1
Cal
Once, when I was seven, I was chased by a dog.
We lived in a trailer park then, my brother, our mother, and me. There were lots of dogs around, most of them running loose. I didn’t mind. I like dogs. But dogs . . . dogs don’t much like me in return. Puppies do. Puppies like everyone. They’d crawl in my lap, chew happily on a finger or the tattered edge of my sneaker. Dogs are different—one sniff of me was enough. The upper lip would peel back, ears would flatten, and the warm brown eyes would go glassy and slide sideways as they hunched away with tail tucked beneath their legs. Dogs don’t just not like me; they’re afraid of me.
Except for Hammer. Hammer wasn’t right; not right being flat-out crazy. One hundred pounds of shepherd mixed with Rottweiler mixed with God knew what else, Hammer wasn’t afraid to look at me as the other dogs were. No, Hammer liked to look at me. He liked to think about me. If anyone thought animals didn’t think, didn’t plot, didn’t plan, then they’d never met Hammer. Two trailers down and one of the few dogs in the park kept on a chain, he watched me every day as my brother and I walked to school. He never barked. He never growled. He never even moved. He just watched.
Because of his lack of apparent aggression, any other kid might have been tempted to pet him. Not me. Even at seven, I knew a monster when I saw one. It didn’t matter whether his owner had made him into one or he’d been born one like me. Hammer was Hammer. You didn’t pet him any more than you petted a rabid grizzly bear. You just walked by and kept your eyes on the ground. You never looked. . . . Just as Hammer never moved.
Until he did.
Hammer was bad inside, wrong, and as I recognized him, he recognized me. And when drunk old Mr. McGee let the chain finally rust through, Hammer came for me. I had my dollar-store sneakers and a bagged lunch my brother had made for me, but I didn’t have my brother. He’d gone ahead, although he was still in sight. He never failed to make sure I was in sight. I’d forgotten my backpack like kids do. I’d catch up. No big deal, until Hammer made it one.
He’d been lying in the same position he lay in every day. Bowl of dirty water, gnawed club of wood. That day, like every day, I wondered why he didn’t like me. We were both twisted. Both wrong. So why? I didn’t get a chance to wonder any further than that. There was a blur of fur, jaws clamped into my backpack, and my body was thrown sideways. He dragged me several feet before he tore the pack completely off me.
I didn’t think. As I said, I’d seen monsters. You didn’t hang around and ponder the situation. I got up and ran. While I’d seen monsters before, been followed, watched, I hadn’t ever been chased by one. It was my first taste of death at my heels, my first taste of running for my life.
It wasn’t my last.
In fact, I ended up spending a vast amount of my life running. Not just living my life on the run, which I had as well, but actually running. I wasn’t seven anymore, but I was still flat-out hauling ass. Like the wind—like the fucking wind. Running from this, running from that—usually from something with teeth, claws, and the attitude of a great white on steroids. Things that made Hammer look like a toy poodle.
I hated it, the running. Hated it like poison. Which may be why I had finally decided I’d had enough and committed to staying in one place more than a year ago, and that place was New York City. A veritable Mecca for monsters like me, as well as monsters like Hammer—those that had me literally running for my life or the life of one of the few people I gave a shit about. There weren’t many of those. Part-time bartender, private investigator/bodyguard/jack-of-all-trades to the nonhuman world, and one suspicious son of a bitch, that was me. Not precisely Mr. Social. It paid to be wary in a dark world thought to be nothing more than fairy tales and ghost stories by most people—most people being the blindly oblivious, the cheerfully clueless, the ever-so-lucky assholes.
The handful of people, humans and non-, that I did give a crap about had all ended up in New York, too—in the City That Never Sleeps, a good place for us creatures of the night. Everyone I cared about, and one in particular: my brother. He had been with me since the beginning, my beginning, and now had me running through the streets to make sure my beginning didn’t bring him to an end.
The running—it always came back to that. A pity, because I was an inherently lazy son of a bitch. Burning lungs, knotting muscles, stuttering heart—I could do without any of that, thanks. But now I was running toward something, although there was plenty to run from. Death behind me; the unimaginable before me—an unholy situation, and it only made me run faster. The bus that nearly clipped me as I ran across the street? That wasn’t even a blip on the radar. I had bigger, badder, and far more destructive things on my mind.
“Traitorous cousin.”
The side of that bus brushed my jacket as I looked up at the sound of the icy hiss. For a second I saw it crouched on top, proving that mass transport wasn’t just for hygienically challenged humans. I saw metal teeth, red eyes, and hair the color and drift of jellyfish stingers. I saw a killer. I saw a monster.
I saw family.
Then I saw something more immediately relevant—the front of a cab barreling at me. I dodged to one side as it braked. I rolled across the hood, taking down a bike messenger. Vaulting the cursing man, I ran on. I didn’t look behind me. I didn’t have to. I knew what was there. I knew what was coming, and I knew it wasn’t alone. But that was the least of my concerns. What was important to me now was getting to the park, because I had other family. Real family.
My brother was at Washington Square Park, waiting for me. We were supposed to spar. “Spar” was a word Niko used when he meant he was going to beat the shit out of me for my own good. He kept me sharp and quick. He kept me evading monsters and taxis with equal alacrity. He was the reason I’d lived this long. The ones that followed me, the Auphe, knew that too. They hated him nearly as much as they hated me. And hate was like air to an Auphe. When something was as easy as breathing, you got pretty damned good at it. But the Auphe weren’t good. No . . .
They were the best.
That’s why I ran. Not because they were behind me, but because I suspected they were also in front of me. They’d been waiting for me at the apartment building at St. Marks’s, where Niko and I lived. I’d come home to see them lining the roof, and I’d felt the internal wrench as they ripped holes in reality and slithered through. The dread was instant. If they knew for sure where I lived, they knew where I went. If they knew that, they knew the same about Niko. Months ago they had said they’d kill everyone in my life before they killed me. I believed them. Reapers and rippers and older than time—living murder wrapped in cold flesh. They didn’t lie. Why would they when blood-soaked destruction was so much more entertaining?
Yeah, it had been months, but they said it, I believed it, and now was apparently the time. Long months of waiting, but, hell, I’d have been happy to wait a little longer.
No such goddamn luck.
I came off East Eighth Street, crossed Astor, then hit Broadway and kept running. This time I was hit, a big, ancient black Lincoln, but it only grazed my hip. There was the screech of brakes as I was knocked to the asphalt. As I scrambled back to my feet and kept moving, the skies opened up and dropped a waterfall of icy rain. I was soaked instantly, but the cold I felt on the outside couldn’t touch what swirled inside me. Once on Fourth, I was running through the people. The human and the non-. The blissfully ignorant and the voraciously aware. The dinner and the diner.
Among the walking, talking snacks that were now cursing the rain, I could see the occasional pale amber eye, the gleam of a bared tooth. Upright Hammers. And they knew me as Hammer had. Smelled me. Werewolves were good at that. Leg humping and sniffing out a half-Auphe—it was all a piece of cake.
There were other monsters among the unwitting, but I didn’t bother to pick them out. I didn’t have time. I didn’t have time for anything except getting to Nik. It was a fifteen-minute run, going as fast as I could. Fifteen minutes was a long time. I didn’t let myself think it might be pointless, that Nik had been at the park for more than an hour now. I just gulped wet air, tried not to think how much easier it would be if I shot the people milling in front of me, blocking my way, and kept running.
There were people in the park, but they were all leaving—running themselves, although not as desperately as me, for shelter from the unexpected downpour. When it was cold enough to shrink your balls and wet enough to prune up everything else, it tended to put an end to casual walks and Frisbee playing. Niko would be on the far side of the green. There were bunches of trees gathered around the perimeter of the park. We worked out by a particular group of them in the northwest corner. As I ran toward it, I smelled the grass crushed under my feet, the mud, the dead leaves, the acid-free oil Nik used to clean his swords. . . .
And Auphe. I smelled Auphe.
Elf and Auphe, one and the same. Proof that mythology never failed to get it wrong. How it had gotten blond, prissy, silk-wearing elves from the world’s very first monsters, I would never know. After pointed ears and pale skin, the resemblance stopped, and the steel teeth, razor claws, and lava eyes of a demon started.
I ignored the few people who gave me quick stares as they ran in the opposite direction, and tried to get more speed. I couldn’t—I was giving it all I had and more. But then I was there. I was in the trees. The leaves had all fallen and the dark branches should’ve been bare as they split from the trunk to spread against the sky. They weren’t. They were filled with Auphe, as pallid as the winter sky behind them. They were hidden enough by the rain that I could barely see them, but they were there. There had been no one behind me because they had beaten me here, the same twenty from the apartment building. From the roof to the trees—it was only a step for them. Open a door in reality, pass through, and there you were.
The one on the bus hadn’t been following me. It had been playing with me. Homicide and humor—it was one and the same to the Auphe.
And Niko faced them all.
Revealing himself, he stepped from behind a glistening black tree trunk. Jesus. Alive. Fucking alive. And he was ready, with dark blond hair pulled back and katana held high in the pounding rain. The Auphe didn’t blink, didn’t move. “Gun,” Nik said calmly.
I was already reaching under my jacket for the Glock .40 in my shoulder holster. My grip should’ve been tight and cramped with adrenaline, but I’d pointed one weapon or another so many times over the past four years that my touch was light and confident. The rest of me could’ve taken a lesson. Normally I was good at this—I saw monsters all the time and faced them head-on. Kicked ass, tail, flipper . . . whatever they had. But this . . . this was the Auphe. Half of my gene pool. They’d been not only the bogeymen of my childhood, but of my whole damn life. Outside windows at night, around darkened corners, trailing behind me from the time I was born until I was fourteen. Bad, right?
Wrong.
There was worse. They took me. For two years. I didn’t remember those years and I probably never would, but inside, at a level I couldn’t access, I somehow knew what they had done. Could feel it. Seeing just one was enough to have the taste of screams and blood in my mouth and a chunk of ice in my gut.
Seeing twenty of them was like seeing the end of the world.
Pointing a gun at the end of the world seems fairly goddamn futile. I did it anyway. “It’s broad daylight, assholes. Seems bold even for you,” I said tightly. I didn’t freeze, not this time. I swallowed the bile, grew a pair, and kept the Glock steady. Two-headed werewolves, mass murderers, dead bodies hanging like fruit in a tree, I’d faced all of that—I’d face this. “Or did you get the weather report I missed out on?”
“Faithless cousin.” Hundreds of titanium needle teeth bared at me as the closest one spoke. “The blind do not see us.”
“And when your eyes are ripped from their sockets,” hissed another, “neither will you.”
Jesus, family. It was a bitch.
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