Rob Thurman - Doubletake

“If he kills me, I wasn’t good enough to be part of the Second Coming or father the new race. If I kill him, he wouldn’t be good enough either. It’s a test too. Like him siccing Janus on me is a test.” I gave up on the food. I’d eat after I showered. “But mainly it’s a game he hopes we’ll survive long enough to complete his plan.”

“You can’t think that it’s actually…”

“Fun?” The grin crawled across my face of its own volition. I tried to hold it back, but I couldn’t. “It is so much fucking fun I can hardly goddamn stand it.”

And I could see then that while I didn’t regret handing over a slice of my human pie to save Niko’s life, he did. “Shit.” I exhaled. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry. But I couldn’t let you die, Nik. I couldn’t do it.”

“I know.” He wrapped a rough arm around my neck, squeezed, and bumped his forehead lightly against mine. “I’d have done the same damn thing. It might not be the right thing for the world, but sometimes the world has to take a backseat.”

He straightened. “You’re not worried as much that Grimm will kill you; you’re worried that he’s…” He searched for the right word, Nik who knew every word, all the time. I think he didn’t want to say it.

I said it for him. “Contagious. The asshole is contagious.” I’d seen him once now and I was running down the dark road as fast as I could go, and there was no slowing down. I’d tried. Part of me was running, part of me was pushing, and part of me was trying to turn around. That last part was small now, too small to have a chance of holding its own. It was slowing me some, though. All parts of me were stubborn, large or small.

“I’m less worried about him turning Janus loose on us again than just seeing the bastard.” Ah, the hell with it. If I let this shit stop me from eating, I’d starve to death in a week, because we weren’t solving the Grimm situation that quickly or easily. I pulled the bowl back and went to work.

“If he finds out you’re limited to three gates—two, actually—that could be much more of a problem.”

Unworthy and spoiled, crippled and useless.

I shook my head and smiled at him. A real smile, the kind I saved for the brother who’d raised me and no one else. It was completely human and completely genuine. “He won’t find out,” I lied, because how could I know? But the lie was the best thing I could give Nik. I didn’t want him blaming himself for the gates. If he hadn’t given Rafferty the okay to rewire me, limit me, I might have gone all Auphe by now, reached the bottom of the road a long time ago. Chances were high.

Besides, Nik was wrong—it wouldn’t be a problem if Grimm found out.

He’d kill me.

But Niko was also right. Sometimes with family the world takes a backseat, but sometimes it doesn’t—not when you were the family, the solution, and the problem… problems .

And when your problems are going full monster and helping create a new race to enslave or slaughter humanity…

Death solves them all.

It wouldn’t be long before Janus found us. Tonight, maybe tomorrow night. Grimm’s tests and games were nowhere close to being done. That’s why when Kalakos finished and Niko took his place in the shower, I thought it was time to wrap up the loose ends. We might not have a chance to again if Janus crushed each Vayash like a cockroach. Robin was making his way through the honey-fragrant lighter fluid cup by cup, and how he wasn’t dead or blind by the time he reached the fourth bottle, I didn’t know. There was tolerance and then there was taking to heart that embalming fluid shortage Jackie had told us about. After one last cup, he sprawled on the couch and was out. Not passed out. He was drinking the Chinese version of moonshine, but it’d take a barrel of it to knock him out. He was asleep, tired same as we all were.

Talk about your long day. Gods, monsters, minefields of metal, and too much ass-kicking to recall.

I was ready for my shower and a spot on the floor to sleep too, but first there was something I had to do. Kalakos sat on the floor by the low table—there was no room for anything larger. He crossed his legs the same as Niko always did, and helped himself to the leftover food. The bastard resembled Nik so much, they should’ve been brothers, instead of father and son. And he had saved Nik from the Cyclops.

As little as I cared about Kalakos, I did care about my brother.

Shit.

“Do you want to talk to your son?” I demanded abruptly, the last word the painful bite of tinfoil on my tongue.

“I do,” Kalakos answered simply. He hadn’t taken his first bite yet, and put down his fork.

“Okay,” I said brusquely. “I talked to Niko when we were driving to Bridgeport.” The real reason I’d insisted on separate cars. “I think I convinced him to talk to you long enough to ask you some questions.”

“I’m surprised you would do that, with all that has happened. Blood under the bridge, so to speak”—again with the similar quirk of the lips I saw daily from Nik—“but I am grateful.”

“Don’t think this means he thinks of you as his father or a human being, for that matter, although he might give you the benefit of the doubt on the last one. Niko thinks anyone is capable of change. But I’m not Niko. I know who you are. I know what you are.”

I didn’t have to have an Auphe sense of smell to scent my own kind—branded by violence. “All the apologies in the world aren’t going to change that. Even saving his life won’t change it. You’re no different from Sophia.” I smiled and it wasn’t the one I’d given Niko. This was as cold as the inside of a morgue drawer. “Funny, though, considering what you think or say you once thought of me, you’re no different than I am in the very worst of my ways.”

I, on the other hand, was different from him or our mother in the one way that counted. They had nothing in them that wasn’t tainted and completely selfish. I had Niko. I had Robin. I had Promise and Ishiah, not in the same way, but still, a way I refused to let myself believe Kalakos had, wanted, or was capable of. It was too late for him, but I’d let Niko decide for himself, and watch his back while he did.

“So if he does want to ask you something, say if he has any other brothers or sisters out there—because no other relatives would be capable of being the disappointment you are—you’d damn well better answer him. Try to manipulate him, try to get something out of him for the information and he’ll simply walk away. That’s Niko’s way.” I stood and let the blade up my sleeve fall into my hand. I flipped it, a mercury-silver pinwheel, to point at him.

“And after he does I’ll be waiting in the shadows to slit your goddamn throat. That’s my way.”

“Is that the Auphe in you speaking?” Kalakos asked, his mind on me, but his eyes on the knife.

“No, you asshole,” I snapped. “It’s the brother in me.”

I faded off toward the shower as Niko stepped out. He’d have heard the discussion. The room was too small not to. He did deserve to know if he had other brothers or sisters out there, if nothing else. I hope he stuck with the decision I’d dragged out of him in the car. If he did have any siblings, it wouldn’t make him any less my brother. Would I be jealous? Hell, yeah. But I wouldn’t begrudge him human brothers and sisters—the kind that hadn’t once freaked out and killed and eaten a raw deer in the woods.

Then again, maybe one sibling was all he thought he could handle.

I stood in the small bathroom with the door open, leaning against the frame—watching and listening. I’d meant what I’d said to Kalakos. Every word, which meant I wanted to hear every one of his.