This scene is a part of my 9-book series entitled

^Click the above title for the book proposal ^

^ Here are character summaries and a story outline, ^
^ if you'd like to read them. ^

      As Jeff spied on him from the dark bathroom, Nick read the news report, tugging the tie from his captured hair and shaking it free. He pulled his thick, wavy black hair back and twisted, released, and pulled it back and twisted again and again, slowly at first, but then with more frequency. It was clear to Jeff that Nicholas was neurotically driven to keep some part of his body in motion. After a moment of reading, the mortal who looked like Nicholas wiped the beading sweat from his brow.

     Jeff questioned why Nicholas looked toward the bathroom where the cop hid, then went back to the paper. Three times he glanced toward the bathroom, and Jeff couldn't tell if Nicholas was sensing that someone was there, perhaps even sensed the close proximity of another Keeper, or the man needed a fix.

     Either way Jeff figured Nick would find him soon, so he prepared to take Nicholas down if he were pushed to it. With catlike silence, the youngest Keeper drew his sidearm from the holster behind his back and cocked the Glock. And waited.

     Just as Jeff had predicted, it wasn't long before Nicholas was up and headed for the bathroom. Slowly, appearing a bit disoriented, Nicki spanned the big studio to where the prowler hid counting down his arrival, and the bathroom light went on.

     Shocked, Nicholas found Jeff's gun inches from his nose for the second time in five or six hours. The healer in Jeff spotted spider webs of red and yellow in Nicholas’s once crystal eyes, his pupils engulfing the color that should have shown like blue topazes. Beads and channels of sweat carved into premature wrinkles in his cheeks. Black circles marred his face. The man who stood before Jeff Sutherland looked as bad as any heroine addict he’d seen as a cop on the beat. Nicholas hadn’t looked so bad just hours ago.

     Without a word, Jeff shifted the pistol in a forty-five degree angle and pressed it into Nicholas’s face, prompting him to back up. Nicki complied, his big hands in the air, recognizing that he’d been mastered.

     Jeff directed Nicholas into the center of the warehouse apartment, and the cop turned and shot the lone fluorescent light that lit the room, shattering the lamp and showering the floor with glass shards. The moonbeam from the skylight was more to his liking, keener for his eyes. Jeff spun back to Nicki and motioned with the pistol for him to pull a nearby chair and sit. The silencer on the gun had muffled the sound well, only the two of them heard it, and of course, Alexander, wherever he was.

     "That's strange," Nicki mocked, bypassing the order of the chair to taunt his captor. "I thought cat burglars relied on their stealth and brains, not fire power. You don't look like the timid type to me," he jabbed, "Hell, you're my size. What are you scared of?"

     Under his black cowl that hid his face, Jeff kept his silence, and Nicki smiled confidently. "Are you here to assassinate me?"

     Jeff’s eyebrows dove under his disguise. Why, the healer wondered, did Nick assume Jeff would be an assassin and not a common burglar?

     "Or," the unawakened Keeper mused, "could you be on a treasure hunt with the rest of the turtles? Don't tell me, you're here to recruit me for your game. Am I to be Donatello?"

      Jeff found it an ironic thing for Nicholas to say as the artist stood in the midst of his own great paintings. Nicholas’s body movement suggested he was prepared to put up a damn good defense.

     Nicholas motioned for Jeff to come closer, flashing a charming grin. "A man doesn't need to pack a gun, so put it down and we'll work this out with skin and blood. What are you scared of?"

     It didn't take much to tick Jeff off, and being called a coward was just the right button to push. How interesting it was that this man knew that. All his young life, Jeff had always dreamed of the chance to abuse Nicholas, the two having shared an often tumultuous history of rivalry. Nick seldom turned down the opportunity to tear Jeff apart. Still, too, was the unspoken fact and destiny that both men would compete for Fiona’s heart and hand.

     As adults, the bitterness between them had lain dormant in Jeff’s heart, smothered and buried by the needs of the Keepers. But now, Jeff Sutherland felt all the rivalry being born again.

     "Come on," Nick repeated, angry now, impatient that the masked burglar hadn’t moved to take up his challenge. The bartender sweated profusely now.

     Against Jeff’s will, the old feelings, the old inner war, reawakened within him, and his childhood rival stood before him, offering himself as his punching bag, an absurd offer coming from a man so strung out on addiction. But, it proved to be an offer Jeff Sutherland could hardly refuse. Jeff pictured Nicholas’s hands biting into Fiona’s arm, hurting her.

     "This one's for Fi," Jeff said aloud, as he removed the gun's clip and the bullet in the chamber, and placed them snugly in his front pants pocket. He laid the gun on a nearby shelf, and he gave Nicholas a silent signal to come and get him.

     Nicholas took a slow and badly planned shot at him, very unlike the Nicholas Jeff knew. Jeff ducked and whipped around with a spinning back kick. And another one. The third sent the bartender reeling. Nicki took the full force of Jeff's jabbing kicks, sending him staggering over to one of the windows. The last elbow smash to his face sent the bigger man flying into a window and shattering the glass. Nicholas was out.

     "Way to go, champ," Jeff heard a sarcastic voice say, both in the communicator in his ear and aloud in the room.

     Jeff turned and found Alexander leaning against the stairwell, his arms crossed in front of him like a favorite martial arts coach of his had been prone to do. Alexander had watched the miserably short confrontation.

     "Good fighting form. Too bad you didn't have an opponent. I'll venture to say you've waited a long time to do that."

     Alex hit a switch that engaged another large set of fluorescent lights overhead, and the Consort paced over to Nicholas's limp body, pulled him from the broken window, and checked his pulse. "I think you broke his nose. Why didn't you just shoot him?"

     Jeff smiled, sadly hidden by his ninja face cowl. "Because he's been kicking my butt all my life. If he lives through all of this, I'll never let him live it down."

     With a smirk, Alex drew two sticks of gum from his shirt pocket, stripped them of their wrappings, and he shoved them into his mouth, as he replied, "Yes, you will. You probably just beat up a junkie looking for a fix. How much pride could that give you?"

     "Rain on my parade, Alex," Jeff retorted, pulling the black gloves from his hands. Both men stared at the stranger inside of Nicholas, and Jeff wondered what surprises this new man would bring to the Keepers.

     "He sure challenges like Nick," Alex added, sounding very curious. "Too bad he couldn't fight like Nicki. Who knows? You might've been healing yourself tonight, Healer, had it really been the Keeper in his prime."

     Bitter, Jeff replied, "I can’t heal myself from major damage, but I'd like to think I could hold my own with Nick now."

     Alex reached for a chair, netting one from the other side of the room, and he tossed Jeff a roll of duct tape that had been lying on the floor. "Tape him to the chair. Misty, are you listening?"

     "Yes, Alex," the Consort’s computer mistress replied, through the earpiece communicators.

     "Dial Jeff’s house."

     "Yes, Alex. I am connecting now," Misty told them.

     Turning to Jeff, the Consort told him, "I want Fiona to scan this man while he's weak, might be an eye-opening experience.

     "And for Fi's sake, heal his nose."

     Jeff hauled Nicki’s limp body from the shattered window, and into a chair, and began to tape his arms and legs to the arms and legs of the seat. "Boy, am I tempted to tape up the hairiest parts of his body. Hmm, maybe a few strips across his chest. It's a forest. He can afford to lose a few hairs there." The youngest Keeper snickered cruelly.

     The healer took a victorious breath as he leaned over Nicholas and his busted face, inspecting his own wicked sculpting. When he finished gloating over the injury, Jeff placed his hands lightly over Nicholas's face, and the healing white light seeped through his long, tapered fingers, repairing, reforming the broken cartilage, and closing the many deep cuts opened by the window glass. How Jeff did it, he didn’t know, but it worked every time. By the time Fiona answered the phone, Nicholas's face had been restored to its prior wholeness.

     "Fi," Jeff came on the line to say, when he heard the empath answer the call through his earpiece. "Get your moneymaker over here. We need you to scan Nicki. Yes, you’ll have protection, I promise. Nick won't be roughing up any women again."

     They said goodbye, and he turned to Alex, who now sat on the floor, searching the scattered newspaper Nick had abandoned. "So, what was he reading that was so engrossing, sale ads?" Jeff asked in his caustic fashion.

     Alex seemed silent too long. Then, as though he’d not heard what Jeff said, Alex changed the subject completely. "I thought you ran a check on area attacks?"

     "I did. Nothing fit Nick's favorite pastimes, assault, battery on women. Nothing unusual stood out." Jeff’s stomach sank, well versed on the troubled look on Alex’s face, so he walked over to where his cousin bent and read clipped articles. "Why do you ask?"

     "Because this guy just cut out a story on a strangulation murder that describes Crystal's attack almost to the penny, but this girl didn't get away."

     Alarmed, Jeff scanned the article over the Consort’s shoulder, and everything Alex said stared him right in the face. How had Jeff missed this? Why hadn’t he turned up this case in his area check?

     Jeff reached down and turned the paper to the front page. It was the Atlanta Sentinel, only a state away but still another judicial system. "Jeez," the cop said, "he's driving to another state to kill women. Smart, I suppose, if that's what you're into. This case must have slipped through the cracks."

     Nicholas started to stir and moan from the rearranging Jeff had done to his face. Alex rose, paced right up to him, and waited for Nick to become fully conscious.

     Nicki opened his eyes and gawked at the almost seven feet tall giant in front of him. "Who the hell are you?"

     "I’m your brother-in-law, Nick," Alex replied back to him, apparently seeing no reason to lie to him. "This is for your sister."

      With every fiber and muscle in his body, Alex pulled back and punched Nicholas right square in the face, knocking the chair flat on its back. Nick was out again.

     "Way to go, champ. I think you broke his nose." Jeff cackled with glee.

     "Shut up and heal him," Alex directed flatly. "Fiona will be here in a few minutes."

     Probably angry at all the disasters that kept popping up to spoil his plans, Alex began a search of the apartment, tossing things over his shoulder without regard to covering his tracks or concealing his fingerprints.

     "Wait until I tell them you hit a junkie tied to a chair," Jeff snickered in retaliation of Alexander’s earlier tease. "I'm surprised you didn't crush his skull with a swing like that."

     "You shut up, or Nick won't be the only one getting his brains beat out of him tonight."

     Jeff could hear the attitude in his cousin’s voice, and unwilling to goad him further, the healer concentrated on repairing Nicholas again of his well deserved infirmities. When he was finished, Jeff took a refreshing draw of air and reached for the article to read in earnest this time.

     Having discovered no great treasure of goodies, and nothing that spoke of Peter, an obviously disturbed Alexander stepped over to Nicholas's unconscious form, still strapped in the chair but no longer bleeding on the floor.

     "The paintings, unveil them," Jeff directed his way.

     Alexander’s eyes set upon the easels, most of them covered with dropcloths. "There has to be twenty of them. Works he hasn’t sold or given away."

     Jeff looked up and saw them all lined up like soldiers awaiting orders. "That’s not like the Nick we know to hoard his work. He’s always giving away his paintings."

     "This isn’t the Nicki we know."

     Taking up the suggestion, Alex began to unveil the closest paintings. With a yank of dusty cloths, Alexander freed each work and stared. "Each one is more bizarre than the last. The colors are dark, the images shadowed. They’re barely recognizable things, only visions of dark, evil emotion."

     Quitting the paper, Jeff joined his Captain, and they grimaced at each disclosure. The paintings were ghostly, black and blood red. "They say," Alex muttered, "that an artist’s work is a window into his mind."

     Jeff studied each painting, many of different mediums and subjects, but the tone, colors, and theme were the same. Doom, pain, power, and blood. "I can tell already that I don’t want to look inside this man’s window."

Alexander shook his head.  "This isn't Nicholas.  Something is very wrong."  Alexander looked over to Jeff, and asked, "Could an unawakened Keeper have been born into the mind and body of a maniac?"

     The healer shrugged.  "What could be worse?"

     Finally, Jeff reached for the last canvases way in the back and threw the cloth over its top, only to be struck speechless by the sight of a map of northern Florida with maybe fifty or so pins dotting out-of-state counties. Beside it was a collage made up of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi news articles announcing suspicious disappearances of local women, discoveries of bodies, each of them strangulation murders taken place outside the borders of Florida.

     A third canvas held pictures of women from the papers. Pictures of missing women. Jeff’s cop instincts told him these pieces of artwork were intended to be a sick taunt to the various police departments involved. There were far more pins in the map than there were articles. Jeff could only assume Nicholas had hidden the other bodies well.

     Jeff turned, and found Alex sheet-white, staring at the pins. Jeff could read his mind. The healer knew Alexander felt the loss of control of the Keepers.

     "Look at these women," Alexander moaned, pointing to the easel that contained dozens of prom pictures and snapshots. "All tall, blonde, green-eyed. He’s been hunting Crystal."