Lightbreaker

and milk, everything else is just preservatives and chemical dyes.

Regional geographies, cultural mores, social histories, divine providences, and local soothsayers all play a part in how the energies of the world are understood. Some schools were filled with shallow spirituality; some were fiercely physical, filled with blood totems and sacrificial rites; some were tangled schemas of mental peregrinations reflected in word games played in dusty parlors. I found schools where simple rhymes sung by children while collecting water contained vibrations of the Word of God; others bound themselves to sequences of arcane gestures and complex physical gyrations like the inexplicable dances of back mountain Baptists and Moroccan fakirs.

In the end, they all reflected the same thing: the world was energy-humanity was energy-and the Universe was a self-perpetuating system. Magick was how we tried to comprehend the chaotic possibilities of creative energy.

I floated on the surface, an idle leaf in the flow, as the Chorus dipped silver ladles in the stream. The warm trickle of absorbed energy further eased the knot in my knee. The twitch in my wrists faded to a dull itch.

Nearby, a disturbance broke the surface of the flow like a fish jumping for a mayfly. A vibrating ball of light, the energy signal moved against the currents, approaching my point of perception. The police were sending someone to talk to me, someone who burned brighter than his surroundings. My interrogator was a magus.

I came out of my trance as the lock on the door clicked. The Chorus took a final sip from the stream, and I wound them down into the dark hole in my chest, hiding them beneath the layers of my meat. The door opened, and I rattled the handcuffs slightly as if the sound had startled me, but made no other effort to get up.

As anticipated, a single man entered the room. He wore a dark green suit with a tiny pattern woven in the fabric, little goldenrod points like seedpods bursting apart in the early summer. His shirt was crisp, and his tie was a melange of reds and violets-too random to suggest anything concrete, but regular enough to suggest machine generation. The Art Deco design of modern business accessories. Clean-shaven, manicured nails, expensive haircut that gave each follicle individual attention (as well as a tint like summer wheat), cuff links that glittered even in the decrepit light of the interrogation room: the package said 'Upper Management.'

He closed the door quietly, and examined me. Tiny violet pinholes in his pupils twinkled as if he had pricked himself with a straight pin. He was Seeing me, looking beyond the gross physicality of my shell. He was looking for mystical radiances, spirit glimmers, sigil echoes, and other signifiers of a magickal aptitude. His gaze lingered on the white braid about my throat; under close magickal examination, it would glitter, but just enough to seem like a weak bit of flash and not as a magus' focus.

Completing his initial assessment, my interrogator approached the table. He opened the thin manila folder he was carrying and glanced inside. 'I'm glad you find this so amusing, Mr. Markham,' he said in response to the ghost of a smile on my lips.

'Awkward and tedious, actually,' I replied. I rattled the handcuffs a second time.

His eyes flickered toward the sound. 'Well,' he said, 'I apologize for the inconvenience. Bureaucracy, you know. It's the paperwork that needs to be filled out when a veneficus publicly stamps his Will on the world. Fewer lies to fabricate when they keep to themselves.'

'Veneficus? Is that the popular term now?' Poisonous, and a sorcerer. How quaint.

He closed the folder and tapped it against my outstretched legs. 'You want to tell me what happened?'

'Not really.'

A thin crease quirked the edges of his lips. The violet spark in his eyes flashed, and I felt the temperature of the room change. 'Too much of a tough guy to talk to me?'

I shrugged, dismissing the shift in energy density. 'It's not a question of talking; it's a question of trust.'

'I am Lieutenant Pender of the Metropolitan Division, Seattle Police Department,' he said, still maintaining the measured facade of Polite Cop, though sarcasm was beginning to creep around the edges. 'We can go about this situation two ways: I can make this little nuisance disappear; or, I can drown you in a shitstorm of paperwork. It'll be a year before you can take a piss without filling out a form in triplicate. Your call.'

This was our dance then: good cop versus malingering veneficus, how schooled was each of us, and how long would we try to hide our knowledge from the other? I assumed his folder contained the results of a database crawl. The mundane information known about me: my ancient and puerile police record, what financial holdings I had in US-controlled banks, my recent spending patterns, my out-of-date political party affiliation, and a scattered list of entry and exit dates at international airports. What would make him more inclined to consider me as one of his 'poisonous sorcerers' was the dearth of real estate holdings or vehicle ownership, a lack of rental history, and a seeming indifference to cell phone technology: the signs of transience, the lack of hooks that tied one to a single location. How he interpreted these two classes of data would reveal what he thought about rogues-adepts who had no clear affiliation with organized temples-and that outlook would temper his amenability.

'You've been in town two weeks, Mr. Markham.' He returned to his notes. 'Your room at the Monaco-let's see, room 605, is it? — is booked through the weekend, though the folio has been tagged as open-ended. The rental policy on your car is good through the end of the month. You seem to be in a state of flux, caught in some indecision about your plans. Are you planning on staying in Seattle long?'

'It depends.'

'On?'

'How long you plan on keeping me cuffed to this table.'

He sighed, and traced a long finger across his forehead as if to alleviate some pressure building in his skull. His lips twitched again-downward this time-and he gestured toward the bands circling my wrists. The pulse of his spell was precise and focused. The cuffs clicked open and fell off, clattering on the table like cheap jewelry. It was a simple physical manipulation spell, one we were both very capable of executing. It had simply been a matter of who would show their Will first.

Small victory. It meant nothing really, but it told me we were past the stage of sparring about the existence of magick.

I sat up and swung my legs to my right and hopped off the table. I stood with my back to him, making a show of rubbing my wrists.

'What happened to Gerald Summers?' he asked.

The old man on the ferry.

'Who?' I feigned ignorance as I turned back to the table and my interrogator.

Pender took out a crime scene photograph from the folder. 'Mr. Summers,' he said, sliding the photo across the table so I could examine it more closely. If I actually needed to, that is. It had been taken from the front of the stall on the ferry, a tightly framed shot of Mr. Summers' head and shoulders.

Summers' wide eyes stared up toward the top of the photo; his mouth gaped in a crooked cry of incomprehension and panic. Doug had only relinquished his grip after Summers' heart had started to collapse. He left the old man with a second of life, just a single tick to feel the shuddering collapse of the failed heart muscle.

'Psychoanimist possession,' I said. 'Burned him from the inside out.' I looked at Pender. 'But you knew that, didn't you?'

The skin around his eyes tightened.

'Did you find any of my prints at the scene?' I asked. The single item on my police record was from college. I had made a poor decision at a University of Washington frat party one night. While I had never regretted my actions, the resolution of the evening had involved the police. A full set of fingerprints had been taken. Once in the system, they never came out.

Pender lifted his shoulders. 'The forensic investigation hasn't been completed.'

'I'll save you the trouble. You won't find any other prints on him. Not mine. Not anyone's. His body walked into that stall, and that was the last thing it ever did. Summers' heart gave out shortly after he sat down. He only had control of his body for a few seconds.'

Pender was still holding up the picture. 'Possession,' he mused. 'Mr. Summers was possessed by another human spirit? Is that the psychobabble you expect me to believe?' Testing me: Was he unaware of such techniques or was he probing the integrity of my story, trying to catch me in an inconsistency?

'Ask your detective how much nonsense it is.'