Book 4: Nick of Time (Signed Paperback Edition)

Available on all retailers April 14th, 2025. Signed paperbacks will be ordered ahead, signed by the author and shipped by April 7th, 2025.

Have you ever tried scaling a wall while hoisting two duffel bags full of cash?

I hadn’t. Not until tonight.

I had not come prepared.

Sweating and grumpy, I stood on a cardboard box, which rested on a plastic crate, which was perched atop the lid of a stinking dumpster. I stretched up, steadied myself, and reached out with my right hand.

My metal fingertips dug into the concrete lip of the high wall, scraping out grooves as they caught hold.

The annoying part of my new prosthetic was that I didn’t have feeling in my alloy fingers. That, and metal detectors. Airport security had become my nemesis.

But the upside? Sweet Jesus, the upside was something else. Nothing could hurt them, for starters. I once deflected a bullet with my knuckles. My grip was rock solid, powerful enough to make pretzels out of dumbbells—and I had done so on several occasions. It was barely an effort to suspend myself by a single pinky.

That kind of unexpected power carries a certain reassuring weight. Even when I wasn’t carrying my sidearm, I would never be without a weapon. As a bounty hunter who earns his living catching bail jumpers of all stripes, from mundane deadbeats to dangerous offworld fugitives, I took comfort in that fact.

Surely, a high wall couldn’t keep me out.

I shifted my weight, all hundred and ninety pounds plus two gym bags of cash—onto my cyborg hand. My leg wobbled on the crate. I felt a strain at my elbow and shoulder. Not painful, mind you, but not comfortable either. As I readjusted my grip, my left hand—a mere flesh-and-bone thing—reached up. The pile of boxes under my feet shifted.

Concrete crumbled beneath my too-powerful fingertips. Rock dust sprayed into my face, and I found myself falling through the air.

My ribcage slammed into the dumpster’s edge, knocking the air from my lungs. A duffle bag strap snapped tight across my neck, choking off my airflow.

“Ngh,” I managed to say before twisting sideways and bringing one arm up to give my windpipe some relief. This motion earned me another tumble. I landed on my side on the alley floor, my cheek resting in a rancid puddle.

After a moment, my lungs refilled with a gasp, and I was able to breathe again.

“Ow,” I said, the picture of eloquence.

A chuckle echoed across the alley, piling insult upon injury.

I scowled into the night as I lumbered up, brushing myself off and panting.

“I know that laugh,” I said, wiping one cheek on the sleeve of my denim jacket. “How long have you been watching?”

“Long enough,” a gravelly voice responded. Samael the Daacro winged gracefully through the air to land on the dumpster’s edge. He looked me in the eye, smirked and said, “I’m so glad I waited. That was quite the comedy of errors.”

Samael was an offworlder, an extraterrestrial, one of many who lived here in Austin. Recently, events had brought the existence of alien life into mainstream conversation, but most people still mistook Samael for a strange-looking grackle. Or, perched on the edge of a rooftop, a gargoyle. Most didn’t know any better.

For better or for worse, I did.

“I live to entertain,” I said. Embarrassed, I retrieved the two duffel bags and set them on top of the dumpster. “Now, get lost. I’ve got business with the Gatekeeper.”

“Not in there, you don’t,” he grated out. The creature’s gravelly voice matched his rough skin.

I froze. The Gatekeeper was a local alien capo, his monopoly on offworlder transit and trade sanctioned by the Federation. The Gatekeeper also happened to be Samael’s boss.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“They moved the door.”

I groaned and leaned against the alley wall to collect myself.

The Gatekeeper had been a hard body hopper to get ahold of. That was why I was scaling the wall to sneak into the Museum of the Weird’s courtyard at 4 AM. The access point to his secret alien nightclub, Harbor, was located beneath our feet.

At least, it used to be.

I tugged at a soreness in my neck as the diminutive creature regarded me with two bulging, oversized eyes.

“Are you planning on telling me where the door is now?” I asked. “Or are we gonna stare at each other for the rest of the night?”

“That depends.”

I frowned. I just wanted this to be over with. My debt to the Gatekeeper had been hanging over my head like a shameful reminder of my worst impulses. This piece of unfinished business went back years, originally as a business loan to expand Gunn Bounties and then as a way to cover the cost of my mother’s funeral (and inadvertently fund my father’s binge drinking habit).

I needed to get the Gatekeeper out of my life for good so I could put all that behind me.

“Depends on what?” I asked.

“On whether you’ve activated your Peacekeeper mods or not.”

If he told me there was cause for concern, I’d be a fool not to listen. Samael and I weren’t friends, but he was reliable. I’d saved his life once. In exchange, he’d risked the Gatekeeper’s wrath to give me key information. It led to a missing offworlder for a client of mine.

At the same time, it pissed me right off. I’d brought enough money to settle my debt to the Gatekeeper, but I’d made zero progress on this other piece of unfinished business.

“Now, why’d you have to go and bring that up?” I asked.

“Because if you have activated the augments, my instructions are to keep you as far away from the Gatekeeper as possible.”

That gave me pause. It meant I actually posed a threat to the Gatekeeper. “I haven’t,” I said after a moment. “Honestly, I don’t even know how.”

And not for lack of trying. Anna, Vinny, and I had worked hard to find a way to undo the changes Dyna had made to my body. We’d come up empty-handed.

However it worked, those chemical agents still pumped through my veins like a Trojan horse: dangerous, dormant and likely to kill—myself or others.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it, bounty hunter.” The Daacro produced a small, pen-shaped device from beneath a flap in his wings and scanned me with it. Twin lights at either end throbbed in a strobing pattern as he drew it up and down my body.

When it stopped blinking, Samael stowed the device and stretched his wings. “You’re clear,” he said. “Follow me.”

Looked like I passed the test. I hefted my bags and hurried after him as he flapped away.