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Following the slope of the hill, the descending Blüdhaven rooftops stopped suddenly at the blue expanse of the sea. It glittered in the sunlight, and the smell of salt and the cries of the gulls traveled on the wind to the rooftop where Slade waited. Where Slade had been waiting now for five minutes longer than he’d initially been led to believe he would. He shrunk away from the sunlight and deeper into the shadows, feeling exposed in the daytime, in the distinctive black and orange of his Deathstroke suit. His shoulders hit the cool surface of the brick wall, and Slade leaned against it, and he scowled.

Not that there was anything in particular to scowl at. He knew that much even before the small, white shape of his daemon crawled back over the ledge of the rooftop and bounded over to him, standing on her back legs. Obligingly, Slade stooped and picked her up.

“I couldn’t find anything unusual,” Xiao Mei reported, climbing up his arm and sitting on his shoulder.

“And no sign of him?” Slade asked.

Xiao Mei shook her head. “No.”

“He’s late,” Slade said.

“Only five minutes. And he wouldn’t be late if it wasn’t important,” Xiao Mei reminded him.

Important could mean he’d stopped to prevent a mugging, or deliver a baby whose mother wouldn’t get to the hospital in time, or save someone from a fire. It could also mean something worse, and Slade answered with a grunt.

“There’s no point in worrying yet,” Xiao Mei said, picking up on his thoughts.

“I’m not worried,” Slade said.

“Yes, you are. I am, too,” Xiao Mei said with a flick of her tail, which brushed the back of his head through the fabric of his mask. “You’d be stupid not to be, and neither one of us is stupid. I only meant it hasn’t been that long yet.”

She was annoyingly right. Rather than admitting it aloud, though, Slade unbuckled a strap at the top of his armor, allowing Xiao Mei to crawl inside. She settled there with her head near his neck, and Slade took one of his gloves off to pet her soft fur, feeling the thump of her tiny heart against his collarbone. It was possible, and frequently useful, for Xiao Mei to travel much farther from Slade than the few yards most daemons could manage without causing great pain to themselves and their humans both. Still, neither Slade nor Xiao Mei enjoyed the separation. She’d investigated a three-block radius this time, and they’d both felt every inch of that distance.

Above them, the large, lazy shape of a zeppelin droned through the air. Slade watched it fly north, the passenger compartment on the bottom at a height that would render him an invisible speck. As it turned out over the water and disappeared behind a line of clouds, Slade’s eye caught another shape. It emerged from that same direction, and it flew under its own power, but there the similarities came to an end. Compared to the zeppelin, this shape was vastly smaller, and its flight was looping and erratic where the zeppelin’s had been smooth, and it was alive.

It was also coming right at him.

The bird daemon crash-landed on the roof and slid to a stop a few feet away. With the strange, floaty apparatus she wore, it was difficult to tell exactly what type of bird she was. And that was the idea; Nightwing could hardly be seen with the same melanistic barn owl usually seen perched on Dick Grayson’s shoulder and hope to keep his vigilante and civilian identities separate and secret. But Slade knew this daemon as he knew her human, and he couldn’t help but look up, expecting to see Nightwing flipping down onto the rooftop to join her. Any second now, he’d be here with in his skintight, black suit with the neon-blue stripe bent across his chest and traveling down his arms to encompass his middle and ring fingers, his domino mask and winning smile, his anbarified escrima sticks that Slade had been on the wrong end of more than once.

But the seconds passed, and Nightwing didn’t appear. A chill passed through Slade as he approached the daemon and crouched beside her, the truth rapidly becoming evident. She was alone.

Naturally, it was Xiao Mei who scrambled out of Slade’s armor and down to the hard surface of the roof to check on her. Humans mostly spoke to humans, and daemons to daemons, and Slade was loath to touch someone else’s daemon save for the most dire of circumstances. Xiao Mei, though, could put her paw on the side of the other daemon’s face and smooth back her feathers.

“Raji?” Xiao Mei asked. “What happened?”

Explaining seemed beyond Raji. She trembled all over and got to her feet slowly, and with much effort. Her wing shook like a leaf as she extended it, the long flight feathers pointing east, towards the water.

With a gasping breath, she managed to say, “Boat.”

At once, Slade understood. He pulled a sling out of a compartment on his armor, kept in case he got his arm broken on a job, but it would accommodate the weight of a barn owl just fine. Laying it on the ground, he backed away to give Xiao Mei room to help Raji settle into its center. Carefully, Slade picked up the ends and tied the sling around his neck, allowing Raji to rest against his chest. It was still closer to him than another person’s daemon should rightly be, but at least he wasn’t touching her.

He adjusted the sling a final time, and Raji lifted her head up and—

Rubbed her beak against his finger.

A jolt went through Slade, and he gasped sharply. He stared at Raji, but she was closing her eyes, and though her owl face didn’t hold human expressions, he thought the motion looked pained. Shock pinged back and forth between Slade and Xiao Mei like a bullet, like an echo. Belatedly, Slade realized his hand was still bare from when he’d taken his glove off to pet his daemon, and he hastily covered it again.

There wasn’t time for anything else.

In a second, Slade was on the ledge that ran around the side of the roof, and then he was off, leaping and running from building to building towards the sea.

*

The last time Slade had seen Dick Grayson, it had been as Deathstroke and Nightwing, and the kid had flown through the air to plant both feet in Slade’s chest and knock him down onto the dirty ground of a Blüdhaven alley. In the dark, the lenses in his domino mask glowed out from his shadowed face, and the anbar sparks of his escrima sticks had danced around him, and he’d been pissed off and beautiful. Slade remembered smiling behind his mask as, off to the side, Raji spread her wings in a threat display at a hissing Xiao Mei.

“Get out of my city,” Nightwing had growled.

With his contract finished and Dick far too furious with him to be accommodating, Slade had gladly fucked off and left his second least favorite city on the eastern seaboard, beat in that category only by Dick’s native Gotham.

The time before that, they had spent a memorable three days at Slade’s safehouse in Paris. By the end of it, Slade had accomplished both his goals: the first being to feed Dick only the best food the city had to offer, the second to fuck him on every available surface. He’d been golden in the afternoon, spread out and laughing with the bedsheets tangled around his legs, continually pulling Slade down for another kiss. On the dresser, Raji dozed with Xiao Mei tucked beneath her wing, and Slade felt the warmth of his daemon’s drowsy contentment.

Paris was memorable, though not because it was their first such encounter; that had happened some ten years prior, and it had been a clinging, messy affair with tears and blood between them, and it had happened because Slade’s son had died.

Or so Slade had thought. Running Joey through with a sword when he’d become possessed by powers beyond his control had seemed fairly conclusive at the time, but Slade had forgotten his body-jumping powers—or rather, hadn’t thought they were relevant. He learned his mistake some years later, when Joey’s sleeping soul emerged from Slade’s mind, and his honey badger daemon had split from Xiao Mei in some of the worst pain Slade had ever felt.

Joey was fine, now. Off with the Titans, with Rose, the daughter Slade hadn’t known about until after Joey’s supposed death. They got on all right, a relief that came before Slade knew he’d been worried at the sight of their daemons playing, Rose’s Japanese marten running circles around the much larger honey badger while their humans sparred.

That was the second of Slade’s sons whose death Dick Grayson had witnessed, the first being his eldest. Those two events connected in Slade’s memory, Grant’s death and Joey’s resurrection, like that, the contrast rather than the more logical comparison of both of their deaths together. Possibly because Slade had been busy plunging a sword through Joey’s back and so had not watched his daemon disappear like he had Grant’s, the ferret badger sweet and soft where Grant had always been rough and angry. Xiao Mei clung to Grant’s daemon as she clung to his corpse, and then slowly and inexorably faded away.

And left Slade holding the body of his dead son, because he’d told Grant about Deathstroke but not who Deathstroke was, because he’d rejected the HIVE’s contract on the Titans and they’d gone after his son instead, because the false serum they’d given Grant had stopped his heart mid-battle. Slade had, selfishly, wanted his son to look up to him; he’d loved Grant, but he’d always done a bad job of loving.

Across the small clearing, Dick Grayson had watched him.

He had not been Dick Grayson to Slade then, and he hadn’t been Nightwing yet—he had been Robin, leader of the Titans, all stopping the battle uncertainly with their daemons at their sides as Grant collapsed. Later, Slade would learn that the name Robin had come from the daemon form belonging to Dick’s dead mother, but at the moment, he had only gathered up Grant’s body and cursed them and swore revenge.

In a way, he’d gotten it, and in a way, he hadn’t, and it had all long since ceased to matter. Slade was thinking of it now because he was thinking of Dick Grayson, of their lives marked and bound together by tragedy. But that described much of Slade’s life absent Dick Grayson, and much of Dick’s own life, ever since he had witnessed the murder of his acrobat parents, a sabotage that led to them plummeting to their deaths and their daemons fading out into nothing. His father’s had been a bird, too, a glossy crow that accompanied them and the robin in their circus routines.

Everything crashed together in Slade’s head like sheets of broken glass, the images in them scattered. Paris and Blüdhaven, Grant and Joey and Rose. All that had happened over the last fifteen years.

None of it added up to Dick’s daemon touching him.

Against Slade’s chest, the sling jostled and bounced, but he couldn’t secure it better than he already had. Xiao Mei had crawled inside to help stabilize Raji and comfort her, and the fur of her white coat against the dark, mottled pattern of the owl feathers kept showing in flashes as Slade moved. He leapt to the last rooftop before the buildings stopped at the beach and swung down the fire escape like a monkey instead of using the ladder, and then jumped the last floor to the ground. The impact jarred his knees, but Slade ignored it, running off towards the pier.

Boats crowded against it, bobbing gently in the water, and Slade quickly found what he was looking for. Something small, fast, and with a nearly full fuel gauge. That it was unoccupied came as an added bonus, but Slade would have just as soon tossed any obstinate owner into the water and gone on his way. Stealing the boat outright risked the Coast Guard enough as it was; he’d just have to hope he got lucky.

A slice of his sword cut the rope, and Slade returned it to the holster on his back before jumping onto the speedboat. He positioned himself behind the wheel, planting his feet, and started it up. In another minute, he had it reversed away from the dock and heading out into the open water.

Looking down, Slade gingerly lifted the edge of the sling with his fingers. Xiao Mei peered back, her eyes wide and worried, but Raji breathed fast and shallow with her eyes squeezed shut. A strange urge came to touch her again, to smooth down the feathers over her breast, like he would Xiao Mei’s fur to comfort her.

He couldn’t. “Raji,” Slade called, and Xiao Mei shook her gently to help. Once the owl opened her eyes, Slade continued. “You have to tell us where to go.”

Gathering herself, Raji took in a breath and said, “North. For now.”

The speedboat flew north, cutting through the water. Slade wished he had an aircraft, something quiet and better for pursuit. Failing that, a small, stupid part of him wished vainly that Xiao Mei could change shape like she had when he was a child, could transform into a bird and scout ahead as long as Raji wasn’t up to the task. He knew Xiao Mei wished the same, his frustration reflected in her, and that the desire, though fruitless and pointless, didn’t carry the added burden of resentment.

It had for a time, shortly after Slade turned thirteen and Xiao Mei had settled as all daemons did when their humans started to grow up. Her stoat form, brown and white then, had resembled the nasty little weasel daemon of Slade’s drunkard father so much that for a time, he could barely stand to look at her. Now, Slade’s father had been dead for years, and he couldn’t imagine Xiao Mei in any other shape.

They plunged onward, the shore a thin strip visible to their left. Raji spoke up occasionally, correcting their course when Slade started to drift. The sun blazed down out of a clear sky, the thin layer of an awning the only shade, but Slade was grateful for it. A storm out here would pose a problem, possibly one too great for him to deal with.

“Are we getting closer?” he asked presently.

“Yes,” Raji said, and through Xiao Mei, Slade knew she was a little better, a little stronger. “It’s a fishing boat. Not as fast as this one.”

A fishing boat likely also had a larger fuel tank, and Slade glanced at the gauge and felt anxiety twist his stomach. If it got too low, he’d have to go back to shore and find another way, and Raji…Raji would just have to hold on if that happened. She belonged to Dick Grayson; she was as strong and stubborn as him. Leaning over the wheel, Slade pressed the speedboat on, spurred on by Raji’s suffering as he might have been for the sake of his own daemon.

Most people went their whole lives without touching any daemon except their own. Slade had never touched Addie’s when they were married, nor those of any of his children. The very thought forced Slade to suppress a shudder. Cutting open a person’s stomach and digging around in their organs would be less invasive and probably less painful.

Yet, when Raji had been alone and hurting and separated from Dick, she had sought out Slade for comfort, had wanted his touch. And Slade had allowed it, and though he’d resisted the urge, he’d wanted to touch her again since. As much as Raji looked like an owl, like any other Slade might see swooping silently through the night sky, she wasn’t. She was a part of Dick, as much as his mind or body, inextricably tied.

That could only mean one thing. Slade knew it, and Xiao Mei knew it, and the only reason his daemon wasn’t shooting him significant looks was due to her concern for Raji. Slade thought of the last time in Paris, and the other last time in Blüdhaven, and how much it had hurt to leave. He hadn’t admitted it to himself at the time, but he’d wanted to go back and take Dick in his arms even if it meant dealing with his anger, and as Slade left, he’d heard that anguish echoed in Raji’s forlorn call.

Oh, hell.

They’d gone and fallen in love, hadn’t they?

Wings fluttered against Slade’s chest, pulling him out of his thoughts. Raji sat up in the sling, looking bright-eyed and much recovered, and then hopped out and flew over to perch on the railing around the speedboat’s edge. Her exit had turned Xiao Mei upside-down, and Slade felt her confusion and her little paws flailing against his armor to right herself. She managed it with a huff and poked her head out, and she and Slade turned together towards where Raji sat with her beak pointed towards the waves.

Barely audible over the roar of the engine and the splashing water and whipping wind, she shouted, “That’s it! That’s it!”

In a few more seconds, Slade squinted ahead and saw what she meant. There in the distance, the thin masts of a small shipping vessel sailed due north.

*

With the fishing boat visible and Raji herself again, ruffling her feathers and hopping back and forth on the railing in excitement, Slade reduced speed and continued his pursuit at a safe distance. Again he regretted the necessity of his fast departure; he wanted a wetsuit that would allow him to swim up to the fishing boat and take it by stealth. Xiao Mei knew his thoughts and spent a few minutes opening and poking through every compartment on the small speedboat, but no wetsuit or even any scuba gear appeared, much less a bag to carry his armor and weapons.

Her search did, however, yield one useful thing: a telescope, which she delivered to Slade proudly. Rewarding her with a scratch behind her ears, he accepted the object and then set about adjusting it while she climbed back to her habitual spot on his shoulder.

First, though, he had another source of information at hand. “Raji,” Slade called, and waited until she turned her owl head all the way around to look at him. “Tell us something useful.”

The little, offended huff she gave in response recalled Dick Grayson so strongly that Slade cracked a grin. But Raji flew over and settled on the dashboard by the wheel, the situation preventing further protest.

“We were tracking reports of children going missing from the Zee Moores,” she said. “It’s a poor area, so the police don’t care. Even if they did, the residents wouldn’t trust them.”

And with good reason, given the notoriously corrupt Blüdhaven police. “I’m familiar,” Slade said. “Go on.”

“There’s not much more to tell.” Raji moved her wings in a shrug. “We checked what surveillance footage we could and asked around, but the only connection we found was that all the children attended the same school. Naturally, we went to investigate this morning, and…” She trailed off, dipping her head in something like embarrassment. “There was a dart. I saw it in Dick’s neck before the sedative kicked in and we passed out.”

“Did you see who shot it?” Slade asked.

Raji shuffled her feet side to side. “No. We woke up on the boat, and he sent me to find you,” she said. “I wanted to check the place out first, but Dick told me it was too dangerous—whoever captured us might have flying daemons that could catch me before I could get out of range.”

That had been wise; as much as Slade wanted to know what waited for him on the fishing vessel, he’d have done the same in Dick’s position.

“He’s safe?” Slade asked.

Closing her eyes, Raji nodded. “For now.”

That much Raji could feel intuitively, if not the finer details. Slade had the same sense whenever he and Xiao Mei separated; either she was ok, or she very much wasn’t.

“He asked us to meet with you,” Slade said after a minute. “What’s our interest?”

“Well, we did hear a rumor.” Raji seemed reluctant to tell him, and when she spoke again, Slade knew why. “We talked to a girl whose sister went missing. She said…she saw her sister talking to a man, and that his daemon looked like a giant bee.”

Slade’s hands went tight on the wheel. His mind reeled back fifteen years, to that first meeting with the faceless HIVE in their purple robes, the buzzing of their hornet daemons a deafening roar. And then he was on his knees again, holding Grant in his arms while his sweet ferret badger faded and Xiao Mei let out high-pitched cries in her distress…

A nip to his ear brought him back, and Slade started. Xiao Mei nuzzled through his mask in apology, and Slade exhaled through his nose and ran a finger down her spine. Those HIVE daemons had always bothered him, buzzing and identical, a mystery unsolved. Slade cared little for philosophers and theologians, less for their endless debates on the nature and origin of daemons, but he knew the one thing they and everyone else agreed on: daemons reflected their humans. Similarities might crop up among families and professions, of course. Xiao Mei and the daemons of Slade’s father and his children had all settled as mustelids. In the army, Slade’s fellow soldiers invariably had carnivorous daemons, and the larger and more powerful the carnivore, the more likely that soldier was to achieve a higher rank.

But an entire group of people, all with the exact same daemon?

That was unheard of, and it gave Slade a low sense of foreboding like the pressure in the air before a storm.

Back when he’d been dealing with the HIVE, though, he’d been more concerned with fulfilling their contract on the Titans to honor Grant’s final wish than with their strange daemons. Slade drummed his fingers on the wheel. That oversight was coming back to bite him now.

“Alright,” Slade said at last. “That’s something.”

He lifted the telescope to his left eye, his right blinded and useless, but not without Raji clearing her throat. When Slade ignored her, the sound came again. Giving up, he moved the telescope away to look at her.

“I can fly, you know,” she said primly.

“The same might be said for their daemons,” Slade said, his imagination conjuring up a deeply unpleasant image of Raji engulfed by a cloud of stinging hornets. “If it was too dangerous when you left, it’s too dangerous now.”

Picking up on Slade’s thoughts, Xiao Mei leapt off his shoulder and landed next to Raji. “He’s right,” she said consolingly. “Don’t worry. We’ll get Dick out soon.”

There was something very like Dick Grayson in Raji’s slump. She lifted her wing and leaned closer to Xiao Mei, who ducked under it and pressed against the owl’s side. That settled, Slade lifted the telescope again and adjusted the lens.

At this distance, he could just make out the deck beneath the thin masts. If any of the crew looked back, they’d also see him, but the stolen speedboat at least had the advantage of its smaller size. Maybe a half-dozen figures came into view, walking about the deck or leaning against the railings. None of them had daemons he could see, and Slade thought again of the hornets, which wouldn’t be visible from this far away. Then again, the same could be said for Xiao Mei if she were at Slade’s feet rather than sitting on his shoulder.

Lowering the telescope, he looked appraisingly at Raji. Her earlier weakness and distress had vanished, though she still moved her weight from foot to foot, as if eager to take to the skies and fly back to where Dick was trapped on that fishing vessel. The memory of Xiao Mei scurrying away from him to check the perimeter not an hour before stirred some sympathy, but the need for practicality pushed through stronger. Perhaps they could fall back a stretch and wait until nightfall. In a few hours, they’d have the dark to work with, even if Slade couldn’t hide the sound of the speedboat’s motor.

No sooner had the thought taken form than Raji went stiff and gave a sudden cry. Xiao Mei shot up on her back legs in alarm, one of her front paws resting gently on Raji’s shoulder.

“Something’s wrong,” Raji said quickly before either Slade or his daemon could ask. “He’s—”

“Go to him,” Slade said. “We’ll catch up to you.”

Without another word, Raji hopped over to the railing and launched, flying swift and silent through the air. Xiao Mei jumped down into a cupholder and braced, knowing Slade’s intention as he pushed the throttle to a speed that would have thrown her off the dashboard if she hadn’t moved. Internally, he cursed his lack of knowledge about what lay ahead and second-guessed his decision to send Raji off. If Dick was in trouble, though, the absence of his daemon would only cause anger and suspicion, and she could help him fight.

The fishing vessel grew in the distance as they approached, the sailors on deck coming into focus. A few ran over to the railing, still no more than shadows and stick figures to Slade’s eye, likely drawn by the noise of the engine. Hesitation rather than hostility marked their movements, evident even this far out, and Slade would use every second that gained him to the fullest potential. Banking to the side, he shot an arc of water up alongside the boat, projecting the image of a rich asshole showing off.

He kept it up as he drew closer, darting left and right and going airborne once, the whine of the engine changing pitch as the boat lifted out of the water and dove back down. Angling the boat just right kept the thin awning between the sailors and the telltale black and orange of his Deathstroke suit, but he could only get so close before they saw him. Slade would have to time it perfectly. He scanned the side of the fishing vessel for any hand- or foothold that might help him on board, and then his eye caught something else.

A small, black-and-yellow shape, darting out over the water and then back to one of the sailors leaning over the railing.

Slade hissed between his teeth and pushed the speedboat forward for the final stretch. That awful buzzing was in his head, Grant’s body a phantom weight on his arms. Dangerously close to the fishing vessel, close enough to see the rust between the peeling paint and hear warning shouts from above, Slade turned the wheel and rode the cresting waves that spilled out in the vessel’s wake. He edged the throttle forwards, and then the voice of his daemon broke through the noise.

“Slade!” Xiao Mei called. “Cabinet to your right!”

The words sounded more in his head than out loud, given the roar of the engine. Slade stooped immediately, wrenching the door to the cabinet open with one hand, and pulled out the singular object inside.

When he saw what it was, he laughed bright and triumphant, and felt Xiao Mei’s echoing pleasure. She seized the opportunity to leap from the cupholder to his suit, crawling into the opening at his collar. Hand still on the throttle, Slade pushed it and spun the wheel one last time, forcing the speedboat into the air.

It arced higher than the last time, its apex bringing them level with the lower deck. Bending his knees, Slade sprung out just as the speedboat tipped again, the momentum carrying them over the railing and onto the fishing vessel.

*

Slade hit the deck hard, rolled, and came up with his power lance in his hand. Two sailors manned the lower level, both with giant black-and-yellow hornet daemons hovering by their shoulders, both running towards him. Planting his feet, Slade faced one while he felt Xiao Mei emerge from his suit and use it as a springboard to attack the other. His assailant had a gun up, but Slade was faster; he dispatched the man with a blast of his lance, tearing out half of his rib cage and a chunk of torso. The man stopped, a frown on his face as if he couldn’t understand why his body was no longer moving, and then he tipped slowly over the railing and into the water with a splash. Above him, his daemon flickered out and vanished like smoke.

Turning back to Xiao Mei, Slade found her with the other sailor’s hornet daemon already pinned beneath her paws and out of the reach of its human. She dug her teeth into its neck, a killing blow, and the daemon faded out into nothing just as the other one had. A few fatal steps short, the sailor’s eyes rolled back, and she collapsed, dead.

Shouts sounded from the upper deck, too far away and too buffeted by wind and waves for Slade to pick out the words, but he was well familiar with the cadence of panic and desperation. The first barrage of gunfire hit the deck behind him, but Slade was already moving, Xiao Mei jumping from the deck to his suit as he passed and holding on as he took aim and put a bullet between the eyes of the shooter. The body toppled over the railing and hit the lower deck with a sickening crack, the man’s daemon, whatever it had been, too far away to see.

A ladder bridged the distance to the upper deck, and Slade bunched his muscles into a running leap and caught a rung about halfway up. He shot another sailor stupid enough to lean over the side, glinting barrel of the gun as clear as a beacon, and was this time close enough to watch the hornet daemon flicker out. In another second, he vaulted over the side and onto the upper deck, landing in a crouch.

No fewer than twenty sailors greeted him, adjoined by the same number of buzzing hornet daemons, lifting off from their shoulders and gathering in a central swarm. Xiao Mei jumped down from Slade’s suit and bared her teeth, preparing to fight the daemons as Slade took measure of the humans and their weapons against his power lance and guns and sword.

For a long, still moment, no one moved.

Pushing off his back foot, Slade charged with a wordless shout, going for the man to his left, his good side. As he did, the swarm of hornet daemons flew as one body around his right, descending towards Xiao Mei. A good strategy, enough of them to sting and sting before she could take out more than one or two, and Slade could already feel the way her body would writhe with pain and swell with poison and finally give out.

It drew closer, the swarm a cloud over her head, and Slade pivoted at the last second, spinning on his heel and away from the sailor he’d feinted at. He pulled out the object from the boat, the one Xiao Mei had told him to grab, and swung it towards the swarm with all his strength. At first glance, it looked like a tennis racket, the handle black and the rim yellow as if ironically designed to match the giant hornets. The center, though, differed vitally, the strings metal and carrying an anbaric charge. His strike connected with a sizzle, and several of the hornets fell to the ground.

The sailors cried out in pain and alarm, a few collapsing in Slade’s periphery, but he was already swinging again. He caught a few more of the hornets, dropping them to the ground where Xiao Mei pounced eagerly. Pinning a struggling hornet between her paws, she quickly tore its wings off with her teeth and then moved to another, not wasting the time it would take to kill them. The rest of the hornets rose above Slade’s head to a safer distance and circled, waiting for an opening Slade was determined not to give them.

A bullet ricocheted off his armor, the force of it still hard enough to bruise. Slade grunted at the very pointed reminder that the daemons weren’t the only threat, then swapped the bug zapper for his sword, bringing up his semi-automatic in the other hand. Roughly half the sailors remained unaffected, and Slade shot the first that came at him in the throat, removing the arm of the second with his sword. Blood sluiced off the blade as he twisted it around to stop a metal pipe, and behind his mask, Slade allowed himself a grim smile.

One of the sailors got close enough to scream in Slade’s face, spit flying and rage-wild eyes: “How dare you do that to my daemon! I’ll kill you, I’ll—!”

Her words cut off in a roar of pain as Slade headbutted her hard enough to spurt blood out of her nose, following it with a heel kick to her stomach that sent her sprawling. Another sailor collapsed sideways onto the deck, unconscious or dead from Xiao Mei attacking his daemon. Slade couldn’t see her, somewhere past the press of bodies around him—five or six left, still too many—and then a sharp pain lanced up his right leg.

Not his pain, his leg and the armor around it were intact, and the source of it traveled along Slade’s connection to his daemon. He tore through the rest of his assailants in seconds, uncaring if they were incapacitated or dead, and dropped into a crouch at Xiao Mei’s side. Half of Slade’s awareness remained on the deck around them—he’d been a mercenary too long for anything else—but the other half was with Xiao Mei, her back leg swollen and throbbing where one of those fucking hornets had stung it. She lay on her side, gasping in pain.

After all these years, Slade still didn’t know for sure if touching her when he did this helped. His gloves were on, anyway, so it wasn’t quite direct contact, and the sole benefit may have been in his mind. Either way, Slade reached for the long, scarred line of the bond between them and willed her to heal. Xiao Mei felt it as a coolness, a relief, a sensation Slade knew from the way it echoed in him. Her leg twitched, then stretched, and then she stood and gave a full body shake. Setting his hand down, Slade let her climb onto his arm and up to his shoulder.

“I wish you’d let me get you some armor,” he said.

“Daemons don’t wear clothes,” Xiao Mei replied. “It would only restrict my movement.”

Slade huffed out a laugh, if only because she was whole and healthy, better as if the injury had never occurred. The gift had come from his latent meta-gene, activated by the army’s serum and responsible for Slade’s own healing factor as well as the ability to extend it to his daemon. But his heart still clenched every time he had to use it, at the reminder that as tough as she was, Xiao Mei was small and fragile and could be hurt.

A low groan called Slade’s attention. A sailor crawled across the deck, making slow progress with his hand cupped protectively around his now wingless hornet daemon. Slade flipped him over with a steel-toed kick to the ribs, planting his boot in the middle of the man’s chest. He made a sick, choking noise and clawed ineffectually at the boot pinning him, too exhausted to move.

“Where is he?” Slade asked, his voice deceptively calm.

The man bared his teeth. “Abomination!” he spat.

Casually, Slade leaned forward and put more weight on the man’s chest. He gasped for air, and his daemon buzzed feebly in his hand. In Slade’s shadow, he was at least smart enough to look scared.

“Abomination? Really,” Slade said, dripping with condescension. “I never actually touched your daemon.”

He never had—not this man’s daemon, nor any others. What people often forgot, though, was that daemons were as vulnerable as their humans to bombs or bullets or the sharp edge of a sword. Some of his targets had relied on convention to keep them safe, or the pervasive sense of wrongness that came from touching someone else’s daemon, but Slade had long since suppressed that particular flinch. It had kept him alive and helped him earn his reputation as the world’s deadliest mercenary, and Slade personally thought that, by now, people should know what to expect when he had them in his crosshairs.

Despite all that, most still managed to be surprised.

“Fuck…you!” the man ground out, forced to pause between the words.

And, in the process, wasting too much damn time. Slade pulled his gun out and shot the man in the shoulder. He screamed and writhed in pain, then went limp again, breathing hard between his clenched teeth.

“The next one’s going through your skull,” Slade said. “Tell me what I want to know.”

Jaw clenching, the man turned his head to the side, but there was defeat in the motion. “They’re in the fish hold,” he said.

Slade picked up on the plural—that meant Raji had found Dick again, for better or worse. He nodded to himself and kicked the man in the chin, knocking him out. None of the other sailors moved, by all appearances posing no threat, but appearances could be deceiving. Stepping away from the man he’d been interrogating, Slade stopped and listened, focusing on the heartbeats around him. Half a dozen remained, all slow with sleep. Even so, Xiao Mei took up her station on his shoulder as he walked away, her eyes sharp for any movement.

Meanwhile, Slade scanned the deck for a hatch leading downward to where the fish hold would be. He moved towards the cabin that hosted the navigation deck, seemingly empty through the windows surrounding its sides. That prompted Slade to look out to sea in case they were headed for a collision course, but only open water surrounded them. He’d just have to hope that remained the case until the job was done.

Returning to the hatch, Slade knelt down on one knee and had nearly grabbed the handle when something moved. He stood up fluidly on the balls of his feet, his power lance at the ready as the figure came fully around the side of the cabin. Once it did, Slade’s hand tightened around the power lance, suddenly and horribly useless.

At least one of the sailors on this boat possessed a daemon that wasn’t a hornet, and it was the giant of a man facing him. His daemon prowled at his side, a German shepherd with golden eyes like a wolf. Slade had faced larger men, though, and Xiao Mei had faced more vicious daemons, and none of that was what froze Slade in place.

Trapped against the man’s chest, pinned there with one massive arm while the other hand held a gun at his temple, was Nightwing. He had his wrists bound in front of him and a cut on his forehead, and he was furious and bleeding and alive.

*

In a series of snapshots, Slade took in and assessed the situation. By his stance and haircut, the big man had a military background; by his dog daemon, he was hired muscle rather than a member of the HIVE like the rest. Dick’s suit and domino mask remained intact, and he hadn’t appeared to favor either leg as the man walked him forward—he could be useful in a fight, once Slade got him free. At Slade’s collar, Xiao Mei huddled close and sent him an image of Raji, on the roof of the cabin. A good lookout point, and a safe distance from the German shepherd daemon’s claws and teeth.

Last, Slade let his gaze dip to the rope holding Dick’s wrists together, and…saw as he twitched the first two fingers of his right hand in a signal. Even behind his mask, Slade didn’t smile, but a quiet satisfaction bloomed in his chest. Dick had already freed himself, was only waiting for the right moment to strike.

“Drop your weapons, and get on the ground!” the big man snapped, all his attention on Slade, ignorant of the closer danger. “Do it, or I’ll put a bullet in his head!”

If he did, there would be very little to stop the man from killing him next. Slade kept his gun where it was, aimed back in a stalemate.

“That would be inconvenient,” Slade said mildly. “Do you know who I am?”

The big man’s eyes narrowed. “Deathstroke,” he spat.

“So, you know what I do,” Slade surmised. “My contract is on Nightwing. Give him to me, and I’ll let you go with no hard feelings. Interfere as your friends did”—he indicated the dead and injured sailors with a toss of his head—“and I’ll deal with you the same.”

A sliver of doubt appeared in the man’s eyes, a hesitation that traveled down his limbs and eased up his white-knuckled grip on the gun. Dick shifted a hair away from it, a move his captor didn’t seem to notice.

“No. No!” The man shook his head. “You don’t know what he can do! Him and his freak of a demon! He can send her away like the witches of the north, and who knows what else?”

“Then I’m sure you’ll be glad to let me take him off your hands,” Slade replied. “Here’s how it is: you kill him, and I have to kill you, or I lose money. I can’t have someone else taking credit for my hit.”

He let that sit, the logic of it worming its way into the man’s mind and weakening his resolve—and, with it, his hold on the gun. With his free hand, he gripped Nightwing’s arm like he didn’t know whether to pull him closer or push him away. The German shepherd daemon growled, looking uncertainly between his human, the captured vigilante, and the mercenary waiting for someone to make a move.

The gun slipped a fraction further from Dick’s temple, and he gave Slade a small, daring half-smile, the only warning before he suddenly dropped. Startled, the man shouted, and his gun went off, the bullet flying wide, and then the gun was safely out of his hand as Dick grabbed his wrist and disarmed him. The German shepherd daemon leaped towards them, but Raji dived off the roof and at her head, raking across it with her talons. Yelping in pain, the daemon spun and snapped at her, just missing her feet as Raji flapped her wings to gain height.

“Xiao Mei,” Slade said and felt her shiver with anticipation.

Leaping from his shoulder, Xiao Mei landed on the deck and ran across to the German shepherd daemon. She cocked her head in confusion at the sight of the tiny stoat, a fraction of her size, and then growled as Raji swooped again, coming up on her back legs to try and catch the owl in her teeth. It was an opening, Xiao Mei seized it, closing in on the German shepherd’s soft underbelly with her claws and teeth. The dog tried to double over to bite at her, but Raji’s talons took a strip out of her back, and she fell over on her side with a whine, trying to escape the pain.

A scream of anger and agony came from her human, helpless where Nightwing had pushed him back against the windows of the cabin, pummeling the big man’s ribs with his fists. He was already losing, the injury to his daemon weakening him further and making him stagger. Dick finished it with a swift kick to his head—in Slade’s opinion, an unnecessarily showy move when a hard punch would have sufficed—dropping him to the surface of the deck.

Silence carried across the ship, broken only by the sound of wind and waves. A check of the sailors on the deck behind them showed no movement, all either dead or unconscious or smart enough to stay still. Xiao Mei returned to Slade’s side and proceeded to climb his suit to his shoulder without waiting to be picked up, busily grooming herself to get rid of the other daemon’s blood.

Over by the cabin, Raji shook the worst of the gore off her talons before lifting off to land gracefully on Dick’s outstretched arm. She shuffled sideways to his shoulder, a position that mirrored Xiao Mei as Slade walked over to join them.

“You couldn’t have helped?” Dick asked by way of greeting, nudging the big man with his foot.

“We did help,” Slade said, petting Xiao Mei’s fur. “Besides, I thought you could stand to blow off some steam.”

Dick sniffed, and Raji ruffled her feathers. “Yeah, seems like you let off plenty,” he said, turning his face towards the sailors laid out on the deck. “Did you have to—?”

“Yes,” Slade said irritably, tired to death of the same, old argument. “You asked for my help, and you gave me no information to work with. I did what was most expedient.” As a concession, he offered, “Some of them are alive.”

Leaning his head back against the window, Dick turned his face away, then straightened up again and sighed—accepting Slade’s argument, or at least shelving it for now.

“I need to find my escrima sticks,” Dick said after a minute. “Keep a lookout here, and try not to kill anyone else.”

At times like these, Slade had learned it was best to leave Dick alone to cool off. He kept busy by locating a pile of fishing nets and using them to restrain the sailors left alive, identifiable by their extant giant hornet daemons; those of the dead had since vanished into the ether. Privately, Slade thought the ones left didn’t look much better, crawling wingless over their humans and buzzing mournfully, unable to fly. One tried to sting Xiao Mei as Slade manhandled its human into a fishing net, but it was unbalanced without its wings and tipped over pathetically before it could get close. Getting its legs under it again, it skittered away into a pocket as the man it was attached to groaned in pain.

Given enough time, the hornets’ pincers could still potentially chew through the nets to freedom, and Slade grumbled beneath his breath at the stupidity of the risk. Left to his own devices, he’d put a bullet between the eyes of each sailor and never look back, but that would only propel Dick into a fight that Slade wasn’t in the fucking mood for. A nudge from Xiao Mei called his attention to her thoughts, namely that the giant hornets were too weak and injured to get through the nets before they returned to shore. Slade relented with a long exhale and scratched her head with his index finger, rising to his feet as Dick returned with his escrima sticks safe in the holster on his back.

“Can we go now?” Slade asked, crossing his arms.

“Not yet.” Dick stalked past him without further explanation and squatted down by the hatch Slade had almost gone through earlier. With a grunt of effort, he pulled the handle and lifted it, revealing the first few rungs of a ladder leaning down into darkness. “Come on.”

Shrugging, Slade walked over to the ladder and started climbing down after him. Raji flew past silently, and in a minute, they landed together on a lower deck. Just as Slade opened his mouth to ask what they were doing here, Dick pressed a button on the wall, and a panel below them slid away. A faint, fishy smell wafted out, making Slade wrinkle his nose, and then a chorus of voices rose over the sound of the engine. At first, Slade couldn’t parse the words, and then he realized they were names. Those voices were calling to each other, interspersed with sobbing and pleas for help: all young, and all very scared.

He looked to Dick, who was already moving to crouch at one side of the open hatch. Copying him, Slade took up the same position on the other side and peered down into the compartment below. As it came into focus, Xiao Mei hissed, and Raji flapped her wings.

To one side, a group of children sat trapped behind the crude, metal bars of a cage that looked like it had been welded into the structure of the fishing vessel. On the other, a few yards or so away, a newer cage contained what had to be the children’s daemons. It shone silver and glowed with an anbaric charge, and transform though they might, the daemons could not find a form large or small or strong or flexible enough to escape.

Against his cheek, Slade felt Xiao Mei shudder, and he remembered what the HIVE sailor had said, the words taking on a new meaning.

They’re in the fish hold.

“A Maystadt cage?” Slade asked, cold with revulsion.

Grimly, Dick nodded. “Ready to be a hero?” he asked.

Slade snorted and said, “After you.”

The children screamed when they dropped down into the fish hold, scrambling away from the bars of the cage. About two dozen of them stared back through the gloom, lit by a few dirty lights installed near the ceiling. Slade placed them roughly between nine and twelve—the older ones nearing the age where their daemons would settle.

“It’s alright!” Slade announced, holding his hands up. “We’re here to get you out!”

Next to him, Dick smiled wide and comforting. “The people that took you aren’t going to hurt you anymore,” he said. “We’re going to free you and your daemons and take you home, ok?”

No answer came, but some of the children edged closer to the bars, wary and curious. Xiao Mei made a friendly, chirping sound, and a few of the kids looked to her longingly. They missed their daemons, trapped just far enough away to make the separation painful, and Slade regretted not killing the other sailors left on the deck of the boat.

“See if you can break them out,” Dick said to him quietly. “I’m going to try and disable the Maystadt cage.”

Part of Slade wanted to insist they trade places; Nightwing was the hero, the one accustomed to saving and comforting lost children. But the welded bars of the children’s cage looked thick, and the lock formidable, and Slade was the one with enhanced, meta-human strength and better-suited weapons. He sighed and trudged over to the door.

One little girl blinked up at him, a smudge of dirt on her brown cheek but her hair done up neatly in braids. Plastic beads clinked in them as she moved her head to follow him. Slade curled his hands around one of the bars, finding it annoyingly solid and immovable, and paused to look down at the girl.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Laura,” she said. “My daemon’s Cornelius.”

“Nice to meet you, Laura,” Slade said. “I’m going to try and break this lock. Can you keep everyone away so they don’t get hurt?”

The few that didn’t back away preemptively went when Laura pulled them back. Slade took out his power lance and aimed it at the lock. With a final check to make sure none of the children were in the way, he fired.

A ripple of surprised exclamations came from the children, but Slade ignored them. The lock was half-melted, the edge of the blast hole glowing red. Avoiding it, Slade kicked just beneath it, destroying what was left of the lock as the door banged open.

“Wait!” Slade called as the children surged forward. “It’s still hot—you’ll burn yourselves!”

They might not have obeyed, but Slade heard a whir behind him like machinery powering down. He looked back to confirm what he already knew: Dick had turned the Maystadt cage off, and was now cracking it open.

Daemons burst out of it, almost all transforming into birds to cross the distance faster and return to their humans. Slade stood back and let them flow through the bars of the children’s cage, each barreling into a pair of outstretched arms. The daemons changed again on landing, taking the form of soft, small mammals, something warm to kiss and hold and comfort. In a second, the cage was full of rabbits and cats and a few stoats like Xiao Mei.

“I’d like to get them out of here and up on deck,” Dick said, coming up to stand at Slade’s shoulder. “After you clean up your mess.”

But he said it without rancor, and in the face of their victory and the celebrating children, Dick smiled like he just couldn’t help it. Slade let out a dry chuckle in response, shaking his head as he went over to the wall and the built-in rungs leading up.

*

Weighted-down corpses went easy over the side of the ship, splashing into the water and sinking down immediately. Xiao Mei found a hose, and Slade used it to wash the remaining blood and viscera off the deck, though a few red-stained patches remained. He could only hope Dick wouldn’t say anything about it. With Dick’s help, he got the five remaining sailors and the big man with the German shepherd into the fish hold and locked them in, the children huddling on the level above and shrinking away as their former captors got herded into the enclosure.

And then they brought the children out onto the upper deck like animals emerging from hibernation, brand-new and learning the world. In a few minutes, they were laughing and running about, the sun shining down on them and the wind in their hair, their daemons transforming into seabirds and dolphins that swam along the side of the ship.

Dick called for them to be careful, and Slade shook his head and went into the cabin. Xiao Mei crawled down his arm and onto the dashboard, looking out at the sea as Slade found the GPS and began navigating them back to the Blüdhaven docks.

The door opened a few minutes later, silent on its hinges but obvious in the rush of air and the sounds of wind and water and playing children. Slade turned, expecting to see Dick, and was mildly surprised to find Laura instead. Her daemon, Cornelius, perched in stoat shape on her shoulder, copying Xiao Mei in ermine white.

“Hi,” Laura said. “Can we stay in here with you?”

She could hardly tip over the railing and require rescue in the cabin, so Slade faced forward again and said, “As long as you stay out of the way and don’t distract me.”

“Ok,” Laura said blithely, clearly used to that sort of directive.

She climbed into one of the bolted-down chairs by the navigation panel and folded her hands in her lap. In this lighting, Slade could see her ruffled dress and shiny, black shoes; she looked like she’d been taken on her way to church.

For around the first thirty seconds, Laura kept her word and remained quiet. Then: “We wanted to thank you for saving us.”

“You’re welcome,” Slade said shortly.

“You never told us your name,” Laura pointed out in a venturing tone that wasn’t quite a question.

“It’s safer for you not to know,” Slade said.

In his periphery, Laura frowned. “Why?”

“Because I’m a dangerous man who does dangerous things,” Slade replied. “That’s made me enemies.”

“Oh,” Laura said quietly, and Slade thought that might be the end of it. Instead, she asked, “What happened to the other people with the big bee daemons? There used to be more of them.”

Telling her had an above average chance of making her cry, which in turn had an above average chance of pissing Dick off, but Slade had never coddled his own children when they were growing up. He was hardly about to coddle someone else’s.

“When I came onto the ship, they attacked and tried to kill me, so I killed them first,” Slade said, looking sidelong at Laura to see how she would take it.

“Really?” Laura asked, perking up along with her daemon, who had over the course of the conversation changed into a cardinal. “Can I see?”

That, Slade hadn’t been expecting. “What? No,” he said. “I threw the bodies overboard.”

“Aw man,” Laura said, slumping in disappointment.

From the dashboard, Xiao Mei caught Slade’s eye, and he quickly stifled his laugh into a cough. He was about to suggest Laura find some amusement outside with the other children when the door opened again, thankfully bringing Dick rather than another kid into the cabin.

“Hey—oh,” Dick said, stopping as he noticed Laura. “What are you doing in here?” he asked. “Are you ok?”

“Uh-huh. We were just talking,” Laura said. “Your friend won’t tell me his name, though.”

“It’s probably better if you don’t know it,” Dick told her, more kindly than Slade had.

Laura threw her arms up dramatically. “That’s what he said!” She looked between Dick and Slade, then gestured the former to come close. Once he had, she stage-whispered, “Do you know he killed people?”

“Dea—Why are you telling her that?” Dick demanded, catching himself at the last second.

“She asked what happened to the other sailors,” Slade replied easily. “And she’s hardly the worse for wear.”

In response, Dick shook his head and clicked his tongue. He bent down closer to Laura and put on his friendly face, the one he used to calm traumatized civilians and get them to cooperate with him saving their lives. It was one Slade had little use for, though in these circumstances, he could acknowledge its efficacy.

“Your name is Laura, right?” Dick asked. “And this is Cornelius?”

A nod, and Laura said, “Yes, Mr. Nightwing.”

“Just Nightwing is fine. And this is X-Wing,” he said, introducing Raji in the shifting fabric that partially obscured her form. “Laura, we’re trying to figure out why the sailors took you and the other kids. If there’s anything you can tell us, anything they might have said or that you might have overheard, that would be a big help.” He smiled encouragingly. “I know this might be hard for you to talk about, though, and it’s fine if you can’t.”

Her eyes went distant, her expression morphing into something serious. “They didn’t say much, but one of the men got mad and yelled at me when he was putting me in the cage. He was mad ‘cause I bit him,” Laura said by way of explanation. “And he told me that after they changed my daemon, I wouldn’t fight anymore.”

“Sorry,” Dick said. “After they changed your daemon?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make sense, ‘cause Cornelius changes all the time, and even if they like, hurt me and forced him to change into something, he could always change back.” On her shoulder, Cornelius chirped, and Laura looked to Nightwing. “Right?”

The smile Dick flashed came through painfully fake to Slade’s eye, but it seemed to appease the girl. “Of course,” he said. “I think you’re right. He was probably just mad.”

Stepping away from her, Dick stood and turned to Slade, and they exchanged a long, meaningful look. The white-out lenses of the domino mask obscured Dick’s eyes, but the tight corners of his mouth suggested they were troubled.

“Laura?” Dick said, pasting on his brightly false smile again. “My…friend and I need to talk in private for a minute. Can you go play with the other kids?”

“Ok,” Laura said.

She slipped off the chair and went to the door, pausing to squint back at them curiously like she’d prefer to stay, but knew better than to push her luck. Then, she reached for the door handle and opened it.

“Make sure to stay away from the railing!” Dick called after her.

“I will!” Laura called back, and then the door swung shut and left them alone.

Dick leaned against the chair Laura had just vacated, and Raji fluttered off his shoulder and landed on the dashboard next to Xiao Mei. The furrow in Dick’s forehead looked pensive, as did his folded arms. Slade continued steering the ship southward, waiting for him to speak first.

“Change their daemons,” Dick said again, feeling over the words. “What do you think that means? Some sort of intercision?”

“No, I don’t think so. The members of the HIVE I’ve fought still responded to pain and threats to their daemons. They didn’t act severed,” Slade said. He turned the wheel, considering the question as he looked out at the waves. “This is something new.”

“I always thought it was strange,” Dick said. “The HIVE and their daemons. I used to wonder how they could all have the same one.”

As had Slade, but then the HIVE was defeated with its remaining members captured by government agents, and Dick had his team of Titans to lead and then Blüdhaven to manage and a thousand other things to worry about. The mystery of the HIVE and their daemons had naturally fallen down the priority list. Slade thought about telling the kid not to beat himself up over what he couldn’t change, but decided against it.

“They must have some way of forcing daemons to take shape,” Slade said. “If I had to guess…” He trailed off, the horror of it becoming evident. “I would say that children’s daemons haven’t settled yet, which would make them easier to change.”

“God,” Dick said quietly, his voice raw.

On the dashboard, Raji cooed a note of distress, and Xiao Mei commiserated with a soft chirp. Slade felt it, too, the sickening, familiar feeling. Just when he started thinking nothing else could shock him, that he had seen every nasty, putrid thing the world had to offer, someone always had to go and do something worse and prove him wrong. Intercision was bad enough, splitting a human from their daemon and leaving them hollow and muted and barely more than an automaton. Exerting control through someone’s daemon, though…

He’d never thought of that.

And if Slade thought about it much more, he was going to go down to the fish hold and slaughter everyone there.

“Worry about it later,” Slade told Dick, told himself. “Let’s get the kids home first.”

“Yeah.” Dick swallowed visibly, but latched onto the distraction. “What’s the plan?”

Slade mused for a minute, then said, “We’ll call the Coast Guard and leave before they show up. I don’t like to tangle with the authorities if I can avoid it.”

“Me neither. Especially not in Blüdhaven,” Dick said ruefully.

The police there, as Slade understood it, had been far less welcoming to vigilantes than the Gotham police of Dick’s teenage years. He nodded once, glad to be in agreement, and the cabin fell into silence.

Normally, that would have been far from noteworthy; Slade had shared many a silence with both Nightwing and Dick Grayson. Today, though, it felt different, the air between them thick and charged. Through it came a new sensation, the whisper of a soft and comforting touch, and Slade became aware of their daemons. Raji combed her beak through the fur on Xiao Mei’s face, grooming away the last of the blood.

Glancing to the side, Slade caught the slightest tinge of color rising to Dick’s cheeks and immediately and resolutely faced front again. Xiao Mei had started brushing through Raji’s feathers with her small paws, almost suffocatingly intimate.

Earlier that day, Dick’s daemon had touched him.

Neither one of them asked their daemons to stop.

Something was rising in Slade, a mounting pressure waiting to burst. “Grayson,” he said, and heard Dick gasp. It broke the rule, the one where Slade always called him Nightwing when he was in the suit, even like this, when there was no one else around to hear.

Dick took a tentative step towards him, and then another, and then Slade reached out and pulled him the rest of the way in. Peeling the fabric of his mask away from his mouth, Slade closed the last bit of distance and kissed him hard. A small noise escaped Dick’s throat as he kissed him back, and—

The raucous sound of cat-calling surrounded them.

Whipping his head up, Slade stared out at the gaggle of children, their faces pressed to the glass. Several of them made mocking kissy-faces, and Dick turned his head into Slade’s shoulder and shook with silent laughter.

“Get out of here!” Slade shouted, the volume of his voice causing them to shriek in delight and scatter.

He sighed gustily in aggravation, but Dick was still laughing against him, and Slade couldn’t find it in himself to stay mad.

*

Sunset lit Dick’s bedroom in shades of orange and gold. It wasn’t half as nice as Slade’s closest safehouse, even though the kid could definitely afford better and was only living like this to go against his billionaire adopted father, which was one of many certainties Slade knew better than to voice aloud. A perch at the bedside provided a place for Raji to rest, as she was now with her eyes closed, and a platform beside it held a nest that fit Xiao Mei perfectly.

The nest had been there since the first time Slade had stayed the night, shortly after Dick had moved in. He’d never thought to question it.

Rolling over in bed, Slade kissed Dick’s bare shoulder. Dick made a sleepy, contented noise and craned his neck back for a kiss, then shifted around to face him. Opening his eyes, Dick smiled and kissed him again.

“Are you hungry?” Slade asked softly. “I can order something.”

“No, I’m ok for now,” Dick told him. He stretched long, his arms and legs out, and then relaxed back against the bed. “Just been a long day.”

That was an understatement. Slade pushed a lock of Dick’s hair off of his forehead and asked, “Since when have you been able to send your daemon away like that?”

“Well…since I died,” Dick said, a touch awkwardly. “You remember. You were there.”

Of course. “Fucking Luthor,” Slade swore.

“There was a bomb strapped to me, and the only way to stop it was to stop my heart,” Dick said. “It was smart. If the bomb had gone off, I would’ve died anyway, along with a lot of other people. Luthor’s way allowed him to revive me, so all in all, it could have been worse,” he said pragmatically, and a lot more charitably than Slade thought Luthor deserved. “But ever since then, yeah. Raji and I can separate.”

“It still hurt you,” Slade hazarded. “When she left you today.”

Dick’s mouth dipped in a frown. “It’s not perfect. Not like…” He bit his lip and continued. “Bruce sought out a witch when he was young and somehow convinced her to train him. He can be hundreds of miles away from his daemon, and it doesn’t hurt him. At least, not in any way that I can see. After I died, Raji and I just realized she could go a little farther from me, and then a little farther than that. We’ve never tried as far as she went today.”

With the life Dick led, Slade knew better than to wish they never would again. He would settle for wishing that next time, it would feel a little easier, and that they would find each other at the end of it. Cupping Dick’s cheek in his hand, he kissed him again.

“It worked,” Slade said.

“Yeah,” Dick replied with all the unspoken gravity of the only alternative; if it hadn’t, if Raji had collapsed over the water, they’d both be dead. “I always thought…” He searched Slade’s face, then looked down. “Something similar must have happened to you.”

In retrospect, Slade should have anticipated the question. Yet as time had gone by and Dick hadn’t asked and hadn’t asked, Slade had started to assume he knew. From Joey or Rose, or even Adeline. He’d thought the lack of inquiry came from politeness, or discomfort, or both.

Apparently it had—though due to the normal discretion surrounding another person’s daemon, not anything specific to Slade.

“No, I was—” Slade broke off, continued. “When the army gave me the serum, I was raving, and then comatose. They thought I would die, so they decided to do something drastic.” He took a breath and said, “They performed an intercision.”

Dick recoiled, his eyes wide. “But you—you’re not—”

“Severed? No. Not anymore,” Slade said. “The serum activated a latent meta-gene, and with it, my healing factor. It healed the connection between us.”

“Oh,” Dick said. “Oh.” He blinked tears away. “That’s a miracle. I’ve never heard of a severed bond healing that like outside of magic or divine intervention.”

Which Slade knew; on a technical level, he’d been very lucky. He hadn’t felt it at the time, though, too hurt to care. After, he’d been too bitter.

“I’m sure some would claim it was,” Slade said. “Either way,” he went on briskly, pushing past it, “we’re not severed. I can feel Xiao Mei as much as I could before.”

“Still, that must’ve been—” Dick broke off. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Slade said. “We’re fine now.”

Mostly, Slade remembered the pain. The screaming, burning agony of the cut, followed by that awful hollowness that was the absence of his demon. It was the worst he’d ever felt, even after Adeline shot out his right eye and ended their marriage because she’d failed to end his life, even after Joey and his daemon split from Slade and Xiao Mei in traumatic resurrection. For a long time after the operation, he hadn’t been aware of anything. The first thing he’d felt was Xiao Mei, reaching out to him again, a single thread that became a rope that fused back into their old bond. Slade had woken up with his daemon clutched to his chest, crying like a child, too wrecked to feel ashamed.

The doctors assumed that the intercision had been a failure, that there had been some mistake. Slade had never bothered to correct them.

After, Slade never knew if the serum or the intercision did it, and he didn’t much care. When he left the facility, though, both his blonde hair and Xiao Mei’s stoat-brown fur had lost their color, bleached to a matching, ermine white.

Behind him, Xiao Mei chirped and hopped down from her nest to the mattress, climbing over Slade’s body to nestle against his chest. The memory always made them both crave closeness. Raji hooted from perch in quiet sympathy.

“I felt it when Raji touched you,” Dick whispered.

He was watching Xiao Mei with a sort of dazed fascination, and Slade didn’t say anything, couldn’t. Slowly, very slowly, Dick extended his finger out in her direction. Slade could barely breathe as he watched him, as his daemon turned towards it. Xiao Mei sniffed Dick’s finger, and then rubbed her face against it like Raji had done to Slade with her beak.

“She’s so soft,” Dick said, laughing in astonishment. “Slade, I—”

“I know, kid,” Slade murmured. “I know.”

There were a myriad of ways this could go wrong, an endless list of possibilities that all ended with Slade taking Dick’s fragile heart in his hand and breaking it. For once, though, Slade didn’t let himself think of any of them. He held Dick close and kissed him, and the responding curve of a smile pressed back against his mouth.

***