Doubletake by Rob Thurman Page A

was then. We didn’t know.” Didn’t know there’d be a now when limiting me to two gates with the third one killing me along with the Auphe in me would be more harmful than helpful. At the time gating had brought out the worst in me—the uncontrollable darkness in me. “Rafferty didn’t know…you didn’t know.”
    I could hear Goodfellow’s rapid footsteps coming from the bar. Niko let it go. He didn’t have much choice. We could talk and bond and spill our feelings, but as I’d bleed to death in the street at the same time, I thought the girly shit could wait.
    A hand rested on my forehead. I opened my eyes. When had they closed? “We have to get this off of you, and with its being embedded into the street, I think you’d rather not be conscious when that happens.”
    “Just don’t mess up the face.” I slurred a little. “Only thing left on me worth looking at these days.”
    He wasn’t smiling now. In the face of death, yes. In the face of this, no. But his tone was reassuring. “You’ll wake up as good-looking as you ever were, which isn’t saying much.”
    Before I could reply, I saw a skin-colored flash and then I dreamed.
    Of smoke and lightning and living metal that would grind you to blood and bone dust.

5
Black Sheep
    Interesting.
    And fucking annoying.
    He was maimed. Spoiled. He hadn’t gated away. Couldn’t gate away, but why? He was the Unmaker of the World. He had once been able to build a gate to the past…to millions of years ago. You can’t create a damned and doomed doorway such as that without the innate ability to gate with unmatchable ease.
    Nearly unmatchable, that is. There was me, wasn’t there? Yes…ah, yes…there was
me.
    I took another bite of my dinner and chewed as I put down the binoculars. He had looked dead as the pathetic meat bag of a human and the goat tried to free him from the metal claws of a thing the likes of which I’d never seen. A curious thing too, but I didn’t have time for another curiosity. Caliban was my one and only at the moment. I’d gated his attacker to the top of a building far across the city. It seemed to like building tops. Whatever that thing was, it wasn’t mine, but it might prove useful to keeparound. One never knew when death incarnate would be needed. But in the end my brother was my toy; his miserable life or death belonged to me alone.
    I swallowed and took another mouthful. Caliban might have looked dead, but he wasn’t. He was family, and our family didn’t die easily. No no no no no. I was proof of that. I had lived through twenty years of torture…lived
and
escaped. Twelve more years hadn’t made me forget every burn, every sear, every slice of a blade, every week of starvation—none of it, because those memories made me stronger and more determined.
    This failure was going to prove to the family that rejected me, the family that was gone but not forgotten, that I was
better
than they were…so very much better.
    And the success…Cal-i-ban, something had happened to him. He had built a gate to the past. I’d “talked” to those who roamed this city: the vampires, the revenants, the Wolves, others. I’d talked to them with my teeth and my man-made claws. I left nothing but shredded flesh, intestines, and death when I was done with them. But isn’t that the result of talking? I thought it was, and if I thought it was, no one would tell me anything differently or I’d talk to them as well.
    They’d all said the same: He could gate like a motherfucker.
    Something had happened. I had only to find out what. Not that in the end it mattered. We healed. Against anything that didn’t kill us—we healed. It might take time, but we never failed in that.
    We were Auphe.
    What didn’t kill us only pissed us the fuck off.
    I tossed away the leg of the security guard who had tried to stop me from accessing the rooftop of the building at a safe distance from Caliban’s party. He wasn’t muscularor flabby, the guard, but