Doubletake can-7

by Rob Thurman

  But if I were an optimist, this wouldn’t be my life we were talking about, would it?

  The Bae gripped the wood to pull it from its chest, then swiveled its head to hiss and lunge at the next person hesitating in the doorway. Kalakos cursed in Rom and took its head off at the shoulders with his saber. The move had been instinctual. That could be seen in his brown skin that now almost matched the color of the Bae as it fell in two pieces. Paler than pale. He hadn’t seen what was attacking him. It had been too quick, in the middle of a rescue, the moment too muddied. Kalakos had seen a threat. That was all. It wasn’t until it was down and dead that he saw, for the first time, an Auphe. Or the closest thing next to me to qualify as an Auphe.

  I watched it twitch and changed my mind, my former scorn sulking. I’d more or less told it that give it fifty years’ experience and it would be the next thing closest to me. Now I thought that in fifty years I’d be the closest thing to it instead. It had the equipment, the ability, and Grimm would make certain the Bae would learn to use them. Grimm knew education was an advantage above all others.

  “Makes me look pretty good, doesn’t it, Kalakos?” I said. “Given half a century or so of murder and mayhem and it would’ve become the shadow of an Auphe.” A thousand years and it would leave the Auphe in its dust. “Tell that to your clan, the cowardly sons of bitches. Afraid of a sixteen-year-old mentally damaged kid like I’d been. I doubt they’d have done much spitting if that had come calling in my place.”

  He took a step away from the Bae, regained the equilibrium a warrior needed to survive, and looked at me for the first time. Or rather saw me for the first time. All my…heh…quirky imperfections aside, I wasn’t the Bae. There was some human in it, but there was humanity in me. I wasn’t overflowing with it, but it was there.

  “I apologize,” he offered in that familiar if older echo of Niko’s voice, “for myself and my clan. This…this is a monster, not you. We misjudged our own blood and we are shamed for it.”

  That was unexpected, kind of decent, and the right thing to do. If it had come eight and a half, nine years earlier, it might have made a difference. It hadn’t, though, and my grudge was about what he, decent but not decent enough to be a father, and the Rom had done to Nik. I didn’t give a shit what they thought about me.

  Niko paused for the briefest of moments at the apology before overlooking it to grip one of my shoulders hard enough to get my instant—ow—attention. “Who was that? What was that?” He wasn’t talking about the dead Bae on the floor or the others. He was referring to the one clever enough to take me from the condo alive, fast enough to escape my real brother and survive—all while making an edgier game of it than I’d thought. I’d been down here less than fifteen minutes, listening to Grimm, attacking him, fighting the Bae. He hadn’t bothered to go any farther than what I had to think was two or three buildings down from Goodfellow’s. Niko didn’t have his tracker with him. That had been left back home when we’d fled Janus. Goodfellow had one, though, as did Promise and Ishiah in a locked safe at the bar.

  “He’s one I missed in South Carolina.” I wiped some of the Bae blood from the xiphos carelessly onto my pants. “By twelve years. He was the Auphe’s first success, not me, and they never knew it. He’s also head of the Auphe Second Coming. Big, bad Auphe messiah.” I ran a hand slowly through the space where his gate had been. I could feel the pain and the wound of reality knitting itself back together still. Every gate had a price. Mine too, as much as I tried to forget it.

  Kalakos had thought I was a monster and then he saw the Bae.

  I’d thought I was a monster when I’d been old enough to realize what a monster was.

  I’d eventually reached a point where I didn’t care anymore if I was one. I’d admitted it without shame. Sad to say I occasionally enjoyed it on the sly lately, but now I knew.

  Accepting that you were a monster wasn’t the same as being the real thing, full-time, every single second of every single day.

  Grimm had shown me that.

  He’d also shown me that he was right. He was superior to them. He was as ruthless as the Auphe, but smarter. More adaptable. Thrived on change. Nature had taken her fuckup and created a rung higher on the ladder, and Grimm was standing on it.

  “Nik,” I said, calm, not that that was what I felt. I didn’t know what I was feeling other than it was a seething mass of confliction. “You need to know. He’s better than me…even on my very best day.” Best day. Worst day. My Auphe days, the ones that were now gone or at the very least viciously choke-chained and powerless.

  And why wouldn’t they die? Auphe. Half-Auphe. I killed them over and over, three times now.

  Why wouldn’t they fucking die?

  Yet…

  Welcome back, brothers and sisters. I missed you.

  I missed the game.

  10

  My brother was surprised I was smart, smarter than him. That I’d gone to school and Death had a degree. I sat in the New Mexico desert, back against a rock, eyes closed, and slowly healed. It was cloudy even here today, but warm, and it felt good as the stab wound in my stomach bitched. It wasn’t a critical wound—that was the best part of being half-and-half. You never knew where our bodies kept the important parts. All of us had been different, but I’d lucked out and Caliban hadn’t. He’d skewered me all the way through, but hadn’t hit a single worthwhile organ when he did.

  Of course, it hurt like a motherfucker, which was good. I’d learned to like pain. Sidle had taught his prisoners that. He, my very first teacher, had taught us to love it. Hate and pain—they were the only things we could love.

  So, so good.

  Caliban had given me a present. I’d give him one too. Whether he’d learned to like pain the way I had, I didn’t know. He hadn’t had a Sidle.

  Time enough to find out.

  Sidle with his lessons had been my first teacher, but not my only one. There were no degrees in pain among the cattle.

  I’d had several teachers as I traveled looking for Caliban before I caught up with him in Nevah’s Landing. For some reason the fight made me think of a teacher I couldn’t remember. A woman. Red hair? I didn’t recall. But the wound in my gut made me think of something I couldn’t think of. Something I’d done to her. Senseless, that. It was a lost memory and I didn’t lose memories. What Caliban had done to me was the same as birthdays and balloons. What I’d done to her was a hole in the ground with maggots your only party favors.

  But who was she?

  When had I sliced her open?

  Maybe it was but a dream. A good dream, but a dream.

  I traced a gloved finger over the clotted blood covering the slash in my stomach, then tore it away to let it bleed again, up the pain again. Ah, good, good. Pleasure and pain, pain and pleasure. I watched the blood course out.

  The dream, which was all it could’ve been, made me think of martyrs. After hearing my long-gone warden read the Bible over and over, for the good parts—smiting, killing firstborns on either side, selling your daughter, sacrificing your firstborn son because God told you to before saying Psych! Destroying cities—I knew what to do with a martyr: Stone him or cut off his head. Stoning would take far too fucking long.

  I could be logical and martyr a teacher too in a dream. What could be better?

  The memory of the dream grew sharper.

  Shit, what a giving, kind, love-everyone-in-the-whole-wide-blessed-be-world cow she’d been. It was unbearable.

  I couldn’t remember her name. Georgia? No, not it—as if it mattered.

  She’d been a freshman in college, worked as a waitress to pay her tuition, worked the soup kitchen on alternate weekends—I like soup, or how it seasoned the homeless man who I’d eaten in the alley, and she’d volunteered her time to teach classes for GED candidates. She’d grown up in New York City, and shook her finger at us to not make fun of her accent. One day someone had asked her why she left and ended up in Columbus, Ohio—for college, and she thought
she needed a change, she’d said. She’d been tired of the city. Tired of its not being what she wanted it to be and of knowing it never would. The world wouldn’t change. The world was the world and it had rules, and because it wouldn’t change, neither could she. The best you could do was change where you were in it, and she had.

  Fuck, she’s one of those, had been my disgusted thought.

  There’d been no waiting then. I couldn’t sit there every day with that in the room.

  “Patience is a virtue,” I’d read, curling my lips and nodding at the saying she’d written on the blackboard.

  She’d laughed, red hair springing around her shoulders. “I know. I’m such a hypocrite, aren’t I? Patience for everyone else is a virtue, but I lost patience for patience or for virtue. But that’s who I am now. We are who we are and sometimes there’s a cost. And that is how it will always be unless you decide you don’t want to pay it anymore. Now, this isn’t philosophy. Turn to the chapter on Charlemagne.”

  The rest of the students were puzzled and generally not that bright when it came to things they couldn’t see or touch. They had been sitting with their history books open, thumbing through to find what she was talking about. Idiots. Never did they want to think for themselves; they wanted knowledge handed to them like a blood-coated can. Drink it down. Ten seconds later they were goddamn geniuses. They didn’t know. Our teacher was human, but not all humans were golems of mud slouching from here to there, thick tongues with nothing interesting to say, no interesting ways to die.

  But I would’ve given anything to make a buffet of them all, scratching, and chewing gum, and poking me in the back to ask for a pen. That student hadn’t come back to class; they did tend to drop out once in a while, but this one did get his pen—jammed in his eye before I’d dumped him in the Ohio River.

  The teacher had begun class and I’d paid close attention. Cattle had things to teach me if I bothered to listen. They taught me how to imitate them, think like them, and end them. It was work, but after eighteen years in a cage, vengeance isn’t work. It’s a gift.

  After the class was over the teacher let the others go but had called me over to her. She’d sat on the edge of her desk, her gold-and-brown long skirt drawn primly around her legs. Her eyes had been brown, I’d thought, but, no, that was wrong. A gold light had glowed behind the brown. She’d known things. Some humans did. The ones who loved money told you what they saw in the dark of their minds. The ones who thought they knew their place in the world and the universe, they said what would be would be, and the knowledge they saw would only hurt you. You simply had to accept that there was a greater purpose. And what you did ask them they wouldn’t breathe a word of an answer to you. Greater purpose. Pat on the hand. They were as bad as the first. They thought they knew, but they didn’t. No one knew.

  The universe was a coin spinning on its edge. When I gated, I could see it. Violently unpredictable. You didn’t know which way it would fall. It was chaos and nothing more. But the peace-loving Gandhi wannabes thought differently, because they could see, but they couldn’t see what one like me could see. She was right. She was a hypocrite, but she didn’t know why. None of the good ones did. None of the good ones knew they lied to everyone and they lied to themselves. They told all that nothing big could be changed and you were stuck with what life gave you.

  But I had proved them wrong. It took a while, but I wasn’t stuck now.

  Not once did they stop to think that they took hope instead of giving it. Not that I needed hope or a denial of my fate. I made my fate.

  What will be will be.

  Suck that shit up.

  It was too bad. She’d been an adequate teacher, one of the best I’d had. But sometimes you had to move on.

  Because “what will be will fucking be.” As much as I despised her fucking kind, I couldn’t let her be anymore.

  As I’d stood by her desk, she’d taken my hand, the dark gold of hers a contrast of the light tan of mine. She met my eyes through the sunglasses I refused to take off in class. “I knew someone like you when I was a year or two younger.” Younger…when she’d lived in NYC. Someone like me. There was only one like me, except…I felt the grin start, but held it back.

  Cal-i-ban.

  “I loved him.” She’d squeezed my hand, but her eyes held only calm, no sadness. No fear. If she’d known me, she should’ve feared. “And he loved me. Too much, I think. He said I was born of peace and he was born of blood and death. He told me it wasn’t a guess, but that he knew I wouldn’t survive in his world. And he was a killer, but he wouldn’t be responsible for killing me just by being with me. I was willing to trust fate. He wasn’t.”

  Then there had been sadness. It had made me smile. “He was right, but he gave me a chance,” she’d said. “He’d let me look at our path and where it led. I told him no. Little things can change. The whole of your life or death cannot. I refused to look and he refused to risk me without a guarantee I would be safe. That I would survive. I’ve thought since I came here of my sin and my lie. I loved him so much that I broke my only rule. I did look. And then I left. He was right and neither of us should have to see it happen.” Her voice was soft and would have been boring had it not been for the information on Caliban.

  She’d put her other hand against my face. I’d felt the warmth of it through the hair that fell across my cheek. “I know you won’t believe me, as he didn’t believe me, but the first day you sat in my class I knew you. I broke my rule again and looked into your future too. I won’t run and I won’t blame you. You were born to be who you are, Grimm. We are all born to a purpose.” I hadn’t told her my real name in class, yet she knew.

  I really hated those damn seers.

  “Balance in this world is far more important than those who live in it.” She’d leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “But, Grimm, you will not tell him what you think to do here.”

  Not tell Caliban I sliced up one of his old girlfriends? Yeah, that was a promise. Stupid bitch.

  Her hand on my face had burned, and the brown—no, what color?—of her eyes had turned to pure glowing golden amber, and I thought felt something leave…no, something stolen from my mind. It was there. It was about Caliban, who was in NYC, but what…? I wasn’t supposed to tell…tell him about my teacher? Why would I?

  I’d forgotten her name and face the second I used a switchblade to slice open her stomach. It wasn’t like she was important. Finding Caliban, after all these years, that was the only thing.

  I’d retracted the blade to put back in my pocket, shook my head, and removed my sunglasses to rub at my eyes, my headache fierce. The teacher, Georgina…George…G.

  Eh, it was gone. Why would I waste a brain cell on her name or her face anyway?

  I’d left her sprawled across her desk. Blood pooled around her. I couldn’t really tell what color her hair was—brown? Black? Red as her own blood? I did see the palm of her hand—it was the same silver-white as my hair. Freaking bizarre.

  But she was gone and so was I. And the world was better off with one less psychic. I’d planned on killing her when the GED class graduated anyway—martyrs and psychics. Hell with them. And I knew where Caliban was, NYC—I didn’t know how I knew, but suddenly I did know—and teachers were a dime a dozen. I was on the move. Blood dripped to the floor. I vaguely remembered gutting her, but not with the intensity I normally did. I loved a good gutting. I liked to lie in the grass or abandoned buildings or even a bed and relive them from time to time. I shrugged. She must not have been that interesting.

  Now the blood began to splatter the floor.

  But that’s what happened when you broke your own rules. My kind had no rules. We lived—or had lived—in the same place, but dwelled in different worlds.

  I was sure she thought she’d gone to a better one. They always did. There were other worlds, I knew. Whether she went to a good or bad one wasn’t up to her, whatever she thought. It was up to that ever-spinning and capricious universe. And
if it had made me, it couldn’t be very good and generous, could it?

  She had been a good teacher, though.

  I took the apple out of my jacket pocket, polished it on my sleeve, and left it in her limp hand before I left. I’d brought it to be ironic. An apple a day will never keep an Auphe away.

  I walked out into the hall and closed the door behind me. I thought I heard the sound of something being tossed into a metal trash can, the kind by the teacher’s desk. With my Auphe hearing, if I heard something, there was something. I glanced back through the frosted glass and saw a misty outline of a crying woman, face in her hands, red hair.…I rubbed my eyes again and it was gone.

  Just a dead human on the altar of a teacher’s desk, martyred as she’d meant to be. A human without a face or color or a name.

  “I’ll find a way to change it. I will. I don’t care if it’s never been done. The world can’t stop me. No one can stop me.”

  It was a woman’s voice choked with tears and determination. Familiar. I turned to look again, but then I’d found myself on the first floor with no memory of coming down the stairs. Too much excitement, too much glee at the games to come. My brother. Fighting, blood, family joined again and maybe a few hundred deaths or so.

  Because he was in…She’d said he lived in…Fuck.

  I’d known.

  I’d just this second known and it was gone too, like the other things…like…what other things?

  Absently I put my sunglasses back on, left the building, and stepped down to the sidewalk. Why was I standing here doing nothing? I could be in the library searching the Internet for Caliban. Or I could be off showing one of those gangs downtown that when they said they were going to take your money and shove your head up your ass, it was harder than it sounded. You had to break a lot of vertebrae to do that, have some real upper-body strength, and a machete to make that back door a few sizes bigger. I had the ability and the motivation. Tonight, I’d thought, I’d be the teacher.