After the word got around that he had stood up to the gang of bullies, a lot of the good kids around school started to open up. He was invited to join the martial arts club, and found that he really enjoyed it. There were kids in the club who had been taking lessons since they were five or six, and they were often technically better than he was.

The coach immediately pegged him for an accomplished street fighter who didn't go around looking for trouble but didn't run from it either. He started teaching Jonathan specific moves for fighting a much larger and stronger opponent and using his own size and strength against him. Jonathan talked Alvin and the girls into joining the club as well.

Jonathan started to notice after that, every time he turned around, Nancy was there. Hanging out led to seeing a couple of movies. She was a lot of fun.

But as he walked her home from a school dance, he realized she wanted something much more. She mentioned that her parents were going to be out late, and he knew he had to tell her somehow that she was wanting someone he couldn't be. He wasn't fifteen and looking for his first real love--and he wasn't fifty and waiting for Sam. "Nancy, can we sit on the porch for a while?"

"Sure. Is something wrong?"

"I can't go inside with you. It isn't you, and I really like you. I don't want to hurt you. I'm sorry."

"Why? Did I do something wrong?"

"No, you didn't. It was--there was this girl. At my old school. We, uh, broke up. But when I look at you, I still see her, and I don't know how to stop feeling that way."

She nodded. "I understand, Jonathan, really I do. And I'm glad you cared enough to tell it to me straight instead of--of doing some stupid, player thing and just using me to forget this other girl. We can still be friends, can't we?" She asked anxiously.

"I wouldn't have it any other way."

"You will find the right girl one of these days, I'm sure of it. Someone who cares as much as you do is bound to find someone to care about."

He left her with a smile and a chaste kiss on the cheek. For some reason, he felt better than he had since all this had started. It was OK to take all the time he needed. Sam's happiness was all he really ever wanted. She was happy, he had seen that in her eyes when he first saw her and Jack together on Loki's ship. And he believed that Nancy was right, all in good time he would find someone.

Ben didn't show up for his tutoring session the next Monday evening. That was odd--he never missed. Keeping his grades up to avoid being benched was too important to him.

Jonathan decided to mow the grass while he was waiting. He finished up, cleaned the grass clippings out of the lawn mower, and ran the weed eater along the fence--still no Benjamin.

He had an English paper due next week, and he wanted to go fishing this weekend, so he spent most of the evening on that. When he hadn't heard from Ben by the time he was ready to go to bed, Jonathan made a mental note to catch him at lunch and reschedule.

There was a substitute teacher in biology that morning, so they actually got a lot of work done in class for a change. Jonathan wasn't the only one who was happy to be able to leave his biology book in his locker.

It was raining, so the cafeteria was crowded, since they couldn't use the picnic tables. Jonathan looked around for Ben, and didn't see him. He did see Nancy sitting next to one of the football players.

She looked a little embarrassed, so he gave her a quick grin and a thumbs up. At that she really did turn red.

Jonathan saw some of Ben's friends, who told him that Ben was absent.

Now that really wasn't like Ben at all. Jonathan went outside to call him at home.

Ben's mother answered the phone, and she was frantic. Ben hadn't come home from school the night before.

"Have you called the police?"

"No, they won't do anything till he's been gone for twenty-four hours."

"No, ma'am, since he's under eighteen they'll start looking right away. Go ahead and call them. I'll look around myself. Did he ride the bus or did he ride his bike yesterday?"

"His bike's gone, so he must have taken it."

"OK."

Jonathan got his own bike from the rack, and noticed that Ben's bicycle wasn't there. He took the usual route home, along the railroad tracks. A flash of white in the weeds was Benjamin's bike. The rain had washed a lot out, but from what he could see, it looked like someone had forced Ben off the road and that there had been a fight.

Disturbing the scene as little as possible, he called the police and waited.

The cops arrived and soon after that a K-9 unit came. Ben's mother was there, so Jonathan gave up on any ideas of returning to school that day and stayed with her. She was divorced and her mother was watching her other son, so there was no one with her.

Jonathan knew it was bad when an ambulance came up and the paramedics carried a stretcher into the woods at a walk.

It was nearly an hour later when the paramedics brought the stretcher back, bearing a small, blanket covered figure.

Ben's mother caught on and took off running through the wet weeds as fast as she could go. Startling the paramedics, she pulled the blanket back and started screaming.

Jonathan got her away from there and held her when she fell to her knees in the wet grass, crying and blaming God for taking her son, and herself for letting this happen. Jonathan remembered the day Charlie died, and somewhere, God only knew how, he found the strength to hold up under his own grief and guilt as well as hers.

Someone was to blame, but it wasn't the Almighty. Someone had shot Ben in the back of the head, probably a small-caliber weapon from the lack of an exit wound. Other wounds, cuts and burns, had been made before that, from all the blood.

A homicide detective finally, gently, took her to a police car. Her partner asked, "Are you the victim's brother?"

"No, I'm his friend from school."

The detective wanted to know how Jonathan was involved, so he told the whole story from the night before when Ben hadn't shown up at his apartment.

"Detective, you get this son of a bitch!"

The cop nodded. "We'll get him all right. If he left so much as a hair we'll nail his ass to the barn door. Is this your cell number?" When Jonathan indicated that it was, the detective told him go on home.

He put his bike in the garage and dried it off with some rags. Then he sat on the bottom step and that was where Granny found him when she got home from work.

"Jonathan? What's wrong?"

"You know Ben, that kid I was helping with his geography?"

"That tall boy? Holy Mary, Mother o' God. He's the one they found--?"

He nodded. "I found his bike. I was there with his mother when they recovered his body. The damn fools let her get over there and see him like that."

"Oh, Jonathan. Come inside, you're soaked and cold clear through."

A few minutes later he was in front of her fireplace, wrapped in a blanket. She splashed whiskey in two glasses and brought him one.

"Aren't you afraid you'll get in trouble for giving alcohol to a minor? Fourteen is old enough to be tortured and murdered, but God forbid we let a fifteen-year-old have a drink."

"Screw that, medicinal purposes," she said, with a healthy sip of her own.

After that, there was nothing to say. For a long while, they just sat there, silent against a world where such things happened to children, neither of them in any practical position to do anything about it. But there was a strength in shared sorrow. Sometime later the rain stopped, and Jonathan went up to his apartment.

A nightmare of blood and agony and death shook him out of sleep sometime before dawn. He had never set foot on Ba'al's planet or in Iraq--damn Loki to hell for cursing him with these memories! Grief for another man's son, love for his woman, all for the sake of some goddamned experiment. Bad enough that Ben was dead so long before his time. What earthly purpose could there be for Jonathan to need such a visceral understanding of what he'd gone through before his death? What good could that possibly serve?

He lay back down in his cold bed, too exhausted to do anything else, and waited for dawn.

There is a human need for an outpouring of love in the face of senseless death. In the front hall of the school, someone had set up a table with pictures of Ben and Robbie Diaz. There were similarities, and although the police weren't confirming or denying anything, rumors of a serial killer were flying thick and fast. It was also common knowledge that both boys had been raped.

Faculty and staff and students alike had surrounded the photographs with flowers, cards, candles, ribbons, stuffed animals. Having nothing else to leave, Jonathan put ten dollars into a collection for a permanent memorial.

"What a waste of emotion for the weak and unfit."

Unable to believe his ears, Jonathan turned around and stared. "Forrester. I should have known. What is your problem, anyway?"

"My problem is this outpouring of maudlin sentiment for the obviously unfit. Their removal should be--"

"Unfit? Would that be because the Diaz kid was Hispanic and Ben was Jewish? Is that it, Mister Forrester? Or is it because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ran afoul of some sick bastard who needs a gun to get a date? Because I'd really like to hear what you think was so damned unfit about them!"

Forrester flew into a rage and took a swing at Jonathan. His hand shot up in an automatic block, stopping Forrester cold.

In the heat of the moment, neither adversary had noticed that their raised voices had drawn Principal Morgan from his office. His hand closed firmly on Forrester's shoulder. "I, on the other hand, have heard and seen quite enough. I think you ought to go home now, Mr. Forrester."

"Wh-what!"

Morgan smoothly interposed himself between teacher and student. "You heard me. Get off school property right now or I'll have security escort you."

Forrester blasted through the front doors so fast, he almost knocked down the elderly home economics teacher, Mrs. Collins. Jonathan and Principal Morgan both hurried to her assistance. By the time they collected the stack of books and papers that she had dropped, Forrester had reached his car. He peeled out of the lot so fast that he laid down rubber halfway into the intersection and cut off a city bus, nearly causing an accident.

Mrs. Collins said, "He must have been unhinged by this awful tragedy. Oh, those poor, poor little boys, God rest them."

Morgan said something comforting and held the door for her. "Jonathan, please see Mrs. Collins to her classroom with all of that, then return to my office."

"Yes, sir. Here, let me help you with those."

"Thank you, young man."

The home economics room was just down the hall, so it was only a few minutes before Jonathan got back to the principal's office.

Morgan asked kindly, "Weren't you the one who found Ben's bicycle?"

"Yeah. About that with Mr. Forrester--I'm sorry, school wasn't the place for it."

"On the contrary, son, school is absolutely the place to speak out against bigotry and racism. Why else were we put on this earth? If you learn nothing else in your years here, your education will have been a success if you take with you the courage and sense of honor that I saw this morning."

"Yes, sir."

A few minutes later, the school superintendent arrived. He asked what had been said, and Jonathan told him.

"He never gave you his reasons for the unfitness remark?"

"No, he threw a punch and Principal Morgan told him to leave. He knocked Mrs. Collins off balance and then he squealed out of the lot so fast he almost wrecked a bus!"

The two administrators shared a grim look. Morgan asked, "Do you feel up to going to class today, or would you rather I had someone take you home?"

Jonathan thought about Alvin and the girls and wondered how they were holding up. "If it's all the same, I'd rather stay here with my friends."

"That's fine, son, if that's what you'd rather do."

An off-duty teacher had been called from the teachers' lounge to cover Forrester's first period class. The kids looked like they were in shock and a lot of them had been crying. Some hadn't known about the second murder until they arrived at school.