Downfall Read online

  Right?

  Right.

  * * *

  I checked the locks on the door to our place. No signs of anyone trying to pick it, although they’d have better luck taking a crowbar to it. Niko was serious about his locks after several break-ins of the less than human type, who had no interest at all in stealing our TV. Stealing our lives or livers or both, yes, but our electronics were safe. Looking up at the second-floor window, I could see the metal bars and glass were intact. Good to go.

  Opening the four locks on the door of our apartment, I walked in and locked up behind me as automatically as I’d done since I was seven or eight. There were as many human monsters in the world as there were Grendel/Auphe and Niko had taught me how to stay safe early on. I’d learned defensive moves with a kitchen-fucking-Ginsu knife he’d stolen at a flea market almost before I’d learned to tie my shoes. Hey, my life was worth more than laces. That’s what Velcro is for, asshole.

  I dumped my jacket on the floor. My double shoulder holster I left on, as well as the knife in each boot, and the holster at the small of my back. Most accidents happen in the home. If a flesh-crazed zombie cockroach was going to come after me—and it wouldn’t be the first time—I wanted to be prepared.

  I liked our place, the best by far we’d ever had. It had been converted from a garage and was about the space of four good-sized apartments. Promise, Niko’s one and only, had taken a small amount of money from her five late husbands, which told you how much money they had had to consider this investment small. She had it redone and rented it to us for practically nothing, which was exactly in our price range most of the time: practically nothing. Sometimes we were flush and sometimes we were flushed. It was the nature of the business.

  Paying assholes hostage money and making sure to get the hostage back. Paying assholes ransom money, then killing them if the hostage was already dead, and returning the money to the family. Kidnapping children-eating assholes, holding them for ransom, and then dropping them off thirty-story buildings. That was one of my favorites. Exterminating poison-spitting pixies. That was the least of my favorites. Fucking pixies. Clearing a pack of kishi out of a Kin neighborhood as kishi howled at a frequency that made Mafia Wolf ears bleed. Blowing up a mausoleum to get rid of a ghoul. Granted, doesn’t show a lot of respect for the dead, but once ghouls eat enough of the dead, they move on to the living. Nipping that in the bud is in everyone’s best interest. Not to mention explosives. I had a no doubt unhealthy—but who cared?—love of explosives.

  It was a dirty business. Even if Niko tried to keep us on the more moral side of it, it was also a business that someone would be paid to do. It might as well be us. We were familiar to the extreme with the paien population—the monsters that humans have no idea exist. A kelpie living in a Central Park pond had killed ten pony lovers who tried to push it out of the water to safety before we put it down. You’d have thought the blood-soaked mane, unnaturally glowing bog green eyes, and three rows of piranha teeth would’ve made a person think twice, but nope.

  People . . . too stupid to live, . . . yeah, that’s all. Too stupid to live.

  I was dragging my feet with all the crap that had nothing to do with what was lurking in the depths of my murky subconscious, looking for a way . . . any way to hide. No putting it off any longer; that would only make what I’d imagined worse. If I had seen it at all. It could’ve been an illusion caused by the speed of flying glass and my jerking movement to try to avoid it. It could be nothing. It didn’t have to be what I’d automatically assumed. I only had to look and get it over with and then I could laugh at my paranoia. Even if it was from the fetal position under my bed, it was still laughing. That counted.

  I walked down the hall and into the bathroom. For all the size of the open area of kitchen, living room, gym, and then add on the two bedrooms, the bathroom seemed small and getting smaller the longer I stood in it staring at the ragged green towel. It was partially rolled to wedge on top of the medicine cabinet with the rest falling over to hide the mirror. I’d put it up one day years ago in a different place, but no matter where we moved, the position of the towel never did. And Niko never commented on it. Hell, Niko, to save me the humiliation, was the one to put it up.

  I don’t like mirrors, as I’d thought in the bar. By now that’s not news, right? It certainly wouldn’t be news to anyone who knew me—really knew me, I mean. Three or four people, which wasn’t a long list, but I had no desire to add to it. The more on your list, the more likely you’ll fuck up and let the wrong person in. In my world, you often find out who that wrong person is a second or so after he buries a dagger in your back. I didn’t care for that, and it made an awkward fit when it came to my jacket. They say it’s not paranoia if people are really out to get you. What do they say when there are people . . . creatures whose sole purpose in being born is to get you?

  Ah well. Things weren’t likely to change.

  Popularity is for pussies anyway.

  So, yeah, I had a handful of people who knew my thing about mirrors. The not-liking thing. It wasn’t a phobia. It absolutely was not . . . anymore. Not that it would matter if it were. I was a low-maintenance guy. I shaved by feel and pulled my not-quite-shoulder-length hair back into a ponytail. If my hair grew out too long, my brother cut it for me. He’d started after the first time he caught me trimming it with a KA-BAR serrated combat knife. All in all, it was under control. All hygienic chores would be, and were, done reflection-free. No mirrors required. And if I missed a patch shaving, no one at the place I bartended would mention or notice for that matter. The clientele were a little more than hairy and/or furry themselves. Living without mirrors was a helluva lot more doable than looking into one.

  But, let me repeat, not a phobia.

  Unfortunately tonight I did need a mirror. Niko wasn’t here to help me out. He was out with his vampire ball-and-chain Promise. Not that he would call her that, nor would he do anything to stop her from dislocating my arm if she heard the not so affectionate nickname. Sadly, it even wasn’t true. They were one of those meant-to-be couples. Romeo and Juliet, minus all the angst and suicide. Paris and Helen of Troy, without the war, mass destruction, and stupidity of a guy who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants . . . under his ancient leather miniskirt—whatever. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but lacking the litter and the ability to be a living tour of Nations of the World ride at Disneyland, Alien and the Predator if . . . nope, that was perfect. Same interests, same hobbies, and one had fangs while the other a deep, deep appreciation of deadly weapons.

  A disgustingly perfect couple who didn’t deserve to have their night interrupted over a slight mental malfunction I’d picked up years ago. They should be on Promise’s sofa, drinking wine and surfing Transylvanian Web sites for orphaned vamp babies to adopt. They should have at least that first part of a night together, as the second part never could or would happen.

  My brother had always put me first in his life, probably a result of raising me himself. Nik had once let it slip, and only then because it had been the first, last, and only time he’d been too drunk to self-censor, that our mother, Sophia, hadn’t bothered to pick me up out of the birth-blood-streaked bathtub she’d delivered me in. She’d cut the cord with a rusty steak knife and stepped over me to stagger out of the tub. After telling Niko “Here’s that pet you’ve been nagging me for,” she went to her room to fall into bed with a bottle of whiskey. With that stellar maternal reaction, I doubted she’d given me any further thought other than to look at me with an eye calculated as to whether I was small enough to flush down the toilet. But too bad for Sophia. Niko said I’d been born small, about five pounds. Five pounds isn’t much, yet still larger than your average dead goldfish.

  With Promise being more understanding about Niko and my Titanic-sized case of codependency than . . . hell . . . any woman, vampire or human, I wasn’t going to crash their alone time. Naughty time. Pervy time. Wh
atever time they had going on, it didn’t matter. I could handle this myself.

  First I’d check the cut to see if it needed stitches. I’d done stitches enough times I wouldn’t see anything in the mirror but the slice to the skin. It had long become pure reflex, done on enough different body parts, my brother’s as well as my own, that I didn’t need to pay attention. When that was done, I could focus on the mirror itself for a second or two to see if anything looked . . . off.

  Easy.

  I reached toward the mirror and ripped down the towel as I fumbled for the first aid kit, one of several stashed around, under the sink, spotting the box of syringes while I did so. That was a different situation. I might dread the mirror, but I was pinning a lot of hopes on those syringes and the new bottles in the refrigerator that went with them.

  But time for that later.

  With gauze and peroxide I wiped the dried and fresh blood from the slice that ran from the far end of my right eyebrow in an almost directly horizontal line to my hairline, keeping my eyes on it and only it. It was a red, seeping mess, but once I had it cleaned, it turned out not to be that deep and only a few inches long. It might not even scar. Wouldn’t that be a shock, considering the scarred mess my hands, chest, and ribs were? I applied several butterfly bandages and it looked good. A little blood would ooze past the antibiotic cream a half Auphe with a hyped-up immune system like me didn’t actually need, but otherwise it could’ve been worse.

  The worse, of a different sort, was what I was preparing for now.

  I dropped my eyes to study the sink as I pulled the ponytail holder out of my hair. It was a nice sink—no cracks in the glazing, the first one we’d had in the city where the water came out clear instead of rusty orange. I’d much rather look at it than the mirror. “Coward,” I exhaled before stiffening my shoulders and raising my gaze. My hair, now free of the holder, fell thick and black as my mother’s own had been. Dark and depthless as it always was . . . except for one solitary gleam. I felt my stomach burn as I raised slow fingers to tease out that glitter I’d seen in the broken piece of hell’s own reflection at the bar.

  One silver-white hair.

  It was tucked down in the lower layer and only chance, the flickering light of the bar’s bathroom, a flying sliver of mirror, and my own suspicious pessimism had let me see it. It could be natural. I’d already thought that. Black hair often goes prematurely gray or white. Sophia’s hadn’t. I was twenty-five now. She’d been thirty-eight when the Auphe burned her alive in our decrepit trailer, but she’d died with hair as black as her burned corpse. She could’ve been lucky, if dying a pretty much well-deserved death with your natural hair color could be called lucky. Her mother or father could’ve gone gray younger. I wouldn’t know. I’d never met them, but . . . I had to have hope. Faith was a lying whore who’d kicked me to the curb me long ago, but Promise and Goodfellow had proved charity existed. Why not a little hope to prove the trio wasn’t a mirage?

  The hair was between my thumb and forefinger—only the one. I didn’t see any more of them. One premature silver-white strand, it was normal. So fucking normal that I should be pissed at getting that worked up. Niko would snort at my idiocy. Goodfellow would buy me the cheapest box of hair dye he could find at the drugstore. They would . . . I dragged my fingers down the bright thread and felt the snag of serrated hooks too small to be seen by the naked eye. It stung, a hundred tiny bites.

  Hope had given me my answer. Hope was a bitch, same as her sisters, because the Auphe had white hair. They had silver-white hair that burned and bloodied your skin when you snagged a hand in the fall of it as you jerked back their head to cut their throat. It bit and had a texture slick at first touch and then jagged, altogether strange compared to human hair.

  I yanked at it, pulling it free from my scalp. It didn’t come easy like human hair either. It came stubbornly with a root stained with a clot of blood and a pain that didn’t only annoy; it pissed me the hell off. It showed in my eyes. Not from their narrowing in anger, but that the gray of them glittered with small flashes of ember red. They would, wouldn’t they? The Auphe had white hair and the Auphe had eyes as red as the Nile had once run in the First Plague of Egypt.

  The beginning of the end. There was no stopping it now.

  My life, as I knew it, was over.

  As one healer had told me: Auphe genes always win.

  He didn’t say it to be cruel, although Rafferty’s bedside manner was fairly crappy; he said it for two reasons. First, it slipped out, I thought, he was that surprised I looked completely human except for paler skin than normal. Second, it was true. The Auphe had been the apex predator of the entire world for millions of years. They didn’t have a recessive gene in them. I might have started out half human, but that hadn’t lasted too long. That had shown in ways that weren’t visible.

  When I was young, I hadn’t thought like other kids did. I didn’t understand them or people in general. Rules, expectations, right and wrong. None of that came naturally. Practicality, expediency—that was what I had been born knowing. For Niko’s sake I had memorized the school’s rules, society’s rules, and for him I followed them when it was convenient.

  It wasn’t always.

  But what did they say? Charged but never convicted? That was good enough for me.

  Then I became older. Then I was snatched away for two years to Tumulus Hell, and then I came back . . . then, then, then. I couldn’t remember those two years, but I’d changed. Age and subconscious trauma, a tantalizing good time for all. That’s when the occasional bouts of temper started. As a kid, it had never been personal. If you were in my way and I had to punt your balls to the sky to move you, I didn’t enjoy it . . . much. It just had to be done. After Tumulus and two years of age and raging hormones, I began to appreciate the little things like that. If I had to take down a monster for the good of the neighborhood . . . think of the children, right? Why not have fun while you were doing the “right” thing?

  On and on marched the Auphe genes overriding my human ones, and there was no stopping it. After the increase in violence then came the loss of control now and again . . . and perhaps one or two complete losses of sanity. No big deal, you understand, because I could push those away, make myself forget them.

  It was a different game now. The Auphe had always played to fucking win, and their DNA did the same. The difference being as a six-year-old taking Dodgeball to a Lord of the Flies level because rules were inexplicable and winning was all that mattered was just a freaking strange-ass kid. Now I was a man, one who ran with the supernatural, the paien, and now everyone would see it. Not only smell it, sense it, observe it in the way I moved. No, the time had come when they would see it. With less than a glimpse, with a fraction of a glance, they would see.

  If they could see it, I would be it.

  Remember that pop quiz I’d warned about at the bar?

  “It’s what’s on the inside that counts?”

  Wrong.

  There was another half Auphe in the world besides me. Grimm. He’d asked me once what would I do when I finally looked as Auphe on the outside as he knew me to be on the inside. He would find that saying hilarious. I mean, he wasn’t wrong. Is it fucking hilarious or what? People actually say that. It’s what’s on the inside. . . . What would they say if they knew what actually was on my inside, when the hereditary remains of the first murderer to walk the earth finally destroyed the dwindling human genes of its descendant and showed its true face?

  What would they say when someday the red sparks grew like a lethal wildfire in my eyes until there was no gray left at all—only blood and flame?

  What would they say when the Auphe inside and outside finally matched? Because that was what was happening. I couldn’t change the way I looked and not change the way I was. When the outer monster appeared, it would magnify, explode, and raise all fucking hell with the inner me. There was no escapi
ng that. I wouldn’t be half Auphe any longer. There’d be no more uneasy partnership with what I wished I was, what I actually was, and what I would soon be. I’d be pure Auphe, and the entire paien world including my family and friends knew that would make me a mobile slaughterhouse. Murder walking.

  Cal would die and Caliban would be free.

  Prisms and splinters of silver and glass rained around my feet. This was about the fifth mirror I’d shattered in my life. What did that add up to? Thirty-five years of bad luck. I laughed, but it wasn’t as dark and bitter a laugh as I’d expected. Then again, why cry over milk that had been spilled before I was born, a biblical flood of it from my very moment of conception? I grinned without humor or maybe only the kind of humor a human couldn’t see or understand. Time was running out, no matter what the mirrors wanted to charge me.

  Thirty-five years of bad luck. Yeah, right. I laughed again. I should live so long.

  And everyone else?

  Everyone else should pray that I didn’t.

  3

  Goodfellow

  Where was I before I was rudely yet inevitably interrupted. Ah . . . yes.

  There’s a sucker born every minute.

  Engrave that on every brain cell you have, if you don’t already know it. And if you do not know it, then you haven’t got a single brain cell to inscribe. You are brain-dead. Do everyone a favor and find an empty grave to settle into, as that is all you’re good for.

  In the utmost seriousness, you will not hear any words more wise or more important in your life. Grip them tightly and do not forget. They may save your life someday.