Doubletake

21

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…