Fade To Midnight. Shannon McKenna

a whack job you are.”

      “It would,” Kev agreed, unoffended. “This guy died a few years ago, though. A fire in his lab, they say. I want to see a photo of him.”

      “Excuse me? You want to look at a picture of this freak? The last time you saw someone you thought looked like this Osterman, you went into a fugue state and practically killed an innocent neurosurgeon!”

      “Shut up, Bruno,” Kev said absently, still clicking. “I’m busy.”

      Bruno subsided, grumbling. “If you freak out and attack me, I’ll kick your sorry ass to hell and back,” he warned. “I won’t hold back just because you’re a pathetic bag of bones. Be warned.”

      Kev clicked on yet another photo. His eyes flashed over faces, his hand already clicking to magnify them as a name in the caption registered.

      The illustrious, late, great Doctor O explains it all for us.

      His hand froze on the mouse. It was set to increase magnification by ten percent at each click, but with no new activity, it defaulted to one magnification per second, the center being at the cursor. The picture zoomed in on the guy in a white lab coat. Close-set dark eyes. His arms flung over the shoulders of two teenagers. Mouth open, in a big laugh.

      Kev couldn’t move. His muscles were frozen. He couldn’t even blink. Switches were flicking on and off inside his brain, he could not control them. He observed, as the power grids in his brain started to go dark, that the guy really did look like Patil. Patil was darker, being Indian. Dr. O looked like the Greek or Italian version of the same man.

      The pressure built in his brain. He struggled to breathe, to move.

      Kev? What the fuck? Kev, what’s the matter? Hey! Kev!

      It was Bruno’s voice, faraway. He couldn’t answer. Couldn’t look at the other man. Muscles frozen. Falling back, into the dark oubliette.

      Oh fucking shit, man, no! Don’t do this to me again…

      Bruno’s frantic voice faded into the distance. The photo got bigger. The face filled the screen. The mouth. Bigger and bigger.

      Pop, pop. Something gave way in his eye. A hot rush of liquid down his cheek. Broken blood vessel. A haze of red obscured his vision. That red, toothy mouth stretched wider and wider, hungry to devour. The image widened still more, into a meaningless checkerboard of pixels.

      Lights out.

      CHAPTER

       4

      “Come on, you geek freak son of a bitch. It’s me, Bruno. Not that Osterman turd, so don’t try a fucking stress flashback when you open your eyes, or I’ll rip your throat out. This bullshit is pissing me off!”

      Bruno yelled the words, leaning over Kev’s hospital bed, but there was no response. Kev looked like a marble statue. It made Bruno’s stomach hurt. Over twenty-four hours, and no sign of waking. Another coma, or something like it. The doctors were baffled.

      Fuck this shit. Fuck it in every orifice.

      Tony grunted from the other side of the bed. “Ain’t you just a charmer,” he said. “Whisperin’ sweet nothings in his ear.”

      Bruno blew out an explosive breath and sprawled back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the plastic table. “We tried nice last time he woke up,” he said sourly. “He didn’t respond well. He liquefied Patil’s face. It’s safer to be rude. That way, there’s no mistake about who’s busting his balls.” He leaned over Kev again. “Not the Osterman motherfucker, hear me? It’s that pain in the ass, Bruno! Anybody home in there?” He tweaked Kev’s nose. “Hey! Butthead! Hello! Anybody?”

      Kev’s face did not change. Bruno flung himself back into the chair, muttering. Tony sat on the other side, like a stone monolith, his slablike face grim. But Tony’s default expression was always grim. He was a Marine, an ex-drill sergeant, a Vietnam vet. Habitually pissed off. Most of what Uncle Tony saw around him annoyed the living shit out of him. Bruno and Kev impartially included, for the most part.

      Kev in a coma again? That pissed old Uncle Tony off bigtime.

      Kev looked so pale and still. Like Mamma, in her coffin. The funeral parlor guys had been creative in covering up the damage Rudy had done to her face. She’d looked weirdly peaceful, lying there.

      But unlike Mamma, Kev genuinely was weirdly peaceful. Even before he relearned how to talk, Kev was super mellow. He never lost his temper. Unless someone fucked with him, of course, at which point, he morphed into a demon dervish, and kicked that unlucky someone’s ass to hell and back. Karate, kung fu, judo, aikido, jujitsu, all of them were mixed into in Kev’s unique fighting style. He was un-fucking-beatable.

      In fact, his fighting skills had inspired Kev’s chosen surname. After the incident at the diner, Tony started calling him Kevlar. It stuck. And when Kev was talking well enough to want a surname, he went with Kev Larsen. It was Kev’s weird, quirky idea of a joke, though it was also a bland, under-the-radar nordic name that fit him well enough. He could be a Swede, or a Dane. Tall, sinewey, lots of dirt-blond hair. A yellowish cast to his skin, rather than nordic skim-milk white, but with that stoic expression, he was a classic, battle-scarred Viking warrior. All he needed were braids, a horned helmet, and a mantle of shaggy fur.

      So Kev Larsen it was, though Bruno took pains to point out that only a narcissistic pussy would tattoo his own name on his own leg. He’d once tried to bust Kev’s balls by insisting that Kev had been a gay boy before Tony found him, and Kev was actually the name of his lover.

      But Kev never responded appropriately to ball busting. His grin pulled weirdly at the scars on his cheek as he grabbed Bruno’s ass and made smooching sounds til Bruno ran for cover.

      Teasing about Kev’s gayness had ended abruptly there.

      Bruno lifted the hospital sheet, stared at Kev’s leg. His calf was furred with dark blond hair, sinewy and bulging with hard muscle. The tattoo was very small. The three irregular letters were a crooked, blurry bluish smudge beneath his body hair. It looked like a bruise.

      He flung the sheet down. It made him twitchy and rattled. His own vulnerability, staring him down, scaring him shitless. Kev was the pillar in the center that held up the roof of his whole life. More so than Uncle Tony, more so than Aunt Rosa. Kev had saved Bruno’s ass. Kev had given payback for what Rudy had done to Mamma. Some, anyway. It could never be enough. But it was a shitload better than nothing.

      Kev couldn’t die. Life would be unthinkable without him. Bruno didn’t usually think in those squishy emotional terms, but seeing how similar Kev looked right now to the way Mamma had looked in her coffin, after Rudy got through with her—it got to him, deep inside, in places he preferred to ignore. And being aware of it made him aware of his other stupid, irrelevant feelings, too. Like, for instance, how jealous he was of this hypothetical fucking family that Kev might or might not find. No, amend that. Would find. If they were out there, Kevlar would find them. The guy was as focused as a freight train.

      Kev’s real family. Bruno could never be part of that, if it existed. This perfect family would enfold Kev to their bosoms and overwhelm him with their wonderfulness, at which point Kev would forget that the wiseass pain in the ass punk Bruno Ranieri ever existed. There would be a pie-baking mamma, wielding a wooden spoon, a benevolent dad with a pot belly. Brothers and sisters who looked like him, understood him, knew things about him that Bruno would never know.

      Take a fucking pill. Families like that didn’t exist, except on TV. Families were, by definition, fucked up. But blood was blood.

      It was a stupid thing to be worrying about, though, since Kev hadn’t even woken up yet. He still looked like a goddamn corpse. In fact, Kev’s blood family was the least of Bruno’s current worries.

      He hadn’t felt like such hammered shit since Mamma’s death. Every muscle hurt. He had a headache, from grinding his teeth. He hadn’t gone into Lost Boys since Kev’s episode, yesterday morning. They were managing