"You have got to be fucking kidding me," snarled Parker, attempting, nonetheless, to ignore the vibrating mobile. Three in the goddamn morning. "I'm going to kill the rat bastard," Parker groused, grudgingly retrieving the object and angrily pushing her index finger across its screen. "What do you want, Jarod?"

"Uh, I'm sorry?" The caller, a woman, spoke timidly, hesitantly. "Miss Parker?"

"What do you want," demanded Parker.

"I'm a nurse at St. Andrews in Dover. We retrieved your number from a cell phone that a- um, a Mr. Lyle had on him."

"On him?" Parker repeated, irritably.

"He's misplaced his car, keys, wallet, and clothes. This number is listed as an emergency contact; it's the only number we could find in the phone."

"The phone that Lyle claims doesn't belong to him?"

"That's correct yes, and he's convinced that you're the only one who can protect him."

Parker revolved her eyes, stifled a yawn. "Protect him from what?"

"From Satan."

Satan?

Mm.

Hell of an upgrade, Jarod.

"Don't you people have a psych ward for these kinds of things?" Parker inquired testily.

"Recent funding issues-"

"I don't care," Parker interrupted brusquely.

"If you're unable to remove your brother from the premises he'll likely spend the evening in jail."

Police involvement.

Fabulous.

____________________

Parker's battered and partially bald—and rather traumatized—brother leapt at her car.

"Oh, thank God," Lyle shrieked, sliding and stumbling, and falling into the passenger seat, and then frantically clutching the hospital gown he wore. "Lock the doors. Hurry!" Lyle shouted, his words all strangely muffled.

If he drops food in my car I'll kill him.

"Loosen your sphincter, Bobby," Parker instructed sternly. "Jarod doesn't take life," she added, and met Lyle's gaze. And gasped. Audibly.

Had she received a different telephone call, one from a coroner, had been asked to identify her brother's remains, she would have been entirely incapable.

"You were saying," Lyle said, making quite an effort to speak with a mouth filled with gauze. "He dislocated both of my shoulders, electrocuted me, fractured my good thumb-"

"Your only thumb," Parker corrected incisively.

"--and my face, evidently," Lyle continued as if he hadn't been interrupted, and observed his sister's face contort as she strained to understand him. "He broke three of my teeth. I can barely see. He could have blinded me. My entire body hurts, I'm going to have to shave my entire head now, and he knew I would. I have to take antibiotics. When my face heals I'll need to see an oral surgeon, and that's if I don't die before my face can heal."

"Die?" Parker asked. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm not supposed to be alone for the next thirty-six hours; the swelling might interfere with my breathing; if it does I have to come back. I don't have anyone to care for me. I don't know where my car is. You say Jarod doesn't take life, but I could still die. I could stop breathing, develop an infection-"

"You're not going to die," Parker fairly screamed, exasperated.

"He's not done yet. He's going to come back and finish me."

Parker's face twisted in confusion. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"He promised he would. You- Parker, you're the only person who can protect me from him."

"Fine," Parker shouted, infuriated. "You can stay with me."

"Knew I could count on you, Sis."

"Don't ever call me that," Parker snarled.

"Fine, fine. You won't regret this," vowed Lyle, and observed Parker's scowl.

"I already regret it," hissed Parker, acutely cognizant that Jarod would view the babysitting stint, regardless of how temporary, as a robust Parker sibling alliance, that placating Lyle would invite the Pretender's continued ire and interference in her life.

I might as well send Frankenrat an invitation now.

Jarod, unperturbed by the absence of Parker's hastily composed missive cordially inviting him to harass her, predictably materialized in Parker's bedroom precisely at midnight.

"Hello, Jarod," Parker drawled glacially, dropping her fingers from blouse buttons grudgingly and silently. The disgust in her eyes, however, was damn near deafening; she had no intention of pretending that she hadn't been mere seconds from shedding her office attire and climbing into bed naked or that Jarod's presence in her home wasn't an imposition. "Or do you prefer to be addressed as Satan now?"

"I'd prefer to hear the truth," answered Jarod irritably, "but you Parkers seem to have some difficulty with honesty."

"And your solution is to beat it out of us?"

"One of you knows something. If Lyle isn't lying," Jarod explained softly in a voice that was equal measures deceptive tranquility and profound menace, "you are."

"And what? You put him in the hospital and now you're here to do the same to me?"

"Oh, no," Jarod sang darkly, advancing. Unabashed and with a conspiratorial wink he confessed, "I'm not exactly enthusiastic about pesky law enforcement involvement either."

Jarod observed Parker's face intently, anticipating her eyes widening in comprehension, perhaps a fleeting expression of perturbation.

Parker hastily and accurately apprehended the potential magnitude of Jarod's disclosure, whether conveyed deliberately or by mistake; she, however, thoroughly concealed her tumult from him. Parker refused to contemplate the extent of Jarod's voyeurism, rejected distractions. 

"Or," continued Jarod abruptly, "hospitals. Pain, after all, is pain regardless of severity. I'm quite capable of tidily, immaculately even, inflicting injury," he added, elevating a single eyebrow. "Obvious physical trauma and evidence can be easily avoided."

"You wanted to make a mess of Lyle," Parker accused tartly.

"Of course not," Jarod argued, wounded. "I wanted the truth, and I intend to have it. Don't worry: if you tell me where Sydney is nothing will happen to you."

"Do I look worried to you?"

"No, you don't look worried. Yet. You do, however, look exhausted, unarmed, smaller than me. Now," he continued gently, "I know what you're thinking."

"Doubtful," injected Parker, smugly.

"You're thinking that you've taken down men twice my size. I'm aware that you have, and aware, too, that those men all have the combined intelligence of a rock. They don't know you like I do."

"Make no mistake, Jarod, you know only what I want you to know, and that's all you've ever known, or will ever know, about me."

"I know you're not retreating, and I believe that's a wise decision."

"I don't run," returned Parker, fiercely, her voice low, tight.

"No, because you don't want this to escalate."

"I'm not afraid of you, Jarod," laughed Parker, "or of an escalation."

"Either you're lying or you're not as intelligent as I once believed you were."

"Mm brilliant deduction, Sherlock. I'm not as intelligent as you. No one is. Did that slip your mind while you were breaking faces and cases wide open?"

"Clever," lauded Jarod, addressing Parker by her name, the one she'd whispered to him when they children. "You want me to believe that you're not going to fight," Jarod said, and immediately shifted his weight to the left to avoid Parker's knee—and subsequent wounded testicles—and, simultaneously, grasped her wrists, anticipating each move before she made it. Jarod believed, erroneously, that Parker's weapon of opportunity was a vase, but only because he was unaware of the letter opener concealed beneath a book, "but I know you much too well to ever believe that."

"Let go of me," Parker ordered.

"That's not how this works," cooed Jarod.

"This isn't a line that you want to cross," cautioned Parker.

"No, it isn't," Jarod promptly agreed. "Tell me the truth, and I won't have to cross any line."

"Have to," repeated Parker with some incredulity, twisting her wrists in his grasp, attempting, again, with similarly futile results, to thrust her knee into his groin. "The way you had to fracture Lyle's face and glue a phone to his ear?"

"My point seemed rather obvious," Jarod explained. "He wasn't listening to me, and now you aren't listening to me."

"No, you aren't listening," Parker shouted. "Had you listened you wouldn't have deemed it necessary to terrorize Lyle, and you wouldn't be here now attempting to intimidate me."

"One of you has to be lying."

Parker laughed. "Has to? So, you're going to continue this endless loop of threats and violence, and return to Lyle if I don't tell you what you want to hear, alternate depositing my sadistic sibling and I at an emergency room until one of us dies? This is a you problem, Jarod."

"Hmm now you look worried," Jarod announced triumphantly.

"Thanks for finally noticing, mad genius. I am worried--- about Sydney. I've sorta gotten used to having the old guy around, and right now no one else is looking for him except Broots and me. So go ahead and do what you've gotta do, Jarod," she added with a shrug of indifference, "but do it quickly, because time is something Sydney probably doesn't have. And then leave, and don't come back."

Jarod's face crumpled, his hands dropped at his sides. "Oh, God," he cried. "If you don't know where Sydney is-"

"No," interrupted Parker, hotly, shoving Jarod with both hands. "No, no, no!" Parker screamed at Jarod. Hastily, and with an expression of horror, Parker withdrew her palms from Jarod's chest, and clumsily recoiled, stumbled away from him.

She murmured an obscenity, drew a breath, thrust a finger at him, commanded indignantly, "You keep your shit together or-"

Parker frowned, yelped when Jarod dropped leadenly to the floor with an agonized grunt-- revealing a third party, gleefully brandishing an ebony fire iron.

"I got him," Lyle cheered. "Yes. Ooh," he groaned in pain. "I think I opened a stitch."

"What part of bed rest don't you understand, Lyle?" Parker hissed, grasping her temples in evident exasperation and hastily kneeling at Jarod's side. "Brilliant. He's bleeding."

"Consider it appropriate comeuppance," answered Lyle simply. "He- he threatened you, had his hands on you. Someone has to hold Jarod accountable, Sis."

"Couldn't you have done that after we found Sydney and anywhere except my home?"

Lyle shrugged, murmured indifferently, "I'll get the handcuffs."

"Lovely," Parker groused, "now I have to babysit two sociopaths."