***Chris Campbell***

Tap, tap, tap, tap tap taptaptap.

“You got somewhere to be?” Chris asked, glancing over at Ken, whose shoe was clicking against the laminate outside the principal’s office.

“I just fail to see what this is going to get us. We’ve got his records,” Ken said.

“Sure, but records don’t tell us jack shit about who we’re chasing. An interview can offer ten times more insight. Didn’t they teach you that in detective training? Oh wait, that’s right, you got the retard promotion.”

Chris took a casual poke at Ken’s ego and spotted his jaw clenching tight again.

Awfully fragile, he thought, lacing his fingers together. Ken was full of tells, and from Chris’s extensive experience dealing with assholes, he thought he might be looking at a malignant narcissist starting to circle the drain. About to explode.

Is it the promotion unraveling him, or is it something else? Normally he would give his fellow officer the benefit of the doubt, but the weird shit around Ken wasn’t adding up, and Chris was going to keep picking at it until he got the whole story.

Or Ken exploded.

In this case, he was wasting their time with a school visit to talk to Tom Graves’ teachers. The slower he went, the faster Ken tapped his foot, glancing at the clock.

Ken’s tells screamed that he’d rather be doing something else, but the way he bit his tongue and kept his mouth shut also implied he didn’t want to share it with Chris.

“Mrs. Simmons is available, detectives,” the principal said, ducking his head out into the hall, pointing down the hall at a woman approaching them in the distance. She looked slightly haggard, wearing oversized pearl earrings that looked too perfect to be real.

“Detectives, you had questions about a former student?” she asked, shaking Chris and Ken’s hands.

“That’s right. We’d like to ask you a few questions about Tom Graves?”

Mrs. Simmons gave a sharp inhalation of breath.

“Oh God,” she muttered, crossing herself.

Chris raised an eyebrow at the woman’s unusual reaction.

“Was Tom a problem student?” he asked, genuinely curious. “It didn’t mention any sort of problematic behavior in his file.”

Mrs. Simmons frowned at him for a moment, testing her words. “Do you know how we say, ‘When you grow up, you can be anything you want to be’?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you know how that’s bullshit, right detective?”

Chris shrugged. “More or less.”

“Not for Tom.”

“Tom Graves came to me before every class and asked for the homework assignment, which he would fill out the first five minutes of class and then spend the next forty minutes getting the dirt from his shoes on his desk while he took a nap. He never used a book, and he never took a backpack home, never studied a day in his life. I’m fairly sure he only went to school because he had to, and wanted to hang out with his friends during lunch.”

“Oh,” Chris said, his hair standing on end as he adjusted his expectations.

“One day I had the clever idea to call Tom up for a problem we hadn’t learned the formula to solve yet. You know, show him he’s not perfect.” She clutched her cross like a lifeline.

He used calculus - he didn't know it was calculus - on the spot to solve it, then wrote down the formula by reverse engineering the math. That boy was brilliant. I mean, effortlessly fantastic. Unlike so many other children, he actually could have been anything he wanted to be in the world. Anything. But nothing interested him. He always looked so bored. I saw that as my failing.”

Mrs. Simmons sighed, glancing off to the side. “So, if you’re here to tell me Tom Graves has finally taken an interest in something, and it’s bad enough detectives are asking about him...I’d say you’re probably fucked.”

***Tom Graves***

“I’m back!” Jacob shouted, butting his way in through the door with Tom’s shopping list. He trucked the materials in the front door with a wheelbarrow that barely fit in the doorway.

Fatty goose meat, prepaid cell phones, and various other supplies Tom had added to The List as he thought of them were piled high in the wheelbarrow.

Tom lunged forward and snatched up the first phone he came across and began the laborious process of freeing it from its blister pack.

He needed to touch base with Gramma and Grampa and hear Ellie’s wordless shrieks. A full day separated from them and he was going crazy. He’d been so close to losing his composure that he’d spent a long time reading and re-reading the small chapter on magical surveillance.

He didn’t have the soul-pulses, but he’d considered buying some anyway.

While Tom was gnawing on hard plastic, Jacob stepped aside and motioned to the doorway with a flourish. “And guess what!?”

Tom glanced to the side, his brow rising as he spotted a man wearing tattered, dirty clothing layered thick to keep out the weather, such as it was. A moment later, the faint scent of feces wafted through the house, making him wrinkle his nose.

“I got us a hobo!”

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“My lord,” the hobo said, falling to one knee. “I would serve you faithfully for a term of no less than five years in exchange for your generosity in helping me return to my home. This I pledge on the name of House En’hol.”

“En’hol?” Tom asked, taking the blister pack out of his mouth and pointing it at the kneeling hobo.

“Yes.”

Tom glanced at Jacob. Carol had called Tom En’hol, a couple times, as well as a phone operator from the Outsiders world. And here was a guy claiming to be one. Very interesting.

“And where did you get this guy?”

“He threw himself in front of my car and begged me to take him in. I was gonna kick his ass a little and send him on his way, but he said some weird shit about you and Lily...after I kicked his ass a little.”

“About Lily?” Tom asked, raising a brow.

“Yeah.” Jacob glanced at the ragged figure. “Spill it.”

“I knew Lily from before.”

“That’s an easy claim to make,” Tom said, planning how to dislodge the shyster.

“I knew her from before she came to this world, while she was still called Ku’leth.”

Tom immediately thought back to Carol’s words when she was playing with Ellie, only a few days before.

If I allowed you to raise Elenore, she would grow up to also be a spineless peasant. This little one is destined to crush the enemies of house Ku’leth. Isn’t that right, my little unheard-of freak of nature?

One could be a coincidence or plot, but both? At the very least, the guy knew some things Tom could drag out of him.

“I accept those terms,” Tom said. “Go take a shower, help Jacob with anything he needs, and expect an exhaustive debrief before bed.”

“Yes, milord. My name is Grant.”

“I’m Tom,” Tom said, reaching out with his right hand. The dirty, smelly hobo actually looked like Tom’s hand was beneath him for an instant before the expression crumbled, and he shook on it.

Grant turned to Jacob. “What’s a debrief?”

“Nothing bad. Before anything else though, you need a shower.” Jacob yanked a bunch of new clothes out of the depths of the wheelbarrow and guided Grant towards the bathroom.

“Does this look like a fuckin’ clown house?” Reese asked from the couch.

Jacob reached into his pocket and tossed her a rolled-up wad of hundred-dollar bills.

“Welcome to the clown house,” Reese said, pocketing the dough.

With a crack, the blister pack popped open, and Tom set about the business of calling up his family. His grampa had ditched his cell phone and changed motels when Tom had called them the night before, leaving Tom with the name of the next place he intended to go.

Tom got in touch with them, and thankfully, nothing had gone wrong. Gramma was pissed, but they were alive. They were in a motel several hours outside of the city, set up to get farther out of town now that they knew for a fact there was a psycho actively trying to kill them.

Tom rubbed his temple, irritation building as he once again thought of the cop’s ‘reason to put you down’ comment.

Would he have still come after us if I hadn’t taken Lily’s ring? Tom thought. I like to think the psycho would have, eventually. He might not have even bothered to ask us any questions first before killing us all in our sleep.

He had a long chat with Grampa, giving him a few ideas for how to stay a bit safer during the night, until they got far enough out of town that they didn’t have to worry about the crazy bastard.

“Yeah, inside the room!” Tom said, trying to hold a phone and stir simmering goose fat simultaneously.

“Are you sure? That seems awfully weird.”

“Awfully weird like Carol being a real demon, weird?”

“You’re just gonna play that card every time, huh?”

“Pretty much.”

Grampa gave his usual grunt of ‘begrudging acknowledgment’.

“Fine, I’ll do it.”

Tom ended the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket, returning his attention to the pot of goose fat. It was about time to start adding the ashes to make the ink he needed.

Tom was stirring a bigass pot over a propane fire, much like he would imagine a modern witch would be doing, should one exist.

Across the yard was the wheelbarrow with all the tools he’d need to strip the spells off the crypts and write something new on them. For something soft like gold, he didn’t really need anything other than a fine sander to pull off the old text, and a hard steel chisel to press the new symbols in.

I hope that hobo emerges from the shower soon, Tom thought, glancing over at the trailer. He could use the extra hands.

Only a minute after he’d had the thought, Jacob and Grant came out the back door, waving as they approached. The hobo cleaned up good. He was tall when he wasn’t hunched over or kneeling, and his facial features were strangely exotic.

He was wearing a pair of cheap jeans and a flannel shirt, sporting deodorant and a fresh shave. He looked about the same age as Tom, actually. Living on the street will add years to your appearance, I guess.

“Here, your first job. Stir this while Jacob grinds and adds ash,” he said, holding out the dripping spoon.

Grant did as he was asked, taking Tom’s seat and stirring. Tom went and grabbed the sander and went about plugging it in.

I can’t just sit here and do arts and crafts while there’s a crazy out there trying to kill me, Tom thought, grabbing the flamethrower crypt and beginning to strip away the Flex Seal disguising the gold.

The main problem was, the guy trying to kill them was a cop. Killing him was a bad move, but it was their only move. He couldn’t get the guy convicted of using magic to try and kill them. Without that critical piece of the puzzle, none of the stories made any sense, and he would wind up being acquitted.

Maybe if we think about this the other way around. If I make sure to kill him with magic, there’s no way I could be found guilty.

Still, there was a good chance the other cops would find a way to take their own justice.

I think Mr. Fluffybottom is gonna be my all-star here. I just need to find a way to get Ken to come to me, then I can feed him to a cougar. As long as I don’t leave any incriminating evidence, my family can move away and let this whole thing fucking die.

“So, you knew Lily before she came to America, right? What was she like?” Tom asked, glancing over at Grant between passes on the sanding machine.

Grant was staring into the goopy goose fat he was stirring, like it held the answer to life itself. His face was blank, and his cheeks were sagging like he was having a stroke.

“Umm…Grant?”

Grant didn’t respond to his name, but his body began to shake, convulsing forward and nearly dropping him into the simmering fat.

Jacob was standing next to the young man, and he let out a shout, dropping a handful of ashes to tear Grant’s face away from the boiling soup.

Grant fell onto his back in the long grass of the drug dealer’s back yard, twitching violently.

Words began to vomit out of him as if they’d been tugged out by a chain of wild horses.

“Woe to the Great Houses! In their eternal quest for power they have finally achieved what they sought, and it will be their doom! The Enemy will flood the land with an army unlike any the world has seen. It will grow without limit, requiring no master nor provisions to sustain it as it rends the world asunder, and it will be Endless.”

Grant gave a keening cry as his body devolved into more and more intense spasms. His teeth clenched hard, creaking against each other as he panted a new phrase through them.

“Don’t killer, don’t killer, don’t killer, don’t killer, donkiller donkiller donkiller…”

Grant’s eyes rolled back in his head, his spine arching as he continued to chant the nonsensical phrase over and over again, slowly sinking into a high-pitched whine in between his panted breaths.

Nearly a minute later, the color returned to his face, and he blinked, glancing at Jacob and Tom leaning over him.

“Is the fat burning?” he asked.