Lightbreaker

Taser, after all. I suppose you get shot with that sort of thing every day.'

'Not every day. I'm sorry about that. You were right. It was a trap. But not one of Pender's design.'

'Yeah,' he nodded. 'I figured that out when he arrived. He was convinced you had orchestrated that mess: shot me, taken the girl, and made a run for the border.'

'What did you tell him?'

'Nothing. He was eager to have me corroborate his story.' He shrugged. 'So I did.' He leaned forward. 'I met your friend.'

'Who?'

'Antoine.'

He was here. My insight into the Weave had been correct. There was a larger game afoot, and we were being moved about in accordance with a coordinated plan. 'So Pender's act was for his benefit.'

'Yeah, that's what I figured. He was trying too hard to sell his story.'

'Did Antoine buy it?'

Nicols settled back in the seat, exhaling noisily. 'He's. . ah, 'inscrutable' is a good word. He's not fucking there when you try to look at him. And forget trying to read his body language. It's like trying to read patterns in running water. He knew I could See and the fact that I couldn't read him at all may have amused him. Or maybe not. I just don't know.'

'Antoine was always good at hiding himself.'

'He's more than good.' Nicols shook his head. 'Pender wanted to hold me for questioning. 'Observation' was the term he used. But Antoine-Jesus, he barely said anything and Pender was still ready to shit himself-wasn't going to have any of that. He told Pender to leave me alone.'

I smiled. Nicely done. My abduction had been meant to be a distraction, but Antoine had simply brushed the misdirection aside. He left Nicols in play, knowing the detective would look for me.

'What about Kat?' he asked. 'Did you find her?'

I looked at the fire, at the cloud of black smoke rising from the ruined warehouse, before I nodded.

The waitress wandered over with the coffee pot. She poured Nicols a cup, and while she refilled mine, he talked her out of the ketchup bottle in the pocket of her apron. He smothered his omelet and I looked away, my stomach churning. Too much like blood.

'Where is she?' He hacked off the end of his omelet, a clean slice done with an executioner's precision. Like a sword through a limb.

'I don't know.' I hadn't found her body: not in the container, not in the interrogation room, not anywhere else in the building. Kat was gone, and a part of my heart told me-over and over-that she was already dead. She had been broken and the invasive darkness would devour her. Even if I had been able to find her immediately, how was I going to save her? I hadn't been able to save my own soul from a tear more imagined than real. What was I going to do for someone who was actually missing part of their soul? And now, three days on, how much could possibly be left? How much of Kat was left, and how much was turned into something else.

A Qliphotic echo looped behind those questions, a lingering remnant of the poison. It still sought to influence my Will, to lure me into that immolation of vengeance. That Mahapralaya moment. Find those who killed her. Do to them what you did to the nine. They all deserved to die. They all conspired to take her from you. Every one of them. Break their souls.

I stabbed my plate so hard the fork stuck into the porcelain. 'I don't know.' I looked out the window, and my exhalation left ice on the glass. Part of me repeated what the voices were saying; part still liked that empty and cold worldview.

Cancers linger. They never die quickly. Their hearts can be extracted, but their roots are persistent and they don't die overnight. The rot stops, but the decay can still be infectious. Days, weeks, months-years, even-would have to pass before it was truly gone.

'What happened?' Nicols prodded me, a gentle nudge to shake me loose from this cycle of endless recrimination. A simple question, seemingly innocent, but his eyes were hard and he didn't blink.

'I didn't hurt her, John. I found her and. . everything. . it was all wound around a lie. Some story I told myself so often that. . she wasn't responsible, John. She was just. . a symbol. Just something that reminded me of what I had lost.'

He looked away, and not because of the nakedness of my confession, but because of his own reaction to my words. His own secret. What was it? I grabbed onto this question as a way to escape my own thoughts, and I pieced together the clues he had left me: his empty house, and the clothes still in the closet; his reference to on- going therapy sessions-started before the incident on the ferry; and his mannerisms, deliberate and yet hesitant-a corpus of non-verbal communication that had become a dead language now that the only person who had understood his gestures and affections was no longer here.

Sarah. He had referred to her in the past tense.

'I'm sorry, John,' I said. 'My issues aren't the same. Not at all.'

His jaw paused. 'Yeah,' he said, putting his fork down. 'They aren't.'

A burst of cheap music trilled from the pouch of his sweatshirt. Nicols dug out his cell phone, looked at the display, and his eyebrows pulled together. He flipped it open and raised it tentatively to his ear. 'Nicols.'

The conversation was one-sided; his contribution was several noncommittal grunts. I tried to read something in his expression, some indication of what he was hearing. 'Yes, Ma'am,' he said. He shut the phone and a reaction to what he had just heard crystallized in his eyes: fear.

'That was my captain. I've been recalled to active duty. I'm supposed to report to a suburb called Ravensdale immediately.'

'What's going on?'

He shook his head. 'She wouldn't tell me. But she did say that the call is going out to everyone. We're all being sent, every cop the city can spare. Something has happened.'

Bernard. The theurgic mirror.

In my heart, there was a spurt of fire. Break their souls.

On the Thomas Guide map, Ravensdale was a tiny community off Kent-Kangley Road, tucked away on the eastern side of the ridge from the larger suburb of Kent. What the map failed to show was how the cone of Mt. Rainier dominated the horizon this far from the urban center of Seattle, a mottled white and gray peak towering over the surrounding bumps of the Cascade Range. The aftermath of Tuesday's storm had fled the valley, leaving only a thin layer of clouds gliding across the pale sky.

A piebald blanket of pine trees blanketed the foothills of the mountains. The verdant growth of trees was broken in irregular intervals by construction. Persistent urban encroachment. The escalation of property values in Seattle proper continued to push people further and further away. As we drove out Maple Valley Highway, Nicols pointed out the creeping edge of the frontier: first Newcastle and Kent, then Maple Valley and Covington, now Ravensdale.

When we reached the police roadblock, we queued up behind three other cars. King County Sheriff's deputies gathered around each vehicle as it rolled up to their four-car barricade. I rolled down the window as we crept forward, listening to the wind and the sounds from the forest. Both were hushed, as if afraid to be the ones to tell me what had happened here.

One of the three cars in the queue was turned away. Two guys-radiating annoyance and anger-glared at us as they rolled past. As if we were somehow responsible for denying them access. Nicols' casual wave didn't improve their mood. 'Erickson and Stenhill. From the Times,' he explained. 'I've never seen them in anything but a foul mood.'

When it was our turn, Nicols offered his shield and ID. The young man at his window seemed too young to have been on the force long-first or second year, probably; the Chorus could taste him. He read the details on Nicols' ID carefully, comparing image to face, and then he leaned down further and looked over at me. 'Who's this?'