Cal Leandros

Cal Leandros is half-human, half evil fairy. His mother got paid by the Auphe to produce a child, and that's all she did. He was raised by his Aloof Big Brother Niko (who was four years old when he was put in charge of a newborn), and Niko has spent his entire life protecting his brother and becoming a Badass. They've also been on the run. At age fourteen, the Auphe caught Cal. He came back two days later, two years older, with no memory of the Eldritch Abomination that he'd seen.

Two years later, the guys have settled in New York City and made a few friends. But the Auphe aren't going to let Cal go...

The author, Rob Thurman, is an example of Moustache De Plume. She has also written the novels Trick of the Light, Grimrose Path, Chimera, and Basilisk. The first two are set in the same universe as the Cal Leandros stories.

Books in the series:

As listed at The Other Wiki:

Nightlife (2006)
Moonshine (2007)
Madhouse (2008)
Deathwish (2009)
Roadkill (2010)
Blackout (2011)
Doubletake (2012)
Slashback (2013)
DownFall (2014)
Nevermore (2015)
Everwar (Uncertain - Publisher cancelled)

The following tropes are common to many or all entries in the Cal Leandros franchise.
For tropes specific to individual installments, visit their respective work pages.

Abandoned Hospital: shown in Madhouse.
Abusive Parents: Sophia.
Exclusively Evil: the Auphe
Always Save The Brother. Or in Rafferty's case, cousin.
- Cal and Niko swear by this trope. The world had better hope it doesn't come to a choice between it and one of the Leandros brothers.
A Man Is Not a Virgin: Cal's losing of his virginity (more specifically, who he will allow himself to boink) is a plot point.
Antagonistic Offspring: Promise's Manipulative Bitch daughter, Cherish.
Anti-Hero: Cal moves from Type III to Type IV over the course of the books and is fighting not to become a Type V, but temporarily goes back to Type III when his Auphe side is suppressed by Nepenthe spider venom. Delilah is a Type V.
Anything That Moves: Robin. Oh, Robin.
Badass Family: The Leandros boys have been forced to become this.
Badass Normal and Badass Longcoat: Niko.
Bad Guy Bar
Bad Powers, Good People: Cal finds some good uses for his gate-opening ability, but...
Batman Gambit: Delilah's solution to her pack demanding the death of Cal. Her Alpha is dumb enough to believe that a girl can't handle killing a guy. Then she sics Cal on them, knowing that Cal is more badass than her pack.
Berserk Button: Cal and Niko are each other's. Mess with one brother, and the other will come after you. Also, don't hit on Niko in front of Promise.
Black Speech: The Auphe language. Cal learned it during his two-year stay in the Tumulus but the ability to speak it is buried in his suppressed memories and only comes out very rarely and only in very bad situations.
Body Horror: Abbagor.
Bus Crash: George in Deathwish. Though since she seems to have developed Mind Manipulation skills in the meantime, it's possible that she somehow faked her death in Grimm's memory.
- Technically, the bus crashed in Doubletake.
Cannibal Clan: Well, Sawney Beane returns in Madhouse.
Can't Have Sex Ever: Cal won't have sex with anyone who can have children, which rules out the girl he actually loves.
Chupacabra: One shows up in Deathwish.
Dark-Skinned Blond (Niko) as well as his father and Dark-Skinned Redhead (George)
The Dark Times: Before humans, Earth was ruled by a wide variety of monsters, most of them quite nasty, with the Auphe being the worst.
Deadly Doctor: Suyolak.
Deadpan Snarker: Most of the characters, but especially Cal and Robin.
Demon Slaying
Disappeared Dad: Sorta...whoever Cal's dad is, he and his race have been keeping tabs on Cal forever. Also, Niko's dad took off before he was born. And Cherish's isn't even mentioned.
- Bonus points for first, Cal, for killing his "dad" during his escape from Tumulus, and then for Niko, for killing most of the rest of the Auphe and all of the males, thereby deadending that genetic lineage of evil in the climax of Nightlife.
Domino Revelation: If the Auphe weren't bad enough all of the other weird monsters like the Goat Sucker show up or are often mentioned.
Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Cal.
Enemy Within: The Darkling does this to Cal.
Evil Counterpart: Grimm.
First-Person Smartass: Cal. All the time. He can't open his mouth without snark coming out of it. Catcher is this in Roadkill, though since he can't talk, he types out his comments on a laptop.
Friendly Neighborhood Vampires / Our Vampires Are Different: Promise. Vampires are born, and thanks to modern technology can live off supplements rather than drinking blood.
Fork Fencing: Amnesiac Cal takes this up in Blackout. On Robin. Multiple times.
Gold Digger / Black Widow: Promise has had five rich, elderly, now-dead husbands. Black Widow is most likely a subversion since (a) she's a vampire and would outlive them anyway, and (b) given that she's a generally nice person, she probably made their last few years enjoyable.
Heroes Want Redheads: George.
Heroic BSOD: Niko at the end of Deathwish. Do not get this guy mad at you.
Heterosexual Life Partners: Cal and Niko.
Honest John's Dealership: Robin's place of employment.
I Just Want to Be Normal: Cal, of course.
- by the end of Blackout, he's accepted his monster side and his human side is slowly slipping away.
In the Blood: Cal is terrified of going Auphe. Leads to The Dark Side calling... and Evil Feels Good.
- Niko's father, Kalakos, remarks that their bloodline is said to be descended from Achilles, an idea that Robin reaffirms by saying that Niko and Kalakos look like Achilles.
It's Not You, It's My Enemies: Cal to George and Delilah. Justified in that the Auphe have promised to slaughter his loved ones first.
Katanas Are Just Better: Niko loves swords. Cal prefers Cool Guns.
Knight Templar Big Brother: Niko, for obvious reasons. Cal too, despite being the younger brother.
Ladykiller in Love: Robin after getting involved with Ishiah...* gasp* considers monogamy.
- Considers it? He puts the word "monogamite" on his business card--along with the number for the suicide hot-line, which Robin figures everyone will need when they learn he is no longer available.
Laser-Guided Amnesia: The plot of Blackout involves Cal getting a case of this from repeated! Nepenthe spider venom.
The Legions of Hell: Tumulus.
- More properly, the Auphe. Tumulus is just where they hang out when they're not murdering and torturing everyone else for the fun of it.
Long-Lost Relative: Cal's nest of 'siblings' in Blackout and Grimm in Doubletake. Also Niko's father Kalakos.
Masquerade: The Vigil operate as "supernatural janitors" to maintain it.
Meaningful Name: Cal is short for Caliban. His mother made darned sure he knew why he had the name.
The Medic: Rafferty.
Morality Chain: As Cal's humanity is slowly eaten away by his Auphe side, he comes to consider Niko to be this.
Mugging the Monster: a random junkie tries this in Doubletake. His intended victim? Cal.
Mysterious Past: Promise doesn't like to talk about the bad old days when she had to kill people in order to eat, and Niko usually doesn't ask.
Occult Detective: Cal, Niko and Promise's business.
One-Gender Race: Pucks.
Only You Can Repopulate My Race
Our Angels Are Different: Cal believes that the peris and the Greek gods with wings are probably the origin of stories about angels. Given that peris are winged humanoids and that Cal's peri boss, Ishiah, can not only seemingly appear out of nowhere but owns an actual flaming sword, he might have a point.
Our Elves Are Different: To quote Cal:

After all, the Auphe were where the elf myth had started and if you took away the hundreds of needle-fine metal teeth, the scarlet eyes, the black talons, shredding jaws, nearly transparent skin, and a raging desire to destroy humanity, then I guess you were close enough. The pointed ears were the same, right?

Our Werewolves Are Different: Particularly the ones who got bred to be more werewolf-y. And Catcher, who lost the "were" part of that entirely.
- Also, according to one of the Wolf characters, they aren't humans who can turn into wolves. It's the other way around:

"We were wolves first. We started that way. We evolved as wolves and along the way a mutation did occur. We did split from the primary race...but that primary race was wolf."

Our Zombies Are Different: They're called revenants and they're actually alive, for all that they resemble rotted corpses of adult humans.
Pet Monstrosity: Salome the mummy cat.
- And, as of Blackout, Spartacus, a mummy tomcat that Cal gave to Robin to keep Salome in line.
  - Don't forget the three cats Robin gifted to Promise. Lucky girl.
Plaguemaster: Suyolak. Dear God, Suyolak.
Portmantitle
Power Limiter: As of Roadkill, thanks to Rafferty, Cal can only open two gates within a period of a few days before he dies. In Blackout, however, Cal implies that he believes his Auphe genetics will eventually override the block. In Doubletake, he turns out to be right.
Precision F-Strike: Cal may love the "F-bomb," but when Niko drops it in Deathwish, you know it's serious.
Psychic Powers: George, who's a fatalist on the subject of whether or not anything she sees can be changed.
Psycho for Hire: Darkling.
Purple Eyes: Promise Nottinger.
Roma: Sophia, Abelia-Roo and the Sarzo Clan. Cal and Niko are half-Roma, not that that counts.
- Actually, it's been stated that Niko is full Roma. However, neither brother is accepted by their mother's clan, the Vayash, because Sophia accepted money not only to have the child of an abomination, but to have a child who would—inevitably—be half-gadje (half-non-Roma). Cal is an insult to Roma tradition by his very existence.
  - Confirmed as of Doubletake, when Niko's Rom father makes an appearance.
Shout-Out: Despite the fact that Cal's universe has a few differences with our own—a werewolf Mafia, scientists who have developed a treatment for vampirism, and so on, it also shares a lot of similarities. For example:
- In Blackout, Cal uses some Meaningful Names as aliases: Calvin F. Krueger, Calvert M. Myers and Calhoun J. Voorhees. It doesn't take him long to recognize that he, a killer of monsters, gets kind of a kick of naming himself after movie monsters.
- In the same book, he also refers to MacGyver:

"I could impale a nosy son of a bitch on a Norman Rockwell picket fence if I had to. MacGyver had nothing on me."

- And he names a mummified tomcat Spartacus.
- He also talks about Piglet and Christopher Robin not getting over it if he kills a baby monster.
- His usual nickname for Niko is Cyrano. In Blackout, when he can't quite remember the nickname, he asks Nik if he calls him Pinocchio.
- When talking about an angry and badly injured Wolf, Cal refers to him as Cujo and Old Yeller and asks for someone to put the poor rabid bastard down.
- Robin Goodfellow, at one point, asks Cal if he's familiar with the story of Oedipus Rex.
- Cal heard the story of Peter Pan from Nik when he was seven and Niko was eleven. This becomes a fairly important plot point in Blackout.
- The Jaws movies also apparently exist in Cal's universe, as he refers to a mummified cat's gigantic yawn as "a preview of Jaws 15, the IMAX version."
- Cal gets a double Shout-Out with one line: "It's going to be a bright, bright, bright sunshiny day, Shelob," I said with enthusiastic dark cheer.
- Shortly before that, in the same paragraph, he says, "All we needed was Cthulhu singing [the theme song from] Rawhide."
- He also mentions Spider-Man 3 and Tobey Maguire.
- On recovering from amnesia, he says that Nik needs his real brother back--"not a Stepford version."
- In Roadkill, he refers to Spock: "Thank God I hadn't gotten the pointed ears. Who wants to look like a Star Trek or The Lord of the Rings fan boy for the rest of their natural-born lives?"
- When speaking of an immortal and extremely angry entity who can destroy all life on earth, Cal, referring to the entity's habit of singing Roma dirges, says, "Maybe he'll hit American Idol and that asshole Brit will humiliate him to death."
- When Cal sees a female revenant giving birth, he refers to her as "the size of Jabba, times two."
  - He also refers to Catcher, a werewolf who is stuck in Wolf form as "Chewbacca."
- Rafferty's cousin Catcher was named after The Catcher in The Rye.
- Cal read Stephen King's The Stand when he was sixteen and his brother, who was homeschooling him, demanded a book report. According to him, the book scared him nearly as badly as the Auphe do.
- Cal says of Catcher, "He was the happiest damn Wolf I'd ever run across. Lassie had nothing on him."
- And he describes Robin offering cologne "like a professional assassin from a James Bond movie."
- Robin makes a sarcastic reference to Delilah, the Wolf who's Cal's sometime bedmate, "eating [Cal's] liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti."
- Catcher refers to Flowers for Algernon.
- Cal tells Delilah that he doesn't care who else she sleeps with: "This isn't Weres and Vamps 90210."
- Robin refers to his penis as Excalibur.
- Cal calls being on the run and being in very large wide-open spaces "a Where's Waldo freebie."
Sibling Yin-Yang: Cal is lazy, foul-mouthed, sulky, not an intellectual, and loves junk food. Niko is a hard-working, rarely swearing, noble, intellectual guy who is a health food snob. The brothers rag on each other for these traits all the time.
Slap Slap Kiss
Son of a Whore: The Leandros boys are well aware of being this. Cherish throws it out as an insult to Cal at one point; he assumes she just "knew" from looking at him.
Star-Crossed Lovers: Cal and Georgina. As of Doubletake she peeks into their future and confirms that any relationship they would have is indeed doomed.
Superpowerful Genetics: Cal has Perfect Health (other than getting injured all the time, he's been sick once in his life), and can open gates to other worlds.
The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Catcher is slowly losing his human patterns of thinking the longer he stays wolf-only.
The Plague
Tomboyish Name: George (really Georgina).
Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Cal's inability to remember the two years he spent with the Auphe.
Trickster Archetype: Robin and Cherish.
True Companions: Cal and Niko acquire some in the series.
Urban Fantasy: Really speaks for itself in some regards.
What Measure Is a Non-Human?: After getting amnesia in Blackout, Cal assumes everything nonhuman is a monster. This is really awkward when he's being introduced to his nonhuman friends.
Will Not Tell a Lie: Niko, mostly, as a reaction to growing up with a Consummate Liar mother. He considers his decision to lie to Cal and dose him with Nepenthe spider venom, even to let him stay happy, to be a Moral Event Horizon.
Winged Humanoid: Peris.