I couldn’t leave Nik alone either. He’d stayed with me then, and I was staying with him now. After what we’d lived through, Sophia and the Auphe, no one should have to carry that past by themselves. He needed the brother he’d always had—not a Stepford version, not a Boy Scout.
Not one who would hesitate to tear out the heart of what, at times, had been a beautiful woman. The best predators were always beautiful. It made them good at what they did. My Auphe made me good at what I did—protecting my brother. The other Cal—he wasn’t equipped. I’d told Niko before if there were gray areas in what we did, that was why I was there. Those places weren’t for him. It didn’t stop there. If there were those pitch-black places to go, unimaginable lines to be crossed, that was for me as well—not him.
Someone’s heart … quivering in my hand … It was the very least of what I would do for my brother.
Don’t ask what the most would be.
Sitting beside him, I leaned against him so he could pretend he wasn’t leaning against me. He always had to be the strong one. Who was I to take that away, even once? “I was going to work at the bar when she and her spiders jumped me in the park.” I ran there on occasion. Boggles made great incentive on improving your running time. “She kept asking me where my brothers and sisters were. I had no idea what she was talking about. It was her and about forty spiders. If I could’ve seen her, I could’ve taken care of her then, but I couldn’t. She was hiding in the trees and her scent was everywhere. And forty spiders?”
I shrugged. “I’m good, but no one’s that good. One bit me and my memories began to disappear, erasing backward. It was strange how I could feel that. Like those old VHS tapes when you’d rewind them. So I traveled. I built a gate and went through, but the venom was so damn fast, it hit my memories of being seven and in South Carolina at the same time that I hit the gate. By the time I went through and ended up on the beach, it was all gone. But I remember now. I remember being seven at that glorified shed we stayed in. I remember you telling me the Peter Pan story. And I remember the Auphe that talked to me when I was playing out back, the one I thought was the crocodile from the book. White with red eyes and metal teeth—no wonder I thought that story was scary as shit.” The third voice in my head wasn’t a voice at all. It was only the echo of what wasn’t even a memory, unless you counted repressed ones.
“The alligator you told me you saw.” I had forgotten everything; Niko had remembered it all.
I looked up at the sky. No stars. There never were here. “Can’t blame a spider for that one. I forgot all on my own there. The Auphe told me I had brothers and sisters. Rejects. Failures. Toys for me to play with when I grew up to be a big-boy Auphe. Ammut must have heard the rumors. Who knows from where. Other life suckers. Or tricksters—they never let a piece of juicy dirt go by.” I looked back down and picked at the sole of my black sneaker. “Don’t you hate it when someone knows more about your life than you ever did? Gossipy assholes.” Had Robin known all this time that there might be more of me out there? Could be. But good friends don’t always tell you the truth. Good friends know that sometimes a lie is better. I shifted my shoulders. I was turning into a regular emo shrugging machine. “Anyway, that memory disappeared too, and I was in the middle of the one where you were going on about Neverland. Tree houses. Flying. A safe place. That was why I went there, the seven-year-old me falling through a gate, before there was nothing left but amnesia. I was a scared kid looking for sanctuary. I definitely wasn’t looking for a killer Auphe crocodile or a freak show family.”
Niko exhaled and traced his fingers over the grip of his katana. We all have our security blankets, some more lethal than others, and his and mine hadn’t changed an iota over the years. “I’d wondered before,” he started cautiously, then more resolutely, “how many times did the Auphe try before you? How many failures were there before you were born? I’ve wondered that since I was old enough to take my first biology class in school. What they were trying to do … Whom they were trying to make. Human genes crossed with Auphe genes would never work with only one attempt. I can’t imagine how many it would take.” He’d wondered, huh? He’d wondered; Robin had very well known of the possibility. I should have thought about it too, but I hadn’t wanted to. I was the very best at not doing or thinking things I didn’t want to. Cowardice or self-survival or both; at those I excelled.
The Auphe hadn’t been keeping an eye on just me in those days, but on multiple mes. For some reason the others hadn’t been allowed to “be human” for a time while being observed. The Auphe needed two things from their breeding program: the ability to travel—to build gates and move hundreds of miles in a second—and the capacity to still be human enough to host a parasitic creature called a Darkling that could channel a power enormous enough to cross millions of years instead of only miles. Humans were the only creatures the Darkling could possess, and it had accidentally blown up a few Auphe while proving that. That the creature slid in and out of mirrors, more slippery than any reflection and no less homicidal than the Auphe, had been the beginning of my mirror phobia. That it had taken my mind and slid in and out of it as easily wasn’t something I wanted to think about.
It would’ve taken a while to find out if the rest of the Auphe-human half-breeds were defective, or maybe they’d been defective from the day they were born. I didn’t know which would be worse—being defective or being the success, the goddamn golden boy of Auphe genetics. I was about to find out, though. The ones that were alive were in Nevah’s Landing—as the albino crocodile with the smile of metal had told me. Waiting … They were waiting for me.
I hadn’t gone there for them at the beginning of all of this; I hadn’t known they’d existed, but I was going for them now.
“Let’s get Promise and Goodfellow out here to help you,” I said, standing. “I have something to do.” Something that should’ve been done before I was born. But the Auphe, in their infinite ability to be sons of bitches, hadn’t done what I would have guessed. They hadn’t killed the failures. That would have been too easy for them and for me.
Niko shook his head. “No. Do not even think about it. You are not going to Nevah’s Landing to take out a nest of half Auphe by yourself—if they need taking out at all. Think, Cal. They might be like you. Only without the power to build gates. They could be the same as you.”
That was funny. Goddamn hilarious. They might be like me. Of anyone in this city, only Niko would think that made it better. God, I did love my brother, no way around it.
“No, I’ll go. This is mine.” I helped him stand and, within seconds, he was good—stable and capable of taking care of himself as I called Goodfellow on the cell to get his ass out here. I wished he’d taken better care of himself in the past week and less care of what had only been a reflection of me—the best reflection.
“They’re not your responsibility, Nik,” I said. On this I had no give. “They’re not your family.” Thank God they weren’t. He didn’t deserve that. “They’re mine. I don’t want you to see that.” I met his eyes quickly before looking away. He wasn’t the only one ashamed. We’d both have to learn to get over it. “I don’t want you to see them in me, all right? I don’t. I’m not sure that’s something I could live with, knowing what you might see.”
And there was no way I wanted him to see what I might have to do.
“I’ll check them out. See if they’re salvageable. I’ll call if I need help. There come Promise and Robin now.” The chair was kicked aside as the door to the roof opened. “They missed the real thing, but they can take you to the after-party.” I gave his braid one last yank, tossed it over his shoulder, and said, “Ask Ishiah what your tattoo means. I’ll be back in time for you to kick my ass over it. Swear.”
He sheathed his sword, jaw tightening before he exhaled. “You’re the most goddamn stubborn man I know. Goddamn it, I missed you, you asshole.” Three curse words in two sentences—that was more big-time emotion for Nik. He wrapped one arm around
me and that brotherly man hug I’d tried to avoid in Nevah’s Landing came back to bite me in the ass. The one arm made it brotherly. That my ribs nearly gave way and my spleen pretty much did too made it manly. That I returned it just as hard was, hell, just manners.
I was always about manners.
Epilogue
(The Alpha and the Omega)
Nevah’s Landing smelled the same as it had when I’d left. Salt, a touch of swamp, water, and saw grass brown and crisp for the winter. People, the metal tang of cars, of old asphalt parking lots that might never see the fresh tarry black of it. Spanish moss … I liked that smell. If a plant could smell like air, Spanish moss would be the one.
Air and nothing else. No blood. No decay. Only air. That was provided you didn’t count the hole in reality hanging there, gray, silver, black, and swirling with a hunger to gobble up the world. I shut the gate down with that mental twist I’d learned at the age of nineteen. It went … sulky and snarling in my mind. It could sulk as much as it wanted. It knew who held its leash.
I was behind the motel where I’d lived that so-called normal life for four whole days. I didn’t want to slice open a tear in the world and walk through to see two people screwing on a mattress that lay on top of my guns. My babies. Most of the asses in the Landing, thanks to the diner food, weren’t small. They were big and wide as a barn door, as they say. I could just imagine them moving back and forth in stretch-marked thrusts… . I did not want to see that. No one wanted to see that.
I wiped the blood pouring from my nose, fought the skull-crushing headache, and let the sweat pour down my neck and face, soaking my hair. Once I’d made gates as I’d pleased, as Auphe did, and as often as I’d pleased. Rafferty, our long-gone healer that Delilah had tried and failed to kill, thanks to my gun muzzle behind her pretty ear, had “fixed” me. Limit the gates, everyone thought, and limit the Auphe genetic influence on me, because there hadn’t been a doubt that the more I “traveled,” the more Auphe I felt. Rafferty had done some chemical rewiring on my brain, though only a little, because he couldn’t break me down genetically and remove the Auphe half. That would leave half a human, and that, well, I guess that would be an unpleasant puddle of gore on the ground.
He’d found a way around that. He’d given me something called serotonin syndrome. One gate, bad. It would trigger an uncontrollable flood of serotonin in my brain, which would cause my blood pressure and body temperature to go up radically. Gate two, worse—the same as what was behind door one, but doubled. Gate three would probably mean death from a burst aneurysm in my brain. Since the two I’d used on Ammut for her brain and heart had really been only one—in theory, this was technically number two. If Rafferty was right, I’d survive it.
I guess I’d wait and see. It took me two days or so to “reset” the gates, which meant I’d be driving back to New York—again, thanks to Rafferty.
He was a great healer, the best in the world as far as I knew, and he’d even said it himself—Auphe genes always won. Limit the gates, limit the gene’s effect on my mind and my control. He’d said it; I remembered every word, but I don’t think he got it, actually got it. Auphe genes always won. Maybe a hyped-up superhealer could slow them down by short-circuiting my traveling, but it wasn’t only gates and traveling that made an Auphe. We all wanted to forget that. We wanted to forget the truth. Traveling made an Auphe in the same way as walking made a human. It didn’t work that way. The truth never did.
But I had better things to do than think about the truth—better things to worry about than whether I was a pretty good guy fighting bad genes or a very bad guy resisting good genes, or whether I was a human with a little monster in him or a monster with a little human. I’d thought it through back in New York and I was done with the subject. It all depended on your point of view and the specimen didn’t get to make that call.
That was me … a specimen. Surprisingly, that didn’t bother me as much as it once would have.
Holding my arm to my nose, I let the cloth of my shirt soak up the blood while I looked for a car to steal. Even with that thought in my head, I was tempted to go see Miss Terryn, Lew, and the diner to remember what it was like to be that good guy; to be human and only human. I did know; however, that wasn’t what they’d see if they saw me again. They’d see the shadows. Everyone, including cameras, did. The shades that lived around me weren’t real to the eyes, but something in a person sensed them. That something was a long-lost survival instinct, a soul—if they existed. It was futile to wonder. Besides, those days were over. That was past. No more substantial than a dream, long gone. Dreams like that never stuck around. Those were the memories, unlike others, that didn’t last. And that …That was just life. In that way, I was the same as everyone else.
I found a car—unlocked. Southerners.
It was while I was at the gas station, one of three in Nevah’s Landing, that I went over another memory. I’d mixed it up for more than sixteen going on seventeen years with the story Nik had told me—flying children, pirate ships, princesses, waterfalls, and an albino crocodile. We’d been squatting in a shack at the Landing, a long-abandoned one, near saw grass that had taken over the water’s edge and most of the yard. Niko had been making me lunch out of moldy bread, carefully pinching away what green he could, and bologna when I went outside. Sophia was in town, doing whatever was best for ripping people off that day. I scrabbled around for a rock I could throw in the water. The grass was too tall to see it land, but I would hear the splash.
That was when I’d seen it. Stripes of white showing through the green, the bloodred eye, and a thousand needle-fine metal teeth—teeth no crocodile could ever claim. And though I’d known it wasn’t the ghost of the crocodile Niko had read about to me, I’d pretended it was, because if I hadn’t—Seven-year-old boys went crazy too, when they saw something like that, so wrong and so close—close enough I’d been able to smell the blood on its breath. It had whispered to me without bending a blade of that grass. It had told me not about Never Land, but about something else.
Caliban, baby boy.
I’d frozen, crouched in the grass with fingers still reaching for that stone.
We told your pathetic human ape-whore of a mother to bring you. We want you to know. Here you have brothers and sisters. Here we have left you presents. Play with them as you wish. When you wish. Destroy them and sharpen your skill on them. They deserve no better. They are worthless failures in an experiment that begins to weary us. There are so many, we grew bored of killing them, but for you, we left some alive.
Toys for you. Toys for our one success. A present so that you do not forget where you come from, what you are. Toys so that you do not forget we can turn you into a toy if we please.
And someday when you’re a big boy and bloodthirsty— the smile was hideous—you will come play, will you not?
Because you will not forget who you belong to, offspring of the Auphe. You will not forget who you are.
Never.
I had forgotten, though. Instantly. I went back inside, ate my bologna sandwich, and never thought of it again. I simply told Niko I saw a crocodile out in the grass. He automatically corrected it to alligator, and went looking himself. He didn’t find anything. No gators. What a relief.
What a goddamn relief.
And I hadn’t remembered any of it until the past week, thanks to the Nepenthe venom hitting that precise cluster of neurons when I’d gated out from Central Park, and thanks to Ammut demanding my brothers and sisters. Where were my brothers and sisters, a string of lives that could feed her for years? For one split second I’d remembered, before every memory, including that one, was swallowed by darkness. But even after the amnesia had taken hold, there had still been whispers. Ammut hadn’t given up and neither had that long-dead Auphe crocodile. Where are your brothers and sisters? Where are they? Where?
In Nevah’s Landing when I’d been there working at the diner, I’d feel a hand groping inside me, tugging, saying, Here. We?
??re here. Every day I’d felt the connection, but I hadn’t known what it meant. I obviously didn’t belong there, despite a human Cal wishing he did. I hadn’t known what it meant then, that pulling and presence, but I knew now.
All Auphe felt one another. I’d learned to travel years before I learned that skill. If an Auphe was around, I’d feel it. I’d know it. That was the biggest reason I hadn’t wanted to leave the Landing when Niko came for me. They were calling me, but I couldn’t make it out. I didn’t know what it was. I wouldn’t have thought there were any of them left to feel after Niko and I had destroyed the last, but a white crocodile reared its head, finally, in the back of my brain and told me differently. I’d forgotten a lot about the Auphe in my life, mostly on purpose. If you think seeing one in the grass sucked, try being raised by them for two years. At least I knew that was one memory that wouldn’t hop out and say hello. Or if it did, my sanity wouldn’t be around to say, Right back at you, buddy. I’d be catatonic or I’d be a killing machine with no memory of Cal Leandros at all.
Either way, I wouldn’t know about it. Smooth sailing into crazy world.
“Hey, boy, didn’t you work in Miss Terrwyn’s diner?”
“No.” I didn’t bother to look at the gas station guy as I continued with my business of pumping gas. Nevah’s Landing Cal would’ve said, Hey or Nice day. Caramel-apple-pie day at the diner. That Cal was gone, and, to me, this Cal in the here and now, this guy was just an annoyance.
“Ain’t that Ralph James’s car?” he persisted.
With vocabulary skills worse than mine.
“No,” I repeated without interest.
I finished up, paid him, and left. Whether he called the cops or not didn’t much matter. He might not. People here were so friendly that when faced with bad manners, and I could fucking dish out bad manners, they struggled over whether you were a dick or took what you said at face value. I’d said I was all about the manners on that building roof with Niko before I’d left; I simply hadn’t said what kind. Again, it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be here long.