"I did something naughty," Philly told her friends.

It was late, and Tommy only minutes before had returned from what Sam had described as a "meeting with Davisson." It had taken the young woman a moment to realize that Tommy was not wearing the same clothes he had been when he'd departed the seminary that morning. She suspected she knew why. Now clad in a familiar t-shirt, he had joined her and Sam at the kitchen table after a quick shower.

"How naughty?" asked a smiling Sam.

Her host was his usual warm self, but to Philly he seemed tired. She didn't recall ever having seen him like that. Tommy was even more quiet than usual, and brooding. That definitely was unlike him. A sudden urge to cheer the two men struck her, and she regretted having brought up her teensy transgression. There was a moment of hesitation.

Tommy must have seen something in her face—it seemed sometimes as if he could see right through her—and he placed an affectionate hand on her back, just below her neck. He knew her spot, so it had its usual soothing effect, and a reassuring smile formed on his face.

Fuck, he is trying to comfort me, she thought. Mettouchi, you are a needy piece of ....

"I drained all of Summerall's accounts," she said in a casual way. She didn't feel bad about the accounts, only about being an emotional sponge. She scooted her chair closer to Tommy and leaned into him.

Fuck it. Go big or go home.

There was a silence.

"How the hell did you do that?" Sam seemed surprised.

She gave him the pitying look she'd spent endless hours in the mirror cultivating. Sam looked away uncomfortably after a few moments.

"Have you guys been in contact with Camille?" she asked. Neither had since morning. "Their boss made them take the day off after the literal and metaphorical ass beating they took the other night, and the feds came in with a book-load of court papers today and seized everything relating to Summerall."

Sam swore under his breath, but Tommy merely gave her a comforting squeeze and an affectionate kiss to the side of her head. He had yet to say a word since his return.

"Oh, don't worry," she said, poking Sam under the table with a toe. Tommy's hug and kiss made her feel buoyant and a little bold. "Camille's partner, Detective Mueller, who I may just marry, by the way, already scanned everything and hid it on the cloud. It took me about 20 minutes to find what I needed, and ... lo and behold, the NYPD hadn't gotten around to placing his accounts under civil asset forfeiture. So, I drained everything into a numbered account in the Caymans. What ...??"

Sam had made a few futile protest noises as she'd spoken, but she was feeling self-righteous. "Anybody who buys and sells women like they're cattle deserves to take it in the sphincter."

"I think Sam's more worried about the trouble that might come your way." It was the first time Tommy had spoken.

"Oh, that?" she giggled. "I've done all this before. Nobody's going to figure it out or trace it back to me."

It took a few more minutes for her to explain the details, but, in the end, Sam seemed to calm down.

"So ... how much we talking, here?" he said after a few initial clearings of the throat.

"Eleven-three," she answered.

"Eleven ...?"

"Eleven point three million," she said with a lazy gesture.

"Dollars?" Sam's throat sounded dry.

"Well, no. Euros actually ... but their trading at about the same rate right now."

Sam got up for a glass of water, and Philly continued.

"I thought we might be best-off turning this into a slush fund to operate our little resistance movement. There's no reason we should go broke protecting ourselves and others. I'm just pissed we couldn't get at his safety deposit boxes," she concluded, biting on her index finger.

"Well, we should forget about those," said Sam from the kitchen door.

She smiled her sweetest. "I could just walk right in."

"Do you have the key?" the old man asked.

"Mm... no. It wasn't in the inventory my future husband posted."

"We probably don't need whatever money might be there."

"I don't want the money, Sam. I just don't want him to have it. Guys like that should live and die in the gutter." She leaned farther into Tommy. "What did Davisson say?" she asked him with more emotion than she'd intended.

"Nothing much we didn't already know," answered Tommy. "Merrick fled the country ... he isn't sure to where but suspects Morocco. One of their other colleagues, the woman Vincent, was killed in a shoot-out with police in Salt Lake City this morning. He didn't know much else, other than everyone is either in hiding or on the run. I guess the information we've been feeding Camille has been getting traction in other cities."

"That's good news," said Sam, nodding his head.

"Camille's been working from home, today," she told the men. "I didn't want to share until both of you were here, but she wanted us to know about Vincent. One other, the one named Kulich, was shot to death after killing three officers in Miami. Various departments have collected eight more over the last couple of days. I recognized some of them from the list you got from Weliver. They were all small-fry, former Valhalla people mostly."

Sam gave a smile and a morbid chuckle. "Well, I guess the feds can't bail out a dead body. It ain't much, but it's good news."

She reached up and patted Tommy's arm. "Camille says your friend Paloma and her brother have warrants out for their arrest."

"I figured they might," Tommy said with surprising calm. "They're not bad people, but they got greedy and ended up with their hands caught in the gears. They have a lawyer, and it looks like, for the non-Gifted at least, the criminal justice system is working as it should ... at least, I hope. If so, it's another small victory."

Somehow, she didn't know for certain how, her feet had ended up in Sam's lap. Despite her occasional flirtations, she had since decided these men were the brothers that she'd never had but had always wanted.

"I saw a video today of an angel bringing a woman to the hospital in Lake Forest," she said in a hushed voice. "It showed this vague, luminous figure flying her in and flying back out ... and there were something like 50 eyewitnesses. They all said he was the most beautiful creature they'd ever seen ... but couldn't agree at all on what he looked like. Something like 3,000 people were at a candle-light vigil there tonight."

Tommy sat with an unreadable look on his face.

"You are an angel," she said, reaching up to touch his cheek and jaw.

"Let me put the lie to that, right now," he said, shifting as if to rise but instead loosing an enormous fart.

"Oh, Jesus CHRIST," Philly screamed. Getting up to run away, she felt two powerful arms entwine her and pull her into Tommy's lap. "No...!" She began to tussle, this way and that, as the smell finally struck her. "Ooh.... fucker ..." she spat bitterly.

Glancing up, she caught sight of a shocked Celia rushing into the doorway. The child's face contorted, and she screamed for her sister. Bending down, the girl reached for Sam, who, for the first time, Philly realized was flat on his belly trying to low-crawl to the door.

"Save Sam," wailed Celia when Lydia and Christy arrived. The faces of both took on that same bitter twist as they crossed into the room, and the younger woman groaned a pathetic, "motherfucker." The three soon joined in dragging the gasping and cackling Sam out of the room, through the hallway, and into the gym beyond.

Within moments, all Sam's kids were rolling, wrestling, and laughing hysterically with the old man, the only audible words uttered during their escape having been a quiet, "... no, she's a goner," from Christy, in response to some inaudible plea from one of the girls.

Traitor, Philly thought as she tried to hold her breath. When her efforts gave out, she found herself pounding Tommy's massive arms.

"Let. Me. Up. You're sick ... sick ... sick!"

She rounded on him when he finally released her and, unable to find anything suitable to say to her panting and laughing friend, stomped over and began opening windows. After flinging open the last, she leaned out to catch her breath.

Well, shit. You wanted brothers.

Her eyes still watering, Philly turned and rummaged through the kitchen cabinets for air freshener, which she applied liberally.

"Go outside and air yourself off," she snapped at the now sober but still smirking Tommy. "Git, git, git...."

When Tommy returned some minutes later, the crime-scene was more or less back to normal, and Philly's ire had abated. Before Phil could speak, Celia jogged through to the fridge to secure drinks and snacks.

"Satan musta crawled up your ass and died, old man," she announced on the way back out of the room.

"I hope that puts an end to that 'angel' thing," Tommy said to Philly after the child departed.

"It does. I promise." Then she spoke more seriously. "What happened with Davisson? I know it was something, but Sam wouldn't say."

"I don't know. Both Sam and I were in a mood ... Are you sure you wanna know?"

She nodded.

"He had a prisoner ... but I guess you figured that part out. It was some poor college kid he ran across in a bar. I took her to the hospital and, after Sam left, asked the guy some questions out over the Lake."

"What did you do with him? ... and, yes, I really want to know."

"After I was certain he told me all he knew, I gave him a choice. I could rip his nuts off and leave him at the nearest ER, or he could keep his junk and I would drop him off somewhere in the Canadian wilderness."

Philly didn't know how to respond to Tommy's words. Part of her was scandalized ... horrified. She knew he wasn't joking. The other part of her? Fuck the guy, she thought. How else will a government-shielded rapist face justice?

There was no doubt in her mind, though, that Tommy must have been torn at the notion of judging and punishing others. She'd known him that long, and he'd spoken so often of mercy and justice. From his demeanor, though, she just couldn't tell how torn. It was that idea that frightened her most.

"So, what did he pick?" she asked after a few breaths.

He shrugged. "I've never known a man to willingly give up his balls. It's why I was so late."

"Where'd you leave him? ... No," she corrected herself, "would you really have done that?"

"Castrated him?"

She nodded, and an odd feeling of shame knotted her throat. Why do you care? she demanded of herself.

"When I was a young guy," Tommy said with scant pause, "exposing someone, leaving them out to die in the wilderness, was considered the most humane way of ending a life, even for young children or the sick and wounded. The notion was, I think, that it at least gave them some tiny chance at life. Perhaps the gods would intervene ... or, who knows, some other such miracle might occur."

"I know now that isn't true, at least in my mind I do. People exposed others because they wanted to spare themselves the guilt and pain of turning a knife or cudgel on a helpless friend or a suffering loved one. I don't know why, but I still find it an appropriate way of ending a life. Maybe for that same reason ... because it keeps my hands free from blood."

"I don't really believe Davisson has a chance where I left him ... but maybe he does. I gave him the option of mutilation because I wanted to know for certain that he had a chance at life ... a life in which he would never again harm someone the way he did. He chose his own fate," concluded her friend with another of his signature shoulder shrugs.

"I'm sorry," she said. "You're right. It was much better than he deserved. But it must have been a difficult thing for you to ...."

"Do you really believe that?" interjected a smiling Tommy, his words nearly singing with humor.

Again, Philly didn't know what to say or do. He placed his hand on the special spot on her back. She again was embarrassed by the calming effect it had on her.

"Do you know what a daemon is?" he asked her after a short time.

She needed to think and, in another act of weakness, leaned her head onto his shoulder.

"You mean like out of Greek mythology?" She continued when she felt his slight nod. "Isn't it some sort of minor god? ... you're not telling me you're one of those, are you?" She almost believed her foolish words as she said them.

"No, I'm not ... but I do have one."

She wasn't sure whether he was teasing, but she could hear the humor in his voice.

"But they weren't gods, though," he continued. "For the Greeks, the daemon was, um ... sort of a guide. It was an inner voice, a voice that tells you when you're doing something wrong, even when there's no one else there to bear witness against you."

"Sort of like a conscience?"

"Exactly like a conscience."

"And you have one?"

"Yeah," he said with a sigh, "but it's a scrofulous little thing, all crippled and palsied, blind in one eye and can't see out the other. Worst of all, the silly fucker hardly says a word, and when it does, it's seldom more than a whisper ...."

She leaned more into his shoulder, attempting to soak in a tiny portion more of warmth, pondering but not fully believing his words.

"You have one, too." His tone was more upbeat. "A fabulous one ... big, strong, and robust, with a voice like a foghorn. I depend on it a lot, just like I depend on Sam's daemon, and Rhonda's ... and dozens more."

He turned her toward him and looked her in the eye.

"It's easy for me to do horrible things ... it isn't always easy for me to stop. That's why I need my friends so very much ... so they can feel things I don't. It speaks incredibly well of you and your humanity that you loathe a creature like Davisson and still feel such compassion at his suffering."

She wanted to crawl away and hide at his words. He was doing that trick again where he peered through her ... and making her feel so good when he did it. Damnit.

"So, where did you leave him?" she asked.

"I'm not sure exactly. It was somewhere not far south of the Arctic Circle, on some wretched little patch of woods. Once we got there, he didn't seem so excited about the deal. He tried to bribe me ... they always do."

"What was the price?"

"He's not as rich as your friend Summerall, but he promised me a million-five ... U.S., that is."

"Did you take him up on his offer?"

"I did," he said, pulling some papers from his pocket and handing them to Philly. "He told me where to find his bank documents, and I told him I'd come back after I got the money."

"You going back?" She was now laughing, and Tommy chuckled. It was a black humor the two had shared before; clearly, she'd managed to place her daemon on mute for the moment.

"Only if his account information doesn't pan out." He pointed to the papers. "It'd be nice if some of that made it to his victim."

"It will."