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accommodate their steroid-swollen muscles. Ferrety, shifty-eyed types whose furtive attitudes screamed that whatever they intended to do with their new-found strength, it would be illegal and deeply unpleasant.
    They were being cheated, yes, but she couldn’t help feeling that the world would be a better place for the fact that all the pills would do for them was cure a headache. And the money kept mounting up.
    Byron had just completed an exchange with a narrow-eyed man with tattoos that marked him out as part of the Jackal Mafia, and who was going to be able to treat minor pain and low-grade fever in any number of his goons, when he whirled around and his hand shot out.
    He was holding a skinny, dishevelled girl by the wrist. She wriggled and tried to get free. She had a hard little face and there was a blankness behind her eyes that made Naomi shiver with misery. She was about to step forward, but Byron whipped up the girl’s sleeve, exposing an ugly patchwork of bruises that extended up her arm. He growled, but it was obvious his anger was not directed at the child. He gentled his grip and crouched down in front of her.
    “It’s okay, he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. You were trying to pick my pocket.”
    “I wasn’t!” she protested, but when he released her wrist she didn’t run. She looked down at her feet and kicked the dirt. “It’s okay for you,” she said. “You’re big and strong already. You don’t need any magic potion.”
    Byron studied the little girl seriously. She didn’t look away. “I’m big and strong,” he agreed. “But I remember what it’s like to be little and scared. Who hurt you?”
    She shrugged.
    “Your dad?”
    She looked away.
    “Okay,” Byron said, and his voice was low and soothing. “Listen to me. The pills I’ve got won’t make you strong or keep you safe. But I know some people who’ll stick up for you and make sure nobody ever hurts you again.”
    He pulled a wad of notes from inside his jacket and handed it to the child, folding her hands around it. It probably represented half of what he’d made. “Tuck this away somewhere safe. Safe! There are pickpockets around.” He grinned that heart-melting grin of his, and the girl gave him a tremulous smile in response. “There’s a bus station a couple of streets over. You need to get a bus over to Greenville, and when you get there, you ask for Mae and James, got it?”
    She nodded.
    “Good. The people there will keep you safe, find you somewhere to live. Some of them are kind of strange-looking.” He thought for a moment. “Also you’ll learn some really bad language. But they won’t hurt you, and they’ll make sure nobody else does either. Okay?”
    The little girl searched his face, as if trying to decide whether she could trust him. Naomi had no doubt she’d been caught picking pockets before, and she’d expected a curse or a blow. Not…this.
    Byron took her by the shoulders, turned her around firmly and gave her a shove. “Off you go!” he said.
    She darted away in the direction of the bus station and disappeared into the crowd.
    And then he slipped back into the persona of Doctor Dash as though it had been nothing.
    “Just who are you?” Naomi muttered under her breath.
    By the end of the day, they had enough money to stay on the run…and Naomi no longer knew whether she believed Byron should turn himself in, even if she could clear her name. He wasn’t the person she’d thought he was. The person she’d been told he was.
    Clem would return to his stall to find enough money to pickle himself for a week – some of it even from Naomi’s attempts to sell his flowers.
    The girl was on her way somewhere safe, even if it sounded an unconventional kind of safe.
    Byron picked her up and twirled her around, laughing, exhilarated by his performance, and she shrieked with delight.
    Byron the loner, Byron the lover, Byron the showman…which one was the real him?

Chapter Nine
     
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