by Neil Hetzner
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Jack Fflowers had been only slightly reluctant to do as his father first had asked. Deceiving Prissi, besting her, appealed to him. Admittedly, his father had been oblique. The plot, just lightly sketched, was that, with his grandfather ill, there were bound to be seismic changes at Cygnetics. If Adaman were not to be swept away in those changes, there were things that needed doing. Jack might be able to help his father’s, and his own, future. Adaman would take care of Uncle Illiya, but Jack needed to neutralize Joe. But, to be able to neutralize his cousin, he first had to be found. On that first night home on Spring Break, Jack had left the family game room thinking that bird-dogging Prissi with a bug, in the hope that Joe would get in touch with her, was nothing more than a lark.
In the NYPD, an hour after he had led the charge through Isabel’s House of Spirits, which had felt like such a prank, Jack learned that he had become an accomplice to Beryl Langue’s murder. After Jack absorbed that knowledge, he, too, lost his father.