“Fuck you!” Iñigo growled and tried to spit at me.

“Wrong answer,” I said and shot him in the head.

I made sure I was looking into Krystos’s eyes when I did it. Sometimes you need to use visual aids to really make your point.

Krystos screamed and tried to crawl backward into the wallpaper. There is a difference between seeing death in combat and seeing an execution of someone you know. I lowered the pistol and walked back to Krystos and hunkered down in front of him.

“Okay,” I said into an ugly silence. “Let’s try this again. Do you understand English?”

Krystos whimpered and forked the sign of the evil eye at me with his bloody hands. I rang the barrel of the pistol off the top of his head. Not too hard, but hard enough.

“Last try,” I suggested. “English?”

All at once the fight drained out of him. Maybe he finally grasped the fact that he was totally helpless and I owned his life. He kept staring at what was left of Iñigo’s head. Without looking at me, he spoke in a tiny voice. “Y—yes. Some. A little.”

“Good, now we’re getting somewhere,” I said with an approving smile. “Are there any more of you fucktards around here? Anyone else in the house?”

His eyes roved around to take stock of all the dead. He shook his head.

I placed the hot barrel against the knee of his undamaged leg. “Be real sure.”

He whimpered as he cut a quick look toward the stairs and back. “No. My people … are all down here.”

I didn’t like the way he leaned on “my people” and knew that I was going to have to go upstairs. I sure as hell did not want to.

“Who sent you?”

“W—what?”

I said it slower. “Who. Sent. You?”

Now Krystos looked at me, and the expression that washed over his face was one of complete puzzlement. He said, “God.”

His tone of voice suggested that he was surprised I didn’t already know that.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“God,” he said again, shaking his head.

“You’re saying that God sent you to kill me?”

He nodded.

“Do you even know who I am?”

He shook his head. “It does not matter. You are one of them. Upier!”

“Which is what, exactly?”

He shook his head in exasperation, apparently perplexed that I did not know what he was talking about.

“We’ll come back to that,” I said. “Why does ‘God’ want me dead?”

Krystos licked his lips and winced at the taste of his own blood. “To … stop.”

“Stop what? Or who?”

“Evil. Big evil.”

I was getting tired of this and it must have shown on my face because he immediately recoiled from me. “No! Please, no!”