***ALEX***

AK whistles, finally breaking the long silence left in the wake of my reveal. "You're telling me that our twins are friends in the afterlife? Holy Christ, what a coincidence!"

I look up at him and the three cops surrounding us. (Oh wait, no, two cops and Bennet's a consultant. Don't tell him I forgot that, though he probably knows from hearing it in my thoughts anyway.) "Yeah..." I drawl. "Yeah, this is the part where you insist you believe me, but you're all lying through your teeth."

Khan and Moss exchange glances and small smirks, while Bennet folds his arms and says, "Kid, we know when people are lying to us, and you're not."

"In which case," says Khan, "that pretty much puts all our respective afterlife beliefs in the trash, am I right?"

"Don't act so surprised," says Moss. "We all knew that day was coming sooner or later, right? Turns out it was sooner." He looks up at the wraparound ground-level window again. "Oh, cool. Sanchez is back."

Sure enough, seconds later, Sanchez comes through the glass doors and back into the bullpen. At a fast clip, his wings still fluttering a bit through the back of his uniform (at least his has wing slits in the back, unlike, say, my school blazer and shirt), he returns to his cubicle and triumphantly slams down another lore compendium on his desk. "And thank you," he says, "for screwing with the order of the ones I keep here. Not that it really matters. I guess I'll just add this one to the pile..." He places the new compendium on top of the stack for a second, then lowers it back to the desktop and opens it up.

I catch the title a split second before the cover goes facedown and vanishes from view.

Logan.

"Wait, Logan?" I ask. "As in Wolverine?"

"As in the movie that bears his alias," Sanchez says.

I'm about to ask what he's talking about, but then it hits me. I've only seen that movie once, but there's one scene I remember all too well - when Logan's driving Laura and Professor X on a freeway in Oklahoma or someplace, and they get sideswiped by a passing truck. At first, I kept thinking the truck belonged to their enemies, but it just went on its way and was pretty much never seen again.

The reason for that, I think, is because the truck actually had a little something in common with Scoville's.

It was entirely automated.

"Yeah, you're getting it now, aren't you?" Sanchez nods to me with a smile on his face. "And you?" He turns to AK, who just stares into space, images from the movie spilling out of his head and into all of ours. "That's what I thought."

"Yeah, but..." AK scratches the back of his neck. Huh. Guess there's a little more family resemblance between the two of us than I thought. "I mean...is Scoville copying something he saw in the movie, or was the movie made with his concept in mind, or...?" He shakes his head, the longest parts of his hair flopping around loosely. "I'm so confused."

"You're not the only one," I say. "And as the only one who actually understands any of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels-"

"Don't tell me we'll need my lore compendium for that series too," Sanchez says.

I purse my lips in thought for a moment. "Nah. Pirates aren't really a thing in my life."

"Your life?" Moss repeats.

"Like I said, weird shit happens to me all the time."

"So what do you propose we do?" Bennet asks. "Visit Scoville himself and ask him the truth? He's a little out of our jurisdiction, though, isn't he?"

"Hey, this accident happened in our town, and it was his toy that made it happen." Khan cracks her knuckles. "I say we should go pay the ol' CEO a house call. Assuming you can call that crystal spire of his a 'house.'"

"Say what?" asks AK.

I lean over and whisper an explanation to my out-of-towner cousin. "Scoville Corp HQ in San Jose, it's the tallest building in town."

"Pretty shoddily built too, I bet." Sanchez scoffs. "You know how fast that tower went up? It can't possibly be up to earthquake code."

"If we wanna get over there," says Moss, "we should get going now, you know?" He consults his phone. "The rain's getting worse, and we're gonna be following the storm down to San Jose, so we'll be in the thick of it the whole way."

"If we actually go down there right now," says Sanchez. "And would we bring these boys with us?" He gestures to me and AK, but doesn't quite look at us, as if he expects us to answer.

But we don't. We're a little lost, both of us. What's even the point of us being in this police station now? It's clear to me that none of these cops (sorry...Bennet's a consultant) intend to really take statements from either of us. Why that is, I can't say. And while I can't speak for AK, I'm sure my mom would be none too happy about me unnecessarily traipsing up and down the Bay Area and getting myself into, potentially, yet another seriously life-threatening situation.

I mean, can I just have more than a day of hanging out with friends that doesn't devolve into chaos at the drop of a hat? Yesterday was the one day I was allowed, I guess. Not cool, universe. Your demands on my time and energy, they're really starting to take a toll.

Sanchez picks up my thoughts and says, "You know, you don't have to stick around. We'll take care of business without you. No need to-"

"That's okay." The words leave my mouth before I can stop them, because as Sanchez was talking, I remembered, again, what Gabe said about Peppermint and TJ getting digitally possessed. I didn't get the details, of course, but something tells me there's more to the story than what's happening in the Second 'Verse. As an Agents of SHIELD fan, probably the number-one fan in Heaven too, there's one old catchphrase that keeps coming to mind every time I'm about to get involved in another one of those seriously life-threatening situations.

"It's All Connected."

And if I can't do my part to un-connect it (lame as that might sound), what good am I doing? None.

"So you're gonna come with?" Bennet sounds particularly excited about this, for some reason.

"Yeah, I am." I turn to AK, who nods along with me, but he's got a strained smile on his face, and he looks a little pale too. I even see him reaching for the bulky hoodie pocket where he keeps his inhaler.

"Cool." Khan claps her hands and starts walking. "Come on, boys. I'm driving."

"She's a terrific driver," Bennet says. "Especially 'cause she's the only one who passed the department's car chase test."

"Hey, at least the rest of you aced the theoretical exam with flying colors."

Sanchez waits for me and AK to leave his cubicle before bending down and conspiratorially whispering a terrifically placed Harry Potter quote, complete with a pretty good attempt at imitating Harry's accent. "'And what good's theory going to do in the real world?'"

AK and I both laugh along with him, but none of the other cops do. Except Bennet, which doesn't surprise me. I sensed he would be a fellow fanboy. Something about him being, by far, the most excitable of the four adults in this group. Oh wait, that's five. AK's eighteen, so he counts as an adult too. Hell, since none of these cops have had a chance to see my ID, they probably don't think I'm a minor either. No one mistakes me for a kid anymore, not now that I'm pretty much fully grown at six-one and 155 pounds. Or maybe 160 by now, thanks to my increased upside-down crunches helping me build up more of my core. I haven't weighed myself since the day before Thanksgiving, I don't think.

By the way, in case you were wondering, angels tend to be a little lighter than humans and demons. So while I'd be at the lower end of the healthy BMI range for my size by Hellish standards, here in Heaven, I'm actually a tad bit overweight. Not that I mind, really. I used to be pretty negative about my body, especially when I was fourteen and gangly and felt like I would never properly pubesce (that's a word, right? If not, I'm coining it, so Oxford, start adding it to the dictionary, please!) compared to the more naturally-athletic Luca. But hey, taking up working out has been a major help. And at least I'm young and metabolically fast enough that I can still eat tons of junk and not worry about losing shape.

That's your way of diffusing your tension? I hear AK ask me as we climb the stairs back to ground level. Thinking about your diet? He snickers into his hand. Not in front of the pizza guy, dude. I'm always hungry as it is!

I stop short when I spot a pair of vending machines in the corner of the lobby. Sanchez is the first to notice that I'm distracted, as is AK, and he signals his colleagues to wait up while we all stock up on snackage. To my delight, they have these cappuccino chocolate-chip cookies that they used to carry in the vending machines at the Coldfire Creek Library, but stopped sometime last summer, apparently, as I discovered when I first paid the library a visit as a Balthazar senior in August. I grab one of those, and so does AK, who gets a look at the word "cappuccino" on the package and has his interest sufficiently piqued.

More proof that we're related, I guess.

He manages to eat all his cookies by the time we get to our ride - a Dodge Durango SUV, black and unmarked. Sitting in the backseat, he leans back as much as he can, his own long legs bumping into mine.

"You sure you don't wanna sit more up front?" Sanchez cranes his neck to look at us from the second-row driver's side seat. "I'm not as tall as either of you two. I could take one of you guys' places. Or, or maybe Bennet could-"

"No, no, no," AK says, holding up his hands - and pushing against my own arm so I almost drop my still-unfinished package of cookies. "We're good, right?"

"Yeah, sure," I say.

"As long as you don't get crumbs all over the carpet," Khan says as she fires up the engine. "In which case, I'd pay you...hmm...maybe five bucks to detail the whole damn interior."

"She would." Moss flexes his arm. "I still can't extend this properly - all my muscles locked up last time she made me clean this baby."

"That was two years ago!" Khan yells at him.

"And didn't you drop a Whopper on the leather?" Bennet reminds him.

I'm really hoping they're talking about Burger King's signature menu item - about which I'm reminded because there happens to be a Burger King across the street from Maguire Mall, which we pass by on the drive out of the motor pool - and not some kind of secret San Castiel PD code for a drunk-off-his-ass perp puking or shitting all over the place.

While the adults argue over the exact circumstances of the "Whopper-dropping" and Moss' subsequent punishment (and Bennet quietly muses that it's too bad Khan didn't spring for the optional snorkel, especially with the rain pounding loudly on the metal over our heads), I turn to AK, who still looks pretty strained and nervous. You okay? I ask. Not the first time someone's gotten more than they bargained for, being my friend.

Is it normally this scary? AK drums his fingers on his knee.

If it helps, I think, put your celebrity crush at the front of your mind. Like, say, Chloe Bennet for me. Who's yours?

He blinks a couple of times and blushes brightly before saying, Brett Dalton.

I do a double take. You're an Agents of SHIELD fan too?

Mm-hmm. And between us, our crushes are SkyeWard. How about that?

I almost want to dissolve into the seat. SkyeWard can really set me off as a fan, especially given that Ward is, shall we say, a fucking Nazi. And because of Chloe Bennet's resemblance to Fionna, which, I think, is why I started liking Fionna to begin with. I swear to God, at one point freshman year, I legit thought she and Chloe Bennet were sisters.

Instead of allowing embarrassment or fanboyish anger to overtake me, though, I content myself with a would-be cool reply. I was always more partial to QuakeRider myself.

Huh. AK snaps his fingers. That's who you remind me of.

Who, Robbie Reyes?

No, his brother. You're practically the spitting image of the guy, 'cept you're not in a wheelchair, of course.

I shake my head. He's a bit of a butthead, though, that little brother. Not like the real Gabe I know. I take a breath, even though I'm not talking out loud. My own brother.

The one who died?

Is there ever going to be a time when I'm okay talking about Gabe? Well, it's going to be a long drive to San Jose, so I could talk for a while, maybe. You would've loved to meet him. You have a lot in common.

Like what?

Okay, maybe I didn't think this through, because I don't quite know enough about AK to compare him to Gabe. But I can think of a couple of good ones. You're both fanboys. You, uh, both like to read Danielle Paige. You... I think about the pictures I saw of him and Will on his Instagram. Did you ever do double dates with your brother? Gabe and I did that with our...our partners.

Believe it or not, no. For some reason, nobody I ever dated really liked TJ. Can't imagine why - he's not the type to make enemies.

Not like me and Gabe, huh? I look out the window - we've been stuck at a stoplight in front of the Maguire Mall parking lot for what feels like an hour, and now I have a pretty good view of the cemetery that stands kitty-corner from the mall itself. One of those weird San Castiel things (like the steep, eucalyptus-covered hills, or the now-empty modern building that used to be world headquarters for YouTube for a minute) that Gideon, even after living here for over a year, still can't get enough of pointing out every time Luca or I come to town.

What? You mean how you and Gabe's partners didn't hate their partner's twin and you could double date? Or that you and Gabe made enemies?

The second one. I keep on gazing through the window at the cemetery, almost expecting the rain to wash off enough of the uppermost layers of soil to expose the burial vaults below the tightly packed gravestones. And what if that ultimately leads to a bunch of zombies rising up and storming after us? Oh, and you know what else you had in common with Gabe?

What?

For this one, I'm exaggerating a bit. His celebrity crush was Brett Dalton too. Actually, Dalton's nowhere close to the top of Gabe's list. Not when there's the cast of Supernatural inhabiting the multiverse. And who doesn't have Jensen Ackles on their list of celebrity crushes? Well, maybe Luca, but that's probably it, I think.

"Hey, whoa, watch out!" Sanchez cries as Khan drives us into the intersection and a car races up the street, poised to T-bone us. A blue Chevy, pretty new, and its driver is, thankfully, possessed of good enough reflexes to avoid actually hitting this SUV. Good thing only because A) they'd pulverize their ride, and likely themselves, against us; and B) it'd be AK, and possibly Sanchez as well, taking the brunt of the impact. But bad thing because A) the road is slippery; B) the Chevy doesn't appear to be equipped with four-wheel drive or traction control; and C) they're now spinning around, 90, 180, maybe 210 degrees...

Khan's so stunned by this close call that she actually stops in the middle of the intersection, barely managing to get out of the way of the other car as it spins around uselessly.

"Hey, it's okay," Bennet says. "Look, they're moving on, huh?"

I lean around AK and watch the blue Chevy back up a bit before turning and driving the way we came.

As Khan moves on, a thought occurs to me. "You guys don't think...no, no, it's too obvious." Beat. "Actually, no, nothing's too obvious. Or too impossible."

Besides fucking yourself, AK thinks, nudging me.

Yeah. Besides that.

Sanchez clears his throat. I guess he's hearing our thoughts, despite us keeping them as quiet as possible. Then again, he's a cop, so it makes sense that he's got inconveniently sharp ears. "You think whoever was in that car was trying to hit us on purpose?"

"No..." Although now he's said it, I can't keep that possibility out of my mind, try as I might. "No, they were going back towards the police station. Or...or maybe towards the truck? The...th-the wreck's still there, right?"

"I think so," says Moss. "I didn't get a really good look at it, but you try navigating a big enough tow truck to move that wreck through the Maguire Mall parking lot. Might as well be driving a monster truck."

"Yeah." Approaching the nearest intersection, Khan gets into the left turn lane to go back into the mall's parking lot - which she'd have to do given that the sign says "No U-Turn." "A monster truck trailing a giant's string of cans or whatever it is they attach to 'Just Married' limos."

"Don't ask any of us," says Sanchez. "None of y'all other guys are married, right? And when the wife and I got hitched, we eloped. No fancy-ass limo for us!"

As Khan takes us past the thoroughly rain-lashed ten-foot-tall reindeer that's been installed in front of one of the mall's entrances, she drums her thumbs on the steering wheel. "Are we sure we should keep following that other car?" she asks. "What are the odds that they're even involved with Scoville?"

"Slim to none," Bennet says.

"Slim like my jeans?" I laugh.

"Dumb joke," AK says, "but probably."

Sanchez places a call to a guy in the police station who keeps him supplied with an internal video feed. He cycles through these on his phone for a minute while Khan drives through the parking lot - it's slow going because the loop road has a ton of other drivers crowding it. Welcome to the holiday shopping season - now in full swing because Christmas is only a week away, exactly. Thank God Mom got all the shopping done last week, including stockpiling the pantry and freezer like the zombie apocalypse was nigh. Even going for groceries at Costco would be nearly impossible to navigate by now.

"There's nothing," Sanchez says when we finally get back around the corner and within viewing range of the still-smoking crash scene, as well as the BART parking garage and the police station. "Wherever they're going, it's not headquarters." He puts his phone to his ear. "Yeah, Dent, could you get me footage of the other parking garages next to our building?" Pause. "Both of 'em. BART first, though, 'cause I see the theater parking garage is still taped off. Ain't nobody getting in there unless they're on official business." Pause again, then he almost drops his phone. "Whoa, wait, what? What's going on?"

"Should I floor it?" Khan does start to subtly move us faster.

"Get into the BART parking lot," Sanchez orders her. "They're in there, and they're trying to hack us."

"Us meaning-?"

"The police station. Not us specifically, but just in case, all y'all shut your phones off and...oh wait, there won't be no taking out the batteries. Stupid solid-state smartphones..." He shakes his head. "Yeah, Dent, I gotta call you back." He hangs up and turns his phone off.

"Us too?" I ask. AK takes his own phone out of his pocket as well.

"Yeah, good idea," says Moss as he turns off his.

We obey. Not that our phones would do us much good in this giant concrete Faraday cage anyway.

Another minute or so of circling around this place and we finally find what we're looking for - the blue Chevy parked in a far corner, the lowest and darkest in the entire parking garage. And the closest to the police station too, I think.

A pair of people - one guy, one girl - stands in this corner, a few feet away from their ride. The guy carries a long, bright blue wire, matching the car's shade, while his female companion holds up a heavy power drill.

I recognize her, however, by her hair. Not too long, but dyed dark red. Burgundy, even.

AK knows who she is too. "She was at Joey's yesterday! And...and you were there too, remember? What was her name? Fergie?"

Slowly, not wanting to startle our friends, the cops emerge from the SUV and announce themselves. None of them draw their guns, but all with guns have their hands on their holsters, ready to unleash their contents if need be.

"Turn around slowly," Khan commands them, "and show us your hands."

They do so, also lowering their wire and power tool to the ground.

Now, AK and I can confirm these two are the same pair who were at Joey's last night. And I remember their names too. "Firdaus? Ahmad? What are you...are you with Scoville?"

Firdaus' eyes flick from me, to the car, then to the cops. "Scoville?" she repeats. Then she laughs out loud for a full four seconds. "I wouldn't work for them even for a million dollars. Not after they blew up my car!"

"Rental," Ahmad corrects her.

"Still my responsibility," Firdaus says.

Ahmad's eyes roll skyward, though they'd have to search through several layers of asphalt and steel girders to find it. "Um, I know you said to show our hands, but...can I at least get myself a smoke?"

"Sorry, man, no smoking in here." Sanchez points to a nearby sign that says so.

"And I'm asthmatic," AK points out, "so even if you could, I'd rather you wouldn't."

Ahmad's hands tremble a bit, but he sighs and says, "All right. Fair enough."

"You said Scoville blew up your car?" I ask Firdaus.

Khan nods, then chimes in, "Were you targeted?"

"At first, I didn't think so. They weren't even supposed to know I was here. But..." Firdaus lowers her own hands, and when none of the cops object, Ahmad copies her, reaching for a squarish bulge in his pocket until AK casts him a meaningful look, as if to say, "Don't make me prove my illness to you." Firdaus, meanwhile, bends down long enough to pick up the wire she'd been carrying. "With all the double-dealing, double-crossing...I wouldn't be surprised if Graziadei knew when to send Scoville's people after me."

"Who now?" I ask.

Firdaus and Ahmad fall silent, looking around nervously.

"Why don't we take this conversation inside?" Khan suggests. "There's eyes everywhere, and if you guys are paranoid, we can keep you safe."

"Yeah," says Firdaus.

"Good idea," Ahmad says almost at the same time.

Great. Another third party's involved in today's conspiracy. Or is it fourth? Well, whatever number of party this Graziadei person is, they're soon going to find out that I'm pretty low on patience at this point.