Doubletake (17 page)

“Cattle?” I noticed for the first time that he was the only supernatural creature that didn’t use the more typical word for humans. “Not sheep?”

He pressed the metal claws against my face. “Nooo, Caliban. Never sheep. I am the sheep. The black sheep of the Auphe. Blackest of the black. That is my title. They thought you a bad boy. I wish at least one remained to see what I am and what I will be. Bad enough that they would’ve bowed before me.”

The claws clutched my face lightly, but not so lightly that I didn’t know he could have removed my face if he’d wanted. I could see through the space between the talons as I felt their chill. “You gate, you can’t gate, and then today you gate again. And you heal from something when it should’ve taken you weeks to recover. I want to know what you have become. I’m intrigued. Life was so boring before you, Caliban.
Borrrrrrring
. You cannot know.”

“What things do you want me to do for you first?” I asked abruptly. “What do you mean by ‘spread my blood’?”

His red eyes flared brighter in anticipation or something close to it…GED, short attention span. He was more like me than I cared to admit. “Humans, they breed and breed. You know. This is why we were made. To go back and warn the first Auphe. Destroy the humans before they gobble up the world, gobble it all up when it
belongs to us. It’s too late for that now, but it wouldn’t matter if it weren’t.” The talons loosened some, not for my comfort, but as he was caught up in what he had to say, his…hell…vision. “We are better than them. The Auphe are gone, but you and I remain. We are the Second Coming, the new wave that exceeds the first. We are meant to take their place and do what they could not. But as the Auphe in us breed slow, as we live so long—”

Keep dreaming on that one, asshole. I’ll outlive you; I promise you that, even if it’s by seconds, I thought, my grip tightening on the hilt of the xiphos.

“—I needed to find what else we could breed with besides humans. Something that matured faster, fast enough to equal the humans in a few centuries, at least.” He tilted his head until his forehead rested on the metal claws that pressed against my skin, his eyes bloody mirrors of mine, so close the gray of my own reflected in his. The same as the red of his must have reflected in mine. Not brothers, but something as binding, that called to every Auphe cell in me.

An obligation. The last. We were the last…until he proved we don’t have to be.

I pushed the thought away.
Yes, we did have to be. The last.
That’s what the remains of my conscience said, and it was right.

“And I did find what would breed the fastest.” His eyes remained fixed on mine. “Succubae. They lay eggs, but not with us. With Auphe they have litters, and those litters mature in a year. Three hundred and sixty-five days and you have a full-grown member of the Second Coming.”

Spread the blood. That’s where the déjà vu came from. I’d had this “invitation” before by the real deal. Pure Auphe, not the watered-down versions we were. I’d
jumped off a building to turn that particular one down. I wasn’t any more enthusiastic about this one, no matter what other thoughts might slink about in the lowest levels.

“Succubae? They hate us, especially the taste of us.” I knew that from personal experience. Succabae lived on sexual energy, any sexual energy from any being, except one. Auphe energy revolted them. I’d had one nearly upchuck in my lap after tasting me. “They wouldn’t breed with an Auphe,” I said with all the ego-bruised confidence in the world. “For any reason.”

The jagged voice was mildly curious. “Who said I asked their permission?”

This was what I’d traded part of my humanity for…control and something else. Control for situations such as this. The something else was Niko’s life. Those months ago, while facing the Egyptian life-sucker whose pets had made me forget my life—all of it—things had taken a turn. I’d finally been on the verge of regaining my memories, and not only my memories but the biogenetic skills that resided there.

I couldn’t function properly, the useful part of me—the
bad
part of me—unless all was whole, memories that resided in brain cells and Auphe abilities that resided in both. I’d been close, minutes away, but they were minutes I didn’t have. Half a minute and my brother would’ve been dead. What I’d needed I’d needed right then, not in minutes.

You have to give to get.

The better Cal had pushed a part of his human self down and let the Auphe flow over it. Devour it. A small bite only, but large enough that I was myself again—less/more than myself again, the true Cal with an added cloud of a dead race. Thirty seconds then was more time than I needed
to tear out the heart of that Egyptian snake goddess and watch it melt at my feet.

I’d saved my brother and gained control of my former attacks of dangerously
unaware
violence. The Auphe had been many things, but not unaware in their violence. They were very aware. With more Auphe in me as the human portion was swallowed up, I gained awareness.

Control: The Auphe in me spoke of obligations to what was left of our race—the Auphe in me that was yet only half, shit, maybe three-fourths as both time and genes multiplied, as I sacrificed, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough for Grimm’s plan. That was my newfound awareness.

As for permission…

He did say he hadn’t asked the succabae’s permission.

Control could also mean violently
aware
attacks. It wasn’t as limiting as one might think.

I didn’t ask for permission either when I sheathed the xiphos in Grimm’s stomach.

Grimm was more Auphe than I was, with their speed, but he also had another quality of theirs…enormous arrogance. That worked to my advantage. It made him assume things he shouldn’t.

Things such as: You’re my brother, because why wouldn’t you want to be?

I already have a brother, better than you.

You know you want to prove ourselves deadlier than the first Auphe.

Been there, done that. The T-shirt shop was closed.

You have to want to reclaim the world. You want to rule it and everything on it.

Rule the world? Too much damn work.

You want to kill whoever or whatever you want, whenever you want.

I already can.

You want to kill.

I do.

You need to kill.

In his conceit, he was right on that one.

At this precise moment, I did need to kill.

So thanks for the opportunity.

“What?” I twisted the blade and felt his blood pour over my hand. “Should I have asked your
permission
first? Like you asked the succubae?”

The talons tightened on my face. He said he liked guns, but I knew all Auphe save me liked claws and teeth the best. I didn’t want my face ripped off like a Halloween mask, yet it felt good to get down to the basics of flesh and blood, the cutting of one…the spilling of the other. As long as he died with me, it would be worth it. Here was the plate and here was me stepping up to swing the bat. I could save the world from him. Was that the martyr in me? It would sound better to say yes, but it would be a lie. It was about the world, but with the smell of blood, the warmth of it covering my sword hand, an enemy pinned by my metal and his arrogance, it was more about something else. It was about the
game
.

I could kill another Auphe, defeat him. He wanted to play? Let’s see who won.

But was it that easy? No. When is it ever that easy? From behind I felt five gates open. “Father?” The hiss was pure succubae/incubi, the smell mostly Auphe. Some visitors for Daddy. There went my opportunity to finish the game with Grimm.

Which pissed me off to no fucking end. Not good news for those available for me to take it out on.

I pulled the xiphos free. I was going to need it. Grimm smiled, that perfect human smile, before dropping his
claws from my face. He didn’t appear upset about the black-red blood leaking from his abdomen. It was already clotting. With us human-Auphe half-breeds you couldn’t begin to know where the vital organs were. We were all different—although maybe not as different as I wished we were. “No, Caliban, we’re not ready for that game yet. We have things to do,” he said, before pointing a gleaming talon past me. “Turn and greet your new brothers and sisters.”

I did. It was the past returned to life, or very nearly. They looked as ghastly as the Auphe, but unlike the half-Auphe in Nevah’s Landing, these all appeared the same. Identical—same father, perhaps same mother. They were Auphe pale, nude, with the slippery long white hair, the whiteless red eyes, the small pointed ears, but there were no hundreds of metal needles in each narrow jaw. They had succubae/incubi fangs. Metal, but snake fangs all the same, each five inches long and curved, their black tongues forked. Here and there on their skin was the glint of a pearlescent snake scale. You couldn’t tell if a pure Auphe was male or female except by smell; the females had no breasts and the males’ reproductive organ was withdrawn until needed. It was the same with the new ones.

I usually didn’t bother to tell the difference. It was easier to think of them all as its.

It
killed,
it
mutilated,
it
needed to die.

Grimm had done what he’d claimed. They appeared as deadly as the real Auphe had, but I felt a contemptuous disdain coiling in my gut. They were one-fourth Auphe, half of what I was. I felt about them as the original Auphe had felt about me and the others. They were lesser.

Pathetic corruptions.

Great. I was a monster, I had a nightmare family that
would not die no matter how many times I killed them, and now the Auphe in me was not slaughter-prone alone; it was also a bigot. Whatever. It wasn’t as if I’d intended on welcoming them with a slap on the back and a six-pack anyway. And if they were sending off any cuddly-puppy vibes, I was missing them totally.

They crouched by the back basement wall, the five of them, fully grown, as Grimm had said they would be. Fangs bared; black natural talons that their father would envy were poised in the air. They continued to hiss. Despite my inner scorn, I’d try to be careful and do my best to believe that they were at least half as dangerous as the Auphe and Grimm. Arrogance had been his downfall. I wouldn’t let it be mine. There was one way to know—the tried-and-true way. The oldest way. Every Auphe proves himself an Auphe. Survival of the fittest. Time to prove myself part of a family I didn’t claim and hopefully prove it more lethally than they could, ending all of this at the same time.

I pointed the xiphos at the nearest one. “Call me Uncle Cal. It’ll make me feel all warm and fuzzy when I chop off your head.” Grimm was older than I was, but I was by far older than these new Auphe. They matured in a year?

I’d introduce them to twenty-four years of being the real bogeyman in the closet of every other weak excuse for a monster.

So much for careful.

Useless shadows. Garter-snake doppelgängers. Show them what a real Auphe is.

A real Auphe—a real predator—didn’t wait for its enemy to call it out or for its daddy to tell it what to do. It didn’t wait at all.

And I didn’t.

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.