Lightbreaker

needed to build the mirror; you let him activate it. As a result, all these people have been collected. They've been harvested. For what purpose? Making Qliphotic shells? There is no 'Way' here. This is just carnage.'

For an instant, Antoine's guard slipped and I saw the abject sorrow hidden beneath. Like a scar on his heart, he would never reveal the true temperament under his impenetrable psychic armor. Not to me. Not now. Even though we shared similar grief about what had happened, we stood on opposite shores, separated by a gulf of our own making. Separated by steel.

'You are summoning them. Like moths to your flame,' he said, a grin smoothing over the break in his armor. 'I will offer you a deal, mon ami. Divest yourself of your stolen energy and we shall talk about the past. And the future. You will not dissuade me from what must be done, but we can at least end it with some civility.'

'The alternative?'

He sighed. 'I have no time for distractions. Your thread in this part of the Weave is done. You will be removed. Decisively.'

A single zombie was already halfway across the field, a staggered row of shambling soul-dead not far behind. They wanted my light and, in the same way I had obliterated the old man by the road with a blessing of that energy, Antoine wanted me to dismiss the dead of Ravensdale. One massive pulse, a coruscating stroke that would drive away all the darkness. A final blessing for the restless dead.

I have no time.

I had thought Bernard and the Anointed Hollow Men had planned to use their newly learned psychoanimist techniques to take over Antoine. But Bernard had hinted at a larger purpose for the theurgic mirror. If Antoine had bankrolled the creation of the mirror and this experiment, then why was he here? Why wasn't he with them?

Because they weren't finished. Ravensdale was just a test run, the first part of something else. But it couldn't be about theft. What was the point in taking all this energy? Unless. . there was a way to use it somewhere else. To do something. .

He seeks the Key to Immortality.

And not just Bernard, but everyone. Why wouldn't Antoine want it as well? But he had lost control. All of his coy obliqueness aside, his Watch had failed. He was on the defensive, reeling from this sudden reversal. Key pieces he had thought were under his control had disappeared.

I was a thorn, an old wound that refused to heal. He wanted me removed from the Weave. One less thread to follow. One less mischievious child-

They all had a plan. Antoine. Bernard. Pender. They all saw me as the chaotic element that could disrupt the other team, but I was also the veneficus, the uncontrolled poison. I didn't belong to any of them.

Certainly not Antoine. Why had I run from him for all these years? Because I was afraid of him, or was it because the Chorus knew how fear worked on me? They knew my secrets, knew which strings to pull.

I hadn't backed down when Antoine had challenged me in Paris. Was I going to start now?

'Okay,' I told him. 'I'll take your deal.'

Before even they could read the lie, I split the Chorus open, tearing them like I was rending roses. Petals falling through my fingers. They keened and whined, fighting the assertion of my Will, but I dug through them and tapped the storehouse of the energy I had stolen.

Antoine narrowed his eyes slightly as he sensed the bloom of power. Nicols raised a hand to shield his eyes from my abrupt brilliance. The nearest zombie increased his speed, his head twitching back and forth. A light- blinded moth, unable to stop its suicide dive at a hot bulb.

I gathered what was left of the Hollow Men, and raised it through my frame, letting it bleed through my lungs and heart and throat. A twisted knot formed over my head, a ball of lightning that thrust angled shadows across the field. I let the outer edge of the ball spit flares like an aroused sun as if I couldn't quite keep the sphere of power in control. As if my Will wasn't completely focused.

I waited for Antoine to tire of Watching my engorged Will, to turn his head and Witness the demolition of the dead. I waited for him to look away. As his attention shifted, I released the ball of coalesced Will.

He knew he had made an error the instant my Will realized itself. Phosphorescent streamers erupted from his frame as the energy wave struck. He held his ground, clothing vaporizing and skin tearing as the annihilating angel of my Will flayed him. His muscles and fat started to sizzle and burn, and then the true weight of the spell hit him and he was hurled from the field.

In the time it took to exhale, Antoine was thrown more than a hundred yards. What was left of his body inscribed a shallow arc across the landscape, a low-flying meteor of burning tissue. The arc of fire that filled his wake dispersed in a crackling rush and the trees bent with the echo of the atmospheric discharge. His body crashed into a parked car in the shopping mall lot.

The nearest zombie was blown into ash. Behind it, others were knocked down, while those still further afield were disoriented. Their magnet was gone, swallowed by a rush of fire and fury. The only bright light remaining was the ambient swirl of energy coming off Antoine's burned shell. It was enough to turn their hunger, and they drifted away from the field, staggering toward the smoking wreckage of the car.

I grabbed Nicols' lapel and dragged him away from the circle. 'Let's go. Before he gets up.'

'What?' His feet stumbled as he tried to keep up with me. 'He's still alive?'

The Chorus read a vibration. I knew it. I knew it well. 'Yes,' I said. 'And I've just made him angry.'

XXIII

Nicols drove aimlessly and recklessly for a half hour, speeding down two-lane highways that cut through the forested hillsides, that bisected communities smaller and sleepier than Ravensdale. He fled, inchoate sounds issuing from his mouth, with no destination in mind. His hands: one gripping the wheel like a drowning man clinging to a life preserver, one beating against the molded circle. Finally, on a road that appeared to run straight until it was swallowed by Mt. Rainier, he pulled over to the shoulder and got out.

He paced back and forth in front of the vehicle, shouting and raging. In an unintelligible dialog, he started arguments, screamed denials, spat accusations, and choked on the rebuttals. He smoked two cigarettes: the first, in a short series of violent inhalations; the second, in a reflective frame of mind. As he finished the second, grinding it out on the fractured shale, he summoned me from the car with a rigid index finger, indicating exactly where he wanted me to stand.

'Tell me everything,' he said as I got out of the car. 'I want to hear it all.'

I told him about the shipping container, about Kat, about the poison I had been carrying for the last decade. I told him about Bernard and Julian, and the theurgic mirror they built; I told him what happened in the Arena, and what transpired after.

He started to chew on the end of another cigarette when I finished, staring at the ground between us, not seeing the rock. 'This library-Van Groenig's.'

'Van Groteon.'

'Right. You think this is where Bernard found what he needed to build this. . mirror device?'

'Yes,' I said. 'A man can be swayed with a single book-it takes only a page to convey a secret. But it takes a bunch of books to synthesize the record of human experimentation. Libraries are dangerous; we ably demonstrate that we have a predilection for destroying them-Alexandria, Dr. John Dee's, le Comte de Saint Germain, the Nazis.'

'Where did this library come from?'

'During WWII, Hitler was obsessed with the occult; he wanted magickal tools, objects that would make him invincible. That would win the war for his side. Himmler, who was even more obsessed with the occult, had a group charged with collecting artifacts, relics, books, and the like. The Ahnenerbe-SS.

'After the war, most of the artifacts in Nazi collections disappeared. A lot of relic hunters have been chasing rumors and myths for the last fifty years, trying to track down the grimoires, the black-magic reliquaries, the holy and unholy relics-you name it, people have been looking for it.'