Rob Thurman - Doubletake

And I didn’t.

That Kalakos was the one who took the last of the five Auphe-bae hit team out of this life was a surprise. To me some. To him most of all.

But that came a few minutes later. Right now the first four I had to take care of myself.

The Second Coming slashed at me with claws and jerked their heads forward in reptilian fashion to try to bury their fangs in my flesh. Succabae and incubi weren’t poisonous. They didn’t have to be. With the size of the fangs, these kiddies could cut through you ten times more efficiently than any butcher knife. The hissing…it didn’t stop. It was almost worse than the fractured-glass sound of an Auphe voice piercing your eardrum. That had been once in a while—not big talkers, the Auphe. This was constant. Trying to tune it out while listening for the movement of Grimm’s grown children was almost impossible. Add that to their gating when they pleased—and they pleased a damn good deal—and I was fighting what disappeared before me and what I couldn’t hear coming up behind me.

I loved every damn minute of it.

The adrenaline rush. The feeling of righteousness. Sometimes I thought the only time that I felt truly salvageable was when I fought something truly evil. Grimm’s doing—they were evil. They weren’t meant to dwell on the skin of this world. I didn’t get that feeling when I took out a supernatural hyena. They belonged. Yes, they ate people, but so did lions, given an opportunity. They weren’t evil as the very definition of the word, but what I faced was, in every sense and bitter syllable of the word.

I whirled as out of the corner of my eye I saw one reappear to my right. I sliced it from neck to pelvis with the xiphos. It didn’t matter where its vital internal organs were with that kind of wound, as basically every organ it had cascaded out onto the filthy concrete floor we fought on. Another one vanished from in front of me to appear behind me—directly behind, as I felt its weight on my back. Claws sank into my arms and I knew fangs were angling to tear my throat out. I didn’t waste any time. I saw another Auphe-bae gating out and I swung around to put the majority of the one leeched onto my back into the gate as it closed. That meant it took whatever part of the Auphe-bae that had been inside the gate with it. As pieces of him fell around me, I guessed it had been about three-fourths. There was half of a head left, the red eyes dulling but the jaws snapping slowly as black brain matter pooled outward. There were arms and legs, but a good deal of his torso, including his spinal cord, was gone.

They didn’t have the proper respect for a gate that they should. And not one had thought to open a gate in me, as I’d tried with Grimm. Grimm had said they matured physically in one year—mentally as well, from the cursing they sprinkled in with their hissing. Yeah, they were all grown-up and cussing with the big boys. It was efficient for breeding to retake the world, if you were only going by numbers, but one year of fighting experience didn’t make the grade.

I grinned at the three left, the one now having gated back. I had the blood of their siblings dripping off the blade of the xiphos. I liked the sound it made when it hit the floor. The pitter-patter of a slow and soft rain. “Daddy didn’t tell you what else was out in the big, bad world, did he? What else could put a boot up your pasty snake asses without half trying? Kids, you don’t know what a bona fide ,” I drawled, “Auphe is, and now you never will.”

I could understand Niko’s appreciation of swords now. You felt the thud of the metal entering the flesh. You knew, by the vibration that traveled up your arm alone, whether you’d ended a life or only damaged it. Niko would value it for different reasons: giving your enemy more of a chance, having more time to decide if they deserved that death you were handing out as freely as Halloween candy, challenging yourself to be a superior fighter.

His reasons were principled; mine were not, but we ended up at the same place. I didn’t know if the difference mattered, and right then I didn’t care.

I dived to the floor as two gated out and one sprang toward me. I rolled onto my back, the one thing you didn’t want facing an enemy. This one was the biggest by a few inches, broader in the shoulders, heavier. If there was a runt in the litter, this one would’ve eaten it.

It almost vaulted over me as I’d planned, but was able to stop itself, if only barely, to land on top of me. “I have killed men and women. Children and babies.” Its breath was not Auphe hot on my face, but Auphe-bae cool, cold-blooded as its succubus-snake mother. The tang of truth was in what it said—that tang being rot and decomposition. “Vampires, Wolves, hordes of revenants, and you think me not Auphe?” The hissing soared, filling the small room with its rattrap, claustrophobically low ceiling. “You think me not worthy of the name?”

No, senseless little snake. No. No. No.

“In fifty years or so, you might be worthy.” I’d knocked my Desert Eagle from Grimm’s hand to land on the floor earlier. Grimm had forgotten it or wanted to see if this batch of Auphe-bae noticed, testing his progeny. They failed. They didn’t look at anything in the room but me. That wasn’t smart. I could’ve smashed the overhead lightbulb and jabbed the delicate sliver of glass into the eye of one of them until it pierced the brain. Anything can be a weapon.

“Maybe a hundred years,” I amended. “Give me a call then.” I reached behind me, hand scrambling against the concrete, seized the grip, then inserted the muzzle of the Eagle into one pointed ear and gifted him with five rounds.

“Thanks for reloading it,” I said to Grimm. I had time to see the quickest flash of him; his back hadn’t moved from the door. He was making sure this game played out to the end, whatever end that might be.

He had too—reloaded the Eagle. Niko had used all the explosive rounds in it. These were nice, normal hollow-points. I had to worry about wearing my victim’s blood and brain matter, but not roasting off my own face in the bargain.

“I went to school. So should they. Survival of the fittest is the best school,” I heard him say, nothing in his words but careless amusement. I killed his children and it didn’t trouble him. Why should it? He could make more.

A hundred years, you told the Bae. Together in a hundred years Grimm and I could make a hundred thousand…

“Can’t afford the child support,” I muttered to myself as I pushed the body of the one I’d shot off of me and impaled the one that gated out of the air above me before I could sit up. It kicked, flailed, and screamed with rage as its chest rested against my hand that gripped the xiphos while I finished it off with the Eagle, this time three rounds in a scarlet eye. That blew the dead body back, and I gave a jerk to the xiphos to let the child of the Second Coming go flying across the room.

Two more to go, and I had no expectations, belly wound or not, that Grimm would be anything like the Bae, who were so easy to dispose of that they no longer deserved the name Auphe. He was older than I was, had been free long enough to be more experienced in dealing death, could gate, was closer to true Auphe. If Grimm wanted to kill me, there was a chance that the best I could hope for was a suicidal tie.

It was time to find out.

His last pick of the litter had vanished in a vortex of silver, gray, and black before reappearing as I stood. It also had come out in midair, but not over my head. It appeared next to the ceiling, getting as much height as it could, and to the side, giving it an angled downward speed. As it did, I heard the force pounding against the basement door. I threw myself backward and sideways to let the Bae tumble and charge past me. Janus could follow the Vayash as if a GPS were stapled to my ass—funny, huh? But it wasn’t a serious consideration I’d had earlier about the war machine. It was a serious one, however, when it came to other matters.