Butch made no move, no sound. If he interrupted, he was liable to remind the male that he was talking, instead of reliving his previous life internally.

It was pretty clear where this story was going.

“I like X. I like coke. I like … some other hard-core shit. Two years ago, I went on a bender. Gone for like a week. One night, my dad tried to reach me by phone. Left me these messages—I was so fucking high that I got annoyed with him.” That low voice trailed off. “I got … annoyed.”

When Axe stalled out, the haunted cast to his face was a heartbreaker.

“What did you do, son?” Butch said softly, because he couldn’t help himself.

Axe cleared his throat a couple of times. Rubbed underneath his nose like the tears he was holding back were irritating the thing.

“I erased the messages.” There were a couple of coughs. “I erased … all the messages without listening to them.”

“And then what.”

“They’d killed him. The lessers. He was working in one of the aristocrats’ houses that got hit in the raids. He was … dying at the time he left me the voice mails.” Axe shook his head. “I went back and looked at the call log when I found what had happened and did the math.”

Butch closed his eyes for a second. “I’m sorry, son.”

“I didn’t know about it all right away … I guess a son of one of the workers went there and discovered everyone? That guy, whoever he was, he took care … of everything. When I finally got back home—you know, three days later—there was this note that had been put on the door. Someone had called the house phone and left messages, and when there was no one returning them, they put it all … in a note.”

“Brutal. Fucking brutal.”

“I kept the note.” Axe sniffed hard and shook his head. “I have the note they left. The remains are still on the estate—I think the house is in human hands now?”

“Do you want to get them back?”

“I don’t know. No. No, I don’t think so. Just one more way to be a bad son, huh.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“Heard she moved up in the world, married some rich guy, living the life. I don’t know—I don’t care.” As the male looked up abruptly, Axe’s face resumed its earlier composure, shutting the emotion down in the same way you might lock out an intruder. “So, no, I haven’t seen death up close. That’s one cherry I haven’t popped. Can I go now?”

Butch felt like he should say something profound. But what Axe really wanted, more than some pep talk, was the exit. “Yeah. You can.”

That chair made a squeaking noise against the concrete as it was shoved back hard, and then Axe steamed for the door. Before he opened it, he stopped. Looked back over his shoulder.

“What is it like?”

“Death?” When he got a nod, Butch did an inhale of his own. “You sure you want to know that kind of shit?”

“You said we needed exposure.”

Touché, he wanted to say. Instead, Butch pictured the male going back to the modest house he lived alone in and getting really fucking drunk and slitting his wrists. Or OD’ing. Or jumping out a window.

Not a foregone conclusion, given the amount of pain lurking under the half-tats and the metal.

“I want you to move in here.” Butch rubbed his large gold cross through his shirt. “Craeg’s going to stay with us, you need to as well.”

“What, worried I’ma go hang myself in the bathroom?”

“Yeah, precisely.” When Butch just stared across the desk, those dark brows of the guy rose once again. “You’ll stay here, Axe. It’s safer, you’re protected, and you can concentrate on what you need to do.”

There was going to be a fight about this, of course. Asshats like this guy always had a—

“Okay, but I’m going to need a night or two every once in a while to … you know.”

Interesting, Butch thought. So the poor SOB was aware, on some level, of the shit going on in his brain—and was spooked.

“You need to get laid, huh?” Butch drawled.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t blame you—and you can make arrangements with the doggen to drive you in and out. That won’t be a problem.”

“So … what is it like?”

Butch fell quiet and found himself pulling a little middle-vision-field of his own as images—gruesome, horrible images—played across his mind. For a moment, he wondered whether he should go there with the kid, but then he recognized that the truth was something that needed to be spoken even if it was terrible. Maybe especially if it was terrible.

And it had to be told to anyone who wanted to fight in this war.

If Axe couldn’t handle his demons, then the last thing that was good for anybody was to give him a dagger and a gun and send him out into Caldwell’s alleys.

Butch shrugged. “I used to be a homicide detective with the human police—don’t ask—so I saw a lot of it. To answer the question, it depends on how old it is and how it happened. The new stuff … especially if it was violent … can be messy. Body parts really don’t like to be cut, stabbed or hacked into sections, and they express their anger by leaking all over the fuck. Jesus, we’re, like, seventy percent water or something? And you learn that’s so fucking true when you go to a fresh scene. Pools of it. Drips of it. Speckles of it. Then you got the stained clothes, rugs, bedsheets, walls, flooring—or if it’s outside, the ground cover, the concrete, the asphalt. And then there’s the smell. Blood, sweat, urine, other shit. That juicy bouquet will get in your sinuses and stay there for hours afterward.” He shook his head again. “The older cases … the smell is worse than the mess. Water deaths, with the bloating, are just ugly—and if that gas that’s built up gets out? The stench will knock you on your ass. And I don’t know, I wasn’t too crazy for the burn deaths either. I mean, you’d think we’d realize we’re not different than any other mammal—cooked meat is cooked meat, period. But I’ve never seen a grown man puke up his coffee and donuts over a medium rare T-bone.” Butch refocused on the male. “You want to know what I always hated the most?”