Rob Thurman - Blackout

Only she didn’t know they were lost. Because of that she was going to kill Nik and I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t, not with a gun or a knife—not with any weapon I had.

She is nothing. A worm beneath your heel. A sheep with scales instead of wool. She is not like you. There is nothing like you. You need no weapon.

You were born a weapon.

Niko’s eyes rolled back. One hand let loose of his tanto. His other hand loosened on his katana. To drop his katana, Niko would have to be dead.

My brother …

Dead.

I thought I’d lost it, lost consciousness, lost my brother, died myself wrapped in Ammut as it all went black—everything. There wasn’t a sole Manhattan light, not a flicker of a candle or the orange sky of nighttime NYC. There was only the dark … because I knew now. I was at home. The dark was me. I told myself stories there—every story about myself that I knew. Some were gone forever; only stories of stories, and that was how it had to be. Some stories weren’t nice and some were chaotic jumbles of terror and malice. Some were of Niko and me living short lives that seemed long, of the things we’d done—good and bad. I told myself about the killing, when it was necessary, when it wasn’t, and how you couldn’t always be perfect. Best of all, I spun the tale of why I’d been made … what the Auphe had needed … what I could do, what they had passed on to me. I told myself about the traveling, how I could slash a hole in the ether of the world anytime I wanted. Gates that were doorways to anywhere.

I liked that.

That was useful.

The first to walk the earth, and the earth would let us do anything, include rip screaming tears in it, if we would only walk through the gates and leave. If the earth hoped, if it prayed, that was what it prayed for—in vain, because we never left for good.

Blackness flickered; the blackbird’s wing that had taught me about death fluttered across my vision and then was gone. I could see. I could feel. And I could remember everything. Not the seventy-five percent I’d walked in with, but one hundred percent prime-grade Cal. I could remember me—all of me, human and Auphe. I could remember what I’d told myself in the dark:

The thing I was.

The things I’d done.

The things I might do.

I was okay with that—better than okay. There was pain. I’d expected it. I’d had it after my first encounter with Wahanket, my first coming back, the first of the shadows, then again at the brownstone. It was hot and white—my soul, if I had one, giving up the ghost or sinking down to bide its time, buried in a shallow grave. My human genes bowed down before the Auphe ones as they always had before. I muscled through the burning ache of it and hung on to that moment where everything felt right. Nothing felt more right than this. Sad, in a way, but it was the way things were meant to be. Some would say I was giving up something I might not get a chance at again. I said I was getting something back—me. The real me. All of me.

He slipped away, the Cal I could’ve been, but never would’ve been—thanks to memories. Yeah, maybe. But mostly thanks to genes that had been too busy fighting off the spider venom to make themselves known. That was why Delilah hadn’t scented Auphe the first time. In body I’d still been part Auphe, but faded—faded to practically nothing because every capable working Auphe gene had been concentrating on feeding its power to those in the part of my brain that could get me back to normal—my normal. During that time, while Auphe genes had been reknitting old memories, I’d been human, as close to human as I ever could be, with human emotions, human decisions, human instincts.

I hadn’t known. My entire life—I’d never known how far away from that I was. How far away I’d always been. I hadn’t known that human was only a word, and that never had that word been for me.

The time we’d spent looking for Ammut, looking for the monster, I’d been the monster all along.

Me.

What we’d been chasing was nothing compared to what lived inside of me—what was me. With every job we did, every case we took on, every mystery we tried to untangle, I’d been the real monster and we’d all pretended we didn’t know it. I’d been half right a week ago. A killer had woken up on that South Carolina beach. A killer and a monster; that was who I was, and it was never going to change.

So what?

I gave a mental shrug, for once in agreement with that particular inner voice. After all, this voice was me. The other one had been a soul I barely had fighting for an existence in a body that simply wasn’t meant to support one. Again …

So what?

If you couldn’t change it, you used it; otherwise, it wouldn’t be long before it used you. That was why I’d had Niko get the Aramaic tattoo—to understand what I did; not to regret what he had done. Brothers before souls. Bros before souls. Although if I said it like that, he’d kick my ass, and so what if it didn’t actually rhyme? Close enough. It got the point across. Brothers before souls. I’d made the decision to be the brother Niko truly wanted—even if he could’nt admit to himself that a human Cal and an Auphe Cal couldn’t be one and the same. Now I saw as I’d seen before that he needed that same brother, the old Cal—the real one, but not for the reason he thought. Not for a shared past. Not for a lost familiarity.

Not for what I could do.

But for what I would do.

Her mistake was letting me so close, because she wanted me. No matter what you wanted, you should never let someone like me get close. No matter what you wanted, you should never let some thing like me be on the same fucking planet.

“Let him go,” I said, calm and sure. And I was sure … of precisely what she wanted. “Let him go and you can have me. Me and my brothers and sisters.”

“Yes? You care so much for him? You’d give up yourself and your siblings?” She was suspicious, but she also wanted this, maybe more than anything in her snaky little life. An Auphe. To feed on an Auphe; no one would claim that. To feed on many of them—that would make her the goddess she claimed.

“Cleopatra, I don’t give a rat’s ass about anything else. Let him go and it’s all yours.” One of the best things about having an Auphe as a father and a sociopath as a mother was that lying was by far easier than telling the truth. Nik hadn’t learned that. He was too damn good, and I wasn’t letting that kind of good pass from this world. I’d take down the world first and anything else that got in my way. “I’ll even let you have a taste first before I tell you about the rest of the family.”

That was too much temptation. Temptation and greed make you stupid, and honestly she hadn’t seen me be much of a threat so far, except as an exterminator. And, hard as it was to admit, she was right. Then. Now was a different story. The coils around Niko’s chest and neck loosened. His neck wasn’t broken, and I could hear the ragged breath he pulled in. He fell to his knees, barely conscious, but he still had that sword in his hand. An entire army of samurai was nothing compared to him.

Ammut slithered down from the protective wooden covering and balanced in front of me. One hand rested on top of Niko’s bowed head as he struggled to breathe. “I do not have to break his neck to take his life. I can do the second as easily and just as swiftly.”

“I’ll behave,” I promised. I wanted to grin. Goddamn, I wanted to, but I was good and lived by the lessons both my parents had taught me—human and monster. Lie, steal, slaughter, and never let them see it coming … until it’s too late.

I dropped the Eagle. Why did I think I needed a gun? As I’d told myself, I was a weapon—one more effective than any automatic. I put my hand against her chest, the scales a razor-sharp scrape under my palm. “Let him go,” I repeated. “Him for me. That’s the only way you’re going to get what you want. What you’ve wanted since you came here, Auphe to devour. Vampires and Wolves, they have to get boring after a while, centuries of fur and fang. But me … and my brothers and sisters. There’s nothing like us. You know that. You came here for that, didn’t you? Not all the others, but for me—for me and my brothers and sisters?” I knew it. Everywhere we’d gone, she’d left messages for me I hadn’t understood … until now.