There were almost three hundred Golden Arches in New York. 

That was three hundred barely passable eating establishments dishing out rock-hard, ass-nuggets scraped off the back of a fryer by some permanently exhausted individual. In retrospect, it was a terrible idea to try to scour every questionable grease bucket looking for Ender, especially if he had decided to move to New Jersey or something after I killed him the last time.

Instead, I have Felix copy down all the nearest locations on a notepad while I drive us around since Ender mentioned living and working nearby when he drove down to meet me at the motel. It narrowed everything down a tiny bit, but with thirty-five days slowly ticking away until the next apocalypse, I wondered if the effort was worth it. Ender had Jace to help him die, and if this had been going on for a while, maybe it was better to let them sort it out.

"You know what déjà vu is, right?" Felix asks me and doesn't look up from his notepad as he scribbles in a bright pink glitter gel pen. 

"Seriously? I wasn't born under a rock. Everyone knows what déjà vu is." I look over, and I think I see him drawing us holding hands, but I can't be sure when he moves his shoulder a little bit forward to block my view. 

"I figured you would know, but do you really know? It's a French term that means "already seen," coined in the 1800s by Émile Boirac, a philosopher and one of the first Death Bringers in history." Felix informs me, and he closes up his notebook with the list of Mcdonald's scribbled down inside and maybe some suspicious doodles on top of that. "When a Harbinger dies and the world remains intact, there's a skip in time." He explains, "Like a record catching on the needle and needing to be reset. You know what song's already playing and how it's supposed to go. You just never make it to the end. That's déjà vu."

I study the road, but I'm hanging on to every word he says. 

"How did you become a Death Bringer?" I ask him. "I'm going to take a wild guess and say you're either really good at what you do or you fucked your way to the top. Or both."

"Oh, I'm happily married," Felix replies happily. "So I really don't need to do that."

Bones spits out his drink in the back seat. 

"You're married?" I ask him, and I'm sure my face has ten different types of expressions on it. "What the fuck? I thought you were, like, nineteen or some crap like that. You mean to tell me you have a wife or a husband out there somewhere?"

"Somewhere," Felix replies mysteriously, and that seems to be the end of the conversation because he doesn't mention a name or anything that would give me an idea of who had actually married this pink creep sitting in the seat beside me. It was fully possible that he didn't trust me not to use the information to my advantage, and he was keeping it under wraps on purpose, and I got where he was coming from because I didn't trust him, either.

"The first Mcdonald's shouldn't be more than ten minutes from us." Felix pipes up after we sit in silence for a little while. "Maybe we'll get lucky and find Ender there."

"You still didn't tell me how you got hired as a Death Bringer," I point out when he leans forward to type in the coordinates on his phone and the GPS.

"Yeah, homie," Bones says from the backseat. "At least tell us who we're riding with."

"Oh." Felix reaches up to push some of his cotton-candy pink hair back. "You have to meet certain criteria before they choose you. In my case, I was sixteen when they offered me the position."

I started to sneer because imagining this pink doofus signing up to murder people was just mind-boggling to me. Felix was scary, sure, but without his powers, he couldn't intimidate the socks off a mouse, even if he tried.

"I was supposed to meet up with a guy at this really nice lake," He explains. "I went to school—it was sophomore year—then I worked a few hours at the grocery store afterwards. He texted me on my shift, asking him to meet him, so I got off early." 

The smugness starts to melt off my face right then and there.

"I waited around a couple of minutes, but he didn't show up, so I figured he either got busy or maybe he just forgot about me," Felix explains wistfully. "Instead, a couple of jocks and some girls set the whole thing up, and they ended up ambushing me. The guy was never real; they made it up to lure me there."

"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to," I tell him, my voice strained. 

I felt so bad for him, even though I knew he had killed people and what he planned to do to Ender when he finally met him.

"They tied me up and beat me bloody with a couple of baseball bats, and then rolled me into the lake, hoping that I would drown if I wasn't already dead." Felix tells me, "But I got a second chance while I was down there. See, up until then, not a single person had ever been kind to me. I was always afraid to come out because I knew people were going to react badly to it when I did, and as it turns out, I was right."

"Holy fucking shit," Bones murmurs from the backseat.

"I'm sorry, Felix," I tell him quietly, "That never should have happened to you."

"My employer is a good man, Hector," Felix smiles softly, but it doesn't reach his eyes. "He saw the potential in me. He believed in me when no one else could, and it's because of him that I am who I am today. That's why I need to find Ender Calloway, so I can complete my job once and for all and prove to my boss that he didn't make a mistake when he hired me. I'm going to be the best Death Bringer that he's ever hired."

I swallow hard and just nod my head a little.

Because now that I knew the whole story, I knew Felix would do anything to find Ender, and honestly, that was a little terrifying given the level of power he was hiding behind that adorable face. 

"Make a left turn at the light," Felix instructs me, "Let's go find Ender and make this right once and for all."