Rob Thurman - Doubletake

“I have something to say. I’m a better swordsman than all of you put together,” Robin groused. “Why don’t I get a chance at one?”

“You don’t have Vayash blood,” Niko reminded him, running a hand over the dark metal. “Janus has nothing against you, although it will still eviscerate you if you get in its way. Do remember that. But this mess is not of your making. Stay back and stay safe. You as well, Promise. We have three more days before Cal’s gating ability will have recovered to solve all of this for us.” That gate I’d built to escape Janus today had set the clock back. Between the first and second gate I had no limit, although I had pain. Between the second gate and the third, which would kill me…it took three days to reset me back to gate one.

“Kicking metal butt and sending it to another dimension. That’s me.” Three days was a long time when Janus could find us as if we had a GPS stapled to our asses, and we all knew it.

I examined my own xiphos, for the first time putting down the gleaming Eagle. Goodfellow was on the money. He was a better swordsman than all of us, but hundreds of thousands of years—or longer…as he’d said in the bar, long enough to be forever—after that kind of time spent with a sword in his hand, he couldn’t be beaten by anyone human. Perhaps not even by anyone less or more than human. It made me think of what Robin had said in the bar. How old was he—genuinely? Why had no other puck poached on his name? What did they all know? Consciously or subconsciously?

The Auphe weren’t the only firsts. The first in time, but not the only first of a race or the only ones who had lived millions of years—a number that went hand in hand with insanity, unreasoning hatred of everyone and everything, and pitch-black malevolence. Hob, the first puck, had been that way, and although he was now dead…

He screamed. Didn’t he scream like a baby? First born—last torn.

It was a warm thought. He had tried to kill Niko and Georgina, a girl I’d loved. He had deserved to scream. There was no denying that, and most would scream their lungs inside out when ripped apart by the mass of unbelievably pissed-off Auphe I’d tossed him to. I had no regrets.

It didn’t change my original thought, though.

Hobgoblin—Hob to all others, as shorter names made it quicker in getting to the running part—was the first trickster and had been as much a murder-loving bastard as the Auphe. A combination like that we could use until the days passed and I could gate Janus onto the bones of those now-dead Auphe and the bones of the first puck as well in Tumulus. Good company for an ancient war machine. “Goodfellow.” I ran a careful thumb along the blade. “If he had to face Janus, what do you think Hob would do—to at least slow it down?”

Robin’s lips flattened. “I do not know.”

“You knew him better than most. You’ve said so. He was the first trickster. He would have a chance to put this bastard off for three days at least. What would he do?” Robin was one of the best tricksters out there, but he wasn’t what Hob had been—a blood-spilling psychopath created out of insanity and violence. He was violence, or had been, walking and talking, but so sly and slippery you didn’t see him coming until you wondered why your guts were on the outside instead of the inside. It would’ve been a challenge for him, but I’d seen into that bastard’s eyes. Pure poison was all that lurked in their depths. His tricks, they always ended in death. He would’ve known how, if not to take out the automaton, then how to delay it. I knew from personal experience that sometimes it took a monster to outthink a monster.

“I don’t know.” It was more that he didn’t want to know, didn’t want to go down that path. I didn’t blame him. I had my own path. I knew what it was like. Moving along the path slowly, controlling each step, but I was walking it all the same.

Halfway there now…

“Okay,” I said. I wouldn’t push him on it yet. I’d give him a chance to think about it before I brought it up again. “No big deal. We’ll just—”

That was when I felt it. Behind me. A gate. Jesus Christ, a fucking gate .

Once I would’ve thought, No. Not again. Not anymore. I was the last. I’d made sure of that. There were no more. No . No more kidnappings. No more threatening to kill my brother, my friends. No more red eyes, white skin, metal teeth. No more Auphe hell.

God , no more.

Of course, I was somewhat of a chickenshit then, not that everyone—or anyone—agreed with that. But I had been more human.

Not that I hadn’t had my moments back then, but they were Auphe moments, lost in a blind genetic rage. I wasn’t blind any longer. With help, I’d killed every last one of these bastards on the planet, culminating with eight half-breeds like me in Nevah’s Landing.

What were my thoughts now?

Shit, not again. And the emotion that went with it wasn’t fear. I was mad as hell. I’d destroyed our race. Our entire goddamn race. What the fuck did this out-of-thin-air, leftover asshole think he could do to me?

Arms wrapped around me from behind, steel bands. Stronger than me, stronger than Niko, who was hurtling toward us, but it was too late. The coldness of the gate swallowed us and the condo was gone. But I heard the words that floated behind.

An unfamiliar voice but with an all-too-familiar sarcasm, the same as mine—at someone else’s expense—said, “You could cover your windows, goat. I go where I see, and I saw far too many perversions through yours.”

It was bad when an Auphe thought your sex life—your monogamous sex life—was a perversion. Or it could be it wasn’t the sex but the emotion that went with it. Yeah, Auphe were creatures of few emotions and they were all malignant as biohazard waste filling their skulls. Hate, disgust, slaughter-glee, arrogance, ravenous hunger. No affection, though—that didn’t exist to them.

And we were gone, bodies and voice.

The gate dumped us in a dark basement with a concrete floor with one flickering bulb overhead and the rot of dead bodies—gone, but the decomposition lingered in the cold air, as did the taint of Auphe. I was used to my scent. I’d had it all my life, after all, but the smell of another Auphe was somehow different and repulsive. It…he released me and I whipped around, the xiphos between us. I missed my Desert Eagle as much as I’d miss my hand. “It was the feathers, wasn’t it?” I grinned, showing all my teeth, top and bottom. The predator’s grin—the better to eat you with.

If there was one thing I could say about an Auphe, it was that I didn’t have to conceal what I was in front of him.

Guard up, using every ounce of swordsmanship Niko had taught me, I drawled, “Spying, were you? I think that makes you the perv. Did you see the feathers flying around the bedroom as the peri”—he didn’t need to know Ishiah’s name—“spunked goose juice everywhere? Did he look like a pigeon that swallowed a grenade and exploded? That’s my mental nightmare.”

The Auphe. No, the half-Auphe, like me—I’d seen that at the same time as I’d smelled it—grinned back. He was even dressed all in black, as I was, although he had a leather jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and combat boots, whereas I was stuck with sweats and damned socks.

Ever had to face death while wearing a pair of socks? It’s somewhat humiliating.

He had human teeth, straight and white, until a second row of hundreds of hypodermic needles snapped down over the top of them. That made him more Auphe than me, as did the red irises he revealed when he took off and dropped dark sunglasses to the floor. His hair was white, the Auphe winter tint with the glitter of ice, but the same length and don’t-give-a-shit style as mine. It was on purpose, to mock me. I knew it. His skin wasn’t pale as mine was, though. His was a healthy human tint. Light tan. He was me, but the opposite of me.