“Cyrano, it’s been a month now. Nothing’s happened. You need to take a break. I’m here to make sure you take it,” I said with exasperation as I looked up at him moving halfway down the stairs from the fourth floor and waited for him to join me. He did need a break, although I hadn’t had much luck convincing him of that. The guy deserved a life of his own that was more than rolling out of Promise’s warm bed at three a.m. to look after me, but once a big brother, always a big brother. That his little brother was a monster in his own right didn’t put a dent in his determination.
Promise had been patient about the protectiveness issue several times now, but everyone’s patience runs its course. Promise with her knowing eyes, fields of lavender under moonlight, and her ability to snap a neck as gracefully as the movement of any Renaissance dance, was good for Nik. She was a mirror of his calm and control, and being a vampire helped if our work spilled over into our private lives. Promise had no difficulty taking care of herself. I didn’t want him to lose the sanctuary he had in her because of me. The very reason he needed a sanctuary was thanks to me after all.
“Grimm waited twelve years to find you,” he pointed out, stopping beside me. “I doubt a month of laying low will be much of a strain for him.”
Grimm was the problem I’d gifted Niko with, the reason I’d blown off Ishiah and his serial killer. Grimm was actually my problem, the outlet for the worst part of me—he did double duty. He was not Nik’s trouble, but brothers, like company, loved misery. Or was that the other way around? Whatever. Grimm was half Auphe like me, the result of the same experiment in genetic engineering spawned by a race that had once ruled and ravaged the earth long before man had yet to be the next best thing to a tadpole. Now, thanks to Niko, some friends and myself, the Auphe were extinct, but part of their experiment remained. Grimm and me.
Grimm wanted to kill me and he wanted my help in fathering a new race to replace the Auphe. And being half Auphe he saw no reason he couldn’t have both things. It was something of a blind spot, but not a surprising one when the Auphe had been the worst of the worst when it came to monsters. They had lived only to murder and mutilate and do so as frequently as possible. Our childhood name for them, Grendels, had fallen damn short of the reality.
Now Grimm thought he had the balls to step into their jockstrap—and he was right.
As problems went, Grimm was a big one. I was a monster, no matter what Nik said to the contrary, but there were degrees of monster. Grimm was the better monster. A month ago I’d sent him packing with a chest full of bullets, but I’d been able to do it only because I’d set my human part to one side and let all my monster come out to play. A dangerous thing that.
A fun thing.
That too, but my kind of fun came with a price tag. Every time I let it off the leash, there was more to chain back up when I was done. More monster equaled less room for the human in me—the sanity in me. There were monsters and then there were monsters. I didn’t want to become the latter . . . if I had a choice . . . at least not this soon.
What I’d done to the eight killers on the street—that was nothing to what I could do. Nothing. I could have done so many things. . . .
Not the time nor the place.
No longer a member of the human race was the singsong rhyme in my head.
I snorted at the childishness of my own subconscious before shoving it down hard and slamming the lid on its box. I had once made a mental box when I was a kid to store bad thoughts, bad memories, bad desires. Now I had thousands of boxes. That was good, in my opinion. It meant that I was in control. I would fight to my last breath to keep it that way—identity crisis or not.
Not that it mattered now, because this was Niko time. I needed to make the most of it. Niko deserved a personal life that didn’t involve playing bodyguard to me and I wasn’t giving up on that.
“If Grimm shows up,” I said, “I’ll gate the hell away to parts unknown”—at least to Grimm—“and he’s screwed.”
Gating or traveling was a nice way of saying I’d tear a bleeding hole in reality, wounds of rippling tarnished light, and step through to end up a block away or a thousand miles away. My choice, although not to where I’d sent my eight attackers in questionably fashionable hoodies. I’d never go to that place. Never again.
The ability to gate came with the Auphe blood and though I hadn’t been able to use it well or often at one time, now I was cooking with gas. The Traveling King. All bow before me. Grimm could gate too, but as long as he didn’t know where I was going, he couldn’t follow.