Downfall (20 page)

Sophia could raise rattlesnakes and they’d end up needing therapy.

Thank God for Nik—what would I have been without him?—but this asshole hadn’t needed to know that. “Fifty bucks should take care of me and my brother for a month.”

I’d straightened, tucked my hair behind my ears, and leaned to grab a tiny yellow teddy bear from the wall. “A
whole month of eating real food. I hope that warm and fuzzy feeling lasts you as long.” I’d studied the bear cradled in my hands, small hands. It seemed I’d never grow sometimes, always be small and slender like the father who’d spawned me. Not birthed me, but
sired
me. “There you go. We don’t have a stuffed animal that means self-righteous dick, but the yellow is all you.”

I’d tossed the bear at him. “You know what yellow means, don’t you?”

He’d caught the toy without meaning to, I thought. His reflexes were too good to not snatch it out of the air. “Coward,” he said, so low and ill that I barely heard him.

“Too right!” I’d grinned blackly. “But don’t feel bad. You fed me and my brother for almost a month. What a hero you are! Once your ‘acquaintance’ finds out what you did for the needy, starving boys who pick their next year’s school clothing out of garbage cans, I’m sure he’ll hop in bed with you. You’re a miracle waiting to happen, aren’t you?” I’d snorted. “And if it doesn’t work out for you, my mom charges twenty-five bucks for a BJ. Fifty bucks for the weird stuff. I could hook you up.”

He bent a bit at the waist as if he might toss his cookies then and there. “No.
No
. That’s not what I meant to . . .” He’d swallowed and I remembered the scar then, thick and running along his jaw. “I might be able to save you. I don’t know, not for certain. Your mother would be simple to go around, but your father and the rest of them . . . they would try to kill us. They would probably succeed.” Hands clenching the bear tight enough to rip it open and his shoulders slumped. The weight of the world or just two boys. It’d been too much and his tune changed. “And where I live, I’m not allowed to kill them. It’s against the law for my kind. We can’t have a hope of beating them if we can’t kill them. They’re too strong. They never give up.” This time when he met my eyes I
didn’t remember the color again. I was too goddamn pissed to register it. “I hope that you can kill them. I wish you good fortune. I swear that I do.”

Cold and full of disgust, because he
knew
—I hadn’t known how—he was probably another supernatural creature. Our personal monsters weren’t the only ones we’d seen, especially in the past few years. I stared at him. “You’re no different from them. They’ll do anything they can to get what they want. You’ll do anything you can to get what or
who
you want. Wait—you are different because you won’t get involved. Good fortune to me? That’s what you said earlier, right? You know, but you won’t commit. You’d leave us sitting ducks because you’re even more afraid of them than we are. You hope I’m strong enough to fight them when you aren’t? I’m a fucking thirteen-year-old kid. I hope your ‘acquaintance’ knows that, because he wouldn’t give you the time of fucking day if he did. You leaving kids to run from monsters. You, a guy five times my size, says he can’t fight them but good luck to me. As for God’s work, either your God sucks or you’re not doing him much damn justice.”

I’d slammed the metal shutter closed to the booth and locked it, but not before I saw the guy walk away, pale blond hair washed out under our dim lights. He was walking slow and grim as if his dog had been run over. Fifty bucks to get on someone’s good side and here was hoping we lived long enough to spend it. Asshole. I hadn’t thought about him again beyond giving the money to Nik to feed us, clothe us, and keep Sophia in the dark about it. Out of nowhere there was an explosion of white and gold light around the guy as he kept walking, and then he was gone. Vanished. Supernatural dicks. I cleaned the money out of the booth, including the fifty bucks. Fifty bucks and sorry about your impending doom, kid.
“God’s work, my ass,” I’d snorted, and stomped a white-and-gold feather into the mud as I’d left to find Nik and get supper.

The recollections became so sharp and real that I stopped running through the waist-high grass to swear. Light blond hair, gold-and-white wings, following after an acquaintance of ours named Robin, throwing a little God’s work in there.

“Ishiah, that worthless son of a bitch.” Fifty goddamn dollars to get on Robin’s good side, fifty bucks to get laid by a puck. Fifty dollars were his thirteen silver pieces. I was glad that hadn’t worked out for him at all and Goodfellow haven’t given him the time of day for twelve more years. Ishiah had known about the Auphe, which Robin hadn’t when we were young, and Ishiah had left us anyway. Angels and peris, neither were worth a damn. They’d saved us once when it was easy, but when it came to the Auphe—the truest of monsters—they hid behind excuse of rules and fake ignorance.

Robin would’ve taken us if he’d known about the Auphe, but we hadn’t known enough about him or them to tell. As far as we knew, he was human and that wasn’t any help. And as far as he knew, the Auphe in me much harder to sense at that age, we were human kids that needed to live their lives until they were old enough to have the stamina and legality to hang around with him. He’d been waiting for us, ready to find us when life decided the time was right. If he had known about the Auphe, he would’ve hidden us from them immediately. He would’ve died trying to save us if he’d known. He’d said so when finally admitting to the reincarnation bizarreness, and I believed him as I believed only Nik in this world. Robin hadn’t known and so had walked away to let us grow and develop as this life demanded until he would see us again, grown and ready for more adventure.

Ishiah . . . he had
left
us and had walked away without a backward glance. Ishiah, who had known that the Auphe chased us, and had given us fifty bucks. Two twenties and a ten, and good luck surviving the entire Auphe race who is after you. Fifty bucks, but you might be able to bribe the totality of the Auphe nation with that if you bargain wisely.

“Ishiah, that worthless son of a bitch,” I growled.

That had to be out of nowhere for Nik, but he was used to that from me and kept going. Beside me, he pushed me back into motion. “That’s your customary opinion of him, but not pertinent right now.”

He had no idea what I was talking about, and with the situation we were dealing with, that was for the best. “Yeah, it usually is. Duck!” I yelled.

Niko hit the ground and rolled over onto his back as I swung the shovel and half decapitated the Bae leaping out of the grass at us, fast and strong as the lion I was. With transparent, glittering scales, eight-inch fangs from a snake meant to pin and rip flesh, inherited from their succubus mothers. The white skin beneath the scales, the metal composition of the fangs, if not the dark color, the crimson eyes, the slippery white hair cascading down their backs like a waterfall made for hypothermia and death—that was Auphe.

“Home run,” I crowed.

The Bae staggered. Grimm called them the Second Coming, an improvement on the Auphe. I would have thought he’d learned some after the last time he’d sicced them on us, which ended up in their death. Gruesome and bloody, like one of your better sparring sessions, it was saved in my mental scrapbook. We’d killed them, but that didn’t mean that was all of them unfortunately, and not one who fought us survived. Once you’d fought a real Auphe, a Bae . . . a Bae was
nothing
. If Grimm knew
any other half Auphe besides me, I’d tell him he needed to invest in peer review of his Frankenstein lab work. If he didn’t have peers, as I was not at all willing to help, then he should review and rethink his own work.

However you saw it, Grimm had never fought an Auphe or he would’ve known his Bae weren’t going to do the trick against those who had fought them and
won
.

I gave our attacker a vicious grin or maybe it was my I-just-won-the-lottery-grin—sometimes I didn’t know the difference since both put me in a good mood—as it weaved back and forth, trying to keep its cervical spine from fracturing in half completely. It held on to its head, handfuls of hair, with both hands and was washed chest to waist in black blood. It bared its enormous curve of titanium metal fangs and hissed at me, little garter snake that it was.

I leaned closer and hissed in an exact echo back, “It’s an old saying, but Grimm should’ve taught it to you anyway. ‘There’s no crying in baseball.’”

I’d played sports when I was young. Niko thought it would help run off my excess, more than human energy. And it had worked for a while, until my lack of comprehension regarding rules became more of an issue when a dodgeball in your hand had not been as effective as a baseball bat. I’d never understood rules and I didn’t to this day. If you were playing to win, you’d do absolutely
anything
and rules didn’t count. Winning was winning, and did I get that?

Yes, I did.

That meant I carried my bat with me after hitting the ball to take down a second baseman before he could tag me out, or I tackled a kid before he made it to home plate, banging his head into the ground until I was sure that home plate was the very last thing on his mind. I didn’t hurt anyone that badly, didn’t put anyone in the
hospital, as that would draw attention, which we didn’t do. That had been Nik’s rule and that one I understood. Attention was bad when you lived life on the run. No, no hospital—I’d been careful while doing as I had been told by the gym teacher: Win. It didn’t stop me from getting labeled with “rage issues” and daily visits with the guidance counselor. She couldn’t understood no matter how many ways I explained it to her: If winning is the goal, rules have to be ignored. You can have one or the other but not both. That’s logical. She hadn’t seen it that way and written “sociopathic tendencies” in tiny cramped letters in my file. I didn’t care. She was a human and except for Nik, humans had no idea about the world, not the real one. She could label me a sociopath if she wanted, but I wasn’t ashamed. I’d guarantee I’d survive longer than her with that label.

Winning is all. That’s what the coach told us. It was one of the few things I had been told in school that made any sense. That was what resonated throughout me as nothing else ever had.

Win
.

“Batter’s up!” I gave a warning call.

I swung again and while the Bae’s head didn’t come off completely, its body did fall to the ground, where I bashed in its skull with the shovel. It only took three or four times. I had to say, it was a good shovel. It was a little rusty, but the head was solid and heavy and as much a weapon as the guns I’d left behind in our apartment. If I needed a shovel in NYC, I’d take this one with me. I might take it anyway for decoration and the occasional beat-down of whatever broke into our place.

When we were young or even in our early twenties and we’d faced the Auphe, we’d been . . . shit . . . terrified. Killing one of them . . . only one . . . with Nik, Robin, and me, it was doable but not guaranteed. Every time you
faced one, you were flipping a coin as to whether you’d live or die. Killing the entire race of over a hundred seemed impossible. I was more afraid of them than death a thousand times over. Death was easy. The Auphe were a nightmare you couldn’t imagine no matter how hard you tried, and with them there was no escape unless they wanted it. They were monsters to the other monsters. They were crazed, bloodthirsty, sadistic, insanely cunning, and you could not win against all of them unless you were willing to die and take them with you. Unless you were lucky enough that they missed your plan and let you
die
when you took them with you. Auphe didn’t understand sacrifice and giving your life for something else. They couldn’t predict that.

Yet that’s what we’d done . . . but it’d worked out better than I’d hoped, although the suitcase nuke the Vigil had provided us with, ah . . . the irony . . . had contributed quite a bit.

It
had
worked though and that was all that mattered.

Then Grimm, a half-breed like me, who’d been running free while I hadn’t known and while the Auphe themselves hadn’t known, had captured succubae and made these things
—
these Bae. One-fourth human, one-fourth Auphe, and half succubae.

They were . . . curious and interesting.

At first.

Grimm had been different. He’d lived life in a cage for half Auphe failures, those who couldn’t gate, for eighteen years with a part-Auphe caretaker/torturer watching, and tormenting him and the others. That would drive anyone insane—until he had learned to gate and escaped, carrying insanity and a grudge so massive that King Kong couldn’t have lifted them with both hands.

But I’d spent two years with the real thing,
living
as the real thing, the Auphe in Tumulus, with all they could
say and do to me. I didn’t remember it, but I knew I fought as they fought, I ate what they ate. . . . I still couldn’t even approach that thought sideways without lunging for the bathroom without quite knowing why, except it was something so bad, so wrong that I thought I’d sooner die than remember.

And I learned to gate as they did. While I knew that had happened—the Auphe wanted me as their weapon, and that meant they had to make me the same as them or at least think and act the same, what else would be the point? It might have worked. I didn’t know anything other than when I left through my gate I was naked and covered in blood. It hadn’t been my blood either. It had been Auphe blood, and it was my sire’s blood—I’d never call it a father. I’d torn him to pieces to make my escape.

It was one more thing I knew, although I couldn’t picture any of it. All my memories of Tumulus were buried in my subconscious. My conscious had built a wall . . . a door . . . something that couldn’t be breached or open between the two. I didn’t complain. You tend not to when your brain comes up with methods to keep you sane. It hid the specifics of those two years away to let me hold on to my sanity. I knew about them in the way you know of your first Christmas. You could guess what went on, what had happened around you at the time—Santa, a tree, presents—but you couldn’t dredge up a mental picture, a memory of the genuine event. In this case, I didn’t want to remember, because if I did . . . Grimm, wouldn’t he be fucking pissed?