"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. It was all planned out, practically preordained, but now here they were, with the embodied shame sitting on their mother, his torn thumb gleaming with the wire he'd used to attach it back to his hand. "That's very generous, *brother*," Danny said. "You're a prince among *men*." "Let's go," Alan said. "Breakfast in town. I'm buying." They filed out and Alan spared Davey a look over his shoulder as they slipped away, head down on his knees, rocking in time with their mother. # Krishna grinned at him from the front porch as he staggered home from Kurt's storefront. He was dressed in a hoodie and huge, outsized raver pants that dangled with straps and reflectors meant to add kinetic reflections on the dance floor. "Hello, neighbor," he said as Alan came up the walkway. "Good evening?" Alan stopped and put his hands on his hips, straightened his head out on his neck so that he was standing tall. "I understand what he gets out of *you*," Alan said. "I understand that perfectly well. Who couldn't use a little servant and errand boy? "But what I don't understand, what I can't understand, what I'd like to understand is: What can you get out of the arrangement?" Krishna shrugged elaborately. "I have no idea what you're talking about." "We had gold, in the old days. Is that what's bought you? Maybe you should ask me for a counteroffer. I'm not poor." "I'd never take a penny that *you* offered -- voluntarily." Krishna lit a nonchalant cig and flicked the match toward his dry, xeroscaped lawn. There were little burnt patches among the wild grasses there, from other thrown matches, and that was one mystery-let solved, then, wasn't it? "You think I'm a monster," Alan said. Krishna nodded. "Yup. Not a scary monster, but a monster still." Alan nodded. "Probably," he said. "Probably I am. Not a human, maybe not a person. Not a real person. But if I'm bad, he's a thousand times worse, you know. He's a scary monster." Krishna dragged at his cigarette. "You know a lot of monsters, don't you?" Alan said. He jerked his head toward the house. "You share a bed with one." Krishna narrowed his eyes. "She's not scary, either."