A/N: Sorry about the erratic updating habits I've been keeping, but I don't want to commit to a set schedule because I'm afraid that in order to meet the deadlines I'd be pumping out less than quality fan fiction (that is to assume that I am currently pumping out quality fan fiction). I'm shooting for every other day, but one day I might update three chapters and then I might go several days. Bear with me. Or bite me. Your choice.

Also, please excuse the version of Tumulus that does not gel with what Rob wrote in Deathwish. I am basing it off the vision that Cal as Darkling had when he opened the gate to the past in book one. Or, if you want, this can be a more irrigated region than the desert section made reference to. It is still freezing, and the sky is still red, after all.

TEN

The Other End Of The Gate

Once when I was seven, I remember coming back to the trailer after running to the communal john, and panicking because Niko had disappeared. He had been there seconds before, making dinner in the sorry excuse for a kitchenette, when I had left. Then I had got back and the stove was off and the light was off and he was gone. Just . . . gone.

I'd panicked, possibilities for his disappearance flashing through my juvenile and impressionable brain. I'd thought maybe Sophia had told him to go away and never come back. I'd thought maybe he had decided to leave because he was sick of me. I'd thought maybe my daddy and his friends had come to take him away. I think I might have cried. Shit. Okay, yeah, I'd cried like a teething two-year-old.

I felt that way now, on my hands and knees on the skid-marked, filthy concrete floor of the dim parking garage, staring at the place the gate had been only seconds before. The same shaking, helpless, shit-your-pants, panicking fear. Only this time Niko wasn't going to come back holding the eggs he had run out to borrow from a neighbor, he wasn't going to hug me and tell me that it was alright and listen in solemn horror as I told him what I had thought had happened. He'd told me he'd never leave me, and he'd never let anyone take him from me.

Well, it had been a lie, apparently.

It felt like he was dead. He'd come damn close to it before – at the hands of Hob during the kidnapping fiasco – but even then I could sense him, in this world, the light at the end of the dark tunnel, a solid presence that wasn't going to go away. Hell, if he was in some far flung jungle island in the South Seas I'd feel him. I couldn't feel him now, which scared the shit out of me. I closed my eyes and reached out and buried my nails in the palms of my hands, but I couldn't sense his presence. He was gone, just . . . gone. That Auphe bastard had taken him, partly for revenge and partly to get me to follow. What had he said? That I'd follow wherever he took Nik? Well, for once I was going to play the sucker for the bad guy and do exactly what it was he wanted. Because, hell, I was following. No matter what lay on the other end of the gate.

"Caliban," Promise called, stepping out from the stairwell. "Caliban, what happened? Where's Niko?"

I didn't answer. There wasn't time to answer.

I had never created a gate to Tumulus before. Well, that's not exactly true. I had once, but that had been Darkling working with my Auphe half, and I myself had had little to say or do about it. It was going to be rough – travelling from the Brooklyn bridge to my living room was one thing. Travelling to another place and time was a whole other kind of shit. But I'd be damned if I wasn't going to try.

I let my Auphe half wander down the neural pathways or wherever that innate knowledge of the inhuman and preternatural was stored. My inner monster, freed to wander where it would, knew exactly where to go. I had a sudden whiff of thin, sulfuric air, the tang of violently green foliage, and heard the bellows of long-dead beasts lost in the mists of time. Home.

Usually I would have shunned the thought, shoved it back to wherever it came from, locked it in there, and thrown away the key. But now I embraced it, terrible as it was, because it would lead me to Niko. And – in a way – that did mean "home".

"Caliban, what are you doing? Answer me!" Promise insisted, coming slowly through the parking garage. "Niko said something was wrong . . ."

"Get away," I shouted, dragging the gate out from inside of me. It opened in front of me, where the other gate had been, in a roar of temporal winds. Through its agonizingly slowly opening maw, I could see a flash of that same violent green, a red sky trapped forever in sunset, felt the cold. How anything green could grow in that cold I had no idea. But this was Tumulus we were talking about, not a place actually governed by the laws of biology or physics or whatever determined when and how plants grew.

I glanced at Promise, who had recoiled from me and my gate, her violet eyes large with incomprehension. "Cal, where are you going?" she shouted, shaking off her fear and running toward me, one lily-white hand outstretched to grab me back.

No time for hesitation. If I didn't go through now and pull it closed after me, Promise would be joining me in hell. And I didn't have to worry about someone else right now. Hell, I didn't even have enough worry left in me to care about my own ass. This was all about Niko. Three was a crowd, and in Tumulus crowds got eaten quicker than twosomes.

I dove headfirst into the breach in time and space, like it was the deep end of a damn swimming pool. Right before the sensation of falling up, down, and sideways all at once rattled my brain into semiconscious panic, I sealed the gate behind me. I had a sudden vision of Promise alone in the dimly lit parking garage, her hand still reaching, frozen in shock. But it was too late for her to do anything. The Leandros brothers had left the building.

I fell for a long time. It wasn't like traveling from one place to another as I had done before, one second one place and the next, somewhere twenty miles down the road. I was literally falling, end over end, legs kicking, eyes tearing up, suffocated by the icy wind that seemed to suck all the oxygen from my lungs and replace it with a vacuum.

As I fell, I remembered.

My neck and my arm were burning and bloody again where dear old dad had grabbed me to pull me through the window of the trailer. I heard the words of glass and metal again, hot in my ear: "Mine. My spawn, mine." The burning trailer, Sophia blazing like a roman candle in the doorway, the realization that Niko was doing the same within.

And then my first vision of Tumulus, the Auphe surrounding me, herding me toward the caverns where I would spend the next two years, sandwiched between rock, fed my own vomit, bled to keep me weak, spending days after an escape attempt hanging upside-down over an abyss, sealed in a spiders' cocoon. Promised freedom and comfort if only I told them I would do it – only if I told them I would help them destroy the world. But, even at fourteen, I had known what that would mean. If they destroyed the human race and took over the world for their own, then what freedom and comfort could I expect? Besides, I hadn't spent the first fourteen years of my life with Niko's pride and honor drilled into my head without some of it rubbing off. In reality, it was his stubborn goodness in the face of Gypsy guile that had saved the universe. Which was one of the reasons I needed to get him back. He'd saved the universe too many damn times to get this kind of shitty payback.

My trip down memory lane came to an abrupt halt when I smashed face-first into the barbed grass. It wasn't nearly as hard as it should have been, considering the time it had taken me to drop from the high heavens. But it was hard enough to black me out for a second as I attempted to get the breath back into my lungs. I could feel liquid warmth on my face and a heavy, sluggish pounding in my head. Great. I probably broke something, I thought grimly, setting my teeth against the pain and lifting a hand to wipe the blood from my upper lip.

Gasping, I lifted my head, feeling the skin of my cheek catching on a hundred tiny devilish barbs, and looked up. I nearly lost what little breath I had managed to choke back into my system at the sight of the surrounding landscape. It put Steven Spielberg to shame, that was for sure, or any other movie director that ever tried his hand at the lush, warped prehistoric look. Jurassic Park had nothing on this. The ground sloped downwards, the color so violent green that it hurt to look at; it exuded a hazy green aura like motes of an airborne fungus. The sky followed the slope, the same ugly, glowing red color as Auphe eyes. The sight of it, scudded with black streamers of cloud that looked like smoke from a million funeral pyres, made me want to cower, cover my head with my hands, and bury my face in the serrated grass. It was too familiar. I though I would never have to deal with this sight again. That I could bury it in the dark corner of my head and forget about it and never be faced with it again.

No such luck.

Cowering was out of the question, as well, because I was on a mission. Getting shakily to my feet, I turned around in all directions, hoping against hope that I had opened a gate right behind Niko and that hellspawn, N'zen. Once again, no such damn frigging luck. I could have opened up a gate on the other side of Tumulus, for all I knew, or maybe . . . I shuddered as the terrible thought passed through my bemused brain . . . maybe it had already been years for Niko. I was by no means proficient at traveling yet, especially to parallel universes. I could have traveled too far into the future. Or maybe the past. Maybe Niko hadn't even been taken yet . . .

Shit, it was too much to think about. I couldn't wrap my head around it, I didn't want to. And in the end, it didn't really matter. I wasn't exactly planning on giving up and going home. No matter if I gated to the right time and place or not, I was scouring this godforsaken spit of hell until I found my brother or died. Maybe slaughtering N'zen in the most horrible way imaginable as well. Yeah, I'd throw that in the agenda for now, just to brighten my day.

Now that I was in an upright position, I could see something in the distance. A bank of hills, a mottled patchwork of blinding green and barren brown, tinted with hazy red. Trees, too, sprinkled before them. Well. My first stop.

I shivered as a bone-chilling wind rushed across the huge expanse of grassland and slammed into me. Now all I needed was a motorcycle. I'd even make do with the shitmobile. But I had not had the foresight to grab one of the cars and drive it through the gate I had opened – assuming that it would have stayed in one piece upon landing.

I wasn't gating, for two reasons. One, I was wiped from traveling to Tumulus. You didn't gate from one world to another like you jogged around the block. You didn't even do it like you ran flat out for ten miles. This exhaustion was more than physical, it was mental. Plus, I had a killer headache and my nose had finally stopped bleeding and I wasn't about to tempt fate. Two, the only reason I could gate was because I was half-Auphe. I had no idea if my traveling would send vibes jittering throughout the atmosphere, cluing all my little family members as to my arrival in their homeland. Our homeland. Because I was betting their reaction wasn't going to be throwing me a welcome home party.

So, for lack of a better method of transportation, I began to walk.