the explosive eruption from the narrow grate. The furniture caught fire and the molded plastic of the occasional pieces steamed and melted.
With my second toss, I managed to wind the psychic wire around Julian's neck. He grabbed my wire, steadying himself, even though the psychic current of the Chorus was shutting down his nervous system. Napalm dripped from his ruined arm and he hurled a spray at me.
Most of it missed, pulled off course by the mystic gravity well, but some of it spattered on my clothes. The napalm seared, lancing my flesh. Burning deep.
He was too strong. Too much power available from the soul crown. His spells were overcharged, a vicious ferocity I couldn't withstand. My Will wasn't enough.
My focus wavered, flickering for just a second, and he acted in that tiny vacuum of intent. He pulled the psychic wire right out of me, and I staggered, feeling the Chorus tear. Down in my core. Again.
He knocked me to the floor with a burst of fire. I tried to breathe, and sucked in flame. My throat felt like I had just drunk lava.
Before I could recover, he was on me. His good hand touched my throat and fire sang throughout my head. I beat at his hand, but it was like trying to break stone with a peacock feather. Color bleached from my vision and his skin became opaque. I could see his skull as he leaned close to my face.
A pair of pistol shots. Thunder in an enclosed space. Julian jerked forward, grunting from the twin blows in his lower back.
His hands vanished from my throat and I rolled onto my side, coughing up soot. Each breath felt like I was fueling an inferno in my chest.
Julian held Nicols' arm in his hand, the pistol shaking in the detective's persistent grip. The magus beat at Nicols' vest with his stump, smearing burning napalm on the Kevlar material. Nicols strained against the magus, trying to get the barrel of the pistol lined up. Julian shook his head, and bodily threw the detective against the statue.
Nicols groaned from the impact, and he dropped the gun. Flailing his arms, he tried to regain balance against the gravity of the mirrored sphere. His left arm drifted against the silver ring in the middle and, feeling something solid against his wrist, he reached with his hand to steady himself.
He touched the sphere.
A primal howl ripped out of him, a scream echoed by the hidden fear in my heart. The Abyss. The sound one makes when confronted with that nothingness, that complete emptiness. Nicols' cry was filled with both despair and anger-the nihilistic sound of enlightenment of an abandoned Heaven.
A string of soft lights coursed down his arm and vanished into the mirror. Much like the ibis-hound had sucked energy from Kat, the facets of the mirror drank from Nicols' soul, draining his spirit through the contact afforded by his flesh. He tried to break the connection, but his hand was fused to the mirror.
I tried to reach him, but Julian grabbed the collar of my coat. The iron force of his Will wrapped around me, and kept me from reaching John. Nicols swung his free arm out and our fingers just missed.
Julian wrapped his bloody forearm around my chest, tucking his body against my burned back. My raw skin twitched from the hot contact and I felt the napalm of his blood dripping down my chest, scouring tracks as it flowed. 'I want you to watch,' he whispered in my ear. I struggled, straining to move closer to the mirror and John- almost close enough to touch-but the effort only tightened Julian's cage about me.
Nicols tried to reach me again, but his strength was fading too quickly. Each pulse of light down his arm lessened his life force. Already he could barely stand, his knees leaning against the statue for support. Tears ran from his eyes, and when he tried to speak, his final words weren't loud enough to be heard.
When his head fell forward and rested against one of the bronze shoulders, Julian released me. I reached Nicols' body as the mirror let go of his fingers, the contact no longer needed. The body was just an empty shell. Detective John Nicols was gone.
I cradled his body across my lap and his face stared sightlessly at the ceiling. His expression was like Gerald Summers' face. The flesh, wondering why its light had failed.
Julian capered nearby, waving his bloody stump over his head. 'One more,' he shouted over the sound of the fire alarm. 'One more for the party.' He danced close and bent down toward me, bringing his stump to the side of his head. 'I can hear him. Right in here.'
My hand touched the leather holster of the unused pistol on Nicols' belt and, in a smooth motion, I pulled the gun out and pressed it into Julian's left eye socket. 'Right here?' I pulled the trigger.
The back of his head came off in a spray of pink and gray that contorted in flight as it became subject to the mirror's pull. His legs went rubbery and he fell back on his ass. Mouth working like an out-of-water fish, he struggled to form a thought with half his brain missing.
I unceremoniously dumped Nicols' meat on the floor and put two more rounds in Julian's chest-right through his heart. Just one more thing for him to try to think about. As long as he had the crown of souls, he could still manage to put himself back together.
Grabbing the front of his blood-stained robe, I dragged him over to the window. I thrust my hand into the skein of stars floating above his skull, feeling the crown's electrical surge in my finger joints. The wild lines of the crown fit into the Chorus like bridle bits in the mouths of race horses. 'Time to leave the nest, little bird,' I said to Julian as I pushed him out the window. His head snapped back, caught for a moment before the crown ripped free, and then he fell.
I raised my star-filled palm to my cheek, pressing the fading rain of lights against my flesh. I could feel them, just as he said, I could feel all of them.
And the Anointed too. Bright lights against the skein of stars. They pulsed, flexing and swelling like gas bubbles. I felt a jolt of energy jerk elsewhere.
To Bernard.
He was standing next to the table, his throat a vein of silver and pink. His voice box was ruined, but he didn't need to actually speak for me to hear him. 'It is done,' he Whispered.
The mirror collapsed. Its implosion was a gravitational well. Deep in the scarred darkness of my gut, something vital tore, something already ripped-not once, but twice. Something I could never replace.
Everything froze, dim shadows against the burst of pure light that came from the artifact. Nothing changed for a split second as the world came apart at an atomic level and then reassembled itself. The same, but fractured, broken, and hurriedly put together without care for a proper fitting of all the microscopic pieces.
Thoth's Key. Bernard had activated it.
The crown of souls clutched in my hand, I jumped out the open window. A desperate attempt to flee the realization of the artifact's purpose. I tumbled from the top of the Tower as lightning split its dome. I fell.
An incendiary burst bleached the surfaces of the surrounding buildings as if the sun had come to Portland.
I hadn't jumped from a building for a few years, and never without a chute, but the body remembered. The Chorus streamed behind me, grabbing at the air, and my descent was somewhere between a headlong fall and a clumsy glide.
As I neared the ground, the last glitter of energy from the crown faded, and I Willed it into a whirlwind beneath my feet, a fluffy soup of air that supported me as I reached the grassy lawn. Not far from Julian's shattered body. Face-down on the grass. Not much of a flyer. Not much of a witness either. Facing away from the very cataclysm he had worked to bring about. Missing everything. That seemed fitting.
There were other witnesses, though. Cars in the street, their occupants peering out open windows at the source of the hard illumination that slew every shadow in the street. Couples on the sidewalk, their faces turned upward.
I crossed the landscaped lawn and jumped the low hedge at the property's edge. A middle-aged man with a bushy mustache was half-out of his stopped sedan, twisting his body so he could stare up at the peak of the tower. He neither blinked nor turned his head as I approached his vehicle. His expression rapturous, his eyes were fixed on the star. I blocked his view with my palm and nothing changed; the light still dazzled his eyes.
He was blind to the physical world. Free of the illusion made by shadows. Free to look upon God.
