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ignored my bitching and in fact picked up the pace. When you were on the run, you needed to be able to actually
run
, he was fond of saying.
    We stopped for lunch, since we were seriously destitute of all the four food groups at home. I was for burgers. Niko was set on something healthy and utterly lacking in anything that might pass for flavor. So we compromised and hit a hole-in-the-wall pizza place and ordered the vegetarian special. It was still pizza and covered in cheese so I could choke it down, and Niko could graze on the rabbit food toppings to his heart's content. Sitting with his back securely to the wall, Niko kept an eye on mine. I, on the other hand, was keeping an eye on my glass. "I think there's a bug in my Coke."
    Niko leaned forward for a look and nodded thoughtfully. "It does look that way." Settling back, he pointed out, "It is protein. Probably would be quite nutritional. You should give it a chance." Snorting, I wavered between fishing my new friend out with a spoon or sending the Coke back. Decisions. Decisions.
    Unsympathetic to my dilemma, my brother went to work on the fresh-from-the-oven pizza on the table between us. Pushing my glass away, I decided to let nature take its course. Sink or swim. Survival of the fittest. Ladling a piece of pizza onto the thick white plate in front of me, I yelped and blew on singed fingers. Looking down his not inconsiderable nose, Niko handled his steaming piece with smug aplomb and commented, "It's a simple matter of discipline. Mind over matter."
    "Yeah, and I bet you can break boards with your dick. You're a helluva man." I picked something green off the top of my slice and eyed it narrowly. Broccoli. "So, what do we do now? Hope the Grendel was sightseeing or dig into it further?"
    "I'm not looking into membership in the Optimist Club these days, Cal. Are you?"
    "That's what I thought." I checked my watch. "You teaching today?" When he wasn't pulling bodyguard duty, Niko supplemented our income by teaching at a tiny dojo. More money under the table for our running-like-little-girls fund.
    "Later perhaps," he dismissed. "If we get this resolved. Now eat your broccoli before it gets cold."
    I scowled but obeyed. "Scrub the floor, Cinderelly. Eat your broccoli, Cinderelly," I grumbled around a mouthful of cheese and bread.
    By the way… the bug made it. Good for the bug.

Chapter Three
    Mom had been a fortune-teller in nearly every rundown carnival and one-horse town in the country, although she'd actually preferred the towns over traveling with other carnies. She didn't have to split her money when it was just her in some gloomy one-room apartment ladling out useless bits of crap and outright lies to the desperate. Yeah, the whole ball of wax was hers then. And Sophia had liked her money. Or rather, liked the things it could buy her, booze and drugs… the bright-and-shinies of her world. Safe to say that she had never kept money long and she would have done anything for it.
    And I do mean anything.
    That's how she'd ended up with me. For a while, when I was younger, I thought it could've been another way. She'd been a young woman, a girl really, beautiful in the way storms are… wild and free. Maybe so beautiful that a monster couldn't resist taking her and doing things to her that might twist her. Twist her, change her, make her care about no one but herself. Drive her to the kind of destructive behavior that tainted her and everyone around her. How could she not hate me considering where I came from? How could she forget an act so horrifying, so hideous? And how could you not forgive someone who had had that hell visited on them?
    Of course it hadn't been that way. This was real life, not a made-for-TV movie, chock-full of bland, overwrought nobility. But I'd been young and stupid and looking for any way to… hell…
absolve
her. One of Niko's fancy words, but it rang true. Because no matter how tough you are, how jaded, every kid wants a mommy. Every