"May I ask you a question, Mr. Sykes?" He was close enough that I could smell the blood and rose perfume on his breath. His fingers felt like steel shackles encasing my hand.

I remembered that the blue glass jar marked Strength Beyond Numbers had been nearly empty. I wondered how much of it Scott-Beck had running through his veins.

"Who sent you in here?" he asked.

His hand crushed brutally around mine. I slashed my free hand up and drove my long nails into the flesh of his throat. His skin was like horse hide. My claws barely cut into it.

In an instant, Scott-Beck stepped aside and twisted my hand violently. Cracking pain burst through my arm as a bone in my wrist snapped. He twisted my hand farther and I stumbled on my feet, dropping to one knee.

He kicked me hard in the chest. My ribs cracked inward. My lungs crushed in as the air was forced out of them.

"Who sent you, Mr. Sykes?" He was still smiling as if this had just been a friendly tussle.

"You're going to kill me whether I say or not, aren't you?" My voice was barely audible.

"Of course." Scott-Beck squeezed his fingers around my broken wrist. "But it's up to you, how I do it."

"Please, don't." I closed my eyes as if that would hold out the pain. "The man who hired me..." I carefully dropped the fingers of my free hand down into my coat pocket. "He didn't tell me his name, but he wore an anatomist's pin. He was blonde and young." I closed my hand around the vial.

"An anatomist?" For a moment Scott-Beck's attention shifted from me to the man who hired me.

I lunged forward, smashing the vial into Scott-Beck's groin. The delicate glass shattered and Scott-Beck howled in agony. I jerked my hand free of him and scrambled for the window.

A brutal weight slammed into my back and crushed me face down to the hard wood floor. I hadn't seen Brown come in after Scott-Beck, but I recognized the smell of him on top of me. I tried to twist out from under him, but his weight on top of me was immovable. He seized a fistful of my hair, jerking my head up. The tendons of my neck strained as he pulled my head back so that I was looking up at him.

"It seems that you still don't know how to answer a question properly, Mr. Sykes." Brown's face was flushed deep red. His expression was one of pleasure, almost arousal. He slammed the side of my face down into the floor. A deep explosion of pain and dizziness rocked through my skull. He pulled my head back up and slammed it down again. I fought against him. Brown threw his weight against my straining neck and my head cracked into the floor again.

My throat and shoulders spasmed with tearing pain. Blood welled out from the side of my head where my skin had split upon impact with the floor. My vision wavered as a ripple of darkness passed through my consciousness.

Brown lifted my face again, and this time I hung limply in his grip.

"What about it, Albert?" Brown asked. "Shall I split his little skull?"

"We want to know about the girl first." I heard Scott-Beck walk up on my left. "Ask him who she is."

"Well, then?" Brown shifted his weight on my back, rocking his groin against me as if I were a two-penny whore. "Where's the girl you've been working with, Sykes? What's her name?"

"I think it might be something like...Fuck You!" I could hardly think for the pain, but it didn't make me any more cooperative.

"Listen, Sykes. I can make you wish you were back in the Inquisition House." Brown pulled my head back a little more. I could see Scott-Beck out of the corner of my eye. He stroked his thick white beard and studied me. In my beaten state, I suddenly thought that he looked a great deal like a painting I had seen of Father Christmas. He considered me as if it pained him to see that I would be going down on his naughty list. "I don't know how far you're going to get with him—" Scott-Beck's words were cut short by a sharp rap at the door.

Scott-Beck walked back out of my view, but Brown remained on top of me. I heard Scott-Beck open the door.

"What is it, Tim?"

"There's a man from the Inquisition here." The secretary sounded slightly flustered.

"What does he want?"

"He says he's looking for a Prodigal named Belimai Sykes." The secretary's voice dropped to a whisper. "He won't go away."

"How inconvenient." Scott-Beck walked back to where Brown had me pinned. He dropped down beside me and took a firm grasp on my throat with both his hands.

"Lewis," he said to Brown, "you and Tim go down and get rid of the Inquisitor. I'm afraid that we're not going to have all the time we would have liked with Mr. Sykes."

As Brown rose off of me, Scott-Beck lifted me by my throat. I scrambled to gain my footing. Brown caught my arms and jerked them back behind me. Pain seared through my broken wrist.

"I was hoping to have a little longer with him," Brown said.

"Next time," Scott-Beck assured him. "Perhaps with the girl."

"Fair enough." Brown retreated back through the door with the secretary.

Scott-Beck sighed and then shoved me back against the desk. His expression was resigned, not even slightly perturbed. I knew from the sheer number of bottles on the shelf above us that he had murdered many Prodigals before me. If it had ever troubled his conscience, he was long past that now. Like the Confessors who had tortured me in the Inquisition, he was utterly at ease with himself and what he did.

I hated Scott-Beck for that.

Rage gave me a burst of strength. I kicked him as hard as I could and shoved against him. Scott-Beck stumbled but caught himself before I could twist free. He slammed his fist into my bleeding head with professional ease.

My vision went entirely black. Blind nausea swelled through me, enveloping all other sensations of my body. I rolled back into a senseless darkness and collapsed onto the desk.

Often in the last six years I had thought of my own death as a comfort. I had thought of it as I slid a needle into my soft flesh and imagined that it would be as easy and restful as the ophorium that poured into my blood. But now I knew I didn't want to die. Too much had been taken from me already. My life was all I had to claim.

A burst of stabbing agony brought me back up. Scott-Beck was leaning over me with one hand planted directly on my throat. My shirt and vest had been torn aside, and a bowl was tucked up next to my bare chest. With his free hand, Scott-Beck continued to slice a scalpel deep into my stomach.

Fury surged through my body. I had never felt anything like this before. A deafening roar ripped up from my throat. The sound of it was like a thunder clap. The window exploded. Scott-Beck took a stunned step back, the scalpel falling from his fingers to the floor. For a moment I thought my scream alone had caused all the blood to drain from his face.

Then I felt the heat of flames bursting up across the floor. I turned my beaten face and saw the Prodigal girl from Saint Christopher's Park hovering just outside the open window. Scott-Beck took another quick step backwards.

The girl moved forward, crouching on the windowsill. Her cracked red eyes followed Scott-Beck's every motion. I didn't think she was even aware of my presence.

"I can smell his blood on you," she said to Scott-Beck. "You murdered Peter."

Scott-Beck started for the door. The girl was faster than him. She sprang into the air and hurled one of her black-bladed knives. Scott-Beck dropped to the floor. The knife whipped over his head and drove into the wall. Flames burst up from the blade and spread across the wallpaper.