***ALEX***

Three days in a row now, I've been meeting the Jackson sibs for coffee. But we haven't been making any kind of heist plans. For one thing, we don't exactly want Mrs. Smythe to overhear us. For another, we're not exactly the cast of Six of Crows here. Sure, we might bear certain resemblances to certain members of the group - Ty could easily pass for Jesper (especially if you give him a pair of revolvers and a belt of bullets like a cowboy), Kelly could almost be Inej (though she's the wrong race), and my prom picture makes me look sort of like Kaz without his cane. But that's as far as the resemblance goes. Appearance, not ability.

I've been waiting for another dream with either Gabe or Fionna, just to check in with them as well. No such luck. Then again, I never have shared dreams more than one night in a row. I don't know why I expected that pattern to change.

I've also been waiting for more out-of-control icing on my part. I haven't had any of that either, although I've been getting a bit more carried away in elemental combat. I figure if I cut loose there, I'll be less likely to, say, freeze up the shower again. I've explained my issues to Luca and Kyle as best I can, and as usual, it surprises me how understanding they are.

Still, though, I've found myself feeling unusually cold at night lately. I've even gone and broken out the winter quilt I keep in the closet. It's kept me so cozy that on Wednesday morning, Luca woke me up, not the alarm clock. "Sweet dreams, Jack Frost?" he asked.

I jumped out of bed, terrified that I'd be covered in ice. Thankfully, I wasn't - but then I was standing in the middle of the floor, feeling cold air all over my bare legs and arms. "Dickhead," I growled, turning my phone on for the day. I stared at the lock screen, half-expecting to see a missed call from Gabe, but no such luck. I've done that a lot since he died, wishing he would reach out to me outside the dream world. Maybe he has, and Russell or some other scriv in charge keeps intercepting his communication and blocking it from me. Maybe Fionna's done the same.

When my phone buzzes (I've silenced it so it doesn't disturb Mrs. Smythe as she makes more coffee - it's a little busier than usual today), I almost drop it while retrieving it, dying to see whatever text I've gotten from the Second 'Verse or the Terminal or wherever.

But no. It's from Prime for sure.

"The police called Ty. We're going down to the station. Wanna come with?" That's the first message Kelly sends me. A second comes in as I'm reading the first. "Also, he doesn't have your number. Can I give it to him?"

I answer the texts in reverse order. "Yeah, sure. Are you gonna get the arrowhead?"

"Not exactly," she answers a minute later. "It's better if you see it for yourself."

My affogato - I finally ordered one today - steams at me, daring me to abandon it. I almost choke downing the rest of the espresso, and then I spoon the remains of the gelato down my throat at record speed. Next time, I should ask if this can be made with chocolate gelato instead of vanilla. Hardly traditional, but someone's got to innovate in the coffee world, and I bet this place could get tons of business with mocha affogati. The lines outside the Bridge would be epic.

It's a sunny day outside, and I'm still cold. Maybe it's nothing to do with my ice issues, though. Maybe I'm just sick. Physically, not mentally. It's not really flu season yet, but you never know when something could start spreading around at Balthazar. Sophomore year, right after New Year's, someone came back to school with the flu. Two days later, sixty percent or so of the student body was feverish, sweating, vomiting. Luca was lucky. Me, not so much. Of course, that was the year I'd skipped my flu shot - it gave me a fever the previous year.

You'd think with all the health-care advances in Heaven compared to the other dimensions, we'd have cured all the incurables by now.

As I cross the border, I stop as my brain radiates spikes of energy through my head. For a moment, I'm an antenna, picking up on a signal to which only I'm capable of tuning in. But I can't be picking it up. I haven't been able to for months.

Almost as quickly as the spikes come, though, they die down, fading into a background thrum. The static you hear between channels on the radio.

But again, I know that static all too well.

As much as I'd love to locate the source, I can't. I have other business to attend to.

Kelly and Ty wait for me outside the Bridge entrance on the Hell side. I join them, feeling conspicuous because I'm the only one wearing anything heavier than a T-shirt. Even Kelly, whose pink and purple shirt is long-sleeved, she's keeping it light, along with her blue jeans. Ty, who's abandoned his usual flannel and is showing off his white V-neck (probably so he can put the arrowhead back in its proper place - force of habit, I think), eyeballs me oddly and asks, "Did you freeze yourself again?"

"My thermostat's just broken," I say. "So what's up? You guys are getting the arrowhead back, right?"

Kelly shakes her head. "They said something about it being missing."

Would that I could do a coffee spit-take right now. "What?"

"Yeah." Ty kicks a small rock on the ground, and it skips into the nearest storm drain. "That's why we're going down there - so I can give them a piece of my mind."

"And if they don't offer us proof," Kelly says, patting the small purse hanging from her shoulder, "we're gonna break in and find out for ourselves." She takes a hairpin out of her purse and lets the sunlight reflect off it before putting it back. "If you wanna help-"

"Gabe's here." I blurt it out without thinking.

"What, your brother?" Ty scratches his head. "The...Gabe, you said? The dead dude?"

"He's here." I cross my arms, trying not to smile at how amused to death Gabe would be if he ever found out Ty just called him that. "I know he is."

"You felt it in the Force?" Kelly laughs.

I'd glare at her, but she wins all the points for expressing herself in my language, so she gets a grin instead. "There's nobody else I'd be able to sense like that," I say.

"Oh man, don't tell me he stole the arrowhead from the cops," Ty says.

I look up and see that we're right outside the station. "I guess we'll soon find out." Before we go in, I turn to Kelly and whisper, "Uh, who taught you how to use a hairpin lockpick?"

"My mom. Who else?"

Inside, the station is pretty much exactly how I remember it from the night of Fionna's death. The officer at the front desk takes Ty's name, and tells us all to sit and wait on the bench near the front door. After an eternity, he calls us up (like there's been anyone waiting in line ahead of us) and opens a side door. Not the one that leads to the main office, where Gabe and I had to give statements that night. This one goes to the other side of the building, and down into the basement. Because where else would the evidence locker hide? It's not much of an evidence locker, either, but that's no surprise. It's Coldfire Creek. Not much happens in this town, and certainly not much crime.

Guess you won't need that hairpin after all, I think to Kelly. She says nothing, telepathically or otherwise, but she does pout at me.

At the back of the room, the woman in charge of this place shows us a cardboard box with "NATE BINAG (?)" written on the front. "Don't look like it's been broken into," Ty says with a short laugh.

The woman flips the lid up, revealing the remains of a red seal inside. A seal that's been roughly sliced open. "The contents of the box are almost all here," she says, laying them out on the shelf for us to see. It's all the clothes Nate's scriv was wearing, as well as a shiny feather that must have fallen off his win at some point. All Ziploc-bagged and tagged. "All but the arrowhead, which we were gonna give back to you today."

"You wouldn't have needed it?" he asks.

She shakes her head. "It wasn't important to the investigation." She starts putting back the evidence with a twitch of anger on her face. "The investigation, which is now FUBAR. You know, this never used to happen around here. But then we get the deaths of Freddie Krause and Penny Crowe, and they want us to believe that mad angel did it?" She scoffs. "Right. Now this. These so-called 'scrivs,' I bet they're all a hoax. Like those creepy clowns a few years ago."

"Those creepy clowns were a hoax," Kelly says, "but this shit is real."

Agent Scully here - she's even a redhead; how's that for ironic? - scoffs again, then slides the box back into place. "I'll just wait for the forensic results from Bearville to come in and prove me wrong. But they've got a bloody backlog, so don't expect to hear from me anytime soon."

Ty clenches his fist for a moment, showing a similar twitch of anger to the one I saw earlier on Ms. Evidence Keeper. "Sure. Fine. Whatever. Thanks, I guess."

"You're welcome. And..." We're heading out, but our new friend has one last thing to say before we even open the door. "You in the hoodie? Drink some lemon-mint tea. Always helps me when I have a cold."

"I don't...what?"

"Oh, I'm sorry," she says, shaking her head and giving an embarrassed grin. "I just assumed...I mean, you were all bundled up."

"Yeah, I'm not sick," I say. "But thanks for your concern."

Outside, under the red sky, Kelly peers at me again and says, "Seriously, Alex, you're looking a little pale. You sure you're all right?"

"Yeah. I'm sure." I barely even heard her - I'm responding on autopilot, pretty much. What's got most of my focus right now, though, is that static at the base of my skull. Coming back up from the evidence locker, and then out of the building completely, has raised it up to a level that's going to seriously bug the shit out of me until I find out where it's coming from.

"God, this fucking sucks," Ty mutters to himself. "Don't they know how much I value that stupid arrowhead?"

Finally, something that'll distract from my other distraction. There's got to be a story here. I give Ty an attentive look, and when I catch his eye, he says, "Oh, you don't know...yeah, I might as well tell you." We cross the street and sit in a nearby bus shelter, and he says, "So you know how I like racing?"

"Yeah," I say slowly. "The Kid Flash poster you showed me?"

"Exactly." Ty nods. "I didn't tell you, though, that I actually raced a couple of times when I was your age." He scuffs his sneakers on the sidewalk, then snickers. "And now I made myself sound like an old grandpa."

"You raced?" I let out a low whistle. "I thought you said you didn't."

"Did I?"

"He always does," Kelly laughs.

A bus approaches from up the road, and we get up and leave the shelter before the driver thinks we're waiting for it. Walking toward the Bridge, Ty's face clouds over. "I didn't really do much of a race, really," he says. "Just one or two drag competitions. Most of the time, it was a spectator sport for me, 'cause I barely even had my license yet." He swallows. "Then I met Jobie. Jobie Robertson. You probably never heard of him, huh, Alex?"

I shake my head. "Should I?"

"Nah, he's one of those demons y'all don't know about in Heaven." Ty shows me a picture on his phone, a selfie of him and a shorter, skinnier black dude. "In this part of Hell, though, Jobie's a legend. He saw my first time racing and took me under his wing. He wanted me to be his apprentice, fix his car up and all that." He zooms in on Jobie's face, then pulls the picture up to show him from the neck down. He's wearing a white V-neck...and the arrowhead pendant around his neck. Wait, that's Jobie? But that's the sort of outfit Ty wears.

"I've been dressing like this to honor him ever since he died," Ty says. "Night of my second race, he gave me the arrowhead. Said he didn't need the good luck, but I would, and he wanted me to keep it. Well, I won that race, but Jobie, he went on a bigger race that night, up the mountains. On the same road we're walking on, even." I find myself tearing up alongside him and Kelly. "About fifteen miles east of town, he was in the lead, and he lost control on this one patch of black ice - it was April, it was under a tree, and it just didn't get enough sun after the last snowstorm of the season." He puts the phone away. "They closed the road for days, picking up the wreckage. And his body. And...and I haven't raced since." A breeze blows past us. "'Cause I'm not like Wally West. I wasn't racing to help with my mom's medical bills. I was racing 'cause I enjoyed it. Hell, I thought I could make a career out of it, if being a mechanic somehow didn't pan out."

"He says, like that's not a useful skill," Kelly laughs.

"It's an old joke of mine, I know."

"Yeah, Grandpa," I say.

We're at the Bridge entrance, and I'm about to turn and leave Hell when I notice the buzz again. No longer distracted by Ty's story, I need to follow this frequency. It's been getting stronger the longer we've been walking, and now I sense some kind of rhythm to it.

"You leaving?" Kelly asks after exchanging glances with Ty, something I only see out of the corner of my eye.

I shake my head. "I think I know where he is."

"Who, Jobie?" Ty asks, bemused.

"No..." I walk past the Jacksons. "If Gabe's here, and he's got the arrowhead...I know where he'd be." Memories flood my head. Me and Gabe, the one time we went sneaking smokes. Sharing a knife and giving ourselves each one more cut. Hunkering down in a rare dry place on a rainy night, his hand on my shoulder as I radiated some of the worst anxiety I'd ever had. "There's a cave," I say. "Way up in the woods. Maybe a mile beyond you guys' place. If there's any place Gabe would hide, it's there."

They don't question my judgment, except for another exchange of glances - and I hear some doubtful thoughts from their heads too. But they trust me enough to follow me as I set off in the direction of that cave.

My suspicions are confirmed when we're maybe fifty feet away, barely within sight of the cave. Two men jump out from the trees behind us and brandish long blades from their hands - blades of solid black. One of them, an older, grayer individual, I don't know. But the other, we all recognize, especially with those angular black spex of his.

"Russell?" I blink rapidly at him.

"In the flesh." He retracts his blade into his hand, the dark energy swallowed by his knuckles.

His new friend follows suit and asks in a lightly accented voice, "You know these kids?"

"Yeah, he's Gabe's-"

"OH MY GOD!" Fionna's voice rings out around us, and we turn to see her coming out from the cave with two other kids our age in tow. One is Kensi Stark, whom I remember fought scrivs with Luca, Mattia, Paul, and Gideon. And Russell, too. Can't forget him. Kensi's holding Fionna's hand - is that because she's dragging her along with her as she comes out of the cave, or is there some deeper connection? I wouldn't be surprised, actually.

Fionna lets go of her long enough to hug me, Kelly, and Ty, though.

The other kid with Fionna is a skinny, jumpy-looking boy. He could be sixteen or seventeen, but he's got a real baby face. When he sees me, his eyebrows arch impressively, and he turns around, shouting into the cave, "Yo! Sweaty Elf Boy! Is that your brother?"

"What?"

Hearing that voice, my heart stops. The buzzing in my head ends, clearing my brain at last.

"That's a yes," says the new guy.

I walk past him, trancelike, then I see Gabe emerge from the cave. He's grown his hair back a bit - after making it progressively shorter in the last few months of his life, he looks so much more like himself now.

"I was counting on this," he says.

"Sure, you cheeky bastard."

"Hey, that's my line!" He actually slaps the back of my head, Gibbs-style, for that, then he pulls me in and hugs me.

I pound his back, and vice versa. "Love you too, brother."