Grimm was here. On the beach maybe. I didn’t try to see. It would be impossible through the New York version of the Amazon jungle. And if he was on the beach, he wouldn’t be there long. I was right. I could feel him moving…gating…triangulating our scent. There was the familiar flash of gray, silver, and black light on top of the Battery East and then they were there…on the powder magazine.
The king of the Second Coming and his malignant windup toy.
It was dark, but the night wasn’t as deep as you’d think. Janus glowed. I thought it would, but not like this. The crimson, in heat and color, that outlined each metal shield that scaled him like a dragon lit up the entire top of the powder magazine. Its eyes were lamps to lead the dead, and the face with the grinning mouth and pointed ebony teeth was half turned my way. I could see the liquid twin to lava running slowly out of its mouth. Whatever had made this had made it in a volcano and you couldn’t tell me any different. Its mouth wasn’t big enough to throw virgins into, but other than that…volcano god.
“I like this place, Caliban,” Grimm said as the gate died around him and Janus. “If nothing else, you take the game higher with every throw of the dice and rattle of the bones.” The light from Janus was enough to let me see the half Auphe take a step to see over the side of their royal stage. He wanted a three-sixty view of his victory ring. He got something else instead. He walked the top, all four sides, reading the Hungarian goulash recipe and the English pseudo-translation that went with it. Every word that shone on the ground.
Graffiti to outrage the ego.
When he finished, he halted, facing me precisely. I’d been wrong that he couldn’t nail down my precise location, but I hadn’t been wrong about his being pissed. His eyes made the long-set sun as nothing. His Auphe teeth were down, the silver reflecting the red aura around the magazine, turning the metal needles into flickering flames.
“Why would I want to befoul my tongue or my eyes with the scribbling of a race that let one miserable half human destroy what was left of it?” He didn’t gate to the ground. He leaped, hitting the dirt at the base of the magazine. He made the jump down as if it had been three feet instead of twenty. It threw me off. My thumb was on the detonator, but I’d expected to see the swirl of a gate as I pressed the button. The physical action of it rather then the Auphe one put me off for a fraction of a second before I recovered.
The detonator Rapture had sold me had an inch-tall antenna and was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. I’d dealt with C4 once or twice—some monsters are bigger than others—but I hadn’t used this much of it before on any job. It should have an approximate blast zone of thirty feet. I pressed the button on the detonator and blew that motherfucker before Grimm could gate this time or take a single step. There was a very nonstereotypical war-movie boom. Or rather…
BOOM!
Holy shit. As far back as I’d been, six feet into the weeds, which was a good fifty feet from the powder magazine, I was thrown back farther. I didn’t have any idea how far. The branches and twigs of the wild bushes whipped at me as I was tossed, but didn’t make it through my jacket. As I’d been crouching when I set off the explosive, my back was clearing a path for me. When I landed, I considered myself pretty damn lucky.
And then something else landed…on top of me. Grimm. The son of a bitch had escaped a mess of C4. Outgated an explosion that to human eyes would be instantaneous. Why the hell he wanted my help, I was beginning to wonder. Why he was enraged I could speak Auphe and he couldn’t, that I knew. The Auphe had made him and thrown him away like garbage. Said he was garbage. He hated them, but he wanted to prove to them they were wrong. He was something they couldn’t have thought possible to create: He was the first of nature’s second big fucking mistake, not the Bae. No supernatural creature thought the Auphe evolved—why would the perfect predator need to evolve? Yet they had. Grimm wanted to prove it to them, except they were gone and I was the only thing left of them. But why he thought I could be his equal, was almost his equal, was fit to wipe his royal Bae-siring ass, much less help breed his race, I didn’t know.
Outgated a fucking explosion. Jesus.
His man-made curved claws dug into my shoulder, his knee bearing all his weight was wedged against my crotch, and his hundreds of hypodermic-needle teeth were pressed against mine. I was grimacing. He was smiling. The fact that pain was peeling my lips back and rage his nevertheless had the same effect. “You insult me. You insult yourself. You’re a fool, but a fool I will give one last chance. Come to the Bae or I’ll rip off your face and your balls. But I won’t kill you. Not for hours. Not until there is nothing to remove from your bones.” His breath had the sweet fragrance of raw meat on it. The warmth of copper. The odor of death.
Sweet. It smelled sweet.
Things that are meant for you. Tell him yes. Be the Bae with him. The Second Coming is for you and him. And you want it. To rule. To kill. To make it better than before.
I held tight to the control that hadn’t let me down yet. Those thoughts weren’t true. Not unless I let them be. Not true, I repeated silently to myself. Not true. I had the power to deny them and I would. But they were…
Practical.
Be practical.
If you couldn’t keep that part of you from whispering slyly, demanding harshly, stop ignoring it—use it.
Temporarily and with a different type of control.
Four years old and I’d known what to do. I damn sure wasn’t going to do any less at twenty-four.
I didn’t fight it. Grimm was better than me—now. Fighting what was in me wouldn’t change that, and fighting it didn’t make me more human, only not as Auphe as I could be. And I could be much, much more. I’d tainted a good deal of my soul, if it existed, for control and now I was going to intentionally give it up, turn it off, push it aside. I’d have to have faith I’d be able to get it back. I’d have to believe I’d come back. A child’s assurance told me I would. I chose to believe him.
I let it go.
Let…it…go.
Things changed. My desire to join Grimm changed and it changed in all the best ways.
Join him? The laughter echoed in me—derisive, disgusted. He is a failure. No matter what he can do now, there will come a then. Auphe are not wrong in our judgments. He was a failure once. He will be a failure again. The Bae and the Second Coming are not his. They are mine. They are mine because I will take them and fix them.
Building is the sheep way. Taking is the Auphe way.
I’d been fishing my hand in the bag on the ground by my hip. He was watching for a move toward my holsters. I gave him a different one. I pulled the ring on a grenade and shoved it down the front of his jeans. “They can sew my balls back on. They’ll need a microscope to find what’s left of yours,” I snarled. “Good luck knocking up the snakes by wishing real fucking hard.”
His snarl matched mine and he flung himself off of me, retrieved the grenade, and tossed it where it exploded off in the brush. He could’ve gated out of his clothes, leaving the grenade behind too, but that would be Auphe. Fighting naked—the highest of predators, but animals too. No clothes. No history and education to refine your plans. The highest, yes, but unchanged for millions of years. They didn’t advance in their ways, didn’t retreat. A human would think that primitive.
Caliban would think it practical. Didn’t I? Why do you need weapons when you are one? Why do you need clothing when you can kill and luxuriate in the warmth among the bodies of your fresh prey? Why learn when you are the only thing worth learning about in a world that belongs to you?