by Rob Thurman
Souls … inconvenient scraps of nothing.
The spiders had Niko backing up, but he was taking down every single one within reach and some that weren’t. I lunged forward, shooting them from behind, which wasn’t the best location for putting a bullet in a spider. Blowing huge ragged holes in their abdomen to leak out was good, messy, but ineffective in the short term. A fork in the head, my favorite, worked great but shooting from behind while gory wasn’t good for killing them. For that I needed a head shot, but not one of the sons of bitches would turn around. Intent on Niko, I could pop them like party balloons and they didn’t care.
Fine. I would see exactly how much they didn’t care. I waded into them, a Lovecraftian version of a herd of Shetland ponies. All we needed was Cthulhu singing “Rawhide.” I moved up beside one spider and blew its brains all over the one next to it, climbed the dead one, and took out its buddy before it had even managed to get the brain goop out of its eyes well enough to see. Those daisy, sunshine eyes. I moved on to the next one. It was beginning to get how things were going and was starting to turn. “It’s going to be a bright, bright, bright sunshiny day, Shelob,” I said with enthusiastic dark cheer. “Too bad you won’t be here to see it.” Another round, another spider brain turned to pudding.
Niko was swinging his katana with one hand, his tanto with another, and if the son of a bitch would just let me get a machine gun or carry those convenient grenades to parties full of people, I’d have kicked his ass for not using them. One blade sliced through the head of the spider closest to him, bisecting it neatly. The other shorter blade he used to nail a jumping spider in midair. The silver, sheened with green-gray slime, exited the top of its head, but the mandibles thrashed on in the death throes and Niko swiftly flung the spider off his weapon. One bite had sent me to la-la land. One bite would kill him.
That was not fucking happening.
I moved to the next poisonous piece of shit, put it down, and was about to do the same to the next, but it was too late. Niko had tried to get around them, to fight back to back. We did that when the attackers were this many, but there wasn’t enough time and too many had never been this many. The closest ones to him were rearing on their back four legs to block the most of any escape route that they could—not that there was one. They had a plan and a purpose. Their goddess couldn’t kill me and get what she wanted, information I didn’t have, not yet. It was coming. Close … so close, seconds away, but not yet. And she wanted that more than anything, because what could be better than eating a half-breed Auphe? Having a literal buffet of them. She hadn’t tried to kill me in the canal, only take me … to where she could ask and I could answer.
Niko continued to take out the spiders right and left, his sword slinging spider blood in all directions as I continued to move toward him, even though we both knew it wouldn’t be enough. Plastered in sweat, covered in their blood, he couldn’t climb over them when they stood more than seven feet tall, but he could bury his blade in their vulnerable underbelly. It didn’t help. As each one fell dead, two more stretched high in its place, upper legs ending in curved claws striking. And when they died, the same happened again. Death meant nothing to them. They had only cared about one direction, one thing—getting him to take two steps backward. Niko knew it and I knew it, the same as he knew to watch his back if I wasn’t in a position to do it. He knew when he was being herded, but options could sometimes be limited. Having thirty Great Dane-sized spiders in your face was one of those occasions. It was only two steps, and as many bullets as I fired, as quickly as I tore my way through them, those two steps happened. And they were enough to get him within reach of Ammut.
She’d been behind an arched wooden covering that protected a couch and table with small candles lit in glass bowls. Following that, she was on top of the covering and her tail was wrapped tightly around Niko’s upper chest and throat. I’d forgotten her speed from the brownstone. When something can move that fast, you can’t remember it, not in accurate detail. How can you remember what you can’t see?
Snakes were swift and she was all snake again. She lay sinuously on the wood, her claws scoring it. Bronze and green, copper and gold, with that flower smell so strong it could’ve come from a hundred funeral homes. It was cloying and thick, never quite covering the ripeness of decay. She was beautiful still, in the way of nature if not woman, but I could smell what she really was. It didn’t matter. She could’ve smelled as beautiful underneath it all as she appeared.
Nothing mattered—not a goddamn thing in the world except that she had my brother.
He swung his katana, only to have it bounce off the scales, not doing any more damage than my bullets in the brownstone basement had. He couldn’t turn to strike at her face or eyes as the coils tightened around him, holding him in place. But this was Niko. He didn’t need to see his target; he needed only to know where it was. He reversed the grip on each of his blades and jabbed them backward and up. It was useless. I never thought I’d see anything faster than my brother. I was wrong. She avoided every blow with ease, her gold eyes strobing because her head moved so quickly. But Nik kept striking behind at Ammut’s face and then finally at those coils around him. Metal bounced off its equal. Ammut was copper and bronze, not only the appearance of it. Metal scales met the metal of his sword, and the faintest of sparks was the sole effect.
Niko didn’t give up, though. He didn’t know how to; he never had. He kept fighting because he was who he was, all the while turning more and more blue in the candlelight that was left from those he hadn’t knocked over in his struggle. Too quick, that color blue. She wasn’t going to asphyxiate him. She was going to break his neck—my brother’s neck. She wasn’t going to bother to take the time to suck out his life force. That wasn’t what she wanted. She was impatient and tired of waiting for me to give her what she did want. She was going to kill him and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it. I’d shot her before. It didn’t work. What the fuck, I tried again. It was the same as Nik’s attempt. I couldn’t hit her eyes. Her head weaved so fast, I saw only the afterimage of it. After she broke his neck, then broke me only in a different way, she no doubt thought, she’d have more time to pry what she wanted from my lost memories.
Only she didn’t know they were lost. Because of that she was going to kill Nik and I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t, not with a gun or a knife—not with any weapon I had.
She is nothing. A worm beneath your heel. A sheep with scales instead of wool. She is not like you. There is nothing like you. You need no weapon.
You were born a weapon.
Niko’s eyes rolled back. One hand let loose of his tanto. His other hand loosened on his katana. To drop his katana, Niko would have to be dead.
My brother …
Dead.
I thought I’d lost it, lost consciousness, lost my brother, died myself wrapped in Ammut as it all went black—everything. There wasn’t a sole Manhattan light, not a flicker of a candle or the orange sky of nighttime NYC. There was only the dark … because I knew now. I was at home. The dark was me. I told myself stories there—every story about myself that I knew. Some were gone forever; only stories of stories, and that was how it had to be. Some stories weren’t nice and some were chaotic jumbles of terror and malice. Some were of Niko and me living short lives that seemed long, of the things we’d done—good and bad. I told myself about the killing, when it was necessary, when it wasn’t, and how you couldn’t always be perfect. Best of all, I spun the tale of why I’d been made … what the Auphe had needed … what I could do, what they had passed on to me. I told myself about the traveling, how I could slash a hole in the ether of the world anytime I wanted. Gates that were doorways to anywhere.
I liked that.
That was useful.
The first to walk the earth, and the earth would let us do anything, include rip screaming tears in it, if we would only walk through the gates and leave. If the earth hoped, if it prayed, that was what it prayed for�
�in vain, because we never left for good.
Blackness flickered; the blackbird’s wing that had taught me about death fluttered across my vision and then was gone. I could see. I could feel. And I could remember everything. Not the seventy-five percent I’d walked in with, but one hundred percent prime-grade Cal. I could remember me—all of me, human and Auphe. I could remember what I’d told myself in the dark:
The thing I was.
The things I’d done.
The things I might do.
I was okay with that—better than okay. There was pain. I’d expected it. I’d had it after my first encounter with Wahanket, my first coming back, the first of the shadows, then again at the brownstone. It was hot and white—my soul, if I had one, giving up the ghost or sinking down to bide its time, buried in a shallow grave. My human genes bowed down before the Auphe ones as they always had before. I muscled through the burning ache of it and hung on to that moment where everything felt right. Nothing felt more right than this. Sad, in a way, but it was the way things were meant to be. Some would say I was giving up something I might not get a chance at again. I said I was getting something back—me. The real me. All of me.
He slipped away, the Cal I could’ve been, but never would’ve been—thanks to memories. Yeah, maybe. But mostly thanks to genes that had been too busy fighting off the spider venom to make themselves known. That was why Delilah hadn’t scented Auphe the first time. In body I’d still been part Auphe, but faded—faded to practically nothing because every capable working Auphe gene had been concentrating on feeding its power to those in the part of my brain that could get me back to normal—my normal. During that time, while Auphe genes had been reknitting old memories, I’d been human, as close to human as I ever could be, with human emotions, human decisions, human instincts.
I hadn’t known. My entire life—I’d never known how far away from that I was. How far away I’d always been. I hadn’t known that human was only a word, and that never had that word been for me.
The time we’d spent looking for Ammut, looking for the monster, I’d been the monster all along.
Me.
What we’d been chasing was nothing compared to what lived inside of me—what was me. With every job we did, every case we took on, every mystery we tried to untangle, I’d been the real monster and we’d all pretended we didn’t know it. I’d been half right a week ago. A killer had woken up on that South Carolina beach. A killer and a monster; that was who I was, and it was never going to change.
So what?
I gave a mental shrug, for once in agreement with that particular inner voice. After all, this voice was me. The other one had been a soul I barely had fighting for an existence in a body that simply wasn’t meant to support one. Again …
So what?
If you couldn’t change it, you used it; otherwise, it wouldn’t be long before it used you. That was why I’d had Niko get the Aramaic tattoo—to understand what I did; not to regret what he had done. Brothers before souls. Bros before souls. Although if I said it like that, he’d kick my ass, and so what if it didn’t actually rhyme? Close enough. It got the point across. Brothers before souls. I’d made the decision to be the brother Niko truly wanted—even if he could’nt admit to himself that a human Cal and an Auphe Cal couldn’t be one and the same. Now I saw as I’d seen before that he needed that same brother, the old Cal—the real one, but not for the reason he thought. Not for a shared past. Not for a lost familiarity.
Not for what I could do.
But for what I would do.
Her mistake was letting me so close, because she wanted me. No matter what you wanted, you should never let someone like me get close. No matter what you wanted, you should never let something like me be on the same fucking planet.
“Let him go,” I said, calm and sure. And I was sure … of precisely what she wanted. “Let him go and you can have me. Me and my brothers and sisters.”
“Yes? You care so much for him? You’d give up yourself and your siblings?” She was suspicious, but she also wanted this, maybe more than anything in her snaky little life. An Auphe. To feed on an Auphe; no one would claim that. To feed on many of them—that would make her the goddess she claimed.
“Cleopatra, I don’t give a rat’s ass about anything else. Let him go and it’s all yours.” One of the best things about having an Auphe as a father and a sociopath as a mother was that lying was by far easier than telling the truth. Nik hadn’t learned that. He was too damn good, and I wasn’t letting that kind of good pass from this world. I’d take down the world first and anything else that got in my way. “I’ll even let you have a taste first before I tell you about the rest of the family.”
That was too much temptation. Temptation and greed make you stupid, and honestly she hadn’t seen me be much of a threat so far, except as an exterminator. And, hard as it was to admit, she was right. Then. Now was a different story. The coils around Niko’s chest and neck loosened. His neck wasn’t broken, and I could hear the ragged breath he pulled in. He fell to his knees, barely conscious, but he still had that sword in his hand. An entire army of samurai was nothing compared to him.
Ammut slithered down from the protective wooden covering and balanced in front of me. One hand rested on top of Niko’s bowed head as he struggled to breathe. “I do not have to break his neck to take his life. I can do the second as easily and just as swiftly.”
“I’ll behave,” I promised. I wanted to grin. Goddamn, I wanted to, but I was good and lived by the lessons both my parents had taught me—human and monster. Lie, steal, slaughter, and never let them see it coming … until it’s too late.
I dropped the Eagle. Why did I think I needed a gun? As I’d told myself, I was a weapon—one more effective than any automatic. I put my hand against her chest, the scales a razor-sharp scrape under my palm. “Let him go,” I repeated. “Him for me. That’s the only way you’re going to get what you want. What you’ve wanted since you came here, Auphe to devour. Vampires and Wolves, they have to get boring after a while, centuries of fur and fang. But me … and my brothers and sisters. There’s nothing like us. You know that. You came here for that, didn’t you? Not all the others, but for me—for me and my brothers and sisters?” I knew it. Everywhere we’d gone, she’d left messages for me I hadn’t understood … until now.
Give them to me. Where are your brothers and sisters?
Givegivegive.
And I was. I was going to give her what she wanted. It was her bad luck that she didn’t know I was more poisonous than any Nepenthe spider.
“I can tell you where they are, the rest of us half-breeds, and me? I’m right here.” I felt the strange suction where my flesh touched hers as she drew a little of me … of my life out. It was barely a mouthful and I had a lot of life to give. She was welcome to it. “I know you can feel me. I know you can taste the Auphe in me, can’t you?”
“Yes.” The gold eyes, wild and striking in their way, closed. Ecstatic yet almost hesitant. That answered that question. She’d never sampled an Auphe in the flesh, not before me. She was intoxicated instantly. Some couldn’t handle their liquor; some couldn’t handle their life force. Too bad for her. Someone’s eyes were bigger than their stomach. “Dark,” she murmured. “Infinite in its rage, hate, hunger, and other desires. Desires the same as my own.”
Not hardly. Her desires were a Santa wish list compared to mine.
“I’m glad you like it. Consider that one taste a freebie.” I opened a gate around my hand, tarnished gray and silver, and shoved it through her chest. Her scaled flesh melted away, gone forever, beneath my fingers until I touched what passed for her heart. I could feel the serpent-slow beat of it against my skin. She couldn’t feed through a gate. Nothing could breach a gate unless I wanted it to. The gates,the doors, they belonged to me and only me.
“Can you still feel me?” I tightened my fingers. “How about now? Can you feel me now, Goddess? You murdering bitch.” The eyes were open again and
they weren’t so beautiful any longer. “Let Niko go or we’ll see how you manage to tie on the lobster bib and chow down on anything in the future without your fucking heart.”
Ishiah had told the truth in the bar when I’d asked the question.
I was a bad guy, when I needed to be, which made me the right guy for the job.
The fury behind those eyes, in the fast and ominous chittering of all the spiders that surrounded us, didn’t matter. That the bronze and green coils unwrapped themselves from around Niko’s neck, setting him free, was the only thing that did. He dropped to the concrete on his side, unmoving. In the yellow illumination of the rooftop lights I could see the gray touch, the ashes of mortality in the color of his skin. It would fade as his breathing returned to normal. His color would come back; it was coming back. He was all right. Safe. That was the only way it could be.
A good guy or a bad one, a monster or a man, whichever, I fucking loved my brother.
A soul I could do without. I couldn’t do without Niko. When it came to options, there I had none. I didn’t want any. And when someone messed with him, hurt him, especially because of me … goddamn what a big mistake they’d made—one they would regret as long as they lived.
Yeah … That wouldn’t be too fucking long, now would it?
“Release me.” Her heart was beating faster beneath my fingers now. She was a predator, but all predators had someone higher than them on the food chain. Something bigger. Something badder. They all had to answer to someone. Today her someone was me. “I did as you said. Release me. Now!” The goddess voice was back. Ammut, Eater of Hearts, Devourer of Souls. Hear my voice and obey. Bow and obey. The hypnotic flower aroma was back too, everywhere, thicker than ever as it soaked every molecule of air, but it wasn’t helping her now. Fool me once… .