Downfall (28 page)

I had told Cullen I would be there for Cal, but being there had so many meanings, mercy in life and a mercy killing, a child couldn’t know.

“Cal, I will tell you this only once: If you put that glove on again and lose control, I will kill you.” He said Niko and I were safe, sacrosanct, but Ishiah and Promise he was less sure about. Then there was the fact that Niko had said he’d remembered his time in Tumulus, boasted of hunting and eating in a way that defied any measure of humanity left in him. And he’d laughed. He’d laughed at the memories of that Auphe-hell as if it were fucking Disneyland. That wasn’t the control I needed from him.

“As much as it would hurt me—and it would hurt more than you could comprehend—I would do it all the same. I would end you. Do you understand?” I questioned as I watched the small rivulet of blood course down the skin of his throat.

He nodded, unmindful to the steel at his throat and his attention on me alone. Silver-white hair, lava red eyes, but Cal through and through. “Fuck, of course I understand, Robin. I’d do my best to let you. I mean it. Three times three.” An oath that couldn’t be broken. A promise he had no idea what meant now, but knew at a subconscious level, Cullen’s level, what it had once meant. That was enough for me.

Three times three.

I smiled, put away my dagger and surged forward to rest my forehead against his. “Put it on, then, cub, and let us go kill as many Bae as we can find.”

Caliban

Niko had lost his shit, which hardly happened.

I was a little more than in awe of it as I watched Robin and him shout at each other—and there was a huge amount of shouting—with the artfully tarnished silver and copper hand-painted design of the bedroom wall as a background. The colors wavered in and out, as my head wasn’t quite right yet. Whatever Nik had shot me with had left me dizzy and with a sharp headache.

The shouting didn’t help any of that. I slid on my glove-and-claws and felt a fleeting disappointment that it wasn’t the disemboweling sort of shouting and wasn’t that too bad?

What was worse than the “too bad” that skittered through my head was the fact that I thought that at all.

It was that secondary thought, that recognition that had me pulling it together. I kept my promise to Robin
and held on to the human Cal, claws and all, and not the Auphe Cal. Three times three. Whatever that meant. I had no idea, but it seemed important. Like one of those old historical oaths, the rare ones that people used to keep. The ones you didn’t break. Considering the other things that had gone through my head today, not knowing why a bunch of threes equaled an unbreakable vow was nothing at all in comparison. It was also nothing at all in comparison to the fighting.

Not that I cared when Goodfellow and Niko sparred, mock fighting. But this was real. They were fighting like dogs in a pit. It was wrong. They didn’t fight like that. Not for dead and gone and that’s all there was, but I could see in Nik’s set and cold face that’s where he was now.

At first I thought it was about what I’d done. I knew I’d lost something of myself back at Nik and my place when Grimm had shown up. I didn’t remember much more. The claws, Grimm, Tumulus, maybe, although that was gone now, Nik in my bedroom doorway with a gun. Nik with a gun—that was unreal no matter how you frigging looked at it. But there he’d been. Nik with a gun. My brother who considered anything not a sword as disgusting and lazy and, well, me all over. Him with that attitude the majority of his life and yet he’d shot us both. Grimm and me.

But he’d shot me first.

I knew why. He was
saving
me first. I’d been shot with a tranq gun before. I recognized one when I saw it, although the Auphe in me didn’t. That had been lucky, that Auphe ignorance, or things might have turned out differently . . . and far more bloody.

That wasn’t the issue currently. Keeping my brother and best friend from killing each other . . . watch me prioritize.

I put my hands up, one clawed as deadly as you could
want, and shouted, “Stop! Jesus Christ, just . . . stop. I was Auphe. I’m the one who fucked up and yeah, I’m the one who needs to be put down like a rabid dog if I can’t hold it back, but I am holding it back now. I’m Cal now, not Auphe. So, fuck, just stop!”

Robin looked at but not out a window, as it was covered with blinds and a curtain, both so muting that there might not have been any light at all from outside. His shoulders were set with anger and regret because it was his back to the wall, wasn’t it? Before it had always been Nik alone who had accepted the responsibility of taking me down if it came to that. Now the puck was throwing his money into the pot and showing his cards. If Nik couldn’t do it, and for all the years he said he would—I didn’t think he could—but Robin would. “I’m fine with who you are and who you might be,” Goodfellow said, guttural, and not from the shouting, I didn’t think. “And I know what I’ll do in either case.” What he was saying was unrelenting and reassuring all at once. I had no problem with it. As he said, he would do whatever needed to be done no matter who I was.

Cal or Auphe or both.

Mind? Hell, I was grateful he could be that and do that for me. And he’d be doing it for Nik as well. If Nik didn’t have to do it himself, I’d be thankful. I didn’t want to put that on him, to kill his own brother, and it had been on him for a long time now. Goddamn grateful didn’t cover it.

“Nik.” I looped fingers around my brother’s elbow, fortunately within reach, and jerked him back down to the chair beside my bed. “He’ll stand behind me if I fight Grimm, and he’ll stand against me if I fight the world. What more could I ask? Nothing. He’ll put me down so you don’t have to. That’s a
gift
. He’s a goddamn saint for that, okay? Now calm the fuck down, would you? Please?”

Niko, who sat on the bed beside me as alert and ferocious as any guard dog, was so many levels of screwed up, fucked up, and a thousand times done with this shit. I was surprised he had words for it all. He bowed his head, exhaled, and let it all go. Much more calmly, he offered, “He’s doing what I should do. But what I don’t think I can do, as often as I promised. I am the one who should apologize, to both of you.”

Nik, who’d been my brother, my father, my mother. He had seen me take that first breath, and that was no exaggeration at all—how could I expect him to be the one who made sure I took my last? Whether he thought it his duty or not, whether I needed it or not, I couldn’t expect it.

“Do not say you are sorry or I’ll swat you again.” Goodfellow sounded serious on this one. “That is why I am here.” Robin gave me another pat to my foot and then rubbed a hand across the top and back of Niko’s head, pretty much destroying his braid. “To do what you cannot bear to do for each other.” He stood and gave a full-body shudder. “Now this is becoming sickening. Embrace or hug or whatever perversion one must do between brothers. I have to leave before I must vomit at the sight of so much emotion. I’m off to the living room and wine to wait for Ishiah.”

He was gone and I smeared carelessly at the few drops of blood that I could feel pooling at the base of my throat. “He’ll do what has to be done, Nik. I’m not sure it’s fair—hell, I’m sure it’s not—but he’ll do it. That’s better than you having to do it. Let him, all right?” I swung my legs out of the bed. “You shot me and you hated that, didn’t you?”

“You have no idea.” I felt his fingers automatically wipe away the blood on my throat, on a bathroom cloth
that wouldn’t be seen again. “Despite that, you don’t know what I could do if I had to.”

But I did. I did know what Nik could do and what he couldn’t, and Robin knew that as well as I did. Niko couldn’t kill me. . . . Whether it would save the world and all humanity or not. He’d had to once make an attempt at killing something that was not me but lived inside me. At the last second he’d turned an attempt at a mortal wound into near-mortal. That, combined with the desperately good fortune of getting me to a healer we knew in my last moments to bring me back, had given him a taste of what he’d sworn. He wouldn’t be able to do it again. That’s the way it was, and I was glad of it for the both of us. My brother couldn’t kill me, but Robin, my other brother, could. He could remember me in every life and knew, painful as the passing years were, I’d return. Niko knew that, believed that, but he couldn’t remember it. As the ultimate agnostic, I knew: If you couldn’t see it, you couldn’t believe it. It was difficult to kill your brother on faith alone.

Robin had seen it, lived it. Robin didn’t need faith; he had fact. He could save humanity from Grimm and me by ending us both, and that was more than I’d hoped for.

“I’m starving. Since I made breakfast, you can make lunch.” Twenty-five years of protein shakes and vegan casseroles caught up with me in a hurry as I thought better of that and what he would make. I slid out of bed, taking off the claws. They weren’t practical for eating . . . not what humans thought of as food. “We’ll scrounge in his refrigerator. He usually has a buffet that would boggle Vegas in that thing.”

On the living room couch Ishiah had arrived and sat giving Robin an oral report of his findings. If you think oral means his tongue was down Goodfellow’s throat,
you’d be right. I groaned but went with relief it was only his tongue. I didn’t believe it—all right, didn’t want to believe it when Robin said I’d once gone to orgies thousands of years ago. I had no problem waiting on my next life, human again, to see if that were true or not. As I headed for food, Niko was giving them the same look he gave me when I fondled my guns a little too much during cleaning.

“Maybe he can tap out in Morse code with his dick if he learned anything else about the Bae,” I suggested with bite. I hadn’t forgotten Ishiah and the carnival yet, whatever he’d done for us since. “Or spell it out in saliva.”

“Ask me,” came a voice far more familiar than I wanted it to be.

Grimm crouched on top of the refrigerator. “I can tell you all about your one thousand and twenty-five brothers and sisters. That is what your sickly flying rat was looking for, right?” Once again, his gate came and went so damn quickly I didn’t see it and barely felt an uptick in my pulse at its presence. How the hell could he be that good, better than the oldest of the Auphe had been? Could he be right that he was an improvement over any Auphe? If in gating only?

“Ah, but look.” There was that silver grin. “I have a phone now, as communication is important, even to us monsters.” Yeah, the motherfucker did. He took it from the pocket of his leather jacket and held up the screen to face me. There was a mass of white serpentine coils in which I couldn’t make out one Bae from another. “That is the last litter. Precocious. They ate their mother five minutes after they were born.” His tainted silver grin mocked me. “A family moment. Should I text so that you can see the next birth? Sometimes they eat each other as well. Those Hallmark moments always deserve to be commemorated.”

I had already heard Nik’s katana come out and was pissed as shit someone had taken off my holster with my guns or that I thought I couldn’t eat a goddamn bologna sandwich without being armed with claws. “Are we going to get down to the business of killing each other or what?” I snarled. “Because that would be infinitely less painful than listening to your shit.”

But at least someone, or a few someones, was excessively armed, as no fewer than five knives were slicing through the air toward Grimm. All disappeared with the faintest of dark shimmers before they reached him and he paid no attention to the attempt. Why would he, something so easy that he hadn’t needed to
think
about it? I’d killed people with gates and a thought . . . but it had taken at the very least that one thought. With Grimm it was as automatic as breathing.

Holy shit.

It was true. A thought I’d considered, but I hadn’t let myself believe it. Not wanting to believe didn’t change what I was seeing. Denial couldn’t defeat the truth, and the truth was right there.

“Getting down to business. Is that what you want?” Grimm sounded mockingly doubtful but agreed. “Then we will. One of us will die. Maybe both. That was always meant to be. But will that be now or a hundred years from now when we tire of chasing herds of humans in a world once ours again?” He shrugged and I swear to God I recognized the dismissive, bored sentiment as a mirror image of mine come back to bite me in the ass.

“We will fight, however. For fun first, and you know how fun it will be, and to prove yourself worthwhile, because you are far from showing that. Definitely. We will fight. Anytime, anyplace. You name it, Caliban, but only between you and me. Understand? The first rule of Auphe Club.” He made a movie reference. His grin, metal
ripping through gums to drop over his human teeth, was so destructively elated that I could see his own blood coating his teeth; he cared that little about death and life that he’d made a movie reference. I didn’t know if that was more disturbing or the fact that he was a monster and could
make
movie references. “Call me.” He held up his other hand and made the universal sign to go with the words and that was somehow worse than the blood dripping from his mouth. Such a casual human gesture. My control between human and Auphe was sketchy, but Grimm’s . . . his was ironclad on both sides. His bloody grin widened as he tossed me the cell phone and was gone the moment it left his hand.

I caught the phone, furious, full of adrenaline that had nowhere to go because it was now clear that while Grimm could follow my gates, his gates were far beyond my abilities. Worse, I was more than a little confused. He was much easier to deal with when I was full-blown Auphe who didn’t know doubt or fear. This . . . I dropped the phone on the granite kitchen counter as if it were a face-eating Amazonian spider. “He left us baby pictures and quoted
Fight Club
.” And he’d bled while he did it, showing his teeth, thinking nothing about it. Blood to Auphe, whether of others or even your own, was to be savored, never feared.

“You’re not fighting him alone,” Nik said adamantly.

I sat on the island and put my head down after picking up the phone again to toss to him. “Here. Look at some baby pictures. I’m going to think about how Auphe I need to be to survive this fight and how much Auphe will have Robin cutting my throat. Complicated balance. Oh yeah, and a plan to get Grimm and all his little fucking snakes together to take them all out at once, because if we do it one by one, we’ll be drowning in them in five years.”

“His gates seem much more advanced now. From an
eye toward scientific observation only.” Robin sounded speculative, not accusing, but I couldn’t let that go all the same.

“His gating is a fucking sight more advanced, thanks, Mr. Spock. I think he was holding back on me last time. Getting me to underestimate him. He still hasn’t decided if he wants me dead or not, at least not immediately. Then there’s the fact that he has been gating about twelve more years than me, and no matter what I tell him about being less than an Auphe, he isn’t. I thought . . . but shit, he isn’t less. He’s more. He’s better than them, better than he even thinks he is. Evolution. I lose sight of that when I go . . . you know . . . insane, because to an Auphe ego there can be no one better. But we wiped out their asses, a human, a half human, and a puck, so they were wrong, weren’t they? And when I’m all Auphe all the time I’m wrong too. I think like them. I forget my weaknesses. Don’t accept I have any.”

Ishiah had taken a step back. “Better than an Auphe? More? That cannot be.”

Goodfellow wrapped one hand around the peri’s wrist and squeezed. “Faith. You had it once. Remember it again.” He’d stolen the phone from Nik with his other hand. “He does have one number in here. Apparently he was serious about you calling.” He quickly copied the number into his own phone.