Rob Thurman - Doubletake

“He’s one I missed in South Carolina.” I wiped some of the Bae blood from the xiphos carelessly onto my pants. “By twelve years. He was the Auphe’s first success, not me, and they never knew it. He’s also head of the Auphe Second Coming. Big, bad Auphe messiah.” I ran a hand slowly through the space where his gate had been. I could feel the pain and the wound of reality knitting itself back together still. Every gate had a price. Mine too, as much as I tried to forget it.

Kalakos had thought I was a monster and then he saw the Bae.

I’d thought I was a monster when I’d been old enough to realize what a monster was.

I’d eventually reached a point where I didn’t care anymore if I was one. I’d admitted it without shame. Sad to say I occasionally enjoyed it on the sly lately, but now I knew.

Accepting that you were a monster wasn’t the same as being the real thing, full-time, every single second of every single day.

Grimm had shown me that.

He’d also shown me that he was right. He was superior to them. He was as ruthless as the Auphe, but smarter. More adaptable. Thrived on change. Nature had taken her fuckup and created a rung higher on the ladder, and Grimm was standing on it.

“Nik,” I said, calm, not that that was what I felt. I didn’t know what I was feeling other than it was a seething mass of confliction. “You need to know. He’s better than me…even on my very best day.” Best day. Worst day. My Auphe days, the ones that were now gone or at the very least viciously choke-chained and powerless.

And why wouldn’t they die? Auphe. Half-Auphe. I killed them over and over, three times now.

Why wouldn’t they fucking die ?

Yet…

Welcome back, brothers and sisters. I missed you.

I missed the game.

My brother was surprised I was smart, smarter than him. That I’d gone to school and Death had a degree. I sat in the New Mexico desert, back against a rock, eyes closed, and slowly healed. It was cloudy even here today, but warm, and it felt good as the stab wound in my stomach bitched. It wasn’t a critical wound—that was the best part of being half-and-half. You never knew where our bodies kept the important parts. All of us had been different, but I’d lucked out and Caliban hadn’t. He’d skewered me all the way through, but hadn’t hit a single worthwhile organ when he did.

Of course, it hurt like a motherfucker, which was good. I’d learned to like pain. Sidle had taught his prisoners that. He, my very first teacher, had taught us to love it. Hate and pain—they were the only things we could love.

So, so good.

Caliban had given me a present. I’d give him one too. Whether he’d learned to like pain the way I had, I didn’t know. He hadn’t had a Sidle.

Time enough to find out.

Sidle with his lessons had been my first teacher, but not my only one. There were no degrees in pain among the cattle.

I’d had several teachers as I traveled looking for Caliban before I caught up with him in Nevah’s Landing. For some reason the fight made me think of a teacher I couldn’t remember. A woman. Red hair? I didn’t recall. But the wound in my gut made me think of something I couldn’t think of. Something I’d done to her. Senseless, that. It was a lost memory and I didn’t lose memories. What Caliban had done to me was the same as birthdays and balloons. What I’d done to her was a hole in the ground with maggots your only party favors.

But who was she?

When had I sliced her open?

Maybe it was but a dream. A good dream, but a dream.

I traced a gloved finger over the clotted blood covering the slash in my stomach, then tore it away to let it bleed again, up the pain again. Ah, good, good. Pleasure and pain, pain and pleasure. I watched the blood course out.

The dream, which was all it could’ve been, made me think of martyrs. After hearing my long-gone warden read the Bible over and over, for the good parts—smiting, killing firstborns on either side, selling your daughter, sacrificing your firstborn son because God told you to before saying Psych! Destroying cities—I knew what to do with a martyr: Stone him or cut off his head. Stoning would take far too fucking long.

I could be logical and martyr a teacher too in a dream. What could be better?

The memory of the dream grew sharper.

Shit, what a giving, kind, love-everyone-in-the-whole-wide-blessed-be-world cow she’d been. It was unbearable.

I couldn’t remember her name. Georgia? No, not it—as if it mattered.

She’d been a freshman in college, worked as a waitress to pay her tuition, worked the soup kitchen on alternate weekends—I like soup, or how it seasoned the homeless man who I’d eaten in the alley, and she’d volunteered her time to teach classes for GED candidates. She’d grown up in New York City, and shook her finger at us to not make fun of her accent. One day someone had asked her why she left and ended up in Columbus, Ohio—for college, and she thought she needed a change, she’d said. She’d been tired of the city. Tired of its not being what she wanted it to be and of knowing it never would. The world wouldn’t change. The world was the world and it had rules, and because it wouldn’t change, neither could she. The best you could do was change where you were in it, and she had.

Fuck, she’s one of those, had been my disgusted thought.

There’d been no waiting then. I couldn’t sit there every day with that in the room.

“Patience is a virtue,” I’d read, curling my lips and nodding at the saying she’d written on the blackboard.

She’d laughed, red hair springing around her shoulders. “I know. I’m such a hypocrite, aren’t I? Patience for everyone else is a virtue, but I lost patience for patience or for virtue. But that’s who I am now. We are who we are and sometimes there’s a cost. And that is how it will always be unless you decide you don’t want to pay it anymore. Now, this isn’t philosophy. Turn to the chapter on Charlemagne.”

The rest of the students were puzzled and generally not that bright when it came to things they couldn’t see or touch. They had been sitting with their history books open, thumbing through to find what she was talking about. Idiots. Never did they want to think for themselves; they wanted knowledge handed to them like a blood-coated can. Drink it down. Ten seconds later they were goddamn geniuses. They didn’t know. Our teacher was human, but not all humans were golems of mud slouching from here to there, thick tongues with nothing interesting to say, no interesting ways to die.

But I would’ve given anything to make a buffet of them all, scratching, and chewing gum, and poking me in the back to ask for a pen. That student hadn’t come back to class; they did tend to drop out once in a while, but this one did get his pen—jammed in his eye before I’d dumped him in the Ohio River.

The teacher had begun class and I’d paid close attention. Cattle had things to teach me if I bothered to listen. They taught me how to imitate them, think like them, and end them. It was work, but after eighteen years in a cage, vengeance isn’t work. It’s a gift.

After the class was over the teacher let the others go but had called me over to her. She’d sat on the edge of her desk, her gold-and-brown long skirt drawn primly around her legs. Her eyes had been brown, I’d thought, but, no, that was wrong. A gold light had glowed behind the brown. She’d known things. Some humans did. The ones who loved money told you what they saw in the dark of their minds. The ones who thought they knew their place in the world and the universe, they said what would be would be, and the knowledge they saw would only hurt you. You simply had to accept that there was a greater purpose. And what you did ask them they wouldn’t breathe a word of an answer to you. Greater purpose. Pat on the hand. They were as bad as the first. They thought they knew, but they didn’t. No one knew.