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 bac
k into the car ahead of an armed but uneasy mob, I’d said my first and only words of the day.
My voice had been rusty from rare use, but insistent, and the words were my first real step back toward sanity—toward Cal. “Don’t hate. Don’t beg. Not you.”
Because my brother had been better than that. Better than those sheep. Better than me.
He still was.
That encounter with the Vayash had in part made Niko what he was now: honorable if you deserved it, the unforgiving steel of his sword if you didn’t. That would always be a part of him. Thanks, in a large part, to that and this bastard I’d attacked at our door.
The one last thing I did remember…Sophia hadn’t taught us Rom. Not the language of our clan or the overall language of all clans. While he could guess from the tone what those words had implied, that wasn’t enough for Niko. Two days later we had stopped in a library. After an hour on the Internet, he’d taken me back to the car and I thought, in that one moment, that he’d been glad I wasn’t coherent enough to ask him what those words had meant. In the years since, he hadn’t once told me, and I hadn’t asked. He also hadn’t learned any more Rom; Niko who ate knowledge and languages like they were Wheaties. He would have nothing to do with it.
It didn’t make a difference if Kalakos was his absent father or not. He was Vayash and that damned him as equally in Nik’s eyes.
Kalakos nodded once. “I heard what happened, but I was not there. I swear it, Niko. I would not lie to you. Like Sophia, the clan is too small for me. I roam and I rarely see them. If I had been there, I would’ve spoken for you.”
Yeah, right.
“And I never came to you before”—prior to the Auphe’s taking me, before Niko’s second or third or fourth or seventh birthday—“as I found out about you when you were two years old. I didn’t know I had a son until then. But I thought your mother the better choice for you. The life I lead, constantly on the move, the work I do, not so different from yours, it wasn’t any life for a child.”
That…that was worth a fucking comment or two. “You thought Niko living with Sophia…a bat-shit crazy, abusive bitch of a mother, was a better life for a child? Is that your story?” He was a liar. He’d slept with her, he knew her, he knew what she was—a sociopath. People don’t change that much in three years. He’d known and he hadn’t wanted the responsibility of a kid, of Niko, any more than Sophia had. He’d just made it out in time before Niko entered the world—or a booze-soaked hell. With Sophia it was the same thing.
Better life?
Shit.
“Guess what, asshole? You were wrong.” I straightened and threw the Ka-Bar directly at him. I didn’t lose control. It was me, all me, and entirely deliberate.
In a move so reminiscent of Niko it was uncanny, he leaned to one side with incredible speed and caught the combat knife by the handle, as it would’ve passed by his neck or through his neck if he hadn’t dodged. The corner of his mouth lifted. I could see the curve of condescension building. For a half Auphe, I wasn’t too impressive, not at all—I could see the thought forming behind onyx eyes.
We’d see about that.
Yes, we would.
“Keep it,” I said with a mocking grin. “Where you’re going, you’re going to need it.”
The gate I created blossomed into hungry, pulsing dark gray around him and then he and it were gone. All Auphe could build gates to places they’d been to or could see. An endless number of gates. So could I…once. Now I was limited, but I had enough ability left in me, and this one had more than been worth it.
“You didn’t.” Niko frowned, and it wasn’t throwing the knife at his deadbeat dad that sparked that statement. “Tell me that you didn’t.”
I swept my hair back out of my eyes. It was nice to not be mistaken as the sheepdog entry in the Unshowered Best of Show. But letting it hang, glaring through it, I’d been what Kalakos had expected me to be—wild and tainted. Auphe. That had been worth it—delivering the goods. “Goodfellow said all supers had fled the city last night. Worst that happens is he gets mugged.”
“You did. Buddha on high, you gated him to the boggle pit.” Niko lowered his head to pound the base of his palm lightly against his forehead. “Cal, there is supernatural and then there is über-natural. The Panic might affect the boggles some, perhaps, but not enough to make them leave. They can burrow under the mud to avoid the pheromones if they have to, but pheromones or not, I have a feeling not even the Panic is enough to drive the boggles elsewhere.”
True. Boggles, nine feet of mud-wallowing, alligator-skinned, shark-mouthed humanoids that lived in the least accessible part of Central Park, were the unsocialized pit bulls of the paien world—if pit bulls were the size of bears, could talk, and ate muggers and joggers. Very little—actually nothing—scared them.
I groaned at having to admit social responsibility, which was only for Niko’s sake or I would’ve dropped that asshole straight into the pit and had a brewski to celebrate the occasion. “No, I didn’t.” I opened the refrigerator and grabbed some frozen waffles. “In case the boggles didn’t leave”—and I knew as well as my brother what tough mothers they were—“I gated him about one-fourth of a mile away. If he’s a fast runner, he’ll be back to annoy us—I mean you—soon enough.”
He would be too, the way he moved. I saw where Niko had obtained the potential to become the fighter he was. If he hadn’t put in the work, studied martial arts, trained in every single method he could get his hands on, the potential might have stayed dormant. But he had put in the work. He had to keep his brother alive from the pursuing monsters until I was old enough to do it myself, and that took effort.
All of his life had been about making sure I kept mine.
Giving Niko a better life, Kalakos had said.…That bastard.
I popped two waffles into the toaster. “Is it all right if I hate the son of a bitch for you?” I asked, pretending to search for syrup in the wrong cabinet. “He’s a dick and he screwed you bigger than anything, but he’s your father.…Guess it’s polite to ask: Can I hate him?” I already did, but if Niko had a problem with it, I’d pretend otherwise. If Niko wanted to bond with the deserting dick, the absentee asshole, I’d grit my teeth and go along with that as well. I’d despise it, and keep hating underneath, but I’d do it. To say I owed my brother didn’t quite cover it.
“Don’t worry.” Niko handed me the syrup from the pantry, ending my charade of not meeting his eyes. “He didn’t come for me and then he didn’t come for us both. You aren’t his son, but you’re my brother and he knew that. Family is family. He is not ours. He deserted not only me, but you as well.” His smile wasn’t savage as mine had been, but it was far more bitter.
“Trust me, Cal. I hate him enough for us both.”
Niko hated.
The younger me, the Cal of eight years ago, felt a pang of regret.
4
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.