TITLE: Where's Your H.A.L.O.?
Chapter 4: A Little Thing Called Leverage
AUTHOR: Mnemosyne

For Disclaimer and other notes, see chapter one




Dylan couldn't sit still. Her mind was reeling from the Thin Man's revelation, and her body felt the need to follow suit. It would have been wonderfully soothing to twirl in place like a maniac, but the practical side of her nature told her that making herself dizzy and sick was a recipe for disaster, so she'd have to leave the Dervish impersonation for later.

"Ray Carter," she muttered, staring distractedly at her feet as she paced back and forth across the room. "Ray Carter! I mean… Ray Carter!" She stopped and looked at the Thin Man, who was calmly watching her fitful wanderings as if he'd been expecting this reaction and was completely unfazed. For some reason, that annoyed the hell out of her; it was as if she had no secrets around this man. When did HE get the monopoly on mystery?

"Let me get this straight," she said, crossing her arms and turning to face him head on. "Ray Carter, former chief of the US Marshalls, is NOT actually dead, like everyone believed. Instead, he's holed up somewhere with one half of the two holy frigging H.A.L.O. rings, and is searching hell bent for leather for the other one. Am I close?"

A nod.

"Great. Just great." She threw her hands in the air in a gesture of frustration. "Doesn't anyone stay dead anymore!" Stabbing an accusatory finger in his direction, she demanded, "Tell me Seamus O'Grady is dead. PROMISE me he's dead."

Another nod.

"Madison Lee?"

Nod.

"Eric Knox? Vivian Wood?"

He gave her a bored look.

"Hey, this might be old news to you, bucko, but to me it's the stuff headlines are made of." She crossed her arms and began pacing again. "Well at least we only have one greedy, power hungry psycho to take down this time. Thank heavens for small favors."

A moment later, a wad of paper hit her on the side of the head.

"Hey!" she exclaimed, miffed, stopping her pacing and glaring at him. "What do you think this is, fourth grade homeroom?"

He gestured to the ball of paper on the floor, and Dylan crouched down to pick it up. Smoothing it out, she read Thugs.

"Okay, so we've got one greedy, power hungry psycho and a load of his henchmen to take down," she amended. "Fine. We can do that." She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. "Yeah, with an army and a vat of teargas." Crossing her arms over her knees, she looked the Thin Man in the eye. "I need Nat and Alex," she told him plainly. "I can't do this alone."

The look he gave her was half indignant, half hurt as he shook his head firmly. Then, almost as an afterthought, he pressed a hand to his chest, his gesture plainly saying Me.

Dylan winced. "Sorry," she apologized, standing up and moving to the bed. Sitting on the edge beside him, she admitted, "I kind of keep forgetting you're on my side here." Hesitating just a moment, she covered his hand with her own. "Thanks."

He looked at her, blue eyes indescribable. Dylan felt the urge to run her fingers through the impeccably coiffed black slick of his hair, mussed only slightly by their earlier tussle on the floor. It curled around his face now, rather than staying plastered firmly back behind his ears, but she liked the effect. It made him look more human, and helped her justify the tingles he elicited in her stomach.

"Anthony," she said softly, using his adoptive name for lack of anything else, "Where did you get the ring?"

His eyes moved away from her face and he stood up, whip thin body moving like a knife blade. Dylan watched him go. "You can't keep hiding it," she told him. "You're going to have to tell me sooner or later, or I'll find out on my own. I don't think you want that."

His back was to her, but she could tell from the tension in his shoulders that he didn't like his options. "I know you stole it from Carter," she prompted, watching him carefully. "But I have to ask - how did you know Carter had them?" She paused only a moment before continuing, "How did you know any of it, Anthony? About Madison, about Max being Leo, about the Coal Bowl. All of it. It took Nat, Alex and I ages to deduce any of that, but you knew before us. You knew it all. HOW?"

There was no movement from his tall, lanky body for a long time. When he finally did shift, it was to scribble something on his pad of paper before turning around and extending the note towards her. Dylan took it.

Not Anthony.

Her eyes snapped upwards. This wasn't what she'd been expecting. "What should I call you, then?" she asked, trying not to sound too sarcastic. "Slim?"

He took the pad, wrote something else, and handed it back to her. Again, she read the spidery writing.

Lucian

She read the name several times, trying to get a feel for it. Somehow it suited him. There was something about the sound, the syllables, the way it rolled off her tongue, that fit his angular features. Perhaps it was because it sounded so close to Lucifer.

Abandoning that train of thought as cynical, she slowly raised her eyes from the pad and found herself pinned under his intense gaze. His eyes were blazing, the way a fire burns hottest where the flame turns white. Dylan had the feeling he had never shared this secret with anyone before; that he had given her something very important with that slip of paper, and that he would have no qualms killing her - infatuation or not - if she so much as breathed wrong in the next few seconds.

She took a deep, slow breath, and calmly tore the note to shreds.

"The nuns were right, then," she said quietly, eyes never leaving his face. "You're Romanian." He made no indication of ascent or disagreement as he watched her sift the homemade confetti from one hand to the other and scrunch it into a ball. "Okay, Lucian," she continued, reaching out to open the nightstand's drawer and drop the scraps of paper inside, "what were you doing that got you involved in this whole mess?" She held out the pad for him with one hand and closed the drawer with the other.

He took the proffered notebook, wrote a short message, and handed it back. The note was brief - only two words - but it chilled Dylan in a way she couldn't explain.

This was the message.

My job

*********************

"Tick, tock, ladies. The mouse has run up the clock and back down again and found himself a timeshare in the Hamptons. Anyone feel like talking now?"

Alex had trained herself at an early age how NOT to sweat. Like everything in her young life, she had taken the adage Never let 'em see you sweat to heart, and had forced her body to take it just as seriously. The trick, she'd found, lay in making your body believe you were always in a nicely air-conditioned room, drinking a chocolate milk shake. In later years, the milk shake had been replaced with a strawberry daiquiri, but the principle remained the same. Never let 'em see you sweat meant never giving them any sweat to see.

Sitting here, in this empty room, chained like an animal and looking down the shiny edge of a 4 inch straight razor, it was all she could do to keep that strawberry daiquiri from shattering in her hand, taking her self-imposed cool with it.

"Look, we don't know what you're talking about, okay?" she heard Natalie saying, in some faraway, distant land. The tone of the other woman's voice told Alex that the blonde was trying to hide her fear behind false bravado. "What do you WANT? And why do you want Dylan?"

Good. Try to get some information out of him. At least one of them was thinking. Alex had never liked razors, and having one this close to her face was unnerving.

"Natalie, Natalie, Natalie," Carter chided, as if talking to a small child. He was alone with them, presumably having left Bruiser and Brit Boy - his two resident thugs - outside, which meant he was either extremely confident or plain stupid. Alex couldn't move her hands, and she'd lost feeling in her feet where her bindings held her immobile. She was inclined to believe the former.

Carter waggled the razor beside Alex's cheek, and the dark-eyed Angel forced herself not to close her eyes. "Do I look like Boris Badanov to you? I'm not going to give away my plan, so you can attempt a daring escape in full possession of all my secrets." He laughed a little. "See how I said attempt an escape? Because you wouldn't get ten feet before I shot you. It's that simple. And if you don't want Ms. Munday here to learn what it's like to be a Thanksgiving turkey, you'll start talking." The razor started to swoop in.

Alex cringed, and heard Natalie exclaim, "Wait!"

The razor froze, half an inch from her eye. "Yes?" Carter said. "You have something you wanted to say?"

"We don't know where she is," Alex managed to say, forcing her eyes to open fully so she could glare up at the man in front of her.

Carter's eyes were two blue suns in his tanned, unusually handsome face. "Sorry if I find that a little hard to believe," he shot back sarcastically. "You three are so attuned to each other, you might as well be surgically attached at the hip."

"She's telling the truth," Natalie verified, in earnest. "She disappeared, sometime between last night and this morning."

The former US Marshall looked back and forth between them, as if trying to gauge their honesty. Alex had managed to recover her cool by now, and refused to give him anything more than cold animosity.

"Okay," he said after a moment. "Let's say I believe you. That leaves us with a bit of a situation, doesn't it? Namely, what do I do with two meddling women who can't seem to keep their pretty noses out of my business?"

"Don't play dumb with us," Alex spat at him, eyes hard. She didn't enjoy threats anymore than she enjoyed people shooting at her. "You WANTED to be found. The beach, the car. You used to be government - you know how to blend in, and you were purposely doing just the opposite. I think you know EXACTLY what you're going to do with us. I think you've known all along."

Carter looked at her for a moment, then grinned. If he'd been one of the good guys, she might have fallen for him with a smile like that. But she wasn't Dylan, and a toothy grin wasn't going to set her knees knocking; not when it was coming from a man whose right hand was still fiddling with a gold-plated straight razor. "Very good, Ms. Munday," he congratulated her, though the praise fell on cold ears. "You know, I had a feeling that maybe Dylan didn't have anything to do with my little robbery. That she was just an innocent bystander, caught up in the fray. After all, from what I know of you Angels, you do everything as a unit, and Ms. Sanders went rogue once already. I doubt she's itching to do it again." He reached two long fingers into the breast pocket of his casual dress shirt...

…and withdrew an unmistakable lock of silky, auburn hair.

"But with evidence like this, I couldn't in good conscience not even ASK," he said, fingering the strands idly. "I'm inclined to believe you two. You're good, honest people. You believe in right and wrong. You pay your taxes; I know because I checked your files before my tragic death. So I don't think you'd lie to me about this. For that, thank you, because you've answered my second question."

"Which was?" Alex asked coldly.

"If not Dylan, then who?" He arched an eyebrow. "And I don't think you need me to answer that for you. You're smart ladies. I found this near the safe where I kept the A-half of the rings. If it wasn't ripped out of Ms. Sander's skull in her rush to get the hell out of Dodge before I found her, then it got dropped by someone in a hurry. We almost had her last night, and then she would have had plenty of chances to explain everything and plead her innocence before we killed her. But someone got to her first. So I ask you." He looked purposefully from one to the other. "Who do you know that has an obsession with hair? Especially," he held up the lock again, "this hair."

Alex had the urge to share a look with Natalie, but fought it down.

"So you're right, Alex," Carter continued, absently flipping the razor open and closed. "I do know what I'm going to do with you. I'm going to keep you right here, locked up nice and tight, until your little friend comes looking for you. And where she goes, that skinny son-of-a-bitch will follow, and then I'll really have the bull by the horns. I'll shake him till he coughs up my ring, then I'll show him what happens to men who double-cross Ray Carter." He snapped the razor shut with a terminal CLICK.

Alex arched an eyebrow. "You're a real prince, Carter," she said acidly.

He gave her an icy smile that didn't reach his eyes. "I'm a businessman, Ms. Munday," he answered. "That's something Madison never understood. She thought I was a greedy G-man with connections, and she was the brains of the operation. But all she was was a distraction - a shell game so I could get the rings." He laughed a little and rubbed his eyebrow with his thumb. "I think she thought she was the only one who didn't work well with partners." He shrugged. "Her loss, my gain."

"You suck," Natalie shot.

"Sticks and stones, Natalie," he chided. "Now if you two don't mind, I have a brutal dual murder and subsequent cover-up to plan. Then I have to decide what I'm going to do to our thin friend and his lady fair. Get some rest. You'll need it." With one last smile, he turned on his heel and headed for the door, leaving them in the darkness with the knowledge of just whose murders he was planning to keep them very much awake.

**********************

Dylan listened - or rather, read - Lucian's story with the cold, dispassionate attention she would have paid beige paint swatches. She had to, or else risk losing what was left of her mind. It all fit together so perfectly, but was no less shocking for it's inevitability.

After surviving the explosion at Knox's castle, the Thin Man had taken a few months to heal, then had gone looking for work again. An assassin of his caliber was always in high demand, and it wasn't long before he had found himself a steady stream of business. One thing led to another, and he soon came into the employ of Ray Carter.

"The H.A.L.O. operation," Dylan observed flatly at this point in his narrative.

The Thin Man said nothing, but handed her the next page of the story, written in his painfully cramped script.

His silence, he claimed, made people trust him more than they would other assassins. Carter was no different. Before long, the corrupt US Marshall had explained his entire plan: the rings, their importance, and the integral participation of Madison Lee. Madison would work as the go between - she would be the front of the operation; the one who would actually "steal" the rings, which would then be "returned" to the government when she was defeated.

That defeat was Lucian's primary task.

"So that's how you knew about everything before we did," Dylan observed quietly, watching his face with distant eyes. "Carter told you."

Lucian nodded, and handed her the next page.

He had been charged with damaging Madison's plan at every turn. At the Coal Bowl, he had killed Emmers. He had deliberately allowed the Angel's to follow his tracks to the orphanage, and subsequently to Seamus' ship, which had then set up Carter's retrieval of the rings.

"Carter knew that Madison had been an Angel," Dylan mused, "and he knew only the Angels could defeat her." She looked at him, this time with clear eyes. "But he couldn't trust that we would stop her completely - he had to have a backup plan. So he had you sabotaging the operation from the inside, to degrade her in the eyes of her clientele. Piss off the O'Grady's, or the Yakuza, or the Mafia, and you're in trouble. That's what you were doing, right? Pissing them off on her behalf."

Yes

"That was a dangerous game," she said softly. "If Madison had found out…"

A quick scribble. No one finds out

That made her shiver. She took the next page as he handed it to her, and continued to read.

Carter had deliberately led the Angels to the observatory, for a dual purpose: to have witnesses to his "death," and to reveal Madison as the "evil mastermind." With him removed from the picture, he was free to steal back the rings.

"Hold on," Dylan said, physically holding up a hand and squinting at him. "He stole them BACK?"

A nod.

"How! I doubt Madison let those rings out of her sight!"

Me

Dylan cocked her head to the side, assessing him silently. She tried to imagine him sneaking into Madison's boudoir as she showered, fingering through her unmentionables until he found the rings hidden in a secret compartment in her underwear drawer. It must have been something like that - Madison would never have let him have the rings if she'd been wearing them.

Dylan felt a stab of useless jealousy, but fought it down.

"All right, I think I get the rest of this now," she said, holding up a hand to refuse the next page of the story. "You took the REAL rings and replaced them with Carter's fakes. You took the originals back to Carter, and when we defeated Madison, we got the fakes." She shook her head. "But there's still something I don't get. A few things, actually. One," she held up an index finger, "WHY did you give the rings to Carter, if you were just going to steal them back later?"

He hesitated a split second before writing his response. Later

"No, not later. I want to know now."

An emphatic line added. Later

Dylan sighed in frustration but let it pass. "Fine. Later." She pointed at him with an accusing finger. "But that later WILL happen."

He nodded, then gave her an expectant look, waiting for her second question.

Dylan sighed. "Why did you come back?" she asked softly, watching his face closely for a reaction. "You didn't have to. Your job was over."

The look he gave her was searing, as if he were reading her mind; or more so, as if he were trying to make her read his. It didn't take much - his thoughts were written all over his face.

"It was me, wasn't it," she murmured, making it a statement rather than a question. "You came back because of me."

No response, but she knew she was right.

"Lucian," she breathed in frustration, reaching out to touch his cheek. He recoiled for a moment, then leaned into her hand, pale eyes closing in rapture. Dylan didn't bother to hide her confusion as she ran a thumb over his cheekbone. "Why me?" she whispered. "Why bother with ME? What did I ever do to … imprint on you like this? Natalie's more beautiful, and more cheerful. Alex is … well, more beautiful, too, and a hell of a lot richer. I'm just Dylan - all I do is wear wigs and hit things. I'm good at both, but they're nothing to crow about."

His eyes opened again, and he gazed at her silently. Then, slowly, he pulled away from her hand, picked up the pad, and wrote, Lonely.

"Lonely?" she snorted, letting her hand drop into her lap. "I'm not lonely. I've got Nat and Alex and Charlie and Bos. I've got plenty of people around me all the time. I'm good."

He ignored her, and scribbled a short diagram on the back of his last note:
Natalie = Peter
Alex = Jason Gibbs
Bosley = Family
Charlie = Daughters

Dylan read this, and frowned. "Charlie has daughters?"

The Thin Man grabbed the diagram back, scribbled out Daughters and wrote in Angels.

"Oh," Dylan murmured, reading the revised note. After a moment she shook her head, "No, you're forgetting that the Angels and I are sisters." She smiled at him. "As close as, at least. They're my family."

Then why did you leave

Her throat went dry. "How did you know about that?" she asked, though the answer was obvious - Carter had told him.

He ignored the question, and pointed at the question again.

"Because I… didn't want them to get hurt," she explained. "No one wants their family or friends to get hurt because of some stupid mistake they made. I dated Seamus - that was MY problem, not theirs. Their lives didn't deserve to be put in danger because of a dumb move I made when I was a kid. Any sister would have done the same." She looked at him, seeking his approval for her excuse.

He wasn't giving it. Break ties, no connections

"Yeah, well I've been in the WPP long enough, I'm a dab hand at that."

Lonely

"Stop saying that, all right?" She knew how odd that sounded, talking to a mute as she was, but she didn't care. "And what does any of this have to do with my question, anyway? Why did you pick ME?"

He studied her for a minute, then picked up her hand. She watched as he quietly spelled out letters on her palm with his fingertip.

L-O-N-E-L-Y 2

For some reason, that choked her up, and she found herself staring at his thin, pale face and trying to find the frightened boy who lurked there beneath the surface. The one who had found himself on the doorstep of a catholic orphanage after the tragic death of his family. The one who had chosen, at such a young age, to live apart from everyone else; to seclude himself from all manner of society in every way possible, even removing his own voice. She wondered if she would have done the same thing in his situation. It came as only a small surprise to her when she discovered that yes, she probably would have. Not because she was afraid, but because she was stubborn; stubborn as a mule, and twice as ornery. If she didn't want to talk, no one was going to make her talk. And if that self-imposed ban lasted twenty years, then so be it, because she was the boss of herself. They could plead, wheedle, and cajole, but nothing they could say would convince her. NO ONE was going to tell her what to do.

Then after a while, people would stop trying. Then, after a longer while, they wouldn't even know they were supposed to.

"What were you trying to say to me?" she murmured, voice trembling slightly. "On the roof, when we were fighting Madison and Seamus. You tried to say something, after we… After we kissed." She wanted to curl her fingers around his hand and squeeze, but resisted the urge, leaving her canvas free for him to write. "What was it?"

He took so long to answer, she wondered if he had heard her question at all, or if he'd been in a zone all his own. She was about to ask a second time when his fingertip began to move on her palm again, spelling a new word. She bit her tongue and paid attention to the swirls against her skin, trying to make out each letter in turn.

W
O
W

It took a few seconds for that to sink in. When it did, Dylan found a sneaky smile creeping onto her face. "Liar," she chuckled quietly, looking at him through her lashes. "You didn't start to break a twenty some-odd year vow of silence just to say Wow."

His eyes nearly twinkled, and she knew he was glad to have made her laugh.

For a moment, Dylan was struck by the oddity of this situation. She was sitting in the dark with a murderer, soaking in his secrets like a sponge, while he pried open all the doors she'd ever locked around herself and peered inside. It was a crazy, creepy feeling; a bit like staring into the abyss and finding that the abyss wasn't deepest black at all, but was actually a pair of milky blue eyes with pinprick pupils, topped by rapier thin eyebrows. She saw things in this man that scared her, because they reminded her so much of herself: a gravity towards danger, a life of seclusion, and now, a bone-aching loneliness she hadn't even allowed herself to acknowledge until tonight. Because he was right - she WAS lonely. Through her teen years, Helen Zaas had been a social creature, perhaps running with the wrong crowd, but at least it WAS a crowd. After sending Seamus to jail, the Dylan Sanders that emerged had been stronger, bolder, even more stubborn, and absolutely determined that she would never, ever let anyone get close enough to hurt her again. Discovering Seamus' true colors had felt like riding a racehorse that came to a sudden, jarring halt, throwing her from the saddle and pitching her forward, between its ears, to land winded and wounded on the hard-packed turf. A rude awakening at best, a blood-deep betrayal at worst, and Dylan never did anything by half-measures.

"You scare me," she murmured, not realizing she'd said it out loud until the words were past her lips, "but not because you can kill me, and I know you can. You scare me because I could have been you, and because part of me still wants to be you, and another part of me wants to hear how you became you, and another part of me is convinced none of that matters because you're who you are, I'm who I am, and somehow we work." She swallowed, folded her fingers around his hand, and refused to look away from his eyes. "You scare me because you KNOW. No one knows." She could feel a hot lump in her throat and forced herself to swallow around it, ignoring the tears that were searing behind her eyelids, begging to be released.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, as if that could make up for everything: his parents dying, his life of crime, her life of justice, and the seemingly unbridgeable gap that stood between them, even though mere inches separated them on the bed. "I'm just sorry."

This time she DID look away; it hurt too much to look at his eyes, knowing the pain she'd find there. Instead, she looked down at their entwined hands, and wondered what it would have been like if she'd met him instead of Seamus all those years earlier. Maybe she could have changed him for the better; maybe he'd have changed her for the worse. Either way, she couldn't imagine them blasting down the Strip listening to Bon Jovi. Instead, she saw quiet, sultry nights spent in silk-draped, windowless basement apartments, lit by candlelight, making love to the strains of Beethoven's Für Elise like vampires. Maybe she could have gotten him to say her name. Maybe he would have taught her how to fence. Maybe they'd both have died young and immature and violently in love.

That was how Helen Zaas would have done it. Dylan Sanders was just tired.

The hand under her chin was soft but persistent, and when she finally looked up, she only had a moment to register his face moving in before his lips were firmly pressed against hers and his hand had slipped around to cradle the back of her neck like fragile china. She stiffened, surprised, then let her eyes slide shut and moaned, leaning into the kiss. This wasn't like the exchange on the roof of the Los Angeles Theater - there was no fatalistic urgency, no fear. Lucian's hand tightened on the back of her neck, holding her still as his mouth worked over hers like waves over beaches. Dylan took the onslaught and gave it back, twining her hands in the lapels of his suit and pulling hard enough to strain the intricate tailoring to the breaking point.

Their instincts had kicked in, and the predators were fighting in grand style to see which would become the prey. Dylan had never been a demure bedmate - she knew what she wanted, and she got it everytime. But there was something in the way his fingers curled in the hair at the nape of her neck, how his other hand shook loose of her grip and snaked around her waist, pulling her closer in a vicelike grip, that excited her. He held her like nothing else existed, and she was the only necessary thing for his survival

Little by little, she loosened her grip on his lapels. Little by little, she played to lose.

Then, there was a cough.

The moment shattered like a fallen chandelier. Dylan leapt away from the Thin Man, who in turn nearly jumped out of his skin as he flew to his feet, a murderous gleam in his eye.

"Sorry to interrupt," the masculine figure leaning casually in the doorway said, a laugh evident in his voice, "but we've got a few pressing matters to attend to, mate, and I thought you'd like to know about them."

He stepped into the room, a tall, strikingly attractive man with dark blonde hair and brown eyes, and the kind of muscular physique you saw on soccer players. He also had what Natalie would have referred to as a "swoony" British accent.

And a very large 9MM tucked into his belt.

"Who are you?" Dylan asked through gritted teeth, her embarrassment forgotten as she slowly got to her feet and took up a defensive position next to the Thin Man, who was not taking his eyes off the stranger.

"What, you mean Anthony hasn't told you all about me?" the man asked with mock hurt. "Pull the other one, 'Tone. And here I thought we were partners in this sordid little affair."

Dylan gave the Thin Man a disbelieving look. "You know this guy?"

Lucian still hadn't moved a muscle, but she saw his jaw twitch faintly.

"He sure does, ducky," the man said with a smile, and held out a hand towards her. "Names Rodger Makum, but you can call me Dodger. Most folks do."

"As in Artful?" Dylan asked sarcastically, ignoring his hand.

"Can't beat the classics," Dodger admitted, tucking his hand amiably away in his bomber jacket pocket. "So Anthony hasn't told you about me?"

"He's a bit tight-lipped, yeah."

"Always has been, the old sod. I guess I understand it though, seeing the business we're in and all."

"And what...business is that?"

"What, you don't know?" He jerked his thumb in Lucian's direction. "I do what he does, only better." He gave her a dazzling grin. "Just came from HQ, actually, and I thought you might like to know that Carter's got your two lovely friends locked up in a godawful cargo hold down at the docks, chicky. You might want to be getting them out of there, 'fore he starts getting happy with that razor of his."

"WHAT!" Dylan exclaimed, staring at him in stunned amazement.

"Oh, it's the oldest trick in the book, luv," Dodger continued, seemingly unfazed by her reaction. "He wants you, and he wants him," the Englishman nodded to Lucian, "so he took something that means a little something to you, and now he's just waiting for you to come collect. It's a little thing called leverage. I'd've thought you'd've heard of it, being who and what you are and all."

Dylan could only gape, for once stripped of anything to say. The Thin Man, strangely enough, did all the talking. He grabbed up his cane, which was leaning against the nightstand, slid the hidden blade from its narrow sheath, and proceeded to slice the nearest pillow to pieces with a furious howl.

"Yeah, I thought you'd say that," Dodger said with a nod. After a moment of watching feathers fly around like confetti, he added, "Kind of feel sorry for the goose."

Dylan could only blink and watch the Thin Man's rampage with a faraway gaze. //Oh God,// she thought, swallowing. //Not again.//

And this time, she couldn't even run for Mexico.



TBC...


Author's Notes: Hello again, all! Thanks for sticking with the story! I promise, more action in the next chapter. ;) LOL! Dearne, good call on the British guy. ;) To everyone, I hope this chapter kept you interested, and that you'll be back for chapter 5! Thanks so much for reading!