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The door itself banged open, freeing Chess Pargeter to gladly obey his oldest and swiftest instincts — to snatch both sidearms up by their barrels, flipping them mid-way, and thread indexes through triggers like a damn magic trick. Thumb-cock the hammers, low and level, and train them both on whatever — whoever — was revealed.

Ed Morrow, as it turned out. Agent Ed Morrow, that was. And looking none the worse for his trip Down Under, either.

“Chess . . .” he began, then stopped short, the very sight of him apparently enough to drive a man’s words out of his head entirely. “. . . I, uh — see you’re awake.”

“Uh huh. Figure that out all by yourself?”

“Um . . .”

Squinting hard at Morrow, Chess abruptly discovered that the additional buzzing he was “hearing” (above and beyond that of his sicked-up companions, who were already starting to die off, perhaps over-weighted down with a double payload of blood and impossibility) must be that of Morrow’s actual thoughts, which almost immediately began to blunder through Chess’s own skull. A goddamn offputting thing, not least since it made him inevitably wonder if Rook had always been able to read his, all along. . . .

The thoughts jumped forward, clarified and blew up hurting-large: himself staring back, looking somehow older, even tougher than before — both less and MORE attractive in a strange way, even with a FIREARM POINTED STRAIGHT ’TWEEN MORROW’S EYES —

— aw shit, God DAMN that stings!

“You . . .” Chess said, slow, and shook his head. Coughed again, wrackingly. “You’re a goddamn Pink.”

“Chess, it ain’t like you think it — ” But here Morrow seemed to register Chess’s blood-slicked chin for the first time — along with the raucous, hovering debris of his recent supernatural up-sick — and stopped again, transfixed. “ — just what the hell did you let Rook do to you, you damn crazyman?”

Chess scowled at him, drunk with pain and fatigue and fever. He couldn’t keep both guns up any more, and let the left one drop to the bed, while the right one wavered. “Well — are you, or ain’t you?” he demanded.

“That’s neither here nor there. What did he do?”

Chess didn’t glance down, though his other hand brushed automatically against the raw-to-touch skin where his scars should lie but didn’t, stroking it.

“Cut out my heart, fool,” he snapped back, annoyed by Morrow’s incredulity. “Just like you saw.”

“Literally?”

“You were damn well there, weren’t you? Pinkerton man?”

Morrow sighed again. “Look . . . it ain’t what it seems.”

“Yes it is,” Chess said, and pulled the trigger, which clicked hollowly against nothing. Enough of a surprise to make him pop out the barrel and gape at the empty chamber, thus allowing Morrow time to both roll his eyes and snatch the gun away with one sharp yank.

“I took the bullets out three damn days ago,” he snapped, though he knew Chess wasn’t listening (and Chess knew he knew, in a completely distinct way from how he’d’ve once meant that sentence — Jesus, this shit was weird). “Just left the guns so you wouldn’t pitch a fit, if you woke up and found them gone. Now c’mon — you’re sick. Get back in bed.”

“Sure. Gonna try and hold me down?”

Morrow flushed, and Chess knew, precisely, to the last little drop — as if gauging the mix of a favourite drink — how much of that flush was memory, equal parts arousal and embarrassment, versus how much was exasperated anger . . . with something else lurking lower yet, gobsmacking in its urgency, its stark truth: fear. Of Chess — no surprise there. But also — for him.

Shuddering, Chess pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “I’m worse by far’n just sick, Morrow,” he said. “Sick people don’t heave up bugs, or puke cooked blood — and better still, when people ain’t got a damn heart in their chest, sick or not, they usually go on and die. Not to mention how there’s no sickness I ever heard tell of lets you fuckin’ well hear what someone else is thinkin’ — ”

But that was a mistake, ’cause the instant the words were out, Morrow paled, and Chess swayed under the cold blast of his fear before he threw it off with a jolt that rocked both of them: No no no shit, get your head out of my head you sumbitch!

Silence and numbness slammed down. Chess stared hard at Morrow, who stared back — then sighed. And replied, “Sounds like hexation, right enough . . . ’cause you’re a hex, Chess. That’s the sad truth of it.”

Morrow crossed to the nightstand, flipped the plain denim clothes at him. They fell on top of the bed. “You don’t wanna sleep, fine. Put those on, at least. We got business to discuss.”

And I could stand not havin’ to watch your tallywhacker jig free under there, while we do it.

Oh get out, get out, get GODDAMN OUT!

“I don’t see how there’s any sorta business left ’tween you and me, exactly — ” Chess started.

But here Morrow whirled on him — faster than Chess had ever seen him move, ’cept maybe in the occasional gunfight.

“Inside this circle Songbird’s done up here, you got no more mojo than I do, Mister Pargeter,” Morrow snarled, his sideburns fair to bristling with the righteously angry effort of it. “There’s enough men to fill a whole goddamn state would wanna kill you, they found you like this — and I might even be one of them, too, if I didn’t already have bigger shit to worry about.”