Zane's Redemption

Zane shrugged. “Dog’s gotta go when I’m at work.” Then he walked toward his friend and clasped his arm. “Good to see you.”

“Same. Nice digs.” Quinn motioned his head to encompass the entire house. “Sketchy neighborhood.”

“Amaury assures me it’s a great investment. Besides, the nightlife is plentiful.”

Quinn’s face split into a huge smile. “And by nightlife I guess you mean juicy necks at your disposal?”

“If you were honest with yourself, my old friend, you’d admit that the bottled stuff just doesn’t cut it.”

Yeah, his friends and colleagues at Scanguards might drink blood that a shell company posing as a medical facility acquired, then bottled and shipped to vampires nationwide. But Zane didn’t touch the stuff.

“There’s nothing better than warm blood straight from a vein. But you go right ahead and keep lying to yourself.” Zane stepped into the living room and let himself fall onto the couch.

“What’s gotten your dander up?” Quinn followed and plopped down next to him.

Trying to deflect from what really bothered him, Zane decided to steer the conversation onto a more tangible subject. One that was much more clear cut, yet just as dangerous. “Someone tried to kill me yesterday.”

“Shit!” Quinn turned sideways. “Who was it?”

Z waddled into the room and tilted his head, looking at both of them.

Zane twisted his mouth. “An assassin.”

He made an inviting hand movement toward Z, and the dog jumped and settled in his lap.

“I killed his father last year. He wanted to avenge him by killing me.”

Quinn nodded. “Did he get away?”

Zane scoffed. “Do I look like I'd let an assassin get away?”

“Hey, I’m not trying to insult you.”

Zane grunted. He almost regretted having told Quinn about his past—or at least part of it—in a weak moment over five decades earlier. It was the only reason Quinn didn’t judge him for the murders he’d committed. Because those murders had been executions. And it allowed him to speak to at least one person about the things he’d done. On occasion, it had been a relief.

Zane pulled out the pin and the key from his jeans pocket and tossed both at Quinn who caught them effortlessly. “I found these on him.”

Quinn perused the items. “The key looks like it belongs to a locker.”

Zane nodded. “I came up with the same. How about the pin? Have you ever seen this symbol before?”

Quinn shook his head and twisted the item in his hand. “Hmm. Odd, those two parts,” he commented. “That wave in the middle could be a river, but it could also indicate that something is broken in half.”

He held the pin closer to his eyes. “The one symbol on the top of it looks like a ‘u’ without the down stroke but with a handle to the right instead. And the symbol below is its mirror image.” He looked up. “Could it signify some mathematical equation?”

Zane reached for the pin, taking it from Quinn’s hands to give it another look. He’d stared at it for hours after he’d killed Brandt’s son, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

“I’ve never seen a mathematical symbol like this.”

“Maybe the broken line in between means the two pieces belong together,” Quinn suggested.

Zane refocused his eyes and imagined the line gone. As the two pieces moved closer to each other, they formed a symbol he was only too familiar with.

“It’s a broken Swastika.”

“You sound surprised. Given who the man was you killed last year, you shouldn’t be.”

Zane shook his head. “I never found anything like this on Brandt or the others. So why on his son? And why break the Swastika in half? Why not admit to what they are?”

“Maybe the broken line means something else.”

Unease skidded over Zane’s back and crept up to his neck. “It’s too obvious. I don’t like it. Almost as if the old guard is still there, but now their children have taken over and put their own stamp on things.”

“To do what? The Nazis will never rise again. No government on this planet will allow it.”

“What if they don’t look like Nazis? What if nobody realizes that they're one and the same, just dressed up differently?”

Quinn took a deep breath. “I think you’re reading too much into this. The guy wanted to avenge the death of his father, that’s all. Anybody would have done the same. It doesn’t mean there’s a grand conspiracy behind all this.”