Lightbreaker

his cell phone. This is for the intercom in the lobby.' He played with the twisted cord. 'The fifty-cent solution.'

The vases were molded assembly-line artifacts meant to look hand-made but the 'Made in Taiwan' sticker on the bottom ruined that mood. Against the wall opposite the TV, there was a table between two tall bookcases. I did a quick scan of the books in both cases as Nicols went through the two-drawer file cabinet shoved under the desk. Crowley, Mathers, Plotinus' Enneads, an abridged version of Frazer's Golden Bough, a recent translation of TheCorpus Hermeticum, Eliade's Shamanism, and TheNag Hammadi caught my eye. The rest of the 'esoteric' titles were the sort of pabulum sold by the case to the local New Age shops. The other case was filled with thrillers, New York Times bestsellers, and Oprah's Book Club selections that made one look well-read, and a scattered handful on fly fishing.

'Investment banker,' Nicols announced as he found a stash of financial statements. 'Looks like he works for a brokerage downtown.' He flipped through the pages in a file folder. 'Five years now.' He glanced at the bookcases. 'Anything?'

I shook my head. 'Nothing you couldn't buy at Borders. It's mostly stuff the big publishers flooded the market with a few years ago when everyone was talking about New Age Magick, trying to address Pre- and Post-Millennial fears. That sort of bullshit.' I swept my hands to include both cases. 'Little of it is really useful. It's the sort of collection you'd find in the room of a fourteen-year-old girl who thinks being a wiccan pagan and a lesbian are the same thing. Doug's well beyond the 'let's make a love potion!' crap most of these books offer.'

'What about the useful stuff?'

'It's the wrong sort of details. Eliade's Shamanism is a good magico-religious overview of the old techniques, but the rituals Doug and the others are doing aren't part of the archaic practices. The couple of Crowley books are better, but they're still filled with distractions and practices which have no bearing on what we saw in the barn.

'Admittedly, these skills aren't going to be publicly available-most of the practical manuscripts were hand- copied, passed from magus to magus. They aren't the sort of thing that you're going to leave haphazardly on a shelf. The last time I had the opportunity to examine a real alchemical text was a year ago in Singapore. A fourteenth-century copy of Speculum Alchemiae. The buyer paid more than five hundred thousand dollars for it.'

'So if he's really experimenting in radical stuff, why is there so much junk on his shelf?' Nicols asked.

'Exactly. He seems to lead a pretty Spartan existence. Why waste the space on populist crap written for dilettantes?'

Nicols put the folder back in the file cabinet. 'He's never here,' he sighed. 'The DMV records put him at twenty-eight years old. According to his pay stubs, he's making six figures a year. But there's no sign that he's even paying attention to anything. There's not a shred of personality in this place. Might as well hang a 'Vacancy' sign over the door.'

'I figured you'd appreciate the decor.'

'Why is that?'

'It's not much different than your place.'

Nicols sucked at a tooth as he looked around again as if to see the room from a different perspective. 'No,' he said with some care. 'He's never lost anything. This is just a shell that hasn't been filled.'

An involuntary shiver ran up my spine. A shell. A husk emptied of light and life, one that didn't recognize its lack of humanity. It just kept breathing and functioning, waiting for something to make it feel less empty. Something to fill it.

'You okay?' Nicols asked, watching me.

'Fine,' I replied. 'Goose on my grave. That's all.'

'Is that something we should worry about?'

'No. Just an old memory.'

'Sneaking up on you?'

'Something like that,' I muttered, walking toward the bedroom.

A flicker of energy caught my attention, and I stopped in the hallway. A sparkle-glitter on glass-coming from the bathroom. I set the Chorus in a defensive array, and pushed open the half-closed door with one finger. Light flickered from the bathroom mirror, a dancing knot of magick like a captive butterfly under glass.

I felt Nicols at my back. 'What is it?'

'Not sure.'

The magickal form in the glass didn't have an edge to it, nor was there any sort of signature attached to the flickering charge. It was just a small bundle of energy transfixed beneath the glass, free to twist and shine in its reflective prison. It was a static spell, an incantation caught inside the mirror. Without a regular infusion of energy, it would fade in a few days.

I walked toward the mirror, hand outstretched. Nicols sucked in his breath noisily behind me. The light spun faster as my finger, kissed with the focused fire of the Chorus, approached the glass. When I touched the glass, the mirror cracked. Nicols made even more noise, and I heard the safety-snap on his holster pop open.

'It's all right.' I stepped back to the hallway. On the end of my finger, stuck as if it were glued, was an oversized playing card. The back of the deck was stamped with a multicolored Rose Cross, a rainbow pattern of petals arranged at the center. I plucked the card free, and turned it over so Nicols could see its face. Through a veil of geometric patterns, a soldier in green armor struggled with his golden chariot. Tiny cherubs, lashed to the ornate frame with wire and ribbon, were too slight, too ineffectual, to pull the heavy wagon.

'What is it?'

'It's a tarot card. From a deck designed by Aleister Crowley,' I said. 'It's the Prince of Swords.'

He glanced at the broken mirror, trying to process what he had seen: a spark of light drawn through a piece of glass, transformed into a playing card by my touch. How were such things possible?

'It's a message,' I said, ignoring the question on his face. 'Left for me.'

'From Doug?'

'No. From Pender.'

He scratched the side of his nose. 'Okay, I'm not up on the secret codes. Nor-' His eyes strayed to the broken mirror again. '-the ways you guys leave notes for each other.'

'It means Pender knows who I am.'

As if the words were a trigger, darkness striped across the face of the card. The corners curled inward, and I let go of the card. It didn't fall; it just vanished into a cloud of dirty vapor. Poof. Leaving nothing but a tiny rain of ash.

X

We would have been happy to find any hint of Doug's extracurricular hobbies: printed emails left carelessly in the trash, a desk calendar with circled dates and cryptic references, notes scribbled in the margins of his esoterica, secret society-style robes and objects of office hidden in a valise shoved in the back of the closet. What we found instead was the not-so-subtle suspicion that the place had been cleaned. The condo had been sanitized by Pender so as to remove any occult impropriety. Now, it was just the empty apartment of an energetic investment banker who spent most of his time chasing clients, spending money, and reading pop magic books. Nothing more.

After the dismal return on breaking the law at Doug's, Nicols insisted on getting something to eat. We repaired to the nearest 24-hour restaurant-Minnie's on the corner of First and Denny. Caffeine and starch. Post- midnight brain food.

I was having trouble sitting still as Nicols looked over the menu. My lower intestine was busy knotting itself over the fact that the hunt for Kat was going to have to be abandoned. My small window of opportunity had closed. The back trail was gone, and not only was Pender waiting for me, he was already removing what scant clues I had to go on. Doug's group had gone to ground. I didn't have the time to look under every rock.

No way to them. No way to her.

Seattle wasn't safe anymore. The psychic card in Doug's condo meant Pender had made contact with Paris.