Something Wicked 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)

10: I hate Halloween

250A Malvinas Avenue, October 27

A crazy desperate thirst drove me from Dante's bed. My head felt like it was packed with cotton balls. My back pulsed with a dull rhythmic throbbing that no amount of Advil could numb.

Dante's room was spotless; no sign of the night's chaos save his bloodied rug rolled tight against the wall, and a rusty spot on his bedsheets where my bandage had leaked. Cannibalized laptops and modems littered one side of the spartan bedroom. A gray toolbox lay open on the desk, its contents scattered around what Dante had apparently been working on while I'd slept: a tiny silicone-encased ball attached to a delicate optic fiber. A secret camera.

I stepped back from the high-tech toys on the desk with a sinking feeling. If intelligent, well-equipped and determined Dante Russo hadn't taken down Alcor in a year, how the fuck could I, with nothing but two throwing stars and a death-wish?

Next to Dante's modified micro-camera lay a boxcutter, a little column of sharp steel sheathed in yellow-and-black plastic. As tiny as it was, the sight of it sent white-hot bolts of pain shooting through my scar. I tore my eyes away and stumbled against the closet with my head in a whirl and my scar scorching like a burning coal.

The number of bottom-rung, disposable henchmen I'd mangled with my kris in the depths of a demon-frenzy, yet the sight of a pissy little boxcutter made me cower like the worst of them, my scar aflame and sweat-beads trickling.

A boxcutter must have been how they'd done it. Short of weapons, Sergeant Kate Jones's Marine Corps sadists had probably sliced open my brachial artery with whatever packaging tools had lain abandoned in the warehouse in Jeddah.

Slow, steeling breaths calmed me the fuck down enough to peel my scantily-clad self off the closet door. I needed clothes. Dante wore the most beat-up clothes ever, so my jaw dropped when I opened his closet onto multiple boxes of Nikes with sweet colorways, T-shirts with vivid designs, and stylish hoodies. The guy owned the sickest clothes but dressed in faded threadbare shit through choice, not poverty like me, at least until Hamish McCloud's cast-off business-casual showed up in my life.

I wrestled on a green T-shirt and gray sweats from a clothes pile that was freestyling on the closet floor. The T-shirt looked sprayed on, and the sweats sat tight on my hips, my Alcor tattoo winking at me in the bathroom mirror as I threw glass after glass of water down my neck.

The tunnel vision of the night gave way to a pleasant noontime view; Dante's apartment was airy and stylish, like it was rented by a grown-ass dude, not some twenty-six-year-old gargoyle-climber. I shuffled past a set of photos on the hallway wall: Steph and Dante in front of a waterfall, Debs giving a thumbs-up to the camera.

Debs? Why was my parole officer's picture on Dante's wall? My eyes lingered on the photos while I strode on toward the kitchen.

And straight into a man.

Our heads knocked together with a hollow crack. The man reeled along the counter into a crouch while I staggered backward. The room spun around me until I got my bearings.

He was wearing an Italian suit. Not an everyday office rat, this guy was suave. He eyed me with the confident gaze of the one percent. Dante didn't tell me he had a brother.

Maybe in his mid-thirties, big bro had Dante's eyes and Dante's elegant stance. But, although he was fine as hell, he didn't possess that effortless beauty that Dante had. Coal-black Romani eyes scanned upward, taking in my bare feet, Dante's tight-ass clothes, my dozy red-eyed stare.

"Hi." I gave him an apologetic smile. "Dante's at work. He said it was OK for me to grab some cereal–"

"Don't mind me, pal!" Homeboy sidled away from the counter, flicking open a cupboard and pulling out a box of granola with suspicious agility as he passed. "All yours."