"Like he's you and you're him."

"Like we're one person, yes." Atticus sighed. "What are we going to do with him? We can't keep him locked in the basement."

"He's not going anywhere soon. We give him a phone to keep him happy, stuff him with food, and let him sleep. It's only for a few days, and then when we're done here, we can deal with him properly."

"If we let him call the Dog Warriors, they might come here."

"He doesn't know where he is. We picked him up a hundred miles from here, and he was in a car with Pennsylvania plates—who knows where those butchers actually killed him?"

"He'll ask."

"You are just so fucking truthful sometimes it hurts." Ru laughed softly. "We lie to him."

"What if he knows this area? He'll recognize it."

"We improvise. It's what we're good at."

"I don't want you hurt," Atticus said.

Ru reached out and brushed his hand down Atticus's side and paused, letting it rest on Atticus's hip. And they stood a moment in quiet prelude—the wordless question waiting for a silent answer. One would think, after all this time, he'd be less hesitant, more comfortable with their relationship, with himself. There was still that point, though, where love and desire didn't completely mesh. So delicate was the act of engaging both, that a single word could derail him. So they learned this silent dance, temporarily reversing their normal roles—Ru taking lead and he nearly passive—until they could bump over some deep-seated block.

Atticus nodded, and Ru stepped close, hands warm on his back, mouth softly coaxing him into the full unity of love and want.

CHAPTER TWO

Hyannis, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Monday, September 20, 2004

Kyle's anxious whisper woke Atticus. He stood at the foot of the bed, jiggling the mattress. "Atticus. Atticus."

"What?" Atticus untangled himself from Ru, who was awake but not stirring. Wise man.

"The power is out." Kyle wore pink bunny slippers and black silk pajamas that he plucked at nervously.

Atticus fumbled for his wristwatch. He'd been asleep only four hours. Outside, the howl of the wind drowned out the roar of the surf. "Fuck."

"I can't run the security systems without power. My laptop has only six hours of power, max. The outside line is dead too."

"Fuck," Atticus repeated, scrubbing at his face. "Remind me to kill Sumpter next time I see him."

"What do I do?"

The heat must be off too—the air was chilly. The temperature had dropped outside, sucking the heat of the house through the great expanse of glass.

"Take the Explorer and find a rental place," Atticus told Kyle. "Pick up a generator. Get fuel for it. There's a fireplace downstairs, right? See if you can pick up some firewood."

That was all that was needed. Kyle nodded, calmed by having a direction pointed out to him. "Okay. It will take me about an hour or two."

Atticus crawled out of bed.

"What are you doing?" Ru grunted, not even opening his eyes.

"Scouting around the house, getting used to the lay of the land."

"I'll come with you." Ru stirred feebly.

"Get more sleep. One of us should be sharp enough to deal. Besides, I want you to stay with my little brother." It felt weird saying that. Little brother.

"Hmmm? Hmm! Oh, yeah. The Dog Warrior. Okay."

***

Atticus took a cold shower, leaving the hot water for Ru. Dressing, he pondered his taste in clothes. He would have thought such outward choices were dictated by upbringing, not something genetic. Somehow it seemed impossible that Ukiah could be so feral and yet wear the exact same boots. Atticus laid out warm clothes for his brother, and then tried to banish him out of his mind; he had bigger things to think about.

Putting on a windbreaker to cut the cold wind, Atticus went outside to explore the area.

Lasker's place sat on a low bluff, flanked by other luxury beach houses, which Atticus cautiously circled. He found them empty: weekend retreats closed up for the week. While fringed by a stand of stunted hemlocks, the hilltop had only sand and dune grass, giving it an impression of barren isolation even though he could pick out sounds of distant traffic, screened by the trees.

The houses shared a narrow beach facing south, looking out over Nantucket Sound. The storm surf pounded the shore; the water rolled deep green until it broke to white, reeking of salt and a billion fishy organisms, alive and dead. Atticus knew Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket lay out across the water, but the fog hazed the sky to a smothering level.

Atticus had never put his hand in a bag full of scorpions. He assumed that he had too much common sense and intelligence to ever attempt doing so. There was also the little matter of someone finding a good enough reason for him to try. Yet here he was, about to do the equivalent—and worse, it wasn't going to be his hand alone dipping into the bag.

We should just leave. How could this ever have sounded like a good idea?

To be truthful, it never had. It had always sounded like a bag of scorpions.

They were chasing after a phantom, a new designer drug with street names like Pixie Dust, Mojo, Liquidlust, Blissfire, and Desire. They'd first heard about Pixie Dust in raves around Baltimore, elusive as an urban legend. The supply was so erratic and the demand was so high—and still growing quickly—that they'd never even seen a sample of the drug. No one knew where Pixie Dust was coming from. As Atticus and Ru set up deals for old favorites inside the Beltway, others tracked the new drug to Upstate New York. Outside of Buffalo, things had gone horribly wrong.

Atticus had worked with Boyes, Scroggins, and German. Despite what Sumpter might think, the men had given new meaning to the word "paranoid;" it was unlikely that they would have been careless. Whoever ambushed them had done a ruthlessly thorough job, killing everyone at the warehouse, buyer and seller alike, and smashing all the security equipment.

He and Ru had driven up to Buffalo to identify the bodies. Early Sunday morning, he'd slipped under the police tape and searched the warehouse with his inhumanly sharp senses, but there had been little to find. Scroggins and German had emptied their guns—both carried a SIG Sauer P229 in forty-caliber Smith & Wesson—but not into the dead drug dealers, who had been killed with shotguns. The lack of bullet holes in the back wall indicated that they'd hit someone—only all the blood splatters matched up with accounted-for dead bodies. Also there'd been a mysterious swath of clean floor, as if something had been dragged across it. During the long drive from Buffalo to Cape Cod, he'd reviewed his perfect memory, recalling every inch of the floor and walls in minute detail, and found nothing he'd overlooked.

Both sides had reasons to keep the meeting secret, so who would have ambushed the buy and walked away unscathed? Atticus would have suspected the man who had acted as the go-between—Jay Lasker—but he had dropped dead suddenly after setting up a second meeting. With Lasker had gone all the details about the Pixie Dust and the people selling it.

So here Atticus and his team were: at a dead man's house, meeting with people who had no names, seeking a drug they'd never seen. Unfamiliar with the area, they didn't know the secret ways, the ancient history, and things long ago buried but not forgotten. And now his brother was thrown into the mix.