There was a hesitation, then the jaws closed and it laughed. “You do not know. Cousin. Brother. Auphe.” It laughed again, and this time when it spoke I thought my eardrums would bleed. The Auphe language was as sharp as my blades, as brutal as a bullet-shattering glass. With every unnatural sound Cal tensed against me tighter and tighter. Then the gate appeared behind it and it sprang backward, disappearing just as Robin’s sword blow from the right and Promise’s from the left would’ve taken its head. Instead the gray light took half their blades before the gate vanished.
Cal fell off me. He tried to push away, but couldn’t coordinate the movement. He did manage to hit the wall solidly enough to lean against it beside me. His eyes were infinitely aged beyond that long-ago three-year-old boy, but the dread was the same. “You’re bleeding,” he said, the words syrup slow, before sliding down the wall and sheathing fingers in his still shower dripping hair as he drew up his knees. “I can’t do this.” He looked up at me with more desperation than he’d ever given an Auphe the satisfaction of. “You have to let me go, Nik. You have to.”
And selfish son of a bitch that I was, I kneeled down beside him and gave him my answer.
“No.”
Blind. I was so damn blind. I didn’t see what he was asking for. Not until his eyes fixed distantly on the gun that had dropped from his hand to skitter across the floor when the Auphe had disappeared. Cal wasn’t talking about running this time.
Auphe were quick, Cal was quick, but I’d never been so quick in my life. I grabbed his shoulders and held him firmly against the wall. “You promised me a long time ago. You promised you wouldn’t do that to me. You may as well pull the trigger on me first,” I said quietly, “do you understand?”
He swallowed thickly and bent his head to butt it against my chest like he hadn’t since he was five or six years old. “What did it say?” I asked, moving one hand to cup the back of his head. He’d understood it, one of the flashes that came from those missing two years, picking up the Auphe language. I wished he hadn’t, because I’d known without asking what it had said—I didn’t need to speak Auphe to understand what I’d wanted so badly to be wrong about.
The Auphe Cal had killed last year in Florida had been male. The last male we’d seen. Turn it around and you could say Cal had killed the last male Auphe.
When Cal had said all the Auphe in the park were females, I’d been uneasy. And when he’d confirmed the last Auphe before them, the dead one, had been male, I’d gone from uneasy to a balance of sharp worry and denial. Then I saw the shock in the eyes of the Auphe I’d just killed. It hadn’t expected to die. This hadn’t been a suicide run. They thought the four of us couldn’t take the two of them. They’d wanted to kill me in front of Cal and to make sure he knew, truly understood their new plan for him. No death. No escape. Nothing half so easy.
“They said . . .” He failed and tried again, but choked on the words.
“Never mind. It won’t happen. We won’t let it,” I denied, shaking my head. “You don’t have to say it.”
He did anyway. “The last male Auphe.” He shuddered with every word, but it didn’t stop him from repeating it in dull horror.
“I’m the last male Auphe.”
7
Guts stink.
Human, monster . . . it didn’t matter. They were rank, nasty, and had long ago lost the ability to bother me. They say nurses can wipe a patient’s ass with one hand and eat a sandwich with the other. It’s all in what you get used to, right? I lived a life where I was used to guts on the floor. Lucky me. Yeah, lucky, lucky me.
A pair of rubber gloves, a garbage bag, and I was good to go. I wasn’t wasting a Samuel favor on a mess this small, and as I was the only one not wounded, it fell to me. I doubted Promise’s cleaning service would’ve really understood. We don’t do windows and we don’t do body parts. Sorry.
“She’ll have to move. Between the cadejos and this, the stench will never come out.” Robin sat carefully at one of the dining room chairs. The flesh over his ribs was clawed and clawed deep, but other than that he and Promise had held off the second Auphe long enough that it hadn’t had time to turn its attention to Niko until the first one fell. Promise was worse off than Goodfellow, bitten on her shoulder and hip, and clawed from the nape of her neck to the small of her back, but she would heal a whole lot faster than he would, and feel it less.
Nik had a good swipe across his chest and a shallow bite on his neck. As it was right over his jugular, it would have to be shallow, wouldn’t it? A little deeper and he would’ve bled out before we could’ve done a damn thing to stop it. He would’ve died on the floor next to the Auphe and that . . .
Hell, that would’ve been that.
There’s another fact besides the guts-stink one. Sometimes you get pushed so far. . . . So much shit happens that you end up with three choices: You can eat your gun, you go catatonic and wear a diaper the rest of your life, or you can suck it up and go on.
For Nik, I picked the last option. I couldn’t have done anything else no matter how tempting another choice might have seemed for a second. Only the Auphe could make torture and death seem like a trip to Coney Island. Only they could make you wish that was the prize you won, being slowly ripped to pieces. That was the winning number and I could rip that lotto ticket up, because I’d lost big. But, hey, here’s the consolation prize. I got to be the last male Auphe in the whole damn world. Hybrid or not, pathetic half-sheep mutt that I was, I was all the Auphe had to rebuild their race. Which went to prove I didn’t know them quite as well as I thought I did. No suicide for them. The Auphe were mad, sure . . . join the crowd. But they were relentless too. They’d thought of a way to destroy the world before. Give them time and they might come up with another.
I was the time. Robin said Auphe lived nearly as long as he did, if not longer, but even twenty—no, eighteen now—Auphe might have trouble with world domination. But they could bide their time and breed. Build the race back up. And each successive breeding would slowly wipe out the human taint of the hybrid sire.
And Goodfellow thought he was a stud.
I bit back the jagged dark laughter. If I started that, then I would be in diapers when the Auphe came to drag me to Tumulus, and I didn’t want that. Because if they did manage that, then Niko would be gone and any promises I made would be gone with him. I wasn’t going to hell again, not to visit and not to live. The fact that I’d be insane the minute clawed hands threw me on ground glass sand under a dirty, piss yellow sky didn’t make a difference. I wasn’t adding to the Auphe population. I wasn’t making another monster, not a single one. Worse yet, I wasn’t making another one like me. Through Auphe arrogance I’d been left with Sophia for my childhood. Niko had raised me. What if the Auphe had instead? What would that baby have grown up to be?
The urge to laugh hysterically changed to the burn of bile against my throat, and I stopped thinking about it. Any of it. I had to focus on the here and now or I wasn’t going to make the next five minutes, much less long enough to come up with a way to save all our asses. See me suck it up. See me save my friends and brother. See me completely ignore reality so I didn’t lose my fucking mind.
I skirted my eyes around Niko’s blood on the floor as I kept scooping Auphe insides and tossing them in the plastic bag. Of all the blood I’d seen in my life, that was the blood I could never get used to—my brother’s. “If you think it smells, bring your deodorizer cat over here. That’ll fix it up,” I said grimly to Robin. “Maybe she could eat this . . . thing for us.” I didn’t even want to say the name. I definitely didn’t want to be touching it, but as I was the most mobile, I wasn’t going to let anyone else do it. And Niko had tried. He’d tried to push me into another room. Out of sight, out of mind. If he actually could’ve pulled the memory of the fight and the Auphe words out of my head, I think he would have. Hell, I know he would have. He’d suspected what those bitches wanted. Not that he’d told me. Never given me a single clue.