4. TO PROTECT HIM.

BLAZE

The report landed on my desk at nine on a Thursday morning and I read it twice.

From Sergio: The photograph placed at Pendle Street was traced to B-side. Confirmed. Not internal.

B-side.

That was what we called the Bowscut organization internally, not to their faces, nothing that would land as disrespect, just the shorthand of people who dealt with a rival by not respecting the name. Bowscut had been pushing the central district for four months, gradually and irritating, the organizational equivalent of someone testing an electric fence. They ran numbers, some distribution, a protection arrangement in the south quarter that encroached on two of my established agreements.

They'd been manageable. Very irritating but still manageable.

What they'd done to Micah's apartment was not manageable. Not in any direction.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the report.

They'd tracked the connection from the alley. Someone had seen me there — seen Kaius to be precise walking into an alley where a priest was getting mugged and walking back out, and done the math wrong, or the right math. Either they knew about the family connection or they'd simply concluded that any priest I'd involve myself with was a pressure point, and Bowscut had been looking for a pressure point since February.

This was my fault.

I was not sentimental about fault. Fault was information. It told you what needed to be corrected and in which direction. I had walked into that alley because I had been monitoring Micah's routes… a decision I'd made the day I heard he was returning, when I'd calculated that an oblivious priest in a changed city was a variable I needed to know the location of, and someone had seen me do it.

Decision made in the wrong direction. Moving on.

The problem was moving on required Micah to not be in Haloshul, and Micah had looked at me in the alley with that split lip and that annoying expression he'd had since he was fifteen, the one that said, “I hear you and I disagree with every molecule of my body,” and it was clear he had no intention of going anywhere.

"The photo was clean?" I said to Sergio, who was leaning against the wall with his coffee.

"Professionally done. There's no metadata. Someone knew what they were doing."

"They were in the apartment for—"

"Forty minutes minimum. Based on the thoroughness."

Forty minutes in a priest's apartment in the middle of the afternoon, going through his things and leaving a photograph on his kitchen table like a calling card. Like they were saying, We know who you are. We know where you sleep. We know you went to the grave on Monday.

Micah was naive, he had spent three years in a seminary and was now walking around Haloshul with his schedule posted online.

I should have made him leave when I had the chance.

"What's the move?" Sergio asked.

"Nothing yet."

He waited.

"I want eyes on the housing and on his route," I said. "Discreet. Nothing he'd notice."

"And Bowscut?"

"Send a message that the Pendle Street property is off-limits. Don't explain why."

"They'll push on the why."

"Let them push," I said. "I'll deal with the why when they ask it directly."

Sergio nodded and left. I turned my chair to the window and looked at Haloshul in the morning light.

Micah was a liability. That was the correct framing. He had arrived in my city, walked into my alley and made himself into a pressure point that someone was already using, and the solution was for him to leave, but he wouldn't leave, and the next solution was to make the city understand he was not a useful lever, and the only way to do that was to—

I didn't finish that thought.

I went to the cathedral that night instead.

********

It was late, after eleven. The cathedral locked its main doors at ten but the side entrance off the prayer garden had a lock I knew from three years ago when I'd had reason to know it, and it was the same lock, which said something about institutional faith in the goodness of Haloshul that I found both touching and idiotic.

He was inside.

Of course he was inside at eleven on a Thursday. Micah at twenty-two had the same quality Micah at fifteen had— an inability to be anywhere he wasn't supposed to be. He was at a desk near the altar, papers spread around him, one lamp lit in the dark of the cathedral, looking like something out of a painting I'd have called too obvious.

He heard me before he saw me. His head came up fast, and for one second I saw what fear looked like on Micah Sawyer.

Then he saw it was me and the fear became something else.

Annoyance.

"What the hell," he hissed, which was not something I expected from a priest and which I found, against my will, mildly satisfying. "How did you get in here?"

"Side entrance."

"That's a locked entrance."

"Yes."

He stared at me. Then he put his pen down. "What do you want, Blaze?"

I crossed the nave and simply looked at him.

He looked tired. The bruise on his cheekbone had moved into the yellow phase, which was almost worse.

Good. Better that than dead.

"Someone searched your apartment," I pointed out.

He went completely still.

"Thursday afternoon," I said. "While you were at the hospital. Forty minutes or so. They left something on your table."

“How do you know that?"

"Because I know this city."

"That is not an answer."

"It's the answer I have and it is what you will get."

He stood up. The chair scraped back as he stood up and looked at me across the desk and for a moment I saw it— the actual anger that had been simmering on the surface.

"You said last week that whatever happened to me in this city wasn't your problem," he said.

"Yes."

"So why are you in my cathedral at eleven at night telling me about my apartment?"

Good question, Micah.

"Because what happened to your apartment changes the variable."

"What variable?”

"The variable," I said, "where your presence in Haloshul only affects you."

He looked at me processing what I said.

He would get it. He was smart.

"Someone searched my apartment," he said slowly, "because of you."

I said nothing.

"Because of you," he said again, and now the anger had a direction. Me. "They saw you in the alley. And they went to my apartment because they wanted to know who I was to you." He stepped around the desk. "Who are you, Blaze? In this city. What are you?"

"Someone who handles things."

"That's not—"

"That's all I'm going to tell you."

"Then you should leave." He pointed at the side entrance. "Get out of my cathedral."

"Micah—"

"Get. Out." His voice was very hard now. "You told me two weeks and then I'm on my own. It's been six days. Come back in eight days and tell me to leave, I'll have the same answer. Until then, this—" He gestured between us, at the air, at whatever the space between us was. "This is not something I want."

I looked at him, then at the collar, the lamplight and his bruised face.

"You need to take the apartment schedule down," I said. "Tonight. Before you leave here."

"I already told you—"

"Tonight, Micah." I stepped forward. Just one step, and I watched him not step back, which took something from him, I could see it taking something. Like he was trying to stand his ground. "They know your Tuesday route. They know the hospital. They know the cemetery." I paused and let that land. "They know you went to the grave."

Something moved across his face. "Who are they?" he asked.

"People who are interested in using you to get to me."

"Using me—" He stopped and drew a breath. "So I'm…what, collateral? I haven't done anything. I've been here six days."

"It doesn't matter what you've done."

"It should matter."

"Yes," I said. "It should. Haloshul doesn't care."

He stared at me. His jaw was tight, hands at his sides, and I knew that expression — fifteen years old, eighteen years old, twenty-two years old, Micah's face was easy to read.

"I'll take the schedule down," he said finally. "Fine. Tonight. And then—"

"Then I'll look into it."

"Look into it," he repeated. "You'll look into it? What does that mean, Blaze? What happens when you look into it?"

"Nothing that comes to your door," I said.

"That's not—" He stopped and looked at the ceiling, which was what Micah did when he was asking God to give him patience for a human being who was failing to deserve it. Then he looked back down. "This is insane. This is genuinely insane. I've been back six days."

"I know."

"Get out," he said. "I'll take the schedule down. Get out."

I turned and walked back through the cathedral, my footsteps going everywhere. At the side door I stopped because there was something else.

"Lock your windows tonight," I said, without turning. "All of them."

He said nothing.

I left, walked back out into Haloshul and took out my phone and called Sergio.

"Reinforce the Pendle Street position," I ordered. "I want someone there overnight."

"Already on it," Sergio said, which meant he'd anticipated the call.

"Don't tell me that," I scowled.

"Understood."

I hung up, stood on the street outside the cathedral and looked at the steeple against the night sky.

He should have left.

But he's not going to leave.

I walked back to the car. Somewhere on Pendle Street, my people would watch his windows through the night and he would never know it.

*******

The call from Deacon Farris's number came at 2:17 in the morning. Except it wasn't Deacon Farris's voice.

Sergio was already awake when my second phone rang. I had four lines, each for a different function, and this was the line that only current situations used. He was in the chair by the window when I answered and I watched his face change while he listened.

"Find him," was all he said when he ended the call, and then to me, "Bowscut took Farris. He's been running late-night administrative work at the cathedral. They picked him up from the car park."

I was already up. "They called the priest?"

"Used Farris's number. Want a meeting tomorrow morning. Said he comes alone."

I looked at the time. 2:17. Micah was in his apartment with the locked windows, and someone had just called him on a dead man's phone, no, not a dead mans’ stop, Farris was not dead, they needed him functional, a dead deacon was not leverage, and told him to come alone.

He was going to call me.

I was certain of it. He had no one else in this city to call and he was smart enough to know it. Whatever his feelings about me and my city and the fact that his apartment had been searched because of me, he was going to pick up his phone and—

My phone rang. The third line. His number, which I'd had for years, which he'd never called.

I answered on the third ring.

"Blaze," he said, and his voice cracked. "They have Farris."

"I know," I said. "Don't move. Don't call anyone else."

A pause followed. "There are police—"

"If you call the police, Farris is in a worse position by morning. Do you understand me?"

A longer pause followed. Then… "Yes," he said.

"I'm coming to you."