciously coincidental when it came to Janus.

In the car, I made Robin sit in the back with Kalakos and hoped for one day that he could at least pretend to let the monogamy slide. Man hath no fear like a closed-minded Rom chased by a puck ready to tap that, knock some boots, bang some balls, whatever those puck kids were calling it these days. If I had cut Kalakos’s throat when he first showed up, as I’d been tempted to, it wouldn’t approach the punishment of a horny puck thinking you reminded him of Achilles.

We all threw down Tylenol as I drove back to the city. “I was thinking,” I said, fiddling with the radio, putting it off, as I didn’t want to say it at all, “Janus and Grimm showing up at the same time. Maybe it wasn’t a Rom family in the clan that passed down the frigging secret password to get Janus’s juice flowing. Grimm has been around thirty years, free twelve of them. The son of a bitch went to adult-education classes to get his GED. He knows how to research and problem-solve, not just slaughter. Probably reads Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, like Nik.” I added, “I hope he doesn’t sleep with them like Nik does. That’s not Auphe; that’s just sick.”

Niko snorted as he was cleaning the blood where he could, pulling up his pants legs and taking off his shirt. He was using surgical sterile scrubs from the first-aid kit he’d brought with us. We didn’t go much of anywhere without one. “I sleep with someone much warmer. Can you say the same?”

Not since I’d booted my ex, Delilah, out of my life and was waiting to put her down like a rabid dog. In a way she was. She was a Wolf, taking over the werewolf Mafia—the Kin—and had tried to kill me, Niko, and two other long-gone friends. The other Wolves, Alphas or not, feared her. She had no limits, no conscience—only ruthlessness and the certainty that no one counted in this world but her. Rabid in the mind and soul.

But in better days, she had been warm in bed.

Robin accepted the kit handed back to him. “You think Grimm is capable of that? Finding out how to wake up Janus and stealing him? Being what he is?”

I flipped down the visor and wished for sunglasses. The clouds were thinning, and the sun, lower in the sky or not, was directly in my eyes. The radio did say the rain had stopped in the city. That should keep Janus out of sight until nightfall.

“Grimm is me on crack with eighteen years of torture, locked naked in a cage, fed nothing but raw meat, and then escaping to twelve years of freedom. He hates the Auphe more than I did, and who the hell thought that was possible? Think what I would’ve been like if I’d lived his life. If I were more driven, smarter, so sociopathic that they need a new name for it, and not crazy.”

If he’d had the Auphe kind of crazy along with their skills and predation, that could’ve actually helped us. Arrogance and insanity—they had been their only weaknesses.

“You like him?” Robin decided he didn’t want to think about it and brushed it off with, “I wouldn’t have tried to sell you that first car. I promise you that.” He had taken off his coat and then his pants entirely, not bothering to roll them up like Nik, to scrub down the slashes and cuts on his legs. I could see in the rearview mirror that there was enough red splattered for an entire finger-painting class gone wild. My legs felt as his appeared as I drove, but since Niko had been pulled beneath the earth, scraping metal as he went, and Robin was about as bad off as I was, I’d rather have him tormenting Kalakos while I claimed the driver’s seat.

“You would be more driven, in a positive way, if you were less lazy,” Niko pointed out doggedly. “And you are intelligent. You lack some on occasion in the knowledge base of what we hunt, but again…”

“Lazy,” I grumped. “Well, you can take it to the bank Grimm is not. He’s motivated, obsessed, and since the Auphe aren’t here for vengeance, he’s decided the world will do instead.”

“Who is Grimm? Another Auphe?” asked Kalakos, who hadn’t been allowed in on the debriefing of my kidnapping, “and why isn’t this ¸tap wearing any underwear, his koro kani waving free in the breeze?”

“My dick is not blind nor a scrawny chicken, and if I was going to die fighting Hephaestus, I wanted its glory witnessed one last time,” Robin replied, offense lurking nastily behind the trickster facade. “And if I weren’t monogamous, arthida, you’d find that a Rom can’t run far or fast enough to escape what I’m carrying. But no worries, I do not sexually assault, in the traditional fashion. I’d strangle you instead with my nonblind, nonchicken dick. I have the reach to circle your neck and some to spare.”

From Kalakos’s saber suddenly lying across his lap, he believed him. I laughed, didn’t try not to. He had healed me and saved Niko, but trust is earned, and not in two actions or two days. “Your arm’s bleeding a good deal,” Niko commented, while still cleaning blood from his skin. He unbuttoned the sleeve at my wrist as I noticed the entire material starting six inches below my shoulder had gone from pink to solid red. It was worth it. I’d take red over pink and anything over those damn buttons, no matter how I had to get it. Goddamn Goodfellow.

He rolled up the sleeve until he revealed the cut. I took a quick look, then eyes back on the road. It was a keeper. Monsters…paien…whatever Robin wanted to call them, they respected scars. In our life we’d eventually come around to that way of thinking as well. Not as badges of honor, or attractive to the opposite sex, but signs you’d fought something big and bad and lived to show the proof. We didn’t care about the first two, or Niko didn’t; I kept the second one on call if needed, but the third…it was a warning that something nasty had fucked with me and not walked away. You’d best make certain you were bigger and badder and nastier than hell if you didn’t want to make their same mistake.

Bleeding in the gush of a slow waterfall, the wound was long and ugly, starting in the front of my biceps, curving to the back of my arm, and was about half an inch wide. A Cyclops’s talon isn’t as sharp or precise as a scalpel. One thing did relieve me. It was two inches below my tattoo. Messing that up would’ve pissed me off.

Kalakos, once Robin’s pants were back on, leaned up to see. “‘Fratres…’ Part of your tattoo says ‘brothers’ in Latin. What does the rest say?”

“It says, ‘If you’re close enough to read this, I’m going to pluck out your eyes and use them as Ping-Pong balls.’ Mind your own damned business.” I ducked instinctively as the first-aid kit came flying back over. Niko caught it. “You want your stitches while you’re driving or in a fast-food parking lot?”

I was hungry. That tipped the scales. While we were at McDonald’s, I ate a Big Mac with my other hand while Niko stitched my arm. Goodfellow refused the food, saying he’d seen pigs at troughs who dined better. Kalakos had brought back the Big Mac, fries, and chocolate shake for me, a salad for Niko, and two plain hamburgers for himself.

“You are stoic. Admirable.” Kalakos watched Niko’s precise work. “I’ve sewn myself up often enough and cursed most of the time. On the first and last occasion that I killed a werewolf, I may have screamed in finishing the stitching of the last of the seven claw marks.”

“I’m not stoic.” I reached for the shake wedged between my legs. “I’m used to it. Big difference. If I screamed or yelled every time I was cut up and Nik had to turn me into a craft project, I’d lose my voice.”

“We face Wolves every day. They don’t attack us often anymore, but for years it was almost a daily event. You, Emilian Kalakos”—it was the first time I’d heard Niko say his entire name—“are out of your league here. When Janus is dealt with, you should leave. The creatures that live in the city make Wolves seem as puppies.” Niko finished washing off the stitches with another surgical scrub.

“And I’m not wanted.”

“You may have saved Cal. You did save me. It’s appreciated, but it doesn’t wipe out the past. Your opportunity to make amends has long come and gone.” He slipped his shirt back on and put the first-aid kit back together and handed it to Kalakos in case he needed it. He didn’t want him around, didn’t want him at all, but Nik, contrary to what he was saying and unlike his father, did do what was right from the very beginning. Not a lifetime later.

Kalakos proved to be as stubborn as Niko. Genes do sometimes tell. “You have a tattoo as well. Same black and red, but a different language. I do not recognize it.” What does it say? went unspoken, as Niko wouldn’t threaten to make Ping-Pong balls of his eyes; he’d do it first, warn after the fact.

But Niko did answer. “‘Brothers Before Souls.’ Cal’s gift, albeit drunken, to me.”

When I had a choice at one point to revert to human, at least temporarily, or stay as I was born and far more able of keeping my brother alive, I’d made my decision and it needed no thought. I would do anything for Nik, whether it be light, gray, or the dark at the end of the road. Before the father of my half brother, before my friends, before my life, before the world itself, and, yeah, before my soul. It was my promise to Niko, and he might not have wanted it, but it was his and he knew what the tattoo meant.

Exactly what it said.

“Can you match that?” Niko asked.

“No.” Kalakos settled back as I checked the mirror again. He turned to face out the window. “No, I can’t.”

At least the bastard wasn’t making excuses anymore.

Goodfellow had been serious about the Chinese. We had a cab drop us off at Canal Street, right in the middle of Chinatown. It left us standing in front of a small greengrocer with a red-and-green awning as the sky darkened to night. Fruits and vegetables were piled in bins for people on the sidewalk to pick up and examine. An orange and white cat stared at us from inside through the window of the store itself. It knew what cats dragged in and that it would look much better than we did.

“I don’t cook. Unless they sell corn dogs in there, there’s no food here,” I grumbled.

A fiftyish small man with slicked-back black hair and a wide grin of white teeth except for one silver one that flashed cheerfully greeted us. “Luō bīn xiansheng, wõ hěn gaoxìng zàicì jiàn dào nīõ. Nín zuò wõmen de róngxìng yuõ nín de guanglín. Nīõ shentīõ haõo ma?”

The smile disappeared and the brown eyes drooped as he took in our scratches and cuts, and my shirt covered in dried blood. “A, wõ kàn yěxuõ bùshì.”

“He is asking about my well-being. Something that would’ve been nice to hear from the two of you after I faced a god that hates my guts.” Goodfellow answered the man in Chinese. “Zhè shì yīgè feicháng jiannán de yītian, Liú xiansheng. Wõ shì lái yòng le yīduàn shíjian wõ de fángjian, rúguõ zhè shì nīõ méiyõu bùbiàn.”

The owner responded in English for politeness’ sake. “Of course, your room is prepared as always, Mr. Fellows. Come inside. Welcome, welcome.” He led us to the door, through the tiny store and the door at the back. We went down the stairs, passed through a room where knockoff designer bags were being produced among giggling and impossibly fast chatter, to another door, more stairs, and finally a subbasement. He took us to the largest room, which still qualified as small, but with expensive, comfortable furniture, a computer, and a TV squeezed into it. “I will have my great-grandmother bring you food, medicine, hot tea.”

Robin collapsed on the overstuffed couch. “And, Mr. Chen, alcohol, please. A great deal of Baijiu. You know what I like.”

The man bobbed his head. “Of course. Only the best for our friend and benefactor.”

“You’re genuinely going to send your great-grandmother down those stairs? You still don’t trust me with your daughters?” Goodfellow drawled.

“I will help her, and no, Mr. Fellows, I do not trust you with my daughters.” The sad eyes brightened again, the skin wrinkling around them in a laugh. “I also do not trust you with my wife, my grandmother, or my lucky cat that sits in the window to watch for the police.”

The great-grandmother must’ve mainlined ginseng, because she and the owner were back by the time we had all picked out a place to collapse. She looked a hundred and fifty years old, but her feet moved at the speed of light as she balanced a tray on either hand. “I will ring the buzzer if the police come,” Mr. Chen said. “Haters of capitalism that they swear by, tsk, but I fear there is no way out down here.”

“You can say that again.” The puck sighed, referring to our situation rather than a lack of a basement door. “Thank you. You are a true friend.”

Mr. Chen had carried a large box loaded with clothes, bandages, and ointments, as well as a more modern first-aid kit, and balanced on top of all that was a tray with six small ceramic bottles and smaller cups that reminded me of the kind you served sake in, but shaped differently. Goodfellow lifted the tray out and placed it on a low, black lacquered table and started pouring. “That’s a lot of alcohol?” I snorted. “If we had a teddy bear we could have a tea party.”

“They’ll bring more when we finish,” Robin promised. “Here. Try it. It’s honey fragrance. It will help with the pain until more Tylenol takes effect. Oh, and it’s not like sake. You shoot it. No sipping. Treat it as a shot. It enhances the flavor.”

I should’ve known by his offering me the first one. But I was tired, hurting, and if this took the edge off, I’d take that. I tossed it back and promptly choked, positive that kindly Mr. Chen had put diesel fuel in that innocent bottle. My throat was liquid lava and for a moment I thought I saw a tunnel and a bright light. “Honey fragrance?” I coughed several times before gasping. “Then their bees must be flying around sipping paint thinner instead of nectar.”

“But it’s such a small amount.” Robin grinned, pouring one of his own and throwing it down as if it were mother’s milk. “I’ll be sure to tell Chen how disappointed you were. He’s a good host. He’ll hurry with more and stand there until you drink it to make sure all is satisfactory.” He gave up taunting me long enough to point to a small dark alcove in the back of the room. “There’s a shower. It’s not much, but finding underground facilities bearable to use as an emergency bolt-hole isn’t easy. However, I learned a long time ago that it pays to keep them. I’m hoping that in whatever manner Janus senses Vayash, buildings on top of buildings on top of the ground and us beneath it might slow him down.”

“It’s almost night, when he can travel unseen. We will find out then.” Kalakos rummaged for clothing and claimed the shower first.

I didn’t mind. I was more hungry than worried about the blood and dirt. I left the alcohol alone and moved to the trays of food. There was rice, several bowls of different soups, dumplings, a dish of poached vegetables I passed to Nik, a hot pot of steaming beef, and on and on. It was less a dinner for four than a buffet for ten. I grabbed a fork and started loading up a plate. As long as it didn’t look like fried chicken feet, I scooped it up.

“Had your time to think about Grimm?”

“You couldn’t eat your grass clippings and let it go, could you?” I kept eating but with less appetite.

“I can listen and graze both,” Nik said, dry as dust, but serious too. I’d had my time to think and come to terms. And the thinking had been done. The terms, they were harder to swallow than Mr. Chen’s alcohol.

The room was too small for Robin to give us any privacy, making the assumption that he cared about anyone’s privacy. He didn’t. But this time he turned on the TV and kept drinking to give us the illusion of it. That was a first, but we were all having a bitch of a time with relatives these past two days, including one he didn’t want to talk about either. This once he understood and gave us a break.

I took another bite of something spicy and loaded with chicken. After swallowing, I used the fork to push the next bite around the small pot. “Grimm has a damn good shot of taking me out anytime he wants—he could gate circles around me and cut me to pieces, but he needs me to build the new race. The Bae.”

The puck immediately gave up pretending he wasn’t listening. “No. The Bae.”

I frowned. “‘Succubae’ or ‘succubi’ is plural for ‘succubus.’” And they sounded the same whether spelled different or not.

“Yes, that was true until copyright law came into effect and I copyrighted the word and/or syllable ‘bi’ used in any remotely sexual way, which includes a succubus. You may call them ‘Bae.’” Pronounced ‘bay.’”

“You really are a freak, aren’t you?” I considered stabbing him with my fork. It wouldn’t be the first time…or the second. “But whatever, okay. Anything if you’ll go back to watching TV.” I addressed Niko again. “He needs me to build the Bae. And he needs me cooperative.”

Which the Auphe, when they had tried this same plan over a year ago, hadn’t required. They’d had access to Tumulus, a place that would drive me insane in minutes. Frothing at the mouth or catatonic, I didn’t know, but insane enough that they could’ve either used my crazed rage or a catatonic body, posable and reactive as any other male body—but without anyone home in there.

Grimm, an assumed failure, hadn’t been taken to Tumulus. He didn’t know the way. He couldn’t get there. And if he could, he wouldn’t have known its effect on me. He probably didn’t know I’d spent two years there at the mercy of the Auphe while being trained for the big day—gating them back far enough in time to wipe out the human race.

So that was out.

No insanity equals no involuntary cooperation.

“And since the succu bae aren’t willing and I’m not willing—it ain’t happening. I don’t think he’ll try to hurt you or Promise, Robin, or Ishiah. He’s been watching me since I put down the other half-breeds in Nevah’s Landing. He knows there’s no way in hell he’d get me on his side if he did anything to you. I don’t know how many succubae he has or how many Bae offspring, but replacing the Auphe as top ruling race on the planet is going to take a long time. He can’t hold you all hostage while I help him knock up”—I let go of the fork and said it for what it really was—“while I rape succubae for a few hundred years or so.” Assuming I inherited the Auphe longevity. “Robin, Ish, and Promise would still be around, but you’d be…gone. It’s not smart or efficient and Grimm is both.”

“You think he is that much more of a threat than the Auphe? They deserved their place at the top of the evolutionary ladder when it came to predators. We were lucky, very lucky to beat them. That and you were incredibly stubborn, as usual.” Niko tapped my plate and bowl with his fork. I might not feel like eating but I couldn’t fight if I didn’t fuel the machine.

“The Auphe were cunning. Grimm is smart. He has a goddamn degree. What kind of Auphe gets a goddamn degree?” I ate some more. “The Auphe had no problem dying for their cause, bringing the good old days of murder and mayhem back. Grimm will live for his cause. If he thinks you or I are about to take off his head, he’ll gate and come back to play the game later.”

“That is troublesome.” Now Niko stopped eating, but he’d nearly finished his meal, depriving me of fork vengeance. “What do you mean by ‘game’?”

“Trying to kill each other,” I said uncomfortably. This was something new: to Nik and me. It was something I’d not felt with the pure Auphe and probably wouldn’t feel with Grimm if I hadn’t given up part of my humanity months ago to get back all of my memories and to save Nik’s life.

“I thought you said he needed you alive and cooperative, and trying to kill each other is a game?” he demanded.

“Yeah.” I speared a piece of chicken and looked at it instead of my brother. He had never looked at me with disappointment, but I didn’t want to see the first time if it came. “It’s the only game Auphe play with one another. I didn’t know before the Nevah’s Landing amnesia-fest.” I heard the rasp of Niko’s hand touching cloth and knew he was touching the tattoo through his shirt. I didn’t regret it, becoming less human and more Auphe. It’d been for Nik. Even without a single Auphe gene in me, I wouldn’t have been much of a human being if Niko hadn’t been around all my life. Mom would’ve needed a dictionary to look up the phrase “good influence.”

“But now I feel it, felt it when I saw Grimm. I want to kill the bastard because he’s Auphe, a murderer, a monster, because it’s justice, but I also want to…play.”

“If one of you kills the other, how does that help the son of a bitch’s plan?” Niko asked with an edge of confusion and of that anger he rarely showed…until Kalakos had shown up, which was yet another problem to be handled.

“If he kills me, I wasn’t good enough to be part of the Second Coming or father the new race. If I kill him, he wouldn’t be good enough either. It’s a test too. Like him siccing Janus on me is a test.” I gave up on the food. I’d eat after I showered. “But mainly it’s a game he hopes we’ll survive long enough to complete his plan.”

“You can’t think that it’s actually…”

“Fun?” The grin crawled across my face of its own volition. I tried to hold it back, but I couldn’t. “It is so much fucking fun I can hardly goddamn stand it.”

And I could see then that while I didn’t regret handing over a slice of my human pie to save Niko’s life, he did. “Shit.” I exhaled. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry. But I couldn’t let you die, Nik. I couldn’t do it.”

“I know.” He wrapped a rough arm around my neck, squeezed, and bumped his forehead lightly against mine. “I’d have done the same damn thing. It might not be the right thing for the world, but sometimes the world has to take a backseat.”

He straightened. “You’re not worried as much that Grimm will kill you; you’re worried that he’s…” He searched for the right word, Nik who knew every word, all the time. I think he didn’t want to say it.

I said it for him. “Contagious. The asshole is contagious.” I’d seen him once now and I was running down the dark road as fast as I could go, and there was no slowing down. I’d tried. Part of me was running, part of me was pushing, and part of me was trying to turn around. That last part was small now, too small to have a chance of holding its own. It was slowing me some, though. All parts of me were stubborn, large or small.

“I’m less worried about him turning Janus loose on us again than just seeing the bastard.” Ah, the hell with it. If I let this shit stop me from eating, I’d starve to death in a week, because we weren’t solving the Grimm situation that quickly or easily. I pulled the bowl back and went to work.

“If he finds out you’re limited to three gates—two, actually—that could be much more of a problem.”

Unworthy and spoiled, crippled and useless.

I shook my head and smiled at him. A real smile, the kind I saved for the brother who’d raised me and no one else. It was completely human and completely genuine. “He won’t find out,” I lied, because how could I know? But the lie was the best thing I could give Nik. I didn’t want him blaming himself for the gates. If he hadn’t given Rafferty the okay to rewire me, limit me, I might have gone all Auphe by now, reached the bottom of the road a long time ago. Chances were high.

Besides, Nik was wrong—it wouldn’t be a problem if Grimm found out.

He’d kill me.

But Niko was also right. Sometimes with family the world takes a backseat, but sometimes it doesn’t—not when you were the family, the solution, and the problem…problems.

And when your problems are going full monster and helping create a new race to enslave or slaughter humanity…

Death solves them all.

I was swatted awake the next morning by a paper in the face. It was rolled up and I wondered briefly if I’d piddled on the couch. “Up and at ’em, couch thief. Janus came back last night and wiped out about half an acre of Central Park. At least I’d say it’s a reasonable assumption it was Janus, as the unnatural and unseen tornado out of a clear sky makes less sense, but is a weatherman’s wet dream. One drop of rain and they’re on TV yap-yap-yap, counting every drop, predicting the planet-threatening sprinkle but a mere five days away.”

I snatched the paper from Goodfellow’s hand as he kept yap-yap-yapping himself, to find it was in Chinese, which left me out. But there was a picture zoomed in on a circle of trees splintered and flattened. “Shit.” Central Park. “The boggles.” I’d come to the conclusion that Grimm wouldn’t mess with family or friends, but I hadn’t considered enemies. Some enemies can be more useful than friends on occasion. Then there were the kids.…“Jesus,” I groaned, and sat up, every muscle aching.

“You were right. Grimm is intelligent, too intelligent.” Niko was handing me some kind of sticky pastry with a napkin wrapped around it and a cup of coffee. I looked at both blankly for a good minute before I recognized what they were and what to do with them. Morning was not my thing. “He may have gone after something we value but can’t claim as family. It’s a fine line, if it’s one he’s indeed walking.”

I grunted and ate. “Go?”

“Yes, I think we should. The area that was destroyed isn’t close to the boggle pit, but it’s not far enough for comfort either. And there is no other reason for Janus to have been there. We weren’t.”

“Games.” One in which Grimm was several moves ahead of me. Did he think I cared enough about the boggles to come after him? Or that I cared that they were too useful for him to be screwing with? He was outlining the boundaries, dipping a toe in the water to see if Caliban the shark snapped at his leg and pulled him under. He wanted to know how far he could push, yet keep the possibility of my changing teams. Observation had shown him how I felt about family and friends; now he wanted to know how I felt about others.

Did I know myself? You can spend enough time with a monster that would rip off your arm like a turkey leg if you eventually let yourself get used to it. A give and take that goes on for years. Information for pay. Sparring for experience. As long as you’re equally matched and you both can walk away…some were convenient to have around. Like Boggle and her litter.

“I need more coffee,” I mumbled. “Lots more coffee.”

We’d gone home. All of us. We needed it. A respite. Several near-deaths and death itself called for it. Home was the closest thing to putting you right, particularly when you’d spent most of your life on the run: your mother from the cops, you from the Auphe. When you do find a place you can stop, own things that are more than can be packed in a garbage bag, you don’t take it for granted.

Robin went back to his condo and mummified cats. Niko and I returned to the garage apartment that was drenched in two or three inches of water from a new skylight, a gift of Janus. Everything in the main area was ruined…except the couch that I’d gated to Goodfellow’s condo when the automaton had come through our roof. The TV was dead from the rain that had run down the wall. I didn’t mourn as the boggles mourned, but I wasn’t happy about it either. The workout mats were underwater, as was the rest of the floor. Everything was wet and already smelling of mold.

It made no difference in the end. It was home. Correction: It was home for two of us. The third, Kalakos, it was not his home. But until Janus was taken care of, he had no intention of staying in a hotel.

That he was around to have intentions or a lack of them, he should’ve been damn thankful. He’d made an attempt to keep Niko from going after Robin and me in Boggle’s pit. He’d said it was too late. We were gone and they had the boglets coming for them. He was doing what he could to save Niko as he’d saved him before from the Cyclops.

He could’ve thought he was doing the right thing. He hadn’t seen Niko grow up, but in the past two days I’d have thought he’d have learned that, hell, no, what he did wasn’t the right thing. When it came to Niko’s manner of thinking, what he’d done was a crime, a sword the punishment, the homicide justifiable, and the justice karmic.

But bottom line to the philosophy of Niko’s morals and what flipped them upside down was simple: Don’t insult his brother, don’t fuck with his brother, and don’t get between him and his brother.

“I was doing what I could to keep him alive. I thought you and the puck were beyond hope. Do you think I was wrong?”

My bedroom was relatively dry, thanks to my habit of keeping my dirty laundry as well as most of my clean laundry on the floor. It was a system. It worked and it had soaked up the water that we splashed through in every other room.

Coming home was necessary and going into my room was a second homecoming. I was able to wear my own clothes after showering off the mud from the park. I’d lucked out and done a load of laundry the morning before Janus had attacked us. I’d dumped half of it on and half off my unmade bed. I wouldn’t have to wear something off the floor that’d have to dry on my body. I put on my holster and shrugged into my jacket. The first had been ripped to shreds by Janus when he’d attacked me outside the Ninth Circle. But I had backups. The holsters and jackets were the two things I didn’t leave on the floor. I hung them from four hooks I’d jammed into the wall. I had three of each, three holsters and three jackets. The holsters hung on one hook, but each jacket had its own. I used hangers, believe it or not, but I took my jackets seriously.

“Was I wrong?” Kalakos demanded with a sharpness that was a clue to how he went about his business…with impatience that would lead to threats and on to the results of those threats. Then the inevitable boring cleanup of whatever was left. When it came to personality and ethics (too much of one and not enough of the other), he should’ve been my father. He was nothing like Niko.

“I heard you,” I answered. “I’m thinking. Shut up and wait.”

The jacket felt good. Leather, comfortable, and ready to load up. I was me again. A man wasn’t a man without a cool jacket…the coolness factor measured by the fact that while wearing one I could carry enough weapons to make me my own walking WMD.

“Nope. I don’t think you were wrong.” I had thought, but I doubted Kalakos would get it. How do you explain the color red to someone who’s been blind since birth?

I reached under my bed and pulled out a locker. It was army-sized, but waterproof. Opening it, I chose the Desert Eagle I’d taken back from Grimm, Eagle against Eagle, because I had no doubt he had one of his own. I backed it up with my SIG Sauer. “Keeping Nik safe is it. Number one priority for me.” I started shoving clips in my pockets.

“Then you see.” He yanked the tie from his hair and shoved fingers through it in clear frustration. “Then why won’t he? I want my son back. We were making progress and now this.” I felt his eyes on me, questioning. I didn’t meet them. He’d been gone twenty-six years. That was too late for wanting big-eyed fucking tearful reassurance from me. “If it had been you I’d have held back,” Kalakos pushed, “with Niko already beyond reach and gone, you would’ve understood.”

When I’d moved the locker from under my bed, I’d turned it and myself to the side to keep Kalakos in the periphery of my vision from where he stood in the doorway. Force of habit with any stranger…and the majority of those I knew. I trusted my back to four…eh, two people. That was it. “Oh yeah, I’d understand,” I said without emotion. “If you’d tried to hold me back from getting to Nik, no matter what the odds, I’d understand you’d be breathing through a bullet hole in your throat.”

From the locker, I picked three knives: serrated combat, two throwing blades, and left room for the xiphos. A small sword, it fit in my jacket in a holster that held two guns and a smallish sword against my back. It wasn’t comfortable, but it made the grade of concealed weapon. Lastly I slipped a switchblade in my pocket with the ammunition clips. Unfortunately I’d used my last grenade in the black market on that mutated octopus. I hadn’t stocked up on those lately. Getting lazy. I didn’t bother with the flamethrower. Janus was made of impervious metal and filled with some type of lavalike substance. It’d think a flamethrower was a refreshing shower or a damn sex toy.

Shoving the trunk back under my bed with a solid kick, I stood from my crouch. My combat boots were wet, but they would’ve been wet from walking through the several inches of water anyway. They’d dry. “I’m going to cut you a break because you did save Nik at least once. But I know you won’t get it. You look like Nik, but you’re not half as smart, and wanting to invest in emotions for your son now? Is ‘too late’ not in your vocabulary? But since you want to try…”

It was Nik. I didn’t know what he wanted when it came to Kalakos, because he didn’t know what he wanted. I’d do my best to leave the door open, though—in case that’s what he decided.

“So listen, Kalakos. Concentrate.” Now I did meet his eyes, and he didn’t care for it. It didn’t matter that Niko and I had eyes of the same gray. The color wasn’t what counted. There were things in my eyes that no one would ever see in Nik’s. That no one would see in anyone’s eyes…except maybe Grimm’s.

“I’d do anything to save my brother. Anything.” I’d proven that. Some lived to regret it, most didn’t, and I hadn’t given a rat’s ass once.

“And he’d do the same for me. He has done the same,” I went on. “Think it through. He risks his life for mine. Then I see the mess he’s gotten himself into while pulling my ass out of the fire, and I’m right back in after him. Same risk. Same mess. Then back it goes again. Vicious circle, I think they call it.”

“That’s all but suicide,” he snapped. He was stunned, angry, and me? I was not giving a rat’s ass all over again. If he wanted a say in Niko’s life, he would’ve shown up sooner.

I ignored the comment. “And if we’re too far from each other and it’s too late”—I shrugged—“vengeance has nothing to do with the Lord. Cain was wrong. I am my brother’s keeper. And Niko’s mine.”

“That is suicide, plain and simple.”

“You said it yourself, Father Kalakos. Niko is who he is because of me. I am who I am because of him. For me that won’t stop. I’m terminal and Nik is my chemo. He keeps me human and he keeps me sane.” For as long as he could. I walked toward the door and Kalakos took a few reluctant steps back. He’d said I wasn’t a monster like the Bae, but I didn’t think he or I actually believed it.

“Niko,” I reflected, “I don’t know what he would’ve been without me. Not you. Absolutely not you. Better off? Maybe. Able to love, like he loves Promise? To trust, like he trusts Goodfellow? I don’t know. And neither does he.”

“It’s insane. Friends and family grieve and go on when people die. They don’t jump in the grave after them. People live on.”

“Yeah, people do.” I brushed past him in the hall and left him behind. People mourn and move on.

Certain monsters and heroes don’t.

If I could respect cattle, an impossible, stupid notion, but if I could, I might almost respect the human Caliban claimed to be his brother. He was devious and sly. I liked both of those qualities. He wasn’t bad with a sword either, but he was cattle and I couldn’t respect one of them whatever their talent. And he was human, and that was the reason he wasn’t Caliban’s brother.

As if a human could be part of us. That made me want to gag. Their blood was in us, I knew, but it was disappearing. The Auphe cells are more efficient than any virus in existence. They touched the human cells or enveloped them or excreted a contagion.…I didn’t know or think about it as long as it worked.

And it did work. It turned them. Human became Auphe. We ate humans in this form, a farmer surprised in his field—he’d tasted of pork, and our cells ate human cells in turn on the inside of the form. It was a slow process by human standards, but a whirlwind to an Auphe or a half Auphe who planned to live as long as the First.

Efficiency beats fear and war on every occasion. The Auphe hadn’t known that.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

They had the tools, but not the schooling. Instead they attempted to make a thing that could make a gate and the last of the First would meet the first of the First to end humans before they barely began, or keep them cave-bound and low in numbers. They had determination and luck and then bad luck.

One of my teachers had taught that invaluable lesson on efficiency by combining biology and history. He told us of some human seaport close to a thousand years ago with walls too thick to breach…for humans. The attacking army came down with the plague and, smarter than your average cow, catapulted their diseased dead over the walls into the city. Those cowering there were then infected and that battle was over. That teacher—I had so many, learned so much—went on to say it did little good in the end, as the plague swept the continent and most of the humans died.

Flying humans: dead, rotting, and crawling with contamination. An entire continent all but wiped out. Cattle inventing a new way to kill, cunning enough to do tricks not unlike dogs do for treats.

All that comedy, and I missed it. It would’ve been hilarious.

I ate that teacher too, but I did pat him on his balding head first for the excellent job he’d done. He’d tasted of roots and rice and beans. A vegetarian. One bite and I’d spit it out. Evil. No good deed goes unpunished. That was my first and last plant eater.

I could taste the vegatation now and wished I’d broken every bone in his body instead of only his neck. And I took back the pat. Grass eaters could have all the knowledge in the world, but no one who tasted that bad deserved a pat.

Disappointing, and the memory of his flavor was making me want to vomit. I sighed and continued to wrap a bandage around my chest. I’d leave it until the edges of the two sword cuts meshed back together. I healed faster than the other half Auphe had. I thought I healed faster than the Auphe themselves had. I laughed at that. More proof I was above them. I’d told Caliban we were evolution in motion.

Or had I told myself that?

Or the Bae?

Who knew?

I didn’t worry. My memory was fine. Top of my class. Top…of…my…class. I didn’t remember, because I didn’t care. I was all that mattered. My plan all that mattered. Memories came and went, but I didn’t forget a single part of the plan. The plan that was born of the only beautiful thing I’d known in my life: biology. There was more to it than plague and flying bodies.

Although those were as beautiful too.

I’d always been the most Auphe of the others in Nevah’s Landing—insane and weak every one—and years later the Auphe in me had grown, then continued to grow and spread. When I took biology…I’d enjoyed throwing the irritating lab tech off the roof. Him I had no desire to eat. He was greasy and flabby with the stench of STDs following him like a cloud. How he’d gotten anyone, even a whore, to give them to him was a mystery. And loud. He was loud enough to puncture my eardrums. Off he had to go. I didn’t leave that class. I wasn’t finished and he was an obvious suicide. He covered the sidewalk in an explosion of bacon-grease-coated syphilis. He…

Where was I? Where was I? Where…

Biology.

I’d learned and what I learned combined with what I knew and felt happening in me. It wasn’t hard to figure out. The Auphe were the first predators of merit on earth. Didn’t Sidle the warden tell us that enough? Brown-nosing, cocksucking shit.

The Auphe genes had survived and evolved the longest. Mixed with any others, they couldn’t lose. You could start out half Auphe, but given years—I didn’t know how many, but I could wait—all the human would be gone from the inside. Consumed. Perhaps the outside too. We’d see.

With time, you would become pure Auphe. And with us, better—smarter. Able to learn and knowing it necessary to learn. Auphe times two. The Second Coming.

Caliban’s cattle companion taught college classes. I’d watched. He’d taught Caliban because that’s what cattle companions, loyal and true, do. They would both know biology as I did. They would have seen the changes in Caliban over the years.

They knew.

But they didn’t know.

Because they didn’t want to know.

And so they would refuse to know.

Caliban could tell he was becoming more Auphe, but completely Auphe? He wouldn’t believe that. He’d think monster… stupid word… predator, crazed, thoughts and actions of an abnormal beast. Close to an Auphe, but not an Auphe. He was right, but not in the way he wanted to be. We would make the myth of Auphe forgotten with what we would be and the things we would do.

The Auphe would be nothing next to us.

Caliban would’ve been happier to be pure Auphe if he knew that.

But all he saw were snakes and a half-breed. He’d believe one day. Denial didn’t last forever when your hair turned silver, eyes red, your fake family became a pool of blood and flesh at your doing.

Denial couldn’t turn its back against that.

I rested against the Bae’s cavern wall. The separated succubae, can you imagine, weren’t fond of me. The rapists didn’t like the raper. Hypocritical worms. I pointed at the nearest Bae. “I’m hungry.”

It nodded and disappeared into the murk. The only light was from the small opening far above us. It was cooler down here. I enjoyed it. I liked the warmth, but up above was too warm a good deal of the time. I examined my hand that Caliban had put a blade through almost at the same moment I’d put mine through his. I’d played nice. I needed him for the Coming, whole, not a cripple—although he’d healed fast from Janus’s attack. I put the ice pick center and parallel in his hand. My need to accelerate the Coming made me weak in that one action.

Caliban hadn’t been. He’d slammed his blade home transverse. He’d broken bone, torn tendon, sliced through nerves—doing the worst damage he could. He’d said he’d won that round. The son of a bitch had been right. While I needed things from him, he didn’t need a thing from me. And if I broke his new rule—stay away from his cattle—he would splatter his brain with whatever gun he happened to have in hand.

But I’d known that before he told me. Watching, watching, thinking. He was still the smallest measure too human to let that go. I’d always planned to let him solve the cattle problem himself when he was ready, and he would when he finally became what he’d always been born to be. What the Auphe themselves had never imagined could exist beyond them.

I tried to move my hand, but I could hardly twitch my fingers. I could try for anger, but…he was a worthwhile opponent. The only one I’d had. I’d heal sooner or later and the game was the game. If it didn’t hurt, if you were positive you wouldn’t die, why the hell would you play?

“Food, Father.” The Bae was back with a large chunk of meat. It had been skinned, but one whiff said what it was. Wolf. Not desert wolf, but werewolf. They were one of my favorites. They weren’t difficult to catch or slaughter, but they had a strong taste. Wolves had an appetite for anything. When you ate one of them, it was a regular buffet of tastes. Human and non.

I took it and dropped it in my lap before whipping out Caliban’s switchblade and pressing it against the Bae’s neck. “Are you afraid?”

It opened its mouth to hiss at me, black cobra fangs ready, red eyes unblinking. “No, Father. It’s the game. We play it too…some of us. From your stories.”

I narrowed my eyes in thought. “How old are you?”

“Ten years, Father.”

Ah, one of my first. “When does the fear go? How many years before the corruption of your breeding lizard bitches passes?” Caliban and his shitty assessment of my new race. Fearful. Little snakes. If he couldn’t force himself to accept what he was becoming, he couldn’t accept what my children would become, and, as rapidly as they matured, faster than he could think.

Imagine any of it, he couldn’t yet.

Lie, lie, lie, lie to yourself. That will only lose you the game and by then maybe make you eager to join the Coming. You can’t fight what is in you if you cannot admit it’s there.

“Five, Father. Some four. Some six. Some never. But at five years the fear usually goes.”

I was thinking how I’d like to be in Caliban’s face to tell him that—while perhaps cutting out that lying tongue—but a rumbling from outside distracted me. Janus. Time to put him back down until tonight. For a machine made for nothing but murder, my favorite hobby, it was nothing but an unholy pain in the ass to keep penned.

After tonight that wasn’t my worry anymore.

If anyone was still alive after this round, it was my gift to them.

Merry Second Coming.

Tonight at Fort Tilden. There went the two more days I needed to gate Janus to Tumulus, inescapable graveyard of radioactive bones and assholes like this that couldn’t die. We could run to get those two days, but Grimm would take it out on someone. Someone I couldn’t claim to care about to include in my protective circle, someone I might not know, but someone who didn’t deserve to die.

Or might. Taking that attitude would turn the dark road into a vertical slide. Holding on to the human in me was what I had. I’d use it to my last goddamn breath.

“Niko, I know Grimm, Christ, in a way you can’t. You have to listen when I tell you what to do when it comes to him,” I said as I tried to call Goodfellow. I didn’t get through but he had changed his voice mail message to say that if this was the Hardy Boys, he’d had another idea about Janus. He’d call us when he found out something. After three more calls, I gave up. I left the info on Fort Tilden and Janus. He’d call back sooner or later. His facing Janus with us was nothing compared to what we’d faced with the puck reunion.

“Again, when do you listen to me?” Niko demanded with a snort when I flipped the phone shut. “Particularly if someone stabbed me in the hand and seemed inclined to chew off my face with metal teeth?” On the way home from the bar, he’d bought a laptop with an extra battery, as the rain that had filled the place had knocked out the electricity. “We listen, but if we see an opportunity, we take it. I saw one. I took it.” He magnified the picture on the screen. “I was wary of trying to cut off his head. I thought he might see the swing of the blade out of the corner of his eye. I was in the right. Stop complaining.”

“Then why do I have to listen to you bitch for hours if I see a big fat opportunity and don’t do what you say?” I demanded.

“Big-brother prerogative.” He was staring at the screen, a satellite close-up of Fort Tilden. He was memorizing it. He had all that crap on his phone too, but bigger is better for imprinting rough terrain on your brain cells.

“You are such an ass,” I grouched before pushing up to sit on the breakfast counter beside him. “How’d you do it anyway? Neither one of us saw you, heard the door…although you have the ninja-stealth thing going on, but we didn’t smell you either. That much closer to us and we should’ve noticed how much stronger your scent was. You were like frigging Houdini.”

“I was able to do it because you and that misbegotten megalomaniacal would-be ruler of the world have three things in common.” He handed me the computer. “Arrange to meet that supplier of yours, Rapture. We’ll need all the explosives she has in stock.”

I sent an innocent, Let’s grab pizza today at five. My treat, e-mail. “Let’s grab lunch” meant I was in the market to buy. “Today” meant today or not again, and no one could afford to lose my business in weaponry. “My treat” meant I was willing to pay double if the shit was good, exotic, and plentiful.

“Okay, done. Now tell me what Grimm and I have in common.” His being aware that I could have been Grimm in another life was not what I wanted to know, but I could live with it. Not comfortably, but it was doable, knowing that except for one omission of Sidle’s to the Auphe a possibility would’ve been a stone-cold certainty. Past is past. Telling Nik and the others the way things might have been was one thing. Having my brother tell me the same was a knife in the gut. He was the one who told me it wasn’t true. That was what got me through and made me believe it part of the time.

“Not what I wish you’d shown back then.” He looked at my hand when he said the words, the large puncture flushed, stitched, and wrapped in a bandage cleaner than a bar towel. And there’d been another shot instead of ointment. Hands were more prone to infection than most body parts. Nushi didn’t have to teach Nik that. We’d seen that ourselves years before Nushi and we both remembered. Niko had come close to dying from a bite. Not a Wolf bite, but a dog bite.

Like he’d said, back then…

Three hours later we were going into a bakery on Melbourne Avenue. Robin hadn’t called back yet and that was beginning to worry me. Niko had called Promise to check on his condo and we were waiting to hear back from her. It wasn’t like Goodfellow. Okay, honestly, it was like him with everyone else, but not with us and not now.

The bakery wasn’t much to look at. Plain. Blue and pink cupcakes had been painted on the smallish window by hand, and not a good one. The paint was peeling now, giving them a slowly advancing case of sugar leprosy. But as with most dives, that’s where the food was the best. When I opened the door, the smell was unbelievable. Bread, pies, fudge, and ten kinds of cake. The place was called Rapture’s Buns. The paint on that was flaking too, but it wasn’t making the business suffer. The place was full of people lined up at a glass case, squabbling over who was first in line and snatching free samples off the top of the counter.

Repeat customers like me didn’t have to go through that. Rapture bumped them to the front, actually the back technically, as soon as you walked in. She saw me as she was putting a cake in a box and handed it over to one of the guys who worked for her. They were all guys. All tough, some with prison tats, but all good-looking. Rapture liked her baking harem.

She beckoned impatiently toward the door in the back. “Bebé, where have you and your hermano, el buenorro, been? My best customers and you desert me. Where is the lealtad these days? Ay, the world, she is falling apart when my children starve because your wallet is too tight to buy some of my sweets.” She didn’t have kids, but it was a good line when bargaining.

Rapture had been thrown into hooking when she was sixteen, two years after coming over from Puerto Rico. Her favorite line had been, “My name be Rapture, honey. I’m so good, sugar pie, I’ll make you see God.” I think she came up with the line first and then picked her street name. I had no idea how big she’d been then, but she was large enough now to bring her chosen name to the whole world or at least an entire continent. I had a feeling she’d been close to the same big and beautiful three hundred and fifty some-odd pounds she was now as when she’d shot her pimp’s cousin at the same time she sat on her pimp’s head and suffocated him. She said they called him Tiny Tino for a reason. It was a good story and I believed it.

After two years of hooking she’d decided it was time for a career change. She loved telling her success story. It gave hope to other whores with stupid pimps, she said. Tino had a cousin who sold weapons, and he made money Tino couldn’t dream of. And he didn’t have to give blow jobs in alleys. She watched and learned and made that profit when she brought the Rapture to Tino and shot the cousin with one of his own guns. Of course, then it was her gun and that was a quicker profit than a BJ any day. Now Rapture was thirty-five and not the only gunrunner in the city, but one of the top ones. And she gave you a free cupcake with every purchase. How the hell can you beat that?

We’d left Kalakos driving the car around a few blocks until we were finished. With what I was buying, those random checks on public transportation these days would give a transit cop a heart attack and have us running before the government buried us so far under that the word “lawyer” was a myth.

She closed the door behind us and stripped off her baker’s jacket and hairnet. The last thing she’d want was the health department coming around and finding even the rats carried Uzis. She fluffed her curly black hair and pulled down a sequined tube top that Niko, Kalakos, and I all three could’ve stood in. “I had the boob job. What do you think? I have money. Why should I not give the angels a look at what they’re missing?”

They were perky, and as she was half an alphabet past a D cup, that made me both doubt gravity existed and think she had one damn talented doctor…who used concrete instead of silicone. “They’re…damn. I’ll bet men fight to the death for you when you walk down the street.” Hey, I didn’t want to get shot by my supplier. If they made her happy, good for her. For someone who sold guns and had put a few people six feet under, she wasn’t bad.

She hugged me thoroughly until my bones creaked and I was inhaling sequins. I heard the click in Niko’s throat he made when he was desperately trying not to laugh. His laughter was rare and I’d have wanted to hear it if it weren’t at my expense and would get him shot as well. Rapture let go of me, pulled up the glittering top again, and then waved her arms. “So? What is it you need? Wait. My book.” Opening the book, she flipped pages and ran a finger down.

“Ah, here. Cachorro Gruñón.” She didn’t know any of her customers’ real names in case the police ever tracked her down. She gave us code names, and I got Grouchy Puppy, as I’d started buying from her when we’d first moved to New York. I’d been seventeen. Apparently that had gotten me “Puppy.” “Grouchy” I’d earned on my own. She always tried to get me to smile. At that point I was being chased by the entire Auphe race. I didn’t have a lot to smile about.

“Yes, tsk, you take vacation? You should be low on everything. Explosive rounds. Jaivin made a good batch last night. Your usual forty?”

“Nah. Thirty should do it. They’re not quite getting it done on my current job. What I really need is about twenty grenades,” I’d want some spares around if we survived Janus. “C4 with military detonators, all you have. A grenade launcher. A little more distance than my pitching arm would be a good thing.”

Her round face beamed. “With this, I might get the butt lift too. Very popular in Brazil.” She wrote a couple of check marks in her book and then, unusually, scribbled what looked like three words. “I am sorry, Cachorro. I sold my last grenade launcher last week. Am waiting on new batch to fall off truck. But lucky, lucky you, bebé, I have something that would have you spit on that. I have a thing of such beauty. For almost a year, it sits sad and unwanted on the shelf. I should know you would be the one to buy it. To appreciate the virilidad magnifico.”

I knew a few Spanish words, but that wasn’t one of them. I glanced at Nik. “Virility,” he supplied dryly. That sounded right. If it swung a bigger metaphorical dick than a grenade launcher, bring it on.

She opened yet another door at the back of the room and shouted, “Marco, bring us the Javelin.”

That word I knew, and not in the Olympic throwing-competition category. “You have an antitank rocket?” I asked, incredulous at that as I was at the fact that her tube top was staying up.

“An antitank system.” She planted a kiss on my cheek. I could feel the thick coating of bright red lipstick. I carefully waited to wipe it off until she was focused on Niko. Do not offend the woman with the antitank system. “Your puppy brother. He has vision and like all good men knows the perfect tool for the job.”

Niko said, “You mean as a terrorist would?”

She waved her hands vigorously. “I sell to no terrorist and your brother has good heart. He doesn’t want to think so. He hides it. But one day, you will see, your brother is a hero. One day he might save the world. My abuela had the sight. Me some too. You will see.”

Before I could tell her she’d better get some glasses for that sight, as she was way off about world saving and hearts, she was shouting again. “Marco, you lazy, worthless bastard. I have the order of the week. Are you back there with the porno magazines pulling on your polla again? I told you next time I would cut it off and bake it in a turkey-apple cobbler.” That was the Thanksgiving special. “This is work time, not pervertido time.”

Marco was up for the list in less than five seconds and his belt was buckled in the wrong hole, pants bagging low on his hips. I wouldn’t be eating the cobbler here for a while, on Thanksgiving or otherwise. While he was back pulling the inventory, Rapture added up the bill. “Since you are good customer, Cachorro, I will give you discount.” That and the fact that she was having a hard time selling the antitank rocket. Discount or no, it was about half a year’s pay. It was a good thing I’d brought almost all the cash we had on hand, because at this rate we’d be lucky to pay the six-fifty toll on our way to Tilden.

When we left, I was carrying three large bakery bags by white twine handles. Each bag had pink boxes with RAPTURE’S BUNS written in flowing white script. The boxes were cake-size but held C4, detonators, grenades, and a small box of explosive rounds. Niko was carrying the Javelin on his shoulder. It was wrapped in brown paper painted and dried ahead of time with garlic butter. As far as anyone was concerned, he was toting a piece of Italian bread almost four feet long…and close to thirty pounds.

“Grouchy Puppy.” This time Niko did laugh as we walked along the sidewalk waiting for Kalakos to come by. “She labeled you impeccably on your first visit.”

“I wouldn’t push it.” I snorted. “She thinks you’re my ‘hot brother.’ She’s got brand-new boobs ready to try out. I could tell her you’re up for some mountain climbing.”

Before he could get me back, and he would have, his cell rang. It was Promise. Robin’s condo was empty; his phone was gone; nothing appeared out of the ordinary except that our couch was still beside his. Salome and Spartacus weren’t perturbed. What would perturb a dead cat, I didn’t know, but they were batting around an old skull Goodfellow had given them. Yorick. It was their favorite toy. It seemed as if Goodfellow had taken his cell phone and gone. “What about his coat?” I prodded Niko. “He wouldn’t go out without his coat to cover his sword.”

Promise’s answer to that was that he had so many coats that Armani flew him free to Italy every year for the new line, and how could she possibly know if he’d gone on his own with a coat and sword or unwillingly without either.

Shit. Now I was worried. But it was Janus and Grimm prep time. Niko asked Promise to try to find the puck. We needed her help, but Robin might need it more. She said she would do her best. I heard her voice from Niko’s cell. Her best didn’t sound too enthusiastic. Granted, Goodfellow had tried to steal Niko from her, but Niko was straight. She should be over that. He had stolen some jewelry from her, had orgies in her penthouse when he’d been hiding out there on the run from an ancient Arabian death squad. He’d tried to give her two undead mummified cats out of the eleven I’d dumped in his condo. When she turned them down, he’d waited until she was out at dinner with Niko one night and given her three instead. Each had engraved collars: Vlad, Spike, and Elvira.

And they wouldn’t leave. As strong and quick as vampires are, Promise hadn’t been able to catch a single one. She was stuck with them and not a cat person. Every cat person knows that not liking them makes cats like you and enjoy torturing you all the more. I had no sympathy. If you weren’t an undead mummified cat person, there was something wrong with you.

“She sounded pissed,” I said after he disconnected.

“She is—a good deal lately.”

Women, can’t live with them. Can’t screw them without passing on monster-Auphe babies. It wasn’t fair.

“Maybe it’s because the cats line up on her headboard and watch the two of you when you have sex?” I suggested. “Jesus, finally. There’s Kalakos.” I waved him down.

“How did you…” Niko frowned. “I meant, that does not happen.”

I grinned at him. “Mummy cats talk, and I don’t know how, but Salome talks to Goodfellow.” I didn’t think she actually did. It was another trickster lie for the entertainment of it. “He had some tips for the two of you, but I told him if he wanted to keep his head, he might want to forget about that.” I put the bags in the trunk and went around to the passenger seat. Kalakos moved to the back and had the antitank rocket dumped in his lap by Nik. Hard. Who was the grouchy puppy now?

Niko got in the driver’s seat, silent until we were at the Brooklyn Bridge. “That son of a bitch.”

“He did say there was a position called the Seventh Posture from a book called The Perfumed Garden that for the not very skilled would improve—” I ducked and his hand smacked the window glass of the passenger door instead of me.

“One more word and that antitank rocket will be used on you, not Janus,” he threatened. He wasn’t serious, not completely serious. The thought of the puck having eyes and ears in your bedroom, that was worse than a sex tape on the Internet. That might be worse than anything in creation.

“We have an antitank rocket?” Kalakos asked, lifting his hands cautiously off the package that lay across his lap.

“You are definitely not in the union. When this is over, you should retire and go home to roll dice with the old men,” I said lazily, before tossing him one of the dozen cupcakes Rapture had given us. “A rocket is nothing.

“We once had a nuke.”

It was about seven when we made it past Rockaway Boulevard, turned left, and found a well-hidden restricted road. Restricted meaning: Park Here, Please. Niko drove around the horizontal metal pole that acted as a gate and his junkmobile disappeared into the tall grass. There was salt water saturating the air, and the sun hung low in a clear violet sky. If you were into nature, it was the place to visit.

Goodfellow hadn’t visited. He hadn’t shown up or called and Promise hadn’t found him yet at any of his usual haunts. Worried as I was, there was nothing we could do. Janus and Grimm would be coming soon. When the sun set would be a good guess. Grimm would think the dark would give him an advantage, but around Janus it wasn’t completely dark, with the red light pouring from its eyes and the cracks between the metal shields that constructed its outer shell.

I checked my phone one more time in case somehow I’d missed a call. Nothing. Shit. We were all, him and us, on our own now. At least he wasn’t going to be around Janus. That was something. A bleak hope but better than none at all. We hoisted the bakery bags and our other equipment and started hiking through the grass. It was taller than waist-high, not good terrain for the type of fighting we planned on. Or Nik and I planned on. Kalakos was protective of Niko now and a damn good sword fighter, but I’d told him before: He was out of his league. He was a babe in the woods with this gear, and babies didn’t need to be touching explosives or things that set them off.

When we reached the Battery Harris East portal we pried open the gates with a crowbar and not a lot of effort. Nothing erodes like salt water. We walked down the middle of the battery corridor and the two metal frames of what had once been working train tracks. My footsteps gritted against the concrete dust. Niko and Kalakos were ghosts. “What was this place?” Kalakos studied the passage and the graffiti on the walls.

“The Battery Harris. A battery for a gun, one of two large ones, during World War Two. The cannons were sixteen-inch bore, something for their time. The east and west batteries are about two hundred feet long, fifty feet tall, and eventually covered in concrete to keep the guns from being used against the country back then.” When Grimm had said Fort Tilden was the place, Niko had researched it until there was nothing he didn’t know about it. “It’s a tourist attraction now during the day.”

I jiggled our bags. “But maybe not after tomorrow.”

“Behave. Don’t bounce the weapons of mass destruction,” Niko said.

“It’s C4,” I complained. “Stable as it comes. More a weapon of minidestruction.” Depending on how much you had. If we weren’t used to keeping our identity hidden and avoiding credit cards, real or fake, like the plague, I’d have said we would’ve maxed them out on what I was hauling. All right, I’d give it to Nik…mass destruction wasn’t totally out of the ballpark.

Coming out into the open between the east and west batteries we kept moving as I said, “This is good. Like you said, Nik. It’s practically a small coliseum. Grimm will eat this up. Lions and Christians, bread and circuses.” The two structures about two hundred or more feet from each other hemmed in either end, and vegetation, thick and tightly intertwined, had grown tall enough to provide a natural wall on each side. It really was the next-best thing to a coliseum. Where was Russell Crowe in his leather skirt when you needed him?

Grimm hadn’t specified where at Fort Tilden he wanted us, but he wouldn’t have any difficulty. Either he would pick up our scent or Janus would find us, however Janus did that. We had problems, but that wasn’t one of them. After walking another hundred feet out of the first battery, I put down the bags and started opening cake boxes to mold gray bricks around the base of the powder magazine that sat square on the combination concrete road and track. It was about twenty feet high and had a large square entrance that the ammunition train would’ve gone through.

“How do you know for certain that’s where they’ll be?” Niko asked.

“Looking down on my victims, held up like an emperor, with my unstoppable gladiator beside me. It’s where I’d stand…if I were Grimm. Arrogant, remember?” I activated the receivers and handed Niko one of the two detonators I had. “Just in case.”

In case I lost mine or had no heartbeat or fingers left to press the button. The customary precautions. Then I took one of the two duffel bags we’d given a mystified Kalakos to carry and took out a can of spray paint. Neon glow-in-the-dark red. Another prop to Grimm’s ego. Niko had been right.

Practical was the way to go.

Playing the Auphe game for a human reason wasn’t.

And I thought people couldn’t change. This was me changing my ways.

As Niko observed, I shook the can and sprayed a large circle around the magazine. I’d stomped down the shorter grass that had sprung up through the cracks in the concrete and the paint went on fairly evenly. Outside of the circle I sprayed symbols. They looped, came to odd points, tangled with one another, turned jagged, insane, and forbidding as anything written.

“And that would be?” he questioned. I hadn’t mentioned this part to Nik. It wasn’t a weapon, unless you counted psychological ones. It might not do shit, but then again it might. If ever there was a time to pull out all the stops, this was it.

“Grimm can’t speak Auphe.” I started spraying the English translation in yet another ring around it. “He hates that. He hates that I can. From the two years they had me, I know some. I don’t remember it, like I don’t remember anything else from then. If I tried to say something in it now, I couldn’t. It just comes to me…sometimes. But Grimm doesn’t know that.” He’d know…know that I thought I was more Auphe than he was, mouthing their dead words, but Grimm didn’t know anything about what I felt when it came to that.

It didn’t mean it wouldn’t burn his ass.

For a guy who thought he was superior to the Auphe, he had a thing about which of us had the most of them in us. He was a conflicted son of a bitch. Black sheep often were. Your family of monsters throws you in a cage and has you tortured and you hate them for it. Your family of monsters throws you in a cage and has you tortured, but you want their acceptance.

Now, that was pathetically human.

“How often is sometimes?” Niko inquired, hiding that he was uneasy about that. But not hiding it very well.

“Hardly ever. Like two or three times when I was really pissed off, but only with Auphe.” Or the Auphe in me. “Nobody else brings it out.” I finished up and stood to look at my masterpiece. The English read, “It’s only an illiterate human half-breed with the cock of a herpes-ridden, snake-raping sheep who can’t speak or read the tongue of the First.”

“Grammatically atrocious, but effective,” Niko admitted.

“Grimm is as conceited as you”—I elbowed my brother—“about his intelligence. This has a chance of pissing him off so badly that control will be the last thing on his mind.”

Kalakos glanced at the circles and rapidly away. “Evil magic,” he said with dark accusation. “Those are the words of demons. They will drive us to madness.”

“Unless I spray it in your eyes, it won’t do shit to you or anyone.” I snorted and tossed the empty can of paint to Nik. “The Auphe spoke, but they didn’t write. No written language. I copied this from that spooky little girl two blocks down who’s always writing on the sidewalk. It’s gibberish.”

“Actually I think it’s Hungarian.” Niko tilted his head.

Huh. “Could be. Her place smells of goulash a lot. The good spicy kind.”

He put the paint can in his bag, folded up the bakery boxes and bags, and stuffed them in there too before splitting the grenades between the two of us. “I’ll be at twelve o’clock. Kalakos at eight. You at four. Let’s not make goulash of one another. Kalakos, stay back as far as you can until we blow it all. Once the C4 goes—and if it doesn’t do the job—you won’t have accurate enough hearing to count the grenades.” He started to offer the Javelin to me, but I shook my head.

“Grimm will definitely be after me. Janus could be after us all. Better you have it. The instruction manual’s taped to the side.” One last joke.

“And I get nothing?” Kalakos demanded. “I can and have fought with the best of them. I helped Niko escape the Cyclops. If this is all you expect of me, you should’ve left me in the car until it was done.”

“You ever used a grenade?” I asked. “A rocket? A goddamn nuke? I didn’t think so. If I’m going to be killed, I’d rather it be by Janus or Grimm than because you miscounted and threw a grenade down my throat. So hang back. Niko and I will be doing the same thing. And if we’re screwed and none of the explosives do the job—here.” I gave him back his xiphos. “So far it’s the only thing that has made Janus think twice.”

I slapped Niko on his shoulder. “See you when I see you.”

He cuffed the back of my head as he walked behind me to pick up his bag. “The Javelin has night sight. I’ll be seeing you the whole time.”

“Wait.” I pulled a ponytail holder out of my pocket…the hell with Kalakos’s identical one…and yanked my hair back tightly. Praise Jesus. I could see. “And now I can see you. Later, big brother.”

He lifted his hand, his lips curled smugly, having gotten his way. “Later, little brother.”

We all separated and headed into three different directions, burrowing into the greenery. It was almost impossible, it being as unyielding and densely woven as a prison fence, but using my combat knife, I made my way in about six feet. Grimm would know I was there. He would find me by scent and feel me as well. But knowing I was there and knowing where I was within several feet weren’t the same.

Six feet back, he wouldn’t see me, as the branches, leaves, and grass had all sprung back into place—which was important. He wore those sunglasses all the time for a reason, and not just because his eyes were red. I hadn’t inherited the Auphe heightened ability to see in the dark, but it was safe to say he had. Six feet back and hidden by nature. Six feet close and ready to blow the C4 with backup grenades in the smallish bag that I had looped from left shoulder to right hip. It woudn’t interfere much if I had to unholster my Glock with my left hand while either setting off the detonator with my right or using it to throw grenades. All assuming my left hand cooperated.

I flexed it and gritted my teeth. I straightened it, then flexed it again. This time I tasted the blood of a teeth-torn bottom lip. Now I knew. Cooperation was not on the menu, but I’d make do. If it’s not broken or severed, you can make it work and the hell with the pain. I wasn’t taking the pain pills. I’d rather hurt than lose my edge. I checked my phone one more time. It was the same. Nothing. Goddamn it, Goodfellow, I thought, your horny ass had better be alive. Then I turned the phone to vibrate and slipped it in my front jeans pocket.

The sun set and Mars rose. Mosquitoes swarmed about, but after one bit me, it and the others buzzed off. Like that succubus had once made clear: They did not like the way I tasted. I was about to check the phone again when I felt him.

Grimm was here. On the beach maybe. I didn’t try to see. It would be impossible through the New York version of the Amazon jungle. And if he was on the beach, he wouldn’t be there long. I was right. I could feel him moving…gating…triangulating our scent. There was the familiar flash of gray, silver, and black light on top of the Battery East and then they were there…on the powder magazine.

The king of the Second Coming and his malignant windup toy.

It was dark, but the night wasn’t as deep as you’d think. Janus glowed. I thought it would, but not like this. The crimson, in heat and color, that outlined each metal shield that scaled him like a dragon lit up the entire top of the powder magazine. Its eyes were lamps to lead the dead, and the face with the grinning mouth and pointed ebony teeth was half turned my way. I could see the liquid twin to lava running slowly out of its mouth. Whatever had made this had made it in a volcano and you couldn’t tell me any different. Its mouth wasn’t big enough to throw virgins into, but other than that…volcano god.

“I like this place, Caliban,” Grimm said as the gate died around him and Janus. “If nothing else, you take the game higher with every throw of the dice and rattle of the bones.” The light from Janus was enough to let me see the half Auphe take a step to see over the side of their royal stage. He wanted a three-sixty view of his victory ring. He got something else instead. He walked the top, all four sides, reading the Hungarian goulash recipe and the English pseudo-translation that went with it. Every word that shone on the ground.

Graffiti to outrage the ego.

When he finished, he halted, facing me precisely. I’d been wrong that he couldn’t nail down my precise location, but I hadn’t been wrong about his being pissed. His eyes made the long-set sun as nothing. His Auphe teeth were down, the silver reflecting the red aura around the magazine, turning the metal needles into flickering flames.

“Why would I want to befoul my tongue or my eyes with the scribbling of a race that let one miserable half human destroy what was left of it?” He didn’t gate to the ground. He leaped, hitting the dirt at the base of the magazine. He made the jump down as if it had been three feet instead of twenty. It threw me off. My thumb was on the detonator, but I’d expected to see the swirl of a gate as I pressed the button. The physical action of it rather then the Auphe one put me off for a fraction of a second before I recovered.

The detonator Rapture had sold me had an inch-tall antenna and was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. I’d dealt with C4 once or twice—some monsters are bigger than others—but I hadn’t used this much of it before on any job. It should have an approximate blast zone of thirty feet. I pressed the button on the detonator and blew that motherfucker before Grimm could gate this time or take a single step. There was a very nonstereotypical war-movie boom. Or rather…

BOOM!

Holy shit. As far back as I’d been, six feet into the weeds, which was a good fifty feet from the powder magazine, I was thrown back farther. I didn’t have any idea how far. The branches and twigs of the wild bushes whipped at me as I was tossed, but didn’t make it through my jacket. As I’d been crouching when I set off the explosive, my back was clearing a path for me. When I landed, I considered myself pretty damn lucky.

And then something else landed…on top of me. Grimm. The son of a bitch had escaped a mess of C4. Outgated an explosion that to human eyes would be instantaneous. Why the hell he wanted my help, I was beginning to wonder. Why he was enraged I could speak Auphe and he couldn’t, that I knew. The Auphe had made him and thrown him away like garbage. Said he was garbage. He hated them, but he wanted to prove to them they were wrong. He was something they couldn’t have thought possible to create: He was the first of nature’s second big fucking mistake, not the Bae. No supernatural creature thought the Auphe evolved—why would the perfect predator need to evolve? Yet they had. Grimm wanted to prove it to them, except they were gone and I was the only thing left of them. But why he thought I could be his equal, was almost his equal, was fit to wipe his royal Bae-siring ass, much less help breed his race, I didn’t know.

Outgated a fucking explosion. Jesus.

His man-made curved claws dug into my shoulder, his knee bearing all his weight was wedged against my crotch, and his hundreds of hypodermic-needle teeth were pressed against mine. I was grimacing. He was smiling. The fact that pain was peeling my lips back and rage his nevertheless had the same effect. “You insult me. You insult yourself. You’re a fool, but a fool I will give one last chance. Come to the Bae or I’ll rip off your face and your balls. But I won’t kill you. Not for hours. Not until there is nothing to remove from your bones.” His breath had the sweet fragrance of raw meat on it. The warmth of copper. The odor of death.

Sweet. It smelled sweet.

Things that are meant for you. Tell him yes. Be the Bae with him. The Second Coming is for you and him. And you want it. To rule. To kill. To make it better than before.

I held tight to the control that hadn’t let me down yet. Those thoughts weren’t true. Not unless I let them be. Not true, I repeated silently to myself. Not true. I had the power to deny them and I would. But they were…

Practical.

Be practical.

If you couldn’t keep that part of you from whispering slyly, demanding harshly, stop ignoring it—use it.

Temporarily and with a different type of control.

Four years old and I’d known what to do. I damn sure wasn’t going to do any less at twenty-four.

I didn’t fight it. Grimm was better than me—now. Fighting what was in me wouldn’t change that, and fighting it didn’t make me more human, only not as Auphe as I could be. And I could be much, much more. I’d tainted a good deal of my soul, if it existed, for control and now I was going to intentionally give it up, turn it off, push it aside. I’d have to have faith I’d be able to get it back. I’d have to believe I’d come back. A child’s assurance told me I would. I chose to believe him.

I let it go.

Let…it…go.

Things changed. My desire to join Grimm changed and it changed in all the best ways.

Join him? The laughter echoed in me—derisive, disgusted. He is a failure. No matter what he can do now, there will come a then. Auphe are not wrong in our judgments. He was a failure once. He will be a failure again. The Bae and the Second Coming are not his. They are mine. They are mine because I will take them and fix them.

Building is the sheep way. Taking is the Auphe way.

I’d been fishing my hand in the bag on the ground by my hip. He was watching for a move toward my holsters. I gave him a different one. I pulled the ring on a grenade and shoved it down the front of his jeans. “They can sew my balls back on. They’ll need a microscope to find what’s left of yours,” I snarled. “Good luck knocking up the snakes by wishing real fucking hard.”

His snarl matched mine and he flung himself off of me, retrieved the grenade, and tossed it where it exploded off in the brush. He could’ve gated out of his clothes, leaving the grenade behind too, but that would be Auphe. Fighting naked—the highest of predators, but animals too. No clothes. No history and education to refine your plans. The highest, yes, but unchanged for millions of years. They didn’t advance in their ways, didn’t retreat. A human would think that primitive.

Caliban would think it practical. Didn’t I? Why do you need weapons when you are one? Why do you need clothing when you can kill and luxuriate in the warmth among the bodies of your fresh prey? Why learn when you are the only thing worth learning about in a world that belongs to you?

“Sheep.” I said it in Auphe that the failure couldn’t understand.

“Never even a black sheep, failure. Only a malformed human sheep.” I said that in English so that he would understand it this time—to hear his shame, one no greater. “You are human, the Auphe in you barely a single cell. Any race you create with succubae is already polluted twice over. Yet I can make them right.”

By wiping them out.

I had the patience the failure only thought he had. I could wait until I finally became all Auphe. The Auphe genes in me wouldn’t stop their progress—ever. A trillion clocks ticking away inside until the day I was pure Auphe.

I would take his succubae, and then I would undo his Bae until they were nothing but piles of bloody parts and start again when the time came. Make them as Auphe as they could be until they too one day became pure. The mongrels he’d created—I could be patient, but I didn’t have a million years for them to turn. Half-pure—my race would be whole far sooner than that.

“You think you can do better than I have?” he growled.

“I know I can.” This time I pulled the Eagle and emptied the clip at his head. “Because I am Auphe.”

Inside now and, with time enough, I would be outside as well.

I gave him a grin and then the worst threat tailor-made for him. “The single one left. Auphe live free to kill.” I 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 who’d slaughtered more than one before coming after me; I knew it. It was the smile of someone who belonged on death row with a needle in his arm. An arrogant, sociopathic asshole who should be put in a grave and nowhere else.

“Relatively painless, at least. And he was sixteen without having stuck his dick in a woman yet. As lives go, his was a waste anyway. If he screamed and cried for his mother”—that smile let me know he had—“blame yourself. It’d been a long time between hunts, and that is thanks to you, freak. No Rom will speak to us or hire me. We are dead to them. We have been cast out by all the clans due to our shame, so our shame must end that our exile can end.” That goddamn smile. I’d cut it off his face. “I do miss my work. Killing and raping at random is good for fending off boredom, but it doesn’t pay. I want my old life back. All the Vayash do.”

“And for that Cal has to end,” Niko said. “You fooled us so well. No, you fooled me. Nothing but suspicion from the beginning and you still fooled me. Let me guess. You healed Cal so we wouldn’t begin moving him to hide him from your machine. It would give Janus time to find us again.”

“Which would’ve worked perfectly if the abomination hadn’t used his unholy door to carry us away to the house of the goat,” he growled. The smile was gone now, his sword twisting back and forth in his hand. “Then worse, yet another abomination appears and steals Janus. Pulling it here and there through that same unholy doorway. Leaves it in the park to do what war machines do when their target isn’t there: mangle and destroy whatever is.”

Grimm had stolen Janus, but not for long and not in the beginning. He’d seen a toy and a way to taunt me and he’d taken it, probably from our place after it had attacked us there. Grimm and his goddamn binoculars. He could see me, but I couldn’t feel him.

He hadn’t directed the titan or known how. He simply turned it loose to see what it would do, and death and destruction was it. He didn’t know it was centered on me or he would’ve turned it loose a little closer…just to see what I would do. No one played games like Grimm, even accidentally.

“You targeted it on Cal.” Now Niko’s other sword was in his hand. “Specifically. You came to me. You asked for my help. You saved my life with Hephaestus. You tried to save my life with the boggles, or pretended to, so Cal along with Goodfellow would drown in mud or be killed by the Boggle below. You asked to claim me as a son. And you did it all to murder my brother.”

“Never have I told so many lies that made me want to bite off my tongue. You’re the son of a slut and a whore. Why would I claim you? I saved you to gain further acceptance. To stay with you. I was at the point where I was going to slit the freak’s throat myself no matter what the clan wanted. I could stand no more of you demons. Sharing the same space with you, eating with you—all of you unclean and debase. Your kind and all you touch contaminate me. It was disgusting enough that I think I deserve a bonus for all of this. I’ll bury the burden myself, but first I’ll have Janus wipe the world of my first and only mistake.” He turned and said something in rapid-fire Rom to the automaton and then pointed the xiphos at Niko.

Janus had been reprogrammed.

Kalakos was dead. Achilles reborn, my fucking ass. He was dead.

Somehow.

Niko didn’t stand around waiting for his fate. He ran. Quicker than Cal could, but not as quickly as when I let out the Auphe in me. But neither human nor Auphe matched the titan. I was running too, and although fast as shit, I wouldn’t break any world records with it. But I could throw like a son of a bitch. Could’ve been a baseball star in another life. “Nik!” I pulled off the bag and strap and tossed it farther than I could ever run.

He caught it and didn’t stop running and dodging claws scoring the ground behind him. He took one grenade from the bag, flipped the spoon, pulled the pin, and dropped it back in the bag with the others. Then he somersaulted sideways as Janus’s last tangle of metal talons buried themselves up to its wrist in the dirt where Niko had been less than a moment before. Nik didn’t take advantage to get more space between them. He propelled himself toward the automaton, which had dropped to one knee to pull its killing claws free. Niko used that. He—counting off the grenade’s six seconds, because I sure as hell was—planted a foot on Janus’s knee and, taking advantage of its blind eye with the sword embedded in it, used the thrust of the forward motion to leap high enough to hang the bag around the titan’s neck.

I blinked and he was gone, already running as I’d not seen him run before, and Niko was the fastest human I’d seen in my lifetime. Counting the short three to four seconds he had left, he would make it out of the blast zone. I knew it.

I knew it because if there was an Achilles reborn it wasn’t that bastard Kalakos.

It was my brother.

A warrior from the womb. A reluctant warrior, but a warrior like the world hadn’t seen in thousands of years.

I threw myself on the ground right before the grenades blew, closing my eyes against the fierce light and heat, and opening them immediately after to see Nik down, but because he’d done the same. He’d made it. I’d made it.

And so had that goddamn Janus. An explosive collar on a demonic metal dog and it didn’t stop it from freeing its claws and rising to its feet. The ground shook under the weight and its head spun to move the blinded eye. It saw Niko climbing to his feet and raced toward him as if nothing had happened. How could something that heavy and made of metal move that goddamn fast?

If we’d had that suitcase nuke from a year and a half ago, I didn’t think that would have done a damn thing. It was indestructible. We weren’t. We were good at what we did, but with the biggest disadvantage around when we could die and it couldn’t.

Niko was weaponless now except for his various swords that would do no good, the same as my guns. Useless. If he managed to get to Kalakos and use his sword to blind another eye, what would that do? Janus would have two left and that was enough.

It wouldn’t have made a difference if it had had only two eyes. I could see it run as Niko turned and ran again. It would reach him before he could reach Kalakos. Better than human, better than a crippled Auphe, what do you do then?

Nothing…nothing that would work.

I didn’t care if it would work. I did it anyway.

Other than hurling myself in front of Niko before the automaton could reach him, there wasn’t anything I could do—and I was too far away from them both with the titan’s speed to do even that. I pushed up off the ground and ran. It was hopeless, but I did it, because that’s what you do. Deny reality. Deny you won’t make it in time. You do your best to throw yourself between your brother and death whether it will save him or not. You shred your lungs, seizing more oxygen than is possible, tear tendons to gain ground with a flight that isn’t there. You do the physically impossible.

You died for your brother or you died with your brother. Watching him die was the impossibility.

It was just what you fucking…

Goodfellow.

Goodfellow—he’d told me about Janus’s commands. And about more. He’d found out how to wake Janus and how to put him back to sleep.

And they were the same.

I wasn’t going to make it. I wasn’t fast enough or close enough and had one more day before I could gate. One more damned day. The four-year-old me was wrong. There was time enough to be practical once more tonight. To trust myself one last time—the very last time. I didn’t close my eyes. I didn’t think about it or concentrate. I didn’t focus. There was time to be four again, but there wasn’t time for any of the rest.

I made the third gate.

The gate that would kill me.

Niko had stopped. He couldn’t run anymore, but Niko was Niko. He would face death, not turn a cowardly back on it. He staggered and turned to face the blades of Janus’s hand flying toward him. He faced it like the warrior he was. Across the circle, Kalakos, keeping his distance—another warrior but worthless, a fighter, but spineless—disappeared, haloed by dark-veined tarnished silver.

Wasn’t that just too bad?

He reappeared in a haze of gray and black directly before Janus’s outstretched 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…

“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 laughed.

The stars were brighter than ever.

It was a great night.

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?

Rob Thurman lives in Indiana, land of cows, corn, and ravenous wild turkeys. Rob is the author of the Cal Leandros novels; the Trickster novels; the Korsak Brothers novels; and several stories in various anthologies.

Besides ravenous wild turkeys, Rob has three rescue dogs (if you don’t have a dog, how do you live?)—one of which is a Great Dane/Lab mix that weighs well over one hundred pounds, barks at strangers like Cujo times ten, then runs to hide under the kitchen table and pee on herself. Burglars tend to find this a mixed message. The other two dogs, however, are more invested in keeping their food source alive. All were adopted from the pound (one on his last day on death row). They were all fully grown, already house-trained, and grateful as hell. Think about it the next time you’re looking for a Rover or a Fluffy.

For updates, teasers, music videos, deleted scenes, social networking (the time-suck of an author’s life), and various other extras such as free music and computer wallpaper, visit the author at www.robthurman.net.

Nightlife

Moonshine

Madhouse

Deathwish

Roadkill

Blackout

Doubletake

Trick of the Light

The Grimrose Path

Chimera

Basilisk

Courts of the Fey

EDITED BY MARTIN GREENBERG

Wolfsbane and Mistletoe

EDITED BY CHARLAINE HARRIS AND TONI L. P. KELNER