Rob Thurman - Deathwish

That was an option I hadn’t considered on the beach. Seems I wasn’t the only one who could think like an Auphe. But I was the only one who could breed like one. Good old science experiment Cal. A male Auphe could impregnate a female human, but apparently a male human couldn’t impregnate a female Auphe . . . or at least not as quickly as I could. Sure, I was better, being half Auphe, but it’d be easier grabbing a random guy with no gun, fighting skills, or lethal brother. Although good luck on him getting it up for a nightmare of pale skin, bone-cracking teeth, and eyes of blood. As for me . . . the Auphe and Tumulus would send sanity bye-bye on me. Madness, torture, the memories of probably the same from the past; the Auphe would get what they wanted from me. One way or the other. I just didn’t know if being insane would make it better or worse.

“Are you all right? You look like you might . . .” Robin made an obvious gesture with one hand, while patting my shoulder with the other and leaning away from me all at the same time. The guy had talent.

“Fine. I’m fine.” Frigging dandy. “I won’t run. Nik would find me and make me wish I was dead before the Auphe actually had the chance to do it.” It wasn’t a lie, just a rehashing of what Nik and I had talked about on the beach . . . before I knew what I knew now. We hadn’t told Robin and Promise that I’d understood what the Auphe had said, and when I’d told Niko I was the last male Auphe, it had barely been a whisper, and a garbled one at that. Robin and Promise didn’t know that while the Auphe still wanted them dead, they had different plans for me. And I didn’t want them to know. That kind of pity I couldn’t take. If I saw that on their faces every time I turned around, it would only make all of this more real. And right, now reality was the last thing I needed.

I stripped off the gloves, tossed them on the newspaper-covered table, and reached back to wipe a sweaty hand across the top of my back. My bloody back. Half dried, the sticky residue of Niko’s blood was rough against my palm. Before it had itched; now it burned. “Shit,” I said. I’d been unable to look at it, but here I was feeling it. The Auphe wanted me, but not yet. First I got to see the big show. Death and despair, and you want popcorn with that?

They wanted Nik first. They wanted me to watch. Wanted me to see. Wanted me wearing his blood.

And I was.

I moved for the bathroom and the shower without another word. I stood under steaming hot water, letting it wash the blood away. I was there a good five minutes before I thought to take my sweatpants off, and it was nearly half an hour before I stepped out nude from behind the curtain. Niko was waiting to toss me a towel.

He leaned against the double vanity as I silently dried off and wrapped the cloth around my hips. He hadn’t made a sound when he came in. I hadn’t heard him or the door over the thundering water, and I fully expected a swat for it. I didn’t get it. “Are you speaking to me yet?” he asked, folding his arms.

“ ‘Goddamn you, you son of a bitch’ was speaking,” I told him wearily.

And that’s what I’d said to him after revealing I was the Last Damn Mohican, my head burrowing into his chest like when I was a kid, and Sophia had told me another bedtime story about how the monster wasn’t under my bed—it was in it. That’s what I’d said to him for not letting me go out the quick and easy way.

That was me, shouldering my part and stepping up to the plate as I’d promised myself I would. Way to be a man. Really showing I’d meant it when I’d said things would be all right. Thinking like an Auphe, I’d said I could do it and I hadn’t, not by a long shot. Only I could manage to pull off being a monster, but not monster enough. I put the toilet lid down and sat, the back of my head thunking back carelessly against the wall.

“Pity party for yourself?” Niko asked dryly, but behind the sarcasm I could see the shadow of worry.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” I exhaled. “BYOA. Bring your own angst. It’s festive as hell.” The bandage was white against the olive of his skin, but he was alive, and I felt the mental knot unravel a little at that thought.

“Perhaps I’ll join you. My brother . . .” He stopped, took a long calming breath—probably to keep from banging my head repeatedly against the wall—and then started again, voice steady as a rock, worry to anger in a heartbeat: “My brother threw himself between me and the jaws of a shark. And if that wasn’t enough, he asked the shark to eat him first. Can you imagine how I would’ve felt if the shark had taken him up on it?”

“I’m guessing grateful’s not it.” Water—not Niko’s blood, just water—dripped from my hair and down my back. Cool and clean.

“No,” he replied grimly.

“Going to punch him in the nose? I hear he punched you.” The bruising under his eyes was more noticeable in the bright light of the bathroom. It’d been a good punch—short and precise with the exact amount of power I’d meant to go into it. Just as I’d been taught.

“No. That would be far too easy on him.” He loomed. Niko could loom like nobody’s business. “On you.”

“Nik, it wasn’t that big a risk. Hell, no risk at all.” The dripping water pooled in the small of my back, still cool, but not as cool as Niko’s expression. The cooler it got, the more pissed he would be. “We know better now. They won’t kill me.” No matter how much I demanded. “That’s not in their playbook anymore.”

“And as the Auphe are completely sane and utterly logical, we’ll depend on that? No, I don’t think so. It only takes one Auphe to get the taste of your blood and lose sight of its goal.” His lips tightened. “Just one. A shark can be docile, but throw one in an ocean of blood and all it would know is slaughter. The Auphe are the same. You can’t depend on madness. Or worse yet, they might not be as mad as we think. In that case, they might lose patience with vengeance and just take you. Leave the rest of us for later and take you to where I can’t get you back.”

It was true, although I had my doubts the Auphe would ever lose their lust for vengeance. If anyone could be mad and patient, it would be them.

“You’d have done the same thing,” I pointed out, going around an argument I didn’t want to have and crap I didn’t want to think about. Not yet. I wanted a few hours of denial. Just a few. Was that so bad?

“Logic? You? Now I know you’re desperate.” He tossed me another towel from the counter. “And it’s my responsibility to keep you safe. The right of the firstborn. Part and parcel of being the big brother.” His jaw set. “It could’ve taken you, Cal, do you understand? It could’ve taken you or killed you.”

I took the towel and scrubbed at my damp hair before countering, “It could’ve killed you too.” I swiped at my wet neck with the cloth. And it had come close. So goddamn close.

He exhaled, “This is getting us nowhere. And waiting to be picked off one by one isn’t the best strategic plan spawned in history. We need to find them. Go after them for a change. Surprise them.”

Go after them? Okay, that wasn’t just crazy talk. That was Hannibal Lecter eating his own foot with Dijon mustard wacko. “They live in Tumulus , Nik. Hell’s ghetto.” It wasn’t really hell, but it was a place—far from this world—that would make any mythological hell look like an amusement park. Two years of my life had been swallowed up by a nightmare dimension where time ran in all different directions, which explained how I’d come back to Nik only two days after my kidnapping but two years older. That was the one thing I did know about Tumulus. The rest was so thoroughly blocked out, I had only the faintest of impressions left. Rock and sand as red as blood, a sky the color of pus, and the cold of a long-closed tomb. But I didn’t have to remember to know that sticking your dick in a bucket of acid was a better idea than going there.