It wasn’t the look in the man’s dark, dark eyes—a look so wild it was nearly unhinged—or his size, which was substantial, or the charcoal drawing he held in one crooked, bandaged hand, or the way he’d demanded to know where the girl in the drawing now lived. It was the gun he pointed in Dante’s face. Slowly, with his hands held up in submission, the night air swirling around his bare shins beneath his robe, Dante repeated in a shaking voice what he’d just said, a lie he was hoping wouldn’t get him killed. “She moved out. I-I don’t know where she went.” He said it in English this time, because the man with the gun clearly didn’t speak Spanish. Dante had a fleeting, deranged thought that maybe the man spoke Martian. He had an unnervingly alien look about him, all eyes, teeth, and appetite. Keeping his wild black gaze trained on his, the man silently stepped over the threshold into Dante’s apartment.
