Doubletake

by Rob Thurman

  The door opened without a knock, which only two people would do. Robin—looking to beef up his porn site material—or Niko, who’d seen it all before from the day I popped out of the oven.

  “What’s taking so long?” he started with a scowl, then a frown when he took in the sight of my legs and the bloody water still circling the shower drain. “When the Cyclops took me under, you ran for me. From across the room, you ran.”

  I tossed him the empty tube of ointment before grabbing a towel to scrub at my dripping hair. “Yeah, I ran. Sort of a given, Nik.”

  “Kalakos was closer and he ran carefully, picking his way through the metal. From the looks of you, you did not. You look as if you’ve been…flayed. Damn it, Cal, it wouldn’t kill you to be as careful as him once in a while.”

  “No, but it might have killed you, and I keep saying it, but I have never heard you curse this much in your life, much less in two days,” I said, voice muffled by the towel. “Well? Any brothers or sisters?”

  “If you’d fallen, you could’ve cut your own throat five times over and no, no siblings but you.”

  I peered from under the towel, my lips curving in a wicked smirk. “Did you cry? In relief, I mean. At least one tear?”

  “I thanked every major religious figure I could think of. I thanked Goodfellow as well, as he once pretended to be a god. I wanted to cover all the bases.” His face showed nothing but absolute sincerity.

  I grinned wider and went back to drying my hair, then dumped the towel in the sink. I avoided the mirror as always and carelessly finger-combed my hair. “Do you think he meant it? That he’s sorry?”

  “Probably not, but he made an effort and that may count. Fractionally. I have to think on it.” His lips tightened. “My God, your legs.”

  “Looked at yourself lately?” He’d cleaned off the blood from himself in the car while it was still fresh. It didn’t change the fact that he appeared to have been attacked by five or six tiny dominatrices with small whips. And it wasn’t his legs, although they were now covered with pants, but his arms, his chest, his neck, and a few cuts on his face, from being pulled down through the floor by the Cyclops. I’d seen it in the car and here. We were all sliced and diced, some more than others and some less. Niko and I had the most. Kalakos and Robin the least. Kalakos because he was careful. I swallowed the growl. Robin, in spite of running full-out, because he had a few millennia of practice at dodging sharp objects. I respected the puck’s skill. I didn’t respect Kalakos’s investment in keeping his skin whole.

  But whichever half you fell into, the more or the less, the four of us were all injured, Niko had pointed out. “The subject of the first class for blind butchers wouldn’t have fared as badly as we did.” That was a Nik joke. Not the type that are funny because they’re true, but the type that aren’t funny because they’re too true.

  “Tired?”

  I groaned. “You have no idea.”

  Five minutes later he’d kicked Robin off the one couch in the room and had me on it with pillow and blanket before I had half pulled on a Chen-donated pair of cotton pajama pants. Goodfellow complained; I didn’t blame him. The cushions were soft and comfortable. The floor wasn’t going to be either one. But I heard Nik telling him it was time for his shower and first aid assisted by Niko himself.

  My brother, he knew how to take one for the team.

  “Monogamous or not, I am horrifically wounded and need all the first-aid assistance I can get,” Robin agreed promptly. “Ish would want that. For my health…my best interest. I’m sure of it.”

  Ishiah wasn’t on a mission. He’d gone to Vegas to hole up in a hotel room and recover. Or flown farther, to Mexico, where they sell Viagra in barrels, not bottles. Whichever it was, I knew he had sun, and nothing trying to eat his feathered ass. I wished we could say the same.

  Knife under my pillow, I slept instantly and hard and dreamed of Grimm. Of living his life shackled and chained. Tortured and craving the taste of raw meat. Dreamed of freedom and traveling a land I didn’t know existed. Learning things I hadn’t suspected, but knew I needed once I saw the world…the real world. I had a nightmare of killing a teacher, but I couldn’t remember what she looked like or what her name was or why she kept talking when she should’ve been dead. I dreamed grim and Grimm, but no more than five or six times.

  Maybe seven.

  Isn’t that the lucky number?

  16

  I was swatted awake the next morning by a paper in the face. It was rolled up and I wondered briefly if I’d piddled on the couch. “Up and at ’em, couch thief. Janus came back last night and wiped out about half an acre of Central Park. At least I’d say it’s a reasonable assumption it was Janus, as the unnatural and unseen tornado out of a clear sky makes less sense, but is a weatherman’s wet dream. One drop of rain and they’re on TV yap-yap-yap, counting every drop, predicting the planet-threatening sprinkle but a mere five days away.”

  I snatched the paper from Goodfellow’s hand as he kept yap-yap-yapping himself, to find it was in Chinese, which left me out. But there was a picture zoomed in on a circle of trees splintered and flattened. “Shit.” Central Park. “The boggles.” I’d come to the conclusion that Grimm wouldn’t mess with family or friends, but I hadn’t considered enemies. Some enemies can be more useful than friends on occasion. Then there were the kids.…“Jesus,” I groaned, and sat up, every muscle aching.

  “You were right. Grimm is intelligent, too intelligent.” Niko was handing me some kind of sticky pastry with a napkin wrapped around it and a cup of coffee. I looked at both blankly for a good minute before I recognized what they were and what to do with them. Morning was not my thing. “He may have gone after something we value but can’t claim as family. It’s a fine line, if it’s one he’s indeed walking.”

  I grunted and ate. “Go?”

  “Yes, I think we should. The area that was destroyed isn’t close to the boggle pit, but it’s not far enough for comfort either. And there is no other reason for Janus to have been there. We weren’t.”

  “Games.” One in which Grimm was several moves ahead of me. Did he think I cared enough about the boggles to come after him? Or that I cared that they were too useful for him to be screwing with? He was outlining the boundaries, dipping a toe in the water to see if Caliban the shark snapped at his leg and pulled him under. He wanted to know how far he could push, yet keep the possibility of my changing teams. Observation had shown him how I felt about family and friends; now he wanted to know how I felt about others.

  Did I know myself? You can spend enough time with a monster that would rip off your arm like a turkey leg if you eventually let yourself get used to it. A give and take that goes on for years. Information for pay. Sparring for experience. As long as you’re equally matched and you both can walk away…some were convenient to have around. Like Boggle and her litter.

  “I need more coffee,” I mumbled. “Lots more coffee.”

  At first I thought the mud pit was empty. To be polite we’d shouted we were coming for a “consultation” with Mama Boggle when we were several hundred feet away in the deepest part of the woods of the park. It wasn’t necessary. She had a nose as good as a Wolf’s, but temperamental was a boggle’s nature. That and predatory, homicidal, and they liked bright, shiny things. Mama Boggle was nine feet of scales, claws, pumpkin orange eyes. She was a humanoid alligator with the backward bite of a shark’s mouth, and a magpie’s attraction to gold and gems. When she was mildly annoyed, she’d uproot full-grown trees and throw them at you. If you were a mugger or a lost jogger, she ate you.

  As informants went, she was a good one. If she knew anything and you bought her a bag full of Tiffany’s best, she’d tell you. If she didn’t know anything, she’d ignore you…or go back to throwing trees at you. If she hadn’t had the kids to feed and teach to hunt, she would’ve been more interested in killing us, but keeping her litter in line took a lot of time and energy. They looked just like their mom, but only sev
en feet tall and not that bright. They’d outgrow it. And when they did, I wasn’t sure what would happen. One boggle in Central Park was survivable. One with a litter of boglets—they were occupied teaching and learning, also doable. But when the boglets became full-grown, I didn’t think Central Park could sustain that many adult boggles. I knew we couldn’t take on that many if worse came to worst.

  Unless they stayed on the dim side.

  I crouched by the pit and knocked on the edge of the mud. It wasn’t as crusted around the edge, thanks to yesterday’s storm that had finally cleared up around late afternoon. I lifted my hand and wiped the coating of mud on the grass. “Boggle?” I swiveled my head to look up at Nik and the others. “I smell sulfur. Janus. But not strong. Not like it was here. More like the boggles brought the scent back on them.”

  “I don’t care for the sound of that. Unless they did us a favor and took Janus apart to keep his bright and sparkly pieces for souvenirs,” Robin said with a yawn as he stood beside me, leaning on his sword. The floor hadn’t been conducive to sleep, he’d said…repeatedly. That was intended to make me feel guilty.

  It didn’t.

  I was about to knock again when the pit erupted and widely sweeping arms wrapped around Goodfellow and me and dragged us under. So much for the neighborly visit. My last sight was Kalakos holding Niko back, yelling, “It’s too late! You can’t fight that! And there are others…”

  I didn’t hear any more about the others as mud filled my ears, nose, but not my mouth. I kept that shut. It was true that enemies could be more useful than friends once in a while, but that didn’t mean you ever forgot what they were. You’d be tempted to…with every interaction you survived, but if you let yourself forget, you’d be delivered from that temptation in a less than biblical way. I’d always known that about Mama Boggle. The first time you dropped your guard, she’d take you down.

  Which is why, when I’d knocked with one hand, I’d been aiming my Glock with the other dead center at the pit. I was firing as soon as her scaled arm started to wrap around me. I couldn’t avoid it—not with her speed—but I could react. Male boggles were bad fucking news, and fast. Female boggles were bigger, stronger, faster, and bad fucking news to the tenth power. They were of the “shoot first, ask questions never” kind if they came after you.

  I was emptying the clip as fast as it would go, which, as I’d learned how to convert semiautomatics to full-auto when I was seventeen, I think equaled Mama Boggle’s speed. Goodfellow would be using his sword with all the skill possible in a liquid pool of mud. All in all, we were probably going to die anyway, but she’d feel it when we did.

  I like being right, but I also like being wrong. This was one of the times that wrong was my pick of the day. There was a tremendous push and I was out of the mud and back in the air again. Flying through it, but breathing it too. I landed hard against a tree trunk and fell to the ground on my side. Robin was next to me on his stomach, although lucky enough to have missed the tree. Both of us were covered in mud—rank, rank mud that reeked of decomposition.

  With the Auphe scenting skills of a predator, I’d had a problem with things like that in the past. When a human came across a whiff of the bloated gaseous dead, it was disgusting. When I did, the same whiff was multiplied by fifty. It was the difference between driving past roadkill and shoving a rancid portion of it up your nose. “Hard to deal with” would be a huge understatement. I was getting more control of it now, though. I went ahead and puked twice. In the old days, I’d have vomited for fifteen minutes at least.

  Robin was already on his feet and trying to pull me up as well, but his muddy hand kept sliding off my similarly covered shirt. “I hope you didn’t break your back when you hit the tree, because now is the time for running. And I can’t carry you and outrun a boggle. One or the other, but not both.” He was optimistic. A Kentucky Derby winner couldn’t outrun an adult boggle.

  I wiped the mud from my face as I staggered up with his slippery help, then automatically ejected the Glock’s empty clip and jammed in a new one. Glocks were sturdy enough to handle a little mud—if I was lucky. It was liquid, which helped, but it was thick, which didn’t.

  Mama Boggle was half in and half out of the pit, one of her harvest-moon eyes gone. Muddy pulp. She seemed determined to end us, but I felt a pang nonetheless. Boggles, like the alligators and sharks they resembled, weren’t beautiful, National Geographic glorious, or anything less than freaking flat-headed, black-taloned evil with the smell of dead humans on their breath. But if they did have one redeeming physical quality, it was their eyes. Big, brilliant, and orange as a Halloween pumpkin. They were like the gems they desired, and either I or Robin had destroyed one. I regretted it.

  Goddamn pussy.

  Next to that mouthy part of me, some piece of me might be, but I had memories of lying in fields in the fall when I was seven or eight with my brother and seeing moons as round and as bright in color. I felt as if I’d torn it from the sky and it wouldn’t be seen again. Every autumn would pass, but that miracle of nature wouldn’t light the sky again.

  Everything passes. Everything.

  But not today.

  I scanned the area for Niko and felt a stronger pang of relief when I saw him. He was less than thirty feet away with his sword buried in Kalakos’s shoulder. The five boglets loosely surrounding him he was keeping at bay with the xiphos in his other hand. He had seen me thrown clear of the pit. I knew because the katana blade was in his father’s shoulder and not his heart. Kalakos had Niko’s best interest in mind, but Kalakos didn’t have any idea that my brother was as extreme as I was when it came to some subjects. Keeping me alive was Niko’s number one subject, A-plus, and more degrees in it than a Nobel Prize committee could handle.

  Interfering with that would get you stabbed. The result of your interference would determine where you were stabbed. If I hadn’t been tossed out of the pit that rapidly, Kalakos wouldn’t have had to worry about the best interests of anyone again.

  Niko was his son. I’d been, by his eyes, bait for a prehistoric crocodile and already swallowed. But that didn’t mean that no good deed went unpunished. Step between brothers, for any reason—good or bad—and you might find a high price to pay.

  “I’ll take Mama. Go help Nik with the boglets.” I gave Goodfellow a push, but no warning. He knew how lethally dangerous they could be. He also knew they were nothing compared to the one who whelped them.

  “You think you’re more able to fight her off than I am?” He may have lifted his eyebrows, but as he was a talking mud pie, I couldn’t tell.

  “I think I can hit her other eye without having to get anywhere as close as you’d have to.” I pointed my gun at his sword.

  “Good point. Spanking the kiddies, it is.” He ran toward Niko, Kalakos, and the boglets with sword leveled and ready. “Spanking” was a euphemism for the end of days for boggles in Central Park. They were teens in monster terms and I didn’t like it.

  Liar.

  All right. The best part of me didn’t like it, but whatever had happened had set them off and there was nothing left to be done. It was us or them. You could dump a few pints of Mother Teresa genes in me to counteract the Auphe, but when it was an us-or-them situation, it was always going to be them. I’d hike up that nun habit and keep shooting.

  I had the Glock aimed at Mama’s remaining sundown eye and was halfway through the exhalation that would end in pulling the trigger—until she flung six hundred pounds of herself on the ground beside the pit and screamed. When you think scream, you think chick or kid or man with his balls crushed with a pair of pliers. High-pitched and hopeless. Boggle’s wasn’t that. Hers was deep-throated, wailing, a crocodile/she-lion/bear mourning in an agony fierce enough to banish the day and bring an endless night. The sound shook the leaves from the trees to fall as if the first frost had come early. It was a bellow of pain and of loss. Woman or boggle, the loss was the same. It was the shrieking sorrow of dead children snatched to
the empty heavens itself.

  When the boglets heard it, they deserted Niko and his father and gathered around the pit and wailed with their grieving mother. One eye was gone, but she didn’t care. I didn’t think she had noticed after the first explosion of agony. Her arms disappeared under the mud again, this time to pull free one dead boglet and then another. It took more than two attempts. They weren’t whole. One had his head hacked off by metal claws and one had his entire body separated at the waist. Both had the faint scent of sulfur on them.

  Janus.

  “They hunt.” Boggle gathered the pieces of them to her. Limp arms and legs. A head and only that cradled against her chest. Intestines resting on top of the mud and spilling forth further as she huddled over them. Hands and talons tried to shove them back together, to scoop up the guts and shove them back inside. To grind a head back onto the shattered vertebrae of its neck. “They hunt but they do not come back. We search and we see it. Atrocity.” Her lips writhed to reveal the inward-curving shark teeth. “Not sheep. Not paien. Thing. It was a thing of metal and fire and wrong. Not of this time. Not of this place. Wrong.”