One year and one week after the Parker brothers reunited, Nick stood over an open grave, looking down at a disheveled pile of bones. Grave was too generous a word—those were found in cemeteries, neatly arranged with headstones and flowers and groundskeepers. This was a hole in the ground in farmland, found only because of a certain someone's Gift and a certain someone's 'investigation'.

The farmer, who'd been watching the scene unfold, gagged before finding his voice. "I'm telling you, sir," he pleaded, "I had no idea. I've been rotating crops here for decades, I have records—"

"You're not under suspicion." Nick steadied the camera for pictures. "All evidence points to someone burying their victim somewhere they assumed they wouldn't be found. The police will ask for a testimony and your land records, but you won't be bothered beyond that."

The farmer nodded gratefully. Soon after, a local cop escorted him to his house. The other local cops were stalling around the scene, shaking their heads. They weren't happy when a fed showed up at their station and told them he was looking into an unsolved missing persons case from seventeen years ago. Nick didn't blame them. His presence implied two things: that his agency thought their then-office was too incompetent to have figured it out on their own, or that they'd helped cover it up.

It was neither. Their then-office did everything they could and followed every lead they had. Nick wasn't any better a detective than they had been. He just had help they couldn't even begin to comprehend.

Of course, he still had to frame it realistically. All of his special cases had to be meticulously put together. First, he pulled a random missing person's or unsolved murder case from records, as he'd been doing for the past year. When his colleagues asked why he was wasting his time, he simply shrugged and said he was interested. He'd drive to the town to pester the local police for their side of the story. And then—well, they had to assemble a believable trail, because Jack might know where the body was, or he might know how to get there. In this case, he knew both.

So Nick started talking to 'every' citizen in the town, in order, house by house, until he naturally reached 421 Miller's Lane, Ms. Delores Green, who, as it turned out, recalled seeing something strange on one of her drives after Nick jokingly brought up how his mother once saw a cow kick another cow along farmland.

She'd gotten a faraway look in her eyes before scrunching her face. "Seventeen years ago, you said? Well, it was no cow brawl, but...sometime back then, can't tell you if it was that same year, I saw a van parked aside a farm once, and some folk's fightin'. That's not, you know, unusual, but that kinda thing doesn't happen 'round here without everyone hearing. Gossip and grudges, even lawsuits, all that. But I never did hear, and there were no new grudges, so I think they must've been out-of-towners. It was a local road, though. Twists and turns that took miles to reach interstates. Never did understand why they'd be taking it."

It was a conversation that could quite literally mean anything, and lots of people took roads they didn't need to, and why would the cops have talked to Delores Green, a then-grocer who wasn't related to nor friends with the missing person or their family and who was nowhere near the last sighting? But this was exactly what Nick needed, and he smiled and asked if she could repeat her story for a recording.

As to which farm it was near: she didn't remember. Okay, which road? She didn't remember. A detail? There was a certain curve. Only one local road had the curve as she described it, and that was Sparrow's Way along Cooper's Farm. This was what Nick's colleagues liked to call a crack lead, because none of what he did to get to this point made any real sense, and following it also made no sense, but it wasn't a waste of time if he already knew it would work.

He asked Mr. Cooper if he could walk through the farm along the road, and Mr. Cooper said sure, no problem. The crops were only waist-high, and nothing was out of the ordinary, except, wait—was that a small bone sticking out of the dirt? One that looked oddly like a human metacarpal?

Jack had, several hours earlier, arrived at this exact spot to dig up one of the bones and leave it sticking out of the dirt. No one in their right mind would accuse someone of doing this just so an FBI agent could happen upon it later and order an excavation. No in their right mind would accuse Nick of magically knowing where a seventeen-year corpse was just so he could fake a successful case. Presenting the finished puzzle was easy because Nick's superiors were, in fact, in their right mind. It was creating the pieces and making them fit that took most of his time.

Nick handed the camera over to the police and headed back to the car. There were many ways to explain the single bone found several feet above the rest—crop rotation, rain, animals, et cetera. And the disturbed dirt before the crew arrived? Well, Nick asked Cooper for a shovel and dug himself after he saw the bone, obviously, and there was nothing out of the ordinary beforehand.

He got into the car and called his brother. "Are you sure he's an Enhanced victim?" Nick asked, because Jack wasn't always sure. Sometimes a missing person was just a missing person. Sometimes a murdered person was truly murdered and not devoured.

But Jack said, "Yeah."

Nick pulled onto the road. The missing person was found. Now he had to try to pin it on Mystery Group X. He drove to the closest trailer park, an entire town over, and asked for their nearly two-decades old records.

"We've only got paper books," the attendant said irritably.

"That's not very efficient, is it?" he said.

She scowled and rummaged around the back before returning with two books. It seemed she meant it; no one had typed up the old records. He asked to borrow them so he could scan the pages with the names of people who rented spots near the days of the last sighting, and she waved him off. He doubted she cared if he brought them back.

He visited the motels in the area, too. Somewhere in these hundreds of names were identities that didn't show up in any state's records, meaning they were fake. Identities that could be linked to monetary fraud, scams. Identities that showed up in other motel or trailer records he'd been collecting.

Perhaps he'd find nothing. It was worth a shot regardless.

.......................................

When Nick hung up, Jack slid his phone back into his pocket and stared up at the sky. He was wearing a combination of features he'd never use again. Every case was a new face, or faces. If anyone saw the man digging in Cooper Farm in the early hours of the morning—no one did—they would've seen a mishmash of evolving, indescribable features.

The shovel he'd used was already cleaned and neatly returned to the farmer's shed. The dirt under his nails had already been scrubbed off. This case was more work than most; he hoped Nick would find something in the names he was out collecting.

Mystery Group X was the Enhanced. Nick couldn't just come out and claim there was a Gift-sucking cult that killed people in the process. Instead, he formed a 'theory' of a particular group of murderers. No magic Gifts, no magic vampires, just a good old fashioned pack of serial killers. That was believable. He investigated missing persons and unsolved murders, trying to find which were Enhanced-related and which had the right crumbs. Their plan was to gather enough evidence of said mystery group to warrant a search for them in the present-day to pin them on murder, fraud, anything they could. The Enhanced might be special, but they could be arrested and prosecuted like anyone else.

It could take years. Decades. They might have to build up a base for later agents to take over after Nick's retirement. It might not ever work. In the meantime, Jack finally had a purpose, and he was no longer alone, and that felt good even if the Enhanced remained at large.

Nick still had to do his actual job, obviously. He got assigned current cases, worked with different partners. He had lots and lots and lots of paperwork and training and meetings. Jack happily stayed out of his way when he was busy: he wanted his brother to keep his career and do well. His...affliction and the evil that followed it was not going to get in the way of that.

The missing person, Jacob Christiansen, still had family in the area: a beloved niece who lived with her wife and son only a few roads down from where Jack stood. He closed his eyes and heard them calling to each other when she was young, niece and uncle, babbling about pie on Thanksgiving. It was soothing.

Soothing wasn't a word you'd expect ever-suffering Jack Parker to use about his powers, but things had changed. His Gift acted differently now. It was because he was using it more often—more intentionally, more specifically—for the cases, or maybe it was because he was, for the first time in a long time, happy and well-rested. It could be both. He still saw things he didn't want to, still had the occasional vision or fact pop into his head against his will, but it was so much less severe than what it once was. Most of his Gift still hid in the darkness where he kept it, and he never dared pull another stunt like what he did to scare off Anna, but he no longer felt his power scratching at the walls. He no longer screamed as light spilled out of his eyes. So, he had no problem listening to Jacob and Sarah Christiansen's last Thanksgiving as he walked to her house, left a lily, Jacob's favorite flower, on her doorstep, and changed his face as he left.

He didn't know what actually changed when he shapeshifted—was it everyone's perception of him, as if he'd put up an illusion, or was he physically changing? He felt like himself yet saw someone else in the mirror and heard someone else's voice when he spoke. His newfound comfort in his Gift hadn't given him an answer about the shapeshifting. It likely never would. He was okay with that.

There was another good thing: Death had not bothered him since the fateful night. Jack knew better than to be completely certain that she'd finally accepted his rejection, but it sure seemed that way.

His phone buzzed; Nick was done collecting names. They were done here.

.........................................

Nick stopped the car and walked around to the passenger seat as Jack took the driver's. Home, still D.C., was only a few hours from here, and they'd decided Nick would sleep on the way because of work in the morning.

He used to refuse to let Jack drive. Nick was scared he'd have a vision, a haunting, an episode—he didn't really know what to call his brother's experiences—and crash. But Jack said, calmly, that's not going to happen. When Nick had asked how he was so sure, he said, still calm, because I said it's not going to happen.

It was a cryptic, nonsensical answer. How could someone running from a cult and an entity called Death, someone grappling with a Gift he didn't understand, possibly know this one specific thing for certain, or make this one thing happen for certain? But Nick saw the look in his eyes and knew this was a question he shouldn't ask.

The confidence, along with the fact that Jack had been driving perfectly fine for the past several years, made Nick set those worries aside. Now he rested his head against the cool window, watching headlights approach and pass. Jack switched to his own face as they crossed the first state line.

"It was the middle finger's metacarpal," Nick asked, "wasn't it?"

Jack shrugged. "Maybe."

Nick laughed. Jack smiled. It felt good.