Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: We're back on the crack AU wagon again. There are five parts to this story, and they are complete. Here there be spoilers for S1 and S2. Consider yourself warned.

The expression on her face in that moment was one he would remember for the rest of his life. There were others that time had imprinted on his memory. The shrewd curiosity with which she'd regarded him as she sprawled on the pavement of 34th Street with her skirt bunched under her ass. The fond softness of her face when affection had deepened to love. The pop-eyed, open-mouthed surprise when he'd pushed into her one sticky August night. The triumphant exhaustion of a July morning five years later, when she'd lain in a hospital bed with blood on her thighs and his son on her heaving stomach. But none were as absolutely clear as the one she wore right now. It was the expression of a woman who was going, going gone.

His first instinct was to bolt from the table and rush outside, and his calves twitched in anticipation of the movement, but Delgado's hand was on his wrist, and the phantom heft his badge was an iron anchor at his hip. If he left the table now, he risked blowing the whole operation and letting half a dozen perverts and pedophiles walk to hurt more kids. Not to mention the risk of getting them both killed.

He stared at his wife through the thick glass of the restaurant window, and his heart cramped painfully in his throat. Her lips were parted in surprise, and her eyes were round and clouded with disbelieving anguish. What the fuck are you doing? her eyes asked, and as he watched, she ran her fingers through her hair.

He knew damn well what she thought he was doing. Any sane woman would have jumped to the same conclusion had they seen their husband sitting at a table in a fancy restaurant with another woman. No doubt she thought he was wooing the woman across the table in preparation for a super, extramarital fuck. It was written all over her bloodless, pinched face and the white-knuckled grip of her fingers on the armrests of her chair.

You shoulda told her, his father grunted with dour triumph. If you'da told her, this wouldn't be happenin' now. She'd know that you were workin' undercover with a female partner to bust a child prostitution ring sellin' six-year-olds to rich perverts who liked their fields to have no grass or hills. She'd understand that this was strictly business and not pleasure, and she wouldn't look like she was bleedin' to death on the pavement.

But naw, you had to go play Rambo and decide she'd be better off in the dark. You told yourself you didn't want her worryin' about you while you were crawlin' with the rats in the sewer, that she had enough to worry about takin' care of Junior. So you kept your mouth shut and just told her that you were workin' a case that required you to be away from home for a few days. The wistfulness in her eyes at that news twisted your heart, but she soldiered up and told you she loved you, and in the mornin', she met you at the door and handed you the toiletry kit you'd forgotten to pack. She was the dutiful police officer's wife.

Now she's standin' out there, watchin' her world fall down, and God knows what she's thinkin'. You were her first-not just her first fuck, but her first everythin'. Her first fuckin' love. She was so shy about givin' herself to you. Her hands used to tremble every time she touched you, light as dust against your skin, and she still cries sometimes when the lovin' has been good. She exposed herself a little at a time, let you see all her insecurities and scars, and it took years for her to believe that Alan Funt wasn't hidin' in the bushes somewhere, waitin' to tell her that the fairy tale she was livin' wasn't a goddamn joke.

Well, fuck if it ain't over now.

His legs twitched again, and Delgado tightened her grip on his wrist.

"Don't, dammit," she hissed through gritted teeth. "Keep your cool."

Fuck you, he wanted to shout. Fuck you. That's my wife out there. My beautiful, loyal, sweet fuckin' wife. She's done everything I ever asked of her and then some. She's given me a home and a son and stood by me through months of shit no wife should ever have to endure. She deserves to know that my heart is still hers and always will be. She deserves better than to be left on the frozen fuckin' sidewalk, watchin' her worst goddamn nightmare.

"Think about the case. We're almost home. Don't blow it now," Delgado whispered frantically.

Fuck the case. But his mind's eye filled with the images the DA had brought him a few weeks ago. Little girls barely out of training pants who knew far too much about what grown men had in theirs, and little boys with open legs and closed faces. He remembered the horribly vacant eyes and the distant stares and the way his stomach had rolled with each new, glossy photo. It had made him unclean, defiled him, and even the scalding water of the precinct showers couldn't rid him of the taint. He'd promised those unnamed children that he'd bring down the dirty bastards who'd ruined their childhoods, and he'd never gone back on his word.

Yeah? Well, you just did. You promised her when you married her that you'd never hurt her, never break her heart. You swore that you would love, honor, and protect her until your dyin' day, and you failed spectacularly. You did what thirty years of life with wheels under her ass couldn't: you broke your adamant angel.

Rebecca gazed at him in mute entreaty. Come. Tell me this isn't true.

Oh, my doll, I want to so bad, he thought, but before he could push his chair back, the children were imploring him, petting him with small, grimy hands and beseeching him with tired, tear-stained faces. He forced his legs to relax.

Rebecca's face, a pale moon in the window. Please. Make this unreal.

I am so, so sorry, doll, but I have to finish what I started. I love you so much, and my Junior. I love you. Please forgive me. Once I finish this job, I'll never go under again. Never. It's not worth it. I have to hurt you now. Just this once.

He willed his fingers to twine with Delgado's. "You're absolutely right, pumpkin," his numb lips said. "A night out was just what we needed." He kissed her knuckles, and his mouth tasted of gall.

Rebecca crumpled. One minute, she was upright, and the next, she was doubled over in her chair, hands clamped to her bony knees. He braced himself for the sight of vomit splattering onto the pavement in a steaming clot, but it never happened. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, and he sensed rather than heard the sound she made, a low, strangled hunh hunh hunh, as if someone had kicked her in the stomach.

He waited for the wracking sobs and the screaming hysteria, and his vivid imagination helpfully supplied images of her storming into the restaurant and attempting to neuter him with the salad fork, but none of those things happened. Instead, she slowly heaved herself upright again, a puppet in the hands of a precocious but inept child. Her face was wooden and inscrutable, and her eyes were painted into their blanched sockets, as dead as the eyes of the children he was trying so desperately to save. Her lips twitched, and she grimaced as if she had swallowed something rotten and bitter, and he was sure that she was working herself up to curse him with the choicest of the invective at her command, but she only smiled at him, a tortured, terrible rictus that made his blood run cold. It was the smile of a corpse that had not yet surrendered to the reality of its demise.

A Death's Head smile, he thought nonsensically, and shuddered.

She backed away from the window with that terrible, dead smile still on her face, and he was convinced that she was simply going to roll herself into oncoming traffic and the path of a speeding taxi. Grille would kiss spoke with the spanging, crunching twang of crumpled metal and twisted axle, and then his girl, who had never learned to fly, would spread her arms and soar over the asphalt in defiance of God until gravity slipped cold, cruel fingers around her bony ankles and dragged her back to earth. She would leave the world in a flash of gold and a gaudy splash of red.

Won't that be fun? When he gets older, you can tell Junior all about the day you ran into the street and scooped his mother's brains off the road like gelato. You can tell him that when you tried to cradle her shattered head and tell her how sorry you were, pieces of her skull kept falling off into your hands. I'm sure he'd like to know that her blood was sticky as corn syrup on your hands, and that it turned her blonde hair a deep, wet red. That'll be a good one for show-and-tell. And hey, as a special bonus for being such a good boy, you can tell him how your and Mommy's friend, Dr. Hawkes, stuffed her broken head with paper and mortician's putty.

Suddenly, he no longer cared about his cover or mournful children in too few clothes. He just wanted to be sure his girl didn't go away and leave him and Junior with no one to dry their tears. He dropped his fork and was halfway out of his chair, shaking loose of Delgado's grip with a blind, savage jerk.

"Re-,"

Just before her rear wheels would have left the steep curb and plunged her into Midtown traffic, she pivoted sharply to the right with a disjointed, mechanical snap of her arms. One last, baleful look, and then she was rolling past the window and his field of vision. He watched her until she was out of sight, heedless of Delgado's increasingly firm tugs on his wrist. Her hair was last to disappear; it faded slowly into the distance, the last ray of sunlight swallowed whole by an approaching storm.

"Darling, are you all right?" Someone was talking to him, and he turned his head from the window to see who it could be and how they could possibly matter now that the sun had gone out. There was a woman seated across from him, and for a heartbeat, he didn't recognize her. Then, she hissed, "Dammit, dear, you're making a scene," and the penny dropped. Delgado. He sank into his chair again.

"Are you okay, sweetie?" she asked brightly, but her face was hard and furious. You're blowin' it, asshole.

"Mmm?" he muttered vaguely. "Yeah, I'm good, honeycakes. I just thought that girl in the wheelchair was gonna roll into traffic an' get hurt, is all. She shouldn't be out alone." The words were stilted and poisonous in his mouth, belladonna Novocain, and he hid his grimace in a sip of flat champagne.

Traitor! his mind shrieked at him, and his tongue needled and burned as if he'd swallowed a mouthful of turpentine. Drive another nail in, why don't you? Insinuate your genius wife is a fuckin' droolin' retard who doesn't know her own goddamned mind. Never mind that she's thirty times smarter than you'll ever be. Go ahead and tell Delgado there that she's a lousy lay, too. Why not? Since you're diggin' your own grave with the soup spoon, why don't you go for broke and fuck Delgado in the handicapped stall? Wouldn't want somebody else to get your first-class ticket to Hell.

"You're so thoughtful, honey," Delgado cooed, and reached for his hand.

He flinched and extricated his hand. He might be able to speak with a forked tongue, but that was a treachery he could no longer abide. He ate his soup with his hand balled into a bloodless fist and kept in there no matter how many significant looks Delgado lobbed him over her salad greens.

The color bled from his world after that. It happened gradually. He first noticed it when the waiter brought their entrees. His starched, white shirt had dulled to a drab grey, and his black bowtie was the color of old slate. Nor was he the only one. Across from him, Delgado's rich, caramel skin was the diseased, papery grey of the dead. The alleged ringleader of the Pervert Mafia had entered the establishment resplendent in a maroon suit, and now it was colorless and ugly.

"Your salmon, sir," the monochrome waiter said with grey lips, and set down a platter of well-dressed newsprint.

His stomach rolled, but he picked up his fork in limp, cold fingers.

"Ooh, that looks lovely, dear," the ghostly Delgado said, and he smothered a bark of nauseated laughter.

Two colors, however, did not fade. They stood out in bright relief in his new, black-and-white world, and they struck him with the force of premonition. Red and gold winked at him from every direction. The handkerchief tucked neatly into the waiter's vest reminded him of a strangely prim gunshot wound, and Delgado looked like a scream queen at the end of the night in her red dress and matching heels, and the succulent cherry tomatoes in her entrée salad made it look like she was eating blood and dirt. As he watched, she took a prodigious forkful of salad and shoved it into her mouth.

Enjoyin' that dirt, are ya? he thought maniacally, and almost tittered.

And there was gold. Until now, he had never realized how much gold there was in any given room. Now, it was everywhere he turned. Gold in the necklace that Delgado wore around her neck and in the fake wedding band she wore on the third finger of her left hand. Gold in the buttons on the alleged ringleader's buttons and on each of his five fat fingers. Gold in the elegant sconces that adorned the walls.

And gold on the third finger of his left hand. There brightest of all. It was a gleaming spark in the dullness of the room. It had always shone with its own light, even in the somber darkness of St. Patrick's Cathedral on his wedding day. Especially then.

You couldn't stop lookin' at it there on the velvet pillow. Sure, the ring had sparkled in the store display case, but you hadn't expected any less. Those stores probably hired people just to clean the jewels and spiff 'em up to draw customers. But it was still glowin' that mornin' with no display lights to blame it on, and you were mesmerized.

You still remember the contrast it made with Rebecca's pale, spidery fingers as she slipped it onto your hand, sunlight and ivory. It was beautiful. When you were a kid, your ma always talked about the sacred and the profane. Life was sacred, she said, and hope, and love, and givin' yourself to another person. You wanted to believe her, so you did.

Then you grew up and saw all the terrible things people do to each other. You saw the consequences of unchecked lust and greed and hate. You fished bodies outta dumpsters and rivers that had been put there for twenty bucks and a pair of shoes, and it was impossible to believe that anything was sacred or ever had been. The last sacred thing in your life had been Diana, and she was in the ground with no one to mourn her but you. If the sacred had existed in the world, it had retreated to the earth with her and left nothin' but the profane behind, and that it had left behind in spades.

But standin' at the altar with Rebecca in your arms and that hunk'a gold on your finger, you believed it the sacred again. She was holy-what the two of you made together was holy-and you were reminded of it every time the light caught the rings on your fingers. It was always on the periphery of your vision while you spun her around the dance floor like a china doll, and it was exquisite against the dainty, white satin of her panties and the delicate lace of her stockings.

Rebecca must have sensed it, too, because she held her ring up and examined it for a moment in the moonlight that streamed through the bedroom window of the apartment.

Look at that, she murmured, and laughed, a relaxed, easy chuckle. Love magic, she whispered.

Her breath was warm against your cheek, and you thought she was joking, and anyway, your hands were busy fumblin' with the clasp of her bra. But knowin' what you know now about who and what she is, you wonder if she wasn't serious. You kept track of your ring all night, watched it trace blazing patterns over her skin, and you savored the way she shuddered when cold metal met the wet, warm flesh between her legs. That ring was proof of the sacred, and you tainted it. You fuckin' profaned it.

I didn't do anything, he protested indignantly, and suddenly he was sixteen years old again and trying to explain to his father how it was that one of his children was lying at the bottom of the stairs in a house they'd been forbidden to enter. I didn't mean it, Pop. I thought she was right behind me. I didn't-

It doesn't matter what you did or didn't do. It only matters what she saw, what she believes. Belief gives magic its power, and what's love but a kind'a magic? Love lives or dies by belief. Your sister should have taught you that much. Her death was preordained from the minute she believed you hated her. You saw the light flicker and die in her eyes, smothered by the conviction that you really wished she'd never been born, and it never came back, no matter how much you tried to rekindle it. She died less than a year later, just up and stepped off the landing and into the heart of that rotten house.

Oh, she told you that the house took her, that it asked her to choose which of you it would have, but in your heart, you suspect that she took that freefall to escape the knowledge that for a second-just one, single second-you hated her. She had lost her belief, her love, and a person who believes in nothing cannot survive. So she closed her eyes and winked out, a star gone to supernova.

How long until the wedding band winks out, fades to dull, tarnished copper on your hand? Will you wake up in the morning and find it's lost its luster, or will it take longer? Days? Weeks? Months? Maybe it'll slough its shine every time you think of her and ache, or maybe it's tied to her lifeforce. Maybe it'll go on shinin' until she works up enough courage or hatred to suck on the end of your spare service pistol, and maybe it'll pop and sizzle like a blown bulb when her brains hit the walls and ceiling in a messy, red spray.

He realized that Delgado's lips were moving.

"-the move," she said.

"Hmm?"

"They're on the move," she repeated.

Sure enough, the alleged ringleader of the Pervert Mafia and his cronies were pushing their chairs back from the table and rising, slipping into coats and mufflers and shouting to overcome the stubborn deafness of the drunk. In the monochromatic grey of Flack's vision, the ringleader was a wattled, waddling elephant, and he watched his tootling, trumpeting departure with dazed amusement.

He and Delgado followed suit a few minutes later, trailing the noisy gaggle at a discreet distance. The air was stinging and cold against his cheeks, and ice crunched beneath his feet like bits of bone. The world was still grey, and the newsstand bled into the façade of a neighboring bodega. Even the people were indistinguishable lumps milling and jostling around him, ghosts with no faces and no purpose. Occasionally, a flash of red or gold would catch his eye, and he would stop, convinced that Rebecca had come back to offer him a second chance, but it was never her. It was a haughty Manhattan socialite or a poodle crammed unceremoniously into a red sweater vest. Those looked like walking blood clots, and he watched them scamper past with dull fascination.

Delgado tried to thread her arm through his as they walked, and he stiffened and pulled away from her. "No. You're not my wife," he said matter-of-factly.

She rolled her eyes. "Thanks for the newsflash, Flack," she muttered. "It's called pretending. Now let's go. Get with the program." She reached for his arm with her mittened hands.

"No," he snapped, and several heads swiveled in his direction.

Delgado rounded on him. "Goddammit, what the hell is the matter with you?" she demanded in exasperation. "You've been off-script since the appetizers. Are you fuckin' tryin' to get us made, you stupid prick?"

He stuffed his gloved hands into the pocket of his leather overcoat and studied a smashed cigarette butt a few paces ahead of him on the pavement. "You remember that woman outside the window of the restaurant?"

Delgado pursed her lips. "The one in the wheelchair? The one you thought was goin' to roll into traffic?"

He nodded once. "She was my wife."

Delgado shrugged. "So?" Then as the wheels began to turn and click inside her mind, "Oh. You didn't tell her you were goin' under?" She rummaged in her handbag for the crumpled pack of cigarettes she kept there.

Goin' under. He snorted. What an innocuous, misleading phrase that was. It implied that you could come up for air anytime you wanted, like the game he and Diana had played when they were kids, the one where they'd bet ice cream on who could hold their breath the longest.

I guess she won that one, sneered a wry voice inside his head. She's been holdin' hers for fifteen years and countin'. Beat that.

Except this was nothing like the game he had once played with his sister at the public pool. That had been a bit of fierce competition and harmless fun between two halves of the same whole, and it had not been for keepsies, as Diana would have said. The worst that could go wrong in that game had been a mouthful of heavily-chlorinated pool water and a few hours of sisterly crowing.

But this version of the game was terrible. It was very much for keepsies, and there was no coming up for air until one of them was either dead or in handcuffs. There were no take-backs or timeouts to make things right. He could either walk away and let Delgado die and fourteen children be sold into the sex trade, or he could stand here on this shitty, frozen sidewalk and let his wife think he was fucking around on her, let her bleed her love magic through clutching, disbelieving fingers.

Life's not fair, he thought miserably. Not fair not fair not fair.

"Naw," he said at last. "I thought it'd be easier on her, you know? I mean, she's already got her hands full takin' care of my baby, and I didn't want her worryin'. 'Sides, the DA cocksucker assured me it'd be a quick job."

Two, three days, tops. That's how he sold you on this job. Just forty-eight hours, and you'll be back with your own family. We've already got mountains of circumstantial evidence and a statement from a jailhouse snitch; we just need corroborative evidence. In and out. Then he tossed that dossier of stomach-heavin' pictures onto your desk, and you were hooked. You could never turn down a hunt once you saw the victims, and that smug bastard knew it. So you agreed to team up with Delgado and tail the fat shit alleged ringleader to see what you could see.

Then word came down that the prosecution's star witness, a ten-year-old boy who'd been flashing his undeveloped johnson at webcams since he was four walked in front of a Coke truck makin' deliveries on the lower East Side. Mac and the rest of the Nerd Squad are still tryin' to figure out if it was an honest accident, or if the kid just decided to punch his own ticket rather than pose for that lidless eye one more time. Hell, you wouldn't blame him if he did, mortal sin or not. You remember how hard it was to do it just that one time, after your sister died and they'd wanted to be sure you weren't hidin' a dirty little secret.

You were sixteen, old enough to understand what was happening, and there was nothin' inappropriate in the way the forensic photographer looked at you while he scuttled around you, snapping pictures, but you still felt dirty and violated. You felt like throwin' up the whole time, and on the way home-

He pushed those thoughts away. He refused to go there again. Not ever.

Fine, the voice said reasonably. We won't go there. We'll talk about the fact that your forty-eight-hour easy job has turned into six days of following this asshole around and sleepin' in the rack room at the station house and in shitty hotel rooms with Delgado in the other bed. You lie awake and smell the stale farts in the dirty bedsheets, and you wish like hell you were with your girl. But you roll over, and there's just Delgado, sleepin' in her clothes and the sound of some hooker bangin' a john in the room next door.

What you wish for most is Junior. You want to hear the little noises he makes when he's playin' with his fingers or toes in his crib or in the bouncer Rebecca set up in the livin' room so he could be with his parents in the evenin's. He don't really bounce in it yet-he's only three months old, and his limbs still have a mind of their own-but he lies there in the sling seat with his fist crammed happily into his toothless, gummy mouth and looks at you. You can reach over and tickle his twitchy feet or stroke his drool-covered fingers while you watch the Rangers on TV, and sometime between seven and eight o'clock, Rebecca brings you his bedtime bottle. You lift him onto your lap and offer him the rubber nipple, and then you relax to the sounds of him pigging out and the soft kneading of his small feet on your forearm.

It's the peaceful rhythm of your life that's been shattered by those stark photos of children in adult poses. The last time you saw Junior was six days ago goin' on seven, when you were blowin' raspberries on his belly to watch his legs kick. The last time you heard him was three nights ago, when Rebecca held him up to the phone so he could hear your voice. He squealed into the phone. Maybe it was just gas-probably-but you like to think it was 'cause he recognized his old man. Hearin' him made your heart ache, and you were countin' down the hours until you saw 'em again.

Now you might be goin' home to an empty apartment.

I'm drownin', he thought. Oh, God, I'm drownin'.

Delgado lit her cigarette and inhaled deeply. "Shit, Flack, I'm sorry." The words emerged on a cloud of smoke. "I really am, but you gotta pull your shit together, or we're both gonna come outta this in bags."

"I'm not touchin' you anymore. I can't." He shrugged.

"Christ, Flack, I'm not dyin' for your wife's trust issues."

"Go fuck yourself," he snarled, and turned away from her. He strode down the sidewalk, hands balled into fists in the pockets of his overcoat. Up ahead, the alleged ringleader of the Pervert Mafia was laughing at something one of his cronies had said.

"Fuck. Flack, wait." Delgado from behind him, and a moment later, he saw a flash of red on the periphery of his vision. "Look, I'm sorry, all right? I know this can't be easy for you, but you're just gonna have to gut it out."

What would you know about it? he thought with vicious cynicism. There isn't a ring on your finger, but department scuttlebutt has it there's been plenty of plugs in your socket. Rumor has it that you were bonin' the desk sergeant at the 51st, and kudos to you if you actually got that old limp-dick to stand at attention. If I was a truly petty bastard, I might actually believe the rumors that you blew your way onto the Vice Squad instead'a earnin' it on your feet like Bonasera did.

"They're goin' into that bar," he muttered out one side of his mouth, and jerked his head in the direction of a grotty, hole-in-the-wall dive called The Rack Room. He bit the inside of his cheek to the quell a bark of laughter at the bitter irony.

Inside the bar, it was dimly lit, or he supposed it was. The greyness that had fallen over his vision after Rebecca fled down the cracked pavement and took all the colors with her had not lifted. The bar was packed, and the ash people drifted around him, vague and ephemeral as smoke.

An elbow nudged him in the ribs. "There he is," Delgado whispered in his ear, and pointed to a private booth where the alleged ringleader and his coterie were settling in.

That must be the VIP booth, he mused sardonically. The vinyl isn't ripped in half a dozen places.

"You find us a table," he told her. "I'll be right back." He started to thread his way through the living fog to the bar, where the golden taps flared like beacons.

"Where are you going?"

"To get a fuckin' drink."

"We're on the clock."

As if that mattered anymore. "I don't care."

The liquid in the glass the bartender gave him looked like water, and so he drank like it was even if it burned on the way down and settled in the pit of his stomach like a warm ember. Fire water, he thought as he downed his third shot. I think that's what the Indians called it. Now I know why.

Delgado was scowling at him in thinly-veiled disapproval, but he ignored her in favor of watching the ash people as they drifted aimlessly around the bar. Flecks of red and gold were everywhere, bright and startling in the overwhelming grey, and it suddenly occurred to him that there was something important about that color combination. His brow furrowed as he tried to draw the memory forth, but the fire water had blurred the clarity of his mind's eye, and he heard only a snatch of a long-ago conversation, Rebecca's voice, weary and subdued.

-or of the house of, it said, and then it faded.

Well, the gold could be her hair. To this day, you've never seen anything like it. The bottle blondes that sashay down 5th Avenue could never hope to match it. Even if they could capture the color, they could never reproduce the texture or the sweet scent of it. It's spun silk and liquid sunshine, and even before you knew her well enough to run your fingers through it or taste it on your mouth, your eyes were drawn to it. She calls it her crowning glory, and that's exactly right.

You love to run your fingers through it, and sometimes when she's feeling wicked, she draws it over your bare belly and cock. Or she wraps it around your prick when she's jerkin' you off, and the combination of her soft hair, dry palms, and wet mouth is enough to make your ears pop. Gold is the color of your love's hair.

The memories the voice conjured made his cock twitch, and he shifted in his seat.

What's red, then?

Blood, came the simple answer. Red is the color of blood and retribution.

-ed more blood than all the rest, said Rebecca's voice in the back of his mind, and then the answer came to him.

Red and gold had been the colors of her house, the house of lions. She had been a child of serpents, she'd told him, sitting propped in their bed with four months' worth of Junior making a hump beneath the bedsheet, but she'd gone to battle in the colors of the lion. She'd marched across the castle greensward with a wand in her hand, and by the time she'd been carried back to the castle six days later by the man she called the Serpent King, the gold had been swallowed by a tide of red drying to black. Blood.

They spilled more blood than the rest, she said, propped on her pillows with her hands plucking restlessly at the sheets. The Serpent King said it was because they were fools and idealists, and he was right, but they also had balls of solid brass, and if they were going to die, then they were going to take as many of the enemy with them as they could. They fought hard and died hard, and when the dust cleared and the Ministry started counting the bodies, the only group with a bigger pile than the Gryffindors was the Death Eaters they'd killed. Long live the house of lions, she finished bitterly.

What did you go down as? he asked, and stroked her belly.

She snorted. A Gryffindor, of course. That's what I was according to the school records. Oh, but I was a Slytherin to the bones, and if anybody ever needed proof of that, all they had to do was look at the marks I left on the fourteen bodies by Hagrid's hut. The asp has ever been at the heel of the lion, and it wouldn't surprise me if they resumed their rivalry as soon as the dead were decently shrouded.

That bad?

Mmm. But it can be overcome. I married a Gryffindor, after all, and now I'm bearing his child.

Does that mean he's gonna come out with fangs and a lion's tail?

She'd laughed then, and so had he, but he wasn't laughing now. He was thinking of something she'd said(the asp has ever been at the heel of the lion), and of a play he'd seen his senior year of high school. He couldn't remember what it was called or who had written it-Shakespeare, maybe, but he remembered one character with perfect clarity.

Medea. Medea, who became so enraged at her husband's treachery that she murdered the two children she'd borne him. Medea, who stood over the bodies of her children with blood on her hands and that terrible Death's Head smile on her face. Medea with the vacant eyes and murderous heart. The rest of the play had bored him to tears, but that scene had dried the spittle in his mouth and made his balls crawl into his belly. Medea had given him nightmares.

He stood so abruptly that he almost upended his chair. "I'm gonna go take a leak," he announced too loudly, and headed for the bathrooms and the battered payphone in the alcove.

Delgado snared his elbow in her red-nailed hand. "Flack, for God's sake, don't. I know what you're thinkin', but you can't. Just hang in there."

He shook free of her grip. "Tell me somethin', dear," he said.

"Yeah?" Wary.

"You ever sleep with a guy who was still there in the mornin', or did he just leave the money on the dresser?"

The slap was hard and stinging when it came, and grey became sepia for the briefest instant.

"You're a bastard," she spat, and flopped into her chair again

He knew he had scored a deep and unfair hit, but he could not spare the energy to care. He shouldered his way to the payphone, pulling silver from his pocket as he went. He'd intended to call Rebecca, but by the time he reached the phone, he'd changed his mind. She rarely picked up if she didn't recognize the number, and even if she did, she'd likely hang up as soon as she heard his voice. He slipped the coins into the slot and did something he hadn't done since he was sixteen: he called his father for help.