But Gryphon was allowed one of those moments that he’d come to cherish, a moment when his Greek chorus of the damned fell mercifully silent. He got to hear the white noise hum inside his head, the emptiness where thoughts should be. Of course he had none; he felt hollowed out, flushed, wiped clean. The crowds of people who had shared space inside him had carved away pieces of himself until he had nothing stored up anymore. But again, that was okay. He found he preferred the silent nothingness, as he so very rarely had it.

Once he got home, he went straight to his room for a nap, and promptly had a dream.

He was sitting in a chair outside a changing room in a small clothing boutique that looked kind of familiar, although he couldn’t remember the last time he shopped for couture dresses. Soft music played in the background, and the air smelled vaguely of vanilla and linen. As he sat, waiting to see what happened, a kind of dowdy salesclerk walked by, hanging up dresses and slacks that women had decided not to purchase. He recognized her as Julie, and realized what was going on. “Something bothering you, Julie?” he wondered.

Again, this was not like her. She didn’t talk much; she kept to herself. She was the perfect backseat driver in that you often forgot she was there. She paused by the racks and seemed to look at him reluctantly, as if he was invading her sanctuary. “Why do people do this?” she asked.

What the hell ..? “Do what?”

She made vague gestures that meant absolutely nothing, then gave up with a sigh and let her arms collapse to her sides. “Hurt each other. All we seem to do is find people that hurt each other.” She paused briefly. “Men. Men who hurt women.”

“Sometimes they hurt other men too. And kids. And sometimes pets.” Her facial expression grew increasingly stark, suggesting this was the wrong tack to take. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you. Except occasionally we run into a woman who’s done something awful. They just have a tendency not to be serial killers - that’s more of a man hobby.”

Her eyes flashed briefly with pent up aggression. “Why?” This is what bothered him about Julie: he always got the sense she was a time bomb, an accident waiting to happen. And who would blame her? Beaten to death by a husband she had grown to hate. She was one of those people you could describe as “She was always so quiet” when the news crews came around to ask you if you knew your neighbor was going to go off and shoot up a mall. She was the perfect picture of a person pre psychotic break.

“I don’t know. One almost killed me too, you know. It’s just … there’s a lot of sick people in this world. I don’t need to tell you that.”

Julie turned away in disgust, fussing pointlessly with a rack of dresses. “But why?”

“I don’t know. If I knew, maybe I could prevent it somehow. As it is, all I can do is clean up the mess that they are. And, you know, if given a choice, I wouldn’t even do that. I always wanted to be a slacker.”

She didn’t appreciate his attempt at humor (or was it honesty? Being a slacker sounded great) as she turned away even more and went off to find something else to do. “I just want it to stop,” she said so quietly he could barely hear her. “I don’t know why I’m still here.”

Before he could answer her - well, no, before he could think of an answer for her - a phone rang, drawing his attention away. As soon as he realized there was no obvious phone within the boutique, the dream tore around him, fractioning like a pane of glass, and he woke up blinking into his pillow. The phone kept ringing, and cursing at it didn’t make it stop.

Finally he crawled out of bed and found the phone, and made a gravelly noise that could have been interpreted as “Hello”. “Are you okay?” Varner asked.

“Fine. I’m just tired,” he muttered, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“I bet.” He said it in such a way that he implied he wasn’t sure how he ever got up. Or maybe he was reading too much into it.

“Look, I only called to let you know that you’re off the hook for today; I don’t think I’m going to need you. We’re still running the partial print, and we’re getting stick from the real estate place in charge of the store’s lot.”

“Stick? Why?” Gryphon remembered he went to sleep damp, which might explain why the sheets were clinging to him like cellophane. It felt like they were trying to hold him down, and he could barely move.

“Supposedly the boss of Sunshine Realty is away on vacation, and the sycophant who’s filling in for him isn’t sure he can release the records of everyone who might have had access to the property without his blessing. Can you believe that? People have been killed and chopped up on the property, and this fuck’s worried his boss’ll be mad if he gives us the information.” Varner snorted derisively, and he heard a faint thunk, like he’d just slammed something down on his desk. He imagined it was a coffee mug. “I told him this guy could kill in the meantime, he could flee the state, and this moron tells me it’s all “hypothetical”, and his job isn’t. I’m runnin’ this guy’s record - he’s gotta have a parking ticket or something I can harass him about.”

“Death is an abstract thing when it happens to strangers.”

Varner paused for a moment. “I don’t know if that’s philosophical or monstrously depressing.”

“Probably both.”

Varner grunted. “Probably.”

There wasn’t much else to their conversation, although Gryphon offered to pay him a visit and scare the shit out of him. Jason thanked him and turned him down … for the moment. He said he’d get back to him.

Gryphon didn’t feel like sleeping anymore, so he peeled himself out of the blankets and went to take a hot bath. He sat in the tub until he could feel the warmth in his bones, and then he dried off and found some warm clothes to wear. Since his chorus remained blissfully silent - maybe they were tired too - he decided to go downstairs and try the computer.

He didn’t do it a lot for obvious reasons, but when he got to, it was a fun time waster. Thanks to his passengers he knew of a lot of porn sites, but there was no way he could visit them with a crowd looking over his shoulder and commenting. It was just too weird.

Spirit Guides did have an email address accessible to them all, but Gryphon never liked to check it. After all, now that they were starting to get well known, people were starting to email him, wanting him to make contact with their dead son or grandmother, not understanding that wasn’t how his abilities worked at all, and he was not some comforting con man who asked a handful of leading questions and then told them what they wanted to hear. He was rarely the harbinger of good news. How could an angel of death ever be good news?

Tad dramatic there, sport, Hugh said.

Perhaps. But if he wasn’t an angel of death, what was he?

Out of curiosity, he entered Sunshine Realty into a search engine, and finally narrowed down the categories to Oregon (he hadn’t expected so many Sunshine Realties). He checked out the website of two that were closest in the area to the store, and they were very basic, unimpressive things. There were small pictures and descriptions of homes and apartments and other properties available in the area, from run down trailers to million dollar condos. (The latter of which always baffled him. If you had a million bucks to drop on a home, why the fuck would you do it on a condo?)

Eventually he skipped over to the realtors page, and saw that the Sunshine people wore ugly mustard yellow jackets and similar empty smiles, making them look like Stepford real estate agents. You might by a home from them, but only out of fear that they’d lay an egg in your chest if you didn’t.

His eyes glided over the eerie, insincere smiles (although the vaguely sincere smiles were honestly creepier), and then something made him stop scrolling down the page. It was a thumbnail sized photo of an agent named Harold Cook, who had an almost perfectly capsule shaped head, highlighted by the fact that he was one of those bald guys who shaved their wispy strands off in the hopes that people would think they were trying to be cool, not trying to hide a lack of follicles. He had a long chin, pointed, which added to the capsule look, and his eyes were almost lost beneath beetled brows that suggested his hair, when it existed, was a sort of blondish-brown.

He looked so bland, so ordinary, he blended in well with the page. Gryphon wasn’t sure why he’d stopped here, and then he realized it was the eyes. He’d seen those eyes looking at him through a visor worn over his face to protect him from the blood splatter. This was him; this was the river killer.

The screen fuzzed and jumped like a t.v. with poor reception, and Gryphon pushed himself away from Clay’s desk, the wheeled chair carrying him across the room until he slammed into the far wall. The computer looked okay, but who knew for how long?

Call Varner, Mr. Aronofsky insisted. Let him bring him in.

“That isn’t what they want,” Gryphon told him, returning to his room to grab his coat and car keys, and put some dry shoes on. “Besides, I found him first.”

He was in the phone book, and why not? It wasn’t like serial killers would get special private numbers. They were psychopaths with some concept of normalcy - they didn’t like it, but they knew they had to pretend to be like everyone else, to be anonymous, to hide their fixations to get away with it. If they blatantly flaunted their preoccupations, they’d be caught quickly. To keep killing, they had to pretend they were so average you’d never notice them. How awful that must have been for them, to hide in the closet like boogeymen, and pretend to feel things like everyone else. They probably would have made fabulous actors if killing people didn’t give them such a hard on.

He almost called his number, but when he picked up the handset, he heard static crackle like tin foil, and knew his power was building up. It was mainly Ruby, of course, seething just below the surface, but no one was too thrilled with the idea of a serial killer. They and the pedophiles just didn’t have a huge fan club.

Gryphon drove out to the address listed with his phone number in the book, as it was only a few miles away. He lived in a leafy suburb known as Deer Point, in a two story pre-fab house painted a delicate blue-grey, with a neatly trimmed lawn and sparkling clean driveway. Children’s toys were scattered about the lawn, and Gryphon stood in the driveway before becoming aware of the voices of children and a woman inside the house, along with the sound of a television.

He didn’t need to go up and knock on the door to know Harold wasn’t here. Somehow he sensed his target, the man he wanted, wasn’t within his range. He didn’t know how he knew this, except death recognized death; his ghosts would let him know where there were others. And Harold probably didn’t know it, but he was leading a ghost parade.

Gryphon drove out to the Sunshine Realty office that employed Harold, but he wasn’t there either. He sat in his car, frustrated, wondering where this fuck could be, when Ruby said, He’s hunting. You know where he likes to hunt. Go meet him there.

Of course. In retrospect, it was totally obvious.

He drove back to the bad side of town, where the store was, and even though the parking lot was still cordoned off with crime scene tape, he idled in the lot for a moment, until Anna appeared in the passenger seat, blood still running down the center of her face, dripping off her chin. “What’s up, chico?”

“Show me where he picked you up.”

She shrugged, looking out the passenger window before pointing down the street. “Go that way.”

He did. He followed her instructions, driving deeper into the sad part of town, the place where nobody came unless they absolutely had to, or was a psychopath hunting for an easy kill. Just beyond the corner where he picked up Anna was a very seedy looking bar, small and dark, set squat in a building that used to be a hotel and was now … well, who the hell knew, the signs were contradictory and unilluminating. The windows were dirty, beer bottle brown, and a lower pane in the chocolate bar shaped window had been smashed and “replaced” with plastic wrap taped in a thick layer on the inside.

Gryphon felt drawn to it, and knew what was waiting for him inside. “I see somethin’ funny,” Anna told him as he got out of the car. He never saw her get in, and he never saw her get out either; she was simply there once he was outside the car.

“What?”

“It’s … I dunno. Like a dark line.”

“It’s him,” he said, although he wasn’t sure how he knew that. “You can almost always find your killer. In a strange way, you’re bonded.”

“Ick.”

That summed it up pretty well.

Smoking had been banned from all bars, and yet as soon as he walked in, he was greeted by a smoky room, a layer of grey smoke curling around the dim yellowed lights like flocks of moths. Country music played somewhere, and the wood was so dark Gryphon felt like he was walking into a void.

Harold was easy to spot. He sat in the darkest corner, an untouched glass of beer in front of him, studying the hookers who were attempting to ply their trade with the sad sacks at the bar. As soon as Gryphon approached his table, he saw all the river ghosts - save for the deeply confused Rita - standing behind Harold. Anna remained beside him, though, as if afraid to join the entourage.

He pulled out an empty chair and sat down, staring across the cigarette burned table at Harold. “Hello. Remember me?”

Harold stared at him blankly, as if he was a hallucination from eating bad clams. “Who the fuck are you?”

“The end. Are you aware that the police are right now trying to get a list of people who have access to the store property? You must be on the list, Harry.”

He had a dead eyed stare, like a shark. “My name isn’t Harry.”

“It is whatever I say it is,” he told him. “I’m the last living person you’re ever going to talk to.”

He scowled at him, brow furrowing as his thick eyebrows dipped down towards his eyes. He was probably in his forties, a bit older than your usual serial killers. “You don’t wanna fuck with me, kid.”

“Oh, I know, you’re the big bad river killer. But I’m not a hooker or a junkie or a runaway, so I kinda fall outside the bounds of your usual victims.”

Now Harold had stopped looking through him and just glared at him hatefully. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. But you better get up and leave me the fuck alone, or you will end up dead.”

Gryphon smirked, as Anna said, “He really is a dick, isn’t he?”

“You can’t kill me, Harry. You can’t even touch me. You have no control here.” To prove his point, Ruby went to work. Harold’s hand raised of its own volition, and he looked at it, startled, before he slapped himself hard across the face, the noise of flesh striking flesh filling the bar. He did it so hard he almost knocked himself off his chair.

“What the fuck -” he began, but then he slapped himself again, his wedding ring catching on his bottom lip and ripping it open. The beer in his glass was sloshing, and the lights overhead were flickering.

“You really should stop hitting yourself. You’re causing a scene.” Anna and the other ghosts were laughing themselves sick over this. But people were starting to look over at the crazy man hitting himself with such violence.

Harold now stared at him in open disbelief, all attempts at his tough guy façade - which was probably real, a hint of the true monster peeking through his thin veneer of normalcy -disappeared in the face of his complete shock. “What the fuck are you doing to me?” he demanded, although his voice had lowered to a hiss.

“Introducing you to victimhood. Not fun, is it?” Ruby slid his beer glass across the table, and let it crash to the floor, splattering more cheap beer on a surface that was pretty much warped from the constant spills.

He was trying to move his hands, his body, get up from the table, but Ruby held him where he was. Beads of sweat popped on his forehead, and veins started to bulge at his temples. He was fighting it, but it didn’t matter. Hugh had already proven that the dead could pretty much be as strong as they wanted to be, and against the indignant hatred of Ruby, he wouldn’t have had a chance even if he was strapped to a Sidewinder missile in the midst of launching.

The bartender came over. Here, he had to double as the bouncer, a thankless job, and he was a large dark skinned man with the build of a high school linebacker who was about four years past his glory days. His head was shaved bald too, but it looked better on him, and when he crossed his arms over his broad chest, his biceps bulged like rising dough. “What’s goin’ on here?” he asked. He had the faintest hint of a Southern accent.

“This … asshole’s … crazy,” Harold said, spitting out each word through clenched teeth, like he could barely speak the language. His throat muscles were starting to cord; it looked painful.

Gryphon looked up at the bartender and shrugged, twirling his finger beside his head in the universal gesture for “bugfuck”. “Harry didn’t take his medication today. I’m supposed to bring him home.”

“Bull … shit,” Harold hissed.

The bartender’s almond eyes darted over to Harold, appraised him, and instantly dismissed him, looking back at Gryphon with the smallest wince of sympathy. “You need help getting him outta here?”

“No,” Harold gasped. He was ignored, like most of the genuinely mentally ill were.

“No, I got it. He’s usually a good boy for me.” Gryphon looked across the table at the straining, failing, battling Harold, and said, with truly irritating condescension, “Aren’t you, Harry?”

“Fuck you!” Harold snapped, a single pearl of blood tinged spit flying from his lip to the center of the table.

The bartender dropped a big, meaty hand on Harold’s shoulder, and said, “Let’s get you home, buddy.”

He was trying to be kind, and Gryphon was honestly touched to find someone who wasn’t completely burned out by people in such a place. He supposed he should have left him a big tip, but he hadn’t brought any cash with him; he’d have to come back and give him some another time.

The bartender hauled Harold to his feet, and he seemed stiff, like his joints had frozen. He probably thought that Harold really was suffering some side effect from forgotten medication, that he was a deeply fucked up individual, when really he was just trying to escape from an invisible straight jacket. When Gryphon moved beside Harold and grabbed his arm, Harold seemed to shiver, an attempt to pull his arm away from him that had no hope of working. But he was trapped and he knew it. Harold was trying to send a request for help with his eyes, but it honestly just made him look crazier, and the way the bartender gave Gryphon a pat on the back, he knew that no one saw anything but a crazy man being helped out of a bar before he started hurting himself even worse. It was probably driving Harold apeshit.

Good.

Gryphon “helped” Harold outside, really just hauling him out, while Harold’s struggle to escape remained mainly internal. As soon as they were outside in the cold, damp air, which smelled of mildew and exhaust, Gryphon sighed, and said, “You ready to have some fun, Harry?”

“What the fuck are you?” Harold demanded, his voice still strained.

Gryphon eyed him coldly, and gave him a smile that felt like a snarl, and probably looked like it too. “I already told you - the last living person you’ll ever talk to. So tell me, Harry, how did you think you were gonna die?”

He glared at him sidelong, his eyes white and wild. “You don’t scare me.”

He went upstairs to change and grab one of his surveillance kits (as he had learned to pack them up ahead of time - you never knew when your plans would be disrupted by the need to tail a client’s cheating husband), and found Dylan splayed out in the bed, already asleep, the box of cold pills left on the nightstand beside the alarm clock. For just a brief second, the moment he came in the door, he thought he saw Paris laying there, but it was just the sight of black hair against the pillow that made his mind take an unwelcome leap elsewhere. It probably didn’t help that it was the same faux suede tan blanket they always had either, something he associated more with Paris’s taste than his own.

It was time, wasn’t it? To pack it away, get something new, try and move forward. Of course, bedding was one thing. Was he going to pack away the framed picture of him in his “library”? The shirt of Par’s that he had hanging up in his closet and liked to smell every now and then, bury his face in the fabric and take a deep breath of the memory of him? No, he couldn’t do that. But you took these things one step at a time, right? Not that he’d ever put away the photos or stop wearing the wedding ring on a chain around his neck; there were some things you just couldn’t do.

On his way out, he made sure the blanket was pulled over him, and gave Dylan a kiss on the forehead. He was so out of it he never came close to waking up, but that was okay with Roan. He felt like he was in a weird head space at the moment and wasn’t sure he could talk about anything relating to himself or them. If there was actually a “them”, but considering they’d already slept together and he’d given him permission to stay here until he felt better, there probably was a “them”.

Oh man - he just remembered why he hated relationships. Oh well.

He packed the surveillance kit in a backpack and took the bike back out, driving over to Holden’s place on the off chance he was still there. As it turned out, he was, he just wasn’t answering his phone. He answered the door shirtless, dressed only in his collection of necklaces and a pair of blue boxer briefs. Holden leaned against the door, apparently unconcerned about his neighbors getting an eyeful of him, and said, “If you’re going to cuss me out, you can’t come in.”

“What if I’m just going to punch you?”

That made him smirk. “Now you want to get physical. Men.” He clicked his tongue and walked away, leaving his door open. Roan took that as an invitation and came in.

Holden paid no attention to him and walked back to his bedroom. Roan could have followed, but since he sensed a possible trap, he just stayed in the living room and shouted from there. “You need to call it off, Holden. I’m serious.”

“I’m sure you are, but I can’t. Kai’s on the clock right now, and I won’t be able to talk to him until we’re on the hour. And even then, he said he’d meet me on the boulevard after he’s showered and changed. And, knowing him, inhaled two Jumbo Jacks. That kid has the metabolism of a whippet.”

Roan huffed a breath through his nose and shook his head in disgust. He could have been lying about Kai being “on the clock” - an obvious euphemism for fucking a client - as Roan had no way to refute or confirm this, but Holden had a gloating tone in his voice that seemed to point sharply towards truth. Roan looked around Holden’s living room, noting his iPod dock and a few books, and then wandered to his kitchen to snoop. Hey, he was a detective - if you invited him in and left him alone, you had to expect him to pry. “Tell me about this kid. How young is he?”

“He’s twenty three, but he looks - and talks and dresses - seventeen. He’s quite popular for that very reason, especially amongst the older clientele.”

Now that was a disturbing detail he really didn’t need. “Can he take care of himself at all?”

“Do you mean fight? Well, his parents sent him to karate lessons when he was young in hopes of butching him up. It failed in several respects.”

“Ah.” Holden must have cleaned up fairly recently, or just hadn’t been home much, as his kitchen was quite neat. There was a single coffee mug in the sink, as well as a fork and a spoon, but that’s all. His cupboards were equally neat but sparse. His small collection of plates and bowls matched, but his glassware was mixed, and he had a small but inexplicable collection of novelty mugs. The foods he found were general staples - peanut butter, pasta, albacore tuna, soup, a loaf of whole grain bread - but here he had been told that good gay guys eschewed carbs. At least he wasn’t alone in liking carbs.

“But the kid’s tough. Don’t let him fool you. He’s probably stronger than most of us, at least in an emotional sense. I don’t know how he survived half the crap he’s been through in his life.” He could tell by the shift in volume that Holden was coming out of his bedroom, so he retreated to the living room, and was standing there when Holden came out wearing a pair of artfully distressed jeans, pulling a brown t-shirt on over his head. It advertised Spanky’s strip club, complete with a pole dancer in silhouette. Holden always liked to support his fellow sex workers, male or female.

“His parents treat him like shit?” Roan guessed.

Holden grimaced and shook his head. “I think he would have preferred being treated like shit. His dad raped him since he was five years old on.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. And it was only discovered when he was nine and got really sick and ended up in the emergency room … with the clap. Of course they called the cops - what nine year old gets the clap? - and all sorts of hell resulted. His father was charged with molestation, his mother mortgaged their house to bail him out of jail, and as soon as he was, he took off, ran to Mexico. So Kai and his mother lost the house, and they ended up moving to Ohio to live with a sick Aunt. His mother fucking hated him - she blamed him for breaking up her marriage and ruining her life. She became an abusive alcoholic, and he has the cigarette burns to prove it. When he was fifteen, he dropped out of school and ran away, and he’s been on the street ever since.”

“Goddamn man - how can we ask him to do something like this? Hasn’t he had enough monsters in his life?”

“Look, I know, but in his Kai persona you’d never know he ever had anything bad happen to him. In fact, if you ask, he’ll say he had a typical, boring childhood.”

The way he said that made him pause. “The Kai persona? You’re not telling me he has multiple personality disorder, are you?”

“Not exactly. He’s sort of constructed the Kai persona for himself. His real name is Tom, but he doesn’t answer to it anymore; he’s legally changing his name to Kai Alvedo, but the judge has no idea he’s concocted an alternate life story to go with it. He seems to need to believe it’s true, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do, which is why getting him involved in this bothers me. The guy could get in a couple of good hits before we get to him, if he does pick him up. Kai could get hurt.”

“If it’s anything, physical pain doesn’t mean much to him anymore. I brought it up, but he just shrugged. He says he’s had far worse in his life.”

Roan shook his head and winced, glancing out the window, where he found a smoky grey cat staring back at him through the pane. Since he didn’t smell a cat in this apartment, he figured it must be a neighbor’s cat, or maybe a stray he was feeding. Holden was the type to adopt all kinds of strays. Was that why he was so eager to let Roan into his life? “I really don’t like this.”

“I know. But the kid really wants to do it, and I don’t see talking him out of it. Besides, it might actually do him some good to see someone actually arrested for hurting people. His dad got away clean, and his mother was never charged with anything.”

“Lovely.” One of the first disillusioning things you learned as a cop was that justice wasn’t always done; in fact, sometimes it was almost impossible. It wasn’t just the need for evidence - you needed a hell of a lot more things to align to get a solid conviction. That it happened as many times as it did was a minor miracle. Or a rigging of the system, but that was another disillusioning story entirely. “Look, I have to meet Fiona at the office, but I want you to try and seriously talk him out of it. I know you probably can if you put your heart into it.”

Holden gave him the sly smirk that almost passed for charming. “Are you flattering me, Roan?”

He scowled at him, a look that should have backed him off, but of course it didn’t. Part of Holden’s sexual allure was his complete confidence in himself; he clearly thought he could do anything, and that made everyone else believe it too. Roan may have had the evil look down, but meeting Holden’s brazen confidence it was the immovable object hitting the irresistible force. A Mexican standoff of ‘tudes. “Cut the bullshit. They don’t call you Fox because you’re pretty. Call me and let me know when you’ve gotten a hold of Kai.”

As he was leaving, Holden called out, “You think I’m pretty?”

Roan flipped him the middle finger over his shoulder, and the last thing he heard before he closed the door was Holden laughing. The guy was nothing but trouble, knew it, and reveled in it. Perhaps that was the only way he could be sure of his own power.

Although he showed up a bit early, Fiona was waiting for him in the lot of the office park, sitting behind the wheel of her car, a pumpkin orange ancient Fiat that looked like she’d once sideswiped something on the right hand side. He never would have guessed a dominatrix drove this car, but what did he think she drove? A paddy wagon?

Her red hair was held back in a more casual ponytail, and she wore dark green cargo pants and a lipstick red fleece pullover, a black bag slung over her shoulder. She looked around at the other businesses, from “Gorp master” Braunbeck’s chiropractic office to the lawyers down the way, the dentist who’d just moved in last winter to the all female CPA firm Randi worked for, and said, “Wow. I never imagined there was a private detective’s office around here.”

“I know. We’re supposed to have offices in shady areas where Peter Lorre look-alikes lurk in shadowed doorways. But do you know how much those places ask for rent? It’s criminal.”

“But you got the sarcastic, wise cracking thing down pat, huh?”

“Oh yeah, that’s free.”

He opened the office and led the way inside, trying hard to pretend the smattering of dust was just a feature. He established that she could start the coffee maker and was capable of both taking a phone message and filling out a form, and offered her the job. “So do I get to carry a gun or what?” she wondered. From the way she grinned, she was probably being funny.

“Well, if you can find a way to keep your bullwhip in your purse, you can carry that.”

“Who says I don’t already?”

Fair point.

He was showing her the office computer system and she was criticizing it, telling him about a much better operating system that went in one of his ears and straight out the other, when the door opened and a vaguely familiar man came in. He was relatively tall and wore expensive tailored black slacks and a soft blue button down shirt that had a faint glimmer to it, like the threads were taken straight from the silkworms thoraxes. On top of this he wore a long Burberry coat that seemed a little heavy for the weather, and sleek black sunglasses that hid his eyes and almost matched the sleek black of his dyed hair. He leaned on a fancy mahogany cane, and Roan thought there was something familiar about him, even though he didn’t know anyone with a cane. “You know it’s rude to ignore phone calls,” he said, and the voice gave him away as Eli.

Really? Roan was surprised, but didn’t let it show on his face. He knew he hadn’t seen Eli in person for a long time, but what the fuck had happened to him? “I gave you my answer. I’m not interested, and nothing you can say will change my mind.”

Eli sighed wearily. “Give me three minutes in private. That’s all I ask.”

He was really leaning on his cane - it wasn’t some bizarre affectation. Just that fact alone piqued his curiosity, which was a pain. And would probably be the death of him. Curiosity killed the cat, right? “Fine. But make it fast.”

As Eli limped his way towards them, he saw the look Fiona was giving him, followed up by a hearty elbow nudge, just in case he missed it. “Fiona, this is Eli Winters. Eli, this is my new assistant, Fiona Sutton.”

“My name isn’t Eli Winters anymore,” Eli replied testily.

“I am never calling you Elijah Prophet. Accept, adapt, and move on already.”

“Elijah Prophet?” Fiona repeated. “That crazy cat cult guy?” The second that left her mouth, her eyes widened in horror, and she quickly added, “Oh shit, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“I thought that summed it up nicely,” Roan assured her. Eli gave him a dirty look behind his shades, his thin lips turning down into a reverse crescent shape and bringing out heretofore unseen lines in his face.

As soon as he shut the door of his office, he asked Eli, “I guess you’ve figured out the blessing is a curse?” He looked gaunt, the clothes draped on him in a way that hid most of his thinness, but not enough. Roan figured he was limping from joint pain; if this was during his cycle, it might not go away until he transformed.

“You’re terribly cynical, aren’t you? It must suck to be you.”

“Not really.” He went to his desk and slid his backpack off and put it on the floor, waiting for Eli to lower himself into the client’s seat. As soon as he levered himself down, Roan sat behind his desk. “Now, say what you’re going to say. I’ll hum quietly to myself.”

“I’m not going to ask you to speak for your people anymore. If you don’t want to, fine, be that way. Let the government round them up and ship them away.”

“That’s not happening and you know it. So why are you here?”

He took off his sunglass and folded them neatly before tucking them into the pocket of his coat. His eyes looked tired, and fine lines had gathered there, along with circles that were so dark they looked like bruises. Eli still had the rich Eurotrash air about him, but now he also had a dissolute aura as well. Being a leopard was starting to disagree with him more and more, but what did he expect when he got infected at such a late age? The older you were, the harder it was on your body. “I want to hire you for a job, Roan. I have reason to believe that my brother has been conspiring with our family lawyer, Aaron Stockport, for a very long time, bilking me out of part of my parents’ inheritance. Can you find out for me?”

More and more surprises from Eli today. “Umm, yes, I’m pretty sure I can.”

“Good.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a thumb sized flash drive in an electric blue case. “I’ve copied every single financial document on record, from my parents’ initial investments to the family trust as it stands now. You’ll also find tax documents submitted by my brother and Stockport, and a master list of passwords to various financial accounts. I trust you will give this back to me when you’re done?”

If he was telling the truth - and why wouldn’t he? - he was handing him the financial keys to the Winters’ kingdom. That wasn’t small by any means. “Of course. Eli, why the hell are you trusting me with this?”

Eli pulled out a folded check and put it on the desk beside the flash drive. Roan caught a glimpse of a five and three zeroes. “Because I know you hate my guts, Roan, but you’ve proven yourself to be an honest man. And nowadays, those are almost impossible to find.”

Coming from anyone else, he’d have dismissed it as blowing sunshine up his skirt, but he knew that Eli hated him too. He was desperate for an ally who wouldn’t steal his money. What a sad day when a man had to turn to an enemy to help him out. “Do you believe this … let’s call it embezzlement, for lack of a better term, is recent?”

“No. I think they’ve been at it for a while, but recently they’ve increased it, which is how I finally noticed it. Stock downturn my ass.”

If Eli wasn’t being paranoid, it would make sense. After all, the Winters’ brothers had a major falling out after Eli decided to become the ultimate kitty cult leader. Shit like that could cause hissy fits, especially in a “respectable” family.

They discussed a few details, and Roan had the horrible realization that he felt kind of bad for Eli. Why? He did this to himself - he got himself infected, knowing that even if he survived the initial transformation, he was in for a world of hardship. He’d die young and in pain; there was no way around that. So what if he thought it was divine somehow, a way of connecting with god? He wanted it, and he was facilitating the infection of other people, especially kids, who didn’t really know better. Fuck him! He deserved worse.

They worked out the details, and it took about a minute for Eli to stand up. He was definitely favoring his left leg, and Roan almost asked what his problem was, but decided not to. He just didn’t look good. “How much time do you have left?”

He must have known what he was talking about, but he remained emotionless as he slipped his sunglasses back on. “I don’t know. But I’d appreciate you taking care of this ASAP.”

As he left, Roan was struck by the fact that he was going to outlive a lot of people. That was both good and bad.

He plugged the flash drive into his computer, and was surprised at the sheer amount of documents on it. It was a bigger drive than he initially thought. His eyes started to blur as he scanned the records, and he knew he’d have to get Randi to sift through these records and pick out the relevant parts. It was too big for a favor, he’d have to hire her as a “consultant” and pay her an hourly rate, but Eli would pay for that, and Randi would be thrilled to do it as soon as he told her these were the Winters family files. In fact, he might have to take the flash drive back by force. Still, numbers were not his friend, and Randi actually enjoyed them, for whatever reason. Sometimes having insane friends paid off in spades.

He went out to tell Fiona how to set up a client file, and she was acing it and making him feel like a dumbass when his cell phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket and wasn’t surprised to find it was Holden. “Tell me you have good news.”

Holden scoffed, a noise that was swallowed by cell phone static. “Anything but. Kai called me from the boulevard - his gig ended early, so he decided to get a head start.”

Roan’s stomach knotted so violently he winced. “What the fuck ..? He can’t do it without us anyways!”

“I know, I said that, and he said he was just “staking out his space”. I’m on my way there now. Join us when you can.”

Holden hung up before he could respond, or the cell phone dropped out - either way, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t sure if he should blame Holden more for this mess or himself. Certainly Kai shouldered a lot of it, but he wouldn’t have been involved in this if he hadn’t talked to Holden.

O’Leary continued to do so, although he was struggling to get a hold of himself. He sobbed in a strangled sort of way, like he was trying to physically hold back the tears and failing miserably. He still was refusing to look at him.

Maybe a minute passed, the plopping sound of the rain in puddles an oddly appropriate counterpoint to his strange, squished sobs. “I didn’t mean … I panicked …”

“I was black, so you fucking shot me!” Jeff snapped, and Gryphon was pretty sure he saw the puddles around them waver in response. He was only a ghost, but that didn’t mean his anger lacked power.

“… shots were being fired, Jones went down … I shot the first person I saw …”

“First black person you saw,” Jeff insisted.

“ … I fucked up, okay? I know I did. I’m not proud of it.”

“Jeff seems to think there’s more to it,” Gryphon prompted.

“Fucking yeah there’s more to it,” Jeff said.

O’Leary looked up at him, tears streaking his broad cheeks, his entire face ruddy in a way that seemed unhealthy, although Hugh volunteered it was an “Irish thing”. (Of course Gryphon really didn’t want to know why he thought that or how he knew that - he knew enough about Hugh to fear information of this sort.) “What? I made a stupid fucking mistake. What more could there be?”

“He seems to think there’s a racial element.”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “What?”

Tell him you know he’s a fucking racist cracker asshole, Taneesha said.

You don’t know that, Mr. Aronofsky said. We have no idea what happened that night.

My gut instinct is to go with the dead guy, Taneesha replied.

O’Leary shook his head, but it seemed more mournful than anything. “I’d have shot the first thing I saw no matter what it was. Black, white, Mexican … house cat, probably. It was so fucking stupid … I just panicked. I’m a cop; we don’t panic.”

He’s apparently never been at a four alarm blaze when a cop thinks his partner’s still inside, Hugh said.

“Everybody panics at some time,” Gryphon said comfortingly, although he wasn’t sure that was true or not. Hugh and Ruby both seemed immune to panic; Ray would claim he was, but Gryphon knew that was simply self-delusion. Hugh had spent his life semi-detached from humanity and himself; panic was just too strong an emotion for him to muster up. Ruby had no time for panic, as that was a softer emotion for weaker people. “But you made things worse. You lied about it.”

He sighed like he’d just been hit in the stomach. “My job is my life. What else did I have?”

“So it was worth my life, is that it?” Jeff replied.

“It was wrong and you know it. Not just the lying, but letting his death be blamed on someone else. Sure, they were bad guys, but they didn’t kill him.”

O’Leary sniffed and wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his arm. “They killed others.”

“Maybe, but not him. Just like this was a witch hunt without a witch. There’s a serial killer out there right now preying on women, and I’m probably the only one who can stop him, so why don’t you admit your guilt and stop fucking bothering me?”

O’Leary looked at him in surprise, red and puffy eyes looking half shut. “What d’ya mean admit my guilt?”

“Apologize to Jeff. He’s right here.”

He looked around as if he actually expected to see him. Jeff waved his hand, and said, “Right here, fucko.” Not that that was any help to O’Leary.

“Why is he here?”

Gryphon sighed wearily. “Haven’t we been over this? He’s following you around. Ghosts sometimes do that.”

“You fucking killed me,” Jeff snarled.

“He’s really not letting this “you killed me” thing go,” Gryphon told O’Leary, since he couldn’t hear him.

O’Leary closed his eyes, and seemed to mentally count to ten. Gryphon just shivered, and wondered if he should wring his clothes out before tossing them in the dryer. At least he probably wasn’t dehydrated anymore. “Jeff, I’m sorry,” O’Leary said, almost hissing the words through his teeth. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I didn’t become a cop to hurt people.” He wiped the rain off his face, or maybe it was tears; it was hard to say now. “If I could do that night over again, I would. I’ve lived with it all these years, and I’m tired of it. I wish I could take it back.”

Jeff was quiet for several seconds. “Can I kill him?”

“Would it change anything?” Gryphon asked.

O’Leary gave him a funny look, thinking he was talking to him. “Huh?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Talking to Jeff.”

Jeff sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. “Guess not. Might make me feel better, though.”

Gryphon shrugged. “It might. But we’d have to do it, and I’m too tired right now.”

He huffed a noise of disappointment, and grumbled, “I’ll hafta think about it.”

“Good, he’s thinking about it. Let’s go.”

Gryphon didn’t wait for O’Leary’s reply, he simply sloshed over to the SUV, and walked around to the passenger side. He was inside the behemoth when O’Leary said something, and he had to scramble over to the vehicle to talk to him. He opened the driver’s side door and looked up at him, face dripping like it was melting. “What the fuck d’ya mean he’s thinking about it? Thinking about what?”

“You really don’t want to know. Just consider it good news.” He pulled a wet hank of hair up from his scalp and wrung it out, sending water dribbling down to O’Leary’s leather seats. “Can we go now?”

Gryphon knew that getting water all over his upholstery would upset him and make him move, and it did. He got in the SUV, reluctant macho sorrow turned to comfortable annoyance, and maybe he was worried just a little bit about what he refused to say.

The silence between them was tense and uncomfortable, and the SUV ran a bit rough, but it was probably lucky to run at all. When he dropped him off at Clay’s house, he said, “You know, you’re really freaky.”

Gryphon could only shrug. Thanks for the news flash, asshat, Ruby replied.

He went up to his room to dry off and get some dry clothes, and he asked Clay if he’d do a Google search for him. There were times when he could actually use a computer, and there were times when he could erase the hard drive just by being in close proximity. He felt he was more likely in the latter than the former, so he let Clay do the work for him. He told him one of the river ghosts he’d encountered had wanted him to give a message to someone, and that’s why he had to find him.

Once Clay tracked down the info he wanted, he offered to drive him, but Gryphon turned him down and pulled the tarp off his car, where it sat at the side of the driveway. He may have moved into a new home, but it was hard to let the old one go.

He drove out to Axel Beech’s place, blasting the heater to keep the chill away.

Axel lived in a trailer on a good sized piece of land, but the lawn didn’t exist; the ground all around was mostly mud, with small tufts of yellow grass here and there among the mud pits. There were trees, but so far away they could have been in another county - they certainly didn’t belong to his property. If a caption appeared in the bottom of his vision reading “After the apocalypse”, he wouldn’t have been surprised.

He slogged up the three little steps that made up the front porch, noting the silver glimmer of an old pony keg under the gap between the trailer and the ground, and as he knocked on the flimsy door, he marveled at how he alone could have ripped this thing off the hinges. Usually he needed his people and their awesome dead people power to help him, since he was as muscular as a ninety eight year old retired spinster with osteoporosis, but this door made him feel like the Hulk. He could rip it off and pound his chest with his fists, bellowing in triumph.

After a moment, the door rattled open, and he was face to face with a man in his early thirties, with a wispy thin mustache and thinning brown hair the color of faux wood paneling, wearing an old Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt and tighty whiteys. He was neither thin nor fat, but he had the soft build of someone who drank more than was medically wise, and offset any physical gains manual labor normally would have given him. (Was his underwear stained? Oh god, he wasn’t going to look …) The guy looked at him blearily, like he just got up, his eyes glazed and bloodshot in such a way that he was obviously hung over. “Who the fuck’re you?” he slurred.

“Karma.”

He just eyed him like he was trying to focus. “Weird name for a dude.”

Wow, Hugh said. He’s a rocket scientist.

Maybe he was a bit sharper when he wasn’t hung over, but he wouldn’t have bet money on it. “I’m here to talk to you about Clifford Wax.”

It seemed to take a moment for the name to sink in, penetrate the fog of the lingering alcoholic haze, and then he didn’t respond, just tried to close the door on him. This one was easy to stop and shove back open - he didn’t even need to ask Hugh for help.

Axel stumbled back into his kitchenette - slash - living room as Gryphon came in the door, slamming it behind him. Which didn’t have the scary impact he’d hoped since it was like slamming a pet door shut, but he never claimed to be Mr. Butch ‘99. “You really should consider yourself lucky, Axel. That I’m not a cop; that you have received a hung jury.”

His thick dark eyebrows, messed up from sleeping on his face, drew down in obvious confusion. It seemed there was a four second delay between what was said to him and when he processed it. “I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about. Get out of my house. I’ll call the cops.”

“Will you? Go ahead. I can’t wait to tell them how you killed Cliff and left his body at the bottom of the well he hired you to fill in. What was Sean’s last name? Cliff didn’t know.”

Axel stared at him like he could make him go away if he just stopped blinking. “What’re you, one of his butt buddies?”

“Butt buddies? Oh yes, all child molesters are gay in your world, huh? Trust me, they’re not - I’ve encountered loads of them, most even alive. Cliff was a damaged human being who liked little girls, which should have been clear on the website. Seriously, you kill a guy for being a pervert, and you don’t know what his perversion is? That’s just sloppy.”

Axel found his anger and launched towards him, fist raised to strike, but he’d barely covered half of the meager distance between them when someone - Ruby or Hugh; he didn’t know, didn’t much care either - threw him back hard against the kitchen counter, making the dirty dishes in the sink behind him clatter like skeleton teeth on stainless steel. The empties lined up on the other side of the counter started rattling like they were having a small earthquake, and the beer and whiskey bottles on his coffee table soon joined in as the energy started building in such an enclosed space. But it was hard to hear over the sound of raindrops reverberating through the tin can trailer.

Axel looked at him through wounded eyes, not comprehending what was happening here. “How’d you do that?”

“Do what? I did nothing. I’m just standing here.” The best part? That wasn’t even a lie.

He glanced at the rattling bottles, still not getting any of this. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m the speaker for the dead, and I’ve got to say, you’ve put them in a bad position. They don’t like murderers as a rule, but it was better than likely they would have killed Cliff themselves, so there’s some debate on whether you should die or not. That’s the hung jury I was referring to earlier.”

Axel didn’t look impressed. “You’re fucking nuts.”

“What you have to understand is that you can never do this again. You got lucky, Axel - the man you killed was honestly guilty of the crimes he’d been accused of. But that’s not always the case. Justice is blind, deaf, dumb, and as far as I can tell, limbless. Innocent people get sent away, and guilty people walk clean. It happens more than anyone actually knows. The only reason I know is because I encounter the victims, I share their lives, and I don’t have an evidence chain to follow or require a lawyer to save my ass. Did you know a third of murders are never solved? I think that’s the general number - it varies among racial and economic divides, as well as from state to state. That’s a no brainer, isn’t it? Either way, it’s more than most people know outside a cop shop. Forensic evidence is great, but it is not the miracle worker television would have you believe. Sometimes the only people who know who killed them is the victim, but not everybody can hear them. Or anybody.”

I don’t know who killed me, Taneesha said. Since she was the victim of what seemed to be a drive by shooting gone awry, she didn’t even see who shot her, and as far as he could tell from what he could dig up online, her case remained unsolved. It was gang territory, and witnesses willing to risk their lives and come forward were thin on the ground. Random murders, where there was no connection between the victim and the killer, were the hardest cases to solve.

Axel looked like he still wasn’t processing any of this. He grabbed one of the rattling bottles and made to either throw it or hit him with it, but it exploded in his hand, sending some fragments of alcohol tainted glass straight into his face. He yelped in pain and grabbed his face, dropping to his knees on the thin strip of peeling, yellowed linoleum that made up the kitchen floor.

“Attack me with glass?” Gryphon asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “Wow, that was so idiotic I’m just stunned. Why not try and use a taser on me? Now that’d be funny.”

Gryphon saw a bit of blood oozing out under his hands, down his cheek, but they must have been superficial cuts, because head and face wounds usually bled like a motherfucker even when they didn’t hit anything major. “What the fuck d’ya want from me?” Axel cried, anguished, but it seemed more from confusion than genuine pain. The yeasty smell of beer mixed with the scent of fresh blood in a way that was truly nauseating, although it was slightly better than the old beer and sweat sock smell that seemed to permeate the trailer. You couldn’t tell he was an alcoholic bachelor with sporadic hygiene, could you?

“Your word that you will never, ever kill anyone again. If you do, I will find out, and you won’t get off as lightly as you are now. In fact, if you ever see me again, you’re a dead man. One way or another.” He crouched down to be at his eye level, but since Axel wasn’t looking at him, it was a spectacularly wasted gesture. “In fact, one of my passengers brought up a good point on the way over. You know people who bash gays? They’re usually acting out in fear of themselves; they’re afraid there’s something gay in them and they just can’t stand it, but rather than take the violence out on themselves, they take it out on a complete stranger. It’s basic psychology. So what does that make a person who gets so riled up he kills a child molester he’s never seen before? A man who’s obviously single, has no children, lives far from the victim, and yet checks sex offender websites. Maybe runs one? A man obsessed with sex offenders? What does that say?” Axel started crying pathetically, still not looking at him, bringing his knees up to his chest and curling into a ball against the base of the counter. “There’s a couple different choices here really, Axel. You could be a former abuse victim, once upon a time, or you could know one. Or maybe there’s something in you that you recognized in Cliff or his crimes, and you couldn’t stand it.”

He hit close to the bone. Axel shouted, pained and panicked, “Get out of my fucking house!”

Gryphon grabbed him by the chin and forced him to look at him, through tears and snot and blood. Brown glass glistened in cuts above his eyebrow, underneath his eyelid, half way between his eye socket and ear. “Some friendly advice: get therapy. Don’t make me come back here and kill you too.”

He hiccupped a sob, and Gryphon knew he wanted to bluster, take up some macho posturing to prove he wasn’t scared of him, but he was and he couldn’t hide it. All he did was sniff and whimper and nod very faintly.

Gryphon let him go, and stood, someone opening the door for him. (Yeah, it did smell pretty ripe in here, and if you had a smell that could bother the dead, well then brother, you stank.) He almost expected Axel to get up and try and attack him while his back was turned, but he was too scared now to bother. It wasn’t the fact that he could attack him without moving; what scared him was he got under his skin somehow. He almost felt sorry for the pathetic sack of shit.

Maybe we should have killed him, Ruby said, once he got in the car.