Prodigal Son

serenity that she associated with monastics in their cowled robes.
        Some sociopaths were serene, too, as collected as trapdoor spiders waiting in their lairs for prey to drop on them.
        She said, "What were you doing in my house?"
        "From what I've seen of how you live, I think I can trust you."
        "Why do I give a rat's ass whether you trust me? Stay out of my house."
        "Your brother is a heavy burden. You carry him with grace."
        Alarmed, she said, "You. Aren't. In. My Life."
        He put down the damp cloth with which he'd been wiping out the popcorn machine, and he turned to her again, with only the candy counter between them.
        "Is that what you want?" he asked. "Is it really? If that's what you want, why did you come to hear the rest of it? Because you didn't come just to tell me to stay away. You came with questions."
        His insight and his quiet amusement did not comport with the brutal look of him.
        When she stood nonplussed, he said, "I mean no harm to Arnie or to you. Your enemy is Helios."
        She blinked in surprise. "Helios? Victor Helios? Owns Biovision, big philanthropist?"
        "He has the arrogance to call himself 'Helios,' after the Greek god of the sun. Helios… the life-giver. That isn't his real name." Without emphasis, without a raised eyebrow, with no apparent irony, he said, "His real name is Frankenstein."
        After what he had said in Bobby Allwine's apartment, after his riff about being made from pieces of criminals and given life force by a thunderstorm, she should have expected this development. She did not expect it, however, and it disappointed her.
        Carson had felt that Deucalion was special in some way other than his formidable size and appearance, and for reasons that she couldn't articulate to her satisfaction, she had wanted him to be something special. She needed to have the rug of routine pulled out from under her, to be tumbled headlong into the mystery of life.
        Maybe mystery was a synonym for change. Maybe she needed a different kind of excitement from what the job usually supplied. She suspected, however, that she needed more meaning in her life than the homicide assignment currently gave her, though she didn't know quite what she meant by meaning.
        Deucalion disappointed her because this Frankenstein business was just another flavor of the nutcase rants she encountered more days than not in the conduct of ordinary investigations. He'd seemed strange but substantive; now he sounded hardly different from the pinwheel-eyed ginks who thought that CIA operatives or aliens were after them.
        "Yeah," she said. "Frankenstein."
        "The legend isn't fiction. It's fact."
        "Of course it is." Disappointment of various kinds had the same effect on her: a craving for chocolate. Pointing through the glass top of the counter, she said, "I'd like one of those Hershey's bars with almonds."
        "Long ago, in Austria, they burned his laboratory to the ground. Because he created me."
        "Bummer. Where are your neck bolts? Did you have them surgically removed?"
        "Look at me," he said solemnly.
        She gazed longingly at the Hershey's bar for a moment but at last met his gaze.
        Ghostly radiance pulsed through his eyes. This time she was so close that even if she had wanted to, she could not have dismissed it as a reflection of some natural light source.
        "I suspect," he said, "that stranger things than I now roam this city… and he's begun to lose control of them."
        He stepped to the cash register, opened a drawer beneath it, and withdrew a newspaper clipping and a rolled paper tied with a ribbon.
        The clipping included a photo of Victor Helios. The paper was a pencil portrait of the same man a decade younger.
        "I tore this from a frame in Victor's study two centuries ago, so I would never forget his face."
        "This doesn't prove anything. Are the Hershey's bars for sale or not?"
        "The night I was born, Victor needed a storm. He got the storm of the century."
        Deucalion rolled up his right sleeve, revealing three shiny metal disks embedded in his flesh.
        Admittedly, Carson had never seen anything like this. On the other hand, this was an age when some people pierced their tongues with studs and even had the tips of their tongues split for a reptilian effect.
        "Contact