Doubletake (6 page)

“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.

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.”