He didn’t look at me, and I didn’t mind saying that scared the shit out of me more than the thought of being Auphe. Nik was always there for me. When I was a kid, if bullies picked on me, he was there… usually to pull me off the bullies’ backs as I tried to strangle them with my backpack strap, but he was there. He was there to stand between me and a scotch-bottle-throwing Sophia; there when the Auphe took me-just too busy not burning to death to be able to do anything about it, but he was still there when I came back psychotic as hell-temporarily psychotic, but still no damn picnic. And when the Auphe took me again, that time he did get me back, and there was never a time in my life he wouldn’t meet my eyes. But my eyes were different now, weren’t they? They were the only physical feature we shared in common and now we didn’t even have that.

He continued to look at the ground, braid of hair over his shoulder and lying on his chest, as he sketched a few letters in the gritty dirt. Fratres. “Do you know what that means?” He didn’t wait for my answer, although I actually had one that time. “It means brothers. The plural of the Latin word for brother. It’s part of that tattoo around your arm. At least they spelled that word correctly. We’ll discuss sterility of instruments, hepatitis, and the ablative case of Latin later.” Now he looked at me, amusement layered over something deeper and darker. “Yes, you have ‘brothers- in-arm’ tattooed around your biceps instead of ‘brothers- in-arms,’ but as always, it’s the thought that counts.”

Before I could groan at my… no, the tattoo parlor’s stupidity… Nik gripped that same tattooed arm. “I’m kidding. Fratres-in-armis is correct. Although you should have me vet all future tattoos in foreign or dead languages. Just in case.” His grip tightened as that deeper and darker became more so. “We’re brothers, Cal. We always will be. I don’t care if you grow fur like Catcher and hunt down and eat a deer every night. Six months ago I thought you died. This is nothing compared to that. I don’t care about your Auphe genes, and no matter what you do, no matter what,” he emphasized, “you will always be my brother.”

That was a big promise to keep, especially in the face of so many things. “Mayhem, violence… murder?” I asked quietly. “If I try to do those things? If I try to do them to you?”

“You already know the answer to that.”

I did. Real brothers, true brothers, stood by each other-even if it came to a Butch and Sundance moment. If there came a time that, like Catcher, I wasn’t myself and never would be again, if Nik had to be my combination Butch and Bolivian army, there was no one I would rather be the one to do it. I hadn’t wanted to talk to him earlier because I’d failed him. I often did and he more than often denied it. Sometimes I thought if I hadn’t been born, I still would’ve found a way to let him down. Sounds impossible, but I would’ve found a way to do it. Been incarnated as a cranky Chihuahua and mauled his ankle. Who knows? But if I had faith in anything besides my brother, I had faith in that. Niko believed in karma and I had bad karma stamped on my ass from the day I was born; yet I’d gotten nothing but the good kind in the form of my brother. It was hardly fair to him or his life, but incredibly good luck for me and my fucked-up one. I would be an ungrateful bastard to spit on it, although it would be the right thing to do, the noble thing, the Niko thing. And yet Niko himself would never let me. He never had before.

And he thought I had survival issues.

“Brothers.” I held out my hand and he gripped that instead of my arm. “But if you had any damn sense, you’d kick my butt off a ten-story building.”

“Brothers,” he reaffirmed. “And I know, but smothering you with your pillow would be less messy. You know I despise messy.” Behind the joke, he’d answered me in all seriousness. For the first time I thought he did actually know and wasn’t in denial about who or what I really was; yet that knowing still didn’t make a difference to him.

Hell, Niko was as screwed up as I was.

It was a revelation, but it didn’t change the fact that it was also a moving moment, doubly so when a foot slammed into my ribs, moving me over and against Nik. “This? This is why I give you the money that keeps starvation from our door? So you can sit in the dirt like a worthless beggar, the soulless monster and his clan traitor of a bar?” I’d picked up by now that bar was brother, and I also discovered an evil, vicious old woman could swing a mean old-lady shoe. Her foot was the size of a child’s, but it had the feel of a three-hundred-pound football player’s size thirteen… with a pointy heel.

An arm came over me and across my chest to hold me back. Niko knew before I did myself that I was going for Abelia-Roo and I couldn’t blame it on the Auphe. I could’ve been human to the last cell, with ancestors who came over on the damn Mayflower, squatted on Plymouth Rock having tea and biscuits, and never saw a cute little fairy under a cabbage leaf, much less screwed a monster, and I would’ve felt the same: homicidal. She was calling Nik a traitor, when he’d almost died because of her? That took balls and if she’d been a man, I would’ve relieved her of them.

“We wait and we wait, because of you. Suyolak causes this.” She waved an arm at what was left of the wreck down the interstate. “We hire you to work, and work means you find ways around Suyolak’s machinations.” Dusty black and purple skirts rustled as she aimed another kick.

Niko caught her foot with his spare hand, which was smart. If I had caught it, I would’ve turned it into a paperweight and she could’ve beat her next subcontractors with the stump that was left. “Attracting the attention of the authorities will only slow us down and give Suyolak more time to pull ahead of us. Also the fact that I won’t let my brother take your foot home as a souvenir doesn’t mean I won’t pick up your eighty pounds of venom-spewing ancient body and stuff you back in that eye-searing RV from Easter Egg Hell. Now go.” He released her foot. “And reexamine your knowledge of souls. Those without aren’t equipped to make judgments about the status of others.”

She hissed in a way that made any monster, including an Auphe, seem like an amateur. I was too hard on myself, because she gave me a run for my money and then some. Strangely enough, it made me feel a little better-all human and worse than ninety-nine percent of the monsters I’d run across. Skirts swirling, she turned, less than five feet tall, but that didn’t make a difference. When she moved back down the highway, she was a miniature tornado of pure spite.

“Plague of the World and all,” I said, getting to my feet, “is Suyolak honestly that bad?”

Niko was already up. “Next to her, maybe not, but we’re not comparing apples and oranges. We’re comparing black widows and black mambas. Both can make you wish you were dead. Now let’s rid the world of at least half of that combination.”

This time Rafferty drove. Any one of us would’ve had to fight him for the wheel. We were close, he said. As a wolf or Wolf on the scent, he would know. As a healer, he knew absolutely; he’d already told us. He wanted Suyolak and not for a fee or to save the world. He wanted him for Catcher and that was a thousand times more motivation than the rest of us had. I’d seen the same motivation and intensity in my brother a half hour ago that Rafferty was showing now in nailing the antihealer to save his cousin. Either kill Suyolak or drain him dry, whatever it took.

Best of luck to him.