“And since when have you,” Sandy said as she grabbed a chicken wing, “given a dog’s cock for laws flouted or otherwise, Corbin Rafferty? I’ve heard you say at this very table”—knocking with her fingers on the wood—“that it’s this city’s laws that ruin us.”

“Once I say a thing, you’ll stalk me with it to my grave, Sforza.”

“And stab you through the heart with it to make sure you’re dead, and good riddance to the world.” She laughed; Rafferty’s girls didn’t, and Rafferty himself laughed too loud.

“If we are to sacrifice at all,” he said, “we should be repaid. Monsters on our own rooftops, and the lot of you don’t mind?”

“Likely just tall tales,” Matt said. “Crier says they’ve been here a year. I never seen one.”

“But Matthew,” and that was Ray, leaning back on two legs of his chair, balanced as perfectly as the log cabin of chicken bones on his plate. No one could leave so pleasant a mess as Ray. “Of course you haven’t seen them. They come to those who need help, and when was the last time you needed any?”

Matt drank. “Don’t see the problem,” he said, after. “Even if they are here. So long as they help people.”

“Maybe someone doesn’t want help,” Corbin said. “Maybe what helps you, hurts me.” He tossed a wing bone down as if casting thunderbolts upon a sinner. “If the Stone Men are back, Lord Kos ought to shatter them. We need Blacksuits on every roof.”

Ray snatched a celery stalk and knifed its hollow full of blue cheese. “You haven’t been to church often this year, have you, Corbin? Plenty of sermons about coming to terms with old enemies.”

“You mean they’re going soft.”

“I mean none of us knows the whole story. Stone Men don’t touch my business. Why should I worry about them?”

“A man ought to own his city.”

“In a single question,” Ray said, “I can prove incontrovertibly the Stone Men are no cause of concern for folk like us, who keep our beaks down: Have we ever seen these creatures?”

Matt followed Ray’s gaze around the table: Ray’s son, face buried in his second burger, shrugged and shook his head and chewed. Sandy Sforza drank her beer and shook her head as well. Sandy’s daughter Lil was staring at Ray’s boy’s barbecue sauce–streaked face with a sickened expression entirely unlike Hannah’s, but when she realized the others were watching her, she said, “No.” The gazes slid to Matt, who grunted no, as did Corbin.

“There you go,” Ray said. “If they’re in the city or not, what’s it matter to us?”

Slow jowly nods around the table. Corbin cracked his knuckles, frowning.