Rob Thurman - Doubletake

Undefeatable.

“How are your legs?” Niko asked. Grimm’s seeing me limping wasn’t what we wanted. “Did you take the pills?”

I grinned. “Oh yeah.” I’d dosed up on Vicodin to the max and then some before we left home. “I’m pretty sure I have legs, but I’m not feeling them.” The wounded don’t get to play the game. The wounded are broken Monopoly pieces thrown in the garbage. Grimm couldn’t know, which changed the winding road of my thoughts to the one that was waiting for me. I felt him like he’d feel me. The entertainment factor of that thought was higher than sitting in a cab discussing plans we didn’t know and facts we didn’t have. My chances of dying were higher as well, but that was the game.

Time to play.

Yeah, time to play.

The cab was stopping at the bar. “He’s there. I can feel him.” I reached for the handle while Nik paid. “I’ll talk to him. That’s what he wants, right? To drink, talk, and to convince me to be the second founding father of the Bae. But, Nik, you can’t sit with us. Take a table across the room, all right? Behind me.” Watching my back as always.

“Why?” was followed and erased by, “No. Absolutely not.”

“It’s the game. Him and me. Only Auphe get to play. There are two rules and that’s one of them.” I slid out and slammed the door behind me.

“We could take him together. It’s a possibility.” Niko slammed his own door, considerably harder.

“And he could gate however many Bae he’s fathered into the bar and wipe out everyone. If it looks like he’s going to kill me, I would appreciate your coming over and joining in. Swear. But if I don’t at least try the game, prove myself—then it’s all over. He’ll know I’m not as good as he is.” Or the same as he was. And I wasn’t.

Not yet.

“And it’ll be hell-in-a-handbasket time then,” I finished.

“I don’t like it,” he said, standing between the door and me. He could’ve been made of obstinacy instead of flesh and blood.

“And you wonder why I’m stubborn. I come by it honestly, Big Brother.” I snorted. I stepped up on the curb and then stopped. “Be ready and don’t move.” I added reluctantly. “The second rule of the game.”

This time his question was silent, but as forceful.

The second rule. “We’re going to hurt each other, him and me. Not fatally, at least not now. But like the park.” I rubbed at the bullet burn along the side of my neck. “Don’t come over with your sword to make sure all new baby Bae are born with two assholes, one carved by a katana, okay? The game always hurts. Whether you’re playing to play or playing to win, it’ll always hurt.”

“Why?” It was an echo of his earlier questions.

I didn’t answer this time. I didn’t want to tell him the truth.

If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not fun. If someone doesn’t bleed, it’s not the game.

I’d learned that when the Auphe had me in Tumulus. I didn’t remember it, but I knew it. Felt it.

“Just a fact-finding mission. Right?” I said.

He didn’t respond to the verbal poke, holding the bar door shut, before saying something I hadn’t expected to hear from him. Not in my lifetime. “I’ve seen you, Cal, when you’re Caliban, which is more often than you think. Don’t ever doubt you can take him.” It was the first time Nik had admitted there was a Caliban, that I was Auphe as much as or more than human. Cal and Caliban, not two. One. In the past I’d have been ashamed that he’d let himself believe it—the brother who always thought the best of me. Now I understood that this was how it should be and for the rest of my life how it had to be. He accepted me, all of me, with no denying of what I might become and what I might do.

“You’re my brother, every part of you. Don’t you forget that. And if you have to, then kick his goddamn ass, because I know you can,” he ordered, opening the door and following me through it.

“How many times do I have to say that this non-Niko cursing is beginning to worry me,” I started to say before I saw Grimm two tables over from the door. Niko kept walking to take a table against the back wall. He didn’t look at me again or indicate anything other than that he just happened to be here at the same time as me. Grimm wouldn’t touch him, but being careful not to do anything to change that frame of warped half-Auphe mind was a good idea.

Samyel and Kushial were working the bar and neither one seemed too happy. I didn’t blame them. They didn’t know what Grimm was, but they would have a good guess. They knew what he looked like, with his white hair, clawed glove, and red eyes, his sunglasses discarded. He looked Auphe—part Auphe. Like me, only more so. That would normally make you want to leave, but turning your back on an Auphe of any kind, half, a quarter, was the same: asking for claws buried in your back or tearing out your throat. If it wasn’t trying to eat you at the moment, staying calm and as motionless as possible was the best choice you could make to keep it uninterested in you.

And the last thing you wanted was for it to be interested in you.

There were no Wolves in the bar. Lamia, revenants, vodyanoi, vamps, but no Wolves. This was a big Wolf hangout. If there wasn’t a Wolf in here, the reason was sitting at the table to my right. They’d smelled him ten blocks away and found a different bar. I guessed he didn’t smell like me then, or the difference was slight but enough for a Wolf to detect. They were used to my being behind the bar. Grimm they weren’t used to and didn’t want to be, from the lack of leg humping and clumps of fur on the floor.

The other bar patrons couldn’t smell an Auphe or hadn’t seen one in their lives. They knew he wasn’t human, but there were so many races of paien around that they didn’t know all of them. Drinking and laughing, clawing and snarling, it was party time as usual for them.

I knew he’d felt me coming for a while. I moved to the table and turned the chair around to straddle it, same as he’d already done—which I’d bet he’d copied from watching me—and sat across the table from Grimm. He had a black-gloved hand, the one without the claws, lying casually on the table next to a half-empty pretzel bowl. He liked pretzels or he ate out of boredom. I did both. I reached for one. He tilted his head, irises red but as opaque as if he had kept on his sunglasses. “We should talk,” he said cheerfully as he slammed an ice pick into my left hand, pinning it to the center of the table.

“Yeah, we should.” That’s what he heard after my switchblade had skewered his hand in place as well, next to the pretzel bowl of both our downfalls.

“Fast,” he approved. “I didn’t see it coming. Someone’s been practicing. I’d clap, but, well…” He grinned, his human one, and raised his free hand for a round of drinks. The metal cat-claw glove wouldn’t have drawn any attention in the Ninth Circle unless you knew what was wearing them…as the peris did.

Behind me, I’d heard the scrape of a chair against the floor, but Niko, after the first involuntary movement, kept his seat. He was trusting me on this, because on this no one knew as much except for Grimm himself.

“Practicing.” I rolled the word around and I was juiced by the scent of the blood, the successful nailing of his hand, the pain inflicted, all part and parcel of the dark road. “No. Just not holding back as much to make the game last longer. You aren’t the player I thought you were. Sending Janus after half-grown boggles? If you’re that damn desperate, I should get a Chihuahua to kick, if that’ll make you feel king of the Auphe.”

“King is right. Bow down whenever you pull your hand free.” He nodded at my shirt. “I like that. Where can I get one?”