Niko shook his head. “No. Do not even think about it. You are not going to Nevah’s Landing to take out a nest of half Auphe by yourself—if they need taking out at all. Think, Cal. They might be like you. Only without the power to build gates. They could be the same as you.”
That was funny. Goddamn hilarious. They might be like me. Of anyone in this city, only Niko would think that made it better. God, I did love my brother, no way around it.
“No, I’ll go. This is mine.” I helped him stand and, within seconds, he was good—stable and capable of taking care of himself as I called Goodfellow on the cell to get his ass out here. I wished he’d taken better care of himself in the past week and less care of what had only been a reflection of me—the best reflection.
“They’re not your responsibility, Nik,” I said. On this I had no give. “They’re not your family.” Thank God they weren’t. He didn’t deserve that. “They’re mine. I don’t want you to see that.” I met his eyes quickly before looking away. He wasn’t the only one ashamed. We’d both have to learn to get over it. “I don’t want you to see them in me, all right? I don’t. I’m not sure that’s something I could live with, knowing what you might see.”
And there was no way I wanted him to see what I might have to do.
“I’ll check them out. See if they’re salvageable. I’ll call if I need help. There come Promise and Robin now.” The chair was kicked aside as the door to the roof opened. “They missed the real thing, but they can take you to the after-party.” I gave his braid one last yank, tossed it over his shoulder, and said, “Ask Ishiah what your tattoo means. I’ll be back in time for you to kick my ass over it. Swear.”
He sheathed his sword, jaw tightening before he exhaled. “You’re the most goddamn stubborn man I know. Goddamn it, I missed you, you asshole.” Three curse words in two sentences—that was more big-time emotion for Nik. He wrapped one arm around me and that brotherly man hug I’d tried to avoid in Nevah’s Landing came back to bite me in the ass. The one arm made it brotherly. That my ribs nearly gave way and my spleen pretty much did too made it manly. That I returned it just as hard was, hell, just manners.
I was always about manners.
Epilogue
(The Alpha and the Omega)
Nevah’s Landing smelled the same as it had when I’d left. Salt, a touch of swamp, water, and saw grass brown and crisp for the winter. People, the metal tang of cars, of old asphalt parking lots that might never see the fresh tarry black of it. Spanish moss … I liked that smell. If a plant could smell like air, Spanish moss would be the one.
Air and nothing else. No blood. No decay. Only air. That was provided you didn’t count the hole in reality hanging there, gray, silver, black, and swirling with a hunger to gobble up the world. I shut the gate down with that mental twist I’d learned at the age of nineteen. It went … sulky and snarling in my mind. It could sulk as much as it wanted. It knew who held its leash.
I was behind the motel where I’d lived that so-called normal life for four whole days. I didn’t want to slice open a tear in the world and walk through to see two people screwing on a mattress that lay on top of my guns. My babies. Most of the asses in the Landing, thanks to the diner food, weren’t small. They were big and wide as a barn door, as they say. I could just imagine them moving back and forth in stretch-marked thrusts… . I did not want to see that. No one wanted to see that.
I wiped the blood pouring from my nose, fought the skull-crushing headache, and let the sweat pour down my neck and face, soaking my hair. Once I’d made gates as I’d pleased, as Auphe did, and as often as I’d pleased. Rafferty, our long-gone healer that Delilah had tried and failed to kill, thanks to my gun muzzle behind her pretty ear, had “fixed” me. Limit the gates, everyone thought, and limit the Auphe genetic influence on me, because there hadn’t been a doubt that the more I “traveled,” the more Auphe I felt. Rafferty had done some chemical rewiring on my brain, though only a little, because he couldn’t break me down genetically and remove the Auphe half. That would leave half a human, and that, well, I guess that would be an unpleasant puddle of gore on the ground.
He’d found a way around that. He’d given me something called serotonin syndrome. One gate, bad. It would trigger an uncontrollable flood of serotonin in my brain, which would cause my blood pressure and body temperature to go up radically. Gate two, worse—the same as what was behind door one, but doubled. Gate three would probably mean death from a burst aneurysm in my brain. Since the two I’d used on Ammut for her brain and heart had really been only one—in theory, this was technically number two. If Rafferty was right, I’d survive it.
I guess I’d wait and see. It took me two days or so to “reset” the gates, which meant I’d be driving back to New York—again, thanks to Rafferty.
He was a great healer, the best in the world as far as I knew, and he’d even said it himself—Auphe genes always won. Limit the gates, limit the gene’s effect on my mind and my control. He’d said it; I remembered every word, but I don’t think he got it, actually got it. Auphe genes
always
won. Maybe a hyped-up superhealer could slow them down by short-circuiting my traveling, but it wasn’t only gates and traveling that made an Auphe. We all wanted to forget that. We wanted to forget the truth. Traveling made an Auphe in the same way as walking made a human. It didn’t work that way. The truth never did.
But I had better things to do than think about the truth—better things to worry about than whether I was a pretty good guy fighting bad genes or a very bad guy resisting good genes, or whether I was a human with a little monster in him or a monster with a little human. I’d thought it through back in New York and I was done with the subject. It all depended on your point of view and the specimen didn’t get to make that call.
That was me … a specimen. Surprisingly, that didn’t bother me as much as it once would have.
Holding my arm to my nose, I let the cloth of my shirt soak up the blood while I looked for a car to steal. Even with that thought in my head, I was tempted to go see Miss Terryn, Lew, and the diner to remember what it was like to be that good guy; to be human and only human. I did know; however, that wasn’t what they’d see if they saw me again. They’d see the shadows. Everyone, including cameras, did. The shades that lived around me weren’t real to the eyes, but something in a person sensed them. That something was a long-lost survival instinct, a soul—if they existed. It was futile to wonder. Besides, those days were over. That was past. No more substantial than a dream, long gone. Dreams like that never stuck around. Those were the memories, unlike others, that didn’t last. And that …That was just life. In that way, I was the same as everyone else.
I found a car—unlocked. Southerners.
It was while I was at the gas station, one of three in Nevah’s Landing, that I went over another memory. I’d mixed it up for more than sixteen going on seventeen years with the story Nik had told me—flying children, pirate ships, princesses, waterfalls, and an albino crocodile. We’d been squatting in a shack at the Landing, a long-abandoned one, near saw grass that had taken over the water’s edge and most of the yard. Niko had been making me lunch out of moldy bread, carefully pinching away what green he could, and bologna when I went outside. Sophia was in town, doing whatever was best for ripping people off that day. I scrabbled around for a rock I could throw in the water. The grass was too tall to see it land, but I would hear the splash.
That was when I’d seen it. Stripes of white showing through the green, the bloodred eye, and a thousand needle-fine metal teeth—teeth no crocodile could ever claim. And though I’d known it wasn’t the ghost of the crocodile Niko had read about to me, I’d pretended it was, because if I hadn’t—Seven-year-old boys went crazy too, when they saw something like that, so wrong and so close—close enough I’d been able to smell the blood on its breath. It had whispered to me without bending a blade of that grass. It had told me not about Never Land, but about something else.
Caliban, baby boy.
I’d frozen, crouched in the grass with fingers still reaching for that stone
.
We told your pathetic human ape-whore of a mother to bring you. We want you to know. Here you have brothers and sisters. Here we have left you presents. Play with them as you wish. When you wish. Destroy them and sharpen your skill on them. They deserve no better. They are worthless failures in an experiment that begins to weary us. There are so many, we grew bored of killing them, but for you, we left some alive.
Toys for you. Toys for our one success. A present so that you do not forget where you come from, what you are. Toys so that you do not forget we can turn
you
into a toy if we please.
And someday when you’re a big boy and bloodthirsty—
the smile was hideous
—you will come play, will you not?
Because you will not forget who you belong to, offspring of the Auphe. You will not forget who you are.
Never.
I had forgotten, though. Instantly. I went back inside, ate my bologna sandwich, and never thought of it again. I simply told Niko I saw a crocodile out in the grass. He automatically corrected it to alligator, and went looking himself. He didn’t find anything. No gators. What a relief.
What a goddamn relief.
And I hadn’t remembered any of it until the past week, thanks to the Nepenthe venom hitting that precise cluster of neurons when I’d gated out from Central Park, and thanks to Ammut demanding my brothers and sisters. Where were my brothers and sisters, a string of lives that could feed her for years? For one split second I’d remembered, before every memory, including that one, was swallowed by darkness. But even after the amnesia had taken hold, there had still been whispers. Ammut hadn’t given up and neither had that long-dead Auphe crocodile.
Where are your brothers and sisters? Where are they? Where?
In Nevah’s Landing when I’d been there working at the diner, I’d feel a hand groping inside me, tugging, saying,
Here. We’re here.
Every day I’d felt the connection, but I hadn’t known what it meant. I obviously didn’t belong there, despite a human Cal wishing he did. I hadn’t known what it meant then, that pulling and presence, but I knew now.
All Auphe felt one another. I’d learned to travel years before I learned that skill. If an Auphe was around, I’d feel it. I’d know it. That was the biggest reason I hadn’t wanted to leave the Landing when Niko came for me. They were calling me, but I couldn’t make it out. I didn’t know what it was. I wouldn’t have thought there were any of them left to feel after Niko and I had destroyed the last, but a white crocodile reared its head, finally, in the back of my brain and told me differently. I’d forgotten a lot about the Auphe in my life, mostly on purpose. If you think seeing one in the grass sucked, try being raised by them for two years. At least I knew that was one memory that wouldn’t hop out and say hello. Or if it did, my sanity wouldn’t be around to say,
Right back at you, buddy.
I’d be catatonic or I’d be a killing machine with no memory of Cal Leandros at all.
Either way, I wouldn’t know about it. Smooth sailing into crazy world.
“Hey, boy, didn’t you work in Miss Terrwyn’s diner?”
“No.” I didn’t bother to look at the gas station guy as I continued with my business of pumping gas. Nevah’s Landing Cal would’ve said,
Hey
or
Nice day. Caramel-apple-pie day at the diner.
That Cal was gone, and, to me, this Cal in the here and now, this guy was just an annoyance.
“Ain’t that Ralph James’s car?” he persisted.
With vocabulary skills worse than mine.
“No,” I repeated without interest.
I finished up, paid him, and left. Whether he called the cops or not didn’t much matter. He might not. People here were so friendly that when faced with bad manners, and I could fucking dish out bad manners, they struggled over whether you were a dick or took what you said at face value. I’d said I was all about the manners on that building roof with Niko before I’d left; I simply hadn’t said what kind. Again, it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be here long.
I drove with the lights on, piercing the night, and “felt” for my kind, truly my kind. I was Auphe, but only half, and so were those brothers and sisters I was looking for. It took about forty-five minutes of driving before the feeling grew strong enough to have me bouncing the car down a road that had never been paved and probably never would be. The house revealed in the headlights was nearly hidden by trees drowning in Spanish moss. I stopped the car in front of the place. It was old, two stories. If it had ever been painted, I don’t know what color it had been. It was gray now, the gray of termites, mice in the walls, and dead possums at the side of the road.
The porch was still standing with a dim light on, hard to believe, and with a man in a rocker. He looked up when I slammed the car door. He had short ginger-turning-white hair—snow on the mountain as they said here. His skin was dark and spotted from the sun and he had a wide yellow smile. It was the man whom I’d caught a glimpse of when working in the diner. He’d walked past, with pale orange hair and Miss Terrwyn’s stamp of wickedness on him. I hadn’t known Miss Terrwyn long, but in that time she had always been right. This one proved it. “Well, there you are, Mr. Caliban. They told me to wait for you, but I didn’t know it’d be so long.” He jerked his head back and forth hurriedly as if they could see him or hear him. He didn’t know then … about his masters. The Auphe were gone—the true Auphe… .