“What?” I had to know if he’d been followed, or what. Dad had never come home this beat-up. August’s familiar white tank top was torn and dirty, dyed bright red. His jeans were a mess of ribbons,

and he held his blue plaid shirt over his chest with one arm. His boots were soaked and dark. I started dragging him toward the bathroom. “August, dammit, what happened?”

He shook free of me and scrambled for the bathroom. I ran through all the first aid I know—I can

handle pretty much anything short of a gunshot wound, really. First I had to find the damage, then

stop the bleeding, check him for shock—

“It’s all right.” He made it to the bathroom door, a slice of white tile behind him. The entire apartment was suddenly too small. I mean, it was a cracker box anyway: one bedroom, the kitchen and

dining room the size of a postage stamp and papered with movie posters, the tiny bathroom with its

claw-foot tub. “Looks worse than it is. Bring vodka.” His accent—half Brooklyn, half Bronx, all

Bugs Bunny—cut every vowel short. But something else was rubbing through the words, too. The

song of a different tongue.

I made it back into the kitchen on shaking legs. If we had to blow this place, he wouldn’t have

asked for vodka. Relief burst through me.

After all, he’d come back. He went out almost every night to hunt. I guessed New York was pretty

dangerous, all those people crammed together and the things that go bump in the night hiding in all

the corners. I wished I knew a bit more about the things that inhabited here—rat spirits, certainly.

Hexes and voodoo, certainly. Sorcery, you bet. Other predators. There were probably werwulfen

too, but Dad never messed with those. And August wasn’t like Dad; he didn’t tell me anything about

what he did. I wasn’t his helper.

Missing Dad rose like a stone in my throat. I grabbed the Stoli bottle from the freezer, sloshed it,

and decided to put a fresh one in. Before I carried it into the bathroom, I uncapped it and took a

healthy swallow. It burned the back of my throat, cold fire.

I knocked on the bathroom door. “Augie?”

No sound for a long moment. I had a vivid mental image of him standing in front of the sink, bent

over halfway, his lips pulled back from his teeth and a haze of red spreading out from—

He jerked the door open. “Brought the vodka?”

His hair was dry, springing up in soft golden spikes. I didn’t think about it. I was more concerned

with him bleeding, so I pushed into the tiny bathroom and grabbed the Medikit in its green nylon

bag. “Where’s the worst of it?”