Doubletake

by Rob Thurman

  I swallowed and took another mouthful. Caliban might have looked dead, but he wasn’t. He was family, and our family didn’t die easily. No no no no no. I was proof of that. I had lived through twenty years of torture…lived and escaped. Twelve more years hadn’t made me forget every burn, every sear, every slice of a blade, every week of starvation—none of it, because those memories made me stronger and more determined.

  This failure was going to prove to the family that rejected me, the family that was gone but not forgotten, that I was better than they were…so very much better.

  And the success…Cal-i-ban, something had happened to him. He had built a gate to the past. I’d “talked” to those who roamed this city: the vampires, the revenants, the Wolves, others. I’d talked to them with my teeth and my man-made claws. I left nothing but shredded flesh, intestines, and death when I was done with them. But isn’t that the result of talking? I thought it was, and if I thought it was, no one would tell me anything differently or I’d talk to them as well.

  They’d all said the same: He could gate like a motherfucker.

  Something had happened. I had only to find out what. Not that in the end it mattered. We healed. Against anything that didn’t kill us—we healed. It might take time, but we never failed in that.

  We were Auphe.

  What didn’t kill us only pissed us the fuck off.

  I tossed away the leg of the security guard who had tried to stop me from accessing the rooftop of the building at a safe distance from Caliban’s party. He wasn’t muscular or flabby, the guard, but in between. Succulent and soft, yet not too soft—the perfect consistency. But I was full. The rest could stay on the roof until someone found the leftovers. I sat up and put my sunglasses back on. Night to everyone else, but the lights…it made it day to me. I didn’t like the day. I didn’t like the tedium of lying on rooftops either. I’d relieve the tedium later by slaughtering one or two people…or three or four. With the sudden lack of paien -kind around for the past two days—except for the goats, and even I wouldn’t bother with a putrid, diseased goat—humans were all I had, and they were no challenge. It took more to satisfy.

  But soon…soon I’d find out what had made Caliban less of an opponent, less family, and so much less interesting. I had patience though. Thirty years of it. We would see what we would see. He could again be a worthwhile challenge himself, sooner or later.

  I needed a challenge, and so…

  I would wait.

  Awhile.

  6

  “Nothing for his blood pressure. It’s far too high from Rafferty’s manipulation, but with the blood loss it should be dropping like a rock. If we give it a chance, the combination should stabilize it in a normal range.”

  Odd when hearing something like that can be comforting, but it meant one thing: I was home.

  It was still dark, but that was fine. I was content to float there awhile. I knew when I opened my eyes that things weren’t going to be as pleasant.

  Once we had a healer, Rafferty. He could lay his hands on you and knit flesh back together like magic. Except there was no magic, only monsters. He had a genetic gift, one much better than mine. Then Rafferty had left—for good, I thought. He had family of his own to care for.

  There’d also been a Japanese healing spirit who had lived in the city, working as a doctor and teaching premed at Columbia. But a time had come when he’d wanted to return home. And me? I couldn’t go to a hospital, not like Niko. On the outside I was human; on the inside, I was less so. One blood test, one CT scan, and in would swoop the black helicopters, and the government would take me apart. I doubted very seriously that they’d put me back together when they were done.

  That left Niko, who, when he found a problem, found a solution…or he took out his sword and beheaded the problem. One of the two. Either way, he got things done.

  Which meant that he’d gone to med school—in a way. He had only three months’ notice that O-Kuni-Nushi, better known to his oblivious colleagues as Dr. Ken Nushi, was headed home for several hundred years at least, but Niko was smart, the smartest son of a bitch I knew. He spent every spare moment with Nushi for those months, that big brain of his soaking up every piece of knowledge at maximum speed. Nushi had known the only medical training needed for us was trauma, and that had made it easier. And as a practicing doctor, he had access to plenty of medical supplies and drugs to send our way. What he didn’t have access to—he worked as a general practitioner, not a surgeon—had to be stolen or bought from highly questionable sources.

  Seemed right. I was highly questionable myself.

  I slitted my eyes and hissed at the spike of pain caused by the light. Almost immediately the level was lowered. “Damn it to hell. Head?” I mumbled, recognizing the symptoms from too many times before. I then vaguely remembered the bounce of my skull off the street when that thing had slammed into me before trapping me with those massive claws. That would be a big yes on the head injury.

  “Head, a few burns to your legs, and sliced open like a side of beef. Oh, and Rafferty’s ‘gift’ that keeps on giving.” It was Goodfellow’s jovial rundown.

  I opened my eyes wider this time. I felt a little loopy, and that wouldn’t be from Niko knocking me out. “I feel…weird. Kind of…happy? Is this happy? I think I like it.”

  I heard Niko’s snort, and his face appeared above me. “Deep sedation, IV. I had to stitch you up, and not just skin, but layers of muscle. When we managed to get that thing off of you I could see your ribs. I could see bone. When I didn’t see the blood.” His lips tightened before I saw him tuck the image away. “You’ll be useless for weeks. Not that you aren’t perpetually useless to begin with,” he added.

  “Love you too, big brother.” I grinned and that hurt too. “Ow, Jesus.”

  “You also have a mild burn to your face from the first explosive round you fired. Fortunately that one knocked the automaton back far enough that the flash from the other rounds didn’t reach you. Although if it had happened, I’m certain Goodfellow would be the first in line with the barbecue sauce.”

  “You engage in one bonding incident of cannibalism to save your life from a pissed-off pack of natives and you never live it down,” Robin muttered.

  Niko ignored the sulking as he chose a syringe from the metal table beside him, pulled off the plastic cap, and slid the needle into the port to the IV in the back of my hand. “This should help. Not that you need it for your face. It could pass as a sunburn, but your incisions over your ribs and the one on the back of your head are going to wake up and let you know they are there soon enough.”

  Suddenly I wasn’t feeling quite as happy anymore. I looked around, doing my best not to turn my head and irritate the injury there any sooner than I had to. I was in Nik’s room. All the more intensive medical care was done there. God knew it was as antiseptic as any operating room. I had bandages that ran the width of my sides, three on the right and one on the left. A blood-pressure cuff around my right arm. There were IVs, one in my right hand and one in the crook of my left arm. Clear fluids on one side and a bag of blood on the other. You couldn’t find half-human, half-Auphe blood, but Nushi had assured Niko that the Auphe in my system could tolerate any type of blood: A, B, AB, O. Probably cow blood if it came to it, and that wasn’t a joke. Nushi didn’t joke about medical matters, Nik had said.

  Anesthesia, surgery, blood—it was the first test of Niko’s training, not the basic first aid we’d picked up along the way. I didn’t think he cared for it too much. I knew the feeling. I’d sat at the side of his hospital bed once, helpless to do anything. Which was worse? Knowing there wasn’t a damn thing you could do for your brother or knowing you were the only one who could?

  That was an easy question to answer: They both sucked equally.

  Niko’s scrubs—those we could buy legally, although that wasn’t as much fun—were stained liberally with blood. He didn’t bother with a surgical cap or mask. With my immune system, a stray hair or fl
u germ wasn’t going to be a blip on the radar. He did use gloves, though, if only to keep the blood off his hands. The gloves had their work cut out for them this time, I saw, as he peeled them off and tossed them in the garbage can that had to be at his feet even if I couldn’t lift my head from the pillow to see it. Niko would sooner commit seppuku than toss garbage on the floor.

  “Doctor, samurai, weapons expert, teacher, historian, barkeep-slash–puck boy toy, monster killer. You’re this generation’s Buckaroo Banzai,” Robin drawled. He was dressed in bloody scrubs and stripping off gloves as well. A desperately quick surgery required someone to hand over the instruments, hang more fluids, maybe wipe up the floor so you didn’t slip in the blood. No one in the room had had much of a good time, except the unconscious guy. But my body would make sure I paid for that later.

  I knew Niko didn’t care for the doctor part of Robin’s list, and that more than anything made me change the subject. “Did you say that thing was an auto-something? Jesus, if it was a Transformer, I wish you would’ve just let me go. I don’t want to live in a world where those actually exist.” Things were getting blurry and soft around the edges. The painkillers kicking in. Unfortunately the pain had jumped on the track and was neck and neck with the drugs. I hung in there. I’d hurt worse in my life, more times than I could count. I’d most likely hurt sometime worse in the future. It was the way things were.

  “Automaton,” Niko corrected as he pulled a heated blanket over me. That was another way to know I was genuinely conscious…Niko correcting me. The warmth of the blanket banished an icy chill I hadn’t been aware of until then and had me shutting my eyes, interest in my question instantly gone.

  But Goodfellow always had a way of getting anyone’s attention, anytime, anywhere, any way. I heard his cheerful comment close to my ear: “You know what surgery tends to include?” The next word went from cheerful to wickedly gleeful. “Catheters.”

  I opened my eyes and glared first at him, then at Niko. “You didn’t let him”—I waved a hand at the general area—“play around down there. Tell me you didn’t. Niko, I will kick your ass so damn far it’ll rotate around the earth like a fucking defense satellite.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a simple procedure, especially for someone like Goodfellow, with so much experience in that area. I could talk him through it while I did my best to keep you from bleeding to death, which you almost did.” His impassive gaze took me in. “Do you have anything further to say about the situation?”

  No, I didn’t. That shut me up as Goodfellow smirked, stripped off his bloody scrub top, and headed for the bedroom door. “I’m going to change while you give him the history lesson, Niko.”

  “Robin said that from the look of the metal and the description I gave him, the creature was an automaton, specifically a Janus automaton, as it had two faces. It’s a metallic, virtually living machine made by the Greek god”—or whatever was pretending to be a god—“Hephaestus. Robin hadn’t heard of this particular one, but he said Hephaestus made so many or bought them and passed them off as his own that our mythology doesn’t know one-fifth of what he created.” The automatic whine of the blood-pressure cuff inflating again had Niko’s eyes fixed on the glowing numbers.

  I didn’t care to look. Either it was so high it killed me, thanks to Rafferty, or it was low enough that I lived. Nothing I could do about it. The warmth and the pain meds finally taking over had me wanting to drift away slowly again, but I resisted it for the moment. “How do we stop it?”

  Niko was frowning as he reached for another syringe and injected that into my IV as well. “Apparently we don’t. None of our weapons will be effective against it—it’s an ancient technology that outreaches ours today. You need to know the correct phrases—a long-dead language, I’m assuming—to turn it off. Goodfellow doesn’t know them. He said every automaton has different command codes, I suppose you’d call them in this time. How it was activated is a mystery, the mystery being some Vayash traitor did, at least, know that phrase. That means we avoid it if possible until you’re well enough to send it to Tumulus. I am guessing that’s where you were attempting to send it.”

  “No, Nik, to Coney Island for a roller-coaster ride and a giant goddamn pretzel.” I tried to snort sarcastically. I wasn’t too successful except for the trickle of blood I felt start running from my nose over my lip. Niko took a washcloth and wiped it away.

  “Stop thinking, or what passes for your version of thinking, and go to sleep. Second gates aren’t supposed to kill you, but you tried too hard and Rafferty’s work is too effective. I can’t get your blood pressure down yet. So for the love of Buddha, sleep…please.”

  He didn’t say “please,” my brother, not often. He was polite and honorable—when he wasn’t forced to kill you, given—but somehow he avoided the word as if your behavior should be equally polite and therefore no “please”s required.

  When he did say it…I obeyed. I was about to close my eyes when he whipped his head around and soundlessly put a hand on the unsheathed katana on the low dresser behind him. He was listening. I didn’t hear anything except dripping IVs, the low beep of a blood-pressure machine, and a narcotic ringing in my ears, but if Niko heard something, it was there.

  I started to sit up, but realized before I did that that was the worst thing I could do. Monster slayer? I couldn’t slay a hamster right now. The only thing I would do was get in Niko’s way. He stood, not frozen, but waiting. What he waited for stepped into view out of the darkness of the hall. The only light on in the place was in this room, and it was a low light in deference to my concussion at that. It didn’t matter. I recognized him all the same.

  Kalakos.

  He had outrun the boggles. Damn that streak of humanity in me. At the moment I didn’t regret anything more than not dropping him directly into their pit. Mama Boggle would’ve solved this problem for us with one bite of her jaws. Niko’s father scanned the bedroom. He didn’t seem surprised by what he saw. “You heard me pick the lock,” he said to Niko. “I suspected you kept it slightly rusty for a reason. You are like me. No matter what we do, you and I, we will always have our reasons.”

  I saw Robin in the murk behind him. Kalakos didn’t hear him. As long as he had lived or guessed he’d lived, no one would hear Goodfellow if he didn’t want to be heard. He had a sword as well, not a katana, more crusader style, but lighter-weight. It was lined up directly at Kalakos’s back as the puck took several silent steps closer.

  Niko pointed his katana. “Leave,” he ordered flatly. “Now.” I was vulnerable, embarrassing as that was, and around an unknown variable. He didn’t like it.

  He didn’t like it to the point of being on the verge of burying steel in flesh without a thought.

  But that bastard didn’t see that as I did. Kalakos’s eyes showed no fear, but they did show resignation. “I told you that the burden is one all Vayash are responsible for recovering.”

  “We have nothing to do with your burden or the Vayash.” Kalakos didn’t know Nik, had never bothered to know him, but I knew him. I knew that while he rarely lost control, when he did…it was one goddamn thing to see. And he was standing on the edge. Teetering.

  The black eyes focused on me, on the bandages, the medical equipment, the dried blood that still covered Nik’s scrubs.

  Just…about…now.

  “I think it seems that you do.”

  That was that.

  “That is the burden? That is the duty? It did this to my brother? When you said it could sense Vayash, you meant that literally? Sense us by our blood?” Niko’s knuckles went white under his olive skin. “And you wanted us to help you fight it. Did you lead it here?”

  The point of Goodfellow’s sword came to rest against flesh. I could see that in the tightening of the skin around Kalakos’s mouth. Sandwiched between two blades, he kept his hands carefully away from his body. It was a smart move.

  “I told you that it smells Vayash like a wolf smells a sheep. You chose not t
o listen. And I did not bring it. It came of its own—”

  Niko didn’t listen to the rest. His hand wrapped around the grip of the katana slammed into his father’s face with brutal force, knocking him down and out. While Kalakos lay unconscious on the floor, Niko spit on him. I didn’t think I’d seen Niko do something more unlike himself or had seen him as furious, but then, as Kalakos had said, he and my brother always had their reasons. This was history repeating itself. “This is what the Vayash gave us when we came to you,” Niko said coldly. “And this is what you get in return, you bastard. You and your burden.”

  Kalakos’s getting his ass kicked in a truly righteous way for a truly righteous reason made me feel better than all the narcotics in the room. Niko had buried this for his entire life, and it was time that he had a chance to get it out and deal with it. To “emote.” It was a fancy word for a beat-down, “emote,” but that only made me enjoy it more. I had only one regret.