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Here's the thing. Telling you about me? That's...um...complicated.

Okay. First things first. My name is Caliban Leandros. Most people call me Cal these days. It doesn't matter. I'll answer to either one.

My mother, a Roma woman named Sophia Leandros, gave me that name. She decided early on that I was never gonna forget that I was a half-human monster she'd been paid in gold to have. Thanks, Mom. I needed that.

And...yeah. Half human. I look human on the outside--dark hair and gray eyes that I got from Sophia and pale skin that I inherited from the thing that sired me. Picture something tall and thin with black talons, white and nearly transparent skin, blood-red eyes, shredding jaws and hundreds of needle-fine metal teeth. Oh, and pointed ears. Yeah, pointed ears. As I found out when I grew up, the monsters that my older brother and I grew up calling Grendels--God knows where Niko came up with that name; I don't think that he read Beowulf as a kid, but I can't be sure--are actually called Auphe. Basically, they're monstrous terrorists from another dimension who have a taste for torture, murder and insanity and a raging hunger to exterminate the entire human race. As near as Niko and I can figure, they're the origin of the stories about elves. Where anyone got the idea that elves were harmless little creatures with butterfly wings or were wise, gentle, golden-haired tree-dwellers I have no idea.

Anyway. Sophia figured that once she'd had me, her parenting duties were done. She immediately--and I do mean IMMEDIATELY, as in "right after giving birth"--handed me off to my four-year-old brother, telling him that hey, he'd been wanting a pet, so here. I don't know how Nik managed, not that I'm ever going to tell him that. It would be awful for his ego if he knew that his kid brother was impressed with him. (Besides, it's against the Cosmic Code of Younger Siblings to compliment older ones. We're obligated to tease, whine, dig our heels in and provide mocking nicknames. Flattery is not really part of the job description.)

Somehow, we grew up. Niko made sure that I went to school--whichever school we were going to, as Sophia moved around a lot--did my homework, ate whatever was put in front of me (seriously, I remember being fed fishsticks and yogurt more than once--and loving it) and generally felt like a kid and not a monster. I owe him for that. Even if he doesn't believe that I owe him a thing, I do.

It ended when I was fourteen. The Auphe came calling. They'd decided it was time to collect their little genetic experiment.

I remember screaming. I remember seeing the trailer we were living in burst into flames. I remember seeing Sophia catch fire...and I remember Nik not coming out at all.

The next two years are a blank. I know that the Auphe took me to their home dimension, but I don't remember what happened. It's probably better for my sanity.

I escaped, popping back to the trailer park in a state of traumatic stress that had nothing "post" about it. Niko was waiting. For him, those two years had been two days. He'd decided to give me a few days--and, if I didn't show up again, he'd fight his way to wherever the Auphe were holding me. Tumulus, he calls it. Apparently it's an old word for Hell.

He would have done it. The man is a master of martial arts and edged weaponry. He's also a freaking genius. You do NOT want Niko pissed at you. Ever. In ancient times, he would have been a warlord...the kind that united kingdoms and got worshiped as a god. (A warlord with a code of honor that makes the Knights of the Round Table look corrupt, but still.)

What? That's not flattery. I just know my brother.

Niko got me patched up physically and psychologically--again, don't ask me how; there's a reason why he's the brains of our operation--and we wandered around the country for a bit before ending up in Manhattan. We figured it was a good place to get lost...and we knew that was necessary, because the Grendels kept appearing.

We didn't know then that they could create gates that led directly to wherever we were. That they were, in effect, playing with us. Or that I could do it, too. But we found out.

We became supernatural bodyguards. And detectives. And vigilantes. And along the way, we picked up some friends. Like a used-car salesman of a trickster species who has the most terrifyingly imaginative sex life possible. I know this because--unfortunately--Robin won't shut up about it. I used to sleep with a very sexy werewolf who was a member of the Kin...you know, the werewolf Mafia. Niko acquired a vampire girlfriend. (No, Promise is NOT undead; vampires are mutated humans. They live longer and age slower than normal humans, but they also have chronic iron deficiency. Hollywood gets everything wrong.)

I had to deal with a bout of amnesia a couple of weeks back that ended rather messily, but for the past week, things have been more or less normal. Well, for me, anyway. Today, however, I walked into The Ninth Circle, which is the peri bar where I work between bodyguard jobs...and ended up in another bar altogether.

A bar that I don't seem able to leave.

...Niko is gonna KILL me.

***

Disclaimer: Caliban "Cal" Leandros, the characters and settings he mentions and the backstory that he provides are the creation of Rob Thurman and are the property of Rob Thurman, Roc Books, New American Library and Penguin Group. Cal appears here solely for the purpose of roleplaying for fun in milliways_bar, from which no profit whatsoever is being made.

Cal has two abilities that he inherited from his Auphe sire. First, he can create portals to anywhere that he can picture, a skill which can be a dangerous weapon if he creates a portal around an enemy and which will be severely curtailed in the bar...not the least because when Cal uses his gating ability, his Auphe side becomes dominant, both physically and psychologically. He also has, for lack of a better phrase, a sense of super-smelling. He can smell emotions, or at least the chemical changes wrought by emotions, far better than a human. He generally uses this in interrogations and ignores it the rest of the time. This will not be of much use in the bar, as there are so many people in the bar with alien biologies that he won't know if what smells like emotion X in his world IS emotion X for that species. Those who have a similar sense of smell may notice that Cal himself smells strange--a weird mixture of prey ("sheep" to most supernatural creatures in his world) and Auphe (which are so murderous and so insane that they give immortals and apex predators nightmares).

He's also terrified of breeding the next generation of psychotic Auphe--not too surprising, since the Auphe bred him at least partially for stud purposes, evidently hoping that a hybrid would be as fertile and as fast at breeding as humans. As a result, he refuses to date or have sex with anyone that he could impregnate.

Cal is coming into the bar shortly after the conclusion of Book 6 in the Cal Leandros Mysteries, Blackout. Around four years have passed from the first book to that one. Cal would say that he's twenty-two, though his birth certificate says he's about twenty; he counts the two years he served in Tumulus.

The TV Tropes page about Cal's canon is here.