This is my world, Phury thought. This world of Baggies and wads of cash and using and worrying about the next fix consumed more of his time than even the Brotherhood’s mission.

The wizard popped into his mind, standing like Atlas in that field of bones. Damn right it’s your world, ya fried daft bastard. And I am your king.

The lesser hauled on the chain, cutting off the wizard and making the stars in Phury’s head even brighter.

If he didn’t get back in the game here, asphyxiation was going to be his best and only friend.

Bringing his hands up to the links, he gripped the fuckers in two thick fists, jacked into a tuck position, and roped his prosthetic leg around the steel leash. Using the foot for leverage, he pushed against the links that ran under the sole of his shitkicker and created some slack so he could breathe.

The slayer leaned back like a waterskier, and the prosthesis weakened under the pressure, the angle of his fake foot changing. With a quick unhook, Phury freed his leg from the chain, dropped the slack on his end and braced his neck and shoulders. As the slayer went flying against the brick wall of a Valu-rite Dry Cleaners, the undead’s force and body weight yanked Phury up off the ground.

For a split second the chain went loose.

It was just enough for Phury to spin around, get the thing off his neck, and palm a dagger.

The lesser was stunned from getting body-slammed by the building, and Phury took advantage of its struck-stupids, lancing forward with his blade. The steel-composite tip and shaft went deep into the lesser’s soft, empty gut, springing a leak that ran glossy and black.

The slayer looked down in confusion, as if the rules of the game had changed in the middle and no one had told him. His white hands came up to stem the flow of sweet, evil blood and got nowhere against the deluge.

Phury wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, as a tingling anticipation lit him up from the inside.

The lesser took one look at his face and lost his out-of-it expression. Fear seeped into his pale features.

“You’re the one…” the slayer whispered as his knees went wonky. “The torturer.”

Phury’s can’t-waits faded a little. “What?”

“Heard… about you. Mauls first… then kills.”

He had a reputation in the Lessening Society? Well, duh. He’d been making messes of lessers for a couple of months now.

“How do you know that’s me?”

“By the way… you’re… smiling.”

As the slayer slid down onto the pavement, Phury became aware of the gruesome grin he was sporting.

Hard to know what was more horrific: that it was there or that he hadn’t noticed.

Suddenly, the lesser’s pupils shot to the left. “Thank… fuck.”

Phury froze as a gun muzzle pressed against his left kidney and a fresh wave of baby powder shot into his nose.

Not more than five blocks to the east, in his private of fice at ZeroSum, Rehvenge, aka the Reverend, cursed. He hated the incontinent ones. Hated them.

The human man dangling in front of his desk had just pissed in his pants, the stain showing up as a dark blue circle at the crotch of his distressed Z Brands.

Looked like someone had nailed him in the hey-nanny-nannies with a wet sponge.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Rehv shook his head at his private guard of Moors, the ones who were playing hanger to the piece of shit. Trez and iAm both sported the same disgusted expressions that he did.

Only saving grace, Rehv supposed, was that the guy’s pair of Doc Martens seemed to function okay as a pair of punch bowls. Nothing was dripping.

“What’d I do?” the guy squeaked, the pitch of his voice suggesting his balls were somewhere north of his wet boxers. Any higher and he could have been a contralto. “I didn’t do noth-”

Rehv cut the denial off. “Chrissy showed up with a busted lip and black-and-blues. Again.”

“You think I did that? Come on, the girl whores out for you. It could have been any-”

Trez raised an objection to the testimony, cranking the man’s hand into a ball and squeezing the forced fist like an orange.

As the defendant’s bark of pain trailed off to a whimper, Rehv idly picked up a sterling-silver envelope opener. The thing was shaped like a sword, and he tested the point with his forefinger, quickly licking off the dot of blood it left behind.

“When you applied for work here,” he said, “you gave an address of Thirteen-eleven Twenty-third Street. Which is Chrissy’s addy, too. You arrive and leave at the end of the night together.” As the guy popped open his piehole, Rehv held his hand up. “Yes, I’m aware that’s not dispositive. But you see that ring on your hand- Wait, why are you trying to put your arm behind your back? Trez, you mind helping him plant that palm of his on my real estate over here?”

As Rehv tapped the tip of the opener on his desk, Trez muscled the beefy human over like the guy weighed nothing more than a laundry bag. With absolutely no effort at all, he flattened the bastard’s hand out in front of Rehv and held it in place.

Rehv leaned forward and traced a Caldwell High School class ring with the opener. “Yeah, see, she’s got a funny mark on her cheek. When I first saw it, I wondered what it was. It’s this ring, isn’t it? You backhanded her, didn’t you. Caught her in her face with this.”

As the guy sputtered like a bass boat, Rehv ran another little circle around the blue stone of the ring, then took the razor-sharp point and stroked the man’s fingers one by one, from the bony knuckles on the hand to the flat nail beds at the ends.

The two biggest knuckles were bruised, the pale skin purple and swollen.

“Looks like you didn’t just backhand her,” Rehv murmured, still petting the man’s fingers with the opener.

“She asked for-”

Rehv’s fist pounded into his desk so hard, his multiline office phone did a jump and scramble, the receiver bouncing free of the cradle.

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.” Rehv fought not to bare his fangs as they punched out into his mouth. “Or so help me God I will feed you your own balls right now.”

The ass-wipe went inanimate as a subtle beep-beep-beep replaced the phone’s dial tone. iAm, cool as always, calmly reached forward and replaced the receiver.

As a bead of sweat dripped off the human’s nose and landed on the back of his hand, Rehv smoothed out his anger.

“Right. Where were we before you almost got yourself castrated? Oh, yeah. Hands… we were talking about hands. Funny, I don’t know what we would do without two. I mean, you couldn’t drive a stick-shift car, for example. And you have a stick, don’t you? Yeah, I’ve seen that tripped-out Acura you tool around in. Nice car.”

Rehv laid his own hand down on the glossy wood, right next to the guy’s, and as he made comparisons, he pointed to the salient distinctions with the envelope opener.

“My hand’s bigger than yours in length… and width. Fingers are longer. My veins stand out more. You have a tattoo of… what is that at the base of your thumb? Some kind of… ah, the Chinese symbol for strength. Yeah, my tats are elsewhere. What else, now… your skin’s lighter. Damn, you white boys really need to think about tanning. You look like death without some UVs.”

As Rehv glanced up, he thought of the past, of his mother and her collections of bruises. It had taken him far, far too long to do right by her.

“You know the biggest diff between you and me?” he said. “See… my knuckles aren’t bruised from beating a woman.”

In a quick move, he drew the envelope opener up and slashed it down so hard the tip didn’t just go through flesh; it penetrated the teak of the desk.

The hand he stabbed was his own.

As the human screamed, Rehv didn’t feel a thing.

“Don’t you dare pass out, you fucking lightweight,” Rehv spat as the asshole’s eyes started to roll. “You’re going to watch this carefully so you remember my message.”