Rob Thurman - Doubletake

I didn’t have a look or another comment for Kalakos’s metaphorical “coming to God” as he leaned against the wall, the water he was standing in only half an inch deep now. That I had nothing for him wasn’t due to the fact that all of this wasn’t his fault. It was his fault if you went back far enough. Regret didn’t change that.

But I was thinking of other things, such as how at four I’d already shown a little Auphe when I hadn’t known what they were yet. Sophia told me I was a monster from the day I was born, before I knew what words were. Niko told me she was crazy and spiteful and there were no such things as monsters. He knew there were, but I’d believed him…for a while. It wasn’t a lie I’d hold against him, then or now.

Niko did have a look for his father, though, the recrimination in the tightening of his jaw, but then it loosened into a frustrated exhalation. The man had saved his life and thought he was saving it twice. My brother had eventually learned to do practical and do it well, but he’d not grown to like it. The guilt that went with it had faded, yet a sliver would always remain. To him that would mean that if his father could feel guilt, he might be salvageable as a human being.

What people…what Kalakos had done in the past, however…they couldn’t undo. I’d go along with what Niko wanted, but I wouldn’t forget that. Kalakos didn’t have the patent on being brutally unforgiving.

I returned to the original subject. “What three things do Grimm and I have in common that let you sneak up on us?”

Niko poured the rest of the pills into a small pocket on my jacket lying between us and zipped it. The night was going to be long or short, depending on how successful or unsuccessful we were. I might need them. “First, and you said it yourself: You’re both arrogant. Grimm doesn’t think anyone or anything can take him. You’re the same, except when it comes to me.” True. Niko had taught me to fight. He knew what I’d do before I did it. Without gates, Niko could and had taken me down.

“Second: competition. Right now you use the game. When you play the game, neither of you sees anything else. You see each other, the pain, the blood. Competition blinds you to all but the game.” He was right when it came to that too. Once I’d smelled Grimm’s blood, the rest of the bar had been lost in a fog.

He slid off the counter. “I suggest we grab an hour or two of rest before we meet your combustible contact.” The roof of the bedrooms had remained intact. The floor was wet, but the beds were dry. “Kalakos, I’ll give you a blanket if you can find something mostly dry to sleep on.”

“Hey, what’s the third one?” I asked. “You said we had three things in common.”

“I’d thought that obvious. You’re both idiots.” That wasn’t a joke. He was serious. “He taunts you; you taunt him back. Forget he’s making baby Bae right and left; it’s all about the game. Forget you might kill him and ruin his plan. Forget all those potentially life-ending, world-ending issues. ‘We’re part Auphe. We have to play. Born to play. So much fun I can’t fucking stand it.’” He quoted me with a mixture of anger and frustration.

“But you’re both lying to yourself. It’s not a game. It’s suicide. Grimm thinks he wants to take over everything, but the entire damn world? He doesn’t know that he can. He is smart enough to know that maybe he can’t. He’ll be a failure like he was before.” He jammed a finger into my chest. “And you think you want to stop him and this is how to do it. It takes an Auphe to beat an Auphe. You two think the game is the Auphe part of you. It’s not. The blood is. The pain is. Even the game, but you’re not playing it how the Auphe would play. The rest of it, the winner and the loser when it comes to you two, isn’t Auphe. That’s the human in you. It’s the easy way out and you know it is. The game is what you let it be.”

That wasn’t right, was it?

“Grimm would sooner die than fail again, and you think that you could’ve been Grimm, that you will be Grimm someday. You’d sooner die than be that, to get that far. I know you don’t trust yourself, but, Cal, trust me. I won’t let it happen. That’s my promise.”

This time he slapped me. It wasn’t a real slap but the Godfather kind. The “whatta I’m gonna do with this boy?” light one. The anger was gone. The frustration remained, but it was tempered with empathy. “As I said: idiots. Using an Auphe game for a human reason.”

He opened my hand and put something in it, concealing the object until he closed my fingers around it. “You’re twenty-four, twenty-five next month. You’re a man, Cal. You have been long before you could drive. Be as practical as you were when you were four, little brother. You don’t play to win. You just win and screw the games.”

He lifted a bunch of the hair hanging in front of my eyes and added, “And for the love of all that is holy, will you do something with your damn hair? You can fight blind, but your chances are better if you don’t.”

Orders given, he went to his room. When his door shut, I opened my hand and saw a ring. It wasn’t the Vayash solid-silver ring of manhood. The top half was black metal and the bottom half bronze. Or the other way around, depending how you flipped it.

Black for me, bronze for Niko, and it may as well have been case-hardened steel. We wouldn’t be Vayash; neither of us would want a ring attached to that name. He might mean this as my “Leandros” ring of manhood. Niko putting the lie to the black-market monsters who accused me of being much more of a nightmare than they were. Niko denying Grimm’s games and plans and lures.

My genes didn’t matter one way or the other in what Nik knew and had always known. I wasn’t a monster.

I was a man.

He must’ve bought it from Mr. Chen before we left. It fit my middle finger, which would be at the forefront of any punch I threw. It not only said I was a man, but it was…I grinned.

Practical.

Three hours later we were going into a bakery on Melbourne Avenue. Robin hadn’t called back yet and that was beginning to worry me. Niko had called Promise to check on his condo and we were waiting to hear back from her. It wasn’t like Goodfellow. Okay, honestly, it was like him with everyone else, but not with us and not now.

The bakery wasn’t much to look at. Plain. Blue and pink cupcakes had been painted on the smallish window by hand, and not a good one. The paint was peeling now, giving them a slowly advancing case of sugar leprosy. But as with most dives, that’s where the food was the best. When I opened the door, the smell was unbelievable. Bread, pies, fudge, and ten kinds of cake. The place was called Rapture’s Buns. The paint on that was flaking too, but it wasn’t making the business suffer. The place was full of people lined up at a glass case, squabbling over who was first in line and snatching free samples off the top of the counter.

Repeat customers like me didn’t have to go through that. Rapture bumped them to the front, actually the back technically, as soon as you walked in. She saw me as she was putting a cake in a box and handed it over to one of the guys who worked for her. They were all guys. All tough, some with prison tats, but all good-looking. Rapture liked her baking harem.

She beckoned impatiently toward the door in the back. “ Bebé , where have you and your hermano, el buenorro, been? My best customers and you desert me. Where is the lealtad these days? Ay, the world, she is falling apart when my children starve because your wallet is too tight to buy some of my sweets.” She didn’t have kids, but it was a good line when bargaining.