Danny looked at each in turn with eyes gone
yellow and congealed, and bared his mouthful of broken and blackened
teeth in a rictus that was equal parts humor and threat.
Bradley was the next to wake, his bat in his hand and his eyelids
fluttering open as he sprang to his feet, and then Alan was up as well,
a hand on his shoulder.
He crouched down and walked slowly to Davey. He had the knife, handle
wound with cord, once-keen edge gone back to rust and still reddened
with ten-year-old blood, but its sharpness mattered less than its
history.
"Welcome me home," Davey rasped as Alan drew closer. "Welcome me home,
mother*fucker*. Welcome me home, *brother*."
"You're welcome in this home," Alan said, but Davey wasn't welcome. Just
last week, Alan had seen a nice-looking bedroom set that he suspected he
could afford -- the golems had left him a goodly supply of gold flake,
though with the golems gone he supposed that the sacks were the end of
the family's no-longer-bottomless fortune. But with the bedroom set
would come a kitchen table, and then a bookcase, and a cooker and a
fridge, and when they were ready, he could send each brother on his way
with the skills and socialization necessary to survive in the wide
world, to find women and love and raise families of their own. Then he
could go and find himself a skinny redheaded girl with a Scots accent,
and in due time her belly would swell up and there would be a child.
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