“Should I decide to double your pleasure in all things Goodfellow, you’ll be the first to know,” he retorted with a wicked grin. “Participation isn’t strictly necessary, but I always enjoy an appreciative audience. Volunteers are especially”—he caught Promise’s eye and shifted smoothly—“but never mind that. I was thinking Thai for lunch. Any takers?”

Promise’s gaze moved to meet mine. What I saw there . . . I wasn’t sure what it was. A chance? An unwillingness to surrender what we had? Both perhaps, and both still built on secrets. She had compromised with me . . . my half-Auphe brother. Our ongoing battle with those monsters. She had been loyal when it would’ve been in her far better interest to be otherwise. She had risked her life. Actions are supposed to speak louder than words.

I still wanted the words.

I wanted the truth—whole and unvarnished. I wanted it all. With my mother, I had had nothing. With my brother, I had the words, the action, and the truth . . . no matter how grim it might be. I had no experience with the territory that lay between the two extremes. I didn’t know that I could dwell there.

I caught Cal’s elbow before it could connect with my ribs. I looked from Promise to him and he tapped his nose meaningfully. “I’m good for another one,” he said.

“You’re a good brother,” I replied dryly. Despite his good, if overly physical, intentions, now wasn’t the time to make any decisions. It was time to concentrate on the Auphe—they were certainly concentrating on us.

Cal had said they would come. He’d said it hollowly in the dark of his room where the only light had come firefly-distant through the window and from the sickly gray illumination flowing around his hand. They would come and they would come soon because that’s how he thought . . . no, how he knew they would think.

I wanted him to be wrong. And it wasn’t that the more time without the Auphe, the more time we had to sharpen ourselves, to prepare. It was a good reason, but that wasn’t it. I wanted him to be wrong because I didn’t want him thinking that his thoughts were the same as Auphe thoughts. They weren’t. Cal was not Auphe. In the past, I’d threatened those who’d said that. And I’d hurt those who’d attempted to act on their belief, inflicted a great deal of pain with an even greater lack of regret. I wouldn’t have anyone believing Cal was Auphe, not even himself.

But in another way I wanted him to be right. If he were right, then what I suspected from what he had seen in Washington Square Park would be wrong, and I’d never wanted to be wrong so much in my life.

The universe, in its infinite indifference, didn’t care either way. The Auphe came that evening.

Filthy, malevolent monsters.

I was oiling the katana when the first whirlpool of tarnished silver light formed before me. I had the dining room table covered in newspaper with the rest of my blades fanned in a semicircle, waiting their turn. I heard a door slam against a wall, the sound of spraying water, and Cal shouting, “Auphe!” If a gate was opened close enough, within a few blocks of him, he’d feel it . . . just as he felt this one.

And the one that followed.

Cal came running down Promise’s hall, dressed only in sweatpants, still soaking from his interrupted shower. His face was already set, frozen and blank. He had the knife he kept with him always and the gun he must’ve taken into the bathroom with him. Prepared. He had believed what I hadn’t been able to drive from his head. That Auphe blood was Auphe blood. That Auphe was Auphe.

Two gates . . . one less than he had said. It was a small number, and I was afraid that made me right and him wrong. On the other hand, two Auphe were enough for a suicide run, as Cal had guessed. We would see.

I stood with katana ready. I’d seen my first Auphe when Cal was three and I was seven. I was sure they’d been there since Cal was born, spying, but that was the first time I actually saw one. It had been at our kitchen window while we ate supper. Sophia had been out doing what she did: drinking, conning, or whoring. All three at once, maybe. I’d known from a younger age than seven that that’s what her life was. This time she’d gone out instead of bringing her work home with her. It was better that way. Fish sticks and cartoons for Cal. A sandwich and a book for me. Sixteen years later, I thought wryly, things weren’t so very different.

I hadn’t minded being home alone then. It was safer. There was no yelling or slurred insults or thrown whiskey bottles. There were none of Sophia’s “friends,” the kind that paid before they walked through the door. There was quiet, Cal’s occasional laugh at the tiny TV screen, and The Lord of the Rings. The librarian said it was too much book for me, and I’d told her she was wrong. But when I’d lifted eyes to see what shared the winter night against the small dingy window, I wondered if I’d been the one who was wrong.

The glow of red eyes, the triangular white face with tarnished silver teeth so wickedly fine you couldn’t begin to count them all. It could’ve come straight from the pages in front of me. It smiled as I froze. Smiled and then tapped a black nail against the glass. The sound convinced me of what my eyes couldn’t. It was real. Monsters were real. Those awful things Sophia said about Cal’s father . . . I’d managed to turn my head to see my brother. He was on his last fish stick, face bright and happy as the TV burbled. I jerked my eyes back to the window. Empty. I’d swallowed hard and felt warm wetness at my crotch.

Real. It was real.

I’d put Cal to bed, which was my bed too. Sophia wasn’t wasting money on two beds when we both fit in one. It was the first time I was glad she was cheap; it let me watch Cal, protect him. And now I knew he really needed it. Sophia was a liar, but the one time I wished she had lied, she did worse. She told the truth. I had cleaned up and washed my pants in the bathroom sink. I didn’t sleep a minute that night, and I didn’t say a word to Sophia when she came home, but it didn’t matter. She saw it the next day—the spidery handprint on the window. Cal was sitting at the table with the bowl of oatmeal I’d fixed him when she bent down to be face-to-face with him. “Daddy came, didn’t he?” Her smile had less teeth than the monster’s, but it was as cold and hard. “Daddy came to see his special little boy. His little half-breed freak.” I still remembered the crumpled look of confusion on Cal’s small face—his eyes wide and wary with dread behind long black bangs.

Every time I saw an Auphe, I saw my first monster. I felt that echo of that first knowledge that there were things foul and hideous in the world. But now? Now I was ready for the monsters . . . the murderers . . . the dealers of death. And when the Auphe came through the light, I was ready for it as well. I couldn’t think of it as female, no more than I would’ve thought of a shark as male or female—just as death. I sliced at it, but the narrow head and pale flesh slithered under the blow so quickly that it was inside my guard almost before my eyes registered the move. The predator unparalleled.

Almost.

As it lunged at me, it impaled itself on the dagger I held in my other hand, close to my hip. I didn’t say anything. There was nothing in an Auphe worth wasting words on, but I did smile. It was a Sophia smile, cold, hard, and satisfied. Then I ripped the blade upward, from abdomen to bony sternum. Where Cal’s blood had been warm on my hand a year ago, this blood was cool and slippery.

“You are quick.” It moved an inch closer, giving me a smile of its own as bone scraped and caught on steel. “For a sheep.”

I was. I was quicker than Cal and Promise, and close to a sober Goodfellow. I excelled at what I did. I was a scholar, a friend, and a brother, but beneath it all I was a killer, pure and simple. Better at taking lives than anyone or anything you’d meet walking the street. I’d made sure of it. And this evil was the reason why.