Doubletake

by Rob Thurman

  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.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen a face in the window…colors of brown, red, and amber. I’d smelled the pumping heart and the circulating blood of healthy life.

  I’d heard one word.

  Forget.

  The desert heat made me sleepy as I tasted my own blood from the tip of my leather-covered finger. It had made me dream. An enjoyable dream.

  Forget.

  I could see the blood, brighter than any other blood I could think of. It was all I could see. It was a curtain pulled over everything else. But I didn’t mind. I liked blood, and I liked red. As I began to tumble into a healing semicoma, I had an image of me handing Caliban an apple and laughing. Laughing. Laughing. Laughing.

  Forget.

  I could hear a woman crying. “I’ll find a way to change it. I will.”

  Forget.

  Had I dreamed? It didn’t matter. If I had, I would sleep again and dream of better things, things that I could remember. Such as Cal’s sword in my stomach. The Second Coming.

  Family.

  The end of the world.

  The beginning of mine.

  11

  I told Niko, Robin, and Promise about Grimm, the Auphe-bae, every detail I could remember, except for the specific ones of what I’d done in South Carolina to the other imprisoned failures. That I glossed over. Niko already knew them. I’d told him the day I’d returned home. I told Niko almost everything, and not only because he was my brother. He was all that stood between me and the world. I wasn’t worried about myself. Of the two, the earth and Cal off his leash, I wasn’t the one that needed protecting. I was sane currently, and I did go back and forth on whether that was a good thing or not, but who knew if that would last?

  Not if. How long…

  I didn’t tell the puck and Promise the particulars of what I’d done in Nevah’s Landing at the beginning of the year, that I’d shot seven half-Auphe manacled in cages like fish in a barrel, because it was my only option. I didn’t want to and I didn’t have to. They knew what had happened, as it was the only thing that could’ve happened. They didn’t need me painting them a mental picture. It hadn’t bothered me when I’d done it, and it didn’t bother me now. There was nothing else to do.

  But I didn’t want to see them look at me with that mental image in a continuous loop behind their eyes. On the other hand, Sidle, the warden and torturer…When it came to killing him, my only regret was that I couldn’t do it again…and again. He merely wasn’t worth mentioning to the others, as he had been a useless thing. He’d been proof that you didn’t have to gate or look like an Auphe to be a monster. You could be a weak one with an advantage that he hadn’t deserved. The half-Auphe had been in cages while he roamed free to find instruments of pain to make them behave.

  It was in that one instance that Grimm had been right. I should’ve made that bastard suffer instead of putting him down instantly and painlessly like a rabid dog.

  “I’ve killed, Caliban,” Promise said, curled on Robin’s couch after we’d pushed ours off of it. She’d said the male psyche was a mystery to her, but that wasn’t true. Not with five deceased elderly husbands. As far as I’d seen, Promise knew any thought that might run through a man’s head. And she saw mine.

  “In the old days befo
re we had ways other than blood, I killed to live. You shouldn’t feel that you are worse than I was—or Goodfellow, for that matter.” She slanted a knowing glimpse of violet and velvet his way. “I have heard tales of his escapades, and pretending to be a god wasn’t the worst of them.”

  As far as Robin was concerned, the vampire wasn’t there and the subject she’d brought up didn’t exist. He didn’t want to talk about it, apparently. And that was more bizarre—alien-pod-person bizarre. Goodfellow was incapable of “not wanting to talk.” From the first time he’d opened his mouth to introduce himself and try to sell us a car, he hadn’t shut up once, and that had been close to five years ago. He’d been kind of…off during the Panic. I’d thought he’d gone back to his old self after it was over, but now I wasn’t as sure. I watched as he continued to pretend Promise wasn’t on his couch—or on the planet, for that matter. The dismissal of her was that complete.

  He was rearranging notification cards on the table. When we’d returned to the condo, I’d read them upside down as I’d looped around the coffee table to grab my spot on the couch. They said that he was not monogamous, and should he find the originator of the rumor he would drench his dick in Tabasco sauce, piss in his treacherous mouth, as that was all it was good for, and then draw and quarter him before letting a horny mule hump his remains.

  Sounded like a great start for a new line of greeting cards to me. They were clearly meant as damage control for the attending members of the Panic. Next to them was a stack of smaller personal cards spelling out Robin Goodfellow—monogamous since 2011, with the suicide hotline at the bottom for those who couldn’t face the fact. Side by side sat the contradiction. It didn’t make any difference to the puck. What was one lie to a trickster? Especially when it was to other tricksters?

  A lie would be the first words out of a trickster’s, especially Robin’s, mouth the moment he woke up in the morning.

  Of course you’re not average size. You’re enormous, he’d say. Unbelievable. I was stunned, momentarily blinded by the vastness of it. Now…is it a penis or a clitoris again? Sorry. I drank entirely too much last night.

  Or he might tell the truth if it was worse than a lie. A puck knew how to do the most damage, and the best weapon to wield.

  It’s not me; it’s you. It’s really, really you. It could not be more you. You should carry a bucket for your sex partner to hurl into when they wake up and see you in the daylight.

  But that was before monogamy with Ishiah. I didn’t want to know what he told him first thing in the morning, but it crept into my mind all the same. Having sex with a walking, talking feather duster doesn’t make me sneeze at all.

  I sneezed through my entire shift every shift at the bar. I knew that would be a whopper of a lie. As a matter of fact, I sneezed as I finished telling my grimmer-than-Grimm fairy tale and scattered Goodfellow’s cards across the coffee table. It was psychosomatic, since I hadn’t seen Ish anywhere since the Panic had come and gone. I didn’t know if he’d returned or not. I thought he and Robin still kept separate apartments, but I didn’t ask, as I had no desire to know. I liked the boss/employee relationship the way it was…with me not knowing shit about what he did after hours. Now, though, with the mess we were in, it seemed odd he wasn’t around. “Where’s Ish?”

  Niko went to the door to let Kalakos inside. The Vayash wasn’t privy to Auphe, half-Auphe, one-fourth-Auphe secrets. As far as he knew, the pure Auphe race existed yet. He didn’t know they were extinct. Very few did know that, rumormongering tricksters included, difficult as that was to believe. Mainly, Niko had put forth, because no one wanted to talk about the Auphe. They were the original “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil”—with an emphasis on “speak no evil.” If no one talked about them, then no one could know they were gone.

  Kalakos didn’t need to know anything about our lives, and as Niko wouldn’t have trusted him with our plastic tableware, he’d been left in the hall while we’d talked. Although I had to give it to him: He had charged into that basement behind Niko and ended up decapitating the last Bae. He’d watched Niko’s back—far too late by twenty-seven years, but it meant something all the same. Maybe.

  I’d think about it.

  But regardless of what Kalakos had done, it wasn’t my call to make. I elbowed Robin, who was gathering the cards into neat piles again with impatient, quick movements that made a professional cardsharp appear to be moving in slow motion. “Ishiah?” I prompted.

  “He’s in Vegas. Lucky bastard,” he grumbled. “The peri have something rather like…” He rearranged the cards again. If it had been anyone else, I’d have said he was buying time. But this was Robin, trickster extraordinaire. He didn’t need to make up a lie. He already knew every one there ever had been or would be. “They have something like the National Guard. Ishiah is retired, but he’s been reactivated for one mission. It shouldn’t take more than a few days. A week at the most.”

  Why peri would need a National Guard was my next question, but the puck cut that off promptly with a suggestion. “I’ve been thinking. Cal, note that—you can think all the time. It’s true, but I digress. My first thought is this: Janus will be showing up soon, as it’s still storming and he can move about unseen. Which means we should move before he tracks the Vayash among us here. As if it would hurt any of you to use an effective war machine–deflecting deodorant?” he complained. “My second thought is that perhaps Hephaestus could assist us with the situation.”

  As Kalakos came through the door, Niko closed it and asked verbally what I longed to ask physically, with my hands wrapped tightly around Goodfellow’s neck. “He’s alive? He traded whatever currency of the time for that monstrosity before years later passing it on to the Rom to guard, and you only thought now to bring up the fact that he’s still alive?”

  Robin snorted. “If it were that easy, don’t you think I would have? No, he’s not alive. He’s dead. Deadish. Yes, deadish would be more accurate, and he’s wildly insane, quite naturally. All Greek legends end up insane sooner or later. It must be something in the water.” He shrugged, as I put a water purifier for him on my mental Christmas list. “But he was insane long before he became biofunctionally challenged, which makes it that much more difficult.”

  “Is he in Greece?” I asked. “Because that’s a long trip. But if we go with you, Janus will probably jump the plane and ride it all the way there.”

  “Greece? No. Very few of us are there now. When the people stopped believing in us, we left. Too many painful memories of better days.” He checked his watch. “Conveniently enough, Hephaestus is in Connecticut. With traffic we could be there in two and a half hours.”

  “He’s in Connecticut. Dead and in Connecticut? Less than two to three hours away?” Niko said dubiously. “I find that difficult to believe. Greece, very well. But if he’s dead, why isn’t he in Hades or the Elysian fields?”

  My brother the Buddhist believed in life after death—of all different sorts. An afterlife for every belief that has been and will come. I didn’t give him grief over it. After what he’d lived through in this life, he was entitled to believe whatever he wanted. But I knew after death there was nothing but emptiness and nonexistence. I had no problem with that. It was heaven in my book.

  Goodfellow answered Niko’s question by holding up two fingers. “Two words: industrial revolution.” He added, “And guns. He loved weapons, anything that could inflict death and despair. We all have our hobbies. He was late by a hundred years or so. As I said, wildly insane, easily distracted, and behind on the news, but by the time he caught up, weapons were that much more advanced. I’m sure he was quite the happy camper when he discovered the concept. They don’t have guns in Hades or the fields, so he went where the guns did.”

  “I repeat, you didn’t bring this up sooner?” Niko’s voice lowered to the same threatening rumble of the thunder outside.

  “Niko, he’s madder than a syphilitic-ridden Al Capone, not deader than dead, but deader tha
n he should be, and he hates me. Ares’s steroid-induced rages, does he hate me. You don’t need to know why. If I thought he had an iota of sanity or cooperation in him, I’d have mentioned it, I don’t know, perhaps while Cal was dying, while you were beating your father like a Turkish rug, when we were again attacked by Janus, while Cal had been kidnapped and we were frantically searching for him as if he were a microchipped prizewinning Westminster Labradoodle. So many wasted opportunities when we were lying about while lacking in any pertinent activity, I realize, but it’s a chance in a thousand anyway. He despises me more than any creature I know, and that, considering my extraordinary reputation, is saying much.” He gave up on the cards and pushed them off the table.

  “Was I put in my place?” Niko asked me ruefully, not entirely used to the feeling.

  I was, however, and didn’t mind seeing someone else suffer. “You were puck-slapped but good. Okay, we’re taking two cars and I’m not wearing a sweater.”

  Goodfellow was shocked and appalled. Everyone wore sweaters in Connecticut. He was ninety-nine percent positive that you couldn’t cross the state line without one.