Lightbreaker

She nodded, placing a bookmark in her book and setting it on the counter. 'Large or small,' she asked.

'Large.'

Nicols, standing next to me, nodded like he was thinking the same thing. He wasn't. He had no idea what I was about to do and, if I had told him, he would have tried to stop me.

We were out of options. I had to See the Weave; I had to find the threads. My Will would open the Way.

She walked over to the nearby display case, and unlocked the cabinet. From the stock of tarot decks, she plucked out one of the larger boxes-the purple set-and returned to the counter. 'There you go.' She put it on the counter. 'Anything else?'

'Do you know much about the tarot, Devorah?'

Her eyes narrowed for a second as I used her name. It was on her nametag, but I could tell the store policy rankled her. It bred familiarity, a level of personal intimacy that bugged her. It was a chink in her armor, and she didn't like it when people were able to reach inside and touch her so easily.

I'm so sorry, Devorah. I wish there was another way.

'Have you ever had your fortune told?' I slit the plastic on the box with a fingernail, and dumped the sealed deck and the instruction booklet onto the counter.

'Once or twice,' she said cautiously, a non-answer that kept the conversation alive yet didn't invite me any closer.

The plastic around the deck was tight and there was no easy flap to get a fingernail under. I snapped a line from the Chorus to the end of my fingertip, starting a tiny spark, and melted the corner of the plastic wrap. The spell was quick and faint, not enough to catch her attention, though I felt Nicols shift at my side.

Devorah was watching me with a mingled light of curiosity and annoyance in her eyes. I was unwrapping the merchandise at her station and, while it wasn't an overt attempt at shoplifting, it was a violation of store policy. The tarot decks were under lock and key for this very reason-patrons would get their grubby fingers all over the cards otherwise-and I was flagrantly ignoring the rule.

However, reading the symbols on her shirt, I knew there was rebellion in her, an anarchistic flutter keeping curiosity alive in her heart. As brutish as I was being about the rules, part of her still wanted to see what I was going to do.

I scattered the deck on the table and the Chorus rippled through my hands. I touched and stroked the cards with Willful fingers. 'Do you know this card?' I asked, feeling the psychic imprint of the one I wanted. I showed it to her. 'Do you know what it means?'

She looked at it, curiosity beating annoyance. 'Princess of Cups.' She shrugged. 'Sorry, I don't know anything about it. Look-'

'We need an oracle,' I interrupted. 'We need for you to scry for us.'

'Excuse me?'

I leaned across the counter, and the serpents of the Chorus wrapped themselves around her arm. I grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward me. The Chorus licked the edge of the card in my other hand, and I slashed the Princess of Cups across her open palm, cutting a shallow line along the course of her lifeline. Laying the card aside, I grabbed her paperback and fingered it open to a random page. I spread the book out on the scattered backs of the Crowley cards-a sea of rosy crosses floating beneath our hands-and dragged her bleeding palm across the open page.

She struggled in my grip, crying out from the pain I had inflicted. 'Vide,' I said, inflicting a different sort of pain entirely on her. The electric charge of the Chorus lit the word as it left my mouth. Her body spasmed, a live-wire reaction that ran from the crown of her head to the root of her feet. I smeared her now limp hand twice more across the book. 'I need you to See for me, Devorah. I need you to Read the page.'

The Chorus surged into the quiescent part of her psyche, looking for the door she instinctively advertised that she had. When I found it, I broke the seal and forced awake her precognitive talent.

The justification for the spiritual rape was already being written in my head. History writ by those who survive the cataclysms. If we succeeded in finding the others, in stopping Bernard's Great Work, then my actions were justified-a Machiavellian excuse for the fruit it was to bear. If we failed, then no one would ever know. We would all be dead-Nicols, Devorah, me, most of Portland-and my metaphysical assault on this girl would be a minor transgression in the great scheme of the Universe. My sin was small.

Still, so was Kat's action; so was the promise I made in the woods. Tiny acts which, like the chaotic ripple of the butterfly's wings, caused interference waves in the Universe. It was in this seemingly infinite space that a multitude of incremental errors spawned an immense blot.

Devorah's cheeks quivered as I held up the bloody book, and the pupils of her eyes shrunk to minute dots. Her voice, when she spoke, was lusterless; the bright innocence of her throat marred by a scratchy fever. The Chorus swirled in my belly like sun-warmed snakes at the sound, and I grimaced at the pleasure they found in what I had done to her. 'As one great furnace flamed,' she intoned. 'Yet from those flames no light; but rather darkness visible.' Her voice grew more agitated with every word.

'I need to stop the darkness, Devorah,' I said, trying to sooth her with the sound of my voice. 'I need you to tell me where the light is going. How does it all start?'

She shook her head and her eyes twitched in their sockets as if she were fleeing from a vision, a spectral image fixed in front of her face. 'Down they fell,' she moaned, 'driven headlong from the pitch of Heaven, down into this Deep; and in the general fall I also.'

I spread the pages open even further. Her prophecies were finding their voice in the text. A drop of blood fell from the book and spattered on the card beneath, the bright blood staining the jeweled center of one of the multicolored crosses on the back of the card. 'I need to know, Devorah. I can't stop it if I don't know where it begins.'

'But torture without end still urges,' she said, her voice growling. 'And a fiery deluge, fed with ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.'

Nicols-who, surprisingly, hadn't said anything so far-swore loudly at my side. 'What the hell is she saying?'

I was trying to keep up and didn't have time to explain it to him. Milton was as dense as English literature got, and attempting to decipher his verse when it was being couched as a precognitive offering demanded a lot of my attention.

'Where does the fire start?' I asked.

She looked at me, a bloody tear starting in the corner of her left eye. 'There stood a hill not far, whose grisly top belched fire and rolling smoke,' she said. 'The rest entire shone with a glossy scurf-undoubted sign that in his womb was hid metallic ore.'

The bloody eye. The shadow woman in my dream who stood as tall as Heaven. Under her skirts, she had shown me her eye and it had rained bloody tears.

I closed the book and put it down. The Tower. Nicols' reading also held a physical component. 'A metal hill?' I asked. 'Is that where I can find him?'

She closed her eyes and her shoulders started to shake. 'Let none henceforth seek needless cause to approve the faith they owe; when earnestly they seek such proof, conclude, they then begin to fail.' Her voice cracked on the words, each one more fragmented and broken than the last.

I walked around the counter and helped her sit down on the stool. I took her bloody palm in my hands, sealing her flesh between my own. Valetude. The Chorus smoothed away the wound in her hand as if the flesh was as malleable as hot wax. 'I'm sorry,' I said as I put her hand in her lap. 'I ask for your forgiveness, but know that I can never expect it.'

Tears tracked down her face. The drop of blood smeared across her cheek. Nine drops. Nine swords. Cruelty. My past, severed, but not yet cleansed from my soul.

I didn't look at Nicols as I walked away from the counter, heading for the stairs and the street. 'Hey,' he said, coming after me, reaching for my arm. 'What the fuck are you doing?' He gestured back at the crying woman. 'Are you just going to leave her sitting there?'

I glanced down at his hand on my arm. The Chorus boiled under my skin and he held his grip for a few seconds before letting go. 'Better here than with us,' I said, and continued down the stairs toward the exit. He hesitated at the top of the stairs.

Nicols caught up with me again on the corner of Tenth and Burnside. His face was knotted with anger, his big