Well, looks like I'm going to be quite busy from here on out.

Jay belongs to Disney Channel, Tails and Amy belong to Sega Corporation, and Ash Williams belongs to Renaissance Pictures.

The most upsetting part? I'd been expecting this sort of thing ever since we got in the Terminal Commerce building.

But I hadn't expected Starr to take that long to put two and two together about me and DJ swiping his prize. He had to be pretty smart to ditch his burned-up base in order to avoid suspicion. I guess we'd hidden ourselves better than I'd thought. Horzvedt's interference in the case probably hadn't helped matters, either. Would he be next on Starr's hit list? Suddenly I didn't want to put him in danger.

"Why bother with killing us now?" I asked. "You could've killed us in your hotel room."

"So I thought, until my guards finally admitted you'd gotten in under false pretenses." I gulped. Yeah, that move had come back to haunt me. "I had to kill half of them for it." He moved slowly toward us, but Imira's hijab uncoiled and whipped out to form a wall in front of her, blocking him off.

"Stay away, you jerk," she growled at Starr as the veil retreated. "I know about your alignments. I'm not letting you near my friends. Especially not Amos."

"Bold move, girl," Starr said, "but I think you should stay out of this."

"I know what happened," I blurted out.

Starr glared at me. "And what are you saying, boy? You know where that thing is?"

"I wasn't talking about the censer," I retorted. Stupid of me to keep talking, but I'd much rather clarify these things before I got shot. "I was talking about the fire. In San Francisco. That jog your memory?"

Starr frowned at me. "That was before you were born, little boy. Long before. Why does it matter to you?"

Did I mention that I don't like being called a little boy?

"Evading, Patrick Starr," I sang. "I think it matters. Your pal seems to think so."

Starr hefted the gun at me. "Boy, you have no idea what you are saying."

I glanced around at my friends. DJ was glancing at her Forcecuff, which was fully charged, although I highly doubted she wanted to call on an Alter Ego in this situation. She already had a letter opener from a nearby desk in her hand – which wouldn't do her much good against a gun, but was better than nothing. (Seriously, letter openers make excellent daggers.) Vinny Lee was rummaging around in her tote, but that thing was so chock full of items I wasn't sure she'd find a proper weapon in the mix – if she even had any in that tote besides her talon gloves. Imira had her fists clenched, no weapons in hand, but she'd always been intimidating without them.

She turned to face me. I recognized the look she was giving me all too well – Amos Darvosky, don't you be an idiot. (She gave me that look quite a bit.)

Probably the worst thing I could do in a situation like this – with a gun in my face – was keep right on talking. So naturally, that's what I did.

"The fire must've been pretty bad if you left your base in San Fran," I said, staring Starr in the face. I knew the drill too well. Maintaining eye contact was a challenge in the eyes of anyone. I didn't want to break it, or Starr would attack me. (He did have a gun. All I had was a belt.)

Starr shrugged dismissively, as if losing the base to the fire was no more a loss than if one of his counterfeit models broke. "The base was unrecoverable after the fire. Nobody used it besides me, anyway – and folks didn't know about that. Dense Californians and all." DJ tensed up and scowled at Starr in a way that made me think that the forger should not have said that in her earshot while she was holding a sharp object. (She's a little sensitive about being called "dense," or synonyms of the sort.) "But if I'd started rebuilding it, people would've gotten suspicious. The building was condemned, after all. They would know a forger was hanging around their city if it got rebuilt. It was all about secrecy, boy, and nothing else."

So Starr always hung out in rejected buildings, eh? Buildings like Terminal Commerce? The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense. If I was a criminal lowlife, and I needed a place to lie low and/or operate without being discovered, I'd look for a place absolutely no one would dare to go – and risk being caught for trespassing.

Although, I'd done the exact same thing the first few times we hung out in the Hangar (before Mama bought it out with Mrs. Jorgman), so I probably couldn't criticize. And it didn't explain why he'd been camped out at the Heid. But I supposed that was probably just to throw off his pursuer, Horzvedt. If so, that plan hadn't worked. Horzvedt had shown up anyway – and allowed a censer to escape Starr's grasp. Thanks to us.

"Secrecy?" I continued talking. (This is a mistake I make a lot.) "Not the fact that you had blood on your hands? The blood of a little teenage boy who died in the fire that destroyed your base? A little boy like, oh, the one you're about to gun down right now?"

Starr scowled at me. It occurred to me that Starr really hadn't lost any sleep over Jethro Stein's death, whether that had been an accident or not. He was much more upset over the loss of the base – which wasn't really saying much. That discovery about Starr made me hate him even more, if I didn't hate him already. "That little boy was asking for what he got. Destroying his pendant… I could've done it. But there was something else in there I didn't know about – something else that made it backfire on me."

He rolled up his sleeves and I noticed something else about his appearance. His arms and face were covered with scars – burn scars, from the look of them. That didn't help his repulsiveness at all. And they looked like blaster burns from Star Trek…

"And that pendant's back," Starr realized, glancing at Starry (which I hadn't had time to hide). "What an insult. I couldn't even destroy it right."

Suddenly I realized what must've happened in that big disaster. The blast from the Charactus must have punished Starr first, because he'd been the one to make a move to destroy it. Not starting with Jethro, whose idea it had been. Then the blast rebounded on everyone and everything else – including Jethro and Horzvedt… and the base.

Speak of the con man – Horse Vet himself stormed in, not looking very happy. He scanned around the room – his eyes going from me to Starr to the gun he had at my face. I could easily imagine him processing everything about this situation and making an assessment of what to do. He pulled out a gun and brandished it in Starr's face. (Gosh, we had a lot of gun-pointing in one day, didn't we?)

"Starr," he said in a low voice, with almost a growl. "Put the gun down."

I noticed the same burn scars on Horzvedt's face, but not as many. Perhaps the Charactus had gone easy on Horzvedt because he'd tried to reason with Jethro. But then Jethro took the brunt of the blast…

Starr laughed. "You always were a tricky one, Jasper. Stuck on me like a fly on meat. Always on my tail. And then I lose a censer while you're in the room."

"It didn't belong to you anyway," Horzvedt said firmly. His voice was so hard and convicted I didn't need to look at his hands to know he wasn't lying. "It belonged with the people it represents, not sold to the highest bidder."

"He's right, you know," I said. At this point, I was just buying time. I didn't like this standoff, and I wanted to get out of the room before things got really ugly.

I glanced over at the avatars. Jay had his snake staff out, Tails was levitating various tools on Starr's desks, Amy had her own hammer out, and Ash had fitted his chainsaw hand on and was actively buzzing it around.

Ash gave me a grin and mouthed; I've got this.

The overconfidence of a novice. But my heart was still warmed.

"Patrick?"

Charlie! She must've come in from her office. I didn't know what had gotten her attention, and I wasn't sure I would live to find out.

Ash peeked over at Vinny Lee and spotted the piece of paper in her pocket. He squinted, then scowled. He then rummaged in his fanny pack. Just what was he planning to do?

Charlie's gaze darted from Starr to the gun to us. Just as suddenly, she raced in front of us. "Patrick, leave them alone."

"Charlie–" Starr hefted the gun. "Don't make me shoot you."

Ash turned off the chainsaw, sneaked beside the still very tense Horzvedt and slipped something in his trench coat pocket. How Horzvedt didn't notice that when he'd pinpointed me hiding in the Heid (which would make a great song lyric), I had no clue.

The novice then stepped back and pointed, deploying his power between Horzvedt's coat pocket and Vinny Lee's tote. (Again, how did Horse Vet not catch this?)

"Well, you can't just kill them," Charlie replied. "They're only kids."

I could tell she still remembered our chat in her office. She'd taken quite a liking to us, and didn't want Starr to kill us. But she looked a little shaky, as if it was bothering her to stick up to Starr. She really was risking a lot here – even her life. Were we really worth that much to her?

Or what was she doing?

Jay grabbed a steel pipe off another desk. I could tell what he was planning to do with it – trigger his Morphis so he turned to steel and punched Starr's face in. The fact that Starr had a gun wouldn't even be a problem for him, as he was invulnerable either way–

BLAM!

Starr yelped and dropped the gun, clutching at his now-bloody shoulder.

"Stay off her, Starr," Horzvedt said coldly, lowering his gun but not holstering it. "The next time you move in to strike her, I won't be aiming at your shoulder."

I hadn't even realized that Starr was about to make a move. No wonder Horzvedt hadn't noticed Ash's action – he'd been preoccupied with watching Charlie and making sure Starr didn't hurt her. What did she mean to him?

Ash tapped on Horzvedt's shoulder. "Ahem."

Horzvedt wheeled around. I guess he'd had some experience with Evil Dead, because his expression shifted to surprise upon seeing Ash with his chainsaw hand.

"Check your pocket," Ash said with a sneer.

Good Moses, I thought. What does he know that I don't?

Horzvedt set the pistol down. After a bit of rummaging, he found the pocket Ash had targeted with his power and pulled out the slip of paper that had been in Vinny Lee's tote – before Ash switched it out.

As he read it, his expression turned to shock, then rage, then outright fury. He crumpled it once he was finished, then glared at Starr, picking his gun back up. He moved forward, smoothed out the paper, and thrust it in Starr's face.

"What is the meaning of this?!" he growled. "WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER?!"

Vinny Lee, just realizing what had happened, checked her tote. "Oh, bueno, Ash," she said, holding up a spool of twine. "I needed that."

"Does nobody care about the ticked off criminal with a gun?" I asked, gesturing toward Horzvedt in case the others didn't know which one I was talking about.

"Charlie, get behind me," Horzvedt said firmly.

She didn't ask questions but moved behind the con man.

"I'm guessing that's not good," Imira said – referring to whatever had ticked off Horse Vet, no doubt.

I nodded. It certainly wasn't what I needed to hear in my mood. I was already reciting my chant to keep from exploding outright.

"Did he–" Vinny Lee's fists clenched, and her claws came out. I couldn't blame her at all. "You – you bruto, you–" She then devolved into a torrent of Spanish I can't translate.

"Stay out of this, VLADJI," Horzvedt said quietly. "This is a family intervention."

"Family–?" I almost asked.

Charlie spoke up, just then. "Yes. Jasper Horzvedt is my father."

:O Shocker... and after hearing about that abuse, too.

Verse for the update: Isaiah 24:16. Stay tuned for more!