Disclaimer: The usual disclaimer applies. I do not own any of Rob Thurman's characters nor the rights to the wonderful world she has created. I obtain no profit from this work.

Author's Note: My friends have convinced me that I have been overestimating the innocence of teenagers in this current generation and suggested I lower my rating to T. Please be aware the following contains some adult language, adult situations (nothing gratuitous), and violence. If you are just now seeing this work, please note this is the fifth book in my Sidetrack series. I strongly suggest reading the previous stories to avoid confusion. They are still marked under the rating M, as I am too lazy to change them. Any comments, concerns, and criticism are more than welcome. Please contact me at rina232 .

LOOPHOLE

A Cal Leandros Novel

Book Five of the Sidetrack Series

Decisions shape a life, from the inane to the impossible. The people let into a life have just as profound an impact. Cal Leandros has made certain decisions, let certain people in, and laid happily in the bed that had been made, but what happens in a world when those decisions and people are taken away? What happens in a world where they never existed?

CHAPTER ONE

CAL

I was not New York's finest. My mother named me after the misfortunate monster of Shakespeare's Tempest for a reason and begrudgingly let me take on her last name for cover among the human flock. Caliban Leandros. I wore the name like a badge over the last few years. The preternatural paien feared me almost as much as the nightmares my fraternal parentage garnered. Half Auphe Cal, man of attitude, a short temper, and explosive means of interrogation. With my full-blood human brother, we had saved the world on more than one occasion, but the humans didn't know and the paien didn't seem to care. I was still a monster, I was still 'not right', and I was still nothing to be trifled with.

I was also a gun-for-hire. It was about the only reason other paien associated with me. They were willing to lay their eyes upon this unclean thing only when they needed me to kill something in their way. It led my brother, Niko, and me into some interesting places in New York. And some interesting locations, for secret meetings so other paien didn't see the weaknesses of the one that was hiring us. But it wasn't often those meets took place in a chain restaurant and certainly not one as 'human' as Panera Bread.

Of course, I wasn't meeting with a werewolf, or Kappa, or even a vampire today. The sun was shining too brightly for them to crawl out of their darkly shrouded rocks. I was meeting a friend. A word I didn't use to lightly, since there were so few I could call such.

When I slipped through the front door of the overly-warm coffee and pastry establishment, I didn't have to glance around to weed her out from the masses of hipsters and business suits on break. She glowed brighter than the ovens in the back and her scent drifted crispy through the doughy fragrance of bread and the musk of too many humans packed in on a hot early autumn day.

Georgina King sat primly at one of the press-board tables. She held a paper cup of coffee between her amber-hued hands and met my eyes from across the room. She hadn't been watching the door for my arrival. She didn't have to. She knew the exact moment I would walk in and her eyes fixed on me a second before I opened the door. It was her gift. She was a seer, psychic if you will. Human, but far more than that in essence.

I weaved my way through a few tables, careful to keep the Glock tucked under my arm out of view for the sake of the lambs jabbering like annoying songbirds all around me. I had bigger weapons, more potent ones, but on the human side of town I didn't need them. Hell, I didn't need any man-made weapons. Niko taught me how to kill with my hands as aptly as he taught with blade or gun. He had to keep his little brother alive while the monsters chased after us and he did a damned fine job of it over my twenty six years of life.

It just became twenty six a few months ago. Another year keeping me above ground; sometimes I thought it would be better to celebrate his accomplishment of that that, instead of my birthday.

"Hey," I murmured as I eased into the hard chair across from her. George smelled like cinnamon today. The sweet honey perfume much more diluted with the reason for our meeting dampening her usual easy whimsy. Part of that was my fault.

When I first met her, not long after Nik and I settled down in New York to hide among the hustle and bustle, she was a beacon of light. The one good thing about this dirty city. She was just a teenager and her doe-brown eyes, despite seeing all the wrongs in the world through her gift, were not as jaded as they were when they forced a smile across the table today. She still wore a sundress of a cheerful yellow hue to match the weather and maybe what she wished she felt inside, but it no longer reached her lips.

All the death and horror she saw in those visions when she touched another's hand, and it was my losses that brought her down. It was a sweet sentiment and a guilty one.

"How are you?" she asked. It wasn't small talk. It wasn't a precursor, like asking how my job was going or talking about the weather. Georgina actually wanted to know. She wanted to know how I was coping with the fact that my lover was stolen from me five months ago and I had no means of getting her back with my usual tactics.

Humans weren't all oblivious lambs for paien slaughter. There was a group of them, a growing organization of power-hungry and desperate fools that knew about the preternatural and were determined to make those unlike them their bitch. Of course, I was only guessing that the Vigil started up in the US, maybe it was Russia…or Germany. That would be historically ironic, now wouldn't it?

Regardless, the Vigil had started out as the humans' attempt to protect themselves from monsters and beings several levels stronger, smarter, and older than them. As concepts went it wasn't irrational. And, from what I was told – not certain I believed it– many of the Vigil chapters didn't believe in taking that protection any further than monitoring the paien that were out of line and either disposing of them or quarantining them from the rest of the world. The Manhattan Chapter took it further. A continent's miles further.

They saw me, half-Auphe, and my lover, also half-Auphe but with a peri twist, and saw the potential to obtain a weapon or maybe an army of indentured soldiers that no one could touch and everything feared. They made Cassie…my lover, bear a child for that purpose. And another when I rightfully stole away the first.

She was half a race known as the greatest evil of the world and they managed to confine her in a cage, pregnant, and me helpless to get her out. Only she wasn't pregnant anymore. And that made it worse. Now the Vigil could not only threaten her life at any attempt I made to get to her –killing every one of them had been my original plan– but they could threaten the life of my youngest son. They could make another, no big deal. I knew they had my half-Auphe sperm locked up in a cooler somewhere and they were the bastards that made it possible for my barren lover to have kids in the first place. Killing a two-month-old wouldn't be a source of any guilt or sacrifice for them.

And they called me a monster.

I didn't answer George. My fury and depression had been as outwardly visible as my pale skin and shaggy dark hair for months. The scowl rarely subsided. Only Niko and my eldest, Dante, could erase it for small periods.

George twisted the coffee between her palms. There was no steam coming off of it anymore. She'd been sitting here for a while. I hadn't been more than five minutes late, which meant she had come here early to sort out a way to speak with me. The only reason for that was bad news.

"What now?"

She wet her lips, brushed a hand over her freckled cheek to free a red lock of hair from her lashes. "There is bad news, but…I'd like to give you something before we get into that."

I frowned. I preferred to hear what the Vigil decided to do that would be considered bad, before she tried to lull my temper, but I needed to let her lay out her practiced speech. This was hard on her too. Her fiancé was still in the Manhattan Chapter, for me and for Cassie. He was originally from Boston, a chapter that I'd been told was hardly as tyrannical-mad-scientist as this one. George and Josh gave up their home to help us. Josh was risking his life to siphon information out to me. Monitoring and manipulating other members to keep Cassie and my son safe. Constantly searching for a means to get half of my family out of the Vigil's grasp, all the while he was just as apart from George as I was from Cassie.

I waited. George pressed her hands to either side of her coffee. After a moment, she reached one palm up for me to take. I did. George was my first love and the first person to kiss me despite the beast inside. She changed my life when I was still a teen and she hadn't stopped changing it years later. Lastly, I trusted her and I trusted her not to read any of the dark and awful thoughts running through my head or in my future path with the touch of her hand to mine.

"They found another one of the sleepers. Transferred her to the Brooklyn Chapter. For review."

I sighed. "How many does Josh have left?"

"Only three. He can't recruit anymore. They'll make him too." Josh's superiors back in Boston already knew he was infiltrating the Manhattan Chapter to get it shut down for its unreported and unsanctioned experiments on paien. Boston didn't, however, know he was planning a jailbreak for my girlfriend. We all knew Boston's protection would only stretch so far. Manhattan probably already suspected him. They never let him see Cassie from the day they kidnapped her off the street. Sure they knew, but they kept him on for whatever reason.

"What does this mean?"

"They gave Charlotte a message, assuming she was in contact with you." George squeezed my hand, preparing to recite. "'Any further interruption with Castiella's care and they will begin the third phase of Nephilim without recourse'. Do you know what that means?"

I was surprised George didn't. "They'll impregnate her again."

"It's too soon," she gasped, pulling her hand back in reaction. "It's barely been two months since Connor was born. Even if she heals quickly, that is still too much for a woman's body to take."

"It's a threat. It isn't meant to be good for her, just productive for them," I growled and raked my hand over my face.

"And incorporating Project Charlemagne?"

I froze, my hand mid-way to resting back on the table. It was a strange sensation when blood flowed like fire while your skin felt as if a bag of ice was dumped over your head. "They said that?"

"They told Charlotte."

It took me more than a moment to swallow that. Impregnating Cassie again…I always knew that was possibility while she was held and caged and drugged by them, the fact that they would rush it was the threat. Even more than that now. Even worse than that. "Project Charlemagne is Grimm. They mean to use him to impregnate her. That is the threat."

I doubted they would use frozen semen in that instance either. Not when they finally admitted to having my red-eyed arch nemesis voluntarily lounging about in their facilities down the hall. Just waiting for this opportunity, just waiting for the Vigil to let him loose in Cassie's cage. He wanted her as his queen. Wanted her to birth dozens more half-Auphe so he could take over the world, kill the current Auphe, and seat himself on a king's throne. "God damnit."

George reached over, took both my hands that were covering my face, and kissed my knuckles as she leaned over the table. "Josh won't let them. None of the sleepers will let that happen."

"This is the good news?" I asked.

"There is no good news," she whispered. "That was the bad. It seemed like you wanted that first."

"I need to get her out of there. Her and Connor."

"I know, we will." George let go of my fingers after giving them another comforting squeeze. She fished through the purse set beside her in a vacant chair and pulled out her cell phone. "This is what I wanted to give you."

She didn't hand over the phone, but instead thumbed away at the touch screen. My own cell buzzed in my jacket pocket after a second. I pulled it out with my hand holding the lapel shut. Humans were a little gun shy nowadays due to their own breed trying to kill each other in crazy ways, so I really needed to keep the Glock out of sight if I didn't want to add outrunning the cops on my list of things to do today.

George had sent me a video. Niko and I had upgraded our cell phones when it became too difficult to keep up with the information Salamandier –another informant desperately trying to find a way to stop the Vigil and save my family—was passing along. The former amphibian, alchemic mishap and current, slick-skinned, hacker was just too high-tech for our old burn phones. We kept them for job usage, but we'd both given in to the smart phone era for our main line of communication.

Georgina was out of her chair and circling around the table to my side. I watched her, curious and a little frightened to press the play button over a stilled image of half her fiancé's face.

"I suppose this is a bit of good news," she hummed. A little of her innate warm glow reached out to touch my constant gloom as she leaned over my shoulder. Her curls brushed against my crown and her scent of cinnamon and sunlight made me close my eyes. Georgina tapped her finger to the icon for me; I could sense the motion even if I didn't look.

My phone's volume was always on low, but even in the moderate din of idle chat around me, even with the sounds of the oven and the rumble of the air conditioner, nothing could stop the gleeful little giggle from reaching my ears. I could hear Josh's voice; not the usual gruff tone filled with distain and egotism –a tone we used to toss back and forth like teenagers in a schoolyard. It was a light tone touched with a musical cadence and a smile that no one had to see to hear. And at every playful prompt of his voice, that nasally little adorable trill followed.

"Cal, open your eyes," George pleaded. Her hand was on my shoulder now; she'd eased down into the seat next to me.

With a deep breath and a hard swallow I did as I was told.

It was my son…my little boy in Josh's arms. There was another filming –a woman by her voice. Josh looked haggard and tried, but his eyes still lit up with a smile that slowly mended its way across my own face. He was holding my son. He was there, protecting my boy. And holding up his plump little arm to wave to me.

"He's so chubby," I snickered.

"He's healthy," Georgina corrected and tapped my shoulder in form of a berating smack. He was wrapped up in a soft blue blanket, but his random arm movements kept knocking it off his shoulders. He seemed proud of his baby pudge. The video was only thirty seconds and stopped with his little round face framed on my screen. It was too early to determine who he looked like without comparing baby photos which weren't invented in Castiella's birth year.

I pressed the button to replay it. George rested her chin to my shoulder. "They moved him. Cassie attacked a scientist during a visit with Connor. None of the sleepers were there, but I'm sure it was deserved. They moved Connor as punishment, but they let Josh visit him. He goes as often as he can, feeds him formula, plays with him."

"His hair is white," I muttered softly. It was my first time seeing him outside of Cassie's body. George had smuggled other information to me. His height and weight, when he was born –there were complications, Cassie had bled, but the doctors there had stabilized her easily. The Vigil had some healers on their team too.

"Some children are born with light hair. It will darken." George drifted a hand over my scalp, smoothing the ponytail my hair was in. We might have looked like a couple to others, but there were no sexual undertones to her actions. She knew I was hurting, she knew this was killing me, she knew my fears. "His eyes are gray, Cal. Just like yours and Niko's and Dante's. He's your legacy, Cal. He's yours."

"Will I ever get them back?" I let the video stop again. Staring at that puffy faced, toothless smile. She knew what I was asking. I'd asked before. For her to look. For her to glean my future and see if I could scrape my family back together.

"You always do, Cal," she whispered. "You always will."

It was an assurance, not a fact. She wouldn't look and I couldn't force her too, no matter how desperate I became. It was an assurance, but one spoken with such confidence I could almost believe it, just as I believed she was right when she said he was mine. He could have been Grimm's. The bastard had taken Cassie at her weakest moment the same time she was up to her eyeballs in fertility drugs as the Vigil tried to get her pregnant with my sperm. Connor could have been his, might have been mine. I would never truly know unless they did a paternity test.

George's candor made me believe though. Connor was mine, Josh would keep him safe, and I would get him and my love back. Soon.

I spent most of my subway ride home watching the video on mute. Feeling the tension coil inside me, then melt away at that smile. I didn't cry often. My shitty life had hardened me up so that most of the downfalls, no matter how high or hard I dropped, were looked upon as inevitable or deserved. But when his little cheeks rounded over the bottoms of his gray eyes as he stared out from the screen…my lashes were a bit more than wet.

I cast my hand over my face and stuffed the phone in my pocket for the hike to the penthouse and up the twenty plus floors. Usually, if Nik wasn't with me, I took the elevator. He didn't appreciate the limitations a metal box gave him and all the bad things that could happen in one with no alternative exit available, but I didn't like walking up infinite flights of stairs a bit more. Today, I needed it. The time and exertion…it didn't help.

Slipping into the sprawling apartment, the weight had only pulled harder at my limbs. It was enough that I even had a little trouble pulling out my phone and shoving it in Niko's grip. He had sprung out of his chair at the kitchen table, abandoning his computer for the look on my face. I said nothing, ignored Promise and Dante as well, and hid in my room.

I could hear that laugh even through the closed door. They'd turned the volume back on, but I couldn't blame them. That sound was probably the most adorable thing I would ever hear in my life; mewling internet kittens and puppies baying 'I love you' couldn't compare to the sound of your child giggling. I wondered if Niko ever felt that way. A four year old forced to conduct the responsibilities of a child twice his age, on his toes staring into a cardboard box peering down at his little brother –because in my imagination Sophia wouldn't shell out for a crib, but maybe I got the bottom drawer of the dresser. I was probably a wriggling mass of wrinkles and red-faced. I probably whined and bawled all night and he probably held me in his just-out-of-the-toddler-stage arms, protecting from day one.

I hadn't gotten to hold Dante when he was born. I hadn't gotten to hold Connor…

My bedroom door whispered open without a knock, then shut softly. Almost as softly as the footsteps that approached my bed. I was sitting on the edge, back curved in surrender to gravity, arms braced to my knees. I knew one of them would interrupt my wallowing and I figured it would be my brother.

"Cal."

"I'm never going to get to see my kids grow up, am I? Between the Auphe and the Vigil…"

"Cal," Nik said with more command. He sat down beside me on the mattress. I rocked listlessly with the shift of weight. His hand reached over and took mine. His index finger tapped at the center of the back of my hand. "He's beautiful."

I huffed out a pained laugh, pulled my hands away, and pressed the heels of my palms into my eye sockets. It burned. My eyes, my nose, the back of my throat. All of it was tight and burning. Niko's hand traced over my back, his fingers tugging at my hair. Instead of the three inch hank sticking out beyond the hair tie, he tugged at the shorter re-growth at my nape. It had been shaved not long ago to dig out a Vigil chip that would have busted my brain open like a sledgehammer to a watermelon.

"I promise you, Cal. He will be in your arms before he speaks his first word."

I met his gaze –just like George has said, same as mine. Only his eyes were narrower and the rest of his features were more Rom than mine. He had a long Roman nose that earned him the nickname of Cyrano, that and his intelligence. His skin was an olive tan, scarred much less than mine. His jaw sharper and his forehead larger, but he still –somehow– looked enough like my brother that no one questioned it. Either that or people were just used to multiple baby daddies.

I knew those features better than I knew my own, mostly because I had a justified fear of mirrors. I knew the subtle twitches that indicated a smile, the solemn creases around his eyelids that showed grief and guilt, and the minute lift of a dark blond eyebrow that told me I was about to be schooled in something I couldn't care less for. Right then, there were more creases around those gray eyes than I'd seen in a long while. Something was wrong.

"What is it?" Like this day couldn't get worse.

"Just considering something," he told me. And he would explain further once that consideration became an idea or a plan. He didn't bother me with the beginning stages of anything, I would only exacerbate his thought process. "Salamadier is on the line."

By 'line' I assumed he meant his computer, considering he had been sitting in front of it when I trudged in. Niko also spoke those words with the same expression as before, which meant he wasn't announcing he had to get back to Skype-ing. Something was still wrong.

Niko stood from my bed, back a little more ridged than usual. "He stumbled upon a project in the Vigil's files. One they are updating regularly." Which meant it was an active project.

"Nephilim?"

He tilted his head; the action had a touch a rage to it. "Nephilim is an ongoing project, but stage three isn't scheduled for another six months."

"They're threatening to bump that up if we intercede with more sleepers. They're also threatening to change the paternal donor."

Nik hummed. That was also laced with fury and a little vibrato of discomfort, but Nephilim obviously wasn't the project he was talking about.

"What's this new project about then?"

Big brother's mouth became a thin white line. "It's called Roman Ring. And from what Salamadier's saying…it's a giant, gate-driven, time machine."