"What kind of person is he?" Davey said. "What kind of person is he? He is in love with my brother, looks at him with cow-eyes when he sees him, hangs on his words like a love-struck girl." He laughed nastily. "Like *your* love-struck girl, like she looks at him. "I wonder if he's had her yet. Do you think he has?" "I don't care," Krishna said petulantly, and levered himself to his feet. He began to pace and Alan hastily backed himself into the doorway he'd been hiding in. "She's mine, no matter who she's fucking. I *own* her." "Look at that," Darrel said. "Look at him talking to them, his little army, like a general giving them a pep talk. He got that from my brother, I'm sure. Everywhere he goes, he leaves a trail of manipulators who run other people's lives." Alan's stomach clenched in on itself, and his butt and thighs ached suddenly, like he'd been running hard. He thought about his protégés with their shops and their young employees, learning the trade from them as they'd learned it from him. How long had Don been watching him? "When are we going to do it?" Krishna spat out his cigarette and shook another out of his pack and stuck it in his mouth. "Don't light it," Drew said. "We're going to do it when I say it's time to do it. You have to watch first -- watching is the most important part. It's how you find out what needs doing and to whom. It's how you find out where you can do the most damage." "I know what needs doing," Krishna said. "We can just go in there and trash the place and fuck him up. That'd suit me just fine. Send the right message, too." Danny hopped down off the trash can abruptly and Krishna froze in his paces at the dry rasp of hard blackened skin on the pavement. Davey walked toward him in a bowlegged, splay-hipped gait that was more a scuttle than a walk, the motion of some inhuman creature not accustomed to two legs. "Have you ever watched your kind, ever? Do you understand them, even a little? Just because you managed to get a little power over one of my people, you think you understand it all. You don't. That one in there is bone-loyal to my brother. If you vandalized his little shop, he'd just go to my brother for protection and end up more loyal and more. Please stop thinking you know anything, it'll make it much easier for us to get along." Krishna stiffened. "I know things," he said. "Your pathetic little birdie girl is *nothing*," Davey said. He stumped over to Krishna, stood almost on his toes, looking up at him. Krishna took an involuntary step backward. "A little one-off, a changeling without clan or magic of any kind." Krishna stuck his balled fists into the pockets of his space-age future-sarcastic jacket. "I know something about *you*," he said. "About *your* kind." "Oh, yes?" Davey's tone was low, dangerous.