“Sheep.” I said it in Auphe that the failure couldn’t understand.
“Never even a black sheep, failure. Only a malformed human sheep.” I said that in English so that he would understand it this time—to hear his shame, one no greater. “You are human, the Auphe in you barely a single cell. Any race you create with succubae is already polluted twice over. Yet I can make them right.”
By wiping them out.
I had the patience the failure only thought he had. I could wait until I finally became all Auphe. The Auphe genes in me wouldn’t stop their progress—ever. A trillion clocks ticking away inside until the day I was pure Auphe.
I would take his succubae, and then I would undo his Bae until they were nothing but piles of bloody parts and start again when the time came. Make them as Auphe as they could be until they too one day became pure. The mongrels he’d created—I could be patient, but I didn’t have a million years for them to turn. Half-pure—my race would be whole far sooner than that.
“You think you can do better than I have?” he growled.
“I know I can.” This time I pulled the Eagle and emptied the clip at his head. “Because I am Auphe.”
Inside now and, with time enough, I would be outside as well.
I gave him a grin and then the worst threat tailor-made for him. “The single one left. Auphe live free to kill.” I grinned wider. “Human failures go back to their cages.”
He’d gated as I pulled the trigger, but I was already turning, faster than I’d ever moved in my life, to where I felt reality ripple behind me. I was firing the Glock this time before the gate even opened. I hit him several times in the chest in that one second before he disappeared again.
“So long, brother.” The sneer wasn’t on my face, but the word was soaked with it. I didn’t think he’d be coming back for a while if at all. That gave me time.
Things to do. Track him or his corpse down. Him and his Bae bastards, his succubae breeding ground. My succubae breeding ground. They were long-lived. They could wait as long as I could for my last human cell to die, gobbled up and transformed to something far superior. Then the first race to walk the earth, the first to discover the pleasure of murder, the Cains of the supernatural world—we would return.
No.
I cocked my head to the side. What was that?
I’d heard…What had I heard? A voice. Small, but determined.
No. Caliban time is over. No more practical today. It’s Cal time again. They were the words of a four-year-old. Familiar. Firm. Undeniable.
Me.
I hissed with rage as I felt the shadows creep away at the order of a four-year-old kid twice as smart as Cal. I stubbornly refused to reach for the control they revealed. It reached for me instead. Caliban became Cal again—if we’d been separate to begin with. I hadn’t lost control as I used to in the past. I’d purposely put it aside, but it remained a hard-won part of me as much as the Auphe was a part. As I’d known since my last visit to Nevah’s Landing, we were one, a disagreeable, highly conflicted one, but one.
The kid I had once been was right. I would come back from any future trips to Auphe land and those trips could be nothing but deliberate and by choice.
For now.
How long would now last?
But it wasn’t time for thinking about the future when the present had gone to hell, no road of good intentions needed to lead the way. I heard, “Cal, move!” and jerked my head up in time to see Janus, wreathed with smoke, but still intact except for the original missing claw-hand. He was rushing me, and Niko was behind him with the antitank rocket.
It reminded me bizarrely of the old Road Runner cartoons. Explosives, grenades, antitank rocket and a determined coyote, and it was then that it struck me that the poor furry bastard had gotten screwed by Acme’s products every damn time and we weren’t doing any better.
I lunged sideways, heard the rocket fire and hit Janus in the back. It knocked it forward, but not off its feet. It went down to all fours, claws digging into the earth, its head spinning slowly. One face smiling, one frowning. Over and over.
Scrambling off to the other side away from Niko where we wouldn’t be one concentrated target, I shouted, “You’ve got to be shitting me! C4 and the rocket?”
“And all of my grenades. Don’t bother wasting yours,” Niko called back grimly.
But I did have to when Janus staggered back up, shaking the ground, and came after me again. Mr. Popularity, that was me. I ran. I wasn’t as fast as when I’d been Caliban, and that was a problem, because Janus was quick enough that he was a blur of metal and flame. Throwing another grenade, I kept going, barely avoiding the claws reaching for my legs. One more explosion to Janus, and nothing compared to the C4 and rocket. He went down and was up again faster this time.
That’s when Niko ran between us, his xiphos up. He was trying to distract Janus from me and annoy him with the xiphos, which was the full extent of its powers I’d seen so far. And where the fuck was Kalakos? He wanted his role in the battle. Well, here it was. I started to yell his name when Niko found a way to make the sword do something else than only annoy the automaton. He arched his arm back and threw it directly in the boiling red left eye. There was a sound, metallic and buzzing but louder, as if Janus had swallowed a hundred chain saws. It staggered in a weaving circle. Niko pushed at me. “We have to find Kalakos and his sword.”
I was already moving, but as I ran I felt it in my pocket. My cell phone was vibrating. I snatched it and held it to my ear. “Way to go with the goddamn impeccable timing, Goodfellow!” I snapped. I heard frantic noises, but they weren’t loud enough to register as words. Shit. I couldn’t imagine it could be as important as being halfway to dead, and shoved it back in my pocket, still running. It vibrated again.
“Motherf—” I cut myself off. I could be wrong. With Robin it might be that important. I switched to text and read as I ran and yelled for Kalakos all at once. After I read it again, I stopped and I didn’t shout for Kalakos again. From what I was reading, he was the last person we wanted around.
I was on the other side of the powder magazine, and with one eye black and dead, as I’d done to Boggle, Janus was walking through the rubble of it that now stood less than four feet high. I was on the automaton’s blind side until its head started to turn again. I crouched down in the bushes. Kalakos, the son of a bitch, stood, rising opposite me on the other side of the clearing. Only the red light and his dark blond hair let me spot him. For all his complaining, it didn’t look like he was in any hurry to join the fight.
And I knew why.
“I saw you, Caliban.” With my pale skin, no one had much problem seeing me.
Kalakos had shouted, but his voice was piercing, deep, and full of the contempt I’d expected at the beginning when he’d first shown up at our door.
A Vayash, proving you should always judge a book by its cover. “I saw you on your phone. You looked surprised, although not as surprised as I expected. A father touches his son, who in turn touches his brother. You accepted me if only for him. Family can be a joyous and yet woefully naïve thing.”
His smile was my smile, the one I gave the worst of my enemies…the moment before I ended them in metal and mortality, guts and gore. I should’ve been his son, not Niko.
“That horny goat who’s been missing, let me guess. He had something to tell you, didn’t he?”
Robin had. There had been a secret code, commands in a long-lost language, but with each new buyer, they were changed to the new language. Mutable, as Dodger had said. Adusted to the new owner’s language of choice. And wouldn’t that make sense? You don’t sell a car but refuse to give over the keys. The commands had been changed to Rom when Hephaestus had given Janus to the Vayash for safekeeping, and hardly a burden when you thought about it. He was an unplugged toaster for all the guarding or care he needed. The Vayash knew turning him on in this modern day and age wasn’t an option. And they weren’t murderers. Some were con artists, bounty hunters; some got by doing honest odd jobs; some were thieves. They were all different, the same as any other people.