My mother once told her entire suburban book club about how she rubbed my head when I was a baby. "I did it up real nice," she said, winking at me as I stood in the doorway, hugging that shitty white rabbit stuffy. "Boys need their heads shaped by their mommas. They're more likely to go bald when they're older. I did Melvin a grand favor, gave him something right pretty ."

I remember because it was the only thing I could think about the day Mick the Brick took a razor to my head in the yard.

I don't know what my mother imagined for me, but I doubt it included six lacerations across my scalp and a whole lotta thread X to close 'em.

They shaved my hair right off in the Hospital Ward. I couldn't see much else but blood. It ran into my eyes and down my chin (head wounds bleed the most, Momma used to say). And if it wasn't the blood, it was the soap lather that stung.

I cried. A rubric afternoon among many, that's for sure. I didn't care that I cried, though, or that the warden saw fit to put me in solitary. Because we all knew, I was in it deep. Thirty days alone beat one day on the block in my condition.

My condition being terminal, that is.

Mick knew what he was doing when his big boys held me flat on my chest. I ate dirt and near broke my arm twisting against their meat-paws—until he settled his knee between my shoulder blades and sliced my melon up six ways to Sunday. I bit clear through my lip to keep from screaming.

I've got a little hair back now, and a lotta nasty scars. White hash lines and bristles. Raised. Cruel. I mighta been clawed by a mountain lion. Maybe I'll tell that story when I get out, but for now all I see when I look into what's left of my cell mirror is Mick and his razor.

And I know, he'll be coming for my throat next.

It's not something I like thinking about, especially since today was the day they were sending me back to C block. Sending me home.

Every murderer and uptown thug too rancorous for ass backward, small fry type of prisons communed on this nubby little island a mile from The City. Every hall was filled with 'em: A block, B block, C block, D block—even the basement. And Mick the Brick was king over all. Even security turned a blind eye, he had that much power.

I was a dead man on each and every row. And the frigid bay beyond the fences made certain I'd stick around to see my number come up.

The cell door whined on salt-rusted hinges, stretching back as slow and stiff as I felt crouched near the sink. When the light hit me square, I couldn't keep from flinching. My instincts warned me to hide as long as possible.

What was I? A farm boy from Virginia. All I knew was raising corn and teaching dogs to fight, mean. True, I'd won every spelling bee since the first grade—but spitting out "ameliorate" correctly didn't mean jack-squat when you weighed one hundred and fifty pounds dunked. Most of the incarcerated men here had mommas that weighed-in at twice that on race day.

I'd be dead long before I turned twenty. I'd be dead by dinner.

The guard tapped the door with his baton. The sound pinged off the paint chipped walls of solitary and crawled inside my ears. I swallowed, rolling my shoulders to relax the iron bands seizing in my chest. When I caught a half-decent breath, I'd move. Really, I would.

"Light a fire, Malone. Time to play."

Time to play.

Sonofabitch sounded pleased.

Emerging from that tiny box, I was an insect, cracking through an old shell and wrestling free. Bony elbows and a body built for running, I slid from safety and into a set of irons. I had nowhere to run now, not with a pound of metal on my wrists. Every muscle I owned rebelled, circumscribed.

Two guards walked me back to C block, fully cuffed. I tried not to look at the faces that followed me. Striated by round metal bars and years of stir-crazy hate, the other inmates goaded and jeered from their containment, tossing objects when it suited. Toilet paper and tobacco chew rained down around me like confetti.

My cell was on the second tier; a long balcony overlooking the corridor below. Just one in an endless row of cells that sweltered in the summer and turned fridge when the fog rolled in, still, it was better than being on "Park Ave." No privacy, there. Only the guards in their standard, uniform kit and nothing but blank cement cinders to stare at. At least I gotta window across the way. All saw-proof grills before you even see the bay, though.

"Easy, Malone." One of the guards, Gerst, grabbed my shoulder to stop me shuffling forward. His compadre, Kelly, raised a hand, signaling for my cell door. I could taste the rust in the air, already: tangy, sweet. A hint of sour. It was the sewage pipe for the toilet.

Home sweet home.

Gerst's fingers flexed, his palm pushed just enough to nudge me toward the railing. "Ever think what it would be like to fly on outta here?"

"Naw, I'm a landman myself, G. You?"

The electric lock buzzed and Kelly swung my cell door open. "In."

Gerst snorted and gave me a right fierce shove. I didn't take it personal, but it irritated me just the same.

"Sit tight, Malone," Kelly said from his place on the tier outside. Gerst freed my hands and pointed to my cot. The steel frame chipped the floor as I sat, the feet putting another white scar atop the hundred others arrayed like starbursts on the cement.

"What?" I asked, making sure to keep my hands visible, tucked together between my knees.

Kelly tapped the bars with his baton. "You got a visitor, Fish."

That, I doubted. First, visitation wasn't until Sunday, when my Momma would be in, talkin' at me through a porthole the size of my fist. And second, no one received visitors in their cell. We only ever saw our neighbors at tier time and count.

And only Mick could get at you in the yard.

I straightened my shoulders because, suddenly, I couldn't breathe too easy. Nerves coiled in my gut. "Yeah? Who?"

Gerst exited my cell. I wouldn't say the lack of his large girth made my teeny-tiny room bigger. But it helped, some. Kelly reached out and yanked someone into view.

"Ten minutes."

It took me less than one to recognize my visitor, but by the time I opened my mouth and stood on my feet to object, Kelly had swung my cell door shut.

He glowered through the bars, "Nine minutes." Then he walked outta sight, a sniggering Gerst nipping along behind him.

Hands on my hips I breathed out, slow, cussed once, and rested my forehead against the bars. The uneven paint job pricked my brow like sandpaper.

"I am not talking to you, Sammy. I said we were done, unequivocally. Finito. Finished. "

I heard him move behind me, but I refused to turn around. Every inch of me wanted to run again. The thought of being sandwiched inside a 5 x 9 box with Sammy-Smike and his galaxy eye made me itch enough to shed my skin.

"No," I said. I could feel the weight of his unspoken request hovering just over my shoulder. A friendly pat. A razor blade on my scalp.

I flinched and scrunched my eyes shut to stop them stinging.

"Apologies for your head."

"I'm touched."

"But I haven't come to ask you for a favor, again—"

"Ha."

"—I came to grant you one."

I wrapped my fingers around the bars and squeezed. The tension turned my knuckles yellow. April 10, 1941. The same day I first drew breath—enclosed inside the shitty white walls of county hospital room—my father died. Drove his rusted-up flatbed straight off the road and into a grandaddy tree. A big ol' oak with a trunk so wide, George Washington himself probably pissed on the sapling. It was an exchange to be sure: a drunken hick for a would-be felon.

But, see, my daddy was also a thief. Only, the people he stole from couldn't be found in just any ol' phonebook. They popped in and out of dreams and nightmares, legends and fairytales like some sort of cocaine vision: iridescent, irascible. Tricky.

They didn't like him stealing itty-bitty things from their house. I'm none too clear on how he did it, but Momma always bragged about the gold baubles and incomparable silver plums he used to bring home for her. She says that's why I'm so handsome—all that heavenly fruit she ate while I was swimming in the womb. Most kids get a taste for rhubarb or pickles when they're in the oven. I knew a guy once, who loved anything South of the Border because his Momma was from Veracruz. I, on the other hand—

I wound up with the shakes and sweats. No amount of food made me stop crying, I couldn't keep it down. Going on two weeks, Momma thought I'd die. Then a helpful little man in a Panama hat and wrinkled linen suit showed up on her doorstep.

He wanted to grant her a favor, too.

I tapped my fingers against the bars and took a deep breath before turning. I had to do this face to face. Sammy had to see. I scrubbed the palm of one hand with the thumb of my other, trying to hide the tremble.

Lookin' Sammy-Smike in the eyes was difficult. He had one eyeball that was clear blue like a summer's day; the other was all amber slivers on the inside, mixed in with a whole lotta pin-pricks of white that looked like caught stars.

My hands found my hips. I couldn't keep them still. "No is no."

Sammy sat cross-legged atop the flimsy table screwed on brackets into the wall. He looked like a genie on a magic carpet, floating there, midair, his cockscomb of blood red hair fanning down the center of his head. He wore the same clothing as the rest of us—denim trousers and a blue buttoned shirt—except, he accessorized with strips of cloth wrapped up his palms and knuckles. Insulation.

There was a great deal of iron in the pen. Faeries, I've found, have as much tolerance for parts of the periodic table as I did for cigarettes or bourbon. And, in the light of the overhead electric bulb, Sammy looked about as healthy as an anorexic hemophiliac. The valleys between his cheekbones and chin rivaled the craters on the moon.

"What if I could free you from this place for good, Malone. What would you say then?"

"Still no."

"Why?"

"Because escape is impossible. And if it weren't, you'd have done it by now."

Sammy looked at me square. The odd periwinkle walls clashed with his unnatural red red hair. Where the other prisoners saw a thin boy with a side swept ginger top and pocked skin—I saw a hellish freak. A real life Beksinski. And a set of collarbones sharp as knives.

Or razors.

He nodded. "To be sure. I would have extracted myself long ago if it weren't for one, little, problem."

"What problem?" I asked outta habit, mind. But a woven Panama hat cartwheeled through my brain and wished I hadn't opened my trap.

Sammy scratched his chin. "One you could help me with, were you to consider my offer."

I spent my whole life trading in favors. Working off my daddy's debt to a higher kind of society than Momma's book club in downtown Richmond, VA. None of them, however, were ever actually for me.

Not since the first one.

"Melvin?"

I sighed. Whenever Sammy used my first name, I softened. I don't know why. Maybe it was the familiarity in his voice. Three months being addressed by your given sur, listening to it get chewed over and spat out by men who thought you were scum, did things to a man's psyche. A gentle tone felt like a balm. I hated myself for needing it.

"A'right, but this is the last time and I mean that. What do you need, Sammy? What do I gotta do?"

"No, reneging?"

"No, reneging."

Sammy shrugged, rubbing the flat of one palm over the burn marks on his throat. They were small, round. Like someone had decided to heat up a quarter to brand him with. "I will help you escape from Alcatraz, Melvin Malone. All I require is the Brick, dead."

• • •

Momma had a favorite rhyme. She sang it to me every night until I was old enough to travel with the Panama hat man (who I later learned was in no way human). Until I was old enough to understand: she'd been trying to teach me my place. My place in the deal that saved my tiny life.

My servitude in exchange for a magical white rabbit stuffy.

Then, I started reciting the rhyme myself.

P.I. detail. That's when I'd get Mick alone. I made sure to write down a few parting thoughts for Momma, just in case. Outside the blockhouse, the briny air bare filled my lungs. I was too scared to breathe, properly. The guards shuffled us along between wire fences and Momma's words whisked out under little gusts of my breath. "Bah, Bah, a black sheep, have you any wool? Yes, merry have I, three bags full. One for my Master. One for my Dame. But none for the Little Boy, who cries in the lane."

Sammy kept looking back at me from his place at the front of the line, from his place next to Mick the Brick. His galaxy eye was even more disconcerting participating in such a fierce, unblinking stare.

No reneging.

It was the same look he gave me the day he figured out what sort of creature I actually was.

Mick set him right, though, wrapping a muscled arm around Sammy's waify shoulders, and chucking his chin with a clenched fist. Eyes forward.

Those two were hardly ever apart. I figured that out the day the razor bit clear to my bone.

Inside the industry building, Mick found me first.

I penciled my name on the sign-in sheet and waited for the guard on the other side of the partition to hand me a rolled up coverall. As soon as he turned his back, a set of heavy hands colluded with my shoulders. Nestling close to my neck they started to squeeze.

"Times up, Fish." Mick's voice had plagued my nightmares for weeks.

I tried to run. He strong armed me, pushing me against the counter. I heard a click. Not a razor. A knife.

I went very very still.

"There you go, be a good little boy, now." He rubbed my head, rough like. The bristles I called hair brushed his chapped palm. He gave me a push toward an exit.

"Move."

One-half of the industry building's ground floor hosted a clothing factory. The buzz from a dozen sewing machines clogged my eardrums, chomping down on the thick wool fabric, closing the seams with rows of thread X. I tried to slide between the tables, tried to escape. But Mick snagged my elbow and kept me walkin' the center aisle to the stairwell.

The last thing I saw before the door closed was Sammy-Smike, sitting cross-legged atop a sewing table, biting a thumbnail. Dust glittered around him in the light from the warehouse windows. An aura. His fan of wiry blood-colored hair looked like a shark's fin.

Mick flung me at the cement stairs. Whatever guard was meant to be tucked out here was somewhere else, getting coffee, taking a piss—

I grabbed the pipe railing and pulled myself to my feet. A hundred dollar bill slipped between the bars worked about as much magic as whatever it was Mick had Sammy runnin'. The guard wouldn't be back for fifteen minutes, as agreed. Plenty of time.

Mick locked the door.

I had all the privacy I needed now.

My promise kept me from flat out refusing when Sammy told me what he wanted me to do. If I were to renege on any task, I'd suffer. Last time I said no, a pixie took my sight as collateral and I had to complete the job blind.

Sitting on the fold-down table, Sammy'd grabbed my wrist. Unbuttoning the cuff, he'd slid the sleeve up along my forearm until we both could see the brand I preferred to keep hidden.

"Who owned you, you never said?" He asked.

"A hob." I tugged loose and covered the mark again. "He made me well when I was small. I helped him with his...endeavours."

"What did he do?"

"He ran dog fights all across the lower forty-eight."

"And you?"

"When I wasn't teaching them dogs, he hired me out to any nasty fae with somethin' worth the trade. The world's advancing, we're going to the moon, eventually, and there's just some things you fancy folk can't get your hands on. But you know that."

He'd known that the second he spotted my brand over a tray of chili con carne during Mess. A circle with four wavy lines intersecting in the middle. An oceanic pinwheel. The mark of communication. My bus pass to a land of freaks who made magical stuffed rabbits and ate silver plums.

Sammy folded his arms over his slight chest. "This hob. Where is he now?"

"His dogs killed him." I made sure not to look him in the eyes. "Now, you gonna tell me why you need Mick dead?"

Sammy nodded. Ripping a sheet of paper off the pad on the table near his knee, he creased it in half. When he passed the paper to me, it was a one hundred dollar bill.

"He knows my full name, Melvin. A powerful thing, a name. As long as he has mine I must do what he wants, grant every wish. It's the reason I'm in here. He tricked me once, a long time ago, and I've been affixed to him ever since. I detest it."

I detested it, too. The part about granting every wish. I couldn't care less about Sammy—he wasn't the one boxed inside a stairwell with a high chance of having his guts spread like a carpet.

Mick was turning towards me now, and I made sure to meet him on my feet. I kept one hand in my pants pocket, clenching the second thing Sammy-Smike had given me: a grip of sand.

"Hey, man, you don't have to do this. We can work something out."

Mick flicked the tip of the knife up to the soft part of my chin. "I told you what would happen when I saw you again." He pushed on the blade a bit, nicking my skin. "No one steals from me," he shoved his middle finger in my face. His heavy metal school ring rested under the knuckle: Sammy's first request.

Unfortunately, Mick caught me mid-swipe.

"And no one tries to, either."

Mick stepped back, taking the knife and leaving a sharp pain where the edge had bored a little.

I dabbed a finger to the cut, pressing the blood into the grooves of my finger tip. I'd never felt scared before Mick carved me up by the fences. After all, I taught them dogs to fight, mean. I told them when to ease off and when to kill. I watched them tear up whole rabbits and stepped in to take the mangled feet without worrying about the fangs.

I didn't appreciate feeling like those rabbits. I didn't like the flashes of red that made it hard to breathe. I didn't like hiding in dark corners every time I heard a boot tread hit cement.

And I certainly didn't like Sammy-Smike.

Mick smiled. His ruler-straight teeth and coiffed hair made me think he belonged in a proper suit in an office somewhere, threatening people with engraved fountain pens instead of pen knives.

"You're gonna die now, Fish."

I shook my head. "No. Not today."

Yanking my hand from my pocket I tossed the sand into his eyes. Sammy said to imagine whatever it was I wanted to happen, so I did.

The sand arched across Mick's face, burning a raw swath over the bridge of his nose. The knife dropped and he screamed. Jamming his palms tight against his eye sockets, Mick fell, hard, on his knees. Eyelids blistering.

Bloody tears slipped in ribbons down his cheeks. After a breath, he stopped screaming and began slapping the floor with trembling hands, searching for a defense. I watched his mouth open and close like a bass just dragged from the water; like the hob that afternoon I sicced his dogs on him.

Plucking the knife away from Mick's reaching fingers, I squatted down to see him.

"Hey, hey," I slapped his cheeks to get his attention. He tried to swing at me, but I closed in first and secured a fistful of shirt, jerking him forward.

The blade moved against his throat and I pushed hard enough to make my point.

Mick went very very still.

"Are you listening?"

His mouth quivered into a defiant line. So I drew my own, opening a red gill on the side of his neck.

"Yes!" He shrieked. "I'm listening. I'm listening."

I grabbed the back of his head and tugged, "Good boy. You're gonna answer some questions for me, right?"

"I'm listening." He mumbled again. Tear marks, like red veins, cut tracks to his chin.

My heart beat quick, wild. Adrenaline. Power? I smiled and cuffed his ear. "A'right then, let's start with numero uno."

• • •

Sammy met me in my cell, perched cross-legged on the graying mattress. Officer Kelly made sure the door was locked up good before leaving.

"Five minutes." He said, and walked off, hand resting on his baton.

I stayed near the door. Slipping my arms through, I leaned my weight on the crossbar and looked out. Beyond the window, the bay was a gray smudge in the distance, a drop off on the horizon.

Everyone knew Mick the Brick hadn't come back from P.I. There was a quiet on the block that reminded me of solitary.

"Is he dead?"

I let Sammy's voice linger and fade. Switching my weight from one foot to the other I continued leaning on the bars.

"My mother used to sing me a song, Sammy. "Bah, Bah, Black Sheep," do you know it?"

He didn't answer, but I could feel his single working eye roving along my shoulders.

I kept talking. "I always figured myself as the Little Boy, you know, the one who ends up with nothing at the end. And then I realized, I'm the sheep. The black sheep. Without me the Master and the hoity bitch, they get nothing, see? And the Little Boy—he's just the last loser who used to be something until someone came and took everything from him."

I turned around, resting my hands on my hips. "You're the Little Boy, Sammy."

His face rippled, every muscle tightening and twisting, eyes boiling to black. When he opened his mouth, lips curling away like a dog, I could see his fangs.

"Is Mick dead?" He asked again, slow and dangerous. Every ounce of his wiry body, coiled. I could imagine his skin pulling over his ribs beneath his shirt. His chest expanding with each barely contained breath. I imagined him tawny, like the Ridgebacks I'd trained, his spine a raised dorsal.

Sammy untangled his legs and rose to a crouch.

The cot frame creaked. I shook my head. "No. He's in the Hospital Ward. Third-degree burns from the rubber machine, a nasty accident."

"I told you," he growled. "No reneging."

"And I told you we were finished." I snapped, pointing a finger at his face. "But you wouldn't listen! Your kind never do. You sons of bitches, playing with people's lives like it's a game. Who do you think you are?!"

Sammy lunged. Snagging me by the throat he slammed me backward into the cell door. The clang rattled through my bones. I could hear his snarls from deep inside his gut, bubbling to the surface, sneaking out between clenched teeth. Once, I saw a lion at a zoo. A great big cat with a mane tangled with branches. He made the same sorta sounds, hunkered over a haunch of fresh cut deer.

Sammy looked me up and down and bobbed nearer, pointed nose swaying inches from mine. I could feel his breath on my cheek. The pin-pricks in his galaxy eye glittered, fierce. My chest tightened and burst—swelling from the energy, from the thrill of being close.

"I'm going to slice you open, Melvin." He whispered. "And when you're lying there, paralyzed, I'm going to reach inside you and squeeze that frail, frail human heart. Pop." He smirked, lip catching on a canine. A snaggletooth. "I'm in desperate want of a new dye."

I raised an eyebrow, contemplating his fan of scarlet hair. "Yeah, good luck with that, Jackass."

Sammy choked as I dug my fingers into his throat, just under his angled jaw. Mick's ring nestled in the crook between my knuckle and his skin.

"Or is it Samton Thistlesmike?"

Sammy rushed me, mouth open. But the ring worked faster. A harsh sizzle and the iron melted a hole through his veiny flesh. Sammy jerked free, white smoke curled from the open wound. The newborn burn mark on his neck went crusty-black in seconds.

I drove my foot into his kneecap. The crack sent chills along my arms as I watched him collapse on all fours. I rolled my shoulders; the tension evaporated like fog in the sun.

"There's been a restructuring," I said. "You work for me now. You and Mick."

Sammy spat on the ground. "You imbecilic child, I was going to help you—"

"You did help me, Thistlesmike," I said. The sound of his name on my lips made him cringe. I liked that. "I was a dead man until you gave me away to stop Mick. I don't wanna leave, Sammy. I put myself in here on purpose to get free of you creeps. There's only little ol' you in here, no other goblin or ghoul. And now that I know your name...well...I'm safe as houses."

Sammy slumped into a sitting position, resting against the fragile cot.

I held up the hand with the ring. It listed to the side, a size too big on my finger. "Oh, and by the way. I am telling you this just once: you can never harm me, or use anyone else to harm me, ever. Got it?"

He tipped his head in my direction, eye like a maelstrom. "As you wish, Master."

♛ A/N: Anyone following me on tumblr or instagram will understand the setting ;) Thank you so much for the read! Don't forget to ★ vote ★