He took my gun from me. I got a little tour of the neighborhood as we walked towards the eponymous Red’s Park, the back alley streets and vines which crept up through the pavement, making the sidewalk resemble nothing less than a desert, the rippling of sand dunes across it. “We gotta talk frankly,” he said, and staring down the second knife pointed at me in so many hours I didn’t feel like arguing. “You been running around all day not telling us anything, Hexel, and it seems like when we tried to talk earlier it didn’t quite sink in.”

The park itself had been made neat and tidy, and then it’d slowly fallen apart over the years. A willow tree was bent double over the weight of its leaves and leaning dangerously over the river, and tall grasses had colonized the paths which had once crisscrossed the space. Bright red flowers, almost glowing even in the darkness, had wrapped their way around the iron railings and snapped them in two, leaving metallic wreckage behind. My foot caught a bit of it and I stumbled until Koshmar grabbed the edge of my jacket and hauled me back. “No time to be careless,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to get yourself hurt.”

“No, you want to do that yourself, don’t you?” I snapped. “If you want to talk then say what you mean.”

“Sit down, Hexel.” He shoved me towards a diagonal bench, a rusted plaque on its seat. Some name I’d never known and never heard of, some nightmare who’d gambled for immortality here and lost it. “I want to talk, but I gotta hear it from you. What were you doing there?”

“Nothing.” I grinned. “Drinking.”

“And here I’d thought it’d make you more talkative.”

I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out the vial of liquid I’d found in Chesnes’ basement. “Well, I was drinking something like this, and I gotta be honest I’ve no idea what they put into it. You ever see something like it?”

Impressive, how quickly he clamped his teeth together. Impressive, how that silver tooth gleamed and ground against the others. “You shouldn’t be drinking something like that,” he said. “It does bad things to you. And some of the people who drink it, well, bad things happen to them anyways. But you knew that.” His eyes narrowed, and it felt like the ground shifted where I sat. Koshmar wasn’t as powerful a nightmare as Chesnes was, but he knew how to leverage it, how to keep it burning inside him and then turn it on me when he needed. “I don’t know how much you know but you should know that it’s dangerous.”

“Like Morés?” I spat.

“Like Morés.”

“I thought you weren’t-”

He waved a hand. “For the little guys, sure. They don’t need to know about our trouble. But there’s no point dancing around it, not when there’s trouble here, too.”

“So it is trouble,” I said. “No—don’t back off now, don’t say it’s not. There’s no point pretending again, and if you want me to tell you anything I can’t stand listening to you bluster about how nothing’s wrong. Chesnes is dead and he shouldn’t be dead—and you think you know something about why.” I leaned back, wondering if he’d kill me for it. Death to follow death. It’d be fitting, at least. But the mean scrappy little idea that’d been rattling around my head all afternoon was ready to go up against him and I didn’t think the silver tooth could bite down on it fast enough. “Who does Drakon fear?”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He spun the knife around in his hand. “Careful, Hexel. You do one job for us, you get paid, there’s no protection there. And Drakon isn’t scared of you, a human detective running around beneath notice. Stay there, and-”

“So who is he scared of, then?” I leaned forwards. “Someone killed Kit Chesnes, who was Drakon’s right-hand man. He was a bit of a—jackass in his own right, running a bit of Dragon and whatever the hell this was in his basement, enough that Vallas tried to cover for him. But…” I listed the options on my fingers. “You didn’t know, didn’t care, and didn’t kill him for it. Okay. That’s one option down. He wasn’t killed for love or lust or petty burglary or any of that, because Vallas would have said and Drakon would have raked them over the coals for it. You like your goddamn examples, don’t you?”

“Careful.”

“I was Luna before Drakon came in, before he took over this city and made it his own. This looks like the same kind of trouble,” I said. “So who is it? Who killed Chesnes that Drakon doesn’t dare move against now?”

“Nobody,” Koshmar said. “We ain’t scared of nobody. And if you keep saying stuff like that-”

“You’ll what? This was funny at first but now it’s tiring. You don’t do it as well as your boss and you don’t have Chesnes’ charm either. He took my blood to keep me quiet about Morés-”

He had a vial in his pocket too. “I know.”

Oh, hell. That’s how he’d found me, that’s why he was slumming around Vallas’ house. I should have known he wasn’t smart enough to find me otherwise, I should have guessed that Koshmar wasn’t catching me on his own intelligence or initiative. “I’m right. We both know I’m right. Hell, I’ve seen it before from the losing side and if you’re stuck in that you should know if won’t be only Chesnes that dies. If you’re doing Drakon’s dirty work you’ll be next and, goddamn it, I’ll be cheering from the sidelines when that hap-”

He didn’t take any windup. He just punched me across the cheek. I tasted blood in my mouth and I felt skin split across the bone, and when my vision cleared from the spots I saw him nursing his knuckles. “And you wonder why we advised you to stay away?”

“No,” I said. Trying to get the vowels out felt like trying to squeeze around a locked door. “I’m not wondering that.”

Up into his hands flashed the knife. “It’s none of your business, Hexel, and yet here you are and here I am. But I’m not ungrateful. No. Chesnes was my colleague, too, and I respect you trying to pursue him. I really do.”

“You’re capable of that?”

He ignored me. “But you’re not supposed to be here. I told you that and you didn’t listen to me, and I’m not a man to go back on my promises.” Down again the ground seemed to go around hi. I pulled myself to my feet, grabbing onto the edge of the bench for support—but this was deeper than it’d been before, and Koshmar’s sneer a little sharper, the grin of a carnivore. “No, Hexel. I’m an honest man. I won’t kill you, not here, not for Chesnes. But I do have to make it worth your while to stay away, and you know how that goes.”

I made a grab for the knife. If I could get it out of his hands, maybe I could get Bella back and make a run for it. But my balance was suspended somewhere above the void that was his nightmare, and Koshmar laughed as his arm darted away from mine. He kicked me in the stomach, and the first took so much breath out of me that he was able to do it twice more before I crashed to the ground.

I tried to get up, but my hands couldn’t find purchase on the slick muddy ground. Koshmar drew his foot back and kicked me, rolling me over onto my side. The green and brown of the park danced with lights like the world was rushing past. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It always stops hurting soon enough.”

And he was right. He kicked me again and the world got darker, and I was falling. Just in a nightmare, falling and falling and falling-