Lightbreaker

I took it. 'Markham.'

He smiled. 'Yeah, with a first name like yours, I'd stick with just the family name too.'

'It's a perfectly good given name,' I said. 'I even let my friends use it.'

'Let's not get ahead of ourselves.' He sucked in his cheeks, highlighting the shape of his skull. There were dark circles under his eyes, which had been bright green once but the job-no, something else-had dulled the color. Now, though, they twitched and moved like he was tracking shadows and ghosts. Like he was Seeing. 'I want to ask you some questions.'

'Didn't Pender tell you?'

'Pender. .' He made a face like he had just swallowed a bony piece of fish. 'The lieutenant is. . efficient. He knows the right people, and he knows how to get them to move quickly.' His cigarette found his mouth, and his words slipped out around the obstruction. 'I'm on administrative leave-with pay-for two weeks. My therapist has already been instructed to double my sessions, and she's already offered to write me a prescription for anti- depressants.

'Patrolman Murphy-the kid you jumped-is off the streets. Got himself a promotion.'

'Really?'

'No one is talking about what happened to his fingers. Including Murphy.' Nicols removed his cigarette, but didn't look at me. 'Way I remember it, you did more than crush his gun, but you wouldn't know it looking at the kid.

'He's smart. This is his lucky break, regardless of what really happened. He's not going to rock the boat. He's going to just forget it, along with everyone else, just like Pender wants. The lieutenant has. .' He weighed how much more he wanted to say, how much more he wanted to confide in me. An uncomfortable position for a man like him. He grimaced, deciding I probably already knew more than he did, even though I was the outsider. 'Murphy's been hooked. He doesn't realize it yet, does he? Pender isn't one to waste any opportunity that can be leveraged. I've never had any reason to run into the guy-I knew his name, his reputation for being a hard-ass-but it didn't take him long to twist everything to. .'

'His advantage,' I finished.

'Yeah.'

'It's a carefully cultivated skill,' I said.

I had broken bones in Murphy's hand. The patrolman had, whether Pender allowed him to remember it or not, accepted a gift from a Watcher by letting Pender heal his hand-that was most certainly what had been done to sanitize the scene. Such gifts were never free-these were the sorts of favors that would be called due in the receiver's lifetime. Having been exposed to magick, the young officer would be primed to deal with it again. Such agents were useful. But he didn't know what awaited him in this new world, and I doubted Pender planned on telling him. Murphy had been asked to take on a little faith.

'You're apparently too old to be useful,' I said. Or too obstinate. 'You get the 'let's medicate the lunatic' option.'

'Yeah, lucky me.'

'Are you seeing things, John?' I asked. Not Detective. John. Two men sharing things they have in common, sharing secrets. Building a bond.

Some of the techniques the Watchers taught their young were worth remembering. Hell, Nicols probably knew a few of them himself. Probably had been shown them by his mentor when he came on the force. Thus was ever the way secret knowledge passed from generation to generation.

He looked at me, and then his gaze skipped away as if I were too shiny to look at for very long. 'At first,' he said, 'it was just a weird glitter, like being outside on a sunny day without sunglasses. Everything seemed shinier than it should be. But it's getting worse. Now people are starting to glow. From their eyes.'

The windows to the soul. Trite, but true: the eyes were the most light-sensitive route to the soul. You could hide beneath the flesh, but it was more difficult to hood the eyes. 'What else?' I asked. Could he see the flow?

He gestured toward the front of the boat. 'I see a big stripe in the water. It runs right beneath the boat. Like we're following it.'

Doug's possession had been brutal enough that Nicols' vision had been torn wide open, a huge rift in the protective layer over his psyche. He was Seeing too much and he couldn't turn it off. 'It's called a ley line. Spelled L-E-Y. There are natural ones-geomantic lines formed by the magnetic fields of the planet-and there are the ones we make by traveling over the same route again and again.'

'So I'm seeing some sort of energy pattern?'

'More of a grid. A framework of flow. We're all part of it. Our first roads followed the natural lines. As we became more forceful with our own desires, we strayed from the leys, and started creating our own tracks. Over time, the constant passage of human energy along a new path causes a shift in the Earth's geomantic fields. The ley moves to correspond to the new route. You can't escape entropy, Detective. All systems move to a state of least resistance.'

'And I'm seeing all of this because of what happened on the boat.'

'What do you think happened on the boat?'

He looked at me, squinting as the Chorus lit up the narrow choker about my throat, as I let him See the coiled energy in me. He needed an anchor, some place he could ground himself so he could start to understand his altered sight, and I showed him mine-the strands of hair twisted and woven into a tight braid permanently bound to my skin. 'Who's Doug?' he asked. 'And why do I know him?'

'Because you two were sharing the same space for a little while. Doug was the guy who assaulted your body and tried to push out your spirit.'

'My spirit?'

'Your soul.'

He laughed, a guttural cough that trailed off as he put his cigarette in his mouth. 'My soul,' he said as he exhaled, smoke dribbling from his mouth. 'Are you shitting me?'

'I have better things to do, Detective.' Formal now. Cold. The door to my secrets closed. Make him reach for it, make him try to pry it open again. Make him realize he wants to know what secrets I have to offer.

He chewed on the end of his cigarette awhile, struggling to decide what he could believe, what he thought possible, and what would help him to understand the streams of light he was Seeing. I let him work to his own conclusion, to his own understanding. I never forgot my first night-how my sight had been ablaze with light and color, everything had been richer and fuller than it had any right to be. How the woods had been so alive. And yet, beneath all that glitter, how dark the belly of the world.

'This is what happens when a soul is attacked.' Give him a glimpse now. A little flash of what he wanted. 'You become more aware of your surroundings; you become sensitive to the energies of the world.'

'Everyone can see like this?'

'Sure. But not everyone wants to. Nor do they need to.'

'If I try hard enough, it'll go away? Sort of like selective blindness?'

' 'It' won't go anywhere. You'll just stop Seeing the lines. Just because you don't understand or believe in something doesn't negate its existence. Your brain records a great deal of sensory data which you-the part you think of as 'yourself'-don't bother processing. You've decided-consciously or unconsciously-that you don't need to See. Therefore, you don't.'

'If it doesn't go away?'

I shrugged. Choices: some we make for ourselves, some are made for us; what defines us is how we react. Opportunities or obstacles. Ten years ago, I could have tried to blind myself; I could have ignored the cold hole in my chest, and maybe it would have gone away. Maybe. More likely, I would have just stopped feeling it, but that didn't mean it wasn't still there. That it wouldn't have killed me.

'What if I fight it?'

'What is there to fight? You going to dig out your eyes with a spoon?'

He snorted smoke out of his nose. 'This is such bullshit.'

'Sure it is, which is why you came crying to me.'

His eyes narrowed and, for an instant, I saw the bull that had terrorized the offensive line and, later, was used to a similar effect on criminals. 'I should throw your ass back into that holding room.'