As Ru mixed another cocoa blast using raw eggs, pureed liver, wheat germ, and chocolate sauce, Atticus helped Kyle hide away the money.
"Speaking as someone who has an asshole for a brother," Kyle hissed, "we shouldn't trust him."
Atticus looked to the stranger with his face and feral eyes. Brother?
Amazing how one word could explode so much emotion through him. Atticus couldn't even identify all the fragments. Excitement? Maybe something that might have even been joy, but heavily mixed with anger and fear. Family was something Atticus had dreamed about as a child, along with a Santa Claus who would finally figure out which foster home he lived in and deliver several years' worth of misplaced presents.
The Dog Warrior at least had his keen hearing. "B-brother works."
Yeah, right.Still, Atticus couldn't deny that they were genetically identical. Younger twin brother?"Who are you? Really?"
Ukiah eyed Kyle, apparently unsure if Kyle was in on family secrets.
"These are my best friends," Atticus said. "I don't hide things from them."
Ukiah picked up a bag of fresh pizza dough Ru had set out of the refrigerator in his search for the cocoa blast makings. "O-our mother was from the Cayuse tribe. Her name was Kicking Deer."
The Cayuse were a Native American tribe in northeast Oregon, over the mountains from where Atticus had been found. According to his case files, the Idaho state police checked with the reservation outside of Pendleton and no one had reported a missing infant. He and Ru had double-checked the summer of their junior year in college. Atticus controlled a flash of anger—he couldn't assume that the boy was telling the truth.
Ukiah fumbled open the bag, and shivered while making the dough into a soft, squishy doll. "Kicking Deer was kidnapped and made pregnant by our father, Prime."
"Prime?" Atticus echoed.
"That's the English version of his name. He wasn't human." Ukiah laid the doll onto the granite counter, and hugged the blanket around his shoulders. "Kicking Deer had a baby. His name was Magic Boy."
"Just one baby?" Ru took sausage links out of the microwave and set them in front of the Dog Warrior.
"I don't get it," Kyle said.
"One of us was this Magic Boy?" Atticus hoped there was a point to this story.
They had to wait while the narrator gobbled down the sausages and licked his fingers clean.
"I-if Magic Boy was hurt," Ukiah continued finally, pinching off a small ball of dough, "what he lost became a mouse." He rolled the ball around on the counter. "Which Magic Boy could recover later by merging it back into him."
"We know about blood mice," Atticus said.
"Ah. Good." Ukiah merged the tiny piece back into the doll with trembling fingers. "Got to keep track of them. They're very important."
Atticus fought the urge to ask why. Why can't I remember being a baby when I have a perfect memory? Why do I bleed mice? Why do we come back from being dead?There were so many questions. Would he like the answers? "So I'm this Magic Boy?"
"Well, one day Magic Boy was murdered." Ukiah pulled a cleaver from the knife block beside him. "He was killed with an axe."
Atticus watched with horror as the Dog Warrior hacked the helpless doll apart, reducing it to bits.
"It was quite horrible," Ukiah said sadly, letting the cleaver drop. "All the parts ran in terror. Some went this way." A leg rolled into a ball that went right. "Some went that way." The head rolled to the left. "The pieces scattered away, never to be Magic Boy again."
Ukiah rolled the dismembered torso across the counter to Atticus and then looked at him with the feral stare. "This was you." He leaned back and pointed at the severed leg in front of him. "This was me." His story done, Ukiah ate the scattered pieces of dough.
"That," Kyle whispered, "is profoundly creepy."
Ru moved the cleaver and the knife block out of the Dog Warrior's range.
Atticus stood and walked away. If it weren't for Ru and Kyle, he would have walked far, far away. He settled for prowling the downstairs. This was too much, too soon. This was like the first time he watched his blood turn into mice. This was like the first time he knew for sure that he had died and come back just by the terror on Ru's face when he woke up. This was like the time he blew off the fingers of his right hand and watched them grow back over a week's time. This was one of those huge mind-altering experiences.
He tried to get a handle on it. He and the boy had been one person. The boy was once his leg or his arm. Someone chopped off his leg and it became the boy. He had a brother. One that bled mice, came back from the dead, and aged oddly too. He wasn't alone.
In the kitchen, the conversation continued without him.
"I need to use a phone," Ukiah was saying.
"The phone hasn't been connected yet," Ru lied. "It should be hooked up tomorrow."
"What about cell phones?" Ukiah asked.
"Sorry, I forgot to charge mine," Ru said. "And Atticus doesn't own one."
Atticus glanced back, feeling slightly guilty; as usual, though, Ru was taking all weirdness in stride, calmly putting out food for the boy while fending off requests that could prove awkward.
Undeterred, the boy looked questioningly to Kyle.
"I-I-I forgot mine at home." Kyle made a bad show of patting his pockets.
There was a reason they kept Kyle out of sight.
Sighing, Ukiah wearily laid his head on the counter. Obviously the food was hitting bottom, and his body was focusing on putting it to good use. He'd be dead asleep in minutes, waking up only when his body burned through all the food he just ate. "I need to call . . ." He yawned deeply. "Let everyone know I'm okay."
"I'll plug my phone in after we get you in bed," Ru promised, clearing away dirty dishes. "You can use it when you wake up."
"Hmm." Ukiah didn't move.
"Where should we put him?" Ru asked Kyle. "How many bedrooms are upstairs?"
"There's one downstairs." Kyle made a face over Ukiah's head and pointed urgently downward.
" Downis easier than up," Ru studied the boy for a moment before saying, "He's asleep already. Atty, can you carry him?"
Atticus realized that he had actually felt the boy falling asleep; the fading of a presencemaking him aware of its existence.
"Atty?" Ru said, meaning, Are you okay?
"Sure." Atticus said, meaning, I'm fine.
***
While not apparent from the driveway, the house was built into a slope, so it had a walkout basement. In one corner was a guest bedroom with glass-block windows. Obviously Kyle thought it made a handy prison; after they tucked Ukiah into bed and shut the door, Kyle produced a latch and padlock, which he installed with a cordless screwdriver.
"Okay." Atticus eyed the padlock. "You've found something out?"
"Come upstairs."
Upstairs, Kyle logged back in to his computers. "The Dog Warriors are one of five biker gangs that make up the Pack. They're not like any outlaw motorcycle club I've ever heard of—not that I'm an expert."
"Outlaw" denoted the one percent of biker gangs, like the Hell's Angels, who embraced being outside the law. Kyle knew enough to distinguish between the "one-percenters" and normal, law-abiding motorcycle clubs; it was a bad sign that he labeled the Dog Warriors as such.
"How so?"
"Well, they don't pretend to be a club. They don't have a clubhouse, membership dues, charter rules, officers, or any of that stuff. They don't even seem to have a base city or state—they're complete nomads."