1. Lindsay Monroe

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N:** Written for the Allhallowsfic Challenge on Livejournal. SPOILERS for all seasons.

Once upon a time, Lindsay Monroe had loved Halloween. She'd loved the cool autumn air and the rustle of the wind through the short scrub grasses that grew on the homestead. When she was little and her imagination more fertile and less threatening, she'd thought it was ghosts' feet shifting through the dead grass. Then again, to the ghosts, maybe it hadn't been dead at all, but green and lush like the valleys of Goshen. Maybe everything was inside out and upside down when you were a ghost, a photo negative of the world left behind.

It had made so much sense as a child. She'd cut her teeth on Sesame Street, learned about opposites on the knees of Gordon and Maria and Luis, and even then, she'd known that dead was the opposite of alive. Live butterflies flitted from flower to flower and wore the colors of spring on their wings. Dead ones curled on their backs, underwent a final metamorphosis into a dull-winged moth the color of dead leaves. They curled like them, too, and made the same dry, brittle crunch when you stepped on them with the toe of your Easter shoe. Dead people went to Opposite World, and so, if the grass was brown and withered in this world, then it was green and vibrant in theirs. Simple as that.

Back then, she had found the idea of ghosts and Opposite World comforting. Ghosts were old friends that peeked from behind houses and between bare branches in invitation to a midnight dance, and Opposite World was where sorrow turned to sugar. Sick people stopped hurting and started dancing, and dead babies played with Jesus in a field of sheep. Opposite World was Heaven in blue jeans.

And Halloween was its dark carnival.

She'd gone trick-or-treating for the first time when she was four, dressed as a scarecrow and shepherded through the mall by her frazzled mother. Her four older brothers hadn't wanted her to come, hadn't wanted to be burdened with a wide-eyed toddler with stubby legs, but all complaints had abruptly ceased when Mama had threatened to whip the hide off of them. Lindsay had been so excited, kneeling on the backseat with the plastic handle of her pumpkin basket in one small fist. Most of her life had been spent on the horse ranch on the outskirts of Bozeman, where stars outnumbered streetlamps and neighbors were often five miles apart. Going to town was an adventure.

She didn't remember anymore what her brothers had dressed as-cowboys or zombies or Alice Cooper in Mama's ratty pantyhose-but that first invitation to the dance had been the start of a love affair she had thought would be forever. She'd been enthralled by the gaudy decorations and the noise and rush of people as they wandered the mall in chattering groups. Lanky vampires and gangly Elviras had passed her, and the air had been thick with warm sugar and fake blood, caramel apples and greasepaint, candy corn and rubber spiders. And the lights. The dim green of a witch's brew; the diseased, bleary red of a backlit, cardboard cemetery; the acid-trip, fish-bubble black of the "haunted house" cobbled together in the mall backlot.

It had been nothing but a cramped, ramshackle huddle of particleboard and cheap carnival gags, but to her child's mind, the hallway had stretched into yawning eternity, and the roof had reached upward into infinity. She had explored every warped nook and cranny with relish and delighted in the furtive, giddy rush of fear. She'd stayed until she'd been pushed out by a peristaltic wave of incoming children, and once expelled, she had wanted to go back, to return to Hill House, Jr. on the cold, lumpy blacktop. But her mother's haggard, chivvying impatience and her brothers' insatiable hunger for sweets had pulled her inexorably onward, and she had spent the rest of the night breaking the cardinal rule of childhood and accepting candy from strangers. By the end of the night, her plastic, grinning jack-o-lantern's empty guts had been stuffed with more Smarties, Tootsie Rolls, and candy necklaces than she could've eaten. She had gobbled what she could for a few days after, her brothers had taken what she was too weak or lazy to defend, and her mother had chucked the rotting remnants the second week in November.

That Halloween had been her first taste, but not her last. She'd celebrated Halloween with gusto long after her brothers had grown too big for "baby games". She had agonized over her costume every year from August to October, spent hours in the derelict thrift shop run by old Mrs. Cormier, who wore rouge like fever blisters and lipstick like a bloody gash. Mrs. Cormier had worn green-striped knee-highs that had reminded Lindsay of the Wicked Witch of the West, and the milky cataract in her right eye had made her look like the Crypt Keeper. Still, Lindsay had lost hours rummaging through the haphazard racks of secondhand clothes and trunks of old bric-a-brac. She had found primo costume material underneath the dust and cobwebs, and her junior and senior year of high school, she had worked in the shop in exchange for first pick of the incoming clothes.

When she was six, she'd dressed as Alice in Wonderland and learned to curtsey, and when she was eight, she'd dressed as Strawberry Shortcake and gone trick-or-treating with Christie Halloran, who'd gone as Blueberry Muffin. They had giggled and licked their lips clean of the flavored lip glosses that had complemented their costumes, and up ahead, lost in the throng of white-faced vampires and Rexall witches, their mothers had swapped domestic horror stories over cups of coffee made to foam like a mad scientist's unholy concoction. Mrs. Monroe had been tall and thin as a stalk of Nebraska wheat, while AnneMarie Halloran had been a waddling, squat duck of a woman with thin lips and red hair, and Strawberry and Blueberry had followed their progress by standing on tiptoe and looking for wheat and fire. Best friends forever, or at least for that Halloween.

She couldn't recall what or who she'd been when she was twelve, but she did remember that she'd been part of a quartet, a corner in the square of four who truly had been Best Friends Forever. Ashley and Candace and Christine and Lindsay. They had been burning brightly with the fire of puberty by then, sure that each was destined for greatness and happily ever after, but they had still been children, too, and they had linked arms and moved over the sidewalks of downtown Bozeman in a laughing human chain, unblemished and unbreakable.

Shopping bags had replaced the plastic pumpkins, but it hadn't been about candy by then, anyway. Candy was for little kids who could afford to lose their milk teeth to the sweet rot of sugar. It had been about the crowd and the sights and smells and the thrill of fear that had deepened into something else, something delicious and sharp that made her acutely aware of the ache in her budding breasts and the humid, sticky dampness that she sometimes found between her thighs, wet and glistening like an aborted secret. It had been about the forbidden territory of night, where ordinary objects and deeds acquired extraordinary curves without the harsh light of the sun to hold them to their places and toils. Everything was richer at night, deepened by the absence of light.

Even smells were stronger in the dark, more intense. She could still recall the acrid, burnt tire stink of the cigarette Candace had lit in the girls' bathroom their freshman year, how clear and sharp it had been over the stink of industrial hand soap and old urine, how sure she had been that they would be caught. Blood smelled stronger in the dark, too. She had learned that the Halloween she turned sixteen, when she had lost her virginity in a rick of hay at a barn party and blood had mixed with come on her exhausted, trembling thighs. It had been the first time she had learned that lesson, but certainly not the last. The job had reinforced it again and again in the intervening years, offered a refresher course each time she responded to a call in the middle of the night.

Darkness thinned the world, and it was thinnest of all on Halloween, when all artificial boundaries were swept aside and Opposite World bled into this one. Halloween was the night when she could shed her boring, Midwestern skin and step into another. She could cover her sturdy, unassuming body with spangles and bangles and teach it to dance to music it would never hear. She could exchange Lindsay Monroe for the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, or a Rockette. She had, too, and had preened in the full-length mirror in her bedroom and pressed her palms to the cool glass of mirror maybe.

Halloween had exposed her to the possibility of a world beyond Montana and its endless expanse of cattle ranches and wheat fields. It had whispered of Out There and bright lights and made her belly cramp with an erotic longing. Out There, she could reinvent herself, be someone other than Lindsay, youngest and only girl. Good little Lindsay, who never broke curfew, and who learned to rope and ride instead of how to cook and sew and starch church dresses. She loved Montana, but it had become a glass cage in the end, a box that had penned her in and displayed her to the critical, rapacious gazes of her neighbors.

Especially after…

_Especially after that night in the diner, when Daniel Katums came through the door with his shotgun and his blackened soul and sent your friends and a waitress to Opposite World. They looked you high and low after that, especially the parents who'd buried their girls in a square of Montana dirt. They wanted to know why you were left behind, why you got so lucky. They watched you at the memorial service, and at the wake; each came in turn to look you in the eye, search for the secret of your good fortune. You'd've quailed from the scrutiny if you could, because their tears burned like lye when they dripped onto your hands from their scalded cheeks and the ends of their noses. You never did, though, because you owed it. It was the price you paid for being "the lucky one."_

_The grieving parents weren't the only ones to gawk. Everyone did; you became Lindsay Monroe, newly-minted freak, the Only Survivor of the Kitty Korner Diner Massacre. Your picture was splashed across the front page of the paper for days afterward, your sunny, smiling yearbook picture a gross incongruity beneath the grainy photos of a bloodstained diner floor and three black-bagged bodies strapped to gurneys like sacks of feed. Whispers followed you like perfume, and pointing fingers jabbed your flesh like spears. _

_You can remember the precise moment when you realized that Montana was too small for you. You were in the Rexall, buying tampons. The cashier, Mrs. Dalton, had known you your whole life, had babysat for you and your brothers and changed your diapers once upon a time. She'd once babysat when you had chicken pox, and she'd distracted you from the miserable, insistent itch by showing you how to make macaroni art. You spent an afternoon building Noah's Ark with Kraft macaroni and making edible animals to march inside two by two. You'd kept that art long into middle school, until the glue relaxed its grip and spilled the noodles onto the floor like loose teeth._

_You'd bought tampons there before, too, regular as clockwork. But that day, you came up to the counter with the box in one hand and crumpled bills in the other, and it was like she'd seen a ghost. _

Lindsay. _Her hand traveled involuntarily her throat, as if she were afraid you were going to lunge over the counter and tear it out._How nice to see you, honey.

_But her mouth was lying. Her eyes told the truth. It wasn't nice to see you. It was a terrible nightmare from which she was trying to awaken. You were Nosferatu, the Living Dead Girl who'd dodged a hail of bullets, and she was watching the horror show unfold. She was mesmerized and horrified, and her fingers kept mistyping the price into the register, stutter-stepping over keys in a fit of digital epilepsy. _3.99. 23.42. .54. 505. _You remember that one best because it reminded you of SOS. SOS, please. Have a nice day._

_You tried to smile, tried to pretend you didn't see the revulsion on her face and smeared behind her lipstick like acting putty, but the world of Make-Believe had winked out of existence on the echoing roar of a shotgun blast, and your face was hard plastic on your skull. You could only stand there with dollar bills crumpled in your fist and wonder what Mrs. Dalton saw. It sure wasn't little Lindsay Monroe anymore, with her lopsided pigtails and faded, yellow sundress and the fear of old-time Jesus in her heart._

_You know what she saw, _interrupted a cold, pitiless voice nested deeply inside the base of her brain. _The same thing you saw when you closed your eyes. Candace, facedown on the table with her lungs in her plate like uncooked livers. The waitress, with half her face torn off and her arm reaching for the tray of shakes she'd been bringing when the world ended. Ashley, staring blindly at the Christmas lights while her brains dripped down the back of her chair like cold oatmeal. And Christine, who'd just been talking about the possibility of getting into UCLA in the fall. She was on the floor beside her chair. It looked like she was trying to do a push-up until you realized that the towel she'd been lying on was actually her intestines, wadded beneath the hole in her belly like dirty gauze. She was seeing the blood on the windows and the brains on the floor, and maybe she even saw the high velocity blood spatter that clung to the ceiling and fell onto your shoulders like raindrops as you stood in the middle of room and breathed in the stink of blood and gunpowder. _

_You didn't know what made her see it, and you still don't. Maybe it was the tampons and their intimate promise of blood, their frank reminder of life and bloodshed. Maybe she imagined you in your bathroom with blood on your hands and smeared on your thighs and wondered if it was all yours. Maybe she wondered if you were washing what was left of them down the drain to ease your survivor's conscience. You never knew, but you did know that when you passed her the bills crushed in your numb fingers, she'd accept them gingerly and separate them from the rest, stuff them into the back of the till until you were out of sight and she could dispose of them. You also knew that you could never come here again. Bozeman and Montana were suddenly too small by half. You took the tampons and left the store on stiff, ungainly legs, and then you lurched around the corner and vomited on your shoes._

_You vomited when they died, too. Bacon and eggs over easy and hashbrowns smothered and covered. They came up in a thick, chunky clot onto Christine's back._

Her guts look like sausages, _you thought, with your hands on your knees and your hair in your face. _A complete, balanced breakfast. _Then you hiccoughed and giggled and burst into hysterical tears. The next you remember, you were crouched behind the counter with the phone on your lap, begging the 911 operator to hurry. The phone was still cradled in your lap like a kitten when the first officer on the scene found you. You didn't want to let it go, and he had to pry your fingers from the handset._

_You vomited again in the back of the ambulance, a ratcheting burp that tasted of bile and the tart, liquid ozone of spent adrenaline. The paramedic handed you a sick bowl, and you sat on the bench in the back of the bus and heaved between wracking sobs and monosyllabic answers to the beef-necked deputy who squatted improbably on the running board. Your mouth tasted of bile and metal shavings, and all you could think was, _Sausages. Her insides looked like sausages.

_You vomited for a third time at the hospital, standing under the scalding, stinging spray of a hospital shower. Your clothes had been confiscated in the name of evidence, and your hair had been combed for trace, and no matter how hot the water was, you couldn't get warm. Your teeth chattered, and you wrapped your arms around yourself to conserve heat. But it slipped through your fingers like the water that sluiced and gurgled down the drain, and so you sank to the textured floor and watched the water carry the dirt away. Then you noticed bigger flecks, splashes of red and pink and grey. _

_A dim, detached part of you thought it was pretty, those grains and whorls of color in a river of grey silt. You reached out to stroke a particularly large clot as though it were a passing minnow, mouth pursed in concentration. It was thick and viscous underneath your probing finger, the smooth velvet of a horse's flank. You almost smiled._

_Then water dripped from the sodden ends of your hair onto your hunched shoulders, and you were back in the diner and standing beneath a drizzle of blood. Comprehension dawned. It was a piece of Candace, Christine, or Ashley beneath your finger, a souvenir from your girls' night out._

_You recoiled, breath caught in your throat, and scuttled to the far end of the stall. Your stomach spasmed, and then you were puking onto your breasts and belly in a warm, wet splatter. Each desperate breath brought a fresh wave of nausea and bile, and your tortured stomach throbbed. You collapsed onto your side and scrabbled weakly at the floor. On and on it went, until you were bringing up only sound, a guttural, lowing moan that reminded you of a steer struck by an inexpert slaughterman's hammer. _

Sausage and oatmeal, _you thought, and watched your hand clutch at raindrops._

_A nurse found you sprawled in the shower, pruned and covered with soap and vomit, and you spent the night under observation. The doctors sent you home the following afternoon with a prescription for Valium, and you went home and dreamed of nothing, swaddled in the comfort of drugs and your favorite pajamas. Cops came and asked you questions. Reporters came with questions, too, but they were turned away by your father and brothers, and eventually, someone else's daughter had the decency to die and tempt them from your door with fresher grief._

_Everything changed after that night. Opposite World came to stay in yours, and the ghosts were no longer the friendly Caspers of childhood, but bloody and ragged, with gaunt faces and accusatory fingers and black, bloodless holes where stomachs and brains should have been. You were Lindsay Monroe, the little stained-glass girl, and the townspeople shied from your taint. Only your family stayed close, and your mother drew close enough to smother you in the throttling protection afforded by her apron strings._

_Daniel Katums blew a hole in the veil between the worlds with his double-barreled shotgun, and it was never again as thick as it ought to have been. You saw things from the corner of your eye, shadows that flitted in corners and curled around the window eaves like smoke. Sometimes, the shadows passed outside your bedroom door and made the reassuring strip of light that filtered in from the hall stutter and dim. Sometimes, they looked like feet and lingered in front of your door as though someone were poised to knock. When that happened, you hid underneath the bed and pulled the coverlet over the gap between the bedframe and the floor so you wouldn't awaken to the scrutiny of pupilless eyes in the middle of the night._

_You tried to tell your parents about the shadows, but your father was a practical man, and he merely embraced you in a bearhug and whispered gruffly that the nightmares would stop soon enough, Little Bit. Your mother twittered and soothed you by making too much of your favorite food, and she stared at you whenever she thought you weren't looking, eyes bright and glassy and bruised with concern. She was waiting for her little stained-glass girl to crack and shatter._

_You couldn't tell the police or the psychiatrist for fear that they would think you were crazy and dismiss you as an unreliable witness, and your only teenage confidantes were buried under six feet of Montana earth and held together by mortician's putty and rotting skin. The other kids wanted nothing to do with The Girl Whose Friends Had Been Murdered; no one wanted to take their places beside you at the table, lest the Devil reappear for another sup._

_So, you had no choice but to hold your tongue and watch the shadows dance and slither over your world like fog. You tried to be as practical as your father and told yourself that shadows had no faces, no arms, no light-blocking feet that stood before your bedroom door. No clittering, bony fingers fisted to bang upon it. Opposite World and its inhabitants were just a figment of your imagination, one that had been warped and corrupted by the peppery smell of cordite. You tried because you wanted to believe it, and because you wanted to be a good girl again, but you never could. Because you saw too much even when your eyes were closed._

_You thought the shadows would fade over time and recede beyond the veil, but they didn't. Instead, they got stronger and more defined. You saw Ashley for the first time in January of '97, in the bathroom mirror. You'd just emerged from the shower and were combing conditioner into your hair. Your toothbrush was resting neatly on the edge of the sink, dutifully awaiting its nightly foray into your mouth. You were humming tunelessly, and you sometimes wonder if that isn't what summoned her, that thoughtless moment of happiness._

_You flipped your hair and reached for the medicine cabinet, and there she was, reflected in the fog-smoked glass, swaying and grinning. She was solid, and a rancid blue-white that made your belly crawl because it brought to mind the fetal pig you'd dissected in tenth-grade biology. Her teeth were black, and so were her lips, and her head-what was left of it-was a ruined, concave mass, a deflated football from which one filmy green eye peered with avid malice. She reached for you with one awful, long-nailed hand, and that's when you realized how close she was. Close enough to touch the nappy flannel of your pajamas and snag her fingers in it._

_Close enough to wrap those horrible, fleshless fingers around your neck and squeeze._

Fingernails keep growing after you're dead, _you thought with a heady, swooning horror, and whirled to face the monster._

_There was no one there. The towel rack held out its offering of dry towels, and the hamper regarded you blankly, its hinged mouth set in a thin line of disapproval. The only sounds were your panicked breathing and the intermittent, waspish buzz of the light fixture. The yellow wallpaper mottled to brown at the edges as it had always done, and the white trim warped where it met the damp, wooden floor. It was business as usual._

_You took a deep breath and told yourself to get a grip, and then you turned around and brushed your teeth. You brushed too hard, and the bristles came away pink, and when you leaned over the sink to spit, you saw the eye peering at you from the drain. It was milky and swamp-water green and burning with malice. The drain catch had rusted to nothing and been discarded years ago, and your bloody spit struck the eye dead center. The water gurgled and chuckled as it sluiced down the drain, and you swore you heard a voice from deep within the pipes. _

Hi, Lindsay.

_There was nothing for it but to scream then, and you screamed loud and long, loud enough to bring your father on the run. He shouldered the door off its hinges and stood in the threshold in his longjohns and undershirt. Your brother, Paul, was there, too, nineteen and reedy behind your father's hulking bulk._

What is it? What is it, Little Bit? _your father demanded, wild-eyed and thrumming with fight or flight._

N-nothing, Daddy, _you stammered, and hid your terror and confusion behind the damp curtain of your hair. _'M so tired, I think I started to fall asleep at the sink and scared myself.

_Your father sagged with relief and pulled you into a clumsy, one-armed embrace. _Scared the hell outta me, Little Bit, _he sighed, and planted a firm kiss in your hair. _Get some sleep. Go on, now.

Yes, Daddy, _you murmured, and slipped past him without looking at Paul, whose fear was dissolving into irritation at your fit of screaming memes. You went to bed, but sleep was a long time coming, even with the aid of a Valium chaser. You kept seeing faces in the window and in the shadows cast by the tree in the backyard._

_Once you saw your friends in the shadows, you couldn't unsee them. The feet outside your door became a nightly occurrence, and in February, when the snow was thick upon the ground, Ashley paid you another visit. Her arm did, anyway. You were building a snowman in the backyard, and all that was left to do was the head. You'd stooped to gather another armful of snow, and the twig you'd used for the snowman's left arm shot out and snagged the sleeve of your coat._

_Suddenly, it wasn't a twig anymore, but Ashley's clawing fingers, black-nailed and blue-white and cold as frozen steel._

Best friends forever, _whispered a mischievous, malevolent voice beside your ear, and you shrieked and staggered backward. You fell on your ass in the cold wet snow and stared into the face of the snowman, sure that his coal button eyes would be green. But they were only coal, and Frosty grinned at you in idiotic glee, twiggy arms oustretched._

Hi, Lindsay, _it seemed to say. _Want to be friends?

_It was a fair question, given that you'd spent the morning and part of the afternoon building him from the ground up, but you wanted nothing to do with him. You lurched to your feet, brushed the snow from your frozen, wet ass, and punted Frosty square in the invisible jimmy. He crumpled as any man would, but that empty grin never faltered. He was as chipper as you please. He was still smiling his empty, sunny smile when you smashed in his face with the heel of your boot. _I love you, Lindsay. Let's be friends.

_You kicked and stomped until there was no trace of him, until even the coal was so much black dust among the snow. You spread his remains like salt over unhallowed ground, and then you fled into the house. Your mother mistook the color in your cheeks for happiness, and she was so buoyed by the delusion that you let her go on believing it. You choked down half a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup, and then you sought the refuge of your bed. It was safe there, warm and snug, and as long as the door was locked, the blinds were pulled, and you faced the window, you could sleep._

_You saw your friends often after that, as often as you blinked, but you never said a word because your folks wanted things to go back to normal, and because you didn't want to lose your mind on top of your friends and your innocence. You saw them in corners and mirrors and crouching in the corners of the stalls when you mucked the horses. _

_You saw Christine during a ride on the back forty. She was knee-deep in the icy water of a creek, intestines floating on the gunmetal-grey water like a lily of mourning. She smiled, and her teeth were the dingy grey of a ruined city, not unlike the buildings that would one day hem you in like prison bars. Her eyes were sunken and clouded, and when her throat worked, all that emerged was black blood and grey creek water._

_She beckoned with her dead finger. _Come with me, Linds. It's where you belong

_You didn't come. You ran like hell, ran all the way to the University of Washington. You thought it would be better there, and for a while it was. There was orientation and the heady rush of new experience. You buried yourself in new friends and classes and reveled in the wonders of life in the big city, where the lights were always on and ever bright. The dorms were never dark. There was the ever-present glow of the emergency lights and the periodic spark of a desk lamp from beneath the doors. The shadows had nowhere to hide._

_By the first week of October, you thought you were going to make it. You'd left your friends behind in Montana, and they were no longer waiting for you in closets and bathroom mirrors, no longer rising out of the shower steam with their clutching hands and rotting faces. Even the nightmares had become less frequent and less intense. You'd shed them like old skin, and you were free to redefine yourself. It was exhilarating and glorious, and you spread your wings and let them touch the sun. You plastered your side of the dorm room with pictures of New York and L.A., Boston and Chicago, and dreamed of the brightest lights in the biggest cities._

_And then you got invited to the Phi Kappa Tau sorority Halloween party. You should've known better; you knew that the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest on that night, and that Daniel Katums had made it thinner still with his gun and his malice, but you wanted to remember the lightness of merriment, and besides, Opposite World was four hundred miles in your rearview mirror._

_You dressed as Dorothy from _The Wizard of Oz, _and for a while, the innocent magic of Halloween returned. The only ghosts you saw were white-sheeted frat boys who drifted at midnight and went bump in the night at two in the morning. Your suitemate was the queen of Sheba, and her boyfriend, Todd, was a tiger in orange and black greasepaint. You danced and drank spiked punch, and when a frat boy dressed as a cop molded his hands over your gyrating hips and mouthed your neck, you let him. Thirty minutes later, his lips were on your cunt in the back bedroom. He reeked of sweat and rum, and you left your mark on his shoulders and the curve of his ass. You never knew his name, and it was wicked and deliciously nasty and so fucking good._

_You left him passed out on the sheetless mattress, sounding his successful tapping of you ass with sonorous snores that heralded the sleep of the well and truly bombed. You went bobbing for apples after that, on your knees over a battered tin tub with your ruby slippers sticking from beneath the hem of your sensible, blue dress. _

Here I go for the poisoned apple, _you mused as you watched the apples bob in the water, and smiled at the sticky, satisfied ache between your legs. _I'm such a bad little farmgirl.

_You'd braided your hair in a bid for authenticity, and the plaits sank into the cold water like heavy fishing lures as you lowered your face into the tub. Apples grazed your cheeks, minnows and silt against your rapidly numbing skin. You opened your mouth and tasted iron and Washington Reds, and the water was a knife on your tongue. You stretched and lunged for the tender, ripe bellies of the fruit, and you were exhilarated by the steadily increasing pressure inside your chest. Sex and death on Halloween night. God, it was good to be alive._

_Strands of hair floated into your field of vision, and you thought one of your plaits had come undone. You shook your head to clear it, but it only drifted more thickly still, a shoal of blackfish in a tiny pond. Another more vigorous shake, and you saw a flash of white, fish belly and defleshed fingers. It wasn't either of those things, please God that it had been. You froze, and terror overrode sense. You opened your mouth to scream, and water flooded your gullet._

_Candace grinned at you, and her hair framed her white, puffy face in a writhing tangle of Medusa coils. Her chest wound was a sucking, black void. Tattered remnants of withered lung fluttered inside the hole like kelp, and the exploded sac of her heart hung like a dead tubeworm. Dead like everything else. She held out her hand, and bits of sloughed flesh marked its passage through the water and landed on the sedately bobbing apples like sea lice. The slender crescents of her fingernails squirmed like maggots, and your drowning gorge rose in mutiny._

Come with me, Lindsay, _she warbled. _I've been waiting for you for a long time. We all have.

_You vomited your guts like a squid in flight and came up screaming. Water sloshed over the side of the tub as you recoiled and scuttled away, vomit thick and sour in your mouth. The crowd, which had been happily goading you in the chase for the forbidden fruit, was silent and wary, huddled in twos and threes around the ruined tub. The girls brushed their hair behind their ears with nervous fingers and chewed their lower lips in stifled pity. They guys looked at you askance if they looked at all, and their averted eyes registered gratitude that they hadn't been the ones to lay you down on a lumpy, backroom mattress. No one stepped forward to help, and you were relieved beneath your fear and shame. You stammered a thick-tongued excuse about having one too many beers and took your leave, wet hair plastered to your scalp. No one protested your departure, least of all the mortified suitemates who'd brought you in the first place, and you returned, alone, to your dorm room, where you quailed and shivered beneath a mound of blankets._

_The story of your Halloween meltdown made the campus rounds, and invitations to parties dried up. Your reinvention had been a success, but not in the manner you'd hoped. You weren't the hayseed Montana farmgirl anymore, but neither were you the popular social butterfly you'd imagined while you thumbed through magazines with glossy pictures of exotic places like New York. You were the weird girl who screamed at invisible monsters and barfed into the tub of apples like a naïve frosh._

_You didn't mind the solitude. Better to be left alone than to be marked as the dupe by prettier girls with lye and petty hatred in their veins. You couldn't level their trust-fund slanted playing field, but you could beat them on yours, and you did. While they wasted their beauty on one-night stands and empty-headed dreams of glamour, you studied your way to the Dean's list and a double major in Criminology and Biochemistry and turned your tassel with honors. Their futures were only as bright as the fading star of their youth, but yours was fixed in the bedrock of science._

_You sent out applications to all the major police departments-New York, L.A., Boston, Miami, Philadelphia-but nobody was interested in a petite rube with no real-world experience, so you tucked tail and returned to Bozeman, where they were in desperate need of new blood to replace old cowboys who either went out with their boots on or died in the saddle. You spent three years riding shotgun with a morose, overweight deputy and two years as a CSI, swabbing blood from the floor and scooping brains from bowls of congealed oatmeal, and every one of those five years, you resubmitted your resume to the metropolitan police departments in the hopes of escaping your lifelong fetches. You prayed for New York, of course, but you'd have taken Philly in a trice._

_Then Mac Taylor called in late summer 2005, and six weeks later, you touched down in JFK. New York, New York, and surely you looked like every idiot tourist to ever jam the city streets, standing in the middle of the seething concourse with your bags over your shoulders and crowded timorously at your feet while you gaped. You were an easy mark for a pickpocket, slack-jawed and starry-eyed while the city jostled around you and brushed past with hard, impatient shoulders. Hick in the city, with her head full of dreams and unreasoning hope. You could get lost here. If you could disappear anywhere, surely it would be here, in this city of teeming millions and eternal light._

_You buried yourself in the city and its myriad cultures and immersed yourself in the job. You did your best to fit in, to be part of the crowd because crowds had no faces, no names. No past. Your fetches couldn't come for you if they couldn't see you. You rented a shabby apartment and went to the opera and told yourself that it was safe now. You were hidden in a forest of stone._

_And you were safe, for a while. That first Halloween passed without incident, without the merest rustle of curtain. You sat up all night and waited for the feet beneath the door and the wan faces in the window, but the light spilling beneath your bedroom door never dimmed, and the pages of a windblown, old newspaper were the only visitors to your window. When dawn bled into the sky and the ghosts returned to their crypts for another year of slumber, you thought the nightmare was finally over. You let out a ragged breath and danced a whirling jig on the bedroom rug, arms outstretched and teeth exposed in a delirious smile, the last victim of St. Vitus' Fever. New York was your haven, and the bogeys of Opposite World had no power here. Free at last._

_Except it wasn't, they did, and you weren't. They found you. It just took them a while, that's all._

They had found her on the day Flack had been injured in a bomb blast, had made their grand reappearance while she had hovered awkwardly outside his hospital room and gazed through the glass wall at his still, pale body. Christine had blinked into existence at his bedside, loops of intestine trailing her legs like garters. She had reached out a hand and rested it on Flack's forehead in a gentle caress, and then she had turned her head and grinned at Lindsay with blackened, pointed teeth.

_If I can't have you, I guess I'll have to take him instead, _she had whispered, blood and sewer mud and moldering vocal cords. Her fingers had brushed the hair from his forehead in an obscene, greedy parody of a lover's intimacy, and Lindsay had understood with dull, nauseated clarity that she meant it. If she had stayed in the warm, shifting knot of family that held vigil behind the wall, Flack would have died, victim of an inexplicable heart attack or pulmonary embolism. So she had fled, had pleaded wooziness and exhaustion from her inconsequential scrape and begged Danny to take her home. She had left the hospital and its sterile sodium lights and dragged Christine into the darkness with her.

Danny had not understood her pathological need for escape, and he had never forgiven her for impressing him into service as her knight in shining armor. Oh, he said he did, murmured his empty assurances into her ear when they lay tangled in the sheets, but he was a terrible liar, betrayed by the stiffness of his body and the restlessness of his gaze. Forgiveness granted under cover of darkness was gone by daylight and the harsh light of the labs. Danny's eyes told more truth than his mouth ever did, and they were distant and guilty and followed Flack's every ginger, white-faced step.

"I shoulda been there," he had said more than once, low and bitter, and underneath that confession was an even dirtier one: _You're the reason I wasn't._

And dirty as it was, it was just as true.

She had thought Danny could protect her; he was brash and full of swagger and had the bald balls to run down suspects without batting an eyelash. He was Bronx mouth and Hell's Kitchen sex, rough and dirty and sharp at the edges, and he apologized for none of it. He was New York, take it or leave it, and the very taste of him was gritty, cigarettes and cinnamon and sauerkraut.

But Danny was full of cracks beneath all that bravado, hairline fractures that went as deep as the bone. He walked around bone on bone, and sometimes, when he crouched at a scene to collect blood swabs, she heard them slide, rattle, and pop beneath the skin. He was the Tin Man to her Dorothy, and he lived in a place darker than Oz by far, a place that called itself kin to Opposite World. Sometimes, she woke in the night and tasted him on her lips, and shuddered beneath the sheets, suddenly aware of how close she was to true darkness.

To be fair to Danny, she doubted any of them could protect her. Not Stella, with her no-nonsense mettle and John Rambo kinship with a gun, and not Mac who thought Semper Fi was a Biblical commandment. Certainly not Flack, though he would count it his duty to try, and not Hawkes, who had a scientist's mind and a surgeon's hands. It had been selfish and naïve to ask of them an impossible task, but then, those who knew her best, her three faithful fetches, would have said that was par for the course. Lindsay Monroe, always taking more than she deserved.

She had hoped to outrun them, to bury them with time and distance, but she had known in her heart that it was useless. You could never outrun what belonged to you, and the dead were infinitely patient. After all, they had nothing but time, and what was distance in a world without roads? They had been looking for her for ten years, pursuing her over rutted, dirt roads and subway tunnels and the yawning expanse of bridges, and now the chase was almost over. Underneath the ferocious, instinctive terror was a shameful relief. She was tired of running.

Stella squatted a few feet away, head bowed over the rubber-masked corpse sprawled indecorously on the pavement. Blood pooled beneath his head and back. It was red darkening to brown, and though she knew it was real-the smell of iron hung in the air like ozone after a lightning strike-Lindsay thought it looked fake in the beam of Stella's flashlight.

_Turn him over, and he'd look like Christine, _she mused. _Is that her latest and greatest calling card?_

"No shell casings," Stella murmured. "Stabbing, maybe?" She shone the beam over the rubber mask. "No hole in the mask, though. And who stabs somebody in the head?"

"Someone out of control," Lindsay offered, and joined her beside the body. Behind her, Flack directed the milling uniforms assigned to canvassing and crowd control, and the crime scene tape rattled like rustling leaves.

Stella shook her head. "No. See, there's a stab wound here-," she pointed her beam to the ragged hole in the vic's t-shirt, "-but no corresponding hole in the mask. Either our killer stabbed the vic in the back of the head first and rolled him over to finish the job, or the blood underneath the head has a different cause."

"You're thinking multiple assailants?"

"Only one way to find out." Stella reached for the thin, rubber seam of the mask.

Lindsay mimicked her motion. "A bit like Scooby-Doo," she observed, and Stella snorted in wry amusement.

No stab wounds on either side of the head, but the left side was lumpy with shattered bone and so perversely concave that Lindsay's eyes hurt to see it.

_Like that scene in _The Haunting_ where the bedroom door bulges inward in defiance of logic. _

"Ouch. Looks like our perp treated himself to some mindless violence for Halloween."

Lindsay looked over her shoulder to see Flack looming over them, notebook in one hand and the other hand on his hip as he surveyed the carnage. His mouth quirked in a dourly amused grimace, and his eyes were bright and alert inside his face as he watched Stella photograph the mess. The ambient red light from the patrol cars parked beyond the tape gave his close-cropped, brown hair an ethereal, silver sheen that reminded her of a ghost.

_Maybe he's been dead all this time. Maybe I wasn't fast enough, and Christine killed him, smothered him with her cold hand or strangled him with the festering umbilicus of her intestines. He's been dead since last May, but he never left. He stayed to carry out his sworn duty and look out for his Nerd Squad. He's Casper with a badge and a five-o'clock shadow._

Then Flack shifted, and he was just cop, a heavy, protective presence at her exposed back. His badge gleamed in the dim light. "You thinkin' multiple doers?" he asked.

"Can't get anything past you, Flack," Stella responded amiably, and rose from her crouch.

Flack snorted and shook his head. "Rumor has it that I can walk and chew gum at the same time."

"Amazing."

"Yeah? Get this." Flack leaned toward Stella and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "I even remember to put the seat down when I'm done."

"That's too much information, Detective," Stella said, but she was smiling, and her eyes sparkled with secretive amusement.

"I thought you'd appreciate thoroughness," he retorted, and grinned. Then, before Stella could rob him of his victory, "I'm gonna round up some of the looky-lous and get their statements, but I wouldn't count on much. Most of 'em are probably in the bag or high on "sugar." He rolled his eyes and loped toward a crowd of onlookers who lingered beside his squad car.

It was comforting, the unthinking bonhomie between Stella and Flack, and she wondered how much longer she had to enjoy it. Not long, she suspected. The shadows had begun to crouch at the foot of the bed she shared with Danny, hunched, arachnid forms that scuttled just beyond her field of vision. Last night, she had awakened from a dream to hear the sibilant, clandestine tread of bare feet on thick carpet, and when she had peered into the darkness, she had seen a flash of white-teeth or fingertips-at the edge of the coverlet, hovering in the blacklight darkness like a UFO. Then, _blink. _Gone. And somewhere behind her ear, near the supple, soft nautilus that Danny liked to kiss, a laugh, fingers drawn lightly over yellow, dusty piano keys. _Ready or not, here I come._

They processed until two in the morning, and though Lindsay said nothing, she saw flickers of movement outside the crime scene tap, areas of deeper darkness without physical cause. Once, she smelled Ashley's perfume, jasmine and oleander. Now and then, she stole sidelong glances at Stella to see if she noticed the blackness beyond night that lived outside the tape, but Stella had eyes only for the task at hand. The veil rested comfortably over her eyes as she studied the scene for the last time.

The body made the trip to the morgue in the sleek, black hearse of the coroner's van, and Stella followed in its wake in the Tahoe, Death's vassal in four-wheel drive. Lindsay sat in the passenger seat and pretended to notice neither the strained silence from the driver's seat nor the leering, distorted faces in the tinted window. She wished Stella would turn on the music, but she knew better than to ask. She had spent all her good graces during the Cole Rowen case, when she had still hoped to ignore truth by ignoring the past. So they drove in silence. It was cold in the car, colder than it should have been, and her breath danced past her lips on the cusp of visibility.

A pebble bounced of the road and struck the window with the sudden, insistent _plick_ of a tapping finger, and she recoiled.

Stella never took her eyes from the road. "You okay, Lindsay?"

"Hm? Yeah. Just tired, and my mind is playing tricks on me." _Peekaboo, and I see you._

She was exhausted by the time they returned to the lab, and when Flack offered her a ride home, she almost accepted. The silence of his car would be civil if not friendly, and the interior would not reek of piss and stale sweat like the subway. Maybe he would even put in an audiobook, and she could listen to the sane, recorded voices of real people instead of the malevolent, triumphant whispers of the dead but never departed inside her head.

In the end, she refused. He looked as tired as she felt, dark, bruised circles underneath his red, strained eyes, and in the subterranean basement of her mind, she was reliving the night of his bombing, when Christine had promised to take him if she could not have her. Maybe Christine had gotten greedy after her long pursuit. Maybe one was no longer good enough, and she would take Lindsay and whoever was with her when her hand groped from beyond the veil. Flack was a decent guy who deserved to have a wife and kids and grow old surrounded by lazy dogs and rambunctious grandchildren, not to be another casualty of her cowardice. It was a risk she could not take, and so she left him in the foyer of the precinct and let the darkness swallow her whole.

She trudged to the subway station, sure that every step would be her last, but she descended into the watery, underworld light without incident and shuffled to the platform. The only other occupant was a wino dressed in a filthy rain slicker. He reeked of booze and garbage and smiled at her with a gummy, toothless mouth, but she was grateful for the company. The only thing worse than dying was dying alone.

From down the tunnel came the throaty, grinding rumble of the train, and a wildly hopeful voice in her heart murmured that all was not lost, that maybe she could outrun her fetches one more time. Then the cold from the SUV returned, a serrated knife against her breastbone and a wet cloth over her mouth, and she knew. No more running, no more dodging bullets meant for her. No more sandcastles built on hope and hubris. It was the witching hour on Halloween night, and there was no more road beneath her feet.

The train pulled into view and lurched to a halt, and the doors opened with a pneumatic wheeze.

"Not long now," croaked the wino in a brittle, phlegmatic voice, and smiled. His gums were blackened and bleeding.

"No," she agreed quietly, and stepped onto the waiting train, braced for the curl of a frozen, white-blue hand around her ankle.


	2. Danny Messer

Danny had never liked Halloween when he was a kid. Even back then, he'd known it was a gyp, all plastic and rubber faces and candy that tasted like those wax lips no matter what the wrapper said it was. His ma had tried to dress him up a few times when he was still in short pants, and he'd bet a paycheck that she still had the Kodaks of Great Pumpkin Danny and Casper Danny in an album tucked somewhere far out of his father's drunken reach, but he'd been a pain in the ass even then, fussed and twisted in her arms and tugged fretfully at the sheet until she'd given up and set him on his feet to run wild on the living room furniture. At least until Pop grunted and raised his rough, nicotine-yellowed hand in a gesture Danny had understood perfectly. _Shut up, or I'll instruct you in the joys of silence._

It was hard to fuss when you couldn't open your mouth.

His ma had taken him trick-or-treating once, when he was five. People thought she was a wallflower because she hardly spoke, but there was an iron spine beneath her apron strings, one grown harder by the years she spent with Louis Messer, Sr., and when she set her feet, there was no moving her. So, she'd dressed him up in a cheap Batman costume, thrust a plastic pumpkin into his reluctant fist, and taken his picture while he stood on a kitchen chair like a miniature convict, sullen and pooch-lipped. He remembered the camera, a bulky Brownie with the heft of a brick and a lens that had jutted from the camera face like an impudent cock. She probably still had that picture, too, hidden in a shoebox and buried beneath half-empty compacts and thinning brushes. After twenty-six years, it was likely surrendering the fragment of spirit it had stolen to create the memory, milky and liver-spotted by photographic necrosis.

He hadn't wanted to go that night. He'd wanted to watch _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ and _It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown_, stretched on the living room rug with his one-eyed teddy bear named Patch and a bottle of Yoohoo, but his mother had her own means of persuasion. A flicker of disappointment in her brown eyes cut more deeply than any harsh word or careless blow from Pop, and when her pleas had begun to waver and crack with desperate unhappiness, he'd decided that a bag full of candy from strangers was just what he'd wanted. So, he'd left the Yoohoo in the refrigerator and turned off the television set with a pang of regret at the thought that Snoopy would be waiting for him, trapped inside his father's idiot box and searching for his familiar, friendly face.

"Mama, what 'bout Snoopy?" he'd asked as his mother had ruined the effect of his Batman costume with a muffler and a pair of mittens. "Won't he miss me?"

Mama had squatted to adjust his muffler, and she had kissed the bridge of his nose with her dry mother lips. "Snoopy'll be fine, honey. He'd want you to have fun. You want to have fun, don't you?"

He'd been having fun with the prospect of a Yoohoo and a night with Snoopy, but she was his mama, and her face was anxious and too white, with hectic patches of color in her cheeks. So he'd nodded and said that he wanted to go out. She'd flashed him an overbright, hysterical smile and told him that he was her good boy, and he really had felt like Batman in his fifteen-dollar costume, masked hero to tired mamas everywhere. Only later, when he was snuggled beneath his down blankets would it occur to him that he'd lied to her. The sticky film of sweets had been guilt on his teeth, and he'd folded his hands and prayed for God's forgiveness. Later still-years and murders later, he'd realized that lying wasn't always a sin. Sometimes, it was necessity; sometimes it was mercy.

_Like the phone call you made the night Sonny Sassone scrambled my brains for me and left me bleedin' in a heap out front of the body shop where I was poundin' out dents in station wagons with a ten-pound mallet, _Louie said, voice thick with nicotine and yellow phlegm and thick, black blood from his ruptured larynx._ You didn't tell her how bad off I was or how I got that way. Especially not that last part, right, short pants? Wouldn't want her to know that her precious Danny was the reason her prodigal son was suckin' wind through a plastic tube. She might not look at you like you were Christ in a labcoat. You were the only straight man in her life, the only one whose money was as clean as his conscience, and you didn't want to give that up. You told yourself that it was for her good, a merciful, necessary lie of omission, and maybe it was, a little. You're not a complete prick, short pants, but you're enough of one that it mattered what she'd think of you._

_So you didn't tell her that my head got caved in on your account, and you damn sure didn't tell her how it sounded when Sonny parted my hair with my Kentucky namesake, an overripe pumpkin shatterin' on grease-stained concrete. There are some things a mother never needs to know. If you've learned anything on this job, it's that. Honesty isn't always the best policy, and sometimes lies are kinder. You just told her that I'd been attacked on the street by an unknown thug. It was as close to the truth as you could come without losin' your fuckin' mind and your status as favorite son._

_And since it's just the two of us talkin', you can admit that it was easier to lie to her than you care to admit. The falsehood rolled like oil offa your tongue, same as with the condolences you offer to the poor bastards who stand on the sidewalk in the middle of winter and watch you tweeze pieces of their broken lives off the bloody, frozen pavement. Just part of your job description and another tool in your stacked field kit. It was so smooth that you almost convinced yourself._

_How many boldfaced lies have you told in pursuit of the truth, your mouth full of sugar and lye, guilt like Halloween candy on your teeth and tongue? Hundreds? Thousands, maybe, if you count the ones you've told suspects and assorted dirtbags. _Your daughter didn't suffer. Your son never felt a thing. We've got your prints on a condom in her bathroom trash. Your buddy's in the next room, cuttin' a deal with the D.A. to save himself from the needle, so you better start talkin', asshole. _Each told for its own purpose-mercy, or leverage. And lies of omission, of course._

_Occasionally, they're weapons, lies like that, half-truths designed to trip up schemin' shitbags, but mostly, they're shields, acts of mercy meant to blunt the ugly horror of loss. You don't tell the parents of a murdered thirteen-year-old girl that she was raped _after _she was dead. You don't tell an eighty-six-year-old man that the mugger didn't split his wife's skull because his arthritis-swollen fingers were too slow getting off that fancy watch. You don't tell the five-year-old who opened the door to the delivery man that his ma might still be breathin' if he hadn't opened the door. And you sure as fuck don't tell ma that you hear my skull crackin' like a china plate beneath the fat barrel of that bat._

_You consider it your penance. You couldn't stop the crime and can't raise the dead, but you can be the secret keeper, guardian of unpleasant truths. You'll swallow the worst of the darkness so tear-filled eyes can make the most of broken, warped light. If you've gotta lie to make it easier for heartbroken mothers and fathers and lost lovers to go on, then so be it. It's the least you can do and part of the duty that came with your badge and gun. You haven't been ashamed of lies in a long time. In fact, it's gotten so you don't know what you'd do without 'em._

But that was now, years into a life stretch of adulthood and jaundiced cynicism. Back then, he'd been five, and the world had been black and white. Good boys didn't lie to their mamas. Bad boys did and went to Hell, far away from their mamas and everything that was good forever and ever. So he'd folded his hands, his fingers so tightly interlaced that his knuckles had ached, and prayed. He'd run through his limited repertoire of prayer-God is Great, God is Good, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, and, of course, Our Father, Who's Art in Heaven-and been laboring through Hail Marys when Louie had banged on the thin wall between their rooms and hissed at him to let God get some sleep, goddammit. Danny'd thought to ask Louie how come God would want to damn His own sleep, but he'd sounded angry-Louie, not God-so Danny had wisely kept his mouth shut and pondered the question of when God had time to sleep since He had to set the sun and hang the stars all over the world. He'd fallen asleep to that thought and awakened to the smell of his mother's pancakes, and for a moment, he'd thought he was in Heaven.

He hadn't wanted to lie. He'd wanted to like Halloween to participate in the revelry with the same gusto that Louie had. He'd wanted to like the sweet rot of candy and pretend to be someone more exciting than little Danny Messer, who loved his mama and his ball glove and the wavery, underwater glow of the Mets on the two-ton television that dominated the living room. But he couldn't because he had known what was underneath the rubber masks and shredded bedsheets. Werewolves with yellow eyes and sharp teeth.

Louie had told him when he-Danny-was four, seated on the foot of Danny's bed with a corner of the blanket bunched in his raw-knuckled hand. Danny had been scratching and sniveling his way through the chicken pox, and Louie had drifted in unexpectedly and flopped gracelessly onto the sunken edge of the secondhand mattress.

"Heya, Louie," Danny had chirped. "You wanna play checkers or spades?"

Louie had shaken his head. "Naw, short pants. I ain't in the mood for games today. 'Sides, I might catch your baby cooties."

"I ain't a baby!" Danny had protested, wounded. "And they ain't cooties. They're chicken pox. Cooties are for girls."

"Whatever, short pants."

The Benadryl and cortisone Mama had given him to help with the needling itch of the pox had made him woozy, but something in Louie's voice had pierced the comforting medicinal haze and made him sit up in the bed, propped haphazardly against sagging pillows yellowed with years of sweat. Louie's voice had begun to change that summer, first thinning until it broke and then deepening. He had begun to sound like Pop. But that day, as afternoon had slipped into evening and the smell of burning newspapers had drifted to his window from the alleys below, he had sounded small and young, as young as Danny and just as miserable.

"What's the matter, Louie?" The itch of his pox had been temporarily smothered by cold unease. He'd been tempted to touch him, but he hadn't quite dared. Louie was eleven going on twelve, too old to be babied, he said.

"Nothin', Danny." But Louie had wiped his nose with the back of his hand and curled more deeply in on himself, and Danny had known he was crying.

Panic had fluttered in his gut, mingled with the tomato soup Mama had made for him and soured it. Louie never cried, not even that time he'd broken his arm trying to surf a stair railing on a bet from Mikey Bertuzzi.

"Why you cryin', Lou? What's the matter?"

Louie had rounded on him, twisted like a striking snake. "Who said I was cryin', you little pantywaste, huh?" he'd snarled. "You see me cryin?"

No, but he had seen Louie's blotchy face and the fresh shiner that had decorated his lefty eye. It had been swollen and livid, an ugly tattoo that had made him look like Bluto after a fight with Popeye. The black eye had been hilarious on Bluto as he sprawled amid broken crates and dented cans of spinach, but on Louie it was terrifying. It was too dark, too full of blood. If he looked closely, he could see burst blood vessels crawling beneath Louie's puffy skin, the slender legs of poisonous spiders. The sight had been so startling and disturbing that he'd forgotten to be afraid of Louie's mouth.

"What happened?" Danny had suddenly felt like crying, like calling for Mama to come and stroke his forehead and pillow him against her chest while lullabies rumbled inside it. Maybe he was a big baby like Louie said. Tears had filled his eyes, and his lips had trembled with an unspoken cry of _Mama._ He'd taken a hitching breath and retreated into the flagging safety of his tired pillows, sure that Louie would give him two for sniveling.

But when Louie's hand did move, it had only been to gingerly brush the lank strands of his bangs from his forehead. "Don' worry 'bout it, short pants," he'd said, and offered an uneven smile with teeth that had already borne traces of nicotine.

But Danny had worried about it. It was in his nature, so much so that Mama had called him Auntie Fret when he was little and warned him against wearing a groove in the rug. When he'd confessed to her what he wanted to be fifteen years later, hands curled around a cup of coffee to still their nervous twitching, she hadn't been surprised. She'd just offered him a rueful smile of her own over the rim of her cup and smoothed nonexistent bangs from his forehead.

"Of course you do, my Danny boy," she'd said fondly. "It's what you've always wanted."

It was funny, the connections the mind made when you just let it run. He'd been thinking of Halloween and werewolves and the story Louie had told him one late afternoon when he'd had the chicken pox, and somehow, he'd stumbled onto a mental switchback that had led him to the day he'd told his mother that he'd wanted to be a cop. He supposed it was the gesture that had bound those moments and linked those paths forever in his mind, that careless, gentle sweep of fingertips that had smoothed hair into place. The fingertips had been different, of course, but the gesture had been the same, mute testimony to a shared history.

Louie's fingertips had been ragged that day, grimy-nailed and chewed to the quick. He'd nibbled the harassed skin of his thumb before he'd said, "A werewolf did it."

He'd regarded his brother in confused silence, sure that Louie was putting him on, like he had when he'd told him that the Easter Bunny was really their Uncle Phil, who turned into a rabbit one night a year and went around crapping eggs on people's lawns and in their windowboxes, but Louie had been solemn and thin-lipped, and hunched forward the way he always got when he wanted to tell the truth. The truth always had to be whispered, Louie said, because it was a secret.

"A werewolf?" Danny had repeated uncertainly, and absently scratched his neck. Mama had warned him not to, but Mama hadn't itched.

"Yeah," Louie had said, eyes dark and earnest, and that's when Danny had known he was telling the truth. There had been no sly joke in his voice, no telltale, beckoning lilt of the worm at the end of the hook.

"But they're just made up," Danny had ventured. "Just stories."

"Naw, they ain't, short pants. They're real. All the monsters are real. They just look different than the movies, is all, and so nobody recognizes 'em."

He'd absorbed that revelation and shifted uncomfortably beneath the sheets, which had suddenly been too hot against his legs, Saran Wrap instead of light cotton. "All of 'em?" Shrill and babyish, but he couldn't help it. His mind was filled with images of every monster he'd ever seen on the Saturday afternoon Creature Feature. Ghosts in dirty sheets and torn clothes and greasy-haired witches with green skin and cauldrons full of the Devil's bathwater. The Devil himself, horned and hoofed and red as raw meat. Frankenstein, with his patchwork limbs and cinderblock face and dead man's legs that lurched like killing scythes as he lumbered after his victims with arms outstretched. Dracula with his scarlet-lined cape, bloodless, white fingers, and slender, predatory fangs. The living, oilsmoke darkness beneath the bed.

"Yep," Louie had grunted solemnly.

"But if nobody recognizes 'em, how do ya know they're real?"

Louie had scowled at him and exhaled heavily through his nostrils. "'Cause I've seen 'em."

"You've seen monsters, Lou?"

"Not all of 'em. Just werewolves."

"When? Where?"

"You see 'em on the street sometimes, lurkin' on the corners. They don't bother people mostly. They don' wanna bring too much attention, see, 'cause then the cops might start huntin' 'em like they did a long time ago in Merry Olde Europe or somethin'. Sometimes, they can't help themselves, though. It gets in their blood, and they gotta hurt someone."

"How do ya know they're werewolves?"

Louie had shrugged. "Just do. It's in the eyes, mostly. They're kinda yellow in the white part, and shiny when the light hits 'em just right. New quarters. Sometimes you c'n smell 'em, too, if you get close enough, like Ma's old fur coat after it's been in the hall closet all summer. Musty. Dirty dog."

"Where'd you see 'em, Lou?" Danny had been besieged by images of werewolves circling the garbage cans in front of his building, dressed in the frayed tatters of their human skins and sniffing delicately at the choice remains of Mama's pot roast.

Louie hadn't answered. Instead, he'd folded one leg atop the bedspread, ignoring Mama's rule about no shoes on the furniture, and leaned forward, eyes and lips thin with concentration. "You tellin' me you've never seen one, short pants?"

Danny's mind had turned to the battered Pontiac that often squatted across the street from their apartment, and the pair of shadows that lived in the front seat and sent tendrils and plumes of smoke through the tops of the tinted windows. They'd been there every day for as long as he could remember. His father cursed and muttered under his breath whenever he saw them, and if Mama wasn't around, he flipped them the bird with a callused finger. Mama never cursed, never even spoke. She just nodded and kept her head up as she crossed the street to the market, fingers curled too tightly around his while he struggled to keep up.

He'd asked his father about the shadows in the Pontiac once. Pop's brow had darkened, and he'd been afraid Pop was going to lay into him for being nosy, but Pop had merely ruffled his hair and told him not to worry about it. Five minutes later, Danny's mouth and fingers had been smeared with the sticky joy of a Milky Way bar, and the shadows had been forgotten.

But with Louie grim-faced and long-limbed on the edge of his bed, he'd begun to wonder.

"Maybe," he'd said cautiously.

"No maybe about it," Louie had declared. "When you see one, you'll know. You ain't seen one yet."

"Where'd you see one?" he'd asked again.

Louie had sucked his bottom lip as he stared listlessly out the bedroom door and down the narrow, dim staircase that led to Pop's office and what Mama called the parlor and Pop called the goddamn living room. His face had been too sharp and too thin in the harsh light of the yellow bulb in the bedside lamp, and Danny had thought of Dracula and his gaunt, bone-white face. The bruise around Louie's swollen eye had pulsed with a strange, ugly beauty that had fascinated him.

Finally, Louie had shaken his head. "Ain't none'a yours, short pants. They wouldn't bother with a runt like you anyways. Don' worry 'bout it, an' if you tell Ma I told you, I'll rub your ugly face in my asscrack." With that, Louie had slipped off the bed and abandoned him to his thoughts and his feverish dreams, which had been filled with snap-jawed wolves in high collars and silver eyes that watched him from behind the windshield of a Pontiac.

Louie had never mentioned werewolves or any other monsters again, but Danny had never forgotten that conversation. It had nested in his memory, a dark pearl he occasionally stumbled upon when the apartment was quiet except for the creak of settling floorboards or the throaty shuffle of socked feet on the bathroom carpet. Sometimes, the rustle of cotton on shag had conjured images of padded paws and lolling, pink tongues bracketed by glistening canines, and he'd burrowed deeper into the covers and screwed his eyes shut.

That conversation had been on his mind the night his mother had insisted on taking him trick-or-treating. He hadn't want to go out for fear of seeing the werewolves in their hiding skins, yellow-eyed and grinning with their papery human mouths. He'd wanted to stay inside with Snoopy and the Yoohoo and the comforting heat of the radiator as it chuntered in its corner. But Mama had asked, and the flesh in the corners of her mouth and around her eyes had been pinched and wan, the way it always was when the bills came due or Pop's friends turned up with their cigars and bottles in rumpled, brown paper bags. He'd wanted Mama to look happy, and so he'd let her lead him from the apartment.

Out of the building and across the street, past the Pontiac and its living shadows. He'd stood on tiptoe and craned for a better look. The firefly glow of a lit cigarette had darted to and fro in the cabin, and one of the shadows had raised a hand in greeting. In the faint, unsteady light of the Marlboro lantern, the fingers had been too long, possessed of too many knuckles, and he'd thought of Dracula's hand curling hypnotically around the dirt-stained lid of his coffin. His mother must've had the same thought, because she'd quickened her pace and tugged him to the opposite curb with unnecessary force.

_Mama, I think the monsters saw us, _he'd thought in dismay, and stared at the Pontiac until he was around the corner.

Mr. Cho in the Korean deli had given him a handful of Atomic Fireballs, and Mr. Sutelli had dropped a huge brown fistful of Smarties into his proffered pumpkin pail. By the time Mrs. Berkovitz at the flower shop had exclaimed over his store-bought physique and paid Tootsie Rolls in tribute, Danny had forgotten about werewolves and vampires, caught up in the excitement of Halloween. He'd let go of his mother's hand and waded confidently through the moving pumpkin patches of babies dressed as jack-o-lanterns, pail outthrust like a veteran stripper's tip jar.

"Trick or treat," he'd bellowed exuberantly, and one gap-toothed grin later, the loot had poured into his Great Pumpkin. His mother had frowned and scolded whenever he'd pushed the wobbling, toddling pumpkins and chicks out of the way in his enthusiasm, but she'd been relaxed. She'd smiled at his glee and laughed when he'd squealed at a generous windfall of butterscotch discs.

"Gold, Mama!" he'd howled, and Mama had laughed, head thrown back to expose her slender, olive neck and the heavy curtain of her dark hair as it spilled from the loose chignon into which she'd tied it before they'd left the apartment. She'd looked like an angel as she'd leaned against the edge of the ice cream case in the front of the store.

"Not gold, Danny," she'd said between giggles. "Just candy."

Mr. Vindal, who'd run the store with his half-blind wife and oldest son, and who would die in front of that same display case nine years later after a robbery gone bad, had folded his arms across the gargantuan barrel of his chest and laughed, a booming guffaw that Danny had never forgotten. "Lady," he'd said, "tonight, there ain't no difference." He'd gently shooed her off the display case, reached inside, and produced a triple-chocolate drumstick. "The lady deserves a treat, too, huh?"

His mother had shared the ice cream with him as they'd wound lazily through the neighborhood, and when his pumpkin pail had grown too heavy for him to carry, she'd lifted it from his straining fingers. The police station four blocks east of their building had been their last stop, and after panhandling a crowd of patrolmen for some lollipops and toffees, they'd started home, mouths rimed with sugar and the aftertaste of peanuts.

It had been late, far later than Danny had ever stayed up before, and the darkness had been dense and heavy, humid with the heat of slinking, running bodies and burning newspapers. Smoke from the latter had tickled and wrinkled his nose. The babies and little kids had been replaced by older kids in Freddy masks and hockey masks, and they had chased each other through the streets, crowing and cursing and swinging cheap hockey sticks through the air as if they were broadswords and hatchets. There'd been kids older than Louie, too, lanky boys and awkward, blossoming girls that had teetered on the brink of adulthood. No costumes for them. Just leather jackets and stonewashed jeans, and the air had been thick with a smell he couldn't name, brine and tobacco and sweat on vinyl. And the language of unsupervised night.

"Fuck," a kid who looked like Lou Diamond Philips had shouted, and the epithet, so sour and malicious on his father's tongue, had been joyous. He'd swung a plastic bag of candy in one hand, and the other had curled possessively around the waist of a girl with long, back hair and full, red lips, Snow White in denim and thigh-highs. The boy's fingers had rested on the swell of her ass.

Danny had thought the girl was beautiful, and he'd waved shyly. The girl had smiled, straight, white teeth bright in the darkness, and her gaudy, silver, hoop earrings had twinkled like fairy lights when she'd tossed her hair over her shoulder. They'd clinked, too, and Danny had found the noise inexplicably exotic. He'd giggled, and the girl's indulgent smile had broadened.

The boy had turned, his face hard and predatory. Twenty years later, Danny would associate the expression with the start of bad intentions and the end of live and let live, but back then, he'd thought only of the Big Bad Wolf and what big teeth he had. Of werewolves, with their yellow eyes that shone silver in the moonlight.

_Oh, Mama, the werewolves found me,_ he'd thought.

"Whatcha lookin' at, little man?" the boy had sneered. His mouth had been smiling, but his eyes hadn't been. They'd been cold and hard and glassy.

Danny hadn't wanted to look at those eyes. They'd been alien and yet terribly familiar. He'd recoiled and sought the refuge of his mother's legs. _Like Daddy's eyes after a bad day with his friends, _he'd thought miserably. _Or like the eyes of those sharks on the _National Geographic _specials, the ones who tear baby seals in half while their eyes roll to whites in the sockets. The ones that don't leave no pieces floatin' in the water._

"'M sorry," he'd mumbled, and shuffled his feet. He hadn't felt like Batman anymore, just stupid and small and tired. He'd wanted to go home and divvy his candy with Louie, swap lemon drops for Sugar Daddies and watch what was left of _Sleepy Hollow. _He'd wanted the smell of his father's cigars and the worn nap of his mute Teddy Ruxpin under his chin and stroking fingers.

"I'm sorry, don't think I heard ya, there, little man," the boy had said, and dropped his arm from around Snow White's waist.

"Please," his Mama had pleaded, and Danny had almost burst into tears. He'd never heard her like that before, weak and timid and frightened. Mama had a voice like thunder and Yahweh, and she'd needed no stone tablets to carry the law of her house. "Please, he's just a baby."

Lou Diamond Philips had ignored her and dropped to his haunches. He'd loped toward him in a perversely fluid spiderwalk, and fear had risen in Danny's throat, sweet ice cream and bitter peanuts.

"You're old enough to look, though, ain't'cha, little man? So why don't you tell me what you was lookin' at?"

That close, Danny could smell cigarettes and stale sweat and the sweet, piquant musk of oiled leather. Matted fur and rotten meat. The reek of the beast. His chest had begun to hitch, and his Batman suit had suddenly been too tight, hot and prickling against his skin.

"'M sorry," he'd muttered. "'M sorry. I was just lookin'."

"At what?" The boy had moved closer still, so close that Danny could see nicotine stains on his teeth and smell burning leaves and greasy meat on his breath. "Huh? At what?" His hand had shot out and gripped the arm of his Batman suit. The grip had been ruthless and biting, and Danny had felt the flimsy fabric tear with a sad, spent breath of dying thread.

_My, what big teeth you have. _And Danny had known that he was going to be eaten on the sidewalk, devoured like a baby seal in the jaws of a shark. Any minute now, the jaws would gape, the eyes would roll, and he'd be so much blood on the street. His mother's voice had lost its thunder, and her legs had run to taffy. No one was going to help him. The other kids who'd thronged the sidewalk five minutes before had melted into the shadows and the storefronts like receding fog, frightened by the scent of the wolf. He was going to be eaten by the monster, and when the policemen from the nearby station came with their badges and their heavy flashlights, they'd find his mother clutching the bloody sleeve of his Batman costume, candy strewn at her feet like remembrance stones.

_Mama, he's gonna eat me. _Then Danny had cried, a helpless, mewling _baby _whine. "I was just lookin' at the girl," he'd sniffled. "She's pretty, like Snow White."

The boy had laughed, eyes gone to silver in the moonlight. "Snow White, huh? Well, what're you, a fuckin' dwarf? Weepy, right?" The kid had reached out and ruffled his hair, and in the light, Danny had seen purple bruises on his forearms. They'd reminded him of his bout with the chicken pox and his conversation with Louie.

"Joey, c'mon," the girl had said, and tugged on Joey's arm. "He's just a kid. Let's get outta here, and I'll give ya some honey with your candy."

Joey's nostrils had flared, a hound scenting blood, and he'd turned those silver eyes on Snow White. "Yeah?" A growl, low and fraught with a tension he hadn't understood. Danny had worried that the wolf had decided to eat her instead, rise from his crouch and lunge for the tender, brown enticement of her throat.

"Yeah." Snow White's tongue had darted out to moisten her lips, and her grip had tightened on Joey's arm.

Joey's smile had widened, predatory and ugly on his lean face, and he'd turned to face Danny again, silver and ivory in the dark. "Looks like I'm outta here, Weepy. Ain't nothin' better than honey. Trust me, one of these days, you're gonna want nothin' more than to make Snow White's petals run red."

Behind Danny, his mother had moaned. Then the boy had straightened and turned and loped easily into the shadows, into an alley that housed a huge, green dumpster and dunes of garbage that it had rejected. Snow White had trailed behind him, tethered to him by interlaced fingers, and Danny had wanted to scream at her not to follow him, to run away like the Gingerbread Man or Little Red Riding Hood, but the werewolf had devoured his brains and his voice, and he could only cry and salt his upper lip with tears and snot.

His mother had carried him home, had lurched drunkenly through the streets with him clinging desperately to her neck. She'd stumbled once or twice, caught unawares by the grasping fingers of chinks in the pavement and pits in the neglected asphalt of their neighborhood. She'd cupped his head in her trembling hand and pressed kisses to the top of his head. She'd crooned to him that it was going to be all right now, that she wasn't going to let anyone hurt him, but her voice had been breathless and weak, and he hadn't believed her. He'd been ashamed of his doubt, but he couldn't banish it. The truth had been too bright to ignore, and just as frightening as the werewolf's grin when he'd looked at him and predicted that he'd want Snow White to turn red some day. His mother had a mask, too, and just like the Werewolf's, it had slipped. Mama couldn't protect him anymore. Maybe she never could. He'd wondered if Louie had known. Probably. Louie had known everything.

His mother had carried him straight into their apartment, simply shouldered the door and marched past Pop and his cronies, who'd been seated at the kitchen table like grime-faced knights of the round. Pops had looked up from his card game, cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth, and Danny had sensed the angry shout rising in his father's throat, seen it in the thunderously knitted brow and the dangerous hardening of his jaw. Pop had never liked to be interrupted during his card games.

"Don't. Don't you say one damn word to me, Louis Messer," his mother had snarled, and Danny, who had been lulled by the unsteady rhythm of his mother's gait on the walk home, had burst into hysterical tears again because she'd sounded just like the werewolf, low and gravelly and inhuman.

_He didn't eat me. Not me. He ate Mama instead, gobbled her up, and now he's wearing her skin like the Big Bad Wolf wore the grandma's nightgown and glasses in Little Red Riding Hood. If I look, her eyes'll be silver and her teeth'll be too long. She'll eat me before Daddy even sees, or maybe he won't ever see. Maybe the werewolf'll carry me into the bathroom and eat me, and Daddy'll never know because he'll never look up from his stupid cards. Maybe he'll find me at the end of the night after all his friends have gone home, or maybe all he'll find are my pajamas and some bloody claw marks on the windowsill. _

The thought had terrified him, and he'd thrashed in his mother's arms, convinced that underneath the smell of her bath soap was the scent of rotting meat and damp fur.

"Danny! It's okay. It's okay, my Danny boy." Startled and on the cusp of panic. "Sssh, honey, Mommy's here."

"What the hell's up with him?" Pops had demanded, cigar drooping from between his clenched teeth like a charred and broken bone. He'd half-risen from his chair, but he hadn't let go of his poker hand.

Danny's mother hadn't said a word. She'd simply marched him into the bathroom, stripped him of his clothes and costume, and plopped him into a warm chamomile and lavender bath. She'd murmured soothing nonsense as she'd slopped water down his back and over his head. _It's all right, my boy. All right. He was just a bad man, but he's gone, and he can't hurt you now. You're safe with us. All right now. All right. _Her words had moved to the rhythm of the water and made his bones light and his eyelids heavy.

"Monster, mama. Monster," he'd tried to tell her, but his tongue had been clumsy, and the words had slurred drunkenly on his lips. Adrenaline had drained from him along with the water in the tub, and by the time she'd toweled him off and poured him into his flannel pajamas, he'd been boneless inside his clean skin. He'd floated to bed, guided by his mother's gently chivvying hand, and collapsed into the prickly, protective embrace of his blankets. He'd been asleep before his mother's parting kiss had cooled on his forehead, and he'd woken the next morning to the furtive rustle of Louie pilfering his caramel chews. The encounter with the werewolf had retreated to the bottomless vault of childhood memory.

He'd never forgotten it, though, nor had it been the last. He'd seen them often after that, caught glimpses of them as he walked home after school or kicked the hackeysack around the entrance to his building. He'd never tried to see them, had never sought them out, but once he'd seen them, he couldn't unsee them. Louie had passed knowledge of them to him like contagion, just as he'd passed on most of his colds and his love for the Mets, and though the original infection had passed, traces had remained, antibodies that had allowed him to see behind the masks.

Sometimes, Louie had been with him when he'd seen them, and he'd put his arm around Danny's neck and hiss, "Don't look, short pants. They won't hurt you as long as they don' know you c'n see 'em. Just keep your head down an' pretend you don't see an' don't give a shit." Louie's arm, so strong and reassuring on his neck, and his breath on his ear and the side of his face, comforting in spite of the faint, greenbark odor of stolen cigarettes.

So he hadn't looked. He'd turned his head when the glimpses came, the flashes of silver in the whites of passing eyes, the fleeting smell of damp fur or rotting meat. He'd dropped his gaze to the gritty, grey blankness of the sidewalk, scuffed his initials on it with the toe of his sneakers. Once, he'd seen the silver glint in the eyes of a Salvation Army Santa tolling his bell outside a Kroger's, and he'd closed his eyes against the sight under the pretense of rubbing them. Louie had told him he'd be all right if he didn't look, and Louie had never steered him wrong.

Maybe if Louie had followed his own advice, things would be different now.

_You're not sure when they got to him. You've turned it over in your head a thousand times, invented a thousand scenarios to explain when he became one of them. You've told yourself it doesn't matter, that it hasn't mattered since you left that house and the Messer sphere of influence. It sounds so rational inside your head, all scientific and adult and everythin' that you tell yourself you are. You even wrote it down once, in an old composition notebook left from your college days. You figured that if you wrote it down, it'd make it real, a wish whispered into the ear of God from the cool, prim lips of a ballpoint pen. _

_So much for wishful thinkin'. You wrote it down, a confession on college-ruled paper, and it didn't change a damn thing. You still wonder when your brother lost himself, when his face became a mask and his eyes went silver. Maybe you shoulda burned the paper and tossed the ashes and dying embers into Long Island Sound to hiss like brimstone. Maybe the fire woulda robbed the thought of its power to consume you. Maybe. But you doubt it. _

_You knew what Sonny Sassone was the minute you saw him and his cronies holdin' court on the courts behind P.S. 139. He was all teeth and mouth and leather jacket that smelled vaguely of mesquite. He was seventeen and already makin' his bones on blow and dope, and he was the princelin' of the streets. All seedy roads led to Sassone, and every crook and wannabe was sniffin' at his feet. Louie had talked about him all that summer, sung his praises like a love-struck schoolgirl. It had driven your old man crazy, and he'd gotten so fed up with Sonny mania that he'd reached over the whipped potatoes one night at the dinner table and popped your brother in the mouth. Your brother had bled into his peas, and your mother had cried into her napkin, and the subject of Sonny Sassone had been abruptly tabled, but silence and secrecy had only made Sonny more thrilling to Louie, and by the time, you saw him on the courts that afternoon, he was a god._

_Louie hadn't gone lookin' for Sonny that day. He was there because you'd pestered him into takin' you to the corner bodega for an ice cream sandwich. You still had it in your hand when Louie stopped short, gaze fixed on the picnic tables just beyond the chainlink fence that separated the basketball courts of P.S. 139 from the rest of the city._

What is it, Lou? _you asked, vanilla on your lips and chocolate bleedin' over your fingers. _

Nothin', short pants, _he assured you. _See that guy over there? _He nodded in the direction of the benches._

_You squinted against the sun. _The Fonzie guy?

The Fonz, my ass,_ he rebuked sharply_. That, short pants, is Sonny Sassone.

_You blinked in molish surprise and studied the figure more closely. After months of hearing about the exploits and miracles wrought by Sonny's hands, you'd expected a mythic superhero carved in the image of Superman, but the kid on the bench was like ten thousand other kids in the borough. He was short and square and dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. He was smokin', and ashes from his cigarette drifted onto the square, steel toe of his boot like shed divinity. When he noticed, he shook 'em off with a balletic twist of his foot and blew smoke from his nose._

_You wrinkled your nose and took another bite of your ice cream sandwich. _That's him? I thought he was cool an' stuff, _you said around a mouthful of chocolate and meltin' strawberry ice cream._

Yeah, _Louie said distantly. Awed and worshipful, as though he'd crested Olympus and glimpsed the gods. _Listen, short pants, you stay here a minute while I talk to Sonny. Stay where I c'n see you, though. Ma'd have my ass if you went and got hit by a fuckin' cab.

I ain't a baby, _you protested indignantly, but the sticky smears of red and brown drying to tacky sweetness on your fingers and in the corners of your mouth belied the sentiment. _'Sides, we gotta go. It'll be dinner soon, and you know how Pop gets when we're out after dark.

It won't take long, _he promised. _If you keep your mouth shut, I'll buy ya another ice cream bar.

But, Louie, _you whined. _I don't wanna. I wanna go home. I gotta make a diorama for school.

_Louie rolled his eyes. _For fuck's sake, Danny. When did you become such a fuckin' pussy?

I ain't a pussy, _you sniveled, stung, but Louie was already striding towards Sonny, hand raised in greeting._

A minute _turned into an hour, and all you could do was stand on the pavement outside the fence and watch. Your brother laughed and smiled with Sonny and his boys, slapped hands and shoulders and swore with gleeful intensity. It's a pussy word to use, maybe, but he was radiant, somehow older and younger at the same time. He was free out there with Sonny, no Pop to beat him down with family obligations and no watchers parked across the street in a bronze Pontiac. He was raw and free, Louie Messer under the dirt of the family name. Louie as he was when there was no one else to see and judge._

_Watching him made your chest hollow and too warm, as though your ma had placed a menthol compress under your shirt. He'd never been like that with you and never would be. There were seven years between you and him, and that was an insurmountable gap in childhood years. He was seventeen, a man. He'd already ridden the velvet mountain in the back of a deserted subway car, and you were still playin' with Transformers and He-Man and just beginnin' to realize that girls were more than cootie farms. You were crawlin' in his footprints and getting left behind. The chanlink fence between you was a continental divide, and the drift would soon carry him out of sight. He wasn't gone yet, but you already missed him like hell._

_But you envied him, too. You wanted the same freedom, the same escape from that dingy apartment and the palls of cigar smoke that hung over the kitchen table. You wanted to live where the watchers in the Pontiac couldn't follow. You wanted to live without Pop's parliament of cronies cawin' in the middle of the night and linin' their pockets with bits of the grocery money. You wanted legs long enough to run and hands big enough to crush the throat of the beast. You wanted to be like him, big and strong and unafraid of the monsters._

_The sun sank toward the horizon, and Louie disappeared with it. He became a collection of suppositions and shadows, all angles and harshly intersecting lines and dimly recollected features-the sharp jut of a nose, for instance. Soon, even those were gone, and all that was left were the Sesame Street shapes of a human bein'. The oval of a head. The long rectangle of a torso. The pipestem cylinders of arms and legs. A shadow man occasionally thrown into wavering relief by the burnin' light of a shared cigarette. _

_You waited as long as you dared, torn between your fear of bein' called a pantywaste pussy and your well-founded fear of your mother's anger and your pop's callused hands, but when the playground was dark and Louie showed no signs of leavin', you gathered your balls an' headed for the fence._

Hey, Louie, _you called, and hooked your fingers through the cold, hard chainlink. _We gotta go. Ma'll kill us.

_The long, reedy shadow slipped from atop the picnic table and ambled toward the fence, and you breathed a sigh of relief. Then you realized another shape was coming, too, shorter and thicker. It passed the reedy hulk of your brother and loped to where you stood. In the dark, fingers transformed into serrated claws. Then the figure stepped into the weak, flickering light of an artificial moon, and it was Sonny Sassone. He smiled and drummed jauntily on the fence, which bulged and creaked in a tortured, musical jingle._

And who might you be? _he asked._

_You retreated a step and said nothin'. Your ma had taught you never to speak to strangers, and Sonny raised the hackles on the back of your neck and made your spit go sour. His smile was bright and broad and terribly wrong. It stretched the skin around his mouth and showed too many teeth, and it stopped short of his eyes, which were flat, black stones inside his face. _

Not real, _you thought. _The smile ain't real, and not the face, neither. It's plastic, like the rubber masks they sell at the dimestore on Halloween. Just the eyes are real, and they're awful, a dead guy's eyes.

The better to see you with, _whispered a guttural voice inside your head, and you almost loaded your pants._

That's just my kid brother, _the reedy shadow that was Louie offered at last. Diffident and embarrassed, as if he were discussin' a pile of dog shit or a particularly troublesome zit in the heart of his asscrack. _

_Sonny surveyed you through half-lidded eyes. _This is the runt, huh? How old're you, kid? _He reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a crumpled pack of Marlboros. He opened it and tapped one of them into his hand._

Ten, _you declared defiantly. _And I ain't no runt. _To illustrate your point, you hauled off and kicked the fence. It's a wonder you didn't fall on your ass, Charlie Brown whiffin' a punt 'cause Lucy houdini'd the ball at the last second. The fence quaked and shuddered. _

_Sonny just laughed and lit his cigarette._

Fuckin'-A. I guess I can see the family resemblance, after all, _he said, and took a drag. The others had drifted from their picnic table perch to flank Sonny. They laughed dutifully. It was harsh, ugly laughter, like the cawin' of your old man's poker buddies, and your unease deepened._

He's always had a big mouth, _Louie muttered apologetically. _I haven't been able to beat it outta him yet.

That so? _Sonny mused. _Maybe you ain't been tryin' all that hard. Maybe you need a little help with that. _He was smilin', but his voice was hard and calculating, a wolf ponderin' a hapless chick that had tumbled from its nest and lay, broken-backed, atop a snowdrift. _What do you think, boys? _Sonny asked, and the satellite shapes drew closer, thin, ferret-faced boys with slicked-back hair and patented James Dean scowls. _Ya think Louie here needs a little help teachin' his runt brother a little respect?

Sure, Sonny, _agreed the one on the left. The one on the right merely stepped forward and cracked his knuckles. _

_Even Louie was uneasy now, sidlin' from foot to foot and runnin' his fingers through his hair. _Naw, Sonny, _he assured him. _I got him, sure as shit. Much as I appreciate the offer, I got it covered.

Yeah? _Sonny quirked a thick eyebrow in amused skepticism. _How 'bout you give me a demonstration of your technique? Seein' as how it's so effective an' all, who knows? I might come outta this with a few pointers.

_Louie opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again. Opened it. Finally, his shoulders sagged and he said, _Sure, Sonny. Why not? _He followed the fence until he_ _reached the open gate, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket like concealed weapons._

I like your spirit, Messer, _Sonny crowed as Louie stepped onto your side of the fence. The Dean twins crowded the fence, convicts with their faces pressed to the bars of their prison cells. The thin, fall air was heavy with anticipation, sweat and ozone and damp leather._

This oughta be good, _one of them muttered. _

_Louie loomed over you, hands still stuffed into the pockets of his jacket. _You remember what I told you, short pants? _he demanded. His face was dark and inscrutable, and his voice was queerly flat._

_You goggled at him. He'd told you a million things over the course of your growin' up, truths, lies, and everythin' in between. He'd burst your bubble about Santa Claus when you were eight, and he'd told you that angels rode the tails of comets like chariots when you were five. He'd told you the story of Orion and Taurus and pointed out the Big Dipper and Little Dipper and the throne of Cassiopeia. He'd fixed your Go-Bots when you busted 'em up and taught you how to play Spades and War and Slapjack and Hearts. He'd told you about football and baseball and hockey, and why your parents often traded shouts like blows across the kitchen table. He'd taught you when to avoid Pop and how to keep your head down and your mouth shut when the shit got too thick. He'd taught you how to remove candy and pop from bodegas via the armpit express. He'd taught you everythin' you knew about bein' a Messer._

_He'd taught you about the monsters, especially the werewolves._

_You stared at him, lips tremblin' and eyes pricklin'. It was a test. You knew that by the stony, shrewd set of his face and the constant flexin' and closin' of his hands in his pockets._

You told me lots of stuff, Lou. Like how Sonny-

_It happened so fast that you never saw his hand leave his pocket. You just felt its thunder on your cheek, sudden and stingin' and rough as dead leaves and brittle sandpaper. Blood filled your mouth, perversely sweet, and forever after, you associated strawberry ice cream and blood with betrayal. You reeled and fell on your ass, hard, in the middle of the pavement, feet splayed and teeth clickin'. Louie had hit you plenty of times-punchin' bag was part of the little brother job description-but he'd never hit you because someone else told him to, never sold you out for shits an' giggles. You sat on the sidewalk while the pain burrowed deeper into your cheek and jaw and wondered how a quick slap could hurt all the way to the center of your chest._

Lo-Lo-, _you stammered, but the word wouldn't come. His name had gone foreign and unintelligible in your head, as though it'd rattled loose from the blow._

_He sneered. _What the fuck did I tell you, huh? Get up and stop fuckin' snivelin'. _He grabbed you by the collar and yanked you upright, eyes blank and fingernails rough against your collarbone._

_Sonny applauded, lips pursed in appreciation. _Not bad, Messer. Not bad at all. _He sauntered to where you stood, and crouched. Grit crunched beneath his shoes as he shifted. _Hey, kid, _he said, and tapped your cheek where Louie had hit you. Fresh pain blossomed in your cheek, and you gritted your teeth, determined not to cry like a baby. Beside you, Louie tensed and tightened his grip on your shirt. _

Hey, kid, _Sonny prodded, and Louie's fisted fingers tugged on the captured fabric._

_You forced yourself to look up, into that grinning face. _Yeah? _You swallowed a wince as bruised muscles protested the movement._

That took a lotta guts, not bawlin' after a shot like that. I'm impressed. Maybe in a few years when you get the ice cream offa your cheeks, you come back and talk to me, huh? Maybe you can join the family.

_Squattin' on the sidewalk with his leather jacket grazin' his thighs and his mouth stretchin' in that cold, calculatin' grin, Sonny reminded you of that Halloween when you were five years old and Lou Diamond Philips had almost eaten you up. It was déjà vu, only it was Louie standin' next to you now, a prop as ineffective and impotent as your ma had been. He was the wolf, all yellow, bloody teeth and musty fur and eyes that'd glow silver if the light hit 'em just so._

Thanks, _you managed, and sidled from foot to foot to ease the treacherous ache in your shrunken bladder._

We gotta roll, Messer, _Sonny said as he rose from his crouch. _Maybe we'll see you around. _He snapped his fingers and jerked his head, and just like that, he was swaggerin' into the night, leavin' Louie behind without even a wave._

_Louie watched them disappear into a red Corvette, and then he loosened his grip on your shirt and let his hand drift to your shoulder. You shrugged it off and watched your feet as you walked. You didn't want to look at Louie and see that terrible blankness. He stopped at the bodega and bought you another ice cream bar-two, as a matter of fact-but you'd lost your appetite for ice cream, and they went uneaten. They melted in your clenched hands and left a trail of melted ice cream and bits of soggy, chocolate graham cracker in your wake like bits of decomposin' flesh. There was nothin' left of them but the wrappers by the time you got home, and you threw those into the gutter in front of your buildin'. One held on for a moment, a hapless victim clingin' to the wet, rushin' edge of a waterfall, and then it disappeared into the yawnin' darkness, Snow White snatched from the light._

_Your ma was pissed as hell when you came in well past dark and covered in candied carnage. She was swattin' Louie with a dishtowel and mutterin' dark threats against his insolence when she noticed the bruise on your cheek. Then it was all kisses and maternal worry and hellfire glances directed at a skulkin' Louie until he said that he'd saved you from some local hoods._

_At the time, you hated him for the lie and went to bed without talkin' to him for the rest of the night, but now you wonder if he wasn't lyin' at all. Maybe he was tellin' a truth that you couldn't see. Maybe he did save you that night. Maybe by demonstratin' the ass-whippin' technique perfected by your old man, he saved you from a worse fate. _

_You think that, and you almost believe it. And then you wonder, why, if he was tryin' to save you, didn't he save himself, too, instead of throwin' himself into the waitin' jaws of the dark?_

_It was never the same between you after that. Both of you tried for a while to pretend that nothin' had changed, but he spent more and more time with Sonny and the rest of the Tanglewood Boys and less and time at home. Each time he did come home, he was a little leaner and a little meaner and smelled like wet dog and fresh cigarettes. Everyone noticed the difference, the bitter, dark edge that had crept into his voice and the increasingly slouched, furtive posture. Sometimes when he sat at the supper table, his expression was feral and watchful. You could practically see the wary, lupine twitch of his ears. Everybody saw, but nobody said anything. They just kept their heads down and feigned blindness._

_You tried to tell him once, God knows why. It was already far past too late. Maybe it was envy that moved your tongue, or a desperate love for the brother that was fadin' a little more every day. He came home one night, stinkin' of cigarettes and booze and a tart, sea salt smell that you'd recognize as pussy when you got a few years under your belt. He was listin' appreciably to port when he lumbered in and had to catch himself in the splinterin' doorjamb when he wobbled over the threshold._

Hey, Lou, _you muttered without lookin' up from the math homework that was fanned over the kitchen table. _Been out with Sonny?

Whass it ta you? _he slurred as he tottered against an invisible wind._

_You shrugged and concentrated on your pre-algebra homework, the straightness of your lines, the roundness of your numbers. _Nothin'. I can just tell.

_Louie stopped and wavered, eyes red and glassy and brow furrowed in concentration. _Oh, yeah, smartass? How's that? You figure it out with one'a your fancy fuckin' math formulas there? _He peered at the pages of your open math book with myopic contempt. _Think you're so fuckin' smart with your books an' your honor roll.

_Your face grew hot, and the pencil gained weight in your hand, a stake instead of a thin shaft of wood and graphite._

Wrong weapon, _you thought as you studied the pencil. _Stakes are for vampires, not werewolves. You need silver bullets for werewolves.

You're different, that's all, _you answered neutrally, and plotted a dot on a graph_.

_Louie's unfocused eyes narrowed, and he bent so that his face was level with yours. It'd changed so much in the year he'd run with Sonny and the Boys, broadened and darkened. Grooves had etched themselves into the corners of eyes that had retreated into their sockets and taken refuge behind perpetually hooded eyelids. The bridge of his nose had been refashioned by a well-placed fist and sprouted a spidery network of ruptured capillaries. It was impossible-teeth didn't grow after they erupted from the tender tissue of gums and took their places in your mouth-but his eyeteeth had lengthened and yellowed. In fact, they were so stained that they were nearly brown. Nicotine, you told yourself, just nicotine, but God help you, you knew better. _

Different how? _he asked, and his hand splayed over the pages of your math book._

_You shrugged and pushed the glasses you'd acquired that spring onto the bridge of your nose. _I dunno. You're just different. You walk different. Your voice is different, too. You smell different, too. Like them.

Like who?

Like the werewolves, _you thought. _Like Sonny, _you mumbled._

_Louie laughed, a wet, rasping rumble inside his chest. _And what does Sonny smell like, short pants?

Bad, Louie, _you answered. _He smells like somethin' bad.

_Another laugh, and Louie straightened. _Well, ain't you a poet? _He ruffled your hair and stumbled, nearly smashed your face into your notebook. _Do the world a favor, kiddo, and stick to the numbers. And stop worryin' 'bout Sonny. _He patted you clumsily on the shoulder and tottered toward the kitchen door and the livin' room beyond._

He's a werewolf, Louie, _you blurted to his retreating back. _He's one of the monsters you told me about when I had the chicken pox. His mask is thin, and his eyes go silver in the right light. He's bad, Lou. He's so bad. Don't let him get you. _You stopped, stunned at your unexpected flurry of courage and embarrassed at the words comin' outta your mouth. What had sounded convincin' and desperate inside your head sounded like chickenshit baby talk on the thick, sticky air of the kitchen._

_Louie paused in his totterin' exodus and turned to study you. _Jesus Christ, you still remember alla that shit? _He laughed, but there was no humor in it. _Well, fuck me. I hate to break it to you, short pants, but you've been readin' too many comic books and watchin' too many movies. I made alla that up to fuck with your head. Sonny ain't no more a werewolf than I am Santa fuckin' Claus. Don't tell me you're still buyin' into him, too?

_You shook your head. There was a hot, tight knot in your throat that made speech impossible._

There's somethin' in your favor, at least, _he grunted, and tapped a jaunty staccato on the door lintel._

But Lou-

But nothin',_ Louie snapped,_ _and you knew that was it. _That imagination of yours is gonna get you in trouble one'a these goddamn days. If you know what's good for you, you'll stop worryin' 'bout Sonny Sassone and werewolves and worry 'bout studyin' hard and getting the hell outta here before you end up like Pop, fifty and lickin' the boots of fatass mob goombas with nothin' to show for it but grey hairs and a fistful of busted knuckles.

But-

Grow up, short pants, before life kicks your ass and does it for ya. _His words were hard stones, but his tone was gentle, and the lopsided smirk he shot you before he wobbled into the livin' room was fond._

'Night, Lou, _you said quietly, and wrote a zero sum on your paper._

G'night, short pants. _Far away even though he was only five feet across the linoleum, and then he stepped through the doorway and was gone, swallowed up just like Lou Diamond Philips and Snow White before him. You never saw that Louie again._

_You never mentioned Sonny again, and Louie never offered, and by that winter, it was a moot point anyway, because the werewolves had claimed him for their own, tainted him and left their mark beneath the skin of his left shoulder, a Tanglewood tattoo whose fresh ink glistened like blood on his raised, irritated skin for the first week and then settled into his skin like poison. That tattoo changed everythin', changed him. Family was redefined, and the strongest ties no longer bound. Brotherhood was no longer a matter of blood, but of Indian ink and painted skin. What time Louie didn't spend in the can on petty drug and larceny charges was spent in the company of Sonny Sassone and the ferret-faced twins. Louie's room was empty more often than not, and by the time you were in high school, he was little more than an abstract collection of bittersweet memories that tasted like baker's chocolate and clove on your tongue. The werewolves had devoured him and left no trace, and as the years passed, it was easier not to think of him._

_So, you didn't. You hunted werewolves instead._

Danny smiled bitterly at the thought and took a drag from the cigarette pinched indelicately between his thumb and forefinger. It was an apt description of his job, all things considered. He'd been hunting them since he was twenty-three, chasing them through dark alleys and brightly-lit penthouse suites, armed with his silver and his lead. He followed their trail of carnage and their telltale stink of wet dog and cornered them, unmasked them for the world to see. They always fought when he produced the silver bracelets, snarled and whined and rolled in splay-legged submission when all else failed. Sometimes, they bit. He'd been lucky so far; their snapping, yellow teeth had never broken his skin, but he sensed that his luck was running out. His armor was threadbare, riddled with chinks and drafty crevices where cold fingers could worm their way inside and curl around his balls and the base of his spine. His conscience was fraying and tired, and the only warmth in him now came from the stolen heat of Lindsay's pussy and the merrily burning ember caught between his fingers.

The hunt had brought him here tonight, called him to stand beneath the streetlight across from the rubber room where Louie now grew and rotted in his own soil, left damp and fetid by indifferent nurses who tended their own gardens behind the locked doors of the doctors' lounge. It was too late to go inside; it was past midnight, and visiting hours had ended before he got here, but he lingered anyway, entranced by the brooding, blank face of the building and the bloated waxing moon that hung above it. It was peaceful here with nothing but the skirling leaves for company.

He'd come here without conscious thought, simply left his apartment and Lindsay's hectoring voice behind and begun to walk. Past delis and dark bodegas and darker bars illuminated by giant, neon beers. He'd taken the subway and rattled through the tunnels with his hand curled around the overhead support bar, a zombie lurching aimlessly through the city's underground catacombs. He'd let the people expel him onto the dirty platform, and then he'd stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and walked on. He'd passed Sullivan's along the way and thought he'd seen Flack, perched at the bar and watching hockey players flit over the polished ice like moths. If he had, Flack wouldn't be there for long. He had a hunt of his own tonight, a call to penance that wouldn't go unanswered.

Danny hadn't been surprised to find himself here. In fact, he'd greeted the sight of the building and its hundreds of idiot, unblinking eyes with relief. Here was where the bullshit stopped, where the pretty trappings of humanity fell away and left nothing but the cold, hard truth. Here was the home of ugly answers for those brave or dumb enough to seek them out.

He was hunting for answers, and Louie was the only one who had them anymore. He'd thought that Mac had them once upon a time, but Mac saw only black and white, not silver. Mac would never believe him if he told him about werewolves. Stella, maybe, after her experience with one in her own living room, and Flack, definitely. Flack knew all about the truths that haunted your dreams and slipped under your skin when you weren't looking. Maybe even Montana would understand, but even if she did, she'd only turn it into a reenactment of all her old battles, and he was too damn tired to play nursemaid to a woman who never wanted the bleeding to stop. But not Mac. He'd just trot out platitudes and stale reassurances and wrap himself in the comforting blanket of science. If he didn't believe it, then it couldn't exist. That was the way Mac liked his world-neat and ordered and classed by the Dewey fucking Decimal System.

Stella would believe him but lie to protect herself, and he couldn't blame her for that. Hell, he'd do it himself if he had the luxury. Flack would believe him but lie to protect him. Danny couldn't blame him for that, either. In fact, he loved him for it, though he'd admit it to no one but God. Louie was the only person on God's earth that would give it to him straight, crush bone and tear muscle to expose the rotten truth.

Louie would tell him why the surgically repaired bones of his hand still wept and sang and burned with the salt of their own queer poison months after they'd been reset and declared healed. Louie would tell him if it meant what he thought it did, that soon his mouth would taste only blood and like it, that soon he'd smell like wet dog instead of cinnamon gum and Drakar Noir. That soon his eyes would show silver in the right light, and he'd dream of nothing but making Snow White bleed.

Besides, a morbid part of him needed to see how much of Louie was left. He wanted to know if he could still catch a glimpse of the brother who'd taken him diving for cans and bottles in Long Island Sound and taught him to smoke Luckies behind the body shop where he worked. He wanted to see if the Louie who'd met him for beers after he'd spent sixteen hours trapped inside a panic room with a stiff was still alive, or if his last spark had been snuffed out by the taint of the beast. He wondered if the eyes that now looked out of Louie's face still possessed the muddy cunning of an alligator drifting through the murky underworld of the city sewers, or if they'd given way to silver entirely. He wanted to look into the future and see if there was any hope for him.

He looked at the moon and loosed a lungful of smoke on an experimental howl.

Silver flickered in the darkness of an upstairs window, so quick that he almost missed it. He shuddered and dropped his cigarette, crushed it beneath the toe of his shoe. Another flash of silver, longer this time, and he thought that if he stood there long enough, he'd see a familiar face.

He raised his hand in greeting, and the reconstructed joints wailed. "How ya doin', Lou?" he muttered. "They got me, I think, got me good, but you know that, don't you? You always knew they would."

The silver gleam disappeared, but not the surety that he was being watched. He looked behind him and down the street, brow furrowed in concentration, but there was no one. He wondered if Montana had taken it upon herself to follow him and continue her fine tradition of sticking her nose where it didn't belong, but dismissed the idea. If she were here, she never would've let it lie this long. It was probably just his overtired imagination.

He lowered his hand and left the circle of light provided by the streetlamp in search of a cab. He was so tired and intent upon his search that he didn't notice the bronze Pontiac that squatted in a nearby alley, no light coming from its interior save that of a cigarette shared betwixt two men.


	3. Sheldon Hawkes

**Disclaimer:** All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

**Spoilers for 402, "The Deep."**

Sheldon Hawkes had always wondered how he would die

Sheldon Hawkes had always wondered how he would die. He supposed it was natural, an expected consequence of spending most of his life surrounded by the dying and the dead. The illusion of immortality was hard to maintain when you were wrist-deep in a cadaver's lower intestine, holding a cold, blue-tinged loop of internal plumbing that would never complete the task for which it had been designed. Death was not subtle. It was gaudy and unapologetic and the most dependable of God's servants. It was also, he thought as he tugged fruitlessly on his unmoving, rapidly numbing arm, utterly unpredictable.

He had not expected to die today, trapped below the murky, brackish waters of Long Island Sound by the capricious shift of a rusting bulkhead. If he had had any inkling that his time was up, that his last breaths would taste of river water and recycled air and the plastic of his regulator, he wouldn't have squandered so many of them making small talk with Danny as they'd suited up, nor would he have ignored his urge earlier that morning to put some Miles Davis on the stereo while he'd gotten ready for work. He would've taken the time to pad across his bedroom floor and savor the rough, companionable rasp of the matt beneath his soles. He would've remembered to register the cool, smooth plastic of the CD jewel case. He would've put Miles into the player and let the music wash over him, would've breathed in the notes like incense.

Maybe he even would've danced, rocking and swaying and gliding to the music as he shaved and dressed. He certainly would've hummed along as he restocked and organized his field kit. He would've sprinkled half-formed words over the contents, gris gris dust to ward off evil spirits. He would've turned the music up until it rattled in his bones and vibrated in his teeth, a warning dimly recalled.

There were other things he would've remembered if he'd known. The taste of chicory coffee, strong and rich and laced with a bitterness that spiced the tongue. The fire of the scant leaves that clung to the skeletal branches of the lone tree visible from his small kitchen window. The leaves were the only brightness in a landscape of grey concrete, black asphalt, and grimy brick. They were fire amid the ashes, and they reminded him of a biochemistry professor he'd had in his Princeton days. Deborah Kleman, her name had been. He hadn't recalled her name in years, since he'd left her class with an A, if he was honest, and he knew deep in his guts that he wouldn't have thought of it now if he wasn't drowning. Dying brought all the dead from their graves to watch the spectacle. But he'd thought of her face often enough, and her unmistakable hair.

Dr. Deborah Kleman had been a fierce, brilliant woman with a quick tongue and red hair, or it had been red once upon a time. By the time their paths had crossed, it had been grey fading to white save for a thin, glossy ribbon of red. Every time he looked at the leaves clinging to the tree and dwindling in number by the day and hour, he'd thought of her, a fading goddess with a last vestige of her youthful beauty. If he'd known that he was going to die today, he would've paused by the kitchen window to wish her well and bid her wait for him on the other side of the river so that he might be greeted by a familiar face. Presumptuous, perhaps, considering that until now, he'd had no memory of her name, but beggars couldn't be choosers, and besides, he was only human beneath his civilized polish of an Ivy-league education and a genius IQ.

Deborah Kleman had died six years ago, when he'd been a coroner's assistant. She'd put the business end of her late father's Sig Sauer into her mouth and pulled the trigger, silenced her quick tongue forever to avoid the ravages of inoperable brain cancer. She'd left the tumor and most of her brain on the pillow and the headboard of her four-poster bed. He hadn't recognized her at first; she'd been just another nude body on the slab, naked and cold and anonymous without her human makeup. Then his fellow assistant had washed the blood and drying clumps of brain from her hair, and recognition had come like a thunderbolt, sparked by the familiar strands of red amid brittle, chemo-ravaged white. He'd been so surprised that he'd forgotten to wash her feet. He'd just stared at what had remained of her gaunt, papery face. Death had become perversely familiar, and he'd been glad he wasn't the one who would open her up and catalogue her parts, injuries, and final indignities, an archivist of the dead who reduced people to the sum of their pitiful ends.

He wondered where she was now, and if she regretted her decision not to stand and fight, not to wring a few more years from the well-oiled, ancient treadle of Clothos' loom. Logic and years of medical training whispered that Deborah Kleman regretted nothing because the dead ceased to exist the instant the brain died. Logic insisted that the soul was a human construct, a romantic name for those higher brain functions that made man different from his tree-dwelling forefathers. Logic insisted that the soul was just a synonym for hope. But logic was cold comfort when cold water was worming its way inside your wetsuit with eager, victorious fingers and your regulator was giving nothing but a dry, ominous death rattle.

Logic didn't count for beans as his Aunt Ruby would've said, and then she did say it, the words carried to him on the torpid, silty water that lapped at his ears with a frigid, lascivious tongue.

_Logic don't count for beans, Sheldon, baby,_ she murmured in her gravelly, old woman's rasp that bore witness to fifty years of singing in the church choir on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and sometimes Thursdays, and to the shots of blackcurrant brandy that she took in the winter to warm her belly and keep her arthritic fingers limber. _Oh, logic's nice and all, and it's important in its place-don't you go thinking your education isn't important, you hear? But hope is what gets you out of bed in the morning. Hope is what makes your heart beat. _

In his mind's eye, he saw her as she'd been when he was young, before cancer and dementia had conspired to rob her of herself and leave her shriveled and without history in the same hospital where he'd later spent most of his residency. She was sharp-eyed and serene in her rocking chair by the living room window. That rocking chair had sat in the same place for thirty years, and the runners had cut twin grooves in the carpeting.

_It was those grooves in the carpet that convinced you she was dead, _interjected a droning, matter-of-fact, med school lecturer voice. _After the battle was over and modern medicine came out on the losing end, you and your two cousins volunteered to go through her things so her sisters wouldn't have to rub salt in new and weeping wounds. You came on a Saturday morning and boxed and sorted and assigned value to the signposts of a finished life. Scraps of paper with names and long-ago dates on them. Pictures of people none of you recognized. Her box of recipes. The box of toys she kept in the closet for when nieces and nephews and grandchildren descended on her orderly life-dolls with missing eyes and limbs reattached with a surgeon's precision, Legos, Lincoln Logs with thirty-four roofs and ten logs, Hot Wheels, and teddy bears with quilt-patched bellies, mama bears who'd doubtlessly given birth by emergency C-section. The trashy bodice rippers that were her only vice. The degree she'd earned from Vassar at fifty-four because she'd been denied the chance at twenty-four._

_You sorted and catalogued all day, and God only knows how many mistakes you made, how many priceless heirlooms and pieces of her you threw into the Goodwill basket with a careless toss of your young man's hand. The three of you had intelligence and respect in spades, but perspective on the life of another is hard to come by. In most cases, it never comes. The only one who can truly testify to the worth of a lifetime is the one who lived it. Everything else is speculation._

_Your final duty was to remove her furniture. The lumbering grunts from the moving company you hired took most of it, but not the rocking chair. That was for you. The three of you stood around it in silence. You all knew it had to be done, but none of you wanted to be the first to touch it. It seemed sacrilegious, the desecration of a fallen queen's throne. You hemmed and hawed and looked out the window now stripped of its curtains and the window boxes she put out every spring and summer, and the moving men lingered in the hallway with impatient respect. You can't speak for the others, but you kept waiting for it to move, to rock to the rhythm of unseen, slippered feet swollen with fluid._

_It was your cousin, Freddie, who finally profaned the sacred. _Well, _he said quietly as he looked out the naked window, and you knew he was picturing phantom tulips, _it's got to be done._ Then he retrieved her basket of unfinished knitting, crocheting, and needlepoint from beside the runner and placed it reverently in the center of the seat. Then you each grabbed an arm and lifted it, pallbearers at a second funeral._

_You looked back as you carried the chair toward the door and the waiting movers, who were sidling towards the narrow staircase with visions of beer and brats dancing in their sweaty heads, and all that was left of Aunt Ruby's world were the runner tracks the rocker had left in the carpet_. _Start at Point A, end at Point B; the abridged life of Ruby Mae Nellis._

_That was it; the spell was broken. This was Aunt Ruby's home no more, but just another sad, empty apartment waiting to be claimed by somebody desperate to own a slice of the Big Apple. Soon, the tracks carved by the runners and your footprints would be washed away like footprints in the sand, steamed into oblivion by a professional cleaning crew. By Monday, the super would have guys in coveralls laying down plastic and tearing down the wallpaper in flavor of glossy, white paint. Aunt Ruby was just another ghost in the walls._

Dead was dead, _those runner impressions said. Death was a still rocking chair._

But in his mind, Aunt Ruby was alive and well, rocking to the clack of her knitting needles as a muffler took shape between her knowledgeable fingers and watching him with beneficent curiosity over the square, rimless lenses of her glasses. She was wearing her Sunday pearls, and her slippers were a deep, rich purple.

_Royal purple, _he thought distantly, and the dying regulator gave another gurgling wheeze. Mud through straw, and the white-coated scientist that pulled the levers in the command center of his brain noted that he was rapidly running out of time and air. If he didn't free himself soon, Stella would be bringing two corpses to Hammerback's table, but the image of Aunt Ruby was vivid and growing ever clearer and brighter.

_Hypoxia, _muttered the lab-coated scientist, and he dutifully made a notation on his data sheet. _Also common in victims of strangulation and smoke inhalation._

_Sheldon, you hear me? _Aunt Trudy asked. Her knitting needles never slowed, but clacked in time to the slow trundle of the runners.

_Yes, Aunt Ruby, _he answered. He was fascinated by the vision and oddly comforted by it. He'd practically grown up in front of that rocking chair, learned many of life's truths at her knee. She'd doled them out on the blunted points of her needles, woven them into the fabric of her mittens and mufflers and afghans, and all the while she'd navigated the long, winding course of her life by the gentle rock of that chair, a tiny, black woman who'd rocked, rocked, rocked her boat gently down the stream with the tireless pedaling of her feet.

_You've seen many injustices in your line of work, as a doctor, coroner, and prospector for the wrongly dead. You've seen infants riddled with bullets and tumors that killed and ravaged with equal impunity. You've seen young mothers robbed of the chance to raise their newborn children by catastrophic hemorrhages, and firefighters who lost the wager they made every day, snuffed out by the flames they so valiantly fought to extinguish. You've seen teenage girls who should've lived long, happy lives arranged upon your coroner's slab like butterflied chickens, works of art that would never be finished. You've seen forgotten people left to rot and liquefy in their apartments because no one cared to look for them. They were found only because they'd seeped through their downstairs neighbor's ceiling, or because the super had come to collect the 1350 their lives were worth. You've seen the indifference with which we treat one another, and you've spent your life trying to restore a small measure of balance to the chaos._

_But when you think about it, which is too often though it is too seldom, you think that the greatest injustice you ever saw was the way Aunt Ruby died. She'd spent her life in that chair, gone around the world in an old, oak chair that had been a gift from her late husband, an uncle who was dead and gone long before you were born. Family history holds that he built it himself, lacquered it and varnished it and presented it to her as a wedding present. She'd been mad until he'd explained that it was for rocking all the babies they planned to have. Then she'd taken to it and the man who'd given it to her with her characteristic Ruby tenacity. She did rock babies in it, too, and grandbabies, and she might've rocked great-grandbabies in it if the cancer and the Alzheimer's hadn't torn her apart with their dirty, poisonous claws._

_She'd lived her life in that chair, and so you thought she'd go to her death in it, too. It would be only fitting. Someone would discover her slumped in its cradling embrace with a pile of unfinished TLC in her lap, and that would be that. She'd've ferried herself across the river in a graceful exit, a storybook ending. Instead, she died in a hospital bed, far removed from her rocking chair, raving at shadows and stinking of her own urine and feces._

_That wasn't the first face of injustice you ever saw-that dubious honor was reserved for the playground accident you witnessed when you were eleven, the one that began with the monkey bars and ended with a nine-year-old who would never walk again-but it was the truest. Throughout her life, Ruby Mae Nellis had carried herself with dignity, had never appeared at the Sunday dinner table in anything less than her best. She'd been sharp as a tack, with a razor wit and a fierce, smoldering pride that never left her eyes or her spine._

_In the end, sixty-eight years of dignity were obliterated by six months of gabbling and ranting at sterilized shadows and marinating in her own shit. They say that the first impression is most important, and that may be so, but it's the last that you leave behind. Just ask any cop who's ever blown an impeccable thirty-year career on one mistake, one bad shoot or the one that got away. For years, the only image of Aunt Ruby you could conjure after her death was of her propped against pillows and wrapped like a breathing mummy in sheets that stank of piss and inevitable death._

_Cancer and its treatments had decimated her, left her little more than a leathery husk inside her hospital smock. The proud woman who had once taught you hymns and Bible verses and the proper way to treat your elders in any situation was a mumbling, muttering crone who could no longer recall her name or the year. Sometimes she thought she was in 1964, raising her daughters and her son, and sometimes it was 1990 and she was cutting George Bush the I to ribbons with her tongue and the furious, authoritative clack of her needles. But mostly she lived in the darkness of her deteriorating mind, her internal clock stopped forever at the hour of none._

Cock-gobbling rapist shitfuck. _Those were the last words she ever spoke to you. Your Aunt Ruby, who before then had never so much as uttered a _damn _after stubbing her toe or barking her shin on the coffee table. _Cock-gobbling rapist shitfuck. _Matter-of-fact, even congratulatory, a crazed queen conferring knighthood upon an unsuspecting champion. It would've been funny if had been anyone else, any _time _else, but it was Aunt Ruby, and the words issued from a mouth that carried with it the yellow reek of waning hours, and so you only blinked back the outraged tears and swallowed the lump in your throat and helped the nurse wrestle her onto her side, the better to check for bedsores and skin lesions. You'd already decided to be a doctor, you see, and you thought you could make a difference. _

_Aunt Ruby's death by degrees only strengthened your resolve. You powered through your pre-med requirements with the unshakeable conviction of zealots and lunatics. You were a Blues Brother, on a mission from God to cure the ills of the world. You were determined to rid the world of sorrow by force of will and the unrivaled power of your genius mind. It all seemed so simple, and why shouldn't it have been? You'd achieved every goal to which you'd ever set your heart and mind, overachieved, to be frank. History was on your side. This would be just another laurel with which to pad your considerable resume._

_But you couldn't change a thing. You couldn't even stem the tide. Saving lives wasn't as easy, as cut and dried, as the textbooks and lectures made it sound. Diseases that were so simple in the black and white of text and grainy photos suddenly became complex and unknowable when you saw them in pink and red and bone white. It wasn't so easy to attach labels and prognoses to real lives instead of hypothetical case numbers. Three months wasn't so abstract when you were staring into the face of a seventeen-year-old girl who'd never make it to the prom and certainly wouldn't get a chance to trade that dress in for a wedding gown. Medicine was as ugly as the ills it was meant to cure._

_You rode in Sir Galahad in green surgical scrubs, and three years later, you rode out just another disillusioned knight with too many notches in your armor. You lost as many as you saved, and the victories never canceled the losses. The blood on your arms to the elbows was the same, and too often, gratitude looked like grief on puffy, careworn faces. There wasn't any difference at all when you got down to the hard, ugly bottom. Grief and gratitude are two sides of the same worthless coin._

_After you lost three in one week, thwarted in your efforts by bullets and the ill-advised union of booze with Goodyear, you bowed to the inevitable. Your failures haunted you, weighed down your nimble, acrobatic fingers. You couldn't stand to be little more than an educated Hermes, bringing the message of death to so many. It wasn't what you signed up for, being Charon's steward, so you traded the living for the dead._

_It was better, safer in your necropolis of green tile and frigid steel. The patients on your tables had already passed into the hands of the Almighty. All that was left to you was to discover the whys and wherefores of the journey from the land of the living to the cold, loveless underworld of the dead. You cut and prodded and prospected, documented each hematoma and abrasion and pulmonary edema, and if, by chance, you stumbled upon a tumor spreading its spongy, strangling tendrils into bone or unsuspecting tissue, you pierced its black heart with your scalpel, duly noted it on the innocuous paper person that we all become at the sad, sorry end, and let it lie. It was no longer your enemy or your concern. The mantle of savior had been passed to more capable hands._

_And it was enough, for a while. You thought you'd found your niche in the federally-funded catacombs of concrete and steel. You even carved one there for yourself, made a nest in an alcove not far from where your wayfarers slept in their temporary tombs. It was comfortable despite the frigidity of the climate-controlled air, a burrow hidden from the eyes of the city and the bureaucracy, and it wasn't uncommon for you to spend the night on the cot you'd set up at the far wall, cheap, metal frame abutting the grimy concrete brick in an effort to let the ambient heat of the still-breathing city above combat the cold. You tucked yourself in with a book and a cup of coffee or lost yourself in the backlog of unsigned death certificates. If it weren't for the corpses in the room proper, you might've called it homey. Sometimes you even did. Home away from home._

_Mac found you in there one night, reading a book and heating a human rib in the microwave. God knows what he thought until you explained that the rib was actually from the victim in his latest case. For a moment, his expression was dismayed, as though he'd caught you peeping at _Hustler _on lab time. Disdainful, and more than a little wary. You were perplexed at the time, and bemused, but in hindsight, you can understand his reaction. You were a young, talented, attractive child of the brightest city in the world, an eligible bachelor who could've had his pick of women, and your idea of a good night was to read a book while the aroma of irradiated dead flesh tickled your nose. If you'd read the same anecdote in a forensic psychology journal, you'd have suspected it was a tale in the curriculum vitae of the next Jeffrey Dahmer. No wonder Mac looked at you askance. But you were happy._

_But happiness never lasts with you. It's an unfortunate malaise of the genius, a constant, gnawing hunger that is never, and can never be, satisfied. It's a drive that runs parallel to the libido and deeper by miles and fathoms. Leagues. Twenty thousand leagues under the skin. You're compelled to greatness, seduced by it, and once you've conquered one kingdom, you seek out the next._

_Or at least, that's how it usually works. But this time, it was the dead who'd wearied of you. Their formerly benign, cataracted gazes became accusatory, less the bland, stony gazes of cemetery monuments and more the sinister, implacable eyes of judges and Gorgons. Their stiff, blue-tinged lips fashioned themselves into knowing leers and puckered moues of disapproval. Suddenly, they demanded more than a simple, clinical accounting of their final hours. They were no longer content with just a mouthpiece, a scalpel-brandishing herald to catalogue their final indignities in the bloodless Greek of the autopsy. Now they would have justice._

_You dismissed it at first, chalked up the phantom expressions and perceived grimaces to the workaholic's hours that you kept and to the vagaries of a mind fueled by adrenaline and caffeine in quantities sufficient to stunt growth in lab mice. Stress and insomnia played with the mind, arranged the myriad props of its internal theatre for its own amusements. Some of the residents with whom you'd worked in a galaxy far, far away had hallucinated during hectic rotations, had insisted that patients they'd pronounced dead and shunted to the morgue had reappeared in the hallways, cinder-eyed Jacob Marleys wrapped in medical gauze and shambling the hospital in search of their lost souls. Hell, in your final semester of med school, you were so tired that you saw your fingernails transform into maggots, wriggling and writhing on the ends of your fingers like Tom Savini's belly dancers at a gravedigger's ball. The illusion scared you so badly that you dropped your books and screamed like a girl. You would've crammed your knuckles into your mouth if you hadn't been worried that one of the dancers would find its way into your mouth and lodge in your soft palate, a hideous second uvula. You were halfway to sick and three-quarters of the way to the bathroom when you remembered to breathe and blink, and when you did, your fingernails were your fingernails again._

_Even if you couldn't blame everything on stress and fatigue, science took care of the rest. Bodies move after death, twitch and jerk and sometimes sit up on the autopsy table. Life does not go gently, and when the soul departs, muscle memory lingers in the empty vessel, an echo of the past. You've seen fingers curl and jaws twitch, and even when movement ceases, the body continues the work of dying. Corpses fart and belch and rattle for hours after death. So, if a corpse seemed to glare balefully at you as you loomed over it with a scalpel, what of it? Maybe accusation was the only expression the muscles remembered. There was nothing odd or sinister in it, nothing new under the sun._

_Until the voices, of course._

_If only Mac had known about the voices. How strangely would he have looked at you then? You can guess; you've always had a knack for sussing out the truth, and it's a safe bet that if he had known about the voices you started hearing just before he dropped the ax on Aiden(_and off came her head; the rest burned in the car, and wasn't that merry?), _not only would he never have signed off on your transfer into the field, he would've ordered you to a psychiatric evaluation and frog-marched you to the office with stone-faced, Semper Fi gravitas. It's a short walk from boy wonder to madman, too short for comfort._

_The dead have always spoken to you. That's old hat and standard operating procedure. In truth, you found it rather soothing to recreate them inside your head while you arranged them so artfully on your scales and in your specimen jars. It made it easier to expose their secrets and shames to the world if you could establish a temporary, internal rapport, pretend that you were making small talk like a general practitioner. You discussed hobbies and jazz albums and current events, and they revealed themselves inside your head, jovial and querulous and just plan asshole by turns. It was fun, a bit of diversion to distract you from the grimness of your task and a mental exercise to keep the cogs turning smoothly. But the voices were always, always inside your head._

_You were washing up after a post the first time you heard it. It was almost lost under the thunder of water splashing into the stainless steel sink. You thought it was air hissing through the balky plumbing or the pitter patter of rat feet behind the walls. It was furtive, paper drifting to the ground on a careless, intemperate breeze. You registered it and let it go. Then it happened again, louder and more distinct. You blinked and turned off the tap in order to hear it more clearly. It was silent for the longest time, so long that you started to turn the faucet on again, convinced it was your imagination. Then it came, laughter from one of the drawers, dark and phlegmatic, the sucking, swamp-mud rasp of a lifelong smoker._

_Your hand drifted from the tap handle to the paper towel dispenser, and you tugged a handful of sheets from its slack, cadaver mouth. You dried your hands, and the laugh bubbled from the drawers behind you, abetted by the dry shuffle of cheap, coarse paper over your damp hands. You turned to investigate, head cocked and soggy paper towels forgotten in your hand. You were more curious than afraid, a scientist presented with a new and unexpected hypothesis._

_You moved from drawer to drawer, pressing your ear to cold steel that bit into the sensitive skin, a sharp, predatory nip that made the nautilus tingle and burn. _Danger. Live contents inside. _Which was impossible, since each inhabitant had had his birthday suit redesigned and marred by a ragged _Y_ in ugly, black stitching. Nothing. No breathing. No frantic pounding of fists on the walls to signal that someone had been prematurely buried. No scrabbling clitter of fingernails on metal. Just the sedate hum of the refrigeration unit._

_You waited five minutes just to be sure, though you felt like a fool, standing with your ear to the drawer like some spooked probie. Eventually, you got disgusted with yourself and pried yourself away, back to your books and your forms and the hypnotic rhythm of signing your name to the scrolls of the dead as though it were a royal seal that granted bearers the right of passage into the afterlife. You kept an ear out for the rest of the night, but the dead had fallen into dreams and did not stir, and when you finally signed the last certificate at quarter-past three, you'd neatly consigned the experience to the realm of the strange but untrue. For the first time in a long time, you didn't sleep on the cot in the alcove. You went to your apartment instead and tripped all the security locks behind you._

_You were watchful for a while after that, ever alert for the sound of laughter from the bank of drawers, but none came, and after two weeks of starting at every echo of conversation admitted into the morgue by the swinging doors and every rustle of paper by a coroner's assistant, you put your foot down and rededicated yourself to the daily grind of tending the dead, reminded yourself that it was physiologically impossible for the dead to speak. The cerebral cortex dies within minutes if deprived of blood and oxygen. Minor brain damage begins at two minutes; major, irrevocable damage occurs at four. Five minutes is fatal. Even if the dead could coax their vocal cords to grinding speech, they'd lack the cognitive ability to communicate rationally or effectively. It would be so much gibberish. It was a comforting pep talk steeped in the tools of your trade, one designed to keep the bogeyman at bay. It should've worked, but it didn't._

_You heard them again three months later. You were posting a bloater dredged out of the East River, a spaceman tethered to Earth in your coveralls, spatter guard, and air filtration mask. You were so much the prehistoric cosmonaut that you had reenacted the first moonwalk, complete with slow-motion, exaggerated hops and a performance of underwater ballet. Ironic, considering you're going to die underwater, to relive that giddy moment of coroner's humor by twitching and convulsing while your lungs and stomach fill with fluid. _Death by drowning, _it'll say on Sid's autopsy report, and maybe there'll be the corollary of _death by misadventure_, as though you'd stumbled off the pier and toppled headlong into the water instead of dying on the job with a fistful of old coins. At least you'll be ready for the ferryman._

_The reenactment of the moon landing was several hours behind you when the voices came, however. The only sounds then were the percolating gurgle of your self-contained respirator and the wet, viscous rattle of your scalpel as you made an incision into the trachea, pudding sloshing inside a wet, rotten leather bag. The skin was a deep, mottled purple, and it sloughed despite your practiced delicacy. Water and thick foam beaded beneath the blade._

_There was a ponderous thump from inside one of the drawers, and then the voices, an indistinct murmur that came from everywhere and nowhere, phantom voices like those that came from the radio when the tuner was on the fritz, whispers stolen from the roar of static._

-obbling –ist –ck.

-oing –on –bab

-ock –bling shi-

_Word fragments spit from the silence, pebbles discarded from the thirst-shriveled mouths of wandering prophets and desert nomads. Snatches of madness and nonsense. Except that the nettlesome, barbed finger of truth kept scratching at the base of your brain, reminding you of a conversation, a parting curse, that you'd rather forget._

-obbling –ist –ck._ You could fill in the blanks if you cared to, and even if you didn't, your mind, ever the inventive monkey, would help you along. It had no designs on being a traitor, but sometimes treachery can't be helped._

_The voices knew you knew, must have known, because they got clearer and faster and colder, as though your trusty scalpel had learned to speak. _–obbling –ist –ck –obbling –ist-ck –obbling –ist –ck, _a Greek chorus prophesying doom to a traveler whose feet were already set upon the fatal path. Sharp and burning against your skin, and so insistent that you itched with the need to clap your gloved hands to your plastic-covered ears and hum to block them out. You almost did, almost punctured your eardrum with your blood-stained scalpel, and wouldn't that have been a story for Mac, a red flag that would've kept you out of the field and on his watch list until you retired and shuffled off to play backgammon in Palm Springs? Mac's nothing if not watchful for the mutant. He's been hunting monsters since seventeen. It's all he knows. You know he's watching this right now, watching your monsters rise from the abyss._

_It was a constant babble, echoed in the crackle of your sterile scrubs, and then the power went out and you were plunged into a darkness so absolute that it had its own darkness underneath, a visual double exposure that made you wonder if it was the sight of the blind. It was the most unpleasant moment of your life to be lost in the dark with those voices and a dead man on the table. If the backup generators hadn't kicked in and bathed the morgue in dull amber light, you might've lost your mind, felt it slither from your overstuffed skull and disappear into the abyss, washed into the sewers with the bloater's rotting tissue._

_But the lights flickered on and spared your sanity, and you were grateful until you glanced down at the bloater and saw that his previously closed eyes were now open and avid behind their milkglass shine. Dead facial muscles twitched with a terrible creak, overtaxed rawhide, and the blue-purple lips twisted in an obscene parody of a smile. You wanted the mercy of darkness then, oh, yes, you did, but the squat bunker of the morgue was ever the faithful soldier and did not falter, and so you kept right on seeing._

-obbling –ist –ck, _said the larynx that should have been long past talking, and bits of skin bubbled and split in the corners of his water-swollen mouth. _–oing –don- bab-_ Dark water and foam bubbled from his butterflied trachea._

_You didn't stay to hear the rest. You just dropped your scalpel on the floor and blundered for the door. You were a cosmonaut again, but there was nothing funny about this space walk; this was life or death. The spaceship was leaving, and if you didn't make it inside, you were going to be left on the lightless, airless surface of the moon. You had one hand on the swinging door when Mr. River Man spoke again, this time with perfect clarity._

Aunt Ruby says hello.

_You turned to face the slab. Mr. River Man grinned up at you with his filmy, grey teeth. His opaque, irisless eyes gleamed at you with a manic cheer that brought your heartbeat and your gorge into throat._

She says she'll see you real soon, and oh, the things you'll have to talk about. Won't it be fun? _Then Mr. River Man laughed, and water erupted from his throat, water that wriggled and slithered as it spread across the floor._

_You bolted from the room and sprinted into the nearest bathroom to heave your guts. You hadn't vomited at an autopsy since med school, and the coroner's assistants dragged the incident to the mysterious corners of their locker room for discussion and dissection. You were legendary for your Zen in the face of the messiest deaths, so a body that could part you from your dinner must have been legendary, indeed. Rumor had it that they pooled their collective intellectual resources to uncover the cadaver. If only they'd asked Dr. Pino, who finished the autopsy later that day. Mr. River Man was and still remains the only autopsy you never finished. It was also the first time you'd ever run from the morgue. At least you didn't run screaming, though you would have if you'd had the breath for it. Strangely, your lungs had been tight and heavy inside your chest, as if they'd been filled with sand. Or with river water that wriggled and slithered._

_You thought it would also mark the only occasion for flight, but you were wrong on that count because two weeks later, the autopsy room became a track again. The voices came again, and that time, you got lucky enough to see what was behind the drawer, _who_-_

But that wasn't a memory he wanted to relive, even if the visit was brief. The thought of facing it again galvanized him, and he redoubled his efforts to wrench his arm free of the ensnaring beam. A shadow drifted over him and disappeared, and something brushed his back.

_She's got me, _he thought frantically. _She found her way out of that damn crypt, and I'm never leaving this bay. _But then Danny was beside him, gesturing and reassuring and putting his shoulder to the stubborn beam. His relief was so profound that he laughed, an explosion of bubbles that plumed from his regulator, and a waste of precious air.

_Not that it matters, _insisted the relentless doctor inside his head. _You passed the point of no return sixty seconds ago. You're going to drown, going to join the River Man; it's only a question of time._

He'd always wondered if death hurt; not the manner of death-he'd seen far too many deaths that had been alloyed studies in agony. Aunt Ruby's, for instance. No, he wondered about the precise moment when the body was cleaved from the soul. Was it a clean sundering, or did one cling to the other with the single-minded tenacity of the dying? If it hurt, was it a quick pain, the needling burn of an incision made by an expert hand, or did it linger, an echo that continued to reverberate long after the preacher had folded his holy tent and the gravediggers had finished their work? Would he still feel the water in his lungs while two men with grave dirt under their nails were quaffing pints at a bar? Maybe the moment of separation was determined by the life you lived. Maybe that was the first and last measure of God's mercy for His exiled children blundering through the remnants of Eden. Maybe it was the only mercy He could grant after such a long and willful estrangement. Maybe His cup of grace was empty, nothing inside but drops and dregs.

_Which death will He grant you, Dr. Hawkes? When the moment comes, will He consider your degrees and diplomas, the countless lives you've saved with the practice of your hallowed arts, the roll call of bad guys you've put away as a member of the CSI team? Or will He perhaps consider just two moments, two out of hundreds of millions? Maybe one failure is all it takes, one moment of weakness. If so, you're in very big trouble._

His mind formed images of his second sprint from the morgue, images of what he'd found when he'd so foolishly opened the door to Drawer 3 and peered inside. The thing inside, crouching over the corpse of Mrs. Madeline Guthrie, hit and run, crouching over her in a familiar floral-print caftan and peeling the flesh from her face like the peel from an orange. The thing that rocked and cackled and looked at him with black, dead eyes.

The thing that had placed Mrs. Madeline Guthrie's face over its own and smiled at him.

_What's the matter, Sheldon, my boy? Don't like my new face? Cock-gobbling racist shitfuck. It's ever so much better than the one I was left with because-_

He shut his eyes and tried to picture something else-his apartment, neat and clean despite the array of Miles Davis CDs fanned on his coffee table, the first girl he ever kissed, the first he'd ever bedded, the chocolate lab he'd had as a kid, the one that fetched sticks and tennis balls and was a master of the well-timed soundless fart that could clear a room of unwanted relatives in record time. But the only memory that heeded his call was of himself standing beside Mac behind the two-way mirror while Stella and Flack interrogated Julie Rollins. His own face reflected in the glass like an insubstantial truth as he'd told Mac that he'd done the right thing by not helping his bedridden, cancer-ravaged father escape the pain. Two faces in the mirror.

_Liar, liar, pants on fire._

Something snagged the ankle of his neoprene wetsuit and tugged, and he knew it wasn't Danny, because he was still waging war against the stubborn beam, butting and tugging and willing it to move, goddamn fucking sonofawhore thing, move. Still trying to be Superman, to be dealt a hand he wouldn't lose on the last card. Danny would keep trying long after it was too late, and Sheldon found that comforting, even if it was too late for a last-minute miracle.

He looked over his shoulder and moaned. They were there, waiting for him with eager faces and clutching hands. Deborah Kleman and Aunt Ruby and Mr. River Man, who in life had been a lonely businessman with no one to keep him company and mourn his passing. Mr. River Man, who would no longer be the only bloater in the river. Deborah Kleman's hair was impossibly red and floated behind her like strands of kelp.

Aunt Ruby floated between them, floral caftan belled around her emaciated frame, an ancient jellyfish come to collect her prey.

_You knew you couldn't outrun me forever, Sheldon, baby, _Aunt Ruby said_, _though her mouth never moved. _There are consequences to everything, even those actions we choose not to take. It won't hurt, baby. I can promise you that. Love is often merciful in its cruelty._ She was closer now, close enough to touch his flippered foot, and he knew that when she did, she would keep him there forever.

The regulator gave a final gurgling hiss and quit, and he knew with the detached serenity of certainty that he was going to die. He wondered what they'd talk about at his Irish wake at Sullivan's, what jokes Danny would tell over three beers too many and what stories Mac wouldn't. He hoped they'd have the grace to grieve with laughter, as they'd done with Aiden. He was only sorry he wouldn't be there to join in.

_Sheldon!_ Sharp and direct.

He faced forward again, and Aunt Ruby was there, not the batrachian jellyfish that clawed at his foot with her lethal tentacles and sought to drag him into the muddy deep, but the Aunt Ruby who'd spent her life lifting him up. She sat in her rocking chair and rocked and clacked and watched him over her glasses. She was still knitting, ever knitting, and the muffler had grown enormously, had become a slender, golden rope.

_Sheldon, are you listening to me, boy? What did I tell you? There is always hope, even when you can't see it. Sometimes, you've just got to fight for it, that's all. _She held out the miraculous, golden strand. _You've got a choice to make now, baby. Make it quick. _The rope danced just beyond his reach.

He reached for it with a leaden arm, stretched his fingers until they creaked with the effort, but the rope eluded him, and before he could redouble his effort, cold curled around his ankle and calf in a vise. Aunt Ruby of After had reached him at last, and if he dared look back, he would see here there, crabbed and hateful and burning with malice, Aunt Ruby reduced to bone and ash and twisted medical perversity.

_I'm not going to make it, Aunt Ruby. Sometimes, your best isn't good enough, _he told the Aunt Ruby of Before, who was rocking sedately in front of him, loosely holding the rope in her hand. She was graying at the edges, losing her vibrant color, and receding, and so was the rope.

He reached for it anyway, because he had always been an overachiever, had always exceeded expectations. There was no last-minute miracle this time; he'd passed wunderkind ten years ago. Aunt Ruby smiled sadly and drifted out of reach, and the rope followed her into the shadows, the tail of a dying comet.

_Hale-Bopp won't come around again for seventy-five years, _he thought distantly, _and by then it'll be too late. _

Suddenly, he was jerked from behind, a jolt that drove the breath he'd been holding from his aching lungs and dislodged his regulator. Water filled his mouth, metallic and silty.

_Blood. The Long Island Sound tastes like blood. _It was a horrid, morbid thought, but he had no chance to ponder it. His arm wrenched free of the beam under which it had been trapped with a hot, sprung flare of agony and an ominous crack that reminded him of the sound a nine-year-old boy's neck had made as he'd toppled from the monkey bars all those years ago, the flat, echoless pop of finality.

Then he was ascending, being dragged through the opening and toward the light by Danny, who'd grabbed him by the waist and was kicking furiously, clawing at the water as though it had offended him.

_Too late, _he thought dully. _It was one hell of a try, Dan my man, and you've got nothing to be ashamed of, but it's thirty seconds too late. _They were so close to the surface that he could see the blurry, astigmatic outline of a channel mark. So close, yet so far away. He laughed, and more water flooded his mouth. His diaphragm seized in a last-ditch effort to save him, and the world dimmed, grey, grainy, and indistinct. Irrelevant. He relaxed, and his head lolled bonelessly. Going, goin…

He erupted from the water, the world's most graceless Flipper, and his mouth opened wide to gulp the glorious air. For a moment, nothing happened, and then his diaphragm unclenched. Air, sweet, merciful air, filled his lungs, and his heart sang. Air was honey in his mouth, clove honey, rich and heady as a shot of bourbon in a Friday night jazz club. He took a deep breath and whooped.

"Take it easy there, Doc." Danny gripped him by the elbow and steered him toward the boat, where Mac and Lindsay were already peering over the side. He was still too shaken and winded to see clearly, but he knew how Mac would look-pinched and exhausted, tight-lipped and frayed at the edges.

_Like he's seeing ghosts._

That brought to mind unwelcome images of Aunt Ruby of After and River Man and Deborah Kleman, and he put on a burst of speed. They were still waiting for him down there, tirelessly treading the deep currents, lightless eyes searching for his shadow on the water. As long as he was in the Sound, he was in danger. His giddy imagination supplied him with the image of them exploding from the water to drag him down, an undying and unkillable monster that would never rest while he was near.

"Hey, hey, Doc, slow down, all right?" Danny pleaded. "The worst is over now. You're gonna be all right."

Hawkes didn't blame Danny. He didn't know what was lurking underneath their feet. How could he when they didn't belong to him? He chanced a look over his shoulder as he struggled through the water and bit back a scream. Red on the water, a steadily spreading pool that he might have mistaken for blood if it hadn't been moving stealthily toward him, bobbing indolently on the obliging current. Not blood, but Deborah Kleman's crown of fire.

"We gotta get out of the water, Danny. Right now," he insisted, and tried to quicken his one-armed stroke.

"Yeah, Doc, we're goin', but you gotta take it easy. Your arm's messed up."

"If we don't get out of here now, I'm leaving you here," he replied resolutely. He didn't mean it, of course. He'd never leave any of them behind. They were the closest he had to anything that mattered, kin by the bloody bond of the mutual foxhole they inhabited, but now that he'd been given a second chance, he had no intention of letting it slip through his fingers.

"Well, when you put it that way, Doc, how c'n I refuse?" Danny sighed and kicked harder, his profile sharp and inscrutable.

"Sorry," Hawkes sputtered. "But I just want to get the hell out of here."

Danny's jaw relaxed. "I guess I can relate to that." Messer for "apology accepted."

He considered the matter closed, an incidental coda to the drama of his near-drowning, and so he was surprised when Danny broached the subject again while they were waiting for the ambulance. They were hunkered haphazardly on the shore, slouched and crouched on the asphalt by turns. His arm, which in his doctoral opinion was sprained and dislocated, throbbed in time to his heartbeat, and he counted to one thousand by prime numbers to keep the nausea at bay. Danny squatted beside him, nicotine-stained fingers dangling between his knees, and studied the boats on the horizon.

"Bad habit," Hawkes observed, and nodded at Danny's fingers.

Danny blinked and dropped his gaze to his fingers. He studied them as if they belonged to someone else. "Huh. Yeah. Well, some habits are hard to break, you know?"

"Yeah." He didn't, though. He was an Earthling Yoda. Do or do not. He could break habits as easily as he formed them. There was no try.

If Danny sensed the lie, he gave no sign. He simply squinted at a white fleck on the horizon and scraped a fleck of grime from beneath his ragged thumbnail. "So, Doc," he said at last, "What's the deal with you and the water? If you don't mind me sayin', I've never heard you so emphatic." Danny never looked at him, just followed the path of the boat as it sailed against the sun.

_He doesn't want the whole truth, but just enough, _whispered Aunt Ruby inside his head, the safe Aunt Ruby of Before.

For that, Hawkes was profoundly grateful.

He shrugged. "Bad memories. They have a way of creeping up on you."

Now Danny did look at him, shifted so that his feet crunched in the gritty asphalt. He pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose with a quick jab of his index finger. "Yeah, I gotta little experience with those myself," he said.

Hawkes opened his mouth to protest that he had certainly had no truck with this particular brand of recollection, recollections that rose from the muddy bottom of the bay to claim their rightful piece of flesh, then decided against it. It wasn't worth the effort, and besides, shadows flickered in Danny's eyes, danced and wavered like strands of seaweed brought up from below. They reminded of Deborah Kleman's hair as she'd drifted beside Aunt Ruby and Mr. River Man, and his mouth puckered with the mineral-water taste of the Sound.

He shuddered and gritted his teeth against the bolt of pain the movement inspired in his arm and looked anywhere but at the water.


End file.
