I knew he’d felt me coming for a while. I moved to the table and turned the chair around to straddle it, same as he’d already done—which I’d bet he’d copied from watching me—and sat across the table from Grimm. He had a black-gloved hand, the one without the claws, lying casually on the table next to a half-empty pretzel bowl. He liked pretzels or he ate out of boredom. I did both. I reached for one. He tilted his head, irises red but as opaque as if he had kept on his sunglasses. “We should talk,” he said cheerfully as he slammed an ice pick into my left hand, pinning it to the center of the table.
“Yeah, we should.” That’s what he heard after my switchblade had skewered his hand in place as well, next to the pretzel bowl of both our downfalls.
“Fast,” he approved. “I didn’t see it coming. Someone’s been practicing. I’d clap, but, well…” He grinned, his human one, and raised his free hand for a round of drinks. The metal cat-claw glove wouldn’t have drawn any attention in the Ninth Circle unless you knew what was wearing them…as the peris did.
Behind me, I’d heard the scrape of a chair against the floor, but Niko, after the first involuntary movement, kept his seat. He was trusting me on this, because on this no one knew as much except for Grimm himself.
“Practicing.” I rolled the word around and I was juiced by the scent of the blood, the successful nailing of his hand, the pain inflicted, all part and parcel of the dark road. “No. Just not holding back as much to make the game last longer. You aren’t the player I thought you were. Sending Janus after half-grown boggles? If you’re that damn desperate, I should get a Chihuahua to kick, if that’ll make you feel king of the Auphe.”
“King is right. Bow down whenever you pull your hand free.” He nodded at my shirt. “I like that. Where can I get one?”
“Free my hand? Why? Doesn’t bother me.” I drawled with an insulting ocean of fake sympathy, “Does yours bother you?”
As for the shirt, I’d dug it out of a drawer where I’d hidden several “attitudinal” tees. I knew Niko wouldn’t find them there. Put shirts in a drawer? I didn’t know what a drawer was, in his opinion. I’d retired them after he’d threatened to burn them all, but once in a while you need an ego boost. This one, my favorite, read, KING OF THE FUCKING UNIVERSE.
And I did feel like the king of the fucking universe. Grimm had gotten me, but I’d matched him. That was the game. Although my hand ached mildly, it didn’t hurt as much as it should, whether I counted the normal few minutes of shock or not.
That’s because I was cheating. If you want to win the game, you have to be willing to go the extra mile. Like cheating—I had no problem with it whatsoever. The triple dose of Vicodin hadn’t been for my legs alone. I could handle pain if I had to, but showing none at all…you were a true player. The pills had helped my legs, but they’d also been for the pain I’d known was coming in one form or another.
Cheater. Cheater. Aren’t you proud?
Couldn’t have been prouder. If he was going to force me to play, I was going to play to win, and cheating was nothing compared to what I’d do.
No rules but two. You must be Auphe. There must be pain.
But there wasn’t pain. I didn’t plan on cheating Grimm. I planned on cheating the game too. The Auphe in me didn’t know whether to be amused or pissed off by that. I didn’t care. Grimm thought he was better than they had been, and after listening to and fighting him, I did as well. I was not an Auphe. I was something different and if I played games, they’d be my games. The Auphe said no rules but two?
Bullshit.
I said no rules, period.
Grimm flashed a scarlet glance at my hand. He could look all day…or at least until the Vicodin wore off. Of the two of us, he’d remove the blade from his hand first. Fact. “I don’t care what your idiotic shirt says, I am king. Did you come to prove me better, Cal-i-ban, by playing my game?”
Surprisingly my wound wasn’t as bad as I’d suspected. The ice pick could’ve hit nerves or tendons or broken some metacarpal bones and screwed up my hand but good. It hadn’t. It had gone in parallel to the bones and between them, closer to my fingers than my wrist. I’d have another two holes to stitch up, but I’d be tossing blades and pulling triggers in no time. Besides, it wasn’t my dominant hand. You don’t reach for pretzels with that one.
Either Niko or Chuck Norris had said that.
“I’ll prove you a thousand times better. Auphe don’t play the game, not your game, over bar snacks. That’s degrading. Pathetic. And boring.” I took the bottle of beer Samyel brought over as he did his best to ignore two hands impaled to the table. “Besides we both know we can gate away and this will have been for nothing.” One of us could gate away, at least.
“Gate? Why?” He took a swallow of his beer right behind me. If a half-Auphe could be mellow, it mellowed him, or the game had shifted. “We haven’t talked. It’s important that family talk.” There was that Auphe silver grin again. “I saw that on Oprah.”
“Oprah?” I said, both skeptical and rather disgusted.
“Judgmental to have been raised by cattle, aren’t you?” He put down the bottle of beer and swiped a finger across the top of my pinned hand. There wasn’t much blood, but enough for a taste. “We are the same, but we’re different too. The best of both…or so you should be hoping.”
He returned to the beer. “Daytime TV can be helpful. I have the kiddies to raise. A single father needs all the advice he can get. And chewing through their throats when they screw up doesn’t work. They make more mistakes then. Then there’s more punishment and more mistakes. On it goes. If this keeps up, I’ll have to start from scratch.”
The ache in my hand was growing slightly. The shock had faded. Without being signaled, Samyel came over with two whiskies with a beer back—a different kind of painkiller. Samyel was a good guy, his wings flashing in and out of existence in nervousness, but I’d already had Niko warn him. This was between Grimm and me. No sweeping in like a feathered cavalry. Being a good guy didn’t mean Samyel wouldn’t end up dead if he tried. In some ways Samyel was a little too good.
I tossed the whiskey back and felt the burn. I didn’t like whiskey, but it could take the edge off an ice pick through your hand like nothing else except Vicodin. It assisted that considerably. I put the empty glass back down and gave Grimm a grin to match his earlier one. The Bae. His plan with them had a flaw.
“Oh, Daddy Grimm’s done fucked up.” That made me happy as you could be. “Your little Auphe-bae are afraid. And each time you kill one for messing up you make the others more afraid. The more afraid they are the more likely they are to mess up again and on and on. Maybe I should call in a social worker. Daddy has a temper.”
Grimm had switched from beer to whiskey. He swallowed half of it. He didn’t need the whole glass I’d finished in one swallow. Eighteen years of torture had given him a pain tolerance I knew would’ve exceeded mine if I hadn’t thought ahead to dope up. He’d earned his righteously, though. I gave him that. His metal teeth descended to crack the edge of the glass. “Auphe do not fear. Our bastard fathers did not fear. Their blood overcame the human in us and we do not fear. I do not fear. There can be no fear in the Second Coming.”
I dipped a finger in his blood. Turnabout was fair play—the only fair play you’d see here. And it was his blood that had created the Bae, after all. I drew on the table. “The Auphe were pure.” I talked as I drew a Y with lines of equal length. “We are half and the Auphe made us, own us, even past their death. We can’t escape our breeding.”
“Now…” I put a bloody S in the top V of the Y. “Succubae.” To one side of the letter an H. “Human.” On the other side of the line an A for “Auphe.” My grin widened. “Simple for a monster educated in simple multiplication, or did you miss that day? You and I are half Auphe, half human. That was enough Auphe to breed out fear. But your delinquents are one-fourth Auphe, one-fourth human, and one-half succubae. And you don’t have the balls or the Auphe to overcome that biology. Succubae know fear and you bred that fear into your miserable Bae bastards.”