Downfall Read Online Free PDF Page B

glittered with small flashes of ember red. They would, wouldn’t they? The Auphe had white hair and the Auphe had eyes as red as the Nile had once run in the First Plague of Egypt.
    The beginning of the end. There was no stopping it now.
    My life, as I knew it, was over.
    As one healer had told me: Auphe genes always win.
    He didn’t say it to be cruel, although Rafferty’s bedside manner was fairly crappy; he said it for two reasons. First, it slipped out, I thought, he was that surprised I looked completely human except for paler skin than normal. Second, it was true. The Auphe had been the apex predator of the entire world for millions of years. They didn’t have a recessive gene in them. I might have started out half human, but that hadn’t lasted too long. That had shown in ways that weren’t visible.
    When I was young, I hadn’t thought like other kids did. I didn’t understand them or people in general. Rules, expectations, right and wrong. None of that came naturally. Practicality, expediency—that was what I had been born knowing. For Niko’s sake I had memorized the school’s rules, society’s rules, and for him I followed them when it was convenient.
    It wasn’t always.
    But what did they say? Charged but never convicted? That was good enough for me.
    Then I became older. Then I was snatched away for two years to Tumulus Hell, and then I came back . . . then, then, then. I couldn’t remember those two years, but I’d changed. Age and subconscious trauma, a tantalizing good time for all. That’s when the occasional bouts of temper started. As a kid, it had never been personal. If you were in my way and I had to punt your balls to the sky to move you, I didn’t enjoy it . . . much. It just had to be done. After Tumulus and two years of age and raging hormones, I began to appreciate the little things like that. If I had to take down a monster for the good of the neighborhood . . . think of the children, right? Why not have fun while you were doing the “right” thing?
    On and on marched the Auphe genes overriding my human ones, and there was no stopping it. After the increase in violence then came the loss of control now andagain . . . and perhaps one or two complete losses of sanity. No big deal, you understand, because I could push those away, make myself forget them.
    It was a different game now. The Auphe had always played to fucking win, and their DNA did the same. The difference being as a six-year-old taking Dodgeball to a
Lord of the Flies
level because rules were inexplicable and winning was all that mattered was just a freaking strange-ass kid. Now I was a man, one who ran with the supernatural, the
paien
, and now everyone would see it. Not only smell it, sense it, observe it in the way I moved. No, the time had come when they would
see
it. With less than a glimpse, with a fraction of a glance, they would see.
    If they could see it, I would be it.
    Remember that pop quiz I’d warned about at the bar?
    “It’s what’s on the inside that counts?”
    Wrong.
    There was another half Auphe in the world besides me. Grimm. He’d asked me once what would I do when I finally looked as Auphe on the outside as he knew me to be on the inside. He would find that saying hilarious. I mean, he wasn’t wrong. Is it fucking hilarious or what? People actually
say
that. It’s what’s on the inside. . . . What would they say if they knew what actually was on my inside, when the hereditary remains of the first murderer to walk the earth finally destroyed the dwindling human genes of its descendant and showed its true face?
    What would they say when someday the red sparks grew like a lethal wildfire in my eyes until there was no gray left at all—only blood and flame?
    What would they say when the Auphe inside and outside finally matched? Because that was what was happening. I couldn’t change the way I looked and not change the way I
was
. When the outer monster appeared,it would