Downfall Read Free Page B

other, loathed each other, or hated each other with a homicidal fury. It depended on the pucks and their particular past. Added to that, Goodfellow, he was old. He said he’d been around before dinosaurs, when the stars were the size of your fist, and the daytime sky was purple with the birthing gas of a new world. Or so he said. He could’ve been lying. To apuck, a lie was a work of art. Truth, except on rare occasions, was an insulting lack of effort on your part.
    I hadn’t been sure about the dinosaur issue, but I’d finally accepted it was true enough. My kind, half of what lived in my genes, had also apparently hunted dinos for sport. Not for food, for fucking
fun
. When it came to telling tales, there was one thing and only one that Robin didn’t lie about: the Auphe. When Nik and I were kids and hadn’t known what the monsters were that followed us from town to town, we’d called them Grendels thanks to Niko’s love of Beowulf. When we were a little older, we’d been clued in to what the true name of the bogeyman that did more than follow us; that had hid under our bed, in our closet, and outside every window of every house we’d lived in.
    Auphe.
    What humans had once hilariously, maybe hysterically painted into mythology as elves. See an Auphe face-to-face and survive it . . . that would make you hysterical, delusional, and more than a little mad. Storybook elves were as to Auphe as goldfish were to great white sharks—sharks with a thousand metal teeth in a hypodermic needle grin. They weren’t pretty, they didn’t ride horses, they didn’t wear golden armor. They didn’t wear clothes at all. The only use for a horse they would have would be to eat it. They had roamed the world, an albino, scarlet-eyed, clawed naked
animal
that Mother Nature had for some reason gifted with a brain. A twisted, psychopathic brain, but with the talent of cunning and speech and plans for genocide all the same.
    Too bad that hadn’t worked out for them. On the other hand, lift a cold one that it had turned out for me. Genocide didn’t look too good on most résumés, but in this case, I didn’t have one goddamn qualm. No one cried a single tear over their extinction.
    I most definitely hadn’t. They had been what had birthed the half of me, what had stamped my monster card and let me mix with the
paien
while bringing my human half along as my plus one.
Paien
thought humans were boring and often only good for eating, but they absolutely hated the Auphe. It could be because the Auphe had thought the same thing about
paien
—they were a meal, nothing more and nothing less. No better than a human. No more challenge than week-old roadkill. Although the Auphe, like cats and three-year-olds, did like to play with their food. That explained that while
paien
might loathe that half of me, they didn’t often fuck with it either.
    Thanks to Robin’s history lesson to my brother and me on everything that we didn’t know about the Auphe, which was that selfsame everything, I’d learned several years ago that if I stood up to a monster, most would slink away before I needed to pull a weapon. Goodfellow might lie for fun and profit, but I believed him about my murderous ancestors. If he said he’d once seen an Auphe rip off the head of a velociraptor, turning it into a prehistoric Pez dispenser, then he had.
    It meant something that there was someone to go to who knew the truth about the beginnings of my family tree—the first killers to walk this rock. It meant something that a born con man had taken two overgrown wildly suspicious delinquents, picked up on their clueless nature, their panicked need to escape the monsters that followed them, and filled them in on what was really watching them with scarlet eyes. What was watching
me
.
    Who I was.
    What
I was.
    Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is being a defenseless pigeon right as the hawk hits you in a splatter of blood and feather. With the truth, if it was possible to