Lightbreaker

forgotten. The natural cycle will transform them into something new. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: the cycle repeats over and again. I was cut off from myself, having been transformed that night into something different than I had ever expected to be. A part of me was taken, and wasn't it right that I got that piece back?

Kat was the link. She was the cosmological demiurge who had created me. She had ripped open the world, and shown me the darkness that lay behind the stars. I was going to be caught in this unfinished loop until I found her, haunted by what could have been until I closed the cycle and moved on. Take it back. End the exile. Complete your self.

The Chorus, always happy to remind me in the simplest language possible.

We all deserve the chance for something new, don't we? An opportunity to save ourselves. Sometimes we have to bury the past-bury our old selves-in order to be reborn.

Le roi est mort. Vive le roi. Such is the cyclical nature of all things. Such is the way the wheel turns. Kat had killed me, and I had to return the favor.

Two becoming one. I would remake my own world, once I was whole again.

IX

Back-tracking to Kat died as an option when the barn blew up, obliterating any viable trail. The only remaining option was to find Doug again. While dodging Pender and his surrogate eyes.

Doug would have run back to his real body. Without me on his trail, there was no reason not to return to the flesh he knew. If I was right, then Doug wanted access to his group's inner circle, and completing his rite of separation was the sort of act that came with a promotion. He had to make it back in order to show he was ready for advancement.

The magus at the farmhouse-the white-haired man-was one of Doug's masters, one of the elevated adepts of that group. He had possessed the gunman in the barn just as easily as I could put my hand in a sock. He knew the secrets that Doug so desperately sought.

Your attention is unwelcome. He had known who I was-maybe not my name, but he knew of me-and that meant someone had told him. Best guess was Doug. Just as soon as he had been grounded in his meat again. Who else knew? Had Doug told everyone in the group? Had he told Kat?

Would she know it was me? Doug might have plucked some of my identity from when I was binding him. He certainly could offer a physical description. But was it enough to warn her?

I had to find her before she made a decision about that knowledge, before she decided to run.

After getting off the ferry, Nicols made one call while we were waiting in the traffic. By the time we crawled one block along the waterfront-a deluge of vehicles from Pioneer Square was snarling all lanes along the water-he had Doug's essentials.

Traffic thinned out at Pier 70, and Nicols pointed at one of the tall buildings visible on the slope above the bay. 'Washburne Tower,' he said. 'Upscale Belltown condominiums. Doug lives in number 1712. One bedroom condo.'

'Drive past' I said. 'Let's see who is watching.'

'Pender, probably. Or someone who will report to him if we show.'

'That won't be a problem.'

'No violence.'

I smiled at Nicols, a feral grin tainted by the black root of the Chorus. 'Of course not.'

Nicols merged into traffic flowing up the hill, and turned left onto Second Avenue at the top of the rise. The Washburne Tower was part of the urban modernization of Seattle's Belltown district-towering residential condominiums replacing the squat brownstones from a half-century ago. The building was a mass of dark angles and a thousand glass eyes staring sightlessly into the night. Sporadic squares of light suggested residents were either still awake or slept with their lights on, afraid of being suspended in darkness.

Nicols drove by the building. The ground floor was retail: a coffee shop, a wine bar, a dry cleaner, and a small deli barely big enough for its three coolers of wine and beer. The shops were all closed, lit by neon and recessed security lighting. A quartet of silver-edged doors sat beyond a tiny courtyard of heavily manicured shrubbery. A wide staircase led down to the street. The residential entrance.

Nicols angled his chin toward a cream-colored sedan parked across the street from the courtyard. Pender's eyes. A pale man with a thin face had his head back against the seat rest. The only thing he was keeping an eye on was the inside of his eyelids.

We circled the block, and Nicols parked on the opposite side of the building. A service alley cut into the geometric symmetry of the building, a narrow slit leading back to a loading area. We crossed the street like phantoms, and melted into the wan shadows of the alley. Sodium lights lit up a short loading dock and wire gate that led into the building's underground parking. Overhead, a pair of security cameras. A trio of green dumpsters and two recycling bins huddled tightly together like they were homeless seeking warmth in numbers, their rubber tops still wet from the recent rain. A card reader rose out of the ground next to the security gate, and a single unmarked door stood between the gate and the short tongue of the loading dock.

Nicols nodded toward the door, drawing my attention to the single keyed lock. 'Can you magick it?' he asked.

I nodded, and the Chorus flowed into my palm. Hand against the lock, I felt them glide into the tight fit of the keyhole. I worked the muscles at the base of my fingers, undulating my palm and the Chorus went rigid, filling the empty space around the tumblers. A twist of my wrist to the right and the lock clicked open. We walked in like we owned the place, and Nicols shut the door gently behind us.

Nobody seemed to care. The dimly lit hallway was quiet; the only sound, other than our breathing, was the hum of distant HVAC. Nicols brushed past me, heading for the lobby. We found another unmarked door that put us at the back of the grand foyer, behind the bank of elevators. An open car gaped invitingly, and we slipped onboard like a pair of soft-shoed dancers.

The ride to the seventeenth floor was smooth, and both of us watched the news scrawl on the tiny TV monitor mounted on the inner wall of the elevator cage. Flooding in New Orleans, Hollywood starlet in rehab, Congressional back-biting: plus ca change.

I did the lock trick on the 1712's pair, and we slipped inside Doug's condo to check out his view and the 800 square feet that came with it. Seventeen-twelve was on the northern side of the building, affording us a view of Queen Anne and the Seattle Center. Not much in the way of water or mountain, which meant this condo had been slightly cheaper than the western- or eastern-facing units. Maybe. These days, it was hard to say if that sort of aesthetic detail depressed real estate pricing anymore.

The architecture adhered to the modern minimalist trend still hot in the celebrity gossip magazines-off-white walls with white cabinetry and steel appliances. Personality-bare living waiting for its owner to imprint it. Doug, however, appeared to have very little aptitude for interior design. His only contribution to the decor was a pair of generic Indonesian landscape prints on the living room walls, a flat screen TV hung on the wall between the prints, a couple of glazed vases in the insert over the gas fireplace, and a wildflower calendar in the kitchen. The furniture was Swedish Geometric, straight from the nearest IKEA warehouse, and the contents of the kitchen drawers and cupboards had been bought on the same shopping trip.

Nicols looked in the refrigerator, counted the bottles of spring water and glanced in the crisper to see if anything was still fresh. Two bottles of champagne lay on the top rack. A lonely box of baking soda sat in the back.

Half of the top rack of the dishwasher was filled with teacups, and the bottom rack had two small plates and a handful of silverware. The sink was empty, and the garbage can underneath contained a profusion of Styrofoam and paper to-go cartons. Nicols poked at a few of the containers. 'Thai,' he said. 'A lot of Thai.'

'So our boy isn't big on hanging out at home,' I said. An old rotary phone-molded plastic that qualified more as a piece of shit from Goodwill than a retro artifact from The Sharper Image catalog-was plugged into the phone jack beneath the wall calendar. He didn't seem to have an answering machine. 'It's hooked up to the internal switchboard,' Nicols explained, seeing my confusion. 'Like every other kid these days, he's completely dependent on