“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 that 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.
I couldn’t leave Nik alone either. He’d stayed with me then, and I was staying with him now. After what we’d lived through, Sophia and the Auphe, no one should have to carry that past by themselves. He needed the brother he’d always had—not a Stepford version, not a Boy Scout.
Not one who would hesitate to tear out the heart of what, at times, had been a beautiful woman. The best predators were always beautiful. It made them good at what they did. My Auphe made me good at what I did—protecting my brother. The other Cal—he wasn’t equipped. I’d told Niko before if there were gray areas in what we did, that was why I was there. Those places weren’t for him. It didn’t stop there. If there were those pitch-black places to go, unimaginable lines to be crossed, that was for me as well—not him.
Someone’s heart … quivering in my hand … It was the very least of what I would do for my brother.
Don’t ask what the most would be.
Sitting beside him, I leaned against him so he could pretend he wasn’t leaning against me. He always had to be the strong one. Who was I to take that away, even once? “I was going to work at the bar when she and her spiders jumped me in the park.” I ran there on occasion. Boggles made great incentive on improving your running time. “She kept asking me where my brothers and sisters were. I had no idea what she was talking about. It was her and about forty spiders. If I could’ve seen her, I could’ve taken care of her then, but I couldn’t. She was hiding in the trees and her scent was everywhere. And forty spiders?”
I shrugged. “I’m good, but no one’s that good. One bit me and my memories began to disappear, erasing backward. It was strange how I could feel that. Like those old VHS tapes when you’d rewind them. So I traveled. I built a gate and went through, but the venom was so damn fast, it hit my memories of being seven and in South Carolina at the same time that I hit the gate. By the time I went through and ended up on the beach, it was all gone. But I remember now. I remember being seven at that glorified shed we stayed in. I remember you telling me the Peter Pan story. And I remember the Auphe that talked to me when I was playing out back, the one I thought was the crocodile from the book. White with red eyes and metal teeth—no wonder I thought that story was scary as shit.” The third voice in my head wasn’t a voice at all. It was only the echo of what wasn’t even a memory, unless you counted repressed ones.
“The alligator you told me you saw.” I had forgotten everything; Niko had remembered it all.
I looked up at the sky. No stars. There never were here. “Can’t blame a spider for that one. I forgot all on my own there. The Auphe told me I had brothers and sisters. Rejects. Failures. Toys for me to play with when I grew up to be a big-boy Auphe. Ammut must have heard the rumors. Who knows from where. Other life suckers. Or tricksters—they never let a piece of juicy dirt go by.” I looked back down and picked at the sole of my black sneaker. “Don’t you hate it when someone knows more about your life than you ever did? Gossipy assholes.” Had Robin known all this time that there might be more of me out there? Could be. But good friends don’t always tell you the truth. Good friends know that sometimes a lie is better. I shifted my shoulders. I was turning into a regular emo shrugging machine. “Anyway, that memory disappeared too, and I was in the middle of the one where you were going on about Neverland. Tree houses. Flying. A safe place. That was why I went there, the seven-year-old me falling through a gate, before there was nothing left but amnesia. I was a scared kid looking for sanctuary. I definitely wasn’t looking for a killer Auphe crocodile or a freak show family.”
Niko exhaled and traced his fingers over the grip of his katana. We all have our security blankets, some more lethal than others, and his and mine hadn’t changed an iota over the years. “I’d wondered before,” he started cautiously, then more resolutely, “how many times did the Auphe try before you? How many failures were there before you were born? I’ve wondered that since I was old enough to take my first biology class in school. What they were trying to do … Whom they were trying to make. Human genes crossed with Auphe genes would never work with only one attempt. I can’t imagine how many it would take.” He’d wondered, huh? He’d wondered; Robin had very well known of the possibility. I should have thought about it too, but I hadn’t wanted to. I was the very best at not doing or thinking things I didn’t want to. Cowardice or self-survival or both; at those I excelled.
The Auphe hadn’t been keeping an eye on just me in those days, but on multiple mes. For some reason the others hadn’t been allowed to “be human” for a time while being observed. The Auphe needed two things from their breeding program: the ability to travel—to build gates and move hundreds of miles in a second—and the capacity to still be human enough to host a parasitic creature called a Darkling that could channel a power enormous enough to cross millions of years instead of only miles. Humans were the only creatures the Darkling could possess, and it had accidentally blown up a few Auphe while proving that. That the creature slid in and out of mirrors, more slippery than any reflection and no less homicidal than the Auphe, had been the beginning of my mirror phobia. That it had taken my mind and slid in and out of it as easily wasn’t something I wanted to think about.
It would’ve taken a while to find out if the rest of the Auphe-human half-breeds were defective, or maybe they’d been defective from the day they were born. I didn’t know which would be worse—being defective or being the success, the goddamn golden boy of Auphe genetics. I was about to find out, though. The ones that were alive were in Nevah’s Landing—as the albino crocodile with the smile of metal had told me. Waiting … They were waiting for me.
I hadn’t gone there for them at the beginning of all of this; I hadn’t known they’d existed, but I was going for them now.
“Let’s get Promise and Goodfellow out here to help you,” I said, standing. “I have something to do.” Something that should’ve been done before I was born. But the Auphe, in their infinite ability to be sons of bitches, hadn’t done what I would have guessed. They hadn’t killed the failures. That would have been too easy for them and for me.