Doubletake can-7

by Rob Thurman

  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.

  Those two Cals became one. The venom had activated the Auphe healing to the extent that it had done more than return my memories. It had interwoven what had once been separate. And now there was me. I was improved. I had control, something I believed I’d always lack.

  Having control, that was something unbelievable. Incredible. There was no more reverting to the other half of my gene pool and chasing and eating Bambi in the woods, because there was no other half anymore—not mentally. There was something new and now whole formed by a joining of Auphe and human.

  Something new, something old, something unlike anything on this earth.

  I was in command, darker maybe, but the darkness was worth it.

  Darker than dark, blacker than night. Yessss.

  Enough, Gollum. Christ. I’d gotten the point already.

  But it was worth the trade—I thought. Before, I wouldn’t kill you unless I had to…although I might want to if you pissed me off. Now the whole—the new—Cal wouldn’t kill you unless I had to; I’d just want to a whole lot more—and you didn’t always have to piss me off to have me fondling my guns. The drive was increased, but the decision was the same…because of the control. I held back, unless you did have it coming to you.

  Killer, raper, monster, maimer.

  Past Cal would’ve put you down. I would too, but first you’d have the tour. Down and down, ’round and ’round, through Caliban’s town. In the past, it would’ve been quick. Now I took my time. Your pain equaled your victims. Your amount to arrive six feet under, it took longer.

  Niko believed in karma in the next life. I believed in karma in this one, and I was a stand-up soldier when it came to delivering it. The decisions I would’ve made in the past, they hadn’t changed. Much. The punishment…that I fulfilled more appropriately according to the crime and the time. I was the right hand of justice and the left hand of the undertaker.

  Clever excuses. But why do you think ending the useless needs them?

  The spider venom, the biological repair, had stabilized me—Niko, Robin, Promise, and I, we’d all recognized that. I hadn’t settled where others in the supernatural community would’ve liked, but I was stabilized. That, for everyone around me, was a relief, because it was one hell of a slippery slope, as they say, when my Auphe genes began to overcome the weaker human genes. Auphe genes always win—that’s what a long-gone healer friend of ours had said.

  He’d been right—until now. And would be right again…maybe…sometime in the future.

  There were the dreams too. Awash in blood and the hunt. Did I ever have dreams that heart-pounding? That savored?

  So wild?

  So wanted.

  Black thoughts and scarlet dreams, they didn’t mean anything in the end—unless they were useful. I was in command of myself now and that was all I needed to know. I would do what had to be done only when it had to be done, and if I enjoyed it a great deal more, then that was a win-win.

  I flipped on all the lights in the bar. The last thing I wanted was a dim atmosphere that assisted the pucks in scheming, assaulting, stealing, and a hundred other things.

  While at least I was in control of my mind, I knew I was way out of my depth on the approaching situation. The Panic? No fucking way. I tied the black apron around my waist and started lining up glasses on the bar of the Ninth Circle as I used that control to consider something else besides pucks. I thought about consequences—something I rarely did.

  Consequences were boring.

  Yet sometimes you had to man up and face them.


  That wasn’t boring. That just sucked. But for my brother, I would do it.

  Not that it still didn’t suck.

  “You think I made a mistake gating that SOB to the boggles before we found out what the Vayash burden is?” I asked my brother, who was working beside me with methodical movements.

  The last Rom clan who’d come to hire us to find their lost duty, their burden had been the watchers of an antihealer known not so euphemistically as the Plague of the World. Suyolak could’ve destroyed all life on the planet if we hadn’t stopped him. The Black Death was just a kiddie party to him, and one he’d started. It made me wonder what the hell the Vayash were supposed to be keeping locked down.

  If it was anything remotely close to Suyolak, that was bad fucking news.

  Niko showed no signs of being concerned as he shrugged slightly, following my lead with the glasses. “He’ll be back, as you said. And whatever the Vayash have lost, we cannot find today. Today is the Panic, and not only are we committed, but I think the Panic may supersede any other threat on the face of the planet.”

  It should’ve been a joke, but it didn’t sound like a joke, and I was under no illusions that it was.

  Goodfellow was the typical trickster with typical trickster ways, but he was sane. Fairly content, even happy now that he was in what used to be the foulest curse word in his vocabulary: a relationship. But he was only one of two pucks I’d met. The other, Hob, had been insane, malignantly narcissistic, and would not only kill you for no reason, but do it more efficiently than anyone alive. When you’re the first, born conceivably a million years ago, you learn to fight like there is no fucking tomorrow. My genes were of the firstborn, but I was not a firstborn. There was a difference—as in unnumbered-amount-of-years-of-carnage-experience difference.

  If they hadn’t crippled you, it would be different. Much different.

  “What do you mean, ‘crippled’?” Niko asked, the glass suspended in his hand. His knuckles were white and tense. Shit, I’d actually said that aloud.

  The door opening managed to get me out of an immediate explanation. Robin walked in wearing his usual outfit of expensive green shirt, black slacks, and shoes. He sat on a stool and said rapidly, “All right. Extremely important. Before the others get here you are not to mention, hint, or even think about how I’m in a monogamous relationship. Are we clear? It would ruin my reputation among the Panic. They’d hang me from the ceiling and beat me like a piñata. So keep your mouths shut. ¿Entienden?”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Trust me, I’m traumatized enough. The last thing I want to talk about with a hundred other yous is your sex life.”

  The green eyes shifted to something less Robin and considerably nastier as he raised his voice. “Come on in, brothers! Adelfae! Hear the news.” The door swung open again to reveal a streaming horde of pucks. “It’s true. Goodfellow is monogamous. He’s become a freak. A pervert. Depravity on the cloven hoof.”

  “Or his balls fell off,” suggested another puck who came to the bar. “Or his dick. Anyone who would hang about with Bacchus is bound to get a catastrophic genital rotting illness at some point.” This one was also identical except his hair was a few inches longer and he had both ears pierced with small gold hoops.

  Niko looked at me as the priest must’ve looked at the guy sitting in the electric chair in the old days right before the switch was flipped: resigned sympathy. “I didn’t know he wasn’t Goodfellow,” I protested, feeling the desperation sharply. Not our Goodfellow at any rate, but his carbon copy. “He looks dead-on Robin. He said he was Robin.”

  “Implied,” Niko corrected, the sympathy turning one hundred and eighty degrees to a mildly sadistic pleasure he didn’t make an effort to hide. “He implied it. He didn’t say it.”

  “He’s wearing the same kind of clothes Robin would wear”—I kept up the crumbling defense—“and all of them smell the same.” I hadn’t inherited the Auphe ability to see in the dark, but I had inherited their sharp sense of smell. “Every one of them smells like frigging Irish Spring. All green and minty. It’s not my fault.”

  He put the glass down and patted my back. “It was nice knowing you, little brother. When Goodfellow is through with you and if there’s enough left to bury, I’ll find you a nice plot.” The pucks kept pouring through the door and, immune to pheromones or not, I felt pretty damn panicked as they kept coming and coming. And I wasn’t touching that double entendre with a ten-foot pole…or that one either.

  Another puck came pushing through the crowd. As soon as the others spotted him they started singing some ancient seventies song: “‘Do you like piña coladas? And getting caught in the rain…’” The tone was pure derisive malice, obviously not a “Hey, great to see ya, brother. Congrats on the boyfriend” song.

  A fist banged against the bar, rattling the glasses. “Who told them?” this puck demanded with a poisonous hiss that would’ve done any rattlesnake proud.

  “Goodfellow?” Niko asked dubiously.

  “Yes, Goodfellow. Goodfellow who has been outed as a freak monogamist whose shame will follow him to his dying day. Now who told?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He grabbed a handful of my shirt. “Why do I even ask? We are pucks. Didn’t that one brain cell you possess wake up long enough to let you know we all lie? We all deceive? We all hate one another’s attention-snatching guts and would do anything to humiliate one another?”

  He didn’t give me a chance to respond. “Ah, what did I expect? You’re a Boy Scout in a con man convention. If con men had the drive and conscience of Jack the Ripper.”

  Me? A Boy Scout? With the things I’d done? That was a first, but considering this company, he could be right. Releasing my shirt, he dropped his forehead onto the bar and mumbled, “We should’ve worked out a safe word. Give me three bottles of scotch.”

  A hand slapped his shoulder and squeezed. “Would you like a mercy killing? I’d hate for a tainted monogamy cell to enter the race should you lose the lottery.”

  It was the one who’d masqueraded as Robin. I could tell only by what he was wearing. Otherwise he and Goodfellow were beyond identical. It was creepy. The bar was full of about seventy of them, and besides length of hair, clothing, and the occasional scar, they were as Nik had said: clones. Your brain squirmed at the sight of it. It was unnatural—mirrors within mirrors. “No, thank you, Faunus,” Goodfellow said smoothly, sitting up. “I’d rather discuss how you haven’t had sex at all in a year. Did you take vows or is it true that an incubus bit off your penis in disappointment at your pathetic performance?” He grabbed the hand on his shoulder, slammed it on the bar, and pinned it there with a beautiful Spanish poniard gleaming silver and needle sharp. “Let us check and see.”

  I turned my back just in time to hear the slide of material as pants were yanked down and then a pained groan from the entire bar. Apparently the incubus story edged out the taking-vows one.

  “Is this the type of fight you hired us to prevent?” Niko questioned. I didn’t know where his gaze was, on Goodfellow or Faunus, because I remained with my back to the Panic. I might work that way the entire night if it was feasible—serving the customers without facing them.

  “Hardly,” Goodfellow dismissed. “A fight will be when one of us genuinely tries to kill another. We need alcohol to lubricate that into motion. Give us an hour. And you can look again, Cal—not that there was anything to see.” There was a wicked gloat at the monogamy revenge in the words. “His pants are back up. Luckily he does have a belt, as there is nothing else to hold them up.”

  Warily, I faced the bar again as Faunus disappeared into the jeering and laughing crowd, the bloody blade remaining on the bar. “I think you made an enemy for life.”

  “We are all enemies, but keeping the race alive is more important than that. And what precisely are you doing?” I ignored his question as I uncapped the black marker I’d fished out from under the bar, leaned across, and wrote “RG” on his forehead.

  “Just a precaution
.” I put the marker back under the bar and handed over his three bottles of damn expensive scotch that he insisted be kept especially for him.

  “Actually, that’s not a completely idiotic idea…unless it’s permanent marker.” He scowled, but let it go and pointed to several other pucks around him. “This would be Piper, Pan, Shepherd, Paein, Paniskoi, Phobos, Philamnos, Phorbas, Panikon, Puckstein—he converted—Prank, Puca, Puki, Argos…and you’ll never remember the rest. Simply enjoy the spectacle and if you have to take a break, I’d go together. The buddy system is essential during the Panic.”

  “Mostly Ps. Why aren’t there any variations on Goodfellow or Robin?” Niko asked.

  His face went blank but he smiled…technically. If someone had taken that poniard from the bar and carved the smile on his face, the effect would’ve been the same. “That’s a good question. I’ve wondered myself and then I wonder something else. Hob was the first, a million years on this earth. No one dared to take his name. I say I’m a hundred thousand years old, but as I can’t remember half of those, what else might I not remember? A million more? Hob went insane because he did remember. All those years and all the things that he had done. In a million years they couldn’t all be good things, now, could they? Some might be extremely bad things.”

  His imitation of a smile became more unnatural as he continued. “Or if you don’t care what you do, the absolute number of years of boredom alone would drop you into the deepest pit of insanity. Maybe I’m a little smarter than Hob when I know a perfect memory can be the worst of enemies. Then again, maybes are only maybes. Maybe no one else cares enough for my name to steal it.”

  The smile disappeared piece by piece, chunks of ice shoved methodically one by one into a freezer. “Do you have any interesting questions to add, Caliban?”