Lightbreaker

already spreading, fantasy informing gossip. These two weren't sure what had happened and, as a result, their imaginations were feeding all the wild stories.

All it takes is a seed.

We entered police headquarters in downtown Seattle through an unmarked entrance in the back, spiraling down fluorescently lit passages of white stone into the sub-levels beneath the street. I was hustled through equally unadorned hallways to a tiny room with two plastic chairs and a cheap metal table. A steel ring was welded to the top of the table.

My jacket and the contents of my pockets had been taken from me at the ferry terminal and, after we entered the interrogation room, they took my belt and shoelaces. A young officer tried for the thin braid of hair about my throat, and the Chorus nipped at him. Trying to keep his cool, he pulled back and made a half-hearted dismissive gesture. Something to hide the tremor in his hands. No one offered to take a look at the bloody nick along my side. The fact that it had stopped bleeding was apparently good enough for them. After that, they locked one of the handcuffs to the metal ring and left me alone.

A history of desperate chain-smokers was an old stink permeating every surface-nearly a tactile crust on the room. The paint on the wall opposite the door was less dull than the other walls. An observation window once, perhaps, sheet-rocked over some time ago. The floor was a cheap parquet, an ugly color stained even uglier. The table and chairs were utilitarian: the table legs were welded to the pitted top, the chairs were the molded plastic sort found around the pool at two-star motels. The room didn't bother to obscure its purpose. Out of sight, out of mind. No one wanted to know what happened here.

I tried to get comfortable. The handcuffs and the ring meant I had to lean forward as if I were considering a session of earnest supplication but hadn't quite committed myself to the act. Easier to lie on the table with my hands resting above my head, wrists next to the metal ring.

I was tired. It had been nearly 3:00 a.m. when I had spotted Doug, and the resulting chase had been unexpected and draining. Prior to that, I had been out on the peninsula visiting an old friend.

Father Lenbier was a retired Naval Chaplain with a house outside of Lofall-an hour from the ferry terminal at Winslow. He had been stationed in the Far East for thirty years before being tossed back across the ocean for his final tour at the Naval Yard at Bremerton. I had been to both China and Japan, and I had wanted to catch up.

I had met the priest in Olso years ago-just two wanderers washed into a back-alley bar, looking to offset the permafrost of the dark winter. His faith provided an interesting counterpoint to the. . melancholy that had driven me north. A bottle of Laphroaig consecrated our friendship. It hadn't been my choice-he was the single malt fan-but, by the end of the night, I had learned a measure of respect.

We had spent the evening telling polite lies about our secret histories, and trying to deconstruct the nature of faith via the magic of a bottle of Dalwhinnie 15. The antique market in the Pacific Northwest looked to the East for its history (unlike the New England market which was perversely fixated on Louis XIV's bedroom furniture), and Father Lenbier's stories about the Far East station were filled with useful details. Grist for the small talk which invariably crept up in my business. One must keep up appearances on one's public persona.

Then, on the way home, there had been the deer, with Doug squatting on its spine. Like a guiding star half- glimpsed through a barrier of thick trees or a glimmer of bewitched swamp gas intended to lure the unwary, the animal with its spiritual possessor had drawn me away from the road and into the wilderness.

Chance plays a very small part in the Weave of the Universe. There are currents and eddies in the natural world that influence the mind, but very little of the Universe is driven by random luck. It is a matter of synchronicities, the seeming coincidences have a hidden connectivity. The Weave is the fabric of the World, and its threads are the convoluted tracks of every personal history.

For the last two weeks, I had been tracking Katarina. It had been ten years since we had seen each other-a decade that had done nothing to dull the ache in my chest. On the few previous occasions when her trail crossed mine, the threads had always been stiff and brittle-too old to follow without breaking them. This time, I knew she was still in Seattle. The trouble had been finding something more substantial than the persistent itch caused by her proximity.

The Chorus crystallized in my head, spinning memory. Doug's history. Hazy, but still of some use. Close enough. That scent, that familiar taste.

Kat had touched his soul. Last night, she had participated in a ritual of disengagement. I could taste her presence on him. She had directed the wedge used to drive apart flesh and spirit.

In my travels, I had learned many names for the same objects, the same rituals, the same beliefs. All the names carried with them a different history, a different mnemonic resonance. Kabbalist mystics would label her the unclean child of that harlot Lilith, a foul child who sucked energy from a vessel, allowing the Qliphoth to invade the empty shell. The modern Hungarian Gypsies-who split their time between modern apartments in Budapest and hand-built cabins in the mountains-named her 'szuz ordog': demon maid, a succubus whose ill touch separated the light from the dark.

They taught me other names too. Names meant, not for her, but for me. Lelek rablo. Feny rombolo. Spirit thief. Lightbreaker.

Doug's contact with her hadn't been like mine. There was no fear on him-none of that panic that had overwhelmed me. Their interaction had been a ritual affair, a ceremonial act knowingly consecrated. In the last decade, Kat had learned new tricks and found new friends. They were using psychoanimist techniques: direct manipulation of the soul, spirit possession, and astral travel. New tricks, indeed.

In the last few weeks, I had discovered five groups who operated in the Greater Puget Sound area. One was a weekend wiccan gathering-housewives who sought to influence neighborhood politics and local weather patterns. Another was based out of an underground club in the Capitol Hill district, though it was more of a social organization held together by a mutual affection for rhythmic noise and power electronic music. The others were more rigidly structured-more of the sort that I was seeking, but they appeared to be traditional. Old rituals, older laws. Transgressive and experimental, they weren't. Kat's group, on the other hand, was probably a splinter, a secret cabal bored with the old rituals, who had gone off on their own. Very quietly, and very under the radar. Best to stay hidden in the sexually and morally repressed West, when you were practicing psychoanimism.

The muscles in my arms were jumpy, and the awkward position required by the handcuff ring wasn't making it any easier to relax. A pranayama breathing ritual would help oxygenate my blood and alleviate some of the exhaustion. Though, even with the tension release of the technique, my right knee was going to be stiff for some time.

An interrogator hadn't shown yet, leading me to believe they were going to let me sit awhile. I wasn't even sure if they were watching me. If a camera was hidden behind the ceiling tiles, it had escaped my notice. But there was no point in trying to ascertain if they were watching-there were things I could be doing with the downtime- internal things the camera couldn't see. I fell into the pranayama mantra, and my breathing found the rhythm quickly. The rest would come-the unwinding of my spine, the unlocking of my hips, the bleed-off of energy through my relaxed fingers. .

My mind drifted into the hazy realm of memory and premonition. I dozed, and the Chorus sighed, their voices fading to a tiny buzz of static. The physical world stretched into a transparent film over the surging grid of the urban energy flow. I stretched for the nearest conduit, and slipped into the vibrant ocean of etheric energy pulsating throughout the city.

A Hopi shaman had taught me how to read the geomantic grid of the world. We had spent a week exposed on a knob of bare rock high in the Arizona desert, drinking rainwater and eating peyote buttons. His body, black with pitch, was invisible to the moon, and he had drawn a pattern of stars on his face with orange and yellow paint. He wore a crown of eagle feathers and a necklace of mountain lion claws, and across his broad back he draped a ragged wolf pelt. After three days, when he stopped being a man, he showed me how to taste the earth, how to interpret the scents of the wind, and how to hear the sighing motion of the stars.

In return, I showed him the skein of energy that lay within. As within, as without, he said, they are mirror patterns. The currents of spiritual power flowed all over the world; they were the rivers of creation from which we came and to which we would return. The shaman, he said-the magus, the mystic-is a fish that breathes both air and water. He can traverse the spiritual currents like a ghost, and still walk the earth like a man.

Since then, I had stumbled across as many schools of magick as flavors at Baskin-Robbins, and the metaphysical rationale for each was as subjective and fleeting as the decision made when choosing a flavor of ice cream. The underlying Truths were like the secrets whispered by the cooks in the back room: there is always sugar