“Yes, Doctor, Candi is on the job. Along with many others. They’ll get it done.”

The doctor’s face hardened. “I hope so. Otherwise, I don’t think I’ll be able to fulfill your friend’s other requests.”

Friend? Requests? Duke laughed. “He is not my friend. He isn’t yours, either. And he doesn’t make requests. You have an arrangement.”

“That’s right. We have an arrangement. An arrangement that includes the specimen. Delivered here to me, safe and unharmed.”

Well. The doctor had steel in his spine, Duke had to give him that.

He would also have to give him a good crack on the head when the time came.

But not just yet. The doctor had a reputation and a history. He came from a long line of men known for their brilliant scientific discoveries, their flexible sense of morality, and their penchant for professional disaster and financial ruin. In the middle of the nineteenth century, one of the doctor’s ancestors had abandoned promising experiments in the treatment of infections in order to study spiders, of all things. He emptied his bank account and drained his wife’s inheritance traveling the world to gather as many species as he could. He was killed by the bite of a black widow. When his wife found him, the story went, his body was covered in the numerous tarantulas he kept as pets. To repay his considerable debts, his wife had to sell his lab, his equipment, his papers, and his creatures to the highest bidder, who didn’t have to bid very high to get them. That same bidder went on to develop medicines and even weapons derived from spider venom, and made a killing.

Ha, killing.

Duke smiled at the doctor. “You will have your kitty as soon as possible. I give you my word.”

“Your word,” said the doctor. He blinked slowly, slowly, as if ticking off the seconds. Then he went to the glass cage in which hung the oversized eggs. He tapped the glass. One of them twitched, then twitched again.

The doctor did not peel his eyes away from the eggs when he said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave now, Mr. Goodson. I have a birth to attend to.”

“Of course,” said Duke. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Yes, you will,” said the doctor.

Before heading out the door, Duke took one last glance over his shoulder at the man, at the twitching cocoon-eggs that were gestating who-knows-what. The doctor was murmuring to the things. “Hello, there,” he whispered softly to the mottled, gray husks. “Welcome to the world.”

Not for the first time, Duke wondered if the name you were born with shaped you from the very beginning, or you defined the meaning of your name through action and experience. Whatever the case, the doctor’s name suited him perfectly.