Lightbreaker

'He's with me,' Nicols said.

'I need to log him,' the deputy replied.

Two of them spread out on my side of the car, their hands firmly on their pistol butts. The Chorus heard their heartbeats, and showed me silver adrenaline spikes running across their shoulders.

My hands shook as the spectral ghosts moved in my spine. They were so eager, and I realized how unhinged I still was from the expulsion of the poison and the subsequent fight in the Arena. My control was marginal, my own desire for violence too close to the surface. I was too ready to listen to them. Too ready to burn.

'Name's Markham,' Nicols said, unaware of my mental struggle. He carefully spelled my last name for the cop. 'Special attache to SPD from back east. He's trained for this sort of thing.'

A flutter of pale fabric moved in the shadow of the trees along the road. The fourth deputy-the one who remained near their cars-shouted, pointing out the movement. Struggling to pull their guns, the pair on my side spun around. They missed the convulsive shudder that ran through my body as I let the Chorus out, as I let them touch the approaching figure.

An old man scrambled out of the woods, scuttling on all fours like a rabid squirrel. Dressed in flannel pajama bottoms and a t-shirt so old it had turned gray, he was a strange apparition wildly out of place in the context of the woods. Gnarled and distorted, his face was a melted wax mold. His eyes were gone, black holes in his pinched face and his tongue was a shriveled stick in his mouth. Dark motes drifted from his sagging mouth, a haze of ash.

Before the deputies could decide to fire, the old man scrabbled onto the road, and rammed my passenger- side door with his head. His hands clawed for the open window.

I grabbed his head, evading the snapping trap of his mouth, and the Chorus, wreathing my body like a phantasmal film of silver smoke, collapsed into the point of contact between my flesh and the man's dead skin. With an infernal roar like an industrial boiler lighting, the old man's body ignited. Light into darkness, a sacrament that was anathema to the debasement violating the old man. Qliphotic. Soul dead. A piece of flash paper, he vanished into a greasy smear of smoke, and in a second, there was nothing left but a tiny stain of soot on the road.

Nicols retrieved his badge and ID from the astonished deputy. 'Like I said, a professional.' He eased the car forward and gently rolled us through the narrow gap between the police cars. As we picked up speed beyond the barricade, I looked back. The one who had spotted the old man first was talking into his radio while the others stared, dumbfounded, at the smear on the road.

'Drive faster,' I told Nicols. 'He's calling us in. He's got my name.'

'What the hell was that?' Nicols' calm facade cracked.

I noticed what was strewn across the back seat of the car. The blanket covering most of it had slipped down. Two file boxes filled with papers and books, and it looked like more books on the floor. Unlike the collection on Doug's shelves, this assortment was a better primer. Nicols had been busy.

'Qliphotic zombie,' I explained. 'When the soul is gone, all that remains is a hunger. They're drawn to bright lights. Vacuums fill.'

He nodded. My examination of his library hadn't gone unnoticed. 'Yeah,' he said, jerking his head at the books. 'It all started with a vacuum. Ain Soph collapses into Ain. I got that far in one of the Kabbalah books back there. But where did this zombie come from?'

'Ravensdale.' I heard Bernard's voice in my head. We have a much grander plan in mind. 'Yeah,' I said, answering his unasked question. 'There's going to be more of them.' The Chorus quailed at my imagination, sending a line of fear running down my spine. 'He's taken them all,' I croaked. 'Every soul in Ravensdale.'

As I said it, as I voiced the terrible enormity of what might have happened, I realized why the old man had charged the car. Wrapped with energy stolen from the nine at the warehouse, I was the brightest light in the valley. A psychic magnet, a lodestone for every empty shell within several miles, and I was heading for ground zero.

XXII

Nicols drove past the single shopping complex on the edge of Ravensdale. Swarming the parking lot were off- and on-duty officers from SPD, in addition to King County deputies, policemen from Kent, Auburn, Bellevue, and other local communities. They were like an unorganized hive, a massive interagency effort that hadn't yet settled on its command structure. All the little workers with no work to do. Nicols passed the confusion-it wasn't a nest we were interested in kicking-and angled down the right-hand split of the road just beyond the swarming police presence. A half-block later we hit a T-intersection.

'Which way?' Nicols asked. The view in either direction offered no hint.

I glanced down at the Thomas Guide page in my lap and realized the road we were on was one side of a triangle-three roads that outlined a section of scrub land. 'There,' I said, looking over my left shoulder. 'That's the closest thing this town has to a focal point.'

Nicols pulled over, and we left the car to walk up the slope. At the top, we found an area sectioned off with yellow police tape. Five bodies lay on their backs in a circle-feet pointed out-inside the boundary of the yellow tape. Each wore the gray robe of the Hollow Men, hoods pulled up over their faces. Whorls of red paint, spotted with tiny black letters like a trail of ants, ran along the top of each naked foot. I knelt and peeked under one hood. Similarly adorned concentric circles-three of them-had been painted on the corpse's forehead. Sigils.

'The Anointed,' I said.

'Excuse me?' Nicols asked.

'They're Hollow Men, friends of Doug. He called them the Anointed. Five who had completed the ritual of Ascension and been judged suitable for 'Anointment.' Doug didn't know what the term meant; he just knew it afforded them access to secret knowledge. The hidden mysteries of the inner sanctum, or something equally as specious. Doug wanted in, and I had gotten in the way.'

Nicols didn't ask what had happened to Doug or how I knew these things. He was looking toward the tight cluster of houses on the other side of the main road from this grassy knoll. Shouts, tossed our way by the mercurial breeze, indicated members of the task force were making discoveries. Corpses. Still ambulatory. 'They're coming,' Nicols said. 'The zombies. They're drawn to you, aren't they?'

I nodded and quickly checked the other bodies, looking for a familiar face. Julian wasn't one of them. Kat had said he was Anointed-the first to be so-and Bernard was probably one of the other seven she said she had assisted. With these five, that accounted for all of them. But what was the purpose of being 'Anointed'? Was the title just a misleading appellation, a buzzword that disguised their true purpose as sacrificial lambs in an unholy rite?

The area in the center of the circle of dead men was roughly about the size of the mirror's broad base. I shivered involuntarily as I imagined the takwin ibis-hounds assaulting the five as they lay still on the ground. What had they been promised to make them agree to having their souls sucked? Doug's memory was still sharp with outrage. He had wanted that rank; he had sacrificed for the privilege of being one of the special ones. The ones allowed to participate.

The deaths of the Anointed, the deaths in Ravensdale: they were only the beginning.

'Oh shit,' Nicols said, his hand suddenly on my shoulder.

There, across the field, a single figure came toward us, walking a straight line from the parking lot and the swarming host. A tall man, dressed in a gray coat that flowed back from his legs like the spread of a heron's wings. Sunlight collected at the end of his right sleeve as if he was holding a mirror, or a star. On the psychic level, he was a shifting apparition, both a hole and not a hole in space.

Antoine.

'Hello, mon ami,' he said as he reached the outline of police tape. 'It's been a long time.' He inclined his head toward Nicols. 'Detective.' The word was ripe with inflection and subtle echoes. An acknowledgment of a tool's usefulness. You have given your Will to my cause. The Watcher way of making an individual's efforts seem independent of their manipulation and influence.