Blackout

by Rob Thurman

  Blackness flickered; the blackbird’s wing that had taught me about death fluttered across my vision and then was gone. I could see. I could feel. And I could remember everything. Not the seventy-five percent I’d walked in with, but one hundred percent prime-grade Cal. I could remember me—all of me, human and Auphe. I could remember what I’d told myself in the dark:

  The thing I was.

  The things I’d done.

  The things I might do.

  I was okay with that—better than okay. There was pain. I’d expected it. I’d had it after my first encounter with Wahanket, my first coming back, the first of the shadows, then again at the brownstone. It was hot and white—my soul, if I had one, giving up the ghost or sinking down to bide its time, buried in a shallow grave. My human genes bowed down before the Auphe ones as they always had before. I muscled through the burning ache of it and hung on to that moment where everything felt right. Nothing felt more right than this. Sad, in a way, but it was the way things were meant to be. Some would say I was giving up something I might not get a chance at again. I said I was getting something back—me. The real me. All of me.

  He slipped away, the Cal I could’ve been, but never would’ve been—thanks to memories. Yeah, maybe. But mostly thanks to genes that had been too busy fighting off the spider venom to make themselves known. That was why Delilah hadn’t scented Auphe the first time. In body I’d still been part Auphe, but faded—faded to practically nothing because every capable working Auphe gene had been concentrating on feeding its power to those in the part of my brain that could get me back to normal—my normal. During that time, while Auphe genes had been reknitting old memories, I’d been human, as close to human as I ever could be, with human emotions, human decisions, human instincts.

  I hadn’t known. My entire life—I’d never known how far away from that I was. How far away I’d always been. I hadn’t known that human was only a word, and that never had that word been for me.

  The time we’d spent looking for Ammut, looking for the monster, I’d been the monster all along.

  Me.

  What we’d been chasing was nothing compared to what lived inside of me—what was me. With every job we did, every case we took on, every mystery we tried to untangle, I’d been the real monster and we’d all pretended we didn’t know it. I’d been half right a week ago. A killer had woken up on that South Carolina beach. A killer and a monster; that was who I was, and it was never going to change.

  So what?

  I gave a mental shrug, for once in agreement with that particular inner voice. After all, this voice was me. The other one had been a soul I barely had fighting for an existence in a body that simply wasn’t meant to support one. Again …

  So what?

  If you couldn’t change it, you used it; otherwise, it wouldn’t be long before it used you. That was why I’d had Niko get the Aramaic tattoo—to understand what I did; not to regret what he had done. Brothers before souls. Bros before souls. Although if I said it like that, he’d kick my ass, and so what if it didn’t actually rhyme? Close enough. It got the point across. Brothers before souls. I’d made the decision to be the brother Niko truly wanted—even if he could’nt admit to himself that a human Cal and an Auphe Cal couldn’t be one and the same. Now I saw as I’d seen before that he needed that same brother, the old Cal—the real one, but not for the reason he thought. Not for a shared past. Not for a lost familiarity.

  Not for what I could do.

  But for what I would do.

  Her mistake was letting me so close, because she wanted me. No matter what you wanted, you should never let someone like me get close. No matter what you wanted, you should never let something like me be on the same fucking planet.

  “Let him go,” I said, calm and sure. And I was sure … of precisely what she wanted. “Let him go and you can have me. Me and my brothers and sisters.”

  “Yes? You care so much for him? You’d give up yourself and your siblings?” She was suspicious, but she also wanted this, maybe more than anything in her snaky little life. An Auphe. To feed on an Auphe; no one would claim that. To feed on many of them—that would make her the goddess she claimed.

  “Cleopatra, I don’t give a rat’s ass about anything else. Let him go and it’s all yours.” One of the best things about having an Auphe as a father and a sociopath as a mother was that lying was by far easier than telling the truth. Nik hadn’t learned that. He was too damn good, and I wasn’t letting that kind of good pass from this world. I’d take down the world first and anything else that got in my way. “I’ll even let you have a taste first before I tell you about the rest of the family.”

  That was too much temptation. Temptation and greed make you stupid, and honestly she hadn’t seen me be much of a threat so far, except as an exterminator. And, hard as it was to admit, she was right. Then. Now was a different story. The coils around Niko’s chest and neck loosened. His neck wasn’t broken, and I could hear the ragged breath he pulled in. He fell to his knees, barely conscious, but he still had that sword in his hand. An entire army of samurai was nothing compared to him.

  Ammut slithered down from the protective wooden covering and balanced in front of me. One hand rested on top of Niko’s bowed head as he struggled to breathe. “I do not have to break his neck to take his life. I can do the second as easily and just as swiftly.”

  “I’ll behave,” I promised. I wanted to grin. Goddamn, I wanted to, but I was good and lived by the lessons both my parents had taught me—human and monster. Lie, steal, slaughter, and never let them see it coming … until it’s too late.

  I dropped the Eagle. Why did I think I needed a gun? As I’d told myself, I was a weapon—one more effective than any automatic. I put my hand against her chest, the scales a razor-sharp scrape under my palm. “Let him go,” I repeated. “Him for me. That’s the only way you’re going to get what you want. What you’ve wanted since you came here, Auphe to devour. Vampires and Wolves, they have to get boring after a while, centuries of fur and fang. But me … and my brothers and sisters. There’s nothing like us. You know that. You came here for that, didn’t you? Not all the others, but for me—for me and my brothers and sisters?” I knew it. Everywhere we’d gone, she’d left messages for me I hadn’t understood … until now.

  Give them to me. Where are your brothers and sisters?

  Givegivegive.

  And I was. I was going to give her what she wanted. It was her bad luck that she didn’t know I was more poisonous than any Nepenthe spider.

  “I can tell you where they are, the rest of us half-breeds, and me? I’m right here.” I felt the strange suction where my flesh touched hers as she drew a little of me … of my life out. It was barely a mouthful and I had a lot of life to give. She was welcome to it. “I know you can feel me. I know you can taste the Auphe in me, can’t you?”

  “Yes.” The gold eyes, wild and striking in their way, closed. Ecstatic yet almost hesitant. That answered that question. She’d never sampled an Auphe in the flesh, not before me. She was intoxicated instantly. Some couldn’t handle their liquor; some couldn’t handle their life force. Too bad for her. Someone’s eyes were bigger than their stomach. “Dark,” she murmured. “Infinite in its rage, hate, hunger, and other desires. Desires the same as my own.”

  Not hardly. Her desires were a Santa wish list compared to mine.

  “I’m glad you like it. Consider that one taste a freebie.” I opened a gate around my hand, tarnished gray and silver, and shoved it through her chest. Her scaled flesh melted away, gone forever, beneath my fingers until I touched what passed for her heart. I could feel the serpent-slow beat of it against my skin. She couldn’t feed through a gate. Nothing could breach a gate unless I wanted it to. The gates,the doors, they belonged to me and only me.

  “Can you still feel me?” I tightened my fingers. “How about now? Can you feel me now, Goddess? You murdering bitch.” The eyes were open again and they weren’t so beautiful any longer. �
��Let Niko go or we’ll see how you manage to tie on the lobster bib and chow down on anything in the future without your fucking heart.”

  Ishiah had told the truth in the bar when I’d asked the question.

  I was a bad guy, when I needed to be, which made me the right guy for the job.

  The fury behind those eyes, in the fast and ominous chittering of all the spiders that surrounded us, didn’t matter. That the bronze and green coils unwrapped themselves from around Niko’s neck, setting him free, was the only thing that did. He dropped to the concrete on his side, unmoving. In the yellow illumination of the rooftop lights I could see the gray touch, the ashes of mortality in the color of his skin. It would fade as his breathing returned to normal. His color would come back; it was coming back. He was all right. Safe. That was the only way it could be.

  A good guy or a bad one, a monster or a man, whichever, I fucking loved my brother.

  A soul I could do without. I couldn’t do without Niko. When it came to options, there I had none. I didn’t want any. And when someone messed with him, hurt him, especially because of me … goddamn what a big mistake they’d made—one they would regret as long as they lived.

  Yeah … That wouldn’t be too fucking long, now would it?

  “Release me.” Her heart was beating faster beneath my fingers now. She was a predator, but all predators had someone higher than them on the food chain. Something bigger. Something badder. They all had to answer to someone. Today her someone was me. “I did as you said. Release me. Now!” The goddess voice was back. Ammut, Eater of Hearts, Devourer of Souls. Hear my voice and obey. Bow and obey. The hypnotic flower aroma was back too, everywhere, thicker than ever as it soaked every molecule of air, but it wasn’t helping her now. Fool me once… .

  There was no second part to that saying in the life I lived.

  I cocked my head, as if considering the request. “Why? I didn’t say I would. I only said what I’d do if you didn’t do what I told you. And in any case, whatever I said, it wouldn’t make a difference. Unlike you, I am a monster. I was born to lie and kill. You, pathetic fucking monster wannabe, you were born to die.” I ripped out her heart, black and gold, and threw it down. Ammut, Eater of Hearts. We would see how she did without one of her own and a huge, gaping hole in her chest. Then, with the gate still glowing gray around my hand, I took her brain. Sometimes the heart wasn’t enough. The heart and the brain together always were.

  “Wannabe to never was. So long, Queen of the Nile,” I said flatly.

  She fell, a snake whose back was broken on a country road by a careless driver. As she fell, so did the spiders. I hadn’t planned on that. I was about to grab Niko and go through a larger gate. To where? Who cared? Out of here was the important thing. But it wasn’t necessary. The remainder of the thirty or so spiders shivered, legs flailing, before they flipped onto their backs into full-blown convulsions and finally collapsed—turning gray and still. They were now the husks Ammut had made of her victims. She’d shared her stolen life force to keep them alive … likely from the days of pyramids and pharaohs when Nepenthe spiders were common in the desert. Now they were nothing but long-dead bugs ready to be swept off the windshield.

  That was the way some days went—a bitch of one if you were a spider.

  A cold February wind blew by and the spiders disintegrated into heaps of gray dust—bad day for spiders; fantastic fucking day for me and the janitors. Ammut was slowly dissolving into an oil slick of gold and black. Profound age made for a great cleanup. The gold mixing with the night color—it was the sun being swallowed by a permanent eclipse. It was beautiful, it was a cataclysm, and then it was only a memory.

  I had many of those now.

  The irony of the entire thing was that she hadn’t been much of a monster at all; we’d faced much worse. Not to mention the only reason she’d come here was for me. I hope the replacement council never found out about that. If I’d been at full capacity—had been myself—we’d have gotten her at the brownstone and been at home watching TV, eating pizza, and not wearing uncomfortable James Bond cast-off tuxes. I crouched next to Niko and smacked his face lightly, then more firmly. He was nearly back to his normal olive color, although the bruising around his neck was going to be nasty. “That stings,” he grumbled, his voice hoarse and his eyes still shut.

  “Yeah, I’m crying for you on the inside. I swear. Open up those baby grays, Cyrano. I did all the work. At least you could live through it.”

  He did live. He opened his eyes too, rolling slowly and carefully onto his back. “That’s the second time you’ve called me Cyrano.” His gaze shifted to the ash mound of what had been the spiders and to the puddle of Ammut. “You killed them. You killed all of them.” I couldn’t take credit for the spiders, but, then again, why not? It had been a weird week. I’d take all the credit I could get.

  I reached down under Niko’s neck and back to pull his braid free, laid it on his chest, and gave it a pat. “No need to cut your hair. I’m back. All of me. I’ve been on my way back for a while.” I shook my head and snorted. “Nepenthe venom in the toothpaste, Nik? Really? As if I wouldn’t notice that and you becoming Hans the Hygiene King?” I slid a hand behind his back and eased him up to a more or less sitting position. “It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. Not in the end. My Auphe immune system would’ve fought off the full dose of venom the Nepenthe spider gave me in Central Park.” Not Goodfellow’s lie about a half dose. Before I gated to Nevah’s Landing, I’d gotten a full dose of venom all right. No doubt. But an Auphe immune system had no peer. Had I been full Auphe, the bite might not have affected me at all.

  “It would’ve eventually fought off your minty-fresh version too. Humans build up a tolerance to drugs. Auphe ride over them hell-bent-for-leather.” I tugged his braid, for the first time since I’d disappeared. I didn’t know if he missed that, but I’d missed doing it. I’d been doing it as long as he’d had one. “I was coming back, sooner or later, and no one, not even you, could stop that.”

  “You were happy,” he said. He was ashamed for drugging me behind my back, but stubborn too. He wasn’t backing down an inch on doing something he’d thought he didn’t have in him. Deception aimed at his brother. “Cal, damn it, you were happy.” He didn’t bring up whether he had been or not. Knowing him, he didn’t even think about it. Committing a level of deceit that went against everything he was, that had been for me, not for him.

  But my Auphe genes had made all that trickery unnecessary. They’d fixed me up, making me right again. Despite what Niko thought about my happiness or what a sliver of my own subconscious tried to tell me about monsters, it was only a matter of perspective. Happiness was an emotion invented by a greeting card company to sell pink bears and shiny balloons. But duty and family had existed since the dawn of time—human time at least.

  To thine own self be true. Someone old, smart, and wordy had said that … and, yes, I knew who. It was time I started listening to the smart and wordy of the world. I was who I was, and labels such as normal and right and good, like everything, were open to interpretation. It was long past time for me to be my own interpreter.

  “You lied to me, you know.” I stabilized him as he regained his balance enough to sit without falling over.

  “I did.” He was obstinate through and through, and what he thought of as his dishonor, no matter if with the best of intentions, he hid out of sight. And he did think that to the depths of his soul—that he had thrown away every shred of honor in him.

  “You drugged me,” I reminded him, bracing him with a hand on his back.

  “I did.” Now he sounded empty. No embarrassment, no determination. He’d broken every rule he’d ever made for himself and, while he’d done it for me, how does the most honorable of men deal with that? Losing your brother and losing yourself all in one.

  I punched his shoulder lightly and grinned. “How’s it feel to be the black sheep of the family for once?” I gave him a moment to think about tha
t before adding, “Not that it counts, since it was for what you thought was my own good and not for your good at all. Only you could turn lying into something noble and pure.” I finished up with annoyance and affection mixed. “Always a martyr.”

  He thought I’d blame him for what he’d done. That I’d hate him. As if I had that in me. I had many things in me some would say I’d be better off without, but hating Niko wasn’t one of them. He’d only done what I’d asked for, not especially indirectly either. I wanted to serve up waffles, ignore the reality of monsters, and get a gut from diner food, because that was what ordinary people did. I’d been content—I’d thought. I’d been normal—I’d thought. I’d made it clear at the beginning that I wanted to stay that way and not be the dark reflection in that Halloween picture.

  He’d been willing to give it up for me, all of it—our memories, our history. Knowing someone better than one knew oneself. All that he’d done for me throughout my life … to keep me sane and keep me alive. All the things I did to do the same for him. Sometimes it was the smallest things that did that, the sanity part—the nicknames, the purposeful aggravation, the pokes, and elbows in the ribs. Sometimes it was the biggest things, such as surviving Sophia together.

  But he’d tried to do it, to let all that go. He did his best to carry that entire burden alone. To accept a new Cal when it must have felt like the old Cal had died, his real brother had died, and all because he thought I was happier that way, being human. That was Niko. For me, he’d lose me and he’d do his damnedest to never show how it felt. That was my brother, the one I remembered from the first memory I’d ever had.

  I’d been about three when we hid in the closet as Sophia trashed the house in a drunken rage. Three years old and the glass breaking and the chairs hitting the wall, scary noises, but someone’s arm was tightly around me. Someone was there to keep me safe. I’d heard his voice, whispering reassuring words, although I didn’t remember those words. I did remember what I felt … not alone. I wasn’t alone.