“Jackson.”

Jackson jumped out of his skin, nearly losing his footing as the fierce whisper came out of the dark from behind him. He swung his light and his gun around and found Leo’s face to go with the familiarity of his voice … once he had another moment to recognize it. Hard to do that when his heart was pounding in his ears.

“You know, it’s not often a bad guy calls you by your first name,” Leo mused with his usual snarky attitude, pushing Jackson’s weapon aside. But Leo was also holding a weapon in his hand, the austere black of the Talon part of the reason he blended so well with the darkened room.

“Leo! What the hell are you doing here?” Jackson hissed at him. “And f**k you. I don’t care if the jackass coming out of the darkness knows my grandmother’s name. You’re lucky you didn’t get shot, you idiot.”

“As if you’d ever get the drop on me,” Leo said dryly. “Like I just did on you. Besides, I got here first.” He couldn’t have put more smirk in the sentence if he tried.

“All right, then, tell me what happened here,” Jackson gritted through his teeth, knowing now was not the time to play smart-ass tug-of-war with Leo.

“I have no idea. I just got here about five seconds before you,” Leo said with a shrug. “I heard you coming up behind me and thought you were trouble. But, clearly you’re about as harmless as a butterfly. I could swear I taught you to walk more quietly than that.”

“How did you find this place?” Jackson demanded.

“I told you, man, you ought to stick with me,” Leo said. “Now you got a bunch of cops tramping all over the place, intent on ruining the crime scene. How long do you think they’re going to stand there ringing that doorbell before they remember the electricity is out? I figure that’s about as long as we have to find any clues about what happened here before they muck up the works.”

Unfortunately, Jackson was on the verge of agreeing with him. For the first time in his life, he had begun to feel very restricted by the laws he had sworn to uphold. Sure, there had been frustrating moments here and there when they’d tested him, when he’d been tempted to fudge it a little, but this time, in this particular situation … the frustration was reaching an all-time high. But there was also a sense of satisfaction in knowing that going the legal route had gotten him there at almost the exact same time as Leo, whose methods had no doubt been far from legitimate.

But he also knew that the moment the cops took this place over, especially out-of-county cops, they were going to shut him out. They’d let him come this far because they didn’t think Docia was in any kind of danger, that he was just being an overprotective older brother. But everything around Jackson was screaming otherwise, and they were finally going to agree with him that something was very, very wrong. That agreement was going to be like a gate slamming down on him.

“What do you think this is?” Jackson asked, flashing a light over the dark, purplish stain near his feet.

“No idea. But the whole place smells weird. Like … lilacs. Lilacs are months out of season, and it’s not as though anyone’s been spraying a frigging air freshener to freshen up this mess.”

“Let’s go deeper into the house. The only thing making me happy right now is that there’s no body count. Not that I see, anyway.”

“I’ll lead,” Leo said, moving forward before Jackson could agree or disagree.

“Leo! You’re not a cop!” Jackson hissed, following him at the ready. “You can’t—”

“Shh!”

“Did you just shush me?” Jackson growled, his voice low and soft.

“Gentlemen, may I be of assistance?”

Both men jerked around, their flashlights streaking over the tall, lanky man who had somehow come up behind them. They could hear the resounding banging on the front door as the cops outside tried to gain invitation.

It was odd, but the man did not react to two strangers in his home holding guns on him. Not even the twitch of an eye. It was the first thing Jackson noticed about him.

“Police! Hands where I can see them,” he barked, stepping in front of Leo, blocking his friend’s line of sight.

“Douche,” Leo whispered at his back.

“Officers,” the man said, gently exposing both his palms, “I’m not armed. I was just coming to answer the ruckus at the door.”

Jackson sighed. “Leo, for Pete’s sake, let them in already.”

“Nope. I’m not supposed to be here, remember?”

Jackson decided then and there to kill his best friend. Maybe even twice.

“Sir, can you tell me what has happened here?” he barked at the stranger.

“First, let me introduce myself. I am Henry Kamin. This is my home. I welcome you readily, Officers, so there is no need for your weaponry.”

“Like we’re going to take your word for it,” Leo said dryly.

“Shh!”

“Did you just shush me?” Leo demanded of Jackson, who ignored him. Jackson reached out and pushed a hand down over Leo’s, forcing him to lower his weapon. He did so himself, but only slightly.

“You’ll forgive me, but this place looks like a war zone. I’m not certain it’s all that safe.”

“It wasn’t,” Kamin agreed with a nod and a grim set to his lips. “But it is now. In fact, I have a call out to the local police, which must be you. We’ve had an incident. Some sort of horrible gas explosion. We were able to manage the worst of it, as you see, and have evacuated most of the house except for myself and my personal guards.”

He held out a hand, and as if he’d conjured them, three very strong men appeared out of the darkness. Another oddity, Jackson stuffed into his mind, was that no one had thought to light so much as a candle or spark a flashlight. These men were walking around in the dark as if it were nothing to them.

“Stohn, Hagen … can you see about getting some lights?” Kamin directed, almost as though he had pulled the idea right out of Jackson’s head. “Forgive me, we’re still recovering and haven’t had a chance to touch all our bases yet.”

Jackson watched the ones called Stohn and Hagen move away, the enormous men seemingly more than capable of repelling the Axis forces single-handed. He did notice that Stohn was injured; his left arm looked terribly burned.

He should have offered ambulance services, called for more backup. But that ranked very low on his list of priorities.

“Mr. Kamin, I am looking for a girl. Her name is Docia Waverly. She was last seen in the company of the men driving that vehicle parked in front of your home.”

Jackson watched his aristocratic features very carefully, looking for the slightest flinch, for a shift in his eyes as he prepared to lie to him.

“Of course. Miss Waverly was here, but when all of this happened my friends decided it was safer to take her elsewhere.”

“Where elsewhere?” Jackson demanded. He was taken aback that the man would admit to her being there. It immediately made him complicit in any crimes that might be perpetrated against Docia. If anything happened to her, if she turned up hurt or … worse … they would come back to him and demand answers. As it was, Jackson wanted some of those answers now.

“What was she doing here? Where have they taken her? I want the names of these friends and the address of where she has gone.”

Kamin absorbed the demands for a moment and then drew a breath, still as calm and even-voiced as before.

“You must be Jackson,” he said. “Docia told us all about you. I thought she called you and told you she was safe with friends?”

“Seriously? Does this look safe to you, pal?” Leo barked, indicating the devastated dining room.

“Indeed. An unfortunate event of timing, I promise you. And she is safe. She is with my longtime friend Vincent Marzak. And believe me, as long as Vincent is with her, she is very, very safe.”

CHAPTER NINE

Docia opened her eyes slowly, the grit under her lids scraping at her eyeballs like sand in private places after playing in a powerful surf. She opened them and focused on whatever she could. It turned out to be a floor tile, something Spanish looking, if the bright primary reds and blues were anything to go by … and chipped all to hell. The whole floor had definitely seen better days.

“Are you kidding me? I’m still not dead?” she said aloud, her voice rasping just like her eyes. Honestly, she didn’t know what else to say. What else to think. The last thing she remembered was heading for the ground at breakneck speed, a surprisingly fallible armored creature hurtling to his death right along with her.

She tried to look up but realized she already was … well, in accordance with her body, anyway. It was just that her body wasn’t upright. Not in any normal sense of the word. She was suspended over the floor by her torso, her wrists lashed wide apart like a wingspan of her own, her legs bound tightly together. Looking ahead once again, she noticed there were little drops of blood dripping slowly with a pat-pat-pat sound, right about level with her nose. Now that she was aware of it, if she crossed her eyes a little, she could see the droplets originating off the tip of her nose.

So she was apparently hanging parallel above those worn-out tiles. All she needed was a hang glider to help it make some kind of sense. Bound as she was, she really wasn’t getting a good feeling about it, and the bloody nose wasn’t adding anything to the contrary. On the dubious plus side, she’d lost her pretty new wig along the way, so only half of her side vision was obscured by her hair.

“Hello?” She cleared the crackly crud from her throat and tried again. “Hello? I’m kinda hanging here! I mean, I appreciate not being left on what looks like a really cold and somewhat dirty floor, but … I sorta can’t breathe through my nose. And you have some kind of rope or something over one of my … um … girls … and she’s not very comfortable.… Hello?”

“Docia, hush.”

Well, she didn’t have to see the owner of that voice to recognize him … though he did sound a little off to her for some reason. She tried to twist to see Ram, but he was somewhere past the bottoms of her feet, and when she looked beyond her toes she saw absolutely nothing of him.

“Ram, did you do this to me? I’m really starting to not like you, mister. Ever since you showed up, things have just been going to hell in a handbasket for me!”

“Hmm,” was the dry reply.

“Hmm? What hmm?” she demanded. “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘hmm’? It’s true!”

“I don’t recall being anywhere near New York when you got yourself shoved off a bridge,” he said.

She opened her mouth to snap at him but shut it again almost instantly. He kind of had a point there.

“And I wasn’t there when you entered the Ether.” Silence seemed the best course of action.

“And I had nothing to do with that nice gentleman trying to gut you with a knife.”

“Vincent …” She sighed. “You must be Vincent.” Because Ram had never spoken with such sarcasm and irritability before, so it was the only conclusion she could come to. This was Ram’s other half … but somehow it was undiluted by the Blending. She hadn’t realized that was possible. She had assumed that the Ram/Vincent persona, once Blended, was just that. Blended. So how was it that she could clearly hear another man, another personality, using this familiar voice?

“Damn, skippy, I’m Vincent. And because of you our boy Ramses here has us in a hell of a lot of hot water.”

“Look, I never asked him to show up and be all … all everywhere in my life all of a sudden!”

“You’re his queen. That apparently means something to him. So, like it or not, he and I are here to stay. Provided we make it out of this mess alive.”

Definitely not Ram. She preferred Ram. He was far more comforting. But on the other hand, since she had nothing but time to kill, it seemed, she was overrun with curiosity about more than one thing. But for the time being, she’d start with just one.

“Vincent,” she said after actually taking the time to think about how to word something for the first time in her life, “why did you agree to share your body with a Bodywalker?”

There were several strong ticks of silence.

“Same reason you did. I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t done yet.”

“Oh.”

“And I wanted to kill my fucktard ex-brother-in-law very precisely and very, very slowly. I couldn’t exactly do that flying around in heaven. Or carousing with demons. Whichever way it was going to go.”

“Oh. Is that why you almost died? Your fucktard ex-brother-in-law?”