“He’s waking up.” And Rafferty. That was Rafferty. He didn’t sound too happy.

“It’s about time. It’s been nearly an hour. I didn’t hit him hard enough for that. You could’ve woken him.” Nik… he sounded even less happy.

“I could’ve, but I damn well can guarantee you wouldn’t have liked it. Cal trying to gut us like he did that deer. Trust me, the quiet time did him some good. Now he is Cal again… mostly. A half hour ago he’d have been an Auphe trying to chew through your face.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Every word was a separate dagger of ice. If Nik cut the air with those words, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

It was hard, waking up. Harder than waking up from most naps, but what I was hearing kept me trying. Pushing. Not for me; for Nik. To be there for my brother. What Rafferty said about me didn’t mean anything. I didn’t feel it, but I felt my brother’s anger, and if Niko was angry and allowing it to show, then the situation was bad-definitely bad enough to cut through the fuzziness that surrounded me.

I managed to crack my eyelids and saw a slice of dark blond hair. Niko. That was normal, seeing him when I opened my eyes. He was the one who usually kicked my butt out of bed when I was slacking, which was almost always. Most mornings he was the first thing I saw, or I would feel him firmly rapping the top of my head with my ringing alarm clock.

Then I noticed the hand on my shoulder and the one on my leg, just above my knee. The pressure on my shoulder I recognized-I’d felt it all my life. The weight on my leg I didn’t. Or maybe I did-a distant memory of that same hand burning against a bleeding gash in my abdomen. Years ago. The hand wasn’t burning now, but I could still feel the power in it. Rafferty.

“ Cal, are you awake?”

I managed to open my eyes nearly all the way. “Nik?”

I saw his face then, not just a slash of hair. I saw the somber scrutiny, the tense line of his jaw. “It’s me. You’re safe, Cal. I swear it.” I hadn’t thought I wasn’t, but if I had, I would’ve believed him. Nik never lied to me. But he didn’t look himself: calm… in control. The anger I’d heard was gone, but the longer he met my eyes, the more bleak his own looked. He looked grim and a little lost, and that wasn’t him. It simply wasn’t and why would he…

What had Rafferty said again? About my waking up… Auphe?

Then I remembered-all of it. Remembered it and felt it. The truck, the traveling, the Ördögs, the poor goddamn deer. I’d killed it or helped kill it and I’d eaten part of it. I could still feel the heaviness of it in my stomach. I should’ve been nauseated, but I wasn’t. I should’ve gagged and been sick, but my body wanted it-the raw meat-and it wasn’t going to let it go. I swallowed hard. No wonder Niko looked like he did. No wonder he reassured me I was safe.

But was he? Was anyone around me?

“I fucked up,” I said hoarsely.

“You fucked up,” my brother confirmed, his own voice impassive-not accusing, but not letting me off the hook either. Trusting in my word earlier hadn’t worked out for either of us, but his hand on my shoulder gripped harder. Whatever I’d done, we were family, and for Niko, that would never change.

I was leaning against his chest, my legs bent at the knees with my lower legs behind the driver’s seat and in the floorboards. And the hand on my leg was Rafferty’s. It wasn’t moral support either. If I tried to leave-to travel-Rafferty would stop me, temporarily or permanently. I wouldn’t want to guess which call he’d make, although, if he were smart, he’d pick the second choice, which I suppose told me the answer after all.

Because Rafferty was smart.

I tried to sit up. I could see now that I was in the backseat of the car with Niko and Rafferty. Goodfellow was still driving or, more accurately, sitting behind the wheel of a parked car. He’d been trying to catch up to the truck, but thanks to the wreck and Suyolak who had caused it, that wasn’t going to happen. Catcher was curled up asleep in the passenger seat. He was knocked out, the same as I’d been knocked out, but a little more gently, by a healer, not a fist-or then again, maybe not. He might only be sleeping off a full belly. It didn’t have to be one of his episodes. He could’ve smelled the blood when I hit the deer and joined in. The hunt and the kill was a natural thing to Wolves, the most natural of things.

Knocked-out or sleeping, he looked better than I felt. I rubbed my jaw. It didn’t feel broken, but it definitely was bruised. “I’m sorry,” Niko said. “Rafferty was occupied.” Joining the deer buffet or putting out Catcher, one of the two. I didn’t ask. “And I didn’t have time to spare with your ability to disappear whenever you wish.”

It was stated plainly; again, not an accusation, but I winced anyway. Salome, who hadn’t shown up in the fight… coughing up a resin ball instead most likely… was on the dash, soaking up the sun. She lifted her head, stared at me, and hissed. A mummy cat that killed anything that moved didn’t like the looks of me. That couldn’t be the best of things.

I narrowed my eyes at her and she flashed under the passenger seat, fast as a water moccasin in muddy water. Then I caught sight of myself in the rearview mirror. No wonder Niko was so somber when looking into what should’ve been a reflection of his own eyes but wasn’t. Instead, I saw red in the mirror-in the irises of my eyes, minute flecks of molten lava in the gray. Auphe eyes were that color red-had been that color.

And were still that color.

Because I was still here, wasn’t I? I was still goddamn here. What Suyolak had threatened to do to me, I’d done to myself.

Niko’s hand hadn’t left my shoulder. “Can you turn it off, Rafferty? The traveling? It’s what’s done this.” He didn’t ask me, either because he didn’t think I was in my right mind-and he could’ve been correct-or because I was so frozen that I couldn’t ask for myself. The why of it didn’t matter. He asked. He wasn’t wrong either.

Before the traveling had gotten so easy, before it made me feel so damn good, I’d been myself. Being me had never been worth any prizes, but I hadn’t been killing animals and eating their raw meat and considering rather happily doing the same to my fellow road-trippers.

I hadn’t been in my right mind for a while now and never noticed. Or worse yet, I had noticed, but I’d liked it too much to wonder why life had gotten so much better, things so much easier.

I’d seen those people before, all my life, the jackasses. Everyone had seen them walking around, wearing those idiotic T-shirts-I’M WITH STUPID with an arrow pointed sideways. If life issued those routinely when needed, Rafferty and Niko would both be wearing I’M WITH SCREWED with the arrows pointed directly at me.

Really, really so damn screwed and it was my fault, all of it.

Rafferty didn’t close his eyes as I’d seen him do once or twice when concentrating on a patient. He’d had plenty of time to examine my inner workings while I was out. “No.”

“You’re absolutely sure?” Niko persisted, his calm still seeping away bit by bit, and Suyolak wasn’t responsible this time. I was.

“The only way to turn it off is to turn Cal off, and I don’t think you want that.” Rafferty’s hand was warm now, close to uncomfortably so.

Niko’s grip tightened yet again, the joint creaking under it. “It’s in his genes,” the healer continued. “And the thing about Auphe genes? They’re dominant over human genes. Hell, no matter what they’d managed to breed with, they would’ve been dominant. They were the first sentient creatures on this world. The first, and, in a way, the best-at least at what they did: kill. Up until now you said Cal had traveled rarely and with side effects: vomiting, dizziness, bleeding. But then it had gotten easier, right? That means the Auphe part of Cal ’s genes that had been dormant became active. And there’s more Auphe in Cal than just traveling.” He moved his gaze from Niko to me. “You might look human on the outside, Cal -mostly-but on the inside, that’s not the case. In your blood, in your genes, you’re something new and something old, and something completely unlike anything on this earth. Your traveling did that. It was a biological initiative… or for you, a trap. The more you traveled, the more serotonin your brain released, and the better you felt-a feel-good loop. A happy pill a hundred times better than any pharmacy could dole out. And now here you are.” His hand wasn’t letting me go.