2. THE LIONS’ DEN.

MICAH

I went out that first evening just to walk.

This was habit, not restlessness or grief. At seminary, I'd walk every evening after vespers.

The body needs ritual as much as the soul does. My spiritual director had told me that. Don't only pray with your mouth, Micah. Let your feet be part of it.

Haloshul at dusk was a different thing than Haloshul in daylight.

The neon came alive. Bars and restaurants lit up in colors. Couples walked hand in hand along the boardwalk. Groups of young men moved in loose formations, talking loudly, laughing at things I couldn't hear.

I walked through it feeling pleasantly invisible in my clerical collar, the way priests often feel, we were noticed but not approached, acknowledged but not engaged, a kind of moving sacred space that people made room for without quite knowing why.

I found myself on the street where we'd lived.

It was not on purpose. Or maybe it was on purpose.

But there I was on Calloway Street, in front of the house my father had bought when I was four and my mother was still alive, the house that had changed hands once since his death and now had a fresh coat of paint— a pale yellow that my father would have called too cheerful, and a garden that someone was clearly tending with more enthusiasm than skill.

I stood on the pavement across from it for a moment.

My mother had died in that house. In the back bedroom, which had been remodeled at some point because you could see from the street that the window was different now, double-glazed, modern. She'd died when I was ten and I remembered it in pieces but not clearly — the sound of adults crying in the kitchen, someone pressing a glass of juice into my hands that I never drank.

My father had grieved her for five years before Lupita Nyle walked into his congregation with her son, and by the time I was fifteen they were married in a small ceremony in the cathedral and I had acquired a stepmother and, unexpectedly, a stepbrother.

Blaze Kaius Bronson.

Three years older than me and already, at eighteen, distant from his family. He hadn't wanted a stepbrother. He hadn't wanted any of it, the new family, the new home, the new life. But he'd tolerated it. And I'd prayed for him when I could.

We were never close. That was the simple truth of it. We were people who lived in the same house, ate at the same table, occasionally talked about nothing in particular, and that was the sum of our relationship. I'd tried to include him. I'd tried to talk to him about faith, which was probably naive, and about anything else I could think of, which he'd received with a patient boredom that I'd eventually stopped fighting.

He had been gone by the time I left for seminary. Just gone— one morning he wasn't at breakfast, and my father had said, carefully, that Blaze had decided to live on his own for a while, and something in his voice had told me not to ask further. Lupita had looked at her tea and said nothing, and I'd taken that as my cue to be quiet.

I'd prayed for him. For years, even after my father died, even after the news filtered through that Lupita had been killed — God, that had been brutal, she had been good and gentle, and whatever the specifics of what happened to her, she hadn't deserved it… I had prayed for Blaze's soul but I hadn't reached out. I hadn't attended Lupita's burial.

Big mistake.

I should have been there, but I hadn't been.

I looked at the yellow house for another moment, then turned and started walking back.

I was on a narrower street, one block from the church housing, when something happened.

I almost didn't notice them until it was too late. Three men, mid-twenties maybe, moving quietly.

The street was badly lit here, a stretch between two functional lampposts where a bulb had burned out and nobody had replaced it yet.

I registered the threat half a second before one of them said, "Father. Nice watch."

I looked down reflexively. It wasn't even a nice watch. It was my father's, an old Seiko with a scratched face that I wore for the sentimental weight of it, not the material value. But they weren't really after the watch.

"I think there's been a misunderstanding," I started.

The one who'd spoken moved closer. He was broad and unhurried about his movements, which was the more frightening kind of threat. "Wallet, watch, phone. Now."

I thought, in a very detached part of my mind, that I should have listened to the warning that Haloshul was different now.

"I don't want trouble," I said, which was true and also useless.

What happened next was fast.

The broad one reached for me and I stepped back but hit the wall of a building I hadn't realized was directly behind me. His hand closed around my collar… my actual collar, the clerical collar, which struck me as both ironic and painful as it tightened against my throat, and one of the others grabbed my bag.

I remember trying to pull free. I remember the rough brick of the wall against my shoulder blades, and the third man saying something I couldn't quite hear, and then something connected with the side of my face and the ground came up suddenly and the bag was gone from my shoulder and there was a ringing in my ears.

I was on my knees and my palms were on the pavement, my chest feeling tight.

Suddenly, they stopped.

The alley had gone very quiet in a way that wasn't natural. Then, I heard footsteps from the mouth of the alley.

They heard it too. And they knew who it was.

I heard one of the three men say, very quietly, "Oh, hell."

Suddenly, they were running away, steps pounding against the pavement.

I wanted to move. To run. But I couldn't.

The footsteps stopped in front of me.

I was still on the pavement, my face ached and my palm was bleeding where it had caught the ground. I raised my head slowly, the ringing still subsiding, and looked up at the figure standing between me and the retreating dark.

All I could make out, with the busted lamplight behind him and the silhouette. He was tall and broad, clothed in a dark coat.

He didn't move toward me and didn't speak. He just stood there in the space where three grown men had been thirty seconds ago.

My mouth opened, blood from somewhere… my lip, I thought… was warm on my chin. "Blaze?" I whispered.

There was no way.

The figure looked down at me. And the lamplight, finally, found his face.

I saw the scar first. A thin silver line across the bridge of his nose, new since I last saw him. Then the tattoo… a cobra winding up from somewhere below his collar, scales dark against his tanned skin, reaching toward his jaw. Then the eyes.

Blue so pale they barely registered as a color that should exist. He was looking at me with an expression I couldn't read. Looking at me the way you look at something you've been expecting to see and are not glad to see.

Five years dissolved like they hadn't happened.

He looked at me on the ground of that alley and didn't speak for a moment. His face was doing nothing, there was no sign of relief or shock, not any of the things you might expect from a person who has just found their stepbrother bleeding on pavement.

Then he stood back up. "Get up," he said flatly, his voice hoarse.

He didn't even offer me a hand.

I got up but it took a second. My legs were being difficult, my pride was gone entirely and the side of my face felt like it was on fire.

My bag was three feet away where they'd dropped it in their hasty exit. I picked it up but my hands weren't quite steady.

Blaze stood two feet away and watched me do all of this with a blank look.

This was awkward.

"Thank you," I started. "I don't – it's been a long time, I know, I—"

"Three years," he cut me off.

"Yes."

"You didn't come to the burial."

My heart tightened, and I felt shame flood me.

"Blaze—"

"Three years ago," he said. "She died three years ago. You were what, two hours away? Three?"

My mouth was open but no words were doing anything useful. "I should have been there. I know. I need you to know that I—"

"What I need," he said, and his voice dropped into something quieter that was not softer, "is not going to come from you."

He stepped closer. He was not threatening… I didn't feel afraid, which was its own strange thing given everything about this moment, but close enough that I had to look up at him, which I didn't remember having to do before. He'd been tall at eighteen. He was a different category of tall now.

Way too tall.

"You have two weeks," he said, very quietly. "Request a transfer. Tell them the placement isn't right. Tell them whatever you need to tell them. But get out of Haloshul."

I stared at him. "I'm sorry?"

"Two weeks. After that, whatever happens to you in this city—" He took one step back, and something in his face closed over completely, like a door shutting. "—isn't my problem."

He turned and walked back up the alley the way he'd come.

Oh.

I didn't move for a full minute.

This couldn't be happening.

First night. First hour. And my stepbrother had just looked at me like I was an inconvenience he'd already decided to stop having.

Two weeks.

The audacity of it hit me almost immediately.

Absolutely not.

I walked home, sat in the kitchen under the good light, pressed a bag of frozen peas from the small freezer against my face and looked at nothing.

Two weeks?

No, Blaze.

No.

I would stay.