Taking out a pair of golden shears from her makeup case, she cut a circle into the sweatshirt over where the heart of the man who wore it would have been. Then she diced up the fabric, the cotton fibers giving way easily and falling to the smooth marble in a little pile.

She used one side of the scissors to slice into her palm, and her blood ran dirty gray as it dropped onto the nest she’d made.

For a moment, she was transfixed with disappointment. She wished her blood ran red—so much more attractive.

Truth be told, Devina hated the way she really looked. Far better this body. And the others.

Picking up the sweatshirt’s clippings and grinding them into the tainted blood on her palm, she pictured the man who had had the fabric against his flesh, seeing his hard face and the brush cut that was growing out and the tattoos on his body.

Still milling her hand and keeping an image of Isaac Rothe in her head, Devina walked naked into the bedroom and sat on the duvet. On the side table, she opened a squat ebony box and took out a hand-carved chess piece, the depiction of the queen not nearly as beautiful as her suit of flesh. She hadn’t seen Jim Heron whittle the grand lady, but he had and she pictured him doing so in her mind, imagining him curled around a sharp knife, his sure hands wielding a steel edge to reveal the object within the wood. Pressing what he had made into her bleeding palm, along with the fibers from the sweatshirt, she melded them, integrated them. Then she leaned over and picked up a candle, which lit at her will. Lying down, she blew across the flame, the mingling essences of all three of them flowing over the flame.

The purple glow that emanated on the far side covered her, enveloping her in phosphorescence . . . calling the owners of the things together . . . calling them to her.

Jim Heron wasn’t going to know what hit him this time. He might have won the first round, but that wasn’t happening again.

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4

When you worked in central processing at the Suffolk County jail in downtown Boston, you saw a lot of shit. And some of it was the kind of thing that put you off your coffee and doughnuts.

Other kinds . . . were just frickin’ bizarre.

Billy McCray had been a beat cop in Southie first, serving alongside his brothers and his cousins and his old man. After he’d been shot on duty about fifteen years ago, Sergeant had arranged for him to have this desk job—and it had turned out that not only did his wheelchair fit just fine under the lip of the counter, he was damn good at pushing paper. He’d started booking arrests and taking mug shots, but now he was in charge of everything.