Booker descended. Someone had left(turned?) all the lights on in the basement. Between the flickering bulb at the top of the stairs and the vast glow below, shadow prevailed. Booker kept his pistol barrel low. 

“You gotta be careful what kinda masks you wear, Mikey,” a man’s age-hoarsed voice muttered. “…sometimes they end up wearing us.”

whrrrrr

The brightness dimmed, buzzed, and re-asserted itself.

Booker reached the bottom of the staircase.

The floor of the room sloped subtly toward a drain. Book shelves lined the far wall. An antique full-body mirror, gilded frame and gilded accents, stood in front of the center shelf. Booker saw himself reflected in the glass before he saw the other man.

Nick Robertson, his back to Booker, cleaned a long knife with a stained rag. A mess of tarp and plastic wrap heaped at his feet. Streaks of crimson painted the black, blue, and clear materials. Booker didn’t see a body.

He raised his pistol. “Where is she!?”

Nick turned calmly around. He paused the movement of the rag. Something looked wrong about his face but Booker couldn’t tell what. “Who are you?”

“Oceanrest PD,” Booker produced his badge left-handed, flashed it, and stuffed it back in its pocket. “Get on the floor.”

Nick stared. What color were his eyes? (What an unimportant detail.) “Or what?”

“Is the gun not a fucking answer to you?”

Nick’s lips crawled apart to reveal a thrive of maggots—teeth. To reveal teeth. “That’s what it all comes down to, right? You have the gun, you make the rules. Gods, we are so much alike.”

“Don’t try that shit with me. Where’s Castellanos?”

Nick’s brow folded, wrinkling. “I don’t know who that is.”

“The woman who was just…”

“What woman? When?”

What woman?, Booker wondered. When? His gaze swam the basement. “Get—get on the floor,” he repeated.

“Or else you’ll do what?”

“Get on the goddamned floor!” Booker shouted. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

Nick’s wrong-writhing grin returned. “Oh,” he said, almost a chime. “There it is.”

Booker stared down the barrel at Uncle Nick. “Get on the floor now.”

“Oh, man,” Nick laugh-sighed. “What I would’ve given for a badge, you know? People respect a badge. They let it into their homes. Even a fake one can score a couple kills. How many kills can a real one net you, you think?”

Booker’s voice had lost its volume. “Shut up.”

“Spoken like a man who knows.”

“Shut the hell up.”

“You can shut me up if you want to,” Nick said, gesturing to Booker’s pistol with his gleam-clean blade. “You’ve got the power. One finger, a few pounds of force, nobody ever needs to hear me talk again. Right?”

“On. The. Ground.”

“Tackle me,” Nick spat. “Go on. Or are you scared I might stab you?”

Booker thumbed back the hammer. It sounded impossibly loud. It echoed. “You are under arrest for murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Get on the fucking ground.”

Nick put on a high-pitched, mocking tone. “ ‘You’re under arrest for murder and conspiracy. Get on the ground.’” He snorted, dropped the joke. “Please. This is a binary fucking choice. Only one guy’s walking out of here.”

Booker glowered.

“What, you want it to be me?” Nick chided. “How kind.” He stepped back. “Maybe it will be.”

Something was wrong with Uncle Nick’s face.

“You want a monologue?” Booker asked. “Go ahead. Give my partner some extra time to show up.”

Nick nodded, still writhing—grinning. “Yeah, right. Sure. Nice theory. ‘Partner.’ But we live as we dream, right?” He moved slowly but still somehow blurred. Nick sludged through space semi-fluid. With every rolling, distorted stride, his knife seemed to grow sharper, gleam brighter. “It’s funny. At first, what I did, it made me feel like a god. I held people’s lives in my hands. I took all their potential energy and devoured it. I ate a thousand futures.”

Booker followed Nick with his sights. He couldn’t distinguish the other man’s legs anymore. His glasses fogged with humid heat. “You like to hear yourself talk, don’t you?”

“What do you think makes a god, Detective Booker?”

Booker blinked. How did Uncle Nick know his name? After a half-second’s shock, he took a breath, tightened his grip around his gun, and didn’t answer.

“Is a god just a thing that has enough power?” Uncle Nick asked—except he no longer seemed to ask Booker in particular. “Does a god need an agenda, a plan, a point? Is it just power? To reckon with life and death? Because it’s so easy. Not the first time, the first time felt impossible, but after that…” a strange laugh barked out of him. “Do you know how easy it is to break something, Detective?”

“I do.”

“Do gods do what is easy, do you think?”

“No.”

“Do they do what is ‘just’ or ‘righteous?’ Do they get to define what those terms mean?” Uncle Nick sloughed away from him, shambling toward the mirror on the back wall. “Do they just play along with their whims and rewrite the press release later? Heh. Is that all a god is? PR?”

Booker decided to let the man talk. Nick had made distance and had lowered the knife to his side. He seemed less threatening mid-monologue than he’d seemed earlier. And every moment Nick spent talking, Cas—Virgil, Virgil got closer to the basement.

Hopefully.

(and where had Castellanos gone, anyway?)

“I felt like a god, at first. Killing those women.” Uncle Nick stood directly in front of the gilt-framed mirror. Somehow, Booker couldn’t understand his reflection. “But then…what does it mean to be a god? And what does such a small god do in a kingdom of so many vaster, darker gods?”

Booker blinked. His glasses had gotten too foggy. How? He squinted, tracking the vague shape of Nick through the lenses. “What are you talking about?” he asked, suddenly whispering, whispering and cold without knowing why.

Something was wrong with Uncle Nick.

“Did you feel like a god?” a gravelly distortion of Uncle Nick’s voice asked. “When you killed?”

Uncle Nick melted, his meat rolling off of him in steaming gobs, sloppily forming some new thing over his bones.

Booker stepped back, index finger moving from trigger guard back to trigger. He couldn’t make sense of Bob—Nick. Nick’s knife splintered into slivers and the handle followed and the hand that held it, all the way up the arm until the arm became seven slender tendrils edged and sharp-tipped. His face became a mask. (What did it look like? What an unimportant—)

“I—I—stay back!”

A pitched, multi-voiced laugh rasped out of the monster.

It leapt at Booker.

Booker closed his eyes and—