Felix8 looked at me with a slight sense of amusement and gave a subtle nod of greeting.

“Where did you find him?” I asked.

“Outside your place half an hour ago. He had this on him.” Spike showed me an ugly-looking machine pistol with a delicately carved stock. “There was a single round in the chamber.”

I bent down to Felix8’s level and stared at him for a moment. “Who sent you?”

Felix8 smiled, said nothing and looked at the chain that was firmly clasped around his ankle.

“What do you want?”

Still Felix8 said nothing.

“Where have you been these past sixteen years?”

All my questions were met with blank insolence, and after five minutes of this I walked back outside the cell block, Spike at my side.

“Who reported him?” I asked.

“Your stalker—what’s his name again?”

“Millon.”

“Right. He thought Felix8 might have been another stalker and was going to warn him off, but when he noticed the absence of notebooks, cameras or even a duffel coat, he called me.”

I thought for a moment. If Felix8 was back on my trail, then somebody in the Hades family was looking for revenge—and they were big on revenge. I’d had run-ins with the Hades family before, and I thought they’d learned their lesson by now. I had personally defeated Acheron, Aornis and Cocytus, which left only Lethe and Phlgethon. Lethe was the “white sheep” of the family and spent most of his time doing charity work, which left only Phlgethon, who had dropped off the radar in the mid-nineties, despite numerous manhunts by SO-5 and myself.

“What do you suggest?” I asked. “He doesn’t fall into any of the categories that might ethically give us a reason to keep him under lock and key without trial of some sort. After all, he’s only wearing the face of Felix—under there he’s an erased Danny Chance, married father of two who went missing in 1985.”

“I agree we can’t keep him,” replied Spike, “but if we let him go he’ll just try to kill you.”

“I live to be over a hundred,” I murmured. “I know—I’ve met the future me.”

It was said without much conviction. I’d seen enough of time’s paradoxical nature to know that meeting the future me wasn’t any guarantee of a long life.

“We’ll keep him for twenty-four hours,” I announced. “I’ll make a few inquiries and see if I can figure out which Hades is involved—if any. He might be simply trying to carry out the last order he was given. After all, he was under orders to kill me, but no one said anything about when.”

“Thursday…?” began Spike in a tone that I recognized and didn’t like.

“No,” I said quickly. “Out of the question.”

“The only reason he’d mind being killed,” said Spike in an annoyingly matter-of-fact way, “is that it would mean he failed to carry out his mission—to kill you.”