Roadkill by Rob Thurman

it or try to strangle myself with it. Asphyxiation would be less painful than one of Niko’s “talks.” This time, though, I knew I was right. All the other times, admittedly, I’d been wrong. I knew I was wrong and didn’t bother to deny how very wrong I was. That made this unfamiliar territory.
    He got behind the wheel and closed his door with a muffled click, carefully . . . quietly. It was Nik at his most annoyed. When you could do what my brother could, when you could kill as easily as most people could breathe, it paid to have control—the same kind of control he doubted I had. And to have that control in less than six months with what the gates had done to me before that, I didn’t blame him for the doubt. I did have the gates in check, though, but getting Nik to believe—that was going to be a trick.
    “I take it you have the payback you wanted.”
    His voice was as quiet and self-possessed as the rest of him as he stared straight ahead, although he hadn’t started the car yet. I gave the bag of money he’d set in the floorboard a dismissive nudge with my shoe. It hadn’t been about the money. It had been about making her feel at least a tenth as terrified as I’d felt when I thought my brother was gone. “I got some, yeah.”
    “I think you obtained more than ‘some.’ And there’s only one way you could’ve frightened her that much.” Now he looked at me, almost as though he didn’t know me. That, oddly enough, scared me probably more than I had scared Abelia-Roo. “You did the very thing I told you not to do, and now here we are.”
    I opened my mouth, ready to defend myself—in a very real way, desperate to defend myself. Nik was my only family. I’d spent my whole life knowing without a doubt he was always there for me. If my ass needed saving, he would save it. If I was a screwup, which I was some of the time—hell, most of the time—he didn’t care. He corrected me or accepted me. He was my brother. He knew me inside and out and that couldn’t change. I might have control, but “Know thyself”? I didn’t have a goddamn clue. From day to day, minute to minute, my opinion shifted. Man, monster, an ice-cream twist of the two? I didn’t know. The bottom line was I didn’t know who I was, but Nik did, and that was more than good enough for me.
    “Nik . . . ,” I started.
    He shook his head, cutting me off. “You have control? You swear it?”
    “Yes,” I replied. I might not know who or what I was at my core, but the gates, that I was sure about. Absolutely positive.
    “All right, then.” He started the car.
    “All right?” I frowned and smacked aside a fuzzy dice that swung and hit me in the face as the car backed up. “Just like that? No talk? No kicking my ass? No telling me I’m being a dangerous idiot?”
    “I saw you born, Cal.” He braked, cranked the steering wheel to turn the car around, and used the moment to give me the same look, but I saw it for what it was now. It wasn’t that he didn’t know me; it was that he was seeing something new. “I saw you grow up. Now I see the end product. I see the man, and you can’t be a man if I don’t let you be.”
    I exhaled and folded my arms across my chest in relief and a little disbelief. “I’m a man? Yeah? Do I get a bar mitzvah?”
    “The bris comes first. Do you want to borrow my tanto? I sharpened it this past weekend.”
    This time it was my legs I folded and in a fairly unmanly fashion. “Funny. Funny stuff there.” Home deliveries and a doctor/hospital-averse mother left me as nature made me and it was a little late to be changing that now. “I’ve been trying to cut back on do- it-yourself circumcisions.”
    He had driven us almost out of the park before he spoke again. “As a full-fledged adult, you will experience consequences to your actions, you realize.”
    “There have always been consequences.” Bad ones usually.
    “Yes, but in the past I was willing to let some of your idiocy slide. You