Rob Thurman - Roadkill

The laptop dropped onto the ground in front of me.

Well, shit.

When I refused to drop my head and read the screen, teeth nipped me hard over the ribs. I hissed, glared at the wolf, and then read what was typed on the screen. He’d used the caps lock again, either to get his point across or because he didn’t believe much in my reading skills.

SUCKS TO BE ONE OF A KIND.

He rested his chin on my shoulder, sneezed at the dust, and waited.

“Yeah,” I commented after a long pause. “It does. Good Wolf or bad Auphe, it sucks to be the only one.” Great. First Delilah, then him. They both had me pulling shit out of layaway early.

This time he nipped my shoulder before retrieving from the dirt the ink pen he’d dropped to bite me. He typed: ALL AUPHE WERE BORN BAD. YOU ARE NOT ALL AUPHE. YOU HAVE A CHOICE. YOU CAN BE GOOD. He considered, then backspaced, deleting the GOOD and changing it to NOT SO BAD. At least he was honest, the fur ball.

Then he punctuated the sentence. Joy. “I didn’t know there was an emoticon for a dog humping another dog. Thanks for sharing.” I took off the glasses and rubbed my eyes.

There was more typing. I glanced at the screen. At least now that he was sure that he had my attention, he’d stopped with the capitalization. Cal smart monster. Cal can read. Good for me.

Knock knock

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I groaned.

Knock knock , he persisted, growling around the pen. “Okay, just to shut you up: Who’s there?” I gave in. Why not? At this point, it was almost ludicrous. An Auphe being counseled by a butt-sniffing pound reject.

No one. The Auphe ate everyone in the house.

“You son of a bitch,” I growled.

Knock knock . This time he didn’t wait for the “Who’s there?” Twenty cocker spaniels the Auphe is going to skin to make a pimp coat.

“Seriously, quit it or I will shoot your mangy ass.”

Knock knock

God, he was as relentless as Niko. “Last one,” I warned. “Last one or your ass is grass.” The threat didn’t hold much weight when it was followed with “Who’s there?” I went on, resigned.

You, and what happens behind the door is up to you.

He was smart and he was right, but my decision making had never been among the very best. Not as disastrous as the sinking of the Titanic was what I was usually shooting for in final outcomes, but I could try to do better. If Catcher could deal with being stuck being half of what he once was, I could deal with being more than I wanted to be. For a while. As long as my genes would let me. Next to Catcher, I’d be a complete jackass if I didn’t at least try to do that much.

“He’s a wise person.” Niko crouched on the other side of me. “You should listen to him. If you won’t listen to me.”

I closed the laptop and said to Catcher, “Scoot, Scooby.” The wolf made a sound halfway between a growl and a grunt, seized the computer in his teeth, and trotted off. I brushed dust idly off my jeans. It was just something to do. I was sitting in the stuff. I wasn’t coming clean. “I always listen to you, Cyrano,” I said, still uselessly rubbing at the dirt-my brand-new hobby, “except when I ate Bambi’s mom, and as I’d rather not mentally relive that, can we skip over it if I promise not to make any more exceptions in the future?”

He didn’t look at me, and I didn’t mind saying that scared the shit out of me more than the thought of being Auphe. Nik was always there for me. When I was a kid, if bullies picked on me, he was there… usually to pull me off the bullies’ backs as I tried to strangle them with my backpack strap, but he was there. He was there to stand between me and a scotch-bottle-throwing Sophia; there when the Auphe took me-just too busy not burning to death to be able to do anything about it, but he was still there when I came back psychotic as hell-temporarily psychotic, but still no damn picnic. And when the Auphe took me again, that time he did get me back, and there was never a time in my life he wouldn’t meet my eyes. But my eyes were different now, weren’t they? They were the only physical feature we shared in common and now we didn’t even have that.

He continued to look at the ground, braid of hair over his shoulder and lying on his chest, as he sketched a few letters in the gritty dirt. Fratres . “Do you know what that means?” He didn’t wait for my answer, although I actually had one that time. “It means brothers. The plural of the Latin word for brother. It’s part of that tattoo around your arm. At least they spelled that word correctly. We’ll discuss sterility of instruments, hepatitis, and the ablative case of Latin later.” Now he looked at me, amusement layered over something deeper and darker. “Yes, you have ‘brothers- in-arm’ tattooed around your biceps instead of ‘brothers- in-arms,’ but as always, it’s the thought that counts.”

Before I could groan at my… no, the tattoo parlor’s stupidity… Nik gripped that same tattooed arm. “I’m kidding. Fratres-in-armis is correct. Although you should have me vet all future tattoos in foreign or dead languages. Just in case.” His grip tightened as that deeper and darker became more so. “We’re brothers, Cal. We always will be. I don’t care if you grow fur like Catcher and hunt down and eat a deer every night. Six months ago I thought you died. This is nothing compared to that. I don’t care about your Auphe genes, and no matter what you do, no matter what ,” he emphasized, “you will always be my brother.”

That was a big promise to keep, especially in the face of so many things. “Mayhem, violence… murder?” I asked quietly. “If I try to do those things? If I try to do them to you?”

“You already know the answer to that.”

I did. Real brothers, true brothers, stood by each other-even if it came to a Butch and Sundance moment. If there came a time that, like Catcher, I wasn’t myself and never would be again, if Nik had to be my combination Butch and Bolivian army, there was no one I would rather be the one to do it. I hadn’t wanted to talk to him earlier because I’d failed him. I often did and he more than often denied it. Sometimes I thought if I hadn’t been born, I still would’ve found a way to let him down. Sounds impossible, but I would’ve found a way to do it. Been incarnated as a cranky Chihuahua and mauled his ankle. Who knows? But if I had faith in anything besides my brother, I had faith in that. Niko believed in karma and I had bad karma stamped on my ass from the day I was born; yet I’d gotten nothing but the good kind in the form of my brother. It was hardly fair to him or his life, but incredibly good luck for me and my fucked-up one. I would be an ungrateful bastard to spit on it, although it would be the right thing to do, the noble thing, the Niko thing. And yet Niko himself would never let me. He never had before.

And he thought I had survival issues.

“Brothers.” I held out my hand and he gripped that instead of my arm. “But if you had any damn sense, you’d kick my butt off a ten-story building.”

“Brothers,” he reaffirmed. “And I know, but smothering you with your pillow would be less messy. You know I despise messy.” Behind the joke, he’d answered me in all seriousness. For the first time I thought he did actually know and wasn’t in denial about who or what I really was; yet that knowing still didn’t make a difference to him.

Hell, Niko was as screwed up as I was.

It was a revelation, but it didn’t change the fact that it was also a moving moment, doubly so when a foot slammed into my ribs, moving me over and against Nik. “This? This is why I give you the money that keeps starvation from our door? So you can sit in the dirt like a worthless beggar, the soulless monster and his clan traitor of a bar ?” I’d picked up by now that bar was brother, and I also discovered an evil, vicious old woman could swing a mean old-lady shoe. Her foot was the size of a child’s, but it had the feel of a three-hundred-pound football player’s size thirteen… with a pointy heel.