The last time he saw this man—or at least to the best of his recently questionable memory—was the afternoon he came to his room to tell him that he'd organized the shooting of his father, that he was never going to breathe free air again, and that if he ever caused the slightest bit of trouble again the cost would be the life of somebody he cared deeply about. And all that after oxygen and his own heartbeat had abandoned him about an hour earlier. One of the worst days of his life, to be sure. There have been a lot of additions to that list recently.

Today, without a doubt, goes at the top.

The man seems… different. He looks just like he always does, unruffled and put together and just a little bit perpetually smug, but he feels changed somehow. He steps closer, shutting the door behind him.

Doesn't matter. Nobody is coming after him anyway. This is it.

"You killed her," he whispers.

"Well, no," the man responds, picking an imaginary fleck of dust off the shoulder of his jacket, "I didn't. Credit for that goes to your dear friend Carlton Lassiter."

"There's no way that was really him. I'm not an idiot."

"Very well." If anything, he sounds pleased at the chance to confirm this. "Starring as Detective Carlton Lassiter, we have the impersonator—you've come to know him as Dai Chung. His real name is Vincent Nyo."

He's telling him things. He's giving him information. But none of it matters, not anymore. "You killed her."

"Mr. Spencer, I do believe you already said that."

He grasps at the name, wanting to hold onto it but not able to find the energy to do so. "All right, you son of a bitch. We're at the end of the line. You're killing me as we speak, I know you are. So I'd just like to know why I have to die." Tears prick at his eyes, and he does nothing to hold them back. "I'd like to know why she had to die."

"You know, Mr. Spencer, I'm not a serial killer. I don't feel any particular need to explain my actions or my plans to you."

"I'm not asking to buy time by appealing to your ego," he spits. "Not this time. You're gonna kill me; I'm gonna die. I get that. I'm asking because I want to know. I think I'm entitled." But even as he speaks, his conviction drains out of him, and he's not sure he really cares. Whatever the reason, it's not going to begin to cover the damage that's been done. The price he's paid.

It would have been different if he'd succeeded in keeping everyone safe. If he had, this information would have been his reward, along with finally being released from this nightmare. He would have been able to find it in him to care. But with his failure at the eleventh hour… he's not convinced he deserves even this.

She's dead. And it's his fault.

"After I'm dead… what will you do then?" he whispers. For a few short moments there is no answer, and he lifts up his head.

The Master shrugs, the very picture of casualness. "There are the others to drain, of course. The impersonator, the acrobat."

He stares at the man, something hard settling down in his chest like a stone. "And Sebastian?"

The man pauses, and his lips curve into a grin. "Already taken care of."

He's lying. Arashk knows it immediately. And it's a small comfort, but at least it's something. If he's lying, it means Sebastian is out of his grasp. Arashk doesn't know why or how that could be, but he's not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

An image pops out of his memory, his goddamn eidetic memory. The lock box in that man's closet, all the initials on all the tabs on all the files.

"JR/SJ," "EJ/PT," "VN/DC," "CC/LI," "SS/AR," and "GH."

In the moment, he didn't know his own name, and the one he was going by didn't even feel like his own, so he didn't even recognize the connection between the pair of initials. And right now… actually, right now he's having trouble too. Again. But he knows what all those letters are, at least what they refer to. At this point, specifics hardly matter.

"EJ." EJ was a woman he met quite by chance… an orator, and a part-time dog trainer, attending law school. Unbelievably persuasive and strong-willed, but married to a man she loved very much, which was used against her. She was placed rather insultingly at a snack bar, and she had a quota to meet every single day. And indeed, the amount of food she managed to sell was staggering. But after three months of her drinking the spring water and no evidence whatsoever of improvements on a supernatural, mind-controlling level, it was decided that keeping her around was a waste of resources.

Arashk blinks, suddenly and completely exhausted. "Who's GH?" he rasps out.

For a split second he feels confusion emanating from his captor, but it's quickly replaced with clarity. But all he says is, "GH is next."

He shuts his eyes in an unconscious effort to shield himself from the horror of the notion. "You must have an endgame. You can't plan on running a carnival all your life, especially if you're going to live forever. What are you going to do afterwards?"

The man pulls his clasped hands apart in a gesture akin to a shrug, wearing a smile that almost seems to show pointed teeth. "Who's to say?"


"A small medical team has been dispatched, and Vick is on the way with SWAT, but we'll beat them there by a good ten minutes," says Lassiter as he exits.

Henry sits in the front, every once in a while glancing up to assess their progress so far, but for the most part he hasn't been able to stop rereading the notes since he took them from Juliet him back at his house. The more times he reads them, the better he knows the information.

But also, the more times he reads them, the more he puts off having to think about how his son fits into all this.

At the mention of a medical team, though, a desperate question occurs to him. He glances back at Sebastian. "You said Juliet lost a lot of blood. I take it you couldn't do anything about that?"

Normally he might feel ridiculous asking the question. But this is neither the time nor the place to get hung up on something like that.

The man shakes his head. "I can only put back together what's still there. I can't regenerate what's been lost."

If these notes are anything to go on, his son is in absolutely desperate need of medical attention—more specifically, a limited resource that is surely being used up like there's no tomorrow in lieu of all these crashes.

"Mr. Spencer, can I see those?" asks Gus, and Henry almost says "No" automatically, but that would just be pointlessly cruel. Gus has been struggling to hold himself together for the past year just as much as Henry has, and he deserves answers, even if Henry doesn't know just how well he's going to take those answers.

He holds the notepad out to his side in Gus's grabbing range, but as he does, he warns, "It ain't pretty."

Gus hesitates, but he takes the notes, and Henry is left to fiddle with his own fingers and watch the road as it flies past him, willing it to go even faster, and occasionally urging Lassiter to speed up. Normally, he knows, the man would have some snide remark ready to fire back at him. But right now, all his concentration is obviously on driving.

Henry can't stop seeing the last time he laid eyes on Shawn—from across his front yard, being hustled across the grass, past the police cars sitting idly, directly before he was shoved into that minivan that Henry had never seen before. Especially next to the tall man who was dragging him along, he looked so small, and so pale. And so broken. And no wonder, given how the woman he loved was currently bleeding out on his father's porch.

That will not be seared into Henry's memory as the last time he ever sees his son.

He will not allow it.


"I learned at a young age," begins the Master at length, "that people are unreliable. People abandon you. They are careless and selfish and untrustworthy. But some of them are very intelligent, and as I began to read and learn about the world and the advances that have been made by humankind, I realized that I could find reliable pleasure in the knowledge. Every day I wanted to learn more.

"When I heard of this way to unlock people's potential, to raise the extraordinary but mundane to a higher plane… It quickly consumed my every thought. I had to know if it was real, and on discovering for myself that it was, immediately the world became so much larger and stranger than I had known. And I had to know more. Be more. I still do."

He speaks in a way that's more sincere, more passionate, than anything Arashk has heard him say before. And it is terrifying. The zeal in his voice, in his eyes. For a process which requires, rather uncompromisingly, the taking of human lives.

"You're going to keep doing this?" he whispers. "Even after GH?"

He shrugs. "Perhaps. I'm not looking that far ahead at the moment. Who knows how long it will take me to master the abilities I'll have absorbed. Likely many, many years." He pauses, smiling. "You know, I take it back. It's nice to explain everything to a new audience. Do you have any idea how difficult, how involved all this was? Well, you probably do."

"You… you need the blood, don't you?" he says slowly, realizing. The dream he had on the long road back home—the last dream he can clearly recall. When one man killed the other and drank straight from his side. "Our blood. That's how you take our powers."

"That's right."

"Then… if you know how to take them, you must know where they came from." He realizes too late the pleading note in his voice. And the Master is clearly overwhelmingly amused by it.

"Oh, Mr. Spencer… the desperation in you! You really want to know, do you? How your pseudo-psychic act became real?"

He drops his head back down on the hard table. It's pounding and swimming with incomprehensible murk and it's just too exhausting to hold it up anymore. "You knew I wasn't a real psychic?" Even as he says it, it feels obvious. But it's not a realization he's quite come to until right now.

"Don't insult me, Mr. Spencer. And don't sell yourself short—you are a real psychic." The sharklike smile is evident even in his voice.

"How?" he rasps simply, staring at the ceiling.

"Truly? That's what you want to know most of all? Not how you forgot the names of everybody you care about?"

"You did this," he breathes in response, wanting to sound or at least be angry but lacking the strength. "You did this to me."

"You are psychic. The acrobat can defy certain laws of physics. And I? I deal in names." He's so pleased with himself. It's disgusting. "If you held me down and drank from me you would be able to do it too. Once I have a latch onto a person's mind, I can find that mind again across any distance, and extract names from it. It takes more time the more familiar a person is with the name, which is why I could tell you my own real name and have you forget it the moment you focused on something else, and also why it took weeks for me to make you forget that you were Shawn Spencer." He chuckles. "At this point, they're nearly on the same level. I just told you your real name, Mr. Ronaldo. Can you repeat it back to me?"

Arashk screws his eyes shut, turning his head to the side.

"I have many theories as to why this specific ability was bestowed on me, but they are all personal and I do not believe I wish to share them with you. But there is a certain significance to a name—it gives a person direction, identity. When I gained the ability to take that away from anyone I chose—well, I realized very early on the magnitude of that gift. And I was not about to let it go to waste."

"You manipulative bastard," Arashk says softly, face damp with tears.

"Do not call names, Mr. Spencer," the Master chides, and then chuckles a bit. "Names are my trade."


"Our destination's an old house," Juliet announces after a few minutes of research on her phone, likely involving contact with other officers. "A huge, expensive one. A mansion, really. It was condemned six years ago after a large tree fell on it during a storm and caused severe damage, so extensive that the family moved out immediately rather than try to have it fixed."

"So it's abandoned," Mr. Spencer confirms.

"Yes. And structurally compromised."

"Who gives a damn?" he responds promptly.

"That… does sound like an ideal place to do this," Gus murmurs, still staring down at the notepad in his lap, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice. Sebastian shoots him a look, clearly becoming very confused by his assertion that Shawn is psychic but unwillingness to believe in his divinations.

The fact is, they are driving to an address that Juliet heard Shawn say in his sleep. They are all suffering, he knows, from the uncertain terror of what's going to happen at the end of one hundred fourteen minutes, and they know that if this address is somehow a red herring, they will have no time to do anything else before that timer hits zero. He supposes what surprises him the most is Lassiter's willingness to go along with all of this.

His mind is still trying and failing to rationalize what he saw on Mr. Spencer's porch. When Sebastian closed the substantial hole in Juliet's stomach, not with needles or stitches or any equipment at all, but just by… by concentrating. Gus had been trying very, very hard to go to his happy place, to keep himself from passing out at the sight of all that blood. For the most part, that had involved looking away. He supposes he's glad that he chose the exact moment to start looking that he did, or he would have missed what is now definitely the most unbelievable thing he's ever witnessed.

In some ways, working with Shawn has been… sobering. Of course, in others, it's been the time of his life, but the constant lies have sort of… hardened him to the idea of there being more to the world. Or at least to the idea of that "more" being something that could actually affect anyone's life. But now? Now he's seen it. There is no going back to that mindset.

And he knows that Shawn has never really been psychic.

…But now?


The light in the room is pulsating. And the light is natural, so that either means he's lost a dangerous amount of blood, or the sun is about to blow up. He can't think straight enough to decide which would be preferable. His face feels clammy. Isn't light supposed to be warm?

"You know, your killing Goodwin was… an immense surprise. You had been practically catatonic for over three months. I had really thought you were no longer a flight risk, let alone a danger." He chuckles softly. "But in doing it, you presented me with a singular opportunity, for which I must thank you."

He almost wonders what this means. Almost. But she's dead and he's rapidly losing touch with reality and he doesn't even care that he doesn't care.

"I do love this house," the man sighs at length. "Perhaps one day I'll have something like it. This precise building, I'm sure, will be renovated, one day, years from now. Put back onto the market, sold to a family or perhaps individual with more money than they know what to do with. People will live here, Mr. Spencer. They will go about their business, standing exactly where you are now, and they will never have an inkling that they are on a crime scene. The police will never investigate here. Nobody is ever going to know what happened to you."

"Go to hell," he manages, voice strangled, just wishing the man would shut up.

"That's right, go down defiant," the man's voice continues, almost sounding a little excited. "There's that spirit I read all about in the papers before I decided to take you. Oh, you practically presented yourself to me on a platter—Shawn Spencer, Head Psychic of the Santa Barbara Police Department. Constantly cracking wise and acting like a hyperactive toddler and inventing absolutely ridiculous aliases. But put your partner at risk, or your father, or your pretty little girlfriend? That fire goes out like water was thrown on it, doesn't it?"

If he could will his brain to work at even a small fraction of its full capacity, or if the ceiling could hold still, or if Juliet were beside him, maybe he'd find a retort worthwhile. All he knows, all he can do, is be. It's always been less than the bare minimum—he's always managed it, and he has to keep managing it.

Even if he can't quite recall why.


Lassiter's gunning it. He doesn't care that they've just entered a vaguely residential area. He's giving it all it's got, because they're at just over twenty minutes and the closer the clock gets to hitting zero, the more scared he becomes, and he can't afford to be scared.

It was fine before he saw what Jaeger did. Not "fine," but he could handle himself—because he knew what was real, and what couldn't be. He knew the furthest limitations of the severity of Shawn's situation.

A case hasn't scared him this much since he was a rookie. And even as a rookie, he never faced a case that was this personal. And even as a rookie, he knew that there were certain laws of the universe that no criminal could break.

"Is that it?" Jaeger asks, pointing out his window, and he's shaken out of his existential crisis as they all look in the direction his finger indicates (save for Spencer, who already was). On the other side of the large loop the road leads into, they see an enormous house. On one side the surrounding forest hugs it rather closely, and Lassiter glimpses the base of the huge tree that used to stand erect not even that close to the house, but close enough. It's nowhere near a clean break. It looks like it was struck by lightning, and the top two thirds splintered but did not fully separate from the rest of the tree and crashed through the roof.

"It must be," O'Hara confirms after a moment of silence. "And look, the road ends in a small circle out front. It's the only house on this road."

Lassiter takes her word for it. He's too busy trying not to crash at the moment. Now that their destination is in sight, he instinctively wants to floor it, but the road is taking a sharp enough turn that if this were a normal road there would definitely be chevrons along it, and provided he doesn't want to kill everyone in the vehicle, he is forced to keep his speed down.

He stops himself from imagining what is happening to Shawn at this very moment. Stops himself from considering that with Henry's mobility impaired, O'Hara weak from blood loss, Jaeger weak from the healing session, and Guster not a cop, he is the only person in this car fully capable and qualified to run into whatever they'll find in that house. And that's only speaking technically—he sure as hell doesn't feel qualified for this.

None of that is important. They're here, and they're as ready as they can be. And they are going to stop whatever started with Shawn's disappearance one year ago.

This ends now.


"Oh, look at that. You're going into shock."

Arashk wants desperately to close his eyes, because nothing around him makes sense. He can't remember how he got here and he's not sure what's going on anymore, not that he ever really was—he just knows it's very, very bad, and it's for that reason that he can't close his eyes—he has to stay awake. It's probably a good thing that he's lying down, because the world is spinning around him and he doesn't know which way is up anymore.

"I suppose you ought to know," comes the Master's voice as he struggles to keep his head above water, "that you were the most difficult, out of all of them. I never felt the need to, say, force a tattoo on the impersonator because, well, he cares about his family enough to remain in line. There was never any reason to further demonstrate control over him because he was already decidedly under my thumb. And his family? They're fine. Goodwin never had to touch them."

Then the impersonator, whatever he said his name was, has done much better for himself and the people he loves than Arashk ever could. And as far as Arashk's remaining loved ones, at least things are about to become much, much better for them. When this is over, they will be safe.

And as for the one who isn't… at least he's about to see her again.

Arashk is done.

He closes his eyes.