Doubletake (36 page)

“I wouldn’t push it.” I snorted. “She thinks you’re my ‘hot brother.’ She’s got brand-new boobs ready to try out. I could tell her you’re up for some mountain climbing.”

Before he could get me back, and he would have, his cell rang. It was Promise. Robin’s condo was empty; his phone was gone; nothing appeared out of the ordinary except that our couch was still beside his. Salome and Spartacus weren’t perturbed. What would perturb a dead cat, I didn’t know, but they were batting around an old skull Goodfellow had given them. Yorick. It was their favorite toy. It seemed as if Goodfellow had taken his cell phone and gone. “What about his coat?” I prodded Niko. “He wouldn’t go out without his coat to cover his sword.”

Promise’s answer to that was that he had so many coats that Armani flew him free to Italy every year for the new line, and how could she possibly know if he’d
gone on his own with a coat and sword or unwillingly without either.

Shit.
Now I was worried. But it was Janus and Grimm prep time. Niko asked Promise to try to find the puck. We needed her help, but Robin might need it more. She said she would do her best. I heard her voice from Niko’s cell. Her best didn’t sound too enthusiastic. Granted, Goodfellow had tried to steal Niko from her, but Niko was straight. She should be over that. He had stolen some jewelry from her, had orgies in her penthouse when he’d been hiding out there on the run from an ancient Arabian death squad. He’d tried to give her two undead mummified cats out of the eleven I’d dumped in his condo. When she turned them down, he’d waited until she was out at dinner with Niko one night and given her three instead. Each had engraved collars: Vlad, Spike, and Elvira.

And they wouldn’t leave. As strong and quick as vampires are, Promise hadn’t been able to catch a single one. She was stuck with them and not a cat person. Every cat person knows that not liking them makes cats like you and enjoy torturing you all the more. I had no sympathy. If you weren’t an undead mummified cat person, there was something wrong with you.

“She sounded pissed,” I said after he disconnected.

“She is—a good deal lately.”

Women, can’t live with them. Can’t screw them without passing on monster-Auphe babies. It wasn’t fair.

“Maybe it’s because the cats line up on her headboard and watch the two of you when you have sex?” I suggested. “Jesus, finally. There’s Kalakos.” I waved him down.

“How did you…” Niko frowned. “I meant, that does not happen.”

I grinned at him. “Mummy cats talk, and I don’t know how, but Salome talks to Goodfellow.” I didn’t think she actually did. It was another trickster lie for the entertainment of it. “He had some tips for the two of you, but I told him if he wanted to keep his head, he might want to forget about that.” I put the bags in the trunk and went around to the passenger seat. Kalakos moved to the back and had the antitank rocket dumped in his lap by Nik. Hard. Who was the grouchy puppy now?

Niko got in the driver’s seat, silent until we were at the Brooklyn Bridge. “That son of a bitch.”

“He did say there was a position called the Seventh Posture from a book called
The Perfumed Garden
that for the not very skilled would improve—” I ducked and his hand smacked the window glass of the passenger door instead of me.

“One more word and that antitank rocket will be used on you, not Janus,” he threatened. He wasn’t serious, not completely serious. The thought of the puck having eyes and ears in your bedroom, that was worse than a sex tape on the Internet. That might be worse than anything in creation.

“We have an antitank rocket?” Kalakos asked, lifting his hands cautiously off the package that lay across his lap.

“You are definitely not in the union. When this is over, you should retire and go home to roll dice with the old men,” I said lazily, before tossing him one of the dozen cupcakes Rapture had given us. “A rocket is nothing.

“We once had a nuke.”

It was about seven when we made it past Rockaway Boulevard, turned left, and found a well-hidden restricted road. Restricted meaning: Park Here, Please. Niko drove around the horizontal metal pole that acted as a gate and his junkmobile disappeared into the tall grass. There was salt water saturating the air, and the sun hung low in a clear violet sky. If you were into nature, it was the place to visit.

Goodfellow hadn’t visited. He hadn’t shown up or called and Promise hadn’t found him yet at any of his usual haunts. Worried as I was, there was nothing we could do. Janus and Grimm would be coming soon. When the sun set would be a good guess. Grimm would think the dark would give him an advantage, but around Janus it wasn’t completely dark, with the red light pouring from its eyes and the cracks between the metal shields that constructed its outer shell.

I checked my phone one more time in case somehow I’d missed a call. Nothing.
Shit.
We were all, him and us, on our own now. At least he wasn’t going to be around Janus. That was something. A bleak hope but better than
none at all. We hoisted the bakery bags and our other equipment and started hiking through the grass. It was taller than waist-high, not good terrain for the type of fighting we planned on. Or Nik and I planned on. Kalakos was protective of Niko now and a damn good sword fighter, but I’d told him before: He was out of his league. He was a babe in the woods with this gear, and babies didn’t need to be touching explosives or things that set them off.

When we reached the Battery Harris East portal we pried open the gates with a crowbar and not a lot of effort. Nothing erodes like salt water. We walked down the middle of the battery corridor and the two metal frames of what had once been working train tracks. My footsteps gritted against the concrete dust. Niko and Kalakos were ghosts. “What was this place?” Kalakos studied the passage and the graffiti on the walls.

“The Battery Harris. A battery for a gun, one of two large ones, during World War Two. The cannons were sixteen-inch bore, something for their time. The east and west batteries are about two hundred feet long, fifty feet tall, and eventually covered in concrete to keep the guns from being used against the country back then.” When Grimm had said Fort Tilden was the place, Niko had researched it until there was nothing he didn’t know about it. “It’s a tourist attraction now during the day.”

I jiggled our bags. “But maybe not after tomorrow.”

“Behave. Don’t bounce the weapons of mass destruction,” Niko said.

“It’s C4,” I complained. “Stable as it comes. More a weapon of minidestruction.” Depending on how much you had. If we weren’t used to keeping our identity hidden and avoiding credit cards, real or fake, like the plague, I’d have said we would’ve maxed them out on
what I was hauling. All right, I’d give it to Nik…mass destruction wasn’t totally out of the ballpark.

Coming out into the open between the east and west batteries we kept moving as I said, “This is good. Like you said, Nik. It’s practically a small coliseum. Grimm will eat this up. Lions and Christians, bread and circuses.” The two structures about two hundred or more feet from each other hemmed in either end, and vegetation, thick and tightly intertwined, had grown tall enough to provide a natural wall on each side. It really was the next-best thing to a coliseum. Where was Russell Crowe in his leather skirt when you needed him?

Grimm hadn’t specified where at Fort Tilden he wanted us, but he wouldn’t have any difficulty. Either he would pick up our scent or Janus would find us, however Janus did that. We had problems, but that wasn’t one of them. After walking another hundred feet out of the first battery, I put down the bags and started opening cake boxes to mold gray bricks around the base of the powder magazine that sat square on the combination concrete road and track. It was about twenty feet high and had a large square entrance that the ammunition train would’ve gone through.

“How do you know for certain that’s where they’ll be?” Niko asked.

“Looking down on my victims, held up like an emperor, with my unstoppable gladiator beside me. It’s where I’d stand…if I were Grimm. Arrogant, remember?” I activated the receivers and handed Niko one of the two detonators I had. “Just in case.”

In case I lost mine or had no heartbeat or fingers left to press the button. The customary precautions. Then I took one of the two duffel bags we’d given a mystified Kalakos to carry and took out a can of spray paint. Neon
glow-in-the-dark red. Another prop to Grimm’s ego. Niko had been right.

Practical was the way to go.

Playing the Auphe game for a human reason wasn’t.

And I thought people couldn’t change. This was me changing my ways.

As Niko observed, I shook the can and sprayed a large circle around the magazine. I’d stomped down the shorter grass that had sprung up through the cracks in the concrete and the paint went on fairly evenly. Outside of the circle I sprayed symbols. They looped, came to odd points, tangled with one another, turned jagged, insane, and forbidding as anything written.

“And that would be?” he questioned. I hadn’t mentioned this part to Nik. It wasn’t a weapon, unless you counted psychological ones. It might not do shit, but then again it might. If ever there was a time to pull out all the stops, this was it.

“Grimm can’t speak Auphe.” I started spraying the English translation in yet another ring around it. “He hates that. He hates that I can. From the two years they had me, I know some. I don’t remember it, like I don’t remember anything else from then. If I tried to say something in it now, I couldn’t. It just comes to me…sometimes. But Grimm doesn’t know that.” He’d know…
know
that I thought I was more Auphe than he was, mouthing their dead words, but Grimm didn’t know anything about what I felt when it came to that.

It didn’t mean it wouldn’t burn his
ass
.

For a guy who thought he was superior to the Auphe, he had a thing about which of us had the most of them in us. He was a conflicted son of a bitch. Black sheep often were. Your family of monsters throws you in a cage and has you tortured and you hate them for it. Your family
of monsters throws you in a cage and has you tortured, but you want their acceptance.

Now,
that
was pathetically human.

“How often is sometimes?” Niko inquired, hiding that he was uneasy about that. But not hiding it very well.

“Hardly ever. Like two or three times when I was really pissed off, but only with Auphe.” Or the Auphe in me. “Nobody else brings it out.” I finished up and stood to look at my masterpiece. The English read, “It’s only an illiterate human half-breed with the cock of a herpes-ridden, snake-raping sheep who can’t speak or read the tongue of the First.”

“Grammatically atrocious, but effective,” Niko admitted.

“Grimm is as conceited as you”—I elbowed my brother—“about his intelligence. This has a chance of pissing him off so badly that control will be the last thing on his mind.”

Kalakos glanced at the circles and rapidly away. “Evil magic,” he said with dark accusation. “Those are the words of demons. They will drive us to madness.”

“Unless I spray it in your eyes, it won’t do shit to you or anyone.” I snorted and tossed the empty can of paint to Nik. “The Auphe spoke, but they didn’t write. No written language. I copied this from that spooky little girl two blocks down who’s always writing on the sidewalk. It’s gibberish.”

“Actually I think it’s Hungarian.” Niko tilted his head.

Huh.
“Could be. Her place smells of goulash a lot. The good spicy kind.”

He put the paint can in his bag, folded up the bakery boxes and bags, and stuffed them in there too before splitting the grenades between the two of us. “I’ll be at twelve o’clock. Kalakos at eight. You at four. Let’s not
make goulash of one another. Kalakos, stay back as far as you can until we blow it all. Once the C4 goes—and if it doesn’t do the job—you won’t have accurate enough hearing to count the grenades.” He started to offer the Javelin to me, but I shook my head.

“Grimm will definitely be after me. Janus could be after us all. Better you have it. The instruction manual’s taped to the side.” One last joke.

“And I get nothing?” Kalakos demanded. “I can and have fought with the best of them. I helped Niko escape the Cyclops. If this is all you expect of me, you should’ve left me in the car until it was done.”

“You ever used a grenade?” I asked. “A rocket? A goddamn nuke? I didn’t think so. If I’m going to be killed, I’d rather it be by Janus or Grimm than because you miscounted and threw a grenade down my throat. So hang back. Niko and I will be doing the same thing. And if we’re screwed and none of the explosives do the job—here.” I gave him back his xiphos. “So far it’s the only thing that has made Janus think twice.”

I slapped Niko on his shoulder. “See you when I see you.”

He cuffed the back of my head as he walked behind me to pick up his bag. “The Javelin has night sight. I’ll be seeing you the whole time.”

“Wait.” I pulled a ponytail holder out of my pocket…the hell with Kalakos’s identical one…and yanked my hair back tightly. Praise Jesus. I could see. “And now I can see you. Later, big brother.”

He lifted his hand, his lips curled smugly, having gotten his way. “Later, little brother.”

We all separated and headed into three different directions, burrowing into the greenery. It was almost impossible, it being as unyielding and densely woven as a
prison fence, but using my combat knife, I made my way in about six feet. Grimm would know I was there. He would find me by scent and feel me as well. But knowing I was there and knowing where I was within several feet weren’t the same.

Six feet back, he wouldn’t see me, as the branches, leaves, and grass had all sprung back into place—which was important. He wore those sunglasses all the time for a reason, and not just because his eyes were red. I hadn’t inherited the Auphe heightened ability to see in the dark, but it was safe to say he had. Six feet back and hidden by nature. Six feet close and ready to blow the C4 with backup grenades in the smallish bag that I had looped from left shoulder to right hip. It woudn’t interfere much if I had to unholster my Glock with my left hand while either setting off the detonator with my right or using it to throw grenades. All assuming my left hand cooperated.