Lightbreaker

over the pitched shriek of the protection ward, frantically constructing a magickal defense. The shrieking sound rattled my back molars as a firestorm began to coalesce, the floor starting to steam.

The explosion would kill us both. Didn't she know what it was, what her spell was doing? She couldn't draw enough energy to protect herself from the ward's explosion.

The Chorus giggled, a chuckle of black humor magnified by the roaring echo of the erupting darkness. Fire, they giggled, she's not trying to protect herself.

My fingers closed on her throat. I slammed us both against the wall and she groaned from the impact. 'Goddess, no,' she gasped, her hands fighting against the pressure of my weight. Her spell fled, dying in the collision, and the warning glow of the ward died as well. Back into darkness. Back into the wood.

My face, so close to hers, was filled with her smell: the memory of charred lilacs, the verdant flush coming off her skin now, tinged with an acrid bite of fear. Her hair was in my mouth and against my cheeks as she struggled beneath my hand.

I pressed the length of my body against her, pinning her flush to the wall. She turned her head and our cheeks met, her wet face anointing me. 'Please,' she whispered, her lips straining for my ear. 'Please.'

Settle it, the Chorus hissed, their voices issuing from the angry smoke in my lungs. Kill the bitch, they implored, writhing with need. She's asking for it.

Another echo intruded through the heat haze of the Chorus. A stained memory of Nicols. Standing in the parking lot beside Piotr's trailer. 'Guy's going to Walla Walla for ten to fifteen. You think that's going to fix the hole in his heart?'

My mouth rubbed against her jaw, my lips twitching against the shiver of pain racing through her skin. I felt it in my groin and stomach as well. Her heart, hammering in her rib cage, was a seductive rhythm. Just a handbreadth away. I could reach in and touch it. I didn't even need magick. I could do it the old- fashioned way: by ripping her flesh, by cracking the cage of bone about her precious organ. So close.

'Please,' she whispered again. Her mouth was so dry the word was barely a husk of its letters. 'I don't understand. Who are you?'

The question broke against the black wall of the Qliphotic infection. A phantom voice in my head-my own traumatized innocence-echoed the question. Who? The Chorus screamed, the interfering noise of knives against knives, attempting to drown the question. Drown the tiny creature trying to dig itself out of the muck in my soul.

The Eight of Swords. The eight blades of interference. My roots, sunk deep in the darkness of Malkuth-the physical world, the realm of the weak flesh. The Chorus had been goading me for years. Their need had perverted my desire. Had led me astray. Take back what was stolen from you, they cried, hurt her in the way she hurt you. Dominate her; break her Will.

Kat's stomach pressed against my hip, her shirt shaking against my naked skin like a banner blowing in the wind. The scent of her skin and her soul burned into my cortex-just as it had been seared there so long ago. Lilacs. A field of smoldering lilac bushes. Was this my desire?

I squeezed her throat, the Chorus burning my hands with an urgency of violence. They darted through my skin, tasting her flesh, licking at her fear. She struggled under my hand, twisting in my grip. Her face turned toward me, and I could see the Chorus reflected in her eyes. I could see how she saw me. 'Markham?'

Her hand found my face, her fingers questing for my lips. Touching me as if she couldn't believe I was real. 'After all this time.' Her voice was barely a whisper, such little air as could be forced past my hand. 'Why?'

She didn't know. The Chorus was in her, invading her mind, caressing her spark with their eager tongues. She couldn't hide from me; I read her pure. She didn't know.

My memory was false. She had never touched me in the way I had remembered. She had never broken my spirit. Her mind was bereft of the history in my head.

What world were they trying to force on me?

The Chorus reacted angrily to my hesitation, flailing against my doubt. Their eruption was a volcanic attempt to take control. Just a little tighter. Just a little more pressure. These scintilla of captive souls fought to drive me to the final resolution of their desires, struggled to make me close my hand. Complete this cycle of fiction.

Was I just a creature of their illicit design?

I let go, much like Nicols had dropped the gun instead of fighting for control. I just let go. As I retreated, the loss of her touch-of her presence-sent the souls in my head into full revolt. I fell, unable to stand, and my legs and arms spasmed uncontrollably. My fingers, unable to choke Kat, tried for my own throat instead.

My lungs were clogged with wet soot. Deep in my belly, the orphic egg-laid those years ago in a moment of panic-cracked, and its tainted alchemy spilled out. It was a poison meant to melt the ravaged splinters of my spirit, meant to melt me down so that I could be reformed as a Qliphotic child.

If Kat was innocent, then I was not.

The tear in my soul was my transgression, a symptom of my failure. My fear, festering for years. The Qliphoth, the demons of the dark side of the Tree, made their children through despair and panic. All roads lead through the Abyss, and it is the fearful who are torn off the path. Those who think they are not worthy fulfill that expectation.

The Star, inverted, was me. I had caused this grief. I laid the seeds of what was exploding now. I was the cause. . I was a fallen star.

But. . still a star. Still a spark of the Divine Spirit, however gone astray. Even though I was nothing but a vessel filled with betrayal and deceit. . even though I was nothing. . no thing. .

I rolled onto my side and threw up. From my tailbone on up, flexing everything in one direction, I threw it all out of me in one enormous eructive heave. They wanted violence, blood and gore for their pleasure. Instead, I gave them a violent denial. Nihil non est. My throat and mouth strained to expel the vileness in my gut, an explosive decompression of a decade's worth of entrenched darkness. I vomited a second time and then a third, the wave of cancer lessening to a bitter trickle. By the fourth and fifth spasm, I had nothing left, but my body continued to heave anyway, finding some tortured revelry in this act of expurgation.

The Qliphoth extrusion hissed in the lightless room, a simmering puddle of viscous acid. It wanted to return to me, to swim inside the warm sanctuary of my flesh and to bathe in the hot nourishment of my blood. It wanted the delicious sweat of my fear.

But it couldn't have me. Not anymore. I was done with it, done with all that it wanted.

Still, its desire remained. If I was going to reject its tainted kiss, it would find someone else. The blood on my lips told me as much, the violent desire of the Qliphoth still lingering. It existed to consume. That was its only nature. It had festered in my gut and fueled my flesh's basal desires for that sole reason. These are my roots, sunk deep within the material world of Malkuth.

I raised my fist, lashed with lightning-the walls going white with shock, screaming and keening with near eruptive force-and brought my hand down in the center of the midnight puddle. I struck its core, touched it where it wanted me to touch Kat. I grabbed the vile heart of the Qliphotic essence-revenge, in its core-and blasted it with light.

The room hazed with steam, crackling with burning ozone. For an instant, I feared I had gone too far and had triggered the wards but, as the fractured droplets of the Qliphotic essence absorbed and contained my spell, the ward exhaled, losing light and sound. In a few heartbeats, we were in darkness again.

But it wasn't as black as it had been.

'Have you hated me that long?' she asked finally, her voice raw and tentative. 'Ever since. .?'

I wiped my chin and spat, clearing my mouth of the nasty taste. Clearing out the last vestiges of that bilious venom. 'Part of me,' I said. 'Yeah, a part of me.'

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I never meant for anything to happen. I never meant for. .'

This? I thought. Never meant for me to become what I am?